Selected web resources on Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism

E-Books (HSU users only):

• Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998.
• Emily Bartels. Speaking of the Moor: from Alcazar to Othello. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2009.
• Laura Bovilsky. Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.
• Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, eds.  Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage.  Abingdon, UK: Ashgate, 2008. 
• Terence Hawkes, ed. Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2. London: Routledge, 1996.
• Ania Loomba. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998.
• Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. London: Routledge, 1998.
• Shankar Raman, ed. Renaissance Literatures and Postcolonial Studies. Ediburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011.

Websites, Podcasts, etc.:

• Ania Loomba speaks on "Shakespeare and the Black Body" at the Chicago Humanities Institute, November 13, 2010.
• Renaissance Exploration, Travel, and the World Outside Europe. Norton Topics Online (Norton Anthology of English Literature). Use the navigation bar on the lefthand side of the page to explore "Texts and Contexts" (pull-down menu), "Web Resources," and "Illustrations."
• Renaissance & Early Modern Literary Studies Resources (Jack Lynch, Rutgers-Newark).
• Early Modern Literary Studies collection of Electronic Texts.

Generic Will:

• Although the third edition came out in 2012, the first edition of Sean McEvoy's Shakespeare: The Basics (eBook, HSU users only), is hardly outdated
• The British Library has digital scans of 21 Shakespeare plays in quarto editions (along with other scholarly resources).
• The Folger Shakespeare Library offers a digital image collection, along with lots of other resources for scholars and teachers.
• The Arden Shakespeare site once offered much more "free" material than it does now, before Arden, publisher of one of the oldest and stuffiest scholar Shakespeare editions, was devoured by a series of multinationals. The videos (scroll down) are worth a look, though.
• The website for Robert Shaunessy's Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare has a nifty interactive timeline (and some other stuff).
• Quarto/Folio-a-gogo: Shakespeare-Online.com explains how Shakespeare's plays were published.
• Internet Shakespeare Editions (University of Victoria, BC) has, well, Internet Shakespeare Editions--and a lot of other stuff, including resources on Shakespeare in India and Shakespeare in Africa.
• And speaking of Internet Shakespeare editions: there are lots of 'em. OpenSource Shakespeare is one of the most useful, while No Fear Shakespeare, a division of (cough) SparkNotes, offers side-by-side "translations" from Elizabethan English into contemporary English.
• And speaking of SparkNotes: sure, cheat sheets and bluffers' guides like SparkNotes, eNotes, and Cliffs Notes have their place. The analysis they offer is usually canned and conventional and high-schoolish (SparkNotes tends to rise above the others in this regard, and they also have more free content available), but if you need to refresh your memory with regard to a plot detail or a character, or get a sense of the received wisdom about the conflicts, themes, and symbols of a particular play, then go ahead--but use with caution.
• Finally: okay, I'm no expert. But I've read enough about the so-called Shakespeare authorship controversy to conclude that the anti-Stratfordians are the climate-science deniers of the Shakespeare world. James Shapiro's Contested Will, in particular, persuades me that even their best case is what the English would call a load of bollocks. You can research the topic on your own and believe what you want. But I don't consider it worthy of class time. Nuff said?

Will in the World:

• With its 2012 "Globe to Globe" initiative (which brought Shakespearean productions by 37 companies from around the world to London in conjunction with the summer Olympics), the reconstructed Globe Theatre on London's South Bank seemed embarassingly proud of the fact that the English Bard had conquered the world.
• Mad Shakespeare, a British weblog, adopts a somewhat less triumphal approach to Shakespeare and global multiculturalism, as do:
• Global Shakespeares (pull down the "Regions" menu for sub-sites devoted to the Arab World, East and Southeast Asia, India, Brazil, and the UK & North America) and one of its affiliated portals, Shakespeare Performance in Asia (MIT).

Some Related Literary Texts (for other texts, consult your critical editions of the plays, as well as Norton Topics Online, above):

• William Dunbar, "Of Ane Blak-Moir" (Google Books | Medieval Institute [with glosses and footnotes]) (ca. 1508)
• Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586) (Archive.org | Penn State facsimile ed.)
• Christopher Marlow, Tamburlaine the Great (1587-88): Part 1 | Part 2
• Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589): [html | pdf (excerpt)]
• Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (1589-90)
• George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar (ca. 1591)
• Edward Guilpin, epigrams "Of Nigrina" (Nos. 57, 61, 62, & 65) (1598)
• John Weever, "In Byrrham" (1599)
• Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness (1605)
• Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston, Eastward Ho (1605)
• John Webster, The White Devil (1612)

Background:

• The first few pages of Lyn Innes's excellent A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700-2000 include a good thumbnail sketch of the historical record of Black people in the British Isles from Roman times through the late 18th century. See also:
• Sue Niebrzydowski, " The Sultana and her Sisters: Black Women in the British Isles Before 1530 " (Women's History Review 10.2 [2001]) and
• Eldred Jones's The Elizabethan Image of Africa (Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia/Folger Shakespeare Library, 1971), a companion to his classic (and somewhat longer) Othello's Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford UP, 1965), which our library does not own.

Teaching Resources:

• Shakespeare in the Classroom (pbs.org)
• Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet (Palomar College)
• Joe Winston and Miles Tandy's Teaching Shakespeare 4-11 (Routledge, 2012) focuses on teaching Shakespeare in the primary grades
• The Theatre Collection at Harvard's Houghton Library has an extensive collection of digitized books and images related to the celebrated 19th-century African-American Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge