Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

E A R LY MODE R N C U LT U R A L ST U DI E S Jean Howard and Ivo Kamps, Series Editors

Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 by David Hawkes Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England by Bruce Boehrer Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place by Rhonda Lemke Sanford Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 edited by Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture by Jennifer A. Low Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India by Pompa Banerjee Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn by Douglas Bruster England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism by Mark Netzloff Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean by Daniel Vitkus Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism edited by Linda Woodbridge Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640 edited by Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic Arts of Calculation: Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe edited by David Glimp and Michelle Warren The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World edited by Karen Raber and Treva J. Tucker The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double by Ian Munro Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays by John Michael Archer

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PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama by Denise Walen

Re-Mapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings edited by Goran V. Stanivukovic Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton by Benedict S. Robinson Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th Century Britain by Catharine Gray Global Traffic: Discourse and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 edited by Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng Remembering the Early Modern Voyage: English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion by Mary C. Fuller Memory, Print, and Gender in England, 1653–1759 by Harold Weber Violence, Politics, and Gender in Early Modern England edited by Joseph P. Ward Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare edited by Ivo Kamps, Karen L. Raber, and Thomas Hallock Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture by Michelle M. Dowd Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors by Ian Smith

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Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642 Edited by Adam Zucker & Alan B. Farmer

A N D R H ETOR IC I N T H E R E NA ISS A NCE

BA R B A R I A N E R ROR S

Ian Smith

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R ACE

RACE AND RHETORIC IN THE RENAISSANCE

Copyright © Ian Smith, 2009.

All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62045–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Ian, Ph.D. Race and rhetoric in the Renaissance : barbarian errors / Ian Smith. p. cm.—(Early modern cultural studies, 1500-1700) ISBN 978–0–230–62045–2 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Race in literature. 3. Blacks in literature. 4. Africans in literature. 5. Renaissance—England. 6. Rhetoric— England—History—16th century. 7. Rhetoric—England— History—17th century. I. Title. PR428.R35S65 2010 820.9'353—dc22

2009024116

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Smith, Ian. “Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Quarterly 49:2 (1998), pp. 168–186. © 1998 Folger Shakespeare Library. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Phyllis Smith

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For my mother

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Series Editors’ Foreword

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

Barbarous African, Barbarous English, and the Transactions of Race

1

Chapter 1

Classical Precedents

23

Chapter 2

Race in Perspective

45

Chapter 3

Barbarian Genealogies

73

Chapter 4

Instructing the English Nation

97

Chapter 5

Shakespeare’s Africans: Performing Race in Early Modern England

123

Imperialism’s Legacy, or the “Language of the Criminal”

155

Epilogue

Notes

163

Works Cited

195

Index

217

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C ON T E N TS

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I

n the twenty-first century, literary criticism, literary theory, historiography, and cultural studies have become intimately interwoven, and the formerly distinct fields of literature, society, history, and culture no longer seem so discrete. The Palgrave Early Modern Cultural Studies Series encourages scholarship that crosses boundaries between disciplines, time periods, nations, and theoretical orientations. The series assumes that the early modern period was marked by incipient processes of transculturation brought about through exploration, trade, colonization, and the migration of texts and people. These phenomena set in motion the processes of globalization that remain in force today. The purpose of this series is to publish innovative scholarship that is attentive to the complexity of this early modern world and bold in the methods it employs for studying it. As series editors, we welcome, for example, books that explore early modern texts and artifacts that bear the traces of transculturation and globalization and that explore Europe’s relationship to the cultures of the Americas, of Europe, and of the Islamic world and native representations of those encounters. We are equally interested in books that provide new ways to understand the complex urban culture that produced the early modern public theater or that illuminate the material world of early modern Europe and the regimes of gender, religion, and politics that informed it. Elite culture or the practices of everyday life, the politics of state or of the domestic realm, the material book or the history of the emotions—all are of interest if pursued with an eye to novel ways of making sense of the strangeness and complexity of the early modern world. Jean Howard and Ivo Kamps Series Editors

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SE R I E S E DI TOR S’ FOR E WOR D

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I wish to thank the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library,

and the Clark Library whose fellowship support enabled my research for this book. My greatest personal and professional debt is to Jean Howard whose unstinting generosity and encouragement propelled me forward in this endeavor; without her this project might not have seen the light of day. Others have read the manuscript, or parts thereof, at various stages: Kim F. Hall, Margo Hendricks, Dympna Callaghan, Peter Stallybrass, Michael Neill, and my Lafayette colleague Pat Donahue; to them I offer my profound appreciation for their astute observations. Kieran Kennedy’s kindness, service, and immeasurable help will never be forgotten. Finally, I would like to thank Mary Gray and Joy Grindley, friends who provided support in numerous, intangible ways.

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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

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N T R O D U C T I O N

BA R B A ROUS A F R IC A N, BA R B A ROUS E NGL ISH, A N D T H E TR A N S A C T I O N S O F R A C E “R ENA ISSA NCE ”

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A careful study of race in the Renaissance, the title of this book implies, requires a return to a body of classical texts, concepts, and values to focus on language in defining cultural identity.1 Humanists devoted to the ancient literatures of Greece and Rome spearheaded the Renaissance revolution, effectively elevating and establishing the studia humanitatis, the program of liberal arts, firmly in the university curriculum by the fifteenth century. “They were men,” writes E.H. Gombrich, “who emphasized the importance of language” (25–26). Within such a pervasive intellectual and cultural program, debased, incompetent or vulgar speech—barbarism—had an inverse relationship to rhetoric that was elevated as the central canon in the humanist curriculum to emphasize the evolving role of linguistic eloquence in English self-definition.2 Barbarism is a technical term taken from classical rhetoric and grammar to denote linguistic vices, errors in language that were specifically associated with foreigners or cultural outsiders. Barbarians did not speak Greek or Latin, or did so incompetently, and were defined according to a system of negative classification as non-empire people whose presence along the fluctuating imperial borders kept the threat of invasion an insistent political and cultural reality. The Hellenistic Greeks who bequeathed to modern Europe the concept of a single human species and the term with which to describe it—anthropos, “Man”—also bequeathed to us the first term which

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The rhetorical and classical history within which barbarism as language difference is framed, however, tells a larger narrative of subjugation and superiority, affiliation and estrangement. In the ancient world barbarians did not belong to the civilized master race; to be barbarous was to be a linguistic outlaw, to be exiled to the very margins of culture. Barbarians— the archetypal rivals in the wars of classical imperialism—committed barbarisms, and dramatic literature along with rhetorical theory advanced the interests of the state’s political, ethnocentric and, ultimately, racial agenda. Barbarism’s historical emergence in the classical, imperial politics of linguistic difference situates this study in a particularly “Renaissance” perspective that acknowledges ancient antecedents and foregrounds the role of rhetoric in early modern racial self-fashioning. The Renaissance inherited a powerful conceptual template—however erroneously applied—for imagining the outsider, one that was readymade for racial exploitation. Because of the ebullience implied by “rebirth and renewal,” Lean Marcus reminds us, the term often “buys its optimism at too great a price—the neglect of other cultural currents and forms of cultural production, of a vast sea of human activity and misery that Renaissance either failed to include or included only marginally” (43).3 In this book, barbarism and its assertion of a hierarchy of human relationships, which includes race, certainly qualify as subjects occluded under this traditional critical rubric, “Renaissance.” Used quite liberally as a slur across European cultures where language performance conferred status and provided access to social mobility, barbarism demarcated a cultural division of insiders and outsiders that would eventually sharpen into racial awareness. Renaissance recuperation or imitation, therefore—in the words of Thomas Greene, its “revivalist initiative”—is more than “a gesture that signals the intent of reanimating an earlier text or texts on the far side of a rupture” (37). Textual appropriation included the negotiation of history, recovery of ideas, and actualization of values in the process of rationalizing stable notions of Renaissance modernity. J.R. Hale ponders the specific attitudinal content that was transmitted in the Renaissance’s cultural exchange: “The ancient world depended on a substratum of slaves; did this increase the scorn felt by humanist writers for the lowest grades of their society” (212)? More accurately, Aristotle argued the natural inferiority of the slave and the barbarian, thus leaving a debased etiology to be recovered and used in the Renaissance re-formulations of a neo-barbarian type.4 Replication thus understood is endemic to a racial logic that imagines the Renaissance neo-barbarian

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was capable of making distinctions within that species. The term was barbaros, “barbarian.” And a barbarian was, before he was anything else, one who was a babbler, one who spoke not Greek but only “barbar.” (Pagden 1993: 120)

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as already known and predictable. Surrogates of the ancient model, Renaissance Africans were subsumed within an unchanging, synchronous paradigm that, paradoxically, became their peculiar instantiation of modernity. As we will see, evidence of Africans’ supposedly barbarous speech, perceived as an early modern substitute of the ancient barbarian defect, supports the larger claim in this study that language in the Renaissance is a vehicle through which individual and group identities are marked, distinguished, and imbued with racial significance in a dynamic social and international framework.5 Herein lies the tension written into this “Renaissance” racial matrix: the dynamic circulation of a static paradigm as the articulation of English mastery. Thus, the Renaissance, in the fundamental sense of the period’s self-conscious, humanist commitment to classical texts and ideas, offers a rich context for the re-examination of barbarism’s role in the shaping of a racial vocabulary, ideology, and praxis. Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors, with attention to the central concept of “barbarian errors” referenced in its subtitle, has three overt referents: the specious but generally adopted contemporaneous narrative that purports a humanist history for the early modern African; the racial markers that are the legacy of the classical system, linguistic errors made by the foreign speaker of an inferior tongue; and, with a twist of irony, the barbarism of English’s linguistic reputation, anxiously acknowledged, strategically displaced or, in literary and dramatic practice, overcome. This book’s investigation of language—by way of barbarism—as a historically accurate and productive ground of racial analysis is unique among critical methodologies in early modern race studies. An early focus on physical blackness, represented by the work of Elliott H. Tokson, Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, and Jack D’Amico, has been augmented by the scholarship of Kim F. Hall (1995) and, more recently, Sujata Iyengar to argue the inescapable racial relevance of color and varying hues of difference.6 Still, Michael Neill maintains that, in this period, signs of profound cultural difference registered more significantly “in establishing the boundaries of otherness than the markers of mere biological diversity” (1998: 366).7 A new orthodoxy has emerged as a corrective to the predominant but unsustainable—for the period—sole emphasis on color. Researchers now typically posit that race in the early modern period is the product of several, often interrelated, categories of identification, a complex amalgam of codes that can be mobilized to ratify group exclusion and marginalization.8 Joyce Green MacDonald writes, “indeed, the fluidity and multiplicity of notions of what race meant is one of the most salient features of Renaissance racial discourse” (2002: 166). Gender, for example, is routinely made to function as an analogous category of inferiority and cultural disorder so that racial denigration and exclusion are often conveyed through the social status of women’s bodies and their

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perceived unruly disruption of proscribed sexual behavior.9 An increased attention to the impact of religious prejudice on racism has brought Christian, Jewish, and Muslim relations more firmly within the orbit of early modern studies, mitigating the tendency to make race simply synonymous with color prejudice.10 The new emphasis on racial fluidity has not only increased our awareness of multiple sites of racialization, but also underscored the significance of nonbiological or nonphenotypical codes. It is odd, therefore, that in recognition of this important analytical “bifurcation” of nature and culture, essence and construction, Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton contend in their recent field-defining volume, Race in Early Modern England, that it is necessary “to emphasize the place of religion, gender, class, and sexuality as central to the formation of and workings of racial ideologies”—to the total exclusion of language (8). While Lara Bovilsky claims that “[r]acist theories encompass specific beliefs about nationality, language, psychology, intellect, religion, morality, vocation, class, gender, and sexuality, to name some significant and interrelated categories,” the absence of attention to language is the notable lacuna in early modern race scholarship (10).11 Language as constitutive of race has not been substantively addressed and remains the conspicuously untested category without a full-scale examination into its potential for defining African identities in the early modern period. Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England: Barbarian Errors, therefore, fills an urgent gap by attending to the term “barbarian” and its foundation in language to expand the early modern scholarship of heterogeneous racial codes. Establishing language as a racial marker enables further work in the field: “Race becomes more or less visible in early modern culture in the degree to which it is articulated through and articulates some other hegemonic category” (MacDonald 1997: 13). I do not intend to repeat the argument concerning intersecting codes, but I will (in the following pages and chapter 2) theorize a historical relationship between language and color. This book’s immediate task is to identify a historically accurate terminology that posits language in relation to race and Africa while examining the political and cultural benefits accruing to England as it undertook the work of cultural exclusion and its own national and racial ratification. “Barbarian,” rooted in the Greek imperial wars of the fifth century BC, is that term, but its under-historicized and insufficiently theorized use stands in contrast to this study’s goal to locate its ancient provenance and Renaissance translation in a specific early modern discourse of race and African designation. The term “barbarian,” along with its cognates, is not unfamiliar to early modern criticism, being used, however, in the general sense of savage, cruel, and uncouth as a loosely construed trope for the non-European “Other.” In the most pertinent of such critical engagements, “pagan barbarism” is an abasement of Christian civic and ethical virtues (Cantor 300); the

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“barbarian” is identified in Italian humanist thinking with the Turks (Bisaha 43–93); New World colonial encounter is refracted through the lens of the barbarian-Roman conquests (Vaughan 1997); or a New World barbarian discourse facilitates the “superimposition of Indian on Muslim” to posit a west-east trajectory of cultural transmission and influence (Matar 1999: 16). Even in Margo Hendricks’s “Managing the Barbarian: The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage,” the titular promise serves up “barbarian” as an incidental, loosely associative synonym for “African” rather than a precise descriptor and identity.12 Although these critical deployments effect an argument about pronounced cultural difference, demonstrating the political value of the barbarian trope in designating a foreign group as primitive, socially inferior or dangerous, they misrecognize the Renaissance transitive logic that specifically equates the ancient barbarian type with the early modern African.13 A growing, and more consistently related, body of scholarship has also seized on the concept of barbarism to speak not of Africans or other non-Europeans, but to exploit its ethnic potential for describing British whiteness. Such work admits the confession of Britain’s barbarous past, as decreed by the ancients, and the English attempts to reconcile this history with present narratives of national and ethnic restitution, including the notion of rehabilitative imperialism under Roman rule—that is, Roman conquest as the catalyst of British cultural redemption. Numbered among the northern barbarians, the British, according to Debora Shuger, were subject to the “racial/ethnic,” “culturo-geographic” labeling of the Greeks and Romans who strategically defined their own southern position as the hegemonic norm in contrast to “the primitive tribes to the north” (497–98). From Aristotle, Caesar, and Tacitus, an ethnographical profile emerged of a wild, lawless, predatory people for whom brute strength determined rank and civilization betrayed a weak, enslaved mentality (Shuger 497–506).14 In the late sixteenth century, at that moment of heightened nationalism, Englishmen confronted this “newly conceived barbaric heritage,” John Curran observes, and became motivated “to locate virtue in savage forbears and obscure origins” (1997: 277–78). Initiated by Camden’s Britannia (1586), this historiographic revolution announced an epistemological crisis: an intense desire for a native history (in the wake of the collapse of the Galfridian myth that imagined a venerable Trojan ancestry) and, simultaneously, the distress over the unflattering ancestors unearthed in the ensuing national archaeology.15 According to Jodi Mikalachki, “because they were disturbed by much of what they discovered about British antiquity, early modern nationalists devoted considerable energy and ingenuity to distancing the modern nation from its native origins” and were driven “to exorcise primitive savagery from national history and identity” (1998: 2, 4). In fact, she argues, further examination of the records revealed “a race of barbarians more

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like the American ‘savages’ and ‘wild Irish’ of their budding colonial ventures than the civilized and powerful people of ancient Rome” (3).16 Against this background, I read Mary Floyd-Wilson’s historicizing of “northern ‘whiteness’ and English identity as barbaric, marginalized, and mutable,” a rejection of the “ascension of white over black,” as the normative, oppressive epitome of early modern race history (11).17 As a corrective to the retrospective assumptions concerning the Atlantic slave trade, the denigration of blackness and white hegemony, Floyd-Wilson’s confirmation of a humiliating, barbaric English identity, derived from classical humoral theory, argues for an unstable, marginalized English ethnicity anxious to reconstitute itself as a norm (12–14). Floyd-Wilson’s classical scaffolding, with its insistence on the external factors affecting the English humoral body, also ignores examining the central concept of language in relation to barbarism. Ironically, the work’s corporal telos aligns itself with later biological speculations on race despite her alleged refusal to engage this particular arc of racial ascendancy. Given the tensions inherent in the emergent national historiography, whiteness is the desirable byproduct of exorcised primitivism. A suppression of barbaric savagery recuperates whiteness from the remains of a bifurcated ancestry (primitive yet, nevertheless, white) as the solution to a renovated national identity. Read historically, whiteness can be detached from savagery and primitivism and reformulated as the distinct, esteemed ethnic feature of the new national historiography. Its nominal continuity with the ancients served also as a sufficient, authorizing indicator. Yet coupled with the well-documented hardiness of the northern barbarians—brute force fostering incessant militarism—whiteness was invested with resilience and power that boded well for a rugged English nationalism. While northern barbarians were disparaged by the southern occupants of the geographical and intellectual center of ancient bias and authority, they were routinely ascribed strength that bespoke vigor of body and disposition.18 Whiteness affixed to power, therefore, constituted a national rebranding that accommodated the rise of an English colonial and imperial imaginary. The immediate test case for this reading is the colonial plantation in Ireland where, confronted with the whiteness of its neighbor, the English fell back on a strategy of projection. “In constructing the Irish as savages,” writes Barbara Fuchs, “the English placed themselves within a temporal framework in which Ireland existed at a stage of social development long since surpassed by England. Ireland required civilizing by England in much the same way that England had required colonizing by Rome” (1997: 52).19 The discarded English barbarism would be imputed to the Irish, leaving not only a free, untrammeled English whiteness, but one emboldened to flex its brute strength in the form of colonial management. As part of the newly revived historiography, the notion of the salutary imposition of Roman rule in ancient

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Briton realized an alternate, positive link to Rome (lost in the demise of the Trojan myth) that sustained a “Renaissance” ideology. At the same time, this creative idea of a rehabilitative imperialism justified the English use of colonial force and replayed England’s barbaric ethnic history from the perspective of a revamped subject position—one allied to the Romans—to install and justify practices of domination in the name of progressive civilization. “Barbarian” thus enters recent criticism to elaborate contested identities in the early modern English scene of an expanding multinational consciousness with emergent investments in the politically rife arena of colonial enterprise. Yet where the prevailing critical tendency targets either non-Europeans or white Britons, Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England: Barbarian Errors focuses on the deployment of the term “barbarian” for both the early modern African and English and allows me to argue—especially given my particular focus on barbarism and language—the dialectical process of “race exchange” that underwrote the English construction of the early modern African. I build on current scholarship to advance the racial and ethnic power critics perceive in the term “barbarian,” recognizing the significance of strategies of projection that are consonant with early modern England’s politics of national identification. The English imputation of barbarism to Renaissance Africans examined in this study is contingent on racial necessity, a claim shared, in part, by Geraldine Heng in her characterization of race as instrumental to the invention of national identities. “Medieval examples,” she writes, “instruct us that racial thinking, in premodern contexts, does not require races as such to exist a priori but will produce races at need, in answer to specific historical imperatives and occasions” (2003: 71).20 If race is a product of need, notably to provide stability to communal and national identity at moments of great cultural pressure, then the categories of difference will change to reflect particular historical determinants. While Heng is concerned with the politics of medieval romance where religion, for example, plays a crucial role, her fundamental point regarding race as a function of historical circumstances is relevant to my focus on Renaissance racial construction. In late sixteenth-century England, certain historical factors important to this study were in play: a changing international scene, transformed by the logistics of exploration, travel, and trade; a consciousness awakened to the demands of dealing directly or indirectly with culturally different people; an intense self-revision that was inseparable from the imagined community of the nation; and the impact of humanist thinking that applied elite learning to broadly relevant social issues. Race in the Renaissance, then, emerged from this concatenation of events as a necessary English strategy to protect and defend its own national reputation at the expense of African “barbarians,” a designation achieved, importantly, through an act of

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deliberate misreading of classical texts. This misreading or error, as the book’s title intimates, constitutes what Gayatri Spivak calls a “grounding mistake,” one that relies on distortions and oversimplifications to accommodate a desired national narrative. Addressing the seductive appeal and dangers of the concept of origins, Spivak concedes: “History slouches in it, ready to comfort and kill” (1992: 781).21 The deliberate humanist misreading of the Renaissance neo-barbarian or African provides a boon to English racial and national rehabilitation, under a newly revised aegis of origins, but as an act of strategic disavowal and displacement, its effects would prove disastrous and, without overstatement, deadly for Africans in the records of early modern commerce and art. In addition to being the product of historical need, race is, therefore, fundamentally an exchange or transaction of power that employs distinct, identifiable personal features as the tools of negotiation. As such, race is not uniquely or, for that matter, most significantly concerned with the particular personal identifying trait or an inveterate practice; rather, race’s consequence arises from its transactional function, the establishing of relative merit and power within a social matrix. For this reason, “race” is not the historical possession of post-Enlightenment “scientific” taxonomies and epistemology (as commonly debated); at the same time, the identification of context-specific racial traits is crucial to an accurate appraisal of racial negotiation at distinct periods in history. Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors exploits throughout, as its theoretical underpinning, language’s inherent dialectical character—what the linguist Emile Benveniste accounts as its reversibility—to foreground this principle of negotiation or race exchange.22 Thus, although current scholarship has begun using the notion of barbarism to delineate racial content, it is important to recognize that critics have collectively overlooked the primordial barbarian characteristic: failed language. The book addresses this oversight and examines England’s imbrication in the barbarian dilemma, its anxious mobilization of language to demonstrate a coming of age in vernacular achievement in order to dispatch its own barbarous linguistic past and broker a race exchange, substituting the expedient African in the Renaissance multinational contact zone. Such a tactical understanding and use of language bears directly on the emergent notion of English nationalism to suggest an interdependence of distinct but related categories: nation and race. “Benedict Anderson is no doubt right to insist that language has rarely (if ever) been accepted as a sufficient defining condition of nationality” Michael Neill observes, “but its exceptional capacity for mobilizing the sense of extended community on which the new nation-state would come to depend was first properly understood in the sixteenth century (1994: 14). This study contributes to the scholarship that argues the importance of the self-conscious, collective enterprise that joined vernacular, literary achievement to the

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establishment of a national ideal. For Richard Helgerson, the Henrician revolution paved the way for political nationhood; the “Elizabethan successors were left to make sense of the result. This was the task not just for one poet, but for a whole generation of writers” (4). This book extends the recognition of language’s contribution to the construction of national identity; it makes the further case that language should be regarded as having a racializing function and, as such, foregrounds not only the overlap of nation and race, but also their definitional interdependence. The nation, this project suggests, is not a separate conceptual entity, but, as David Baker argues in Between Nations, its imagined unity is achieved through strategies of repression and expulsion. In the context of this study, barbarism—as it figures race and Africa—is the denied component on which the construct of the nation rests, and race (especially understood as transactional exchange) is properly conceived as a site of struggle.

C OLOR When African characters appeared on the English Renaissance stage, their color was, admittedly, a striking visual feature. Aaron, Mully, Zanche, Eleazar: for these exemplary types, blackness constituted an indelible and mostly negative part of the African’s identity in the period’s dramatic literature; unfavorable descriptions of Aaron as “black ill-favored fly” and “a coal-black Moor” (3.2.68, 79) are typical.23 The offstage world of exploration, nascent colonial expansion, and burgeoning international trade supplied historical and material contexts in which cross-cultural encounter resulted in a similar color consciousness. Winthrop Jordan’s landmark study White over Black concludes confidently that the “most arresting characteristic of the newly discovered African was his color. Travelers rarely failed to comment upon it” (4). Color has continued to occupy a seemingly self-evident place in our pursuit of understanding Renaissance racial constructions, and, as a result, critical studies concerned with the racial aesthetics and politics of skin color in the Renaissance argue, in effect, a historical continuity by observing a filiation of color over time. Whether probing the intersections with gender, sexuality, and religion or arguing the impact of proto-colonial, colonial, and imperial pressures on the formation of cross-national identities, studies on race in the Renaissance have relied on color as a rudimentary aspect of the cultural politics of difference.24 Although attending to the historical specificity of color and its heterogeneous affiliations, these studies also affirm the conceptual significance of the nomenclature “early modern” that understands “the period more in terms of elements repeated hereafter, those features of the age that appear to us precursors of our own” (Marcus 41).25 In the process of elaborating a racial aesthetics of color, these studies fix and rationalize temporal limits that permit a unified, relatively stable field of

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intellectual inquiry to unfold. Thus the confluence of color, corporeality, and colonialism, often articulated in the language of recent theories of imperialism, sustains a historical arc that spans the early modern and the modern eras while confirming the commonsense appeal of the scholarship on somatic difference in the Renaissance. At the same time, the intuitive appeal to color and the body, implicitly filtered through the chromatic politics of slavery and the global networks of colonialism and imperialism, has been construed differently by some scholars, as an unintentional concession that elevates the Enlightenment as the cutoff point in race studies. Thus before turning to the earlier classical and Renaissance contexts which are this study’s focus, therefore, I would like to revisit the often-broached issue of corporal fetishism to contextualize the book’s historical argument concerning the shifting interrelation between color and language as racial markers over time. Color, the generally accepted modern trigger for discerning race, is not immediately pertinent to barbarism’s linguistic genealogy, but its complementary, transitional function, it can be postulated, assumes historical importance as an emergent racist vocabulary responds to a changing world order driven by economic adventure, opportunity, and the resulting intercultural contact. K. Anthony Appiah submits that it is “easiest to understand contemporary talk of ‘race’ as the pale reflection of a more full-blooded race discourse that flourished in the” nineteenth century (1996: 38). An outgrowth of Enlightenment belief in science, Appiah argues, race “as a biological concept, picks out, at best, among humans, classes of people who share certain easily observable physical characteristics, most notably skin color and a few visible features of the face and the head” (1996: 69). Modern race debates remain tied to this language of corporal fetishism so that the ongoing struggle for racial justice and equality is repeatedly addressed in the controversial terms of a “colorblind society” (Dyson 222). W.E.B. DuBois’s poignantly troubling assertion—“the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”—continues to inform deliberations over responsible social and public policy (13). Color, then, might constitute the unavoidable threshold of modern racial epistemology pursuant to Enlightenment pseudoscientific protocols, but color blindness ensues that effectively obscures and minimizes the importance of other strategies of racialization. The work on race that predates the Enlightenment is open to the charge of terminological anachronism, special pleading or, less genially, having an academic chip on the shoulder. Bernard Lewis, David Brion Davis, James H. Sweet, and Murray Gordon remind us that from a strict historical perspective, Christian Europe probably learned to make the association between blackness and enslavement as a result of Muslim practice in the trans-Sahara trade and the Iberian peninsula, many centuries preceding Enlightenment developments.26 But John Gillies who

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adopts Giambattista Vico’s poetic or symbolic geography of the Greek oikumene contends that its spatial, barbarian hermeneutics—center and border, us and them—offers a sufficient model for analyzing otherness and difference that negates “the anachronistic terminology of ‘race,’ ‘colour’ and ‘prejudice’ ” (25).27 Gillies’s structural geography suffers from the ahistorical belief that Moors exist in a fixed and unchanging relation to European culture so that introducing “prejudice,” the expression of human belief and behavior in specific historical circumstances, is simply intolerable to his system.28 Moreover, his appeal to racial anachronism is confounded by his profound commitment to an ahistorical practice that produces unalterable racist roles: the African as territorial sexual transgressor (23–25).29 Still, the broad consensus, as Michael Banton explains it in Racial Theories, has been that race, defined as the social and political outcome of an admittedly flawed biological enterprise and imperial self-interest, simply did not exist before the eighteenth century. To admit any other reading, especially in the English case, is, quite simply, to commit gross errors. The recent first volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire titled The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century submits to this thesis. Collectively, the contributors produce a set of working assumptions for the sixteenth century: where there are no colonies, properly speaking there can be no colonials; where there are no slaves (or too intermittently seized to constitute a critical mass), there can be no discourse of oppression; where there is no outward expansionist gaze, there can be no encounter with others that justifies a racial reading; and where there is no colonial intent, there can be no justification of an imperial analysis. The Origins of Empire argues for a pattern of English slavery and significant slave trade that only emerged in the mid-seventeenth century and contends that “empire” cannot be applied accurately in relation to Britain until 1707.30 By pushing the date of a substantial slave trade and a British Empire further back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, this new history targets and subverts overtly early modern scholarship of imperialism and the production of race.31 The net effect of this revisionist history lies not in its corrective labors; rather, in displacing race and Africa from the terrain of sixteenth-century studies, it reinforces the narrow triangulation of Africa, slavery, and color as historically later, primary topoi for race in our collective academic and cultural consciousness. Still, insofar as imperialism is central to a Renaissance elaboration of racial identities, we should not limit ourselves to what comes later historically as the singular source of imperial discourse. Instead, the role of the Renaissance’s classical legacy, texts, and theories produced during and in defense of an age of Greek and Roman empire, makes it clear that imperialism in the sixteenth century is not an alien or anachronous concept in the early modern racial project. Moreover, “race” is less a unitary identity

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than a relationship predicated on difference in privilege, power, and perceived agency that reinforces a distinct status for an authorized subject; as such, the terminological obsession obscures race’s strategic, opportunistic, negotiating purpose. Distinguished by his defective tongue, the barbarian is ipso facto discredited when race is not narrowly construed as an identity but as a means to organize social and international relationships using the currency of some distinguishing human feature to lend an air of natural, inevitable legitimacy to purportedly self-evident principles of disparity and inequality. Dissenting views aside, scholars of race in the early modern period have also confronted this pertinent issue: what if color was not the primary or unique way to mark race in the Renaissance? Thus, for example, Hendricks asks “whether modern cultural and social critics of early modern literature, by extending the racial taxonomies and ideologies that have shaped post-Enlightenment social subjectivity, fashioned earlier social formations in our own image” (1998: 20)?32 More pointedly, what happens when we limit race to the prevalent semiotics and politics of skin color, a view conditioned largely in the American context by the intervening histories of slavery and colonialism as well as the emergence of biological racism as pseudo-scientific fact? Quite simply, we run the risk of failing to disturb the distinct modern predisposition to equate race and color and so surrender to a reductive, chromal, and somatic phenomenology. The corporal fetishism produced by post-Enlightenment postulates presents immediate difficulties for race in the early modern period when, as scholars have now shown, skin color operated as a point of congruence for other means of racialization: religion, nation, gender, sexuality, and class. It is, therefore, worth reiterating Peter Erickson’s observation that the “chief difficulty of Appiah’s narrative of the past is that its overemphasis on the nineteenth century produces an excessive downplaying of race in the early modern period” (28).33 The point here is not simply to promote the still valid case for studying race in the Renaissance or to replicate the modern or postmodern mirror of color because it appears so familiar, resilient, and inevitable. Rather, my goal is to underscore the need to move beyond the nineteenth and sixteenth centuries for a more comprehensive and terminologically sensitive history of race by identifying the language, ethics and imperial politics of barbarism that were renewed among the period’s efforts to define its racial praxes and ideology. In such an undertaking, color does not become a critical terminus a quo but emerges instead as a factor in the long historical transition from one regime of racialization to another.

L A NGUAGE In contrast, however, to the seemingly inevitable precedence of color, corporeality, and biology in the modern mind, Shakespeare considers 10.1057/9780230102064 - Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, Ian Smith

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a distinct alternative in As You Like It (1599). When Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, characterizes Phebe’s labored epistolary efforts as “Such Ethiop words, blacker in their effect/ Than in their countenance” (4.3.34–35), she argues that the rhetorical style and impact of Phebe’s letter is more offensive than the blackness of the inky print (the “countenance”) of the words themselves. Rosalind employs here a Renaissance commonplace grounded in the traditions of rhetoric and turned to a racial purpose: the barbarous language of the African or “Ethiop.” The African’s language is radically different, a foreign babble that is grating to the ear and devoid of reason in a cultural scenario where aural aesthetics institutes its laws of euphony as the paradigm of the harmonious insular society. In William Rowley’s adaptation of this familiar Renaissance trope in All’s Lost by Lust (1619), the Moors’ military conquest of Spain constitutes a spectacular rupture of national sovereignty and cultural identity. A defeated general Julianus rails against the victorious Mully Mumen: “Give me a sentence horrid as thy selfe art,/ Speake in thy barbarous language, thy last doome” (5.5. 36–37). With the pun on “sentence,” synonym for written or verbal expression, Mully’s “barbarous language” is as hideous as his black self, and Rowley posits the thesis that language and color are interchangeable racial categories. Importantly, the text presents an evolving conception of the African’s opaque, barbarous tongue as having material presence, an embodied or incorporated language that is as “horrid” in its rhetorical ungainliness as its invoked blackness. Language and blackness, the aural and the visual, exist in a state of kinesthetic transformation. In the dawning era of English exploration, African contact literature not only revealed an appreciable cross-cultural linguistic difference, but also averred that its documentary subject was brutish and, hence, lacking in that most humanizing faculty, speech. Travel literature of this type places an emphasis on the second term (“literature”), for eyewitness documentation is supplanted by intellectual excursions, imagined characters, and fictionalized identities that are the productive mix of classical citation, reportage, honorific quotation, ignorance, and bias.34 Richard Eden’s translation of Peter Martyr’s The Decades of the New World (1555) records John Lok’s visit to “a region cauled Trogloditica, whose inhabitauntes dwell in caves and dennes. For these are theyr houses, and the desshe of serpentes theyr meate, as wryteth Plinie and Diodorus Siculus. They have no speache, but rather a grynnynge and chatterynge. There are also people without heades cauled Blemines, havynge theyr eyes and mouth in theyr breste” (356v). Animal-like in their choice of domicile and comestibles, suffering chronic language deficiency, the deformed, headless inhabitants with displaced mouths, divulge further signs of linguistic monstrosity. In Some yeares travels into divers parts of Asia and Afrique (1638), Thomas Herbert presses the literal connection between the simian speech of Ethiopians and their supposed practices of bestiality, 10.1057/9780230102064 - Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, Ian Smith

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claiming that “[t]heir language is apishly sounded (with whom tis thought they mixe unnaturally) the idiom very hard to be counterfeited” (18). In Herbert’s earlier 1634 edition, the words of the revisited “Troglodites” of Ethiopia “are sounded rather like that of Apes, then men, whereby its very hard to sound their Dialect, the antiquitie of it whither from Babell or no” (16). Herbert’s later revision excises the biblical reference to Babel’s linguistic dispersal to advertise African linguistic barbarity with the authoritative classical, Plinian seal of approval. Because African speech is deemed “ineffable” and “barbarous,” moreover, a pervasive anonymity is decried: towns remain unnamed, experience unarticulated, and the continent’s places inaccessible (from an English perspective) until European travel literature can fill that void with its own lexical investments.35 Such is the embedded drama of travel literature: an assertion of English rhetoric over the bestial bruit of barbarous men. The perception of a salutary European language influence is inflected, moreover, with subtle color coordinates, especially when classical ethnography yields to the increasing exigent impulse of commercial and trade narratives throughout the seventeenth century. Concerning the “Land of Negroes,” Peter Heylyn observes in his Cosmographie (1652) that the people “till the coming of the Portugals thither, were for the most part so rude and barbarous, that they seem to want that use of Reason which is peculiar unto man” (53). John Ogilby’s expansive Africa (1670) employs a north-south linguistic gradient with a notable deterioration in clarity, euphony, and quality corresponding to a southerly decline. At the continent’s utmost point, “the people are so sullen and brutishly inclined, that they will neither speak, be sociable, nor appear to any; and in case one of them be taken, he will rather starve to death, than open his mouth and speak” (30). Although Ogilby cautions against classical ignorance of the African interior, vast areas becoming known only within two hundred years of his writing, the ancient symbolic geography remains intact. Increased distance from the central polis led to the fringe existence of the known world (oikumene), the margins where barbarous people were least recognizably human. Removed from the Mediterranean littoral close to Europe, African barbarism reaches its nadir of silence in the sub-Sarahan south. Superimposed on Ogilby’s directional gradient, therefore, is a color scheme that correlates linguistic baseness to blackness. Passing from Barbary, with its mix of whites, Berbers, and Arabs one enters “Negro-land, or The Countrey of Blacks” where the more southerly people of Nubia are “black as Pitch; their Language, as their Colour, peculiar to their climate” (315, 332). By contrast, the common language spoken in Barbary among “the five white people of Africa” is documented as “Aquel Marik, that is, a noble Speech” (29). However, Ogilby misrepresents Leo Africanus, his admitted source, and edits the information to effectively insist on a geochromatic hierarchy, with

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whiteness—whether European or African—enjoying cultural privilege.36 As the purveyors of linguistic judgment on a predominantly black Africa, white European writers also lay the rhetorical foundation of a chromatic culture of difference. Where color has been privileged in our modern, racial, pigmentbased theories of the body, the African’s language in the Renaissance is an equally important site that mediates the racial fictions of differential identities. Writing in the late sixteenth century, Shakespeare proposes an even more radical assertion. In his formulation from As You Like It (“Such Ethiop words, blacker in their effect/ Than in their countenance”), the gross infelicity of the Ethiop’s language or words is compared even less favorably to the black, inky signs on a page or “their countenance.” The anthropomorphic pun on “countenance” fills out the figurative presence of the Ethiop’s black face and body so that the passage suggests the following surprising conclusion: language or words function as an even more powerful racial marker—“blacker in their effect”—than the somatic signs of skin color or complexion. Shakespeare catches the modern audience off guard in a stunning reversal of the primacy of color as the significant racial marker, and, already in this brief extract, he challenges our presumed, preferred racial codification by color. The subtle but palpable contrast between Shakespeare’s assertion of language superceding color and Rowley’s formulation of their complementary, reciprocal status might indicate more than a minor, accidental authorial adjustment. Together, both writers register the simultaneous circulation and broad, historically changing equation of factors used to codify racial identities. The Shakespearean articulation of a linguistic racial precedence is indebted to an anterior model, this study argues, one rooted in the classical theory and practice of defining aliens of the Greek and Roman empires not because of their color but as a result of their language difference or errors. The growing impact of colonialism, slavery, and the concomitant commodification of the black body in the early seventeenth century necessarily gave rise to a corporal fetishism already perceived in Rowley’s conception of language as embodied. As such, Rowley’s evocation of interchangeable categories calls attention to the historical transition in emphasis occurring in the Renaissance from a racial model based on language to one envisioning a corporal empiricism that would resist or retard cultural assimilation, mobility, and transcendence in ways that language could not. As chapter 2 suggests, the negative associations of blackness appear historically later than those marshaled in language, and in the Renaissance, color is adduced to stabilize language as a racializing code. This is not to argue that Shakespeare and Rowley delimit the moment of change or set its historical parameters; rather, taken together, they foreground language as a racial marker and suggest corporal fetishism as its significant competing and complementary

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discourse. However, language is characterized by an adaptability quotient: one can learn proper language use.37 From a historical perspective, the growing demands of racial codification to justify and maintain group differences in the opening era of colonial enterprise and slavery rationalized color as an efficient, that is durable, disjunctive force. Language contrasts with color, therefore, insofar as one is permeable and porous while the other has the appearance of sustained permanence.38 In truth, color is, in the long run, no more permanent than language, given the possibilities of miscegenation following from cultural intermixing. What they both share, however, is the tendency to marginalize and a predisposition to affirm a natural, hence indisputable, corporal logic, where the mechanical and material properties of language production are as much a body event as color.39 In day-to-day interaction, language’s more immediate adaptability and assimilative propensity seemed to warrant a resilient and resistant ally that was found in color.

P R ACTIC A L HUM A NISM Perceived African barbarism, following from the growing English encounters with Africans starting in the mid-sixteenth century and accelerating over the ensuing decades, coincided with a cultural revolution: the changing positive reassessment of English during the same period, itself regarded for centuries as barbarous.40 An exercise in national selfdefinition was engaged by writers, whose collective, sometimes collaborative, goal was to render English an eloquent tool, freeing it from its persistent reputation as an inelegant, crude language. Ironically, England’s philological undertaking of a racialized barbarism concealed a second, anxious shadow-narrative, the obverse of the first, for England’s self-image was haunted by centuries-old claims of its own native tongue as rude and barbarous. Instrumental to the national project of Protestant inculcation, instruction in reading English was not only viewed as a “precursor to the grammar school course, but also as part of the wider movement which sought to elevate the English language as a medium of literary expression” (Charlton 102). However, the story of the state of English is one of gradual progress over the course of the sixteenth century, the eventual turning point in an embarrassing history of linguistic incompetence and stylistic inelegance. The prevailing, negative view is discernible in Thomas More’s apology in A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1528): “For as for that oure tonge is called barbarouse / is but a fantasye. For so is as euery lerned man knoweth / euery straunge langage to other” (337). Other contemporaries, like John Skelton, however, produce a less forgiving criticism of English, observing that “Our naturall tong is rude, /And hard to be enneude/ With pullysshed termes lusty” (Phyllyp Sparowe, 774–76). Translators of ancient works not only

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expressed Skelton’s acute sense of the language’s lack of natural stylistic elegance, but also held English up against the acknowledged standards of intellectual and rhetorical perfection. Having experienced the felicities of Greek and Latin, Nicholas Haward maintains, no one “woulde (forsaking the same,) fal to the barbarousnesse (in respect) of thys oure Englyshe tounge” (B2v). These admissions of English barbarism must, then, be read in the context of the growing sixteenth-century preoccupation with transforming itself from a marginal northern island into an independent nation that could rival other European countries on several fronts. A new collective enterprise toward English rhetorical eloquence was fuelled by the old anxiety that the native tongue was inefficient, unsophisticated, unsuited to grand ideas, and incapable of fostering complex disquisition. At mid-century, against a horizon of nascent maritime exploration and trade, a stream of texts—English rhetorical handbooks, manifestos on English versification, defenses of the theater and language arts, and travel narratives—identified English linguistic eloquence as a cultural goal of national import.41 In 1581, George Pettie continues to argue for the potential of English but is aware of the persistent criticisms. For many, the national language is accounted “barren, they count it barbarous, they count it unworthy to be accounted of: and, which is worse, so I myselfe have heard some of them, they report abrode, that our Countrey is barbarous, our maners rude, and our people uncivile” (10). Ironically, Pettie and others rehearse in tone and conviction the derogatory dismissals that English writers made regarding African languages and culture to produce textual doubles. As companion scripts to the critiques of African barbarism, their verbal similarities betray a deeper structural indebtedness that speaks to the rhetorical and dialectical inseparability of barbarous African and barbarous English. The momentous meeting of the self-confessed barbarous English and the barbarous African in the sixteenth century forms, therefore, a cultural nexus that invites the formulation of a racial idiom while permitting evasive denials of similarity within a cross-cultural view. England’s narrative of an African racial identity is informed by an insidious, if not always fully stated, desire concerning its own already deeply implicated racialized linguistic identity. As the English pursued the national benefits of capital investment through trade and linguistic prestige through the acquisition of rhetorical skills, they found a convenient and available people, Africans, onto whom they could export and project the discarded barbarisms of a newly imagined past. The first recorded contacts of Englishmen and Africans in the 1550s introduced a significant historical timeline; equally noteworthy is the gradual revision of the negative view of the status of English that increased in focus and intensity from around the same time, gaining momentum in the 1570s.42 One should

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not overlook, also, the timely advent of the public commercial theaters during this same period insofar as the staging of dramatic literature constituted communal performative events realizing the artistic possibilities in English. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the English linguistic reputation was being reinvented, construed as recuperated, and displaced onto Africa with the distortions that such a cross-cultural smuggling of debased self-image must involve. This process of English self-fashioning turns on the central term “barbarism” and it cognates that, with considerable irony, register the violence out of which national memory and identity are forged. Barbarism—language errors that betray native authenticity and defective knowledge of the master tongue—assumed added political import in English Renaissance culture, especially given the primary role assigned to rhetoric in the humanist-inspired reforms in grammar school and university curricula.43 The medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric taught in schools was transformed by the humanist trio of grammar, poetry, and rhetoric, ensuring that the scholastic privileging of logical (philosophical) disputation gave way to a program that “was extraordinarily single-minded, perhaps even narrow-minded. The whole tenor was literary” (Martindale 27).44 Brian Vickers reports that between 1400 and 1700, two thousand rhetoric books were published in Europe, each edition having two hundred and fifty to a thousand copies, with an overall potential readership numbering in the millions (1988: 256). The art of speaking, writing, and presenting an argument well, deriving from the requisite familiarity with the canons, categories, and especially figures of rhetoric, had a pervasive hold, prompting Francis Bacon to rehearse the eventual stereotype that “men began to hunt more after words than matter” (3: 283).45 The impact of the investment in rhetorical eloquence, however, should not be lost in this schematic formulation of style over substance (verba over res) that would presuppose a superficial interest of little or no material or historical consequence. On the contrary, the demand for and rapid assimilation of humanist-trained scholars at varying levels in society during the sixteenth century signaled the practical use of men who in their writings regularly touted the importance of education, and by extension language, in the service of the state.46 A turbulent religious and political atmosphere, however, condemned many of the period’s humanist luminaries to execution (Thomas More), imprisonment (Thomas Smith), public humiliation (John Cheke), and generally failed royal careers (Thomas Elyot), in many cases exposing their humble social origins as a continuing political irritant.47 Originating mostly in the “merchant or lower gentry classes,” humanists “promulgated a theory of language and education . . . as a necessary form of cultural capital for upward mobility in the newly bureaucratized state” where dependence underwrote their uncertain negotiation for security among the governing

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élite (Crane 6). Despite the nobility’s virtual monopoly on state power as the ruling class, the “gentry became the Crown’s indispensable agents in local government, notably as deputy lieutenants, justices of the peace and officers on the county militia,” overseeing the operational tasks in this growing bureaucratic administration (Lawson and Silver 94).48 The increasing requirement for an educated labor corps coincided with the prevailing theory of a pragmatic, socially active humanist education at work. Merchants contributed to building schools, motivated by the desire for prestige and the business demand for “literate apprentices for the growing range of skilled occupations on which commercial enterprise depended: book-keeping, surveying, cartography, navigation, shipbuilding” (Lawson and Silver 103). The generation of ideas about language and its social impact was felt in the immediate environment of rhetorical training and formation itself: the school. The general educational sequence provided by historians is one that moves from the petty, parish, or ABC schools that focused on vernacular reading to the grammar schools where classical instruction was the premier goal. While such a schematic representation was necessarily qualified by individual, local circumstances as Rosemary O’Day maintains, it remains true in Kenneth Charlton’s words that “the aim always was to get on with the real business of the day, the study of Latin grammar” (105).49 In the late 1530s, a royal commission produced a uniform standard for Latin instruction, based on the grammars of Colet, Lily, and Erasmus. Lily’s Latin Grammar, as it became known, would be supplemented by other texts that focused on the more advanced stages of speaking and Latin composition, works by Erasmus, Richard Sherry, Thomas Wilson, and Richard Rainolde.50 Pursuing Althusser’s insight that “the primary function of schooling is to reproduce the dominant social order,” Richard Halpern argues that the Tudor classroom, notorious for violent discipline, was a proving ground for social policy that envisioned repressive authority as the norm (22).51 Concurrently, the grinding, dull, repetitious work of learning grammar by parsing sentences “word by word, phrase by phrase, and rule by rule” was eventually replaced by the rival method of the mother tongue approach of double translation (Charlton 109).52 With the older system informed by grammatical rules and rote memorization, “the juridical conception of the text befitted a situation in which the sovereign authority of the pedagogue stood in for the power of the state” (Halpern 33). Alternative methods offered by humanist reforms required the imitation of exemplary classical models in a revised forum that even recognized play.53 Such a shift, however, complements the coercive effects of the punitive model of an oppressive monarchical pedagogue; mimetic inculcation reasserts the doctrine of ideal, hierarchical forms and mentors so that admiration of ancient authority elicits a self-imposed desire

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of subordination. Ideological control supplements corporal punishment in a reformed system that offers “a model of true culture as something given, absolute, to be mastered, not questioned—and thus fostered in all its initiates a properly docile attitude towards authority” (Grafton and Jardine xiv). Stylistic imitation, then, embodies the humanist mentalité: “the present had come, as it were, to possess an alter ego,” an ancient society that “appeared to have been peopled by an intellectual and creative master-race” (Hale 209).54 The veneration of select anterior cultural forms in this mimetic milieu intersected neatly (on a sociopolitical plane) with the exclusive character of an expanded but still closed social élite.55 The fastidious fashioning of form, style’s rich ornamented surface, encoded the ancient, idealized, superior cultural norm slated to invigorate a Renaissance poetic anthropology, but such a style, by virtue of a fractious class system, would register profound dialectical tensions. The institutional, administrative, commercial, and political dissemination of the social ideal of linguistic eloquence within a mimetic humanist pedagogy was demonstrably deeply embedded and widespread in English life. Against the backdrop of such an intellectual and cultural milieu, a study that considers language as a marker for race is not only timely, but also overdue. It locates race, and the social relations intuited by such a notion, not as an afterthought of later historical developments, such as New World slavery, colonialism, and Enlightenment philosophy and science, but as fully cathexed to the dominant linguistic episteme of the period. When the perception of eloquence as aesthetic ephemera has been revised, style’s material and social contexts convey a history of acute class differentiation and the promotion of a dominant epistemological order. Eloquence and style flourished in a reformed system where mimetic inculcation facilitated ideological control and hegemonic regulation amounted to a form of internal colonization. Race, then, catalyzes and escalates these homegrown oppressive norms, directing them outward, so to speak, toward the stranger and alien. In focusing on the linguistic construction of the Renaissance African as barbarian, the study explores material drawn from an area sometimes bracketed off as narrowly elitist in its concerns to suggest how humanist methods and ideas filter out into a recognizable racial vernacular epitomized in the literary expression “barbarous Moor.”56 In short, race in the Renaissance becomes yet another significant site of practical humanism in the service of the nation. Thus construed, race lends an even sharper edge to the perception formulated by Mike Pincombe: “Elizabethan humanism was essentially ‘exclusive’ in character. One might think that any humanism should be ‘inclusive’: humanity should be a property of all human beings, not one of an exclusive minority. But this is not the case” (197). Poised to persuade, rhetoric provides the most effective arguments in the nation’s interests, a pragmatic Ciceronian emphasis “with a view

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to creating a better world with a firm emphasis on the common good” (Ronberg 133).57 Through rhetoric “the Tudor humanists came to an increasing certainty that they could fashion and refashion themselves, and so fashion and refashion society. Being educable, man might also be perfectible,” a qualified ideal, at best, in light of affirmative gender and class discrimination (Kinney 5). Perfectibility is an aggrandizing concept that targets immodest goals in personal and community achievement while the tendentious notion of the common good begs the racial question: what are the obvious limits placed on this universal inclusion?58 With the desire for perfectibility attained through language and education, the human imperfections registered in barbarism stand out in noisy, pejorative relief, part of the conceptual soundscape (or racial acoustemology) of early modern England.59 The goal of rhetoric to enhance the public good had long involved an international political calculus that envisions military conquest as a priority state interest. Thus Thomas Wilson remarks in his pioneering English rhetoric handbook: “For if the worthiness of eloquence may move us, what worthier thing can there be than with a word to win cities and whole countries? If profit may persuade, what greater gain can we have than without bloodshed achieve to a conquest?” (35). Wilson cites Pyrrhus’s Roman campaign, which only earned success after the intervention of Cineas the orator, as the exemplary model for foreseeable, current diplomatic and military engagements in the Elizabethan geopolitical sphere. Given its thorough modern debunking as valid science, race is properly situated within rhetoric, for it is a purposive, persuasive invention or discourse on the structuration of human relationships aimed at achieving, in principle, a bloodless but no less violent instauration of group supremacy.60 The modern fixation on blackness that orients our understanding of race is described by Frantz Fanon as generating “a racial epidermal schema,” the organizing social narrative “woven . . . out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” that reinforces the coding of the body and oversees its “corporal malediction” (1967: 112, 111). Race, Fanon reminds us, is an oppressive, aggregate fiction that confers special meaning on an otherwise neutral body over time; the constitutive subterfuge of race resides in the covert denial of its fictional, rhetorical status and simultaneous insistence on the self-evident truth of a brute, corporeal empiricism. Without question, race can, and does, often with horrifying results, resort to material reinforcements, but its prior instrumentality lies in argumentation, its imaginative conviction that the human word is made alien flesh and affective belief is the justifiable criterion of reality. The citing of the African as the Renaissance neo-barbarian, therefore, relays at once a judgment on a linguistically marked outsider while it implicitly confirms England’s own anxious, racially encoded linguistic rehabilitation. Within this verbal and racial economy, linguistic

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INTRODUCTION

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transgressions translate into cultural marginalization, and the contingent emergence of racial categorization is evinced as a complementary process to English national self-articulation. The processes of identity formation in and through language use and exchange not only define “selves and others as subjects of nation and ethnicity,” as “particular subjects of particular states,” according to Alfred Arteaga, but also, one might add, as particular subjects of discursive racial regimes (1). Crosscultural contact, predicated on linguistic mastery or misuse, provides options ranging from mutual exchange to radical opposition and disassociation, the most historically consequential and dramatic being the agonistic conflict that pits the known, familiar language of the native subject against the unfamiliar, barbarous tongue of the foreigner. This study is not an essay in linguistics; African speech or languages of the period appear different and strange because they are not English or one of the more familiar European languages. Ultimately, the book argues instead how a preset history of attitudes, inferences, and conclusions about language difference is adopted and translated into an early modern idiom of race. While chapters may be read individually, the sequence reflects the narrative that the introduction traces. Chapter 1, “Classical Precedents,” presents the classical contexts out of which barbarism as a pejorative, racial term emerged and is followed by the analysis in chapter 2, “Race in Perspective,” that historicizes language and blackness as codes that, by the early modern period, would begin to operate coextensively. Chapter 3, “Barbarian Genealogies,” develops the central thesis of the book, the English Renaissance insertion of the newly encountered African into the classical paradigm of barbarism that, though based on an error, served a strategic racial function. The irony implied in the assiduous designation of Africans as “barbarous” is the focus of chapter 4, “Instructing the English Nation,” which examines the attempts among writers to render English rhetorically elegant, refurbishing its own distressing history of barbarism. Chapter 5, “Shakespeare’s Africans: Performing Cultural Whiteness,” reverses the focus of the preceding one to analyze the non-English perspective regarding cross-cultural encounter as revealed in Aaron’s and Othello’s responses to racial mixing: resistance or assimilation. The epilogue, “Imperialism’s Legacy, or The ‘Language of the Criminal,’ ” beginning with the threatened linguistic imperialism of Caliban, highlights the significance of understanding language as a Renaissance racial code, given its afterlife in British colonial rule.

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H A P T E R

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C I V ILIZ ATION

Several ancient writers recount a familiar quasi-anthropological myth of the birth of civilization, the story of mankind’s exodus from a nomadic, wilderness existence to the immured life of highly organized communities.1 Cicero records in the De inventione: Men were scattered in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats when [an eloquent man] assembled and gathered them in accordance with a plan; he introduced them to every useful and honourable occupation, though they cried out against it at first because of its novelty, and then when through reason and eloquence they had listened with greater attention, he transformed them from wild savages into a kind of gentle folk. (1.2)

All mankind begins in a barbaric state, but the narrative’s movement— the transformation from brutality to humanity and from barbarism to “civilization” (from the Latin for city, civitas)—affirms the agency of language, specifically verbal eloquence, in the classical constitution of civil society. Subscribing to this myth’s pervasive thesis of a languagegenerated sociological revolution, Isocrates (436–338 BC), however, does more than spin a fantastic story. For in other powers which we possess we are in no respect superior to other living creatures; nay, we are inferior to many in swiftness and in strength and in other resources; but, because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life

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His endorsement of the instrumentality of language bears directly on the political reforms that had revolutionized Athenian society and favored the emergence of rhetoric as “the art of discourse” in fifth-century Athens (Antidosis 253–54). By 450, two major changes in the political and legal structure advanced language to the forefront of the culture: the creation of a participatory democracy, jettisoning the exclusive nepotism of bloodlines, and the restructuring of the jury-system to expand the role of the citizenry.2 Ordinary citizens now had the right to attend public debates in the assemblies and cast a deciding vote; they could also bring suit against one another, and litigation consequently grew. The skillful presentation in the assemblies or in the courts to sway a large jury of more than two hundred empanelled members was no longer a simple matter or the concern of a few. Eloquence became the marketable norm, and schools of rhetoric, with the Sophists Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates in the vanguard, sprang up to capitalize on the new demand.3 In the reformed public institutions, therefore, language became the de rigueur commodity in the fifth century, and Athens claimed its historical place as “the true birthplace of rhetorical instruction” (Conley 4).4 The myth of civilization’s origins cannot be bracketed, therefore, as an elaborate but benign narrative of inglorious beginnings and triumphant attainment. Placed in context, it appears as a totem tale of cultural and political revolution, of Athenian transcendence and democratic pride, the centerpiece of which was language in a newly fashioned culture of rhetoric. Myth mimics historical narrative, telling of a past now rescinded to embrace linguistic and political change whose greater openness professed the mandate of consensus at work. But it is a past whose urgent denial points to another set of political events of the fifth century: the Persian conflicts giving rise to the powerful Greek versus barbarian thesis declaring Athenian world supremacy. Athenians “are pre-eminent and superior to the rest of the world,” Isocrates boasts to his audience, “in those qualities by which the nature of man rises above the other animals, and the race of the Hellenes above the barbarians, namely, in the fact that you have been educated as have no other people in wisdom and speech” (Antidosis 293–94). The myth’s journey toward civilization posits a discarded primitivism that is displaced onto others, evident in the divisive hierarchy that locates barbarians as equal to or below animals. In the stated anthropological order, barbarians might duplicate the linguistic refurbishments that had elevated the Greeks from their brute existence, but the myth’s de facto closed system constitutes one of

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of wild beasts, but have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts; and, generally speaking, there is no institution devised by man which the power of speech has not helped us to establish. (Nicocles 6)

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I MPERI A L O RIGINS

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Before 550 BC, a relative harmony characterized the commercial and cultural relationships between Greek cities in Asia Minor and eastern civilizations, but the reign of Cyrus the Great (ca. 558–530), would alter drastically the world’s political picture.5 Prosecuted by his successors Cambyses and Darius, a campaign of expansion, yielding conquests over Babylon, Egypt, Thrace, and Macedon, propelled the Persian Empire, the most powerful the world had ever known, on the path to total Greek domination. By the turn of the century, the Persian offensive had clearly accelerated, with territories and armies vastly outnumbering the resources of an internally fractious Greek enemy motivated by the local concerns of the individual city-states.6 What followed, from the Greek perspective, was the product of bold and courageous daring, astute military strategy, exuberant cunning, and a new, unflinching assertion of freedom that reviled Persian despotism. The stunning Greek victories at Marathon (490) and later at Salamis (480) and Plataea (479) proved historic turning points and thrust Athens into prominence among the Delian League, a confederacy of city-states promoting Panhellinism, created in 477 that became the foundation of the Greek Empire. These decisive wins ushered in a period of contradictory achievement that heralded egalitarianism against autocracy, freedom against tyranny in a slave society that designated women and non-Greeks as categorically inferior while Athens aggressively mobilized hegemonic control over its confederate allies.7 After 478, Greece’s “transition from backwater state to international power was astonishingly swift,” and “having defeated Persia’s imperialist ambitions in the Aegean, Athens became an imperialist power itself” (Waterfield 65). As a legendary event in the creation of Greek self-identity, the Persian conflict, especially the battle at Salamis, is the repeated subject of Greek authors, among them the comic writer Aristophanes who describes the Greek counterattack to a hail of arrows8: We couldn’t see the sky for all the arrows overhead, but still, with the gods’ help, towards evening we pushed them back; for before the battle an owl had flown over our troops. Then we pursued them, harpooning their baggy pants, and they kept running, stung in the jaws and the eyebrows. That’s why to this day barbarians everywhere insist that there’s nothing manlier than an Attic wasp. (Wasps 1078–90)9

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the most enduring constructs of the Greco-Roman intellectual tradition. The barbarian’s defective speech, his nonexistent rhetorical capacity, condemns him to a subhuman state without the possibility of evolutionary parole.

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Herodotus’s The Histories emerged as a compendious, near contemporaneous account of the grounds, objectives, and disposition of the Persian invasions, “the cause of the hostilities” between Greeks and barbarians (1:1).10 More than an innovative, detailed, if not always reliable narrative, Herodotus’s project was “to define Greek identity, in deliberate contrast to a newly formulated ‘barbarian’ East” (Vivante 79). Writing several decades after the major Persian wars (his last recorded event occurring in 425), Herodotus created a state document that understood the role of a dialectical, political mythology in consolidating Greek, especially Athenian, authority and self-image. Following the Persian conflicts, “the Attic citizenry, mainly men of little education or experience who had hitherto existed within the confines of a provincial horizon” embarked on a project of governing, lacking the administrative, political, and intellectual formation demanded by their new responsibilities (Meier 2). In such an uncertain atmosphere, argues Christian Meier, tragedy provided a forum of collective reflection for “a social body carrying out quite publicly the maintenance and development of its mental infrastructure” (4).11 The term “barbarian,” integral to this educational and political redesign, owes its unique definition, in fact, to fifth-century Athenian playwrights who produced political propaganda of an epic order. The high proportion of tragedies and comedies focusing on barbarian characters or employing a barbarian setting points to the particular role the theater played in propagating a reconstructed Athenian vision of itself.12 Neal Ascherson, following Edith Hall, seizes on the important fact that “Athenian intellectuals, above all the playwrights, devised this change in the way that Greeks perceived other peoples and then they sold it to the wider public. The colonists themselves had little or nothing to do with it” (50).13 The “performance culture” of Athens—civic-minded and relentlessly public, iterating the distinctive, radical political structure of participatory democracy—sponsored dramatic competitions during city festivals that were ideal sites for nurturing the state intellectual.14 During the annual City or Great Dionysia, appointed officials regulated the selection of chief actors and playwrights, the disbursement of funds and the allotment of a Chorus, making this springtime event, coinciding with the sailing season and the arrival of foreigners, a powerful international platform for Athenian self-glorification.15 The concave spatial plan of the open-air theaters and legislative assemblies served as an unmistakable architectural confirmation of their common civic, political function while the location of the Theater of Dionysus (capacity 14,000–17,000) against the citadel of the Acropolis relayed geographically the intersections of Athenian imperial and artistic achievement.16 The broad array of cultural institutions—religious, legal, and political—was, however, uniquely indebted to a performative modality informed by rhetorical suasion. In the lawcourts, rhetorical persuasion substituted for evidentiary

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procedure, and, in a legal system without lawyers, professional writers routinely undertook the scripting of forensic speeches, thus fostering institutional cross-fertilization while offering theatrical parallels for the litigant-actor and jury-audience.17 The affective power wielded by actors in the theater correlated to the rhetorical skill required in the Athenian Assembly where citizens gathered to debate and determine government policy. In such an overdetermined context of theatrical performance as state-legitimization, playwrights acted as public pedagogues and rhetors. In this culture of the rhetorical imperative, the Athenian playwrights became the legislators and purveyors of an ethnocentrism summarily conceived in the barbarian-Hellene split. Thucydides, like Plato and Aristotle, notes, however, that practices condemned in his day as uniquely barbarian were, in fact, only recently abandoned by the Greeks, and some of these customs had still not been surrendered on parts of the Greek mainland.18 “And there are many other points,” he writes in The History of the Peloponnesian War, “in which a likeness might be shown between the life of the Hellenic world of old and the barbarian world of today” (1.6.6). Thus the theater-inspired revolution of the fifth century was an ideological one initiated by the Persian Wars that transformed a relatively neutral term dating from the Homeric era into one that signified the birth of a divisive orientalism. In its primary sense, the barbarian is a non-Greek, and later a non-Roman, whose identity is revealed in his unintelligible speech. Barbarism makes as much a statement about who the Greeks, and later the Romans, were as well as it declares what they were not. By the time of the Augustan age, Romans, proud of their own military and literary achievements, had successfully completed a process of self-hellenization. Refusing the label “barbarian” for themselves, they engaged in cultural assimilation, nominating everyone outside the Roman Empire, except Greeks, as “barbarous.” That language, as the conduit for expressing the preeminent Greek virtues of intelligence, wisdom, and courage, is the first meaning of barbarism reflects the importance of learning, rhetoric and knowledge in Greek political, administrative, and cultural life. Linguistic failures, signaling a total lack of skill or proficiency in the master tongue, betray the outsider and effectively deny corporate inclusion. For the imperial subject-listener, stammering, construed as a speech disability, epitomizes the inchoate, garbled speech of an unfit foreign horde.19 Mispronouncing and grossly misinformed, the libidinous Scythian guard of Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria is a representative figure of barbarian vulgarity and gullibility, an object lesson in the disasters that await the barbarian appropriation of power (1000–1225): “All wit is lost upon this savage [bárbaros] lout./ For work a novel ruse upon a clod/ and you have worked in vain” (1129–31).20 The Phrygian slave escaping the bloody attack on Trojan Helen provides a notable extended example of

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When dey grabbed her around her knees we, her slaves, jumped up, mumbling to each udder dat someding dodgy was up. A few of us taut dat was all baloney, but udders would have no truck wit dat and had dose two buckoes taped. Dey twigged dat a strike was going to be pulled on Helen by dat snake who did away wit his own Ma. (Orestes 711)

In time, flawed speech equated to defective values and character as language was canonized to convey an inviolate cultural antithesis. Playwrights used a variety of acoustic effects to simulate the cacophony and disorder of barbarian speech as in Aeschylus’s long list of pseudo-Persian military and place names deliberately contrived to be jarring (Persians 958–61, 966–72, 993–9; Hall 1989: 76–79). As an onomatopoeic term that mimics unintelligible animal twittering or screeching, the extension of barbaros to lapses in human speech— stuttering, mumbling, malapropisms, grammatical errors—identified the foreigner as plainly, palpably different. So Aeschylus in Agamemnon writes of “speech incomprehensible,/ Barbarian, wild as the swallow’s song” (1050–51), while harsh sounds emitted from the horses’ flaring nostrils merit the descriptor “barbarous” (Seven against Thebes 463–64), and Aristophanes observes that even “the Barbarous Gods/ Half-starved, and gibbering like Illyrians” are tainted with this mortal deficiency (Birds 1520–21). The animal-human continuum communicated in the linguistic definition paves the way for the broader characterization and caricature of the barbarian as unintelligent, credulous, and subhuman. Indeed, the era of neutral nomenclature had passed, and the Greek-barbarian dichotomy was normatively asserted everywhere.21 Euripides’s Iphigenia announces forcefully an offensive military program that carried a host of cultural, essentialist claims of natural inferiority: “Greeks, mother, must rule over barbarian, not barbarians over Greeks: the one sort are slaves but the others are free men!” (Iphigenia at Aulis 1400–1401). Slavery, one of the pillars of ancient society, only supplied additional discriminatory force to the already ethnocentric intolerance of barbarism. Whereas in its earliest usage, therefore, “barbarous” might have carried a “linguisticethnographical-geographical meaning, without nuance of aversion or hostility,” the fifth century witnessed a profound shift: Since, however, (a) language is so powerful a means to consolidating a community and to exalting it in its self-esteem above other, alien linguistic groups; and (b) since the Greek language was so rich, massive,

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Euripides’s imitation of inept, foreign speech for one whose cowardly instincts is mocked by a glowering Orestes. Greg Delanty’s translation captures for the modern ear the demeaning ethnic, even racial, abjection implied in a linguistic order of difference:

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Imperialism, whether the Greek or later Roman variety, provided the political motivation for declaring antagonistic “out-groups” designated as cultural enemies and inferiors. Aeschylus’s The Persians (472) can be considered a signature drama of this ideological revolution, and in its strategic introduction of cultural ventriloquism suggests that more is at stake than the broad implementation of a barbarian-Hellene antithesis. Performed eight years after the naval battle of Salamis at the City Dionysia, The Persians is the only extant Greek tragedy that treats a contemporary event rather than a mythic theme. Where the festival normally reproduced old myths as a celebration of culture, this breaking of the rules by Aeschylus is, as subsequent history would ensure, very much in keeping with tradition: the invention of a new myth about Greek achievement and barbarian inferiority that has tremendous staying power. To this end, Aeschylus, himself a combatant at Salamis, employs hyperbole: the scale of the ultimate victory is magnified by the initial Persian boasts, “Persians are never defeated” (91), and the barbarian Queen’s waking vision of inverted nature, in which a falcon attacks an eagle, predicts the inevitable Persian fate. Against her son’s vain, stubborn, despotic and, ultimately, disastrous attempts to measure up to his deceased father, Darius, at whose royal tomb the drama unfolds, the Hellenic virtues of wisdom, courage, restraint, and justice are supremely extolled.22 Aeschylus’s most striking effect is the manipulation of point of view: a story celebrating Hellenic victory, presented in a Greek theater by Greek actors before an Athenian audience, but narrated entirely by conquered Persian characters in a Persian setting. Dramaturgically, the Greeks are absent, but the Persian adoption of the Greek point of view confirms their ideological presence in the rhetorical inculcation of a defeated enemy. When the Persians lament, “Had numbers counted,/ The barbarian warships surely would have won” (338–39), or “a sea of troubles break in waves/ On the Persian and barbarian tribes” (433–34) or “Persians, all the barbarian host is gone” (254), this barbarian self-naming effects a willing subjection of the self to the ideological prescriptions of another. In contrast to the euphonious “song-like, happy tumult” of the advancing Greeks, “babel Persian tongues” proclaim difference, military chaos and fatal, flawed self-recognition (389, 406). On a conceptual level, Aeschylus has deftly replayed the famous moment of the Greek naval strategy: “The Grecian warships, calculating, dashed/ Round, and

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and masterly an instrument of speech and thought, and the civilization which it verbalized was so superb; and (c) since all in-groups tend to define themselves in terms of contrast, even hostility, to out-groups, it was inevitable that “barbarian,” like “foreigner” among us, should quickly assume an air of contempt. (Gealy 354)

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encircled us” (416–17). For naval encirclement, Aeschylus produces hegemony that envelopes the Persian, newly baptized, within the transformed linguistic and ethical code of barbarism. In this play populated exclusively by Persians, their defeated speech effects a political silence that, in turn, equates to the elided real life Persian response to the wars of invasion. The absence of Persian records of their two failed invasions compounds the one-sided Greek perspective that has dominated historical accounts of this turning point in European history.23 The ideological triumph of the playwrights and other state intellectuals is that a literary conceit became national policy in the cooptation of a master language and the privileging of one point of view through which history is spoken. This conceit produced the prototype of cultural ventriloquism: political barbarism’s linguistic mimicry feigns a universal constituency when it speaks in place of and, therefore, against the barbarian. Antithesis, the figure that is usually employed to explain the barbarian-Hellene divide, leaves intact the notion of two equal but opposite powers, a dyadic cultural phenomenon that retains agency on both sides. The intent of cultural ventriloquism as both literary maneuver and political ideology is, however, to disempower through displacement and to legislate by enforced proxy. In short, barbarism imagines a cultural aphasia—the barbarian as one spoken for, one on whom silence is, as a result, invidiously imposed—that permits symbolic expropriation: the barbarian does not speak. Thus barbarism records in language histories of conflict and imposition while functioning as the necessary correlate to a theory of a state language that certifies identity, regulates citizenship, and conspires toward national unity. Modern linguistic theory affirms that one’s capacity to speak is itself not unique; what matters is a speaker’s competence in a language that produces recognizable, valid utterances. In the classical context, however, competence demands more than a descriptive assessment of performance, installing instead an artificial language ideal that in being motivated by the prescriptions against barbarism is materially weighted with political and cultural information.24 In his critique of modern linguistics, Pierre Bourdieu offers a corrective view that identifies the emergence of an “official language” as necessarily the product of social, economic, and political forces: Produced by authors who have the authority to write, fixed and codified by grammarians and teachers who are also charged with the task of inculcating its mastery, the language is a code, in the sense of a cipher enabling equivalences to be established between sounds and meaning, but also in the sense of a system of norms regulating linguistic practices.

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The normative descriptor of language as a “code,” argues Bourdieu, demonstrates the transposition from the discipline of law to language, an indication of the prescriptive, regulatory mode of the social subject’s accommodation to the dominant dialect turned state discourse. The classical strategy makes clear what modern theories in general linguistics in their emphasis on the immanent linguistic dynamics often conceal: “the properly political process of unification whereby a determinate set of ‘speaking subjects’ is led in practice to accept the official language” (Bourdieu 44). Language acquisition and utterance are, therefore, the symbolic sites of struggle, and the production of an official language bears the significant signs of historical rivalry for dialectical dominance. Since language is a dynamic cultural product, then its anatomy will reveal the impact of relevant sociological data—the competition among dialects for dominance and their embedded economic, race, class, and gender inflections—not always of interest to the general linguist but important for the sociolinguist and cultural historian. Similarly, errors in language are not simply the province of grammatical correctness. They register, among others, access to education, regional usage, geographical provenance, immigrant acculturation, and the range of attitudes toward these cultural factors that determine social interaction. In the context of the post-Persian revolution, language embodied symbolically imperial contest and its resultant divisions of people into distinct national and ethnic groups, foreigners, and citizens. As such, language can be read as a “re-translation of a system of social differences,” a succinct formulation that is especially useful for understanding the legacy of classical barbarism in explicating the racial resources of language in the following millennia (54).

G UA RDING THE F RONTIERS OF L A NGUAGE A GA INST “S LIPPERY C USTOMERS” The specific factors pertaining to barbarism and language acquisition as a site of political and cultural struggle in the classical context require, therefore, further examination. Thus far two defining features have been identified: the repulsed imperial invasions that bred the “barbarian” descriptor as an invidious name for the political enemy; and the role of playwrights as state intellectuals who marshaled literary forces to circulate this notion within an enshrined public discourse cementing Greek

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The official language is bound up with the state, both in its genesis and in its social uses. It is in the process of state formation that the conditions are created for the constitution of a unified linguistic market, dominated by the official language. (45)

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The grammarian was, first, the guardian of language, custos Latini sermonis, in a phrase of Seneca, or “guardian of articulate utterance,” in the description of Augustine. He was to protect the language against corruption, to preserve its coherence, and act as an agent of control: thus, early in his history we find the grammarian claiming the right to limit the grant of citizenship (civitas) to new usages. But by virtue of his command of the poetic texts, the grammarian’s guardianship extended to another, more general area, as guardian of tradition (historiae custos). (17–18)

Located low on the totem pole of education specialists, the teacher of rhetoric being responsible for the upper levels of oratorical instruction that preceded entry into public and political life, the grammarian is an unlikely hero in this history of the intellectual and attitudinal indoctrination.25 Cicero asserts this educational hierarchy, suggesting the juvenile terrain entrusted to the grammarian: instruction in the principles of grammatical correctness and linguistic purity and the means to assure their attainment (De oratore 3. 48–49). From the advanced perspective of rhetoric, Cicero writes, “I do not suppose that I shall be expected to give an account of purity and lucidity of language, as it is not our task to teach oratory to a person who does not know the language, nor hope that one who cannot speak correct Latin should speak ornately” (De oratore 3. 38). His assumption that these are fundamental prerequisites for rhetorical mastery confirms not simply condescension, as scholars point out, but the primordial, inescapable demand for grammatical correctness without which rhetoric and the demands of public life would be unthinkable.26 So integral is the relation between linguistic purity deriving from grammatical instruction and the cultural milieu that the metaphor of the grammarian as guardian must ultimately be unpacked for its military and administrative associations when borders, both linguistic and imperial, demarcated the limits of barbarian interchange. Privately funded by an elite class to ensure political tenure, the heavily literary Roman grammar curriculum required years of laborious familiarity with a select oeuvre as the exemplary basis for learning linguistic purity. The canon, dominated at first by the Greeks—Homer, Euripides, Menander, and Demosthenes—had adopted a coterie of Roman authors in the imperial era as the works of Virgil, Cicero, Sallust, and Terence raised the formerly dismal profile of Latin literature.27 Criticized as

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unity under the banner of imperial solidarity. Another key figure who sustained this cultural mythos over time and across changing political regimes into the era of Roman ascendancy would be the grammarian, described appropriately by Robert Kaster as “the guardian of language,” the gatekeeper of cultural traditions.

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narrow and pedantic, this education lacked a holistic grasp of history, philosophy, and language, its atomistic parsing of minutiae divulging a fragmented epistemology informed by myriad sententiae and subcategories of grammatical rules. Peter Heather argues, however, that, even in late antiquity, this education reproduced and “maintained a totally artificial language—not susceptible to normal linguistic transformation over time—by which the ruling elite of the Empire could recognize one another” (1994: 183). The exclusive canonical regimen produced a highly specialized and immediately recognizable vocabulary, endorsed a core set of moral values for emulation, and promoted the disciplined mental habits that were endemic to the system. From this discrete education, an ideological ossification resulted that was the mainstay of the ruling class and the state it administered. While the classroom methodology appeared to underwrite fragmentation, the emerging language provided internal coherence for an elite and stabilized group membership when imperial expansion threatened a devolution of power from the center. Moreover, since “the grammarian’s school was the single most important institution, outside the family, through which the governing classes of the empire perpetuated and extended themselves” (Kaster 14), an educated caste, atop a class hierarchy, was being mentally conditioned to recognize in the external barbarian its structural, political antithesis. Where Greek education was largely theoretical, valuing arête or academic excellence, its early Roman republican counterpart emphasized a practical, socially conscious curriculum geared toward producing a vir bonus, a civic man, whose moral training prepared him for state service as citizen and soldier (Pascal 353). “The Romans were not interested in technical knowledge for its own sake,” writes J.J. Eyre, “and there was no research; there was no technical or commercial education, either, to compensate for this” (48).28 From roughly 250 BC, the influx of Greek rhetoricians, teachers, and philosophers, the result of increased contact due to growing Roman military might, led to a Hellenized school system that continued to promulgate the ideal of moral character while moving toward new goals of linguistic and oratorical excellence.29 Among its practical ends, rhetorical training had in view two main career destinations: the senate and the court, that is, politics and law, both oriented toward a public, national purpose. The civic efflorescence of rhetorical mastery was, thus, built on a rigorous rehearsal of rules, the student between the ages of twelve and fifteen years, after an elementary preparation in reading, writing, and arithmetic, learning the central tenet of correctness, absorbed from the dominant pedagogic preoccupation—seeking out grammatical errors. Thus for the better part of a decade, the grammarian as master of language and literary analysis prepared his students with a view to technical perfection, where purity and correctness inevitably correlated to moral and political virtues. Despite the existence of

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several Greek dialects, the mixing with non-Greeks following the successful military expansionism under Alexander had elicited concern “that the language itself was in danger of becoming debased by an admixture of foreign elements” (Bonner 198). Hellenismos and its successor concept latinitas expressed essential Greekness and Romanness, a totalized cultural vision uniquely articulated in the notion of linguistic purity and sustained by a careful policing of errors whose distortions were a formal postlude to distant and current histories of encounters with the barbarian world. Emerging under Stoic influence, traditional grammar designated two categories of errors, barbarisms and solecisms, as stated in the Ad Herennium:30 It is Correct Latinity which keeps language pure, and free of any fault. The faults in language which can mar its Latinity are two: Solecism and the Barbarism. A solecism occurs if the concord between a word and one before it in a group of words is faulty. A barbarism occurs if the verbal expression is incorrect. How to avoid these faults I shall clearly explain in my tract on Grammar. (4.12.17)

Barbarisms constitute errors on the level of the individual word, Quintilian affirms in the Institutio oratoria, the most important and fully developed treatment of the subject, defining “barbarism as an offence occurring in connexion with single words” (1.5.6). Solecisms, by contrast, concern errors of larger units—syntax broadly speaking—and include, according to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, misplaced modifiers and mixed metaphors: “a solecism results from not appropriately connecting or joining two words with a word which is equally suitable to both” (3.5).31 For Quintilian, solecisms may be considered extended barbarisms, at least from the analytical perspective that approved for both a mathematical system of computing and correcting errors “as they arose from faulty addition, or subtraction, or transposition, or substitution” (Bonner 203).32 Thus, for example, Quintilian notes the following: “For Tinga of Placentia, if we believe Hortensius who takes him to task for it, committed two barbarisms in one word by saying precula for pergula: that is to say he substituted c for g, and transposed r for e” (1.5.12). These grammatical offenses run the gamut from substituted letters, mispronunciations, spoonerisms, or the verbal equivalent of a typo, to the error a foreigner might make due to the lack of familiarity with a phoneme system or the rules of spelling of a language. Given his overall aim in this work for documentary completeness, Quintilian identifies in 1.5 eleven categories of barbarisms: race; speaker’s temper; substitution or transposition of letters; alterations affecting number or gender; diphthongs versus non-diphthongs; length of syllables; aspirate addition; errors of

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tenor; the placement and substitution of accents (prosody); defects of voice and tongue; and national speech defects.33 The last two entries, in particular, elucidate most effectively for the nonspecialist the technical or etymological definition of “barbarism”: a failure to produce Latin (or Greek) properly because of an assumed mechanical speech deficiency or deficit in national culture. From mechanical “defects of voice and tongue” that betray the individual—“iotacisms” and “lambdacisms” (1.5.32)— the analyst proceeds to the next politically sensitive category concerning “certain peculiar and indescribable sounds for which we sometimes take whole nations to fault” (1.5.33). Moreover, the framing of the list of entries, the first as well as the last two categories, underscores the fundamentally cultural, national, and racial character of barbarisms.34 Early on, Quintilian notes that “words will either be native or imported” (1.5.3), so it comes as no surprise that his first category deals with “race, such as the insertion of a Spanish or African term” (1.5.8), geographical references that map notably the West-East expanse of Roman imperial power. When he explains the second category, “speaker’s temper,” he reverts to metonymy to invoke the stereotype of barbarian savagery: “we regard it as barbarous if a speaker use cruel or brutal language” (1.5.9). Not surprisingly, if barbarisms come, barbarians are never far behind, and Quintilian forces recognition of the figural hermeneutic that is indispensable to grammatical and rhetorical theory in the age of empire. I therefore resume the path which I prescribed for myself and point out that words are either native or foreign. Foreign words, like our population and our institutions, have come to us from practically every nation upon earth. (1.5.55–56)

The increase in barbarisms is directly proportional to the increase in the barbarian population of the Roman world, and grammatical theory is never a hermetically sealed discourse, as it might at first appear, but has as its pressing subtext the complex migration and border problems of imperial provincial management. Roman Africa plays, of course, a significant part in the great, accumulated wealth of the empire, so a desirable economic flow also complicated other patterns of linguistic and personnel movement.35 Like most of the Latin writers of the silver age, including the younger Seneca, Lucan, and Martial, Quintilian was born in Spain, a country that had a long history of resistance to Roman occupation, particularly in the north, but by 133 BC Numantia, the center of resistance, fell finally to Scipio. After his education in Rome, Quintilian returned only to be recalled in AD 61 by Galba, himself a former governor of Spain, and it is in Rome in AD 88, after years of distinguished tutoring, that he composed the Institutio. Thus in the brief sentence (“One kind

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[of barbarism] is due to race, such as the insertion of a Spanish or African term”), Quintilian evokes a set of remembrances that foreground a politically and economically dynamic situation that posed insistent, unresolved questions about barbarian acculturation and identity. Quintilian’s position on the positive role of error in effective speech constitutes a key aspect of his analysis through which he develops further the notion of figural hermeneutics and returns to the uncertain issue of political and cultural legitimacy. Strict grammatical correctness requires five test criteria, four of which are taken from Greek theory: analogy, etymology (both subdivisions of reason), antiquity, authority, and usage.36 Technical grammarians were accused of insisting on analogy and etymology to construct abstract rules that bore little or no relation to the usage ratified by the best authors over time or approved by the best-educated contemporary speakers.37 Their extreme attempt at rationalizing grammar was symptomatic of a broader addictive pedantry that threatened a “language more ‘correct’ than any language spoken anywhere in society outside the narrow circle of a grammatical clique” (von Fritz 354). Quintilian offers another approach: what are the allowable categories for deliberate errors or poetic license? Bridging the gap between the two analytical positions (analogy or usage), he argues the logical attractiveness of barbarisms based on analogy and confirmed by custom. Or again, he asks: do we rigidly exorcise as barbarisms and solecisms those errors that through force of analogical reason and sustained usage have secured their approved place in language akin to figures of speech? The teacher who cavils at these instances is mercilessly ridiculed as “our fat fool, the fashionable schoolmaster” (1.5.14). In the first place barbarisms and solecisms must not be allowed to intrude their offensive presence. These blemishes are however pardoned at times, because we have become accustomed to them or because they have age or authority in their favor or are near akin to positive excellencies, since it is often difficult to distinguish such blemishes from figures of speech. (1.5.5)

By including barbarism as an aspect of style (1.5.1), Quintilian allows for flexibility and conscious linguistic deviation. Book 9.3 forms a companion text to 1.5 in its defense of figures that derive from morphological changes, in short, barbarisms: “For every figure of this kind would be an error, if it were accidental and not deliberate. But as a rule such figures are defended by authority, age and usage, and not infrequently by some reason as well” (9.3.2–3).38 Certain solecisms, too, can be justifiably termed “figures, and although their use is more frequent in poets, [we] will not deny their employment even to orators” (1.5.52). Conceded a successful history in poetics, solecisms are accorded the most prestigious language

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status, oratory; still, Quintilian’s defense of exceptional errors carries the proviso of strict policing: “I must however point out that a figure, if used unwittingly, will be a solecism” (1.5.53–54). Thus Quintilian returns us to his richly suggestive admonition: “barbarisms and solecisms must not be allowed to intrude their offensive presence,” and the grammarian and “teacher therefore, that such slippery customers may not elude detection, must seek to acquire a delicate discrimination” (1.5.5). Clearly, figural hermeneutics takes its methodological cue from the analytical principle of analogy that employs known and familiar grammatical forms to adjudicate dubious cases. Similarly, the grammarian as linguistic-cum-cultural custodian is charged with scouring the language, hunting out odious errors, the latent textual traces of “slippery customers” who have secretly or improperly breached the limits of imperial territorial power. Read in its immediate historical context, the grammarian’s mandate restates the political anxieties inscribed in establishing frontiers, the famous limes, dating from the reign of Augustus. Where aristocratic ambition for military glory had delivered an ad hoc growth in acquired territories during the republican period, Augustus demanded a more coherent foreign policy contingent on a rationalized frontier, at least, according to Tacitus, one “cordoned by the sea of Ocean or distant streams” (Annals 1.9). Originally a “military road, such as the Romans constructed when opening up a newly conquered territory,” limes came to denote a series of earth forts and wooden towers united by a road system instituted by Domitian in AD 83 (Jones 1912: 244).39 This frontline was reinforced by a secondary defense system of stone forts, anticipating a veritable fixed frontier by the mid-second century due to the efforts of succeeding emperors, Trajan and especially Hadrian. The frontier from the Rhine to the Danube, later expanded to the Near East, North Africa, and Britain, was an important administrative and military mechanism to regulate barbarian traffic through “checkpoints in time of peace and in numbers acceptable to Roman authorities, providing entry was in daylight, unarmed and after payment of dues” (Williams 8). The military deployments around this emergent frontier infrastructure insured a definitive and historic disjunction between Roman and barbarian, a topographic inscription that would find its propagandistic equivalents in various literary genres. This evolution from the first century toward a closed, armed frontier suspended a three hundred-year-old imperial policy of expansion. In its place emerged a defensive mindset, materialized in a landscape of towers, ramparts, palisades, and forts that divided barbarism from civilization and endowed the extensive political system of barriers with a moral force implied in its physical stratification. Quintilian’s political grammatology confirms the dynamic of intensive surveillance in the first century, the result of a changing imperial orientation to protect, conserve, and maintain Roman cultural and territorial integrity.

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Imperial realpolitik, however, demanded compromise that would only heighten ideological tensions inherent in the establishment of a closed frontier. Shrewd, practical choices that accommodated strategic mixing had long been the practice of Roman conquest, unique in its annexation of other states without a forcible conversion of languages, beliefs, or cultural traditions.40 The challenge of managing border provinces along a vast imperial expanse required political adjustments, including the hiring of barbarian tribes as combatants against other enemy barbarians in exchange for protection, noncoercive forms of acculturation accruing in the process. A radical integration of aliens toward the end of the third century followed the cessation of the Roman civil wars, begun in AD 240, when barbarian mercenaries, fighting for opposing generals, were granted unprecedented property and settlement rights.41 Formal treaties, both in the early and late empire, supported legal assimilation even though their language incorporating foederati, federates or barbarians brought to the diplomatic table, might have been directed primarily to a Roman tax-paying audience to allay fears of a wild, uncontrollable adversary.42 In brokering a skilful strategy of “state-embedding,” the imperial administration maintained power, while “involving countless members of local populations in its wars and its rituals, in its tax system and its world-view” without autocratic repression (Pohl 4). The notion of a fixed imperial frontier has, as a result, undergone revision among recent historians. The tendency to posit a single, “linear demarcation,” they argue, is heavily influenced by the evolution of the modern nation-state and its political obsessions with rigid circumscribed limits that do not reflect the realities of the ancient Roman experience (Febvre 212).43 Instead of a linear frontier, many historians now opt for speaking about zones, complex areas that are defined by multiple relationships. Security required an imperial military presence but preferred to confine confrontation to “a frontier of intervention” away from the actual site of the garrisons; local authorities collected taxes while imperial officials administered justice, thus creating two additional, independent spheres of government (Elton 1996: 7).44 Military, legal, civil, and imperial activities thus created “a series of overlapping zones,” incorporating where possible already established local networks (4). Within the provinces, integrated barbarians, civitates, were carefully distinguished from external barbarians, gentes, into zones of management designed “to yield predictable results, even when this meant redrawing ethnic and geographic boundaries” (Burns 147). Except for periods of open hostilities, generating stricter border surveillance and punitive economic sanctions, immigrant merchants and traders, like the Goths along the Danube in the fourth century, were granted free passage having satisfied the requisite levies. Archaeological evidence has dramatically altered our understanding of cross-frontier interaction, in some instances

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helping to explain patterns of political loyalties in terms of commercial inducements.45 Natural boundaries like rivers, once the staple of frontier logic, have been proven, as a result of archaeological findings, to be “neither restraints to expansion nor defensive barriers, but lines of communication and supply” (Whittaker 192). Thus C.R. Whittaker’s conclusion is representative of revisionist frontier history: “Frontiers and boundaries are now perceived as historically less permanent and geographically more complex than once thought, without any necessary evolution from one to the other” (191).46 Together, military, legal, economic, and cultural indices suggest areas of fluid intercourse and substantially porous frontier relations that destabilized the concept of a sealed periphery. At the same time, Roman political and ideological imperatives resisted such bilateral leveling. Transfrontier relations, though complex, were motivated by a singular need to secure peace that often came with a price.47 Roman taxation, burdensome and ultimately fiscally damaging, financed the management of the provinces, funds flowing to barbarians in the process, whether in the form of subsidies or bribes. This in-built economic disparity, aggravated by economic resentment, precluded mutuality though it purchased, in part, détente; “Roman assumptions about superiority would be reinforced, perpetuating the view that the only world which counted was the empire, its citizenship the greatest privilege to which ordinary men and women could aspire” (Williams 1998: 26). Against this, a new, growing sense of an undifferentiated barbarian entity drove a sharper conceptual wedge between Roman and non-Roman, a homogenization that served to aggrandize imperial values and rationalize military defense. In the maelstrom of Roman aristocratic, senatorial, imperial jockeying for power, the demonization of the barbarian, more threatening in his monolithic, mythic guise, could reliably justify military expenditure and pay personal dividends for political proponents. The barbarian’s imagined presence was useful, calculated to evoke the greatest political and ideological effects. Consistent with a broader aristocratic impulse to selfveneration, this intellectual turn toward a single barbarian unity became apparent under Augustus and was thereafter routinely epitomized in public iconography and literature.48 Barbarians were always represented “on coins and public monuments in postures of submission, typically lying on the ground or kneeling, bound and with their weapons hung as a trophy or symbolically broken or lying on the ground” (Burns 178). Petrified or minted representations of the prostrate, submissive barbarian recall the military pageants celebrating the victorious general’s return to Rome, defeated barbarians in his wake. More importantly, they articulate a static rhetoric of the unchanging, inferior barbarian that survived intact throughout antiquity.49 Even between the fourth and sixth centuries, during the migration period, when Gothic incursion (AD 376)

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triggered the catastrophic seizure of Roman territory by the Vandals, Anglo-Saxons, and other barbarian groups, the rhetoric of superiority stubbornly defied the logic of historical reality.50 At odds with the daily record of interaction, the monumental and numismatic pronouncements consolidated the imperial propaganda of sovereign superiority triumphant over barbarian abasement. The exaggerated, self-serving rhetoric, Walter Pohl advises, “is not an element of distortion that the historian’s scalpel should neatly cut away from his evidence, but part of the reality in question” (6). Whether ethnography, history or panegyric, literary genres revealed a de facto catalyst: a mindset that defined Roman identity, influenced imperial action and, above all, drew its inspiration from a barbarian mythology.51 Like the literature of imperial propaganda, Quintilian’s grammar, or more precisely his handbook on the instruction of grammar, must be accorded its role in political pedagogy. Quintilian writes fully aware of the growing realities of a frontier across which “slippery customers” have to be processed for entry or be resisted as a marauding enemy. His trenchant phrase suggests, therefore, an unwelcome presence, someone or something to be eradicated so as not to infect the linguistic body politic and undermine grammatical latinitas. As linguistic and cultural custodian, the grammarian “ranged alongside the military commander and provincial governor”; the emperor defends against barbarians while Quintilian discriminates among disruptive barbarisms.52 With a greater sense of late imperial urgency, the anonymous De rebus bellicis recycles the language of defensive anxiety and frontier building that dates from Quintilian’s era: Above all it must be recognized that wild nations are pressing upon the Roman Empire and howling round about it everywhere, and treacherous barbarians, covered by natural positions, are assailing every frontier. . . . Others are defended by marshes and rivers and cannot easily be tracked down; yet they mutilate our peace and quiet by unexpected forays. (6: 113–14)

So the author’s proposal is a grand fourth-century version of Hadrian’s Wall that would extend into Europe, Asia, and Africa. Among the measures taken by the State for its own advantage there is also the effective care of the frontier-works which surround all the borders of the Empire. Their safety will be better provided for by a continuous line of forts constructed at intervals of one mile with firm walls and very powerful towers. (20: 122–23)53

In this later period, violent barbarian attacks from 376 to 408, culminating in the removal of the last western Roman emperor in 476, play out

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definitively the barbarian thesis of “exogenous shock” and imperial decimation prominently articulated in the literary sources.54 Situated at the juncture of necessary but ideologically destabilizing networks of transfrontier exchange, Quintilian’s admonition to police linguistic infelicities relies on an imperial border mentality that finds its political equivalent in the grammarian’s panoply of rules that erects immanent walls of exclusion. As the menacing barbarian becomes politically visible only at the imperial line of defense, so, too, barbarisms realize their transgressive potential when brought up against the prescriptive limits of correctness. At the same time, Quintilian’s defense of permitted barbarisms, which have been culturally assimilated as figures, mirrors the practical military and economic concessions made to barbarians that result in cultural mixing and transformation. His analysis brings into focus two interpretive paradigms that historians have vigorously debated: the “Decline and Fall” model imagines a closed frontier eventually imploding under added external barbarian pressure in late antiquity; and the “Transformation of the Roman World” approach argues an organic development arising from inevitable cross-cultural contacts.55 Each represents different emphases in construing the barbarian’s relationship to Rome: either as primarily binary and oppositional or proximal and assimilative. Quintilian’s reading of the acceptable barbarism reveals, however, a further strain or contradiction in his cultural poetics. Although he mounts an apology for acculturation in the realm of language, this argument only comes after his examination of the closed, uninflected category of barbarisms deriving from race. Quintilian appears wary of evoking cultural license with regard to race, yet he readily approves, though with careful consideration, poetic license in relation to oratory. The principle of equivalence, rooted in the grammatical criterion of analogy, is fundamentally revoked in his hesitation to accept the full racial implications of his figural hermeneutics. The result is that a significant value gap opens up between language and culture, a double standard affecting barbarisms and the designated foreign speakers who are guilty of committing these errors. Poetic license, we learn, does not automatically presume racial tolerance in Quintilian’s grammatology, but it is precisely this racial hesitation that accords with the ideological temper of imperial literature. The pursuit of grammatical correctness, one critic proposes, lacks an explanatory basis. That is, ancient grammarians did not offer any theoretical account regarding what constitutes correctness or what specific criteria, cognitive or otherwise, inform the principle of correctness.56 That grammarians simply did not know appears to be the conclusion even though they rigorously prosecuted the path of purity. Social conformity often prescribes certain forms of verbal behavior, “but the question is rather why this or that sample of discourse can be taken as correct, or incorrect, rather than as merely different from some preferred model”

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(Atherton 250). One response offered here is that the principle of purity is codified negatively as barbarism, a linguistic term whose history is steeped in imperial narratives of aggression, nationalism, and resistance to foreign entities.57 Any accounting of grammatical purity in the ancient world cannot be easily contained in some discrete philological realm, but must assert the intersection, even conflation, of grammatical theory and political action. Thus the criterion of correctness, the antithesis of barbarism, permeates the social consciousness as the expression of political principle. The pursuit of correctness represents at once the iteration of a belief to demonize foreign people as inferior and a reminder to repulse errors’ living incarnations from territorial borders. Historians have pointed out that with the ascendancy of the Principate, the practical, political efficacy of rhetoric went into decline as real power, and the rhetorical presentations that effected policy, receded from the forum to be consolidated in the person of the emperor. Political oratory, as a result, lost its former public purpose, though still remaining relevant for a time in the law courts, and became more inclined to performance.58 Unmoored from its participatory, governmental function in oratory, linguistic purity realized another form of public service: rhetorical spectacle that declared a patent on civilization. In the effluvium of words that persisted, the tenet of grammatical correctness, passing from the Greeks through to late Roman antiquity, proved the durable reminder of what was right about empire.

P OROUS L INGUISTIC B ORDERS Mastering grammatical correctness, as was suggested earlier, came at a price: the exacting, repetitive routine of learning rules, parsing sentences, sifting among barbarisms, analyzing solecisms, and becoming familiar with the stylistic idiosyncrasies of authors was labor and time intensive. For the student continuing with rhetorical studies, a “devoted toil” was expected, “for it is well,” recommends Isocrates, “that in all activities, and most of all in the art of speaking, credit is won, not by gifts of fortune, but by efforts of study” (Antidosis 291–92). Intellectual exertion compared with the physical athleticism honed under the discipline of the gymnasium where rigor delivered excellence.59 A regime of labor, therefore, bequeathed the privilege of being an exemplary citizen who, having collaborated with the greatest authors in the elect task of a literary education, belonged to an elite company. Chief among the ideas circulated in the polemic of grammatical correctness and oratorical mastery was not only the justification of imperial superiority over barbarian nations, but also the specific terms of that human hierarchy. Barbarians, in contrast to the trained, eloquent men of empire, were not only inarticulate, but their speech defect also damned them as beasts, a formulation accredited

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in the ancient world and recycled in the Renaissance.60 Yet the sine qua non of labor raises a perturbing question, for if hard work, under the right pedagogic circumstances, promises career mobility and imperial caste status, then what, at least in theory, is to prevent the permitted resident barbarian within the empire from applying himself assiduously to learn? Practical reasons might, in fact, militate against the scenario of the barbarian habitué of the Roman grammar classroom—age, class, full access and the tiny, telltale residual traces of a mother tongue. Still, the prerequisite of effort in acquiring eloquence ensures that elite Roman (and Greek) identity was, in principle, as porous as the historical geographical frontier, and only its mythic, symbolic, and literary buttressing could authorize it as stable and intact.

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Repeating the notion that by 1605 the “conceit of blackness in a court masque was by no means a new invention,” critics, Kim Hall points out, have effectively nullified the racial significance of color in the Masque of Blackness by subsuming it within theater history (1995: 128). Stephen Orgel launches the countercharge that our tendency to perceive race via slavery and imperialism has distorted our ability to understand blackness in this Renaissance masque (2002: 195).1 His adamant objection is ubiquitous; he identifies blackness and skin color in The Merchant of Venice as more related to “xenophobia, something the English understood well, than about racism” (2002: 198). Similarly, in his reading of Elizabeth’s expulsion order against “Negroes and blackamoors” in 1601, Orgel separates the commodification of blacks as owned property from the fact of their blackness to admit xenophobia but not racism (2002: 200). As a result, he will concede, the spectacle of Queen Anne and her ladies “as blacks, that is, as marketable commodities and rich possessions, is surely not irrelevant to the age’s construction of women generally”; but with that limited admission, Orgel dismisses race from the analysis (2002: 201). While granting Orgel’s argument that the masque uses blackness to represent antithetical court values, Yumna Siddiqi contends that given the momentous “contact of Renaissance England with Africa and Africans,” masques “represent not only the workings of absolutist ideology within the court circle, but also its negotiation of racial alterity” (142).2 Hall argues that in their cultural prostration before the king, the masque’s twelve Ethiopian women are made to reinforce the subordination of blackness and gender as well as demonstrate their mutually reinforcing function as tokens of inequality in an era of nascent imperialism (1995: 134–37).3 The masque reflects the union debate—the joining of England and Scotland—begun

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with the newly crowned James I who advocated the formation of a “Great Britain,” an imperial construct which is clearly “yoked to the glorification of whiteness” (1995: 133).4 Only eleven weeks before the 1605 festivities, Martin Butler reminds us, “James had assumed the title ‘King of Great Britain’ by proclamation on October 20,” emphasizing further the nationalist, imperialist consciousness of the moment and, one might add, the constitutive role of Africa in its construction (160). In what follows, I propose a longer historical view on race— articulated both in blackness and language—that is invited by Jonson’s masque. Blackness does figure as a racial signifier, and so does language; but the imperial context within which they appear in the ancient world is important, with that ancient imperial configuration transmitted as a “Renaissance” intellectual paradigm and not one that, from the limited perspective of modern imperialism, appears to be retrospectively and erroneously applied. Among the innovations in theatrical history achieved in the Masque of Blackness, performed at Whitehall in 1605, was Inigo Jones’s use of perspective art in the painted backdrop that framed the arrival in England of the immigrant women from Ethiopia hoping to become white.5 The depicted maritime scene employed linear perspective not only to dramatize travel and the illusion of geographic displacement, but also codified James I as royal viewer and agent of racial transformation situated at the center of this visual drama of African capitulation.6 From its Greek etymology, “Ethiopian” refers to someone with a “sunburned face” or black skin, and the drama of color conversion promotes whiteness as a racial ideal.7 At stake is the royal performance of the seemingly impossible—“washing the Ethiop white,” an aphorism widely circulated in proverbs and emblematic iconography—but the masque’s celebratory spectacle affirmed the power and racial legitimacy of the newly crowned king whose miraculous powers promise whiteness.8 What remains to be examined, however, is the history of blackness as well as the other major association that the term “Ethiopian” carried that invoked language. That is, Jones’s insistence on perspective theory and technique, with its recalibration of space and depth perception, serves as an analogue to Ben Jonson’s own probing into the classical texts that are instrumental to the received Renaissance tradition of racial construction. The demand made on the viewer’s eye to look beyond the horizon line toward the vanishing point is a visual rendition of the intellectual projection into the classical archive, a project of retrieval and examination that is crucial for assessing the balance between color and language in relation to racial history.

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In the Stuart masque, Ben Jonson raised poetry to a level of importance equal to the spectacle of the staged events, costume and scenic effects,

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creating a revolution in the genre, and his erudite citation of his sources in the text as well as in the footnotes of the printed edition of the Masque of Blackness should not be overlooked as the fastidiousness of a classically oriented mind.9 The queen, who commissioned the masque for Twelfth Night, also appeared in blackface as one of the twelve African women, and Jonson informs us that although “it was her majesty’s will to have them blackamores at first, the invention was derived by me,” laying full claim to the dramatic motif of traveling black women steeped in classical intertexts (18–19).10 Modern readers are familiar with the judgment made by Summerson: “In Ben Jonson’s hands there was nothing trivial about these masques. They were short, but highly wrought in every dimension. The texts were distillations of immense learning and models of literary craftsmanship” (22). Euripides, Hesiod, Horace, Virgil, Lucian, and Ovid are among the classical writers who supply the specific knowledge Jonson needs for the language and costume design. However, Jonson’s classical sources must also be considered as crucial to the critical investigation in racial thinking—the constructions of blackness and Africa—in the early modern period. Working within the pervasive Renaissance humanist practice of engaging Greek and Roman thought, Jonson renovates our perspective on race by making visible the constitutive texts and subtexts of early modern racial construction. The depth-effect of perspective scenery in the Masque of Blackness connotes, on the literary level, a historical undertaking, a reaching back to a series of embedded intertexts that contains the source materials of the Renaissance construction of Africa and blackness. Where the casual observer saw mere spectacle, Jonson loaded the visual text with a rich web of classical references. These classical allusions constitute the semantic infrastructure supporting the masque’s meditation on the interpretations of blackness within a long historical perspective. Drawing on climate theory that suggested the women’s color might be the function of geographical location and temperature, the Masque of Blackness employs a royal pun on “sun”: “Invite them boldly to the shore;/ Their beauties shall be scorched no more;/ This sun is temperate, and refines/ All things on which his radiance shines” (232–35). James, the source of a “temperate” climate in England, will not only welcome these women scorched by a less benevolent sun in Africa, but also alter their appearance to make them acceptable according to the prevailing cultural norm of whiteness. The racial climate in England, with its intolerance for blackness, finds its proper generic expression in the masque whose antithetical form was articulated by Francis Bacon. In an oftencited passage, Bacon, in his essay “Of Masques and Triumphs,” declares masques superfluous entertainments, mere “toys,” not warranting serious attention except for the simple fact that “princes will have such things” (Essays 320).11 His recommendations address, first, the spectacular dimension of the masque to focus on the use of light and color, the

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quiet and speedy change of scenes, and the spatial management of the performers. In providing spectacle, Jonson’s first commissioned court masque appears to adhere to Baconian prescriptions. Despite Bacon’s recognition of the royal penchant for such divertissements, he does not attribute a political significance to the genre. What eludes most commentary on Bacon’s essay is the cultural anthropology that Bacon attaches to the masque’s antithetical structure. After prescribing the masque’s formal properties, Bacon identifies a structural divergence between the masque proper and the antimasque, a distinction that is based on the social—and racial—status of the performers in each. For the masque, incorporating aristocratic and royal participants, he instructs the presenters to follow decorum (“Let the suits of the masquers be graceful, and such as become the person when the vizards are off”) while the antimasque, in his view, is notable for its peculiar population of stage characters: animals, fantastic creatures or exotic people, the latter being either “wild men,” “pigmies,” or “Aethiopes” (321). The groups of humans mentioned in Bacon’s list conjure up non-English types, the uncivilized demi-humans of European mythology or Africans (whether “pigmies” or Ethiopians). Africa stands in stark opposition to England and suffers the same fate as those elements that must be exiled if the triumphal celebration of court and national life is to go forward unimpeded. “In England perhaps more than in southern Europe,” writes Winthrop Jordan, “the concept of blackness was loaded with intense meaning. . . . Black was an emotionally partisan color, the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion” (7).12 The formal architecture of the masque as a genre is grounded in a fully racialized cultural anthropology where blackness, like the antimasque, is targeted as socially disruptive and must, therefore, be expelled. This Baconian assessment of the masque’s internal antithetical form, featuring an Ethiopian cast who advertise the early modern view of blackness as ugly, amounts to a serious racial politics that belies Bacon’s final word on the matter of masques: “But enough of these toys” (322).13 For twentieth-first century readers familiar with the negative stereotypes that have accumulated around blackness and race, the earliest Greek representations of dark-skinned people or Ethiopians offer some significant differences. Faced with the devastating portrayal of the psychologically crippled Breedloves in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, for example, we feel that we have, indeed, traveled a long and complicated route as witnesses to an unfolding history of racialized blackness: “The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they were ugly” (38). Scholars urge that the modern blight of racism rooted

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in negative attitudes toward black or dark skin does not pertain to antiquity. Frank Snowden is an ardent modern proponent of the view that color as a discernible barrier was nonexistent in antiquity. “If Ethiopians were slaves,” Snowden writes, “manumission and a career open to talent were available to them in the same way as others of foreign extraction. If the Ethiopian excelled as a charioteer, pugilist, or actor, he was celebrated by the poet or depicted by the artist. In fact, for centuries, the black man appealed to artists who found in him an attractive model. Neither servile descent nor humble origin was a barrier to acceptance in artistic or literary circles.” Thus, he concludes, there is no evidence “to suggest that the ancient Greek or Romans established color as an obstacle to integration into society” (1970: 217–18). Clyde Kluckhohn focuses our attention on the environmental thesis implied in the name “Ethiopian,” contending that “the Greeks were quite sophisticated in deprecating the value of phenotypical criteria. . . . Color was no stigma to the Greeks, for they attributed color differences quite casually to climate and geography” (34). Unlike later ages, he concludes, the Greeks “did not fall into the error of biological racism. They preferred the pertinence of geographical environment and culture” (42). Herodotus in The Histories speaks of the beauty of a remote people at the edges of the world, in an exotic landscape, a far cry from a crushing urban poverty of the modern variety: “The most remote country stretching to the south-west of the inhabited parts of the world is Ethiopia, which produces gold galore, elephants in abundance, all kinds of wild trees, ebony, and the tallest, best-looking, and longest-lived men in the world” (3.114).14 The majestic form and physical beauty of Ethiopians are only the surface signs that point to a people of great religious character, devotion, and piety, a just people who are favored of the gods. Homer initiates this mythic portrayal near the beginning of The Odyssey in revealing that the god Poseidon had gone far off among the sunburnt races, most remote of men, at the earth’s two verges, in sunset lands and lands of the rising sun, to be regaled by smoke of thighbones burning, haunches of rams and bulls, a hundred fold. He lingered delighted at the banquet side. (I: 36–41)

Similarly, in the Iliad, Zeus departs “for a feast to the incomparable Ethiopians at the Ocean, and all the gods followed with him” (I: 423–24). Writing approximately seven hundred years later, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus elaborates on the myth in his Bibliotheca historica,

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For Zeus had yesterday to Ocean’s bounds Set forth to feast with Ethiop’s faultless men, And he was followed there by all the gods. (3.2.3)

Diodorus provides a full commentary on the preeminence of the Ethiopians, the “faultless men,” whose unique place in human history is attested to by their recording a number of firsts and being judged in superlative language among all humans of the known world: Now the Ethiopians, as historians relate, were the first of all men and the proofs of this statement, they say, are manifest. For that they did not come into their land as immigrants from abroad but were natives of it and so justly bear the name of “autochthones” is, they maintain, conceded by practically all men; furthermore, that those who dwell beneath the noon-day sun were, in all likelihood, the first to be generated by the earth, is clear to all; since, inasmuch as it was the warmth of the sun which, at the generation of the universe, dried up the earth when it was still wet and impregnated it with life, it is reasonable to suppose that the region which was nearest the sun was the first to bring forth living creatures. And they say that they were the first to be taught to honour the gods and to hold sacrifices and processions and festivals and the other rites by which men honour the deity; and that in consequence their piety had been published abroad among all men, and it is generally held that the sacrifices practised among the Ethiopians are those which are the most pleasing to heaven. . . . And they state that, by reason of their piety towards the deity, they manifestly enjoy the favour of the gods, inasmuch as they have never experienced the rule of an invader from abroad; for from all time they have enjoyed a state of freedom and of peace one with another, and although many and powerful rulers have made war with them, not one of these has succeeded in his undertaking. (3.2.1–4)

Diodorus’ splendid mythographic account, situating Ethiopians as the first of all humans, sprung from the soil—the literal meaning of “autochtones”—the first taught to honor the gods, the most pious and the worshippers with the best sacrifices, concludes with the observation that because of their religious devotion, the Ethiopians have been honored by never having their country invaded and brought under foreign domination. In an extended passage in The Histories, Herodotus confirms this thesis in his narration of Cambyses’s planned invasion of the Ethiopians that ended in utter disaster. Choosing from among the tribe known as

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a history of the world, never failing to remember Homer from whose text in the Iliad he cites:

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the Fish-eaters, or the Ichthyophagi, because they “knew the Ethiopian language,” Cambyses sent a delegation to the Ethiopian kingdom carrying gifts, among them, “a purple cloak, a gold torque, arm-bands, an alabaster pot of perfume, and a jar of palm wine.” The Ethiopian king, however, divined the intent of their coming, recognized that they were spies and condemned their mission, indicting the Persian ruler’s investment in colonial conquest and enslavement: “the real reason you are here is to spy on my kingdom. Your master’s behavior is reprehensible too. If he were a good man, he would not have wanted to possess any land other than his own, and he wouldn’t have enslaved people who have done him no wrong.” Without threatening war, the Ethiopian king sent the spies back with the warning to Cambyses that “he should be grateful to the gods for not making the sons of Ethiopia think of acquiring additional lands besides their own” (3.19–21). In a retaliatory fit, the power-hungry Persian ruler launches a land attack with fifty thousand men from Thebes. Along the way, he reduces the Ammonians to slavery, burns the oracle of Zeus but fails miserably in the end to subdue the Ethiopians, his army succumbing to starvation brought on by the impetuous king’s failure to ensure sufficient food rations. Cambyses, later described as going insane, is the dramatic foil for the Ethiopian king in Herodotus’s Greek history that promotes probity and respect for the gods in affairs of good government.15 Eliciting praise for their great moral character, their embracing of wisdom and temperate action, their spiritual devotion, godly demeanor, just government and compelling beauty, the Ethiopians’ combination of spiritual, mental, and physical excellence results in their living long lives, hence the sobriquet “long-lived Ethiopians” (Herodotus 3.22). Beyond the poetic legends inspired by Homer or the stories of majestic rulers recorded in Herodotus, the mainly positive view of blacks remained intact through the early and later periods of the Roman Empire. By this time firsthand interaction between Greeks, Romans, and Ethiopians had been sufficiently well established to support the argument that the positive perception of blacks was also grounded in the real world of empire politics.16 Color, it appeared, remained a neutral social category. Pliny extolled their wisdom, Strabo named Tearco among the world’s great conquerors, Lucian credited the Ethiopians with instituting astrology, and Virgil continued to honor the role that Ethiopians had played in aiding Rome in the Trojan war despite the problems they currently posed for Augustus (Snowden 1983: 52–53).17 At the same time, we cannot forget that the Greeks and Romans detailed distinct gradations of color and scrupulously noted other remarkable physical features. Xenophanes was the first European to extend the list of typically black features beyond color to comment on the broad, flat noses of Ethiopians, followed by Herodotus who made observations on hair: “The eastern Ethiopians have straight hair, while the Libyan

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ones have curlier hair than any other people in the world” (7.70).18 The Egyptians who had long been familiar with Ethiopians, having fought together as mercenaries dating back to 2000 BC, did not use colormarked names for Ethiopians, designating them with the place name, Nehesyu, for the black settlers of the Nile valley (Snowden 1983: 5, 17). Snowden concedes, however, that “the Africans’ color was regarded as their most characteristic and most unusual feature. In this respect the ancients were not unlike whites of later generations who used color terms as a kind of shorthand to denote Africans and those of African descent” (1983: 7). Still, the survival of Homer’s fabulous sunburnt races beyond Herodotus and down through to the Roman Empire bolsters the key critical argument among classical scholars: there is no evidence “of color prejudice in the Greco-Roman world” (Snowden 1970: 169). That kind of discrimination based on physical features is recent, Zimmern contends, and the “sentiment of the ‘color-bar’ appears to be of comparatively recent origin” (330 n.1). This line of thinking about the classical period, Thomas Hahn points out, “produces distinction without difference,” and neutralizing color negates its distributional and evaluative power in order to fantasize race outside of and prior to history. In Snowden’s account, race (or its nonexistence) paradoxically amounts to the “same difference”; positing the absence of hierarchical or valueladen discriminations implies that color exists outside history itself. Installing the ancient world as a domain before prejudice amounts to imagining it as before history, so that it stands as a kind of innocent Golden Age that recognized multicultural identities as entities without contested, or even relational, status. (5)

I would, however, like to query specifically the widespread assumption that an environmental theory of blackness necessarily negates a racial reading.19 It is not immediately evident why, among classical scholars, an environmental theory of race is, ipso facto, any less subject to a racial critique than a biological one. The environmental or climatic argument of color is grounded in a geographical discourse that maps the location of peoples in the world and argues a personality type according to distance and exposure to the elements. Strabo reminds us that from the time of Homer the Ethiopians were conceived as inhabiting the remotest regions of the known world, “the farthermost of men” (1.2.26). Remoteness is not a neutral concept, however, and the following questions remain: remote from whom, furthest from which center? In a fuller commentary, Strabo writes: Within the area of small countries it involves no very great discrepancy if a given place be situated more towards the north, or towards the south; but when the area is that of the whole round of the inhabited

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In this survey of the oikumene, the big picture of the entire known world, the implied Greco-Roman center stands as the geographical and epistemological midpoint in this map of knowledge. The Greco-Roman point of view is the organizing central place from which to observe the climatic effects and differences within the world. At its distant borders, this imagined center postulates difference as monstrous in Ethiopia: “It is by no means surprising that the outermost districts of this region produce animal and human monstrosities, considering the capacity of the mobile element of fire to mould their bodies and carve their outlines” (Pliny 6.35.187). The unstated center of the cartographic perspective disavows its own chromatic presence. Greeks and Romans demonstrated an undeniable obsession with and awareness of color in the antique world, yet their own whiteness appeared unremarkable and invisible, embedded as the normative point of view. The famed medieval Arab geographer Ibn Khaldun observed that for the Greeks and Romans “whiteness was something usual and common, and they did not see anything sufficiently remarkable in it to cause them to use it as a specific term” (in Snowden 1983: 7). Thus the environmental account is contained within a larger set of geographical assumptions that correlates an unstated Greco-Roman centrality with an unspoken norm of whiteness that is as remarkable for the ancient political posture as it is for modern critical practice. Modern criticism’s denial of color’s semantic and racial significance derives an ancillary benefit: where there is no blackness, no admission of criticism’s complicity with whiteness need ever be confessed.

