William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy “Othello” is often the first play that comes to mind when people think of Shakespeare and race. And if not “Othello,” then folks usually name “The Merchant of Venice,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “The Tempest,” or his first – and bloodiest – tragedy, “Titus Andronicus,” my favorite Shakespeare play.

Among Shakespeare scholars, those five works are known as his traditionally understood “race plays” and include characters who are Black like Othello, Jewish like Shylock, Indigenous like Caliban, or Black African like Cleopatra.

But what did Shakespeare have to say about race in plays such as “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” where Black characters do not have a dominant role, for example?

As Shakespeare scholars who study race know, all of his plays address race in some way. How could they not?

After all, every human being has a racial identity, much like every living human being breathes. Said another way, every character Shakespeare breathed life into has a racial identity, from Hamlet to Hippolyta.

The playwright wrote about many key subjects during the late 15th and early 16th centuries that are relevant today, including gender, addiction, sexuality, mental health, social psychology, sexual violence, antisemitism, sexism and, of course, race.

In my book “Shakespeare’s White Others,” I explore the intraracial divisions that Shakespeare illustrates in all his plays.

Here are four things to know about Shakespeare and race.

For a long time, I was afraid of Shakespeare. I am not the only one.

In his 1964 essay “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” James Baldwin detailed his initial resistance. Like many people today, Baldwin wrote that he, too, was “a victim of that loveless education which causes so many schoolboys to detest Shakespeare.”

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