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Using Caste to Talk about Difference

Ann Christensen

Early modern English society was hierarchical. People believed that ranked difference was “the natural order”; for example, apprentices were to remove their caps before their superiors, and the very fabric grade of the caps was dictated by sumptuary laws meant to restrict lower-class access to goods and behaviors available to people from higher ranks.[1] Shakespeare’s plays are obsessed with where certain classes of people should (or should not) be: commoners should be at work, not gathering in public; a wife or servant should come when called as in The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedy of Errors; Black people and Jews should not intermarry with whites as in Othello and The Merchant of Venice. Race in the period separates and ranks people by complexions, identified as fair, tawny, dark, and black and by other somatic markers, including facial features and clothes. As Patricia Akhimie argues, when elite characters assign meaning to the habits and behaviors of those of low rank, they also “racialize . . . the working-class body.”[2] In this way, for example, the beatings experienced by the Dromio brothers in A Comedy of Errors show outwardly; their bruises work in the same way that Black skin does for, say, a Moorish character—to limit, exclude, or demote. In all, such historical gestures, rules, terms, and practices will be strange to students for whom the concepts of race and class familiar today may not seem as clear when applied to Shakespeare’s settings, servants, and situations. How can we both analyze Shakespeare’s hierarchies and be aware of social (in)justice in our own world? What makes difference?

Caste, compared to race and class, is a more capacious and less fraught concept for young people in understanding a range of social and economic hierarchies at work in Shakespeare. In Caste: The Origin of Our Discontent, Isabelle Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Warmth of Other Suns, defines caste as

a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits . . . [that] are ascribed . . . meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste. . . . A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranks apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.[3]

She further explains that caste’s enduring power to keep people “in their place” comes through “patterns of a social order” so entrenched as to seem “like the natural order of things”[4]—patterns recognizable in Shakespeare’s plays and poems where order, divine and natural, is invoked to maintain divisions within classes, genders, and races. Because her writing is accessible, students can parse important terms in class, such as fixed, presumed, immutable, arbitrary, apart, and assigned.

Although the highly acclaimed Caste was deemed an “instant American classic” by the New York Times in 2020, Wilkerson’s paradigm for applying the concept of inequality in the US does not address racial capitalism or give adequate attention to the lived realities of caste in India.[5] As academic reviewer Charisse Burden-Stelly observes, “Wilkerson’s emphasis on caste makes no mention, let alone critique, of capitalism; the word does not appear once in the text.” Because of these deficits, according to Burden-Stelly, the book delivers “a decontextualized, ahistorical, and inaccurate description of racial antagonism, caste, and class.”[6] For Yashica Dutt, another reviewer, Caste “brilliantly frames racial hierarchies in the United States” yet fails to attend to “the horrors of India’s caste structure” that endures today. As a Dalit person, Dutt reported feeling “like being left out of my own history.”[7] These are important concerns. Because we do not want our students left out of their own history or ignorant of others’ histories, teachers should acknowledge the potent, oppressive reality of caste in India and also the economic conditions for racism here. Yet the concept of caste, I argue, does allow students of all backgrounds to find pertinent connections between early modern forms of oppression and the social hierarchies that they witness today. Our pedagogy need not be ahistorical or presentist in its effort to invite students to make relevant connections across history.

Using caste widens the framework to show the different systems of ranking and separation that impact characters and societies—whether based on race and skin color; birth order, like Edmund and Edgar in King Lear; or gender, age, religion, or even region and nationality, as in Henry V and Merry Wives. Thinking with caste neither collapses the different categories nor bypasses them; instead, it illustrates the kindred practices for and consequences of stigmatization or elevation through rigid and random caste distinctions. This wider view of hierarchical order in the plays allows us to attend to “those practices that make race meaningful,” including surveillance (e.g., the frequent insistence that crowds of lower-ranked people disperse and go “home”); exclusion from privileges that upper castes enjoy, such as freedom from bondage; and “justifications for physical abuse.”[8] As Akhimie shows, bias based on Blackness applies to other kinds of “indelible social difference.”[9] With Shakespeare, students can question the usually invisible assumptions behind caste systems and analyze caste in the period at the same time that they question racism, classism, sexism, and ablism today. In fact, as Jocelyn Chadwick argues in “We Dare Not Teach What We Know We Must: The Importance of Difficult Conversations,” students today “question most of the codifications to which we have become inextricably enmeshed.”[10] Our students are readier than ever for this work.

