Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

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WOMEN AND RACE IN EARLY MODERN TEXTS Joyce Green MacDonald discusses the links between women’s racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. She examines the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama, and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. The coverage also includes texts from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries by, among others, Shakespeare, Jonson, Davenant, the Countess of Pembroke, and Aphra Behn. MacDonald articulates many of her discussions of early modern women’s races through a comparative method, using insights drawn from critical race theory, women’s history, and contemporary disputes over canonicity, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism. Seeing women as identified by their race and social standing as well as by their sex, this book will add depth and dimension to discussions of women’s writing and of gender in Renaissance literature. JOYCE GREEN MACDONALD is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. She is the editor of Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance ( ) and has published numerous articles on Shakespeare production and adaption, and on gender and race in early modern drama. She has also edited Thomas Southerne’s play Oroonoko for a new anthology of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, general editor, J. Douglas Canfield ( ).

WOMEN AND RACE IN EARLY MODERN TEXTS JOYCE GREEN MACDONALD

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Joyce Green MacDonald 2004 First published in printed format 2002 ISBN 0-511-02967-5 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-81016-7 hardback

Contents

Acknowledgments

page vii

Introduction: women, race, and Renaissance texts



 Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge



 Sex, race, and empire in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra



 Dido and Sophonisba of Carthage: marriage, race, and the bonds between men



 The disappearing African woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



 Race, women, and the sentimental in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko

 

 Chaste lines: writing and unwriting race in Katherine Philips’ Pompey

 

 The queen’s minion: sexual difference, racial difference, and Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer

 

Conclusion: “The efficacy of Imagination”

     

Bibliography Index

v

Acknowledgments

Parts of this book first appeared, in earlier versions, as journal articles, book chapters, and conference presentations. I thank readers and editors at Literature and History, Criticism, and ELH, and session organizers at the Ohio Shakespeare Conference, the Shakespeare Association of America, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the   Paris conference on Aphra Behn. Chapter  is an enlarged and revised version of a paper which appears in the proceedings of the Paris conference, Aphra Behn: Identit´e, Alterit´e, Ambiguit´e, edited by Mary Ann O’Donnell and Bernard Dhuicq (Paris: Harmattan, ). Portions of Chapter  and Chapter  are from the essay “Black Ram, White Ewe: Shakespeare, Race and Women,” in The Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Oxford: Blackwell, ). Arthur Marotti, Carol Rutter, Marga Munkelt, Alan Armstrong, Laura Rosenthal, Jim Andreas, and Doug Canfield have all provided support and affirmation at key moments in my work. Over the time that this work has been developing, I have had the opportunity to enter critical conversations and – at least as important – develop working friendships with several of my scholarly contemporaries. I treasure talking and corresponding with Shakespeareans Arthur Little, Jr., Kim Hall, Margo Hendricks, Michael Dobson, John Michael Archer, Rebecca Bach, Lori Newcomb, and Lisa Starks, even when nothing of much scholarly consequence seems to be getting said. I owe thanks to my students at the University of Kentucky who asked questions that hadn’t occured to me and to which I didn’t always know the answers. They make me work harder. I am also grateful for the support of my colleagues, especially department chairs David Durant and Greg Waller. My own teachers David Scott Kastan and Ann Jennalie Cook inspired me to enter literary studies. Their intellect, professionalism, and sense of fun still show me how to do this job. vii

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Acknowledgments

I am privileged to be part of two large, close-knit families. My parents, George and Mamie Green, always encouraged my love of books, taught me the value and dignity of work, and showed me that family ties are what endure. I hope I’ve made them proud. Alan MacDonald has always been my loving partner. He and our daughter Lily are the sources of my greatest happiness. I ask their forgiveness for being so distracted during the completion of this book, but I remind them that they’re on every page, because they’re in my heart.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

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Introduction: Women, race, and Renaissance texts

In  and again in  the court of King James IV of Scotland mounted a tournament of the wild knight and the black lady. Surviving accounts of these splendid occasions constitute a rare record of the representation of African women in the early modern period. We know that the king was outfitted in black and gold, from his doublet and hood to the weapons he carried and possibly later presented as prizes. His attendants may even have worn silver and gilt horns as part of their costumes, and ridden contraptions rigged up to look like wild beasts. Mounted during a period when James was attempting to pacify the Gaelic Scots of the Highlands, the tournament of the wild knight performed for court consumption a kind of flirtation with the cultural notion of wildness. As the wild knight who wins the black lady and then reveals himself as the king, James symbolically crosses out of the selfconsciously civilized and magnificent precincts of his court at Edinburgh, secures a prize from outside the borders of that court through at least partial symbolic appropriation of the tools of the unknown, and then returns home to the admiration and acclamation of his subjects. This notion of voyaging outward and then returning with knowledge of and booty from the outside gains significance from the position of the black lady as the prize to be won. The part of this black lady may or may not have been played by one “Elen More,” one of two African maidservants of James’ queen, Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII; the king apparently employed several Africans, including at least one 

A description of the tournament can be found in Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland from the slauchter of King James the First to the ane thousande Fyve hundreith thrie scoir fyftein zeir, ed. Ae. J. G. Mackay,  vols. (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, ), vol. , pp. –. It is discussed by Paul Edwards, “The Early African Presence in the British Isles,” in Jagdish S. Gundara and Ian Duffield (eds.), Essays on the History of Blacks in Britain From Roman Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Avebury, ), pp. –; and Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: The Arts of Rule in Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), pp. –.





Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

family group, as part of his household. These Africans had probably been seized and brought to court by James’ privateers in raids on Portuguese shipping; the Portuguese had well established their European trade in West African slaves by . If Elen More did appear as the black lady of the tournament, her status as trade object and prize of war publicly witnessed the king’s imperial ambitions, his known desire for a navy of his own and a greater international significance for his Scotland. In this case, the king as wild knight possesses and domesticates the token of wildness represented for the court by the African servant; the kingly, and white, essence beneath the wild man’s exterior (wild men were frequently represented in performance as blackfaced, capering “Moriscos”) works to accomplish this taming and claiming. Yet, if it is only proper for the king to defeat rivals in combat and win the black lady, her blackness – sign of her status as designated object of European and masculine gazes – poses a problem for the ultimate accomplishment of union between (concealed) whiteness and wildness. At the tournament, elaborately dressed in a gold-flowered damask gown and attended by two young squires of noble family, she entered the hall carried in a “chair triumphal” decorated in £ worth of Flemish taffeta. Three nights’ banqueting succeeded the staged battles, and the last evening’s festivity was crowned by a sensational conjuring trick: “a cloud came out of the roof of the hall . . . and opened, and snatched up the black lady in the presence of them all, so that she was seen no more.” The black lady’s sudden disappearance, occurring at the climax of a celebration of the king’s authority to tame “wildness,” speaks powerfully to me as I mount this book’s considerations of the manifestations and disappearances of women’s racial identities in Renaissance culture. The black lady’s disappearance is augmented by the fact that it is not at all certain that one of the “Moor lassies” (as they are called in the Accounts) of James’ court actually played the black lady in the tournament. Among the items purchased to outfit the black lady for her appearance were black leather sleeves and gloves. We know that close-fitting black leather masks, leggings, and gloves were early properties of stage Moors and remained so through the Restoration, but if the black lady of James’ tournament were played by an African, would she have worn such devices? Records of black men involved in early performance are frustratingly scant, and  

Edwards quotes Sir James Balfour Paul’s  modern-spelling edition of The Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland in his “Early African Presence,” p. . Edwards, “Early African Presence,” p. .

Introduction: Women and race in Renaissance texts



those for black women are apparently nonexistent. We don’t know what the conventions governing their stage presentation, outside the elaborate costuming described here, would have been. So the black lady of James’ tournament may have vanished doubly, in the cloud machine and from performance, despite occupying what I have suggested is such a symbolically central place in the spectacle. I do not wish to imply that performance in and of itself grants the actor unproblematic access to enunciative authority – even if Elen More or another of the “Moor lassies” played the black lady in the tournament, she would have been doing so from within her subordinate and supplemental role as exoticized expression of James’ visions of glory for himself and his kingdom, a carefully controlled actor within a pageant of royal self-aggrandizement. Rather, what interests me is how the black lady may have been offered and withdrawn, her black skin a necessary accessory to the performance of the king’s puissant mastery of the tools of wildness, yet also somehow – if the black lady were played on one occasion by a white court lady in the black leather accouterments listed in the accounts – performable, significatory. Such racial cross-dressing would satisfy Judith Butler’s definition of performance as a “bounded” act, marked by mimicry, excess, and denaturalization. And yet, studying the racialization of women’s bodies in early modern culture, I have become aware of how curiously fugitive representation of race can be, despite the centrality of ideas about English and foreign women to the establishment of the period’s sexual, economic, racial, and class norms. The effects of this ready (mis)appropriation of the 

 



For discussion of some evidence suggesting the involvement of Africans in Elizabethan performance, see Roslyn Knutson, “A Caliban in St. Mildred Poultry,” in Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (eds.), Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions (Newark: University of Delaware Press, ), pp. –. Edwards sees Elen More and her sister (?) Margaret as contributors of an “exotic touch” to “the grand style” of James’ court, “Early African Presence,” p. . In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, ), p. . Butler usefully remarks that “what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable” (p. ). Borrowing from the title of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Michele Wallace uses the term “invisibility” to describe the representational problems surrounding the social figure of the black woman; see, for example, “Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in AfroAmerican Culture,” in Russell Ferguson et al. (eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, ), pp. –. On contemporary suppression, fragmentation, and representational (mis)appropriations of black women, also see bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, ), pp.  –; and Ann duCille, “The Occult of True Black Womanhood,” in Skin Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), pp.  –.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

black female body were, of course, most literally visible within slavery, where it was transformed into property, “to be ‘taken’ and used at will. Such a body is denied even the dignity accorded a wild animal; its status approaches that of mere matter, thing-hood.” The legacies of this psychologically and sexually violent dehumanization persisted well beyond the end of slavery and are under continuing excavation. My primary concern in this book, however, is with discovering how women’s bodies, white as well as black, and women’s writing identities were “taken” and used by early modern cultures of race and colonialism. Allusion and displacement, rather than excess and denaturalization, seem to me to mark a fundamental descriptive axis of the representational practices surrounding race in the early modern period. In the king’s tournament, 



Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), p. . On European views of New World bodies in colonialism, see Denise Albanese, “Making It New: Humanism, Colonialism, and the Gendered Body in Early Modern Culture,” in Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (eds.), Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –; and Joyce E. Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,” William and Mary Quarterly  (), –. My thinking on this subject was first stimulated by Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, ), with its detailed recognition of the sexual ideologies constitutive of white and black women’s social identities in the antebellum US south, esp. pp. –. A selected list of similarly important recent titles emphasizing the interrelations of gender, race, and sexuality in the experience of black women in the Americas might include Jacqueline Jones, “Race, Sex, and Self-evident Truths: The Status of Slave Women During the Era of the American Revolution,” in Catherine Clinton (ed.), Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past (Durham: Duke University Press, ), pp. –; Stella Dadzie, “Searching for the Invisible Woman: Slavery and Resistance in Jamaica,” Race and Class . (),  –; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women’s History,” Gender and History  (), –; Darlene Clark and Kate Wittenstein, “Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex,” in Filomena Chioma Steady (ed.), The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, ), pp. –; Thelma Jennings, “ ‘Us Colored Women Had to Go Through a Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women,” Journal of Women’s History . (), –; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Black Women in Resistance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in Gary Y. Okihiro (ed.), In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ), pp. –; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “African Women in French and Spanish Louisiana: Origins, Roles, Family, Work, Treatment,” in Catherine Clinton and Michelle Gillespie (eds.), The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –; and Norma J. Burgess, “Gender Roles Revisited: The Development of the ‘Woman’s Place’ Among African-American Women in the United States,” Journal of Black Studies  (),  –. Three earlier pioneering discussions of the subject of African-American women’s history are Paula Giddings, Where and When I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Morrow, ); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, ); and Angela Davis,Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, ). The impact of feminism on the historiography of African-American female slaves is surveyed in Patricia Morton’s introductory essay to her collection, Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), pp.  –.

Introduction: Women and race in Renaissance texts



these practices focus on an African woman’s rich figurative valence, to the point where her black body can frequently be made to disappear in the pursuit of the ideas and relationships it is made to embody. This ideological utility is suggested by the ways in which race is communicated as a quantity which can be split, re-formed, erased; at James’ court, was the black lady played on one occasion by a white woman in the black leather accouterments, and on another by one of the “Moor lassies” known to be present at James’ court? If so, “blackface” impersonation can satisfy the representational requirements of the tournament as well as could the presence of a real African. If the racialized body is thus curiously subject to abstraction and displacement, it was also and simultaneously endowed with a stubborn materiality. William Dunbar’s poem “Ane Blak More,” which may have been produced at the same time as the tournament of the black knight and the black lady, is crudely insistent on the bodily in its vigorous description of the lady in question: Lang heff I maed of ladyes quyhtt; Nou of ane blak I will indytt That landet furth of the last schippis; Quhou fain wald I descrye perfytt My ladye with the mekle lippis. Quhou schou is tute mowitt lyk ane aep And lyk a gangarall onto graep, And quhou hir schort catt nois up skippis, And quhou schou schynes lyk ony saep, My ladye with the mekle lippis.

My point is not that Dunbar’s poem is racist in its denigration of the black lady’s physicality, although the ugliness of its racial consciousness can certainly be argued, particularly in light of what has been suggested about the court’s employment of Africans as exotic indices of the king’s greatness. Rather, I bring it up to point to the stubbornness of ideas of the body and the bodily as they attach to African women in the early modern period. These ideas came to be shaped by convictions of the social consequences of this bodily particularity as it was adopted to the purposes of New World slavery. 

Edwards translates “mekle lippis” as “thick lips”. His version of line six is “thick mouthed, like a monkey.” “Gangarall” in line seven could be either “toad” or “vagabond”; “schort catt nois” is “short catlike nose,” and in line nine, the lady “shines as if soaped” (“Early African Presence,” p. ). He suggests that the poem’s production within the Scots poetic tradition of flyting should prevent contemporary readers from rushing to judgment about its apparent racism, pp. –.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

The King of Scots, being royal, had ubiquity, and was not limited in public demonstration of his puissance by the mere color of his skin or the kinds of domestic order he wished to establish. Putting on the mask of wildness, he is able to emerge from disguise as himself, mysteriously amplified. The African woman on whose representation I meditate here was, in contrast, exposed to increasingly rigorous attempts to fix her in a single place. Almost a hundred years after James’ tournament, another royal entertainment returned to the figure of the African woman and employed her figure in such a way as to reinscribe her disappearance within a narrative more securely closed through the resources of royal patriarchy and of racial rivalry between men. I refer, of course, to Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’ The Masque of Blacknesse, in which the black daughters of Father Niger come to Albion in quest of the magical presence which will have the potency to accomplish the impossible and wash the Ethiop white. In the masque, two kinds of erasure of the African nymphs’ “blacknesse” take place. Not only does the masque conclude with a dance celebrating the “courtship” between Niger’s daughters and the “Britain men” which will make the impossible possible, but the roles of the black women were performed by white women of the court in blackface. Here, Jonson’s and Jones’ work removes the notion of claiming the black lady from the arena of military rivalry between a disguised king and his foreign competitors and situates it within a festival. The king is newly imagined as object of adulation rather than as warrior, and the kind of conflict in which the black ladies are the prize becomes a matter of ritualized courtship display rather than of a demonstration of military prowess. This substitution of love for war transforms the role of the African woman from disputed trade object into eager participant in the mysteries of a court busily disseminating its own convictions of the extent and nature of 



Although gender and, to a degree, race, remain submerged subjects here, Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen  () usefully notes colonial discourse’s “dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness” () so as to reproduce and recirculate certain convictions about the ‘other’ which is being discussed. Discussions of “blacknesse” in Jonson’s masque include Yumna Siddiqi, “Dark Incontinents: The Discourse of Race and Gender in Three Renaissance Masques,” RenD  (), –; Hardin Aasand, “ ‘To Blanch an Ethiop, and Revive a Corse’: Queen Anne and The Masque of Blacknesse,” SEL  (),  –; Ann Cline Kelly, “The Challenge of the Impossible: Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blacknesse,” CLA Journal  (),  –; Joyce Green MacDonald, “ ‘The Force of Imagination’: The Subject of Blackness in Shakespeare, Jonson, and Ravenscroft,”RenP (), –; and Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –.

Introduction: Women and race in Renaissance texts



fatherly authority. In the masque, Niger’s daughters voluntarily leave their own father and submit themselves to the authority of another, greater fount of royal knowledge and power. They yield themselves to courtship by white men who act as romantic and sexual proxies for their new father figure; as in the tournament of the wild knight and the black lady, the black ladies occupy one corner of a triangle, with men at the other two. Here, however, white husbands triumph over the black father in a socially structured difference from the earlier battle between wild and civilized potential suitors. Niger’s daughters voluntarily transfer themselves to the “Britain men,” initiating an exchange of women which effectively removes one male party – their father – from the transaction. Niger’s fatherly authority disappears as much as his daughters’ blackness is intended to do. The fact that the daughters were personated by court ladies furthers this notion of voluntary disappearance. The queen and her attendants sought out blackness as a novelty, putting on the greasepaint of disguise much as James IV donned wildness: to point to the true whiteness, rank, beauty, and marital probity which presumably lay beneath. An actual black body in the role would have been irrelevant, since the point of the masque is erasure and transformation; black skin matters more as a tangible sign of the might of royal patriarchy than as itself. In an age of nascent imperialism which would come to be increasingly reliant on race-based slavery, the signification of women’s black skin came to include capital as well as the sexual policing that The Masque of Blacknesse is designed to celebrate as the foundation of patriarchal might. The relationship between women, their races, and social and sexual authority is again on display in John Marston’s The Wonder of Women or the Tragedie of Sophonisba (); Marston’s play features two black characters, the villain’s “Ethiopian slave,” Vangue, and the heroine’s “maide,” Zanthia. The villain, Syphax, identifies these two as the “blacke knaves” he will call on to “straine” Sophonisba’s “limbes all wide” as he rapes  

See especially Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), pp. –. Bernadette Andrea, “Black Skin, the Queen’s Masques: Africanist Ambivalence and Feminine Author(ity) in the Masques of Blackness and Beauty,” ELR  (), –, discusses the queen’s performance as an instance of female authorship whose gender transgressiveness was underpinned by its placement “within the confines of incipient British imperialism and the emerging model of racial slavery to which it is inextricably connected” (). Andrea’s view of the complication of female authorship by race is similar to my own, which will emerge in the later chapters of this book.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

her if she will not yield to his advances. He later offers Zanthia money if she will persuade Sophonisba to accept him: Zanthia, Zanthia! Thou art not foule, go to; some Lords are oft So much in love with their knowne Ladyes bodies, That they oft love their vailes; hold, hold, thou’st find, To faithfull care Kinges bounty hath no shore.

Zanthia accepts his offer, becoming his “creature” in exchange for mere “gold,” (D–D verso) thus exhibiting behavior which explicitly denies the value Marston’s play places on fidelity and duty. Sophonisba, for example, has not told Zanthia whether she’ll sleep with Syphax or not, scorning the loose tongues of “servants,” Like such as onely for their gaine to serve, Within the vaste capacitye of place, I know no vilenes so most truly base. Theire Lordes, their gaine; and he that most will give, (D) With him (they will not dye, but) they will live.

Zanthia, not knowing of her mistress’ distrust, leads Sophonisba to a cave where Syphax meets them, planning to carry out the rape. Sophonisba, despite her present danger, warns him not to rely too much on the aid of “false” Zanthia; as he is “worthy,” (E verso) he must not allow the servant the opportunity to deceive him, and his guards seize her. Zanthia fatalistically accepts the implication of Sophonisba’s concern for her would-be rapist’s welfare – “When two foes are growne friends, partakers bleed” (E) – and she is presumably removed from the scene as Sophonisba assures Syphax that she “hates[s] thee not” (E). Here, Zanthia betrays Sophonisba because she is a servant, and without morals; her mistress seems to expect nothing better of her, and indeed enthusiastically delivers her for punishment to the unscrupulous Syphax. What is surprising is that both the would-be rapist and his putative victim step out of their dramatic antagonism long enough to agree on the necessity for Zanthia’s punishment. We first see Zanthia as 



I cite The Wonder of Women Or The Tragedie of Sophonisba, as it hath beene sundry times Acted at the Blacke Friers (London, ) here, A verso, D verso. All subsequent citations will be provided in my text. Similarly, although Syphax begins the play addressing Vangue as his “Deere Ethiopian negro” (A verso) and confides his passion for Sophonisba to him, he also stabs him to death in sheer annoyance after finding him – drugged by Sophonisba – in the bed where he had expected to find her waiting for him.

Introduction: Women and race in Renaissance texts



part of the play’s opening tableau: “Enter at one doore the Prologue, two Pages with torches, Asdruball and Jugurth, two Pages with lights, Massanissa leading Sophonisba, Zanthia bearing Sophonisbas traine, Arcathia and Nicea, Hano and Bytheas” (A). She is visually employed here as an accessory connoting the considerable magnificence of Sophonisba’s state. She is ancillary again to the play’s later interest in displaying Sophonisba’s steadfastness and purity of mind as she is taken away from what becomes a rather sensational scene in which Sophonisba escapes and the witch, Erichto, takes her shape and replaces her in Syphax’s lustful bed. And yet, the highly theatrical witch scenes and the display of Sophonisba’s resourcefulness and integrity which are focal points of Marston’s play only become possible through Zanthia’s betrayal of her mistress. Her black skin, presumably the occasion of Syphax’s chummy declaration that she is not in fact “foule,” proclaims her subjection to others’ will, a subjection which acts as a foil to Sophonisba’s claiming of the sexual fidelity which makes her “the wonder of women.” Zanthia’s black skin, token of her knavery, is what makes Sophonisba’s figurative moral “whiteness” visible. Like the black lady of the tournament, Marston’s Zanthia is literal and mysteriously allusive, present and absent. Zanthia’s anticlimactic removal from Marston’s play is a literalization of the kinds of female racial disappearances and emergences which interest me in this book. As I set out to discover African women in Renaissance texts of empire, I discovered, far more frequently than Marston’s explicit portrayal of a recognizably dark-skinned woman, women historically understood to have originated from within the continent of Africa whose skin color was explicitly described as white. This insistent whitening of women who may have had a range of skin colors does not mean that race disappears from the accounts of empire-building that interest me – not unless, that is, our notions of race in the early modern or ancient world are unhistorically bound up with skin color as its primary determinant. Rather, the unspecified skin color or, more frequently, the Petrarchan whiteness of the Renaissance African women whose stories I examine here seem to function as a rhetorical assertion of the opposite of the racial difference whose existence was being forcefully experienced by Europeans in an age of colonization and exploration. The racial “sameness” that these women’s white skin apparently proclaims does not, in 

On the connection between racial identity and women’s moral agency in Renaissance drama, see Ania Loomba, “The Color of Patriarchy: Critical Difference, Cultural Difference, and Renaissance Drama,” in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds.), Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, ), esp. pp. –.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

fact, repudiate the idea of racialized norms of femininity, since other kinds of difference – sexual, political, behavioral – will be fully identified as racial matters within the newly whitened social body. Hence this book’s concern with the strategies of racial representation. Given the spectrality of empire, the difficulty with which ideas of empire could be communicated for the consumption of English audiences during their first consolidations, the gendered and raced means through which these ideas are publicly rehearsed and performed become crucially significant. My book will trace two of these gendered tactics of communicating empire: the removal of dark-skinned women from representation, and the submersion of Englishwomen’s racial identity into gender. Lynda Boose’s article, “ ‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the ‘Unrepresentable’ Black Woman,” did much to stimulate my thinking on the first of these subjects, with its programmatic observation that “it is in the person of the black woman that the culture’s pre-existing fears both about the female sex and about gender domination are realized.” For Boose, a woman’s dark skin becomes a visual token of her mysterious maternal generativity, and so, such a threat to the psychic dominance of white men that women who bear this sign of darkness must be exiled from cultural representation. A second spur to the development of my own ideas was Kim Hall’s book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, perhaps particularly the brilliant section on the color consciousness of the Petrarchan style, which characterizes sonneteers’ employment of a vocabulary of fairness and darkness as a project in aesthetic mastery of gender and racial difference. And yet, as my own work progressed, I began to see how it departs from both these powerful paradigms. Boose’s explanation seems to me to subsume racial difference entirely within gender difference. I am not convinced that the barring of black women from representation was entirely the result of male patriarchal anxiety. Black women were not, in fact, completely absent from representation; the visual record is rich, and richly suggestive. While I agree with Boose that signs of African women’s presence are difficult to trace, I see the roots of this suppression as having more to do with race than with gender. Or rather, I must insist – more than her argument does – on gender’s frequent reliance on race for its voicing. One result of my consciousness that a patriarchal culture needed race to do its work with gender is the attention my book pays to the work 

In Hendricks and Parker (eds.), Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing, p. .

Introduction: Women and race in Renaissance texts



of English women writers. Boose’s formulation – that African women’s representational near-invisibility has to do with male gender and sexual anxiety – virtually forecloses inquiry into whether this emerging racial consciousness shaped Englishwomen as well as Englishmen. My interest in how early modern Englishwomen achieved their authorship within colonialist as well as gendered contexts, and my understanding of how colonialism used gender to naturalize its racial and class hierarchies, leads me to investigate how women’s texts used and circulated ideas about African women. Women as well as men were speakers in racial discourse, and I take up Boose by investigating whether and how the fears she sees driving male responses to the cultural presence of African women were naturalized into women’s texts. This un-representation of dark-skinned women, I repeat, has to do with racial as much as sexual consciousness, and my work will follow the threads of Englishwomen’s achievement of whiteness as well as of authorship. Indeed, writing other women’s race and sexuality becomes a powerful instrument of these women writers’ own authorial legitimacy. Authorial mastery is also very much an issue in Hall, whose discussion of Petrarchan style reveals how deeply shaped this style’s manipulation of languages of blackness, fairness and feminine beauty are by Renaissance colonialism. It is Hall who first pointed out a central principle of my own work: how frequently blackness, and black women, are represented as white in the period. She locates this literary whitening within the establishment of European colonial hegemony. Where my work departs from Hall is in what I think is my greater interest in the places where poets, and colonial societies, fall short of containing and suppressing blackness. Politically, this failure at containment was visible in New World slaves’ strategies of resistance and subversion; textually, it manifests itself in the failures of colonialist texts to perform complete and consistent containment of black and female subjects. The whitening or invisibility to which Hall and Boose refer does not always succeed in erasing all traces of a renegade black femininity. In the case of Othello, for example, the text’s memory of such nonwhite women as Othello’s mother and the Egyptian “charmer” who gave her the strawberry-embroidered handkerchief and endowed it with erotic magic represents an alternative regime to Venetian patriarchy, which shapes audience response to the Moor and which must be defeated before the play can unfold itself as a crisis of white paternal authority. The substitution of female bodies raced as white for those 

See my discussion “Black Ram, White Ewe: Shakespeare, Race, and Women,” in Dympna Callaghan (ed.), The Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, ), pp. –.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

raced as black which I trace in a set of Renaissance texts on the founding of Rome and on Rome’s conflict with Egypt suggests the powerful representational charge possessed by African women’s bodies, but Othello’s narratives of lost or suppressed African femininity also indicate that these women’s stories continue to matter in how we can understand the racial and sexual hierarchies of the play’s present. Unlike Hall, my focus is almost entirely on dramatic texts, and so I am interested throughout in issues of audience, address, and performance. Critics of early modern drama such as Jean Marsden, who have applied contemporary theories of gender and spectatorship to early modern drama, have not deeply engaged with the possibility that watching is a raced as well as gendered act. In my period, which sees both the development of an English colonial empire supported by race-based slavery and the powerful emergence of Englishwomen as actors, playwrights, and influential audience members, the intersection of race, gender, and performance seems crucial. I posit that white Englishwomen viewing the colonialist dramas I discuss, with their whitened African women and their performances of the inevitable – if morally obtuse – triumph of the values of the marketplace, were being indoctrinated into new kinds of racially conscious gendered subjectivities. The sentimentality in which these dramas gloried contributed to the developing ideology of white womanhood as morally sensitive, sexually pure, and fitted by nature to preside over the domestic and maternal. This cultural elevation of white women was the at-home side of the sexual and economic exploitation and abuse of female slaves in New World colonies. One facilitated and justified the other. My sense of the racial dynamics of early modern texts is thus largely enabled by black cultural studies’ perception of the central roles of display, performance, and exhibition to the maintenance of racial and sexual authority. Writing about antebellum US culture, Saidiya Hartman has recently argued that the brutal public spectacles of slavery – auctions, coffles, whippings and other tortures, the capers drivers would make 



I am thinking particularly of Marsden’s “Rape, Voyeurism, and the Restoration Stage,” in Katherine Quinsey (ed.), Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, ), pp. –, about which I will have more to say in my Chapter . Here, see for example, Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, ), pp.  –; bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks, pp.  – ; and Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” in his edited volume Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications, ), pp. –.

Introduction: Women and race in Renaissance texts



slaves cut on the auction block or on the decks of slave ships – were crucial embodiments of racial identity for both masters and slaves: “not only were the rights and privileges of white citizens undergirded by the subjection of blacks but . . . enjoyment in turn defined the meaning of subjection.” The enjoyment to which Hartman refers is both the pleasure dancing and singing slaves apparently took in their condition, and the racial pleasure afforded to whites by watching these and other, less joyful, performances. Following Judith Butler’s theories of the nature and function of performance, Hartman explicitly links the practice, in an American context, to the construction of racial identity: only in its acting out does race become legible, socially real. What strikes me as important in contemporary studies of varieties of black performance is its understanding of how actions undertaken by the racially marginalized can significantly challenge and disturb and restate the structures and beliefs of white racial hegemony. The presence of African characters in performance – however whitened, decentered, policed – opens possibilities for tracing some of the kinds of anxieties, hopes, and desires attached to these characters by their authors and audiences, and thus contributing to uncovering some of the suppressed history of the construction of transatlantic racial identities. The idea of working from the outside, from this regulated representation of a racially-identified subject, thus seems appropriate to me as I seek to recover the various kinds of social functions racialized women may be made to serve near the beginnings of English colonialism. I have thus been stimulated by the interests of a Black British cultural studies in hybridity and the formation of new mixed cultures. But as this project has developed, I have found myself becoming more consciously aware of the places where my subjects – the enforced invisibility of African women in early modern texts, particularly dramatic ones; and the larger reliance on race to define and judge whole ranges of feminine behavior – force me to depart from theories of the postcolonial, at least as they have been marketed to and by the contemporary US academy. Not only is the United States and its rich and strongly color-dependent histories of racial relations, so suggestive as a model, notably absent from postcolonial criticism, but the notion of the hybridity of the colonial subject seems at least to be capable of further obscuring the presence of the already culturally and representationally suppressed raced and sexed bodies 

In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, ), p. .



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

I am interested in here. Recognizing the transformative and even liberatory potential of reading for race should not mean forgetting that in practice, “hybridity” is often a one-way street heading toward the appropriation and refashioning of non-European cultures by white majorities, the transformation of nonwhiteness into representational commodity. As Stuart Hall remarks, “there is nothing that global postmodernism loves better than a certain kind of difference: a touch of ethnicity, a taste of the exotic.” Black women have been relentlessly marginalized and exoticized by the discourses of dominant racial and sexual cultures, their bodies employed as ideological and representational tokens, anatomized, dismembered, repressed. Theories of the fluidity and multiplicity of the social subject can thus, ironically, play into the re-suppression of specifically racialized bodies as one of the determinants of social reality. The evacuation of race from postcolonial and postmodern readings simply ignores, it seems to me, the passionate degree to which race was (and is) believed to inhere in the body and in the bodily for many of the white observers whose works I will be treating here, however mightily they try to erase or dismember it. Along with Hall’s sense of nonwhiteness as cultural commodity, I am also following Susan Bordo’s perception of the degree to which contemporary standards of gender, beauty, social class, and race are transmitted through representation of a normative female body, a normative body which for purposes of capitalist consumption is rarely black. If Hall holds that raced bodies are at least potentially endlessly assimilable to the ends of racially dominant cultures, Bordo holds that this process of assimilation significantly advances through gender. 





Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’,” Social Text  (), –, suggests that one reason for postcoloniality’s academic currency is precisely because it allows the academy to distance itself from US racial conditions and practices. Also see Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism’,” Social Text  (), –; and Ann duCille, “Discourse and Dat Course: Postcoloniality and Afrocentricity,” in Skin Trade, pp. –. “What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” in Valerie Smith (ed.), Representing Blackness (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, ), p. . Hall here also usefully emphasizes the “extremely” uneven development of postmodernism “as a phenomenon in which the old centerperipheries of high modernity consistently reappear,” (p. ) suggesting limits to the availability of the kinds of reformations of racial subjectivity he discusses. DuCille, Skin Trade, suggests postcolonial theory’s usefulness to maintaining western cultural hegemony and obscuring the academy’s investment in doing so: “[T]he academy to which it has become attached has a vested interest in promoting the illusions of grandeur that the very term postcolonial suggests. . . . False universals, such as the postcolonial woman, the postcolonial other, the postcolonial condition, and even the postcolonial critic, camouflage the variety of neocolonial conditions in which masses of people live, work, and theorize” (p. ). See Unbearable Weight, pp. –; and “Never Just Pictures,” in Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from P. C. to O. J. (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), pp. –.

Introduction: Women and race in Renaissance texts



Although this book is about early modern English culture, I find it useful, almost necessary, to work from conceptual models set by Americanists, African-Americanists, philosophers, and students of the visual and performing arts precisely because race and raced bodies have remained submerged subjects in criticism of Renaissance drama until fairly recently. Black feminist criticism in American literature and the social sciences has done more than any other body of work to restore women of African descent to historical visibility, often building new methodological and theoretical frameworks which can allow such suppressed subjects to be recovered. But in following the models constructed by such theorists and critics, I am also aware of the historical constraints that may keep me from following exactly the same lines of analysis. My subject is not the racial and sexual self-representation of black women, since none of the texts I will be discussing (and no early-modern English texts I know about) were authored by black women. Rather, the works 



The originator of this field is Eldred Jones,Othello’s Countrymen: The African in Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press, ). Relevant titles in this increasingly distinguished body of work include Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ); Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, ); Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama, from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ); and Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, ). Important essay collections are Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds.), Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing; and Joyce Green MacDonald (ed.), Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance (Madison, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, ). Two valuable special journal issues are Shakespeare Studies  (), which includes a forum on “Race and the Study of Shakespeare,” and the William and Mary Quarterly . (), entitled “Constructing Race in the Early Modern World.” Articles include Emily C. Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” SQ  (), –; Jyostna Singh, “Caliban versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest,” in Traub, Kaplan, and Callaghan (eds.), Feminist Readings, pp.  –; Margo Hendricks, “ ‘Obscured by Dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” SQ  (), –; Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” SQ  (), –; James R. Aubrey, “Race and the Spectacle of the Hideous in Othello,” CLIO  (),  –; and Jeannette S. White, “ ‘Is Black So Base a Hue?’: Shakespeare’s Aaron and the Politics and Poetics of Race,” CLA Journal  (), –. Recent dissertations include Mary Floyd-Wilson, “ ‘Clime, Complexion, and Degree’: Racialism in Early Modern England” (University of North Carolina, ); Jan C. Stirm, “Representing Women’s Relationships: Intersections of Class, Race, and Generation in English Drama, –” (University of California at Los Angeles, ); and Francesca Royster, “Shakespeare’s Racial Others” (University of California at Berkeley, ). Two examples here might be Darlene Clark Hine, whose essay “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs  (), –, speculates on how the experience of sexual abuse and exploitation in slavery may have contributed to African-American women’s self-silencings, suggesting that sexuality be seen as a category of historical analysis; and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, whose  edited collection Women in Africa and the African Diaspora: A Reader (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, ; rpt.  with the addition of six new essays) suggested the importance of cross-cultural analysis of the experiences of women of African descent.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

I analyze were all written by white men and women, so that the genealogy of black female subjectivities which so much of this feminist AfricanAmericanist scholarship is aimed at creating is not truly available to it. This book’s chronological range – some works I discuss date from the sixteenth century or earlier, while others are from the mid-eighteenth century – also requires me to distinguish between the kinds of colonial and cross-cultural encounters which generate them. Not all of the texts I study, for example, emerge from within an imperial culture fully supported by the slave trade. Seeking to recover black women entirely from within slavery inaccurately foreshortens what might be termed their representational presence in the west. Race and the racial implications of African women’s bodies matter differently to Behn’s or Southerne’s Oroonoko (; ) than they do to the Countess of Pembroke’s Antonius (). I want to learn to speak precisely about colonialism and to distinguish the operations of race within colonial processes. In much of what follows here, I will be talking about racial and sexual identities as they emerge after the establishment of an economic link between old world and new. I will try to maintain a sense of distinction between the very specific kinds of colonial – or more properly, imperial – relations between nations in much of my study, and the broader sense of a unitary postcolonial condition which seems to emerge from much contemporary theory in this area. I do not believe that Renaissance accounts of the encounter between post-republican Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt, which form large parts of my inquiry, can necessarily be understood precisely in terms of postcolonial theory, with what frequently feels like the assumption of a previous state of colonial domination as its normative enabling point. Historians’ accounts of Elissa’s role in the founding of Carthage or of Caesar’s affair with Cleopatra are by no means convinced that the issues of racial and sexual dominance opened by the confrontations on which these stories turn will be firmly resolved in favor of the emerging authority from whose position they speak. (Nor, by the way, do I accept that we are all now equally living in a state somehow after colonialism, that colonization is neatly over and all that is left is discussion of its discursive remains.) My sense of the stubborn slipperiness of the representation of the racialized bodies of African women, in particular their sexual and laboring black bodies, leads me to question the adequacy of a model of colonization – which implies containment, closure – to explain it. 

See Emily Bartels, “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly  (), –.

Introduction: Women and race in Renaissance texts



In my attempt to recover some of the early modern writing (and unwriting) of women’s raced bodies, I follow two separate narratives which were designed to contain them: narratives of Rome’s founding and progress toward empire, and of Britain’s establishment of colonial authority in the New World. Stories about Roman empire and Roman imperialists coalesce around the figures of three “other” women: Cleopatra of Egypt, and Dido and Sophonisba of Carthage. I believe that the removal of black women’s bodies from representation is linked to the establishment of a set of terms under which men’s sexual desires can be imaginatively disciplined so as to serve the purposes of Rome’s imperial dominion. Sophonisba’s racial difference from the Romans is effaced as she is rewritten into familiar Petrarchan terms of gender and of color, and her rewriting in its turn dictates the necessary gendered behaviors of Roman men. What Roman historians conceived as a conflict between races and cultures, dominated by the figure of the redoubtable and recognizably black Hannibal, Renaissance poets and dramatists revise into a more containable and familiar conflict between love and honor. And yet, I will argue here, as race is displaced from the figure of Sophonisba, it is more deeply inscribed into the characterizations of the Romans’ male Numidian and Carthaginian adversaries. If, in these stories, women are defined entirely through gender and sexuality while men’s sexuality manifests a racial identity which in its turn makes them fit or unfit to act as the Romans’ military and political proxies, the Sophonisba stories may well suggest how ideas of empire may be served by the removal of darkskinned women from representation. The story I trace of the roles of race in the legends of Cleopatra is also deeply concerned with the connections between women, color, and empire. Talking about how race may figure in narratives of Rome’s proto-imperial relations with Egypt, and in early modern reproductions of these narratives, is perhaps complicated by the degree to which the figure of Cleopatra has emerged as a kind of shorthand notation for larger contemporary quarrels about multiculturalism and Afrocentrism. I confess here a near-total lack of interest in whether the historical Cleopatra was light-skinned or dark-skinned, since I believe neither that skin color is always a reliable marker of a unitary racial identity or that color and race signify now as they did in Cleopatra’s world. What matters more to me, in my readings of Cleopatra, is instead how variously “race” is construed here: sometimes in terms that are bound to color – as in the lily-white Petrarchan Cleopatras of the s – but just as frequently in terms that are not, turning instead on connections to nation, region, and



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

the sexuality of the narratives’ Roman and Egyptian principals. In all of what follows, I want to pursue my conviction that the fluidity of racial identity in these texts and in the culture which produced them answers particular ideological needs. Race performs specific kinds of work, and I want to speculate on and argue about what the racing and unracing of African women was made to mean. Early modern Britain reproduces and revises Roman models of empire. So too does it produce its own versions of the place of nonEuropean women under its new colonial dominion. Most strikingly, dramatic adaptations of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko () evacuate her African heroine, Imoinda, of her blackness and increasingly produce her as culturally and racially white. What is allowed to remain of Behn’s character is her devotion to her husband, even to the point of acceding to her own death at his hands. In these adaptations, however, Oroonoko’s body remains black, even if his character is as much the product of the new cult of sentimentality as of Behn’s original conflicted fascination with his alienness as a native of Coromantien. A white heroine replaces a black one; a white man circumstantially housed in a black skin replaces a black man who is emphatically different from the Europeans who hold him in bondage. In these racial transformations as well as in Behn’s first writing of Oroonoko and Imoinda, the possibility of a black speaking subjectively is violently silenced, the potentially subversive energies denoted by the black male body are contained and mastered, and the black female body is erased from representation. What emerges from these texts is both the sense of the necessity of this disappearance, and of the means of its accomplishment. This book is organized into six chapters. The first part of the book consists of three chapters on nonwhite women from the classical world whose stories figure in Rome’s establishment of empire. The first of these chapters discusses how the raced figure of Cleopatra may figure in contemporary and Renaissance attempts to reclaim or deny a nonEuropean cultural identity. The second treats Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which significantly refuses many of the majoritarian sexual, racial, and imperial biases many Renaissance readers extracted from 

See, for example, Richard Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans: Inventing Cultural Identity in the Middle Ages,” Exemplaria  (), –; Patricia Parker, “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline,” in George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (eds.), Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –; Robert Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge University Press, ); and Donna Hamilton, Virgil and ‘The Tempest’: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, ).

