Ebony Swan: The Case for Shakespeare’s Race

By Jeffrey McQuain

Everyone knows William Shakespeare was white --- or was he?

“Ebony Swan: The Case for Shakespeare’s Race” is the startling new book that dares to ask, “Was Shakespeare black?”

This explosive nonfiction work by Dr. Jeffrey Hunter McQuain explores whether the world’s greatest writer was not white but biracial. Behind that mystery, though, lies a 400-year-old conspiracy of silence, perhaps the biggest cover-up in literary history.

In exposing that conspiracy, “Ebony Swan” carefully examines all the racial evidence from the Bard’s life and times. The intriguing clues range from Shakespeare’s being called “an upstart crow” to messages that have remained long hidden in his famous sonnets and on his gravestone.

The book provides readers with all of the known facts about Shakespeare’s life, from his 1564 baptism in Stratford-upon-Avon until his burial at the same church exactly 52 years later. It also studies the many plays and poems penned by the writer known as the Swan of Avon.

From the earliest of his tragedies, “Titus Andronicus,” to such great works as “Othello” and “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s work demonstrates an unusual sensitivity to issues of race and multiculturalism not found in other writers of his time. Even his great rival, Ben Jonson, produced theatrical works that were clearly racist in comparison to dramas by the Bard.

But how was the Renaissance writer supposed to tell future generations the truth about himself? Despite the 400-year-old conspiracy meant to silence him, the Bard found ways to counter the cover-up and reveal the secret that made him the world’s greatest writer. The title of this book, in fact, comes from an anagram that Shakespeare was able to hide in Sonnet 55.

Backed up by years of exhaustive research, “Ebony Swan” offers and explains more than two dozen exhibits of the relevant racial evidence. In addition, this illuminating study ends with a complete guide to the hundreds of “black” quotations found in the Bard’s poems and plays.

Not only does “Ebony Swan” make the compelling argument that the Bard was in fact biracial, but this revolutionary new book also offers readers a different and exciting new way to view Shakespeare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeffrey McQuain
• Release date: Mar 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781941536568

Jeffrey McQuain

Jeffrey Hunter McQuain, who lives in Maryland, holds a Ph. D. in Literary Studies from American University. For more than a dozen years, he served as the researcher for William Safire’s “On Language” column in The New York Times. Co-author of the popular books “Coined by Shakespeare” and “The Bard on the Brain,” he has extensively taught and occasionally performed in the Bard’s plays. “The Shakespeare Conspiracy,” his first novel, is based on his nonfiction book “Ebony Swan: The Case for Shakespeare’s Race.” Go to www.btglobe.com for more information.

Book preview

—What the evidence about Shakespeare’s race can (and cannot) prove—

Was William Shakespeare black?

That controversial question goes right to the heart of Shakespeare’s life, a life that the novelist Charles Dickens once called a fine mystery. For the last four centuries, readers and audiences alike have been inundated with images based on the commonplace assumption that the world’s greatest writer must have been white. Until now, there have been few, if any, legitimate inquiries raised about the Bard’s race.

Far from being a simple issue, Shakespeare’s racial identity has been carefully crafted through 400 years of conspiracy and cover-up. Knowing that such a whitewash might happen to him, though, the Renaissance playwright chose to hide information about himself in some of his most important works. In an effort to uncover that hidden information, we must first recollect the times in which the Swan of Avon lived and the unusually sensitive approach he needed to take for writing about race relations in what was a resoundingly racist society.

But was Shakespeare black?

Stated bluntly, such a notion may seem at first a bit unsettling, perhaps to some a little disconcerting to contemplate. Of course, everybody already knows who Shakespeare was and what he looked like. Or so we have long been told. The problem is that we do not really know all that much about the man himself, and we have very little information about his physical features. The supposed knowledge that we do have is almost entirely secondhand, and all too often it comes from people who never met the Bard, many of them not even alive during his lifespan.

Consider what others have previously suggested in their conflicting theories about Shakespeare. Secret identities already assigned to him have attempted to reassess his gender, his religious persuasion, his hair color, even his individuality (posing the possibility that a committee conspired to write his works). Why, then, should the notion of a black Shakespeare be deemed implausible and dismissed out of hand?

Obviously, it shouldn’t be. But while the question certainly deserves to be raised, it is actually being overstated from the outset for dramatic effect. The real question is not whether the Bard was black but whether he was biracial, most likely the mixed heritage of a black parent and a white parent.

Long before Shakespeare’s time and for centuries afterward, however, every biracial person tended to be categorized solely by the minority racial group within his or her bloodline. A child of mixed heritage would be looked upon as a member of that minority, even if not primarily of that race. For many generations in the United States, for instance, a single drop of blood was considered enough to classify somebody as being black.

