Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (review)

If you teach Shakespeare’s plays at an American university, college, or secondary school (as I do), and if you’ve ever felt a disconnect between what you do in the classroom and the real lives of your students, this book is the antidote you need. With unfailing honesty, clarity, and courage, Ayanna Thompson’s Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America confronts the elephant in the room we so seldom admit to seeing—race—particularly in regard to Shakespeare’s cultural authority. Thompson casts her questioning gaze on the ways Shakespeare is studied, taught, and performed in twenty-first-century America; less traditionally, she examines the plays’ appropriation in film, novels, prison and reform programs, and new media such as YouTube. Her wide-ranging inquiry compels the reader to question all sorts of assumptions—about Shakespeare, race, and (most often) the ways both of these are entwined in American thought and practice.

Thompson explains her title’s significance in her introduction. In his address to the Venetian Senate, Othello describes Desdemona’s fascination with his adventures; she found his stories “‘passing strange’” and listened to them “with a greedy ear.”¹ The phrase conveys the unusual wonder Desdemona felt, but Thompson connects the words to the American trope of “passing,” often used in narratives about individuals who pretend to be a member of a racial category other than their own; passing implies the creation of an alternative identity and reflects the desire to “rewrite a story from a different point of view” (11). Finally, “passing” also connotes the changes that take place through time. She stresses that Shakespeare “was / is always defined through the recreation of his identity, image, texts, and performances. . . . [He] needs to be rendered as contingent—as in process and as passing—as the creative moment in which his name, image, text, and performance are invoked” (17).

In the next chapter, Thompson tackles assumptions about Shakespeare’s universalism as reflected in two contemporary films: the small-budget, independent Suture (1993) and the Hollywood comedy Bringing Down the House (2003). Although neither film is about Shakespeare, Thompson shows how the concept of Shakespeare as a universal figure can be appropriated to stand for white, Western culture. Thompson next interrogates the implications of Maya Angelou’s often-repeated claim that Shakespeare was black. She frames Farrukh Dhondy’s Black Swan, a young adult novel whose Afro-Caribbean hero tries to seize Shakespeare’s cultural capital for himself, as a kind of “strategic essentialism”—“the practice of promoting racial differences as inherent, fundamentally different, and therefore fixed in order to create affiliation, cohesion, and unity within a racialized group” (13, 49). Even though most readers will not be familiar with these texts, they will find Thompson’s detailed analysis intriguing.

Chapter 4 moves to multicultural theater, a topic in which Thompson, who edited the collection Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (2006), has particular expertise. Here, she probes the inconsistencies in contemporary casting practices. Although most regional Shakespeare festivals profess to be multicultural, their actual practices can be divided into four categories: (1) colorblind casting, assigning actors according to ability without regard to race; (2) societal casting, assigning actors of color to roles that were originally written for white actors; (3) conceptual casting, assigning actors of color to roles that will “enhance the play’s social resonance” (76); and cross-cultural casting, moving the play’s milieu to a different location and culture. Yet, Thompson argues, theater practitioners seldom interrogate their own practices or face up to those practices’ messy contradictions. Using the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as her primary example, Thompson calls for theater practitioners to recognize and discuss the semiotics of race in their productions.

Thompson’s next topic is even more nervous making: whether a role originally intended for a white actor in blackface (Othello, for example) should ever be performed according to “original-staging” practices. As someone who has written on this controversial topic, I appreciated...