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Adapted and translated into German by Gabriella Bußacker and Jan Bosse. Gabriella Bußacker, dramaturg. Sets by Moritz Müller, costumes by Kathrin Plath, lighting by Michael Gööck, and music by Arno Kraehahn and Carolina Bigge.

Produced by Schauspiel Köln (https://www.schauspiel.koeln) at Depot 1, Köln, beginning 12 June 2022.

Adaptation of 1 and 2 Henry IV. With Bruno Cathomas (Falstaff), and Justus Maier (Hotspur).

In collaboration with Danuta Ulicka.

Includes one essay on Shakespeare.

Recounts history of composition of Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Mary and Charles Lamb’s prose adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays for children. Notes how Mary’s contributions were not credited in early editions. Discusses how adaptation censored sexual elements from Shakespeare’s plays, including scenes of female empowerment, and shows how adaptations’ illustrations reintroduced eroticism and female empowerment into text.

Examines how fairness and white supremacy in Midsummer Night’s Dream is connected with “a poetics of antiphrastic flouting.”

Ascribes racial dimensions to Edgar’s assuming different identity of Poor Tom in King Lear. Notes that his alternations by griming his face with “filth” and tying his hair in “knots” amounts to blackface. Argues Edgar’s disguise “materializes a newly racialized figure in Poor Tom,” whose existence as “near to beast” implies notion of race that depends on political hierarchies rather than biological classification.

Discusses past, present and future of critical race studies in Shakespeare Studies. Notes that field needs “better methods and strategies for disambiguating race and Black people” by studying race in plays typically excluded from Shakespeare’s “race canon,” such as Hamlet, Henry V and Love’s Labor’s Lost, and thereby work to development anti-racist Shakespeare scholarship, performance and pedagogy.

Considers how All’s Well That Ends Well’s Helen “dismantles the logic that makes the politics of blood possible,” undermining systems of inheritance and wealth transmission through familial bloodlines used to justify and uphold racial hierarchies. Explores how women “counter nature” in play and thereby disrupt racial categories.   

Analyzes As You Like It’s Celia’s intention to disguise herself by using a “a kind of umber [to] smirch my face,” as version of blackface which draws attention to racialized binary of light and dark. Argues Celia’s reference to "umber" "makes visible the very whiteness it aims to obscure, inviting us to consider how As You Like It functions as an example of one of Shakespeare's ‘other “race plays”’ in mapping the contours of such whiteness in early modernity."

Analyzes textual crux of FolioTroilus and Cressida’s repeated rejection of Pandarus, once near play’s end and again during its epilogue, surveying different editorial approaches that cut one instance or the other, or retain both. Argues that Pandarus’ double rejection is consistent with themes of doubleness throughout play.

Observes that Coriolanus’s inability to function within norms of Roman political and social systems (while usually ascribed to his perception of his class superiority) can also be read as form of neurodivergence, with Coriolanus’s behaviors in particular recalling those associated with autism. Provides reading of Coriolanus’s “autistic traits.”