Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters

The dynamic interplay between three concepts - gender, text, habitat - as metaphors for cross-cultural definition in Shakespeare's drama is explored here. Shakespeare's reinterpretations of stage aliens such as Jews, Moors, Amazons and Gypsies are shown to be the means by which he interrogates a Eurocentric perspective and challenges the caricatures that cultured create of one another. Writing in an accessible, compelling style, de Sousa argues that when cultures that define themselves as ideological opposites meet, they intermingle in a process of negotiation and identity exchanges. Placing the drama in a historical and cultural context, he examines a variety of topics, including a clash of gender systems; text as a repository of a culture's values, beliefs, prejudices, and practices; erasure of memory and appropriation of identity; the interplay of ecology, culture, and race; and the dual process of cultural estrangement and reintegration. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, de Sousa relies on original archival research and draws on feminist and gender studies, ecology, history, and anthropology. In the process he recovers a wealth of information on race and gender relations in early modern Europe.