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To question further the presumed neutrality of the environmental theory, I turn to Ovid’s account of blackness in Metamorphoses, acknowledging the text’s importance in aiding us rethink how we historicize racial difference. Strabo sides with Theodectes in the debate with Onesieritus over the cause of blackness: “Nearing the borders of these people the Sun, driving his chariot, discoloured the bodies of men with a murky dark bloom, and curled their hair, fusing it by unincreasable forms of fire” (15.1.24). Taking up the climatic narrative referred to by Strabo, Ovid tells the story of Phaethon who finds himself in the midst of an identity crisis. Mocked by his friend Epaphus, Phaethon urges his mother Clymene to affirm that Phoebus, the sungod, is truly his father: “I am ashamed that such insults can be uttered, and I am unable to refute

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world, the north extends to the remote confines of Scythia and Celtica, and the south to the remote confines of Ethiopia, and the difference between the two is very great. (1.1.13)

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them” (49). With his mother’s firm assurance and encouragement, Phaethon rushes out to seek his father whose home, not surprisingly, lies on the borders of Phaethon’s country, Ethiopia: “He passed through the land of his own people, the Ethiopians, and through the country where the Indians live, close to the fiery sun: then he eagerly approached the place from which his father rises” (49). Eager to console his son and prove his devotion as a father, Phoebus offers to grant Phaethon any wish. Upon hearing that Phaethon desires to drive the sungod’s chariot across the heavens for one day, Phoebus immediately regrets his promise, fearing the dangers and possible destruction that his son would face: “If you reply that you want some definite sign, in order to be sure that you are indeed my son, I give you that definite sign by being afraid for you: the fact that I show a father’s fears proves that I am your father” (52). As the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the legitimacy of Phaethon’s desire to ride the chariot and the effects of his rash act are both in question. Phaethon’s “pride of his youth and strength” presents a manifest problem here, his overreaching a sign of destructive hubris (54). Unable to convince him otherwise, the father reluctantly gives Phaethon the opportunity, and, in short order, disaster results, the horses pulling the chariot off its assigned course, letting it come dangerously close to the earth in certain places. As a result, the “earth caught fire, starting with the highest parts. With all its moisture dried up, it split and cracked in gaping fissures” (55). It was then, so men believe, that the Ethiopians acquired their dark skins; for the blood rose to the surface of their bodies. It was then that Libya became a desert, when the heat dried up her waters. (56)

Error produces blackness; error is the parent of blackness. True to the title of the work, Ovid’s narrative is one of racial metamorphosis, where an entire people, the Ethiopians, undergo a change of their skin color as a result of Phaethon’s foolhardy escapade. In this narrative of physical transformation from white to black, the explanatory myth of the appearance of blackness in the known inhabited world of antiquity is in keeping with the general tenor of Ovid’s other accounts of figures metamorphosed beyond their control. Error is the sign under which the black Ethiopian race is born, and the accidental nature of its beginnings makes a strong case for blackness being the unintended and unexpected result of a wayward undertaking. As an accident, the result of a young man’s overreaching, blackness is the distortion of the original course of human nature. The correlate to blackness, whiteness is construed as the Ethiopians’ former, natural state that has been completely undone. An entire race of people is represented as a mistake or a flaw that stands out against the chiaroscuro of an emergent racialized humanity.

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A clear structural design complicates matters further: Ovid offers an account of skin pigmentation that is specifically framed by a young man’s quest for paternity. Phaethon’s search for his father raises the pertinent questions: Is Phaethon the genuine son of Phoebus? Where does he have a rightful place? What heritage can he expect from his father? As a story of a son’s origins, Ovid’s narrative claims to elucidate the cause of blackness in the world while foregrounding the issue of legitimacy. Within an ethical and moral schema, blackness is construed as the illegitimate offspring of young Phaethon’s hubris. Blackness originates, therefore, out of a breach of temperate behavior, a significant error that situates the Ethiopians’ color outside the code of accepted values in a Greco-Roman ethical and cultural system that would contain hubris and bracket its consequences. As the narrative frame to the myth of blackness, Phaethon’s paternity narrative requires us to question the legitimacy of blackness and its place in the world. Structurally, therefore, Phaethon’s quest for his father anticipates the paternity quest on which Ethiopians are now launched: Ethiopians are the illegitimate children of Phaethon who, in their turn, must seek out their father. They, too, are without a significant parent, divorced from their origins of whiteness that, following the logic of the narrative, they might choose to discover. Aristophanes’s argument from Plato’s Symposium identifies an intellectual tradition where human experience is plotted as a narrative of loss and restoration of an original state. The division of the human as hermaphrodite into two sexes can only find a happy conclusion with the eventual recovery of the other, lost gendered half (189c–193d). The many stories of human transformation to some other determined altered state in the Metamorphoses seem to elaborate this particular intellectual tradition, and the Ethiopians’ permanent color transmutation either rules out recovery completely or creates an eternal longing for whiteness as the fate of black people. A reading of Ovid’s narrative of blackness challenges us to have a more nuanced view of color in the ancient world. In Metamorphoses, Ovid has shown us a way that the environmental theory represses a narrative that speaks to the hierarchy and value attached to blackness and whiteness. In effect, Ovid has metamorphosed the environmental or climatic theory and revealed it to be an axiological enterprise where value and legitimacy are part of the discourse of difference that attaches to human bodies. Error is introduced as a vital term in the discourse of color, expressing the flawed state of a lost original and the current difference from the standard norms. Thus the story of Phaethon and Phoebus theorizes a narrative of race expressed as the Ethiopians’ search for the whiteness that once was theirs and remains their proper yet unattainable destiny. In Ovid, the scorched Ethiopians undergo a transformation from the primary condition of whiteness that stands as the substance of a revoked

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past from which they are forever separated. As tragedy, the loss of whiteness is a death of an original self; as history, the loss generates a crisis of unrequited desire to return to whiteness. Such an imaginative journey might appear far-fetched and as foolish as Phaethon’s own desire, but this myth of racial longing is precisely the notion that informs the plot of Jonson’s masque. The Masque of Blackness restages the divergent historical views about blackness, but, in the end, adopts the full implication of Ovid’s account and turns it into the dramatic motivation of the black nymphs’ journey. This frustrated desire for whiteness leads to the characterization of the women’s quest: “in respect of their complexions changed,/ Are each where since for luckless creatures ranged” (ll. 140–41). Niger’s decision to accompany his daughters on their epic journey had been preceded by a debate that draws it arguments from the kinds of classical sources discussed earlier. As a father conversant with the traditional views that have been the source of cultural pride, he reminds his daughters of their ancestry and beauty as “the first formed dames of the earth/ And in whose sparkling and refulgent eyes/ The glorious sun did still delight to rise” (ll. 113–15). Their blackness is the sign of the sun’s fervent favor, “and thereby shows/ That in their black the perfect’st beauty grows” (ll. 118–19). Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, neither age, custom or time seems to have any effect on the black women: Since the fixed color of their curlèd hair, Which is the highest grace of dames most fair, No signs of age can change, or there display The fearful tincture of abhorrèd grey, Since Death herself (herself being pale and blue) Can never alter their most faithful hue; All which are arguments to prove how far Their beauties conquer in great beauty’s war, And more, how near divinity they be That stand from passion or decay so free. (ll. 118–19)

From an expansive perspective of world history, Niger tells his daughters, and Jonson’s audience, that black is beautiful. Created first, blackness is the mark of beauty according to the order of anthropological primogeniture. However, at a certain moment in time, the conventional history was overturned, and the subsequent account of blackness in European culture was rewritten to satisfy a new cultural imperative to affirm white superiority. “Poets” are responsible for this change. Yet since the fabulous voices of some few Poor brainsick men, styled poets here with you, Have with such envy of their graces sung

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The painted beauties other empires sprung, Letting their loose and winged fictions fly To infect all climates, yea, our purity; As of one Phaeton, that fired the world, And that before his heedless flames were hurled About the globe, the Ethiops were as fair As other dames, now black with black despair. (ll. 130–39)

The theory of antecedent creation and ageless beauty is displaced by a competing theory of lost white origins. “More than signifying a different identity,” Arthur Little remarks concerning this passage from the masque, “blackness throughout the seventeenth century came to represent a lost identity” (76).20 He understands that “whiteness functions as the originating construct of a racial self and that blackness signifies some later horror, a kind of accident or aberration, a kind of jungle infestation” (77). “It is blackness, then, not whiteness,” Molly Murray concludes, “that is the mark of innovation” according to the history of racial revision attributed to later European poets and writers in Jonson’s masque (438).21 But as I have argued, the originating myth of the Ethiopians’ lost whiteness dates back to Ovid, and their sunburnt blackness sets anterior whiteness in relief as the standard of beauty and the epitome of the human comedy before the fall (Phaethon’s chariot malfunction). The reference to Phaeton indicates that Jonson’s use of Ovid’s rendition of the story in Metamorphoses marks the historical moment—the turn of the first millennium AD—when the shift in racial perspective occurs. Niger contrasts two cultural systems: a long held view of African beauty and the one invented by European writers who have demonstrated the power of language to subvert the historical timetable of human evolution. As purveyors of European values, these writers have discredited African beauty, installing in its place the adoration of “painted beauties,” the cosmetic creations of Europe. These writers have revised the prevailing history and inserted the emergence of European “beauties” and, by extension, values consonant with the creation of their “empires,” political inventions that are as much the false face of pernicious ideology as cosmetics are to human features. By subverting the anteriority of blackness, European intellectuals have produced whiteness as the identitary norm of European “empires sprung” to argue, in addition, that not only white beauty, but also the very notion of “empire” is the construct of poets and language. Importantly, Niger denounces the writings that constitute this alternate history as “loose and wingèd fictions” that corrupt and “infect all climates, yea our purity.” From this account, an important function of race emerges as false consciousness, the invention of identity categories that serve as counternarratives of power and self-validation. Niger’s charge against “brainsick men, styled poets here with you” has a metatextual force, the terminal “you” appearing to include Jonson

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himself in the pantheon of the poets of European reconstruction.22 Given his allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the account of Phaethon, Jonson has in mind a complex lineage that reaches back to antiquity and, like the traveling women, alight on the shores on England to empower English writers as legitimate intellectual descendants of classical poets. Blackness, more fully understood, is the product of an intellectual heritage whose epistemological contours can only be fully appreciated within the perspective of classical knowledge—the very system whose legacy in the moment of the Renaissance Niger proclaims as hostile to the traditions of black beauty in the first instance. Jonson has given us a text that theorizes the denigration of blackness at the hands of classical writers who are embraced in turn by Jonson as the source of normative knowledge on the subject. The result is theoretical redundancy, a provocatively overdetermined extension of the notion of “error” as Anglo-European intellectual strategy that resides at the heart of the program of whiteness. The Masque of Blackness participates fully in creating a closed intellectual system that is the masque’s self-referential logic, its own deliberately encoded error that is inscribed in the literary practices that we label the “Renaissance.”

B EYOND C OLOR : THE D IFFERENTI A L F UNCTION OF L A NGUAGE The critical consensus that declares “color-prejudice” an invalid and anachronistic category in the ancient world presumes a particular attraction. It posits antiquity as an idyllic locus and an intellectual archive where blackness is removed from the spheres of colonization, imperialism, slavery, and caste stratification that have played a part in our modern notions of race. That similar political dynamics and social institutions were in effect in the classical age should give us cause to pause.23 Importantly, the claim that “color-prejudice” is nonexistent in the classical world leaves a central question unexplored. Color, per se, might not be the unique or primary discourse in the Greco-Roman era that shapes an ideology of difference. While granting the significant body of positive evidence regarding blackness and skin color, we may still need to inquire into other kinds of “prejudices” that operate powerfully in this period and examine how these other constructions of invidious difference attach to Ethiopians. Diodorus, as we have seen, pays homage initially to the Homeric precedent, but an increasingly ethnographic perspective within the Bibliotheca subverts the traditional, honorific status granted to Ethiopians and provides radically different images of blacks. His geographic survey runs from west to east, in contrast to Strabo’s that follows an east to west trajectory, but the fundamental assumptions regarding the semantics of

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The majority of them, and especially those who dwell along the river, are black in colour and have flat noses and woolly hair. As for their spirit they are entirely savage and display the nature of a wild beast, not so much, however, in their temper as in their ways of living; for they are squalid all over their bodies, they keep their nails very long like wild beasts, and are as far removed as possible from human kindness to one another; and speaking as they do with a shrill voice and cultivating none of the practices of civilized life as these are found among the rest of mankind, they present a striking contrast when considered in the light of our own customs. (Diodorus 3.8.2–3)

Diodorus is sufficiently cognizant of the biases inherent in a project whose discriminatory rationale is prejudiced by the “light of our own customs.” Such awareness, however, does not prevent him from issuing a catalogue of inscriptions that, since his time, has informed European cultural constructions of blackness. The repeated charge of savagery finds its climactic expression in the evocation of the monstrous animals, “strange both in appearance and in name,” that inhabit the liminal territories as the all too appropriate neighbors of the bestialized blacks who “display the nature of a wild beast” and “keep their nails very long like wild beasts” (3.15.6). In such a context, their distinctive physiognomic features—black skin, wooly hair, flat noses—are as much a part of their overall peculiar difference that characterizes them as animal-like. The bestialization of these blacks is not neutral. It operates as hyperbole to draw a clear line of difference and to establish a value-laden hierarchy that separates them from a more recognizable humanity, especially those whose expressions of “human kindness” stand in sharp contrast to the lifestyle of a people viewed as “wild beasts.” Diodorus finds their weapons of war peculiar, the prescribed period of service for armed women bizarre, and the habit of going naked too salacious for good taste. When these Ethiopians do cover themselves with animal skins, Diodorus is struck that they let the tails from the hide of sheep hang down the front of their loins (3.8.4–5).25 These black people, in Diodorus’s view, are unmistakably subhuman, “cultivating none of the practices of civilized life as these are found among the rest of mankind” (3.8.3). The word “civilized”—related to the Latin civitas, or city—is the automatic trigger that makes manifest the central binary opposition in Greco-Roman cultural theory: barbarism versus civilization. Continuing his geography of the eastern borders of Ethiopia, Diodorus turns to

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space prevail: the imagined center is the home of a civilized people totally different from those who inhabit the geographic periphery.24 Difference, as a function of geographic distance from the center, is more pronounced at the remotest edges of the known world where Ethiopians are located.

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describe the Trogodytes and, in particular, the Ichthyophagi or Fishpeople who dwell on the coast of the Red Sea “and the part of Ethiopia that faces the noon-day sun” (3.14.6). The Ichthyophagi demonstrate their resourcefulness in taking advantage of the ebbing tide to trap the fish left behind in shallow pools made by their blocking the channels created by the natural formation of the rocky terrain with large stones. Men, women, and children thus fish together: “the barbarians, dividing into several companies, rush in bands each to its respective place with a hideous shouting, as if they had come unexpectedly upon some prey” (3.15.5). The women and children capture the smaller fish while the men wrestle with the larger catch, “creatures of enormous size, not only sea-scorpions and sea-eels and dog-fish, but also seals and many other kinds which are strange both in appearance and in name” (3.15.6). The general picture is of a grotesque people among unusual beasts, who have, nevertheless, adapted to nature “for necessity teaches Nature everything” (3.15.7). As people of nature they are far removed from the city, the civilized and civilizing center within the Greco-Roman worldview. The fuller implication of their closeness to nature is grasped in Diodorus’s perception of these black people as intellectually vapid, bound in a prison of sense and sensuality, the slaves to the mere instincts of the flesh. He names them “barbarians” initially for material reasons: they go about naked, have wives and children in common, and inhabit an apparently inhospitable region near the “rocky shores” and “jagged ravines” (3.15.3). As for these barbarians, certain of them go about entirely naked and have the women and children in common like their flocks and herds, and since they recognize only the physical perception of pleasure and pain they take no thought of things which are disgraceful and those which are honourable. (3.15.2)

More tellingly, the continuous reduction of these black people to an animal-like existence is corroborated by their willingness to dwell in wild, rocky regions, keeping their children in common as they do their cattle. Registering only a sensibility to physical pleasure and pain, they are perceived as lacking reason and presumed to be devoid of moral capacity, taking “no thought of things which are disgraceful and those which are honourable.” Indeed, the vilification of their fishing practices, implied in the description of their “hideous shouting,” is a restatement of an earlier observation of a people “speaking as they do with a shrill voice and cultivating none of the practices of civilized life as these are found among the rest of mankind.” Here is an appeal to the core notion of barbarism, a production of mere sounds whose lack of euphony stands in contradistinction to the elevated language of the Greeks and Romans. Aliens to the life and intellectual institutions of the city, these Ethiopian people

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are the subhuman others of Diodorus’s cultural metropolis, animal-like in their base sensuality, instinct-driven due to their lack of a moral consciousness, and barbaric in their linguistic deficiency. Pliny’s descriptions of the people of the interior of the eastern side of Ethiopia confirm this intersection of the physical grotesque and the absence of speech. There are tribes “that have no upper lip and others no tongues. Also one section has the mouth closed up and has no nostrils.” Still others “communicate by means of nods and gestures instead of speech” (6.35.188). Linguistic incapacity as connoted by the term “barbarian” is the signal emblematic flaw for writers whose perspective is dominated by the idea of language (and its complement reason) as cultural synecdoche. Within the Greco-Roman tradition, language is the gateway term for the highest human achievements that manifest identity. Importantly, the highly charged atmosphere of imperial aggression during this classical period provides the context for the valorization of language as the key component to political and cultural subjectivity. Imperial expansion, and the resultant need to process the barbarians according to their new immigrant status, employs linguistic assimilation as the litmus test that proves the Romanization—that is the full subjection—of the barbarian. The imposition of Roman force in extending the limits of empire was long and protracted, but military persistence eventually paid off. Given the westerly trajectory of his geography, Strabo notes that “the Romans, since they carried on merely a piecemeal war against the Iberians, attacking each territory separately, spent some considerable time in acquiring dominion here, subjecting first one group and then another, until, after about two hundred years or longer, they got them all under control” (3.4.5). Conquest, however, is measured in the degree of Roman influence and subsequent cultural conversion of the barbarians on the Iberian Peninsula. As a result of the military and cultural campaigns, the barbarians “have completely changed over to the Roman mode of life, not even remembering their own language any more. And most of them have become Latins, and they have received Romans as colonists, so they are not far from being all Romans” (3.2.15).26 According to Strabo, language is the crucial denominator that marks the barbarian precisely as unconquered outsider or subdued and assimilated alien. The civilizing function of the Roman presence is fully embraced as part of the imperial mythology. Geographical distance from Rome is, once again, seen as the major cause of barbarian “intractability and wildness.” Imperial control and influence, however, are regarded as the key to civilization arriving among barbarians lacking in “sociability and humanity”: They have this feeling of intractability and wildness to a less extent now, however, because of the peace and of the sojourns of the Romans among them. But wherever such sojourns are rarer the people are harder

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Where remoteness breeds savagery, territorial invasion and cultural proximity are diligently proposed as the solution to the problem of barbarism. With unselfconscious precocity, Strabo testifies to the erection of a Roman superego as the cultural norm and absolute measure of civilization. Interestingly, however, cultural conversion is not an entirely smooth and unproblematic political process. The designation “Latin” is a term of political accommodation in the interest of imperial Rome.27 As “Latins,” converted barbarians acquired what was known as the Latin rights of citizenship, the Jus Latii, which meant that they had more privileges than absolute foreigners but certainly less than the Roman rights enjoyed by citizens.28 Giving up their language might be the radical indicator of the barbarians’ conversion to the Roman mode of life, but the political and legal reality of imperial warfare and expansion insisted on sustaining the memory of barbarism as an ambiguous identity that registered the hard-won successes or failures of Rome to acquire and dominate newly encountered people. In the context of military hostilities, fear of barbarian reversion meant that linguistic conversion had to come under even closer scrutiny and be supported by the flexible legal identities indicated by the nomenclature “Latins.” The available material from classical literature on “Ethiopians” reveals that color was not the only or the most important category of identity. Certainly, Ovid, along with Diodorus, plays a crucial role in altering significantly the Homeric tradition of blackness, and together their work constitutes a challenge to the so-called color neutrality of the classical age. Barbarism, meaning cultural difference connoted primarily through language, was the most powerful and widely deployed category of alterity and had a much longer life of negative scrutiny than blackness per se. However, the ambivalence in Diodorus suggests that while the Homeric tradition persisted down to first century BC, this period, the time also of Ovid, represents the turning point in the emergence of blackness as a complementary category to barbarism in the reconceptualization of Africans within the scheme of humanity. Indeed, Jonson adopts this historical division in his definitive citation of Ovid and by playing out the implications of the Ovidian myth of blackness. The Renaissance carries forward this alternate view of blackness as the sign of defective subjectivity, confirming its allegiance to the classical past understood with a special degree of historical specificity. In the Renaissance, therefore, two systems of racial definition operate, one based in color synecdoche, the other in linguistic metonymy.

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to deal with and more brutish; and if some are so disagreeable merely as the result of the remoteness of their regions, it is likely that those who live in the mountains are still more outlandish. (Strabo 3.3.8)

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Nowhere is Jonson’s debt to classical learning more graphically stipulated than in the Ethiopians’ emblematic westward trek to Britain. His Africans signify the texts and subtexts of the classical literature on blackness and barbarism, and they transport this collective knowledge forward into the early modern period and directly into the celebrations at Whitehall. “Like people and schools of criticism,” Edward Said writes, “ideas and theories travel—from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another” (226). Said’s observation encourages us to theorize further the traveling ideas figured in the black travelers arriving in England. The women’s epic journey is the direct result of the mystical, prophetic urging of Aethiopia, the moon goddess: For in the lake where their first spring they gained, As they sat cooling their soft limbs one night, Appeared a face all circumfused with light— And sure they saw’t, for Ethiops never dream. (ll. 157–60)

Their quest originated in the “real” and sanctioned world of divine prophecy, not as some mere fantastical dream that the women had, for according to Jonson’s text, “Ethiops never dream.” The women’s genealogy, starting with their father Niger, unites the westerly fluvial flow with the intellectual trajectory of English Renaissance racial formation. Pliny, Solinus, Ptolemy, and of late Leo the African, remember unto us a river in Ethiopia famous by the name of Niger, of which the people were called Nigritae, now Negroes, and are the blackest nation of the world. This river taketh spring out of a certain lake, eastward, and after a long race falleth into the western ocean. (13–17)

The opening song of the masque correlates the land journey with the directional current of the waters, “Sound, sound aloud/ The welcome of the orient flood/ Into the west” (ll. 76–78). Oceanus’s address to Niger confirms the occidental drift: And Niger, say, how comes it, lovely son, That thou, the Ethiop’s river, so far east, Art seen to fall into th’extremest west Of me, the king of floods, Oceanus, And in mine empire’s heart salute me thus? (ll. 89–93)

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In search of this [land] have we three princedoms passed That speak out –tania in their accents last; Black Mauretania first, and secondly Swarth Lusitania; next we did descry Rich Aquitania, and yet cannot find The place unto these longing nymphs designed. (ll. 170–76)

By way of a series of transferred epithets, the geographical movement from North Africa through Portugal, Spain, and France and eventually on to England corresponds to the women’s pursuit of change in color: “Black Mauretania” yields to the increasingly lighter colored skin tones of mainland Europe and, finally, to a white “Britannia” (l. 211). Jonson equates the occidental geographic motif with the pattern of intellectual heritage mimicked in the movement of traveling Ethiopians and traveling ideas (from Greece and Rome, “westward” to England), both landing eventually in English cultural territory. His choice of geographical trajectory and specific lands covered is not arbitrary, however, for the specific details reveal a debt to William Camden’s Britannia: Or, a Chorographical Description of Great Britain (1586), a work which read the geographical terrain of England as a still living tapestry of England’s Roman past. Camden, Jonson’s teacher at Westminster, traces the historical roots of the name “Britain,” claiming its origin in a hybridized Greek form of the original name of the native Britons, “Brith.”29 The “most ancient Greeks (the first who gave the name of Britain to our island)” traveling extensively for trade or piracy, learned “from the Gauls who spoke the same language, that the people of this island were called Brith and Brithon, and thereupon, to the word Brith, might add Tania, a termination, which in Greek (as the Glossaries tell us) signifies a region or country” (19). As proof of this Greek etymological history, Camden advances the following: That the matter stands thus as to Britain, I do the more firmly believe, because we find not, in all the world besides, above three countries of any considerable largeness, the names whereof do end in Tania; and these lie in this western part of the world, to wit, Mauritania, Lusitania, and Aquitania; of which, I question not, but that the Greeks who first discovered those countries were the inventers, and that from them the Latines afterwards received them. (19)

Authorized by Greek invention, the name “Britannia,” along with “Mauritania, Lusitania, and Aquitania,” later received wide circulation among the Romans and carries a very specific classical history. Jonson’s

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The peregrination of the Ethiopians traces a distinctly westerly arc:

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striking repetition of the lands traveled by his Ethiopians is an exact citation of Camden’s work that alleges the early modern imperial identity of “Great Britain.” Jonson’s westerly flow of waters personified as the traveling persons, the totemic representatives of classical learning and its transmission, is a deliberate invocation of the translatio imperii, literally, the “translation of empire” or exegetically, the “westward movement of empire.”30 As a historiographic concept developed in the middle ages, the translatio envisions the motor of history as a movement from east to west, where discrete geographic entities are brought into a relation of symbolic equivalence and political inheritance. Translation in this instance was intended as a conscious invocation of imperial succession and continuity. Historical time is construed as repeatable geographic displacement, a canonical site eventually divesting itself of power only to transfer authority to another place, its imperial legacy revitalized in posterity. In its classic treatment, ancient Troy is reborn as Rome in Virgil’s Aeneid, and since medieval times, writers of English history, in using Troy-novant to designate London, gave credence to this imperial historiography and asserted very definite epic ambitions.31 From Troy to Rome to England, the narrative of recuperated history and prophetic glory of an empire without end strides across Europe in stately occidental relief. From the classical past to the early modern present, a spatio-temporal organization situates England, at Europe’s western reach, as the inheritor of antiquity’s greatest gifts. As the temporal loci in the drama of political renewal, the geographical sites are structured according to the synchrony of correspondence while mapping an intellectual program whose teleology bespeaks manifest destiny. What, then, might be the significance to Renaissance racial epistemology of the masque’s peculiar notation: “Ethiops never dream”? What appears at first as a uniquely bizarre and probably idiosyncratic statement by Jonson turns out to be a re-assertion of classical lore, in his inaugural masque, on the role of Africa in his exegesis of contemporary Jacobean culture and politics. We can identity at least two sources. Pliny’s Natural History is explicitly referenced in Jonson’s footnote; however, Herodotus’s Histories is, in turn, a silent source of Pliny’s text. As a compendium of about two thousand volumes written by some one hundred authors, the Natural History, in keeping with its own definitional goals, offers a range of views current throughout the classical period, and the notion of the nondreaming Ethiopians goes back at least to Herodotus in the fifth century BC. About the Ethiopians, Herodotus writes, “The Garamantes use fourhorse chariots to hunt the cave-dwelling Ethiopians, because the cavedwelling Ethiopians are the fastest people of any of whom we have been brought a report. These cave-dwellers eat reptiles such as snakes and lizards; the language they speak is completely different from any other

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This is a tribe called the Atarantes, and they are the only people we know of who do not have names. They have a collective name—the Atarantes—but individuals do not have names. The Atarantes curse the sun when it is excessively hot, and also heap all kinds of vile abuse on it, because its blazing heat wears down both them and the land. (Herodotus 4.184)

Then Herodotus adds the salient observation: The local inhabitants (who are called Atlantes after the mountain) say that [Mount Atlas] is a pillar supporting the sky. The Atlantes, according to my sources, never eat any living thing, and never dream either. (4.185)

Pliny recovers the fundamental details of this ethnography, connecting them in such a way as to force us to ponder their relation to the idea of dreaming. In the Natural History, the corresponding section opens with an excursus on “the interior circuit of Africa,” incorporating in its geographical catalogue “the Egyptian Libyans, and then the people called in Greek the White Ethiopians. Beyond these are the Ethiopian clans of the Nigritae, named after the river which has been mentioned, the Pharusian Gymnetes, and then bordering on the Ocean the Perorsi whom we have spoken of at the frontier of Mauretania” (5.8.43). Several masque elements appear: the classical name of the region’s inhabitants, the “Nigritae” who in Jonson’s time, as he says, are “now Negroes”; a taxonomy of difference (“White Ethiopians”) that informs the Jonsonian premise of color transformation as a Jacobean cultural injunction; and the geography of Africa that is central to the quest narrative of the masque. Among the people surveyed are the Ethiopians who do not dream: The Atlas tribe have fallen below the level of human civilization, if we can believe what is said; for they do not address one another by any names, and when they behold the rising and setting sun, they utter awful curses against it as the cause of disaster to themselves and their fields, and when they are asleep they do not have dreams like the rest of mankind. The Cave-dwellers hollow out caverns, which are their dwellings; they live on the flesh of snakes, and they have no voice, but only make squeaking noises, being entirely devoid of intercourse by speech. (5.8.45)

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language, and sounds like bats squeaking” (4.183). Pliny would repeat the following information with some differences in tribal identification:

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Pliny’s text invokes the classical master trope of cultural opposition in describing the Ethiopian tribe as “below the level of human civilization.” Unlike the civilized Romans whose ethnocentric point of view Pliny assumes to be legitimate, the members of this tribe are uncivilized or barbarous, their barbarism construed principally in linguistic failure that is the sign of bestial depravity. Their diet of snakes represents a metonymic construction of the animal subhumanity of a people who “have no voice, but only make squeaking noises, being entirely devoid of intercourse by speech,” who “do not address one another by any names,” indicating a gross disruption of the assumed functional relation between language and human identity. A defective substitute for language, their noisy, guttural imprecations against the sun lament its destruction of crops and burning the Ethiopians black. In this context, the Ethiopians’ inability to dream, yet one more feature of their barbarism, pits them against “the rest of mankind” to reinscribe Greco-Roman culture as the civilized norm. Herodotus confesses that his accounts are not to be mistaken for firsthand empirical evidence, but rather they are reports that have been elicited from several sources. Pliny’s qualification, “if we can believe what is said” about the degraded level to which the Ethiopians have fallen, points to an anterior, possibly questionable, source in Herodotus’s Histories. Jonson thus borrows from Pliny who, in turn, collects potentially unreliable data from multiple sources, including Herodotus who, by his own admission, is also the notorious promulgator of history as fiction gleaned from various references.32 The galloping domino-effect of empirical, evidential history receding behind the accumulated qualifications of unverified ethnographic fact lands on English shores, like the traveling women, in Jonson’s circulation of fantastic stories in the Masque of Blackness. History as tenuous fiction generated by Herodotus and Pliny is indeed like a dream, and Jonson finds this kind of information on Africa a perfect vehicle for masque spectacle. In fact, the epistemology of the masque does not require empirical history, despite its meticulous citation of classical data, but mythic constructions of Africa that, as such, are malleable to Renaissance reinventions and appropriations. The conglomerate effect of these westward-traveling fictions, circumscribed within the intellectual program of the translatio, affirms the transmission of a racial empire of ideas as conducive to the development of the early modern English imaginary. “Ethiops never dream”—but Englishmen do. Employing this firm logic of usurpation, the Masque of Blackness rationalizes dreaming as a distinctly English prerogative congruent with Africa’s impossible articulation of cultural and national agency.33 Dreaming is conceived as commensurate with a linguistic program of civilized humanity that concurs with the philological undertaking of Renaissance humanism in

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fashioning intellectual and cultural identity, so a contrast between Africa and England, predicated on linguistic capacity and performance, informs the myth of race in Jonson’s text. Dreaming is, in effect, a displaced linguistic phenomenon expressing eudemonistic desire (denied the cursing Ethiopians) that transforms quotidian reality into myths of English validation and African debasement. The masque is a dream form, for it, too, seeks to produce kinetic images that defy ordinary, lived reality even by court standards. It employs mechanical innovation to make real the fantasy that resides in the poet’s head or the images of cultural and court identity that are bodied forth to figure blackness. Where dreaming constitutes the civilizing gesture of articulating self-interest and African dispossession, as Pliny tells it, the Jonsonian masque replicates this function making the genre a dubiously civilized and duplicitously civilizing form. Moreover, dreaming is not an English avocation but a specifically white enterprise refused the “Ethiopians” or black-skinned people. Insofar as race is the assertion of a power differential predicated on perceived native attributes—in this case, the combined functions of language and color—then dreaming is a function of race. Race is a dream act where significant imagined social relations assume a reality status in the world so that fantasy effects social transformation.34 Race as a dream act “is, therefore, among other things, a projection: an externalization of an internal process” that seeks the satisfaction of a narcissistic desire for domination and control (Freud 14: 223). To stipulate that color and language are never absolute racial categories—a point made dramatically clear by the women’s desire to turn white—is to admit that race is an act of interpretation, the asserted belief of a cultural or national collective. According to Stathis Gourgouris, “one ‘becomes’ a national subject insofar as one believes oneself to be a witness to this mysterious process or ritual called ‘national community,’ insofar as one participates in (imagines, constructs, dreams) the fantasy of belonging to a national community” (34). For the dream act, belief is instrumental in affirming the mythic reality of a racial community that consolidates and justifies one’s belonging; the dream act posits a derogatory racial construction of the other that simultaneously institutes the interpretive faith in Englishness as a concomitant imagined racial community. Gourgouris makes the additional claim: “an imagined community always imagines itself. In so doing, however, it must occlude this act by instituting itself as an ontological presence that has, somehow or other, always already existed” (18). That is, to assert its eternal presence, an imagined community—like the racial community to which the dominant subject belongs—has to forget the time before its proper emergence and the subsequent infelicitous histories of itself that are inconvenient and embarrassing to recall. Erasure, as we have seen, is integral to the installation of power and dominance: the elimination or curtailment of citizen

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and legal rights, whether in the Jacobean unification controversy or the Romanization of barbarians; the eradication of personal identities as in the masque’s requisite surrender of blackness as objectionable; or the distortion of history at the hands of cultural legislators by the rewriting of the traditions of blackness, language, and beauty. At the same time, race from the English perspective also requires forgetting, the erasure of a national history of color and, more importantly, linguistic barbarism (to be fully addressed in chapter 4), a strategy that underwrites the notion of moral superiority and justifies cultural projection. Thus we can conclude from the indispensable thesis of Ernest Renan’s “What is a Nation?”: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (11). In the end, race is a selfvalidating dream act that institutes social dominance through multiple acts of denial and displacement.

B L ACK E NGLISH In the Masque of Blackness, the story of England’s assumed undiluted whiteness—contrasted with Africa that, in turn, allegorizes Scotland— must be questioned to expose British dissimulation and denial, that is, race as the dream act at work.35 The chromatic antithesis that separates Albion and the black Ethiopians in the masque is, in the end, far less secure and definite. The British, including the people in the English territories, had been known from classical times for painting their skins and appeared, in the early modern translation, as “Blackamoors” or black Africans (Camden 22).36 Camden, once again, conveniently gathers the relevant classical data in Britannia: “Now it was the general custom of all nations to apply to themselves such names as had respect to something wherein they either excelled, or were distinguished from the rest” (18). His “countrymen,” being no different “had no other mark or character so proper to difference and distinguish them from the rest, as that peculiar custom of painting their bodies.” The etymology of “Britain” confirms this history of body painting justifying the historical evidence expounded by “Caesar, Mela, Pliny”: Nor can any one in reason censure this, as absurd, or over-strained, seeing it has the proper marks of a just etymology; the words sound alike and the name (which is as it were the picture of the thing) expresses the thing itself. For Brith and Brit are very near in sound; and the word Brith, among the Britons, expresses to the full what the Britons really were, that is, painted, stained, dyed, and coloured. (19)

Thus the black women aspiring to be made white in Jonson’s masque are, in the profoundest sense, figures of Britain. They represent the ancient

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identity of the painted British who at the turn of seventeenth century want to relinquish their past, desirous of forgetting in Camden’s words what they “really were, that is, painted, stained, dyed, and coloured.” The well-known negative reactions by some of those in attendance in London at the Twelfth Night festivities of 1605 may now also be read as the revulsion that attended early modern English views on their painted past.37 Displacement, however, is the name of the game. Camden’s Britannia, I remarked in the introduction, was instrumental in establishing the new British historiography that posited a barbarian English ancestry. According to Arthur B. Ferguson, “Camden was the first scholar in England ‘to demonstrate with a newly visual clarity the probable similarity of early British culture to that of other primitive peoples’ ” (Curran 278–79). Citing Solinus, Camden notes: “The country is partly possessed by barbarians; who have the shapes of several beasts artfully cut on the bodies in their youth” (22). More importantly, the accounts of the British from Mela and Solinus read like the descriptions of the barbarian Ethiopians found in Herodotus, Pliny, and Diodorus: “Britain has its nations, and its kings over them; but all are barbarous. And, as they are a great distance from the continent, they are more unacquainted with the wealth and riches of other places” (in Camden 21). Further, when Camden writes that “the natives were called Brit or Brith in the old barbarous language,” he invokes the other ancient formula by which cultural denigration operated: linguistic barbarism (18). The recognition of a barbarous identity, however, produced some apprehension even while it touted a more reliable history promoted by respected humanist scholars such as John Selden, John Speed, and Samuel Daniel: “As much as English historiographers sought to recover their nation’s unrecorded prehistory, they also recoiled from the evidence of native barbarism” (Mikalachki 4). Specifically, the Masque of Blackness dredges up the deep anxieties over the links between Britain and Africa, a past and persistent present that nation building and race construction insist be forgotten. Noting the black British history recounted in Camden, Richmond Barbour observes: “Jonson nevertheless departs from his venerated teacher by identifying Britain with whiteness and naturalizing the latter’s equation with civility and beauty” (83). Thus the international drama of the black women visiting the English court appears to locate blackness, like barbarism (indeed, as a sign of barbarism), elsewhere when, in fact, it resides within. In short, the ethnographic and cultural history of black Africans as detailed earlier, is, for the English, problematically their own. Both the negative associations of color and language, the dual systems of alterity tied to Africans, insinuate themselves into the past of Britain and survive into the early modern period as an uncomfortable reminder for the English. To decode the masque is to deconstruct whiteness and uncover

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the racial epistemology of “black English,” finding there the dream of forgetting. As a cultural practice, humanism is a perfect defense whereby England’s barbarous and black origins can be evaded by demonstrated literary mastery. Early modern literacy must disprove ancient deprecations, allowing England to separate itself from other barbarous nations left in the grip of the past.38 Humanism’s role in the discursive history of race is, therefore, to serve as barbarism’s alter ego.

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BA R BA R I A N GENE A LOGIES B A RBA RI A N E RRORS Richard Brome’s The English Moor (1631) features an Englishwoman in blackface who, in an exchange with a lustful pursuer desiring to “clap [her] Barbary buttock,” imitates African speech as a form of debased English. Nathaniel: Why, why, pish-pox I love thee. Millicent: O no de fine white Zentilmanna Cannot a love a the black a thing a. Nathaniel: Cadzooks the best of all wench. Millicent: O take-a heed-a my master see-a. Nathaniel: When we are alone, then wilt thou. Millicent: Then I shall speak a more a. Nathaniel: And Ile not lose the Moor-a for more then I Will speak-a. (4.3; 61)

Even Nathaniel joins in this singsong rendition of the language of Africans recognizing a pun—“Then I shall speak a more-a”—that recalls the linguistic foundation of the Renaissance commonplace of the barbarous Moor.1 In the world outside the theater, claims about the superiority of European languages, amid the continental clamor of an overwhelming number of African languages, dialects, and contact pidgins, dominate John Ogilby’s voluminous geography Africa (1670). For example, “[t]he people of Akara, Ningo, and Sinko, though near Neighbors, yet understand not one anothers Tongue; but all that dwell upon the Shore, or Trade with the Whites, speak most of them a mixture of broken Portuguese, Dutch, and French: yet in all this variety of Tongues, they all are ignorant of Writing, not knowing indeed what a Letter means.”2 In the region described as

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“Nether-Ethiopia,” a difference in pronunciation of words creates the impression of completely different languages, while on the Island of Socotora, “[t]he proper Language of these Beduins is so barbarous, as not to be understood by others than themselves” (561, 624). Into this Babelian marketplace, writers routinely suggest that only the presence of European trade languages and influence import some linguistic sanity. In Ethiopia, Ogilby maintains that “the Kaffers are void of Literature, stupidly dull and clownish, and in understanding are more like Beasts than Men: but some by continual converse with European Merchants, shew a few sparks or glimmerings of an inclination to more humanity” (590).3 By a twist of semantic fate, then, Renaissance Englishmen encountered a group of people called Barbarians, natives of Barbary, the name given by Christian merchants to North Africa, the region more familiar and well known to Europeans than the bulk of the geographical terrain encyclopedically documented by Ogilby. What followed was the result of terminological conflation, etymological error, ideological projection, and geographic mistranslation so that the early modern African became a neobarbarian, a living palimpsest of classical imperial dogma and unstable early modern racial fabrication. The familiar refrain “barbarous Moor”— epithet for the outsider, the pernicious, cruel, dangerous African— popularized in the theater especially, revived the epistemological context within which one could imagine the African following the oppositional cultural paradigm of antiquity. The semantic seductions of the potent pun, linking the native of Barbary and the classical barbarian prototype, proved to be powerful despite the recognition that such a conflation betrayed a fundamental error. The theater would eventually function as a significant locale where community expression, especially the traffic in ideas derived from contradictory, erroneous evidence, could be ratified and commercialized as collective racial agreements.

THE R ENA ISSA NCE NEO -B A RBA RI A N Unlike other critical labels that are retrospectively introduced, C.S. Lewis observed some time ago, the Renaissance embodied a self-imposed concept that announced the humanist project of “restoring all good learning, liberating the world from barbarism. . . . Our legend of the Renaissance is a Renaissance legend” (56). A canonical narrative of optimism underwrites the familiar, foundational statements about the Renaissance as when Erasmus declares: “I anticipate the near approach of a golden age” and a time when “a genuine and purer literature, may come to renewed life or greater splendour” (Ross and McLaughlin 80, 81). Marsilio Ficino, buoyed by humanism’s “illustrious discoveries” of ancient texts, shares the transcendent vision, confident that this time “like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct” (Ross and

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McLaughlin 79).4 Thus where Jacob Burckhardt argued famously that individualism is the defining, revolutionary feature of the Renaissance, Charles Nauert, Jr. qualifies this claim to suggest that the emphasis should be placed elsewhere, on “historical consciousness. . . . This sense of being deeply engaged in the restoration of true civilization after many centuries of barbarian darkness finds its first clear statement in the works of Petrarch” (21).5 The emergence of a Renaissance historical consciousness coincided with the invention of the “Dark Ages” that was the antithesis to the golden age revival. Thus in the Renaissance argument about itself “something had been dead, and had to be re-born, and the period that had been responsible for this death was the Middle Ages” (Gombrich 23). Of course, we are now fully aware that the Dark Ages were neither so dark, nor was the chasm between the Renaissance and Middle Ages so great.6 Recent critical intervention notwithstanding, the notion of “renaissance” for its progenitors demands the differential function of a middle age across which the cultural narrative of reinvention is engaged. What is often overlooked or not sufficiently appreciated in modern criticism and scholarship is the figural role that the barbarian plays in this otherwise orthodox account of the rise to prominence of Renaissance humanist principles, pedagogy, and practice. It is crucial, therefore, to remember that the villain of this drama of renewed European literary and intellectual history is the barbarian, the conquering invader of late Roman Empire whose ignorance led to the erosion of Greco-Roman learning and inaugurated the Dark Ages that awaited the Renaissance light. Lorenzo Valla offers a typical testimony in his account of the decline of Latin, begun with the barbarian invasions and capture of Rome when “everything was overturned, burned, destroyed” (Ross and McLaughlin 134).7 Henry Peacham, in the Garden of Eloquence (1577), praises the eventual restoration of the “Latine tongue to the former puritie, which through the ignorance of the Barbarians was corrupted, suppressed, and almost quite extinct” (156–57). Still later in 1602, Thomas Campion would recall the collapse of the Roman Empire “and the pollution of their language through the conquest of the Barbarians” (2). Broad historical strokes—classical achievement, medieval decline, and Renaissance restoration—inform a cultural myth making the barbarian indispensable to any self-driven concept of the Renaissance. Nuanced historical details are eschewed in favor of scripting a grand narrative of cultural criminality and the barbarian’s explosive political success as the termination of civilized history. He is characterized as threatening and destructive to good social institutions, aggressive and politically dangerous to the survival of the state, corrupt and thus harmful to the assumed purity of the body politic, and deficient because different and, therefore, destined to undermine every cultural tradition. According to their own theories of literary and cultural history, Renaissance practitioners and promoters of

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the studia humanitatis ensured the barbarian a place of conceptual and lexical prominence. For Denise Albanese, the salient dimension of humanism’s historical consciousness is not its progressive tripartite narrative but its insistent assertion of identification with the classical past that “makes homologous signification a privileged bridge to bygone mentalities” (30). If imitation is humanism’s active agent, then, in this reading, suppression and oblivion are the chief complements: “Humanism, as a deliberate political culture, achieves legitimacy through imagining continuity with classical Greece or Rome that suppresses the fact of historical difference (consider the erasure of the Middle Ages)” (35).8 Still, correspondence and imitation do not necessarily lead to historical oblivion, and Albanese betrays here a certain critical erasure. Her engaging analysis, persuasive as it is, disallows the significance of the barbarian, his origins as the Greek and later Roman antitype and his continuing role as the prevailing spirit of medieval decay. The presumed suppression of the middle period, the product of a structural equation, amounts to the forgetting of the barbarian along with his disruptive legacy of barbarous acts and intellectual blight. Rather, Renaissance humanism is ideologically invested in recovery and resistance: recovery of the past along with its ideology of distrust and suspicion of the barbarian slated for a corrosive cultural translation; renewed resistance to alien things and people, in light of recorded, exemplary history. Humanism’s historical consciousness recognizes imitation as identification to the extent that identities are forged at the expense of the barbarian and barbarian values. Precisely because the Renaissance remembers the medieval period—especially its genesis triggered by the decimation of an old order—its historicism is better served by an appeal to Michel de Certeau’s critique of heterology: the construction of the other is simultaneously requisite for the articulation of the self.9 Humanism’s historical consciousness is fully engaged in a discourse of the other articulated through and against the Renaissance doppelganger, the barbarian. Integral to the movement’s familiar yet deceptively innocuous narratives about self-renewal, the barbarian occupies a figural place at the generative center of the culture’s aesthetic and political unconscious. The term “barbarian,” while conjuring up general images of incivility, uncouth manners, and distasteful behavior, carries a specific history, having emerged from the frontiers of imperial aggression in the ancient world to assume a prevalent and inveterate position at the core of European culture and beyond. For Arno Borst, the term “barbarians,” used to strike out at and injure others, is a term for Europe. It is as old as Europe itself, and lives unchanged in all European languages. It is impossible to expurgate, but we have to ask ourselves why this particular word has been so central

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Borst’s analysis suggests that cultural mixing in Europe has been precipitously predicated on conflict and contentiously assuaged in conquest, the cultural archetype being the military contests between imperial Persia and the Greek city-states of the fifth century BC. So politically and culturally successful was the Athenian dramatists’ ideological reformulation of historical events, which reduced all foreigners to a monolithic ethnic type, that the hierarchical, strategic division between barbarism and civilization has survived largely intact to this day. W.R. Jones observes astutely, however, that it is the term’s shifting applications and adjustments to specific historical circumstances that demand attention and exploration (377, 381). Achieving political prominence in the context of imperial contest, the term “barbarian” has percolated throughout European and world history, continually redeployed, adapted, and adjusted, but reproducing everywhere its opposition to a civilizing stance perpetually construed as justified and right. The cosmopolitan period of Alexandrine territorial incorporation and cross-cultural mixing along with the later Christian era’s inclusive doctrine of divine reconciliation substantially modified the us-them dichotomy of the Greek imperial formula. The Germanic migration of the fifth century AD would reverse this trend, reviving the term’s oppositional character, and imbuing it with significant religious content, to explain the invaders’ threat to the Christian Roman Empire. Converted to Catholicism in the sixth century, and raised to imperial stature under Charlemagne, the Germanic tribes defended the faith against bitter Hungarian, Saracen, and Norman incursions in the ninth century, revealing the term’s labile, polymorphous character. When intra-European tensions threatened to explode, the barbarian proved a useful enemy in redirecting religious and political energies; this was the goal of the Crusades, launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, and the effect of the Mongolian invasion of 1241 and the Turks’ capture of Constantinople in 1453. Up to the late medieval and early modern periods, the barbarian terminology remained current. Europe, enervated by internal wars and internecine indictments in the name of religion, had effectively neutralized the religious content, leaving the disjunctive rhetoric in place to be applied “on the occasion of the overseas expansion that was just beginning, during the early phases of exploratory travel and colonization” (Borst 9). The term’s original destination in a foreign figure, culture, or personality would be satisfied in the new barbarians discovered on pan-European horizons. At the same time, the now-denuded term “was closer to its classical usage,”

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to the tension-filled history of Europe, and whether we really want to continue to live with it. The reason Europe’s historical diversity has brought mankind so much restlessness and suffering till now is exposed by the history of the word. (3)

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the partial result of the Renaissance revival in classical learning and “the accelerated material and intellectual development of certain parts of Europe” (Jones 394). In the English Renaissance restoration of the ancient model, the sharp, derisive edge can be heard again in the gross appellation “barbarous Moor.” An example concerning translation will bring into better focus the Renaissance project of barbarism. In 1581, Thomas Newton published his edited collection of Seneca’s ten tragedies, an important offering as, given the influence of this oeuvre on playwrights, these were the only available English translations of Seneca’s tragedies during the Renaissance. Among the translators, in addition to Newton himself, were Jasper Heywood, Alexander Neville, and John Studley. Thomas Nuce’s English rendition of the closing speech of the ninth tragedy Octavia is noteworthy: here the Chorus laments the false accusation, punishment, and death of Octavia by comparing the merciless Romans to wanton barbarians. urbe est nostra mitior Aulis et Taurorum barbara tellus: hospitis illic caede litatur numen superum; civis gaudet Roma crurore. (978–82)10 The barbarous Moores to rudenesse bent, Then Prynces Courtes in Rome forlorne, Haue farre more Cyuile curtesie: For there doth straungers death appease The angry Gods in heauens on hie, But Romayne bloude, our Rome must please. (4.6: 190)

The expression from the original that equates to Nuce’s “barbarous Moores” is “Taurorum barbara tellus,” a specific naming of the Taurians, inhabitants of a peninsula on the Black Sea, part of Scythia, the archetype of northern barbarian lands. A liberal approach to translation in the Renaissance, more akin to adaptation than the pursuit of correctness, unselfconsciously declared the fact of “acculturation”: that translation is, as its etymology insists, a movement or “process of negotiation between two cultures” (Lefevere 11). A practice of deliberate falsification that revises culturally sensitive or provocative issues is employed among Renaissance translators when the material to be translated from pagan works conflicts with European Christian values, but such a strategy of “accommodation” is not warranted by Seneca’s text (Grafton 3). Rather, Renaissance translation often skewed the vector of cultural negotiation, redistributing the balance of ideological power, reconciling the source text “to the cultural habits of the intended audience

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at that time” (Russell 29). The unlikely emergence of Nuce’s “Moores” from the ancient archive is symptomatic of a distinct Renaissance cultural habit to import the classical type but to render him concrete, relevant, and knowable in the form of the contemporary African. It also effortlessly assumes what recent translation theorists have carefully proposed that “translating a text is more complex than just choosing a text, since it puts into play not only gender and race, but the issues of social class and nationality as well” (Massardier-Kenney 14). Nuce’s calculated mistranslation, grounded in and perpetuating the barbarian error, suggests that the racialized phrase “barbarous Moor” had by the late sixteenth century become a cultural cliché, a term which should not be taken to imply its innocuous power. Thus the first Slave in Robert Davenport’s The City-Night-Cap (1624) confesses with a routine reference, “Both you and I are seen in the base act,/ Slandering spotless honour; an act so base,/ The barbarous Moor would blush at” (3.2: 139). Or again, Dekker and Middleton employ the racial comparison in The Honest Whore Part I (1604), with the Duke’s retort, “thou killst her now againe; /And art more sauage then a barbarous Moore,” establishing the Moor as the standard of savagery by which everyone else can be measured (1.1.36–37). A cliché implies a shared knowledge and set of meanings, but ones so naturalized and culturally embedded that they no longer require explanation, justification, or inquiry, being reproduced as a powerful epistemological reflex. In fact, the cliché’s routine, ordinary, banal status is the token of its current, quiet orthodoxy. At the same time, Nuce allows us to see in a prefatory way the significance of classical barbarism in the racial constructions of the Renaissance African or Moor. He is more than a mere humanist scholar: he has effected a cultural translation, repeated the barbarian error, the invention of a racial type based on classical precedent, making the Moor his contemporary equivalent for this most archetypal of ancient barbarians. The Moor is the Renaissance neo-barbarian, having traded places with his classical counterpart.

S EMIOTIC G EOGR A PH Y, G ENE A LOGIC A L E RROR Understanding the complex Renaissance relation of African languages to the anterior classical model of barbarism requires a return to the geographies that debate the meaning of Barbary, the best known part and, in a nominal way, representative name for Africa in a then emerging continental picture. Barbary conjures in the European imagination a semiotic geography: more than a situated place, Barbary is a locale of contested meanings that invites interpretation to unravel its etymological complexities.11 John Ogilby’s Africa (1670), cited earlier, proves the seminal English text that was, in turn, adapted and translated in Olfert Dapper’s Description de l’Afrique (1686).

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The Arabians, according to the Testimony of Ibnu Alraquiq, have given to this Countrey, by Marmol call’d Berbery, the name of Ber, that is, Desart or Wilderness: from whence the Inhabitants themselves were afterwards stiled Bereberes. But others will have it so nam’d by the Romans; who having subdued some parts of Africa, this part lying opposite to them, they call’d Barbary, because they found the Inhabitants altogether Beastial and Barbarous: Nor is it all improbable, considering that among us it is usual to call such as lead a wilde and ungovern’d life, and not civiliz’d by Education, Barbarian; so of old, the Grecians call’d all people βαρβαροι, barbarous, that agreed not with them in Manners and Customs. But Jan de Leu saith, the White Africans were call’d by the Arabs, Barbarians, from the word Barbara, in the Arabick Tongue signifying Murmuring; because their Langauge in this Region did seem to them a kinde of confused murmur or noise, like that of Beasts. (146)

Where Ogilby drew on Luis del Mármol Carvajal’s Africa (1573–99) for his work of the same name, Dapper’s French adaptation reaffirmed the pervasive influence and pan-European acceptance of three dominant theories in early modern circulation.12 1. Barbary, along with its native inhabitants the Berbers, is derived from an Arab word meaning “desert.” The name “Barbary” memorializes the moment of Arab arrival and appropriation; sparsely inhabited, the deserted province offered insufficient political and semantic resistance: Les Arabes appellent cette Province Berberie, nom dérivé de Ber qui signifie, Desert, parceque cette contreé n’étoit guere peuplée avant que les Arabes s’y habituassent: les habitants portent encore aujourd’hui le nom de Bereberes.

2. Barbary reflects the Greco-Roman influence in naming all foreigners barbarians, the historical legacy of the Roman occupation of North Africa: D’autres veulent que ce nom soit d’origine Latine, & que les Romains ayant conquis cette Province l’aient appellé Barbarie par rapport à l’humeur farouche & barbares de ses habitants. On fait que c’étoit la coutume des Grecs & des Romains d’appeller Barbares, les peuples dont les moeurs & les coutumes étoient differentes des leurs.