In this chapter I present the opening scenes of three plays as shortcuts to teaching caste or, if you like, social hierarchy.[11] Act One, scene one, of Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and The Tempest each stage clashes between lower and upper castes and demonstrate the common practices of surveillance, insult, and racial thinking that students will recognize as tools used today to “keep people [often young people and people of color] in their place.” They will see “rigid, often arbitrary boundaries” installed to keep high and low apart “and in their assigned places.” [12]These short, dramatic, and intense yet easily passed-over moments give students concrete ways into broader and less visible problems with unfair hierarchies. These can be treated as illustrative stand-alone moments from which students can extrapolate terms for racial and other divisions.

In a single class period, you could survey these opening scenes where one or two elite figures belittle groups of lower-caste characters, who seem to be “out of place,” marked by clothing and other features inflected by class and racial difference. Teachers can provide the script for students and show clips of the scenes from the BBC productions that include all the lines.[13] Invite students to notice what I call “high and low words” such as base and noble, along with imperious and subservient speech and action (e.g., in the BBC production, Coriolanus enters on horseback!). Insults will resonate with students attuned to unfair, inaccurate racial epithets today, ranging from laziness (idle) to criminality, unruliness, and ignorance to uppitiness and grossness of body. Julius Caesar is a good place to start since it is common in the US curriculum.

My students come to college Shakespeare appreciating Julius Caesar’s funeral orations—the rhetorical richness and their speakers’ propagandistic power; in contrast, students believe that the people, or plebs, are uniquely fickle, ignorant of politics, and prone to violence.[14] This lot does not have many lines, after all. Focusing on the mid-play orations as isolated rhetorical tours de force misses the fact that upper-caste speakers elsewhere also a) change minds and sides and b) speak to and for these lesser countrymen in narrow, negative terms, whereas in Act Three, scene two, these very people are friends and lovers (1.1.61; 3.2.13, 82). The opening scene—a crowded street scuffle with ripostes—appeals to students and presents a rhetorical situation where the commoners “perform” for each other with in-jokes that exclude the tribunes who terrorize them. Obsession with maintaining caste places—both in the space of the city and in the social order more broadly—clashes with the workers’ holiday spirit. In the play’s first lines, the tribunes order the people hence or away (see also lines 1.1.57–58, 61), insult them as a category (knaves and blocks, naughty, saucy, cruel, senseless, and ungrateful); question their judgment; and finally define what they ought to do as mechanicals or plebs:[15]

Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!
Is this a holiday? What, know you not,
Being mechanical, you ought not walk
Upon a laboring day without the sign
Of your profession?
(1.1.1–5)

A leather apron and tools are the missing sign[s] that should define a low-caste cobbler, who is furthermore out of place:

But wherefore art not in thy shop today?
Why dost thou lead these men about the streets?
(1.1.30–31)

As Jeffrey Doty explains, the people and the commons referred to “those who worked, which also means those who lacked rank.”[16]

The upper caste’s disgust centers on the people’s presumptuous festivity, their abandonment of caste uniforms for their best attire (1.1.8, 53) and their excessive embodiment, as seen when Marullus recounts how “many a time and oft” they transgressed boundaries of “walls and battlements,” climbing

[t]o towers and windows, yea, to chimney tops,
Your infants in your arms.
(1.1.42–45)

At that time, Pompey’s return justified their anatopic misbehavior and idleness, sitting “the livelong day, with patient expectation” of their sometime hero, whose actions they repeat now for Caesar (46). Along with improper dress and idleness, their universal shout is also disruptive and outsized (49–52). They are out of bounds. Students can consider similar contexts when those (few) in power felt threatened by the many they oppressed: the successful revolutions in India under the Raj and the breaking up of apartheid in South Africa.

