Farah Karim-Cooper on The Great White Bard

Farah Karim-Cooper. Photo by Sarah Lee.

Can you love Shakespeare and be an antiracist?

Farah Karim-Cooper’s new book, The Great White Bard, explores the language of race and difference in Shakespeare’s plays. Karim-Cooper also looks at the ways Shakespeare’s work became integral to Britain’s imperial project, and its sense of cultural superiority.

But for all this, Karim-Cooper is an unapologetic Shakespeare fan. It’s right there in the subtitle of her book: “How to Love Shakespeare While Talking about Race.” Far from casting Shakespeare out of the classroom or playhouse, Karim-Cooper shows new ways to appreciate him. And, by drawing connections between the plays and current events, she offers an eyes-wide-open tour of Shakespeare’s continued relevance. Karim-Cooper talks with Barbara Bogaev about the role of race in Titus Andronicus, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and more.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Farah Karim-Cooper is a professor of Shakespeare studies at King’s College, London, and a director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe theater. The Great White Bard is available now from Viking Press.

From the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published August 15, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leo Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Mark Dezzani in Surrey and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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MICHAEL WITMORE: How do scholars, audiences, and artists reconcile being antiracist with loving Shakespeare?

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Michael Witmore, the Folger Director.

Farah Karim-Cooper is a professor of Shakespeare studies at King’s College, London, and a director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe theater. Her new book, The Great White Bard, explores the language of race and difference in plays such as Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest. Karim-Cooper also looks at the ways Shakespeare’s work became integral to Britain’s imperial project, and its sense of cultural superiority.

But for all this, Karim-Cooper is an unapologetic Shakespeare fan. The subtitle of her book is How to Love Shakespeare While Talking about Race. Far from casting Shakespeare out of the classroom or the playhouse, Karim-Cooper shows new ways to appreciate him. And by drawing connections between the plays and current events, she offers an eyes-wide-open tour of Shakespeare’s continued relevance.

The seed of the idea for the book was planted in 2021, when Karim-Cooper received a letter from a member of the public. This letter expressed frustration about the discussion of race in the context of Shakespeare performance. And it led Karim-Cooper to reflect on the intense sense of racialized nostalgia surrounding Shakespeare.

Here’s Farah Karim-Cooper, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: If you could, tell me about the letter you received a few years ago that prompted you to write this book.

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: Well, the letter I received was because I had launched at the Globe in 2021 a series of anti-racist Shakespeare webinars.

The main purpose of these webinars was really just to get an actor and a scholar together to talk about every single play that we put on in the theater season, in the context of race and identity.

When we launched them, there was a huge backlash on Twitter and in some of the more conservative of British newspapers.

BOGAEV: When you say backlash, you mean like hate mail?

KARIM-COOPER: Hate mail. Yeah, absolute hate mail. I mean, some of the most shocking, racist things I’ve ever seen. There was this sense that somehow, the Globe was betraying Shakespeare, or assaulting Shakespeare in some way, or canceling Shakespeare, even. So, it was quite a hyperbolic response.

But it did prompt various people to send letters to the artistic director, to me. The letter that I received was very, very sincere in its anger. It was basically somebody telling me that I’m a custodian of Shakespeare and that I have a very sacred duty to look after the canon. Just because all and sundry don’t necessarily like Shakespeare doesn’t mean it’s my job to bring Shakespeare down to the masses, essentially.

BOGAEV: “All and sundry.” I feel like that’s the operative phrase.

KARIM-COOPER: Absolutely, absolutely.

For me, it meant people of color, essentially, because the webinars were about Shakespeare and race. It was about thinking about anti-racist approaches to talking about Shakespeare to teaching Shakespeare to performing Shakespeare. It was just providing some insights. Most of the participants in the webinars were people of color.

BOGAEV: Okay. So, I imagine you weren’t terribly surprised, but the force of it sounds really extreme.

KARIM-COOPER: I think so. I wasn’t terribly surprised, but I was also annoyed because I’d been at the Globe for, at that point, about 17 years. And so, all of a sudden, I was now destroying Shakespeare when I’d spent the last, almost two decades of my career promoting Shakespeare and making Shakespeare as accessible as possible. So, I got really annoyed by that.

