ABSTRACT
Empire, race, colonialism and cultural difference are rather belatedly becoming central to Shakespeare criticism. In 1985, when the first volume of Alternative Shakespeares was published, it was necessary to establish that colonial expansion was a crucial Shakespearean theme, rather than just a backdrop (Barker and Hulme 1985). In 1987 an important review essay of ‘political criticism’ of Shakespeare remarked on the significant absence of a full-length account of Shakespeare and race (Cohen 1987), but some years later ‘race’ as an analytic category was still conspicuous by its absence, even when questions of ‘difference’ in Shakespeare were being addressed (Wayne 1991).1That several authors of a 1994 feminist anthology take that absence as their starting point and seek to redress it is some indication that ‘race’ is being lifted out of the category of ‘a special topic’ and woven more widely into the critical vocabulary of early modern studies (Hendricks and Parker 1994). The academic encounter between a variety of poststructuralist critical methods and the political concerns of historically marginalized groups has fostered studies of all kinds of ‘difference’—including cultural and racial difference. Still, those who write about these issues today do not necessarily share political or intellectual assumptions. For some, the ques-tion of ‘difference’ in early modern drama is at a remove from contemporary affairs, while for others, it is a means of discussing the world we live in. For others still, ‘race’ and ‘cultural difference’ are distinct from questions of empire and colonialism. Whether a critic lives in (or comes from) Britain, North America or the ‘third world’ also has a strong impact on both the meanings and the
broader pedagogical and political significance she finds in ‘race’ and Shakespeare.2
