2019-2020 Faculty Research Grants

Vanessa Corredera (English)

Audience Education: Shakespeare, Race, and the Importance of Performance Pedagogy

Over last five years, scholars of early modern race have championed the salience of race as crucial category of identity formation during the English Renaissance. This project has involved attending to crosshistorical manifestations of racial difference while paying careful attention to the distinctions between the constructions of race “then” and “now.” Contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s race plays, however, create a unique space where the consideration of these distinctions often collapses. Modern viewers bring their current and inherited racial assumptions to a play created in early modernity. These race plays reflect the racial understandings of their time, understandings with which a modern audience may be largely if not entirely unfamiliar. This clash can be exacerbated through adaptative choices that retain the play’s original language yet update its milieu, therefore further prompting the application of race as understood “today” to a text conceived of in “yesteryear.” My article considers how The Globe Theatre negotiated these tensions through the apparatuses it provided for audience education as it launched its landmark Shakespeare and Race Symposium in the summer of 2018. By analyzing the performance programs and examining the lectures, roundtables and events surrounding the performances of the Shakespearean adaptation Emilia and the traditional Shakespeare race play Othello, this article seeks to identify the various strategies and methods taken toward audience education regarding race in early modernity and in today’s Western world, with particular attention to the ways they informed the presentation of these two productions. The goal is to provide a framework that scholars, conference organizers, and performance producers can build from in order to advance a thoughtful, ethical engagement with race in the space of the theater, a space often only secondary to the classroom in its public reach.