ODERN SCHOLARS sometimes tend to think of race, class, and gender as distinctively contemporary modes of analysis, categories that reflect our own concerns, identities, and anxieties. But the plays of Shakespeare, produced in a period now often described as “early modern England,” are themselves strikingly “modern” in this as in other respects. To an extraordinary degree, Shakespeare's plays, from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest, exhibit and record tensions around and within these categories. And never more than in Othello.
