Viewed historically as the seminal, most written about work in English literature, Hamlet enjoys a prominent place in an already elite canon of works. As such, the play has been regarded as the ultimate Shakespearean achievement that defines, at least symbolically, the canon’s interpretive bandwidth. Notably, however, Hamlet has proven especially resistant to critical race analysis. More to the point, critics have excluded or sidestepped interrogations of race since introducing a critical race reading in this representative text would implicate the entire canon and make visible its talismanic status as a centerpiece of an unstated, white humanism. To address race in Hamlet, therefore, delivers a shock to the Shakespearean system that engenders tremendous skepticism for challenging the conventional premise of this iconic text.

Shattering the impervious play

Approaching the text as evidence is requisite for forestalling skepticism when teaching race in Shakespeare, whether Gertrude’s “black and grained spots”; Hamlet’s “let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables”; or his opening, “I am too much in the sun.” Finding accessible evidence as a point of entry comprises a crucial first step in this pedagogic process.

Rather than start at the beginning of the play, I turn to the closet scene in act 3 where Hamlet draws the harsh contrast between his deceased father, the “fair” king, and Claudius the “Moor” whom Hamlet despises for murdering his parent. The purpose of highlighting these terms is to introduce students to their historical, geographical, cultural, and religious contexts that coalesce into racial types. The instance of “Moor” serves as a cultural shorthand for real-world African and onstage, Black person.

For Hamlet, this racialized word carries such a pre-packaged set of meanings that it has become a byword for human depravity, murder, and wickedness perpetrated by a white man, Claudius. Racialized Blackness was, therefore, the baseline of criminality, and students can appreciate the troubling but commonplace assessment that criminality had a color and a race.

The violent Black man myth

As has been suggested, the closet scene does not represent an isolated, unique example but signals readers to be more sharply attuned to other similar moments. The play-within-the play has preoccupied 20th-century criticism, just as the closet scene or the grave-digger’s scene had for an earlier generation of critics. But this scholarship has carefully avoided Hamlet’s relationship to the traveling company of actors and his request for an extemporary performance from their repertory, featuring the Black Pyrrhus character who becomes Hamlet’s avatar and alter ego for vengeful, unrelenting bloodshed, and vigilante Blackness. When critics refer to the First Player’s speech, they misread badly the evidence that it is Hamlet who recites from memory the actions of a Black Pyrrhus, Shakespeare’s racially baptized, avenging son of the classical warrior Achilles.

Having broached this line of discussion, we may emphasize certain takeaways. Readers must consider whether Hamlet wishes to retain his unspotted whiteness (like his demand for his mother, Gertrude), now a sign of weak inaction, or surrender to the Moorish Blackness that he denigrates. Here, in 21st-century terms, is yet one more response to the perennial Hamlet question: Why does Hamlet delay? We should also reflect on the role theater played in circulating images and ideas of race—Blackness and whiteness—in Shakespeare’s time especially when race is not tied explicitly to an onstage Black character like Aaron, Othello, or Lucianus, the nephew poisoner representing Claudius in Hamlet’s staging of The Mousetrap.

Equally important is the circulation of the violent Black man type, a figure acquiring social currency in the centuries that followed right up to the present when such an idea paints a target on the bodies of real Black persons. A critical race studies approach to Hamlet not only demystifies the “iconic Shakespeare text” by bringing it into a recognizable universe of modern concerns, but it also asks students to think about the demands reading Shakespeare and race places on them as 21st-century thinkers.