Coriolanus’s opening scene pairs well with Julius Caesar not only for the Roman setting and shared themes of the governed and the governing but also because it stages the clash between low and high, the many and the few. The mutinous citizens in Shakespeare’s final tragedy enter as a company armed “with staves, clubs, and other weapons” (1.1.1sd). Speaking among themselves before patrician Menenius arrives, they assess their own situation in terms of caste hierarchy: “We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians / good,” and in the relational extremes of have and lack: surfeit versus need or relie[f]; leanness versus abundance; sufferance versus gain (14–21, italics added). Students can analyze the people’s collective speech with the same attention that they give to individual funeral orations in Caesar.

Transitioning to the new republic (ca. 493 BCE), this Rome is vulnerable (and shaky rungs typify, if not cause, inter-caste violence); the tribune caste that polices the commoners in Julius Caesar is only now newly minted representatives of the people, who, when the play opens, protest for access to public stores of grain. As in Julius Caesar, elite characters confront, insult, and micromanage out-of-place citizens in pointedly hierarchal terms. Menenius uses the pretty tale of the belly to analogize the rungs of caste to the body and demotes the leader to the great toe, “one o’ th’ lowest, basest, poorest of . . . [the] . . . rebellion” (1.1.92, 164, 166–67), while Martius (later dubbed Coriolanus after a battle victory at Corioli) rants against their convening

in these several places of the city
. . . [to] cry against the noble senate, who,
Under the gods, keep you in awe.
(1.1.197–99)

It is this anti-hero himself who announces the new hierarchy rung—the “tribunes [granted] to defend their vulgar wisdoms, / Of their own choice” (235–36), resentful that this needy, unqualified, uninformed class of people now merits choice.[17] Although vulgar had a neutral meaning at this time—vulgus in Latin simply means “the common people” (cp. the vulgate bible in the common language)—the term was also coming to accrue its negative cast of today—lacking refinement, coarse; having a common and offensively mean character; uncultured, ill-bred. (Notably, after the plebs exit in Julius Caesar, that tribune promises to further round up the vulgar.[18]) Here students may recognize current voting regulations that limit access to some Americans.

In this scene from Coriolanus, minutes after Menenius’s belly speech has tamped down their protest, Martius learns that the people claim to know that “[t]he city is well stored” with grain (1.1.202). How dare these people presume to know anything about his city? Threatening violence against these quartered slaves, he mocks their political speech as so much gossip:

Hang ’em! . . .
They’ll sit by th’ fire and presume to know
What’s done i’ th’ Capitol.
(202–4)

His fellow patrician assures Martius of their lacks: they are easily led coward[s], already almost thoroughly persuaded to accept their lot, and lack discretion (216–18). Etymologically, discretion helps us understand the implicit value system within caste since its multiple origins (Anglo-Norman and Middle French discrecion) refer to admired traits that low or marginalized groups in any caste system often seem to “lack.”[19] From the French and classical Latin etymons, positive traits include “discernment, wisdom, [and] sound judgement,” and “prudence, caution, and circumspection.” Beyond the supposed innate absence of such qualities, the people are also deprived of exercising such an ability even if they had it since discretion can also mean the “freedom to decide as one sees fit” (as we say today, “Use your own discretion”).[20] Here the vulgar comply with Carol Mejia LaPerle’s argument that raced subjects are pre-selected as always “dangerous to a dominant idea of public good” or otherwise contrary to norms.[21] To wit, ruling-caste speakers cite the commons’ habitual actions, predicting their (stereo)typical noisiness, noisomeness, ignorance, and ill-will as seen in phrases like this that stress repeated action in the past:  “Many a time and oft” 1.1.37 ). A further origin of discrete, meaning “separate” and “distinct,” in this context, suggests that the people are also guilty of groupthink (they are throughout the play referred to as a “fickle” “mob,” never independent thinkers). According to Martius, “with every minute [they] do change a mind” (1.1.173); they are the “the mutable, rank-scented meine” (3.1.63–64). However, as Doty and Scott Repass separately show, the citizens are not fickle but factious; their internal disagreements are political acts.[22] In our own time, some cast political protests as “riots.”