In the case of Shakespeare, the evidence suggests a strong possibility that he was the product of a racially mixed relationship, something not unheard of in Elizabethan England. There are, in fact, surviving records and anecdotes from that time chronicling a number of biracial births.

As a matter of record, the Britain of the Bard was never entirely populated by white people, although that is the way it is usually portrayed. Furthermore, while it is possible that Shakespeare’s biracial background was strongly pronounced in his appearance, it is equally possible that the Bard was relatively light-skinned, enabling him to be accepted by the racist society into which he was born.

The exhibits that follow explore all of the available evidence about Shakespeare’s race, including many details that have been generally ignored by scholars and critics alike. In the past four centuries of studying the Bard, literary experts have paid more attention to whether he was a redhead than to the possibility of racial diversity in his background. As a result, raising the question Was Shakespeare black? is meant to serve as a springboard, capable of helping incorporate more of the known facts into our study of his life and literary output.

What precisely would be the significance of the Bard’s being biracial? In other words, how would such a realization affect his works and wisdom for readers and audiences around the world? Perhaps it should not matter, particularly in a world that has long been struggling to become less race-conscious. Even if it shouldn’t, though, it still does matter a great deal, particularly to those who study his works.

In recent years the numbers for college studies of Shakespeare have been declining, often through efforts to dismiss him by using the initials DWM, meaning Dead White Male. That academic attack was mainly intended to marginalize him, suggesting that he and other white male writers lack relevance in today’s multicultural studies. Viewed as a biracial writer, however, the Bard takes on a powerful new significance that makes his words more relevant today than ever before.

Prior to considering the evidence for a biracial Shakespeare, we should first acknowledge that there are serious limitations to our knowledge about the Bard in general. Far too many mysteries about the Renaissance writer have long remained unsolved. And even though the evidence about him is limited, there are also far too many careless errors being made in published writings about the playwright.

Take the example of a recent publication by a leading Shakespearean scholar. That book mentions Edmund Tylney (sometimes spelled Tilney), who served as Master of the Revels and exercised the power to censor plays in London during the Bard’s career. In the index to the scholarly book, though, Edmund Tylney is listed as Edward Tylney, a small but telling difference. To be fair, similar errors of identification occurred back in Renaissance England. Shakespeare’s brother Edmund, for instance, was also misidentified as Edward, notably in official church records of that era.

While such errors may seem minor, they become magnified with the passing of time. In fact, small mistakes made during Shakespeare’s day tend to loom even larger nowadays. That the playwright wed Anne Hathaway is a widely accepted fact about the Bard’s life, and their marriage took place shortly after he applied for a license in 1582. That license, however, mentions no Anne Hathaway but instead an Anna Whateley, who may or may not have existed. While this difference might have been only the result of a clerical mistake, speculation still abounds that Shakespeare intended to marry another woman when Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant by him, became his betrothed.

Perhaps no other Shakespearean mystery, though, has been so persistent as the question of whether the man from Stratford wrote the plays and poems that bear his name. As noted, several other candidates have been set forward as the true author, reinforcing a contentious issue that has made enormous inroads into Renaissance scholarship in recent decades. Brunei University, for one example, offers an advanced degree in this unusually specific area, which is identified by the unwieldy phrase the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

With so many potential problems in scholarship, Shakespeareans should be all the more diligent, especially in quoting the Bard accurately. A recent book on The Tempest cites Prospero’s most famous line as Our revels are now ended, going so far as to feature those words in enlarged type. Unfortunately, the words actually spoken by Prospero are Our revels now are ended, and that kind of error merely adds difficulty to issues already complicated enough.

Misquotation of the Bard, as it turns out, is not merely a recent problem, dating all the way back to Shakespeare’s England. A bad Elizabethan quarto of Hamlet, prepared presumably without the Bard’s participation, changes the opening of the play’s most poetic soliloquy into the more prosaic To be, or not to be, aye, there’s the point. Any modern studies of the Bard should at least try to avoid careless rewording.

Today’s students of Shakespeare must also recognize the varied meanings of black in Elizabethan and Jacobean society, a period that mostly favored the fair. Writers back then would choose black to describe everything from brunette hair or dark eyes to a bad humor or depressed mood (Hamlet, for instance, has long been characterized as the black prince).

