Introduction

WHEN ASKED to organize this forum, "Race and Shakespeare Studies: Is There a Future," I was both honored and hesitant. Did we, Shakespearean and early modern scholars and critics, truly need another discussion on "race" and its importance to Renaissance and/or early modern English studies? Has the argument for attention to the "matter of race" not already been made? Yet, after I invited the six contributors to offer their thoughts and had read their essays, I realized that there remains much to be done. In very different ways each of the contributors arrives at the same general conclusion: despite the appropriation of post-structuralist and post-modern theoretical apparati, critics of early modern English culture have yet to comfortably situate the "problem of race" in an early modern historiography that fully adumbrates the complexity, fluidity, and problematic nature of the discourses of race that prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Each of the essays that follow suggestively acknowledges, as David Theo Goldberg has argued in his seminal work Racist Discourse: Philosophy and...