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This seminar considers representations of somatic, ethnic, and religious difference as depicted in the uniquely influential works of William Shakespeare. In a period witnessing the beginning of Atlantic slavery and the plantation system in Ireland and the Americas, how did race and place register in the literary worlds of Shakespeare's poems and plays? This course utilizes the construction in Shakespeare's London commercial theater of distant locales and peoples to investigate histories of race, racism, and notions of essential difference that both rhyme and clash with those in our own globalized present. How did expanding trade routes, contact with indigenous peoples, and early capitalism's drive toward growth influence England's understanding of itself and differently racialized populations? We will address these and other concerns with attention to The Tempest, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, and a selection of sonnets.