| This thesis examines why early modern theatrical stagings of torture intersect with depictions of racial difference. Seventeenth century scholarship on the theatre often focuses on its sanguine nature. Early modern opponents of the theatre despised dramatizations of “notorious murderes” because they promoted “injury, anger, wrath, envy, hatred, contention, [etc].” Of course, early modern defenders of the theatre argued: “If we present a tragedy, [it is] acted with all the art that may be to terrifie men from the like abhorred practices.” But while early modern English tragedies tested the limits of Renaissance stage art, they did not explore the machinations of torture. Blood flowed freely on the Renaissance stage with graphic depictions of mutilations, executions, and decapitations, but torture was mainly addressed verbally—either as an unacted threat or as a graphic figure of speech.; The Restoration theatre, however, reveled in displaying onstage depictions of torture. Plays like John Dryden's Indian Emperour (1665), Edward Ravenscroft's Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (1686), and Colley Cibber's Xerxes (1699) utilized stage racks for torturing characters onstage, in full view. Despite the fact that the historical victims of torture in Renaissance England were English religious and political dissenters, the Restoration stage rewrote the victim's role as explicitly racialized—the African Moor, the Native American Indian, and the East Indian. The fact that the rack was the chosen theatrical instrument of torture—a device that both stretches and exposes the victim's body—demonstrates the desire to view and control this racial body. Staging torture, however, necessarily alters its very nature. Unlike public events such as trials, punishments, executions, and processions, torture in sixteenth century England was a private, unannounced, and unseen affair, only taking place in the Tower and Bridewell and never admitting a public audience. Dramatizing torture made it public, and like other public events unpredicted reversals of power could always occur, thereby collapsing the distance between the racialized other and the self. |
