【正文】 and Caliban an example depicting the master/servant relationship or the nature/nurture contrast. In none of these plays, as in neither The Merchant of Venice nor Othello, does the theme of race ever really e to the fore to bedim other possible themes. Although race was never Shakespeare’s central theme, race and racism actually never escaped the playwright’s notice. In fact, as will be discussed in this essay, Shakespeare’s prehensive soul has made him prehend a lot of things related to the problem of race, his prehensiveness has bee an impartial attitude toward races, and his soul has created a racial vision bespeaking his prehensiveness most impressively.II. Racial Personae We have mentioned five characters (Aaron, Shylock, Othello, Cleopatra, and Caliban) from five plays (Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest) as Shakespeare’s dramatis personae that may have something to do with race and racism. But the five characters do not exhaust Shakespeare’s racial personae. In The Merchant of Venice, at least, we have two other Jews (Shylock’s daughter Jessica and his friend Tubal) and one or two Moors (the Prince of Morocco and the Moor mentioned in passing whom Launcelot Gobbo made big with child), who either directly or indirectly help make up Shakespeare’s racial vision. If we count also Aaron’s black baby by Tamora and Caliban’s hag mother Sycorax (who is also not presented but mentioned in the play), then Shakespeare’s racial personae may be said to be above ten. Of the eleven racial personae, only four are female (Jessica, Cleopatra, Sycorax, and Launcelot’s Moor), but they are enough to connect race with gender. Among the eleven characters, again, we find three Jews (Shylock, Jessica, and Tubal), five Moors (Aaron and his baby, the Prince of Morocco, Launcelot’s woman, and Othello), one Egyptian (Cleopatra), and two Algerians (Caliban and his mother Sycorax, since she is said to be from Argier). Up to Shakespeare’s time, as we know, any race that was nonGreek, nonRoman, or nonChristian was thought to be barbarous. So, all of the characters would have been considered barbarous if none of them had converted to Christianity (like Jessica and Othello) or had been born of nobility (like Cleopatra or the Prince of Morocco). Anyway, in Shakespeare’s vision race is also linked to religion and class, besides gender. In ancient times, the Moslem region west of Egypt in north Africa was called Barbary. It was the place where Moors (a Moslem people of mixed Arab and Berber descent) used to The English word “Moors,” it is said, is related to the Spanish Moros and the French Maures and derived from the Latin maurus and the Greek mauros, which means “dark,” and the word originally referred to “the dark ones” inhabiting northern Africa because they were darker in plexion than the Europeans. Later, in the 15th century, when black slaves were brought back from west Africa, “black Moors” or “blackamoors” was the word used to distinguish the negroes from the “Moors” of northern Africa, though people often failed to make the distinction and kept calling all Africans “Moors” no matter whether they were black or merely swarthy, from north or west In Shakespeare’s drama, Aaron is identified as a blackamoor but Othello is said to be a swarthy Moor. To Shakespeare, “a Moor was not clearly distinguished from a black” (Asimov 609). And I am of opinion that no matter whether Othello is brown or black, this particular Moor is enough to bee a racial topic though critics including Coleridge and A. C. Bradley have strongly argued for the necessity of making Othello a swarthy Moor rather than a Racism is indeed often based on visible morphological characteristics such as skin color, hair type, and facial features. In Shakespeare’s plays, as in any society or natural environment, skin color is the most conspicuous and hence important characteristic used to identify a Moor or a foreigner, or to tell a white man from a barbarian. In Titus Andronicus, the black Aaron is pared to a “swart Cimmerian” (TA, )。 the interplay among passions, reason and will。關(guān)鍵詞：1. 猶太人 2. 摩爾人 3. 種族見(jiàn)識(shí) 4. 種族主義 5. 宏大心靈 6. 種族人物 7. 傲慢與偏見(jiàn) 8. 威尼斯與地中海AbstractRace was never Shakespeare’s central theme, but Shakespeare’s prehensive soul has created an impressive racial vision. Five of his plays have touched on racial problems and his racial personae are above ten. The Jew and the Moor are two most prominent figurers representing two basic types of racism in Shakespeare. Racialism can be distinguished from racism. Intrinsic racism and extrinsic racism are due to racial pride and racial prejudice, respectively. Shakespeare’s world was a whitecentered Christendom. Skin color and religion were thus the elemental features (of nature and nurture) that induced racism, Venice or Italy being Shakespeare’s convenient locale for dramatizing his racial actions and reactions. In this paper, instances of racial pride and prejudice in Shakespeare are presented, the causes of racism are investigated, Shakespeare’s views of race and racism are discussed, and his racial vision is delineated. The conclusion is: Shakespeare recognizes the existence of racial differences but he is not a racist. Shakespeare is in fact an impartial, humanitarian dramatist preaching interracial liberty, equality, and fraternity. In his vision there is always a Shylock locked up shyly in his racial ideology, acpanied by an Othello crying “Ot, hell, O!” for villainous misuse of racial consciousness. The playwright’s prehensive soul wants every one of us to shy away the racial “bond” that cuts our hearts and discard the racial “handkerchief” that brings us tragedies instead of curing our headaches.Key words and phrases:1. the Jew 2. the Moor 3. racial vision 4. racialism/racism 5. prehensive soul 6. racial personae