BOGAEV: I had a kind of basic reaction as I was reading your book, which is whether you were writing it for maybe a younger audience who reads these plays or sits in the theater and they’re thinking, “Wait a second, I have a question about what’s going on with race in this.” Or, “I’m feeling uncomfortable watching this racist 16^th-century stuff.” Or, “It comes off to me that way, but I’m afraid to say anything because people think I’m inappropriately applying a racial subtext to Shakespeare.”

KARIM-COOPER: Yeah, I think I did have, to a certain extent, a kind of generation in mind when I was writing this book.

But I was also really thinking about current—for example—theater directors who might want to take on a play like Othello, or people who are training actors at the moment, or people who are teaching school at the moment.

We know that Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth are set texts, and that the notion of race is something that emerges in both of those plays. And there’s anti-Black language in some of the plays, even in comedies.

You know, young people will definitely, as you say, feel uncomfortable when they come across those lines. I really want teachers to be prepared to answer the questions that they might get.

BOGAEV: Well, you lay your thesis out pretty clearly in your prologue. And that’s that, “Shakespeare’s texts are a reservoir of what’s known as race-making or racial formation, meaning the social process of creation of racial identities,” and that’s a quote.

Could you explain that for us, please? I guess, I read that and I thought, “Well, aren’t all texts potentially a reservoir for that?”

KARIM-COOPER: For sure. Yeah, absolutely. But, I think what’s interesting is that Shakespeare’s texts have somehow been bracketed from that, right? So: Shakespeare can’t be about race.

BOGAEV: Right, they’ve been put in this special category.

KARIM-COOPER: Exactly. They’re in a special box where race doesn’t count and you shouldn’t talk about it. That sounds really silly when we say it, but it’s actually how Shakespeare’s been sort of received over the centuries.

But, the idea of racial formation is just that. It is that notions and ideas and systems of thinking about difference, and that difference being racially inflected, were in development over a couple of hundred years.

So, from the Middle Ages, you can detect it. You can detect the way in which people are thinking and talking about phenotype, about the difference between black and white, and the symbolism that’s loaded onto those two racial categories. Then, that’s inherited as you move through into the Renaissance period.

Certainly, classical texts themselves harken back to, sort of, templates and frameworks for thinking about difference and classifying individuals and groups into superiority categories or inferiority categories. All of that together amounts to a process of racial thinking.

BOGAEV: Yeah, but unlike other playwrights of his day, Shakespeare gets put in this box because he became just the apex of Western culture and in this, kind of, national saint, as you say, of England. But, is it revelatory that Shakespeare is inseparable from and integral to the empire building also helped make him into this national saint?

KARIM-COOPER: Yes, so I think what’s really interesting is that people always want to say that Shakespeare is pre-colonial, when we know that although England was a very small player on the global stage in the 16th century, they had very, very ambitious designs on becoming a sort of global giant. Shakespeare was witnessing a kind of proto-colonial design.

Then, by the time you get to the 18th century, and Shakespeare’s gone through the Restoration, then you see what’s happening in 1670. The Royal African Company is formed and England is well on its way into dominating the slave trade. It was at this time where art and culture, aesthetics, taste, all of these things are being redefined and cultivated in a time of English wealth, and Shakespeare is really sort of instrumentalized for the same purposes. So, it’s really hard to extract Shakespeare from the colonial unless you look at how he was constructed in the 18th century and realize that so much of that construction is still with us. That we still have this sort of, what I call “Bardic notion” of Shakespeare as this lone genius with a quill and a puffy shirt, when actually he was just—if you go back to the 16th century—he was just a jobbing playwright. He was a brilliant playwright, but a jobbing playwright who was working in a very scrappy theater industry.

BOGAEV: Right. And, all those people writing you hate mail about you catering to the groundlings or something are completely missing that point.

KARIM-COOPER: Yeah, exactly.

BOGAEV: Okay, let’s get to the plays. You start with Titus Andronicus. Aaron is Shakespeare’s first Moor character. Just another basic question: What exactly is a Moor in Shakespeare’s time?

KARIM-COOPER: Yeah, so it can be quite a slippery term, but it simply is the English version of the word Moros, which refers to people from Mauritania. It was used kind of as a blanket term to describe Black Africans.