3. Barbary signifies in Arabic incoherent, bestial speech as certified by no less an authority than Leo Africanus: Mais Jean Leon dit, que les Arabes ont appellé les Africains blancs Barbares, de Barbara qui marque le son que forme une personne

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An apparent disconcerting mumbling rendered the language of the native African population unintelligible to the invading Arabs. The medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun recounts a detailed version of the third theory, with an identical conclusion that in Arabic “berbera” signifies confused, incoherent animal-like sounds.14 Similarly, Leo Africanus’s A Geographical History of Africa, cited by Ogilby, states that the people of the region were called “Barbar” because “the African toong soundeth in the eares of the Arabians, no otherwise then the voice of beasts, which utter their sounds without any accents” (5–6). And Peter Heylyn affirms that the conquering “Saracens” gave the region the name Barbary “signifying in their language an uncertain murmur, such as the speech of the Africans seemed to them to be” (25). The context of the third theory is intercultural encounter and occupation, similar to the instance of Roman imperial expansion and border rivalries that intensified the political content of the term “barbarian,” no longer delineating rudimentary difference but a term that also indicates conflict over territory and subjection under foreign rule. Leo, Mármol, Ogilby, Dapper, and D’Avity, among other authorities, submit that etymological inquiry into Barbary is coincident with articulating a history of conquest and acculturation; all three theories enumerated by these authors advance the theme of colonial incorporation.15 More important, a striking convergence of these hypotheses, of the last two most notably, produces multiple semantic histories: the Greco-Roman designation of all uncivilized peoples and behaviors as “barbarous” is rooted in a linguistic differential that appears to replicate its Arabic counterpart.16 Thus two distinct colonial and cultural traditions intersect in “Barbary” that appears as an indeterminate geographical entity that has been historically synonymous with linguistic subhumanity and deviance. Further, in the European tradition, where “Barbary” juxtaposes, and eventually superimposes, two narratives of invasion, Roman imperial expansion and the Arab incursion into North Africa, a lingering anticipation remains. North Africa was and might continue to be a place whose desert-like emptiness is waiting to be filled—politically, through arriving outsiders who subject it to rule, and symbolically, as a quasi-empty semantic space that is textually manipulated to suit others’ projected narratives of self-interested interpretations. George Puttenham, the rhetorician, foregrounds classical barbarism’s definitional emphasis on language and provides the most important English account of the often assumed but historically ungrounded substitution of the Greco-Roman for the Arabic etymology. In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Puttenham affirms the cultural commonplace

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qui parle entre les dents, parceque la Langue des Africains ne leur paroissoit qu’un jargon inintelligible.13

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that in the sixteenth century “barbarous” signals Africa in a section of the work that deals specifically with linguistic vices in Book 3.22. Titled, “Some vices in speaches and writing are always intollerable, some others now and then borne withall by licence of approved authors and custome,” Puttenham’s discussion of barbarism and solecism is derived from Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria Book I.v and the companion passage in Book IX. iii. Consistent with his habit of translating classical figures of speech into handy Elizabethan terminology, Puttenham demonstrates that classical rhetorical theory, based on ideal speech that contrasts with barbarian infelicities, finds a new, topical application in his text.17 In this instance of applied ethnographic rhetoric, a classical lexicon is translated into a contemporary linguistic anthropology of Africa or Barbary and its inhabitants, the Barbarians. In addition, as the section heading announces, his discourse on Africa is limited to those errors of language that never cross over into the territory of figures made acceptable by custom. Africa, therefore, exists within this rhetorical framework under the sign of corrupt and indefensible speech, and Africa itself is thereby excluded from the domain of eloquence and, by extension, the company of civilized persons. Offering a definition that concurs with classical precedent, Puttenham writes, with a marginal note indicating, “Barbarismus; or Forrein speech”: The foulest vice in language is to speake barbarously: this term grew by the great pride of the Greekes and Latines, when they were dominatours of the world reckoning no language so sweete and civill as their owne, and that all nations beside them selves were rude and uncivill, which they called barbarous: So as when any straunge word not of the naturall Greeke or Latin was spoken, in the old time they called it barbarisme. (251)

The concept of barbarism is understood here within the context of world domination and, particularly, Greek and Roman imperialism; barbarism propagates models of hierarchy and opposition based on linguistic difference in a contested world of empire politics. The Greco-Roman barbarian, therefore, is identified by his “straunge word” as an outsider, committing errors in language. The trend over time to transform a linguistic phenomenon into a term of cultural and racial abuse is fully developed in Puttenham’s etymological reconstruction. This term [“Barbarous”] being then so used by the auncient Greekes, there have bene since, notwithstanding who have digged for the Etimologie somewhat deeper, and many of them have said that it was spoken by the rude and barking language of the Affricans now called

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According to Puttenham, a concerted effort to historicize the totem tale of ancient barbarism has led scholars to find contemporary equivalents for the classical barbarians in the peoples of early modern North Africa.19 A grossly generalized “rude and barking language of the Affricans now called Barbarians” becomes the sign and proof of this cultural etiology. Barbarians living in Barbary, who embody the etymology of their land by producing an incoherent and vice-ridden language, materialize the grand march of history from Rome to the Renaissance. Such a twinning of geography and language traces a direct line back to fifth-century Greece, through imperial Rome and up to Puttenham’s present as an unbroken history of barbarism and Africa, hypostasizing a people of flawed and foreign speech whose territory came to bear their cultural dysphasia in its name. This early modern cultural history is facilitated by one central act of scholarship as John Speed was to confirm later in 1627: the English (and Europeans generally) adopted the Arabic place name and supplied its people with a humanist, Greco-Roman history and legacy.20 The grand linear narrative that purports an Afro-barbarian linguistic filiation from Rome to the Renaissance is, therefore, flawed; or at least it depends on a conflation that tends to erasure in the popular imagination, leaving a parasitic humanist tradition installed, having contained a corresponding yet separate Arabic cultural history. The Oxford English Dictionary alerts us to the etymological muddle that undermines this otherwise neat linear model. It notes, as stated earlier, that “Barbary” owes its etymology properly to Arabic, being so called after the “Berbers,” the name employed by Arab historians and geographers to identify the original inhabitants of North Africa ranging from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic coasts. To complicate matters further, the OED also records this important distinction regarding the entry “Barbary”: “According to some native lexicographers, of native origin, f. Arab. Barbara ‘to talk noisily and confusedly’ ”; it points out immediately that the Arabic barbara “is not derived from Gr.” bárbaros. This point is also underscored in La Grande encyclopédie Lamirault. It maintains that Arab scholars explain the root meaning of “Berbers” as “to stutter, to speak an unintelligible language”; any relation to the Greek, with its own emphasis on linguistic otherness and flawed speech, is not supported etymologically. Indeed Puttenham locates the problem with this false etymology precisely in the political events concerning the third wave of invasions

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Barbarians, who had great traffike with the Greekes and Romanes, but that can not be so, for that part of Affricke hath but of late received the name of Barbarie, and some others rather thinke that of this word Barbarous, that countrey came to be called Barbaria and but few yeares in respect gone. (252)18

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suffered by the Berbers in the seventh century AD when the Arab conquerors arrived and imposed Islam on the region.21 For the name “Barbary,” Puttenham contends, is of recent origin, and this historical fact does not support the geo-etymological fallacy allegedly derived from Greco-Roman times. La Grande encyclopédie Lamirault confirms Puttenham’s thesis, pointing out that the region from Tripoli west to the Atlantic was known among Muslims as Beldad-el-Berber and was translated by medieval Christian travelers and merchants as Barbary and later the Barbary States. It was only in the thirteenth century, around the time of the fall of the Almohad dynasty, that the name “Barbary” came into use as a cover term to identify the North African regencies of Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and, later, Tripoli. Thus Puttenham argues: “for that part of Affricke hath but of late received the name of Barbarie, and some others rather thinke that of this word Barbarous, that countrey came to be called Barbaria and but few yeares in respect gone.” Puttenham is astutely aware of the superimposition or palimpsest effect: the implied willful forgetting of the Arabic influence among contemporaries who assume a convenient ancestry of the early modern African in the classical barbarian. The invented cultural lineage from Rome to the Renaissance (“race” in its genealogical, ancestral, tribal sense) was simply too tempting, powerful and useful to resist.22 The presence of the Arab-speaking Berber dynasties over several centuries in North Africa gives way to another political construct; the humanist, Greco-Roman premise situates England not only as inheritor of classical works and values, but also as progenitor of the imperial relations that these works embody. The English rhetorical rehabilitation touted by Puttenham, whereby Englishmen seek their autonomous prestige alongside the Greeks and Romans, reinforces the imperial concept accompanying an independent England’s political and cultural refashioning in the late sixteenth century. Imperialism always remains a constitutive part of the language of humanist doctrine especially since it was the Latin texts of empire, mediating the Greek intellectual tradition, which became the primary documents of English Renaissance cultural repatriation. At the same time, Puttenham’s applied cultural rhetoric invites us to understand that the African is prevented by his linguistic insufficiency from inclusive participation in England’s growing imperial narrative in the sixteenth century. The convenient Afro-barbarian genealogy that plots a trajectory from Rome to the Renaissance must be seen as a persistent error; it rationalizes the preferred cultural construct of Africa where England replaces Rome in a transfigured Renaissance imperial paradigm. This particular narrative that purports a self-evident linguistic anthropology is useful, permitting England to reproduce its relation to Africa and Africans according to the ancient, authoritative schema of the “barbarian” in opposition to the civilized world. And it is precisely a reproduction of Africa

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that is in question since the barbarian error seeks to arrest the African at the first historical stages of the classical prototype. This mythic, humanist genealogy among Englishmen—the barbarian error, conveniently not cited as an instance of intellectual barbarism—is evident to linguistic history, but it remains vital and useful because it meets an English cultural need to express an imperial bias and, ultimately, racial (both genealogical and hierarchical) negotiation. The invention of the early modern African is firmly indebted to an erroneous barbarian genealogy whose strategic purpose is to articulate an antitype against which a still internationally marginal English identity can craft a symbiotic cultural rationale.

R ACI A L P UN : HUM A NISM IN THE C ULTUR A L M A RK ETPL ACE In the English Renaissance, it is not unusual to hear Africans described as barbarous Moors in a decidedly uncomplimentary fashion. The theater, especially, provides many examples of this nomination, designed to denigrate the African as different and an enemy to English and European culture, morality, and taste. Honor the spurre that pricks the princely minde, To followe rule and climbe the stately chaire, With great desire inflames the Portingall, An honorable and couragious king, To undertake a dangerous dreadfull warre, And aide with christian armes the barbarous Moore, The Negro Muly Hamet that with-holds The kingdome from his unkle Abdilmelec. Peele, The Battle of Alcazar 1.0.1–8 And for this Barbarous Moor, and his black train, Let all the Moors be banished from Spain. Dekker, Lust’s Dominion 5.3.179–83 I prize my honor and a Christian’s faith Above what earth can yield. Shall Fez report Unto our country’s shame and to the scandal Of our religion that a barbarous Moor Can exceed us in nobleness? No, I’ll die A hundred thousand deaths first. Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West II 3.2: 131–36

The dramatic setting of these and other works points to historical events that helped shape hostile attitudes. Starting in the 1550s, overseas travel and trade brought Englishmen into contact with Africans or Barbarians,

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natives of Barbary comprising the kingdoms of Morocco, Algiers, and Tunis. On the authority of Hakluyt, we learn that Thomas Wyndham, captain of the Lion of London and acting on behalf of James Alday, pioneered the “traffique into the kingdom of Marocco in Barbarie, begun in the yeere 1551” (6: 136). Barbary, the best-known area of the continent, being nearest to Europe and the site of extensive commercial and diplomatic activity, brought Englishmen into the political sphere of an Islamic empire. The Battle of Alcazar dramatizes the war of succession within the Saadi dynasty in Morocco and Fez that drew the young Portuguese king fatally into the fray and, eventually, brought old rivals England and Spain into contention over the vacant royal seat in Portugal. Lust’s Dominion’s court machinations and espionage end in the exile of Eleazar “and his black train,” a powerful enactment of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain that eventually occurred in 1609. Foreigners and adventurers in Barbary, Spencer and Bess are zealous, competitive standard-bearers of Christianity in the Islamic, Ottoman world of The Fair Maid of the West II. Though the works are not always located in the North African littoral, the unfolding action makes clear that the English drama appreciated the significance of this forbidding but lucrative geopolitical sphere. The tension between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Turks, between Englishmen and North African “infidels” resulted in religious and somatic types that, in the removed space of the English theater, were produced for chauvinistic contemplation, a seemingly requisite dramatic repertoire showcasing victorious English values and affirming narratives of wish-fulfillment. Current critical interest in Mediterranean political and economic history has reoriented the axis of Renaissance studies to de-center Europe and insist on a revision of the colonial assumptions retrospectively derived from a New World context to argue the real imperial presence of the Turks and the pressures placed on Europe.23 Ottoman naval power “threatened European control of the western Mediterranean. These accomplishments reinforced notions of the Ottoman state as military juggernaut before all else” (Brummett 180–81). Thus the expression “barbarous Moor” can also be grounded historically in the transforming and intensified contacts with North Africa, including increased political, diplomatic, trade and commercial ventures, especially as England sought to insert itself into the financial markets, legally or otherwise, of the Mediterranean economic crossroads. The dangers of piracy, seized goods or being held for ransom notwithstanding, Englishmen tolerated risk for the lure of eastern treasure and the fabled riches of Barbary, in Robert Greene’s words, its “glorious wealth / That is transported by the Westerne bounds” (Orlando Furioso 1441–42). The risks near home and abroad were real: “throughout the 1600s Barbary coast corsairs were sighted and engaged in the English Channel, in England, and in Ireland, and hundreds of English men, women, and children were

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captured and hauled to the slave markets of Algiers and Constantinople” (Matar 1993: 489). The profitability of English exports (cloth, arms, iron, timber) and the demand for North African imports (gold, saltpeter, almonds, dates, sugar, silk, indigo) solidified England’s participation in a pan-European period of historic economic transformations.24 The charter granted the Barbary Company in 1585 formalized the Earl of Leicester’s attempt to monopolize an energetic, successful, and hitherto unregulated trade.25 Regarded as more practical and familiar than the American colonial project, which in the sixteenth century was marred by failed settlement, an inhospitable natural environment, a hostile human milieu and further anxiety over navigational uncertainty, Barbary hosted English and Scottish merchants in significant numbers.26 Economic interests on both sides challenged traditional religious and state alliances to produce mutual tolerance, enhanced diplomatic contacts, and an elastic social accommodation for foreign merchants living and settling in Barbary.27 However, the Christian turned Turk was a worrisome example of how pecuniary attractions could radically undermine English religious and national patriotism: “The renegade treated religion not as a way to eternal salvation but as a way to material prosperity: apostasy was a means to a secular end” (Matar 1993: 491).28 Glaring naval and military inferiority, desperate economic opportunity, and threatening religious vulnerability required practical, placatory interpersonal and political relationships—but not necessarily literary or discursive ones. In the context of Mediterranean criticism, the spotlight falls on the term “Moor” as it provides a ready and obvious fit for the critical enterprises invested in historicist, materialist, colonialist, and political readings of geography, travel, exchange, diplomacy, and commerce. “Moor” is, admittedly, a confusing term signifying alternately geographical region, religion, and color as its first definition in the OED reveals. Originally: a native or inhabitant of ancient Mauretania, a region of North Africa corresponding to parts of present-day Morocco and Algeria. Later usually: a member of a Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent inhabiting north-western Africa (now mainly present-day Mauritania), who in the 8th cent. conquered Spain. In the Middle Ages, and as late as the 17th cent., the Moors were widely supposed to be mostly black or very dark-skinned, although the existence of “white Moors” was recognized. Thus the term was often used, even into the 20th cent., with the sense “black person.”

“Moor,” observes Ania Loomba, “could mean both ‘Muslim’ and ‘black.’ ” Still, the Muslim designation remained notoriously unclear, whether “the Saracens of the Holy Crusades, the Arab Moors of Spain, the Turks whose growing empire threatened Europeans, as well as the

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Moroccans, Indians, and others with whom the English wanted to trade” (2003: 45).29 Christian dogmatism denounced Islam as devilish with the result that the Moor’s spiritual condemnation materialized itself in the purported blackness of his skin, the problematic but enduring somatic sign of evil. Although divergent views on the Moor’s color existed, evident in the OED’s citations of Caxton, Borde, Lithgow, and Cowley, a growing pressure and propensity to blacken him, especially in literary and dramatic representations, made negative coloration a crucial feature. John Pory’s widely influential 1600 translation of Leo Africanus’s History, for example, reproduced exactly this tendency in its additions and interpolations that darkened and blackened peoples described in Leo’s Italian original as “Affricani bianchi” (Barthelemy 12). Working from Joannes Florianus’s 1559 Latin version of Leo’s text, Pory accelerated the darkening process begun in Florianus and “made a significant innovation” in introducing the term “Moor,” with all its pejorative associations, at points where such a category is absent in the original (Barthelemy 13).30 In addition, errors in etymology, the fusing of Mauretania, the ancient, original geographic home of the Moors, with Greek and Latin homonyms meaning “dark” or “black” (e.g., Latin maurus), fueled further mistaken associations of blackness with Moors in European thinking. While a shifting but regionally comprehensive geography, widespread religious affiliation, inconsistent and contradictory color schemes all militate against any easy historical reading of the Moor, a crystallization of color, evident in the literary production of the time, attempts a stabilizing counterbalance of blackness. What then do we do with the neglected term “barbarous”? The saturation of Renaissance texts with the term “barbarous” and its cognates is testament to the widespread impact of the barbarian narrative of cultural degeneration and destruction derived from the ancient texts of empire. Writers like John Lyly, Robert Daborne, Thomas Lodge, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Heywood, and Gervase Markham exploited the term’s capacious sentiment of opprobrium: “no crime so barbarous”; “barbarous cruelty”; “barbarous deeds”; “barbarous land”; “barbarous Infidels”; “an act so monstrous and barbarous”; “barbarous villaine”; and “that most barbarous tyrant hand.”31 As the nemesis of the classical purveyors of civilization, the barbarian, his subversive acts revivified for Renaissance writers in the descriptor “barbarous,” is a cultural criminal who has betrayed the fundamental institutions of a civil society—religion, good government, and the law. Given the barbarian’s political beginnings in imperial contest and conquest and his consequent impact on consolidating group integrity, the Renaissance attribution to various national identities is entirely congruent. Robert Chambers deploys the general detractor “barbarous nations,” William Painter writes about the “barbarous Ambassadours of Scythia,” while the anonymous Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda persuades us to

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count “the Turkish race but barbarous.”32 Ireland’s precarious colonial relationship to England made it an obvious target for barbarian labeling as in John Healey’s translation of Joseph Hall’s taxonomy of European national characters (1605): “The French are commonly called rash, the Spaniard proud; the Dutch drunken; the English the busi-bands; the Italians effeminate . . . the Irish barbarous” (10–11). The imperial ambition to subdue and eradicate native custom and identity can be heard in Edmund Spenser’s rationalizing, redemptive paternalism, a hallmark of colonial violence, that would rescue the Irish “from theire delight of lycensious barborisme unto the love of goodnes and Civillitie” (16).33 The deployment of “barbarous” in the specific act of labeling Africa, however, constitutes a unique Renaissance case, and as a result, the African, called “Barbarian,” found himself the unfortunate subject of a series of misguided homonymic puns. The aural and scribal play (the rhetorical figure polyptoton) on geography (“Barbary”), place identity (“Barbarian”), general, pejorative indictment as well as specific classical imperial stereotype (“barbarian”), and derogatory attributive (“barbarous”) places the African case, above other cultural and national applications, in a singularly complex, discursive perspective. Walter Redfern suggests that “to pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms” (17). The Renaissance homophonic blur of “Barbarian” and “barbarian” produced a semantic foreclosure—a lexical and semantic multiplicity veering toward the narrow conceptual unity of a cultural stereotype, motivated by the logic of sound. That is, whereas “barbarous” had multiple referents, the primary ethical and ethnographic sense, derived from classical literature and history, placed pressure on the others toward a singular, abject, overriding signification. “Barbarous” and its cognates have at least three distinct yet overlapping meanings: a geographical pun that points to its contemporary, Mediterranean, geopolitical history; a general term of abuse and defamation; and the humanist, classical heritage that is so central to the Renaissance. Buried in the first meaning is the history of Arabic encroachment that, as we have seen, is silently incorporated into the humanist Afro-barbarian genealogy. Out of this expanded racial and categorical matrix a history of race in the Renaissance can be uncovered, with an emphasis here on the last, largely critically uncharted category.34 Into the fluid semantic and commercial markets of the Mediterranean world enters the classical heritage of the term “barbarous” to provide some anchor to unfolding racial designations. In a work published in England in 1671, Roland de Fréjus downplays the negative stereotype, arguing “that the Inhabitants of this Countrey are not so untractable and savage, as we have hitherto been perswaded they are, and that there is nothing of Barbarous in them, but the Name” (sig. A4v). As a lobbyist for trade in North Africa, de Fréjus is sensitive to semantic sedimentation of the popular, cumulative linguistic

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connotations embedded in the regional name Barbary. Commercial interests require, therefore, the uncoupling of an ethnographic seme that has assumed a normative racial power so that the inhabitants’ moral and social character is not belied by a regional, geographical caste. Obviously, in instances where the action unfolds in or contains references to the region, the readymade wordplay is always available for trenchant moral and social critique. In Richard Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom, Part 1 (1596) human burnings, cannibalism, and sexual ransom demanded by “barberous [sic] Moores” elicit the condemnation “cursed blacke Dogs of Barbarie”; patterned verbal echoes triangulate and fuse the multiple referents of “barbarous” into a unitary code of bestial denigration (94, 95). John Lithgow’s description of “barbarous Princes” and “peoples barbarous and disdainefull countenances” in his Rare Adventures (1615) relies on the assumption that lexical mimeticism is sufficient to approve the natural equation of geography and ethics.35 Dramatic texts, like John Dryden’s All for Love (1677), were equally sensitive to this recycled punning verbal shorthand; the attributive assertion of “barbarous” and Africa is pronounced in Anthony’s proud European relation to his Egyptian queen: “And yet she shall not think me barbarous neither,/ Born in the depths of Afric” (2.1.230–32).36 The fixed mental association between people of Barbary and barbarous people— the rhetorical figures polyptoton and antimetabole—is also heard in the epigrammatic formulation of Thomas Nashe’s aspic denunciation of the Danes’ learning in Pierce Penilesse (1592): “Not Barbary it selfe is halfe so barbarous as they are” (178). With the advantage of hindsight, Laugier de Tassy, in his Histoire du royaume d’Alger (1725), writes against the accepted grain of history in attempting to redress the content implied in the pun’s isomorphic fusion (barbarian-Barbarian), an argument retrieved and replayed in John Morgan’s A Complete History of Algiers (1728). Since first contact between Englishmen and Africans in the mid-sixteenth century, terminological and categorical boundary crossing produced a radical co-mingling of place with person and morality, all under the classical aegis of the differential trope “barbarian.” Yet, any reasoned and reasonable analysis, de Tassy contends, will prove that the faults inveighed against in other cultures are commonly found at home.37 Citing and translating de Tassy in his “Preface,” Morgan acknowledges, however, the currency of the problematic pun: “The Words Barbary and Barbarian,” (says the same impartial Author) “according to our Ideas and Prepossessions, include all that favors of Cruelty and Injustice, all that is contrary and repugnant to any Sort of Religion; nay even to nature itself. Those of mean Intellectuals fancy and believe, that a Native of Barbary has the Nature and Disposition of an African Monster; and guides himself by no other Instinct, than

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Many Persons make no manner of Difference between the People of Barbary and real Brutes; calling them, simply and absolutely, Beasts; imagining those People to have neither Reason nor Common-Sense; that they are incapable of a good Action; nay even, that the very irrational Animals themselves are far preferable Creatures. (iii)

The defects of the brutish Barbarian must, first, be related to the fundamental, defining feature of the barbarian: an absence of the resources of language. “For most Greeks,” Anthony Pagden writes, “and for all their cultural beneficiaries, the ability to use language, together with the ability to form civil societies (poleis)—since these were the clearest indications of man’s powers of reason—were also the things that distinguished man from other animals.” Thus the implied connection between “intelligible speech and reason made it possible to take the view that those who were devoid of logos in one sense might also be devoid of it in another” (1982: 16). Reason, in the early eighteenth century, is the standard for human activity and progress, and the Barbarians’ brutish opacity justifies their stigmatization.38 To the extent that the Enlightenment revisits the values placed on classical reason and learning, the ancient accusation of barbarism and bestial inferiority among aliens as inimical to the culture of man—myopically circumscribed within the imperial city—is here reproduced African style. Renaissance geographers, on the strength of classical authorities like Strabo and Pliny, identified half-human beasts in Africa, as in William Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glasse (1559) that repeats the claims made “of certaine deformed that dwell in Africk, as men with dogges heades” (Fol. 185). It is worth emphasizing the impact of classical geography on Renaissance travel writing that, far from being the unique product of eye-witness experience, often recycles classical sources with a new racialist edge, accounting Africans “blacke, Savage, Monstrous, & rude” (Cunningham Fol. 185).39 For Aristotle, barbarians and those among the lower orders typify the animal-like excesses that must be avoided, and the mythical figure of the Centaur, half-man, half-beast, is appropriated to dramatize this fear.40 Indeed, the force of Morgan’s translation implies a contemporary version of the classical hybrid human that is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s framing of the African general’s entry in Othello. In the opening scene, the as yet unnamed and unseen protagonist, the caricatured “Barbary horse,” is reportedly residing at the “Sagittary,” the inn bearing the astrological sign of Sagittarius or the Centaur, where he will spawn “coursers for cousins, and jennets for germans” (1.1. 111–13; 157).41 Iago’s notorious racial vituperation, steeped in the graphic bestial hybridization of Othello, supplies the

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one like that of the ferine Animals; and that, upon this Account, all that Tract of Land in Africa is called Barbary, and its Inhabitants Barbarians.” (vi)

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literary version of the cultural attitudes de Tassy and Morgan criticize. Their defenses notwithstanding, both apologists admit to the hermeneutic encrustation of the contemporary, multipronged term “Barbarian” that with the passage of time had hardened into a disturbing intellectual habit and prejudicial racial reflex. Like the imaginary Wild Man of European lore, the historically real Barbarian, as construed over the course of the Renaissance and after, serves a particular cultural purpose.42 Hayden White has made the observation that terms such as “wildness” or “madness” or “heresy” do not have an absolute, categorical value. Such notions are “culturally selfauthenticating devices” that “are used not merely to designate a specific condition or state of being but also to confirm the value of their dialectical antitheses” (151). De Tassy and Morgan arrive at a similar conclusion, chastising an intemperate parochialism among certain Europeans, armchair travelers, who “immediately begin with inconsiderately condemning and despising whatever they meet with in foreign Parts, which does not strictly agree with their own Manners, Modes and Customs” (Morgan v). The self-authenticating strategy, according to these writers, is particularly virulent at home. Those who have traveled, seen the world, and met different people are less susceptible to the narrow prejudices that afflict armchair voyagers. Isolated in their own chimney corner, experiencing the world through books, the armchair travelers replicate the classical geographical paradigm of the oikumene, center and barbarian periphery, where the center is always Europe, the center is always home. They are inclined “in Favour of their own precious Selves and Country, and prejudiced, even to Intoxication, against the whole World” (Morgan v). Such travelers, removed from the broad sphere of intercultural exchange, are perfectly content, de Tassy and Morgan observe, to fabricate their knowledge of others without external, empirical data. These writers suggest that books, as the armchair travelers’ key resource, are never merely a substitute for travel knowledge. Books, printed, circulated, and consumed in a particular cultural context, actually create a hermetic sphere, an echo room within which distinct racial epistemologies are produced among the initiated and against the Barbarian. White remarks, however, that there are some differences between the Wild Man and the ancient barbarian type (165–68). The former lives alone and in proximity to society; he lives just beyond the fen, over the hill, and can threaten the individual. The barbarian refers to a group, usually geographically far away, but represents “a threat to society in general—to civilization, to racial purity, to moral excellence—whatever the ingroup’s pride happened to be vested in” (166). According to de Tassy and Morgan, however, the barbarian-Barbarian (the rhetorical figure syllepsis as isomorphic fusion) is also near. He comes home via the routes of literary texts, and in the cultural echo chamber that does not recognize any alien voice, the group

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dynamics of race are collectively ratified as self-authenticating and true. The significance of works by de Tassy, Morgan, and de Fréjus is that in rejecting the racial claims of the barbarian pun, they respond to a discourse that had accelerated over the duration of the Renaissance and reached crisis proportions in their day. The barbarian-Barbarian pun unites the past and the present; ancient type and contemporary personage; geographical site and moral condemnation; and classical imperial political theory and Renaissance racial construction. It prosecutes formally and linguistically the temporal, spatial, ethical hybridization that is the heterogeneous identity of the “barbarous Moor” or African. The multiple semantic threads of both terms are stabilized in the classical framework of the barbarian that promises a readymade narrative of cultural inferiority, dialectical rivalry, oppositional group mentality, and self-legitimating difference. Puns express a widely identifiable Renaissance penchant for what Russ McDonald calls “double talk” or “the multiple senses of a single verbal sign” (138).43 Despite having fallen into general literary disrepute in the eighteenth century, Shakespeare’s punning having earned Johnson’s famous rebuke (“the fatal Cleopatra”), puns with their polysemic power represented a crucial dimension of the élan vital of Renaissance rhetoric.44 Yet, as we have seen, what is discredited as unfashionable in the eighteenth century, persisted as a quotidian racial quibble with a recognizable, broad appeal. However, the pun’s lingering reputation as a frivolous rhetorical device, the result of a mere acoustic accident, is confirmed by a footnote to the OED’s entry declaring its specious origin: “Just as the word ‘pun’ has no point of origin, puns themselves have no point or purpose either. So the dictionary insinuates” (Bates 423).45 Moreover, because of the pun’s fundamental ambiguity, its disappointment of normative expectations has made it threatening to conventional decorum: “Narcissistic, effeminate, showy . . . the pun represents a challenge to the stability of the linguistic order” (Bates 422). Like cultural drifters, puns, because of their adversarial relationship to orthodox language use, have been variously described as “bastards, immigrants, barbarians, extra-terrestrials: they intrude, they infiltrate” (Redfern 4). “Barbarous,” therefore, not only sets in play hitherto discontinuous historical frames of reference, but as a pun it also enacts the metalinguistic and racial theme of alterity. The ubiquitous Renaissance pleasure in the pun’s polysemous motion suggests a rhetorical landscape in epistemological flux where knowledge is constantly being reformed and the cognitive rules are under pressure to be rewritten. The heterogeneous assemblage that is signaled by “barbarous” effects, therefore, a conceptual construction of newly emergent racial identities. Focusing on the pun’s ability to assemble and effect a cultural translation returns us to the question of the Renaissance. “ ‘Renaissance,’ ”

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recalls Andrew Hadfield, “identifies a general cultural change—which is how it came to be used by later historians and cultural commentators. It refers specifically to the rediscovery of classical culture and learning, and, importantly, indicates a reinterpretation and reusing of what had gone before” (3). Deriving from the Italian rinascimento, the deceptively triumphant Renaissance vision of return, rebirth, or revival confronts us with questions of historical adaptation and cultural incorporation represented in the barbarian-Barbarian pun. In an age where rhetorical taste and intellectual temperament gravitated toward linguistic multiplicity, the radial energy of the adjective “barbarous” performs a unifying task, bringing together disparate cultural referents to produce a synthetic racial knowledge.46 The pun is paradoxical: it is at once the site of dispersal and collection—multiple referents become conceptually aligned and are made to intersect. Drilled into schoolboys as part of the humanist core curriculum of classical grammar, rhetoric and logic, the mastery of semantic and verbal copia reconstitutes knowledge, providing “the opportunity to feel ourselves making connections between apparently unrelated and impertinent contexts” (McDonald 142). Within a humanist framework, the pun is an example of Renaissance dialectic or soft logic, for it posits argument by association and reasoning by juxtaposition, both validated by homonymic convergence satisfying the less stringent demands of nondemonstrable or rhetorical proof “which offered practical effectiveness rather than necessary truth” (Norbrook 141–42).47 As in the instance of the simultaneous juxtaposition of place name, regional identity, classical forebear, moral catchword, and an overwritten history, the pun on “barbarous” yokes together multiple distinct, discrete domains of knowledge that synthesize a new, complex racial paradigm.

R ACI A L C ONFUSION IN THE THE ATRIC A L E CHO C H A MBER The tendency of the Mediterranean school of criticism is to reject the oppositional, Orientalist bifurcation between Europe and the rest as ahistorical and irrelevant to argue for “bilateral exchange,” a view that admits greater cultural reciprocity and fluidity accruing from the material and political demands of Anglo-Ottoman trafficking (Burton 125).48 That is, the self-other binary used by cultural historians is insufficient and misrecognizes the porous sites of contact and exchange in the early modern Mediterranean. This growing assertion of cultural mixing complicates further the complementary argument concerning racial heterogeneity in the early modern period: race resides at a discursive intersection, contingent on and mediated through multiple cultural and political categories such as class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion.49 The

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expression “barbarous Moor,” then, increases its racializing potential when read in the historical Mediterranean matrix, where its conflated geographical, religious, somatic, and classical connotations are rendered politically legible. As noted, a great divide exists, however, between the economic motivation of commercial reportage or diplomatic negotiation and the virtually uniform negative characterization of the “barbarous” Africans who people English dramatic literature and the stage at a remove from the immediate scene of enterprise. That close-guarded scene, whose rules of distrust and geopolitical competition were relaxed for the mutual advantages of trade, posed, nevertheless, serious threats to individual freedom, English political autonomy and religious integrity. Even if tensions were commonly contained in the routine of daily transactions on the ground, they found theatrical release in the dramaturgical drubbing of the barbarous Moor, crude racial antithesis registering a degree of “sociocultural stress.”50 Like the founding dramatic texts of imperial barbarian propaganda, along with their counterparts in rhetoric, the English drama that concerns African representation performs a set of cultural tasks that do not envision empirical accuracy as its primary or sole objective. Because real imperial power existed with the Ottomans in the context of Mediterranean encounter, the English drama’s compensatory rhetorical mastery served as an ideological form, the theatrical equivalent of the armchair traveler’s text. Thus the early modern playhouse can, in turn, despite gender and class differences in the audience, function as the cultural echo chamber within which like voices and attitudes can consolidate around the notion of the barbarous African. Finally, the Mediterranean school has warned perceptively “against the ahistorical tendency to describe early modern Englishmen as ‘imperialist’ before English imperialism began”; against the tendency to assume a binary cultural division when the historical data suggest cultural exchange of a different order (Vitkus 3). “Foucault taught us,” asserts Daniel Vitkus, “to recognize the discursive and ideological circulation of power and its ‘net-like’ organization, but he would certainly have agreed that imperial rhetoric without territorial possession—and without control over colonized bodies—does not an empire make.” The result “is a danger here of confusing the discursive with the material, theory with practice, rhetoric with reality” (6). Setting aside for the moment the very heart of the notion “Renaissance”—with its inherited imperial dogma whereby one can claim to be an imperialist by doctrine and belief without the material goods to show—confusion or error is, indeed, central to the notion of race. Race is a collective fiction of desire, a set of cultural agreements, that imagines a configuration of human relationships from the perspective of a promoting agent. It is precisely because race is a fiction that superimposes a narrative of interpretive desire onto

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others—most familiarly, but not exclusively, the bodies of others—that Renaissance dramatic literature is useful in its fictional rearrangement of Ottoman-English, Anglo-Moor relations. Race, indeed, confuses the material or corporal human being—in the broadest phenomenal sense not limited to color—with a discursive fiction that is invented to stratify and give permanent meaning to the dynamics of human interaction.

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B A RBA ROUS E NGLISH As we move from the late Roman imperial era where we witness a political, grammatical, social, and poetic interaction that attaches to the rhetorical concept of “barbarism,” we recognize a Renaissance reanimation of the patterns that subtend such a complex mix. The Greek and Roman competition for territories produced aggressive opposition as a core structure of relating to the peoples inhabiting those contested spaces, and the linguistic deficiency of the aliens remains a constant rationalization for inhabiting the barbarian site. In the sixteenth century, we witness the emergence of a “barbarian” Africa and New World initiated in the voyages of “discovery” and commercial interest that have become the centerpiece of recent critical deliberations on a global Renaissance. However, this period represents a moment of incubation during which the instruments (linguistic, naval, economic, religious, etc.) of cultural negotiations are being honed. While the maritime ventures prepared the way for a full-blown imperialism to come, the development of a native English tongue was also commensurate with the imperial desire of the fledgling nation. Faced with the growing interaction with a barbarian world, the English language had to be promoted as the civilized essence of the nation that legitimized its ascendant supremacy. The glaring problem, however, was that for centuries the English language had been vilified as unstable, rude, and barbarous, a language incapable of artistic achievement, without hope of attaining the greatness of Greek and Latin, and inferior even to other European vernaculars.1 In translating Seneca’s Oedipus (1563), Alexander Neville apologizes for removing the Latin poet “from his naturall and loftye Style to our corrupt & base, or as al men affirme it: most barbarous Language” (A3v).2 While marketing his A Short Introduction or guiding to print, write, and

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read Inglishe Speech (1580) on English orthography for foreigners, an otherwise upbeat William Bullokar concedes the conventional characterization of English as being for “so long time unperfeat, and therefore accounted in time past barbarous: which we our selues can not denie, as touching the unperfect writing thereof, not to be ruled by art of grammer” (2.15). Already in The First Three English Books on America (1555), however, Richard Eden’s defense sounds the note of promise, acknowledging the crucial role translation of classical texts plays in the renovation of English: “althowgh the Latine toonge be accompted ryche, and the Englysshe indigent and barbarous, as it hathe byn in tyme past, muche more then it now is, before it was enriched and amplyfied by sundry bookes in manner of all artes translated owt of Latine and other toonges into Englysshe” (xliii). Linguistic barbarism and cultural barbarity are interrelated, and the deficiency in English manners and morals would be addressed through the efficacy of classical influence mediated through translation as a language-laundering process. Even more pointedly, Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse (1592) understands the poet’s public, state role as indebted to the project of a national culture: To them that demaund, what fruites the Poets of our time bring forth, or wherein they are able to proue themselues necessary to the state? Thus I answere. First and formost, they haue cleansed our language from barbarisme and made the vulgar sort here in London (which is the fountaine whose riuers flowe round about England) to aspire to a richer puritie of speech, than is communicated with the Commonalitie of any Nation vnder heauen. (193)

Completing the translation of Castiglione’s Courtier in1556, Thomas Hoby expresses hope for the emergence of writers steeped in the classical traditions so that “we perchaunce in time become as famous in England, as the learned men of other nations have bene and presently are.” As yet, the current state of the art produces the anxious concern “that wee alone of the world may not be still counted barbarous in our tongue, as in time out of mind we have bene in our maners” (5). The comparison with continental Europeans who constitute the “world” of courtly taste, sophistication, and manners elicits competitive dismay. But the historic confrontation of the English with Africans, barely begun in the 1550s and developing over the following decades, coincided with the emergence of language experiments such as quantitative versification (the imitation of classical meter) and a perceptible positive change in attitude toward the English language that began to emerge during the same period. Cross-cultural confrontation and English language rehabilitation appear as inversely related from within this historical perspective

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of barbarism, and the concern with being “alone of the world . . . still counted barbarous in our tongue” explains the political and racial investment in renovating the English language. The sixteenth-century English encounter with Africans, those other Barbarians, triggered cultural transference; it entailed an emergent racial consciousness, rooted in displacement and nonidentification, that underwrites the symbiotic cultural project of English language reform. Language experiments such as quantitative versification, the subject of this chapter, were not isolated aesthetic undertakings but were self-conscious about their national import. I would also add that the context of their production, the momentous encounters with others counted barbarians, notably Africans, immersed the language and literary theory of a self-confessed barbarous nation— England—in a discourse pertaining to ethnic and racial construction.

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In the English Renaissance, a sustained dialogue on barbarians and English barbarism is located in the intense dialogue over versification that preoccupied the major poets and men of letters during roughly the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The quantitative rhyme debate elicited a range of responses starting with Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570) and can be said to close with the personal exchange between Thomas Campion in Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) and Samuel Daniel’s A Defence of Ryme (1603), falling neatly within the period of Elizabeth’s reign. Rhetorical handbooks, apologies for poetry, and defenses of the art of poetry all engage this issue that is fundamentally about accrediting rules and practices for a national poetry and, in many cases, canons of prose and culture. Prosody served as the literary arena in which the struggle over the fate of English verse, and writing in general, was engaged. As in the instance of Quintilian’s treatment of barbarisms and solecisms (chapter 1), the interrogation of the technical features of literary expression opens onto cultural and political terrain. When Gabriel Harvey laments the social and cultural standing of England in contrast to her European counterparts, he gives voice to a general angst among the English intelligentsia about the need for literary reforms that will enhance England’s sense of itself as a unified culture, a proto-nation: Doist thou not ouersensibely perceiue that the markett goith far otherwise in Inglande, wherein nothinge is reputid so contemptible, and so baselye and vilelye accountid of, as whatsoeuer is taken for Inglishe, whether it be handsum fasshions in apparrell, or seemely and honorable in behauiour, or choise wordes and phrases in speache,

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Harvey reveals a very strong appreciation of the organic, cultural value of specific though apparently disparate social signifiers—fashion, manners, language—that together, in fact, form a continuous semiotic network that constitutes English culture. Among the agglomerate elements of the English social and cultural scene, Harvey perceives a unified, semiotically compounded national product: “our owne cuntrye.” The lexical redundancy signaled by “owne” functions as a grammatical intensifier whose signified is Englishness; the possessive pronoun “our” already identifies ownership, and by extension, the limits of England’s imagined boundaries. Yet “owne” as the redundant qualifier indicates what is proper to England beyond geopolitical limits—its innate, singular character and spirit that Harvey would have move out of the shadow of “Italy, Spayne, and Fraunce, rauisshed with a certayne glorious and ambitious desier . . . to sett oute and aduaunce ther owne languages aboue the very Greake and Lattin, if it were possible” (Smith 1937: I. 123). Harvey’s quibbling last clause, “if it were possible,” attests to the cultural paradox that underlies English verse reform: how does one attain one’s own language or one’s “owne cuntrye” when operating only within the limited sphere of Greek and Latin values? Harvey castigates the Europeans for their immoderate overreaching in desiring to surpass Greek and Latin. His doubtful qualification, “if it were possible,” admits subjection to a Greco-Roman system of value, conveyed in their language achievements, that is nothing short of voluntary intellectual colonization: the domination of one culture by another according to a sustained system of hierarchies. The phrase “our owne cuntrye” recalls another used by Harvey’s famous epistolary correspondent, Edmund Spenser, who in a letter to Harvey complains, “why, a Gods name, may not we, as else the Greekes, haue the kingdome of oure owne Language, and measure our Accentes by the sounde, reseruing the Quantitie to the Verse” (Smith 1937: I. 99)? The issue of quantity and accents is directly concerned with reforms in English prosody. Spenser’s comparable phrase to “our owne ountrye” has served as the genesis for Richard Helgerson’s engaging assertions regarding language and the embryonic nation. The phrase “kingdome of our owne language,” Helgerson argues, suggests a culture’s perception of itself in transition from the “dynastic” conception of “kingdom” to postdynastic nationalism, the latter invoked in what is often felt to be one of the crucial determinants of a nation—“our owne language.” A kingdom whose boundaries are determined by the language of its inhabitants is no longer a kingdom in the purely dynastic sense, but

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or anye notable thinge else in effecte that sauorith of our owne cuntrye? (Smith 1937: I. 124)

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The presence of a monarch does not by itself negate the notion of nationalism; what must be defined is the role and purpose of the monarch in relation to the nation. Helgerson points out that the implications of the phrase “kingdome of oure owne Language” “remind us that conflict was to develop along precisely the lines suggested by these few words, between royal prerogative, subjects’ rights, and the cultural system” (274). His observation reiterates the history of the English nation as one of constant, and at times violent, negotiation and redefinition of claims to authority and function among the three factors. Importantly, Helgerson’s reading foregrounds English culture poised at a moment of transition and choice. The thrust of his argument is to explain why figures such as Sidney and Spenser, men on whom “modern English literature got its first solid foundation,” were caught up in the quantitative movement of verse reform that has been regarded, like the failed career of Harvey, one of its foremost proponents, as a “near joke to posterity” (275, 276). Helgerson takes us back to the late 1570s, pointing out that these founders of English literature were at that time on the verge of writing the works that have solidified their place in the canon. Thus as writers caught in the heady moment of shaping the language and literature, they were as invested in the exploration of technique and form as the lesser lights, in Helgerson’s estimation, as Harvey, Drant, and Webbe. In addition to this evocation of the historical moment of literary choice and national consciousness, however, I would like to focus on the ambivalence inherent in the use of Greco-Roman prosodic systems to advance English national culture, what I have already proposed as the paradox of voluntary self-colonization.

E NGLISH Q UA NTITATI V E M ETER : A ESTHETIC H EGEMON Y The prosodic debate in question refers to attempts to reconceive English verse by basing it on the classical system of versification that achieves variety, dynamism, and rhetorical force from the use of a range of number and kinds of feet. Native English of Anglo-Saxon descent, on the other hand, described by many as being predominantly monosyllabic, cannot achieve the true variety and full rhythmic effect of the quantitative classical system. Instead, it derives its force from the strongly accented words, some with their own conventional emotional resonances accrued over

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neither, so long as it goes on identifying itself with the person of a hereditary monarch, is it quite a nation. Nor are the representational resources of the phrase exhausted by the extremes of “kingdom” and “language,” for between them comes that first-person plural “our” with its suggestion of shared participation and possession. (274)

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time, and from rhyme, the euphonic doubling of similar sounds. The first appears as the more organized and comprehensive approach, urbane in its systematization and rhetorical in its cool cadences. The second is often presented as having no rules for defining a poetics that would, in turn, allow for discrimination between the true poets and the rhymers who could descend to mere doggerel. This is the gist of the feelings and intent on the part of those who wanted to abolish rhyme and accent. However, the inclusion of rhyme and accent together in the domain of prosody signals the confusion that existed in the various attempts to define exactly what was to replace the native tradition. As the name suggests, the quantitative movement takes its cue from the Greek and Latin systems of ascribing a certain value or quantity to syllables. There are two basic sets of values predicated on whether a vowel is long or short. “Long” and “short” must not be confused with the general English notion of stress or accent or even pitch, but should be understood as what might best be described as a mathematical value attributed to certain syllables.3 Roger Ascham, in The Scholemaster distinguishes further between metrical patterns and the value attributed to feet— patterns that, moreover, produce their own set of rhythmic stresses—and the quantitative value of syllables. He criticizes the lack of industry among the unlearned in England who fail to account “not onelie iust measure in euerie meter, as euerie ignorant may easely do, but also trew quantitie in euery foote and sillable” (Ascham 290). Again, “long” and “short” do not correspond to duration although some of the most common definitions rely on this notion of a long syllable being of twice the durational value as a short syllable. From The Latin Grammar of P. Ramus of 1585 we get, “A short syllable is that, which doth consist of one time . . . A long syllable is that which doth consist of two times.” And Hoole’s The Latin Grammar Fitted for the Use of Schools (1651) defines quantity as “Time or Quantity is the measure of pronouncing a Syllable, or the space of tuning a Vowel, whereby wee measure how long it is in pronouncing” (Attridge 62). This confusion of the two ways of approaching quantity, the mathematical and the durational, were inherited from the classical grammarians, the metrici and the rhythmici respectively (8). And even when there seemed to be a general agreement as to what system some prosodists were using, the actual assignment of quantitative value varied significantly to engender debate among Spenser, Harvey, and Drant. In April 1580, for example, after a series of letters in which Spenser and Harvey critique each other’s meters, Spenser writes to Harvey: I would hartily wish you would either send me the Rules and Precepts of Arte, which you obserue in Quantities, or else followe mine, that M. Philip Sidney gaue me, being the very same which M. Drant deuised, but enlarged with M. Sidneys own iudgement, and augmented with

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Spenser is acutely aware of the political advantage of coming to some basic agreements on a coherent and comprehensive system of rules on English quantity. The entire movement could be in jeopardy if competing theories continue to circulate for too long. These are not just men writing as individuals reaching their way toward individual styles or even men writing as the genteel members of a coterie. The urgency of the tone suggests something akin to a literary cabal bent on shaping the course of poetic language and of neutralizing the opposition. Despite the sense of confusion surrounding the definition and realization of English quantity, a few general points, however, bear emphasizing. First, what I have described as the mathematical attribution of value should be qualified by D.S. Raven’s definition of long and short syllable in classical quantity as “being based on the intrinsic quantity of different vowel-and-consonant-combinations” (22). My use of the notion of mathematical value attempts to forestall the English speaker’s inclination to think in affective and dialogic terms of accent, pitch, and tone, attempting instead to focus on the arbitrary system in which, in the case of the hexameter, “an abstract unit called a long syllable was joined with another of the same kind or two abstract units called short syllables” (Thompson 130). However, Raven’s use of “intrinsic” points to the prevailing sense espoused by the hexametrists, following the classical precedent, that the values of these abstract units were not, in fact, arbitrary, but were innate to the syllabic combinations, given the evolution of the language.4 The untenable nature of this discrepant attitude is particularly obvious in the case of poetry that proceeds fundamentally by fairly obvious conventions.5 A related issue concerns the Elizabethan reading of Latin and the training of schoolboys in grammar and prosody. Derek Attridge, in what is the most comprehensive modern study of the issue of English Renaissance quantitative verse, calls attention to the dual awareness of the student reading Latin.6 The most important point to emerge is that quantity was not felt as something immediately apprehensible in the pronunciation of the word, and which could therefore be learned when the word was learned, but was a complex system which could be applied to words, in order to construct verses according to a further system of rules. . . . [T]he way in which the notion of quantity was learned, and the fact that it bore little relation to spoken Latin, could have had no other effect than that of making it seem something abstract and intellectual. (66)

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my Obseruations, that we might both accorde and agree in one, leaste we ouerthrowe one an other and be ouerthrown of the rest. (Smith 1937: I. 99–100)

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Developments in the pronunciation of Latin as early as the fifth century AD led to a radical change in the distribution of long and short vowels: “This meant, of course, that the quantities on which Latin verse was based ceased to be a property of the spoken language and had to be learned for the purpose of scanning and writing classical metres” (21). A further notable complication arises with the occurrence of the Great Vowel Shift in English sometime around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that ensured that the pronunciation of Elizabethan Latin itself underwent a profound change, remarkable in the difference between the pronunciation of continental and English Latin. Attridge concludes, therefore, that the effect of the quantitative movement was to impose an alien and abstract system on the native habits of speech with its tense and lax stresses, “an attempt to impose upon the natural pattern of tense and lax vowels an artificial, and very different, pattern of long and short vowels” (36).7 Attridge considers also the effect this disjunction between two systems could have on the Elizabethan schoolboy who from approximately the age of six to fifteen or sixteen when he entered university was trained in Latin. In time his response grew to be “an intellectual apprehension, not an aural one; if he knew his rules and his authorities well enough, he could ascertain as he read the line that it was made up of the correct patterns of longs and shorts” (76). Attridge highlights the formal competence of the student in decoding the quantities despite the student’s native inclinations. However—and this is only to shift slightly, but I believe significantly, the emphasis of Attridge’s conclusions—since Latin seemed to have been accentuated in the English way when spoken, the student would be trained to sustain simultaneously different aural and mental patterns, figuring out, one might say calculating, the quantitative values, supplying an intellectual counterpoint to the native oral accented patterns. This simultaneous dual competence, secured through years of intense exposure to both systems during the formative period in a student’s life, broadens Attridge’s conclusions based on the notion of imposition to include ones based on dynamic tension and opposition. This is precisely the nature of the argument that John Thompson proposes for the effect the English movement in its ideal realization tries to achieve. Thompson’s analysis of the movement is significant in that it does not approach the debate from the shortsighted and common modern perspective of wanting to pass the movement over as a footnote to later literary achievements, but he insists on recording what effects these theorists aim optimally at attaining. Drawing on G.L. Hendrickson’s important study of Sidney’s quantitative experiments, Thompson assesses the classical approach that Sidney attempts to duplicate for English verse.8 [O]ne principle employed in the classical metres was the opposition of the metrical pattern used to construct the verses and the corresponding

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Thompson’s proposition of a verse poetics based on a phonologicalperceptual opposition appears to be supported in the passage cited earlier indicating Spenser’s desire for an English “kingdome” where one will “measure our Accentes by the sounde, reseruing the Quantitie to the Verse” predicated on the prosodic potentialities of opposing spoken accentual stress to quantity. I would argue, therefore, that the disjunctive interaction between the aural and the intellectual properties of Latin performance was theorized as a transferred, integral part of the artistry and construction of English quantitative verse. Thompson, one could say, explores what remains merely accidental in Attridge’s study of oral Latin and argues by way of Hendrickson that the oppositional effect of the intellectual and the aural patterns was a recuperative one that constituted, in addition to the subtle interplay of abstract quantitative units, another performative level of verse sophistication and complexity. Both Attridge and Thompson offer complementary modes of reading the theoretical implications of this literary experiment and, by extension, ways of categorizing the perceived relationship between English and Greco-Roman cultures arrived at via a cultural poetics. The quantitative movement represents a significant statement about the need to reform the English language, prosody, and culture and at the same time establishes a hypothetical model based on classical prosodic systems transferred to the English case. It posits, in effect, a sustained desire for cultural translation carried out at an abstract, theoretical, and poetic level. Especially since the derivation of English quantity is an imputation of a set of arbitrary and theoretically adduced set of values inspired from the classical system, the quantitative movement claims, at the outset, the classical model as more valuable in terms of cultural poetics. The translation of Latin quantity into English quantity effects the translation of cultures. One way to read this self-generated cultural penetration on the part of the hexametrists is to see the classical system as occluding and obscuring the native English patterns to the point of erasure. This would be adjacent to Attridge’s reading of the imposition of one system onto another, the one becoming completely subservient to the other. In the terms of cultural artifice, this is the model of a willed colonial domination, or to use Gramsci’s terminology, this would represent prosodic hegemony, a consensual domination.9 However, if we maintain that, in an ideal prosodic production, the relationship between the classical quantity and native accent patterns is an oppositional yet dynamic one (Thompson’s

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elements of sound in the language. Furthermore, the opposition was not simply negative, the result of ignoring the stress pattern of the language, but it was a carefully planned opposition. The element of sound, speech-stress, was deliberately put in position relative to its abstract simulacrum, the metrical strong-stress or ictus. (136)

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approach), then the classical is seen as accommodating the native system, including it in a vision of dialectical reform. This view of the translation of cultural poetics still operates hegemonically, I would maintain, but it offers not a cultural dynamic of domination but of shared and mutual performance. This last formulation of a modified hegemony represents a paradoxical poetics and, by extension, political, situation since the performative freedom of the native is always, in practice, limited by the status accorded the classical as the standard against which value is affirmed. Thompson argues the ideal case, however, where the classical and vernacular find a new alliance. Since the value attached to the quantity is ideally perceived as intrinsic, a further translation is underway: an abstract and arbitrary system is being endowed with innate and essential value. Thus the dialectical opposition between the classically based quantity and native stress is the locus of production of “our owne” language, where intrinsic quantity equates to “owne,” the cultural character and spirit. Such a view of English quantity extends Harvey’s observations on the semiotic network that constitutes the formation of the national culture to include the oppositional role of an artificial Greco-Roman system and culture in the elaboration of that network.

