Disciplinary Intersections: British and Anglo-American Perspectives on Race and Gender in Shakespeare Studies

In the light of numerous studies conducted since the late 1980s in the British and Anglo-American areas, as well as from a variety of postcolonial spaces and perspectives, the awareness that the categories of race and gender cannot be separated in the critical analysis of the Shakespearean canon may seem a truism. !e advent of the intersectional approach in Shakespeare studies, however, was preceded by a long preliminary phase that began in 1962 with the publication of Philip Mason's Prospero's Magic: Some !oughts on Class and Race and ended in 1989 with the appearance of Ania Loomba's Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, which sanctioned the successful interdisciplinary encounter between gender and critical race studies, studies on early modern English theatre, and postcolonial theory. In the twentyseven years that intervened between the two volumes, scholarly analyses of race and critical reflections on gender in the Shakespearean canon ran on two parallel trajectories which this contribution traces to and beyond their point of intersection, to review the key moments and texts of an evolving multidisciplinary approach that continues to shake and shape «the order of discourse» (Foucault 1970) of Shakespeare studies.