In each of these openings—as well as in the street scenes that begin Romeo and Juliet and Othello—caste differences in occupation, class, race, or clan are manifest and most stringently upheld by those who most need a rung below them. Roman elite domination is threatened by the [citizens’] own choice, while tribunes privately fear their own servil[ity] in a disruption of caste order (Julius Caesar 1.1.80, Cor. 2.1.274). Meanwhile, Iago clings to the old gradation, Brabantio rests on Venice’s elite civility (Othello 1.1.39, 119–20), and Verona enforces division even where there is likeness (Romeo and Juliet Prologue.1).

“We split”

The Tempest’s short opening scene also stages caste conflict, as a small band of aristocrats on a ship in a storm seem clueless as to how to save themselves: they insult the mariners and pull rank, as their own rank sinks. Again, place matters (Where are these people supposed to be? Who’s in charge?). The King of Naples and his brother separately ask the lower-caste boatswain where his superior, the Master, is, showing their reverence for rank (1.1.19, 11). The boatswain, for his part, repeatedly presses them to keep below (as it were, go home to cabin[s]!) because they

mar our labor.
. . . [and] assist the storm.
(11, 13–14)

When Gonzalo urges him to be patient, he charges back:

When the sea is. Hence! What cares these roarers
for the name of king? . . . Silence! Trouble us not.
(1.1.15–16).[23]

Here a lower-caste man orders his superior hence, the same command that opens Julius Caesar. When Gonzalo demands, “remember whom thou hast / aboard,” meaning royalty, the boatswain again invokes a maritime caste system where the authority of a councillor lacks power:

if you can command these elements to silence . . . ,
we will not hand a rope more. Use your
authority. If you cannot, . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Out of our way, I say!
(1.1.19–28)

In relegating the noblemen below deck and to silence and the name of king to momentary irrelevance, the boatswain exposes caste’s arbitrariness, or at least its relativity.

The boatswain recognizes how this urgent situation renders authority relative since seasoned seamen, though lower caste on land, in fact have the upper hand above deck.[24] Students can see how crises strengthen caste divisions yet also invite them to recede or reverse. Yet, after the boatswain exits, Gonzalo puts him in his place, quipping that he is marked or destined for execution: “Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him. His complexion is perfect gallows” (1.1.29–31). The terms mark and complexion show the intersection of race and class since seamen’s faces would be weather marked. The Prince of Morocco, one of Portia’s suitors, is similarly marked and excluded by a dark complexion (Merchant of Venice 2.7.86).

Classroom Activities with Illustrations from Plays

  1. Glossary of high and low. Have students keep a running list of words, stage directions, and actions that reveal hierarchical relationships—as in bowing, literally, analogously, and figuratively. Where relevant, look up the words (such as terms of address, like sirrah and lord) and search for images (of staging). Discuss language and symbols of high and low: blocking and embedded stage directions, such as above and rise.
  • In Coriolanus Menenius tells protestors they ought to bow down to rather than oppose the patricians: “Your knees to them, not arms” (1.1.76).
  • The Taming of the Shrew. Act Five, scene two, illustrates the analogy between ruler/subject and husband/wife, and the way blocking can work to support or upturn conventional hierarchies.

Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And place your hands below your husband’s foot.
(171–72, 193; bold added)

