Shakespeare writes about race. A lot. Othello and The Merchant of Venice are just the best known examples. Most regard Shakespeare’s writings as humanising the ‘other’ — the stranger among us. Yet his plays portray the kinds of prejudices and hatreds that today we call racism. His pen portrait of Iago, the villain in Othello, is a master pen portrait of the true ugliness of racism. A passage which is generally attributed to Shakespeare (see sources below) is perhaps the only substantial manuscript handwriting of the playwright which has survived until today. The passage appears in a play known as the Booke of Sir Thomas More. It is an Elizabethan…