Is Shakespeare racist?

Shakespeare’s Globe has a new wheeze to popularise its shows. The latest production, Henry VIII, is supported by a seminar about racism in this late play which the Bard co-wrote with John Fletcher. The online event, hosted by the Globe’s Dr Will Tosh, features dramatist-in-residence, Hannah Khalil, and Mira Kafantaris, a critical race theorist from the US. Both these experts proclaim their status as migrants and they examine Shakespeare through the lens of racist exploitation. At first glance it seems tricky to link racism with Henry VIII who was born four years before Columbus sailed for the Caribbean. But racism is everywhere, it seems.

‘Anne Boleyn’, explains Kafantaris, ‘was foreign born, raised in a French court, and our reading of her conduct and manner is very much a racialised one.’ She asks us to study ‘colour coding’ and to read up on theories that explore the ‘racialisation of Anne Boleyn as non-white.’