Shakespeare and Critical Race Theory

Abstract

Abstract This chapter begins by tracing some of the key arguments and developments in critical race theory, with a particular focus on its provenance in legal studies, its systemic analysis of the operations of race and race-making, its interventions into an understanding of whiteness as property, its theory of interest convergence, and its emphasis on intersectionality. The chapter then turns to the critical directions in Shakespeare studies which have originated in and have been influenced by critical race theory. The third and final part of this chapter suggests that thinking with critical race theory as a methodology unfolds new ways of understanding the operations of systemic racial inequity in The Merchant of Venice, in particular its fiction of equal protection and its framework of interest convergence, and the chapter ends with a brief reading of the operations of whiteness in Measure for Measure.