The Modernity of Shakespeare

This little book provides an insightful reading of Shakespeare. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka highlights this in his foreword, where he says:"... Ismail Serageldin has chosen to focus, in the main, on what he astutely discerns as uncomfortable threads in most (European) analyses of Shakespeare's plays: the themes of marginalization, and-to put it bluntly-racism. Focussing especially on two plays that illuminate this region of understated themes, he restores the focus of race and...
More Description

This little book provides an insightful reading of Shakespeare. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka highlights this in his foreword, where he says:"... Ismail Serageldin has chosen to focus, in the main, on what he astutely discerns as uncomfortable threads in most (European) analyses of Shakespeare's plays: the themes of marginalization, and-to put it bluntly-racism. Focussing especially on two plays that illuminate this region of understated themes, he restores the focus of race and prejudice to a rounded reading of the texts, and does justice to the English bard regarding his own position, much misunderstood, on these questions".Serageldin devotes half the book to a review of the various "schools" of literary criticism that have tackled the Bard's immortal works. He looks at the Classical Interpretations, the Political Neo-Marxist School, The New Historicists, The Feminist Critique, the Deconstructionists and Post-Structuralists, as well as some other schools. He declares himself most in keeping with Kiernan Ryan's critique. But then he goes on to presenting his own views applying his insights in analyzing two plays: a comedy (the Merchant of Venice) and a tragedy (Othello). Highlighting in both cases the themes of Marginalization and Racism, that tend to be at best relegated to the background in most of the established (European) critiques. In so doing he fulfils the promise of the title, that there is a contemporary modernity in the writings of Shakespeare that speak to us through the ages.