LAWRENCE — Today is the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth and this year, many scholars are revisiting the Bard’s works and what he has to offer modern man. One of those, Kansas University English professor Geraldo Sousa, has been researching the political themes in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare lived at a time in which England was as bitterly divided as modern American society, he said.
Sousa recently published an essay that looked at immigration and global trade issues represented in ”The Merchant of Venice.” Although the play echoed the anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish feelings of Elizabethan England, Shakespeare presented the perspectives of immigrants and the Jewish merchant Shylock in a sympathetic manner, he said. Shakespeare often sought a way for opposite sides to come together and reach agreement and reconciliation and often expressed sympathy for social justice and the under-privileged, he said. He said he has no doubt that Shakespeare would be sympathetic to the plight of the transnational migrant. “For Shakespeare, opening a door to friends and strangers,” Sousa said, “is a powerful symbol of hospitality, of acceptance, of reaching out. Shakespeare would show that borders are always permeable, that you just cannot separate humanity that way. If you do that, if you just erect barriers, build border fences, you just keep trying to separate core from periphery, haves from the have-nots, instead of working together for mutual benefit.”
Wednesday, April 23, 4 p.m.
