Anti-Muslim racism has been a decades-long project in the US and the West broadly, and it's important for students to think about the representation of Muslims as dangerous and threatening, as aliens and outsiders to Europe and its population.  

Using the frame of Shakespeare, and how many of his plays set in the Mediterranean negate and erase Islam and Muslims, students will investigate how individual, cultural, and political identity is manufactured and reinforced through his canon.  Thinking through these historical representations can help students understand and challenge how these stereotypes travel across time and reappear in our contemporary context.  

Readings  

For this class, each Shakespeare play is paired with secondary sources that offer cultural context or critical readings, exposing the wide-ranging knowledge that early modern English people possessed about Islam, its geographies, and its cultures.   

For brief foundational context

A Very Short Introduction to Islamic History. Adam J. Silverstein. Oxford UP, 2010. 

This text offers students a sufficient, if imperfect, background for understanding early modern Islamic cultures and the vast and diverse cultures that encompass the Islamicate. Silverstein provides context for engaging with the representations of Islam that we find in Shakespeare texts.

Suggested pairings

The Merchant of Venice  

"Muslims in Seventeenth-Century England," Matar, Nabil I. Journal of Islamic Studies 8.1 (1997): 63-82. 

Othello 

"Two Faced: The Problem of Othello's Visage," Dadabhoy, Ambereen. Othello: The State of Play (2014): 121-47. 

Richard II & Henry V 

'''Not Amurath an Amurath Succeeds': Playing Doubles in Shakespeare's Henriad." Richard Hillman.  English Literary Renaissance, 21.2 (1991): 161-189. 

"The Glorious Empire of the Turks, the Present Terrour of the World," Richmond Barbour. Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East, 1576-1626. 

Twelfth Night  

"Was Illyria as Mysterious and Foreign as We Think?" Patricia Parker, in The Mysterious and Foreign in Early Modern England (209-34). 

"The Frontiers of Twelfth Night," Su Fang Ng, in Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds (173-96). 

The Tempest 

"Carthage and Tunis, The Tempest and Tapestries," Jerry Brotton, in The Tempest and Its Travels (121-130). 

Films 

Two films, adaptations of Hamlet (Haider) and Measure for Measure (Rahm), offer students a more contemporary lens through which to think about Shakespeare and Islam. Both films are set in Islamicate societies and use Shakespeare to tell particularly local stories. I assign these films to demonstrate how these cultures have a way of speaking with, to, and through Shakespeare to make his work speak to their realities and worlds.