But, sometimes it was used to describe North Africans or Arabs. Sometimes you see the word “white moor,” so you see that phrase to refer to Arabs. And or you might see black moor or blackamore, which means explicitly, a Sub-Saharan African.

BOGAEV: Right, and already we’re getting into… that’s proof positive that people then in the early modern period were thinking about different kinds of otherness and race.

KARIM-COOPER: Absolutely. Yeah. So, that’s who he was. We have a drawing from the time by Henry Peacham, who must’ve been in the audience watching Titus Andronicus. It’s the only drawing we have of time of a play on stage. It’s of Titus, and you can see Aaron in it and he is explicitly Black.

BOGAEV: Aaron’s really interesting because, well, he’s just so dimensional, although we think of him as completely evil in the play. But, you write that it’s striking that Aaron displays a kind of Black pride or self-love that no other character in the play exhibits, not even Titus.

Are we talking here about Aaron’s speech, “Coal black is better than another hue, in that it scorns to bear another hue?” Tell us about that.

KARIM-COOPER: Yes. Yeah, I mean, it’s really interesting because in the book I sort of draw on all of the different tropes that Shakespeare would have been drawing on. So, you’re thinking about Black villainy, very stereotypical Black villainy, the allusion back to the medieval vice character in the morality plays and who may have been on stage in blackface, and what that conjures up in people’s imagination.

Shakespeare is drawing on all of those, but at the same time, turning them upside-down. This is a technique Shakespeare uses quite a lot, in which he’s asking you to think about two things at the same time so that you’re constantly questioning each of those things that you’re thinking about. It’s mental gymnastics, to be honest.

Aaron, I think, is a character who surprises people. People have spoken for quite a long time about the fact that, you know, one of the things that this play is about is family relationships, right? You’ve got fathers, you’ve got daughters. You’ve got mothers who are begging for the lives of their sons. You’ve got a father who kills his own son, and then he kills his daughter out of honor because she’s been violated.

You get a sense that Aaron, however, who becomes a parent in the middle of the play, because the empress who he’s been with has a baby—which is, you know, in itself really amazing, that Shakespeare has a biracial baby on stage—that he is very tender with the child. Some have even argued that he’s the best parent in the play.

BOGAEV: Yeah, what were attitudes towards biraciality in Shakespeare’s day? How would Titus’ audiences have reacted to this?

KARIM-COOPER: We don’t know for sure. I mean, what we know from Imtiaz Habib’s research is that interracial relationships and marriages and the christenings of biracial children was a thing. We do know that it happened. Shakespeare himself shows a lot of interest, curiosity, about it throughout his canon. So, you know, we’ve got lots of “dark” ladies pitted against, you know, the, sort of, “fair,” “bright” white ladies. Then, we’ve got his sonnets in which a few of them are dedicated to a dark lady. You get a sense that he’s really interested in interraciality and alternative standards of beauty to the conventional one that he’s witnessing in his time period.

BOGAEV: And, Cleopatra, you make the case, is one of those. How does Shakespeare present her race?

KARIM-COOPER: He refers to her twice racially. She talks about how her skin is black from the “amorous pinches of the sun,” which basically speaks to a kind of climate theory that had been around for ages, which was one theory for how people have different or darker skin tones: the farther south you go, where there is more sun, there’re darker skin tones. Then, later on, she’s described as it with a “tawny front.”

Some people say “tawny” means brown or lighter and black is black. But, I think that there are slippages in this time period because there are different skin tones. If you are a Black person, you might not be a very dark. You might be a lighter skin tone. You might be “tawny.” Or you might be “black.” It’s really hard to say what Shakespeare was envisioning.

BOGAEV: The “pinching” kind of cues up just my favorite term in your book, “misogynoir.” Define it for us.

KARIM-COOPER: This is a term that was coined by a Black feminist named Moya Bailey, who describes the, sort of, really intersectional way of thinking about misogyny, which is that it is a simultaneous racism and misogyny: So, Black women are particularly susceptible to misogyny. So, that’s how she refers to it.

BOGAEV: So, I’m thinking about the oversexed-Black-women stereotype, which goes hand in hand with the oversexed African male stereotype, I guess.

