About a third of the way through his study of Italy and Shakespeare, Shaul Bassi tells the story of “one of those real … Jews of Venice” (64), Gino Bassi, his grandfather, who had escaped to Rome in 1944 in order to avoid being sent to the death camps, and who had, many years earlier, on the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, published a short essay in which he wrote that Shakespeare “did not use the theatre as a means to disseminate a faith or to fight a political party or a nation; his genius is … universal” (qtd. in Bassi, 64). Bassi makes emphatically clear throughout his study that whether one operates within the fraught discourse of the universal or the uneasy discourse of the global, “country disposition[s]” (Othello 3.2.204) are more than sources for “ethnic humor” or disciplinary fodder (10–13). Bassi shows with some passionate and intelligent verve throughout his study that incidental and accidental encounters between Shakespeare and Italy “may … illuminate singular potentialities of the plays activated by … specific Italian circumstances and simultaneously turn Shakespeare into a special guide to a nation’s changing ethos and political unconscious” (4).

However, for a study too often more apodictic than circumspect in its argumentative style and tone, Bassi is in fact making a more emphatic claim: haunted by its ancient Roman past, its identification with the Catholic Church, and its bordering Europe and Africa, Italy is not just any historical or postmodern site but the preeminent nexus of Europe whose “roots” are Islamic, Christian, and Jewish (96); and with especially the native informant-philosopher-theorists Giordano Bruno and Giorgio Agamben as his guides, Bassi wants to make the case, especially addressing the “Anglosphere” that has presumptuously assumed almost exclusive ownership of Shakespeare and Shakespearean academic discourse, that Italy has a “more compelling [case] insofar as most of the plays under scrutiny are derived from Italian sources” and “each new Italian staging … brings a text and set of meanings back to their ‘original’ context, creating in turn new texts and new meanings” (4). Remarkably, Bassi’s own words resonate uncannily with Antony’s “new heaven, new earth” (Antony and Cleopatra 1.1.17), a speech Bassi discusses in his chapter on Bruno’s “radical philosophical and political project” (106) and its influence on Shakespeare.

Bassi sets his “generat[ive]” (21) reading of Italy against the Anglosphere’s critical “naturaliz[ation]” of race (12), which he sees as responsible for the emergence there of Shakespeare and early modern race (as opposed to ethnic) studies, which he comes close to categorically dismissing through insinuation, slips, and caricature, even while condoning it as “a corrective to an older color-blind but tacitly racist criticism” (13). While separating race from its “North American inflection” (12–13) is in itself a commendable move, Bassi’s oppositional stance makes the redemptive argument he wishes to make (e.g., 18, 201) less tenable, less intellectually and ethically “manageable” (198). One is left with the impression by the end of Bassi’s book that the philosophical and political traditions and realities of Italy (its cultural, intellectual, and ethical standing) supersede what he sees as the overdetermined identity politicking of the Anglosphere, which flounders in its racial epistemologies and is unable to produce the kind of redemptive work that speaks most saliently to Shakespeare’s genius. Bassi loses at least this reader when he complains that the minority scholar within the Anglo-American “hegemonic academic paradigm” turns his or her marginalization into a kind of hermeneutical privilege (31). Bassi seems to offer his own radical (and passionate but disinterested) Brunian critique as an attenuation or corrective.

The political, philosophical, and, sometimes, the archeological, figure prominently in the book’s nine chapters organized under three rubrics: “‘Race,’” “Politics,” and “Place.” The three chapters of the final rubric—focused on Juliet’s dead body in Verona and Shylock’s ghetto in Venice, stone figures of Moors in Venice, and the heterotopia of the Roman prison in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s film Cesare deve morire/Caesar Must Die (2012)—offer some of the book’s most compelling material and will probably garner the book its most enthusiastic readership. The book will probably be most engrossing to those interested in global Shakespeare, and, ironically, those most especially interested in the global language of race as informed by Shakespeare’s texts and afterlives.