Introduction

Offering a brief survey of the landscape, particularly Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS), and highlighting current gaps in critical conversations surrounding Shakespeare, race, performance, and representation, this introductory chapter calls for increased attention to topics such as racial mixing, racial passing, interraciality, biracialism, multiracialism, and ethnoracialism. It advocates for moving beyond hypodescent and monoracial norms and a “Black and White” mentality, and explains the importance of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) in achieving a more nuanced understanding of race throughout the textual history of Shakespeare&s;s plays and their various performance traditions. Reflecting on rapidly changing global demographics in the twenty-first century a.k.a. The “Mulatto Millennium,” this chapter also provides an example of how CMRS can be fruitfully deployed through an interpretation of Coriolanus as a play that taps into early modern fears about racial mixing and miscegenation. The chapter concludes by offering a detailed overview of the contents of this special volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook which is dedicated to bringing Shakespeare and CMRS into conversation for the first time.