Barbarous play: Race on the Renaissance stage

Barbarous Play examines the experience and figuration of race in English Renaissance drama, arguing that racial fluidity---moments where racial identification shifts for an individual, or where members of one group stand in for members of another---marks the period's most important and characteristic sites of racial representation. Fluidity makes period racial conceptual boundaries more clear by simultaneously delineating and crossing them. At the same time, fluidity highlights the resemblance of Renaissance racial logics to modern ones, which alike base changing categories of racial affiliation on imagined, metaphorical, and contradictory group distinctions of color, genealogy, temperament, and 'blood'.;The dissertation therefore opens up a broad set of values that racial discourses possessed for the culture, finding racial meanings to be pivotal within Renaissance understandings of gender, nation, religion, sexuality, and class, and frequently underlying and intensifying the tensions of comedy and tragedy. The fantasies and anxieties that cluster around the representation of interracial desire are often seen as excitingly or frighteningly internal to English culture, e.g., in "black" women or people of low degree, as well as in groups imagined as alien, such as Jews or Italians. For instance, in Othello, while the racial depiction of Othello changes in relation to his marriage and to his service for the state. Desdemona is racialized when she frustrates gender and class expectations. Her transition from "fair" daughter to "begrimed and black" wife signals deep parallels between the period's ideologies of race and gender. Throughout, Barbarous Play attends to the "blackening" of unruly women---the racial language that attempts to discipline and eroticize the agency of characters such as The Merchant of Venice's Jessica or The White Devil's Vittoria---while considering the role of other differences (e.g. religious, national, and class-based ones) in generating the racial meanings of these plays. The determinants of early modern racial identity are multiple and tangled, and the legacy of their interaction extends well beyond the seventeenth century. The epistemological component of this legacy, with its gestures to the truths of bodily difference and transgression as comprising material evidence for racialism, is taken up in a concluding reading of The Changeling.