Hall, Kim F. "Blackness and Shakespeare's sonnets." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/blackness-and-shakespeares-sonnets. [Date accessed].

Blackness and Shakespeare's sonnets

Using Shakespeare's sonnets to discuss race-making through the language of 'fairness' and 'darkness.'

Download the transcript
Kim F. Hall
Barnard College

Shakespeare’s sonnets allow for generative conversations about the way perceptions of fairness and darkness inform understandings of race in the early modern world. Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets, in particular, tether whiteness not only to physical beauty but to national identity for the English. By attending to the way the sonnets deploy whiteness to consider social and gendered hierarchies, we are able to see how uses of fairness reveal emergent ideologies of white supremacy. As a result, Kim F. Hall explains, we find that the dark lady sonnets threaten the entitlement of whiteness, rendering a real danger for those with dark bodies.

Further learning

Activity

One word essay

This assignment in Kim F. Hall's Shakespeare courses asks students to analyze a single word in early modern texts using a variety of primary sources.

Kim F. Hall
Activity

The unessay

Kim F. Hall assigns the unessay to have students tackle an intellectual knot outside the constraints of the usual college essay.

Kim F. Hall
Activity

BIPOC lives in the English archives

This assignment asks students to investigate online databases in search of BIPOC who lived in England between 1500-1700.

Kim F. Hall

Recommended

Video

Racial mixing in Titus Andronicus

Teaching Titus Andronicus can open up conversations about early modern English familiarity with race, racial difference, and mixed-race identity.

Kyle Grady
RaceB4Race Highlight

Milton and anti-lynching reform

Reginald A. Wilburn analyzes James Weldon Johnson’s anti-lynching poem “Brothers – American Drama” (1916) and its intertextual references to Milton.

Reginald A. Wilburn
Essay

Spenser and his racializing influences

Comparing episodes from The Faerie Queene with episodes from the works that inspired Spenser, in particular excerpts from Ariosto’s and Tasso’s works, is a productive way to draw attention to how racialization travels and mutates across national traditions.

Dennis Britton