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The quantitative movement also inaugurates, somewhat surprisingly, a discourse about barbarians that was to survive in various authors throughout the span of the quantitative controversy that ends about 1603. Unlike the confusion as to what constituted English quantity and the competing theories of rules of quantity, hexametrists are unanimous about the role of barbarians in introducing rhyme in the wake of the fall of Rome in the post-Quintilian era. Thus the hexametrists return us repeatedly to a specific historical period and set of events: by the second century AD, the Macromannic wars leading to the destruction of the Dacian and Macromannic kingdoms had removed the two buffer states between Rome and the rest of the barbarian world. The Franks, the Allemmanni, the Vandals and the Goths, the most powerful tribe, were brought nearer to the borders of the empire and the ensuing increasing pressure finally erupted into a series of devastations throughout the reign of Gallienus (AD 253–68) in the following century. The empire, though weakened, recovered from these attacks, which, however, only presaged the later invasion triggered by the movement of the Huns across the steppes of south Russia. This movement of the Huns from the East forced the Visigoths, those settled along the Danube and caught between two enemy forces, into an uneasy political pact as agents of the Roman Empire by 375 AD. With the death of Theodosius, who had managed this fragile settlement, all the while being continually weakened by civil wars, the

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Visigoths seized their opportunity for freedom, and by 406 AD Gaul, the Roman defensive center, was taken.10 The influx of barbarians into the Roman terrain brought the demise of European culture in the form of rhyme, the jangling and superficial phonetic trifle that had come to be so ingrained in the English poetic tradition. Thus rhyme and quantity came to represent the two opposed camps in the debate over verse—the native and the classical respectively. Roger Ascham, the exemplary Elizabethan schoolmaster combines two functions that, from classical sources, were distributed between the “Praeceptor” who was responsible for “learning” and the “Paedagogus” who oversaw instruction in “maners” (202–3). Ascham the “paedagogus” dominates in the first book whereas in the second book under the heading of “imitation,” he examines quantitative verse. An apologist for the quantitative system, Ascham invokes the barbarian myth while recalling his “sweete tyme spent at Cambridge” under the tutelage of Sir John Cheke who, among others, had wished that we Englishmen . . . would acknowledge and vnderstand rightfully our rude beggerly ryming, brought first into Italie by Gothes and Hunnes, whan all good verses and all good learning to, were destroyd by them: and after caryed into France and Germanie: and at last receyued into England by men of excellent wit in deede, but of small learning, and lesse iudgement in that behalfe. (289)11

The narrative traces the lineage of rhyme back to the barbarian invaders and makes it clear that the stylistic rudeness of English rhyme owes its provenance to everything that is opposed to classical learning and sound judgment. This mislikyng of Ryming, beginneth not now of any newfangle singularitie, but hath bene long misliked of many, and that of men, of greatest learnyng, and deepest iudgeme[n]t. And soch, that defend it, do so, either for lacke of knowledge what is best, or els of verie enuie, that any should performe that in learnyng, whereunto they, as I sayd before, either for ignorance, can not, or for idlenes will not, labor to attaine vnto. (290–91)

Later, Ascham modifies his barbarian myth to reach further back into history. The Huns and Goths had got the idea of rhyme from one Simmias Rhodius whose book in rhyming Greek verse The Egg had inspired no imitators in its time but “was presentlie contemned: and sone after, both Author and booke, so forgotten by men, and consumed by tyme, as scarse the name of either is kept in memorie of learnyng,” that is, until “many hondred yeares after . . . [the] Hunnes and Gothians, and other barbarous

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nations, of ignorance and rude singularitie, did reuiue the same folie agayne” (291). Ascham’s desire to brand the barbarians as ignorant and lacking in judgment comes from his need to find a myth that any reasonable person can assent to: the Goths and Huns are, after all, the destroyers of a great empire; that much is incontestable history that any civilized Englishman would embrace. At the same time, he needs to find an evolutionary myth that at once suggests the possibility of change over time and also places the blame for scholarly contamination elsewhere; ignorance cannot be seen as a native fault or innate barbarousness. Since rhyme is a postimperial Rome barbarian phenomenon, classical imitation allows for restoration and rehabilitation. Ascham’s anxiety on these points is brought to the fore when he appears to smart from the critique of his beloved Cicero: “This fault I lay to [Cicero’s] charge: bicause once it pleased him, though somwhat merelie, yet oueruncurteslie, to rayle vpon poore England, obiecting both, extreme beggerie, and mere barbariousnes vnto it, writyng thus vnto his frend Atticus: There is not one scruple of silver in that whole Isle, or any one that knoweth either learnyng or letter” (292–93). In the glow of national and Cambridge pride, Ascham can now retort with self-confidence: “blessed be God, I say, that sixten hu[n]dred yeare after you (Cicero) were dead and gone, it may trewly be sayd, that for siluer, there is more cumlie plate, in one Citie of England, than is in foure of the proudest Cities in all Italie, and take Rome for one of them” (293). Thomas Campion, the last major defender of quantitative meters, locates the debate within the humanist promotion of rhetorical eloquence as the faculty that separates man from the rest of created nature. His Observations in the Art of English Poesie provides evidence of the Renaissance habit of equating rhetoric with poetry, thereby arguing that the shift away from rhyme toward “numbers” constitutes not only a major refinement of English but a conceptualization of the English as a superior nation in the image of “the noble Grecians and Romaines whose skilfull monuments outliue barbarisme, tyed themselues to the strict obseruation of poeticall numbers” (5). His history of rhyme follows Ascham’s, with greater emphasis on the medieval veil of ignorance cast by the invading barbarians and the renaissance of learning in the early fifteenth century. The barbarian conquests resulted in a bastardized Latin that “lay most pitifully deformed, till the time of Erasmus, Rewcline, Sir Thomas More,” while the efforts of scholastics, “the illiterate Monks and Friers,” did nothing to ameliorate the situation (2). Campion, following the entrenched tradition began in Ascham, charges Italy with being rhyme’s gateway to Europe. So virulent is the strain of barbaric infection or “pollution” in his opinion that “barbarism,” in its technical

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sense, gives rise to an attributive form—the contamination of both the language and the people of “barbarized Italy”(3). In such a technical area as prosody, one can expect a great deal of confusion and misleading commentary. The most misleading, that is, historically unfounded, argument is locating the origins of rhyme in the aftermath of the fifth-century barbarian invasions as a way to explain the current favored practice among English poets. The fall of the empire coincided with the decline in learning from 450 to 700: “The Romanised upper classes that survived in the new barbarian kingdoms continued to cling, though with an ever diminishing zeal, to their old way of life. The public schools of the Empire had with a few exceptions closed their doors by the end of the fifth century” (Bolgar 79). Bolgar also points out that even when the church tried to offer an alternative educational system, the signs of degraded scholarship seemed intractable: “Jerome’s language gave some trouble even to the Romainsed whose slipshod spoken idiom differed from it in many respects, and learning it presented clerics of barbarian origin with a formidable task” (79). However, this specific story of barbarian rhyme has no historical or literary foundation. J.W.H. Atkins dismisses the myth of barbarian rhyme as “a flight of fancy,” and challenges the accuracy of Ascham’s adjusted version that identifies Simmias of Rhodes’s The Egg as the ultimate source of barbarian imitation: “The work thus referred to was, however, no product of classical Greece; it belonged to the Hellenistic age, was not written in rhyming verses, but represented one of those fantastic figure-poems in which that ingenious age delighted” (Atkins 93). In addition, Ascham misreads Quintilian, claiming that he also criticizes the use of rhyme when, in fact, Quintilian is simply warning against “an excessive use of rhyming sentences in prose, as Wilson after him had done” (93).12 Samuel Daniel spends a good deal of time rebutting Campion’s claim that a revival begins with Erasmus, accusing him of an incomplete or parochial literary history when the examples of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Laurentius Valla, this last himself an important figure in the history of rhetoric, stand as testimony to significant literary achievements. Daniel rejects the originary myth of rhyme as false also, claiming that the euphony of rhyme is something that all people everywhere have always enjoyed, “a hereditary eloquence proper to all mankind” (8). The implication of Daniel’s rebuttal is that Campion, following Ascham before him, in his anxiety to find fault with rhyme has to accomplish two goals: first, he has to discredit it, to find a way of categorizing rhyme as something unacceptable; then, he has to distance himself from it by pinpointing a very specific source, the barbarians. This last is a strategy of substitution, for without it, the criticizing subject runs the risk of being identified with stigmatized rhyme.

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Knowledge of historical difference is what, for Ascham, distinguished his moment from all previous moments in English history. And such knowledge brings with it the possibility of choice. Ascham thus presents that active model of self-fashioning to which Spenser, in seeking to have the kingdom of his own language, fits himself—a model based on choice and imitation. What Ascham most despises is the passive acceptance of “time and custom,” eating acorns with swine. (279)

Writing in the Greenblattian tradition and perspective of the protean social persona, Helgerson concludes that, in the end, the progressive stance of Ascham who sought to maintain and improve his close ties to the royal center of power, fails. The phrase from Ascham, however, needs further consideration. It appears in the section where Ascham in full rhetorical flight presses his case against the barbarism of rhyme: But now, when men know the difference, and haue, the examples, both of the best, and of the worst, surelie, to follow rather the Gothes in Rhyming, than the Greekes in trew versifying, were euen to eate ackornes with swyne, when we may freely eate wheate bread emonges men. (289)

Ascham’s reference covers a wide sweep of history from the ancient Greeks past the Hellenistic age through to the decline of the Roman Empire and the vandalizing Goths. It recalls details from Strabo the geographerhistorian with his sharp condescension for barbarian social custom of the Lusitanians, leading to the conclusion: “People who sleep on the ground, drink water, and eat acorn bread are ‘nasty’ ” (Sherwin-White 5). Strabo’s system of contrasting groups pits the Lusitanians against the Turdetani, those barbarians whose well-known capitulation to Romanization is signaled in their becoming people of the toga (3.2.15). Ascham’s reference is not only about progressive theories of individual self-fashioning for political ends, but, more insistently, replicates the system of invidious comparisons as an acceptable mode of determining cultural and literary identity. Men are opposed to swine, Turdetani distinguished from Lusitanians, Englishmen differentiated from barbarians, and rhyme contrasted to quantity. In selectively returning to the barbarian invasions of imperial Rome, English writers are effectively establishing ethnic, racial, and cultural difference as acceptable standards of literary discrimination. They perpetuate and foreground difference, symbolized in the barbarian, engaging continuity between the theories of

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Helgerson identifies Ascham’s quantitative classicism as a stance based on change and progress in contrast to Samuel Daniel’s “countermodel” resting on “immemorial custom” (278).

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literature and the real-world ideological fixations of the English subjects who produce those theories. That is, although the barbarian myth is in every way as much an artificial construct as the notion of quantity, the defense of classical versification leads English writers to mythologize the barbarian, positing thereby a relationship between their abstract poetics and cultural politics. Contrastive cultures and discriminatory poetics: the one entails the other, and both form the groundwork of a body of thought of men at the very center of English letters and government. Given the impetus to ascribe intrinsic value to English quantity, it is not surprising that rhyme is seen as a purely superficial feature that appears, unlike quantity, to yield precious little on the deep structure, metaphysical level. When rhyme is opposed to poetry, the defenders of the quantitative system critique the mere formal attention to rhyme without due regard to the matter which in turn must challenge the form. That is, the accusation is twofold: first, they are accusing these rhymers of attempting to separate the matter from the manner resulting in internal rupture and desiccation; but second, they are also complaining of a redundancy of form, mere homophony on the level of the physical stratum of sound. The accusation is against sameness and redundancy. Yet when they invoke the “barbarian” as critical tool and social antitype, they engage similar analytical procedures that they have condemned in the rhymers. First, they, too, attempt to separate the matter of the “barbarian” from his manner or form. In fact, this is the most conventionally effective intellectual strategy that is made in the whole process of naming the “barbarian”: refuse him any matter or real content of character, for such is the province of the English, and barbarians are not human, at least not in the same way Englishmen are. Second, with form remaining as the definitional category for the “barbarian,” then the constant repetition of the fixed and oppositional category of “barbarian” is designed to function as shorthand, an economic as well as reductive way of dealing with social differences. The barbarian is both reduced and made redundant: he is always the same, an uninflected figure that can never challenge the fixed categories. Definitional redundancy, analogous to homophony in the case of rhyme, is not accidental. It is a necessary and primordial function of producing static, fixed oppositional categories in a rhetoric of difference.

D OUBLE TR A NSL ATION A ND THE TR A NSCENDENTA L S IGNIFIER Ascham’s The Scholemaster stands as an important English contribution to the discussions about rhetoric that were generally dominated by the more substantial and speculative work of continental writers.13 As the title indicates, Ascham engages his subject from the practical

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forum of the Elizabethan classroom, leaving behind a detailed record of teacher-student exchange that contributes vividly to our knowledge of Elizabethan grammar school education. Although my primary inquiry into Ascham concerns his pivotal role in pioneering the discourse on barbarians within an emerging Elizabethan poetics, I would like to comment on the complementary role of Ascham’s theory of translation.14 William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) had argued the right of the laity to direct access to the Bible in English that would reduce dependence on a corrupt clergy.15 His faith in the capacity of the vernacular to sustain accurate translations of this sacred and central text to English culture is announced in his usual trenchant style: “Saint Jerom also translated the bible into his mother tongue: why may not we also? They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue, it is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liars” (89). In the secular domain where literature intersects with court culture, Thomas Hoby’s 1548 translation of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier also demonstrates the rhetorical capacity of the vernacular to enhance England’s literary competence. Hoby’s belief in “a mans owne native tongue” affirms his investment in defining what “England” and “Englishness” might come to mean (4). In both the cases of Tyndale’s pragmatic end and Hoby’s cultural purpose, translation provides an initial frontier on which the campaign for the vernacular is waged. The entire quantitative movement, in its attempt to discover English equivalents of classical models, is motivated by and is a product of this vernacular trend but at the same time relates to it ambiguously in its preferential treatment of Greek and Latin as the master languages. Ascham remains firm on this point: “the prouidence of God hath left vnto vs no other tong, saue onelie the Greek and Latin tong, the trew preceptes, and perfite examples of eloquence” (283). The Scholemaster, as an educational treatise, boasts Ascham’s polemic for double translation, from Latin to English and back again. The beginning student starts with the rudimentary texts, such as certain epistles of Cicero, which provide the essentials of grammar and syntax.16 The teacher reads the text; expounds the content and purpose; translates it into English, reading in such a way to foreground a clear understanding of the content; parses the grammar and syntax; then invites the student to begin parsing in his turn. The next stage represents the practice of double translation: with the rules learned in context, the student on his own translates into English in his little paper book; then after approximately an hour’s break, he takes another paper book and translates from his English version back into Latin, aiming at equating the original verbatim. Where the student makes errors, the teacher corrects to attain a reproduction of the original.17 The emphasis of Ascham’s method falls on a mastery of form with an indifference to content. Or, to put it differently, Ascham assumes

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a complete and unproblematic transmission of content as well as perfect code equivalence as the student passes from one linguistic system to another. Equivalence, along with untranslatability, has long remained one of the cruxes of translation theory and practice, leading Susan BassnettMcGuire to conclude that it “should not be approached as a search for sameness, since sameness cannot even exist between two TL [target language] versions of the same text, let alone between the SL [source language] and the TL version” (29). She cites Albrecht Neubert’s use of Pierce’s categories in proposing the view that “translation equivalence must be considered a semiotic category, comprising a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic component” with semantic equivalence taking precedence in a hierarchy of translation considerations (27). Ascham ignores both the semantic and pragmatic categories in his proposition of a model of pedagogic translation, leading to an implicit assertion of what George Steiner calls “transcendental meaning” (276). In Ascham’s emphasis on the student’s rediscovery of the verbatim original, he shows no philological sensitivity to the incompleteness of translation except in the case of the teacher’s correcting departures from the original source language. Each translation falls short. At best, wrote Huet, translation can, through cumulative self-correction, come nearer to the demands of the original, every tangent more closely drawn. But there can never be a total circumscription. From the perception of unending inadequacy stems a particular sadness. (Steiner 269)

None of this sadness ever appears in Ascham as he presses his case for Ciceronianism, a complete surrender to the original. It may be that since Ascham’s real focus rests on the return of the student to the source language rather than on the target language, he is far more optimistic about equating the original, but such a realization is only possible within the context of having virtually memorized the source language text. However, Ascham’s text does approach issues in translation in the broader sense when he classifies three types of translation: translatio linguarum, paraphrases, and metaphrasis. The first is translation as he has discussed it in the context of double translation. He rejects the last two because both appear to abandon a strict adherence to the original. Paraphrasis, which Pliny termed “Audax contentio,” a bold contest, Ascham defines as “not onelie to expresse at large with moe wordes, but to striue and contend (as Quintilian saith) to translate the best latin authors, into other latin wordes, as many or thereaboutes” (256). And metaphrasis is to translate “out of verse, either into prose, or into some other kinde of meter: or els out of prose into verse” (253). Ascham’s three categories are remarkably similar to those put forward by Roman Jakobson in his essay “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” Jakobson’s

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first category corresponds to Ascham’s paraphrasis: “Intralingual translation or rewording.” His second corresponds to Ascham’s first: “Interlingual translation or translation proper.” And his last appears to be a fuller extension of Ascham’s metaphrasis that is limited to intergeneric transformations: “Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of nonverbal sign systems” (233). Ascham would dismiss Jakobson’s first and last categories, choosing to focus uniquely on “translation proper,” his closed field of transcendental meaning.18 Yet it is this category that Jacques Derrida interrogates in Jakobson in “Des Tours de Babel.” Derrida’s key issue in this essay is the “proper name” and its untranslatability, so his attention is caught by Jakobson’s apparent inability to provide a synonym or another name for “interlingual translation” as he does for the other two: Jakobson merely resorts to restatement in the phrase “or translation proper.” Again, to put the issue in Jakobson’s own terms, Jakobson resorts to intralingual translation to approximate a definition for a second and presumably clearly defined category, demonstrating, perhaps inadvertently, the difficulty in deciding when translation is ever a simple operation or whether we are not always creating translations of translations of translations. This is what Derrida attempts to explain about the term “translation” itself, claiming a status for it as complex as a proper name, especially the primordial proper name “Babel”: In relation to this word [“translation”], when it is a question of translation “proper,” the other uses of the word “translation” would be in a position of intralingual and inadequate translation, like metaphors, in short, like twists and turns of translation in the proper sense. (1985: 174)

This process of an indefinite series of twists and turns produces the paradoxical feature of “translation” and the proper name: it invites a translation but makes translation impossible, for the peculiar nature of its own indeterminate unfolding from the literal to the figurative to the literal and back again suspends translation. However, Derrida’s analysis does not yield impenetrable indeterminism so much as it asserts its logical opposite: a monolithic meaning that constantly escapes us even though its symbolic site is at the center of a proverbial Chinese box. He ends up arguing the impenetrability of the proper name and the untranslatability of “translation” that assumes ultimately, one could say, the status of a transcendental signifier. When asked by Julia Kristeva in an interview whether a nonexpressive “logical-mathematical notation” would be the most critical—both in the sense of “crucial” and “interrogative”—for language, Derrida remained

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carefully aware of the over-valorization of such a linguistic pedagogy that could lead to what I have termed here the establishing of a transcendental signifier: “We must also be wary of the ‘naïve’ side of formalism and mathematism” which could erect “a metaphysics of the simple” (1981: 35).19 Yet, in his argument on translation, he insists on an impenetrable “translation”—not as expressing a signified “translation” but as “translation” in itself, a “logical-mathematical notation”—making that ambiguous and dangerous transition, almost imperceptibly to himself it appears, into a metaphysics of the simple. He seems to be aware of this difficulty he has created and tries to allow room for some way to penetrate the mystery of the transcendental signifier by resigning himself to one of the most primitive forms of translation, word for word interlinear notations. He concludes the essay with a quote from Maurice de Gandillac: “For, to some degree, all the great writings, but to the highest point sacred Scripture, contain between the lines their virtual translation. The interlinear version of the sacred text is the model or ideal of all translation” (1985: 205). One recognizes the appeal of a nominal indeterminism in the notion of interlinearity to Derrida. Yet he is not convincing on this point, for his belated appeal for the verbum pro verbo translation appears as wishful thinking, overshadowed by the logical force of the preceding long argument and its implications.20 In fact a passage appearing shortly before the Gandillac defense is more in keeping with the implications of the instauration of a transcendental signifier: That is what is named from here on Babel: the law is imposed by the name of God who in one stroke commands and forbids you to translate by showing and hiding from you the limit. But it is not only the Babelien [sic] situation, not only a scene or a structure. It is also the status and the event of the Babelian, of the text of Genesis (a unique text in this regard) as sacred text. (1985: 204)

The transcendental signifier invites one to unravel its mysteries like a sacred text but remains untranslatable precisely because of its status as sacred. I have used this detour through Jakobson and Derrida to foreground the nature of Ascham’s double translation. In short, Ascham’s transparent linguistic codes, which allow an unimpeded transition from Latin to English and back, are to be compared with Derrida’s notion of untranslatability. Derrida’s proper name—what I have called his transcendental signifier—is untranslatable because it is at once so transparent that it defies/defers restatement or intralingual determination. Like Derrida’s proper name that demands translation but forbids it, Ascham’s system demands a translation of Latin with a prerequisite return to the original. In fact, “translation proper” does not take place as the translation back into

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Latin is only an attempt to restate the original since other approximations are eschewed in favor of conformity to the verbatim original. Ascham’s goal of formal mastery, with the indifference to meaning, grants priority to the signifiers called Latin. And Latin is granted, within the economy of his system, the status of the proper name, the sacred language. The vernacular ambitions of quantitative verse in Ascham, reveals a highly problematic approach to enhancing Englishness as a transcendental culture. The oppositions implicit in the quantitative enterprise— classical and native, Latin and English—foreground a set of linguistic and cultural translations that is as blurred as that cited by Derrida: Does Ascham propose a translation from Latin to English and back, which would leave the vernacular as a barbarous tongue always in need of translation? Or is he translating from English to Latin values and back, which would mean that quantitative verse is only nominally English but substantially Latin? The desired effect that Ascham appears to attain is an interpenetration of Latin and English that yields an indeterminate relation between both: “like metaphors, in short, like twists and turns of translation.” Or, by contrast, Latin so completely dominates English that we return to the model of consensual hegemony where England is incorporated into the transcendental signifier that is Latin. Because the quantitative movement belongs to England’s attempt to put itself on the cultural map of Europe, in light of Tyndale’s, Hoby’s, and Harvey’s appeals, Ascham’s treatment imagines the invention of Englishness or England as a proper name with an insurmountable subservience to Latin. If we read Ascham in the broader context of the quantitative movement and vernacularization, we perceive that Elizabethan poetics is overseeing the invention of a new hybrid product English-Latin, itself ironically a barbarism.21 What I have suggested in this reading of Ascham and the quantitative movement reveals a philosophical will that is summarized in Derrida’s discourse on the proper name. However, the reality of Ascham’s desire in effecting this invention is best described by Jakobson’s third category of translation, “transmutation,” for the function of poetics among these sixteenth-century writers is to establish an “intersemiotic” equivalence and translatability between literary theory and English culture and life. The product of a new, hybrid English returns us to the moment of Babel where the “single lip, one speech” of the Semites motivated the political will behind the building of the tower: “colonial violence” or “linguistic imperialism” (Derrida, 1985: 169, 174). And why did God intervene in the building of the tower? Derrida replies that it may have been for wanting to “accede to the highest,” but incontestably for having wanted thus to make a name for themselves, to give themselves the name, to construct for and by themselves

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And for what reason does Ascham, Harvey, and Spenser invent English as Englishness and England, “the one as the other”? They too want to “make a name for themselves,” to have in Harvey’s words “oure owne cuntrye” or in Spenser’s, “a kingdome of oure owne Language.” If Elizabethan classicism initially signals a self-generated colonialism, with England as the colonized object, as I have argued, then an important transition is inaugurated within the quantitative movement where England’s own colonial will, this time as imperial subject, is being exerted. And this, of course, is the ultimate intersemiotic translation, for these men are writing in the age of overseas exploration when the new barbarians—proto-imperial subjects—encountered by Elizabethan voyagers loomed on the cultural and political horizon. England is thus poised at the moment where it attempts to reject its position as a marginal culture and begins to assert itself as dominant with the attendant conditions of internal coherence both on the level of poetics and politics. This is the historical transition that is figured in the parallel moment of Babel, where a group of scattered peoples finds a common language and discovers the potential to exert “colonial violence” and “linguistic imperialism.”

C OLONI A L TROPOLOGY That suppression or distortion of historical fact—forgetting—is an indispensable feature of nation formation bears some relevance to the function of the barbarian myth. Because “[u]nity is always effected by means of brutality,” there will always be a need to forget that history of the movement from fragmented tribe to national whole (Renan 11). While trying to avoid an anachronistic post-Enlightenment use of “nation,” one can still maintain that these general principles apply to Ascham’s forgetting of the acts of violence of classical Greece and imperial Rome against barbarians. Instead, he has manufactured a moment of literary violence on the part of the barbarians for which the classical age, in this idealization of ancient Greece and imperial Rome, has no equivalent history. The classical age, that is, exists at a degree zero of literary violence. In the most flagrant instance of convenient memory loss of the fluid and mixed identity of Europe, despite the possibility of recognizing some dominant barbarian groups with certain nations, Ascham, by specifically naming the Goths and the Huns, disavows any possible association of the history of Britain with the invading tribes: “The truth,” Renan concludes, “is that there is no pure race and that to make politics depend

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their own name, to gather themselves there (“that we no longer be scattered”), as in the unity of a place which is at once a tongue and a tower, the one as well as the other, the one as the other. (1985: 169)

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upon ethnographic analysis is to surrender it to a chimera” (14). The reinvention of the classical purity of language that we see in Ascham goes counter to the zoological and cultural data that Renan presents and, in fact, supports another of his contentions: “The political importance attaching to languages derives from their being regarded as signs of race” (16). Because race, Anthony Appiah agrees, even as genetically understood by biologists, does not carry the differential significance we tend generally to assign it in everyday parlance, its real value lies in its being a means to create categories of difference for practical ends (1992: 35–42). The barbarian myth contains two separate but contingent historical processes. The first involves England, its own barbarian heritage and fractured tribal past and the early modern moment when a national whole is being created. The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor. Metaphor, as the etymology of the word suggests, transfers the meaning of home and belonging, across the “middle passage,” or the central European steppes, across those distances, and cultural differences, that span the imagined community of the nation-people. (Bhabha 291)

We expect that Homi Bhabha’s comments in “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation” apply primarily to what in contemporary culture studies we might call “marginal” peoples, but the perception of the literary and cultural marginalization of England in the middle of the sixteenth century was an important component of the English identity as various writers testify. As a marginal group, they, too, are transferring—or translating—certain meanings of home via the barbarian travels across Europe. The important difference is that England, through the evidence of Ascham’s text, has made a choice to forget its barbarian heritage and adopt another. The second stage is the adoption of its classical heritage and spreading it as the literary norm, what we might call the “pedagogical” stage of an elite-driven cultural colonization, arriving at a fortuitous conjunction of Ascham and Bhabha: “The pedagogical founds its narrative authority in a tradition of the people, described by Poulantzas as a moment of becoming designated by itself, encapsulated in a succession of historical moments that represents an eternity produced by self-generation” (229). In the English instance of the privileged “people” of the elite, their production of texts that multiply the myth of the barbarian and the mythology of England constitutes the “succession” of “moments” Bhabha describes. Bhabha conceives the pedagogical as the official national myth accrued and shaped over time that

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is imposed on the people without distinguishing among the population, rendering them “objects” of a particular kind of historical discourse: “the people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin or event” (297). And the barbarian myth as the vehicle of understanding English poetics and culture rejects the notion of a plural nation. From colonial hegemony as consensual on the part of the quantitativists, one arrives at a model of domination within the culture: the elite-sponsored imposition of classicism as normative. This internal cultural imperialism presages the political imperialism that has already begun, in effect, in Elizabethan maritime ventures. A colonial pattern, that would have a long historical life, was effectively being rehearsed at the heart of the quantitative literary enterprise. Ascham’s exclusionary barbarian myth coincides neatly with Bhabha’s conceptualization of one model of nation-imagining. To the extent that Ascham privileges the function of the “paedagogus,” he prefigures Bhabha’s theoretical construct of a pedagogical authority within culture and nation formation that tends toward silencing difference. In Ascham the “praeceptor”—teacher of learning—is united with the “paedagogus”—the teacher of manners—resulting in Ascham’s central figure of intersemiotic translation: the tropology of poetics and culture. Recalling the genesis of The Scholemaster, involving Sir William Cecil’s report concerning an incident of badly beaten students at Eaton, we identify Ascham’s polemic on the need for gentleness in instruction as a model of the benign pedagogue as benevolent colonial master.22 One final point: Bhabha’s essay is written from the perspective of postcolonials living in cultures where they are marginal, with all the implications of political and cultural lack of privilege that this term carries. Bhabha sees the contemporary postcolonial intellectual as surviving in a cultural space structured according to what I described earlier as a modified hegemony. I used the expression in the context of describing the ideal realization of the quantitative movement, where the classical accommodates the native without erasing it: domination is modified by the new vision of shared performance. However, even this “ideal” situation retains a strong hegemonic force since the classical remains the standard of value. This is precisely the political parallel that Bhabha identifies for the postcolonial inhabiting “foreign” nation-spaces, and he tries to propose a theory that undermines hegemony and allows each individual or group its autonomous existence within a plural culture. The performative intervenes in the sovereignty of the nation’s selfgeneration by casting a shadow between the people as “image” and its signification as a differentiating sign of Self, distinct from the Other or the Outside. In place of the polarity of a prefigurative self-generating

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The value of these comments becomes clearer in the dramatic literature of the English Renaissance where the Renaissance neo-barbarian, the Moor, is variously conceived as an “extrinsic Other” or as assimilated citizen—the matter to be taken up fully in the next chapter. The latter identity makes for an intense internal cultural upheaval, typified in the following formulation inspired from Saussurean linguistics and deconstruction theory: “The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal form of social representation, a space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations” (Bhabha 299). While trying to avoid the inherent pitfalls awaiting the modern postcolonial intellectual, Bhabha, like Ascham, resorts to tropology as he attempts to tread carefully through the minefield of theoretical and practical issues as is already evident in the passage cited earlier where the genealogy of loss that is the “nation” can only be accommodated in “the language of metaphor.” The tropological trajectory is tripartite: from culture to poetics and back, the last arc representing the interrogation of the relationship, explicit or implicit, between language or literary theories and the particular cultural contexts in which they are made. In Bhabha’s case, the tropological trace can be stated thus: the trajectory moves from the postcolonial dynamic of a “mixed” nation to language models inspired by deconstruction theories of “slippage” (“a temporality of the ‘in-between’ through the ‘gap’ or ‘emptiness’ of the signifier”) and back to practical resolutions designed for a performative social dynamic. Bhabha’s exposition, by not focusing only on the perspective of the dominant culture, attempts to get past the closed binary of contrasting cultures as existing separate from and outside each other. He attempts to re-examine the problem from the inside, as it were, from the perspective of marginal people who have attained some degree of assimilation. He is also trying to avoid the trap of a Hegelian totalized discourse that taints even the counternarrative of the marginal subjects, forcing them, ironically, to define themselves, yet again, within the prescriptions of the dominant culture. These last two sets of concerns, however, are not engaged by the emergent barbarian narratives of Ascham and others, for their goal is to fix an insurmountable breach with strangers that can only perpetuate discourses of difference and domination. Ascham’s tropology begins with the adulterated state of English culture and advances to a synthetic Anglo-Latin verse form as an antilogical rhetorizing of the culture—one fixed in opposition to other

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nation itself and extrinsic Other nations, the performative introduces a temporality of the “in-between” through the “gap” or “emptiness” of the signifier that punctuates linguistic difference. (299)

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cultures— that eventually performs and presages cultural and political imperialism. As we behold intently the advent of the tropology of colonialism in the work of Ascham, we are struck by the irony and the burden of the legacy bequeathed to Bhabha as a representative postcolonial intellectual—to undo the histories of accrued tropologies mapped by Ascham from Greece to Rome to Renaissance England—by trying to find the right set of intersemiotic solutions to resolve cultural and political issues in terms of language. Or in Bhabha’s own words, he aims at a “cultural construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation” (292). Indeed, this can also be read, though from the different perspective of a nascent colonial semiotics of culture, as an accurate gloss on the quantitative project. Barbarian pedagogy, the disciplining of the barbarian’s linguistic systems, has made incursions, even across the reaches of history, at the most profound levels of cultural poetics.

A CHIEV ING E NGLISHNESS The work, then, to establish and stabilize the vernacular begun by proponents of translation, Tyndale and Hoby, becomes increasingly intensified in a debate that from our historical perspective seems quaint and even frustrating especially since quantitative verse never did—and some claim never could, given the nature of English—succeed in taking root in England (Ward and Waller 289–95). But it is precisely that singularity of the debate that flares up and passes away during that crucial span of roughly thirty years, important for the profound literary and political achievements of the Elizabethan age, that throws into relief the cultural and political aspirations that are at the center of a more widely entrenched passionate bid for Englishness.

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S H A K E S P E A R E ’S A F R I C A N S : P E R FOR M I NG R ACE I N E A R LY M O D E R N E N G L A N D R ESISTING I NTERPRETATION, OR W H ATEV ER H A PPENED TO A NTHONIE A ND B INNIE? Writing about the New World demand for interpreters, Stephen Greenblatt offers the dire assessment: “the principal means chosen by the Europeans to establish linguistic contact was kidnapping” (1991: 106); and elsewhere he observes, “the primal crime in the New World was committed in the interest of language” (1990: 17). Beyond Greenblatt’s New World scope of interest, however, similar crimes of kidnapping were occurring in Africa resulting in historically new circumstances: Africans in England who were learning to speak English. The history of an African presence begins in earnest in the mid-sixteenth century with John Lok’s return from his second Guinea voyage in 1555 with five Africans—described as “black slaves”—whose arrival would have an immediate impact on questions regarding racial coexistence and mixing in England (Hakluyt 6: 176).1 Michael Neill advises against conflating slavery and blackness, in light of recent European colonial activity, because slavery “was part of a much older construction of human difference in which the distinctions that mattered most were not those between different ‘colours’ or ‘races,’ but those between master and servant, or between bond and free” (2006: 125).2 Still, Winthrop Jordan points out that by 1589, the date of Richard Hakluyt’s publication of the Lok account concerning the five “black slaves,” the seemingly gratuitous identification of blackness with slavery affirms what had already become a cultural reflex (60). More

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importantly, the episode suggests that language, and not only color, became inserted into the hierarchy of the master-slave differential. In contrast to twenty-four dead Englishmen, many expiring from exposure to “the clime of the colde regions, as betweene the Islands of Azores and England,” the five African men enter the canon of English narratives on Africa as survivors, on the whole unscathed by the changes in weather (6: 176). Arriving on the coast of Guinea in 1556, the merchant William Towerson recalls that “a fellowe came aboord our shippe without feare, and assone as he came, he demaunded, why we had not brought againe their men, which the last yeere we tooke away, and could tell us that there were five taken away by Englishmen.” Towerson explains “that they were in England well used, and were there kept till they could speake the language, and then they should be brought againe to be a helpe to Englishmen in this Countrey” (6: 200). The following year, their training completed, three of the five Africans return with Towerson to Hanta where they “were well knowen, and the men of the towne wept for joy when they saw them, and demanded of them where Anthonie and Binnie had bene,” only to learn that these two had remained in England to “bee brought home the next voyage” (6: 218). Thereupon, trading begins, with Towerson worrying about the excessive price demanded by the Africans, presumably now able to make his concern abundantly clear, thanks to his newly acquired translators. On one level, Africans enter the English consciousness in the sixteenth century in the global context of exchange, an economic interaction predicated on their usefulness as trading partners or facilitators of communication. The young man who expressed concern over Anthonie and Binnie was “solde 39 basons and two small white sawcers, for three ounces, &c.” by Towerson while the three returning African translators, displaced from among those who eagerly awaited their return, are described by the English as “our Negros” (6: 200, 218). These co-opted blacks play a crucial role in allaying the fears and suspicions of those in West Africa who had already been poorly treated by the Portuguese, leading Eldred Jones to list the job description of these and subsequent Africans taken by European traders “as interpreters and public relations men” (12). Their inflicted training in English, however, was not simply a matter of learning to translate the context-specific language of trade, but also bore the attitudinal and racial bias embedded in the history of barbarism. The generally onesided approach to language learning—Europeans showing little interest in acquiring knowledge of local languages—reinforced linguistic hierarchy and, following Greenblatt, revealed a coded political intent: “to study a language is to place oneself in a situation of dependency, to submit” (1991: 104). More specifically, a marginal note of the Towerson narrative proclaims, “This language seemeth partly to be corrupt,” and the Africans’ transportation into England for language rehabilitation is carried out

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under the presumption of English linguistic purity and superiority that reigns over the barbarism of African speech (6: 201). Whatever happened, though, to Anthonie and Binnie, the two African men who never return? Their intended destiny in the trade system required their assimilation into the English language program as forced subjects of a racializing linguistic economy. Yet their actual fate remains unclear. Were they ever brought back to their home, their place on the West Coast of Africa? Were they lost forever to the economic and racial contact zone, negated in the construction of an emergent maritime nation driven by the fetish for objects of trade that ultimately requires a forgetting of the person? Were they, like Caliban, merely consigned to the irredeemable status of a “vile race” (1.2.359)?3 Or as survivors of oceanic perils, the Africans resided in England, resisted studying English (intentionally or otherwise) and, thereby, rejected the racial politics of linguistic incorporation? Against the emergent history of transcultural interaction, the previous chapter examined language reform from the English perspective; in this current chapter, the critical point of view shifts to the other side of this international equation. Into the interstices of history step Aaron and Othello, barbarians in Shakespeare’s fictional accounts of cross-cultural and racial mixing that function as meditations on the reactions of non-European immigrants relocated in the changing global early modern scene of encounter.

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In a well-known passage on the inconclusive historical setting of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, T.J.B. Spencer observed: The play does not assume a political situation known to Roman history; it is, rather, a summary of Roman politics. It is not so much that any particular set of political institutions is assumed in Titus, but rather that it includes all the political institutions that Rome ever had. The author seems anxious, not to get it all right, but to get it all in. (32)

Despite Spencer’s additional critique—immature scholarship and, as a result, superficial realism—his characterization of the play’s historical indeterminacy points inadvertently to Shakespeare’s goal: the intellectual determinism of the barbarian binary. The play’s deliberate invocation of fluid periodicity produces the unyielding transhistorical European trope of civilization opposed to barbarism. Though the ultimate collapse of Rome and its traditions at the hands of barbarians occurred in the fourth century, the cultural transmission and Renaissance reception of this cataclysmic event assumed a mythic force and overdetermined narrative teleology informing the oppositional paradigm of Roman interaction with

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A nobler man, a braver warrior, Lives not this day within the city walls. He by the senate is accited home From weary wars against the barbarous Goths. (1.1.25–28)

The city walls are the iconic, structural bulwark demarcating the division of restive barbarian territories from the imperial sanctity of Rome, “above all urbs in its etymological sense, the enclave of civilization ringed round with a protective wall, outside of which the dark forces of barbarism lurk” (Velz 11). Titus’s victorious ten-year military campaign against attacking powers has not only subdued the “barbarous Goths,” but has also reproduced intact the barbarian binary that is the mainstay of Roman cultural and political identity. As such, the historical scene announced in Titus Andronicus is precisely steeped in the classical intellectual tradition that, this study argues, informs the racial imaginary of early modern England. The schematic barbarian binary is, however, qualified in Shakespeare’s presentation of a hybrid, mixed Rome, equally guilty of the charges of wanton brutality and inhumane savagery uniquely accredited to the Goths. Titus, to take the archetypal citizen and indefatigable defender of Rome, advances from slaying his own son over a disagreement to inducing cannibalism in Tamora’s consumption of her sons baked in a pie. His own brother Marcus warns, “Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous” (1.1.383), and Tamora’s acid accusation indicts Titus for the ritual murder of her son, “O cruel, irreligious piety” (1.1.133), mocking the Roman patriarch, “Andronicus surnamed Pius” (1.1.23) after Rome’s legendary founder, Aeneas. Shakespeare summons the apparently rigid division entailed in the barbarian binary only to subvert it and undercut the audience’s seemingly assured knowledge to question fixed assumptions about ethnic difference and cultural superiority deeply embedded in the Western intellectual tradition. How, then, might this questioning apply to Aaron the “barbarous Moor” (2.2.78); that is, to what extent does Shakespeare also invite revision of Aaron’s manifest biography of rape, mutilation, and murder? Aaron is, after all, that “black ill-favoured fly” (3.2.67) whom Marcus, the senator and voice of Roman reason, chops up by proxy in a dramatic allegorical fantasy of murder and cultural eradication. As if accepting the grim Roman logic, Emily Bartels concludes that the play reinforces the cliché of blackness, other ambiguities aside: “although the play creates a chaos in which distinctions between right and wrong, insider and outsider, self and other are problematically obscured, it does not challenge the racial stereotype” (1990: 442).

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its political enemies. In Marcus’s nomination speech, he praises Titus as singularly suited to be elected emperor:

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Still, Aaron’s assiduous protection of his infant son from death, a defenseless victim marked for ethnic cleansing, typically garners the sole positive critical sentiment despite the scorn heaped on the escaping father by Lucius, the new Roman paterfamilias: “Say, wall-eyed slave, whither wouldst thou convey/ This growing image of they fiend-like face?” (5.1.44–45). A central motif, the patriarchal thematic of brothers and fathers and sons—most notably figured in Titus’s twenty-five sons, the numerical symbolism designating typological pedigree and descent from Priam, Troy’s ancient king who had fifty (1.1.82–83)—allows for more than the comparative care of one’s offspring that sets Aaron apart from the child-sacrificing Andronici. The play’s insistence on lineage and ancestry is grounded in an early modern meaning of “race,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as a “limited group of persons descended from a common ancestor; a house, family, kindred”; a “tribe, nation, or people, regarded as of common stock”; and a “group of several tribes or peoples, regarded as forming a distinct ethnical stock.”4 Reading “race” as genealogy, however, accounts for more than progeny, offering Aaron’s biblical ancestry as significant in rereading his racial and ethnic role in the play. Leslie Fiedler remarks in passing that “Aaron’s very name, of course, connects him with Jewish tradition,” but the filiation has largely remained unexplored, especially for understanding eloquence in the formation of an ethnic and racial identity (178). The story of the Israelites in Egypt begins with the seventy members of Jacob’s house who over the course of four hundred and thirty years grow into an entire nation.5 Witnessing the rapid proliferation of the Hebrews and fearing that they will outnumber the Egyptians, the new king of this post-Joseph era imposes a set of draconian measures, appointing slave masters to decimate the Jewish population through harsh, unrelenting physical labor. But the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them. Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” Therefore, they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. (Exodus1: 7–14).6

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Driven by demographic hysteria fueling fears of Jewish occupation, enemy alliance, and domination, the Pharaoh chooses a policy of genocide and officially legitimizes friction between Jews and Egyptians, two diverse ethnic and religious groups. The Book of Exodus thus opens with this perceived threat of internal destabilization from an oppressed slave society, and Aaron, the brother of Moses, makes his appearance on the stage of history as the bearer of words, the eloquent man who will deliver God’s message of “racial” deliverance to a recalcitrant dictator-king to free the tribal descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob (also named Israel) now “regarded as forming a distinct ethnical stock” in a hostile Egyptian environment. Called by God from exile in Midian to Egypt to demand the freedom of the enslaved Israelites, Moses hesitates, claiming that he lacks the speech, the rhetorical skills necessary for this daunting political appointment of confronting the Pharaoh: “But Moses said to the Lord, ‘O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue’ ” (Exodus 4:10). Marc Shell suggests that because the “chronology of Moses’ life divides into three forty-year geolinguistic divisions: Egyptian, Midianite, and Hebrew”—his adoptive years as an Egyptian prince, flight to Midian after killing an Egyptian, and return to lead his fellow Hebrews out of bondage—difficulty communicating in languages Moses had probably not spoken for more than forty years might be a natural consequence (117). Such a reading takes into account Moses’ ethnic estrangement as a cultural alien to both fellow Hebrews and oppressor Egyptians, which correlates linguistic familiarity and mastery with racial identity. Having arrived in Egypt to face the violent backlash of renewed repressive measures against Hebrew slaves following his interference, Moses, the beleaguered ambassador, appeals once again to God, here rendered in modernized spelling from the Geneva Bible translation: “Behold, the children of Israel hearken not unto me, how then shall Pharaoh hear me, which am of uncircumcised lips” (Exodus 6:12)? Where circumcision functions as a cultural rite of ethnic identification by excising excrescence, “uncircumcised lips” betrays an inauthentic, unsanctioned speech whose linguistic infelicities have to be shed before racial citizenship can be granted. The marginal gloss to the 1560 Geneva translation of Exodus 6:12 clarifies the recognizable terms in which Moses’ speech defect would have been understood in the sixteenth century: “barbarous and rude in speech, & by this word (uncircumcised) is signified the whole corruption of man’s nature.” Permitted as a substitute speaker for the barbarous Moses, Aaron, the older brother and Levite priest, is the eloquent man whose command of language before Pharaoh affects the eventual passage of the enslaved Hebrews to political freedom and toward establishing a nation. Moses’

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importunity, “Oh my Lord, please send someone else,” is met with God’s reply: “What of your brother Aaron the Levite? I know that he can speak fluently” (Exodus 4:13–14). The Geneva translation characterizes well Aaron’s role as mouthpiece: “he shall be thy spokesman to the people: he shall be, even he shall be as thy mouth” (Exodus 4:16). In the Exodus context of enslavement, forced labor, and ethnic subjection, Aaron’s eloquence represents resistance to tyranny, the rejection of persecution, and opposition to racial disenfranchisement of the house of Israel, this “tribe, nation, or people, regarded as of common stock.” In light of this literary genealogy, the largely negative readings of Shakespeare’s Aaron might undergo some revision. As scholars attest, the exodus narrative does not exist in any extrabiblical history, and its high adaptability quotient derives, in part, from the lack of empirical specificity that allows for broad cultural appropriation.7 The narrative’s inestimable efficacy resides in its enduring power as transmissible cultural memory, a portable history rehearsing the agonistic structure of political oppression and flight to freedom. Elaborating a reception theory approach to history as memory, Jan Assmann proposes the notion of “mnemohistory,” an allusion to Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, to describe the circulation of historical narrative as narrative remembered, distinct from data-driven positivism, by a selfdefining cultural collective.8 Such an approach to history pays attention to the adaptations and adjustments to received narrative in the work of cultural self-fashioning; it also understands that the “past and present are interrelated in collective memory, and the task of mnemohistory is to chart the forces, strains, and transformations in the relationship” (Hendel 604). Titus Andronicus’s Aaron elicits the tensions of such a memorial paradigm. Aaron is the archetypal black villain of recent social and theatrical vintage, George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1588–89) establishing a virtually uninterrupted Elizabethan and Jacobean theater tradition (Othello being the exception). At the same time, Shakespeare evokes a memorial overlay, drawn from the exodus narrative, of Aaron the eloquent spokesman, the resistor in history’s mimetic drama of ethnic and racial oppression. Appealing to our contemporary racial sensibilities, Jeannette White conceives Shakespeare’s Aaron’s behavior as reactive, the defensive, retaliatory acts of a black man subjected to a history of intolerable social persecution (348). The exodus scenario as intertext confirms such a reading from a literary and historical perspective, requiring the audience to understand the Roman trope of “civilization” as declaring ideological warfare on barbarian antitypes, where imperial aggression as its material correlate produces a cast of prisoners brought under the “Roman yoke” (1.1.114). In this oppressive Roman scene, Aaron alone at his first appearance epitomizes the classic barbarian trope: as barbaros he remains totally silent

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for the first five hundred lines, the handicapped speaker, the man without the master language, the outsider whose language deficits register his foreignness. His opening majestic speech, a Marlovian soliloquy, erodes the audience’s initial perception and undermines the hermetic security of the linguistic Roman wall to raise fears of cultural infiltration.9 It is Aaron, as well, among the other barbarians, whose intellectual pedigree matches any of the Andronici; he not only recognizes the Horatian citation wrapped around a weapon sent by Titus, but unlike Tamora’s naïve sons, he also deconstructs the code of the gift as a debt that he must pay with his life (4.2.19–32). His most gruesome crime, overseeing the mutilation of Lavinia, is not merely inspired by criminal necessity: the covering of her rape by cutting out her tongue or amputating her hands, thereby rendering her quiet. In this play that insists on the relentless, literal enactment of literary antecedent, metaphor, or intellectual trope, Lavinia is barbarized—the Moor’s angry reprisal against the very core of Roman identity and intellectual culture erected on the notion of Aaron, and others like him, as barbarous man.10 The violence of the Roman linguistic system is exposed, the horrors of its ethnic and racial practices made visible, in a gendered pageant of corporal desecration. Linguistic porosity, that produces the eloquent Aaron as a menace, is markedly countered by color. Whereas the Goths, the white barbarians, find easy assimilation into Roman culture with Tamora rising to power as empress, Aaron is excluded because of terminal blackness, his son destined for death as a sign of racial cancellation, the end of the black man’s line. The foregrounding of Aaron’s progeny sustains the application of “race,” meaning genealogy, tribe, or family group, to Africans, members sharing a black identity now threatened with annihilation. Titus Andronicus dramatizes the language-color nexus at a crucial historical juncture in late sixteenth-century England. The Renaissance re-emergence of the barbarian trope traced in this study, whose inherent weakness is linguistic adaptation, had to be buttressed by another less permeable system relying on the apparent biophysical fixity of color. The death warrant posted for Aaron’s son reminds us that difference, whether in language or color, is never sufficient in racist societies, and reveals a literal, murderous intent of racial paradigms that euphemistically masquerade as civilized ideas that kill. Aaron’s obstinate refusal to allow this perceived genocide while embracing his blackness as a badge of racial pride (4.2.52–182) returns the audience to the scene of mnemohistory where Pharaoh’s attempt to eradicate the Jews is memorialized in the Elizabethan project to expel blacks from England during the 1590s. Moreover, with the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, except for converts, Aaron stands for a conjoined African and Jewish heritage signifying cultural and racial debarment for the early modern period. As could be said of Africans,

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“English writers increasingly turned their attention to the national status of the Jews, partly in response to unprecedented challenges to their own national identity and destiny” (Shapiro 173). Demographic hysteria over the foreign population explosion, once again, targets “the great numbers of Negroes and blackamoors” within the realm, grown from the 1555 arrival of five blacks brought into London for English language training (a de-barbarization) to be redeployed as translators in the African trade (in Walvin 64). Elizabeth imagines an early modern exodus that limits cultural assimilation, pits native citizens against outsiders in a contest over scarce goods, specifically hoarding the national food supply, an argument that echoes the death by starvation decree issued against Aaron: “Set him breast-deep in earth and famish him;/ There let him stand and rave and cry for food” (5.3.178–79).11 Aaron’s response to aggression, in any form, is self-preservation, a resistance figured in biblical genealogy, and whose methods mimic the intellectual and physical violence of his Roman oppressors. In this he anticipates that other famous Shakespearean resister and barbarian, Caliban the gabbler who redirects the linguistic imperialism of his island masters to protest his servile condition: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is, I know how to curse” (Tempest 1.2.364–65).

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John Hoskins, in Directions for Speech and Style (1599), makes a direct link between mental stability and rhetorical mastery: the production of eloquent utterances is the consequence of a sound mind. Yet cannot his mind be thought in tune whose words do jar, nor his reason in frame whose sentences are preposterous; nor his fancy clear and perfect whose utterance breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties. (2)

Hoskins’ statement underscores the importance of language and rhetorical eloquence as vital categories for the construction of the healthy early modern English subject. Written for young men making their way in public life—white men destined for social advancement whose racial codes are invisibly subsumed within the naturalized category of English national identity—the Directions, a rhetorical handbook, provides practical instructions in the art of speaking well in government and public service, a function inherited from the classical administrative and law courts.12 The acquisition of eloquence—the performative opposite of barbarism—thus coincided with a nationalist project and the emergence of a teeming, competitive society of men, heirs to the administrative policies of the Henrician regime.13 In Jack Beeching’s words, “the Tudor

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dynasty had endowed England with a new dominant class: men who had risen by the law and mopped up their share of church lands, men to whom enterprise and profitability were congenial ideas” (10). Social advancement, status, and power were contingent on rhetorical training, and the nation’s valued subjects, mostly an educated, male (and in many cases urban) elite, came to identify with the English nation and its racialized correlative, whiteness, through a range of disciplined linguistic performances. Within this socio-linguistic context, speaking well for men in public life amounted to a cultural performative in the Austinian sense, the auto-reflexive, self-affirmation in language of class, race, and nation; speaking English well is itself an enacted cultural performance of national identity.14 Moreover, the nexus of language, whiteness, nation annexed by masculinity admits the “masculine ‘Empire of the Selfsame,’ ” and in this “Same” is no room for any “Other” (Young 3).15 England was a performative culture, represented in a relatively small, privileged but authorized group, in the Austinian sense of using language to do something: to establish its own patriarchal national identity predicated on exclusionary principles.16 Hoskins’s caveat thus affords an important gloss on Othello’s hysterical collapse in 4.1: “Lie with her? Lie on her? We say lie on her when they belie her. Lie with her! Zounds, that’s fulsome!” (II.35–36).17 Othello’s “words do jar,” his “sentences are preposterous,” and his “utterance breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties,” rendering him the uneloquent man, a mere shadow of the magisterial homo rhetoricus and military public servant of the senate scene (1.3). He is, one already senses at this point, a debased dramatic version of the cohort of ambitious white men to whom Hoskins’s advice is tenured. As the Moor, Othello is the consummate cultural outsider whose fractured prose, the strained play of the rhetorical figures polyptoton and antanaclasis, epitomizes the psycholinguistic disturbance characterized by Hoskins that Iago readily likens to a “savage madness” (4.1.53). It is also Iago who, earlier at the close of the senate scene, delivers the damning sobriquet “an erring barbarian” (1.3.343), “erring” being a punning reference to Othello’s geographic wandering and his propensity to make mistakes and transgress linguistic limits. In the economy of early modern racialism advocated by Iago, to commit rhetorical errors is a direct function of being an outsider whose very presence constitutes a breach of social order. Johannes Fabian observes that even in the discipline of anthropology, the word “savage” is never neutral: “Savagery is a marker of the past, and if ethnographic evidence compels the anthropologist to state that savagery exists in contemporary societies then it will be located, by dint of some sort of horizontal stratigraphy, in their Time, not ours” (75). “Barbarian” and “savage” are, therefore, two terms that coincide—one might even say equate— naturally in Iago’s stratigraphic mind, designating Othello as primitive

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alien who has erroneously traversed Venetian borders and flouted its rhetorical rules. In effect, the phrase “erring barbarian” is redundant, for to be a “barbarian” is already to have made savage errors of eloquence and violated linguistic limits due to geographic, cultural alterity. Iago’s focused target on Othello’s barbarism finds a historical counterpart in Leo Africanus’s A Geographical Historie of Africa (trans. 1600). Leo, himself a Moor, born in Granada and raised a Moslem, was educated in Rome, baptized by Pope Leo X and wrote the Historie under papal patronage.18 The co-opted perspective of this European convert and assimilé bears the bias of a native informant bent on “securing his Christian, European self at the expense of his ‘Other’ identity as a Moor” (Bartels 1990: 436). Leo reports that Arabs consider the language spoken by the “tawnie Moores” to be “a barbarous tongue,” the same language designated by the Moors themselves as “Aquel Amarig, that is, the noble tongue” (5: 314–15). The consistency with which Africans in particular are associated with barbarism is seen when those Arabs who migrated into Africa are characterized through their language and called “Mustehgeme, that is, Barbarous Arabians; and that because they joyned themselves unto strangers, insomuch that not onely their speech, but their manners also are most corrupt and barbarous” (5: 329). Specifically, the Moors’ barbarous language is steeped in geographical meanings, the etymologies of “Barbary” and its people both indicating language and travel. First, he offers the classic definition, which refers to one who cannot speak well: “Barbar, being derived of the Verbe Barbara, which in [the Arabic] tongue signifieth to murmure: because the African tongue soundeth in the eares of the Arabians, no otherwise than the voyce of Beasts” (5: 313).19 His second relates to the legend of King Iphricus, who, when driven out of his kingdom into Egypt by the Assyrians or Ethiopians, “asked his people how or which way it was possible to escape, who answered him BarBar, that is, to the Desart, to the Desart,” and he crossed over the Nile into “the Desart of Africa” (5: 313–14). Whether signifying “barren of speech” or “barren of vegetation and animal life,” the term barbarian and its cognates imply for Leo a traveling stranger in a foreign land who, because he cannot speak fluently, exists within a shared geographical space but resides, in fact, in the cultural margins. The terms of Iago’s antipathy conform to what Etienne Balibar identifies as a “ ‘culturalist’ racism,” one that antedates the biophysical emphasis of the nineteenth century where cultural differences such as those targeted in the nationalistic zealotry of early modern anti-Semitism are erected as legible, reliable indicators of innate personal defects (24). Balibar is concerned with modern neo-racism, the upsurge in Europe and elsewhere of culturalist strategies of demarcating difference in an era when the pseudo-biological arguments have been critically challenged and exposed as questionable in lived reality. Immigration and

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It is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups of peoples in relation to others but “only” the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short, it is what P.A. Taguieff has rightly called a differentialist racism. (Balibar 21)

Iago’s focus on geography and language difference is meant to produce similar racist effects where Othello’s state-sponsored entry into Venice as a mercenary and his “prating” (2.1.214) might otherwise pass as superficially innocuous. The notion of travel attached to these culturalist signs points to the tension inherent in the differentialist paradigm, for travel implies change, conversion, and assimilation, the very transformations that subtend immigrant mixing. The preposterous, fragmented language of Othello, to use Hoskins’s terminology, can indeed be read as “signs of a deep psychology, as signs of a spiritual inheritance rather than a biological heredity,” as in the instance of early modern anti-Semitic rhetoric (Balibar 24). But the very existence of the Directions, along with other handbooks of language and style, attests to its pedagogic belief in rhetorical training as a means to social advancement under the aegis of a performative culture. Language skills can be learned, and Othello can aspire to performative prowess and enact a performance of cultural whiteness. Thus we have the paradoxical reformulation of the Othello project: the performative of the marginal Self within a performative culture. However, Othello’s deep narrative trajectory traces a falling linguistic arc whose dramatic peripeteia in the language crisis of act four is presented as a spectacular rhetorical implosion. Iago’s racial fantasy of the “erring barbarian” imagines the linguistic infractions of the wayward traveler as the preexisting condition that must eventually devolve into the verbal crisis of act four—even if it requires external help in the form of his machinations. Othello’s rhetorical mastery of the opening sections of the play is, therefore, significant and can be read, along with his assimilative, accommodating marriage, as enacting the racial performative commensurate with the political ambitions of Englishmen on the move for whom Hoskins writes. As a tragedy of race, Othello dramatizes the disintegration of linguistic competence and confidence, the fall of the eponymous hero’s language and the shattering of his, and the audience’s, belief in the culturalist possibilities of equitable inclusion.

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an unprecedented level of mixing in modern societies have fueled this resumption of culturalist racism that has co-opted the humanist lessons of equality among diverse cultures learned from anthropology and rationalized difference as insuperable essence.

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P ERFORMING C ULTUR A L W HITENESS

Why, how now, ho! from whence ariseth this? Are we turn’d Turks, and to ourselves do that Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites? For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl.