Introduction: Women and race in Renaissance texts



stories of Rome’s encounters with Egypt. The third discusses appearances of Dido queen of Carthage in some classical and Renaissance texts, and explores how she figures in narrations of empire’s relations to race and sexuality. After these women from the matter of Rome, the second part of the book turns to women figuring in the early modern matter of Britain, its foundation of a New World empire supported by slavery. My fourth chapter examines the white-skinned Imoindas who displaced Aphra Behn’s black heroine in eighteenth-century dramatizations of her novella Oroonoko. The fifth chapter discusses the white Imoinda and the white Welldon sisters in the first of these dramatizations, Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko. In both Oroonoko chapters, I want to look at the social functions served by the erasure of Behn’s black-skinned Imoinda, as well as by the new emphasis on Imoinda’s whiteness. Chief among these in the adaptations after Southerne, I believe, is the affectively powerful performance of white women’s submission to new inscriptions of their sexually subordinate roles in colonialism’s patriarchal culture. As Southerne playfully flirts with exposing the performative aspects of this gendered submission, he also openly acknowledges its roots in racial privilege. My final two chapters, on Katherine Phillips’ Pompey and Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer, emphasize how English women writers used race – their own whiteness, as well as the races of other, textual, characters – in order to claim their authorship, thus demonstrating my contention that writing, or refusing to write, racial identity deeply implicates gender. This outline of the discussion to follow indicates, I hope, how much it is indebted to work which has come before, and how much it desires to extend our sense of the operations of what can be described as racial consciousness in the early modern period. During our own millennial moment, in which influential public voices are quick to proclaim “the end of racism,” I think it is important to return to an earlier textual moment apparently much engaged in manipulations of tropes of racial difference. This is not because the same racism supposedly ending today was in existence at an earlier point, but rather because this earlier time offers a sufficiently chronologically estranged opportunity to observe and discuss the development of a set of possible origins for these tropes, an evolution whose ends we are said to be witnessing. I also feel that such a proclaimed end has the feel of another instance of willed invisibility 

The phrase is from the title of Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multicultural Society (New York: Free Press, ).



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

about it – racism may not be ending, but public willingness to discuss its manifestations and acknowledge its effects (to the degree that such willingness has existed) may be. Thus this book has been written, at least in part, against what sometimes seems to me to be the increasing absorption of the specificity of race into other kinds of postmodern critical discourse, and an increasing denial of its very existence. Excavating the contours of race has often required me to begin with a kind of oppositional looking, and I have found myself writing against and between critical positions, periods, disciplines. Such overreading has seemed necessary in order to partially uncover a set of tracks whose existence has so often been willfully obscured. 

After I wrote this passage, I found Francesca Royster’s essay, “The ‘End of Race’ and the Future of Early Modern Cultural Studies,” ShakS  (), in which she remarks on p.  that “there has been some suggestion that early modern race studies is already in danger of losing its radical edge. The newest Norton Shakespeare . . . includes a five-page section in its introduction entitled ‘The English and Otherness’. (‘Otherness’ in this case includes racial difference, though the editors do not choose to isolate race in the subtitle.)”

CHAPTER



Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge

In the course of an essay on multiculturalism, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., decries some Afrocentrist preoccupation with Egypt for its “unexpressed belief that deep continuities supervene on skin color. Beyond the heartfelt claim that Cleopatra was ‘black’ is the lurking conviction that if you traveled back in time and dropped the needle on a James Brown album, Cleo would instantly break out into the camel walk. The belief that we cherish is not so much a proposition about melanin and physiognomy; it’s the proposition that, through the mists of history, Cleopatra was a sister.” In Gates’ negative example, the physical phenomenon of skin color is made to stand for a whole set of cultural and racial affiliations; color, race, and culture are in fact collapsed into the single same thing. Bodies – specifically the raced female body of the misappropriated Cleopatra – are used to stabilize cultural meanings which in fact continue to be formulated and reformulated within the shifting conditions of the African diaspora. And yet, as a feminist reader of sixteenth and seventeenth-century texts who also reads for race, I know both that race and culture have been seen as strongly inhering in skin color, and that ideas about race were seen as underwriting larger theses about cultural identity. One early modern expression of this relationship can be observed in the  anecdote reported by George Best about “an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole” who married an Englishwoman and fathered a child born in England “in all respects as blacke as the father was.” For Best, this coalblack baby mysteriously born to a white mother in a temperate climate offers persuasive proof that black skin is about something other than mere proximity to the equator: “this blacknesse proceedeth of some  

“Beyond the Culture Wars: Identities in Dialogue,” Profession (), . A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie, For the Finding of a Passage to Cathaya (London, ), p. . All subsequent references will be included in my text.





Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey, and so all the whole progeny of them descended, are still poluted with the same blot of infection” (). The “infection” of dark skin originated in the disobedience of Noah’s son Cham, who, contrary to God’s word while the family was confined in the ark, had intercourse with his wife, hoping to father a child who might stand heir to the whole world revealed after the floodwaters receded. As punishment, Cham’s son Chus and all his descendants were struck black, so that their color “might remaine a spectacle of disobedience to all the World. And of this blacke and cursed Chus came al these blacke Moores which are in Africa” (). In Best, sexuality is a key part of what blackness means, and how and to what purpose it is transmitted. If talk about skin color that treats it as a token of character or identity is not thus all strictly contemporary, neither is all such contemporary talk confined to Gates’ Afrocentrists. On the far right of US cultural contestation, the link between color and culture is being reasserted with new vigor. A white racial fundamentalist like Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, is clear on the existence of this connection: “Only white people read Shakespeare.” Posing a rhetorical question about why people who aren’t white should read or care about Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Taylor answers himself: “They don’t. But I do.” The American Renaissance web site describes the publication as “a literate, undeceived journal of race, immigration, and civility,” a tag line which plainly verbalizes its sense of connection between color, nation, and civilization. Gates’ invocation of Cleopatra questions both race’s location in the body and the reliability of the colored body as a placeholder for cultural meanings. Concluding that biologically based notions of race are so wrongheaded that they can lead only to equally mistaken analyses of racial practice, Kwame Anthony Appiah has famously declared “[t]he truth” of the matter to be “that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us.” Appiah does not necessarily absolutely deny the existence of race; rather he sees the physical differences highlighted by biological notions of race achieving their greatest usefulness to the degree that they can become the basis of “constructing alliances” () rather than circling the wagons around any 



The Shakespeare remark is quoted in David Heath, “Narrow Outlook on Race Belies Louisvillian’s Broad Background,” Louisville Courier-Journal,  April ,  A. Apparently Taylor made the remark on another occasion than the interview with Heath, but I have been unable to trace it. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, ), p. . I will include future references parenthetically in my text.

Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge



single artificially stabilized notion of self, given that “racial” or “social identities are complex and multiple and grow out of a history of changing responses to economic, political, and cultural forces” (). For Appiah, racially distinguished bodies achieve social reality only as they are defined within such forces. The skin color of Gates’ Cleopatra is thus not racially significant in itself, but rather as it signifies something deeper, “the experience of life as a member of a group of people who experience themselves as – and are held by others to be – a community.” I am drawn to Appiah’s notion of the importance of shared experience as a meaningful construct of racial identity, suggesting as it might the employment of a “strategic essentialism” for the purposes of self-definition (rather than definition by and for the purposes of others). But I am finally convinced that biological definitions of race cannot be so easily derided into nonexistence, if only because of the historical importance they have held in the structures and practices of racial domination. If race as a biological given is a chimera, white supremacy is not: even if race is not a fixed physical essence, it does not logically follow that race does not exist, or that skin color is not socially significant, however scientifically useless it may be as a means of dividing up the human race. In what follows, I would like to return to Gates’ notionally black Cleopatra to argue that far from disappearing into larger and more publicly respectable efforts to write and rewrite culture than the Afrocentrist ones he mocks, her raced female body itself becomes the ground on which race, culture, and cultural affiliation can be promoted. Cleopatra’s race is made available for reading both with and without the help of skin color, an elasticity which adjusts Appiah’s characterization of the fullness of racial discourse as 





Jayne Chong-Soon Lee quotes Appiah’s  essay “Notes on Gender, ‘Race,’ and Ethnicity as Sources of Identity” in her own “Navigating the Topology of Race,” in Kimberl´e Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (eds.), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, ), p. . Gayatri Spivak uses this phrase in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, ), p. . Terry Eagleton suggests something of the recuperative usefulness of ideas of “national character” in the review essay “Reviewing Ireland,” Bull´an . (): “[M]ost radicals or liberals . . . seem to assume without question that ‘national character’ is nothing more than a discursive construct . . . But this is surely quite mistaken, however unfashionable it may be to say so. For a materialist, it would be remarkable if men and women who for lengthy periods of time had shared roughly the same social conditions, with whatever divergences of region, gender, ethnic provenance and the rest, did not manifest some psychological patterns in common. There is no need to be intimidated here by the bugbear of ‘essentialism,’ let alone of racism” (). Eagleton’s subject is Irish nationalism within its colonial context, but his insistence that shared experience shapes collective identity seconds Appiah’s remarks on culture’s construction along phenotypic lines. See, for example, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the s to the s (New York: Routledge, ), esp. pp.  –.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

being chaotically unmeaningful by forcing attention – I hope – to the processes through which pigment, or its attested lack, becomes racially meaningful. One such recent deployment of Cleopatra in talk about the vexed relationship between culture and race can be found in classicist Mary Lefkowitz’s book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, ), and I examine it as a way of clearing space for my own analysis of early modern racial deployments of the Egyptian queen. I am ultimately most interested in pursuing the link between race, color, and culture in stories about her, and in what these stories may have to tell about uses of the colored body as a marker of racial identity. Lefkowitz’s book is a document in the controversy following the publication of the first volume of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, ), and as such is instructive about how deeply entrenched the resistance to discussing operations of racial consciousness can be, both inside the academy and in society at large. Bernal’s argument, that the degree to which ancient Greek culture was hybridized with Egyptian and Semitic sources has been minimized or suppressed by the modern discipline of classics, provoked an astonishing variety and intensity of response. By no means did all of this response reject Bernal’s findings or the conduct of his argument outright; he has suggested that constituencies which feel themselves to be marginalized within classics were particularly receptive to his work. Yet, in public debate, Bernal’s book – with its extensive scholarly apparatus, its grounding in etymology (he is by training a specialist in Near Eastern languages rather than a classicist), and its range over several ancient cultures – was repeatedly associated  



Lefkowitz’s discussion of Cleopatra can be found on pp. –. The academic controversy has been usefully recorded in a special issue of Arethusa, “The Challenge of Black Athena,” Fall , and in an Arethusa forum, “Black Athena: ‘Race,’ Bernal and Snowden,”  (), –. Daniel Tompkins and Bella Zweig chaired a three-year colloquium of the American Philological Association to seat panels on ethnicities in the ancient world at its annual meeting. A “Dialogue” on Black Athena by five scholars with a response by Bernal appears in the Journal of Women’s History . (), –. In Walter Cohen, “An Interview with Martin Bernal,” Social Text  (), Bernal remarks that he had “misjudged the field of Classics, seeing it as a hostile monolith. I hadn’t noticed its internal tensions or dissident constituencies. One is a group I’d never considered – Latinists, who feel that Hellenists have been lording it over them for eighty years . . . Second, women in Classics are exploited, and they have a great deal of resentment . . . There’s also the ‘tyranny of philology.’ Literary critics, art historians, and archaeologists are terrified of the philologists, who have a core position in the discipline” (). Also see n.  below.

Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge



with Afrocentrism, while being positively distinguished from the kind of pop culture fantasies Gates finds so irresistibly easy to caricature in the quotation with which I began. Particularly memorable in this popular representation of Bernal’s critique of the structuring and transmission of knowledge of the ancient world, as an assault on western culture’s origins in that world, was the jacket of Lefkowitz’s book, which featured a white stone bust of a figure from antiquity – Socrates? Plato? – wearing a slightly askew black baseball cap emblazoned with an X. This illustration seems worth discussing to me as an example of the phantom quality of race – is it primarily about skin color? is it a matter of more mysterious “deep continuities”? – in contemporary discussions of multiculturalism. The cover illustration uses a culturally loaded sign, the X that marks the spot where the merely contemporary attempts to impose itself upon and even replace the foundational and the timeless, to articulate some of the argument of Lefkowitz’s book. Such a rendition identifies Bernal’s painstakingly explicated contention of the existence of an ideology of knowledge production with a cartoon version of Afrocentrism, which term, Ann duCille notes, has been “used to include everything from food and fashion to racial fundamentalism.” Here, the “Afrocentrism” of Lefkowitz’s title is visually reduced to the status of a cultural commodity (the X emblem) whose visibility peaked around the  premiere of the Spike Lee film Malcolm X but which had appeared and continues to appear “everywhere: [Malcolm is] on air fresheners, potato chip bags, on T-shirts, sneakers, and baseball caps. He’s being ‘worn’ by whites in rich suburban enclaves” in the US and around the world. But the jacket illustration ignores this cacophony of appropriation. The cap’s slightly tilted position in the illustration is meant, I think, specifically to recall what was originally a black and urban youth style of dress: baggy, oversized tops, sagging unbelted pants, unlaced bulky basketball shoes or hiking boots, sideways or backwards caps. I say “originally” here because the style has crossed over not only from black to white youth, city to suburb, America to the world, but 

 

Bernal, in his, “Interview,” notes that although he is not an Afrocentrist, he does agree with Afrocentrists who argue in favor of the cultural productivity and influence of African societies, and also “that there has been a systematic playing down of these contributions. On a political level, I believe that the dangers of Eurocentrism are far greater and more urgent than those of Afrocentrism” (–). duCille, Skin Trade, p. . Tricia Rose, “A Symposium of Popular Culture and Political Correctness,” Social Text  (), . Also see Michael Eric Dyson, Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (New York: Oxford University Press, ).



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

also (in more neatly tailored versions) from socially marginal youth to their more securely middle-class elders. This interchange falls outside the discursive purposes of the illustration and of Lefkowitz’s argument: if the illustrator was even aware of the infiltration of the X and its associated styles into mass culture, he chooses to ignore it. The picture instead operates powerfully at the level of racial and class symbolism. As the picture has it, Afrocentrism is an outlaw methodology disordering the body of western thought, the black cap working a racial and class travesty on the coolly classical philosopher’s head rendered in white marble. A cover illustration which thus visually implicates black people in the covering up of western knowledge seems at first a poor choice for Lefkowitz’s book. After all, one cornerstone of her argument against Afrocentrist readings of ancient history is classicist Frank Snowden Jr.’s insistence that despite its awareness of differences in skin color the ancient world was without the color prejudice which has contributed so potently to modern American racism. Snowden’s assertion that skin color did not racially signify in the ancient world has, in fact, been opened to some question. But even if his argument is correct, it does not necessarily lead  







Here, see Constance C. R. James’ wonderful essay, “From Kente to Kelly: An Overview of Blacks’ Contribution to Fashion,” in Style Noir (New York: Perigee Books, ), esp. pp. –. On the employment of photographic “cover stories” to “simultaneously mask and reveal political power and its manipulations,” see Wahneema Lubiano, “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means,” in Toni Morrison (ed.), Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon Books, ), p. . Ann duCille, Skin Trade, is similarly concerned with mass media manipulations of visual images surrounding the O. J. Simpson murder trial so as to articulate “the unspoken, unwritten, perpetually present racial narrative” (p. ). I am thinking of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Poetics and Politics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), which emphasizes the interdependence of “cultural categories of high and low, social and aesthetic . . . The ranking of literary genres or authors in a hierarchy analogous to social classes is a particularly clear example of a much broader and more complex cultural process whereby the human body, psychic forms, geographic space, and the social formation are all constructed within interrelating and dependent hierarchies of high and low” (p. ). The illustration’s defense of classical culture depends on a representation of the threat posed to it by (black) mass culture, and so also works to denominate high culture as the province of whiteness. I am also tempted to read the cover illustration against the photograph of Lefkowitz inside the back cover, where she appears neatly dressed in pleated khaki pants (or a skirt), a shirt and a dark blazer with a scarf tied around her neck; her hair is short and parted on one side, and she wears round horn-rimmed glasses. Her outfit is the stylistic antithesis of the kind of outfit the cover illustration luridly imagines as being topped off by a black baseball cap marked with an X. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), and Before Color Prejudice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). Also see his contribution to the Arethusa forum, –. Notably by Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), pp. –. Also see James Walvin, Questioning Slavery (London: Routledge, ), pp. –. Walvin notes that while skin color did not function racially in

Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge



to the logical conclusion that race and racism always and everywhere mean only skin color, as Lefkowitz’s pursuit of Afrocentric scholars’ use of the word “black” to describe people of the ancient world implies. Joel A. Rogers (who died in , well before the modern development of Afrocentric thought) “Appears to think that anyone who was born on the continent of Africa was black, and uses the term black to describe anyone who has African blood, or who can by virtue of location be presumed to possess it.” The territory which became Roman Africa “was colonized by Phoenicians, Greeks, and finally by Romans. For that reason it is unlikely that most natives of what was called ‘Africa’ in antiquity . . . were ‘black’ in the modern sense of the word.” But what “modern sense” does Lefkowitz mean? There must be very few people anywhere who have literally black skin. Her literal reading of the word “black” as referring primarily to skin color strategically divests race of any cultural component, significantly misrepresenting the arguments of even the most extreme African nationalists, at the same time as it invokes the colored body as the most salient marker of the racial identity whose relevance to her concerns she is elsewhere ready to discount entirely. Her repudiation of the significance Rogers attaches to “African blood” also indicates ignorance – either real or strategic – of the ways in which possession of the minutest portion of Negro blood has been enough, at least in the American context which also bred Afrocentrism, to dictate racial identity, whatever the color of the possessor’s skin. The very use of the term “African blood” may suggest a belief in the embodied racial essences whose existence she elsewhere regards as illusory. Lefkowitz’s resolute narrowing of the idea of race allows her to refuse to engage with Afrocentrism as an intellectual endeavor aimed at exploring the consequences of “literally placing African ideals at the center of any analysis that involves African culture and behavior.” According to the scholar who coined the term, such a reorientation of knowledge does 

ancient slavery as it was to do in the New World, it figured strongly as a marker of “the ethnic difference between slave owners and slaves” (p. ). Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, p.  here. Subsequent references included parenthetically in the text. Cheryl Johnson-Odim, an historian whose field is Africa, faults Africanists for having contributed to belief in the sharp racial and cultural division thought to exist between Egypt and the rest of the African continent in “The Debate Over ‘Black Athena’,” Journal of Women’s History . (), : “Many Africanists in the United States and Europe have operated within a paradigm of African history that divided the continent between Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa. This division has often come to be a euphemism for ‘black’ and ‘non-black’ Africa rather than a useful geographical or regional distinction.” Just as Lefkowitz regrets that “most of the writers who have raised and discussed the question about Cleopatra’s ethnicity are not ancient historians,” (Not Out of Africa, p. ) Johnson-Odim believes that the abandonment of ancient Egyptian history to “non-Africanists . . . is part of the problem” (“Debate,” ).



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

not stem from a refusal to recognize “the validity of the Eurocentric tradition within its context: I am simply stating that such a view must not seek an ungrounded aggrandizement by claiming a universal hegemony.” Molefi Kete Asante further remarks that “many today find it difficult to cease viewing European culture as the center of the social universe. Thus the work they produce seldom considers the possibilities of other realities or, indeed, shared realities.” For her polemical purposes, Lefkowitz cannot even accurately characterize the political and philosophical concepts that cleared the ground for development of Afrocentrism, associating the theory, for example, with “a current tendency, at least among academics, to regard history as a form of fiction that can and should be written differently by each nation or ethnic group” (xiv). Post-formalist reading practices, anticolonial politics, gender and race as it may exist beyond skin color – a social existence of which the cover illustration has no doubt – disappear into Lefkowitz’s denial of the contingencies of knowledge production. The result is a book purporting to be about Afrocentrism whose author claims not to find “the topic of ‘race’ particularly interesting or important,” () and who insists that race does not significantly figure in her argument. Here, race is absent and pervasively present, invisible in the social body (of traditional classical knowledge), but always ready to be called on to serve its polemical ends. Lefkowitz states that “Afrocentrists are demanding that ordinary historical methodology be discarded in favor of a system of their own choosing” (, emphases mine). She is ready to characterize all practitioners of non-“ordinary” methodologies as racist; what she conceives of as the  



Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), pp. , , . Johnson-Odim notes that race “is still a passionately defended sociopolitical category” (“Debate,” ) despite its obscurity in the body, and charges that Lefkowitz – despite her rejection of skin color as a meaningful analytical category in the ancient world – is “obsessed” () in her February  New Republic review of the first volume of Black Athena with pinning down the role darkskinned Africans may or may not have played in Greek civilization. In support of what she characterizes as the lack of interest in facts shared by Afrocentrists, post-structuralists, and/or Bernal’s partisans, Lefkowitz quotes Johnson-Odim’s remark in “Debate” that on skin color, “What we are really talking about here is symbolism anyway, is it not?” (“Debate,” ; Not Out of Africa, p. ). In fairness (no pun intended), the context for Johnson-Odim’s statement is her assertion of race’s identity as a “sociopolitical category” which is not necessarily dependent on skin color for its definition. Here, the definition of literary tradition that Raymond Williams advances in Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, ) was useful to me. He defines “tradition” (Lefkowitz’s “ordinary methodology”) as a deliberately selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order,” (p. ) thus insisting that the intellectual contingencies Lefkowitz denies are a necessary part of the critical process. At this point in her argument, Lefkowitz is in effect refusing a critical practice which works to deselect the underpinnings of her reconstruction of the intellectual issues at stake.

Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge



methods of New Historicism, for example, “can . . . lead right back to fictive history of the kind developed to serve the Third Reich” (). As a Shakespearean, I understand quite well how apprehensions of the conditions under which proper meanings can be legitimately formed structure the transmission of knowledge, and how deeply shaping of culture these apprehensions and their enforcements can be. Because of this training, I am also ready to accept Lefkowitz’s conviction as a Hellenist of the informing significance of her field to the foundations of US political culture: “Any attempt to question the authenticity of ancient Greek civilization is of direct concern even to people who ordinarily have little interest in the remote past. Since the founding of this country, ancient Greece has been intimately connected with the ideals of American democracy” (). For her, ways of reading dictate the kinds of knowledge which can be taken away from those readings, and so assume critical importance in establishing and acknowledging cultural genealogies. But it is only by rhetorically minimizing the effects and even the existence of socially determined racial differences (again, an attempt which the cover illustration has no interest in making) that she can conduct her own argument. A belief in the existence of these socially determined racial differences is, of course, the place from which Afrocentrism launches itself. “Ordinary” in Lefkowitz’s formulation may thus actually be closer in meaning to something like “compulsory.” Indeed, this compulsoriness is an explicit part of the conservative cultural program of which Not Out of Africa is an outpost. 



Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, in her introduction to Feminist Theory and the Classics, edited by Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin (New York: Routledge, ), sees a traditional classics’ “devaluation of theory” as enabling its “devaluation of issues of power, race, and gender, which theory would ‘import’ to a consideration of ‘the text pure and simple’.” Classics’ “philological bent is consistent with a lack of interest in attracting women or people of color to the discipline. If point of view is irrelevant, what difference does it make who is doing the editing, translating, or interpreting?” (p. ). Rabinowitz’s observation about philology’s centrality in her discipline recapitulates Bernal, n.  above, and also points to a disembodiment of cultural meaning – a disembodiment which is revoked by the cover illustration of Not Out of Africa, with its invocation of a disorderly black body. Eileen Messer-Davidow’s brilliant “Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education,” Social Text  (), –, cites William S. Lind’s assertion of “a necessary, unbreakable, and causal relationship between traditional Western, Judeo-Christian values, definitions of right and wrong, ways of thinking, and ways of living . . . and the secular success of Western societies: their prosperity, their liberties, and the opportunities they offer their citizens to lead fulfilling, rewarding lives. If the former are abandoned, the latter will be lost” (). Messer-Davidow notes that conservative attacks on multiculturalism published in such journals as Commentary, National Review, and The New Republic (where Lefkowitz published a condensed version of what became Not Out of Africa’s thesis in ) have been one of the “broadest” () manifestations of a conservative cultural program.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Having insisted that it is the cause of methodological soundness and not race which drives her argument against Afrocentrism, Lefkowitz’s book devotes nineteen pages to refutation of Shelley Haley’s and others’ identification of Cleopatra as black. Lefkowitz characterizes Haley’s discussion of Cleopatra’s race in particular and more general assertions about the roles played by black people in the ancient world as “myths,” mistakenly regarded as harmless by some of her colleagues who “have argued that teaching that Cleopatra is black can do no harm, particularly if it helps to instill pride in students who have been mistreated by the majority society” (). I don’t quite know what to make of the present tense here (“Cleopatra is black”), which would seem to contradict the distinction Lefkowitz elsewhere insists on maintaining between ancient and modern meanings, but I do note her implicit reduction of all attempts to reconstruct racial identities in past societies to a kind of social therapy administered to students by well-meaning, if deluded, professors. (Presumably the “mistreatment” these students will have endured is racial in nature, although Lefkowitz’s race-free rhetoric cannot allow her to specify that.) A growing body of work among classicists, mostly, but not exclusively, appearing since Black Athena, has in fact begun to delineate ways in which a consciousness of cultural difference used as the basis for social discrimination which has nothing to do with skin color can be identified in the ancient world. “How reasonable is it,” Lefkowitz asks, “to require the ancients to have shared our definitions of race or our concern with oppression of women and minorities?” (). Such a requirement is, of course, not reasonable at all, especially when she misconstrues what “our” definitions of race are, elides the (questionable) establishment of the ancients’ disregard of skin color into a notion of a raceless ancient world, and projects this peaceful diversity onto the contemporary screen of multicultural Babel. Shelley Haley’s essay appeals to me as an acknowledgment of the place occupied within shifting ideas of racial value by the Egyptian queen who is, as Lefkowitz acknowledges, “a legendary figure” () and a powerfully  

Shelley Haley, “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Re-claiming, Reempowering,” in Rabinowitz and Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory, pp. –. See, for example, Hans Volkmann, Cleopatra: A Study of Politics and Propaganda, tr. T. J. Cadoux (London: Elek Books, ); M. P. Charlesworth, “The Fear of the Orient in the Roman Empire,” Cambridge Historical Journal  (), –; Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), esp. ch. , “Inventing Persia,” pp. –, and ch. , “The Barbarian Enters Myth,” pp.  –; Ellen O’Gorman, “Return of the Living Dead: Carthage and Roman Ethnic Identity,” paper presented at the  meeting of the American Philological Association (APA); and Karen Bassi, “Maternity and Ethnicity in Herodotus’ Scythian Logos,” paper presented at the  meeting of the APA.

Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge



rhetorically charged one in current attempts to determine ways of establishing knowledge about the ancient world and its cultural relations to the contemporary one. Haley’s essay contextualizes her own reconsiderations of what slim evidence survives about Cleopatra’s race within a larger narrative about her own acculturation within the field of classics as a black person, as a woman, and as a black woman. The essay places her reconsideration of Cleopatra inside other stories about her reasons for choosing an academic career, for choosing classics as a field of study, and about her experiences in learning how to “do” classics as a graduate student and a teacher. Thus, it narrates a kind of crossing: from the nurturing family and community of black teachers where she grew up into the competitive world of pre-professional training where other black people were invisible, whose capacity for contributing to the field was publicly denigrated by some of her teachers, and where the possibility of women’s intellectual contribution was considered highly unlikely. Haley’s account invokes the “social universe” of Asante’s remarks: the social universe she entered as a student and professor were very different from the one she had left, and she frequently experienced her acculturation to its methods and presuppositions as alienating, frustrating, and humiliating – terms at striking variance from Lefkowitz’s invocation of a normative, “ordinary” universe of discourse and method. Indeed, Lefkowitz’s endorsement of “ordinary” method makes reorientations of knowledge, such as those presented by the theory of Afrocentrism, or by Bernal’s revised disciplinary history, or by Haley’s speculations about the place of race and gender in the edifice of classical studies, unthinkable. Haley’s reconsideration of Cleopatra’s origins occurs within a climate in which her students, as well as she herself through her own feminist scholarship in the classics, are beginning to ask questions Lefkowitz would consider to be out of the “ordinary.” She comes to see Cleopatra as cultural property (or to see her again as such, noting that the educated black people of her childhood had always assumed a black identity for the Egyptian queen which went far beyond the color they believed her skin was), and to resubmit questions about her racial identity as part of her own coming to consciousness as a black feminist classicist, not the classicist she had been trained to be. In effect, she wants to establish a scholarly reconnection with Cleopatra as she was thought of by the race men and race women of her youth: a figure of iconic resonance. For her, this iconicity is a function of race – race perhaps symbolized by, but 

For more on this topic, see Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra: History, Politics, Representation (London: Routledge, ), which, disappointingly, has nothing to say about the early modern Cleopatra.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

which cannot be reduced to, skin color. I am moved by Haley’s account of her coming into a sense of herself as a practitioner in her field, the way in which her essay invests her sense of her scholarship with a selfconscious history of struggle and recovery. This sense of struggle echoes in other essays in the volume where her paper appears, in other women’s narrations of learning to value and to articulate alternative or oppositional reading practices in their discipline. For Haley, the question of Cleopatra’s race comes to crystallize that moment of insight where it began to seem to her as though classical scholars and the “Greek and Roman authors they consulted had been willing – eager – to erase” the possibility that the Egyptian queen had non-Greek ancestors as part of their project of claiming “the beautiful Cleopatra for Europe” (, ). Reclaiming her becomes a powerful disruption of “ordinary” practice in classics. The extent to which such “ordinary” conduct and construction of a body of knowledge may itself be vulnerable to confusion of its racial terms is suggested in an essay by C. Loring Brace, “Clines and Clusters versus ‘Race’: A Test in Ancient Egypt and the Case of a Death on the Nile,” included in the collection Black Athena Revisited that Lefkowitz co-edited with Guy MacLean Rogers. In Not Out of Africa, I have argued, Lefkowitz simultaneously denies that race was embodied in the classical world and implies that race is visible only in the body, thus both misconstruing what race is (and was) and artificially narrowing – so as more easily to dismiss – the grounds of discussion about links between race and culture. In the Black Athena Revisited essay, a group of physical anthropologists similarly declare that “The ‘race’ concept did not exist in Egypt, and it is not mentioned in Herodotus, the Bible, or any of the other writings of classical antiquity . . . Because it has neither biological nor social justification, we should strive to see that it is eliminated from both public and private usage. Its absence will be missed by no one, and we shall all be better off without it.” Instead of using the scientific falsity of ideas of race to dismiss the idea that race or self-racialized subjectivity has anything to do with building culture, however, the essay authors seem to want to get 



Commenting on Haley’s essay and the volume in which it appears, Lefkowitz notes that editors Rabinowitz and Richlin “are themselves critical of traditional methodology and ideology,” and can only suppose that the articles they chose were “included on the basis of the rightness of their ideology and motives” (Not Out of Africa, p. ). C. Loring Brace, with David P. Tracer, Lucia Allen Yaroch, John Robb, Kari Brandt, and A. Russell Nelson, “Clines and Clusters versus ‘Race’: A Test in Ancient Egypt and the Case of a Death on the Nile,” in Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers (eds.), Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), p. .

Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge



rid of race and somehow keep it, too. Their commitment to the project of returning to the cranial measurements which were the basis of the worst nineteenth-century racist pseudoscience, but this time “adjusting our theoretical explanations, asking the right questions, and then applying the increasingly powerful arsenal of methods that are at our disposal,” () might well indicate some reluctance to dispense altogether with the idea of connection between bodies and races, however insistent their ultimate disavowals. This time, presumably, the result of a new inquiry would be a scientifically “real” notion of race, as opposed to merely “chimerical” () and anachronistic notions of race – real, because embodied, at least in skeletal remains. Seamus Deane is discussing Irish and not black nationalism when he remarks that because colonialist and imperialist regimes “universalize themselves, they regard any insurgency against themselves as necessarily provincial. In response, insurgent nationalisms attempt to create a version of history for themselves in which their intrinsic essence has always manifested itself, thereby producing readings of the past which are as monolithic as that which they are trying to supplant. They are usually . . . under the additional disadvantage that much of their past has been destroyed, silenced, erased. Therefore, the amalgam they produce is susceptible to attack and derision.” Deane here recapitulates Gates’ rejection of a vulgar Afrocentrism’s obsession with racial essences, but also, unlike either Gates or Lefkowitz, emphasizes its roots in a legitimate struggle for political and cultural liberation. What Lefkowitz represents as a question of how to reconstruct knowledge of the historical past should also be understood, at least in part, as a fight for discursive power to shape political agendas in the present and future as well. Race – whether understood as a bodily or a social phenomenon – is a central weapon in this discursive struggle. On this, Gates’ witty putdown of black essentialism and Lefkowitz’s impassioned defense of her discipline from the assaults she rhetorically associates with Afrocentrism are in agreement. Not Out of Africa, its jacket, and the Black Athena Revisited essay demonstrate a vertiginous confusion about what race is and does: race did not mean skin color, race means only skin color now, race is an empty category, the existence of race is (possibly) scientifically verifiable, race is not  

Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, ), discusses nineteenth-century craniology and phrenology, pp. –. In his “Introduction” to Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. .

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

particularly interesting, race has been put to deeply threatening cultural purposes. My interest in the racing of bodies – both human female bodies and bodies of knowledge – was at least partially stimulated by my observation of such confusion. Much far-right rhetoric about raced bodies seems to be aimed at resolving this confusion in such a way as to leave no doubt about either the physical evidence of racial identity or of its social consequences. On its web site, American Renaissance sells tapes from its third biennial conference, featuring such speakers as J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario, whose presentation suggested that ethnic identity is “hard-wired” into our genes as a preference against dissimilar genes and Glayde Whitney of Florida State University, who addressed the topic “The Biological Reality of Race.” Taylor and his fellows (American Renaissance may have female members, but the journal’s editorial board and the speakers at its conferences have been, as far as I have been able to discover, all male) repeatedly identify race as the centrally important factor in what they perceive as western civilization’s threatening “embrace from large numbers of non-whites.” Echoing Best centuries later, Taylor believes that nonwhiteness is an ineradicable social stain, one which in and of itself renders its possessor incapable of and probably even unfit for assimilation into western society: “The unpalatable truth is that race largely governs assimilation. Blacks and Indians have been here since colonial times, but many are still at the margins of society.” Taylor sees race as almost mechanistically determined, a bodily essence controlling who can and cannot become civilized. Before I go any farther here, I want to state that I am asserting no contact whatever between Mary Lefkowitz and American Renaissance. Lefkowitz attributes what she considers the intellectually bankrupt doctrine of Afrocentrism as applied to the classics to mistaken apprehensions of race’s historical existence and nature, while Taylor and American Renaissance believe that racial pluralism will result not in mere intellectual bankruptcy, but in the virtual extinction of European culture and the white race. I employ American Renaissance’s talk about differently colored bodies and their implications for the progress of civilization because it makes clear what Lefkowitz’s production of an Afrocentrism without black people cannot: that the social construction of bodies of knowledge can depend on and be enabled by the social construction of race. It is  

http://www.amren.com/tapes.htm ( February ). Jared Taylor, “ ‘Normal,’ ‘natural’ to seek ‘people like oneself ’,” Louisville Courier-Journal,  May , D.

Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge

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true that both Not Out of Africa and American Renaissance think of race in terms of what is visible, observable, quantifiable: Rushton’s and Whitney’s biology and social science, Lefkowitz’s assumption that skin color alone determines racial identity. The difference is that while Lefkowitz wants to pin race down physically so as to more easily eliminate it from her discussion about the practice and conduct of a discipline, Taylor and American Renaissance want to quantify race in order to admit it to a central place in that discussion. While, as I noted above, there is some reason to doubt Snowden and Lefkowitz’s insistence that skin color did not contribute to racial judgments in the ancient world, there is no reason to believe that skin color was the sole or even primary contributor to the ancients’ sense of cultural difference. Roman sources for the lives of Cleopatra, Caesar, and Antony, and for the civil wars of which Caesar’s defeat of Pompey the Great and Rome’s annexation of Egypt formed the climax are distinctly hostile toward Cleopatra and distinctly conscious of her and her country’s divergence from a Roman cultural norm. Thus, they emphasize the existence of a history of conflict and contradiction that both Lefkowitz’s and Gates’ reconstructions of the classical past tend to ignore. But I am not an Afrocentrist, either: I resist Asante’s attempts to replace one monolithic way of reading with another, and reject the degree to which his system, like much nationalism white and black, reimagines the social body as exclusively and originally male. Concerned as I am with strategies of representation, I want to return once again to the Cleopatra who figures so prominently in both liberal and conservative critiques of attempts to produce a raced self. I do insist that race and culture are linked, although not in the way Gates finds it so easy to scoff at for being insufficiently postmodern, and that Lefkowitz dismisses as an outcropping of a strange modern invention called “identity politics” (). I share Gates’ objection to a transhistorical obsession with dark skin as the primary marker both of race and of an unchanging cultural affiliation, but I also want to move beyond Lefkowitz’s intellectual deafness to the significance of representation to recognize that skin color, especially as it 



Shelley Haley, “Livy’s Sophoniba,” Classica et Medievalia  (), –; Haley, “Livy, Passion, and Cultural Stereotypes,” Historia  (), –; Sarah B. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt, nd ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ), pp. –. Lefkowitz notes the pro-Augustus bias of Roman historiography, Not Out of Africa, pp. –. An example of this can be found in her remarks on the question of Cleopatra’s beauty. Refusing the implications of her own identification of Cleopatra as a “legendary” as well as a strictly historical figure, Lefkowitz’s response to Haley’s comment about classics’ reclamation of the beautiful Cleopatra for Europe is that “the notion of a beautiful Cleopatra is not a construction



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

is linked to gender, can indeed manage to connote racial identity in the early modern period. The difference is that the color I mean is white. I want to take up the implications of the whiteness of the classical bust on Lefkowitz’s book jacket, of the lengths she goes to in order to deny the existence of race (while possibly readmitting it to discussion in the Black Athena Revisited essay) and of the participation of people who might have been physically “black” in the building of Hellenic culture. The significance of her argument is not so much that dark-skinned people did not participate in the establishment and transmission of her field of knowledge as it is the conclusion that everyone who did so, as far as can be properly ascertained, was white. Now again, the skin color Cleopatra or Socrates (or Mary Lefkowitz or Jared Taylor) had is not my primary pursuit here. What interests me is the conclusions people draw from flattened racial identifications, the processes they go through to establish them, what they put at stake. Reading Lefkowitz against the biological essentialism of American Renaissance helps to excavate the roles whiteness may play in accounts of the building and destruction of cultures; American Renaissance has the virtue of laying down a trail which is easy to follow, while the visual presentation of Lefkowitz’s book asserts the negative connection her written text goes to some lengths to deny. How does whiteness – as opposed both to an essentialized Afrocentrist notion of “blackness” and to Lefkowitz’s equally notional raceless and genderless conduct of classical knowledge – operate in early modern productions of Cleopatra? Much contemporary academic theory of whiteness begins by describing it as phantom, evanescent, remaining unvoiced while insinuating itself into such various areas of social life as the administration of justice, the formulation of standards of feminine beauty and sexuality, and popular culture. Whiteness thus paradoxically emerges as a practice to the degree it remains socially unmarked and unremarkable (Lefkowitz’s “ordinary historical methodology”). The more it remains unannounced, unarticulated, the more it may be said to be in operation. Not merely



of ancient historians but of writers like Shakespeare. Plutarch . . . explicitly says that Cleopatra was not beautiful, nor is she shown with idealized features on ancient portrait coins” (p. ). Apparently allure, like race, is also visible only in the body. The classic text here is Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen  (), –. Also see bell hooks, “Representations of Whiteness,” in Black Looks, pp. –; Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race,  vols. (London: Verso, ); and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, ). Reviews of scholarship include Shelly Fisher Fishkin, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture,” American Quarterly  (), –.

Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge

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about skin color, early modern whiteness works to naturalize and normalize the operations of existing hierarchies of race, nation, and sexuality. Whiteness articulates cultural authority. One clear assertion of the value of early modern whiteness in English retellings of the Cleopatra legend may be found in Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke’s translation of Garnier’s Antonie. Eve Rachele Sanders has brought to our attention how radically Pembroke revises her French original as she translates it, creating a virtually new work which emphasizes and vindicates the power of Cleopatra’s sexuality. In Pembroke, for example, and not in Garnier, it is Antony’s memory of “the long intermitting love of Cleopatra” which draws him back to Egypt and away from his wife Octavia. Before her suicide, after drawing the dead Antony up to her monument with her own “strong armes,” (M verso) this newly physical Cleopatra would bid him farewell with “A thousand kisses”: Let you my mouth for honors farewell give: That in this office weake my limmes may growe, Fainting on you, and fourth my soule may flow. (O verso)

She will die not as a queen but as a lover, virtually in the act of orgasm, claiming and ennobling the passion that Antony’s Roman compatriots can view only as disabling lust. But this sensual, energetic Cleopatra is also, and emphatically, white-skinned. In the aftermath of disaster at Actium, she asks that her and Antony’s children be sent for their safety to “distant lands” where “Black Aethiopes” show their “freezed locks” to a harsh sun (N). She believes that if only she had not taken the field at Actium, an undistracted Antony would have won and that even “tawny nations scorched with the Sunne” (H verso) would have yielded to their joint domination of the world. Her maid Eras wonders why she mars the “faire alablaster” (H) of her face with tears. Diomed sees her in classically Petrarchan terms, complete with “Allablaster” skin, “corall”  



Eve Rachele Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. I cite the “Argument” of Antonius as it appears in its first edition, where it was published in a volume with Pembroke’s translation of Philippe Mornay’s A Discourse of Life and Death (London, ); here, F verso. Subsequent references will be provided in my text. For his friend Lucilius, Antony’s love has transformed him into the image of his ancestor Hercules who, bewitched by Omphale, “Slept in hir lapp, hir bosome kist and kiste,/With base unseemly service bought her love,/Spinning at distaffe, and with sinewy hand/Winding on spindles threde, in maides attire” (L).

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

lips, “beamie” eyes like “Sunnes,” and “faire haire” of “fine and flaming golde” (I). The Petrarchan whiteness of the body which will reclaim Antony at the moment of her own death is the enabling vehicle of Pembroke’s bold reimagination of Cleopatra. The Europeanizing of Cleopatra, queen of a country which Roman historians recognized as being organized under disturbingly Hellenistic notions of tryphe, or magnificence – as being, in fact, quite different from the kinds of would-be subject countries Rome was used to encountering – works to refocus the attention to cultural and imperial conflict contained in so many Roman accounts of relations between Rome and Egypt. The considerable erotic authority of this Cleopatra, in other texts so strongly implicated in her imperial designs, is in Pembroke firmly linked to a sense of guilt over the disastrous effects of Antony’s devotion to her. She blames her beauty’s power for causing him to flee Actium – “I am sole cause. I did it, only I” (H verso) – and admits that she insisted on being present at the battle only because she was worried he would leave her and return to his wife Octavia. Despite her courage and vigor, she reads her affair with Antony conservatively, as a violation of monogamous standards. Her whiteness also traditionalizes her, muting the historical sense of her distance from Roman values and of her opposition to Roman political strategy. Her white skin is just as normatively instrumental as her sexual guilt to Pembroke’s project of recreating Cleopatra as an heroic subject. Written in response to the work of his friend and patron Pembroke, Samuel Daniel’s Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius and his Tragedie of Cleopatra second her play’s conviction of the corrosive effects of the Egyptian queen’s sexuality, but without insisting on the truth of her love for Antony. Indeed, Daniel introduces his Cleopatra, who will insist that her hold on Antony has been entirely destructive, as having been elicited by Pembroke’s portrait of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s suicides. The play’s dedication to the Countess of Pembroke insists that he would have been content to continue working in the private, self-referential world of his sonnet sequence Delia – to have “Made musique to my selfe that pleased me best” – “had not thy well grac’t Antony/Required his Cleopatras company.” But the story he feels required to tell about Antony and 



On tryphe in the Hellenic world and Roman culture shock in Egypt, see Robert S. Bianchi, “Ptolemaic Egypt and Rome: An Overview,” in Cleopatra’s Egypt: Age of the Ptolemies (The Brooklyn Museum, ), pp. –. I cite The Tragedie of Cleopatra as it appears in The Works of Samuel Daniel Newly Augmented (London, ); here, lines , , and  of the unpaginated dedicatory poem. Subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in my text.



Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge

Cleopatra differs markedly from Pembroke’s account. Perhaps the first place their differences in tone and emphasis become visible is in the argument of Daniel’s tragedy. Pembroke’s pr´ecis sets the scene for Cleopatra’s last declaration of passion: “she trussed up Antonius halfe dead, & so got him into the monument” (A verso). Daniel’s account ends instead with a somber reminder of the eventual extinction of her bloodline: “Cesario her sonne, which she had by Julius Caesar (conveyed before unto India, out of the danger of the warres) was about the same time of her death, murthered at Rhodes . . . And so, hereby came the race of the Ptolemies to be wholy extinct, and the flourishing rich kingdome of Egypt utterly overthrowne and subdued” (F verso). The histrionic fervor of Pembroke’s queen will not be allowed to stand as a reader’s final memory of the story. If Pembroke uses Cleopatra’s sexuality to efface the existence of racial difference between Roman and Egyptian, Daniel uses it to proclaim and indict difference. Here, her children with Antony are the “lucklesse issue of a wofull mother,/The wretched pledges of a wanton bed,” (F) condemned by their very birth. As does Pembroke’s Cleopatra, Daniel’s queen decries her sexual effect on Antony, but more explicitly and at greater length assigns their joint downfall to her own vanity and lust: For whilst my glory in her greatnesse stoode, And that I saw my state, and knew my beautie, Saw how the world admir’d me, how they woo’d, I then thought all men must love me of duetie; And I love none: for my lascivious Court, Fertile in ever fresh and new-choise pleasure, Affoorded me so bountifull disport, That I to stay on Love had never leisure: My vagabond desires no limites found, For lust is endless, pleasure hath no bound. Thou coming from the strictnesse of thy Citty, And never this loose pompe of monarchs learnest, Inur’d to warres, in women’s wiles unwitty, Whilst others faind, thou fell’st in love in earnest. (F–F)

Explicit in this Cleopatra’s remorse is a contrast between her own “lascivious Court” and the “strictnesse” of Antony’s native Rome. The play perceives Romans and Egyptians as having two separate and unalterably opposed identities. Octavius accuses her and all Egyptians of nursing an “innated hatred” against Rome, which she expressed by attacking the “league and love of blood” (H verso) between Antony and

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Octavia – here, her attachment to Antony is more the product of sheer vindictiveness than of love. The lustful self-indulgence which drove her to seduce and ruin Antony is not merely a personal failing, but a manifestation of cultural alterity: Misterious Egipt, wonder breeder, Strict religions strange observer, State-ordrer zeale, the best rule-keeper, Fostring still in temp’rate fervor: O how cam’st thou to lose so wholy All religion, law and order? And thus become the most unholy Of all Lands, that Nylus border?

With Cleopatra a prisoner, the country’s only hope of survival is that the “sumptuous treasure” it contains will cause the Romans to “learne our way of weaknes,/. . . and carry home/Enough from us to ruine Rome” (I–I verso). In Daniel’s Cleopatra, the queen’s unbridled sexuality is centrally expressive of her country’s corruption and disorder. Its luxury embodies Egypt’s difference from, and poses the greatest danger to, Rome. Her sexuality is thus acculturated and racialized, just as the whiteness of Pembroke’s Cleopatra occurs within a context of sexual guilt for having lured Antony away from his Roman obligations. Daniel’s Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius dilates on the ways in which Cleopatra’s sexuality might be racially linked, despite the fact that – like his Cleopatra – it nowhere assigns her a skin color. In the Letter, Octavia describes her absent husband as “disloyall,” kept by his “impious love” in “a barbarous land.” In Roman terms, an impious love would be one which violates the standards of Roman pietas: devotion to the good name of one’s family and to the welfare of Rome, and submission to the will of the gods. By staying with Cleopatra, Octavia writes, Antony demonstrates that he “despise(s) his children, Rome, and me” (:–). If she had strayed from her marriage bed the way he has, she wonders, What mixture of strange generations would Succeede the fortunes of uncertaine Sires? What foule confusion in your bloud and race To your immortal shame, and our disgrace? (:–) 

I cite the Letter as it appears in The Works of Samuel Daniel Newly Augmented; here, : –. Subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in my text.

Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge



The fear Daniel’s Octavia raises is a fear of miscegenation, that indiscriminate “mixture” of racialized bodies powerful enough to obscure or even obliterate the bloodlines that her marriage of state to Antony was designed to preserve. If she took another lover, she would be committing a crime against the existence of Antony’s pure “race,” whose continuation the patriarchal management of her sexuality is designed to ensure. Emotionally betrayed by her husband’s infidelity, Octavia is also socially threatened in her role as sanctioned carrier of Antony’s seed by his and Cleopatra’s seizure of sexual pleasure outside the borders of Rome. Antony’s crossing of borders, his miscegenous joining with Cleopatra, threatens the survival of the categories of barbarous and civilized, chaste and wanton, legitimate and illegitimate, on which his and Octavia’s Roman patrimony rests. The negative effects of female sexuality, then, are an important constituent in Roman racial fear. In Daniel’s Cleopatra, Octavius needs to kill Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar, because he represents the possibility of “succession from anothers race” (Ii verso). This rival “race” may be that of the dead Caesar, or of Cleopatra herself, but in either case, it must not be allowed to supersede his own. Octavia describes herself as committed to the domestic and familial duties appropriate to a good Roman wife. Indeed, as she sits down to write to her husband, she has just returned from a special visit to her brother Octavius, despite the fact that she is “greate with childe, and as big with sorrow,” (D verso) to beg him not to launch a military strike against disloyal Antony. The home she made for Antony and in which she now hides herself is both a kind of prison and “the temple of my pietie,/Sacred unto the faith I reverence,/Where I will pay my teares for thy offence” (:–). The image of Octavia immured within her home, locked in “the now sad chamber of my once delight” (:), powerfully recalls another early modern Roman matron who became the victim of a man’s sexual misconduct. A few years before Daniel’s Octavia, Shakespeare’s Lucrece is also confronted with the problem of how to continue her life after illegitimate sexual knowledge – in the form of her rape by Tarquin, heir to the kingdom of Rome and her husband’s brother-in-arms – is forced on her. As happens in the Letter, The Rape of Lucrece also racializes its sense of the horror of Tarquin’s crime. Some of the blood that issues from Lucrece’s body after she fatally stabs herself “still pure and red remained,/And 

Haley, “Black Feminist Thought and Classics,” also sees the fear of miscegenation in classicists’ rush to foreclose inquiry into Cleopatra’s ancestry, p. .

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

some looked black, and that false Tarquin stained.” The black blood is surrounded by “a wat’ry rigol,” or border (), which separates it from her “untainted” () red blood, but both bodies of blood have issued from Lucrece’s body. The poem’s patriarchal logic dictates that even though she has been raped, Lucrece has somehow been blackened by non-marital sexual contact. The emblematic Petrarchan colors of red, black, and clear (white?) are arranged here as a marker of the contamination of her racial purity as a Roman wife and mother. They reiterate the color symbolism used at Lucrece’s first appearance in the poem: her “lily hand,” her “rosy cheek” (), her “hair like golden threads” (), her breasts as white as “ivory globes” (). The poem’s use of color and color associations play into its conviction of the overwhelming horror of Lucrece’s fate. Her attempt to talk Tarquin out of assaulting her is compared to what happens when a wind from “earth’s dark womb” () dissipates a threatening “blackfaced cloud” (); she denounces his intention as “black payment” () for the hospitality she has shown him. The natural sovereignty he should possess as a member of a ruling family is instead grotesquely subject to his “[b]lack lust” (). But even without resort to this language of color and moral quality, the poem still exhibits a racial awareness of the nature of Tarquin’s crime, in the sense of lineage and legitimacy that Octavia invokes in her letter to her husband. If Lucrece will not submit, Tarquin tells her, he will rape her anyway, then kill her and one of her male slaves and give out the story that he committed the double murder in shocked outrage on her husband’s behalf at finding her in bed with an inferior. Neither Tarquin nor Lucrece questions his right to commit such an act in defense of the familial honor of another Roman man. They both know, as does Octavia, that with an adulterous mother, her children would be forever “blurr’d with nameless bastardy” (), a “blemish that will never be forgot,/Worse than a slavish wipe, or birth hour’s blot” (–). In Daniel and in Lucrece, but not in Daniel’s friend and patron Pembroke, race is explicitly construed in sexual, cultural, and dynastic terms; reproductive bodies enter history. In choosing to translate Garnier so as to minimize his attention to the political implications of Rome’s passage from republic to empire, Pembroke also denies the equivalencies 



I cite the poem as it appears in Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, ); here, lines –. Throughout, I take all Shakespeare citations from this edition, unless otherwise indicated. On Garnier and Roman politics, see Margaret McGowan, “The Presence of Rome in Some Plays of Robert Garnier,” in E. Freeman, H. Mason, M. O’Regan, and S. W. Taylor (eds.), Myth and Its Making in the French Theatre: Studies Presented to W. D. Howarth (Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –.



Cleopatra: whiteness and knowledge

Daniel will forge between race, empire, and sexuality. Her whitened field of racial reference marshals support for her vision of Cleopatra as a new model of female exemplarity, but consciously draws on the resources of an existing language of color and of femininity in order to do so. Daniel’s vision of worlds in conflict begins within the walls of the bedchamber Octavia has shared with Antony, but expands outward to place an understanding of the nature and value of their marriage at the center of the Letter’s and The Tragedie of Cleopatra’s sense of what it means to be Roman. In looking at these three invocations of Cleopatra, I have begun to develop an account of how race might figure in the transmission of her legend. Race here means differently, and frequently more subtly, than the dark skin with which Lefkowitz’s analysis of Cleopatra’s place in Afrocentrist discourse equates it. Just as race has operated in the construction of the body of classical knowledge that Lefkowitz defends, Pembroke’s and Daniel’s Romans as well as their Egyptians have racial identities. Indeed, in Daniel’s Letter, Cleopatra serves as a kind of foil against which Octavia’s matronly dignity becomes visible. Imagining Cleopatra’s response to her letter – “scorning,” she will say to Antony that it “comes from your Deere”(:) – Octavia asserts that From her indeed it comes, delitious Dame, (Thou royall Concubine, and Queene of lust) Whose armes are pure, whose breasts are voyd of blame, And whose most lawfull flame proves thine unjust. (: –)

The “lawfull flame” of Octavia’s married love points to the authority of sexual discipline in the construction of Egyptian and Roman racial identities, a primacy that Pembroke’s daring revision of Cleopatra insists is more properly assigned to romantic emotion than to social welfare. His Cleopatra appearing at Antonius’ call, Daniel takes pains to reinscribe a more traditionally conceived view of female sexuality – one which insists on its consequences for the public world of which patriarchal families were the foundation – into his contribution to the legend. In these three texts, only Pembroke’s Cleopatra is described as having a particular skin color, and yet, I believe, the texts do all outline the operations of racial consciousness. Whiteness – the Petrarchan whiteness of Pembroke or the invisible operations of cultural authority, invisible until someone (disorderly Afrocentrists or Daniel’s “Queene of lust”) mounts a challenge to its continuance – carries a powerful charge in the legend of Cleopatra. I want very much to detach discussion of race from



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

a discussion of dark-skinned people, not only because this concentration on color as the chief determinant of race is a modern rather than a Renaissance phenomenon, but because assuming that race is only about skin color leaves whiteness – the physically unmarked category, the engine which drives and dictates racial definition and stratification – immune from examination. A concentration on skin color bars inquiry into how race may be linked to region and sexuality. Neither can it help open discussion of miscegenation, which begins to appear in Daniel’s Letter and which will become so important to formations of race in the New World. But my wariness about a modern overemphasis on the easily observed physical quality of skin color as the primary marker of racial identity should not be taken to mean that skin color did not matter significantly to the development of early modern racial consciousness. Cleopatra’s whiteness may approach the status of a literary conceit  or even a fetish, but it is also insisted upon as an observable, bodily fact. Rather, I am only saying that it is not the only thing that mattered, and that it appears in different combinations, different inflections, in relation to region, gender, sexuality, and religion, over the length of our period. In the next chapter, I turn to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which seems to me to exemplify this oscillating sense of what race is and how it may manifest itself in the body and in bodily behaviors. Shakespeare’s imperial lovers invite us into a prolonged contemplation of how variously bodies perform racial identity, and yet the production history of the play has seemed to shut down the possibilities of this variety and to mute the variety of ways in which the play is allowed to speak of race. 



Here, see Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, “The Comedy of Domination: Psychoanalysis and the Conceit of Whiteness,” in Christopher Lane (ed.), The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, ): “Whiteness is a structuring principle of racial meaning; as a linguistic construct, it also subjects individuals to a phantasmatic identification that the body’s surface seems to literalize. In this respect, we must consider whiteness per se and whiteness in principle as elaborate conceits” (p. ). Ania Loomba, “ ‘Delicious Traffick’: Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern Stages,” Shakespeare Survey  (),  –.

CHAPTER



Sex, race, and empire in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

In Act I of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, sweetly torturing herself with thoughts of her absent lover, implores Antony to Think on me, That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black, (..–) And wrinkled deep in time.

Along with Philo’s disgusted observation as the play opens that Antony’s formerly martial eyes “now turn/The office and devotion of their view/Upon a tawny front,” (..–) Cleopatra’s self-definition as “black” suggests that whatever the color of her skin, it is different from that of the Romans. Elsewhere, however, this same Cleopatra refers to the “bluest veins” (..) in the hand she offers the messenger who brings her news of Antony’s marriage to kiss. The play demonstrates a certain indecision about the color of Cleopatra’s skin, about this color’s relationship to her race, and even about what her race might actually be; Philo disgustedly refers to how Antony’s great “Captaines heart” has now become nothing more than “the bellows and the fan/To cool a gipsy’s lust,” (..–) for example. But except for an appendix in Janet Adelman’s  study of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, sustained critical attention to the apparently open question of the color and race of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra has been rare. Indeed, recent editor Michael Neill declares in his thoughtful discussion of the play that “the issue of racial difference in Antony and Cleopatra” is “relatively insignificant . . . the stereotypes involved are the product of Roman perception; 

The Common Liar: An Essay on ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), pp. –. Also see Jean R. Brink, “Domesticating the Dark Lady,” in Brink (ed.), Privileging Gender in Early Modern England (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, ), pp.  –.





Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

and while the Roman view is given a strategic advantage . . . it scarcely goes unchallenged.” However, as the previous discussion of the territorial issues – cultural, discursive, disciplinary – surrounding the figure of Cleopatra would predict, I hesitate to minimize the impact of “Roman perception,” or to dismiss the question of racial identities in Antony and Cleopatra entirely. To regard such issues as “insignificant” is, I think, to accede too easily to a reading of the play which severs its politics from the clearly raced bodies which perform them here. More, and this is an issue to which I will return in my discussion of dramatic adaptations of Oroonoko, dismissing the question of race from serious consideration may facilitate the strategy – common in texts recognized as being produced within a clearly colonialist context – of re-presenting cultural, economic, and racial clashes as primarily personal, emotional, and domestic and so containing, familiarizing, and normalizing them. While Shakespeare’s text may or may not be immediately readable within a context of the economic exploitation of early modern Asia, Africa, and the New World by European powers, it does take up the questions of imperial fate already inscribed within its narrative sources. The thick web of texts surrounding Antony and Cleopatra is deeply marked by the will to supersede imperial and racial politics with sexual ones. Following Jonathan Dollimore’s influential argument in Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries that the sexual bond between Antony and Cleopatra “is rooted in a fantasy transfer of power from the public to the private sphere,” () that the play’s apparent great binaries – male/female, Rome/Egypt, marriage/love – are actually ideological effects of the power relations in whose terms the lovers define themselves and their destiny, most recent critics resist reading gender in the play in firmly oppositional or absolute terms. But reading the play’s sexual mythologizing has often seemed to result in an Antony and Cleopatra from which a materialist awareness of the play’s imperial contexts has been almost entirely removed. For example, as he notes how often Roman men’s fascination with Cleopatra  

Michael Neill in the Oxford Antony and Cleopatra (Oxford University Press, ), p. . All subsequent references will be provided in the text. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (University of Chicago Press, ), pp. –. See also Linda Charnes, “What’s Love Got to Do With It? Reading the Liberal Humanist Romance in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (eds.), Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), pp. –.

Sex, race, and empire in Antony and Cleopatra



ends up being expressed in terms of its final affirmation not of her power over them, but of their own existence as desiring subjects, Jonathan Gil Harris asserts that Roman obsession “fixes on a reflection, or projection, of itself. Like Narcissus, the spectator misrecognizes himself (or his image) as Other.” I do not dispute Harris’ analysis of how Roman desire works, but his sense of the Roman proclivity for projection and control could be usefully supplemented with a sense of how this psychological process may work in colonial, as well as sexual terms. Although Harris does not extend his discussion in this direction, his terms could also offer an apt vocabulary for describing how the colonizer can impose his own image as well as his will on the colonial subject. A physically white Cleopatra or one whose behavior can be understood only in terms of how it deviates from Roman/English controls on women’s sexual behavior are examples of this projection and imposition. Just as the play depicts the Romans’ fantasies of Cleopatra as a sexual object – as she seems sometimes merely designed to elicit and absorb those fantasies – it and the web of texts in which it is embedded may also depict, even solicit, their (or early modern English authors’) fantasies of her as a raced being. Recognition and denomination of racial identity is thus at least potentially as much the result of fantasy as the sensuous Cleopatra is the result of the overheated imaginations of Shakespeare’s Romans. Unfortunately, racial fantasies translate into political realities, with less space in them for negotiation than the terms Roman sexual imagination might at first seem to offer. In an explicitly feminist reading of these Roman habits of appropriation and projection, Hel`ene Cixous seizes on Cleopatra’s stubborn presence in the Romans’ obsessive recitals of desire as an expression of feminine jouissance, a celebration of her and Antony’s “struggle against all the forces of death and to change all the ancient and reductive means of thinking life that would threaten to enclose it, slow it down, deaden it.” Cixous locates the play’s erotic charge in the figure of Cleopatra as she claims space to see the Egyptian queen as a desiring subject, rather than merely a blank slate for Roman sexual projection. But in a phrase which indicates what I have argued is the entanglement of race in inscriptions of the Egyptian queen’s sexual difference from Roman heroes,  

“ ‘Narcissus in thy face’: Roman Desire and the Difference it Fakes in Antony and Cleopatra,” SQ  (), . Here, I was greatly aided by Christopher Lane’s introductory essay in The Psychoanalysis of Race, pp.  –.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Cixous refers earlier in the same piece to woman as the unknown and unknowable “dark continent” of phallocentrism, in effect the Africa to man’s Europe. Here, Cleopatra’s race, while not the immediate subject, becomes an invisible metaphor for the ways in which Cixous can imagine the power of her sexuality. Confronted with the mutual constitution of race and sex in Shakespeare’s play, John Dryden’s All for Love sets out to separate them and normalize their status and relation to one another. “Let your Ægyptian timbrels play alone,” Dryden’s Ventidius orders Cleopatra’s eunuch Alexas, “Nor mix Effeminate Sounds with Roman Trumpets.” Here, Egyptian culture is feminized and aestheticized, clearly diametrically opposed to Roman virility and plainness. It is clear to Ventidius, and to the play, that Cleopatra’s sexual allure has been the ruin of Antony’s Roman manhood: She has left him The blank of what he was; I tell thee, Eunuch, she has quite unmann’d him: Can any Roman see, and know him now, Thus alter’d from the Lord of half Mankind, Unbent, unsinew’d, made a Womans Toy, Shrunk from the vast extent of all his honors, And crampt within a corner of the World? (..–)

Not only Ventidius, but Antony’s loyal troops, believe that Cleopatra has robbed him of his manhood, refusing to rally to him because “they would not fight for Cleopatra . . . to make her Conquer,/And make you more a slave” (.., –). This female power to enslave men is associated with Egyptian decadence, a force against which Antony at least initially attempts to defend his sense of his Roman manhood. He insists, for example, that refusing to let Cleopatra see him would be a discourtesy unworthy of a gentleman. He is not “Barbarous, Born in the depths of Affrick: I’m a Roman, / Bred to the Rules of soft humanity” (..,  –). Uncivil “Affrick” is invoked to articulate what this Roman lover is not, or at any rate does not want to be. The play’s dueling convictions  

Carol Cook, “The Fatal Cleopatra,” in Garner and Sprengnether (eds.), Shakespearean Tragedy quotes Cixous’ essay “Sorties,” pp. , . I cite George R. Guffey and Maximilian Novak (eds.), All for Love (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); here, ..–. All subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in the text.

Sex, race, and empire in Antony and Cleopatra



of propriety and impropriety are as much bound up with nation and region as they are with sexuality; and in this association of certain types of behaviors with certain regions, it approaches a racial consciousness. But sexuality is given far more weight in All for Love as a demonstration of the differences between nations and especially between women than is its sense of race. As its centerpiece, Dryden’s play dramatizes the (unfortunately fictional) confrontation between Cleopatra and Antony’s wife Octavia. Dryden’s Octavia famously admonishes her daughters to “go, I say, and pull him to me,/And pull him to your selves, from that bad Woman,” (..–) thus dismissing from consideration the dynastic considerations which bound Antony’s family to Octavius’ through marriage and which brought Antony and Octavius into uneasy brotherhood. The confrontation scene in effect narrows the scope of the moral choice confronted by this descendant of Hercules to a choice between his wife and his mistress. In Dryden, Octavia is allowed to hurl surprisingly explicit sexual insults at Cleopatra, the insults Daniel’s Octavia is too self-contained to utter as she reminds her husband of his betrayals of dynastic desire. When Dryden’s Cleopatra assures Octavia that her husband far prefers the “easier bonds” of his connection to her to the more rigorous duties of his Roman marriage bed, for example, Octavia retorts that she is not surprised that Your bonds are easie; you have long been practis’d In that lascivious art: he’s not the first For whom you spread your snares: let Caesar witness. (..–)

The “easie” passage between Cleopatra’s “spread” legs is a sinister void in which all men who enter are rendered “blank.” Especially given Antony and Cleopatra’s changeable racial and sexual meanings, All for Love seems comparatively stable and consistently organized around the poles of masculine and feminine, Rome and Egypt, chaste and lascivious, even black and white. In part, I think, Neill’s conclusion about the muted relevance of race to Antony and Cleopatra follows from his rejection of a previous tendency to read the play as offering an “uncomplicated endorsement of racialist and 

The play shows its inheritance of a Petrarchan vocabulary of color and character on a couple of occasions. After Antony revels in his eagerness to rush into this Cleopatra’s “white arms . . . and melt me into love” (.., ), she herself coolly acknowledges that she maintains her hold over him through abstruse “black endearments” presumably unknown to decent Roman wives (..). Dryden’s Cleopatra is clearly white-skinned, but is thus perhaps negatively racialized as black.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

sexist essentialisms,” () a rejection which would make it as impossible to assign a fixed notion of her race as it would to accept the play’s presentation of her sexuality at face value. Yet elsewhere in his introduction, Neill does acknowledge the significance of racial and cultural difference in the play’s reception: “[I]t is a telling paradox of the play’s stage history that, despite Shakespeare’s clearly envisaging Cleopatra as a North African queen whose skin is either ‘tawny’ or ‘black,’ there is no history of black Cleopatras as there has been, since the triumphs of Ira Aldridge in the mid-nineteenth century, a series of striking black Othellos” (). This has begun to change a bit; Dona Croll was Cleopatra in the allblack  production staged by London’s Talawa Theatre Company; Franchelle Dorn played her at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D. C. in ; and Pauline Black took the role in an adapted text, Cleopatra and Antony, that toured England in . Leontyne Price premiered the role in Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, which inaugurated the new Metropolitan Opera House at New York’s Lincoln Center in . Tracing the rarity of casting a black actress in the role of Cleopatra to “the same Orientalism” () which gave audiences blackface and brownface Othellos, Neill notes that despite the increasing recent availability of such classically trained performers “no major company has been willing to capitalize on this development to explore the play’s treatment of racial and cultural otherness” (). I am not certain whether “racial otherness” here is the same thing as the “racial difference” Neill elsewhere says does not significantly matter in the play. But the failure to cast black Cleopatras may not 







Linda T. Fitz, “Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism,” SQ  (), –, traces the place of prejudiced and reductive attitudes toward women and gender in the modern history of the play’s reception. For reviews of these productions, see the Sunday Times (London),  June , : (Croll); the Washington Post,  September , C (Dorn); and the Times Educational Supplement,  February , B (Black). As recently as , Katherine Duncan-Jones expressed impatience with a “stale and pointless” Royal Shakespeare Company Antony and Cleopatra for failing to take advantage of the opportunity to cast a black Cleopatra. For Duncan-Jones, the white actress playing the part “simply cannot represent that charismatic ‘serpent of old Nile’: she is entirely European in physique . . . Caesar’s astonishment at the erotic beauty and splendour of Cleopatra and her women in death . . . is the amazement of an arrogant European dazzled by the mystique of a great African queen” (TLS,  August , ). In an apparent contradiction on the significance of Cleopatra’s race similar to Neill’s, Adelman believes that it doesn’t particularly matter what exactly Shakespeare meant to suggest by having Cleopatra call herself “blacke,” but that her nonwhite skin is meant to contribute to the creation of a sense of her “ancient and mysterious sexuality” (Common Liar, p. ); while her sexuality would presumably be represented differently if she were white, Adelman also seems too hasty to refuse to ask what it might mean if Cleopatra and her sexuality were constructed as black.

Sex, race, and empire in Antony and Cleopatra



be just a matter of insufficient numbers of properly trained actors in the pipeline. Francesca T. Royster has described the professional resistance encountered by Henrietta Vinton Davis, an aspiring black actress in the antebellum United States who staged public readings of scenes from Antony and Cleopatra, but who was never permitted to play Cleopatra in a full production. This was not necessarily just because she was black, but also, Royster suggests, because playing Shakespeare’s Egyptian queen would have required her to appear onstage in an interracial romance, and one which is meant to convey some sexual heat. The portrayal of a dark-skinned Cleopatra who is an assertively desirous sexual subject as well as a queen confounds expectations of the meanings which can be acceptably produced by visibly raced female bodies in performance. In Derek Walcott’s play A Branch of the Blue Nile (), for example, a West Indian theatrical troupe is rehearsing a new version of Antony and Cleopatra which will integrate Caribbean speech with the Shakespearean script. Hence, the actor playing the clown who brings Cleopatra the poisonous asp remarks that “I know that a woman is a dish for the gods, if the devil don’t make the dressing. But them whore-mongering devils does screw the gods up with their women, ’cause for every ten women God make, the devil does mash up five.” In Walcott’s play, the minstrel show Shakespeare can be seen as a way of asserting the existence and vitality of cultural difference, even though the means chosen may also be experienced as reinforcing racial stereotypes. The Caribbean actors are torn between just wanting to play Shakespeare and the conditions of a marketplace which doubts their capacity to signify worthwhile cultural meaning: “Who needs a broke, black, West Indian actress over thirty?” dark-skinned Sheila, originally cast as Cleopatra, rhetorically asks (). Although its author does not remark on it, one recent account of twentieth-century productions may also suggest the role played by race – here, notions of “Englishness” – in British productions of Antony and Cleopatra. Constance Benson made “a most difficult character, and one most foreign to English ideas – comprehensible, pathetic, fascinating”; Dorothy Green in  had “a personality too English, and, if I may say so, too correct, for the exotic languors of the East.” In  Vivien 



“Cleopatra as Diva: African-American Women and Shakespearean Tactics,” in Marianne Novy (ed.), Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-visions in Literature and Performance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), pp. –. For a discussion of the difficulties attending contemporary efforts at cross-racial casting, see Angela C. Pao, “Recasting Race: Casting Practices and Racial Formations,” Theatre Survey . (),  –. In Three Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ); here, p. . Subsequent references appear in my text.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Leigh performed “the archetypal English Cleopatra, ‘cold, smooth, pale, and dazzlingly beautiful’.” For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the look of English Cleopatras was formalized “in terms of highly Anglicized notions of wantonness: pale-skinned, frequently redhaired and often clingingly or scantily clad.” This Cleopatra by way of Gustav Klimt announced a set of affiliations and associations with the part which were clearly racial not only in terms of skin color, but also in their resolute exclusion of the possibility of difference, rather than the exploration of dissimilarity to which the text teasingly invites us. These refusals and short-circuits of racial representation in the stage history of Antony and Cleopatra have occurred at least partially within a context of orientalism, which has been characterized as “a praxis of . . . male gender dominance, or patriarchy; the Orient was routinely described as feminine, its riches fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem, and the despotic – but curiously attractive – ruler.” Clearly, notions of Cleopatra’s fatal sexuality and of the mystery of Egypt participate in this orientalizing of the Antony and Cleopatra materials. And yet it seems mistaken to me to read orientalism as being primarily about gender. Orientalism also operates through and produces discourses of region and nationality which, combined with the colonial contexts of many orientalist texts, can well be understood in racial terms. Enobarbus’ description of the magnificence of Cleopatra’s first self-presentation to Antony would certainly fit these criteria; speaking as a traveler to regions far outside his fellow soldiers’ experience, he is able to seize as powerful a hold over their imaginations as he describes her as having done to the assembled onlookers at the River Cydnus. But if Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra fulfills the criteria of an orientalist text, it does so in an unexpected fashion: refusing simply to designate a colonized woman as the object of orientalizing practice, it also extends that practice to the putatively Roman hero, Antony. The historical Antony was apparently 

 

Richard Madelaine (ed.), Shakespeare in Production: Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge University Press, ), cites an  review on Benson, p. ; a  review on Green, p. ; and a  review on Leigh, p. . Madelaine, Shakespeare in Production, p. . Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Francis Barker et al. (eds.), Literature, Politics and Theory (London: Methuen, ), p. . On orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra, see John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge University Press, ), esp. pp. –. Mary Nyquist, “ ‘Profuse, Proud Cleopatra’: ‘Barbarism’ and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism,” Women’s Studies  (), argues the operation of early modern processes of “orientalization and domestication” () in representations of Cleopatra. Ania Loomba, “Shakespeare and Cultural Difference,” in Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares, vol. II (London: Routledge, ), esp. pp. –, –, discusses the intersection of ideologies of gender with those of colonial conquest in Antony and Cleopatra.

Sex, race, and empire in Antony and Cleopatra



thoroughly Hellenized, drawing on his family’s traditional descent from Hercules as he modelled his public appearances in Rome on the eastern style – “his cassocke gyrt downe lowe uppon his hippes, with a great sword hanging by his side.” This sartorial extravagance was, perhaps, only the physical manifestation of a personality which rejects the austere self-containment that the triumphant Octavius will develop into the “high Roman fashion” (..). Indeed, Shakespeare’s play delights in confusing the firm gender categories on which orientalist practice relies to establish its domains of master and subordinate. Just as the question of Cleopatra’s skin color remains open, on two occasions observers confuse her with Antony. Cleopatra remembers outdrinking Antony and dressing him in her “tires and mantles” as she “wore his sword Philippan” as part of their erotic play (.. –). Philemon Holland’s translation of Plutarch’s “Of Isis and Osiris” provides some discussion of this fluid gendering of the divine queens of Egypt and its cosmological origins: Egyptian authorities “name the Moon, mother of the world; saying, that she is a double nature, male and female: female, in that she doth conceive and is replenished by the Sun: and male, in this regard that she sendeth forth and sprinkleth in the air, the seeds and principles of generation.” In many of the materials associated with Antony and Cleopatra, gender is open rather than closed. Lucan’s Pharsalia is the Silver Age account of the Roman civil wars which climaxed in Caesar’s defeat of Pompey at the battle of Pharsalus and in Caesar’s affair with Cleopatra, then struggling for dominance in Egypt against the forces marshaled by her brother and co-ruler, Ptolemy. The Pharsalia is deeply troubled by Cleopatra’s lack of submission to 



 

From Plutarch’s Life of Marcus Antonius in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, Compared Together by that Grave Learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarke of Chæronea, tr. Sir Thomas North (London, ), p. . For more on Antony’s Hellenism, see Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, pp. –, and Linda McJannet, “Antony and Alexander: Imperial Politics in Plutarch, Shakespeare, and Some Modern Historical Texts,” College Literature  (),  –. North’s Plutarch reports how Antony made habits which would have been intolerable in other men – such “as to boast commonly, to jeast with one or other, to drinke like a good fellow with every body, to sit with the souldiers when they dine, and to eate and drinke with them” – seem positively lovable (p. ). On Antony’s non-Roman personality, see Cynthia Marshall, “Man of Steel Done Got the Blues: Melancholic Subversion of Presence in Antony and Cleopatra,” SQ  (), –. At ..–, Enobarbus mistakes Cleopatra for Antony, and at ..–, Octavius reads a dispatch from Alexandria that Antony “is not more manlike than Cleopatra.” The Philosophy Commonly Called The Morals written by the learned philosopher Plutarch of Chæronea; tr. out of Greek into English, and conferred with the Latine translations and the French, by Philemon Holland, nd ed. (London, ); here, p. . Subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in my text.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

the law of patriarchal control, far more than is Shakespeare’s play. Her liaisons with Caesar and Mark Antony – simultaneously intimate and civic, and initiated by herself on her own behalf – were seen as flouting the structure of gender relations on which Rome’s righteous difference from Cleopatra’s decadent east was seen to rest, as we have already seen in the case of Daniel. Lucan explores at length the question of what it meant to be Roman, and how this definition is caught up in race, history and region as well as gender. Thomas May’s seventeenth-century translation of the Pharsalia prefaces its account of Caesar’s ultimate triumph over Pompey with a scene of Caesar surveying the ruins of Troy, thus plainly orienting itself in relation to the master narrative of empires won and lost, of civilizations in conflict, of the necessity of firmly opposing matters of love and matters of war. Identifying himself as “The greatest heire of all Iulus race,” Caesar raises an altar to the ruins’ mute evidence of Rome’s heroic ancestry and vows that if Troy’s shades will “Prosper my course,” thankefull Rome shall raise Troyes walls againe, your people Ile restore, And build a Roman Troy.

Almost immediately after making this vow, Caesar receives the gift of Pompey’s head, draped in an Egyptian mantle; King Ptolemy of Egypt, Pompey’s ally and brother-in-law, has sold him to Caesar in exchange for his help in maintaining his own throne. The power of his own myths of origin and historical destiny thus initially seem dominant over any possible competing Egyptian design, but he is proven wrong, in Lucan’s view, by the evidence of his affair with Cleopatra, which occupies most of the poem’s tenth and final book: Our Capitall she with her Sistrum scarr’d, With Ægypt’s base effeminate rout prepar’d To seize Rome’s Eagles, and a triumph get Ore captiv’d Caesar; when at Lencas fleet It doubtfull stood, whether the world that day A woman, and not Roman should obey. (Book : S)



Lucan’s Pharsalia: Or The Civill Warres of Rome, betweene Pompey the Great, and Julius Caesar. The whole tenne Bookes. Englished by Thomas May (London, ); here, book , R. All subsequent citations will be provided parenthetically in the text. May was obviously fascinated by the conflict between Rome and Egypt. Not only did he translate the Pharsalia, but also wrote an original seven-book continuation of the epic which took readers up to Caesar’s assassination, and a play, The Tragedy of Cleopatra Queene of Ægypt (acted , printed ), which explored Cleopatra’s suicide.

Sex, race, and empire in Antony and Cleopatra



In Lucan’s formulation of the fateful impropriety of Caesar’s love, “woman” is syntactically opposed to “Roman,” and not to “man”: for all practical purposes, “Roman” means “man,” or at least did before Caesar’s fateful encounter with Cleopatra. Here, gender anxiety is opened to include not only Cleopatra’s womanhood, but also Egyptian and Roman manhood. Cleopatra’s lavish court culture in effect disrupts the identification with fathers’ unforgiving labor which was the hallmark of the republican period, suggested here by Caesar’s pious impulse at the sight of Troy’s ruins. In May’s Lucan, gender helps make the role of “racial” difference in this imperial conflict between Roman and Hellenistic value visible. Indeed, Lucan often seems convinced that all the delicate political maneuvering designed to let Egypt enter the forming empire while saving its rulers’ Ptolemaic face is a desperate compromise destined to result in the erosion of Roman value: We let thy Isis in Romes temples dwell, Thy deify’d dogs, and sorrow causing bell: Osiris, whom thou shewest, while thou weep’st, A man; our god in dust thou Ægypt keep’st. (Book : P)

Political expediency had sometimes dictated that the natural order should be overthrown and men placed in a subject position to women, as English history had demonstrated, but at least obedience to great “Eliza” had not entailed worship of such an obvious and overblown sexual ripeness; rather the contrary. Nor had subjection to the rule of England’s exemplary Eliza, so determined to resist the importunings of male suitors, threatened national sovereignty as Caesar’s obsession with Cleopatra threatened Rome’s identity as the conquering male in the imperial bond. Lucan’s Cleopatra is as sexually alluring as Daniel’s and Pembroke’s, but with a major difference; she is a sexual agent, one whose sexuality is allowed to speak cultural as well as gender difference from the helplessly fascinated Caesar. He is aroused despite himself by Cleopatra’s distinctly un-Roman view of the union between sexual and imperial projects embodied in her marriage to her brother. Caesar, May notes, maintains 



On parallels between the legends of Cleopatra and of Elizabeth I, see Keith Rinehart, “Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and England’s Elizabeth,” SQ  (),  –, and Theodora Jankowski, “ ‘As I am Egypt’s Queen’: Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and the Female Body Politic,” Assays  (),  –. Keith Hopkins, “Brother-Sister Marriage in Roman Egypt,” Comparative Studies in Society and History  (), –, notes the wide occurence of sibling marriage in pre-Roman Egypt



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

enough control over himself to realize that granting Cleopatra political authority in Egypt would be disastrous to Rome’s own best interests there, But beauty pleades, and that incestuous face Prevailes; the pleasures of a wanton bed (Book : S) Corrupt the judge.

