Different Shakespeares: Thinking Globally in an Early Modern Literature Course

Abstract

As in the canon of English literature generally, Shakespeare plays an oversized role in the study of early modern cross-cultural encounters, particularly The Tempest and critical debates on its participation in (proto)colonial ideologies. In an essay that I assign early in “Different Shakespeares”—a masters-level course devoted to developing critical approaches to questions of difference and identity in Shakespeare’s plays and the early modern period—Ania Loomba notes that Shakespeareans have recently sought to interrogate and dislodge what was once taken to be an organic connection between Shakespeare and a notion of essential “Englishness.”1 In this course—whose title I borrowed from an essay by Jyotsna Singh discussing appropriations of Shakespeare in India that displace the cultural authority of the “universal Bard”—I aimed to acknowledge and reckon with this critical history, situating Shakespeare in relation to the emerging field of global Renaissance/early modern studies.2 At the same time, the course strove to decenter Shakespeare, placing The Tempest, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Titus Andronicus alongside other primary texts, including Philip Massinger and John Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage, overseas voyage accounts and commercial treatises, a twentieth-century postcolonial appropriation (Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempȇte), as well as a range of secondary sources.3KeywordsFinal PaperBinary OppositionReading ResponsePostcolonial TheoryGlobal TravelThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.