(2.3.175–78)

Barbarism, in Othello’s opinion, is associated with “Turks” and “Ottomites,” religious, ethnic, and political enemies who represent the absolute antithesis of Venetian ideals. The ease with which Othello resorts to barbarism’s racial typology suggests his total identification with Venetian colonial power in Cyprus that envisions itself, according to Martin Orkin, “as the embodiment of civility” (1986: 3). The nighttime melee, therefore, signals for Othello internal ruination or a barbarism within that substitutes for the averted Ottoman invasion and threatens to devastate the culture of civility that as general he is empowered to protect and defend. Driven by an anxious cultural identification, Othello represses the troubling implications for himself, the republic’s hired barbarian, whose contractual obligations never fully override the fundamental cultural estrangement perceived in the aftermath of his marriage. Even Othello’s reputed sexual modesty, part of the subtext of his interrupted rest, can be read as his internalization of Christian religious attitudes to undisciplined sexuality in marriage and as such reinforces the audience’s sense of his desperate will to assimilate, to overcome the racial barriers erected in the name of barbarism—in short, to enact civility or perform cultural whiteness.20 Facing considerable resistance to his racial incorporation, Othello performs cultural whiteness to an improvisatory end: “to transform given materials into one’s own scenario” (Greenblatt 1980: 227). Improvisation, Greenblatt contends, is a distinctly European strategy, a “narrative self-fashioning” opportunistically deployed for personal advantage, but Iago’s manipulation of the Moor’s sexual anxieties to the point that “pleasure itself becomes for Othello pollution, a defilement of his property in Desdemona and in himself,” Greenblatt maintains, has little to do with race (1980: 244, 251). Nothing conflicts openly with Christian orthodoxy, but the erotic intensity that informs almost every word is experienced in tension with it. This tension is less a manifestation of some atavistic ‘blackness’ specific to Othello than a manifestation of the colonial power of Christian doctrine over sexuality. (1980: 242)

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At the onset of the nighttime commotion among the Venetians in Cyprus, an awakened and disapproving Othello resorts to the accusation of barbarism.

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By contrast, I see Othello’s appropriation of improvisatory racial tactics not only as an indicator of a desire to create his “own scenario” of belonging that, ultimately, yields tragic results, but also as a crucial instance of his particular narrative self-fashioning—a performance of narrative and linguistic skills supposedly denied the incompetent barbarian—aimed at erasing his uncivil, barbarian identity. A participant in the republic epitomizing civic humanism, Othello desires the promised acceptance rooted in “justice, public service, and individual merit” (Slights 379). “In setting his play and in identifying his hero as a ‘Moor of Venice,’ then,” Camille Wells Slights writes, “Shakespeare drew on the humanist myth of Venice, an ideal in which civic virtue produces a powerful, free society that in turn protects and nurtures the honor and freedom of its members” (380). Performing cultural whiteness, Othello aspires to the mimicry inherent in the successful improvisation, the reproduction of “political, religious and even psychic structures” of Venice to effect racial incorporation.21 Early signs of Othello’s cultural assimilation occur the first time the audience sees him in 1.2. The nighttime setting; Iago as traitorous friend or Judas-figure; the two groups of officers bearing torches, one sent to locate, the other to detain the Moor; the skirmish between Othello’s faction and the party led by Brabantio only to be defused by Othello: these recall the moment of Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane recounted in John 18:1–11. Jesus’ response to Peter’s rash attack on the high priest’s servant—“Put your sword away!” (v. 11)—is reproduced in Othello’s elegant, stately command: “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them” (l.59). Similarly, Jesus’ refusal to hide so that his companions might go free is echoed in Othello’s declaration: “Not, I; I must be found/ My parts, my title, and my perfect soul/ Shall manifest me rightly” (ll. 30–32). Othello is identified with Jesus, suggesting not only a positive image of virtue epitomized in a “perfect soul,” but also a religious affiliation as a Christian convert in Venice. Shakespeare’s pointed presentation—recalling Othello’s centuries-old critical canonization as the “noble Moor” by Johnson, Coleridge, and Bradley—is, arguably, indebted to “theological traditions, founded in the Songs of Songs, and bolstered by the legends of Balthasar, Prester John, and the black St Maurice, that allowed for a positive image of black people” (Neill 2006: 127).22 By contrast, the audience’s introduction to “the Moor” (1.1.40) in the play’s opening scene is replete with denigrating animal stereotypes of blackness that mark him as subhuman and evoke reckless lust. That he remains nameless—existing as that blunt, monosyllabic stain on the racist tongues of his Venetian hosts—is simultaneously a strategy of erasing Othello’s full humanity and an effort of denied cultural conversion by insisting on the Islamic inference in “Moor” that is anathema to Christian Europe. Shakespeare’s dramaturgic ploy in 1.2,

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therefore, challenges the earlier racist perceptions produced by Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio through the deliberate use of focalization, reorienting the audience’s perspective of Othello through the filter of the Gethsemane narrative while appropriating that narrative as the index to Othello’s religious assimilation.23 The mental adjustment or reorientation in race-thinking that the audience has to make parallels that moment in Thomas Middleton’s masque The Triumphs of Truth (1613) when the arrival of a ship of Moors causes consternation among the London public in attendance. The event being celebrated is the lord mayor’s inauguration, and the city, personified by a woman in white silk with white hair, is honored by the speaker as “this Fam’d Citty, (Mee) whom Nations call/ Their brightest Eye” (sig. B). Into this white city, enters this seemingly out of place cadre of Moors whose otherwise disturbing black presence must be justified by confession of religious conversion, rendering them harmless. I see amazement set upon the faces Of these white people, wonderings, and strange gazes, Is it at me? Do’s my Complexion draw So many Christian Eyes, that neuer saw A King so black before? (sig. B4v)

The King of the Moors thereupon explains that his color should not be confused with the state of his soul, producing an incongruous early modern type, like Othello, the converted black man: black skin, white soul. However Darkness dwells upon my Face, Truth in my soule sets up the Light of Grace; And though in daies of Error I did runne To giue all Adorations to the Sunne, The Moone & Stars; nay Creatures base and poore, Now onely their Creator I adore: My Queene and people all, at one time wun, By Religious Conversation, Of English Merchants, Factors, Travailers, Whose Truth did with our Spirit hold Commerce. (sig. C)

Added to the mix of infidel idolatry surrendered for Christian devotion, however, is the explicit assertion of the economic rationale behind early modern transnational contact. Evangelism, it turns out, is not a disinterested English effort, and the Thames, incorporated into the mayor’s progress through the city, is the symbolic conduit that connects London’s commerce with business ventures that beckon beyond the seas. The floats that first appear

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at the river and then again in Saint Paul’s courtyard—“fiue Islands artfully garnished with all manner of Indian Fruite-Trees, Drugges, Spiceries”—represent the foreign, exotic places that now occupy a substantive place in the English mercantile imaginary. The “middle Island with a faire castle especially beautiful” (sig. B) is linked to the Moors, signifying the sense of “Touching” (sig. B4v). Thus from the perspective of the masque as a ritual, social performance of London’s cultural ideology, “skin” (the organ of touch) constitutes these Moors’ irreducible pageant identity despite their professed conversion that misconstrues financial enterprise for genuine spiritual transactions.24 Like the various objects of trade, the blacks’ skin is subsumed in a materialist narrative of trafficking that justifies the enrichment of London’s coffers and bankrolls her extolled international greatness. While extortion, bribery, and general economic malfeasance are automatically assigned to Error (sig. B2–B3), the mortgaging of black souls for London’s fiscal welfare remains an unquestioned, hypocritical practice and an integral component of Truth’s triumph. The rhetoric of black acceptance is, in truth, the commercial confession of necessary intercourse with people who, in the masque’s overarching battle of Truth versus Error, would otherwise be destroyed at the finale with black Error and his henchmen, “Barbarisme, Ignorance, Impudence, Falshood” (sig. C2).25 A vested interest motivates European cultural mixing, an overriding pragmatic social reality that escapes Othello’s assured self-assessment as metropolitan immigrant (1.2.17–28), but he refuses to dispense with the bare economic, selfserving fact of his position as state-hired mercenary to ensure Venice’s safety in the face of the impending imperial Ottoman threat. Othello’s defense in the senate is, therefore, framed in complex ways. While the audience’s racial perceptions have been challenged by the biblical focalizors in 1.2, the immediate return of Brabantio’s accusations in the following scene reanimate Iago’s and Roderigo’s denigrations to suggest a socially engrained racial mentality that defines the white Venetian bond. Iago’s “old black ram” (1.1.89) and “Barbary horse” (1.1.111–12) are joined to Roderigo’s aspersion of “lascivious Moor” (1.1.125) to effect what Judith Butler describes, in relation to the performative and its normative compulsions, as a “shaming interpellation.” Together these repeated defamations accumulate force and target Othello as beastly, unnatural, and sexually predatory, a collocation of insults that “echoes past interpellations, and binds the speakers, as if they spoke in unison across time” (Butler 226). Brabantio, following suit, charges Othello with blackness—meaning lust, theft, magic; he rationalizes Desdemona’s seeming violation of cultural law only by means of the pagan practice of witchcraft, asserting her contamination by the alien traveler, Othello. “For nature so preposterously to err / . . . Sans witchcraft could not” (1.3.62–64), concludes Brabantio in his compulsive, highly racialized

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Eurocentrism. According to Patricia Parker, the term preposterous, the English adaptation of the rhetorical figure hysteron proteron, signifies “a reversal of ‘post’ for ‘pre,’ behind for before, back for front, second for first, end or sequel for beginning” (1996: 21). Parker has argued that in addition to being an indicator of linguistic inversion, preposterous also has a range of social applications pertaining to the inversions or disruptions of the conventional valuations placed on gender, primogeniture, and sexuality (producing sodomy) “in the specifically sexual sense of sodomy as ‘preposterous venery’ ” (Parker 1996: 26). Othello invites us to add blackness—the functional code for geographic and religious difference—to that list of social dislocations or errors occasioned by Desdemona’s “extravagant” Moor (1.1.135) who has made an enormous cultural blunder. For nature to err preposterously can mean only that Desdemona has been tainted by the wandering, aporetic barbarian, a transculturation effected within the geographic zone that is Othello.26 His autobiographical defense, at first, appears odd: why tell a story in light of these serious charges? That is, why does Othello resort to eloquence? If barbarians cannot speak the master language, in the senate scene Shakespeare provides us with a most paradoxical figure: the barbarian who is supremely articulate and whose characteristic feature is his rhetorical eloquence. With blackness construed as a fixed, indelible social emblem (despite its rhetorical production from a series of repeated taunts and sexual descriptors), language becomes the necessary proof of cultural belonging, its flexibility the performative evidence in this de facto trial scene. Othello’s defense is a narrative performative whose ultimate goal is to create not just an audience but a racialized audience with whom he shares, literally, a common language.27 Opening on a note of political crisis and general confusion occasioned by the Turkish attack, the senate scene quickly becomes the judicial forum in which Othello has to face the cultural crisis of being the “erring barbarian” who has flouted Venetian customs pertaining to marriage. His narrative defense (“I will a round unvarnished tale deliver / Of my whole course of love: what drugs, what charms, / What conjuration and what mighty magic” [1.3.90–92]) is a subtle retort to Brabantio’s charge of “witchcraft,” for in appropriating the “mighty magic” of words, Othello weaves a web of eloquence that earlier tantalized Desdemona’s “greedy ear” (1.148) and here entraps both the senate and the theatrical audience. By introducing a racial discourse of magic and spells, Brabantio unwittingly provides an equivocal metadramatic vocabulary for assessing Othello’s hold on his listeners. Othello employs a strategy of verbal seduction in responding to Brabantio’s charges. If Desdemona “saw Othello’s visage in his mind” (1.248) because his narrative wooing effectively blanched his black face, then his performance of cultural whiteness before the senate aims at

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a similar result that would also affect the disposition of his case. Othello’s apology, “Rude am I in my speech” (1.81), a deficit owing ostensibly to the limited social exposure of his military life, also indicates his keen awareness of his barbarian status. While conceding linguistic deficiency, however, Othello unfolds his “travels’ history” (1.138) with such magic that his confession of rude speech is revealed as a learned diffidence, akin to the modesty topos of courtly conduct, the narrow path of anxious hedging coupled with a desire to please which the “erring barbarian” must negotiate. His dilations are the stuff of romance, summoning up images “of most disastrous chance, / Of moving accidents by flood and field, / Of hairbreadth scapes i’th’imminent deadly breach, / Of being taken by the insolent foe / And sold to slavery” (ll.133–37). Because Desdemona had only “by parcels . . . something heard, / But not intentively” (ll. 153–54) as Othello recounted these incidents to her father, Othello repeated “the story of [his] life” (l.128) to her and “dilate[s]” (l.152) his geographical history again to the senators. To dilate, a rhetorical term meaning “to narrate at full” or “to amplify,” assumes an exponential value through the multiple repetitions of the narrative of Othello’s life before his arrival in Venice.28 But because amplification threatens excess, rhetorical handbooks “repeatedly caution towards its ordering or disposition as at least in part a means of keeping that potential fertility, or expansion, within bounds” (Parker 1985: 68). In addition to the linguistic effects of his narratives’ amplification, then, Othello’s dilations have a significant social dimension: his narratives amplify his presence, rhetorically introducing Othello’s alien geography into the republic. His narrative skills “make” him white, while the proliferating, dilatory effects render him substantial and big—a “literary fat man”—shaping the image of this equivocal black outsider into an invasive, formidable social persona.29 Iago, self-proclaimed guardian of the linguistic and racial boundaries signaled by Othello’s dilatory eloquence, has already judged his general’s performance as mere “bombast circumstance, / Horribly stuffed with epithets of war” (1.1.13–14). It is he who will attempt to limit Othello’s geographical intrusion into Venetian culture and to punish the excesses of verbal and racial transgression. Performing race is in Othello’s case an attempt to neutralize or even counter the verbal process of social abjection to which, as a black outsider, he is subject. He embraces Venetian identification and cultural whiteness as a racial “performative in the sense that it is not what one is but what one does . . . a condition one enacts” (Culler 98). However, Derrida’s insistent critique of those who, like Austin, overlook the linguistic “remainder,” or excess, can be applied here to Othello’s misrecognition of a cultural remainder (1982: 322). As speaker, Othello assumes a complete, felicitous performative success, the illocutionary (what the

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speaker intends) and perlocutionary (what the hearer understands) effects of his narrative performatives producing a provisional race surrogation.30 The cultural dissemination of race and racial difference—the multiple sites within the culture through which racial identity is continually being interpellated—is ignored, ironically, to Othello’s own detriment. Othello believes that by speaking eloquently, transcending the limitations of linguistic and cultural barbarism, he can control both the production and reception of his narratives and secure a place within this racially split society. But speaking well as the rhetor or narrator in the subject position does not in itself guarantee cultural access for Othello or determine what his interlocutors choose to understand. Slippages between speaker and hearer reproduce the paradigm of barbarism: the perlocutionary indeterminacy—what the hearer understands—allows for errors. Iago’s refusal to see Othello as anything other than “an erring barbarian,” his refusal to be controlled by Othello’s linguistic intent, initiates the failure of Othello’s racial performative and precipitates a significant instance of barbarism as a volatile dialogic process.

THE M OORING

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In the presentation of Iago, Shakespeare undertakes a rhetorical inversion: if Othello aspires after “cultural whiteness,” then Iago is conceived according to stereotypes of “blackness,” and the play’s ostensible racial binarism proves as indeterminate as the unintended semantic consequences of Othello’s narrative performative. Iago’s affinity to Othello can be deduced from recognizable theatrical conventions that had accumulated by the time of the play’s performance in 1604: the stage machiavel’s villainy was the nonracialized counterpart to the stereotypical malevolence attributed to the dark-skinned Moor whose history had been documented in Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1588–89), Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion (1599), and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1592). Orkin suggests that Shakespeare “reverses the associations attached to the colors white and black that are the consequences of racist stereotyping. It is Iago, the white man, who is portrayed as amoral and anti-Christian” (1987: 170). Virginia Mason Vaughan concurs, suggesting that “Othello denies stereotype. Unlike Muly Hamet, Aaron, and Eleazar, he is not a manipulative scheming villain. Those characteristics appear instead in the white Venetian ensign, Iago” (1994: 67). The unstated message carried in these observations is that Iago is dramatically constructed as black, and as the “amoral” antitype to the Christian-inflected Othello, he possesses the stereotypical traits of the Moor.31 He is not simply cast in the dramatic tradition of the villain but follows Muly, Eleazar, and Aaron, earlier black stage-figures who embody deceit, duplicity, venery, and wanton cruelty as attributes of the Moorish villain. Iago thus performs as the

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specifically black villain within Shakespeare’s dramaturgic experiment of reverse racial binaries.32 From an entirely different perspective, early modern humoral, climatological, and geographical taxonomies supported some equations between Moors (situated to the south of Europe) and Italians (southern Europeans) so that, “for example, jealousy and credulity were said to be typical of both” groups, gullibility adhering more to Roderigo than to the arch-manipulator Iago (Hall 2007: 175). And in an applied psychoanalytic reading of race as projection, Janet Adelman argues that, through the mechanism of Kelinian “projective identification” (142), Iago seizes on “Othello’s black skin as the container for his own interior blackness” (130); as a result, Othello “comes increasingly to resemble what Iago has projected into him; and he begins to act in accordance with that projection” (143). Common to these interpretations is the unidirectional identification of Iago with Othello. My point, however, is that in employing a double inversion, Shakespeare reinforces the pairing of Othello and Iago as representative contrasting racial types while simultaneously interrogating the sustainability of that discrete division. By disrupting the expected representations of race, Shakespeare reintroduces the figure of the preposterous, creating a deliberately inverted paradigm that posits blackness and whiteness as social constructions and radically questions Elizabethan racial hierarchies. English contact with Africans during trade ventures in the sixteenth century produced reports of the Moors’ untrustworthiness and treachery that were clearly motivated by economic interest and the frustrations of being in alien territory over which Englishmen exercised no definitive control. Elizabeth’s official authorization of trade with Barbary imposed severe limits on the Moors’ own reciprocal exercise in trade, rationalized by a bias that held their “negotiations . . . as unreadable, unreliable, and deceptive” (Bartels 1990: 442). The fateful “voyage made to Tripolis in Barbarie, in the yeere 1583, with a ship called the Jesus,” during which Englishmen were imprisoned and hanged, supplied evidence of encounters with African rulers whose breach of faith and broken promises confirmed the unpredictable and cruel will of the Moor: “Here all true Christians may see what trust a Christian man may put in an infidel’s promise” (Hakluyt 5: 292, 300). Leo Africanus, on a trading mission among Moors, anticipating robbery and personal injury, and having hidden all his money, was made to strip naked in the snow, but “when they could find no money at all, they said in jesting and scoffing wise, that they did this for no other purpose, but onely to see how strong and hardy I was” (5: 344). Elsewhere, Leo reiterates this theme of perfidy and opportunism joined to indiscriminate cruelty: “Howbeit no trust is to be given unto them; for if occasion serve, they will play the thieves most slily and cunningly; notwithstanding, they seeme to carrie some shew of

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civilitie” (5: 336). The Moors’ perceived changeableness obstructed reliable economic intercourse while their duplicity and dishonor were factored in the continuum of African attributes emblematized as blackness in the early modern English consciousness. The Moors’ sexual excess, their rabid lust and unbridled sensuality, is a commonplace of Elizabethan literature, being effectively dramatized, as we have seen, in Aaron’s mentorship of Lavinia’s rape in Titus Andronicus as well as in the relationship between Eleazar and the Queen Mother in the pointedly titled Lust’s Dominion (c.1599).33 Nondramatic accounts, in addition to focusing on Africans’ nakedness, the practice of polygamy, and their sexual expressiveness, registered a cultural threat “to a people who had a repressive system that governed all sexual contact and interdicted most. The sexual freedom that Africans were believed to exercise had to be condemned in order to justify the sexual codes of Christianity” (Barthelemy 121). Islam, D’Amico remarks, “supposedly permitted and even encouraged unnatural acts between the same or opposite sexes and introduced sodomy into the garden of nature” (66). At the same time, Moors were described as specifically prone to the passion of jealousy. As Leo records, “No Nation in the World is so subject unto Jealousie; for they will rather lose their lives, then put up any disgrace in the behalfe of their women” (5: 356). Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie (1652) confirms this general stereotype, claiming in the section “Of Barbary” that Africans are “in their hate implacable, and jealous of their women beyond all compare” (941). Benedetto Varchi’s The Blazon of Iealovsie (trans. 1615), the fullest Renaissance work on the subject, offers the following conclusion: “such as dwell in hot Regions are very Iealous; eyther because they are much giuen and enclined vnto Loue naturally: or else for that they hold it a great disparagement and scandall, to haue their Wifes, or their Mistresses taynted with the foule blot of Vnchastitie” (23). The geography of Africa, especially the intense heat, explained both the extremes of lust and jealousy, for “the sun was believed to create passionate furies, not dry them up. Moors, in fact, were stereotyped as unusually jealous” (Vaughan 1994: 68). However, Desdemona offers a corrective to this widespread thinking, speaking of Othello’s purported jealousy: “Who, he? I think the sun where he was born/ Drew all such humors from him” (3.4.26–27).34 Through all these accounts runs the thread of Moors as immoral and degenerate, in effect, non-Christian infidels, because Moors, except those who converted, were considered heathens and therefore the religious opposite of the Englishman: “The people are of no Religion, but live like beasts; without propriety so much as in their wives, or children” (Heylyn 973). According to early modern views, then, a Moor’s duplicity, jealousy, changeableness, senseless cruelty, and sexual excesses were a natural product of his alien status. Whether in trade reports or geographical

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histories, the Moor was usually encountered in another place, in Africa, but Othello’s proximate presence in Venice dramatically reconfigures social anxieties and intensifies the perception of the Moor as threatening alien on multiple levels. Since the “African” attributes listed earlier are also trademarks of the machiavel, a racially unmarked category occupied by Iago the white Venetian, the play’s structural juxtaposition of Othello, the ostensible Moor, and Iago forces recognition of the indeterminate nature of blackness as construed in self-serving accounts. In Shakespeare’s experiment with reversal, it is Iago who operates in particularly unsettling ways as the Moor whose mere “show of civility,” to borrow Leo’s phrase, characterizes his entire career of deception. As a result, the audience cannot perceive one set of racial topoi without being constantly aware of the possibilities of its being read in terms of its opposite. The effect is twofold: to render race an unstable category, especially from a European perspective, and to suggest that Iago functions as a dramaturgic mirror in the dismantling of Othello’s assimilationist aspirations. The play’s reversals constitute a preposterous dramatic structure that disrupts audience expectation and demands that we pay attention to the unexpected and perverse. Given the play’s specific context of interpretation—the VenetianTurkish conflict replayed in Iago’s relation to Othello—the traits of treachery and dissembling are evinced as racially significant for Iago. In a long speech honoring the power of treachery, the benefits of duplicity, the profit of opportunism, and the strategic force of dissembling, Iago rebuffs Roderigo’s suggestion that he is serving Othello loyally (1.1.41–66). At the conclusion of that speech, Iago declares trenchantly: “I am not what I am” (1.66), a corruption of God’s naming of Himself to Moses at the moment of the exodus narrative in Exodus 3:14: “I am who I am.” In one economical move, Shakespeare not only imputes to Iago the vices attached to Moors as specific racial stereotypes, but he allows Iago to name himself dramatically as an anti-god and ultimate pagan, a designation typically reserved for Islamic Moors. Ironically, Othello is a converted Moor, and Iago, underscoring the play’s rhetorical inversion, is constructed according to an available social code of blackness as the Moorish pagan. Further, Othello does not betray any signs of jealousy until act 3, when Iago begins his deliberate work of destruction. Rather, Shakespeare foregrounds Iago’s jealousy for the entire first half of the play, creating a further racial inversion: Iago is invested with the notoriously “Moorlike” quality of jealousy. As his opening speeches make clear, Iago is jealous of Cassio’s appointment, and his jealousy serves as the motivation for his waiting “to serve [his] turn upon” Othello (1.1.42). Iago’s jealousy has also been aroused by the rumor of an adulterous liaison between his wife, Emilia, and Othello: “ ‘twixt my sheets / He’s done my office” (1.3.369–70). Iago, not Othello, is the one steeped in lust

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and eros, a character trait realized in his infamous use of graphic phallic and animal images (1.1.89–90; 115–16). In addition, the exact nature of his jealousy has been the subject of much critical speculation, notably summarized in Coleridge’s phrase, “motiveless malignity” (1: 49): (a) Is it the job promotion? (b) Does he really believe that Othello has been sexually involved with his wife? (c) Does he desire Desdemona for himself? (d) Does he really suspect Cassio of being involved with Emilia, too? (e) Or, is there just sheer hate of Othello?35 When we recall Iago’s own characterization—“These Moors are changeable in their wills” (1.336)— the dramatic irony becomes self-evident. We recognize that what appears as a traditional critical quandary, the problem of isolating Iago’s motivation, should be reread according to the play’s own insistence on Iago’s changeable will and as further evidence of racial inversion. In the end, the Mooring of Iago functions as a dramaturgic counterpoint to Othello’s performance of cultural whiteness. The play thus establishes its own rhetoric of racial interchange that produces a sustained dramatic irony in redirecting the images projected onto blacks in English racialist discourse. By contrast, Mary Floyd-Wilson admits the association of jealousy with Italians, situated geographically to the south, but argues that its imputation was strategically important to the English project of revaluating their northern temperament (“ ‘unwariness’ and inconstancy”) in light of classical indictments and promoting an essentialist certification of white English ethnicity (158). Such a reading acknowledges yet resists the rapidly changing public interest in African racial construction for which the play as commercial vehicle is a cultural barometer and conduit: “Othello stands at a crossroads in the history of ethnological ideas when an emergent racial discourse clashed with the still dominant classical and medieval geohumoralism” (FloydWilson 140). The mooring of Iago, I submit, points in the direction of the “emergent racial discourse” that understands the racializing of Africa as an evolving Renaissance phenomenon that seized the popular imagination. Moving beyond the limitations of older humoral models (as represented in Floyd-Wilson’s argument), Shakespeare’s systematic inversion of the behavioral racial codes forces a questioning of the entire Venetian and English racial structure as stable, natural, and essentially discrete. Jean-Michel Heimonet’s observation can be applied to the dialectical effects of such a racial inversion: “To introduce into one’s consciousness the idea of the entirely other is, in fact, to disturb, really shatter its fine orderliness by forcing it to conceive its proper limits” (131–32). By attributing black stereotypes to Iago, Shakespeare challenges the instituting of otherness as a paranoid displacement of anxieties and exposes as false the supposed mastery and superiority of the European Self over the alien. Further, the play provides witness of a European culture that fears its own undoing from the trace of the Other, the Moor.

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As a defamiliarized figure of blackness, Iago, too, performs narrative eloquence, setting up the play’s tragic formula: Othello, the eloquent man, undone by eloquence. When Othello demands “ocular proof” (3.3. 361) of Desdemona’s sexual infidelity, Iago resorts to his own strategies of narrative manipulation and seduction to disarm the eloquent Othello: “Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on? / Behold her topped?” (ll. 396–97). Iago, in effect, cautions against a living theater of sex with Othello situated as spectator. Instead, Iago proposes narrative as an alternate medium of seeing, thus inscribing himself in the classical rhetorical tradition. In the presentation of a forensic argument, the second stage after the exordium is the narration, the recounting of events in the legal case brought to court. Erasmus describes the power of concrete visual images in narration as a recounting “with all the colors of rhetoric, so that at length it draws the hearer or reader outside himself as in the theatre” (47). The production of visual images through words, or enargeia, creates an extraordinary imaginative and cognitive experience described by Lutheran reformer and critic of Melanchthon, Flacius Illyricus: Because all speech aims at instructing and moving the hearer or reader, that work which depicts things as if we beheld them with our own eyes is more praiseworthy than that which only makes us hear them, as if from a distance. Nor does such a work only move the hearers but also finely illustrates the things themselves. . . . Thus it creates what, in the language of the schoolmen, is called an intuitive noticia. (Altman 142)

As the English Renaissance insisted, the colors of rhetoric, figures, and tropes, constituted eloquence. Othello’s forensic request for “ocular proof” is converted into the mental theater of the dream episode (II. 411–27) placing him “outside himself” and into a scene of sexual fantasy as a thoroughly racialized subject. The dream narrative is marked by a series of displacements: Iago displaces Desdemona, since Cassio imagines that he makes love to Desdemona when he caresses Iago; Cassio displaces Othello as the legitimate lover of Desdemona; and Iago and Cassio displace Othello and Desdemona as a couple. This last substitution stands as the most compelling within the context of the Mooring of Iago: the Iago-Cassio coupling is as much an interracial one as the Othello-Desdemona pairing. Through the theatrical self-projection induced by narrative enargeia, Othello is made to confront a homoerotic scene that substitutes for his own erotic history and to internalize an identity assigned to Moors: sodomite, and

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by extension, unregenerate member of Islam.36 Perceived as the antithesis of Christianity, Islam was understood by Englishmen and Europeans generally as a false religion given over to sexual excess and that included, in their view, the notorious sin of sodomy. Recapitulating the voyeuristic scene of the dream sequence, Christianity enables the discursive legacy of Othello as the descendant of Ham, son of Noah and mythic progenitor of the black race, cursed “for looking ‘upon the nakedness of his father’ (a phrase which may be a code for ‘homosexual incest’)” (Gillies 19). We recall D’Amico’s point, mentioned earlier, that within Islam sexual congress that included sodomy was accepted, leading to an English association among Moors, blackness, and homoerotic lust. Reporting on North Africa, J.B. Gramaye adopts the widespread European attitude of vilification: “Now for the Sodomiticall lusts to Boyes, and their damnable services, and sending them for Presents to the Turke or his Bassas, I abhorre to mention” (Purchas 9: 281). Richard Knolles would affirm the sweeping assertion that Muslims “are much inclined to Venery, and are for the most part all Sodomites” while William Davis declared that the Turks are “altogether Sodomites, and do all things contrarie to the Christian” (Matar 114, 113). Since the play’s racial inversion is articulated in the figure of the “preposterous,” sodomy, a classic instance of the operational mode of “behind for before, back for front” applied to sexuality, intersects with race in the dream-narrative sequence.37 Cassio, as an Italian, notably a Florentine, is identified with sodomy as a national characteristic.38 Othello’s distraught questioning of Cassio’s alleged adultery—“Lie with her? Lie on her?”—elicits a sodomitical pun on the Italian for to lie/ liar, bugiare/bugiardo, which renders the English pun on bugger.39 The dream narrative makes the point explicit, exploding with homoerotic sex: “[Cassio] then laid his leg / Over my thigh, and sighed, and kissed” (II. 425–26). The kissing hard on the lips and the laying of Cassio’s leg across Iago’s thigh are signs of full sexual contact where the orifice of the mouth is counterpointed with the phallic leg positioned transgressively “over”; however, the orifice engaged above is metonymically crossed and penetrated below. This dream positions Othello as the black narratee who empathizes with his friend Iago, the rhetorically constructed black and Cassio’s catamite. At the same time, Othello is structurally identified with Cassio within the pattern of displacements; but as someone displaced by Cassio, he, too, occupies a culturally passive position comparable to Iago’s role as both sexual submissive and displaced black Other. The dream, though evidently about the coming together of bodies, has as its subtext a racial politics of active and passive roles and produces what Gayatri Spivak calls “programmed near-images of that very sovereign self”—Europe—images that, paradoxically, promise a metaphoric

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proximity, such as Othello desires of his friend Iago, but always defer the possibility of fulfillment (247). From the white cultural perspective, Iago, in giving Othello the proof he wants, treats the dream as a process of what Freud calls “thought identity,” the rendering of material in as concretely a real mode as possible. The competing process in dreams, “perceptual identity,” approximates to wish-fulfillment, a free rein of desire that produces a utopian satisfaction that is best considered hallucinatory.40 If we read Iago’s “dream” as a performative narrative, then it functions in the range of perceptual identity, where Iago’s utopian wishfulfillment is an erotic triangle that dramatizes Irigaray’s critique of hom(m)osexuality—the effective erasure of the woman (here Desdemona) in order to render an efficient, free exchange between men.41 Irigaray identifies a necessary “homosexual” repression, required because, as an exclusionary interaction between men, it exposes too clearly the secret operational dynamic of patriarchal culture. This repressed metonymic function is revealed in Iago’s dream in its explicit homoeroticism: “he would gripe and wring my hand, / Cry, ‘O sweet creature!’ and then kiss me hard, / As if he plucked up kisses by the roots / That grew upon my lips” (11.422–25). Here there is no repression of the homoerotic as such, except insofar as it is mystified as dream, but instead a demonstration of the homoerotic metonymic structure of relating that is the informing code of patriarchal cultures. So powerful is this mechanism of male exchange that “as soon as [a woman] speaks (expresses herself, to herself), a woman is a man. As soon as she has any relationship with another woman, she is homosexual, and therefore masculine” (Irigaray 194). Irigaray is speaking of the illocutionary force that presupposed a certain male-inflected structure of relations and identity in language. One need not limit cultural performativity to gender relations, but in the light of the concept of the imperfectly speaking barbarian, one can translate suggestively Irigaray’s analysis into terms of racial and ethnic commodification. As soon as the barbarian or African tries to speak, he is immediately caught in the language of Eurocentrism: historically, he translates for the English trader; dramatically, he has to learn the language of Venice; he speaks as a European. As soon as he speaks or relates in language to an Englishman or European, this relation, too, is disciplined according to the patriarchal exclusions of hom(m)osexuality, Englishness, and, to extend the thesis, whiteness. A barbarian silence, then, becomes the optimal sign of exclusion in a culture where patriarchy is not only gendered but also fully racialized. Othello’s is the race that is not one, for the performativity of culture holds him always outside the oneness that is the hallmark of the oikumene, the civilized space of Venice-cum-England. The interracial and sodomitic content implicate him in the dream and are further compounded by the patriarchal subtext that points to the politics of social exclusion. Within a

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culturalist reading of the play, one recalls that homoerotic desire, by itself, was not necessarily consigned to abjection in the early modern period but often “served to empower certain men,” the kinds of socially mobile men for whom Hoskins’s Directions was intended (Bruce Smith 1991: 12). But a nationalist, orientalist project is replete with selective strategies of avowals and disavowals, the kinds of contradictions registered publicly in England’s citation of classical eloquence as part of its national perceptual identity, its own utopic, hallucinatory dream. Thus Alan Bray notes that the relatively rare prosecution of homosexual sodomy in the period, as in the case of Domingo Cassedon Drago, a Moor, would be occasioned by a “period of dislocation,” a social upheaval that triggered cultural scapegoating (72). Elizabeth’s notorious, repeated attempts to expel Moors from England at the turn of the century signal another such moment of social crisis, specifically related to national hegemonic interests. Through Iago’s representation of the inverse image of blackness, the homoerotic content of Venetian patriarchal social organization can be safely disavowed, identified as barbarian and belonging to another place, registering Goldberg’s general observation that a “protoracial imaginary thus accompanies sodomy in colonizing practices” (1994: 7). Iago’s colonizing dream, with its contradictory affirmations and denials of homoerotic desire as well as ambivalent behavioral codes of blackness, registers this principle of ideological fort-da. Europe does strategically protect its hom(m)osexual structure of patriarchy, but since Othello wants to participate in Europe’s cultural whiteness, Iago deliberately reveals its homoerotic structure to repel the barbarian with an alienating image of himself as passive sexual and racial subject. Iago’s construction of Othello as passive sodomite, or black catamite, promotes a particularly powerful geography of self, especially when we recall the etymology of the word as originating in a particular historical place. As Michael Warner writes, “sodomy still implies . . . a map of sexual knowledge and exotic origins . . . sexual acts—if they even are acts . . . practiced not by individuals but by cities, islands, or nations” (332). Othello’s sodomitic transcription through the narrative enargeia is a rewriting of his geography (i.e., world-writing) of self, a rewriting of the barbarian world and self as sodomite through the perlocutionary effects of Iago’s narrative performative. As agent of the selection of this particular narrative, Iago the Venetian male propagates the hom(m)osexual structure of patriarchy as utopian racialist desire, as an hallucination of the nation that collaterally denigrates and excludes black men by charging them with “homosexuality.” At the same time, from Othello’s perspective, the structural use of displacement or substitution in the dream episode instantiates Freud’s notion of “dream displacement” where the manifest images express indirectly other psychic and less easily visible but essential content that is thus displaced: “in the course of the dream work the psychical intensity

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passes over from the thoughts and ideas to which it properly belongs on to others which in our judgment have no claim to any such emphasis” (5: 654). Iago’s narrative may begin by replacing Cassio as legitimate narrator but ends by displacing the Othello-Desdemona union preposterously with a sodomitic coupling that points toward homoerotic sexuality as a further informing social code of blackness. The heterosexual couple has been converted into a same-sex pairing, one of whom, within the play’s dramaturgic logic, is black. The impact of this instance of the Erasmian theater of the mind on Othello falls within audience reception theory. The immediate effect of his imaginative visualization and selfprojection into the sexual scene constitutes Othello’s internalization of the sodomitic construct of himself as an irksome reminder that despite his linguistic acts of assimilation the European obsession with bodily, material acts triumphs as cultural truth. The prevailing European discourse of the Moor as sodomite—and, therefore, unchristian and reducible to the bodily and base—surfaces to reinforce Othello’s abjection and give prominence to his marriage to Desdemona as a strategic disavowal of his racial past. The union between Iago and Othello immediately following this dream recognition is cemented with reciprocal pledges of faith and loyalty. With both men kneeling and Iago swearing an oath, “I am your own for ever” (l.480), this concluding image is nothing other than a marriage and the union figured in Iago’s dream made Othello’s fearful reality. The moment of linguistic collapse that follows in act 4, therefore, represents a mourning of Desdemona’s loss so that language fails at the moment when the bodily, sodomitic confirmation of Othello’s otherness rises to create psychological horror. For the Europeans, the dream narrated by Iago (a total invention) conveys a point of view consistent with Freud’s distinction between manifest and latent dream content. Anthony Storr describes Freud’s dream “displacement” as the process “in which a potentially disturbing image or idea is replaced by something connected but less disturbing” (45). In another brilliant and crucial moment of Shakespearean inversion, the marriage between Othello and Desdemona becomes the latent content that the manifest dream images can only indirectly express. Iago has chosen to recount an overtly homoerotic narrative, and these images of sodomy are, in fact, the manageable, acceptable content that points obliquely to more culturally problematic truth. What, exactly, then is threatening about the marriage? Racial and ethnic proliferation, we recall, was the immediate cause of pharaonic oppression and genocide confronting the biblical Aaron; Shakespeare’s Moor of the same name becomes most dangerous when Aaron produces a child that signals racial duplication and growth. Thus, Othello’s linguistic assimilation is permitted—thanks to his state service and the porosity of language that invites, even requires,

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other compensatory forms of race regulation—until he aspires to intercultural marriage, construed as the ultimate in immigrant assimilation. But marriage also raises the specter of reproduction. In a play that dramaturgically and thematically engages the concept of racial inversion and, by extension, the political and identity problems related to the instability of racial codes, reproduction signifies the effective dilution of a historically emergent category of race—the colored body, both black and white—one that, from a historical perspective, was to serve as the antidote to the cultural pluralism that had been available through language from classical times. The “erring barbarian” threatens another Venetian barrier having penetrated its nuptial perimeter to set in play a cultural mixing that proves untenable. Sodomy not only reinscribes Othello as Moor and outsider, it also negates the possibility of miscegentic reproduction as an assault on color as a sign of racial fixity. Racism’s paranoid policing of interracial sex, its latent violent fantasy, demands Desdemona’s virginity even within marriage or, as the absolute countermeasure, death, both goals achieved at the drama’s end: “Cold, cold, my girl,/ Even like thy chastity” (5.2.273–74). Racism’s fatal logic of nonreproduction exists, therefore, under the jurisdictional rubric of sodomy. Sodomy is a welcome European racial fantasy; interracial, heterosexual union is its deepest fear. For historians of race, Othello is uniquely positioned at a vital juncture when older culturalist forms of racial coding, notably language indexed to barbarism, came under immense pressure to sustain a radical differentialist paradigm or else find other compensatory means to stabilize racial identification. Early modern global economics made the traffic and interactions with others no longer an abstract enterprise gleaned from classical texts or a minor social consideration but an urgent practical reality. Efficient means of management imposed itself as necessary to English national identity, and differentialist strategies were produced to stabilize Englishness in an expanding, shifting global marketplace. Race, as it would become overtly fixed in the nineteenth century, emerges in prototypical form to meet that national and cultural goal. The play dramatizes the European insistence on bodily measures—blackness and the complementary category of sodomy that reinforces the corporal materiality on which the ideological investment in blackness rests—as increasingly available and resilient means of racial demarcation. Corporeality as human materiality inserted itself powerfully into the English mindset to resonate with increasingly destructive consequences for centuries.

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In the early modern period the concept of rhetorical barbarism—the demonizing of the speech of the racial and cultural outsider—can be

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understood as an attempt to control and protect the production and circulation of specific images through the racializing function of language. In an Erasmian theater of the mind, language has the power to create vivid and persuasive images that can determine the chosen identities of both an audience and a culture. Hence the need to control this power and the proliferation of images place the surveillance of language at the center of early modern concerns. Othello’s speech acts constitute a performance of cultural whiteness, adding his perspective on what it means to be a black man in this culture and, in effect, contesting the dominant negative images of blackness. Iago, the agent of linguistic surveillance in this cultural dialogue, counters Othello’s narratives and attempts to contain Othello’s language by rendering it barbarous. When, at the end of 4.1, Othello’s “sentences [become] preposterous” and his “utterance breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties,” in the language of Hoskins’s Directions, the question is no longer purely one of his mental instability; rather, Othello’s linguistic collapse, engineered by Iago, is indicative of a culturally pejorative barbarism. If the barbarian is deemed uneloquent—if he cannot speak or his utterances are judged illegitimate—then his ability to produce articulate images within a cultural dialogue that would transform the dominant racial imaginary is seriously impaired. The political value of the label “barbarian” or “barbarism” is to exclude the potentially oppositional images of the outsider and the disruptive logic of his preposterous sentences from legitimate circulation, preserving the language of the host culture and its ability to produce its own images of itself and others as authoritative and civilized. The indictment leveled by the appellation “barbarian” effects racial interpellation; at the same time, the “barbarian” designation amounts to political censorship of different, unregulated ideas. Shakespeare’s own use of race reversals, a preposterous dramaturgy whose “barbaric” force questions the supposed discreteness of racial categories, stands as a metadramatic commentary on the urgency with which Iago deploys the notion of the barbarian as a strategy of suppression. We find in Iago’s dream an early modern instance of the imperial fantasy that has characterized subsequent relations between Europeans and blacks: a patriarchal economy and regime of desire that require the black barbarian, with his erring geography of self, as part of Europe’s own project of territorial and erotic consumption, its own imperial narrative of desire. Iago’s narrative performative is consonant with the erection of a racial Empire of the Selfsame. And in the final dramatic irony, Othello the eloquent barbarian, an Elizabethan national oxymoron, is vulnerable to eloquence, just as his cultural whiteness is fragile, because it is produced through an unhappy performative. Othello fails to recognize that the rhetorical desire to exclude barbarians should be met with

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the geographical imperative of the self “to really shatter . . . [England’s] fine orderliness by forcing it to conceive its proper limits.” The erring alien’s cultural metaphoricity is creative because he is barbarous, not settling for the dominant culture’s rules of “eloquence,” for these will always constitute, at their limit, the perceptual dream of pure national desire.

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S H A K E S P E A R E ’S A F R I C A N S

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P I L O G U E

I M P E R I A L I S M ’S L E G A C Y , O R T H E “L A N G U A G E O F T H E C R I M I N A L”

The dramatic construction of the “erring barbarian” takes place within

an international Renaissance context so strikingly new and transformative as to serve as the modern prototype for cross-cultural exchange, interaction, and immigration. “Geographers, historians, merchants, or moralizing churchmen,” write Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh, “were all part of the movement of European exploration and ‘discovery’ from the fifteenth century onwards, setting into motion a process of globalization and transculturation that is still with us today” (1). The historical and practical value of understanding the Othello syndrome of desired assimilation allows for an extended meditation on the means and consequences of acculturation, a complex emotional, social, and political process raised at the close of chapter four and the focus of chapter five. Othello’s strategy of belonging within Europe, what I have examined as his performance of cultural whiteness, can be subjected to Frantz Fanon’s critique over naively adopting, or surrendering to, the prescriptions of the dominant group within a colonial paradigm: “At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a cultural work he fails to realize that he is utilizing techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country” (Fanon 1990: 180). At the same time, an alternate Shakespearean pattern of protest and resistance offered by Aaron and Caliban anticipate Fanon’s radical consideration in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) of the separation of the native intellectual from every level of the colonial machinery. Political self-awareness and the linguistic will to confront oppression unite Aaron and Caliban but create a contrasting frame for the critically beloved Othello whose desire to assimilate, to perform cultural whiteness, does not save him from the

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racial truth of tragedy: death. While remaining alert to the danger of presuming an uninterrupted transhistorical colonial narrative, one recognizes the epistemological value of configuring these dramatic encounters and the reactions to them by non-Europeans as significant precursors to enduring questions raised in colonial and current postcolonial analyses. Shakespeare, especially, among early modern playwrights, affords a crucial continuity with the classical conception of linguistic barbarism as an informing racial code, but his work also serves as a point of confluence, providing a historical bridge across which the subsequent developments of this most persistent of European racializing systems can be traced. In a memorable fictional encounter in the discursive history of race relations, Miranda, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the resident island magus of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) berates Caliban for having suggested that he would populate the “isle with Calibans” (1.2.352).1 This motif of reproduction, evident in all three of Shakespeare’s plays examined, functions as the demographic trigger of imagined social rebellion. Miranda, of course, is targeted as the unwilling and unavailable mate to this monster of African descent (his mother Sycorax is from Algiers), a deliberate echo and travesty of Claribel’s marriage to the king of Tunis, another of the four North African regencies commonly called Barbary. Caliban’s wish for a numerical superiority in the face of Prospero’s powerful and enslaving magic envisions propagation as a prerequisite to a social rebellion that needs significant numbers. To Caliban’s extraordinary claims, Miranda famously replies: Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill; I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known. (1.2.352–59)

Where Caliban seeks an increase in offspring as the key to political freedom, Miranda offers, instead, language and its multiplication of words. Caliban understands the political possibilities of sexual proliferation; Miranda rejects it and preaches the civilizing doctrine of language that, in this context, is deeply engaged in its own countervailing notions of enlargement. For her, as well as her father, linguistic dilation is the very measure of imperial expansion. Miranda’s response carries a deep history that ties antiquity’s discourse of barbarism to this now classic example of nascent early modern colonial ideology. The myth of the linguistic origins of civilization, discussed at

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For it is written, that Poesie was th’originall cause and occasion of their first assemblies, when before the people remained in the woods and mountains, vagarant and dispersed like the wild beasts, lawlesse and naked, or verie ill clad, and of all good and necessarie prouision for harbour or sustenance vtterly vnfurnished: so as they litle diffred for their maner of life, from the very brute beasts of the field. (Puttenham 22)

From Cicero to Puttenham, this primal scene of civilization is reiterated, and language emerges as the sufficient and necessary agent of progressive human history. From this narrative, language as a civilizing force appears as an entirely natural event, the product of goodwill and spontaneous expression, and the poet with “his discreete and wholsome lessons vttered in harmonie and with melodious instruments” plays a pivotal role in reordering human nature (29). Shakespeare’s island with its woods, mountains, and native “wild beast” of African descent in Caliban becomes the early modern equivalent of this linguistic primal scene. Prospero is the poet-philosopher, the resident Amphion and Orpheus, who brings order to this disordered, barbarous world while Miranda acts as his instrumental heir (29).3 Prospero’s “art” (1.1.1) thus extends beyond supernatural powers to create a tempest to function as an emblem for the art of language, the aesthetic and rhetorical powers that control and persuade beastly men into adopting and surrendering to acceptable behavior. Shakespeare restages this mythic moment, absent the supposed benignity of the language giver, and Caliban as the epitome of barbarity is savagely assaulted by the linguistic indoctrination of the magus and his daughter. Miranda’s condemnation, Jonathan Goldberg explains, derives its premise from humanist education treatises, such as Ascham’s Scholemaster and Mulcaster’s Elementarie, that argue the incapacity of some to receive learning and, therefore, benefit from its transformative, social influence (2002: 236–37). While education did promote a social mobility project, enlisting thereby new kinds of people into higher echelons of society, it also had what Halpern describes as a “demonstrative” purpose, through which educational failure was taken to indicate those incapable of education. (237)

Humanist education theory posited that there was no inevitable arc to education’s ameliorative agency, and race as essence—“vile race” (1.2.359)

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the opening of chapter one, reappears in Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (Book 1.3), a contemporary Shakespearean intertext.2 Poetry or eloquent and systematically formalized language that aims at persuasion enters the scene of human history to rescue humanity from this barbarous, nomadic existence in the wild.

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of a kind that anticipates Enlightenment classification—disrupted education’s transformative process to install an “unbridgeable racial difference” (Goldberg 2002: 242).4 Caliban’s presumed incapacity to engage in the pedagogic project consigns him to the beastly state of an animal without reason.5 With an allusion to the humanist education project, emphasizing books, learning, language, textual reproduction, and pedagogic transformation, Caliban is criticized as being so evil (a Manichean approach to affirming barbarous difference) that he will not take “any print of goodness” (italics mine). Like the indelible blackness that informs the impossibility of change evoked in the widely circulated proverb “to wash the Ethiop white,” and conjured up in the associations of darkness and blackness with Caliban’s negated good or evil, the island slave resists whitewashing of the chromatic or linguistic kind: he retains his blackness, an emblematic, and possibly literal, sign of his African heritage.6 Further, he refuses to be incorporated into Prospero and Miranda’s humanist writing of history where his contradictoriness or barbarousness will be erased according to the monolingual pressures of colonial narrativization. “When thou didst not, savage/ Know thy own meaning,” Miranda insists with egotistical hauteur, “I endowed thy purposes/ With words that made them known.” Here she outlines the perfect instrument of colonial hegemony: the colonized man will be endowed with a false consciousness that binds him to thinking he exercises autonomy. Caliban, however, understands the work of language indoctrination— whether the ostensibly benign humanist variety or its overtly hegemonic analogue—as insidious and destructive, and he resists its inscriptions of imperial and colonial power. Shakespeare demonstrates that far from being a spontaneous and innocuous instrument of the civilizing process, rhetoric—that is, language as racializing and persuasive—is revealed as violent ideological prescription. Commenting on this passage from The Tempest in The Pleasures of Exile (1960), George Lamming, the Barbadian author, writes from a Caribbean perspective and notes the extraordinary prophetic power of Miranda and Prospero’s linguistic discipline exercised over Caliban. There is no escape from the prison of Prospero’s gift. This example of deformity was a challenge to Prospero’s need to achieve the impossible. Only the application of the Word to the darkness of Caliban’s world could harness the beast which resides within this cannibal. This is the first important achievement of the colonising process. The gift of Language is the deepest and most delicate bond of involvement. It has a certain finality. Caliban will never be the same again. Nor for that matter will Prospero. . . . The gift of Language meant not English, in particular, but speech and concept as a way, a method, a necessary

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For Lamming, the father and daughter’s commitment to this “gift of Language” to Caliban marks an important figuration of the colonial encounter whose legacy Lamming lives as someone born in the Caribbean under British imperial rule and as an immigrant, a Caribbean exile living in London, the metropolis of the empire. Lamming perceives the inevitable reciprocity, the always implied contagion of the gift, that erodes the superiority of the gift-giver so that Prospero, too, will be necessarily transformed by the exchange. Caliban may be Prospero’s “convert, colonised by language, and excluded by language,” but Lamming insists that Prospero “is afraid because he knows that his encounter with Caliban is, largely, his encounter with himself” (15). Still, Caliban “can never be regarded as an heir of that Language, since his use of Language is no more than his way of serving Prospero; and Prospero’s instruction in this Language is only his way of measuring the distance which separates him from Caliban” (110). As recently as 1988 Jamaica Kincaid, born in Antigua, restates, in her characteristic biting tone, the endemic difficulties Lamming outlines: For isn’t it odd that the only language that I have in which to speak of this crime [of colonialism] is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal’s deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal’s point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me. (31–32)

In a passage entirely reminiscent of Miranda’s view of language as ideologically replete with the colonizer’s consciousness, Kincaid expresses the postcolonial dilemma of needing to write, think, and speak one’s subjectivity through the imprisoning “language of the criminal.” The fundamental irony is that the imperial gift of language is disinheritance, for it produces others who are unlike the gift-giver and, for that matter, will probably never be owned as legitimate heirs. Propagation in Caliban’s retaliatory scheme is opposed in the hegemony of the European’s giftgiving language plan. The problematic effects of linguistic disinheritance filter down to contemporary culture. “Between 10 and 12 April 1981,” writes Terence Hawkes, “it seemed to some in Britain as if Caliban had begun to take over the island.” The setting was the Brixton riots involving clashes between

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avenue towards areas of self which could not be reached in any other way. (109)

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the local West Indian population and the police. The subsequent official report, written by Lord Scarman, detailed language—the barbarism of the immigrant group—as the source of racial conflict: “of the factors making the incorporation of the black community into the larger one extremely difficult, ‘trouble with the English language’ is seen as ‘most important of all.’ ” Recalling Miranda’s colonial pedagogy inculcated by Prospero, the report recommends, “teaching a command of the English language, a broad education in the humanities” as the solution to racial tensions caused (so the complaint ran) by barbarous disaffection that undercut the neutering power of assimilation (Hawkes 44). In addition to the range of West Indian responses indicated here (Lamming, Kincaid, immigrant protest), African writers also testify powerfully to barbarism’s contemporary significance. Chinua Achebe, while granting the historical fact that English has been the gift of imperialism that he, as a Nigerian writer, must use, nevertheless concedes “the fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature” (xii). In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of African Literature (1986), Ngugi Wa Thiong’o of Kenya, writing on African literature generally, is even more uncomfortable with this paradoxical linguistic legacy: “The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe. Hence language has always been at the heart of the two contending social forces in the Africa of the twentieth century”—the two forces being “an imperialist tradition on one hand, and a resistance tradition on the other” (4, 2). So profound is the role of language in the imperial histories of the nations of Africa and the ensuing quest for an appropriate relationship with the “natural and social environment” that Ngugi announces in his opening “Statement” that this collection of essays marks his “farewell to English as a vehicle for any of [his] writings,” having previously bid a similar envoi to English for his creative, literary work after the 1977 publication of Petals of Blood (xiv). “From now on,” he declares, “it is Gikuyu and Kiswahili all the way” (xiv). In its postclassical afterlife, barbarism survived as a disjunctive descriptor, and its Eurocentric diffusion of the metropolitan, master language (as attested to in the Caribbean and African colonial contexts profiled here) was integral to the highpoint of nineteenth-century British imperialism. For the very idea of a “barbarian” is, of course, a linguistic notion. If the term originally expressed the Greeks’ disdain for those un-Hellenic outlanders who stammered (i.e. said barbar) when they spoke, the term has lost none of its linguistic force when it subsequently came to be used of the vastly expanded and diverse linguistic groups that

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Such a reminder of the role of linguistic imperialism in recent world history makes it easier for the modern reader to understand the racial force of language in creating subordinate classes of people discriminated against and disenfranchised within colonial contexts. Language, without question, set individuals apart, as clearly and with equal consequence as any biological feature under colonial rule. Official colonial efforts to control education and literacy to have a direct impact on selective discrimination, class hierarchy, and insider-outsider politics attests to the recognition of language’s racial power. Language achieves racial force by creating a distinguishing human feature that is the basis for prejudice, inferiority, and social abjection—in short, transactions of power. “All groups of people,” observes Timothy Long, “have a handle by which they can grasp the foreigner. For some it is color, for others religion, for still others local origin. For the Greeks the handle was language, and especially for the Athenians” (136). Such has been the widespread effects of the role of language in the European colonizing enterprise for which Miranda’s speech stands as a literary archetype that its seemingly intractable legacy invites commentary hundreds of years later. Lamming observes that “it is Shakespeare’s capacity for experience which leads [him] to feel that The Tempest was also prophetic of a political future which is our present” (13). If Lamming sees The Tempest as a prophetic cultural document, then we must inquire into the specific reasoning concerning that imperial prophecy. When Miranda rebuffs Caliban for not yielding to her language, the very token of civility, she lays the blame on his “vile race.” “Race,” certainly functions in this context as referring to family, tribe, or group from which one is propagated; in effect, she turns the tables on the would-be family man, Caliban. However, Caliban’s “gabble,” as she styles his speech—his barbarisms, in other words—is coterminous with his “vile race” and will not allow him to be successfully transformed, transmuted, and civilized.7 The significance of the commentaries made by contemporary Caribbean and African writers is, then, twofold. First, they maintain that language was and continues to be the defining feature of intercultural encounter and the establishing of social identities, confirming the repeated historical twinning of language and racialization. The classical project of using language as an ethnically and racially discriminatory tool, invented and sharpened in the context of imperialism, showed remarkable resilience in its duplication in modern histories of English imperial oppression that, effectively, declared Africans and Africans of the colonial diaspora “barbarians.” Second, they help reaffirm that the examination of “race”

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stammered their obscure dialects inside and outside the borders of the Roman, and now the British, Empire. (Dowling 93)

R ACE

AND

R HETORIC

IN THE

RENAISSANCE

in the early modern period might be fruitfully initiated in the area of language, especially since a complex arc can be drawn in the interest of historical continuities. These modern commentators urge us to examine carefully the early modern sources of language in its imperial and racializing forms, thus identifying the early modern period as a crucial point of departure for these investigations. As this study has argued, however, such a historical examination requires a new “Renaissance” conceptualization of the early modern period—one that acknowledges and situates race centrally—along with the return to the classical formulation of barbarism.