Just as Lucan’s Cleopatra owns her sexualized cultural difference in a way that is suppressed in the closet versions, Roman history also allows Cleopatra’s sexuality an imperial dimension which is absent from Pembroke’s text in particular. In Lucan, Cleopatra invites Caesar to a rich feast, where the bounty of Egypt is summed up and made available in her body, as she carelessly allows glimpses of her “snowy breasts” through thin garments “Wrought, and extended by the curious hand/Of Ægypt’s workmen.” Caesar rises to this bodily bait, whose availability teaches him “The riches of the spoiled world to take” (Book : S). Here, as in Dryden, the spectacle of an Egyptian glamour which is explicitly opposed to a more disciplined Roman style is produced through the mesmerizing whiteness of parts of Cleopatra’s body. Patricia Parker has argued that Renaissance travel narratives link the Petrarchan motif of the blazon to “the tradition of opening the ‘bosom of nature’ to view,” so that “the language of the feminized new land, opened to its developer” contains echoes of an apparently distinct poetic tradition of describing and anatomizing women’s beauty. As we have seen, May’s Lucan has already addressed Caesar’s imperial potential, through the mention of his putative Trojan ancestry. Dryden and especially May unearth the imperial stakes in Caesar’s and later Antony’s Egyptian sojourns through their gendered looks at Cleopatra as an object of sexual and cultural display. But the looks of May’s Caesar at his Cleopatra are dazzled rather than dominant; her sexual authority over Caesar brings into sharp question the extent of Rome’s mastery over Egypt. In Lucan’s account of Rome’s first African encounters, Roman conquerors are shown in the act of civilizing and making productive the unnatural barrenness of Libya, “Barren in all that’s good,” and yet sprouting monsters where the venom from Medusa’s severed head dropped onto it. It took the Romans to show “The Mauritanian men” how to make use of their sole natural resource, 

and suggests that the practice only came to an end “under the double impact of Roman law and Christianity,” () some years after the events were dramatized in Antony and Cleopatra. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen, ), p. .

Sex, race, and empire in Antony and Cleopatra



their country’s rich forests of “Citron wood”; until the Romans arrived, the Mauritanians had been “contented with the shade” (Book : Q). One race of men here easily masters another and the fruits of their land, but Cleopatra is somehow so intimately attached to her Egypt that she and it together form one white-skinned emblem of an entire “spoiled world.” This sense of a special link between Egyptian queens and the land over which they ruled appears in other accounts of the country besides Lucan’s. “Of Isis and Osiris” bases its analysis of Isis’ place in Egyptian cosmology on her love for her brother and mate, Osiris. After Osiris, the chief god of Egypt, was murdered and dismembered by their half-brother Typhon, Isis found and reassembled the scattered pieces of Osiris’ body, all except for his penis, which Typhon had thrown into the river Nile. Isis fashioned him another member, “called Phallus, which she consecrated”; she built a temple wherever she found a part of his body, eventually burying his reassembled body in a special coffer and venerating it in commemorative ceremonies. Plutarch’s interpretation of this myth holds that the waters of the sacred river Nile represent Osiris’ seed, and “the body of Isis is the Earth or land of Egypt,” () made fruitful by the river’s annual flood. Isis and Osiris were also identified with the moon and the sun, so that she also became the patron of the fertility of human women. Egyptians believed that during the new moon, Osiris lay buried in his special coffer, that the gaiety and civility he embodied were gone from the earth. As the moon waxed full, it provided proof that Isis had conquered the power of death through her special love, that she had conceived and was growing in pregnancy. As the special goddess of this pregnant moon, Isis both governed the mortal world of change and depended on the lovemaking of her brother and mate to fulfill her cosmic destiny. Plutarch characterizes her as “the feminine part of Nature,” who has “an infinite number of names” (). The goddess Isis and the Egyptian queens who identified themselves with her were worshipped as the “mother of the world,” () capable of bringing order and wholeness out of chaos and pain. The mysterious 

 

For discussion, see Michael Lloyd, “Cleopatra as Isis,” ShS  (), –; Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), pp.  –; Adelman, Common Liar, pp. –; and Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, pp. –. p. . All subsequent citations will be provided parenthetically in the text. Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra, pp. –; and Jan Quaegebeur, “Cleopatra VII and the Cults of the Ptolemaic Queens,” in Cleopatra’s Egypt, pp.  –, discuss the ways in which the queens of Cleopatra’s line publicly represented themselves as divine.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

fruitfulness of the landscape and of Shakespeare’s queen who bodies it forth – his Agrippa memorably informs us (..–) that Cleopatra “made great Caesar lay his sword to bed./He ploughed her, and she cropped” – rehabilitates the African soil on which the imperial contest between Rome and Africa played itself out. Shakespeare’s play accomplishes this reformation through recourse to a mythological tradition which not only assigns cosmic authority to a woman, but which locates that authority in a spiritual construction of her sexuality which lay clearly outside any construction available under terms of a more conventionally patriarchal culture. It is precisely this mystical bond between queen and landscape, this female and foreign sovereignty over valuable territory, which John Fletcher works to disestablish in his prequel to Antony and Cleopatra, The False One (c. ). In his play, Cleopatra is perhaps the false one of the title, willing to sacrifice her virginity to Caesar in order to secure her position on the Egyptian throne. It is well known, she confides to her guardian Appollodorus, that Caesar is both “amarous” and vain enough to pursue a queen even if she lacks personal beauty: He loved Eunoe, A More, deformed too, I have heard, that brought No other object to inflame his blood, But that her husband was a King . . . 

This Cleopatra (whose skin color we are never told, but who is at least not a Moor) pretends to yield to Caesar’s passion – “I must, you are a conquerour” () – even though she has orchestrated the entire seduction and exults in an aside that “The conquerour of the world will I lead captive” (). 





In George Sandys’ A Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. . Foure Bookes. Containing a description of the Turkish Empire of Ægypt, of the Holy Land, of the Remote Parts of Italy, and Ilands Adjoyning, th ed. (London: ), Antony is interestingly as connected to the landscape as Cleopatra is. “In the tenth and eleventh yeare of Cleopatra,” Sandys writes, “it is by Writers of those times for a certaintie affirmed, that the Nilus increased not; who two yeares defect, prognosticated the fall of two great Potentates, Cleopatra, and Anthony” (p. ). Gary Miles, “How Roman Are Shakespeare’s Romans?” SQ  (), argues that as the Roman empire grew in power and influence, “[a] new language and vocabulary had to be found by which to communicate the stature of the new breed of aristocratic statesman. The Romans found this new vocabulary in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean with its long history of royal dynasties,” including the Ptolemies of Egypt (). As does Antony’s Hellenism, this Roman appropriation of eastern style points to how much cultural interplay actually existed between Rome and the east, in striking opposition to Antony and Cleopatra’s apparent interest in establishing Rome and Egypt as binary opposites. I cite The False One in Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen. Never printed before, And now published by the Authours Originall Copies (London, ); here, p. . All subsequent references will be provided in my text.

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

Cleopatra’s sexual agency and political ambition in Fletcher are familiar from other tellings of her tale, but where The False One departs from the tradition is in the divorce it effects between the queen’s sexuality and the territory she insists on claiming for herself. Realizing that he is still king of Egypt at least in name, her brother Ptolemy stages a masque designed to rouse Caesar’s love of grandeur and, presumably, to remind him of whose hands actually control the riches of Egypt. His advisers warn him that to open Egypt’s treasures to Caesar’s view may tempt the conqueror into pushing Ptolemy himself off his throne, but Ptolemy is willing to take the chance that Caesar will instead decide to work through him in order to gain authority in Egypt. Although his stalwart lieutenant Sceva reminds Caesar that when they saw “such visions” of bounty “In Gaul, and Germany,” they “stood not to admire ’em, but possesse ’em,” () Caesar is still overwhelmed by Ptolemy’s presentation: “Tell me/From whence comes all this wealth?” (). Far from manipulating Caesar into serving her own political ends as she does in May’s Lucan, Fletcher’s Cleopatra is without resource as she must wait to be rescued from renewed fighting. His Caesar appears like a paternal avenger to comfort a Cleopatra who flatters him that she cannot imagine that “nature e’re made a woman,/That in her prime deserv’d him” (). For his part, he will take her to Rome, “where Caesar/Will shew he can give Kingdomes, for the Senate,/(Thy brother dead) shall willingly decree/The Crowne of Egypt, (that was his) to thee” (). In Antony and Cleopatra, of course, Cleopatra “has never been to Rome, and is stubbornly determined to die rather than be enslaved and taken there” (Duncan-Jones, ). Fletcher’s prologue advertises that his play will present an aspect of a familiar story that “the Stage yet never knew” (). If his play departs from the growing tradition of Antony and Cleopatra tales by placing its emphasis on the beginning of his queen’s romantic career rather than on the familiar climax at Actium, The False One also skirts the questions of female sovereignty and racial difference which so unsettle May’s Lucan and other versions of the legend. This Cleopatra is determined to have her royalty recognized and respected, but she claims no special hieratic privilege and indeed is not so demonstrably different from the Romans, although she does not consider herself to have anything in common with Caesar’s discarded lover, the “More” Eunoe. To return to Shakespeare’s possibly “blacke” Cleopatra after seeing the conjoined places occupied by “race” (in its cultural and geographic senses), gender, and imperialism in other accounts of Roman Africa and Egypt is, I hope, to be readier to accept that it matters that she is, through her own declaration, physically different from her Roman lover(s). A

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

different color would only augment the gender and sexual incomprehensibility she already possesses elsewhere in the legend. (Dryden’s Ventidius declares that having attempted to persuade Antony to forsake Cleopatra has been like having “wash’d an Ethiope,” ...) That Antony and Cleopatra are bound together across lines of race as well as of imperial purpose further illustrates the infirm status of the Roman identity for which Octavius lays down the guiding assumptions in the play, and to which the Hellenism of the historical Antony was perceived to pose such a potent threat. My view of Antony and Cleopatra thus holds out for transcendence. I believe the play is finally so convinced of the cosmic import of Cleopatra’s racial difference from the Romans that it cannot be bothered to be consistent about her skin color. Its view of what her race means is so large as to render mere consistency of physical description irrelevant. Her fluctuating color is of a piece with the double gender Plutarch ascribes to the queen-goddesses of Egypt: a performative announcement of her royal prerogative. But Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry (), which takes up events occurring after Antony and Cleopatra’s suicides, is far more interested in racializing its story so as to fix moral and sexual meanings, rather than in intimating the alternative order which fosters the changing bodily descriptions of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Mariam, daughter of the Maccabean dynasty displaced by the Romans who planted Herod on the throne of the Jews, is aware of the distinction between Herod, a descendant of the converted Idumean Jews, and her own bloodline. She hurls this distinction at Herod’s sister Salome: Thou parti-Jew, and parti-Edomite, Thou mongrel: issu’d from rejected race, Thy ancestors against the Heavens did fight, And thou like them wilt heavenly birth disgrace.

Mariam’s sense of race powerfully includes distinction within the Jews, rather than developing only from perceived difference between the Jews and others. It also, and equally importantly, insists on a moralized difference between Mariam and other women. Besides being a member of a “mongrel” race, Salome is also impatient with the social custom which keeps her bound to a husband she no longer desires. Although the right to bring a bill of divorce is reserved to men under Mosaic law, 

I cite the edition by Barry Weller and Margaret Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); here, .. –.

Sex, race, and empire in Antony and Cleopatra



Salome will “be the custom-breaker: and begin/To show my sex the way to freedom’s door” (..–). Just as she set aside her first husband to marry Constabarus, she’ll divorce him in order to marry her new love, the Arabian prince Silleus: “I mean not to be led by precedent./My will shall be to me instead of law” (..–). Constabarus, her present husband, is confused and shocked by her affair and by her plan to take the law into her own hands, experiencing her behavior as a violation of her racial and cultural obligations: Oh Salome, how much you wrong your name, Your race, your country, and your husband most! (..–)

Although Mariam’s marriage to Herod has been unhappy, she is still capable of feeling guilt over her joy at hearing the false rumor that he is dead: “Hard-hearted Mariam, at thy discontent/What floods of tears have drench’d his manly face!” (..–). Bound to a man she can only despise, she is nevertheless aware that she has been derelict in offering Herod the devotion that women owe their husbands. Oddly, Mariam and Salome mirror each other in their contempt for their husbands and unhappiness in their marriages. While at least one other critic has noted this mirroring effect, she reads it only in terms of gender: “Salome functions as the female grotesque who both demonstrates the dangers of Mariam’s analogous passions and saves Mariam from the severe censure that she herself absorbs.” But what we are also seeing is another instance of how a racially marked woman (as opposed to the apparently race-neutral Mariam) is brought forward for that singling out and moral censure, as in the case of Marston’s Zanthia and Sophonisba. Salome’s moral otherness manifests in, and is articulated by, her racial inferiority to Mariam. When Salome urges Herod to carry out the death sentence he has pronounced on Mariam, he wildly rejects her persuasion: Yourself are held a goodly creature here, Yet so unlike my Mariam in your shape That when to her you have approach`ed near, Myself hath often taken you for an ape. And yet you prate of beauty: go your ways, You are to her a sun-burnt blackamoor: Your paintings cannot equal Mariam’s praise. (..–) 

Marta Straznicky, “ ‘Profane Stoical Paradoxes’: The Tragedie of Mariam and Sidneian Closet Drama,” ELR  (), .

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

I offer a fuller discussion of Renaissance ape lore in my chapter on Southerne’s Oroonoko, but here, I will stop at noting the significance of “ape” in terms of Salome’s surrogacy for Mariam. Salome’s deceitful beauty is only skin-deep, the product of her use of cosmetics, or “paintings.” Next to Mariam’s possession of the authentic article, her crude approximation of beauty is as obvious as “sun-burnt” skin would be in conjunction with whiteness. Mariam’s true beauty – her whiteness, which is implied but not clearly stated – remains invisible, part of the “natural” world. In comparison with the multiple practices of racial naming in Antony and Cleopatra, Mariam’s practice is narrowed and normalized around the familiar binary oppositions – in this case, female virtue and female vice – which Shakespeare’s play undermine. Doris, Herod’s first wife and mother of his son Antipater, is bitterly aware of the advantage that Mariam’s beauty gave her over Herod’s quick affections, so that she feels herself to be a member of a separate branch of the race of women. It has been nine years “since Mariam’s purer cheek/Did rob from mine the glory,” (..–) she tells her son, asking in sorrow and anger, “Was I not fair enough to be a queen?” (..). Kim Hall has forcefully argued that early modern vocabularies of beauty are in fact color-coded, so that notions of beauty can be seen to have a racial content. The equation of beauty with fairness – in Cary’s title, Mariam is the “Fair Queen of Jewry” – does more than bias notions of beauty toward Petrarchan whiteness, however. In Cary’s play, the beauty-fairness equation also works to the detriment of Cleopatra, the absent presence who functions to clarify the nature of Mariam’s moral distinction. During the events that Mariam dramatizes, Cleopatra was the mistress of Antony, Herod’s patron who sponsored him as king of the Jews after the establishment of the triumvirate. As the play opens, Mariam’s mother Alexandra bitterly regrets that after Antony was led to realize that his sexual interest in her son Aristobulus was politically ill-advised, she lost 





On the implications of cosmetic use in the Renaissance, see Frances E. Dolan, “Taking the Pencil Out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England,” PMLA  (), –. Alexandra Bennett, “Female Performativity in The Tragedy of Mariam,” SEL  (), –, is also relevant to a consideration of Salome’s inauthenticity in the play, although she does not discuss assumptions of racial disguise. Here, I follow Dympna Callaghan’s important article, “Re-reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry,” in Hendricks and Parker (eds.), Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing, pp. –. See two discussions: Kim Hall’s “Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender,” SQ  (), –; and her “ ‘These Bastard Signs of Fair’: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds.), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London: Routledge, ), pp. –.

Sex, race, and empire in Antony and Cleopatra



the opportunity to secure her family’s future when the triumvir settled on Cleopatra rather than on Mariam as the next object of his lust. If he had only seen Mariam’s portrait first, Alexandra says, “He would have lov`ed thee, and thee alone, / And left the brown Egyptian clean forsaken” (..–). However “brown,” this Cleopatra was also possessed of a surpassing allure to which Mariam’s beauty nonetheless proved superior: That face and person that in Asia late For beauty’s goddess, Paphos’ queen, was ta’en: That face that did captive great Julius’ fate, That very face that was Anthonius’ bane, That face that to be Egypt’s pride was born, That face that all the world esteem’d so rare: Did Herod hate, despise, neglect, and scorn, When with the same, he Mariam’s did compare. (..–)

Mariam tells her mother she would rather be dead than purchase her family’s survival and success by becoming Antony’s mistress, but her declaration of moral rigor is accompanied by this vaunting competitiveness with Cleopatra. Alexandra apparently doesn’t feel that her daughter’s sleeping with Antony would have been too high a price to pay to avoid admitting the inferior Herod to their family, Salome dismisses her claims to lineal superiority by saying that everyone is equally descended from Adam and Abraham, and Doris curses Mariam for having “robb’d” her of “the glory of my life” (..): none of the other women who come in contact with her is as convinced of the value of Mariam’s fair distinction as she is. And yet, Mariam’s fairness, dismissed or disputed by other women, is insistently produced through contrast with the sexual and physical darkness of Cleopatra, the “Egyptian blowse,/Or Aethiopian dowdy” (..–) who got to Antony before she could. In a sense, Herod suggests, Mariam has been too beautiful and sweet for her own good: If she had been like an Egyptian black, And not so fair, she had been longer liv’d: Her overflow of beauty turn`ed back, And drown’d the spring from whence it was deriv’d. (..–)

In Cary’s play, the dark and unchaste Cleopatra is Mariam’s foil, allowing her to shine all the more steadily through Herod’s wild emotional oscillation and beside Salome’s cold self-interest. Perhaps responding to,



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

but certainly rejecting, the variety of tones Shakespeare sounds for both Antony and Cleopatra, Cary confines the Egyptian queen to a single identity. The lustful luxury she shares with Antony strongly differentiates her from Mariam, but also from the character as she is drawn in Pembroke and Daniel. If Pembroke rehabilitates the value of Cleopatra’s affair with Antony, and Daniel affirms her possession of enough moral consciousness to mourn her sexual transgressions, Cary’s Mariam makes a different use of the legend. “Black,” “brown,” a “dowdy,” a “blowse,” Cary’s Cleopatra shadows her heroine, in much the same fashion as the casting of black actresses as Iras has been used to highlight the presence of white English Cleopatras in productions of Shakespeare’s play. Writing within the class and gender settings of closet drama, writing to vindicate her claims to authorship and intellect, Cary – as Pembroke already had – gives the Cleopatra story a white heroine because the alternatives would have been too threatening to the circumstances which allowed these women to write at all. White heroines from early modern female authors emphasize the propriety of their authorship, the affiliation of their speaking voices with dominant racial cultures, even as they may be disputing the sway of dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. If The False One seeks to tame Antony and Cleopatra by undoing the bond between Cleopatra’s person and the Egyptian landscape, thus reducing the scope of the implications of her sexuality and making it more dependent on Caesar’s favor for its political effects, Mariam answers Shakespeare by inscribing a fixed sense of racial identity into its story of life after Actium. Salome defies the divorce laws and her brother veers wildly between hating Mariam and wanting to save her life because of the impure racial descent they share as siblings. While the racially pure Mariam is both beautiful and conscious of her obligations as a woman and a wife, she possesses no designs on the throne of Judea, even though she is a survivor of the last pre-Roman dynasty. This whitened Mariam’s lack of political ambition – a renunciation of the world Cary’s heroine holds in common with Daniel’s and Pembroke’s – contrasts with the worldly machinations of the “brown Egyptian,” Cleopatra. Antony and Cleopatra imagines a very different relationship between race and public authority. Cleopatra’s deliciously offhand allusion to her 



Black Irases include Josette Simon in the  Royal Shakespeare Company production, Cassie McFarlane in the  BBC “Shakespeare Plays” series, and Susie Lee Hayward in the – RSC season in Stratford and London. On women in Renaissance closet drama, see Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), pp. –.

Sex, race, and empire in Antony and Cleopatra



sexual power in the passage with which this chapter begins and the story of racial origins it engenders negates the patriarchal and dynastic terms under which Renaissance classicists conceived of Rome’s “right” to empire, denying colonialism’s (hetero) sexual and masculinist constitution. The dark skin Cleopatra identifies as the result of Apollo’s rough sexual play was most commonly reported as the result of a cosmic accident, when the chariot of the sun and the mighty winged horses which drew it veered out of their normal course under the poor management of Apollo’s half-mortal son Phaeton. The Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch is typical: the unruly horses “note the vulgar people,” and “the bridles are the stay of governement.” Resolute rulers should “spare the whip, reine them hard.” Phaeton’s sad story “to the life presents a rash and ambitious Prince . . . altogether unfit for goverment; which requires mature advice, and supernaturall knowledge.” The horses he is too weak to control “are the common people, unruly, fierce, and prone to innovation: who finding the weaknesse of their Prince, fly out into all exorbitancies to a generall confusion.” Phaeton’s presumption in imagining he could drive his father’s horses is a prime example of the “madnesse” resulting from the arrogance of the well-born; the “ruling of men, or guiding of a Kingdom, is ars artium, and a worke of no lesse difficulty then the ruling of Phoebus his charriot.” In order to rewrite the origin of her dark skin as the result of an intentional coupling between herself and the sun god, Cleopatra erases Phaeton; only Phoebus has determined her color and racial identity, and only by his loving touch. Cleopatra’s information that a god’s desire for her and not some misfortune lies at the heart of the observable facts of racial difference refutes the authoritarian applications of the myth and recasts the place of female sexuality and agency in Roman productions of 



 

Sir Thomas Browne devotes chapter  of Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London, ) to an inquiry into the causes of the color of black people’s skin, and discusses the weaknesses of the Phaeton story as a reliable explanation at length. If the sun was in fact the cause, moving away from the equatorial regions might be expected to have some effect on dark skin color, but “Negroes transplanted . . . into cold and flegmaticke habitations continue their hue both in themselves, and also their generations, except they mixe with different complexions” (p. ). Nevertheless, “having . . . at least made dubious” the proposition that the sun is the “Author of this blacknesse,” Browne is forced to admit that “how and when this tincture first began is yet a Riddle, and positively to determine it surpasseth my presumption” (p. ). I will cite subsequent references parenthetically in my text. Abraham Fraunce, The Third part of the Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch: Entituled, Amintas Dale (London, ; rpt. New York: Garland Books, ), p. . The Phaeton-Apollo story appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book . George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphoses English’d (Oxford, ), pp. , . Alexander Ross, John R. Glenn (ed.), Mystagogus Poeticus, Or The Muses Interpreter (London, ; rpt. New York: Garland Publishing Co., ), p. .



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

the imperial process. Her spontaneous myth of origins also sets aside the patrilineal basis of the activity of making empires (“heire of all Iulus race”), since she tells of an irregular union without issue. Instead of a story about why concentrating power in the hands of one strong authoritarian ruler is best, Cleopatra links her race to a story about masculine desire and masculine surrender. When Antony installs Cleopatra, her son by Julius Caesar, and “all the unlawful issue that their lust/. . . hath made between them” (..–) as rulers of Lower Egypt, refusing the value of the marriage of state with Octavius’ sister, he refuses as well the authority of a precisely defined patriarchal “family” as an authorizing model for the conduct of public life. Dryden’s confrontation between Cleopatra and Octavia speaks for this virtuously republican and bourgeois ideal. Shakespeare’s Octavius tries and fails to honor the ties between Roman men through the use of women – first Octavia, then, after Antony’s death, Cleopatra. To include Cleopatra in his triumph would be to announce his defeat not only of the alternate, feminized order Antony and she tried to establish in Egypt, but also, perhaps, to distance himself from the power of his own identification with the man he regarded as his “brother,” his “competitor,” his “mate in empire” (.., ). Regarding Antony both as his sturdily homosocial “brother” and as his more ambiguous “mate,” Octavius’ grief and determination after Antony’s death suggest how subject to flux the play’s apparently stable gender and racial hierarchies actually are. Defeating Cleopatra and obliterating the proof of her power over Antony closes Egypt’s tantalizingly open formulations of race and gender identity by firmly delimiting a masculine and unitary Roman body of state. Cleopatra’s death and transumption to another plane of being is undertaken in conscious spite of the Roman masculinist order. The degree to which she succeeds in proclaiming the value of her lineage and her sexuality in creating a world that is independent of and opposite to Rome 



In contrast, see Antipater’s insistence to his mother that Herod and Mariam’s children “are but bastards” and might justifiably be murdered: “So we may be advanc’d, it skills not how” (.., ). Plutarch’s Life of Mark Antony reports that after the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, their various children were disposed of according to Roman imperial design. His eldest son by his first wife Fulvia was executed by Octavius, perhaps to forestall the power of filial identification among the Romans; Octavia raised his children by Cleopatra and married their eldest daughter to the king of Mauretania. Octavius married his daughter to Octavia’s son Marcellus by her first marriage; Octavia married one of her daughters to Caesar’s most trusted lieutenant, Agrippa, and then, after Marcellus’ death, persuaded him that his own daughter should be remarried to Agrippa, setting her own daughter aside in order to do so. Preserving the bloodline of her birth family, the Octavians, was obviously of highest priority to Antony’s widow.

Sex, race, and empire in Antony and Cleopatra



is perhaps nowhere indicated as strongly as in Antony’s heartbroken reaction to the false news of her death in Act Four. Calling his manservant Eros, he vows to follow her: I come, my queen. – Eros! – Stay for me. Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand, And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze. Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, (..–) And all the haunt be ours.

This invocation of the legend of Dido and Aeneas shows Shakespeare in the act of unwriting the masculinist and homosocial certainties of epic, as well as the determinedly domesticated and private sphere of closet drama. Dido, who committed suicide out of the forlorn realization that her love could find no lasting place in Aeneas’ dynastic heart, will be superseded by Cleopatra, whose death for love will compel admiration even among the shades in the underworld, and whose sacrifice will be rewarded with her married lover’s eternal devotion. In this way, Antony and Cleopatra, more perhaps than any of the other Renaissance texts of African queens, alters the patterns of gender and racial dominance these texts reproduce. This Cleopatra’s Roman lover is led by his love for her into a denial of the power of one of Rome’s founding legends and all its burden of racial and sexual discipline; in an allusion as offhand as Cleopatra’s explanation of her dark skin, he will refuse as well the foundational significance of racialized cultural conflict to the construction of a recognizably Roman identity. 

See Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –.

CHAPTER



Dido and Sophonisba of Carthage: marriage, race, and the bonds between men

At the end of Antony and Cleopatra, I suggested, Antony’s invocation of the Aeneid works to affirm that his and Cleopatra’s story can be understood as undermining the places of racial and cultural conflict in the founding legend of Romanitas. The two of them will have re-imagined the ending of meetings between east and west, conqueror and client state, male and female. Such an act of cultural will has necessarily required them to construct “new heaven, new earth” (..) as the ground for this transmutation, a new world which will recognize the erotic as the most powerful engine of human and national destiny. But in this chapter, I turn to the myth Antony invokes at the moment of his suicide as a way of revaluing the meaning of his life and death. Versions of Rome’s founding legends, and particularly of the places occupied in them by women and ideas of their racial and sexual duty, are not as malleable as Antony wishfully pronounces them at the end of his life. My readings of some of these texts of Roman origins suggests instead that looking back to Rome’s beginnings reinforces the bonds of gender and of race that Antony and Cleopatra can be glimpsed in the act of attempting to “melt” (“Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch/Of the ranged empire fall,” ..–). The arch of empire in these stories depends on carefully policing sexual and cultural borders, so that looking backwards from Antony and Cleopatra to the myths that Antony would overturn by an act of imaginative will produces a kind of tragic nostalgia for what has not been, and can never be. In Book Six of The Aeneid, Virgil’s hero – steeled in his duty by the revelations of the oracle of Apollo, and having appeased the ever-vengeful gods through sacrifice – is granted entrance into hell. There, he experiences visions which work to reconsecrate his sense of his imperial fate. But among these visions, which culminate in his father Anchises’ revelation to him of the order of the Alban and Roman kings who will spring from his seed, is the sight of the shade of his late mistress Dido. 

Dido and Sophonisba: race and nation



He sees her “in shimring shadow darke and thin:/Much like, as after chaunging new whan prime doth first begin,/Men see, or thinke they see, that doubtfull moone in cloudes above.” In tears, he vows “By all the Gods” () that he deserted her against his will, that he had not realized that his departure would so devastate her as to cause her to take her own life. But Dido is no more moved by his obvious grief and remorse than a “mountaine rocke” () would be by a blast of wind. Her eyes “fixed fast . . . on ground with louring looke,” () she flees, with her “spitefull minde,” () back into the shadows where the shade of her loving husband Sichaeus awaits her. Weeping still, Aeneas pursues her, but encounters only the shades of dead Trojan heroes. In this moment of the poem, Aeneas’ glorious future and his tragic past collide. Indeed, they are linked here through that “shimring” shade of Dido, whose love – which he now admits he returned – was not strong enough to sway him from his ordained path. In the shape of Dido, who will neither acknowledge his pleas nor even meet his eyes, Aeneas encounters a conundrum: his Roman and imperial identities will emerge, the Cumaean Sybil privileges him to see, from the void created by her refusal to allow him to touch her heart. His persistent grief and Dido’s denial of closure are somehow implicated in his achievement of Romanitas, as the immediately succeeding vision of his fallen Trojan brothers-in-arms suggests. In this sense, Dido and her Carthage are firmly located in Aeneas’ accomplishment of his mission. This uneasy coupling of Rome with Carthage is initiated in Book Four, where Dido, on the verge of suicide, pronounces a desperate curse on Aeneas and his destiny, imploring her people to show unceasing “despite” to his lineage: Whan dead I am, let never love not league betweene you bee. Than of my bones arise there may some impe revenger fell, That shall the Trojan clownes with force of fier and sword expell. (:, –)

A sixteenth-century Aeneid offers the marginal gloss on these lines that “Of her came Hannibal that after plaged Rome”: Hannibal’s battles against Rome in the Second Punic War (– BC) are thus seen as a fulfillment of Dido’s curse. It is the goddess Juno who, out of her settled  

I cite The ‘Aeneid’ of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne, ed. Steven Lally (New York: Garland, ); here, : –. See John Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), pp. –.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

hatred for Rome, creates Hannibal as a “man of blood” and invests his dreams with visions of “battles still to come”; when he was a child, his father Hamilcar Barca “sowed war with Rome in the boy’s heart.” These epic sanctions of a fated conflict between Rome and Carthage would seem to preclude inquiry into the possible racial or cultural dimensions of such a struggle, precisely because it is regarded as a fulfillment of divine or supernatural will. And yet at least one classicist has argued that, in addition to pointing toward the formation of Aeneas’ imperial identity, the appearance of Dido and other spectral Carthaginians in Roman epics may also point to the formation of an ethnic identity. Carthage and Dido insistently appear as that which is not-Rome, that against which a distinctively Roman self is formed – both on the battlefield, as classical accounts of the Punic Wars against Carthage maintain, and in legend, in competition with the Roman invocations of Troy as a legend of origins. The war with Carthage thus emerges as a kind of Roman national trauma, one deeply implicated in the development of an “imperialist ideology” precisely because what it places at stake is the triumph of one or another coequal and competing histories of imperial triumph. The city founded by Dido eventually becomes a direct competitor of Rome for worldly glory, stirred into “a frenzy for war” by the sight of “Rome lifting her head high among aspiring cities, and even sending fleets across the sea to carry her victorious standards over all the earth” (Punica, : ). That the ghost of Dido appears to Aeneas on the eve of the fulfillment of his destiny once again invokes the tormenting possibility that his triumph cannot ever be whole and single, but is shadowed by Dido’s competing myth of origins even after her death. 

  

 

The Punica of Silius Italicus was translated by Thomas Ross in . I cite the Loeb classical edition, tr. J. D. Duff (London: William Heinemann, ), : , . All subsequent citations will be provided parenthetically in the text. Marcus Wilson, “Silius’ Punica,” in A. J. Boyle (ed.), Roman Epic (London: Routledge, ), pp. –. Ellen O’Gorman, “Return of the Living Dead: Carthage and Roman Identity,” paper delivered at the  meeting of the American Philological Association. Dido, known as Elissa or Elisa in stories which concentrate on her role in establishing Carthage, was a native of the Phoenician city of Tyre, a great city in the east founded “the yere before the destruction of Troye,” according to Thabridgment of the histories of Trogus Pompeius, Collected and wrytten in the Laten tonge, by the famous historiographer Justine, and translated in English by Arthur Goldyng (London, ); f. . Her origins, like Aeneas’, are thus as contextualized by the story of the fall of Troy as the story of Rome’s founding is contextualized by the previous foundation of Carthage. O’Gorman, “Return of the Living Dead,” p. . Ralph Hexter’s important essay, “Sidonian Dido,” in Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden (eds.), Innovations of Antiquity (New York: Routledge, ), pp. –, discusses the competing traditions surrounding her character which Virgil reworked and transformed in the Aeneid. Hexter remarks that Virgil’s “Dido is not ‘one’ or the ‘other’ but ‘multiple”’ (p. ).

Dido and Sophonisba: race and nation

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As a way into thinking about how representations of African women figure in Renaissance narrations of Roman history, “shimring” Dido offers a powerfully suggestive model of the provisionality of imperial authority and of the partiality of narrative containment. Renaissance retellings of her story dilate on the implications of her difference from Aeneas – her womanhood, her origins in the east and in her claimed land of Carthage – to suggest how her race matters in their doubled tales of imperial destiny. For Dido is as much a founder as is Aeneas, her tale of dynastic marriage, escape, and colonial conquest offering several points of connection with that of the founder of Rome. Elissa/Dido was the daughter of the king of Tyre, who left the kingdom to his son Pygmalion and married his daughter to Sychaeus, a priest dedicated to the worship of Hercules. At the old king’s death, the slaves “made a conspiracye among themselves, and killed all the fre borne people with their maisters also” (Trogus Pompeius, ); in this civil unrest, Pygmalion also murdered Sychaeus, causing his sister to flee. In the Punica, this escape from tyranny is seen as a point of connection between Dido and Hannibal, who is descended from one of the Phoenicians who fled the collapsing country with her. Hannibal’s father, his unreasoning hatred of Rome spurred by Juno’s wrath against the line of Aeneas, teaches him to vow that when he is of age, he will “pursue the Romans with fire and sword and enact again the doom of Troy” (Punica, : ). Her escape also foreshadows that of Aeneas from Troy, Aeneas who, in his turn, will only achieve his own imperial destiny through his denial of her dignity as “foundress” (Punica, : ). Elissa begins her journey with landfall at Cyprus, where she and her followers see the local custom of having unmarried girls earn their “marriage money” (Trogus Pompeius, ) through prostitution. Her response as leader is to command “her men to ravishe fourskore or theraboutes that wer virgins . . . to the entent her younge men might have wives, and the city increase of issue” (Trogus Pompeius, ). As was the case of its fated enemy, Rome, Carthage’s posterity is assured through an act of imperial rape. The rape of the Sabine women was seen as a foundational moment for a distinctively Roman national identity, an identity which viewed marriage as one of its most significant institutions. The 

Gary B. Miles, Livy: Reconstructing Early Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), discusses the Roman historian’s distinctive treatment of the myth of the rape of the Sabine women, pp. –. In his comparison of the rape of the Sabine women to the abduction of the Cypriots’ daughters, Stephen Orgel, ed., The Tempest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), alludes to an “imperial mythology, in which rape is essential to the foundation of empire” (p. ).

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

“increase of issue” for the benefit of a “city” which has not yet been formally founded functions similarly in the legend of Dido, whose men – like the Romans – seize the women of another culture in order to accomplish their own colonizing purposes. And yet, although she presumably approves of the rape of the Cypriot virgins, Dido cannot directly participate in it. Her followers rather act as imperial surrogates for her, accomplishing the sexual acts which will enable the peopling of newly claimed territory, sexual acts from which Dido has withdrawn herself following the murder of her husband. She was moved to escape not only the collapse of social order in Tyre, but also her evil brother’s designs against her, Trogus informs us. It is not quite clear whether these designs include incestuous rape or even the elimination of Dido as a political rival through some kind of forced marriage. At the account of Sychaeus’ murder, the margin of Goldyng’s Trogus notes that he was Pygmalion’s “uncle being also his brotherin-law,” () as though both the blow Pygmalion strikes against family ties, and the tangled state of his family relationships, seemed worthy of note. What is clear, however, is that Dido’s marital fidelity becomes a prime element in the growth of her legend. The Punica tells us that the statue of her the Carthaginians erected depicts her “seated, at last united forever to Sychaeus” (: ); in the passage of the Aeneid with which I began, she rejoins the shade of her dead husband in the underworld. While neither accepting or rejecting the rumors, George Sandys translates an epigram from Ausonius which goes so far as to hold that Dido Troys Æneas never saw; nor bore The Ilian ships unto the Lybian shore: But flying outrage and Iarbus . . . By death secur’d [her] spotlesse chastity.

The “Iarbus” here is the king of neighboring Mauretania who, having heard of Elissa’s extraordinary accomplishments at Carthage, is determined to have her for his wife. According to Ausonius and other readers of Virgil, Dido commits suicide to escape this sexual threat and preserve her chastity, not in grief or anger at having been deserted by her Roman lover.  

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses English’d, p. . Also see George Turbeville’s Songs and Sonets (London, ), whose Dido insists, “wandring Duke of Troie” never “knewe” her or even visited “Lybie lande,” and that she killed herself “to save my Sheete of shame/Wherein good Sychaeus wrapped me” (p. ).