KARIM-COOPER: Yeah, absolutely. So, like, promiscuity; the inability to control, sort of, sexual impulses is absolutely attached to these stereotypes.

BOGAEV: Okay, where do we see this at work then in Cleopatra? I mean, is her ethnicity consistently intertwined in the text with her sexual behavior and her sexual identity?

KARIM-COOPER: I think so. I think it’s also entwined in her association with Egypt itself. Shakespeare read Plutarch, and that’s how he derived the story of Antony and Cleopatra. But, Plutarch also wrote about the Egyptians in other texts and other writers spoke about Egyptians as being dark and as being—as the women as being overbearing and uncontrollable. A lot of these stereotypes are kind of woven into the imagination at the time. Shakespeare, I think, is drawing on some of that. You’ve got phrases like, “Cool a gypsy’s lust.” The depiction of her is really through quite an orientalist—if you’re thinking from a contemporary perspective—this sort of an orientalist depiction of Cleopatra. Very much steeped in sort of exotic imagery. But, also, her temperament, which seems to be very volatile, and that also would have had associations with sexuality.

BOGAEV: So, to summarize then, how do you see Shakespeare interrogating these ideas? Or, is he not interrogating here?

KARIM-COOPER: I mean, I think that’s a really good question. I don’t always want to give Shakespeare a pass, you know? I mean, I can’t always give him a pass.

BOGAEV: No, I mean, he’s a product of his day.

KARIM-COOPER: Exactly, yeah. He’s sometimes just, sort of, potentially reinforcing stereotypes, maybe enjoying and relishing in them himself. Or he might be actually turning them upside down on their head like he does, I think, with Aaron.

It’s hard to say with Cleopatra. I think because she is extraordinarily intelligent. She does come across as extraordinarily intelligent, as vivacious, as full of gravitas. I mean, there isn’t really another woman in Shakespeare who has that same status. So, I think he’s saying something about her as he’s imagining her.

BOGAEV: Yeah, I guess one measure you can speak to is how Shakespeare’s depictions of race compare to other authors of his era.

KARIM-COOPER: Yes, absolutely. I mean, you do get quite, sort of, one dimensional stereotypes in other plays. I think Shakespeare, like with a lot of his other characterizations, provides multi-dimensions to his characters. I think that’s obviously one of the reasons why he’s endured for so long. Yeah, I think there is something different about the way Shakespeare depicts otherness.

BOGAEV: Okay, let’s talk about Othello. You argue among other things that it’s a kind of master class in code-switching, so spin that out for us. Where do we see this at work in the play?

KARIM-COOPER: I think the play has been really viewed as not a race play, because Othello is a very successful Black man in Venetian society. But, what’s really interesting is that Shakespeare chose Venetian society for a reason, because the upper classes of Venice were patrician. The patrician elite will let you into their halls of power, but they won’t let you into their families. There’s a real sense of blood purity within that realm. The patricians were people like the Duke, Brabantio. You know, the people who were governing Venice and in control of its wealth.

Othello is very, very useful, right, as a captain. A very skilled and respected and honored captain of the Venetian army. It’s in their interest to make sure that he does what they need him to do, which is to protect Venetian interests in Cyprus and elsewhere against the Turks, who are this sort of looming enemy.

BOGAEV: You name this chapter, “Model Minority,” as in that racist bias that characterizes Othello as the shining exception to other moors who act more Black.

KARIM-COOPER: Yeah, yeah. It feels so modern, right? I use this Patricia Collins phrase, “the outsider within,” which is what it feels like to be an ethnic minority in a white-dominant business or theater or university. You feel like an outsider even though you’re sort of in the game, as it were. Everybody looks at you as a kind of model. “Oh, you know…” So, you do code switch, that you—in order to get by in everyday life, you kind of have to do that. So, you always feel excluded even when you’re being included.

BOGAEV: Now, it’s interesting that you, in this chapter, talk about the director Iqbal Khan’s Othello and his choice to cast a Black actor as Iago. You speculate maybe his idea was to decenter race in this production. But, how does a Black-skinned Iago change the racial dynamics in the play for you?

