Material / Blackness: Race and Its Material Reconstructions on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12745/et.20.1.2848Keywords:
Stage, otherness, bodies, identity, blackness, cosmetics, race, materialAbstract
Examining William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, William Heminge's The Fatal Contract, and Elkanah Settle's Love and Revenge, this article argues that the seventeenth-century English stage imagines blackness as fluid and transferable because of the materials used in its production. These cosmetics are imagined as being potentially moveable from one surface to another. The article considers the intersection between the materials used to recreate blackness and its semiotic values, focusing on the relationship between black bodies and female bodies. It argues that the materials used in the recreation of these bodies inform and are informed by the panoply of discourses surrounding them.
References
T. B., The Merry Jests of Smug the Smith, or, the Life and Death of the Merry Divel of Edmonton (London, 1657), STC / 4431
Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women (London: 2002)
Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech (London, 2010)
Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage (London, 2016)
Farah Karim-Cooper. Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama. (Edinburgh, 2006)
Annette Drew-Bear, Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage: the Moral Significance of Face-Painting Conventions (London: 1994)
Peter Fryer, Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain. (London, 1984)
G. Gent, The Strange Discovery: a Tragi-Comedy (London, 1640) STC 12133
Imitiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Aldershot, 2008)
Kim Hall. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1995)
William Heminge, The Plays and Poems of William Heminge ed. Carol Anne Morley (Madison, 2006)
Philip H. Highfill Jr., Kalman A Burnim & Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London 1680 – 1800. 16 Vols, (Carbondale: 1973-93)
Nicholas Hilliard, A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning. Ed. R. K. R Thornton and T. G. S. Cain (Ashington, 1981)
Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Colour in Early Modern England (Pennsylvania, 2011), 90-100
Ben Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 Vols., ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, Ian Donaldson, (Cambridge: 2012)
Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage (London, 2016)
Gervase Markham, The Dumb Knight: a Historical Comedy (London, 1608) STC / 17398
Clare McManus, “When is a Woman Not a Woman? Or, Jacobean Fantasies of Female Performance”, Modern Philology 105:3 (2008): 437-474
McManus, Clare. Women on the Renaissance stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart court (1590-1619). (Manchester, 2002)
Thomas Middleton, William Rowley and Edgar Coit Morris, The Spanish Gipsie, and All’s Lost by Lust. (London: 1908)
A. M. Nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History (Toronto: 1952)
Karen Newman. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. (Chicago: 1991)
Lois Potter, Othello: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester, 2002)
Francesca T. Royster, “White-limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly. 51.4 (2000): 432-55
Elkanah Settle, Love and Revenge: a Tragedy in five acts (London, 1675) (Reprint. London: 2010)
William Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare: Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: 2006)
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Eugene M. Waith (Oxford: 1984)
Ian Smith, “Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly (1998)
Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (Basingstoke: 2009)
Andrea Ria Stevens, Inventions of the Skin: the Painted Body in Early English Drama 1400-1642 (Edinburgh: 2013)
Andrea Ria Stevens, “Mastering Masques of Blackness: Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, the Windsor Text of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, and Brome’s The English Moor”, ELR 39.2 (2009): 396-426
Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Aldershot, 2002)
Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: 2005)
Garthine Walker, "Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England", Gender & History 10.1 (1998): 1-25
John Webster, The White Devil, ed. Christina Luckyj. 2nd Revised Edition (London: 2008)
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Contributors to Early Theatre retain full copyright to their content. All published authors are required to grant a limited exclusive license to the journal. According to the terms of this license, authors agree that for one year following publication in Early Theatre, they will not publish their submission elsewhere in the same form, in any language, without the consent of the journal, and without acknowledgment of its initial publication in the journal thereafter.