Dido and Sophonisba: race and nation

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To be sure, marriage – to Lavinia, by whom he will father a race of future kings – is also part of Aeneas’ destiny, one he must survive another round of brutal battle in order to fulfill. But Dido’s representation as a kind of shadow double for Aeneas splits around this issue. The only sanctioned union for Dido was the one arranged by her father to Sychaeus, to whom she is determined to remain faithful. Such protestations as Ausonius’ in effect deny that this dutiful daughter and wife would be capable of seizing control of her own sexuality to the extent of giving herself in “filthy lust” (Aeneid, :) to her new love, Aeneas. Epic works here to uphold the exchange of women between men as a principle of social order. Aeneas only has to fight to claim his destined bride because Juno sows wrath against him in the heart of her mother, Amata; he and Lavinia’s father, Latinus, met and agreed on the betrothal. The Romans could take the Sabine women by force, as Dido’s followers took the Cypriot virgins, as an expression of their cultural and dynastic superiority. In refusing Iarbas, Trogus’ Dido refuses to make use of her sexuality without the sanction of paternal order. But her refusal also suggests something about the role of racial difference in the construction of the sexual commodity that matters so crucially in the business of building empire. Iarbas’ ambassadors present his offer of marriage to her in the crafty way which is after the nature of Afres, declaringe that theyr kynge demaunded some personne, that could learn hym and his Afres more civill manners and trade of lyvynge, but he could fynde none that would vouchsafe to forsake his owne kinfolke, to go among such barbarous people that lived after the manner of brute beastes. ()

The Afres present their plan – “craftely” () – as a civilizing project, invoking the kind of colonizing activity Dido wishes to initiate after being forced to flee from Tyre’s breakdown of social and possibly sexual order. But the kind of sexually mediated civilizing services Dido’s Phoenicians have already performed on the bodies of the Cypriot virgins can apparently succeed only with culturally subordinate women: Dido, Aeneas’ shadow, can claim women and territory, but she herself cannot be claimed – at least, not by Iarbas’ Moors. Rather than being given into a culturally necessary or paternally approved relation with an equal, Dido would here be taken against her will, “whether she would or not” (). Her response in Trogus is to have herself burned on a funeral pyre made “to pacify the ghoste of her fyrst husbande,” () a gesture which, more than merely affirming the subordination of female sexuality to male disposition, also – and crucially – affirms the subordination of

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

female sexuality to the disposition of the right kind of males. What makes Iarbas and his “Afres” the wrong kind of men to deserve Dido is their origin in an inferior race, one lacking the coequal imperial identities of Dido’s Carthaginians and Aeneas’ Romans. The nature of Dido’s sexuality and its role in settling Carthage is defined by her refusal to give herself into sexual congress with Iarbas, into an unworthy miscegenation with a member of a lesser race. Iarbas’ Moors, then, constitute a third term, one outside the binary of east and west that marks the tensions between Tyre and Carthage, or Troy and Rome. They are a racialized wild card which confounds the progress of civilization – or recivilization – that has become Dido’s mission. In The Masque of Blacknesse, Niger gracefully surrenders his ownership of his daughters, eliminating the troublesome figure of a competing black father from the masque’s performance of the triumph of white and royal masculinity. In Dido’s story, Iarbas and his troops represent a threat which is not so easily disposed of, which – in the absence of an alternative white father or husband – can only be escaped by suicide. Iarbas’ planned use of Dido’s body in what he presents as his nation’s progress toward civility reverses her soldiers’ seizure of the Cypriot virgins, since there is no assumption that his mission is as socially or patriarchally sanctioned as is her own. The allusion to Dido in Shakespeare’s Tempest also bears these burdens of racial prohibition and dynastic necessity. As the Neapolitan party attempts to recover from the disaster of a shipwreck which has – or so they believe – taken the life of King Alonso’s heir, Ferdinand, Gonzalo declares that “Not since widow Dido’s time” has Tunis been “graced . . . with such a paragon to their queen” as it is now in the marriage of Alonso’s daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis (.., ). Ill-tempered Antonio immediately challenges him: “Widow? a pox o’ that. How came that widow in? Widow Dido!” (–). Antonio could well be expressing scorn for Gonzalo’s credulous acceptance of Dido’s moral innocence; for him, Dido is the lustful woman whose uncontrolled desire led her into an illicit affair with Aeneas, not the comparatively chaste widowed queen of Ausonius and other commentators. He transposes this Virgilian contempt for Dido, a queen who forgets her dignity by daring to dispose of her own sexuality in defiance of the bonds of dynastic duty, onto Alonso’s decision to give his daughter to Tunis. If not for having had to go to Tunis to behold the spectacle of his sister “loose[d] to an African,” Sebastian tells Alonso, Ferdinand would still be alive (). The Norton Shakespeare and the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare both gloss the word “loose” here as “lose,” which may not fully capture

Dido and Sophonisba: race and nation



the range of early modern meanings this word could contain. Thomas Thomas’  English-Latin word list defines the Latin desero as “to leave or forsake, to let fall, and give over: to betray, to faile, to loose.” His understanding of the Latin amitto is “To suffer to depart: to loose: to send: to let passe: to forgive: to take or cast awaie: to let go: to be destitute of,” while he reads destituo as “To forsake, leave, faile at a neede, or disappoint one: to cause to lack, to break promise, to loose or unbinde.” The notion of loosing thus occurs to Thomas in the context of broken faith, rejection, and abandonment, a context which is clearly appropriate to the Dido reference at the beginning of the scene. To “loose” Claribel by sending her out of “our Europe” () into Africa is to deliver her into the kind of unbridled appetite which “widow Dido” – in one tradition – refused to indulge with an exogamous mate, and which in another she recklessly pursued, to her own abandonment and death. Sebastian and Antonio’s sarcastic iteration of the phrase “widow Dido” (, ) would underline this association of the Carthaginian queen with a civically dangerous sexuality, one whose destructive path could have been reversed if only Alonso had taken care to marry his daughter off somewhere closer to home. Now, with Ferdinand apparently dead, Alonso’s bloodline will disappear into that of the King of Tunis, the authority of a European father over a daughter’s sexuality superseded by that of her new African husband. Gonzalo mildly rebukes Sebastian that his remarks to the grieving Alonso “lack some gentleness,” but he also characterizes those remarks as “The truth” (). Only Ferdinand’s miraculous preservation and his eventual marriage to Miranda will finally banish the fear of Naples’ erasure (an erasure performed when white women take black men for their lovers) by reviving its patriarchal inheritance. Dido, as I have suggested, doubles Aeneas, at least until the moment when she refuses marriage, and perhaps even into that moment, since as a “foundress” she must act – as Aeneas acts when he fights to uphold his right to marry Lavinia – in accordance with her mission to build a new civilization. The importance of the legitimate exchange of women in this building process is emphasized, in Dido’s story, by her refusal of marriage to a free agent like Iarbas and her choice to remain faithful to the husband her late father chose for her. Pius Aeneas, so conscious of his duty as father and son, receives Lavinia from her father. And yet both Romans and Phoenicians feel free to seize the women they need without going through this process of negotiation and exchange: the men 

For further discussion of Claribel’s significance in the play, see Marjorie Raley, “Claribel’s Husband,” in MacDonald (ed.), Race, Ethnicity, and Power, pp. –.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

from whom they take these women are somehow outside the circuit, unrecognizable as men, as subject to the will of these colonizing races as the women will be subject to their new husbands in marriage. Dido proves herself exemplary among women by her refusal to be possessed outside the circuit of patriarchal exchange, the opposite of the Cypriot virgins who eliminate the middleman and trade themselves to gain their own ends. In these stories about Dido, marriage becomes the defining medium through which patrimony is preserved, paternal authority reproduced, racial purity proclaimed. These stories’ dynastic marriages make sharp distinction not only between watchful fathers and properly subordinate daughters, but also between men who are either appropriate or inappropriate recipients of paternal recognition. In these tales of empire, this difference between orders of men is constituted within race. Another strand of the tangled history of Rome and its barbaric opponents involves another Carthaginian woman, Sophonisba, and another set of Roman warriors. If my identification of foundress Dido as African seems somewhat provisional – she was from Phoenicia (modern-day Lebanon) in the east, and came to the site of Carthage, in modern-day Libya, only after being forced out of her home – then Sophonisba, the daughter of the Carthaginian warlord Hasdrubal and niece of Hannibal, is a native of the continent. But her story, as recounted in Petrarch’s epic of the Second Punic War, the Africa, does not regard the body of this African woman as a crucial site for the enactment of racial difference and imperial mastery, as Dido’s decision to remain chaste exempts her from the designs of Iarbas’ deceitful “Afres.” Instead, racial identity is displaced from the body of a woman to the bodies of men, specifically the sexually desirous bodies of Sophonisba’s Numidian husband Syphax, of Massanissa, the Carthaginian prince who is an ally of the Romans but who loves her, and the chastely self-disciplined body of the Roman hero Scipio Africanus. Sophonisba figures in the account of Scipio’s eventual triumph over the Carthaginians, but at second remove, as she disappears into a first-order narration of conflict and resolution between men. These men’s emergence as Roman and not-Roman is made possible through their various reactions to her disturbingly sexual presence. Her lack of agency and subjectivity in these narrations appears in tandem with the racing of Scipio, Syphax and Massanissa. The disappearance of this African woman into whiteness – in Petrarch, Sophonisba’s blonde “locks . . . formed . . . a frame for her slim, graceful neck – /a peerless, milk-white column, sweetly rising” – and silence occurs within a fiction of masculine

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Dido and Sophonisba: race and nation

unanimity. Sophonisba’s whitening may thus be an effect of the epic’s understanding of the roles of men’s races in the assertion of empire. In Book V of the Africa, Massanissa, a Libyan prince who supports the Romans in their offensive against Carthage, falls desperately in love with Sophonisba, who is already married to Carthage’s ally King Syphax of Numidia. Touched by her pleas for protection from the Romans, Massanissa marries her despite the fact that Syphax is still alive. As the Romans seized the Sabine women and Dido’s Phoenicians took the Cypriot virgins, Massanissa here claims Sophonisba: in the exercise of a superior right to her, because of the power of his love. And yet, because of the prior relationship between Massanissa and Scipio, Rome’s representative, Massanissa’s cultural title to her is not clear. He is as subordinate to the Romans as the Romans intend the Carthaginians to become. Scipio rebukes him for so rashly yielding to passion in terms which can be seen as providing a set of instructions for the erection of a conqueror’s identity. “In my hands,” he tells him, “I firmly hold the reins of pleasure’s lures” (): To vanquish Syphax is a glorious thing, but doubt not it is greater to put down the strong emotions raging in the heart and hold tight reins on the intemperate soul. ()

Massanissa’s vulnerability to Sophonisba’s appeal disrupts the compact which has been tentatively established between the Roman general and Libyan prince. The precipitate marriage inappropriately asserts his own authority, an authority he has surrendered in entering into his client relationship with Rome; and he knows it. Sophonisba is also aware that she has violated the rules governing the exchange of women among men: Before her eyes all trembling she called up death and tombs. No respite came in dreaming; there she saw herself reft from second spouse, the first () voicing reproachful taunts. 



I cite the only modern English-language edition of Africa, translated and annotated by Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), here p. . All subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in the text. Fully aware of “the purity of heart/and lofty spirit of the Roman chief,/he cannot doubt that Scipio will oppose/his passion” ().

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Later Renaissance texts about Sophonisba subtly alter the balance Petrarch draws between Sophonisba’s pleas for help at the siege of Cirtha and Massanissa’s vulnerability to his desire for her. One author, for example, excoriates him for the openly “foolish and shameful devise” of marriage to the wife of Rome’s enemy. Here, the imprisoned Syphax, of all people, disgustedly tells Scipio that Massanissa “more madly, and with lesse temperaunce hath received her, then ever I did.” Massanissa apologizes for his error, characterizing Sophonisba as a “madde and pestilent furie” whose “inticement never ceased, till shee had turned” his “heart and minde from his olde friendes the Romanes” (: ). The Romans are not Massanissa’s “friends,” except perhaps in the Renaissance sense which invested the term with an understanding of the mutual aggrandizement to be gained from the relation. His passion for Sophonisba is dangerous because it causes him to forget the terms under which he entered into his clientage. In this account of the Romans’ and Carthaginians’ fight for dominance, the nature of imperial surrogacy is different from that which appears in the story of Dido’s founding of her city. Just as Iarbas’ lust for Dido is insupportable within her story’s unfolding of her identity as “foundress,” Massanissa’s desire disrupts the provisional re-establishment of the imperial alliance between the Romans and their Massyllian clients, breaking the tentative chain of masculinist interest binding them together in successful mastery of Carthage’s more explicitly racialized hostility toward Rome. Another way of putting this might be to say that in the triangulated conflicts between Romans, Massyllians, and Numidians, gender solidarity between Roman and Libyan men is employed to overwrite racial conflict between Romans and Numidians. The relationship, in any case, depends on an assumption that Massanissa and Scipio share a common interest as men when in fact that commonality can only be maintained through Massanissa’s continual acts of submission to Roman authority. Renaissance translators of Roman historians, however, readily read Sophonisba’s story as an example of racially broken faith between men. Holland’s Livy informs us that Massanissa responded to Sophonisba’s initial pleas not only with “mercy and compassion, but also (as all the kind of these Numidians are ful of love, & have no stay of their wanton 

The History of two the most noble Captaynes of the World, Anniball and Scipio: Of their divers battailes and victories, exceeding profitable to reade. Gathered and translated into English out of Titus Livius, and other Authors, by Antony Cope, Esquire (London, ), here, chap. , f. . All subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in the text.

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lust) a conquerour otherwise though he were, yeelded himselfe prisoner to the love of his captive.” His decision to marry her is not merely the culpable but emotionally inevitable failing it is in Petrarch, but also more explicitly an indictment of Scipio’s judgment of Massanissa’s character as well: “Moreover to aggravate these matters, and make them seeme more foule and shamefull, Scipio knew full well, that Massanissa . . . was enamoured upon the lovelie beautie of any captive woman” (). In Petrarch’s telling of these events, Scipio acts with foresight to protect the captive Numidian women from exactly the kind of sexual depredations that, according to Livy, Massanissa is helpless to prevent himself from committing. Thus, Petrarch’s first Renaissance telling of Sophonisba’s role in the Second Punic War rarefies Livy’s prior historical account of what the story may have suggested about racialized conflict – and not raceless unanimity – between men, perhaps in order to accomplish Petrarch’s goal of revivifying the ancient glory of the Italian race. Marston’s Jacobean Sophonisba is allowed to achieve greatness through her willingness to die in order to remain faithful to her true love Massanissa – he helps her commit suicide rather than be given to the Roman general Lelius – thus substituting love for the notions of sexual and dynastic honor which makes Dido view union to Iarbas as a fate worse than death. Thomas Nabbes’ Hannibal and Scipio (performed ) less literally employs a nonwhite woman to emphasize the moral uprightness of its hero, Scipio. Nabbes’ play, however, produced in the neoplatonic Caroline afterglow of a Jacobean patriarchal imperative, is ultimately more interested in idealizing cross-cultural bonds between men than it is in producing a morally whitened heroine (although, to be sure, Nabbes’ Sophonisba is white-skinned, her brow adorned with “golden curles”). It forcefully deflects any possible cultural or racial conflict between Romans and Numidians or Romans and Carthaginians through the employment of discourses of masculine homosociality. Nabbes’ play opens with Hannibal – whose face is “tann’d” to a “swarthy vizard,” but only by “age and cares” (B) – advocating a return to battle against the Romans as the main antidote to the sexual 



The Romane Historie Written by T. Livius of Padua . . . Translated out of Latine into English, by Philemon Holland (London, ), here, p. . All subsequent citations will be provided parenthetically in the text. As a Roman historian, Livy would have been fully aware of the presence of Africans, generically designated “Ethiopians,” in the expanding Roman world; see Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity, pp.  –. Hannibal and Scipio. An historicall tragedy. Acted in the yeare . by the Queenes Majesties Servants, at their private house in Drury Lane. The author Thomas Nabbes (London, ), E. All subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in my text.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

desire which would otherwise sap all his energy. Despite this initial emphasis on martial conflict, love and not politics or war determines the nature of emotional bonds in Hannibal and Scipio. For example, in this play Sophonisba’s love for Massanissa predates her marriage to Syphax, which comes about only when Hannibal gives her to Syphax in order to secure his loyalty to the Carthaginian cause: the MassanissaSophonisba marriage, which is so transgressive in Petrarch, is here entirely unconnected to Massanissa’s allegiance to Rome. These alterations eliminate Petrarch’s emphasis on Sophonisba’s status as a disputed object of exchange between Roman and Numidian men. What emerges as a clearer interest is what heroic men have in common, despite the technicalities of allegiance which may apparently separate them. The place where Roman and Carthaginian heroes begin to build bonds of admiration between them, with Roman Scipio standing in the tutelary role, is the figure of a beautiful Spanish captive that Scipio initially wants for himself. Now, no one is really black in Nabbes’ play. Even his Hannibal is only “tann’d”. I would suggest, though, that the blackness that is evacuated from the figures of Hannibal and Sophonisba, blackness which symbolizes their cultural distance from and (Hannibal’s) opposition to Rome, is gestured at in the Spanish girl’s primitivism. That she is Spanish may itself be an oblique reference to Moorish control over that country, a control whose foundations were laid during the Punic Wars and was only ended with Ferdinand and Isabella’s fifteenth-century expulsion of the Moors from a newly unified Spain. Even after the expulsion, the new Spain founded a new Carthage, its New World city of Cartage˜na, as if to proclaim by this new city’s prominence as a trading center that the threat to western racial and religious hegemony mounted by the Carthaginians, and after them by the Moors, had been conclusively erased from history under the dispensation of a new empire. The sense of difference erected here between Scipio and the Spanish girl may have nothing to do with skin color, in the resolutely whitened universe of Nabbes’ play, but everything to do with culture. For all Scipio’s attraction to her, the Spanish girl is somehow uncivilized, as he immediately perceives:  

Here, see Margo Hendricks, “Managing the Barbarian: The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage,” RenD  (), –. I have no idea of the kinds of stage conventions that would have governed the appearance of a stage “Spanish girl” (the role was played by a man or boy, one Ezekiel Fenn) and whether these might have included some kind of darkening of the skin or texturing of the hair. Would there have been something about the Spanish girl’s appearance that may have gestured toward a kind of carefully contained racialized cultural difference in the same way as Hannibal’s suntan might?

Dido and Sophonisba: race and nation



Nature hath in your yet imperfect beauty Shew’d wonders to the world: you are th’epitome (H verso) Of her most curious labours.

This natural and exotic (“curious labours”) beauty is the native of “a barbarous country, where civility/Hath scarce a name” (H verso). If she were taken to Rome, he assures her, she “shall be taught/Civility of manners.” After a proper education there furnishes her “minde in ornaments of vertue,” and she matures a little more, “Romane Knights” will “court” her: “Perhaps my selfe would take you to my bed” (H). All the efforts of Rome’s civilizing mission would here apparently be focused on transforming her from an uncivil barbarian into a polished courtesan. To be sure, Scipio denies that creating the perfect mistress would be the aim of this civilizing process; in a backward country such as her own, she would never be appreciated for any reasons other than the ones immediately apparent “when they rudely gaze/Upon your forme, and by the sense distinguish/The outward workmanship” (H verso). In Rome, by contrast, We teach our soules A glorious conversation with those vertues That deck the inside of a beauteous frame, And vary pleasures, honours, earths delights To th’imitation of that infinite (H verso) And never dying part.

Even as he confesses his attraction, Nabbes’ Scipio does not forget the power of his civilizing mission, one which can work not only on the dazzled Spanish captive – “I ne’re heard/Of such fine things before,” (H verso) she replies weakly to a particularly passionate lyric declaration of the “Delights” (H) which await her in his Roman bed – but on Massanissa, his client prince, as well. Scipio’s surrender of the Spanish girl to the prior claim of her rude fianc´e teaches Massanissa how to sublimate sexual desire, as well as imperial difference, to the cause of uniting men in pursuit of moral excellence. What elsewhere is presented as the main action of Sophonisba’s suicide, undertaken to salvage Massanissa’s honor among the Romans, is in Nabbes’ play sandwiched between examples of great heroes – first Hannibal, then Scipio – renouncing the claims of love in order to pursue war. After Hannibal drinks poison rather than be taken alive by the 

After a long history of invulnerability to women’s beauty, Hannibal is struck in the first act by love for a woman with whom he vows to “people the wasted world with Warriours,” (C verso) but leaves even her to plan a way of securing Syphax’s loyalty to Carthage.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Romans, Scipio decides to retire from public life, disgusted by Carthage’s “base ingratitude” ( J) to its great hero and convinced that a life “free from mens flatteries,/And feare of their leane envie” ( J verso) is the noblest course. With a Hannibal who is a white man with a suntan instead of a black African, Nabbes’ play deflects the challenge to Roman hegemony represented by the historical Hannibal in favor of a renewed emphasis on noble Scipio’s generous empathy with his competitor. Nabbes also displaces racial difference onto a less redoubtable figure in the imperial contest, the female Spanish captive whose lack of civility may implicitly associate her with Moorish barbarism. This woman, the object of Scipio’s desire – a desire he ultimately resists – becomes the occasion of proof for the power of Roman manhood. An impressed Massanissa allows himself to be tutored in the Roman way: “Passion’s the noble soules worst enemy” (I). If Nabbes tries to minimize the operations of racial difference in likeminded men’s conduct of affairs of state and war, while admitting it into play in putatively sexual relations between men and women so as to demonstrate Roman capacity for rule and self-rule, Nathaniel Lee’s Sophonisba, Or Hannibal’s Overthrow () is less successful in stabilizing the political implications of women’s races long enough to invest them with masculine political capital. Lee’s Massanissa, in explaining his passion for Sophonisba (here, as in Nabbes, a passion that predates her marriage to Syphax), reveals that there are in fact two kinds of African women. His nephew Massina knows only of those who “are all black, have rowling eyes,/Thick lips, flat noses, breasts of mighty size,” but Massanissa reveals the existence of a second type which “close in Affrick Palaces reside,/And from the injurious Sun their faces hide” (). Sophonisba, “a fair white Woman,” is for the lovesick Massanissa a representative of this second type: Though clear her form appear’d, without one stain, Bright as those Bodies which o’re darkness reign () Her Soul is blacker then the skin of Moores.

By thus dividing African womanhood, Lee’s play complicates Marston’s relatively simple moral opposition between white women and black ones. In Lee, even white women are not necessarily white through and through, and so can be only unreliable indices of men’s possession of civic probity. 

Sophonisba, or Hannibal’s Overthrow. A Tragedy, Acted at the Theatre-Royall, By their Majesties Servants. Written by Nathaniel Lee (London, ), p. . I will provide future references parenthetically in my text.

Dido and Sophonisba: race and nation



The intraracial hybridities represented by Massanissa’s acknowledgment that some of Sophonisba’s sisters are not white (and that she, in some sense, may be “all black”) sabotages Nabbes’ employment of sexualized racial difference as a measure of the possession of masculine political authority. A more consistently closed late marshaling of race and gender in the celebration of the emergence of a recognizably Roman ethos of selfmastery can be found in Joseph Addison’s Cato (). While the main plot of Cato describes this republican hero’s defense of ancient Roman liberty against the depredations of the ambitious tyrant Caesar (its republican sensibility made the play a great favorite in colonial America), its closely related subplot portrays the ethical conflict endured by Juba, the republic’s Numidian client prince, who doubts that his admiration for Cato’s selflessness can be honorably reconciled with his romantic love for Cato’s daughter Marcia. Indeed, although he finds her beautiful, Juba is at least as attracted to Marcia because of her similarity to her father – “Cato’s soul/ Shines out in everything she acts or speaks” – as he is because of her own merits. Syphax, here a Numidian general who led the troops supporting Pompey and the republican cause against Caesar’s victory at Pharsalus, points to the racial loyalties which he feels ought logically to distance Juba from Cato and the Romans: Gods! where’s the Worth that sets this people up Above your own Numidia’s tawny Sons! Do they with tougher Sinews bend the Bow? Or flies the Javelin swifter to its Mark, Launched from the Vigour of a Roman arm? Who like our active African instructs The fiery Steed, and trains him to his Hand? Or guide’s in Troops th’embattled Elephant, (–) Loaden with War?

Juba, however, dismisses martial skills and physical endurance as the product merely of “Ignorance and Choice,” as more appropriate to “the Brute” than to “the Hero” he believes Cato to be (). 



On the Restoration breakdown of belief in the ideology of royal phallic authority, see James Grantham Turner, “Pepys and the Private Parts of Monarchy,” in Gerald Maclean (ed.), Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration (Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. On Lee’s generally conflicted views of masculine prerogative and Roman authority, see Victoria Hayne, “ ‘All Language Then is Vile’: The Theatrical Critique of Political Rhetoric in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus,” ELH  (), –. I cite Cato. A Tragedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, By Her Majesty’s Servants. By Mr. Addison (London, ), here, p. . I will provide all subsequent citations parenthetically in my text.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Cato thus portrays a “bad” African, Syphax, and a “good” one, Juba. It does not replicate the thinking of some earlier Sophonisba narratives, refusing to believe that all Numidians “have no stay of their wanton lust,” for example, as does Holland’s Livy. In a manner markedly different from Nabbes’ Hannibal and Scipio, however, Addison’s Cato directly implicates a consciousness of racial difference between men (instead of between men and women) in the political crises it dramatizes. For Juba, choosing to follow Cato means choosing to reject the “Numidian Wiles” () he believes are his sad birthright. If he and Syphax remain loyal to Cato, they can “purge away/Our Country’s Crimes, and clear her Reputation” (). If Cato seeks military aid among other African nations, the combined “swarthy Hosts would darken all our Plains,/Doubling the native Horrour of the War,/And making Death more grim” (). His love for Marcia is perhaps an instance of the inbred “Weakness” () that keeps him from achieving the “Virtue” and “Perfection” () he sees in Cato’s austere example. All these examples are spoken by Juba. He has internalized the consciousness of racial difference to which I refer above; it is a part of how he sees the world, and of what makes him aspire toward the achievement of Roman character. What is odd about the dramatic climax of the play, when the corrupt Roman Sempronius disguises himself as Juba to gain access to Marcia’s quarters, is that the racial difference of which Juba is so aware seems not to register on Marcia – so like her Roman father – at all. Though the real Juba is presumably one of “Numidia’s tawny sons” and thus different in physical appearance from a Roman, Marcia assumes that Sempronius, merely disguised in robes similar to Juba’s, is the real thing: “Juba, the loveliest Youth that ever warm’d/A Virgin’s Heart, Juba lies dead before us!” (). Even when the real Juba, overjoyed at her griefstricken declaration of love for him, reveals himself, Marcia seems not to understand what is happening: “Sure ‘tis a Dream! Dead and Alive at once!” (). I think that at this peculiar moment Cato, after having taken some pains to establish an awareness of the significance of racial difference to the unfolding of its subplot, is demonstrating the appropriation of that sense of difference to the ideals of republican virtue which animate 

Syphax is also aware of the difference between Numidians and Romans, to the Romans’ detriment; when Juba praises Cato’s ability to stand “great and majestic in his griefs,” Syphax sourly dismisses it as “rank Pride, and Haughtiness of Soul,” adding that “I think the Romans call it Stoicism” (p. ). Sempronius, who also desires Marcia, takes pleasure in the thought of taking her by force and thus tormenting “that young, gay Barbarian,” (p. ) but no one else has much to say about Juba’s identity as a Numidian.

Dido and Sophonisba: race and nation



the hero’s principled stand against Caesarism. That is, Juba’s race is raised as an issue in the romance plot so it can become a measure of Cato’s Olympian commitment to duty in the main action of the play. True, neither Marcia nor Cato care that Juba is a Numidian; but the scene of Juba’s “death” indicates that Marcia doesn’t really perceive him as a Numidian, either, which is not quite the same thing. For Cato or Marcia to acknowledge romantic or sexual passion, or the sense of racial grievance which Syphax seeks to incite in Juba, or Juba’s own sense of being marked by his Numidian origins, would require them to acknowledge what has been lost in Cato’s single-minded reading of the republic’s danger. For Juba’s continuing loyalty to Cato and the embattled republic has cast into doubt his own claim on his father’s throne. Before he entered into alliance with Rome, before the rise of Caesar, Juba’s father was a ruler of independent greatness. At Cato’s word, Juba assures him, the “remotest Kings” ruling “Behind the hidden sources of the Nile,” governors of “distant Worlds, on t’other side the Sun” () would rise to his aid, in memory of his father. Cato refuses this offer, concluding that true “Valour soar’s above/What the World calls Misfortune and Affliction” (). He is morally impervious to the mere threat of political peril; but neither will his moral armor let him imagine himself as Reduced, like Hannibal, to seek Relief From Court to Court, and wander up and down, () A Vagabond in Africk!

His sense of his Roman virtue is inextricably tied to his status as a member of a race of conquerors. When Cato sternly tells Juba later in this scene that “It is not now a Time to talk of aught/But Chains, or Conquest; Liberty, or Death,” () as the younger man seeks his blessing in his pursuit of Marcia, his dedication thus arises in part from this sense of imperial entitlement. What cannot be comprehended between the absolute poles of “Liberty” and “Death” – whether it is Juba’s claim to independent status, or the power of love – does not signify to Cato, and is only with some difficulty recognized by the amazed Marcia. I began this discussion by noting the linked places of race and sexuality in legends of Dido and Sophonisba. In some texts, Dido refuses 

Julie Ellison, “Cato’s Tears,” ELH  (), notes the relative lack of critical discussion of race in Cato: “Juba is not erased in contemporary responses to the play as much as he is collapsed into a problem of genre, namely the suitability of romance in the context of tragedy” (). She discusses the play’s use of Africa as a counter in eighteenth-century political debates, –.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

to experience her sexuality outside of her own patriarchally arranged marriage to Sichaeus; when confronted by the possibility of a forced marriage to a Moorish prince, she chooses death, and chastity. In her role as “foundress,” this Dido acccepts and acts upon a conviction of the importance of racial purity to her imperial mission. The Sophonisba tradition alternatively plays with displacing racial difference – as marked not only by the white skin of this new heroine, but also by its fine distinctions between Romans and Numidians – onto gender difference, perhaps particularly the differences between men. Even here, however, the dark women who have been pushed to the edges of the story so it can more securely unfold itself from a more entirely androcentric perspective have a way of remanifesting themselves: in the figure of Nabbes’ Spanish captive, in the physical excess of those black African women who make visible what Massina’s fair love is not. Addison’s Cato readmits racial difference between men to the imperial legend it narrates, but only in a closely policed manner: Numidian Juba is rendered uncomfortable by his own African origins, and those origins are allowed no scope of operation in the present political crisis, despite the role played by Numidia’s allegiance to Rome in that crisis’ inception. Addison’s play thus perhaps culminates a textual tradition in the way it invokes, only finally to contain and deny, principles of racial difference. It does bring the bodies of white daughters and black men into proximity – Juba and Marcia will marry, after the end of the action – but only after the death of the father, and only after the black lover has, in effect, rejected his own racial origins. Even though Cato is dead, the authority possessed by Roman fathers will still hold sway.

CHAPTER



The disappearing African woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn

The second part of this book moves chronologically from the Renaissance to the Restoration, and thematically from discussion of women’s races in texts dealing with the founding of Rome and Rome’s absorption of Egypt into its developing empire to texts concerned with the roles and races of women as actors in English culture. As we have seen, the matter of Rome provided important substance for Renaissance reproductions of the information it presented about gender, its relations to the state, and its placement in history. Stories about Antony and Cleopatra, Dido, and Hannibal were unfolded so as to underline the implications of their concerns with sexuality, gentility, and domesticity, important social terms which in their turn were understood as qualities appertaining to race. While the skin color of all those milky skinned, golden-haired Cleopatras and dark, deceitful “Afres” is reiterated too insistently to be entirely irrelevant to the stories which contain them, racial affinity in these early modern versions of Roman history is just as frequently marked by contrasting or related behavior, particularly marital or sexual behavior. Race becomes a matter of what the English writers and readers of these stories are not, or are not supposed to be. Thus, Octavia’s sorrowful railing against her unfaithful husband and the evil Cleopatra who is “[t]he staine of Egypt and the shame of Rome” (Letter, :) is launched from within her home, the profaned “temple” (Letter, :) of her abandoned bedroom. Most persistently experienced in the realm of the domestic, women’s 

On the coterminous relationship of race and culture, see Walter Benn Michaels, “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity,” Critical Inquiry  (), –. Michaels observes: “It is only if we think that our culture is not whatever beliefs and practices we actually happen to have but is instead the beliefs and practices that should properly go with the sort of people we happen to be that the fact of something belonging to our culture can count as a reason for doing it. But to think this is to appeal to something that must be beyond culture and that cannot be derived from culture precisely because our sense of which culture is properly ours must be derived from it. This has been the function of race” ().





Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

acculturation into race proceeds hand in hand with their production in these texts as wives and mothers. That such figures as Cleopatra, Dido, and Octavia express racial identity from within gender and sexual difference may well suggest that in these early modern texts, emerging into speech and language – see especially the Senecan sententiousness of Daniel’s and Pembroke’s Cleopatras – may be simultaneous with formation inside whiteness. Just as the family is the site where rules of gender are established and maintained through the patriarchal exchange of women, it is also the site where rules governing sexual exchange and inheritance begin to assume their importance as guarantors of racial purity as well as of fatherly authority and social and financial equity. Hence, in Shakespeare’s Othello, Brabantio is perhaps even more distressed that Desdemona has chosen a black man who will degrade his lineage – “cover’d with a Barbary horse,” as Iago threatens she will be, she is committing an act with her husband that will give her father “coursers for cousins”(.., ) – than he is that she has dared choose for herself. As responsive as Brabantio is to the assault on his dignity represented by Iago’s vulgar shouting beneath his windows as Othello begins, Desdemona’s father does not repudiate its specifically racist content. Indeed, he agrees with the characterization of Othello and the runaway match so completely as to wish he’d given his daughter to Roderigo when he’d had the chance. Shared notions of racial purity and propriety unite men so intimately that the social differences between Brabantio and Iago become irrelevant. In the second part of this book, my chapters on Abdelazer, on dramatic adaptations of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and on Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko are all much concerned with this relationship between women, family, and race. Family functions to transmit ideas about race as well as to regulate women’s sexual desires inside marriage, or at least to conceal them behind marriage’s cover. As seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature becomes more clearly produced within the context of Britain’s establishment of an overseas empire supported by the transatlantic slave trade, the removal of dark-skinned women from representation works to support the conception of race as an integral part of one’s cultural identity, as an index to what one was and was not supposed to be. Instead of the relational bond between Rome and Egypt, Mariam and Salome, Octavia and Cleopatra, Dido and Sophonisba, we see more texts which betray no knowledge of the possibility that female whiteness can produce 

See Seshadri-Crooks, “Comedy of Domination,” pp. –.

Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



or be defined by its opposite. White women are differentiated from white men, and among themselves, but the work race has performed for gender has also succeeded in making it difficult for white women to be bound too closely with the subjection of black ones. A second theme in the second part of this book, far more than in the first, will be the work of women writers in the transmission of these joined ideas about race, gender, family, and nation. I will be arguing that in the women’s texts I examine – Abdelazer and Katherine Phillips’ Pompey – approaches to writing race can reveal much about women’s strategies of exercising authorship. In the seventeenth century, English women writers produced both female characters who more consistently conform to the dominant culture’s notions of proper femininity, and non-European characters, male and female, who are more firmly contained and suppressed. Especially in the case of Behn’s Abdelazer, my observations of this joining of majoritarian positions on sexuality and on race strikingly departs from the mood of much recent criticism aimed at reclaiming the literary importance of early modern women writers. Perhaps, as I argued in the opening chapter on the place of Cleopatra in ongoing discussions about the validity of reading racial difference in the ancient world and into the conduct of contemporary knowledge, race still remains a blind spot in our reconstructions of usable historical pasts. At the climax of a mid-eighteenth-century heroic tragedy, the black hero, discovered in a private chamber with the dead body of his white wife, urges the white men who come upon the sight to “Put up your Swords, and let not civil Broils” involve them in his own desperate fate. The play in question is not a version of Othello, as the remark about (bright?) swords and civil broils might at first suggest, but rather John Hawkesworth’s  Oroonoko. Clearly, as Hawkesworth refashions Thomas Southerne’s  dramatization of Aphra Behn’s  novella so as most readily and rightfully to fix “Attention . . . upon the two principal Characters, Oroonoko and Imoinda, who are so connected as to make but one Object, in which all the Passions of the Audience, moved by the most tender and exquisite Distress, are concentrated,” (A verso) he has Othello – a dignified, pathetic, mid-eighteenth-century kind of Othello – in mind. The kind of transaction he conducts with the Shakespearean tragedy, however, ranges beyond establishing similarities of tone. What this revision of Southerne (and beyond him, of Behn) also appropriates is 

John Hawkesworth, Oroonoko, A Tragedy, As it is now Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane . . . By Thomas Southern. With Alterations (Dublin, ), p. . Hereafter, I will refer to this text as “Hawkesworth” and provide all references parenthetically in my text.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

a ready theatrical language for regularizing both Shakespeare’s wild passions and the radical racial and sexual ill-ease occasioned by Oroonoko. Audiences, it would seem, had a ready-made sentimental frame of reference for a miscegenous Oroonoko, but not for one whose enslaved lovers were of the same race. Hawkesworth’s play is only one part of a remarkable constellation of texts originating from Behn’s novella as it entered its eighteenth-century afterlife. In Behn, Imoinda is black like Oroonoko. In Hawkesworth and every other text following Behn, she is white. Only recently has this racial transformation become a subject for extended discussion in the work of postcolonial and feminist critics, primarily in relation to Southerne’s play, where it first occurs. Yet there are several other white Imoindas after Behn, and it is into some of them, rather than solely into Southerne – whose play seems to me so radical a revision and literalizing of the sexual and economic implications of Behn as to require a separate discussion of its own – that I would like to direct my own inquiries. Behn’s Oroonoko, of course, poses the most obvious exception to Lynda Boose’s assertion of the “unrepresentability” of African women in early modern texts. Following Janet Adelman’s psychological analysis of masculine fear of women’s reproductive power in Shakespeare, Boose argues that the reason for the virtual absence of black female characters from this discourse is white and masculine fear that their blackness visibly marks them as the location of that dark place through which men must pass in order to be born as men: “The mother’s part in him threatens the fantasy of perfect self-replication that would preserve the father in the son.” I follow Boose, but consider the possibility that a denial of representation to African women has other rationales than the psychic; or rather, that the psychic is supplemented, articulated, by the material practices of racism. The racial revisions eighteenth-century authors make in Behn – revisions which extend beyond the color of the heroine’s skin to include Behn’s constructions of character and gender identity – are 



See Ros Ballaster, “New Hystericism: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, the Body, the Text, and the Feminist Critic,” in Isobel Armstrong (ed.), New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, ), pp. –; Margaret Ferguson, “Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” in Hendricks and Parker (eds.), Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing, pp. –; and Stephanie Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarc´on, “Oroonoko’s Gendered Economies of Honor/Horror: Reframing Colonial Discourse Studies in the Americas,” American Literature  (), –. Boose quotes from p.  of Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York: Routledge, ), in her own “Getting of a Lawful Race,” p. .

Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



worth examining for what they reveal about the relationships the period established between the social and sexual values and meanings implied by white and black skins, white and black sexual bodies. Historians of Atlantic slavery have only begun recovering the experiences of enslaved African women, detailing how their experiences in bondage differed from and overlapped with those of male slaves. In the interest of extracting as much agricultural work from as many physically able slaves as possible, slaveowners in the American colonies and the Caribbean made no distinction between male and female, putting women to work at the most difficult jobs alongside men: harnessing mules or oxen to steer wooden plows, cutting logs, hoeing and picking cotton, chopping and milling sugar cane. Female slaves mined coal, dug canals, and built railroads, although they seem not to have been depended on to perform in the skilled trades; they were too likely to have been taken away from these essential jobs, too often by the rigors of pregnancy and childbirth. Put to perform men’s work, female slaves were frequently regarded as somehow masculinized, as the reports of many observers of American slavery suggest. While gender was thus not always relevant in distinguishing the work of slaves and masters, slave women’s field work did become a means of racing the female gender. One historian notes that in Barbados after about , black female slaves began to replace indentured white women as workers in the sugar cane fields in a “racially-inspired labour policy” aimed at establishing “the ideology of white racial superiority . . . a long-term attempt to elevate white women and degrade black women.” 





See, for example, Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, – (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ); James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (Washington, D. C.: Howard University Press, ), pp. –; Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, ); and Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, ). Jacqueline Jones, “ ‘My Mother Was Much of a Woman’: Black Women, Work, and the Family Under Slavery,” Feminist Studies  (), reports that one Texas farmer put his female slaves in breeches while they were out doing men’s work, “thus minimizing outward differences between the sexes” (). On the gender divisions which were maintained in slave societies despite this erosion of gender distinction in slaves’ labor, also see Susan A. Mann, “Slavery, Sharecropping, and Sexual Inequality,” in Micheline Malson, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Jean F. O’Barr, and Mary Wyer (eds.), Black Women in America: Social Science Perspectives (University of Chicago Press, ), pp. –; and Davis, Women, Race, and Class, pp. –. Beckles, Natural Rebels, p. . On the implications of race for the gendering of women and their work, also see Davis, Women, Race, and Class: “As the ideology of femininity – a by-product of industrialization – was popularized and disseminated through the new ladies’ magazines and romantic novels, white women came to be seen as inhabitants of a sphere totally severed from the realm of productive work” (p. ).



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

That the labor and social history of African women’s enslavement has, until recently, been scanted in the interpretive record speaks to the requirements of an older historiography of slavery in the Americas – exemplified by the work of Eugene Genovese – which implicitly modeled its understanding of the structure of slave families on that of slaveholding families, held to be at least notionally structured around a benevolent patriarchalism. This domestic historiography of slavery paid small attention to the economic and social roles played by African women in slave communities, but – most crucially, for my interests here – it also contributed to the suppression of knowledge of the extent of female slaves’ sexual exploitation and abuse by the men of their masters’ families, a fearful knowledge which emphasizes the interplay of race, gender, and sexuality in the institutional maintenance of slavery, and the inadequacy of “family” as a structuring framework for understanding it. But the erasure of women’s differentiated experiences in slavery and freedom has not only been a feature in the work of male-oriented historians. Hazel Carby is only one black feminist who has forcefully argued that even feminist analyses which foreground gender above all other sources of social formation for women must inevitably fail to perceive how differently such foundational analytical terms as “family” and “patriarchy” operate within the experiences of white western women and nonwhite women from other parts of the world. Following such insistence on 





Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, ), has as its central thesis the paternalistic structure of white slaveowning families extended to their black slaves, and that blacks eagerly sought to replicate this male-dominated structure for themselves. Hel`ene Lecaudey, “Behind the Mask: Ex-Slave Women and Interracial Sexual Relations,” in Morton (ed.), Discovering the Women in Slavery, pp. –, emphasizes the degree to which the rape and sexual exploitation of slave women has been re-presented as “miscegenation” in much historiography of slavery. In part, she is responding to Genovese, whose interest in recuperating the patriarchal family as a benevolent model for understanding social relations within slavery leads him to view sexual relations between white men and black women primarily as examples of “miscegenation” and not as examples of overt or covert force: “Many white men who began by taking a slave girl in an act of sexual exploitation ended by loving her and the children she bore . . . The tragedy of miscegenation lay not in its collapse into lust and sexual exploitation, but in the terrible pressure to deny the delight, affection, and love that grew from tawdry beginnings” (Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. ). Davis, Women, Race, and Class, quotes Genovese on her p. , but doubts that “there could hardly be a basis for ‘delight, affection and love’ as long as white men, by virtue of their economic position, had unlimited access to black women’s bodies” (pp. –). bell hooks has also characterized the rape and prostitution of slave women as instruments of sexual terror. On the passage from Africa into New World slavery, she writes in Ain’t I A Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, ), “African females received the brunt of this mass brutalization and terrorization not only because they could be victimized via their sexuality but also because they were more likely to work intimately with white families than with black males” (p. ). See “White Woman, Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain (London: Hutchinson, ), pp. –.

Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



historicizing the family as a unit of emotional and sexual, as well as economic production, I begin my own process of reading for the simultaneous and mutually interpenetrating operations of race and gender in the new Oroonokos by unravelling some of the social meanings assigned to, and ideological uses made of, “women” and “family” in the developing racial climate of the early modern period. The domestication of the white Imoinda and her sexuality facilitated the accomplishment of explicitly racial goals. Historians are in increasing agreement about the prohibitions surrounding black women in the colonial societies which were being founded during the early seventeenth century. Legal findings and labor practices busily erected fortresses of distinction between white and black women virtually from the moment that African women first arrived in British America. Each was, in effect, socially produced in relation to the other, and to white men. The first white women and the first Africans both landed in Virginia in . The white women could be purchased as wives by the white men of the colony in exchange for  pounds of tobacco, while the African women could not marry anyone without the permission of their employers. Since African and Indian women quickly came to outnumber white women, interracial marriage soon became common enough that – especially in combination with the increasing substitution of slavery for mere servitude – it became subject to a new tax code in . Under this code, the labor of black women would be taxed at the same rate as that of black men and white men, while the labor of white women was entirely exempt from taxation. A second provision of this law was that white men who married black women would be subject to a new annual tax, while white men who merely cohabited with them would be exempt from taxation. In , the colony reversed centuries of English common law by declaring that all children born there would follow the condition of their mothers rather than of their fathers: white men who fathered children on their black slaves were excused from any legal or moral responsibility, while the children themselves were condemned to a lifetime of slavery. In Virginia, marriage and the family were early defined as racialized spaces. A white man’s entry into any kind of domestic union, except an irregular one, with a black woman was subject to financial penalty. If he had to pay for the privilege of identifying himself as her husband, he was 

Here, I am following Philip Finkelman, “Crimes of Love, Misdemeanors of Passion: The Regulation of Race and Sex in the Colonial South,” in Clinton and Gillespie (eds.), The Devil’s Lane, pp. –; and A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

not legally expected to act as her children’s father at all. Later, a  law criminalized sexual contact between whites and members of other races so severely as to suggest a desire on the part of the state to wipe it out entirely. Under this law’s provisions, any free Englishwoman who bore an illegitimate child by a black man had to pay a £ fine or be indentured to the churchwardens, available to be hired out anywhere in the parish, for a period of five years; her child would be indentured until the age of thirty. According to the same law, if a white person, male or female, married a nonwhite person of any status, the couple would be exiled from the colony. (The punishment Maryland provided for a white woman who married a black slave was even more draconian. There, the woman herself would be sold into slavery for the lifetime of her husband.) Finally, the law forbade any Virginia slaveowner from freeing any slave within the colony, a provision which was not overturned until . The  legislation racially regulated white people’s sexual contacts as much as earlier laws policed the sexuality and labor of black women, and did so by holding their children hostage. A white woman’s sexual transgression would be punished by her children’s loss of freedom. White men had no legal responsibility for their children by slave mothers, but after  if they wanted to free an enslaved child they had fathered, they would have to forfeit all paternal contact by sending the child to another state. The state’s refusal to recognize any family ties but those created within the white race and between men and women of the same status worked to emphasize the colonial family’s role as the agent of a stringently racialized public order. In a colony where numbers of slaves and indentured workers began growing rapidly in the second half of the seventeenth century, some historians have argued, a race-conscious sexuality became a tool for containing the possibility of social unrest. Virginia’s legislators used race as a device for unifying the white population, despite the economic importance of the large numbers of nonwhite workers, and despite the differences in status between free and indentured whites, and 

See, for example, Kirsten Fischer, “ ‘False, Feigned, and Scandalous Words’: Sexual Slander and Racial Ideology Among Whites in Colonial North America,” in Clinton and Gillespie (eds.), The Devil’s Lane, pp. –; A. Leon Higginbotham and Barbara K. Kopytoff, “Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia,” Georgetown Law Journal . (), –; and Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), esp. ch. , “From ‘Foul Crimes’ to ‘Spurious Issue’: Sexual Regulation and the Social Construction of Race,’ pp. –.

Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



between white landowners and white agricultural laborers. The belief in white women’s endangered sexual purity and in black women’s innate whorishness which came to mark the discourse of US slavery were the social issue of such laws as I discuss here. Race, as it was formulated in British America, was relied on to perform social, economic, and sexual work necessary to the interests of state authority. Just as it was (and remains) more than merely a matter of skin color – that the mixed-race and thus potentially light-skinned children of female slaves were also slaves indicates the lack of an even correlation between color, race, and status in our period – it also used, and absorbed, family. Race dictated what could and could not be considered a civically valid relationship between men and women, which children could grow up with their mothers, which children were entitled to their fathers’ love. The state thus shaped raced sexualities to serve its own purposes of maintaining authority and dictating the terms of citizenship. A contemporary feminist analysis of sexuality and slavery further suggests that a self-imposed response of concealment and denial to the continuous experience of sexual assault and of childbearing under conditions which subordinated their motherhood to their owners’ property rights in them and their children resulted in a kind of self-silencing for slave women, a self-silencing which may be crucial in their absence from the historical record. What was not rendered socially invisible was the frustration 





As I wrote this passage, DNA testing on the remains of Sally Hemings’ son Eston strongly indicated that he was also the son of Hemings’ master, Thomas Jefferson. That Sally Hemings was also the half-sister of Jefferson’s dead wife – they had the same father, in whose house Hemings’ mother had been a slave – emphasizes my point about the entanglement of family and race. Yet the impulse to normalize this extraordinarily tangled set of family and emotional relationships also persists, not only in many historians’ refusal to accept the idea of a sexual link between Hemings and Jefferson, but also, perhaps, in a breezy USA Today headline which characterized what happened between them as “an affair to remember” and a “new slant on pursuit of happiness” ( D,  November ). Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, identifies his subject as “the vacillation of the courts, the state legislatures, and even honest public servants in trying to decide whether blacks were people, and if so, whether they were a species apart from white humans, the difference justifying separate and different treatment” (p. ). Contemporary legal scholars have built on Higginbotham’s foundational analyses of racially differential treatment before the law; see, for example, Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Crenshaw et al. (eds.), Critical Race Theory, pp. –. See Hine’s expanded revision of her Signs article, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Southern Black Women: Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Theda Perdue (eds.), Southern Women: Histories and Identities (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ), pp. –. For more on how slave women’s sexuality could function both as an indication of their status as chattel and as a tool which could allow them access to greater liberty for themselves and their children, see Hartman, Scenes of subjection, pp. –.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

and anger of the slaveowners’ wives, who often reacted against the black women in bondage in their households with rage: “Under slavery we live surrounded by prostitutes, like patriarchs of old, our men lie in one house with their wives and concubines.” In eighteenth-century Surinam, the links between whites’ racial authority, black women’s sexuality, and white women’s social repression were even more explicitly institutionalized. John Stedman, a debt-ridden young Scotsman, arrived in Surinam in  as a volunteer for military service on behalf of Surinam’s planters, who were engaged in trying to fight back against the ongoing guerilla attacks staged by bands of “maroons,” or escaped slaves. Composing a Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname some years after he had settled his debts and returned to England to marry and raise a family, Stedman writes that he is sorry to have to describe a custom which he is “convinced will be highly censured by the Sedate European Matrons,” the so-called “Suriname marriage.” The practice, “as common as it is almost necessary to the batchelors who live in this climate,” involves having a female Slave / mostly a creole / in their keeping who preserves their linnens clean and decent, dresses their Victuals with Skill, carefully attends them / they being most excellent nurses / during the frequent illnesses to which Europeans are exposed in this Country, prevents them from keeping late Hours knits for 

Erlene Stetson, “Studying Slavery: Some Literary and Pedagogical Considerations on the Black Female Slave,” in Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (eds.), All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, N. Y.: Feminist Press, ), quotes Mary Boykin Chesnut, p. . In the second part of his Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (London, ), Thomas Tryon’s imaginary slave speaker is shocked to have to report that slave mistresses are capable of as much cruelty as some masters. Indeed, “when they alone have the sole command, as when they are left Widdows, or the like, many of them are more fierce, dogged, pinching, oppressing and severe than the men themselves” (p. ). On the domestic tensions between white husbands and wives created by slaveowners’ sexual use of female slaves, Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), notes that in South Carolina, whose slaveholding practices closely resembled those of the Caribbean, the openly acknowledged miscegenation between white men and black women “warped” the emotional life of aristocratic white women: “The dissipation of the white gentleman was as much a tragedy for his white lady as for him . . . she was made to feel that sensual involvement with the opposite sex burned bright and hot with unquenchable passion and at the same time that any such involvement was utterly repulsive. Accordingly. . . she approached her legitimate sexual partners as if she was picking up a live coal in one hand and a dead rat in the other” (p. ). John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Perennial Library, ), discuss the familial effects of the “extreme sexual privilege” (p. ) enjoyed by male slaveowners, pointing to South Carolina politician James Henry Hammond’s sexual abuse of his four nieces in the s. Once the abuse became known, Hammond’s reputation temporarily suffered, but it recovered enough so that he was eventually elected US senator. His nieces’ good names, in contrast, were permanently ruined; because of the scandal, respectable men avoided them, and none ever married (p. ).

Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



them, sows for them &c – while these Girls who are sometimes Indians sometime Mulattos and often negroes, naturally pride themselves in living with an European whom they serve with as much tenderness, and to whom they are Generally as faithfull as if he were their lawfull Husband to the great Shame of so many fair Ladies, who break through ties more sacred, and indeed bound with more Solemnity, nor can the above young women be married in any other way, being by their state of Servitude entirely debard from every Christian privilege and Ceremony, which makes it perfectly lawfull on their Side, while they hesitate not to pronounce as Harlots, who do not follow them / if they can / in this laudable Example in which they are encouraged as I have said by their nearest Relations and Friends.

The differences between Stedman’s existing accounts of “Suriname marriage” provide an example of how the tropes of sentiment could be employed to represent the harsh sexual exigencies of life in a slave society. The manuscript of the Narrative and the personal diary Stedman kept in Surinam are full of accounts of his own and others’ casual sexual encounters with slave women; eighteenth-century British observers are repeatedly shocked at the coarse familiarity with which colonial planters expressed their sexual ownership of their slaves. Stedman himself was involved in a “Suriname marriage” with a slave named Joanna for virtually the entire length of his stay in the country, its financial terms agreed on in advance with Joanna’s mother. Such concubinage, as well as the widespread prostitution of slave women by their owners during sugar’s 



Stedman’s narrative, one of the most extensive eyewitness accounts by a European of life in an American slave society, exists in two versions: the manuscript he completed in , and the first published edition of . The  narrative has been reprinted in an edition by R. A. J. Van Lier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, ), while Richard Price and Sally Price have produced a full edition transcribed from the  manuscript (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), and an abridged Stedman’s Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), also based on the  manuscript. In addition, Stedman also kept a personal journal during his stay in Surinam. The  edition discusses ’s suppression of ’s and the personal journal’s sexual and racial detail, much of which communicates Stedman’s and other Europeans’ attraction to slave women, lix–lxvi. Here, I quote the  edition, pp. –. I will cite  in my text as “Price and Price,” followed by a page number. Beckles reports on a British Army Major Wyvill who was shocked to see a white woman in Bridgetown, Barbados’ capital, examine the genitals of a male slave for sale “with all possible indelicacy” (Natural Rebels, p. ). The  Narrative observes that “Luxury and dissipation in this Country are carried to the extreme and in my opinion must send Thousands to the Grave, the Men are generally a set of poor wither’d mortals – as dry and sapless as a squeesed lemon – owing to their intemperate way of living such as late hours – hard drinking – and particularly their too frequent intercourse with the negro and mulatto female sex, to whom they generally give the preference before the creole Ladies” (Price and Price, p. ). Compare Van Lier’s  edition of , where the last sentence of this passage reads that the planters are men who “have indulged themselves in intemperance and other sensual gratifications, and who appear withered and enervated in the extreme” (p. ).



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

fallow season, were common practice throughout the Caribbean. For the reading of “Sedate” European women, however, many of Stedman’s more invidious comparisons between white women of the colony and its Indian and slave women, to whom he is much more attracted because of their “remarkable Cleanliness and youthfull vigour,” are censored (Price and Price, ). Such censorship points to ways in which slavery was ideologically reproduced for the consumption of an audience of European women, rarefied of the sexual coercion and the depersonalized sexual contacts which formed the fabric of its daily experience for both slaves and masters. The achievement of a new social and economic status for planters’ wives and daughters in the colonies occured within this social immersion in a commodified sexuality. White women and black ones under slavery were thrown together in a violent, and violently sexualized, intimacy which mocked any idea of the sanctity of home and hearth. And yet, it is the familial, the domestic, the private, which figure so significantly in the transformed Oroonokos of the eighteenth century. A white heroine in these eighteenth-century dramas of pathos and sensibility affirms a new means of socially and culturally producing white Englishwomen as part of the reading and theatregoing public and in the growing abolitionist movement during which these plays were performed or otherwise circulated. For the consumption of a theatrical audience in which women of leisure were present in increasing numbers, a white 





Even in a text committed to exposing the pagan evils of slavery, Tryon acknowledges the unremarkableness of sex, consensual or otherwise, between masters and slaves. He writes that despite sometimes commanding “our young Women to be their Concubines,” the sign of a decent slaveowner was his demonstration of “some regard to their own Seed, and respect to the Women” (pp. –) if the women became pregnant. His fictionalized speaker believes that such masters’ “Moderation and Compassion” will earn them blessings in heaven, and “considerable Profits” (p. ) here on earth. This is the thesis of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). On the uneasy coexistence of white women and female slaves in US slavery, see Stetson, “Studying Slavery,” esp. pp. –. The  Narrative is not surprised that “the poor illtreated Ladies should be jealous of their Spouses and . . . bitterly take revenge on the causes of their disgrace – the negro and Mulatto Girls whom they persecute with the greatess bitterness and the most barbarous tyranny,” and notes that white women in the colony are so competitive for husbands that “it was even publickly reported that two of them had fought a Duel on account of one of our Officers” (p. ). Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ) points to the eighteenth-century shift from home-based cottage industry to wage labor taking place outside the home as a moment of women’s loss of economic authority, and argues the concomitant rise of “[n]ew ideologies of maternal affection and sentiment between mothers and children” (p. ) which glorified European women’s relegation to the home under eighteenth-century colonialism. On the social circumstances surrounding women’s new prominence in the early modern theatre audience, see David Roberts, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, – (Oxford: Clarendon

Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



Imoinda performed in a Britain first entering into the full scope of an imperial expansion crucially supported by Atlantic slavery, performs acts of cultural forgetting. Organized around tropes of white womanhood and its domestic realm, these acts facilitate the erasure of African women from Oroonoko and their suppression within colonial cultures deeply troubled by the sexual implications of white men’s supremacy for the social welfare of white women. Oroonoko after Behn includes dramatic adaptations by Thomas Southerne, John Hawkesworth, Francis Gentleman (), John Ferriar (), and at least one anonymous author (The Royal Captive, ). As they remade Behn, Ferriar, Gentleman, and Hawkesworth were all explicitly motivated, at least in part, by the impulse to correct the “disgusting extravagances” of Southerne’s double plot – one strand dealing with the tragedy of Behn’s characters Oroonoko and Imoinda, the other dealing with the cross-dressed machinations of a London woman aimed at securing rich husbands for herself and her sister on the colonial frontier. So too was Shakespeare’s Othello undergoing a striking series of editorial and performative interventions, interventions resulting in a play which paradoxically titillated white audiences’ awareness of its concern with crossing sexualized racial barriers at the same time as it insisted on new decorums of language and gesture. Like the eighteenth-century Othello, Oroonoko in the period was also produced and understood as a drama of sensibility and pathos. Like Othello,







Press, ). Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, – (London: Routledge, ) is the most comprehensive study of Englishwomen and abolitionist discourse. The first major feminist discussion of the interplay of race and gender in Behn’s Oroonoko, Laura Brown’s “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves,” in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York: Methuen, ), pp.  –, exhibits this shortcoming to the degree it fails to address how this interplay might also involve Imoinda; the only woman she considers is the white narrator. Paula Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), is perhaps so committed to the project of recovering Behn’s discursive authority that she argues that Oroonoko’s portrait of the relationship between Imoinda and the narrator demonstrates that in Behn’s fictions, “all but the worst women appreciate the good and make loyal friends to other women” (p. ). Brown and Backscheider are usefully supplemented by the discussions of race and cultural difference in Susan Z. Andrade, “White Skin, Black Masks: Colonialism and the Sexual Politics of Oroonoko,” Cultural Critique  (), –; and Isobel Grundy, “ ‘The Barbarous Character We Give Them’: White Women Travellers Report on Other Races,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture  (), –. John Ferriar, The Prince of Angola, A Tragedy, Altered from the Play of Oroonoko, and Adapted to the Circumstances of the Present Times (Manchester, ), viii. Hereafter, I will refer to this play as “Ferriar” and provide all references parenthetically in the text. See Neill, “Unproper Beds,” and Paul H. D. Kaplan, “The Earliest Images of Othello,” SQ  (),  –.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

it was also known to audiences from Southerne’s time on through a long record of eighteenth-century performance as a drama centering on a miscegenous love affair between a black African man and a white woman. Here, I argue that the whiteness of Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn is the product of a cult of sensibility as it confronted that most ungenteel of human institutions, slavery. What the whitening of Imoinda permits is a broader whitening and patriarchalizing of Behn’s text and all its ambivalences about the roles of white women, black women, and black men within slavery and the colonial relations it drove. Slavery in the Oroonoko plays is both domesticated and universalized, mystified through the employment of white womanhood so as to erode its historical specificity within Behn’s Surinam and in the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade. The revisions show their Restoration roots in Behn in their preoccupation with the aristocratic value of personal honor, an ideological concept which, by the time of their performance, had been culturally eclipsed and absorbed by the bourgeois principle of individualism and self-reliance. Both ideologies, the elite and the popular, are deployed here in the service of naturalizing colonialism and its economic reliance on the slave trade. Before proceeding with my main argument, I would like to sketch in some terms under which we can speak of an African woman’s presence in Behn’s text. Imoinda in fact manifests there only flickeringly, and largely as a focus and a product of others’ sexuality. Although we are assured she is so beautiful as to be the perfect match for Oroonoko’s princely bearing, “the beautiful Black Venus to our young Mars,” she remains for the most part a mysterious and passive object of others’ passions. She only assumes “all her additions to beauty” after Oroonoko silently communicates his attraction to her (), but even so she exercises a powerful sexual attraction over Oroonoko’s grandfather in Coromantien as well 





G. A. Starr, “Aphra Behn and the Genealogy of the Man of Feeling,” MP  (), –, discusses the character of Oroonoko – but not Imoinda – as it is developed within the discourse of sensibility, while J. R. Oldfield, “ ‘The Ties of Soft Humanity’: Slavery and Race in British Drama,” HLQ  (),  –, discusses some of the Oroonoko plays in light of growing abolitionist sympathies but does not pay particular attention to women or to women’s races. J. Douglas Canfield, “Shifting Tropes of Ideology in English Serious Drama, Late Stuart to Early Georgian,” in J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne (eds.), Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), discusses eighteenthcentury drama in terms of these epistemic shifts, in which rhetorics of meritocracy and “neostoic exemplary morality mask[s] upper middle-class male dominance over gender, class, and even race” (p. ). Discussing a group of heroic tragedies with settings in New World slavery, I am not as surprised as Canfield is that bourgeois dominance dictates the ways in which race can be performed. I cite Paul Salzman’s edition of ‘Oroonoko’ and Other Works (Oxford University Press, ), here, p. . All subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in the text.

Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



as over “an hundred white men sighing after her and making a thousand vows at her feet”() in Surinam. She comes to Oroonoko out of his grandfather’s harem, in an appropriation of sub-Saharan Africa and Africans to the discourse of orientalism and of orientalist notions of non-European women’s sexuality. In captivity, she becomes a commercial as well as a sexual object. In contrast to the white narrator, who removes herself from the climactic scene of Oroonoko’s scourging presumably because of her tender sensibilities, the heavily pregnant Imoinda is carried away “not in kindness to her, but for fear she should die with the sight, or miscarry, and then they should lose a young slave, and perhaps the mother”(). Despite the sexual allure she exercises almost involuntarily, she also always yields herself to the patriarchal logic which governs familial and sexual relations in Coromantien. When she and Oroonoko agree to marry, they decide “on both sides that, in obedience to him, the grandfather was to be first made acquainted with the design, for they pay a most absolute resignation to the monarch, especially when he is a parent also” (). She accepts the necessity of her death at her husband’s hands because in Coromantien, “wives have a respect for their husbands equal to what other people pay a deity; and when a man finds occasion to quit his wife, if he loves her, she dies by his hand” (). In the first Oroonoko and Imoinda we can thus trace an example of what Homi Bhabha has called “mimicry” in the colonialist text: their black skins and the signs of cultural alterity which literally mark their bodies (the narrator somewhat fancifully compares their facial scarifications to the body painting of the Picts) come to signify primarily as touches of exoticism within the determinedly patriarchal story of gender identity being written for them. And yet, even within this absorption of black Africans by a white European narrative of slavery and the sexual and racial relations it dictates, Behn’s Imoinda somehow confounds the construction of a seamless account. Her facial scarification is both more extensive and more elaborate than Oroonoko’s, “her extraordinary prettiness” augmented rather than lessened by “her being carved in fine flowers and birds all over her body” (). Behn’s pregnant 



On orientalism in Oroonoko’s descriptions of Imoinda, see Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (London: Routledge, ), p. ; on the place of the exotic in the narrative generally, see Laura Brown, “Romance of Empire,” pp. –,  –. See, for example, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October . (), –. And yet Bhabha has also claimed that developing a psychological discussion about the positions of nonwhite women within colonialist discourse would require “a very specific form of attention and articulation” he is not yet able to summon [in “The Other Question,” n]. Gwen Bergner, “Who is That Masked Woman? or, the Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,” PMLA  (), –, takes up Bhabha’s proposal.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Imoinda initially resembles, but ultimately diverges from, the ideal of the English mother whose employment in discourses of eighteenth-century colonialism has been so brilliantly traced by Felicity Nussbaum. Her sexual history and her status as a sexually desiring subject, the active role she takes in fighting for her freedom by her husband’s side, the alien origin traced in her very skin, mark Behn’s production of her finally – and only – as Other than the white woman who tells her story. Imoinda’s status as breeding stock in the minds of the planters is a plainly literal exhibition of how, for women in this period, reproduction has become the only means of production. What is missing from Behn’s portrait of an African woman, however, is an acknowledgment of the material bases of differences between women which slavery threw into such sharp relief. Behn recognizes gender difference within her representation of Africans, and also acknowledges the operations of gender within whiteness. As a white woman, Behn’s narrator responds to the beauty and honorable qualities of Oroonoko and his African bride, Imoinda, and is curiously powerless to intervene in the public crisis of Oroonoko’s capture and final, horrible public mutilation. As a white woman, she sails upriver and delights in displaying her undergarments to the uncomprehending Indians who inhabit Surinam’s interior. But, in flattening all Imoinda’s labor into sexual labor, the white narrator declines to recognize how work – sexual and otherwise – distinguished black women from white ones, resulting in her reproduction of an African woman in terms of the emerging social definitions of women of her own race. A test case for my contention that white womanhood is invoked by post-Behn Oroonoko to naturalize the collusion of patriarchy with slavery may be provided by John Ferriar’s Prince of Angola, distinguished within this series of texts by its avowedly abolitionist purpose. In his preface, Ferriar announces that he is writing his version of Behn in order to shock white people out of their insensitivity to the evils of slavery: “We talk of the destruction of millions, with as little emotion, and as little accuracy of comprehension, as of the distances of the Planets” (i). To that end, his play, he tells us, will correct both Southerne’s structural irregularity and Hawkesworth’s inappropriate sentimentality. In Hawkesworth, he tells us, the hero is so passionately swept away by love for his Imoinda that he is incapable of “making any rational reflexions on his condition” (vi) – i.e., of responding to the fact of his enslavement with rage against the slaveholders. Here, Ferriar implies, matters will be conducted differently; 

See especially Torrid Zones’ discussion of polygamy and Richardson’s Pamela, pp. –.

Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



romance will be more carefully segregated from tragedy, and pro-slavery arguments will in no way be allowed to stand unchallenged. Ferriar’s abolitionist fervor, however, is modulated through gender both in his preface and in his play proper. He addresses a section of his Prologue to “The Ladies of Manchester,” who “have distinguished themselves very honorably” in the cause of abolition: Here Pity lives in ev’ry gentle Breast. Folly may scoff, or Avarice may hate, Since Beauty comes the Negroe’s Advocate. Let others boast in Fashion’s Pride to glow, To lure the Lover, or attract the Beau; You check Oppression’s Lash, protect the Slave, And, first to charm, are still the first to save. ()

The advocacy of the Negroes to which Ferriar alludes here emerges as an aspect of the Manchester ladies’ “charm.” His appeal to antislavery women may in fact not be based on their feelings toward Africans at all. In his view, one of the things wrong with Southerne’s play is that its hero is shown kissing the ground and asking to be allowed to worship the disguised white Imoinda, a ludicrous improbability that “will not be easily understood, by those who know, that an African’s highest religious mystery is the Mumbo Jumbo” (v). Englishwomen’s capacity to feel matters more than what they may feel about slaves. White women are written into Oroonoko just as they were thus written into eighteenth-century debates on the slave trade and into wider representations of the gendered prerogatives of empire. Just as the Manchester ladies’ femininity is essentialized into a force capable of “saving” slaves, 



In conversation, Jane Spencer pointed out to me the extent of northern women’s involvement in abolition. I certainly do not intend, by this section of my discussion, to imply that their commitment was less than genuine; rather, I want to point out Ferriar’s textual production of their activities. The dedicatory poem to Francis Gentleman’s revision (Glasgow, ), p. , also implies a special connection between women in the audience and the fate of Oroonoko: Ye CALEDONIAN Fair, in whom we find, Each charm of person, and each grace of mind; For virtue’s sake, a feeble genius spare, The cause of virtue’s your peculiar care; In you it lies to censure, or to save; To your protection take the ROYAL SLAVE. The ladies of Edinburgh, where Gentleman’s play was first performed, are not explicitly addressed as abolitionists, but, as designated champions of “virtue,” they hold the power of life and death over the success of this sentimental heroic drama. The “royal slave” will thrive or perish according to the degree of patronage the ladies extend to him, and to his author.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

presumably through the exercise of “charm,” so too is the femininity of Ferriar’s white Imoinda, whose anxieties as a wife entirely dictate her courses of action. She wants nothing more than to belong uninterruptedly to her husband, Oroonoko, asserting that she would rather die than be left to “the wild passions” () of the lecherous and deceitful lieutenant governor. Ferriar’s Oroonoko is at first reluctant to lead the rebellion against the slaveholders as his own former slave Aboan begs him to, but he is finally persuaded to do so by the argument that slavery’s worst degradations stem from its denial of male slaves’ patriarchal right within the family. One day, Aboan reminds him, he might be sold to a master “Who, proud perhaps to own a Royal Slave,/May suffer you to get young Princes for him” (). Thus moved by the possibility of having the sanctity of his bloodline denied and his reproductive capacity turned to the economic benefit of another man, Oroonoko, in his turn, convinces the other male slaves to rebel against their owners by arguing that slavery profanes the marriage bond when it denies a husband’s right to possess his wife exclusively. He reminds them of the countless times when male slaves have been forced to stand impotently by “When, in the tort’rer’s hands, a wretched wife,/Has scream’d for mercy, has implored your aid,/While your distraction made the Christian sport” (). My point here is not that slavery did not degrade intimate relations between men and women, but rather that Ferriar’s fearful white Imoinda experiences her sexual danger as being virtually divorced from the fact of her enslavement; in Behn, remember, Imoinda fights at her husband’s side in the revolt against the planters, wounding the lieutenant governor with a poisoned arrow. Hawkesworth’s Imoinda is even more explicitly exposed to sexual danger than Ferriar’s, as the attempted rape is sensationally brought onstage. After unsuccessfully begging her husband to kill her in order to preserve her virtue, she finally takes the knife and stabs herself: “where I liv’d, I die in these lov’d arms” (). In the process of re-presenting slavery and the colonial enterprise it supported, a white Imoinda who actively seeks death, rather than merely accepting it as does Behn’s character, creates a place for middle-class women’s complicity with the aims of empire, a complicity which writes them primarily as monogamous, sensitive, and maternal – all the things out of which a portrait of a “savage” African woman would emerge. In Ferriar, the whitening of Imoinda is accompanied by a broader dissociation of slavery from skin color; the first revolt in the play is actually led by angry “Indians,” who are never heard from again. The lieutenant governor fears that the black slaves will be drawn into fighting against

Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



their white masters and so orders Oroonoko to be chained; as for “the white slaves,” he casually remarks, “they’ll not stir” (). While these mysterious white slaves are so docile or so demoralized that they are incapable of or uninterested in rebellion, Oroonoko gallantly fights “at the Head of the Planters” () to thwart the Indians’ attempt to carry off African slaves as spoils of their war against the white slaveholders. Just as the moral Blandford has earlier been moved by Oroonoko’s dignity even in chains to declare that he “will attend, and serve” () him, Oroonoko is moved to fight on the planters’ behalf after Blandford proves his decency by refusing to have him chained when the Indians’ rebellion breaks out. In Ferriar, courage, character, and the right to monogamous love bind men together more than slavery can separate them; or at least, these things unite good men. Blandford bemoans the “cursed” hour that first drove Europe’s “cruel sons to visit Afric’s shore” and assures Oroonoko that he “must not think” (, ) himself to be a slave – without, however, manumitting him. As the play mounts toward its climax, Blandford sets out to rescue Oroonoko and Imoinda from danger and help them escape, asserting that he wishes he could extend the same “Relief to ev’ry drooping African/That now must envy their deliverance!”(). That he cannot, or at least does not, attempt to act to end a condition he finds so repugnant is never examined. Capable of admiring Oroonoko’s personal nobility, yet claiming to be helpless before the operations of slavery, the dramatic Blandford in effect occupies the white woman’s role laid down in Behn’s novella. In Behn, the white narrator and her female friends possess the kind of moral sensitivity which will allow them, as women, to be shocked and troubled by the suffering of slaves; as women, they will also be powerless to stop their men from conducting and profiting from the slave trade. Yet the difference between genders which Behn’s narrative communicates by absence – her female narrator’s disappearances from the action during the slave revolt, when Oroonoko executes Imoinda, when Oroonoko is publicly tortured to death – is here articulated as a difference within genders. In Ferriar, there are good white men who are shocked by the “insolence” of cruel slaveowners who will “strip the injur’d negro/Of his 

A similar racial displacement occurs in Gentleman’s Oroonoko, where the slave rebellion is betrayed to the planters through the machinations of one Massingano, now a slave, who had been Oroonoko’s enemy and rival in Africa. Gentleman’s invention of Massingano’s active scheming against Oroonoko works both to move slavery farther from the center of the plot – another African is as instrumental in causing the hero to lead the revolt as is Oroonoko’s fear that Imoinda will be sexually abused by a white man – and to deny that race particularly matters to slavery, since the black African Massingano is as malicious as the white lieutenant governor.



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

last privilege, the rank of man,” () and there are bad white men like the lieutenant governor, motivated only by lust and cruelty. Oroonoko’s black skin and Imoinda’s white one are significant here primarily in relation to the slaveowners’ possession – or lack – of finer feelings. Slavery, which the play points out existed in Africa as well as in the New World and which binds white people as well as blacks in Surinam, has less to do with the color of the couple’s skins than with the fact that they are both subject to the whim of an evil man, denied the privileges of the liberal individualism on which Ferriar’s abolitionism is based. Hence, the dying Aboan wishes for a better world in which he will be allowed to be Oroonoko’s “faithful slave again” (). If Ferriar’s Prince comes as close as it can to delivering a slavery under whose terms Africans are no more significant than anyone else, returning to Hawkesworth demonstrates the degree to which romantic sentiment is employed in post-Behn Oroonoko to fill the space left by the evacuation of racial difference, and the spectre of conflict it raised, from the text. Confronted by white planters determined to quash the slaves’ rebellion, Behn’s Oroonoko demonstrates his moral indifference to their power over him by stoically enduring his public dismemberment. The body of the wife he loved and executed decomposes in the rainforest, searchers for Oroonoko being led to it by the the smell of its decay – “a stink that almost struck them dead” (). In contrast to these haunting bodily spectacles, Hawkesworth’s slaves enclose themselves within a culture of pathos and sensibility. After a scene in which the evil lieutenant governor tries to rape Imoinda, for instance, in a portrayal of the sexual horror which drives Ferriar’s Oroonoko to rebellion, Hawkesworth contains and disciplines the rage that this sexual danger to Imoinda inspired in Behn and Ferriar with a musical interlude where male and female slaves sing that “Love, Love and Joy must both be free,/They live not but with Liberty” (). Hawkesworth’s Oroonoko is even more reluctantly persuaded to lead the rebellion than Ferriar’s. Not only was he a slaveholder in Africa, but his present enslavement is not all that unbearable: he is, after all, “Favour’d in my own Person, in my Friends,/Indulg’d in all that can concern my care,/In my Imoinda’s soft society” (). Finally convinced to rebel by the thought that the evil lieutenant governor will probably want Imoinda for himself, he is careful to specify that the rebellion be nonviolent: “The Means that lead us to our Liberty/Must not be bloody . . . /Whate’er the Rage of Passion may suggest” (). In fact, if the slaves can take the slave ship still moored in the harbor by surprise, they can sail back to

Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn



Africa and out of the Europeans’ troubled comprehension altogether, thus achieving “triumph without Conflict” (). The suppression of conflict – racial conflict, as well as the gender conflict between white men and white women played out through the bodies of black women – was, I think, a large part of why the black Imoinda was made to disappear from Oroonoko. The beginnings of this suppression are perhaps visible in Behn, where Imoinda’s decapitation and Oroonoko’s dismemberment render as more easily assimilable fragments the black bodies which, whole, pose painful questions about how they should or can be smoothly incorporated within the sexual and racial processes of slavery. The whiteness of Imoinda after Behn becomes the price of the ticket for white women’s admission to a kind of racial authority. A survey of some versions of Oroonoko suggests that what mattered in this extension of racial privilege to Englishwomen was the new Imoinda’s performance of a kind of gender sacrifice to the inexorable operation of a slave economy: a loving wife and mother, she allows herself to be sacrificed – or even sacrifices herself – to a higher cause. When the African woman is made to disappear – triumphally, without conflict – from Oroonoko, a European woman constructed in careful conformity with the interests of a society deeply invested in her chastity and her silence, and requiring her collusion with its new fictions of race, is allowed to emerge. 

Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.),‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference (University of Chicago Press, ), pp. –, suggests that nineteenthcentury Parisians could achieve psychic access to the sexuality of their women only through the degraded and dismembered spectacle of a black woman’s body.

CHAPTER



Race, women, and the sentimental in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko

Imoinda, the “beautiful black Venus” of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (), is probably the most well-known of the few representations of darkskinned African women in early modern literature. Thomas Southerne’s  dramatization of Behn’s novella is, in its turn, probably best known for changing the skin color of its Imoinda from black to white. As her racial and sexual identity are reconstructed in whiteness, Behn’s black Imoinda becomes an early example of the enforced invisibility of the black female subject in the Americas’ dominant cultural discourse. In turning to Southerne’s play as the primal scene of this abduction from representation, I hope to emphasize Oroonoko’s cultural vitality after Behn as a site for the deconstruction and reformation of women’s racial and sexual identities. For all its audacity – an audacity largely unremarked by his contemporaries – the black Imoinda’s disappearance into whiteness is not the only way in which Southerne re-visions women in his Oroonoko. The play is equally taken up with the sexual disguise of its white comic heroine Charlot Welldon, who masquerades as a man for most of the action. Revising Southerne as he revised Behn, the play’s later adapters experienced its double plot – one strand dealing with the tragic fates of its newly miscegenous African lovers, the other with Charlot’s comic maneuvers aimed at finding rich husbands for herself and her sister Lucy in Surinam – as a structural defect. The Welldon sisters storyline was decried as “preposterous, absurd and pernicious,” “loose and contemptible,” “offensive 



One reference to the racial change by Southerne’s contemporaries was made by the anonymous author of “The Tryal of Skill,” in George deF. Lord et al. (eds.), Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, –,  vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, –), vol. VI, p. , who invokes it as evidence of Southerne’s disloyalty (starting out as a strong Tory and Jacobite sympathizer, he lost his Army post after  and eventually informed against six Irish Catholic officers) rather than of his ideas about racial identity. Barthelemy, pp. –, offers one of the few modern discussions of Southerne’s racial transformation, but considers its effects on the presentation of Oroonoko rather than that of Imoinda, where it takes place. Hawkesworth, Oroonoko, A Tragedy, A.



Race, women, and sentiment in Southerne’s Oroonoko



to modesty,” the unfortunate result of pandering to the tastes of “the gross and depraved audience” of an earlier era, and is entirely absent from Oroonoko adaptations after Southerne. Here, I intend to argue that the Welldon sisters plot is in fact related to, even required by, the tragic plot revolving around the whitened Imoinda. I do not seek to articulate this link in order to rehabilitate the claims of Southerne’s play to formalist tidiness, although this might well become an unintended effect of my discussion, but rather to advance the proposition that the rowdy Welldons and the imperiled Imoinda are both the products of the appropriation of their female English spectators to the racial and sexual imperatives of colonialism. One kind of link between Imoinda and the Welldon sisters I have no interest in establishing is the proposition that “women, like slaves, are treated as commodities, without regard for their humanity, their needs, or their desires.” The equation of the enslaved Africans’ situation with that of the husband-hunting Welldon sisters can succeed only if one assumes that being “treated as” a commodity is the same thing as actually being a commodity. Charlot’s wit provides a way not only to acknowledge but even to satisfy her and her sister’s desires for sex, love, and money. Her vision and improvisatory skill would seem to invest her with a degree of agency at odds with a foreordained patriarchal fate, although I do not believe that Charlot’s success is truly revolutionary within the economic, racial, and sexual contexts of the play. Only after the black Imoinda’s disappearance from Oroonoko can the big-city intrigue of the Welldon sisters plot – as vulgar as it was felt to be – begin to negotiate a more explicit, if still limited, social place for white women than that first advanced by Behn’s narrator. The comic spectacle of the Welldon sisters’ achievement of social agency, under the terms of a society which traffics in both sex and slaves, emerges from the erasure of Behn’s black Imoinda, and against the background of the white Imoinda’s suffering and death – again suggesting the degree to which early modern notions of femininity are crossed and even enabled by race. This twinning of   



Gentleman, “Advertisement” (n.p.). Ferriar, Prince, ii. For discussions of Oroonoko’s stage history, see Maximilian Novak and David Rodes (eds.), Oroonoko (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), xvi–xx; and Robert Jordan and Harold Love (eds.), The Works of Thomas Southerne,  vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), vol. II, pp. –. Novak and Rodes (eds.), Oroonoko, xxiii. Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory,” Screen  (), observes that “The radical feminist notion of absolute patriarchy has . . . one-sidedly portrayed the oppression of women through an analogy with slavery” (). Novak and Rodes are hardly radical feminists, but they too seem to me to be striking an unwarranted equivalence between (all) women and slaves.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

comic triumph and pathetic defeat naturalizes those coercive terms, and also presents a relatively early example of the surrogacy of black women for white ones pointed by critics of film and the visual arts. Southerne’s play indicates the thoroughness of this appropriation by the degree to which it divorces slavery from race: his new Imoinda is a slave, as was Behn’s black character, despite the fact that she possesses a white skin. As his Oroonoko explains it, she was sent “far, far off ” into slavery by his lustful father, who was frustrated in his attempts to seduce her by the discovery that she was already his son’s wife. Sex and not race will determine her fate as Southerne rewrites Behn so as to more securely focus conflict on the comic and tragic destinies of white women. As a way into my discussion of Southerne’s whitened Imoinda and her implications, it may be useful to begin by examining this idea of enabling racial surrogacy as it operates in Behn’s novella, between the white female narrator on the one hand and Oroonoko and his African bride on the other. That race privileges some females while suppressing others becomes obvious in the narrator’s acutely detailed description of what she sees in Oroonoko: His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are, but a perfect ebony, or polished jet. His eyes were the most aweful that could be seen and very piercing, the white of ’em being like snow, as were his teeth. His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth, the finest shaped that could be seen, far from those great turned lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes . . . His hair came down to his shoulders, by the aids of art, which was by pulling it out with a quill and keeping it combed, of which he took particular care. ()

The “perfect jet” of Oroonoko’s skin and the snowy whiteness of his teeth suggest an almost Petrarchan blazon, with all of that device’s interest in fixing a subject-object relationship between the looker and the looked-upon, but one which here reverses Petrarchanism’s usual assignation of looking to men and of being watched to women. Recasting this male body as the anatomized object of a female gaze, the passage also fragments and reassembles Oroonoko’s racial identity. His description 



See, for example, James Snead, “Angel, Venus Jezebel: Race and the Female Star in Three Thirties Films,” in Colin MacCabe and Cornel West (eds.), White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, ), pp. –; Tania Modleski, “Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film,” in Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age (New York: Routledge, ), pp. –; and Peter Erickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism  (), –. I cite Oroonoko: A Tragedy as it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal by His Majesty’s Servants. Written by Thomas Southerne (London, ), here, p. . I will provide subsequent references in my text.