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I NTRODUCTION 1. Despite vigorous debates about dating, definition, sources, conceptual unity, or specific national and geographical realizations, scholars can at least agree on the generative role of classical learning and culture on the Renaissance. Charles Nauert, Jr. (1995) provides a comprehensive bibliography. Jill Kraye’s Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (1996) and Robert Black’s Renaissance Thought (2001) are good subsequent companions. See also Ross and McLaughlin’s introductory essay to The Portable Renaissance Reader. 2. On the importance of rhetoric in the school curriculum as well as literary achievements in English and their relation to national identity, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood and T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. 3. From his study of the relationship between language, humanism and Spanish imperialism, Walter Mignolo speaks of “the darker side of the Renaissance” (vii); see esp. Chapters 1 and 2. 4. Politics 1.1.3–6. Hale also writes that the ancient world “was antifeminist: did this influence the increasing subordination of the serious role of women in the sixteenth century?” (212). However, women occupy a position below men in Greek society, but the barbarian, like the slave, is generically inferior to both. 5. I use the term “substitute” in the sense offered by Nagel and Wood, in the context of art history, to describe an overdetermined equation of past and present, “enforcing general structural or categorical continuity across sequences of tokens” to effectively produce a static notion of temporality (405). 6. The argument concerning the racial implications of color in the early modern period is best represented by Hall’s, Things of Darkness and Iyengar’s, Shades of Difference; in addition to Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688, Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race, D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama, Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History, esp. 51–70, also provides important documentary evidence. 7. Neill goes on to argue, however, that color emerges in the language of nationalism in the late sixteenth century fostered by European anxiety to draw radical distinctions from “others” in an expanded world context (1998: 368–69). 8. For a recent thorough treatment of this issue, see Lara Bovilsky, Barbarous Play, esp. 1–35. She remarks, concerning the Renaissance stage in particular, “that narratives of fluidity and boundary crossing mark the characteristic sites for both the production and analysis of racial content” (3).

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NOT E S

NOTES

9. In addition to Callaghan, see Hendricks and Parker, MacDonald (2002), and Bovilsky, esp. Chapter 1, “Desdemona’s Blackness,” 37–65. 10. Loomba (2003) provides an excellent account, 22–74. 11. Several studies have emphasized the multiple, complex intersections of racializing codes in diverse generic, aesthetic, and political contexts: in addition to Hall (1995) and Iyengar, already mentioned, see Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period; Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women; Arthur L. Little, Jr., Shakespeare Jungle Fever; Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts and her edited collection, Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance; Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama and Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism which, despite its title, also focuses on religion; Ayanna Thompson, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage; Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse, eds., Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race and Empire in Renaissance England; Catherine M.S. Alexander and Stanley Wells, eds., Shakespeare and Race; Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama; and Emily Bartels, Speaking of the Moor. For a more comprehensive bibliography, see Loomba and Burton, Race in Early Modern England, 29–30. 12. Virginia Mason Vaughan (1997) admits the political efficacy of an imperial paradigm based on binary opposition to focus, like Margo Hendricks, on the inevitable cultural pollution that results from interethnic conflict and miscegenation in early colonial America. “Only when the concept of civility proves to be an ideological contradiction in the colonial project,” Hendricks concludes, “does the idea of race shift its meaning” from hierarchies of lineage to difference reflected in color (1994: 238). 13. Lotfi Ben Rejeb does note, in passing, the classical connection although he ignores the pertinent linguistic history (345); John Gillies speculates for a brief moment on the probable “wordplay” on “barbaros” in Sophocles, but his focus in Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference is on the representation of Africans as sexually transgressive or perverse (17). 14. Shuger makes the case that the violent aggression associated with the British barbarian past persisted into the Tudor aristocracy (505); the untold story of barbarism, she claims, is of “white upperclass men” (494). In an essay exploring the expression “barbarous Scythian” (1.1.116) in King Lear, Butler argues that the descendants of the Scythians, who were thought to invade Britain, were alive to the Elizabethans: “The phrase ‘barbarous Scythian’ could therefore be shorthand for an inarticulate, poor, barely clad, sexually promiscuous cannibal, wandering through a vast wilderness, a primitive man indeed, without cornfields, markets, roads, cities or temples; beggarly but cruel, dangerous, and very powerful” (75). 15. Curran writes, “Anachronistic conceptions of the ancient Britons as medieval kings had to be revised, as did the notion, intrinsic to the timehonored Galfridian Brute myth, that Britain maintained a glorious royal lineage as old as the Trojan war; ancient British history had now to be understood to begin with Julius Caesar, and Roman accounts were to

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164

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

165

be regarded as the only available sources for the period” (1997: 279). For a full treatment of the shifting historiographic paradigms, see Curran’s Roman Invasions. On the Trojan myth in British history, see also MacDougall, esp. 7–27, Heninger, Ker, and Parsons. The Irish were commonly described as barbarous often with the overt political intent to disparage Irish resistance to English colonization. Tony Crowley’s sourcebook offers several examples, 12–78. See also Neill 1994 and Hadfield 1996. On the racializing function of civility in early modern drama, see Thompson 75–97. The Atlantic slave trade, and the related series of events concerning the denigration of blackness, leads to the recognizable “white over black” paradigm that Floyd-Wilson does not intend to pursue. Instead, by paying attention to the way barbarism and whiteness connect to English ethnicity, she seeks to historicize whiteness, reminding us of “an ethnological history that failed to predict the outcome that we now know” (11). The inverse logic of ancient geography contrasted north and south so that one was a negation of the other; thus the wisdom of the south was contrasted with the dullness of the northern barbarians who compensated for intellectual deficiencies with physical strength. Floyd-Wilson documents this reputation of the northern barbarians in Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (16) and William Harrison’s The Description of Britaine: “they are ‘white in color, strong of bodie, and full of bloud, as people inhabiting neere the north, and farre from the equinoctiall line, where the soile is not so fruitful, and the people not so feeble’ ” (4). Butler also remarks this double response to the barbarian heritage: barbarians “are envied and admired (as Tacitus did the Germans, or Rousseau the noble savage): here is unspoilt man, uncorrupted by society and by wealth” (76). Shuger comments on this notion of forcible civilization: “In Camden’s account of English origins, as in the Irish tracts, northern barbarians belong to a narrative model that configures history as the gradual acquisition of civility—a civility, moreover, apparently dependent upon the forcible imposition of a more advanced culture” (497). In her reading of the gradual social stabilization of England in the medieval period, the emerging nation in its need to legitimize itself constructs the racial other as the abject, threatening thing that the nation is not. While I focus on the English, Africans, and race in this study, Heng’s racial subjects are more diverse; for a similar argument about race and need, see her later article, “Jews, Saracens, ‘Black Men,’ Tartars: England in a World of Racial Difference,” 249. Spivak writes, “The notion of origin is as broad and robust and full of affect as it is imprecise. . . . History slouches in it, ready to comfort and kill. Yet to feel one is from an origin is not a pathology. It belongs to that group of grounding mistakes that enable us to make sense of our lives” (1992: 781). Benveniste explains that the content of a subject’s utterance does not always dominate a communication, for the speaker designated “you” can, in turn, speak as “I”; that is, the positions “are reversible” (199).

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NOTES

23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

NOTES Benveniste offers a model of linguistic subjectivity and freedom that can function as a form of subversion. Note, however, that this communication rule of reversibility is deliberately undermined in the racial contexts of Renaissance England or the Greco-Roman tradition regarding the barbarian, for the barbarian as speaker-object (an amalgamated third “person” which is not a person, reminds Benveniste) is construed as never acceding to the implicit subjectivity of the “speaker-I.” All citations from Titus Andronicus follow the Arden edition. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Shakespeare follow The Riverside Shakespeare. The famous Peacham drawing, a contemporaneous stage illustration, unique in English theater history, confirms the visual impact of color in its conflated scene from Titus Andronicus; Aaron, the lone African character among the denizens of Rome, stands vividly inked— thoroughly blackened—on the imperial margin. On the colonial themes, see Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds., PostColonial Shakespeares; Imtiaz Habib, Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period; and Emily C. Bartels, “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered.” Mignolo offers the following: “While Renaissance studies are oriented toward the Mediterranean and often assume the continuity of the classical tradition, studies of the early modern period turn toward the Atlantic and the Pacific and advocate the perspective of the colonies” (1). Lewis observes that “slavery had indeed been practiced from time immemorial,” but because color was not tied to enslavement in the classical period, for example, the conjunction under Islamic and Arabic conquest was remarkable (3). See esp. Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Chapters 1 and 5; Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, Chapters 3 and 4; Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American racist Thought”; and Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World. For Gillies’s full argument, see 4–25. For example in his reading of Othello, Gillies sees a predetermined set of circumstances: a blameless Iago and a culpable Othello who must bear the responsibility of entering Venetian space. Iago is given a free pass, and Shakespeare, one concludes, is simply surrendering to a preexisting topos (25–30). In addition to the troubling reproduction in his criticism of black figures as sexually exorbitant and perverse, his eschewing a language of “race,” with its potential for antiracist political and critical analysis, can be read as an apologia for whiteness. Although he imagines barbarians as African and black, the net effect of Gillies’s central thesis is an unfortunate collusion with a reactionary strain within whiteness studies. The methodological discontent is stated by David Armitage: “Postcolonial studies have generated proto-colonial studies, and recent scholarship has found the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to be deeply, because necessarily, inflected by the ‘imperial’ experiences of racial difference, irreducible ‘otherness,’ assertions of hierarchy, and national self-determination” (102).

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31. Notably, the pioneering studies on race, difference, and colonial practices in the early modern period find their way on Armitage’s list of suspects, among them Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters and Emily Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness, in addition to several mentioned earlier: Kim F. Hall; Loomba (1989), and Hendricks and Parker. The full list of seven that purports to expose the main offenders of historical correctness is unusually weighted against scholarship on race relating to Africa. 32. Hendricks has in mind here the now discredited pseudo-scientific approaches that emphasized anatomical measurements and biology as the unassailable physical proof of distinct and hierarchical racial categories, flawed science whose social impact remains, nevertheless, potent. 33. On this division of history, Appiah is clear: “it is in the nineteenth century, I think, that the configuration of ideas about race we have inherited began to take its modern shape” (1996: 42). Appiah does, however, pause to make the following comment: “If we look back, for a moment, to the seventeenth-century traditions of English thought that are Jefferson’s background, we see a different configuration of ideas in which the physical body was important not as a cause but as a sign of difference” (1996: 50). 34. Concerning the second Guinea expedition of 1554–55, Peter Martyr notes, for example, that his description starts from the authentic narration given him by “an experte pylot beinge one of the chiefe in this viage, who also with his owne handes wrote a briefe declaration of the same as he founde and tried thinges not by conjecture, but by the arte of saylynge and instrumentes perteynynge to the mariners facultie” (Eden 349v). 35. Even the pretense of ethnographic first-hand data collection, “words I gather’d from one of the gravest of them,” is betrayed by an all too familiar regurgitation of ancient opinion in Pliny’s “Proem of his 5 lib. Nat. histor. That their names and Townes were ineffable, or not to be distinguished. These be Anonymi and so more barbarous” (Herbert 18). 36. Leo identifies “five severall people or tribes; to wit, the tribes called Zanhagi, Musmudi, Zeneti, Hacari, and Gumeri” (7). About this “noble Speech,” Leo observes that “the Arabians which inhabite Africa, call it a barbarous toong; and thus is the true and naturall language of the Africans,” reminding us that the intercultural local politics, native Berbers and invading Arabs constantly replayed this trope of barbarism (8–9). 37. Religion, like language, offers similar possibilities for change and adaptation by way of conversion; see Loomba (2003), 56–59 and Vitkus (2003). 38. Of course miscegenation proves problematic to the theory of permanently distinct, separate races, making color porous; the focus of Vaughan (1997), Hendricks (1994), and Gillies on miscegenation is relevant here (15–25); thus interracial sex has to be vigilantly policed. See also Palmer, Boose, and Little, Jr. 39. In a chapter titled “Re: Membering,” (1999: 96–129), Bruce Smith calls attention to the many ways language is understood as literally embodied in the early modern period; he concludes with this challenge: “We are adept

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NOTES

40.

41.

42.

43.

NOTES at reading graphemes as symbols of semantic concepts; what we need are ways of reading graphemes as indices of somatic experience” (129). On this history of English, R. Foster Jones, Charles Barber, and J.L. Moore are particularly useful; for collections of primary sources, see Cragie and Bolton. The sixteenth-century investment in the language arts can be seen in the popularity of certain schoolbooks and the initial appearance of rhetorics in English. The first fifty years record the enormous influence of Erasmus’s De utraque verborum ac rerum copia (1512), Georg Major’s 1526 adaptation being followed by Veltkirchius’s heavily annotated edition of 1536. The pioneering handbook in English, printed in England, is Leonard Cox’s The Arte or Crafte of Rethoryke (1530); and Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) was the first to employ the complete Ciceronian five-part program. Also at mid-century, Richard Sherry’s Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), the first of its kind, was followed by Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577) that focused solely on figures; Dudley Fenner’s The Artes of Logike and Rhetorike (1584) and Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) both reflected Ramist influence. Angel Day’s English Secretorie (1592), like many other handbooks, underwent several editions; in 1599, John Hoskins’s Directions for Speech and Style neatly balanced Ramist and non-Ramist influences. In addition to Vickers (1981) and Howell, full accounts of the history of English rhetorics can be found in Grund and Baldwin. R. Foster Jones’s The Triumph of the English Language argues the re-assessment of English beginning in the 1570s, and my review of the various statements on English supports his general claim. This is not to suggest that criticisms suddenly died away, for these appear even well into the seventeenth century; see Thomas Sprat’s interesting The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, first published in 1667, and James Howell’s observation from Letter LV (1630): “Now, the English speech, tho’ it be rich, copious, and significant, and that there be divers Dictionaries of it, yet, under favour, I cannot call it a regular Language” (462). However, in the late sixteenth century, a larger chorus of voices is added to the positive evaluation of English, and lively debates ensue that argue for its artistic relevance and achievement; see chapter 4 below. T.W. Baldwin’s pioneering Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, Kenneth Charlton’s Education in Renaissance England, John Lawson and Harold Silver’s A Social History of Education in England, and more recently Brian Vickers’s In Defence of Rhetoric, Helen M. Jewell’s Education in Early Modern England, and Peter Mack’s Elizabethan Rhetoric offer detailed accounts of educational practices and the broad social implementation of rhetorical training. Trousdale writes, for example, “the art of rhetoric dominated Renaissance culture as it dominated the curricula of early modern schooling” (623). Kristeller (1983) agrees, with the qualification ably demonstrated in Mack, that humanism was not the unique expression of Renaissance thought although rhetoric did have an impact in a variety of areas, such as theology, jurisprudence, the sciences, and

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168

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

169

philosophy. For a recent appraisal of humanism in Tudor England, see Woolfson. The core curriculum of medieval universities comprised the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric and logic or dialectic (trivium), arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (quadrivium); see David L. Wagner, ed., The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages. English rhetorical handbooks, following classical and continental tradition, fused rhetoric, and poetics (Vickers 1983: 412); see also Gert Ronberg, A Way with Words: The Language of English Renaissance Literature, esp. Chapter 5. See also Gabriel Harvey’s Ciceronianus (1577): “This will give the sum of the matter: I valued words more than content, language more than thought, the one art of speaking more than the thousand subjects of content” (69). For Victoria Kahn, the relationship between rhetoric and “the active life” is one of the “most fundamental assumptions of Renaissance humanist thought” (9). Her Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance draws connections among rhetoric, praxis, and literature as a major conduit of exemplary models of behavior. Henry VIII’s political problems, divorce, and the birth of the English Church, drew into the national orbit Thomas More and the cadre of men recruited by Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, among them Thomas Starkey, Richard Taverner, and Richard Morison, whose royal employment set a pattern for years to follow. Cromwell, as an additional example, suffered a humiliating fall, his opponents Norfolk and Southampton only too willing to return the low-born minister to his former status. On active, political humanism, see James McConica, A.B. Ferguson, Alistair Fox, John Guy, and Geoffrey Elton. Having traditionally eschewed education as important, the aristocracy, too, came to understand the significance of education in the changing economic landscape of the sixteenth century. On humanism and the gentry’s social rise, see Caspari. Lawson and Silver remark that, as a complement to new land acquisitions in the aftermath of Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries, the gentry seized the humanist educational opportunities to fulfill their goals of mobility in an era when the fashioning of the ideal gentleman had been popularized by Elyot and Ascham (93, 103). See O’Day, esp. 62–76. Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570), Mulcaster’s Positions (1581), Kempe’s Education of Children in Learning (1588) and Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius (1612) and Consolation for our Grammar Schools (1622) provide evidence of this ideal of classical training in the grammar school (Charlton 105). Erasmus’s De Copia was the standard in Europe generally; we find in England Sherry’s Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550) and Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553); and Rainolde’s Foundation of Rhetoric (1563) was a loose translation of Apthonious of Antioch’s Progymnasmata, arguably the most famous school book on rhetoric in the classical and Renaissance eras. In this, Rainolde was not alone, for many of the English school books were adaptations or translations of Latin texts; see Charlton 110–13.

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NOTES

NOTES

51. See also Halpern, 48 and Althusser’s “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus.” 52. Vives criticized the older method in his De Tradendis disciplinis (1531) and found an ally in Ascham who later elaborated the newer approach of double translation; see also O’Day, 67. 53. Rebecca Bushnell resists what she describes as the “tendency to read early modern humanist—and all successive—pedagogies in terms of a Foucauldian saturation of disciplinary power,” preferring instead to observe ambivalence as the “pedagogical texts oscillated between play and work, freedom and control, submission and mastery” (16–17). Halpern addresses the role of play but understands it as instrumental to the seductive subversion of hegemony (28–30). “Humanist rhetorical education,” he writes, “tried to evolve a mode of indoctrination based on hegemony and consent rather than force and coercion; it aimed to produce an active embrace of ideology rather than a passive acceptance” (28). 54. Though humanist pedagogic practice tended toward the mimetic manipulation of ancient texts, Anthony Grafton points out that historical problems posed by such an undertaking did not go unaddressed in the wider European debate: “One set of humanists seeks to make the ancient world live again, assuming its undimmed relevance and unproblematic accessibility; another set seeks to put the ancient texts back in their own time, admitting that reconstruction of the past is difficult and that success may reveal the irrelevance of ancient experience and precept to modern problems” (1991: 26–27). 55. The proliferation of interest in style, Mike Pincombe suggests, is directly linked to courtly literary fashions: 7–9. 56. A caveat: rhetoric was not a slavishly bookish, purely formal, or exclusively elite venture. The mastery of the arts of language was practical, destined to advance careers in public life or, as Erasmus hoped, to democratize religious education, to prepare even the “farmhand to be able to read the Bible while ploughing his fields” (Trousdale 627). 57. Cicero, De officiis, 1.57; 1.85; 3.29–30; 3.40. 58. For Cicero the common good requires elevating the state’s interests above all other personal duties and ethical responsibilities. He asks rhetorically, “Well, then, are not the claims of country paramount to all other duties?” (De officiis, 3.90); unethical actions are justified when they “promote thereby the interests of one’s country” (De officiis, 3.93). Because the state is the ultimate arbiter of what is good, severe limits are placed on the parameters of common or shared wellbeing. Perceived difference or transgression will trigger the collective mandate to exclude, punish, or discipline. 59. I borrow the auditory terminology from Bruce Smith’s The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. 60. “The study of rhetoric,” Kahn reminds us, “becomes the study of the different conventions of interpretation, the different forms of consensus, that are available at a particular historical moment” (23). Race is not only subject to a rhetorical analysis; in the Renaissance it derives from rhetoric as a discipline and practice, calling attention to its conventional,

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NOTES

171

consensual character as opposed to being an inevitable natural reality. On the problematic legacy of race and science, see Harding, Stepan, Barkan, and Barker.

C L ASSIC A L P RECEDENTS

1. In addition to Cicero and Isocrates, both cited in the text, see also Plato, Protagoras 322b-d; Cicero, De oratore 1.33; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria: 2.16.9. 2. The reforms of Kleisthenes struck down kinship ties in favor of an open, participatory democracy. On the legal front, Ephialtes dismantled the power of the aristocratic Areopagus by reducing its responsibilities mainly to homicide trials and placing the bulk of cases in the domain of the newly created Heliaia, courts with large juries consisting of members selected from ordinary citizens numbering six thousand per year. Conley offers a succinct account of the Sophists, the political and legal reforms and their impact on the rise of rhetorical education: 4–7; see also Waterfield 59–62, 81–86. 3. Of course, with teachers charging exorbitant fees, only the wealthy could take full advantage of instruction in this new art of persuasion, thereby undermining, to some degree, the broad horizontal effects the reforms had intended. 4. Legendary stories concerning Tisias and Corax as originators of “the teaching of rhetoric as an art” existed, as referenced by Quintilian, 2.17.7. 5. Summary accounts of the Persian Wars can be found in Waterfield, 63–72, and Vivante, 79–95; see also Burn’s classic study, and more recently, Green and Holland. 6. Up until the threat from Persia, small, individual Greek communities bore the highest level of self-identity, but the invasions forced a national group identity that, interstate Greek rivalries notwithstanding, polarized itself against the barbarian (Hall 1989: 8–9). 7. See Meiggs. 8. Salamis has, on balance, inappropriately displaced Plataea (479 BC), in which the Spartans played the crucial role, as “the decisive victory of the second Persian invasion.” This is due in part Charles Freeman suggests, “to the skill of the Athenian propagandists who elevated the battle to make it appear the conclusive one of the war” (183, 181). 9. Plutarch identifies this omen with Salamis; the owl, being Athena’s bird, is a positive token for the Athenians (Themistocles 12.1). See also Aristophanes, Lysistrata 1248–70. 10. Vivante suggests that Herodotus worked on his history between 460–20 BCE (79). In the Introduction to the Oxford edition, Carolyn Dewald observes that “Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek literary critic in the Roman empire, was right to emphasize that Herodotus was the first to see many different stories of the past as parts of a single whole story.” Moreover, the “Histories are not a chronicle of a single rule or a single people’s contract with its god, but a ‘polycentric’ narrative that moves easily

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1

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

NOTES among different voices, stories, and points of view of many individuals from many different lands” (xii). On the educational and political role of the fifth-century theater, see also Gregory, esp. 1–17, Cartledge 18–22, and Blundell 12–16. Of the nearly three hundred tragedies of which we have some evidence, just less than “half of these portrayed barbarian characters, or were set in a non-Greek land, or both: almost all the extant plays at least refer to barbarian customs or inferiority” (Hall 1989: 1). Edith Hall argues in Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy that “tragedy’s contribution to the theory of the barbarian has been underestimated” (5). While Helen Bacon confirms Hall’s focus on tragedy’s institution and proliferation of the barbarian trope, Timothy Long has also corroborated the Athenian theater’s role in his examination of comedy. On the characterization of an endemic “performance culture” at Athens, see Rehm 3–11. The dramas’ constant references to a host of ritual, social practices seemed to suggest that “the overtly performative genre of theatre acknowledged its debt to the other manifestations of Athenian performative culture” (3). This was also a time when the tributes paid to Athens by her allies in the Delian League were placed on display in the theater, trumpeting Athenian hegemony. On the City Dionysia, see Pickard-Cambridge 57–101. Destroyed during the Persian invasions of 480–79 and rebuilt in 438, the Parthenon atop the Acropolis was an enduring visual reminder of Athenian triumph and ascent rehearsed in the dramas of state. On the spatial comparisons and significance of geographic location, see Rehm 4 and Cartledge 19. Emphasizing only the performative dimension apparent in the comparison, Rehm observes that the “legal system converted both plaintiff and defendant into actors interpreting their lines for the benefit of their jury-audience” (4–5). Thucydides, 1.6.1–6; Plato, Republic 5.452c-d; Aristotle, Politics 2.5.11. The civilized Greek, for example, had rejected the option of carrying arms, once an option necessitated by widespread robberies, but the custom survived among the Ozolian Locrians, Aetolians, and Acarnanians. The Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language defines “barbarous”: “foreign, lit. stammering; a name given by Greeks to express the strange sounds of foreign languages. Cf. L. balbus”; and The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following, but the qualification is unwarranted: “The Gr. word had probably a primary reference to speech, and is compared with L. balbus stammering.” Henderson translates the original as “savage” rather than “barbarous.” Sophocles’s Trachiniae 1060, and Aristophanes’s Frogs 724, for example, reproduce the “Greek and barbarian” antithesis. The entry for “barbarism” in The Universal Etymological English Dictionary reads: “a fault in pronunciation, an impropriety of speech, a rudeness of language or behavior,” indicating the dramatic slide from linguistic concerns to behavioral and moral opprobrium.

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22. In the Republic 4.427e, the four virtues are listed: to be “wise, brave, sober and just.” 23. Freeman speculates “whether among the other concerns of a great empire it made much impact at all” although he does call attention to the recent discovery of tablets at Persepolis that might alter the historical record (171). 24. Where modern linguistics proceeds descriptively from actual spoken data, ancient technical grammar prescribed a language that was the product of internal class interests linked to political mobility and advantage; see Atherton esp. 239–43. 25. A low-class status added to the grammarian’s marginal social presence: “The grammarian was one of antiquity’s great middlemen,” Kaster notes, but unlike “rhetoricians and bishops, for example—the grammarian found that his distinctive role was also his greatest weakness: the man whose function set him amid many vital spheres of activity most often was without a place at the center of any of them” (7). 26. On the aloofness toward grammar expressed by classical writers, see von Fritz, esp. 355–57. 27. Kaster esp. 12–13 and Heather 1994: 181–86 critique the grammar school, its drawbacks and benefits. 28. Eyre notes, for example, that “despite Celsus there was no original Latin work on medicine until the fourth century A.D.; and in mathematics, significantly, the only Roman advance on Greece was in the practical subjects of architecture and surveying” (48). 29. On the Hellenization of Roman education and culture, see Pascal 353–55 and Eyre 48–49; see also Bowersock on a resurgence of Greek influence in the first century BC. Bowman and Woolf warn, however, that “the unity of Graeco-Roman culture is a matter of fierce dispute,” to suggest that the influences are more complex and discontinuous than the linear model usually implies (15). 30. Frede discusses the influence of the Stoics on traditional grammar, 338–59. 31. For a fuller discussion of the various types of barbarisms and solecisms, which include for barbarism foreign words, spelling, pronunciation, accentuation, aspiration, see Bonner 199–211. 32. See also Bonner 199. Quintilian also makes the following qualifications of and adjustments to his definitions: “I admit that a solecism may occur in a single word, but with this proviso: there must be something else equivalent to another word, to which the word, in which the error lies, can be referred, so that a solecism arises from the faulty connexion of those symbols by which facts are expressed and purpose indicated. To avoid suspicion of quibbling, I will say that a solecism may occur in one word, but never in a word in isolation” (1.5.37–38). 33. Prosody occupies the longest section where Quintilian explains clearly the rules and various forms of poetic license that can be achieved through the manipulations of the grave, acute, and circumflex accent. Though interestingly rendered, a good deal of this presentation is too technical for reproduction here. However, it was in the area of prosody that the English Renaissance theorists took up most directly the issue of barbarism.

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34. The second category following race also addresses the linguistic-political context: “Another kind of barbarism proceeds from the speaker’s temper: for instance, we regard it as barbarous if a speaker use cruel and brutal language” (1.5.9). We witness a decline from the linguistic denotation of barbarism to the metonymic devolution of the barbarian as brutal, cruel, or barbaric in the modern sense. 35. For an account of the Roman-African connection, see Raven’s Rome in Africa. 36. Von Fritz argues that vetustas or antiquity, referring to a selective use of archaism, is unknown in Greek theory: 350–52. 37. Both analogy and etymology insist on historical legitimacy: anterior verbal forms must logically serve as the accurate model for other similar morphologies; and root meanings of words must remain the unchanged source for future applications. The theoretical emphasis on systematic function stood in contrast to actual usage. On the emphasis Quintilian accords to what should be a balance among the five criteria, see von Fritz 352–60 and Leddy 52–55. 38. Supporting the intersection of grammar and style or rhetoric, Quintilian makes a distinction: “figures of speech fall into two main classes. One is defined as the form of language, while the other is mainly to be sought in the arrangement of words. Both are equally applicable in oratory, but we may style the former more grammatical and the latter more rhetorical” (9.3.2). 39. Used initially in the sense of a cleared path or track for travel, limes acquired its modern meaning under Domitian who created a “chain of frontier defences” after his campaign against the Chatti; this, in turn, became the basis for the development of the Rhine-Danube system (Jones 1912: 245). For a detailed discussion of the evolution of the frontier system, its varied modes of construction in different regions of the empire, see Jones 1912: 243–57. 40. Williams offers a sobering reading of Rome’s lackluster achievements in the areas of economics, industry, and applied learning in naval and military innovations, 3–5. However, the greatest imperial successes “lay in infantry training and skills,” complemented by “an impressive record in the manipulation and co-option of other nations” rooted in a strategic flexibility (5). For important recent accounts that update and situate this well-documented view in the context of immigration and social integration, see Pohl esp. 4–11and Whittaker 199–218. 41. Burns 13; when peace arrived finally, barbarians were accepted as permanent dwellers, and with their amassed wealth, they revitalized the societies in which they chose to live—whether inside or outside the empire—and were in turn transformed themselves. Nash argues, however, that under the late republic, imperial expansion had avoided employing mercenaries, relying at first upon landowning citizens and men drawn from neighboring Italian communities. A gradual deterioration ensued, with severe economic effects, when landless soldiers were conscripted and allied Italians were given citizenship and their troops, likewise, had to be paid (92–93).

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42. See Pohl’s discussion of the changing meanings of foedus, treaty, and foederati among contemporaries and legal historians, 8. 43. Burns 145–47; an important recent assessment of frontiers and borders in current historical criticism can be found in Whittaker, 1–20. 44. See Elton 1996: 6–9. 45. On the growing significance of archaeological data in understanding Roman-barbarian relations, see Burns 5–7 and 248–308. Whittaker discusses trade restrictions, 204–5, and Williams examines the “prestige goods dependency” theory which proposes that “a tribal society can be made dependent upon a more advanced neighbor simply by supplying novel and luxurious goods to its chieftain” (11); see also Hedaeger 138–39. 46. Even Whittaker acknowledges, however, that the closed frontier theory might be more indebted to “proclaiming symbolic ‘représentations’ not military realities” (192). Whittaker has in mind this working distinction: “Frontiers . . . reflect political and economic expansion and their effect upon those who lie beyond; boundaries concern two social and economic systems and how they interact with each other through exchange” (5–6). 47. Williams discusses the indignation, both fiscal and ideological, resulting from border economics; 24–26. 48. Burns notes, for example, that “the literary and nonliterary materials relating to Augustus reveal an important psychological evolution within political leadership in keeping with the transition from the late republic to the early empire—the public reduction of traditional aristocratic virtues to a set of iconographically manageable and simplistic entities” (177). 49. Burns argues that Romans were intellectually resistant to change, except for military conquest where they became the arbiters of transforming others, somehow imagining that they remained “unchanged by the process” (10). 50. Heather (1999) discusses the “gap between Roman image and frontier reality” in late antiquity; on the Gothic invasions, see 243. 51. Whittaker discusses the role of panegyric, 200–202, concluding that even in the modern world, “in an age of economists and opinion polls, true statements, as Foucault has told us, are not about how things are but about who is in charge” (202). 52. Kaster 30; he notes that the comparison between the grammarian and the political administrator is real and enduring; “it seems on reflection predictable that a grammarian in Milan should have been called guardian of the empire (imperii custos) at the start of the sixth century under the Ostrogothic kingdom.” 53. It is worth noting that Camden cited this Chapter 20 in his Britannia (1600), and appears in Philemon Holland’s translation Britain (1637), 793. 54. Heather 2006: 450; for a summary statement of this argument, from a recent, major proponent, see esp. 443–49. 55. In various ways, historians continue to engage two contrasting models, Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” which emphasized internal decay

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56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

and vulnerability, and Lynn White’s “Transformation of the Roman World,” based, in part, on evolving interdependent economic networks that follow their logical destination. For two recent important contributions, see Heather (2006) and Whittaker. Heather’s study confirms the barbarian thesis that the collapse of the empire was largely due to the “Hun-generated invasions” in the last quarter of the fourth century (445). “Internal limitations must be given their due weight, then,” he writes, “but anyone who argues that they played a primary role in the Empire’s collapse and that the barbarians were no more than an irritant hurrying the process along, has to explain how the imperial edifice could have crumbled in the absence of a massive military assault from outside” (448). See also the volumes resulting from the five-year European Science Foundation project “The Transformation of the Roman World” begun in the 1990s, the first of which is edited by Pohl, cited earlier. Atherton, esp. 241–42 and 249–59. Like barbarism, solecism appears to have a linguistic-territorial etymology, deriving “its name from a colony whose isolated inhabitants had grown apart linguistically from their mother-city” (Atherton 250). Leddy 49; even the resulting increased interest in legal oratory was curtailed “by the end of the first century A.D., when much of the judicial work had been taken over by the Emperor himself and his council” (Eyre 51). Both Phocas and Galen, for example, employ the metaphor to cement the notion of the strenuous mental regimen required: “The school of literature is ‘the gymnasium of wisdom,’ ” records Kaster; and again, a “literary education is the ‘gymnastic of the soul’ ” (16). The myth of civilization explored at the beginning of this chapter was repeated in the Renaissance by English authors, including Puttenham, Sidney, Lodge, Thomas Wilson, and George Webbe. In Rebhorn’s excellent study, he examines the narrative in relation to a range of European authors, 23–79.

2

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1. “We inevitably see Blackamoors through the history of black slavery and of modern racism,” Orgel contends, “but in 1605 the English view of blacks was more complex, and the language of racism was principally applied to the Irish, where it obviously had nothing to do with skin color” (2002: 195). 2. In this period of expanding global networks, William Over suggests that making Africans familiar is an important market objective: “Jonson constructs an intercultural discourse wherein the African figures are fashioned as familiar, commensurate with a seventeenth-century European self-conception—an effect that reduces the threat from alien identities and supports England’s nascent quest for global markets” (27). 3. On gender and race in the masque, see Boose 49–53. 4. On the significance of Scotland in the masque, given the union debate surrounding James I’s ascension to the English throne, see Floyd-Wilson 114–32; Iyengar 81–86. The union debate figured in other masques,

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

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such as Thomas Campion’s The Lord Hay’s Masque, as examined by Kevin Curran. On the masque’s many “firsts,” see Barthelemy—including the first Jonson-Jones collaboration and “the first recorded use of blackening to actually darken the skin of the royal maskers” (20). The painted scene “seemed a vast sea, and united with this that flowed forth, from the termination or horizon of which (being the level of the state, which was placed in the upper end of the hall) was drawn, by the lines of perspective, the whole work shooting downwards from the eye; which decorum made it more conspicuous, and caught the eye afar off with a wandering beauty” (ll. 65–70). Jones had studied classicism in Italy, home of the two key theorists in perspective art history: Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti. All citations from the Masque of Blackness will be taken from The Complete Masques edited by Orgel. In The Odyssey Homer speaks of “sunburnt races” (l.23); quoted later in full. See Thomas Palmer’s emblem from his manuscript Two Hundred Poosees (1566) as well as the often overlooked example from Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586); in Loomba and Burton 98–99 and 119–20. Orgel 1969; see Appendix, 509–11. The English masque has often been compared to the Italian intermezzo that, in the Medici court, had grown into a vehicle for spectacle, poetry, and movement set around a theme from classical mythology. See Summerson 21. Although the queen will not be the focus of the discussion here, it must be noted that recent scholarship has turned attention to Anne. See Orgel 1998; Barroll 1996 and 2001; Burley; Aasand; and Lewalski, esp. 31–33. See, for example, a section in Nicoll’s Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage titled “Courtly Toys,” 29–32. At the beginning of the printed version of Blackness, Jonson offers an extensive apologia for his documentation: “I add this later hand to redeem [these solemnities] as well from ignorance as envy, two common evils, the one of censure, the other of oblivion” (47). Again Jeannette White notes: “To the Elizabethans, in fact, blackness and evil were so synonymous that this notion spawned social attitudes predicated on the belief that black was always indicative of evil” (336). Orgel notes: “It is only necessary that the ‘twelve Nymphs, Negro’s’ be revealed—that we see them—for the ‘antimasque’ to have taken place” (1965: 120). Jonson did not, however, formally announce the antimasque as a structural device until 1609, and Martin Butler warns, rightly, against an “anachronistic” criticism of the masque’s structural incompletion (158). In his commentary to The Masque of Queens, Jonson notes that the queen “had commanded me to think on some dance or show that might precede hers and have the place of a foil or false masque.” But he had already experimented with this technique the year before, 1608, in The Haddington Masque where he devised “an antimasque of boys” (122–23). Note also, Anne Cline Kelly’s caveat: a considerable time

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

NOTES lag separates Blackness and The Masque of Beauty. She argues, therefore, that, “Jonson’s yoking of them in the 1608 quarto and then in the 1616 Folio represents his retroactive imposition of masque theory. Blackness might have come to us as antimasque, but it first functioned as masque proper” (Iyengar 81). In another section, Herodotus repeats what is a familiar image of the semi-fabulous black people who “are said to be the tallest and most attractive people in the world” (3.20). In another historical account, Herodotus praises the Ethiopian king Sabacos, reigning in Egypt. Unique among the rulers in the entire Histories that covers the period 1200–404 BC, Sabacos, the Nubian pharaoh Shabaka, is the only one who willingly surrenders power to embrace justice when confronted with the option of colonial domination. At the same time, his Egyptian reign is remembered for the revocation of the death penalty, the building of dykes and the elevation of the cities for preservation (2.137). Notable among these civic projects was the elevation of the eponymous city that housed the sanctuary of Bubastis or Artemis. Carolyn Dewald makes the general remark that “Ethiopian kings were models of the pharaonic ideal: they built temples, they were scrupulous in religious observance, they respected the traditions of the past” (Histories 627). Greek and Roman interaction with black people grew especially as a result of military engagements. Greek mercenaries serving in Psamtik II’s army as he attempted to repulse the Ethiopians were probably the first Europeans to actually have face to face contact with blacks in the sixth century. Ethiopians served in civilian or military positions under the Egyptian Amasis during the sixth century occupation of Crete, further increasing Greek exposure. Greeks saw blacks in large numbers for the first time during Xerxes’ campaign (480–479 BC) where Ethiopians served as mercenaries. Later during the Roman occupation of Egypt, from the Augustan period to the sixth century AD, contact would only increase. So strong was the Ethiopian opposition that Augustus’ very favorable terms of peace must be read as his failure to subdue these blacks, a peace that was to last with little disruption until the third century AD. During the Roman period, diplomatic exchange and trade—Roman luxury items for Nile products, including animals for gladiatorial spectacles—cemented stronger bonds of intercultural exchange. For a full treatment of these encounters, see Snowden 1983: 21–34. See also Snowden 1970: 50–54. Delphos, founder of Delphi, home of the famous oracle, in some accounts is the son of a black mother, the distinguishing physical feature being implied in her several names, Celaeno, Melaena, and Melanis. Cepheus, the father of Andromeda, is identified in Appolodorus (Bibliotheca 2.4.3) and Pliny (Naturalis historia 6.35.182) as the king of Ethiopia, and Ovid uses Cepheus’ name and its derivatives as synonyms for Ethiopia (Metamorphoses 4.669, 764, 5.1). His daughter Andromeda is variously presented as dark-skinned or white, depending on whether the account subscribes to an African or Asiatic setting. See Snowden 1983: 8–10.

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19. See Snowden’s defense, 1983: 85–87. 20. Citing the well-known reference from George Best’s Discourse (1578), Little reminds us that the Hametic curse is also predicated on the assumption of anterior whiteness: Ham’s sin, so it is postulated, is punished by his offspring’s blackness. Regarding standardization in the Renaissance, as for example in spelling, Francesca Royster notes: “In racial attitudes, too, the move to standardization was still incomplete.” She continues, “Sir Thomas Browne sometimes seems to adopt the language of ‘standard’ unthinkingly: in ‘Of the Blacknesse of Negroes,’ he assumes that white was the originary, standard race and that Negroes at some point in history ‘became blacke’ ” (448). 21. In an innovative reading that focuses on the “denominational chromatics” of Catholic conversion, Murray argues that the Ethiopian women’s original whiteness “echoes Reformation rhetoric equating Protestantism with cleansing; the turn to whiteness is a return to a purer state, washed clean of the taint of decadent ritual” (437). 22. Over suggests a strategic Jonsonian agreement with Niger’s argument: “Niger’s speech against assimilation remains unrebutted in the play. . . . Was the playwright consciously distancing himself from the transparent colonial enterprise of James I, presenting a more complicated picture of cultural and colonial assimilation” (47–48)? 23. Aristotle’s Politics, esp. Book 1. See also Balsdon’s Romans and Aliens and Bernal 84–98, 109–12. 24. See Mudimbe’s account of “Mapping the Margins,” 72–80. 25. Strabo makes similar observations, 17.2.3. 26. Linguistic imperialism as conversion is a crucial part of the political strategy in Strabo’s geographical history. The Cavari “are no longer barbarians, but, are, for the most part, transformed to the type of Romans, both in their speech and in their modes of living, and some of them in their civic life as well” (4.1.12). 27. For another view on this subject of the “unromanized in Rome,” see MacMullen. 28. See Strabo 4.1.12. 29. On Camden as Jonson’s teacher, see David Riggs, 14–17. 30. The translatio imperii was accompanied by the translatio studii, “the translation of knowledge,” or the transmission of classical learning; the yoking of study and empire emphasizes the translatio’s status as an intellectual construct extracted by learned men from classical knowledge’s westerly drift. Otto von Freising—the uncle of Barbarossa and thus certainly no stranger to politics—is credited with being the first to formally theorize the notion of the translatio in his Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus written between 1143 and 46. He also established the crucial connection between empire and knowledge in his formula: “ ‘potentiae seu sapientiae ab oriente ad occidentem translationem’ (the transfer of power or learning from east to west)” (Stierle 56). Coterminous with the translatio studii, the medieval translatio imperii sponsors a belief in classical authority and achievement—in rhetoric, literary, politics, literature, geography, philosophy, architecture—desiring them to be replicated as durable paradigms of contemporary endeavors.

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NOTES

NOTES

31. See esp. Aeneid 1: 363–90. After Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, the Trojan legend in the person of Brutus, greatgrandson of Aeneas, became a virtual commonplace among English writers and playwrights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc, William Warner’s Albion’s England, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, John Stow’s Annales, or Generall Chronicle of England, and Milton’s History of Britain. Heather James’s Shakespeare’s Troy discusses early modern appropriations of the Troy myth as transmitted through Virgil and Ovid. The list of writers who argue the Trojan legend and British history is extensive. See Heninger, Gordon, and Parsons. 32. The “Preface” to François Hartog’s The Mirror of Herodotus takes up the perennial question of truth and lies in Herodotus’s work. More important, Hartog’s study demonstrates admirably Herodotus’s role in the construction of difference in the ancient world. 33. From a modern perspective, a Hegelian bias and strategic foreclosure on Africa is palpable. If Europe is the destined site for the consummation of world history, as Hegel surmises, then his claim is contingent upon the complete rejection of Africa as having any place within his grand scheme. Hegel 93–99. 34. I am inspired here, first, by the notion of the linguistic performative and speech act theory as developed by J.L. Austin (1962). Second, I have borrowed Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation to imply that race, too, imagines a community, that race operates as a social-imaginary. 35. The conventional displacement of English barbarity onto Scotland, as a response to England’s own barbarous northern status, was threatened with the prospect of a political union; the spectacle of black women transformed, an allegory for Scotland, served the purpose of managing and maintaining the myth of English civility; see Floyd-Wilson 118–20. 36. See Pliny 22.1; of course, the term in Pliny is “Ethiopians.” 37. Vincent reveals that he had not personally attended the masque, but news had certainly spread about the women of the court, “all paynted like Blackamores face and neck bare and for the rest strangely attired in Barbaresque mantells to the halfe legge” (Jonson 10: 449). Dudley Carleton writes to Sir Ralph Winwood: “Instead of Vizzards, their Faces, and Arms up to the Elbows, were painted black, which was Disguise sufficient, for they were hard to be known.” When the Spanish ambassador partnered the queen, “he forgot not to kiss her Hand, though there was Danger it would have left a Mark on his Lips” (Jonson 10: 448). The women were not only unrecognizable in blackface, but the scene of the dance was also replete with possibilities for faux pas as the black tincture risked leaving its embarrassing smudge on the faces of the gallant gentlemen who observed the proper etiquette of honoring their dance partners with a kiss on the hand. In his reading, Orgel suggests that the Queen and her ladies were fashion forward, and the negative reactions were merely indications of tastes that were not in the avant-garde (2002: 189). 38. See Fabian’s powerful study about the past, temporality, and cultural otherness.

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B A RBA RI A N G ENE A LOGIES

1. John Taylor’s supposed redaction of “Certaine verses written in the Barbarian tongue, dropt out of a Negroes pocket” offers a mingle-mangle imitation of European-style verse forms: “Mistrum fog smoakrash, choakerumques olifatrish trash/ Dam durticuu belchum, contagioshte vomitroshe” (253). 2. On the Gold Coast also there are so many languages that “between Kormantyn and Akara, being but fifteen leagues, they have no less than four,” and as elsewhere, several of the various peoples use a common dialect in addition to their own language (458). 3. Similarly, in Guinea, “[t]he People living on the Shore of this River speak a particular Language that seems harsh and unpleasant; but when they go to Quoya, or Cabo Monte to traffick, they express their meanings significantly in another Tongue that runs smooth and easie, either to be learnt or understood” (379). 4. Writing in 1575, Loys le Roy confirms the role of the ancients while celebrating contemporary achievements: “For now we see languages restored, and not only the deeds and writings of the ancients brought back to light, but also many fine things newly discovered” (Ross and McLaughlin 91–92). As Peter Burke has shown, this “progress-theory” is pan-European, equally evident in Puttenham’s 1589 Arte of English Poesie as in Étienne Pasquier’s application to French literature in his 1611 Researches on France (1969: 43–49). 5. In the epic Africa begun in 1338 and regarded by Petrarch as his magnum opus, a tripartite history evolved that is repeated in the abundant dyadic metaphors of light and darkness, life and death, growth and decline, and wakefulness and sleep that writers used to trumpet a third, recuperative, Renaissance phase; see, for example, Africa 9: 665–69. Giorgio Vasari’s “Preface” to his Lives (1550) offers the famous analogy of art and the human body, its birth, aging, death, and “second birth” (Ross and McLaughlin 46). The Portable Renaissance Reader offers a convenient collection of primary extracts and statements on the “Renaissance”; see Ross and McLaughlin 65–145. 6. Modern scholars have shown, for example, that the Renaissance has roots in the medieval period. The practical ends of humanist expertise in grammar, rhetoric, history, and poetry constitute one such area. Paul Oscar Kristeller, in particular, has made the case that most Renaissance humanists were employed as official secretaries or as instructors of grammar and rhetoric in schools and universities; they were the direct descendants of the medieval dictatores, professional rhetoricians who served in the same two areas of employment. While Kristeller maintains that the humanist dedication to classical scholarship and models provided a distinct, new orientation and style to their work, he suggests far greater continuities with medieval sources and a more complex Arabic, Byzantine, and Christian etiology than the schematic tripartite periodization implies. See his Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, esp. Chapter 5. 7. In his De elegantiis linguae latinae (c. 1430–1440), Valla goes on to promote the Renaissance recovery of those arts that “had degenerated for

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NOTES

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

so long and so greatly and had almost died with letters themselves, and that in this age they have been aroused and come to life again” (Ross and McLaughlin 134). In Albanese’s view the historicism assigned to Renaissance humanism has obvious shortcomings: “humanism becomes a willed oblivion to the conditions of historical difference, which becomes rearticulated in the familiar universalist ideologies of ‘liberal’ humanism” (33). The effect is that “humanist learning replaced the distance of time with the contiguity of language.” Or in Albanese’s more Foucauldian formulation, “the epistemic foundation of the Renaissance appears to govern the erasure of diachronicity. Resemblance is both the order of, and the ordering of, the day” (31). This Hegelian intersubjectivity suggests the problematic consequences of dependency that follow when a self-proclaimed legitimate, centered ego contemplates the fantasy of an independent other: “the discourse about the other is a means of constructing a discourse authorized by the other” (de Certeau 68). The original passage in Seneca is taken from the Loeb edition; Newton’s edition, which includes Nuce’s translation, follows. For a complementary reading, see Guy Turbet-Delof’s anaysis of the meaning and etymology of “Berber,” “barbarian” and related terms, esp. 9–16 and 23–27. Mármol writes, for example, “Ibni-Alraquiq dit, que le nom de Barbarie est venu de Ber, que les Arabes luy donnérent [sic] avant qu’elle fust peuplée; d’où ils appelérent ceux qui y demeuroient Berberes. Mais l’opinion la plus commune entre les Africains, est qu’elle fut ainsi appelée de quelques-uns des habitans qui se nommoient Barbares, qui possedent encore aujourd’huy beaucoup de terres dans Geneoa & le Zingue, où est la ville de Barbara. D’autres disent que les Romains, quand ils conquirent l’Afrique, appelérent ainsi ce quartier-là, à cause de la barbarie de leur langage, & qu’il luy est demeure depuis” (1: 9). Dapper rehearses Ogilby’s three hypotheses in his adaptation: 116. The full passage reads: “Leur langage est un idiome étranger, différent de tout autre: circonstance qui leur a valu le nom de Berbères. Voici comment on raconte la chose: Ifrîcos, fils de Caïs-Ibn-Saïfi, l’un des rois [du Yémen appelés] Tobba, envahit le Maghreb et l’Ifrîkïa, et y bâtit des bourges et des villes après en avoir tué le roi, El-Djerdjîs. Ce fut même d’après lui, à ce que l’on prétend, que ce pays fut nommé l’Ifrîkïa. Lorsqu’il eut vu ce peuple de race étrangère et qu’il l’eut entendu parler un langage dont les variétés et les dialectes frappèrent son attention, il céda à l’étonnement et s’écria: ‘Quelle berbera est la vôtre!’ On les nomma Berbères pour cette raison. Le mot berbera signifie, en arabe, un mélange de cris inintelligibles; de là on dit, en parlant du lion, qu’il berbère, quand il pousse des rugissements confus” (1: 168). For another account of “Barbary” that reveals a history of political dislocation, see Pierre D’Avity (Peter Davity), The Estates, Empires, & Principalities of the World (1615): “The country of Barbarie was destitute of inhabitants for many ages, like vnto Numidia. Whereupon

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16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

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some say, that the people of these countries hauve drawne their beginning from them of Palestina, who retired themselues into these parts, being expelled by the Assyrians. Some others say, that these Barbarians are descended from the Sabeans, a people of Arabia the Happie, before they were chased away by the Assyrians or Aethiopians. Others are of opinion, that they are issued from certain inhabitants of Asia, who fled first into Greece, being expelled their countrie by their enemies, then being pursued by them, they came to Barbarie, and there stayed, leauing their enemies in Greece. In former times there were excellent men, and verie learned in these countires, and the people were wonderfully ciuile: for among the Mahometans they cannot sufficiently commend king Almansor or Mansor, Marin, and Huceph, men excellent in their superstitions” (1117). I return to conquest, colonialism, and language in relation to these theories in the closing chapter. In adapting classical terminology for Renaissance use, rhetoricians were obliged to translate; Puttenham’s renditions are famously pithy. From Book 3 “Of Ornament,” we find the following examples: “Dialisis, or the Dismembrer” (230); “Prosonomasia, or the Nicknamer” (212); “Antenagoge, or the Recompencer” (224); and “Ploce, or the Doubler” (211). “Histeron proteron, or the Preposterous” (181) has received much recent attention; see Patricia Parker’s Literary Fat Ladies, 67–69 and Jonathan Goldberg’s Sodometries, 4. It is worth noting that the entire section on barbarism and Africa in Puttenham’s text is omitted from Brian Vickers’s modern edition, 1999: 281. Matar concedes the classical pun inherent in “barbarian” (1999: 14–16), but his argument concerning a Renaissance triangle (Britons, Muslims, American Indians) insists that English patterns of defamation, learned in the American experience, were transported to Muslim Africa (83–107). Further, his claim that “Barbary” only achieved currency in the sixteenth century “because in the medieval period, the term had not been used,” is incorrect, as I argue below, and thereby undermines his position concerning New World transmission (15). In A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World, Speed recounts this cross-cultural conversion that transforms Arabic linguistic history into humanist classification and genealogy. Barbary “is esteemed the most noble part of all Africa: and hath its name from an Arabick word Barbara, that signifies a kinde of rude sound, for such the Arabians tooke their Language to be: & hence the Grecians call them Barbarians that speake a harsher language than themselves, After the Latines, and now we, esteem the people of out owne Nation barbarous, if they ever little differ from the rudeness either of our Tongue or Manners” (28). On this history, see Coon, 42. See Hendricks’s important discussion on race as genealogy, 1996: 42. The body of work on this subject continues to grow; I will cite only a few key references: Vitkus, Matar 1999 and 1993, Brummett, Goffman 2002 and 1998, Burton, Kamps, Singh, Braudel, and Chew.

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NOTES

NOTES

24. Theodore Rabb describes the change in the period occurring between 1550 and 1630 as “one of the most striking transformations in economic history” (2). 25. T.S. Willan 163–87; the monopoly was short-lived, and by 1597 it was returned to the free market. 26. See Matar 1999: 84–96. In the case of North Africa, including the thousands of captured Britons, he notes that “it is safe to conclude that the number of congregated expatriate Britons in this period was higher than anywhere else in the world—Virginia included” (92). 27. Palmira Brummett notes: “The profit motive, the competition for commercial hegemony, and sometimes expansionist ambitions prompted states to alter or accept alterations of” long-held, rigidly drawn balances (179). The granting of capitulations allowing foreigners to trade opened the Ottoman world to strangers; this in turn had the effect of creating new diplomatic contacts, set in place to protect resident Englishmen, but also made themselves available for reciprocal political negotiations between heads of state; see Goffman 2002: 183–88; 193–206. 28. Still, the drama invented accounts of the apostate’s punishment and repentance directed at the Christians at home while it was known, in fact, that the pirates Ward, Samson, and Edward lived luxuriously in Barbary (Matar 1993: 491–95); see, for example, the collection Three Turk Plays edited by Daniel Vitkus. 29. On the confused, multiple meanings of “Moor” as a racial descriptor, see also Hall 2007: 177–83, Michael Neill 1998, esp. 364–66, and Emily Bartels 1992 and 1990, esp. 434–35. 30. For the full discussion, see Barthelemy 12–17. On additional problems and errors in Pory’s and Florianus’s translations, see Zhiri 161–73. 31. Lyly, Euphues and His England (1580), 175; Daborne, A Christian Turned Turk (1612), 9.20; Lodge, The Wounds of Civil War, 4.1.300; Daniel, The Tragedy of Philotas (1605), 1357; Heywood, The Royall King and Loyall Subject (1637), 1.1: 6; Markham, The English Arcadia, Part II (1613), sig. Qv; and the anonymous plays, The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda (1592), 297, and The Wars of Cyrus King of Persia (1594), sig. C2v. This is but a brief sampling from a range of texts, some of which contain multiple references. In a section preceding the one already quoted from Lyly, we read: “Couldst thou, under the image of so precise holiness, harbour the express pattern of barbarous cruelty?” (170); and a few lines following the passage quoted from Daniel’s Philotas we read, “Fie, Caenus, what a barbarous course is this” (1368). 32. Chambers, Palestina (1600), 35; Painter, The Palace of Pleasure (1566), 71; Solyman 59; 33. Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) and Sir John Davies’s A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued (1612) are contemporary accounts on Irish plantation and the wild and barbarous condition of the natives; in addition to Crowley, Neill 1994, and Hadfield 1996 cited earlier, see also Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony. On the case of Russia, see the travel documents collected

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34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

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by Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey in the volume Rude and Barbarous Kingdom. I borrow the term “matrix” from Jonathan Crewe, expanding its “language–situation” to embrace a geopolitical cultural network. For Crewe, matrix is used to “designate the loose ensemble of logical categories and operations, rhetorical tropes, semantic units, grammatical and prosodic forms, and whatever other elements comprise the languagesituation for Shakespeare and his contemporaries” (16). Lithgow writes of people “some whereof are subject to the Turke, some to the Emperour of Morocco, and some to their owne barbarous Princes” (320). In such a geographically polysemous environment, Lithgow and company “marched for three dayes through a fruitfull and populous soyle: And although the peoples barbarous and disdainefull countenances were awfull, yet we two went still free of tributs” (321). With this additional reminder of the physical implications, the barbarous African was distinctly different from the Englishman on at least three grounds: color, geography, and morality, and as a triple threat he became the perfect cultural foil in an era of emerging English national consciousness. Similarly, in Thomas Tomkis’s Albumazar (1615), shipwrecked on the way to Barbary, Antonio and “two Marriners/ Swam to the Coast, where by the barbarous Moores/ [They] were surpriz’d, fetter’d and sold for slaves” (4.3.1771–73). In Morgan’s translation: “Let us, therefore, examine our own selves; and in us we shall soon find the very same Vices which we impute to those of other Nations” (v). Stephen Greenblatt has argued that in the discourse and project of colonialism, opacity and transparency are summary judgments about alien cultures that rationalize dismissal or assimilation; in the end, dismissal is but a strategic denial of autonomy and agency, a precursor to the eventual move of colonial absorption; 1990: 16–39; esp. 31–32. See, for example, George Abbot’s A Briefe Description of the Whole World; the section on Africa is indebted to Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Cicero, and Livy. Abbot does express some skepticism concerning the fabled “men of strange shapes, as some with Dogs heads,” lamenting insufficient classical documentation on the more southerly parts of Africa (sig. M2). More generally, Andrew Fitzmaurice makes the interesting case for the role of classical rhetoric in the New World promotional literature in Humanism and America; see also his earlier “Classical Rhetoric and the Promotion of the New World.” Aristotle, Politics 1338b; see Pagden 1982, 17–18. John Gillies calls attention to the classical use of the half-human monster; see Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 9. All citations from Othello follow the New Cambridge edition. Bernheimer begins his study by calling attention to the fictive status of the Wild Man (1); but the latter’s imaginary character is precisely what allows us to understand that he stands for a collocation of ideas that expresses the fears, anxieties, and beliefs of the time.