KARIM-COOPER: I think that it’s a couple of ways. I’ve thought about it subsequently as well. I said, you know, for one thing, I think it does draw on the idea of colorism within Black communities and also other ethnic minorities. I know, for myself and my culture and Pakistani culture, there is colorism. So, there’s a preference for fairer skin, as it were. So, there is a kind of inter-racism, so to speak, or intra-racism. That is one dynamic that’s released by that kind of casting choice.

I think the other one is that, you know, there is an argument to be made that Iago may not be racist explicitly, at all, but that actually he understands the power of racialized language and the insecurity that might then dislodge Othello from himself, because of the notion of internalized racism.

So, actually, it doesn’t matter if he’s a lighter-skinned Black person or if he’s white: That may not really be what’s at stake for him, but we know that that’s what’s at stake for the society.

BOGAEV: That’s interesting. Because he’s lived it, so he knows what a powerful tool, what a weapon he has.

KARIM-COOPER: Exactly.

BOGAEV: Huh. You did say people still claim Othello is not about race. Well, what did they do with all the white and fairness allusions with Desdemona and Blackness as well?

KARIM-COOPER: Yeah, I just think, you know, there are some people who haven’t done deep dives into those color associations of white/Black binary.

I mean, the person that brought this to people’s minds was Kim Hall back in 1995 in her book, Things of Darkness. That, you know, you see these tropes everywhere. And, we’re not really doing a deep enough dive into what they really meant.

When I wrote my book on cosmetics back in 2006, I really wanted to find out what they meant by the word “fair,” because you see that everywhere. People just thought that meant beautiful. But it doesn’t. It’s very explicit that it’s an elite form of whiteness.

Fair means beautiful with a luster, and that luster is God’s light shining. So, it is virtue, class, and whiteness as a combination. That is the most elite form of whiteness.

That’s why working-class women are dissociated from whiteness. Also, women of the upper classes are precarious because Desdemona changes color. As time goes on and she’s labeled an adulteress, and then her face becomes blackened metaphorically.

BOGAEV: Wow, triple-whammy in that whiteness.

Well, we bring so much to these plays. I want to talk about that, how you can go to a Shakespeare play and you are forced to see stereotypes or forced to see people of color or otherness through the eyes of the dominant culture.

Let’s talk about The Tempest, because I think that’s how Caliban, the savage, deformed slave, is framed. And I recently saw a Tempest in which Caliban was a kind of half-fish, half-man monster type. Which is very common for him to be portrayed that way. It’s in the text after all.

But I was much more aware in this production of how uncomfortable it made me because I feel like I’m being forced to see Caliban only through Prospero’s eyes or European’s eyes. Maybe that’s not where we are with Shakespeare anymore. You also take issue with this kind of staging of Caliban. Tell me why.

KARIM-COOPER: Yeah. I do think that what Shakespeare’s doing in that play is showing us the power of language to dehumanize. It’s literally dehumanized him to the point where we’re still staging it like he’s a fish or, you know, a monster of some kind.

It was really interesting, because when we did an anti-racist webinar on The Tempest, we had the indigenous Shakespeare scholar Scott Stevens. He was talking about how he wished productions would stage a Caliban that was the opposite of those, of that language, of that rhetoric. And that would make it really clear that it was literally the lens through which we were being forced to look at Caliban through. But, I’ve yet to see that.

BOGAEV: Hmm. You know, you write really personally about another play, Romeo and Juliet, which you say was a gateway play for you. It’s a gateway play for most people—because, probably of my generation, the Zeffirelli movie. But why was it a gateway play for you?

KARIM-COOPER: Well, partly because of the Zeffirelli film. I was just really captivated by it. Also, it felt, when we got into the story and I really came to understand what was happening in that play, I realized that it felt Pakistani to me. It reminded me of the story of my own grandmother in India who was, you know, pretty much kept under lock and key. Her father was a very wealthy landowner, and she had a lot of brothers. She was sort of guarded, heavily guarded. Then, her marriage was arranged when she was 19.

And, she was very nervous. I mean, she loved my grandfather, who was—it was a great match because he was a fantastic man, and she was just never the same after he died. But, she was terrified. Absolutely terrified.

