From Shakespeare to Obama: A Study in Language, Slavery and Place by Jonathan Hart, and: Shakespeare and Immigration ed. by Ruben Espinosa, David Ruiter (review)

These two books—From Shakespeare to Obama by Jonathan Hart and Shakespeare and Immigration edited by Ruben Espinosa and David Ruiter—deal with the migrant and the marginalized. While the former focuses more on slavery and language, the latter brings together essays that cast a broader net on the different modes of migration possible in the early modern period. Both books will be useful to scholars and students of Shakespeare, as well as to those interested in immigration and race studies.

From Shakespeare to Obama, though perhaps too ambitious at times, links up the origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade with the first black president of the United States. As the subtitle makes explicit, this is a book also about language and place. The strongest sections deal with slavery, and it is here that its broad historical scope proves most effective. The second chapter, “Representing Slaves,” examines Gomes Eannes de Zurara’s account of the first African slaves’ arrival in Portugal, moving on to views of slavery in Western philosophy from Aristotle to William Wordsworth, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce. The book weaves back and forth from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, bringing in Walter Ralegh, who “is part of the Osiris effect or Orpheus effect of scattered or split narrative or argument” (79). Barack Obama and William Shakespeare also appear as specters, haunting the different sections. What is lost in continuity is gained in a much broader discussion of the multiple contexts of slavery, past and present (the latter filtered through Obama’s 2012 speech on slavery).

In between are shorter essays that explore the language of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and history plays, William Blake’s poetry, and the writings of Northrop Frye, J. Hillis Miller, M. G. Vassanji, and Umberto Eco. From Shakespeare to Obama refuses to stick with periodic or textual boundaries, preferring instead the model of the “writerly, inventive, idiosyncratic series of meditations” as Page duBois aptly sums up in her commentary on the back of the book.

Obama naturally features in the final chapters. Here Hart can return to issues of latent racism and the continuing legacy of slavery, particularly its most modern incarnations. In his conclusion he provides the narrative logic of From Shakespeare to Obama: many chapters have a section called “Conclusion and Transition” to help the reader along, and to suggest the connections that might not be initially obvious. This is a book that teases the reader in a rather delightful way and is beautifully written, which is not to take away from Hart the breadth of his scholarship, for this book ultimately comes together precisely because of the wide range of subjects that are brought into the fold.

Shakespeare and Immigration is a much-needed and timely addition to recent inquiries into early modern migration. It covers both internal and external migrants as well as aliens (both men and women) hailing from Europe and elsewhere. As the editors make clear in their introduction, critical interest regarding the legal and social dimensions of early modern immigration has much to do with present debates about the fate of desirable and undesirable strangers. This is a standpoint that gets repeated in almost all of the individual essays that follow—as Peter Erickson, for instance, states in “Race Words in Othello”: “Our contemporary interests are enhanced by the perspectives we bring from our early modern involvements. An equal enhancement moves in the other direction: the methodological value of the present is that it enables us to see early modern formations with new eyes—to loosen the iconographical blinders, to change the interpretive filters, to look again” (172–73).

Where this collection differs from other scholarship on early...