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43. At least three events—the importation of Romance words during the Middle English phase, the Latinization of the language during the Renaissance, and the changes in pronunciation that occurred at the beginning of the fifteenth century—increased the number of synonyms and enhanced the homonymic environment for punning (Kokeritz 54). The widespread investment in wordplay is notably conveyed in the various rhetorical figures grouped under the general heading of the pun; in addition to antanaclasis, the following were among the most popular: “paronomasia, amphibology, polyptoton, syllepsis, asteismus, agnominatio, skesis” (McDonald 139). However, according to the OED, the first recorded use of the word “pun” is by Dryden in 1662, underscoring the currency of the other technical terms in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. See also Sister Miriam Joseph, 164–73, Lee A. Sonnino’s and Richard A. Lanham’s useful handbooks. For further discussion concerning the Renaissance investment in elocutio and wordplay, see M.M. Mahood, Arthur F. Kinney (esp. 41–56), and Brian Vickers (1971 and 1981). For a recent treatment of puns in the theater, see Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Chapter 2). 44. In his “Preface” to Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson writes: “A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it” (7:74). On the eighteenth-century response, see Mahood, esp. 9–55 and Catherine Bates. 45. The footnote to the OED (2nd edition) reads in part: “It has been suggested that pun might originally be an abbreviation of It. puntiglio, small or fine point, formerly also a cavil or quibble (‘cavillazione, sottigliezza nel ragionare, o nel disputare’, Vocab. Della Crusca), a pun being akin to a quibble; and that pundigrion might perh. be a perversion, illiterate or humorous, of puntiglio. This appears not impossible, but nothing has been found in the early history of pun, or in the English uses of punctilio, to confirm the conjecture.” 46. Michel Foucault’s characterization of a Renaissance episteme of correspondence in The Order of Things points to a commensurate cultural corollary, the balancing perspective and intellectual preparedness to find resemblance in multiplicity, similitude in plurality, and coherence in linguistic ambiguity (17–45). Foucault’s proposition has, however, been qualified and challenged; see Ian Maclean, “Foucault’s Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian Counterblast.” 47. See Lisa Jardine’s “Humanist Logic,” where she traces the development of the impact of topics-logic on dialectic from Lorenzo Valla, Rudolph Argicola, and Petrus Ramus, who popularized this shift in emphasis away from scholasticism’s demonstrable proofs, through to humanists writing in English like Erasmus and Abraham Fraunce. 48. Edward Said’s Orientalism is often cited in this critical backlash. The colonizer-colonized opposition, derived from postcolonial theory and a period of empire that postdates the sixteenth century, wrenches history out of proportion; in addition to Burton, see Vitkus’s comprehensive critique, 1–24.

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49. Joyce Green MacDonald articulates what has become the orthodox view in Race, Ethnicity and Power in the Renaissance, 13–14. 50. Hayden White makes the observation that is relevant to the emerging Renaissance racial discourse: “In times of sociocultural stress, when the need for positive self-definition asserts itself but no compelling criterion of self-identification appears, it is always possible to say something like: ‘I may not know the precise content of my own felt humanity, but I am most certainly not like that’ ” (151).

4

I NSTRUCTING

THE

E NGLISH N ATION

1. In Caxton’s “Prologue to the Aeneid” (1490) he describes a situation where the wide variety in English spoken stymies communication across shires, the product of a linguistic flux endemic to his countrymen: “For we englysshe men/ ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone whiche is neuer stedfaste/ but euer wauerynge” (108). 2. In Records Arithmetick: or, The Ground of Arts (1543) the author admits that “the grace of Tullyes eloquence doth excel any Englishman’s tongue, and much more exceedeth the baseness of my barbarous stile”; nevertheless, he undertakes the translation of Cicero “to bring men into civill regiment, from barbarous manners, & beastly conditions” (Record A3). Richard Shacklock also acknowledges that “I was not ignorant that our base tounge coulde not atteine to the maiestie of Osorius his Latten, for I regarde not so muche the fines of wordes, as the diuinenes of the matter” (A4). 3. Raven maintains that although Greek was not accented there are “indications that word-accent was of far more importance to the Latin” poets (31); see 31–39. Raven’s claims about accented rhythm, however, may be more properly placed in the context of the famous controversy surrounding ictus in Latin verse. 4. The supporters of the quantitative movement were sometimes called “hexametrists” after one of the more popular classical verse meters adapted in the quantitative experiments. Harvey, for example, can write exuberantly: “If I neuer deserue anye better remembraunce, let mee rather be epitahped, The Inuentour of the English Hexameter.” And Thomas Nashe writes mockingly of “Gabriell Howliglasse” (Harvey) who “was the first inuenter of English Hexameter” (Smith 1937: I. 230 and 239). 5. In Well-Weighed Syllables, Derek Attridge advocates the nondurational approach to quantity although he concedes that the classification of syllables may not be entirely arbitrary and cites Ronald A. Zirin’s conclusion that syllabic designation may derive from “the relation between syllable and accent in the deeper morphophonemic structure of the language” (12). See Zirin, The Phonological Basis of Latin Prosody. 6. Attridge gives a full examination of Elizabethan pronunciation and reading of Latin, with attention to the grammar school context, in Chapters 2–4. 7. Attridge uses “tense” and “lax” to refer to long and short verbal stresses to distinguish from “long” and “short” in the quantitative sense (9).

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8. In addition to Hendrickson’s “Elizabethan Quantitative Hexameters,” see also B.M. Hollowell, “The Elizabethan Hexametrists,” and R.B. McKerrow, “The Use of So-called Classical Metres in Elizabethan Verse.” 9. For Gramsci’s distinction, see Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 12–14. “The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and the function in the world of production” (12): the parallel here is to the dynamic entailed in the “prestige” accorded Latin and, by extension, the quantitative cartel. 10. For a fuller treatment of the barbarian invasions see Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe, especially Chapters 4–5. 11. Sir John Cheke and Bishop Thomas Smith play an important part in the revival of Greek at Cambridge in revising the pronunciation of Greek vowels to restore the variety and euphony of classical Greek. Their efforts met with hostility, finally being banned in 1542 by the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner. Their philological expertise in classical languages was also put to the service of the vernacular, Smith seeking to standardize English spelling in his De Recta et Emendata Scriptione Linguae Anglicanae (c. 1542) and Cheke, some years later, about 1550, translated portions of the New Testament (St. Matthew and the first chapter of St. Mark). See Elizabeth J. Sweeting, 94–96. 12. Lawrence V. Ryan in his modern edition of The Schoolmaster also affirms Atkins’s critiques. 13. For a cogent review of the European theories of rhetoric, see Renato Barilli. 14. A vocabulary of barbarism had long existed within philosophic debate, for example, among humanists who despised the obscure and torturous language used by scholastic philosophers. So Brian P. Copenhaver writes: “Since the fourteenth century, when Petrarch had warned of ‘a new kind of monster armed with double-edged enthymemes,’ humanists had associated the logic that repelled them with aliens, Britons and Teutons, who excelled at it” (105). 15. William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) is memorable for its invective against the Church’s direct involvement in the political fortunes of Europe. The bishops, the footsoldiers of the Pope in a war of continental conspiracy, “sanctioned the political intrigues of European monarchs, playing one off against the other, encouraging wars of territorial aggrandisement and depleting the national capital either by ensuring a steady flow of cash to Rome or by its dissipation in maintaining fighting forces” (Kinghorn 35). Tyndale’s appeals for biblical translations were to be curtailed by Henry VIII’s “Proclamation against Erroneous Books” (1530), forbidding, among others, unauthorized translations of the Bible. 16. Ascham has in mind a collection of Cicero’s epistles intended for children made by the German scholar and Ascham’s friend Johannes Sturm

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17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

5

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that was published in Strasbourg in 1539: Ciceronis epistolarum libri IV. A J. Sturmio puerili educatione confecti. In addition to these basic steps in the double translation process, Ascham adds a later more advanced stage when the student is required to make the following notations in his Latin text: proprium, translatum, synonyma, diuersa, contraria, phrases (metaphorical, synonymous, slightly differing, opposite, expressions) (186). Daily translations are reduced to every two or three days; the teacher now makes an English translation of an unseen text, and the student attempts to emulate the best tournures learned in the earlier stage of double translation. Finally, a comparison is made between the two Latin texts—to bring the student’s version in line with the original. Ascham sees barbarism as a negative paraphrasis. Thus he allows paraphrasis when the aim is to rewrite barbarisms: “I can better allow an other kinde of Paraphrasis, to turne rude and barbarus, into proper and eloquent” (246). Kristeva’s actual questions formed a series: “If language is always ‘expression,’ and if its closure is thereby demonstrated, to what extent, and by means of what kind of practice, could this expressivity be surpassed? To what would nonexpressivity signify? Would not grammatology be a nonexpressive ‘semiology’ based on logical-mathematical notation rather than on linguistic notation?” Derrida 1981: 32–33. The phrase I have used to describe Derrida’s appeal to interlinear translation comes from Cicero’s famous injunction against translating “word for word” found in his Libellus de optime genere oratorum (46 BC). See Steiner 236. Asham’s strong criticism of Italy as the source of the moral decay infecting England, especially of the corruption of young men of prominent families traveling in Europe, leads him to identify a debased type of Englishman, the “Englese Italianato,” a barbarism personified in which Ascham presses the poetics-person tropology (229). Gathered among the members of the queen’s privy council at Windsor in 1563 because of the plague, Sir William Cecil, the queen’s private secretary reports that he had received news only that morning “that diuerse Scholers of Eaton, be runne awaie from the Schole, for feare of beating” (175). Ascham, normally quiet out of deference for his esteemed company, as he claims, “more willing to vse mine eares, than to occupie my tonge,” was nevertheless invited by Cecil to venture his opinion: “I said somewhat farder in the matter, how, and whie, yong children, were soner allured by loue, than driuen by beating, to atteyne good learning” (176).

S H A K ESPE A RE ’S A FRIC A NS : P ERFORMING R ACE E A RLY M ODERN E NGL A ND

IN

1. All references to Lok and Towerson are from Hakluyt, volume 6. On the black presence in early modern England and Europe, see Earle and Lowe, Walvin, Habib, and Gerzina.

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NOTES

NOTES

2. Camille Wells Slights points out that, starting with John Hawkins’s slaving efforts in the 1560s, English participation in the Atlantic slave trade grew; however, “as English culture simultaneously promoted and denied slavery, so it exhibited contradictory understandings of the nature of slaves and slavery” (381). 3. All citations from Shakespeare’s The Tempest follow the Arden edition. 4. Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition): “race”: n.2 2.a-c. See also Hendricks 1996: 42 referenced earlier. 5. The key parts of this account are found in Exodus, Chapters 1–6. 6. All biblical quotations for this discussion are taken from the New Revised Standard Version (Cambridge, 1989) except where otherwise stated. 7. Wilson (1985), Hendel and Bright examine the lack of extra-biblical data, notably the vaguely defined historical period—when exactly did the exodus occur?—the unnamed Pharaoh, the undecided constitution of the proliferating Hebrews, and, most famously, the evidence concerning Moses’ actual existence. 8. Assmann explains that Mnemosyne embodies the “totality of cultural activities as they were personified” in her daughters, the Muses: “By subsuming these cultural activities under the personification of memory, the Greeks were viewing culture not only as based on memory but as a form of memory in itself” (15). 9. Jonathan Bate, the Arden editor, notes the similarity of Aaron’s language to the First Chorus of Dr Faustus: “Morally we know that we should condemn him, but dramatically we are mesmerized by him, especially when his language soars” (87). 10. See Ian Smith 2003, esp. 287–93; and Tricomi. 11. The 1601 deportation order implies that the resident Africans represent an unnecessary populace in a time of scarcity: “Whereas the Queen’s majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects, greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great number of Negroes and blackamoors which (as she is informed) are carried into this realm” (Walvin 64). 12. J.H. Hexter points to the aristocracy’s indifference to education up to the reign of Henry VIII when a perceptible shift in interest occurs (45–70); see also Stone 1964. 13. In the aftermath of Henry VIII’s break with Rome, “the project of English self-representation” through a “writing of England” became the profession of a generation of Elizabethan writers (Helgerson 3, 1). Approximately seventy years after the break, at a still-developing stage of this linguistic evolution, Hoskins’s Directions was an influential handbook written to aid aspirant Englishmen. 14. I am referring to J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. Where the constative merely describes, the performative enacts and accomplishes an act because of its very utterance; see also Austin 1971: 13–22. Austin’s notion of the performative has been challenged, most notably by Jacques Derrida in “Signature Event Context”; for further discussion, see Christopher Norris. For a more recent interpretation of the performative especially in relation to gender, see Judith Butler.

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15. Hélène Cixous’s argument on feminine writing resonates with my view on the rhetoric of race: “Today, still, the masculine return to the Selfsame is narrower and more restricted than femininity’s. It all happens as if man were more directly threatened in his being by the non-selfsame than woman” (43). 16. The male-centered English culture recalls the Lacanian homosexual regulation that excludes women from the enterprise of eloquence, the presumed sacrifice of sex for the national good. In effect, “the order that [civilization] has created has become an end in itself,” that end being the erection of a self-reflexive masculinity (MacCannell 77). 17. Quotations of Othello follow the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition. 18. Leo in Purchas, esp. 5:319–20, 323–24, 330–31, 358, and 363; all further references are from Purchas. Born and raised a Moslem, Leo traveled extensively in Africa before journeying to Rome, where he was baptized and later wrote his Historie. For the complex denials and assertions of his African and non-Christian past, see Bartels 1990: 435–38. 19. See also chapter 3 where the early modern definitions of “Barbary” offered by Ogilby, Mármol, and Dapper are discussed. 20. Greenblatt analyzes Othello’s relation to Christianity and sexuality within marriage construed as adultery, esp. 1980: 241–52; see also Newman 149–50. 21. On Europeans and improvisation, Greenblatt writes: “What is essential is the Europeans’ ability again and again to insinuate themselves into the preexisting political, religious, even psychic structures of the natives and to turn these structures to their advantage” (1980: 227). 22. On Othello as the “noble Moor” in criticism, see Kolin 9; Neill offers a fuller exposition of the positive black images from theological sources; see 2006: 26. 23. See Bal on focalization, 100–110. 24. The five senses, “Seeing, Hearing, Touching, Tasting, Smelling” are accompanied by the respective emblems: “an Eagle, a Hart, a Spider, an Ape, a Dogge” (sig. B4v). 25. Learning of the Moors’ conversion, Error remonstrates: “What, haue my Sweet-fac’st Devils forsooke mee too?” (sig. Cv). 26. The allusion is to Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation: “ ‘contact zone’ is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect” (7). 27. For a discussion of narratives designed to create an audience, see Marie Maclean, 25. 28. Patricia Parker 1985 discuses the meanings of dilate and its variants; for an expanded version of this essay, see Parker 1996: 229–72. 29. My allusion to Parker’s Literary Fat Ladies suggests ways in which dilation and amplification can be explored in relation to racial discourse in the early modern period. 30. In a recent essay, “The Unhappy Performative,” Timothy Gould argues the infelicitous interplay of the illocutionary and perlocutionary forces.

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31. Discussion of the widespread view of Moors as heathens, associates of the devil, and bearers of the color of Satan can be found in Washington, Tokson, and Barthelemy. The terms Moor, Ethiope, Negro, and African were interchangeable in early modern England even though distinctions between light-skinned Moors and black Negroes existed. Because these terms identified a cultural outsider whose difference was often determined by skin color, I use blackness to refer to the oppositional contrast the Moor/African embodied. For further discussion, see Bartels 1993: 32–33. 32. Analyses of Muly Hamet, Eleazar and Aaron can be found in Eldred Jones, Barthelemy and Tokson. D’Amico provides a more subtle reading of Eleazar (106–19), who is usually written off as a villain, pure and simple. 33. Tokson gives a useful survey of English Renaissance dramas that include a lustful Moor. His account also pays important attention to the ways in which black women were stereotyped as driven by lust (82–105). 34. See Floyd-Wilson 1–3. 35. Lines that support each of these hypotheses are, respectively (a) 1.1.8–33; (b) 1.3.368–72 and 2.1.276–80; (c) 2.1.271–75; (d) 2.1.286–88; and (e) 1.3.350–52. 36. On the political association of Moors with sodomy, see Ian Smith 2009. Vern L. Bullough describes Islam as a “sex-positive religion” in Chapter 9 of Sexual Variance in Society and History. Marc Daniel addresses “male love” in relation to the Qur’an and concludes that although there are stated proscriptions against homosexuality, the apparent rigidity of the claims does not bear out in practice. In fact, he writes that homosexuality “was undoubtedly only a minor problem in the eyes of the Prophet, since at no time did he cite homosexual practices in the list of grave sins which offend God” (61). See also John Boswell, 194–98 and Jarrod Hayes who offers a study of the topic with a contemporary focus. Homosexuality in Islam and its relevant cultural, religious, political, and national effects is still a field where a good deal of work is still to be done. 37. As indicated earlier, the term “preposterous” was associated with sodomy; see Parker 1996: 26–28 and Goldberg 179–93. 38. Alan K. Smith recalls that “Greeks, Italians, and especially Florentines were reckoned as notorious practitioners of sodomy” (90). 39. See Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, I:164–65. 40. For a summary of Freud’s theories of dream processes, see Christopher Miller, 61–65. I use Freud’s distinctions deliberately to retain the patriarchal force of his conceptualization as a way of describing the masculinist underpinnings of performative culture. 41. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 192–93.

E PILOGUE 1. For a reading of Caliban as African or Barbarian see Ian Smith 2000. 2. Cicero, De oratore 1.33, and De inventione, 1.2: “For there was a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals and lived on wild

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fare; they did nothing by the guidance of reason, but relied chiefly on physical strength. . . . And so through their ignorance and error blind and unreasoning passion satisfied itself by misuse of bodily strength, which is a very dangerous servant.” Antonio’s mocking, “His word is more than the miraculous harp” (2.1.87), in response to Gonzalo’s geographical typology of Tunis and Carthage, is a reference to Orpheus and the social metamorphosis obtained through eloquent poetry performed to music. See Brotton on this notoriously obscure discussion among the castaways. Spivak addresses the question of race in Kant, often debated as inconsequential to his mature work: Goldberg 2002: 239–41. Education’s ability to raise men from “mere being” to “well being,” as posited in Mulcaster’s Elementarie, is undermined by recalcitrant human nature echoed in Caliban’s “vile race”: “the sequence from mere being to well being, is not simply a natural telos. The graft may not take on those capable only of ill” (Goldberg 2002: 238). On the proverb, “to wash the Ethiop white,” see Neill 1998: 364; Kim Hall 1995: 114. Callaghan reminds us that “gabble” is also used in an early modern colonial context to describe the demonized language spoken by the Irish; 116–19.

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Aaron (Titus Andronicus), 9, 125–27, 129–31, 141–43, 150, 155, 166n23 Biblical ancestry of, 127–31 as “barbarous Moor,” 126, 129–30 as eloquent, 129, 190n9 protection of son, 127, 150 Aaron (Old Testament), 128–29, 150 Abbot, George, 185n40 Achebe, Chinua, 160 Acropolis, 172n16 Ad Herennium, 34 Adelman, Janet, 142 Aeneid, 65, 187n1 Aeschylus, 28–30 Aethiopia, 63 Africa, 4, 18, 45–47, 65–71, 79–89, 160, 167n31, 180n33 See North Africa Africa (1338), 181n5 Africa (1573–99), 80 Africa (1670), 14, 73, 79–80 African barbarians, 3–5, 7–8, 13–14, 16–17, 20–21, 63–69, 79–85, 89–97, 166n29, 183n17, 185n35 and English national identity, 16–17, 63–69 “error” of blackness, 53–58 and Greco-Roman world, 79–85 and homonymic puns, 89–94 and socioeconomic stress, 95, 187n51

See animal-human continuum; barbarous Moor; barbarian-Barbarian pun; Renaissance neo-barbarians; Ethiopians, as barbarians African beauty, 56–58 See Ethiopians, beauty of African contact literature, 13–14 African interpreters kidnapped, 123–25, 148 African language, 13–15, 22, 73–74, 79–85, 133, 167n36, 181n1, 2, 3 and barbarism, 13–14, 73–74, 79–85, 167n36 and geography, 79–85 African writers, 158–61 Afro-barbarian genealogy, 79–85, 89 Agamemnon, 28 Akara, 73–74, 181n2 Albanese, Denise, 76, 182n8 Albumazar (1615), 185n35, 36 Alday, James, 86 Algiers, 85–87, 90, 156 All for Love (1677), 90, 185n37 All’s Lost by Lust (1619), 13 Althusser, Louis, 19 America, early colonial, 5–6, 87, 164n12, 183n19 ancient Greece, 23–30, 42, 49, 64, 81–84, 91, 100, 171n6, 183n20 and “barbarous,” 81–84, 183n20 and blackness, 49–53, 178n16 and reason, 91

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ancient Greece—Continued self-identity, 25–27 and memory, 129, 190n8 See Athens (5th century); Athenians; color prejudice; grammarians (Greek); Greek language Anderson, Benedict, 8, 180n34 Andromeda, 178n17 Anglo-Saxons, 40 animal-human continuum, 13–14, 24, 28, 42–43, 53, 59–61, 65–67, 74, 80–83, 91–92, 133, 136, 138, 143, 158, 185n40, 186n41 See barbarism; speech defects The Annals, 37 Anne of Denmark (Queen Anne), 45, 47, 177n10, 180n37 Antidosis, 24, 42 antimasque, 48, 177n13 Appiah, K. Anthony, 10, 12, 118, 167n33 Apthonious of Antioch, 169 Arabic, 80–84, 89, 183n20 Arabs, 14, 80–81, 83–84, 87, 133 Aristophanes, 25–28, 55, 172n21 Aristotle, 2, 5, 27, 34, 91, 186n41 Armitage, David, 166n30, 167n31 Arte of English Poesie (1589), 81–82, 181n4 Arteaga, Alfred, 22 As You Like It (1599), 12–13, 15 Ascham, Roger, 99, 102, 107–21, 157, 169n48, 49, 170n52, 189n16–18, 21, 22 See double translation; Elizabethan grammar school education; interlingual translation; paraphrasis Ascherson, Neal, 26 Assmann, Jan, 129, 190n8 Athena, 171n9 Athenian playwrights, 26–32, 77 and barbarians, 26, 172n12

and propaganda, 26, 31–32, 171n8 See Greek self-identity; Greek tragedy Athenian self-identity See Greek self-identity Athens (5th century), 23–29, 161 and barbarians, 27 birthplace of rhetorical instruction, 24, 171n4 law-theater continuum, 26–27, 172n11, 172n17 performance culture of, 26, 172n14 See ancient Greeks; Athenian playwrights; participatory democracy Atkins, J.W.H., 109 Atlantic slave trade, 6, 11, 123–25, 127–28, 165n17, 190n2 Attridge, Derek, 187n5, 188n6, 7 Augustine, 32 Augustus, 37, 39, 51, 175n48, 178n16 Austin, J.L., 132, 140, 180n34, 191n14 Babel, 114–17 babble, 2, 13–14, 29 Bacon, Francis, 18, 47–48 See antimasque Bacon, Helen, 172n13 Baker, David, 9 Balibar, Etienne, 133–34 Banton, Michael, 11 barbarian, the term, 1–7, 25–31, 76–85, 133, 160–61, 172n21 and geography, 79–85 throughout European history, 77–79 See barbarians; speech defects barbarian-Barbarian pun, 89–94 barbarian binary, 59–60, 77, 84, 125–26 barbarian errors, 3, 7–8, 34–37, 73–74, 78–79, 84–85, 131–34, 139–41, 155, 173n31 See Afro-barbarian genealogy

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barbarian frontier See imperial frontiers barbarian rhyme, 106–11 barbarians, 1–3, 28, 35, 42, 59–62, 152, 163n4 as animals See animal-human continuum and barbarisms See barbarisms barbaros, 2, 27–28, 83, 129–30, 164n13 inferiority of, 2, 39, 163n4, 172n12 in literary criticism, 4–9, 74–76 as mercenaries, 38, 174n41 as non-European “Other” See “Other” non-Greeks, 27–34, 160–61, 172n19, 21 and rhyme See barbarian rhyme and Roman empire See Roman empire frontier and speech See speech defects and savagery, 27, 35, 59, 91 See savage as subhuman, 28, 66–67, 81 See barbarous Moor; barbarism Barbarians, 74, 80–83, 89–94 See barbarian-Barbarian pun barbarism birth of civilization myth, 23–25, 156–57, 176n60 classical history of term, 1–2, 25–30 contemporary significance of, 160 definition of, 18, 34–37 and geography, 79–85 and grammar, 1, 34–35, 36, 41–42, 173n31 and hierarchy, 2, 24, 42, 59, 77, 82, 85, 124 imperial origins of, 23–31 and language, 1–3, 10, 30 and nationalism, 8–9

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racial character of, 35, 174n34 versus civilization, 59–60, 77, 84 See animal-human continuum; barbarian errors; barbarian binary; speech defects barbarous English, 16–18, 97–99 barbarous Moor, 20, 73–74, 78–95, 126, 129–30 See Moors; Othello (character) Barbary, 14, 73–74, 79–86, 89–90, 133, 138, 142–43, 156, 182n11, 15, 183n19, 20, 185n36, 191n19 and trade, 87, 142–43, 184n26 Barbary Company, 87, 184n25 Barbour, Richmond, 70 Bartels, Emily, 126 Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard, 3, 88, 143, 177n5, 184n30, 192n31,32 Bassnett-McGuire, Susan, 113 Bate, Jonathan, 190n9 Bates, Catherine, 93 The Battle of Alcazar (1588), 85–86, 129, 141 Beeching, Jack, 131–32 Benveniste, Emile, 8, 165n22 Berbers, 14, 80, 83–84, 87, 167n36 Bernheimer, Richard, 186n43 Best, George, 179n20 Bhabha, Homi, 118–21 Bibliotheca historica, 49–50, 58–62 biological racism, 6, 10–12, 49, 52, 133, 181, 167n32 blackamoors, 45, 47, 69, 131, 176n1, 180n37 blackface, 47, 73, 177n5, 180n37 blackness, 13, 21, 48–62, 88, 123, 130, 135–39, 142–43, 192n31 and antiquity, 49–58 and the British, 69–71 and enslavement, 10, 123–25 as evil, 48, 88, 177n12

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blackness—Continued and linguistic baseness, 14 and Othello, 135–39 See environmental theory; color prejudice; Masque of Blackness The Blazon of Iealovsie (trans. 1615), 143 The Bluest Eye, 48 body painting, 69–70 Bolgar, R.R., 109 Bonner, Stanley F., 34, 173n31, 32 The Book of the Courtier, 98 Borst, Arno, 76–77 Bourdieu, Pierre, 30–31 Bovilsky, Lara, 4, 163n8 Britannia, 64–65, 69–70 Britannia (1600), 5, 63, 69–70, 175n53 “Brith,” 64, 69–70 British barbarians, 5–8, 16–17, 69–70, 78, 99, 117–21, 164n14, 165n18, 19, 180n35, 188n14 Brome, Richard, 73 Brummett, Palmira, 86, 184n27 Bullokar, William, 97–98 Burckhardt, Jacob, 75 Burns, Thomas S., 174n41, 43, 45, 48, 49 Burton, Jonathan, 4, 94, 187n49 Bushnell, Rebecca, 170n53 Butler, Judith, 138 Butler, Martin, 46, 177n13 Caesar, Julius, 5, 164n15 Caliban, 22, 125, 131, 155–59, 161, 193n1,5 Cambyses, 25, 50–51 Camden, William, 5, 63, 69–70, 165n19, 175n53 Campion, Thomas, 75, 99, 108–9, 176n4 Carleton, Dudley, 180n37 Castiglione, Baldassare, 98 Caxton, William, 88, 187n1

Cecil, William, 119, 189n22 Chambers, Robert, 88 Charlton, Kenneth, 19 Cheke, John, 18, 107, 188n11 Cicero, 20–21, 23, 32, 108, 112–13, 157, 168n41, 170n58, 185n40, 187n2, 189n16, 20, 193n2 City Dionysia, 26, 29, 172n15 Cixous, Hélène, 191n15 climate theory, See environmental theory colonial tropology, 117–21 colonialism, 6–7, 9–12, 15–16, 20, 26, 51, 135, 155–62, 165n16,19, 179n22, 185n39 color, 3–4, 9–12, 15–16, 88, 123–24, 130, 137, 163n7, 166n26 and the body, 10 and language, 15–16 See blackness; color prejudice color prejudice, 46–53, 62 See “error” of blackness A Complete History of Algiers (1728), 90 Conley, Thomas M., 171n2 Constantinople, 77, 87 Cosmographical Glasse (1559), 91 Cosmographie (1652), 14, 143 Crewe, Jonathan, 185n34 Cromwell, Thomas, 169n47 Crusades, 77, 87 Culler, Jonathan, 140 Cunningham, William, 91 Curran, John, 5, 164n15 Cyrus the Great, 25 D’Amico, Jack, 3, 143, 147 Daniel, Samuel, 99, 109–10 Dapper, Olfert, 79–81, 182n13 Darius, 25, 29 Davis, David Brion, 10 Davis, William, 147 Dawson, Christopher, 188n10 de Certeau, Michel, 76

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De elegantiis linguae latinae, 181n7 de Fréjus, Roland, 89–90, 93 de Gandillac, Maurice, 115 De inventione, 23 De oratore, 32 De rebus bellicis, 40 de Tassy, Laugier, 90–93 The Decades of the New World (1555), 13 “Decline and Fall” model of Roman empire, 41, 175n55 A Defence of Ryme (1603), 99 Dekker, Thomas, 79, 85, 141 Delanty, Greg, 28 Delian League, 25, 172n15 Delphos, 178n17 Derrida, Jacques, 114–17, 140, 189n19, 20, 191n14 Description de l’Afrique (1686), 79–80 Dewald, Carolyn, 171n10, 178n15 A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1528), 16 dilation, 140, 156, 192n28, 29 Diodorus Siculus, 49–50, 58–62 See Bibliotheca historica Directions for Speech and Style (1599), 131, 134, 149, 152, 190n13 Discourse (1578), 179n20 Domitian, 37, 174n39 double translation, 19, 111–17, 170n52, 189n17 Drant, Thomas, 101–2 dreaming, 63–9, 146–51 Dryden, John, 90, 185n37, 186n44 DuBois, W.E.B., 10 Eden, Richard, 13, 98 The Egg, 107–9 Egypt, 52, 66, 178n15,16 See Book of Exodus Elizabeth I of England, 45, 131, 142, 149

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Elizabethan grammar school education, 103–7, 111–13, 115–16, 188n6 Elyot, Thomas, 18 England (Renaissance era) and Africa, 13–15, 45–48, 63–68, 85–94, 123–25 as black, 69–71 and blackness, 48, 176n1 economic threat of Turks, 86–87, 94–96, 184n24, 27 and imperialism, 6, 11, 84, 95, 160–61, 84, 97 and Troy legend, 65 See English language; English linguistic eloquence; English national identity; Elizabethan grammar school education; Great Britain; international trade; masques; performative culture; union debate English barbarians See British barbarians English language, 99–121, 123–25 barbarism of, 16–17, 97–99 and eloquence See English linguistic eloquence and Latin language, 103–6, 111–17 See double translation; modified hegemony; quantitative versification and national identity, 99–101, 105–6, 110–11, 116–17 and prosody See prosody English linguistic eloquence, 1, 8–9, 14, 16–22, 124–25, 131–34, 148–49, 152–53, 163n2, 168n41, 190n13, 191n16 See performative culture

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INDE X

INDE X

The English Moor (1631), 73 English national identity, 1, 3–9, 69–71, 84, 97–101, 105–6, 110–11, 116–21, 131–32, 151, 180n31 and Africa, 69–71, 79–85 as black, 69–71 and body painting, 69–71 and forgetting, 117–21 and “grounding mistake,” 8 and Trojan ancestry, 5, 7, 65, 164n15, 180n31 See African barbarians; British barbarians; English language; English linguistic eloquence; Galfridian myth; projection; performative culture English theater, 94–96, 129 public commercial theaters, 17–18 Englishness, 68, 100, 112, 116–17, 121, 148, 151 Enlightenment, 8, 10, 12, 20, 91, 117, 158, 91 environmental theory of blackness, 47, 49, 52–58 Ephialtes, 171n2 Erasmus, 19, 74, 109, 146, 150, 152, 168n41, 169n50, 170n56 Erickson, Peter, 12 “Ethiop,” 13, 15, 48, 158, 193n6 Ethiopians, 13–15, 45–69, 74, 178n14–17 Atlas tribe, 65–67 as “autochthones,” 50 as barbarians, 58–61, 65–67, 70, 74 beauty of, 49–51, 56–58, 178n14 as dreamless, 63–69 and “error” of blackness, 53–58 etymology of, 46 favored by the gods, 49–50 sunburned, 46, 177n7 See Masque of Blackness

ethnography, 5, 14, 28, 40, 58, 65–67, 70, 82, 89–90, 117–18, 132, 167n35 etymology, 36, 174n37 Euripides, 27–28, 32, 47 Eyre, J.J., 33, 173n28 Fabian, Johannes, 132 Fanon, Frantz, 21, 155 Ferguson, Arthur B., 70 Ficino, Marsilio, 74 Fiedler, Leslie, 127 The First Three English Books on America (1555), 98 Fitzmaurice, Andrew, 185n40 Florianus, Joannes, 88 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 6, 145, 165n17, 18 foederati, 38, 175n42 foreigners, 1, 3, 13, 22, 27–31, 34, 42, 77, 82, 92, 129–30, 172n19, 184n26 forgetting, and nation formation, 68–69, 117–21 Frede, Michael, 173n30 Freeman, Charles, 171n8, 173n23 Freud, Sigmund, 68, 148–50, 192n40 The Frogs, 172n21 frontier See imperial border/frontier Foucault, Michel, 95, 175n51, 182n8, 186n47 Fuchs, Barbara, 6 Galfridian myth, 5, 164n15 Garden of Eloquence (1577), 75 Gardiner, Stephen, 188n11 Gauls, 64 Gealy, F.D., 29 gentry class, 18–19, 169n48 gentes, 38 A Geographical History of Africa (trans. 1600), 81, 88, 133 Gibbon, Edward, 175n55

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Gillies, John, 10–11, 147, 164n13, 166n28, 29, 167n38, 186n41 Goldberg, Jonathan, 149, 157–58, 192n37 Gombrich, E.H., 1 Gordon, Murray, 10 Gorgias, 24 Goths, 38, 39–40, 106–8, 110, 117, 126, 130 Gourgouris, Stathis, 68 Grafton, Anthony, 170n54 grammarians (Ancient Greek), 30–32, 34, 36, 41, 173n24, 25, 174n36 grammarians (Roman), 32–37, 40–41, 174n38, 175n52 See Quintilian grammatical correctness, 36–37, 41–42 grammatical errors, 28, 34 See barbarisms; solecisms Gramsci, Antonio, 105, 188n9 “Great Britain,” 46, 64–65, 180n31 Great Vowel Shift, 104 Greco-Roman world, 11, 15, 24–25, 33, 49–61, 67, 75–76, 80–84, 100–1, 105–8, 166n22, 173n29, 178n16, 17 and color prejudice, 49–61, 178n16, 17 See barbarian, barbarians, barbarism Greek language, 1, 2, 17, 28–29, 82, 97, 100, 102, 107, 110, 112, 187n3, 188n11 Greek theater, 26–29 Greek tragedy, 29, 172n12, 13 Greenblatt, Stephen, 110, 123–24, 135, 185n39, 191n20, 21 Greene, Robert, 86 Greene, Thomas, 2 Guinea, 181n3 Hadfield, Andrew, 93–94 Hahn, Thomas, 52

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Hakluyt, Richard, 86, 123, 142, 190n1 Hale, J.R., 2 Hall, Edith, 26, 172n13 Hall, Kim F., 3, 45 Halpern, Richard, 19, 170n53 Hametic curse, 179n20 Hartog, François, 180n32 Harvey, Gabriel, 99–102, 106, 116–17, 169n45, 187n4 Haward, Nicholas, 17 Hawkes, Terence, 159–60 Healey, John, 89 Heather, Peter, 33, 175n50, 54, 55 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 120, 180n33, 182n9 Heimonet, Jean-Michel, 145 Helgerson, Richard, 9, 100–1, 110, 163n2, 190n13 Heliaia, 171n2 Hellenic virtues, 29, 173n22 Hellenismos, 34 Hendel, Ronald, 129 Hendricks, Margo, 5, 12, 164n12, 167n31, 32, 38 Hendrickson, G.L., 104–5, 188n8 Heng, Geraldine, 7 Henry VIII, 169n47, 188n15, 190n12, 13 Herbert, Thomas, 13–14, 167n35 Herodotus, 26, 49–52, 65–67, 171n10, 178n14, 15, 180n32 Hesiod, 47 hexametrists, 103, 105–6, 187n4, 188n8 Hexter, J.H., 190n12 Heylyn, Peter, 14, 81, 143 The Histories, 26, 49–51, 65–67, 171n10, 178n15 Histoire du royaume d’Alger (1725), 90 The History of the Peloponnesian War, 27 Hoby, Thomas, 98, 112, 116, 121 Homer, 32, 49–50, 52, 58, 62, 177n7

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INDE X

INDE X

“homosexuality,” 146–51, 191n16, 192n36 Horace, 47 Hoskins, John, 131–32, 134, 149, 152, 168n41, 190n13 Howell, James, 168n42 hubris, 54–55 humanism, 1–3, 5, 7, 16–22, 47, 67–71, 74–76, 83–94, 108, 134, 136, 168n43, 169n46, 48, 181n6, 182n8, 188n14, 193n5 and barbarism, 71, 74, 75, 83 and imperialism, 84 and rhetorical eloquence, 108 See classical texts; humanist education; puns; humanist education, 18–20, 157–58, 169n48, 170n53, 54, 193n5 Huns, 106–8, 117 Ichthyophagi, 49–50, 60 Iliad, 49–50 imperii custos, 175n52 immigrants, 31, 38, 46, 50, 61, 93, 125, 133–34, 138, 151, 155, 159–60, 174n40 imperial expansion and linguistic assimilation, 61, 156, 179n26 imperial frontiers, 1, 5, 37–41, 58–59, 166n23 See Roman empire frontier imperialism, 10–11, 29, 45–46, 82, 166n30 See England, and imperialism; imperial border; rehabilitative imperialism; Roman empire; translatio imperii Institutio oratoria, 34–36, 82 interlingual translation, 113–15, 189n20 international trade, 7, 9, 17, 63–64, 85–87, 94–95, 123–25, 137–38, 142–43, 151, 184n26 See merchants

international travel, 13–14, 63–65, 77, 85–87, 134, 137–38, 191n26 Iphigenia at Aulis, 28 Ireland, 86–87, 89 See Irish barbarians Irigaray, Luce, 148 Irish barbarians, 5–6, 89, 165n16, 176n1, 184n33, 193n7 Islam, 83–84, 86–88, 136–37, 143–44, 147, 192n36 Isocrates, 23–24, 42 Italy, 5, 100, 108–9, 177n6, 189n21 Iyengar, Sujata, 3 Jakobson, Roman, 113–16 James I, 45–47, 176n4, 179n22 Jardine, Lisa, 186n48 jealousy, 142–45 Jefferson, Thomas, 167n33 Johnson, Samuel, 186n45 Jones, H. Stewart, 37 Jones, Inigo, 46, 177n6 See perspective art Jones, Richard Foster, 168n42 Jones, W.R., 77–78 Jonson, Ben, 46–48, 56–58, 62–69, 176n2, 177n11, 13, 179n22 See Masque of Blackness Johnson, Richard, 90 Jordan, Winthrop, 9, 48, 123 Kahn, Victoria, 170n60 Kaster, Robert, 32–33, 173n25, 176n59 Kelly, Anne Cline, 177n13 Khaldun, Ibn, 53 King Lear, 164n14 Kincaid, Jamaica, 159–60 Kleisthenes, 171n2 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 49 Knolles, Richard, 147 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 168n43, 181n6 Kristeva, Julia, 114–15, 189n19

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Lacan, Jacques, 191n16 Lamming, George, 158–61 language, 12–16 as civilizing agent, 156–57 as code, 30–31 of the criminal, 159–60 and cultural belonging, 139 dialectical character of, 8 differential function of, 58–62 frontiers, guarding, 31–42 and hierarchy, 161, 100 and imperial contest, 30–31 and marginalization, 3, 21–22 and national consciousness, 99–101 proper language use, 16 and race, 2–4, 13–15, 20, 160–62 reversibility of, 8, 165n22 and social control, 151–52 and the state, 30–31 See English language; Latin language Latin language, 1, 17, 73–75, 82, 97–98, 100, 102–5, 108, 112–13, 115–16, 187n2, 3 and English grammar school, 103–4, 188n6 “Latins,” 62 Latinitas, 34, 40 le Roy, Loys, 181n4 Lefevere, André, 78 Leo Africanus, Joannes, 14–15, 63, 80–81, 88, 133, 142–44, 167n36, 191n18 Lewis, Bernard, 10, 166n26 Lewis, C.S., 74 liberal arts curriculum, 1, 169n44 Libya, 54 Libyans, 51–52, 66 Lily’s Latin Grammar, 19 limes, 37 linguistic eloquence, 30, 82, 108, 146, 157–58, 191n15 and Aaron (Old Testament), 128–29, 150

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and Aaron (Titus Andronicus), 129 and Ancient Athens, 23–24, 30–31, 173n24 and sanity, 131–32 See English linguistic eloquence; Othello linguistics, modern, 30 Lithgow, John, 88, 90, 185n35 Little, Arthur, 57 Lok, John, 123–24, 190n1 London, 65, 70, 86, 98, 131, 137–38, 159 Long, Timothy, 161, 172n13 Loomba, Ania, 4, 87 Lucian, 47, 51 Lusitanians, 110 Lust’s Dominion (1599), 85–86, 141, 143 MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 191n16 MacDonald, Joyce Green, 3 Mack, Peter, 168n43 Marathon (490 BC), 25 Marcus, Lean, 2 Mármol Carvajal, Luis del, 80–81, 182n12 Martyr, Peter, 167n34 Masque of Blackness, 45–48, 53–58, 63–71, 177n5, 11, 179n21 Ethiopian women, 45–47, 56–58, 63–65, 69–70, 179n21 reactions to, 69–70, 180n37 and whiteness, 47, 53–58, 69, 179n21 See Anne of Denmark; blackface; Niger; perspective art masques, 45–48, 176n4, 177n10 See antimasque; Masque of Blackness Massardier-Kenney, Francoise, 79 master tongue, 27, 30, 43 Matar, Nabil, 147, 183n19, 184n26, 28 Mauretania, 64, 66, 87–88

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INDE X

INDE X

McDonald, Russ, 93–94 McLaughlin, Mary Martin, 74–75, 181n4, 5, 7 Mediterranean school of criticism, 94–96 Meier, Christian, 26 The Merchant of Venice, 45 merchants, 18–19, 74, 87, 124, 137–38, 142, 184n26 metaphor, 117, 120 Metamorphoses, 53–58 metonymy, 35, 62, 67, 174n34 Middle Ages, 75–76, 87, 181n6 Middleton, Thomas, 137–38 Mignolo, Walter, 163n3, 166n25 Migration period, 39–41, 77, 175n55 Mikalachki, Jodi, 5, 70 Miranda, 156–61 Mirror of Herodotus, 180n32 miscegenation, 16, 151, 167n38 mnemohistory, 129–30 modified hegemony, 105–6, 119 Moors, 9, 11, 13, 20, 45, 69, 73–74, 78–79, 85–88, 90, 93, 95–96, 120, 126, 129–47, 184n29, 191n25, 192n31 blackening of, 88 definition of, 87–88, 184n29 and Iago, 141–45 and sodomy, 146–51, 192n36 and Spain, 13, 86 stereotypes of, 141–43, 192n31, 33 See barbarous Moor; blackamoors; Leo Africanus; More, Thomas, 16, 18, 169n47 Morgan, John, 90–93, 185n38 Morocco, 86–87 Morrison, Toni, 48 Moses, 128–29, 190n7 Muly Hamet, 85, 141, 192n32 Murray, Molly, 57, 178n21 Muslims, 4–5, 10, 87, 133, 147 Nash, Daphne, 174n41, 187n4 Nashe, Thomas, 90, 98, 187n4

nation-making, and forgetting, 68–69, 117–21 Natural History, 65–67 Nauert, Jr., Charles, 75 “negroes,” 45, 66, 124, 131, 177n13 Nehesyu, 52 Neill, Michael, 3, 8, 123, 163n7 Nether-Ethiopia, 73–74 Neubert, Albrecht, 113 Neville, Alexander, 97, 187n2 Newton, Thomas, 78 Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, 160 Nicocles, 23–24 Niger, 63 Nigritae, 63, 66 noble savage, 165n18 Norbrook, David, 94 North Africa, 80–87, 89, 156 See Barbary northern barbarians, 78, 165n18,19, 117–21 See British barbarians; Goths; Huns Nuce, Thomas, 78–79 O’Day, Rosemary, 19 Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), 112, 188n15 Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), 99 Octavia, 78 The Odyssey, 49, 177n7 Oedipus (1563), 97 Ogilby, John, 14, 73, 79–81, 182n13 oikumene, 11, 14, 53, 58–60, 92, 148 Orestes, 27–28 Orgel, Stephen, 45, 176n1, 177n13, 180n37 orientalism, birth of, 27 Orientalism, 187n49 Orkin, Martin, 141 Orlando Furioso, 86

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Othello, 91–92, 131–51 Othello (character), 91–92, 131–53, 155, 166n28, 191n20,22 as animal, 136, 138 and blackness, 135–39 and Christianity, 135–37, 141–43, 147, 150, 191n20 and cultural whiteness, 135–41, 152 and culturalist racism, 131–34 and improvisation, 135–36, 191n21 and jealousy, 143–45 as Jesus in Gethsemane, 136–37 and linguistic eloquence, 139–41, 146, 148, 152–53 See “preposterous” as noble Moor, 136, 191n22 sexuality of, 135, 138–39, 146–51 “Other,” 4–5, 21–22, 76, 119–20, 132, 145, 182n9 otherness, 3, 4, 11, 45, 62, 70, 93, 133, 163n7, 166n30 Ottoman Turks, 5, 77, 86–87, 94–96, 135, 138–39, 144, 147, 183n23, 27 outsiders, 1–2, 27, 74, 132, 151–52 Over, William, 176n2 Ovid, 47, 53–58, 62, 178n17, 180n31 and the “error” of blackness, 53–58 See Metamorphoses paedagogus, 107, 119 Painter, William, 88 paraphrasis, 113–14, 189n18 Parker, Patricia, 139, 192n28 Parthenon, 172n16 participatory democracy, 24, 26, 171n2 Pascal, Nanette R., 33 paternity, 55 Peacham, Henry, 75 Peacham drawing, 166n23

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Peele, George, 129, 141 performative culture, 26, 131–32, 134, 135–41, 148, 172n14, 192n30 Persian Empire, 25 Persian Wars, 24–30, 77, 171n5, 6, 8, 172n16 The Persians, 28–30 perspective art, 46–47, 177n6 perspective as history, 45–46 persuasion, 23–24, 171n3 Petrarch, 75, 109, 181n5, 188n14 Pettie, George, 17 Phaethon, 53–58 Phoebus, 53–55 Pierce Penilesse (1592), 90, 98 pigmies, 48 Pincombe, Mike, 20, 170n55 Plataea, 25, 171n8 Plato, 27, 55 The Pleasures of Exile (1960), 158–59 Pliny, 14, 51, 53, 61, 63, 65–70, 91, 113, 167n35, 178n17, 180n36 Plutarch, 171n9 poets and English language, 98–99 and white superiority, 56–58 Pohl, Walter, 40 polis, 14, 91 Portugal, 86 Pory, John, 88 Poseidon, 49 postcolonial intellectuals, 119–21, 159 practical humanism, 16–22, 169n47 praeceptor, 107, 119 preposterous, 131–32, 134, 138–39, 142, 144, 147, 150, 152, 183n17, 192n37 See sodomy “prestige goods dependency” theory, 175n45 Priam, 127 Progymnasmata, 169

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INDE X

INDE X

projection, 6–8, 17–18, 68–69, 74, 142 prosodic hegemony, 105, 188n9 prosody, 99–103, 105, 109, 173n33 and accent, 100–5, 173n31, 33, 187n3, 5 See rhyme Protagoras, 24 Psamtik II, 178n16 puns, 73, 85–94, 183n19, 186n44–46 Puttenham, George, 81–84, 156–57, 176n60, 181n4, 183n17, 18 Pyrrhus of Epirus, 21 quantitative versification, 98–108, 110–12, 116–17, 119, 121, 187n4, 5, 188n6, 7, 9 and syllables, 34, 101–3, 136, 187n5 See double translation; Elizabethan grammar schools; hexametrists Quintilian, 34–37, 40–42, 82, 99, 109, 113, 173n32, 33, 174n37, 38 Rabb, Theodore, 184n24 race and barbarism, 35 and corporal empiricism, 15, 21 and corporal fetishism, 10–12, 15–16, 167n33 and cultural whiteness, 135–41, 155–56 and culturalist racism, 131–34 as a dream act, 68–71, 180n34 exchange, 7–8 as fiction, 21, 94–96 as genealogy, 127, 130 hierarchy, 52, 142, 167n32 history of, 12 and language, 1–4, 12–16, 20–22, 160–62 and need, 7–8, 165n20 as relationship of status, 11–12 See blackness

racial codes, 3, 4, 10, 15–16, 20–21, 151,155, 163n8 racial longing (for whiteness), 53–58 racial puns, 85–94 racism and antiquity, 48–49 as culturalist, 131–34 See biological racism Rainolde, Richard, 19, 169n50 Rare Adventures (1615), 90 Raven, D.S., 103, 187n3 reason, 91, 126, 158, 193n2, 5 Redfern, Walter, 89, 93 rehabilitative imperialism, 5–7, 165n19 Rehm, Rush, 172n14, 17 Rejeb, Lotfi Ben, 164n13 religion, 4, 167n37 Renaissance, 1–9, 74–78, 163n1, 163n3 as cultural change, 93–94 and double talk, 93, 186n44 geographers, 91 historical consciousness, 74–75 and medieval period, 75, 181n6 need for barbarians, 74–78 and race, 1–9, 58, 62 translation, 78–79 See classical texts; humanism; Renaissance neo-barbarian Renaissance Africans See African barbarians; Renaissance neo-barbarian Renaissance England See England (Renaissance) Renaissance neo-barbarian, 2–3, 7–9, 20–21, 45, 73–79, 89–94 See barbarian-Barbarian pun; Barbary; Moor Renan, Ernest, 69, 117–18 reproduction, 150–51, 156 rhetoric, 1–2, 13, 18–19, 82, 168n43, 169n45, 50, 170n56, 185n40 and analogy, 36–37, 41, 174n37

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art of, 18, 168n43, 169n45, 170n56 See puns and common good, 21–22, 170n58 education See rhetorical education enargeia, 146, 149 and perfectibility, 21 performing See performative culture and poetry, 108 and race, 13, 21 and sanity, 131–32, 152 and the state, 2, 18–21, 30, 170n58 theory of, 82, 183n17 See linguistic eloquence; persuasion; rhetorical education Rhetoric, 34 rhetorical education/instruction, 42 in 5th century Athens, 23–24, 32, 171n3,4 in Roman empire, 33 in Renaissance, 18–21, 169n50, 170n53, 54, 60 See also grammarians Rhodius, Simmias, 107 rhyme, as barbaric, 101–2, 106–11 Roman Africa, 35–36, 174n35 Roman barbarians, 27, 37–41, 61–62, 75, 106–7, 125–26, 175n44, 55, 179n26 conversion of, 61–62, 179n26 and Dark Ages, 75 and fall of Roman empire, 75, 77 invasions of, 106–10 188n10 and linguistic imperialism, 61, 179n26 and migration period, 39–41 See gentes; “Latins”; Roman empire frontier Roman education, 32–37, 173n28, 29 See grammarian

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Roman Empire, 5–7, 27, 32–42, 171n10, 174n39–49, 51–52, 61–62, 77, 160–61 barbarians See Roman barbarians and barbarisms, 35 and blackness, 49, 51–53 and change, 175n49 as civilizing, 61–62 education See Roman education and England, 65 and exogenous shock, 40–41 fall of, 41, 75, 77, 106–9, 125, 175n55 frontier See Roman empire frontier and Iberian peninsula, 61 identity, 40 and North Africa, 80 occupation of Egypt, 178n16 and propaganda, 37, 40 Rhine-Danube system, 37, 174n39 strengths of, 61, 174n40 taxation, 38, 39 See foederati; “Latins”; limes; linguistic imperialism; Romanization; translatio imperii Roman empire frontier, 35, 37–42, 61–62, 81, 175n43, 46, 50, 126 zones, 38 See closed frontier theory Romanization, 61–62, 69, 110, 179n26 Rome, 35, 41, 51, 65, 75, 84–85, 125–26, 133 Ross, James Bruce, 74–75, 181n4, 5, 7 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 165n18 Rowley, William, 13, 15 Royster, Francesca, 179n20 Russell, Daniel, 78–79

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INDE X

INDE X

Saadi dynasty, 86 Sabacos, 178n15 Said, Edward, 63, 187n49 Salamis, 25, 29, 171n8, 9 savage, 5, 6, 23, 62, 89, 132–33, 156, 158 The Scholemaster (1570), 99, 102, 111–12, 119, 157, 169n49 Scipio, 35 Scotland, 45–46, 69, 176n4, 180n35 Scythians, 27, 164n14 Seneca, 32, 35, 78, 97, 182n10 Seven Champions of Christendom, Part 1 (1596), 90 Shacklock, Richard, 187n2 Shakespeare, William, 12–13, 15, 56, 91, 93, 129, 136, 139, 141–45, 150, 152, 155–58, 161, 185n34, 186n45 See As You Like It; Othello; The Tempest; Titus Andronicus Shapiro, James, 131 Shell, Marc, 128 Sherry, Richard, 19, 168n41, 169n50 Shuger, Debora, 5, 164n14, 165n19 Siddiqi, Yumna, 45 Sidney, Philip, 101–4, 176n60 Skelton, John, 16–17 slave trade See Atlantic slave trade slavery, 2, 10–12, 15–16, 20, 25, 28, 45, 49, 51, 163n4, 166n26, 176n1, 190n2 Slights, Camille Wells, 136 “slippery customers,” 37–42 Smith, Bruce, 167n39 Smith, Thomas, 18, 188n11 Snowden, Frank, 49, 51–52, 178n16,17 sodomy, 139, 143, 146–51, 192n36 solecisms, 34, 36–37, 82, 173n31,32, 176n57 Sophists, 24, 171n2 Sophocles, 164n13, 172n21

Spain, 35–36, 86–87 speech defects, 2, 27–30, 34–35, 42, 60–61, 65–67, 80–84, 129–33, 148, 151–52, 160–61, 172n21, 183n20, 193n7 and Barbary, 80–83 and linguistic incapacity, 30, 61, 66–67, 129–30, 148 stammering, 27–28, 160–61, 172n19 See babble; grammatical errors; Speed, John, 70, 83, 183n20 Spencer, T.J.B., 125 Spenser, Edmund, 89, 102–3, 105, 110, 117, 180m31, 184n33 Spivak, Gayatri, 8, 147–48, 165n21 Sprat, Thomas, 168n42 Steiner, George, 113 Stoics, 34, 173n30 Storr, Anthony, 150 Strabo, 51–53, 58, 61–62, 91, 110, 179n26 studia humanitatis, 1, 75–76 Summerson, John, 47 Sweet, James H., 10 Symposium, 55 Tacitus, 5, 37, 165n18 Taguieff, P.A., 134 Taylor, John, 181n1 Tearco, 51 The Tempest, 156–59 Theater of Dionysus, 26 Thompson, John, 103–6 Thucydides, 27 Titus Andronicus (1592), 9, 125–27, 129–31, 141, 143 and barbarous Goths, 126 and blackness, 9, 130 and patriarchy, 127 Tokson, Elliott H., 3, 192n33 Tomkis, Thomas, 185n35, 36 Towerson, William, 124 Trachiniae, 172n21 Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda, 88–89

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INDE X

union debate, 45–46, 176n4 Valla, Lorenzo, 75, 181n7 Vandals, 39–40, 106 Varchi, Benedetto, 143 Vaughan, Virginia Mason, 141, 143, 164n12, 167n38 Velz, John, 126 Vickers, Brian, 18, 183n18 Virgil, 32, 47, 51, 65, 180n31 Visigoths, 106–7 Vitkus, Daniel, 95 Vivante, Bella, 171n10 von Freising, Otto, 179n30

von Fritz, Kurt, 36, 174n36, 37 Warner, Michael, 149 The Wasps, 25 White, Hayden, 92, 187n51 White, Jeannette, 129, 177n12 White, Lynn, 175n55 White over Black, 9 Whitehall, 46, 63 whiteness, 5–6, 14–15, 46–47, 53–58, 69–71, 131–32, 134, 135–41, 148, 165n17, 166n29, 179n20, 21 and Anglo-European intellectuals, 57–58 cultural, 134, 135–41 as invisible, 53, 179n20 and linguistic performance, 131–32 loss of, 53–58 as standard, 179n20 as superior, 56–57, 179n21 Whittaker, C.R., 39, 175n45, 46, 47, 51, 55 wild Irish, 6 Wild Man, 92, 186n43 Williams, Derek, 37, 174n40, 175n45, 47 Wilson, Thomas, 19, 21, 169n50 Women at the Thesmophoria, 27 The Wretched of the Earth (1961), 155 Wyndham, Thomas, 86 Xenophanes, 51 xenophobia, 45 Zimmern, Alfred, 52

10.1057/9780230102064 - Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, Ian Smith

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-11

Trajan, 37 transcendental signifier, 114–17 “Transformation of the Roman World” model, 41, 175n55 translatio imperii, 63–67, 179n30 translation, 78–79, 98, 105–6, 111–17 See African interpreters; double translation; transcendental signifier travel literature, 13–14 Tripoli, 84 The Triumphs of Truth (1613), 137–38 Trogodytes, 60 Trogloditica, 13 Trojan war, 51 Trousdale, Marion, 168n43 Troy legend, 65, 180n31 Tunis, 86 Turks, See Ottoman-Turks Twelfth Night, 47, 70 Tyndale, William, 112, 116, 121, 188n15

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