Title
Mislike me not for my complexion": Whiteness and World-Building in Lewis and Shakespeare
Abstract
Although the complicated presentation of the Jewish money-lender, Shylock, in The Merchant Venice is perhaps Shakespeare’s most infamous example of prejudice and xenophobic cultural relationships, the play is actually filled with a variety of ethnocentric discourses from the moment the Christian heroine, Portia, takes the stage in Act One, Scene Two. The pressing question is what position Shakespeare and his audience members took up vis-à-vis such passages as the Prince of Morocco’s “Mislike me not for my complexion speech” or Portia’s later remark “let all of his complexion choose me so.” Most readers, I believe, assume that Portia is Shakespeare’s mouthpiece and, therefore, her prejudices reflect his own. I argue the texture of the play suggests a much more complicated interpretation.
Similarly, C. S. Lewis has been taken to task for his general valorizing of “whiteness” and demonizing of “blackness” or “darkness,” usually lumping him together with J. R. R. Tolkien because of their mutual attraction to “Northerness.” And Exhibit #1 for the case against Lewis is his rendering of Calormene culture throughout the Narnia but especially in The Horse and His Boy. My essay will show that Lewis, a Renaissance scholar and a religious controversialist, is rather closer to Shakespeare than Tolkien in his construction of complicated worlds featuring clashing racial, religious, and cultural identities. At important moments in the narrative (and again in The Last Battle), Lewis requires us, like Shasta in the novel, to suspend our prejudices long enough to hear a grand Calormene tale, told in the grandiose Calormene style.
Lewis was, of course, a person of his age. Shakespeare was as well. In fact, both of those statements are meaningless except as rhetoric, because all the human beings who has ever lived and all the artists who have ever built anything (whether a vase painting of the Amazons fighting the Athenians, a Renaissance tragicomedy, or a 20th century children’s fantasy novel) are persons of their age. The question is not whether they reflect their age, but the degree to which they reflect ON their age. I content that both authors were, if not as generous as we’d like (from our 21st century perspective), more generous towards racial/cultural differences than has been generally recognized.
Bionote
Joe Ricke is an independent scholar and director of the Inkling Folk Fellowship, an international group of scholars, readers, seekers, and artists, meeting via Zoom every Friday at 4 p.m. (EST). He was previously Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of C. S. Lewis & Friends at Taylor University, where he organized and directed the highly-acclaimed Lewis & Friends Colloquium in 2016 and 2018 (“best Inkling conference on the planet,” Devin Brown). At Taylor, Dr. Ricke curated the Brown Collection, and, in early 2020, oversaw the acquisition of the historic McCaslin Collection of Lewis materials. He has presented and published numerous essays and book chapters on Shakespeare and early drama, the Inklings, and Christian higher education. He has co-edited three books and, since 2012, has organized the Lewis and the Middle Ages panels at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. His poems have appeared in various journals and book collections. As a singer/songwriter, he performs as Joe Martyn Ricke and with The Ricke Brothers. Contact: jsricke@gmail.com