Race, women, and sentiment in Southerne’s Oroonoko

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registers him not as primarily African, but as primarily different from other Africans. His skin is “polished” and “perfect” instead of a “brown, rusty black”; his nose is “Roman, instead of African and flat”; his lips are finely shaped (i.e., presumably narrower than other Africans’); his hair falls into shoulder-length ringlets because he arranges it to do so. In contrast to the Europeanized Oroonoko, Imoinda’s physicality remains resolutely African, alien, as attested by her facial scarification. Seeing, the right to look and describe and name, is a power particularly possessed by the white female narrator of Behn’s Oroonoko. Catherine Gallagher has written that “Oroonoko’s [color] radiates a light that illuminates the narrator’s identity . . . The lustrous quality of the hero’s blackness . . . requires the eye-witness reporting of a known author; Aphra Behn, therefore, must emerge from her obscurity and explain the circumstances of her witnessing.” Jacqueline Pearson argues that the narrator’s Europeanizing of Oroonoko’s features may well work to transcend race; he becomes “a character who is used to destabilize such essentially oppressive binary oppositions” as those “between black and white, barbarous and civilized.” But looking is transactional, involving both seeing and being seen. In Behn, the process of looking at Oroonoko and Imoinda is clearly gendered as it endows the female narrator and female author with social and artistic agency. It is gendered again in that it denominates the enslaved lovers as the special social property of “us women” in the novella, in an intimate exchange based on the implicit acceptance of racial privilege and racial difference. However, the narrator’s scopic authority produces specifically political results; her easy and satisfying social intercourse with Oroonoko and Imoinda is undertaken at the request of Trefry and the other slaveowners, who “feared a mutiny” () if their lies about freeing Oroonoko and Imoinda are exposed. The narrator’s privilege to speak and be listened to works to identify her as   

“Oroonoko’s Blackness,” in Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge University Press, ), p. . “Slave Princes and Lady Monsters: Gender and Ethnic Difference in the Work of Aphra Behn,” in Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies, p. . Citing the description of Oroonoko, David Richards, Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (Cambridge University Press, ), remarks that although “Behn’s text does not espouse a doctrine of racial supremacy or of racial hatred,” it nevertheless “could not exist without the acceptance of the cultural significance of ‘race’ ” (p. ). Richards’ assertion that “Oroonoko’s singularity as an extraordinary individual is achieved by reinforcing the degraded nature of the typical” African from whom he is being distinguished (p. ) should be contrasted with Pearson’s claim that the passage suggests a dismantling of the languages of racial difference, above. Also see Anne Fogarty, “Looks That Kill: Violence and Representation in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” in Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring (eds.), The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison (London: Routledge, ), pp. –.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

a surrogate enforcer of the slaveowners’ authority, and emphasizes the deep implication of women’s gender in race under Oroonoko’s colonial politics. Oroonoko’s gendered looks operate within an uneven racial differential as they claim Oroonoko for European resemblance but cannot remake the significance of Imoinda’s black skin or of her facial scarification. Also uneven is the degree to which white women looking at the two African subjects is represented as an interactive process. The white women of the narrator’s acquaintance have “all the liberty of speech” with Oroonoko, especially the narrator herself, “whom he called his great mistress” (). Imoinda is less a participant in dialogue or the occasional demonstrator of martial prowess that Oroonoko is (on the tiger hunt) than a passive auditor, the ideal audience for instruction in “all the pretty works” the narrator is “mistress of ” (). What we know about her once she is brought to Surinam is that she becomes an object of sentimental adoration for “an hundred white men sighing after her and making a thousand vows at her feet” (). Sentimentalizing her instead of presenting her as a probable rape victim, Behn herself perhaps initiates the process of obfuscation, disappearance, and revision that ultimately results in Southerne’s white Imoinda. When a pregnant black Imoinda and the white narrator disappear from Oroonoko, so does Behn’s imagination of a set of circumstances under which white women could be even this kind of second-order participant in colonial processes. Imoinda’s whitening may thus be as much about white women in imperial culture as about black ones. The white Imoinda works to naturalize the superiority of Englishmen in the colonial encounter since it conceals the evidence of a sexual and emotional existence independent of white men’s desire furnished by the decoratively scarred black Imoinda’s pregnancy by her black husband. She also protects Southerne’s audience from the disquieting spectacle of a 



Moira Ferguson’s introduction to her edition of The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ) argues that the slave narrative’s “strategies for encoding the truth” about slaves’ sexual experiences in particular are necessary in a document like Prince’s, sponsored by an anti-slavery society whose propaganda aims demanded that the female slaves whose life stories they published “not . . . be seen to be involved in any situation (even if the woman were forcibly coerced) that smacked of sin and moral corruption” (pp. , ). On the erasure and suppression of female slaves’ sexual histories, also see Jenny Sharpe, “ ‘Something Akin to Freedom’: The Case of Mary Prince,” Differences  (),  –; and Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, ), pp. –. Although she is discussing contemporary African-American novels and not early modern texts, Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery,” Callaloo  (), is suggestive on what may be at stake for a slaveowning order when slaves seek such mutual pleasure among themselves. When

Race, women, and sentiment in Southerne’s Oroonoko



black woman being presented as the object of white men’s illicit sexual desires; in reproducing her as white, Southerne’s Oroonoko soothes the fears of black women’s sexuality which haunt colonialist discourse. Writing before Behn’s novella, the medical doctor Thomas Trapham is convinced he knows how venereal disease was introduced into the white race: “The first opening of this Pandoras Box, at least in the European parts, was at the siege of Naples, where the Spaniards returning from their new found World, brought with them as great a rarity, this new found distemper. Thus they severely paid for their treacherous lavishing the Indian blood, and the sale of their own Faith and Humanity.”  For Trapham, venereal disease is the inevitable repayment for building empires, which he reads – at least among the Spaniards – as the subordination of one’s native “Faith and Humanity” to the search for novelty and wealth. Speaking scientifically, Trapham believes that “the old sower stocks of Venereal affects” are naturally “most plentiful” among natives of the New World and among sub-Saharan Africans, “the cursed posterity of the naked Cham” () – among, that is, the foreign peoples that Europeans were most likely to encounter during overseas expansion. The disease’s appearance among these races, he believes, is the result of a terrible kind of cross-species intercourse. These foreign territories are notable for containing new species of animals bearing disquieting resemblance to the human race, “sometimes under the larger size of Baboons and Drills, as on the Virginia Tracts, sometimes under that of Monkeys and Pongoes, as in Africa, the Native Negroes Seat, or less under the Malmaset, as among the Indians of the more southern Main of America”: All which at first sight bespeak too neare alliance with the Lords of the creation by some unhappy jumble of the rational with the brutal Nature, a sin against the principles of our Being, therefore significantly punished as well as naturally inflicted in the polluted Yawes . . . For when the rich Oar of humane Seminals shall wickedly wantonly be suckt in by a vastly unsutable Matrix, to say no worse, it must necessarily suffer egregious corruption, and not only bring forth an anomalous Breed, but convey an afflicting Taint into the Spermatick vessels of the more noble unlading Animal, who having discharged his owne rich Treasure designed by nature and just rule of commutation for as rich a Cabinet, receives



the heroine of Sherley Anne Williams’ novel Dessa Rose attempts to kill her master in revenge for his murder of her black husband, she is caught and punished by being brutally whipped on her private parts. Griffin writes that “the nature of that punishment suggests that she receives it because she dared to enact sexual agency in a way that gives neither pleasure nor property to the slave master” (). A Discourse of the State of Health in the Island of Jamaica. With a Provision Therefore Calculated from the Air, the Place, and the Water: The Customs and Manners of Living, &c. (London, ), p. .

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

necessarily into the prous vacated Tube the polluted Emergencies of the brutal nature. (, –)

For Trapham, semen is the “rich Treasure” which has been primally misspent, put on display in an inferior “Cabinet” (the reference is the cabinets of wonders in which Renaissance rulers displayed their valuable curiosa). Europeans’ infection by the results of such unnatural waste and perversion has only been made possible by colonial adventuring. By removing the black Imoinda from his account, Southerne eliminates a figure who is doubly associated with miscegenation in such an account as Trapham’s – first, because she is a member of one of the races in whom venereal infection is naturally strong, and second, because she is a colonized woman, sex with whom opens the door to disease and destruction from within. Everyone knows, Trapham writes, that “a Spaniard is too free of his Flesh to be confined within his own Nation” () and thereby avoid infection, but he can only hope that other Europeans will avoid “mixture with these animal People” () of America and Africa and thus save themselves. Rather than gamble that his English colonists will successfully walk the sexual straight and narrow, Southerne in effect removes the strong possibility that they won’t, and in the process cleanses such arguments as Trapham’s about the inherent dangers of voyaging outside the natural confines of one’s own nation (or species) of their sinister force. His white Imoinda soothes the unease accompanying colonial encounter by reframing it as domestic and Europeanized. In compensation for these revoked acknowledgments of racial and sexual difference, Southerne’s audience is instead gratified by the presentation of a white woman yielding to her own higher feelings in choosing death and love rather than sexual dishonor. The acts of seeing Oroonoko in Behn and of seeing the white Imoinda and newly sensitive Royal Slave in Southerne underline the importance of what Homi Bhabha has called “the visual . . . imaginary” in the construction of colonial relations. The white Imoinda in effect mimics a set of new standards for colonial womanhood; and yet, as I will argue, she mimics them incompletely. After Southerne, dramatized Oroonokos will institutionalize the effacement of the black woman from the text, retaining Imoinda’s sexual danger in a manner which obscures that danger’s roots in her enslavement. John Hawkesworth’s  adaptation, for example, emphasizes the new Imoinda’s vulnerability as the villainous lieutenant governor gloatingly anticipates the pleasure of raping her. (He believes the assault will actually 

“The Other Question,” .

Race, women, and sentiment in Southerne’s Oroonoko

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work to preserve her “Sex’s modesty,” () since she will be spared the indelicacy of having to verbally consent to intercourse.) Only the surprise entrance of the virtuous Blandford deters him from his dastardly intention. In Francis Gentleman’s Oroonoko, the lieutenant governor threatens a rape which he never attempts, while John Ferriar’s Imoinda reports an unsuccessful attempt which happens offstage. Instead of in Imoinda’s black body – which is compellingly attractive to Oroonoko, to his grandfather, and to the lustful Lieutenant Governor in the New World – Oroonoko after Behn locates its erotic potential in this plot of constantly threatened, repeatedly avoided rape. Jean Marsden holds that the audience of a set of highly ritualized and violent rape scenes in seventeenth-century plays “‘enjoys’ the actress, deriving its pleasure from the physical presence of the female body. Fictions designed as erotic spectacle for an audience that is tacitly assumed to be male, these scenes present rape as both violent and intensely erotic.” In the case of the threatened and defused rapes in Oroonoko plays, however, I would both dispute Marsden’s reading in gender, and suggest that the spectators of these rape scenes were also significantly constituted in race. For one thing, the defused rapes in eighteenth-century Oroonokos do not follow the “general pattern” (Marsden, ) of a chaste heroine sexually menaced by an evil villain who either succeeds in raping her or is only deterred from doing so by the last-minute intervention of the heroine’s lover or father that Marsden identifies. Imoinda is not raped in these Oroonoko plays. In Hawkesworth, Blandford – who interrupts the lieutenant governor’s intended crime – is not her lover, but a virtuously disinterested bystander. No principle of prior patriarchal or racial ownership is invoked to save her; the sexual threat simply peters out and is succeeded by the lovers’ impassioned declarations of devotion unto, and beyond, death. The social contexts in which Imoinda’s allure matters have been drastically reduced in scope. Marsden is also too quick to elide all spectators’ views into a male viewing position, one from which race is crucially absent. Relying on Laura Mulvey’s deeply influential reading of women in film narrative, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” to help her describe what social purposes such rape scenes may have fulfilled for their audiences, Marsden does not acknowledge the extent to which responses to Mulvey have argued that her original formulation reproduces a rigidly heterosexual division of experience and identification in its under-problematized 

“Rape, Voyeurism, and the Restoration Stage,” p. .

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

conceptions of “femininity” and perhaps especially of “masculinity”; her gender essentialism also, and critically, blocks recognition of the degree to which gender is constituted in and complicated by race and/or class. With the new Royal Slave a victim of cruel circumstance instead of Behn’s defiantly unreconstructed warrior – in Southerne, he sighs that he and his wife “were born to suffer” () – and the new Imoinda safely distanced from the sexual objectification which is her lot in Coromantien as well as in the New World, Oroonoko and Imoinda become simpler objects upon which female spectators can discharge the pity and sympathy which are their emotional reserve in Oroonoko’s colonialist theatre. The fearful spectacle of Oroonoko and Imoinda’s deaths in Behn is absent from Southerne’s text. For the ritualized desecration of the black bodies in Behn, along with what it may suggest of European difficulty with the task of mastering the implications of Imoinda’s black sexual and commercial body in particular (Oroonoko’s death is a public spectacle, while hers occurs deep in the forest), Southerne substitutes an extended pathetic spectacle of Oroonoko’s imprisonment and forced separation from Imoinda. His Oroonoko is so grateful to be reunited with her that he rejects all thoughts of escape; he is “a Slave,” but only “to Love” (). This new Oroonoko seems in fact to be constructed in the victimized passivity reserved for the sentimental heroine, in a kind of gender-crossing which may be more about the flexible resources of racial performance than about attempts to stabilize the performance of sexual identity. If an African woman would interfere too greatly with white women’s identificatory spectatorship of Oroonoko’s racial tragedy, an African man, reconstructed within the discourse of feeling, curiously aids it. In this ventriloquization of gender identity, the new Oroonoko comes to embody both victimization and moral delicacy, an African man standing surrogate for the white women toward whom this ever-more schematically moralized drama was directed. This multiplicity of possible subject positions complicates a simple “active/male and passive/female” model of looking relations by 





On this point, also see, besides Gaines, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Imitation(s) of Life: The Black Woman’s Double Determination as Troubling ‘Other’,” Literature and Psychology . (), –; and Michele Wallace, “Race, Gender, and Psychoanalysis in Forties Film: Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave, and The Quiet One,” in Manthia Diawara (ed.), Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, ), pp. –. Mulvey’s essay is reprinted in John Caughie and Annette Kuhn (eds.), The Sexual Subject: A ‘Screen’ Reader in Sexuality (London: Routledge, ), pp. –. In Behn, Imoinda accedes to being beheaded by her husband, while Oroonoko, after disemboweling himself, is castrated and dismembered before the “rude and wild” (p. ) crowd gathered to watch his execution. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” p. .

Race, women, and sentiment in Southerne’s Oroonoko

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positing a wider and more complex range of spectator responses for Southerne’s white female viewers. If these spectators can view both Oroonoko and Imoinda as objects of pity and identification, freely crossing lines of gender identity in order to do so, women in the audience can also have access to the related but distinct racial pleasure of watching Oroonoko’s surrender and defeat. Because of the unequal distributions of racial privilege, inquiries into women as audience and actors in colonialism cannot be fully satisfied by recourse to theories of female spectatorship based only in an assumption of immutable sexual difference; here, the “racial pleasure” I refer to is equally – but perhaps differently – available to white women and white men. More, Southerne’s Oroonoko has been crucially rearranged in order to secure these new pleasures: the inscrutability of Behn’s Oroonoko – there, he coolly smokes a pipe while being tortured – and the passive acquiescence of her Imoinda have both been eliminated from the text. Especially striking is the way in which Southerne’s new white Imoinda gains in active heroic stature. When the lieutenant governor attempts to rape her, in a sensational scene of Southerne’s invention she pulls his own sword on him and drives him off. As she does in Behn, and in no other adaptation I have been able to discover, Southerne’s Imoinda fights with a bow and arrow at her husband’s side during the slave revolt. When escape becomes impossible, she exercises all her verbal skill in order to persuade him to kill them both and thus vindicate the honor and the innocence of their love. It is she who holds his hands in her own to guide the knife into her body. Despite her newly active heroic stature, Southerne’s Imoinda dies anyway. My point, however, is that the white heroine’s passivity and subjection that a Hawkesworth will dramatize are not immediately part of Imoinda’s new characterization, so that Southerne’s tragic plot does not fetishize an always-imperiled white womanhood within its colonialist narrative in quite the same way as its successors will. Southerne rather secures a place for white womanhood in his Oroonoko by rewriting gender – both male and female – while “unwriting” the blackness of both Oroonoko and Imoinda. In Imoinda’s case, this unwriting is literal: she becomes white-skinned. The erasure of Oroonoko’s blackness is more involved with revoking the unknowability into which he ultimately retreats in Behn; he becomes far more understandable and familiar in Southerne 

On the ideological functions of representations of fighting women in the colonial contexts of eighteenth-century culture, see Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in EighteenthCentury Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

because he is reproduced within the operations of the sentimental, despite retaining his black skin. The blackness of both characters is erased, divided, subsumed; a representation of an African prince becomes an appropriate vehicle for the representation of patience and resignation in the face of injustice, in a series of increasingly formalized and ritualized performances of subjection. Southerne’s degraded display of Oroonoko chained to the floor of a prison cell in his final act is as unmasculine as much as the sight of an assertive and persuasive Imoinda brandishing a sword or shooting arrows fails to conform with the tender sensitivity demanded of the character later in its theatrical history. Later Oroonokos than Southerne’s may more securely close this gap between representations and ideologies of gender’s place in the formation of racial identity under colonialism, but in Southerne, this gap is where the play’s action takes place. Consider the words of Southerne’s epilogue, spoken by Mrs. Verbruggen, who played Charlot in the original production: Men show their valor and women their discretion; To Lands of Monsters, and fierce Beasts they go: Wee, to those Islands, where Rich Husbands grow. ··· Then bless your Stars, you happy London Wives, Who love at large, each day, yet keep your lives: Nor envy poor Imoinda’s doating blindness, Who thought her Husband kill’d her out of kindness. Death with a Husband ne’er had shewn such Charms, Had she once dy’d within a Lover’s Arms. Her error was from ignorance proceeding: Poor Soul! She wanted some of our Town Breeding.

Laura Rosenthal reads the lines about dying in a lover’s arms as a comic citation of the tragic climax of Othello, so as to emphasize “suspicions about the white Imoinda’s motives in choosing a black African love object.” I do believe that Othello is very much alive here as the existing dramatic model for a miscegenous love affair between a white woman and a black man. But I feel more strongly that the lines point, at least provisionally, toward a new way of seeing white women’s roles in the colonialist moment the epilogue invokes. Southerne’s epilogue 

 

On the connections between race and the sentimental, see Ellison, “Cato’s Tears”; and Laura Doyle, “The Folk, the Nobles, and the Novel: The Racial Subtext of Sentimentality,” Narrative  (),  –. The epilogue is credited to Congreve. In “Owning Oroonoko: Behn, Southerne, and the Contingencies of Property,” RenD  (), .

Race, women, and sentiment in Southerne’s Oroonoko

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might be taken as a critique of the results of “Town Breeding,” through whose aid Imoinda “might have learn’d to Cuckold, Jilt, and Sham/Had Covent-Garden been in Surinam” () – if, that is, she in her primeval innocence had had the benefit of the spectacle of the Welldon sisters’ brazen city-bred misbehavior to guide her. Still, the worldliness of the address to women in the audience – who are assumed to be happily adulterous and undeceived by husbands’ claims to know best – markedly deviates from the pious salutes to women’s supposedly superior homeand hearth-centered morality which mark later Oroonokos. The women of Southerne’s audience are specifically urban, bourgeois or better, as capable of and interested in sexual speculation as their men might be in the adventure and hope of economic gain which drew them to unknown “Lands of Monsters.” The bodies of Southerne’s women are objects of economic, as well as sexual, exchange. Everything in his play is for sale, beginning with the bodies which the free Englishwomen as well as the enslaved white African are recognized as possessing. Charlot, Lucy, and the Widow are buyers as well as sellers, as eager for pleasure as for security, enthusiastic (and, in Charlot’s case, gifted) impresarios of their own sexual commodification. The play stages the operations of the mercantile capitalism whose fluidly evolving methods of operation in the early modern metropolis were not always legibly apparent. Specifically, it feminizes these operations, representing women in a variety of relations towards money: as speculators (Charlot has persuaded Lucy to “bring [her] Person for a Venture to the Indies,” ()), as property (the enslaved Imoinda), and as successful, if unscrupulous, capitalists. Stanmore, whom the undisguised Charlot will eventually marry, warns her that the rich Widow Lackitt will “cheat you if she can”; she has no heir other than her “boobily Son” Daniel, whom she stands ready to deprive of his inheritance if his money can help her win a lively new husband (, ). The Widow complains about the unfair advantage male reproductive biology has over the female one, in a literalization of the play’s equation between the bodily and the financial: 



On the establishment of representational links between mercantilism and colonial authority in this period, see David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics and Commerce in British America, – (University of Chicago Press, ), pp. –. Brown, Ends of Empire, is particularly interested in this “feminization of mercantile capitalist thought” (p. ). She discusses Behn’s Oroonoko (but not Southerne’s), pp. –. Rosenthal, “Owning Oroonoko,” is also interested in women and commodification in Southerne’s play, but formulates the links between race, gender, and ownership as to focus more on upholding Behn’s rights in the discursive property of her novella than on what the transition from Behn to Southerne might suggest about the colonialist acculturation of white Englishwomen; see esp. pp. –.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

“Here have I six Slaves in my Lot, and not a Man among ’em; all Women and Children; what can I do with ’em, Captain? Pray consider, I am a Woman my self, and can’t get my own Slaves, as some of my Neighbours do” (). In Southerne and after, the whitening of Imoinda will facilitate the white female spectator’s positioning as an approving witness to her own execution and her compensatory achievement of a moral delicacy which will operate to cement her discursive segregation from the arena in which slaves are traded and empires built. In this first dramatic Oroonoko, however, the Welldon sisters offer female spectators an alternative compensation for their acceptance of bourgeois standards of womanhood and the assumption of ineradicable gender difference on which they were based. Instead of emerging as creatures of supreme feminine feeling, they get to act like men. Charlot, who will spend most of her scenes passing for a man, is initially puzzled by the difference between men, who seem born to “a trading Estate, that lives upon credit, and increases by removing it out of one Bank into another,” and “poor Women,” who “must keep our stocks dead by us, at home, to be ready for a purchase, when it comes” (–). Yet she learns and puts into action the arcane rules of acquisition which seem to differentiate men’s estate from women’s, and is ultimately rewarded by marriage to the senior Stanhope, who is attracted to her and impressed by her wit and nerve. That this disguise plot ends in marriage (as it is consciously intended by Charlot to do from the beginning of the play) performs the same kind of disciplined reproduction of womanhood as Imoinda’s racial transformation does of her blackness: a “man” becomes a woman, a black woman becomes white, so that dominant constructions of male and female can emerge, seeming all the more inevitable and necessary after the masquerade. Just as Southerne’s Imoinda is less delicate and submissive than the character will become in later revisions, his Welldon sisters wildly contradict every aspect of the sentimental heroine who will come to dominate the play later in the eighteenth century. Lucy Welldon is frank about her need for and enjoyment of sex, seeking the security of marriage – under whose respectable guise she can seek as many lovers as she’d like – because she is beginning to find her good reputation “impossible to preserve” (). Charlot observes, and Lucy agrees, that the younger sister could “never arrive at the Trust and Credit of a Guinea-Bawd: You wou’d have too much Business of your own, ever to mind other Peoples” (). That these women’s “stock” is their sexuality, as the Widow’s complaint about her inability to profit from her reproductive capacity makes

Race, women, and sentiment in Southerne’s Oroonoko

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abundantly clear, is a given in the materialistic terms of the comic plot. This frank acknowledgment of the comic women’s ownership of sexual and financial drives does not, however, disqualify them from sympathy with the plight of Oroonoko and Imoinda. In an astonishing moment, they leave the humorous plot and cross into the pathetic tragedy to enter Oroonoko’s prison cell and free him from his chains. Again, I emphasize that I am not interested in drawing any crude equivalence between Imoinda’s status as a fighting Amazon and Charlot Welldon’s disguise as a man in order to compete on equal terms with men in an unscrupulous sexual marketplace. I would, however, remark that this transition from profit-taking to nurturing sympathy marks Charlot’s return to the reservation of socially approved feminine behavior as does the powerful new performance of Imoinda’s submission to the cause of monogamous love: one fights to gain a husband while the other literally fights in order to defend her marriage. The slave economy of Southerne’s Oroonoko appropriates these images of female aggressiveness to its own need to naturalize its foundation in the sexual and racial exchange of human bodies. The marketplace, and not the privatized realm of feeling, reigns supreme. It is the will to make spectacle – comic, pathetic – of the consequences and processes of the acquisition of bodies which unites the plot lines of Southerne’s play. This play with the bodily is probably most visible in the comic plot, which flirts with the proposition that strict constructions of gender identity are in fact varieties of performance before settling down to live under their dispensation. As I noted earlier, once Lucy Welldon is safely and respectably married, she drops her ladylike fa¸cade: her sexual compulsiveness is the truth about her, a truth which her husband (and the city husbands of Mrs. Verbruggen’s epilogue) had best accept. If Lucy acts like a lady, Charlot acts like a gentleman, right up until the moment when, marital quest satisfied, she reveals herself to be a woman and retires into wifehood with the elder Stanmore. Both women disguise themselves in order to secure the marriages which, despite the 

Although she is literally concerned with fictional appearances of the eighteenth-century masked ball, Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women (University Park: Penn State University Press, ), recognizes the degree to which the notion of disguising oneself, as Charlot Welldon does, lends itself to inquiry into “the creation of an image or spectacle for the benefit of a spectator” (p. ). I am, of course, interested in this kind of creation here, and would extend Craft-Fairchild’s definition of masquerade to include the racial disguise of an African woman that Southerne enacts with his new Imoinda. Judith Butler’s assertion of the performativity of gender in Gender Trouble, esp. pp. –, is also relevant, but does not include such acknowledgment of the racial or economic circumstances governing access to “acting like a (white) man” or “acting like a (white) woman” as I pursue here.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

comic plot’s metropolitan knowingness about the inconvenience of it all, remain the only ways of securing their goals. (Stanmore tells Charlot after she reveals herself that he likes her “so well, that I’m afraid you won’t think Marriage a proof on’t,” .) Their husbands’ money, and Stanmore’s cool sophistication, are compensations for yielding to the social necessity for marriage which drove the sisters out of London – where “The Young Fellows . . . had forsaken” () them – and which stands unchallenged at the end of the play. Sexual satisfaction is the goal in the comic plot, and marriage the only means by which the Welldons can legitimately secure it. In the tragedy, however, where Behn’s black African bodies are racially and culturally transformed so as to be made more readily available to the play’s firm reinscription of gender difference into Behn’s racial materials, Southerne alters this equation. Here, the rare spectacle of Oroonoko and Imoinda’s married love is threatened by the crude values of the marketplace. Lucy can pretend to be someone she is not, and Charlot can even “change” genders, but Imoinda and the child she carries can only be property. She and her husband – because of the enslavement which the increasingly sentimental plots of the new Oroonokos will take pains to keep at a distance from their audiences – are unable to negotiate any breathing room under a set of inflexible social circumstances, so that the honorable deaths they choose in Behn and Southerne become their only escapes. Even the white women are balked by limits to the powers of negotiation or improvisation to change what Southerne’s Oroonoko regards as the immutable realities of marriage for women or, presumably, slavery for Africans. Despite freeing Oroonoko from his chains, and however adept at deception Charlot becomes, she and the kind-hearted Stanmore and Blanford fail to convince the corrupt governor to let Imoinda rejoin her husband. For all the witty pyrotechnics of the disguise plot, the Africans are fated to remain in the control of others, a bondage from which they can be freed only by death. Southerne’s play, then, offers a complex acting-out of the (limited) range of possibilities available to women in the newly race- and moneyconscious climate of its colonialist moment. One of the possibilities released by the potential of mercantile capital is Charlot Welldon’s achievement of financial reward through the successful assumption of her transvestite disguise. But in choosing to highlight the links between sexual bodies and money, Southerne also chooses to obscure the link between racial bodies and money. The sentimentalized Oroonoko and his white Imoinda make it all the more difficult to see the full scale of

Race, women, and sentiment in Southerne’s Oroonoko

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the horror the original Oroonoko rejects outright: he would rather kill himself, his wife, and his unborn child than see them live as slaves. Southerne’s white Imoinda thus functions to suppress one social relationship – the intraracial love between the original Oroonoko and Imoinda – in order to excavate another, that between white women and sexual and racial authority, from a colonialist matrix. The first dramatic Oroonoko produces white women as beneficiaries of and participants in these racial and social struggles. These outcomes are first suggested by Charlot Welldon’s manipulation of gender and social class; the play experiences no difficulty in accepting the proposition that colonial Surinam is a white man’s world. Only after Southerne’s Oroonoko will it seem necessary to manage the ideological inclusion of white women in an expanding imperial culture in such a way as to celebrate – rather than lampoon – their domestic devotion and strict segregation from the grittier realities of maintaining empire. The sentimental operations of the later adaptations will bar European women from even a provisional seat at the levers of power by reason of their sex, while employing their race to admit them to a privileged vantage point on the eroticized celebration of their lack of recourse. In this way, the white Imoinda does not only erase the black one, but also, paradoxically, voices the compensated social erasure of her white female audience.

CHAPTER



Chaste lines: writing and unwriting race in Katherine Philips’ Pompey

Writing to her friend Charles Cotterell after the unauthorized  publication of her poetry, Katherine Philips cites some lines from Edward Dering’s “Epilogue” to the  London edition of her translation of Corneille’s La Mort de Pomp´ee: No Bolder thought can tax These Rimes of blemish to the blushing Sex. As Chast the lines, as harmless is the sense, As the first smiles of infant innocence.

Eager to protest her literary virginity, Philips in fact slightly misquotes Dering; he actually wrote that the play’s “Scenes” could not be taxed with blemishing the blushing sex, and that its “words” (not “lines”) were “chast”. The inaccurate transcription works to draw attention away from the fact that Pompey is a play, and not a poem, a literary work which possessed “Scenes” to be enacted and whose “lines” were intended to be closely memorized and recited by actors to a paying public rather than shared and reacted to by readers, or groups of readers. Philips’ letter to Cotterell itself undergoes a more deliberate editorial intervention when it was reprinted as one of the Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus in , more than thirty years after her death. In this second version, the diction has been dignified and standardized; the first letter refers to the  publication of Poems. By the Incomparable, Mrs. K. P. as “this most afflictive accident,” while in  it becomes a “treacherous 

I cite the letter as it appears in the edition of Pompey included in Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda; to which is added, Monsieur Corneille’s Pompey and Horace, tragedies, with several other translations out of French (London, ); the pages of Philips’ letter are unnumbered. Philips’ play was originally published in Dublin and in London in . The Dublin edition, from which the  one does not significantly differ, has been reprinted in Germaine Greer, R. Little, and Patrick Thomas (eds.), The Collected Works of Katherine Philips: ‘The Matchless Orinda,’  vols. (Essex, England: Stump Cross Books, –), vol. III.

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Writing and unwriting race in Philips’ Pompey

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Accident,” for example. And yet other changes seem aimed at a subtle reconstruction of Philips as a female author of a certain respectable social standing. Her sense of the “effrontery” (Letters, ) of the publication becomes a lament over the “impudent manner” (Letters, ) in which the poems were delivered to the world, in a more sharply implied social judgment of the pirates’ assault on the dignified address due to a lady. Where previously Philips rhetorically asked whether there is any “retreat from the malice of this World?” (Letters, ), the  edition personalizes the lament so that she wonders if any “Retreat can shield me from the Malice of this World” (Letters, ; my emphasis). Her confidence that Cotterell’s “credit in the World will gain me a belief from all that are knowing and civil” (Letters, ) that she has not secretly connived at publication is transformed three decades after her death into a conviction that his “Credit in the World will gain me a belief with all the better sort of Persons” (Letters, ). A pair of articles by Elizabeth Hageman and Andrea Sununu on the manuscript circulation of Philips’ poems describe her delicate mediation of her assumption of the identity of a woman writer. Following them, I read Philips’ misquotation of Dering as a strategy for claiming the status of a female playwright, which implied a very different kind of literary standing from the one she had so attentively cultivated to enable the transmission of her poems. Dering, with his protestations of harmlessness, and Philips herself, whose averred chastity of literary intent half obscures the genre of the work in question, place themselves in the apparently odd position of deflecting the fame accruing to the author of the first professionally produced play by an Englishwoman and the first play in heroic couplets performed on the English stage by asserting that her landmark work in no way compromises the childlike ignorance of deliberate writerliness thought appropriate to “the blushing Sex.” Cotterell, in his turn, further contextualizes this existing sense of female propriety within a more explicitly expressed awareness of the perils of social relations between female writers and the paying public, an awareness which anoints him as Orinda’s white knight because of his social “credit,” but which also casts her in a position of helplessness before the “impudent” 



Patrick Thomas edited the Letters as vol. II of the Stump Cross Collected Works (), and calls attention to the significant alterations between Philips’  letter citing Dering and the version which appeared in , pp. – and pp. –. For the letters, I cite Thomas’ edition; here, p.  and p. . All subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in the text. “New Manuscript Texts of Katherine Philips, the ‘Matchless Orinda’,” EMS  (), –; and “ ‘More Copies of It Abroad than I Could Have Imagined’: Further Manuscript Texts of Katherine Philips, ‘The Matchless Orinda’,” EMS  (), –.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

forces of the literary marketplace – an arena which, she now sadly concludes, is not always populated by “the better sort of Persons.” The way in which Philips writes – or is made to write – about herself as a writer, I will be arguing here, is a powerful index of the class and gender terms under which she gains access to the authorship of her Pompey. Despite her translation’s place in literary history, it is equally distinguished by its attempt to give theatrical life to a vision of female honor and agency which turns on self-denial and circumspection, the same vision Philips employed to enable her writing career. In fact, her pro forma reluctance to see Pompey performed or published coexists in her letters with an equally obvious interest in all the minutiae of seeing it through to a wide and influential audience. The reluctance operates effectively to revirginize her literary ambition and thus to purify it of the scandal of professionalism, a scandal obsessively troped in the period around women’s sexual bodies. Exiled in Venice in the s, Richard Lovelace sniped at the admittedly brazen Margaret Cavendish’s public circulation of her poetry as not only vain, but whorish: she “curls a Line, as she would a tresse;/Powders a Sonnet as she does her hair,/Then prostitutes them both to publick Aire.” For her part, Philips seems to experience the anxiety of authorship as an almost sexual violation; the unauthorized publication of her work is like having her “imaginations rifled and exposed” (Letters, ). That the Interregnum and Restoration may have been marked by a particularly acute condemnation of women writers’ public airing of their texts is further suggested by the fact that the artlessness and chastity of intent which are such crucial parts of Philips’ rhetorical self-presentation will become objects of satirical scorn to the witty and worldly next generation of female playwrights in England. The “social problem” represented for Philips by publication and performance may have been more acute for her than it was for such aristocratic women as the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Mary Wroth, and Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, who preceded her in the playwright’s vocation; with her middle-class roots, she is explicitly sensitive to charges of careerism, insisting that she is “innocent of any manner of knowledge, much less connivance at [. . . ] Publication” (Letters, ). Her work, presumably including a play destined for the public stage in two cities, was composed “only for my   

Thomas (ed.), The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, vol. I, p. . Backscheider discusses Delarivier Manley’s satire of Philips in her  play The Lost Lover, Spectacular Politics, pp.  –. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), p. .

Writing and unwriting race in Philips’ Pompey

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own amusement in a retir’d life,” the almost accidental byproduct of her “incorrigible inclination to that folly of riming” (Letters, ). Negotiating the perils of public circulation was trickier for Philips not only because of her modest social standing, but, as ably demonstrated by James Grantham Turner, because the very notion of a gender-based division of social experience into public and private spheres (“a retir’d life”) was itself eroding during the s, under the leadership of a monarch whose powerfully illicit – and openly expressed – sexuality exacerbated lingering post-protectorate anxieties about the potency of masculine authority. At any rate, just as her observance and expert manipulation of the conventions of manuscript circulation did not prevent her from becoming one of the best-known lyric poets of her day, neither was she prevented by her fear of the implications of a mass audience from applying herself to the processes of completing her translation, competing with rival translators, planning for manuscript copies to be distributed to influential readers, and countenancing its performance on the indisputably public stage of Dublin’s Theatre Royal. While professing shock at the number of manuscript copies of the play in circulation, for example, she also decides that the sooner “this Trifle” is performed, “the better: For . . . so many Copies are already abroad, that the particular Respect intended to the Dutchess [of Ormonde, wife of the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who was presented with a copy], will be lost by a little Delay. Besides, the other Translations, done by so many eminent Hands, will otherwise appear first, and throw this into everlasting Obscurity” (Letters, ). After her play premiered to great acclaim, Philips’ commentary on Pompey’s progress displays this same ability to finesse the impact of her decisions to boost its renown. Henry Herringman wanted to print it, which would provide an opportunity for her “publickly to address it to the Dutchess,” but which would also require her to allow her name to appear on the title page, “which I can never resolve to do” (Letters, –). Ultimately, the play did appear, printed from a manuscript copy she herself provided; after all, if she “had . . . not furnish’d a true Copy, it had been printed from one that was very false and imperfect” (Letters, ). The  edition of Philips’ Poems, with its odes of praise from Dering, Orrery, Roscommon, and others, stands as a testimony to the hybrid authorial status Philips was developing toward the end of her tragically shortened life: marked by its origination from within a supportive Royalist coterie and yet ultimately delivered to circulation in the “publick Aire” 

Maureen Mulvihill, “A Feminist Link in the Old Boys Network: The Cosseting of Katherine Philips,” in Mary Anne Schofield and Cecelia Macheski (eds.), Curtain Calls: British and American

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

of a group of unknown readers far more heterogeneous than the relatively closed elite body she insisted receive manuscript copies. Although she begins her account of women’s literary history with Aphra Behn, Catherine Gallagher argues persuasively that eighteenthcentury women writers expertly manipulated tropes of authorial invisibility and helplessness (which could maintain for both male and female writers) through the particular social constructions of their femininity in order to achieve their authorship in an evolving literary marketplace. The letters Philips composed during Pompey’s progress from page to stage are marked with evidence that this means of achieving standing as a playwright – by using, rather than attempting to circumvent, tropes of dependence and lack of conscious intent – was not unknown before . However cautiously she mediates her decision to secure the widest possible audience, Philips nonetheless dedicates herself to making her work known in a way which seems new for Englishwomen writing plays. The Countess of Pembroke’s Antonius, Lady Falkland’s Mariam, and Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory were never performed; Wroth’s play remained unpublished in its full version until , and while the Countess’ title does appear on the  title page, the most Lady Falkland could manage were her initials, “E. C.” The modesty, blamelessness, and chastity to which Philips herself and her many admirers obsessively return, both during her lifetime and after her death, were perceived as necessary preconditions of the singlemindedness with which she pursued the most public kind of success she could conceive for Pompey. Moved by Philips’ citation of literary approval of her chaste intent, I would like here to focus on the kinds of “chaste thinking” that come

 

Women and the Theater, – (Ohio University Press, ), pp.  –; and Claudia Limbert, “ ‘The Unison of Well-Tun’d Hearts’: Katherine Philips’ Friendships With Male Authors,” ELN  (), –. Both detail the kinds of support Philips received from male writers in seeing Pompey mounted, Mulvihill in explicit disagreement with what she sees as “a perception” in recent feminist readings of Restoration literary culture “that insists on an adversarial relationship between men and women of letters” (p. ). My point here is not that gender prejudice manifested itself in Restoration literary culture to the degree that men interfered with women’s attempts to publish and/or to circulate their works, a radical oversimplification of some feminist readings which I see animating both Mulvihill and Limbert. Nor do I see women’s literary cooperation with men as a new phenomenon illustrated by Philips, since women had been participants in and leading figures of mixed-sex literary coteries for decades, in England and on the continent. For a theorization of early modern authorship which does not lean as heavily on print as the determinant of successful achievement as does Mulvihill, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). In Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, – (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). The phrase comes from Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ).

