Hamlet describes his evil uncle Claudius as a “moor” but his own beloved father as “fair”, showing an equivalence of “dark” with “bad” and “light/fair” with “good” in Shakespeare’s work, which some have argued has not just a metaphorical but a racial meaning.

The prevaricating prince also seeks inspiration for murder in the classical figure of Pyrrhus, the slayer of the king of Troy who Hamlet describes as having “a dread and black complexion” – language cited as evidence of the his attribution of negative qualities to “blackness”.

Dr Smith has claimed that treating such references to colour in Shakespeare’s work as purely metaphorical rather than literally descriptive of race is “deeply troubling”, claiming this view dismisses “black experience as only a metaphor”.

The Globe’s head of education Dr Farah Karim-Cooper warned against seeing Hamlet as a universal work of art divorced from racial categories like “white masculinity”, saying: “There will be a contingent of people that don’t see this play as a play about white masculinity, but very much about humanity.

“But therein lies the problem in some way, because white masculinity becomes equivalent to all of humanity.”

Hamlet, with his philosophical soliloquising and reluctance to act, is often critically viewed as a melancholic and introverted character, but it has been argued that this view is a result of British colonialism.

Dr Smith has claimed that interpretations of the “inwardness” of Hamlet come from the Enlightenment period, saying: “At a moment where we have colonialism and imperialism that were part of the politics of the western world .. how we understood the the basis race and racial discourse in term of slavery in the western world, at that very moment this interpretation of hamlet’s inwardness became dominant.