Then, my mother’s—as I talked about, my mother, who kind of rebelled against that kind of convention and married a divorced captain. Much to her father’s dismay, for a little while.

BOGAEV: That must have caused a stir.

KARIM-COOPER: It sure did. He had four kids and she was getting on a ship and sailing away with them. That was really scary for her parents. But, both of those examples just made me think about Juliet.

BOGAEV: Wow. Well, there’s so many modern adaptations of interracial Romeo and Juliet productions, starting with West Side Story. We’re used to thinking about the play in those terms, in terms of race, I think.

But, you focus in on one metaphor in a really interesting way. And those are the lines, “It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night as a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.”

KARIM-COOPER: Hmm.

BOGAEV: Why pluck those two lines out? What’s the significance of this in the play and the significance to your larger thesis about how Blackness is used as a prop for whiteness?

KARIM-COOPER: Well, it’s just that: Blackness is used as a prop for whiteness. The reason why I was really interested in that image is because it reminded me of the sort of legacy of art and the way in which we view Western art in society. We hardly ever see the Black people in the art. We hardly ever see the Black person who’s on the side of the white person.

It just reminded me of the invisibility of Blackness. You know, that image has been there since the beginning and people tend to have not talked about it. You know, I’ve never really heard anybody talk about that image other than people who are focusing on maybe Shakespeare and race.

It’s really surprising how a lot of these images seem to be buried in Shakespeare’s imagery. In his beauty in the sublimity of his language. It’s such an evocative image.

It really does do the work of making Juliet seem exceptional. I think people have been so entranced by Juliet herself and the way in which she’s described. She’s one of the most beloved characters in all of Shakespeare. And, we tend to focus on the white woman in the frame and not see what’s in the background.

What’s really interesting is that imagery is so beloved, but we haven’t really looked at how it racializes people. It’s when you have two Black actors playing those roles and starting to dig into what the lines mean when the impact of those words.

BOGAEV: You know, you admit when you started this project that the idea wasn’t to separate Shakespeare from the racism in his text, but to show how it rears its ugly head. And then what do you do with it? You know, what do you do with it as a director, as a reader, as a person sitting in the audience?

Then I looked at your book’s subtitle—here in the US, anyway, I don’t know what it was in England—“How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race.” I wondered why you wanted to insert love into this equation. Why is that so important that it gets second billing, if not top billing?

KARIM-COOPER: Well, I think it’s because the top billing is the thing that might scare people. And if you know, it’s called The Great White Bard. That’s, kind of, kicking a hornet’s nest a little bit.

I wanted to kind of say, you know, “We’re going to talk about Shakespeare and race, but it’s… don’t worry. He’s not going anywhere and it’s all going to be okay.” Which is kind of really what the message of the subtitle is.

But, it’s also because I love Shakespeare. I can see the things about the plays that disturb me and make me uncomfortable and have potential to harm audiences. And, I feel that if I’m able to grapple with that as I talk about in the book, being able to look Shakespeare in the eye and say, “You know what? I’m going to cut that. Hope you don’t mind.” Or, you know, “Let’s kind of interrogate this. Why would he say this?”—then, it becomes an inquiry.

I love that. I love that work. I love these plays. I think they’re extraordinary. I think they’re extraordinary despite some of the discomfort of those plays, and maybe even because of the discomfort. Because the reality is, there’s discomfort everywhere. There’s racism today. Everyday racism. So if you can spot it in Shakespeare, then I think you’ll be able to spot it anywhere else.

BOGAEV: It’s been such a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it, and thank you for the book as well.

KARIM-COOPER: Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for talking to me.

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WITMORE: That was Farah Karim-Cooper talking to Barbara Bogaev. The Great White Bard is available now from Viking Press.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer, with help from Leonor Fernandez. We had technical help from Mark Dezzani in Surrey and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts. Our building in Washington, DC, has been under renovation for the past three years. But next year, we’ll be opening our doors again. Come visit us on Capitol Hill, beginning in 2024. Take in a performance in our Elizabethan Theatre and check out the world’s largest collection of First Folios—all 82, on display together for the very first time. You can find more about the Folger at our website, folger.edu.

Thanks for listening. For the Folger Shakespeare Library, I’m Folger Director Michael Witmore.