  • Henry IV, Part 2. Act Three, scene one. King Henry reflects on his responsibilities compared to his subjects’ easier lives.
    • Then, happy low, lie down.
      Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
      (30–31; bold added)
    • Their “smoky cribs [or hovels and] . . . uneasy pallets [or beds]” vs. “the perfumed chambers of the great, / Under the canopies of costly state” (8–13; bold added).
    • Their “loathsome beds” vs. “the kingly couch” of rulers like Henry (16).
  1. “Your own discretion.” Recall that discretion is defined as the quality of good judgment, wisdom, etc. Does caste dictate who has or who lacks good judgment? If so, how? Students can research current or historical examples of how societies determine “fitness” for citizenship and making life decisions, and activism around voting rights, the ADA, and adoption laws, for example. What other traits does a given play world seem to value and which characters possess (or lack) these traits?
  2. Rewrite/upturn. This activity invites students to consider who tells the story and how audience sympathy shifts. Explore the possibilities for how upper-caste insult language can be flipped to reveal pro-people/pro-Black/pro-woman qualities. For example, can we view the commoners taking off work to welcome a hero as making history rather than as idleness? Can citizens protest as political activists, not needy petitioners? Can we judge the Prince of Morocco from his value system versus that of Portia’s Belmont in The Merchant of Venice?[25] For example, the tribunes view the commoners as oafs who disrupt propriety, but to the audience and to each other, they are funny and socially bonded. Similarly, in The Tempest, Gonzalo views the mariners as disobedient at best, criminal at worst, and mere mechanicals after all, yet they are skilled and sensible.
  3. Intersectional stigmas and caste markers applied across identities. Speeches like Menenius’s and the tribunes’ discussed above stigmatize poor people’s bodies—their comportment, clothes, and even their breath—and compare them to animals in Coriolanus. Common and enduring epithets connect otherwise distinct marginal groups—foreigners, women, and the working class—as disruptive, lazy, uninformed busybodies; they are slaves and cowards; idle, changeable, demanding, and loud. For example, caste-aspiring Iago views General Othello as one who can “tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are” (1.3.44–45). How do actors convey their characters’ feelings for other castes? In his review of the 2012 film adaptation of Coriolanus, Stephen Greenblatt noted that Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus sports one long nauseated sneer throughout the film.
  4. Who’s fickle/impulsive/loud/demanding now? Close reading and reflection questions.
    • Look for moments when upper-caste characters commit the same errors of which they accuse lower castes. For example, where do nobles and military leaders (e.g., Caesar, Coriolanus, Pompey, and Mark Antony) change their minds, turn their backs, or fail to follow through?
    • Consider the costs of “constancy” above all.
    • Discuss a time when changing your own mind was a good idea.
  1. Caste talk. Assign selections from Wilkerson’s Caste, the article-length excerpt from the New York Times Magazine, or an interview with her, and ask students to summarize and respond to her notion of caste using both personal experience/observation and Shakespeare’s characters.[26] Consider expectations for how we should talk and comport ourselves, and where we should be depending on our occupations and social status. Are there circumstances when you see yourselves or people you know boxed into a caste, surveilled, insulted, and assumed to be less? How does the dominant caste typically view such people as
    • “youth,” especially boys in groups
    • fast-food employees
    • military families
    • speakers of accented English
    • CEOs

Conclusions

We can invite our students to see differences in status through a wider lens than only race, class, or gender. With Macbeth and Julius Caesar, it is easy to focus on the upper caste, their soliloquies and orations, and the seats of power at Macbeth’s Inverness Castle and the capitol in the Roman play—where politics happen. But the clever cobbler and the loyal servants share the stage. The short opening encounters discussed in this paper show a) the rules of caste; b) that alternative systems obtain; and c) that context can undermine or at least suspend caste. The mariners in The Tempest “know the ropes” and mock the councilor for his inability to calm the storm. The cobbler in Julius Caesar commands his on-stage audience (and us) with his smart-aleckiness, and the citizens demonstrate discretion as they weigh their options. The people command attention and audience sympathy.

Additional Classroom Resources

  • See Neil MacGregor’s “City Life/Urban Strife.” This episode from the BBC podcast Shakespeare’s Restless World focuses on how sumptuary laws enforced caste distinctions. The entire series is excellent, and each episode is 20 minutes.[27]
  • You can find classroom-ready audio and video interviews where Wilkerson defines her concepts, such as Don Lemon’s interview with her on the Silence Is Not an Option podcast.[28]
  • See the “Tudors” (season 1, episode 3) and “Stuarts” (season 1, episode 4) episodes of The Worst Jobs in History—entertaining but powerful and accurate historical reenactments of hard jobs, including fishwife and executioner.[29] Most can be seen on YouTube.

Bibliography

Akhimie, Patricia. “Cultivating Expertise: Glossing Shakespeare and Race.” Literature Compass 18, no. 10 (October 2021). https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12607.

———. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.