Sometimes the modifier’s usage concerning racial identity is clear. A murder victim in Henry VI, Part Two should be presumed white because his dead face is said to have changed, appearing black and full of blood. That presumption about race makes sense, whereas other citations are less certain. In Henry IV, Part Two, for example, Shakespeare refers to black George Barnes, a depiction that scholars routinely interpret as black-haired George Barnes, which may not be correct. Whenever a person’s skin color is plainly described as black or dark, then racial difference should certainly not be excluded as a possibility, even in Renaissance England.

In presenting this case for Shakespeare’s racial background, more than two dozen exhibits are to be submitted, with quotations rendered using modernized spelling and punctuation. Considered separately, each of these extensive exhibits offers a different piece of the Shakespearean puzzle. Taken cumulatively, however, the evidence has the potential to change our long-fixed vision of the Bard himself.

Once dubbed Genius of the Millennium by The Washington Post, Shakespeare has always seemed an elusive figure. There may be good reason for that mystery about him. If that reason can be discerned, we will not only clarify our view of the person but also be better able to understand his genius.

Why, for instance, did Shakespeare choose to tell so many stories involving

people of color to a predominantly white audience? What was behind his fascination with such exotic characters if they were entirely unfamiliar to him? And was the stage only a part of what drew him to leave behind small-town Stratford for the more cosmopolitan world of multicultural London?

Finally, resolving the issue of Was Shakespeare black? might help us to solve an even more vexing mystery, namely, What was Shakespeare’s secret? Readers and scholars alike have been relentlessly curious about how the little-educated son of a Stratford tradesman in Elizabethan England could have been transformed into a poet and playwright for the ages. In essence, what made Shakespeare Shakespeare?

To answer that perplexing question, we must first examine the case for the Bard’s race, and specifically the revolutionary notion of Shakespeare as the Ebony Swan.

Exhibit A: Famous First Words

—Early evidence of a biracial William Shakespeare—

When the world first heard of William Shakespeare, it was primarily through an insult.

By the year 1592, the young Shakespeare had moved to London and quickly gained fame in the theater as both an actor and a playwright. Robert Greene, an established London writer of the time, began to resent the Bard’s sudden success, eventually viewing it as a personal affront. In retaliation, Greene wrote an attack for publication that dared to call Shakespeare an upstart crow.

Having already enjoyed considerable success of his own, Greene had fallen on hard times by the early 1590’s. Impoverished and dying, he apparently took great offense at the meteoric rise of the young Bard and decided to put out a pamphlet that, in part, expressed his indignation. Greene found a London publisher and poet named Henry Chettle willing to produce this pamphlet, titled A Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance.

The disgruntled writer, however, did not live to see the publication through to its completion, instead succumbing to what may have been syphilis. After Greene’s death, which was attributed by one contemporary to an excess of Rhenish wine and pickled herring, Chettle went ahead with his promise to publish the pamphlet. It was in that 1592 publication that the first known words ever printed about the Bard appeared.

The playwright Greene complained (with spelling and capitalization modernized) that There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country.

Although Shakespeare is not fully named in that attack, there are at least two clues that he is the object of Greene’s professional contempt. First is the obvious Shakescene, an eponymous pun on the Bard’s name and theatrical occupation. A number of scholars have bent over backward in recent years to explain how Shakescene must refer not to Shakespeare but to some other playwright working at the same time, but their contorted theories have seemed largely implausible and are not generally accepted.

The second clue came directly from the Bard’s own writing. Shakespeare was known in the Elizabethan theater as a player, an actor for the same company that staged his written works. When Greene condemned the tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, he was undeniably using parody to allude to the Bard, whose earliest writings featured a three-play history of King Henry VI. In Henry VI, Part Three, Shakespeare’s dialogue for the Duke of York included an almost-verbatim line, a tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide rather than a player’s hide.

That Greene should have labeled the Bard a Johannes factotum, which is a Latinate term for jack of all trades, also served in a roundabout way to indicate he meant Shakespeare. The newcomer had been brought in as both player and playwright, most likely assuming other duties as well for the company in which he would become a sharer, or shareholder, participating in the playhouse profits. Greene’s words were meant to convey that Shakespeare was not only overreaching as a writer but also as an actor, somebody who was perhaps too vain to realize his own limitations in either profession.

The most significant part of Greene’s insult, though, is what will forever be remembered as those famous first words, pointing to Shakespeare as an upstart crow. In the centuries since that attack, there have been untold buckets of ink spilled in explaining the word upstart in that quotation, but Greene had already used the same adjective in previously published insults about others. Instead, the more intriguing word in Greene’s comment is crow, although critics have largely overlooked that metaphorical metamorphosis.

Consider the word itself. In the incomparable history of our language known as the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun crow is first defined in its literal sense