Against Editing “Whitely”: Restoring Shakespeare’s Interracial Comedic Couple to Love’s Labour’s Lost

Abstract

t his essay shows how anti-Black prejudice, especially misogynoir, led to the editing out of a Black woman — or rather, a fi gure racialized and gendered as such — from the Shakespearean canon of characters and subsequently to the loss of what would have been the playwright ’ s most visible, if not only, interracial comedic couple. 1 The signi fi cance of an interracial comedic couple becomes apparent when we consider how this couple is featured in