Read the excerpt from Midsummer by Derek Walcott.Their thick skulls bled with rancorwhen the riot police and the skinheads exchanged quipsyou could trace to the Sonnets, or the Moor’s eclipse.

The speaker links the quips exchanged by the riot police and skinheads to Shakespeare’s sonnets and Othello, whose central character is the Moor. This suggests that the two opposing groups draw on a shared cultural and literary heritage, even as they clash. It does not mean that most people in the riot have read Shakespeare.

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