Boulukos, Athanasios. “The Cobbler and the Tribunes in Julius Caesar.” MLN 119, no.5 (2004): 1083–89. https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2005. 0002.

Burden-Stelly, Charisse. “Caste Does Not Explain Race.” Boston Review. December 15, 2020. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/caste-does-not-explain-race/.

Chadwick, Jocelyn A. “We Dare Not Teach What We Know We Must: The Importance of Difficult Conversations.” The English Journal 106, no. 2 (2016): 88–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26450216.

Christensen, Ann, and Laura Turchi. “Editing the Renaissance for an Anti-Racist Classroom.” In Teaching Race in the Renaissance, edited by Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright. Phoenix: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.54027/HZRA4663.

Doty, Jeffrey S. “Shakespeare and Popular Politics.” Literature Compass 10, no. 2 (2013): 162–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12022.

———. Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Dutt, Yashica. “Feeling Like an Outcast.” Review of Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. Foreign Policy Magazine. September 17, 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/17/caste-book-india-dalit-outcast-wilkerson- review/.

Fumerton, Patricia. “Mocking Aristocratic Place: The Perspective of the Streets.” Early Modern Culture (2008).

———. “Response to Craig Dionne.” Early Modern Culture: Electronic Seminar 7 (2008.

———. Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Garner, Dwight. “Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ About Our Abiding Sin.” New York Times. July 31, 2020. Updated January 21, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/books/review-caste-isabel-wilkerson-origins-of-our-discontents.html.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “A Man of Principle.” The New York Review of Books. March 8, 2012. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/03/08/man-principle-coriolanus/.

Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1995.

Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

LaPerle, Carol Mejia. “Ill-Will as Racialized Affect: Early Modern Volition, Critical Race Theory, and Shakespearean Ill-Will.” New Literary History 52, no. 3 (2021): 563–83. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2021. 0026.

MacGregor, Neil. “City Life, Urban Strife.” April 25, 2012. In Shakespeare’s Restless World. Podcast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01gg8h6.

Mentz, Steve. “Shakespeare and the Ocean, with Steven Mentz.” Interview by Barbara Bogaev. August 29, 2023. In Shakespeare Unlimited. Podcast. https://www.folger.edu/podcasts/shakespeare-unlimited/shakespeare-ocean-mentz/.

Murphy, Patricia, dir. The Worst Jobs in History. Season 1, episode 3, “Tudors.” Aired September 11, 2004, on Channel 4.

Netzloff, Mark. England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism. London: Palgrave, 2003.New York: B. Blackwell, 1990.

Repass, Scott. “‘Our Wits Are So Diversely Colored’: The Factiousness of the Citizens in Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus.” Literature/Film Quarterly 51, no. 3 (Summer 2023). https://lfq.salisbury.edu/_issues/51_3/our_wits_are_so_diversely_colored_the_factiousness_of_the_citizens_in_ralph_fiennes_coriolanus.html.

Shakespeare, William. BBC Shakespeare Plays. Ambrose Video, 2009. https://www.ambrosevideo.com/screening-room/24-SH.

———. Coriolanus. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed September 15, 2023. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/coriolanus/read/.

———. Henry IV, Part 2. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed September 15, 2023. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-iv-part-2/read/.

———. Julius Caesar. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed September 15, 2023. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/julius-caesar/read/.

———. The Merchant of Venice. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed September 15, 2023. https://www.folger. edu/search/?q=complexion&area=works&work=the-merchant-of-venice.

———. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed September 15, 2023. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/romeo-and-juliet/read/.

———. The Tempest. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed September 15, 2023. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/read/.

Walk, Nigel, dir. The Worst Jobs in History. Season 1, episode 4, “Stuarts.” Aired September 18, 2004, on Channel 4.  https://youtu.be/OMK d4AKaa94?si=ofZRu5TMrr5WlnTF

Wilkerson, Isabel. “American Caste with Isabel Wilkerson.” Interview by Don Lemon. August 6, 2020. In Silence Is Not an Option. Podcast. https://omny.fm/shows/silence-is-not-an-option/american-caste-with-isabel-wilkerson.

