'Dive in and your whole cultural landscape will be refreshed and reframed.' Adjoa Andoh
Professor Farah Karim-Cooper grew up loving the Bard perhaps because Romeo and Juliet felt
Pakistani to her. But why was being white as a ?snowy dove' essential to Juliet's beauty?
Combining piercing analysis of race gender and otherness in beloved plays from Othello to The
Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London The Great White Bard entreats us
neither to idealise nor to fossilise Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon
with the discomforts of his plays playhouses and society. If we persist in reading Shakespeare
as representative of only one group as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon then he
will truly be in peril. But if we dare to bring Shakespeare down from his plinth we might
unveil a playwright for the twenty-first century. We might expand and enrich his extraordinary
legacy. We might even fall in love with him all over again.