———. “America’s Enduring Caste System.” New York Times Magazine. July 1, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/ isabel- wilkerson- caste.html.

———. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House, 2020.


  1. See MacGregor,  “City Life, Urban Strife.”
  2. Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, 27. Akhimie traces how “stigmatized somatic markers” settle onto people as a class (29). Other scholars who have theorized the intersections of race and class (and gender) in early modernity include Fumerton, Unsettled; Fumerton, “Mocking Aristocratic Place”; Fumerton, “Response to Craig Dionne”; Hall, Things of Darkness; and Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies.
  3. Wilkerson, Caste, 17 (italics added). Geraldine Heng’s definition of race’s function aligns with Wilkerson’s caste: to “demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.” Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, 27 (orig. italics).
  4. Wilkerson, Caste, 70.
  5. Among the many positive reviews, see Garner,  “Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste.’”
  6. Burden-Stelly, “Caste Does Not Explain Race.”
  7. Dutt, “Feeling Like an Outcast.”
  8. Akhimie, “Cultivating Expertise,” 6. See also LaPerle, “Ill-Will as Racialized Affect,” 573, 575.
  9. Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, 5.
  10. Chadwick, “We Dare Not Teach,” 89. See also Christensen and Turchi, “Editing the Renaissance for an Anti-Racist Classroom.”.
  11. All play texts used are from The Folger Shakespeare Library (https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/) and are cited by act, scene, and line number.
  12. Wilkerson, Caste, 70.
  13. Shakespeare, BBC Shakespeare Plays. The made-for-television series ran from 1978 to 1985. Of note, Anthony Hopkins played Othello in blackface.
  14. This belief in the fickle plebs is a critical commonplace too: “Dramatically, the scene opposes the humor of the equivocating cobbler . . . with Marullus’ denunciation of the plebeians as an unthinking, many-headed hydra; their unreliability is proved later in the Forum scene, when they agree first with Brutus’ speech, and then with Antony’s.” Boulukos, “The Cobbler and the Tribunes in Julius Caesar,” 1083.Notable exceptions to this kind of assumption include Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice; and Doty, “Shakespeare and Popular Politics” and his Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere.
  15. A senator in Coriolanus Act One, scene one, similarly dismisses the people: “Hence to your homes, begone” (l.1.281).
  16. Doty, “Shakespeare and Popular Politics,” 163.
  17. Coriolanus’s attitude toward the citizens illustrates LaPerle’s argument that “exclusion [became] essential to the structure of the state” in seventeenth-century social-contract theory. “Ill-Will as Racialized Affect,” 563.
  18. The first entry in the OED for vulgar as a class or stratum of a type of people is from Milton in 1645, but both plays’ elite speakers evoke class decades before. OED Online, s.v. “vulgar (n.),” September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1023960968.
  19. OED Online, s.v.discretion (n) October 2024, https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=discretion
  20. For more on the prized qualities and conduct in the period, see Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, esp. 1–35.
  21. LaPerle, “Ill-Will as Racialized Affect,” 574.
  22. See Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere. Scott Repass carefully delineates factious from fickle in “‘Our Wits Are So Diversely Colored’: The Factiousness of the Citizens in Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus.”
  23. The wording here refers to roarers as both the crashing waves and to unruly lower-caste people, especially young and common people behaving or living in a rowdy or boisterous manner; seamen and pirates were among the worst reputed. Menenius also alleges the people’s impatience, snarkily asking the second citizen to “bestow a small—of what you have little— / Patience awhile” (Cor. 1.1.131–32).
  24. See Mentz, “Shakespeare and the Ocean, with Steve Mentz.”.
  25. See Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, esp. 1–5.
  26. See Wilkerson, Caste; “America’s Enduring Caste System;” and “American Caste with Isabel Wilkerson.”
  27.  Neil MacGregor, Neil. “City Life, Urban Strife.” April 25, 2012. In Shakespeare’s Restless World. Podcast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01gg8h6.
  28. Wilkerson, “American Caste with Isabel Wilkerson.”
  29. Murphy (dir.), The Worst Jobs in History; and Walk (dir.), The Worst Jobs in History.