Writing and unwriting race in Philips’ Pompey

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into play in her translation of Corneille. This enforcement of chastity includes Philips’ own production of herself as a playwright (as opposed to a poet), and also embraces the subject of the play she chose to render into English and deliver to the public within her literary aura. Philips translates a play which heroizes the good woman Cornelia, Pompey’s widow, and demonizes Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen who embodies a living threat to an idealized Roman political order. In so doing, Philips’ female authorship, painstakingly produced through recourse to the most apparently conservative constructions of gender and of femininity, is identified with the equally conservatively gendered processes of Cornelia’s moral triumph and of Cleopatra’s political defeat. As Dering’s “Epilogue” has it, Even Cleopatra, not content to have The Universe, and Caesar too her Slave, Forbears her Throne, till you her right allow; ’Tis less t’have rul’d the World, then pleased you. ()

Through the act of translating and seeing produced Corneille’s account of the aftermath of Roman civil war and the germination of a Roman imperial idea, Philips achieves a kind of historical subjectivity as the celebrator of the reputation of Pompey, whose defense of social and governmental tradition recommended him to Restoration neoclassicists; he “greater than himself ’s become,/Now in your Poem, than before in Rome” (from the unpaginated dedicatory ode by “Philo-Philippa” in the  edition). What we see in this gendered entry into history is not only the triumphant invocation of Philips’ authority as a woman writer, but also the identification of her and Cornelia’s womanhood with the defense of a chastely self-disciplined imperium: Cornelia’s wifely devotion exemplifies a version of Roman familial and cultural value, especially since Cleopatra plans to achieve power in Rome by influencing Caesar to divorce Calpurnia and marry her. Pompey textualizes Philips’ correct femininity by dramatizing the defeat of the alternate model of cultural authority offered by Cleopatra, the ambitious and powerfully unchaste foreign queen. While women played dominant roles in the Caroline cult of pr´eciosit´e which shaped so many of Philips’ literary assumptions and so much of her own career as a seeker of literary patronage – she dispatched manuscript copies of her play to the Duchess of Ormonde, the Duchess of York and to Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza – I also want to call attention

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

to ways in which class difference comes to mark gender as Philips employs her womanhood in the circulation of Pompey. (Cotterell’s edited references to distinct sorts of persons offer one example of how an awareness of class disparity, here between coterie audiences and public theatre audiences, mark the play’s reception.) The play maps its awareness of the burden of generalized distinction between women across the sense of cultural and racial difference explicit in so many retellings of the story of Rome’s conquest of Egypt, so that race – as it inflects gender and social distinction – is also chastened into silence in Philips’ translation. The praise Pompey won during its Dublin and London runs, and again when it appeared in an authorized edition three years after Philips’ death, is intimately bound up with a kind of gendered purification that the play and its mode perform on female participation in the literary marketplace, and on the political events it dramatizes. The complex, chaste barricades behind which Philips translates and markets Pompey, and the degree to which it is (deliberately?) out of step with evolving notions of audience, are made more visible by the appearance, shortly after its premiere, of what may be the first English burlesque, William Davenant’s The Play-house to be Lett. Davenant’s play is an extraordinary mixture of scenic spectacle and dramatic self-reflexivity. It opens with a dialogue between an underemployed Player and an uneducated stage manager (or “House-Keeper”), fretting about the prospects of keeping the theatre open during summer vacation time in the city. After they regretfully acknowledge their reduction to renting the playhouse to a troop of French farceurs, the second act of the play is the sex comedy that the foreign actors mount. The third act is a spectacular celebration of Sir Francis Drake’s exploits, and the fourth an equally spectacular play on Spain’s cruelty in its New World territories. This juxtaposition of English and Protestant dominion with Spanish Catholic tyranny itself invokes the imperial dimension which is so conspicuously absent from Philips’ play, whose ostensible subject is a decisive step on Rome’s road toward autocracy and empire. The fifth act – preceded, unlike the second, third, and fourth, by the reappearance of the Player and the House-Keeper, so that its status as performance is underlined – is a burlesque Cornelia play. What Davenant does with Philips speaks broadly to the new theatrical craze for heroic tragedy imported from the French. (One of his characters, an actor facing underemployment during the slow summer season, objects to the genre on the grounds that “The French convey their

Writing and unwriting race in Philips’ Pompey



arguments too much/In Dialogue: their speeches are too long.” ) His sarcasm about French style does more than send up a taste for foreign kickshaws, however. The burlesque also takes as its subject a whole set of assumptions about the roles of gender and sexuality as underwriters of social order, patriarchal assumptions which formed an important strand in the representation of the meanings of the reappearance of a sovereign monarchy under Charles II. If Philips tentatively attempts to develop the possibility of women’s exception from rules of sexual definition, Davenant, in effect, calls her on it by re-presenting her tragedy as farce. One thing Davenant rejects outright is the suppression in Philips’ play of female control over what Ros Ballaster has called “the means of seduction” in early modern women’s texts. In Philips’ fifth act, for example, Cleopatra voluntarily decides to release the vulnerable Caesar from her sexual spell. Reluctantly recognizing that she is “far unworthy to be Caesar’s Bride,” she will be content with her own newly discovered talent for self-abnegation instead of the ambition for absolute power in Egypt and Rome which has driven her to this point. She assures herself that her former lover, who apparently desires her still, will “remember one that for him Dy’d” (Philips, ). In Pompey, Cornelia’s pious devotion to her husband’s memory and her sons’ standing in Rome takes precedence for her over every other consideration and contrasts sharply with the ambitious Cleopatra’s lust for political power. Her standing first as Pompey’s wife and then his widow implicitly differentiates her from Cleopatra, who was first Pompey’s mistress and is now Caesar’s, and who regards her sexual power over Roman men as merely an apt instrument for achieving the broad authority she craves. Davenant takes aim at Pompey’s moral condemnation of Cleopatra’s manipulations by regarding her sexual authority as a simple fact of life in proto-imperial Egypt. His Caesar concludes the scene by inviting Ptolemy and Mark Antony (“Tony”), whom he recognizes has obviously 





I cite The Play-house to be Lett in The Works of Sir William Davenant (London, ; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, ), here, p. . The page numbering of the  edition skips from  to , but no text is missing. I will include all subsequent references parenthetically in my text. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics, pp. –, notes the explicit misogyny of many of the plays produced in London in the early s. Also see Gerald MacLean’s introduction to Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration, pp. –; and Harold Weber, “Carolinean Sexuality and the Restoration Stage: Reconstructing the Royal Phallus in Sodom,” in Canfield and Payne (eds.), Cultural Readings, pp. –. “Seizing the Means of Seduction: Fiction and Feminine Identity in Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley,” in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History: – (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, ), pp. –.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

succeeded him as Cleopatra’s lover as he once succeeded Pompey, to the ale-house where, “while tongues will wag on,/to my Gypsies health I’ll drink a flaggon” (Davenant, ): their serial attractions bind them in affirmation of their own happy subjection to women’s sexual pull over men as well as of her status as a sexual object circulated among the three of them. While Philips’ Cornelia consistently takes the moral high ground – her desire for revenge on Caesar for causing her husband’s death stops short of wanting to see him fall victim to the treacherous means she believes the Egyptians would be likely to use against him – Davenant continues his unsettling of notions of social propriety by turning Cornelia’s absolute morality into something far more flexible. In the burlesque, what finally succeeds in defusing her righteous wrath is Caesar’s offer to arrange her a second rich marriage with “some Blade that has house to make her a Joynture,” a golden parachute she readily and philosophically accepts: “Then farewell sweet Pompey since thou wert mortal” (Davenant, ). As well as undermining the filial devotion of Philips’ Cornelia, the remarriage also removes Cornelia’s chaste widowhood as a marker of the exception she poses to rules of sexual ownership and control of women’s bodies, rendering ridiculous her advancement of chastity as a principle of historical value or of female authorship. The operations of gender difference permit Davenant to identify much more passionately than the equally royalist Philips with an aristocratic viewpoint which mocks Cornelia’s concern with marriage and the sexual propriety it confers as dreary bourgeois commonplaces. What Philips’ translation imagines as a somber celebration of women’s removal of themselves from the worlds of sexual and political change is reproduced in Davenant as the triumph of the values of the resolutely public marketplace and its power to denominate women and their sexuality as commodities. His Cleopatra may be a “sauntering young slatern,” as his Cornelia calls her (Davenant, ), but she is Caesar’s – and the audience’s – slattern; no one here remotely shares Cornelia’s housewifely assertion that the Egyptian queen “should be her Parishes pattern” (Davenant, ). If no one in Davenant but Cornelia upholds high standards for women’s sexual conduct, virtually all the characters recognize how Cleopatra’s sexual availability is also produced in race, in another open contradiction of the Philips version of the same materials. Here, even Pompey, of the straight Cornelia’s sacred marital memory, was a veritable “Dragon,/When he brown damsel got, with scarce a rag on” (Davenant, ). Twice in Davenant, characters refer to Cleopatra as a “black gypsy”

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(, ), and the play also begins with a dance of “the Gypsies with which Cleopatra/Entertain’d Cæsar.” Davenant performs Cleopatra’s enticing sexiness as part of her subaltern class identity, an identity which is physically marked by her “black” skin. It is she, the exoticized sexual object, who belongs in the self-consciously theatrical big-city “Play-house” with “Tony” and “Rome’s roaring boys” (Davenant, ), while the upstanding Cornelia is married and hustled off the scene. Davenant’s play performs the segregation from the economic marketplace and the ideological relegation of white women to the home and family, which will emerge as powerful concomitants of British colonial expansion in the decades after Philips, as a public joke on his hypocritical Cornelia rather than as the article of cultural and racial faith it will become. In her letters, Philips insists that she regards publication as being “exposed to play the Mountebanks, and dance upon the Rope,” recoiling from the carnivalesque atmosphere Davenant celebrates as well as from the sexual connotation of being “exposed” as a writer to such an uncontrolled environment. What Davenant deconstructs is precisely the letters’ linkage between gender and respectability, employing the blunt instrument of his Cleopatra’s newly emphasized race to do so. The burlesque’s play with the racial and class sources of Cleopatra’s attraction, and its rude boredom with Cornelia’s moral posturing, suggest just how striking and even offensive an innovation Pompey’s commemoration of women’s capacity for self-denial was in . Just as she takes such pains to chasten her entry into a more multivocal literary marketplace of any possibly unsavory sexual connotations, Philips must also chasten her play of racial consciousness – perhaps because, as Davenant so happily acknowledges, gendered sexualities were primary vehicles through which race could be articulated. To acknowledge more fully the play of racial and cultural difference operating in the historical materials which Pompey dramatizes would be to acknowledge that gender is not the immutable and indivisible category Philips’ achievement of authorship requires it to be. Davenant’s playhouse is going to be “lett” through a series of reckless miscegenations which not only celebrate white men’s actions on their desire for scantily clad brown girls, but which positively require commodification (of sex, race, and French style), the exchange of goods (women, new plays), and consumption (by Roman men and thrill-seeking audiences). Such defiant inscription of embodied powers of exchange is aimed squarely at Pompey’s positing of a world in which the values of the literary and sexual market cannot apply. Just as Philips chastens her account of Roman civil war of its burden of cultural and racial conflict, Davenant can also be observed in the

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

act of recasting the place of racial difference elsewhere in The Playhouse to be Lett, as his fourth act comments on the management of raced sexualities in the establishment of empire far more soberly than does the Pompey burlesque. This act, which had apparently been performed independently before being incorporated into The Play-house to be Lett, opens with a group of “Incas” celebrating their idyllic existence in the golden age before their “Royall Family . . . taught them to live together in Multitudes, under Lawes.” In this past time, We danc’d and we sung, And lookt ever young, And from restraints were free, As waves and winds at sea. ()

After this first musical interlude, “two Apes” shinny down from the concealed upper stage on ropes, and perform a dance of their own. The apes reappear later in the pageant, after a rescuing army of English soldiers has broken Spanish power in Peru and restored the elder son of the last Inca to his rightful place on his people’s throne. This son had been displaced by a rebellious younger brother who violated tradition by marrying “the beautifull Daughter of an inferiour Prince” () and was propped up on his usurped throne by the sadistically cruel Spaniards. With the Inca liberated from their enslavement by the Spanish, the play shows the Spanish replacing them at the forced labor of extracting “Ingots of Gold, and wedges of Silver” from the new land under the oversight of the English victors. A Spanish laborer, exhausted by his burdens, lies down to sleep, but is rousted by the Apes and “a great Baboon,” () who enter and drive him into the woods. The pageant concludes with a dance of the Incas, the Indians, and the Spanish. A Spanish soldier “does in his gestures expresse pride and sullennesse towards the Indians, and payes a lowly homage to the English, who often salute him with their feet . . . whilst the English and Indians, as they encounter, salute and shake hands, in signe of their future amity” (). Apes and ape lore figured prominently, and oddly, in early modern racial discourse. Many early modern travelers gave credence to the notion that black Africans were the product of cross-species breeding between humans and apes, who were thought to be so lustful that they would even pursue human women. Although by the eighteenth century it was scientifically understood that such breeding had not taken place, the 

The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru. Exprest by Instrumentall and Vocall Musick, and by Art of Perspective in Scenes, &c. represented daily at the Cockpit in Drury-Lane, At Three after noone punctually (London, ), p. . All subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in my text.

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imaginative force of the idea continued to inform conceptions of racial and sexual hierarchy. In The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, the apes first appear as antimasque to the Incas’ first declaration of the innocent joys of their existence before they had been civilized by their royal family or colonized by the Spanish. Their cavorting exists on as performative continuum with the presumably more innocent and dignified disport of the Incas, suggesting likeness, even perhaps a secret kinship. After the repudiation of Spanish colonial control – one which has come about through usurpation and supported by an illegitimate marriage – the apes are brought onstage again to punish the proud, sulky Spaniard: what had been on the bottom is now on top. The Incas (and their ape alter egos) have been released from their Spanish bondage but, instead of reverting to their existence before monarchy and civilization, have settled to the management of a new master, whose kindness and justice will guarantee a new “amity” in the administration of Peru’s affairs. The pageant contains no information on the possible marital plans of the rightful Inca heir, but the lack of native royal offspring can only facilitate English control of the Inca and their rich land. The younger brother’s unsanctioned match may have flouted legitimate transmission of Incan royal authority through marriage, but if the new king does not marry, there will be no Indian royal line for the English to have to explain displacing. Such questions of displacement and legitimacy were obviously sensitive ones on the eve of the Restoration when The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru was first published and performed. The absence of a proper royal marriage in the pageant underwrites its fantasy of English acquisition of empire, wherein the true obstacles are not the Inca themselves and their long-established systems of government and inheritance, but rather their unfit Spanish masters. The older succession had been replaced by a new model of benevolent, and sexless, paternalism. As The Play-house to be Lett subtly restates, or even more aggressively rifles the chastity of Philips’ play, it also comments on the assumptions of its mode, French heroic tragedy. Corneille’s La Mort de Pomp´ee was  years old by the time Philips turned to translating it, a somber look at the difficulties of sustaining a vision of heroic virtue – here, Pompey’s defense of the old Roman republic from the autocratic threat represented by the military hero, Julius Caesar – in a world of shifting political faction and personal opportunism. The difficulty of defending the idealism of the  

Kim Hall reviews much of this material in “Troubling Doubles: Apes, Africans, and Blackface in Mr. Moore’s Revels,” in MacDonald (ed.), Race, Ethnicity, and Power, pp. –. As he incorporated The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru into The Play-house to be Lett, Davenant removed the ape antimasque and added more songs and spectacle.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

republican idea in a world dominated on the one hand by the treachery of Rome’s Egyptian clients and on the other by Caesar’s own moral fallibility is left to Corn´elie, Pompey’s widow, who can only voice passionate warnings about the inevitably destructive moral cost Caesar will pay for power and for his lust for the equally ambitious Cl´eopˆatre. The glory toward which imperial Rome will rise, and by implication the glory as insistently promised Corneille’s contemporaries by the choice of Bourbon absolutism, are shown to originate in La Mort de Pomp´ee’s depiction of the erosion of an aristocratic commitment to public ethics. By refusing either to leave the Egyptian scene quietly or to let Caesar continue his journey toward power without speaking out on the moral equivocation which enables his progress, Corneille’s Corn´elie takes center stage; her passionate advocacy of her husband’s honor and that of the passing regime contrasts with Cl´eopˆatre’s cool acknowledgment of her dedication to securing her authority in Egypt by any means necessary. Together, the two women – one dedicated to claiming her husband’s body for a dignified interment in Rome and to making certain that her sons will not bear any obloquy there, the other to outmaneuvering her deceitful brother Ptolemy and her lover Caesar to win through to her own goals – suggest how gender matters in the heroic drama’s portrayal of the perilous compromises of imperial politics. Cl´eopˆatre’s sexual allure, and her willingness to use it in order to get what she wants, are powerful engines of the new Roman and Egyptian order, while Corn´elie’s wifely devotion to her husband’s memory and her sons’ future stands for the fading familial and patriarchal dignity of the past. This inscription of sexual and gender discipline (or lack of it) in the political order had marked earlier dramatic versions of the story of Caesar, Cornelia, and Cleopatra than Philips’ or Corneille’s (or Davenant’s). In the anonymous Caesar’s Revenge (c. ), for example, where one character claims that “The liberty and commonwealth is lost” after Pompey’s defeat by Julius Caesar, both Roman and Egyptian men are obsessed by the fear of appearing “womanish” in the face of their griefs. Lovestruck Antony is berated as “base femall Anthony,” a “womans souldier” whose 



David Clarke, Poetics and Political Drama Under Louis XIII (Cambridge University Press, ), discusses La Mort de Pomp´ee’s confused moral climate, pp. –. Mitchell Greenberg, Corneille, Classicism, and the Ruses of Symmetry (Cambridge University Press, ), links Corneille’s representations of absolutism both to seventeenth-century French politics and to a psychological reading of gendered personality development, pp.  –. Dorothea Frances Canfield, Corneille and Racine in England (; rpt. New York: AMS Press, ), discusses Philips and the confederate Pompey translations, pp. –. I cite The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, Or Caesar’s Revenge (London: ; rpt. Oxford: The Malone Society, ), here, ... References to inappropriately “womanish” male emotion occur at .., .., and ... I will provide subsequent references parenthetically in my text.

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previous martial energy has been transformed into something now fit only for “nights assaults” (.., ). This generalized effeminization is explicitly blamed on Roman men’s enervating desire for Cleopatra, the “Egyptian Sorceress” who “Enchante(s) these Noble warriars man-like mindes,/And melts their heart in love and wantones” (.., –). If Davenant will make knowing comic capital of male heterosexual desire, Caesar’s Revenge regards it as distracting and even dangerous to the project of committing acts of state and empire. While there is no Cleopatra in Thomas Kyd’s translation of Garnier’s Senecan Corn´elie, and therefore no opportunity for voicing a perception “of sexual difference which haunts and frightens men” (Weber, “Carolinean Sexuality,” ), the consequences of violating strictly policed gender boundaries are voiced here by Cornelia, who experiences the momentous political changes presaged by her husband’s defeat in the civil war entirely in terms of her role as a wife. A widow when she married Pompey, she is haunted by the “light faith” she demonstrated by agreeing to remarry, and believes that her Pompey’s capture is a punishment visited on them both by vigilant heavenly “powers.” She associates her sense of trespass against rules of patriarchal ownership of her body with Caesar’s more generalized despotic spoilation of “th’ancient freedom” (A) of Rome: “I am shee,/I am that plague, that sacks thy house and thee,” she tells the shade of her first husband when she receives news of Pompey’s capture (B). After the deaths of Pompey and her father, Kyd’s Cornelia finally chooses suicide. Kyd’s is the only one of the Cornelia plays in existence before Corneille’s and Philips’ work which is a closet drama, with the concentration on women’s domestic and familial crises typical of the mode. But all of the Cornelia plays take place in a universe in which the racial and cultural conflicts occasioned by Rome’s absorption of Egypt have been rewritten either as private aristocratic struggles between ambition and stoic self-discipline, or as stark dramas of the role that gender difference – within womankind, as well as between men and women – must play in the foundation of the state. Several critics have noted the degree 



Thomas Kyd, Pompey the Great, his faire Corneliaes Tragedie: Effected by her Father and Husbandes downecast, death, and fortune. Written in French by that excellent Poet Ro: Garnier; and translated into English by Thomas Kid (London, ), B. I will provide subsequent references parenthetically in my text. Davenant refuses the Senecan gravity that Kyd finds in the implications of Cornelia’s remarriage. More, his Cleopatra jeers at Cornelia’s pretense at marital faith by taking in vain the name of Lucrece, the Roman matron whose suicide after her rape hastened the downfall of the Tarquins’ corrupt oligarchy and thus affirmed the rightful place of patriarchy in history and culture: “Bodikins! pray why a gog Mistress Pompey?/As high as you are; a Joan may out-jump ye,/Be an example before y’are a Tutress!/You want a Tarquin to make you a Lucress” (p. ).

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

to which the Renaissance revival of Stoicism and of the closely related Senecan doctrines of self-possession, emotional detachment from crisis, and “passive endurance” of the world’s injuries perhaps particularly recommended themselves to aristocratic women as they sought means of achieving authorship; the celebration of honor, submission, and domestic virtue in the texts through which Senecanism was transmitted to the early modern reading public replicated the same behavioral prescriptions urged on them by their own cultural placement. Philips’ Pompey is emphatically not a closet drama, but its celebration of Cornelia’s selflessness as she attempts to secure the body of her dead husband for honorable burial in Rome and its denigration of Cleopatra’s cold sexual manipulation of Caesar do recall the gender fears and convictions of the earlier mode as they are also aimed at constructing its female author in terms of values which would not threaten early modern gender establishments. Just as her lyrics echo the distinction between souls and bodies fashionable in the pr´ecieuse neoplatonism of Jacobean and Caroline literary culture, Philips’ play revives the verities of an earlier dramatic style as it succeeds in inscribing gender in matters of state. The chastity to which Dering’s epilogue refers is thus an apt characterization of a text which takes difference between women as an index to the moral implications of political choice. In pursuing her own translation of Corneille, Philips was, as we have seen, acutely conscious of the English version of the play produced by “Certain Persons of Honor,” the so-called “confederate version.” As Orinda, she wrote to Charles Cotterell that seeing the job that Edmund Waller, one of the confederate authors, had made of Corneille’s first act confirmed her own decision to proceed with the translation, since he  





Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), p. . For further discussion of links between Senecan closet drama and women, see Lamb, Gender and Authorship, pp. –; Weller and Ferguson, Tragedy of Mariam, pp. –; and Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, ), pp. –. Adding to my sense that Philips saw the story of Cornelia’s chastity and faith as a particularly suitable one for her own dramatic debut is the fact that she was actively engaged in trying to rehabilitate the political career of her strongly Parliamentarian husband as she began and circulated her translation. Whatever literary ambitions she may have nursed for her work, she also enjoyed the advantage of being able to contextualize it within her own contemporary example of wifely devotion and concern. For biographical notes on Philips see Thomas, Collected Works, vol. I, pp.  –, and Elizabeth Hageman, “The Matchless Orinda: Katherine Philips,” in Katharina M. Wilson (ed.), Women Writers of the Renaissance and Restoration (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, ), pp. –. Thomas discusses the conservative cultural and political functions of Philips’ neoplatonic coterie, Collected Works, vol. I, pp. –.

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had produced “on the same Subject the worst Verses that ever fell from his Pen.” While her letters attest to her scrupulous sense of French meanings, meanings to which she felt Waller was frequently insensitive, the greater euphony Philips implies that her translation possesses is also manifest in a certain restraint in the ways she renders the conflicts between her Roman and Egyptian principals. Waller’s Ptolemy declares to his counselor Photinus that the news of Pompey’s capture by Caesar has caused Cleopatra “already” to “play[s]/The Queen, and her Ambitious hopes betray[s]”; She looks as if she were already grown My Mistress, or my Partner in the Throne. (Pompey the Great, )

While Philips’ Ptolemy also believes that his sister now “Her Coronation . . . believe’s assur’d,” he does not express any bitterness about her overbearing behavior toward him. Rather, he confines himself to noting that her confidence in her “Antient Friendship” with Pompey now leads her “inwardly” into believing that she “already shares my Throne” (Philips, p. ). Philips is similarly reticent in her description of the origins of the Caesar-Pompey-Cleopatra triangle. In confrontation with Ptolemy over how Egyptian sovereignty should now be divided, Waller’s Cleopatra reminds her brother of how Pompey and Caesar came to be involved in their country’s affairs. When their father sent them to Rome to plead for his throne after the first invasion, she says, he was but a tender Child; myself, though Young, Yet of an Age to make that Beauty known Which Heav’n had lent me, and some Hearts my own. Above the rest Caesar his Passion shows, Declares his Love; but yet, with Caution wooes: Fearing the Senate, he puts Pompey on: Our bus’ness was by their new friendship done. (Pompey the Great, )



Letters, p. . Philips writes on  October  that, “The word Roman blade choques me very much, his frequent double rimes in an heroique Poem, his calling Pompey a Consull, when that was not in ye Originall, or the history, both ye consulls being with him at Pharsalia; Pharsalian Kites for les Vautours de Pharsalie, I ca˜not relish; his englishing le dernier preuve de leur Amitie, their new friendship, & many additions and omissions of ye authors sence” (p. ). Catherine Cole Mambretti, “Orinda on the Restoration Stage,” CL  (), –, offers a detailed discussion of the completion of the rival translations and their productions.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Waller’s Cleopatra is a young but active and self-conscious seducer who compels Caesar to “show” his responsive ardor, and who is forthright about both the sexual payment he will collect when the time is right (that ambiguous “our bus’ness”) and the role her own audacity played in maintaining the Ptolemies in power. Their father knew the kingdom was my beauty’s prize, And ow’d his sceptre to these eyes. (Pompey the Great, )

In Philips, it is Ptolemy who was “very Young” at the time of the embassy, while Cleopatra – even if old enough to be “Already Active in subduing hearts” () – is not as certain of her effect on Caesar as she is in Waller. Philips’ “Caesar received, or else pretended love” (). At Caesar’s prompting, her Pompey develops a “high concern” () for the Egyptians’ welfare, a moral concern absent from the comparable passage in Waller; there, the focus is on the sexually driven Caesar’s realization that he can’t afford to offend a Senate already wary of his intentions by putting himself forward as Egypt’s protector, even if such action would grant him greater access to Cleopatra. Philips’ Cleopatra is also less forthcoming about the connection between her sexuality and the present state of affairs in Egypt. Apparently, her brother Ptolemy only learns the full story of what happened in Rome after Pompey’s imprisonment, when Cleopatra explains her claim on the throne. The effect of Philips’ indirections – keeping Caesar’s attraction to Cleopatra a secret, blurring the impact of her sexual power over him, softening the effect of Caesar’s scheming lustfulness with Pompey’s sentimental “high concern” for Egypt’s welfare – is to blur what the confederate translation promises its audience will be a satisfying emotional spectacle. Waller and his friends vow in their prologue to repay their audience’s “kind Attention” with full knowledge of “How Cleopatra Looks, how Caesar Burns,/How Pompey Dyes, and how Cornelia Mourns.” This attention to emotional fullness results in a play which is not only far less chastened of renegade sexuality than is Philips’ – their Caesar, Cornelia notes with disgust, is ready to “tread” Rome’s laws beneath his feet on his way “to an Ægyptians bed” (Pompey the Great, ) – but which is also prepared to admit a far wider range of mixed emotions generally. This wider emotional range is perhaps most immediately visible in the way it fashions its Cleopatra. Not as subversively intent on exploding the straight play’s pieties of gender and social class as The Play-house to be Lett, Pompey the Great does still produce her as a more fully dimensional

Writing and unwriting race in Philips’ Pompey



character than Philips’ Pompey. Mark Antony, meeting her for the first time, is impressed and tells Caesar so: “Her Wit surprizes, and her bright Eyes so,/That were I Caesar, I should love her too” (Pompey the Great, ). Despite her unabashed ambition to be “the Mighty Queen of all/The Prostrate World,” (Pompey the Great, ) the confederate Cleopatra is also determined to keep her hunger for power “so confin’d,/That though it Dazels me I am not Blind” (Pompey the Great, ). She is conscious of a moral debt to Pompey, who saved her dynasty’s throne, and genuinely cares about Caesar, feeling that although it would be in her interest and well within her capacity to incite him to kill Pompey while he has him in custody, doing so would be “an Injury” to her lover’s “Desire” (Pompey the Great, ). In comparison, Philips’ play works to shut down such opportunities for creating breadth and dimensionality in its Cleopatra. Her Cleopatra is still ambitious – in contrast to Waller’s, her ambition “is the only Sovereign of [her] Will” () – but lacks the confederate version’s delicate respect for the quality of Caesar’s desire or gratitude for Pompey’s labor on her behalf. Most tellingly, for my larger argument about the ways in which Philips’ play chastens itself of historical and sexual contingency, Philips also omits much of the interplay between Cleopatra and Cornelia which the confederate translation found it possible to include. These omissions include entire scenes as well as individual moments when Cleopatra is commenting on some aspect of Cornelia’s travails. In the confederate version, when Cleopatra makes such commentaries, she does so sympathetically. When, for instance, she hears that Cornelia’s husband was killed before her eyes, she exclaims Unequall’d villains! O! Accursed brood! Are they not glutted with that Hero’s Blood, That thus his dearer half they do persue, Forgetting all that to her Sex is due? (Pompey the Great, )

Philips mutes this evidence of the confederate Cleopatra’s empathy for another woman in distress and respect for her devotion to her husband. Her Cleopatra’s response to the news of Cornelia’s suffering is simply “O Gods! What could she either say or do!” (Philips, ). As I have argued, such examples of restraint can be multiplied not only throughout Pompey, but probably also across the breadth of Philips’ writing career. The declaration of Cornelia’s helplessness seems an appropriate closure for a discussion which has emphasized the means by which



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Philips exploited conditions of gender and class restraint which governed the development of her authorship. Although contemporary evidence agrees that Pompey was well received in both Dublin and London, the evidence that survives is in fact very scanty; we don’t know, for example, where it played in London, on what dates, or who was in the cast. Apparently, it never reached (was never intended to reach?) its third night’s performance – whose box office receipts traditionally went to the playwright – and thus would publicly have identified Philips as a woman who was paid for her writing. The letters, which are voluble on Philips’ eagerness to see how the translation was being received in its manuscript circulation, fall mysteriously and frustratingly silent on the subject of the actual performance; they stop before the period of the Dublin performance and do not resume until two months after it. The gap in the correspondence seems almost strategic, as if designed to obliterate not the fact that Philips translated Pompey – a fact which she and her friends did their utmost to publicize – but rather that it had a life, however brief, in the “publick Aire” of a paying theatre audience whose response was beyond the powers of Cotterell or Orrery or anyone else to shape to purposes which entirely suited the circumstances under which she could let it be performed. What survives of Pompey in the theatre, apart from a few scattered references, is the cheerful vulgarity of Davenant’s parody, with its French-bashing and pro-English imperialist pageantry. If Philips’ next foray into translation, the single act of Corneille’s Horace, which was all she completed before her death in , is any indication, she herself may have been moving on as an author; the looseness of the versification, especially after Pompey’s metrical precision and sensitivity to nuances of meaning, may suggest a lack of engagement with a task of which she had already shown herself capable. In translating La Mort de Pomp´ee, Philips – for the gender and class reasons I have subsumed here under the term “chastity” – was bound to say or do no more than could be allowed by her original set text. If an original play would in fact have been her next project – an assumption 



William Van Lennep (ed.), The London Stage –, Part One (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, ), includes on p.  a mention by Gerard Langbaine of a performance of what he thinks was probably Philips’ Pompey, since it was followed by the fifth act of Davenant’s The Play-house to be Lett; without Philips, Davenant’s joke would lose its point. Since Davenant was first performed in August of , Van Lennep puts Philips’ performance sometime in the late spring of that year, at the close of the previous season. Mambretti, “Orinda on the Restoration Stage,” noting Philips’ statement in a letter to Cotterell that the play was to be performed a week from the following Tuesday, dates the first Dublin performance on  February , but is forced to admit that “no documentary evidence” () survives of a London production. I was pleased to discover in conversation with Elizabeth Hageman that she shared this hunch.

Writing and unwriting race in Philips’ Pompey



based on my sense of her career’s movement toward ever deeper (and therefore more rigorously mediated) penetration of a mass literary marketplace – one can only imagine the kinds of authorial defenses she would have found necessary to protect herself and her work. In Pompey’s case, the surest means of self-protection may have been simply to deny the impact of the work in the theatre, which is one likely conclusion to be drawn from that eloquent gap in the letters’ recital of details about the first performance and the London premiere. Her death, so soon after the performance and before another dramatic project could be completed, provided an ironic kind of opportunity for celebrating her achievement without having to connect it to the controversial living person of a female author. The play, and especially the cultivated myth of Orinda, survived to represent Philips as a paragon of gentility, industry, and craft, and to deny the powers of promiscuous interpretative response ever to remove her from the protection of a carefully constructed community of “the better sort of persons.”

CHAPTER



The queen’s minion: sexual difference, racial difference, and Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer

In this chapter, I will discuss the nature of the links between race and notions of gender, family and the state in Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer (). Here, I believe, race is instrumental in shaping the play’s political and sexual assumptions: miscegenation is symptomatic of the senescent patriarchal order that Abdelazer portrays, and also performs critical conceptual labor for the insurgency led by the angry young prince, Philip. While the play may seem to make its claims on behalf of absolutism and sovereignty in a rather perfunctory fashion, it is much more assertive in identifying beliefs about race as a key component of Philip’s stand against the regime headed by his mother and her Moorish lover. But this regime, in its turn, is grounded in the queen’s voracious and destructive sexual appetites. Abdelazer implicates race in the crisis of familial and political institutions it portrays, but at least in the first part of the play, its Moorish antihero is also presented as a victim of a female sexuality which knows no bounds. Black man and white queen both figure in the play’s outcomes, but they figure differently. Making any kind of critical comment on this play has apparently been difficult. Even in the midst of the current Aphra Behn boom, commentary on Abdelazer is rare. The play earns two pages of discussion in Derek Hughes’ recent overview of late seventeenth-century English drama, but 



This paper is a longer version of a presentation I first made at the International Conference on Aphra Behn: Identit´e, Alterit´e, Ambiguit´e (Paris, July ). I am grateful to the conference organizers, Mary Ann O’Donnell and Bernard Dhuicq, as well as to a lively set of auditors, for their kind reception and encouragement of my ideas. Comparing Abdelazer to its sources in the earlier anonymous Lusts Dominion, Derek Hughes, English Drama – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ) writes: “There is not even any explicit providential agency in the restoration of the true heir, and the generalized symbolic associations which cling to the original villain (Eleazar) are removed: Behn, for example, omits the comprehensive exclusion of the stranger, the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, with which Lusts Dominion concludes. At the beginning of Lusts Dominion the villain silences music claiming that he hates ‘all unity’. . . whereas Abdelazer silences the music because he ‘hates all Softness’. . . Enmity to the cosmic principles of harmony and unity dwindles into mere personal brutishness” (p. ).



Sexual and racial difference and Behn’s Abdelazer



is absent from Susan Owen’s Restoration Theatre and Crisis, despite the striking appropriateness of her general remarks on how family order becomes “an important way in which dramatists engage with the problem of order and disorder in the state” to the play. Two recent essay collections each contain scattered references to the play, but no single paper in either collection concentrates on it. A quick scan of the MLA Bibliography for the last fifteen years turns up almost  articles, notes, and dissertations on Behn and her works, but again, none devoted to Abdelazer. This silence on Behn’s only tragedy, when so much new work on her comedies, her prose, and her lyrics is being published, is striking. If talk about Abdelazer is rare, talk about the roles race may play in it is even rarer. (One valuable exception to this rule is Jacqueline Pearson’s essay, “Slave Princes and Lady Monsters: Gender and Ethnic Difference in the Work of Aphra Behn,” to which I will turn later in this chapter. ) Most visible in this connection are the comments of its first modern editor, Montague Summers. For Summers, Abdelazer improves on its antecedent text, the anonymous Lusts Dominion, Or The Lascivious Queen, and is also superior to its eighteenth-century recension, Edward Young’s The Revenge. Especially in comparison to Young, Behn’s Abdelazer is a “magnificent tapestry. . . woven in colours strong and daring.” Confronting the questions of taste and propriety which dominated Behn criticism at the time his edition appeared, Summers asserts that the sexual passions the play portrays with such relish would be “entirely natural in such an untamed savage as Abdelazer, whilst history affords many a parallel to the lascivious queen” (). Thomas Betterton originated the role and Summers is certain he “was no doubt a wonderful representative of the ferocious Afric,” () given Richard Steele’s later enthusiastic endorsement of Betterton’s Othello. In fact, Betterton didn’t play Othello until , six years after the premiere of Abdelazer. His work in Shakespeare’s role became known for its tragic dignity and not for its ferocity or “untamed” quality. Neither is     

Oxford: Clarendon Press, , p. . These are Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies; and Heidi Hutner (ed.), Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory and Criticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ). In Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies, pp. –. The Works of Aphra Behn,  vols. (London, ; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, ); vol. II, p. . Subsequent citations will be provided parenthetically in my text. Philip K. Jason, “The Distinction of Otway and Betterton,” RECTR nd ser., . (), –, believes that, judging by his success in such Shakespearean roles as Hamlet and Othello, as well as in Restoration heroic drama, Thomas Betterton was probably an exponent of naturalistic acting, in which “the power [of his performances] resided in the restraint” (). Also see Virginia Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. On the



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Behn’s hero particularly ferocious or sexually obsessed; to the contrary. His lovemaking with the queen is a morally and physically wasting ordeal. Quenching the “fire of Lust” that burns in her has “Made an extraction ev’n of my Soul, / Decay’d my Youth, only to feed thy Lust!” Abdelazer is the queen’s prey. He renders the sexual exchange between them as a mechanistic “extraction” of his essence, during which he is a virtual bystander to his own dissolution. This sexual subjection is at odds with one of the chief tenets of the early modern construction of the stage Moor, his lustful aggression. To the degree that Abdelazer is Shakespearean, the resemblance may actually reside in Behn’s mining of the same vein of cross-racial spectacle Othello opened, a vein eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatrical practice would work to intensify so that Summers, writing in , can still use Betterton’s Othello as shorthand for a very different role – a role coincidentally also first performed by a white man in blackface. Just as the performative tradition of Othello after Betterton dilates upon the sexual violence committed by the black hero against his white wife, so too does Behn alter her source material in Lusts Dominion to heighten the importance of its illicit miscegenous affair by translating it into the political terms of her own day. If Othello ends with Ludovico’s order to let the “tragic loading” of Othello and Desdemona’s marriage bed be “hid,” (.., ) Abdelazer struggles to let what it imagines as the results of private, cross-racial sexual connections be known. What distinguishes the play’s employment of racial difference between the queen and her lover, between Moor and Spaniard, is the degree to which it finally fails in causally connecting race to the decay of Spanish institutions. The vengeful Moor, as Summers’ remarks attested more than  years after the play’s premiere, is a stage device which attains a kind of theatrical and cultural vitality of its own, regardless of the specific dramatic actions which are designed to contain it.



 

role of Thomas Betterton as a performer of national identity and particularly of his Othello as a chilling embodiment of the fear of miscegenation and erasure in English society, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, ), pp. –. I cite Abdelazer, Or The Moor’s Revenge. A Tragedy. As it is Acted at his Royal Highness the Duke’s Theatre. Written by Mrs. A. Behn (London, ); here ., p. . All subsequent citations will be provided in my text. The pioneering account here is Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen, pp. –. Contrast my sense of Behn’s alteration of her source materials with the opinion of Pearson, “Slave Princes and Lady Monsters,” that “she alters the plot of Lusts Dominion less than one might have expected, following it closely in almost every material respect” (). For further discussion of the work Behn does with Lusts Dominion, see J. LeGay Brereton’s edition (Louvain: Librairie Universitaire, ; rpt. Vaduz, ), xxxiii–xxxv.

Sexual and racial difference and Behn’s Abdelazer



Like the power of Shakespeare’s Othello in performance, the literary legend of Aphra Behn has cast a long shadow over the centuries after her death. Behn has been one of the chief beneficiaries of the feminist recovery and recirculation of women’s texts, and her presence in contemporary classrooms is very much the product of the continuing academic project of refashioning curricula to reflect the reconfiguration of literary knowledge about the period between  and . But her most recent editor Janet Todd has seen contemporary critical attention to cultural productions of gender, race, and class as a kind of backlash against a feminist archival project of recovery and recirculation of women’s texts, the project which has resurrected Behn. Todd suggests that race, in particular, has assumed a falsely privileged status in academic discourse: “[T]he result of the ascendancy of ‘race’ as the issue has been to privilege primarily the non-white voice, too long silenced, and largely to forget that there are other silencing factors on white and non-white voices” (“AngloAmerican Difference,” ). In fact, she argues that race’s deployment by feminist analysis is at least potentially self-destructive: “[S]ince antiracism commands more general assent than feminism ever did, it is often used in a curious way to discredit women and women’s endeavors. Or, to be more specific, the language of accepted anti-racism is frequently used to denigrate the feminist enterprise” (). Todd’s critical investment in the recovery of a female literary tradition – in what she jocularly calls “studying dead white women” () – is such that she perceives feminisms whose focus lie elsewhere than on this process of recovery of a series of female Greats not only as methodologically unsound, but as an attack on “the feminist enterprise” itself. Todd’s reduction of a racially conscious critical practice to reading texts produced in and by “non-white voices” fails to recognize that race is a concept which applies to people who are white as well as to those who aren’t. Even in its narrow modern signification as skin color, race becomes meaningful in the institutions of social, sexual, and economic control which have been built around it, and not merely in its physical manifestations. Behn’s era constructed its version of these controls  



Ezell, Writing, pp. –. In “Anglo-American Difference: Some Thoughts of an Aging Feminist,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature  (),  –. Todd is the editor of The Works of Aphra Behn,  vols. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, –). Robyn Wiegman’s “What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion,” Critical Inquiry  (), –, is perhaps the most recent feminist critique of such a unitary reconstruction of feminism’s history and internal nature as Todd’s. In a response to Susan Gubar’s “What Ails Feminist Criticism,” first appearing in Critical Inquiry  (), –, in which Gubar assesses

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

in the establishment of New World colonies based on the slave trade, and critics of early modern literature have already begun discussing the extent to which women figured and participated in the literatures of colonialism, empire, and abolition. Studying race, then, is not external to or competitive with studying the “dead white women” who are Todd’s preferred critical object; rather, race crosses and complicates these women’s English writing identities, as Behn’s Englishness was crossed by her sojourn in Surinam and the racial rumors it engendered. Hardly “prevailingly fashionable” in studies of Aphra Behn outside Oroonoko and perhaps The Widdow Ranter, writing about race can be profoundly dislocating to a feminist critical practice based, as much modern work on sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early eighteenth-century women has had to be, in the principles of recovering women’s texts and individual women’s writing lives. Writing about race in Restoration and eighteenth-century women’s writing involves writing about differences not only between, but sometimes even within women, which would tend in itself to deny the assumption of the existence of a single “feminist enterprise” or that the proper subject of feminist inquiry can be stabilized around authors or texts conceived as fixed and internally consistent. Jacqueline Pearson’s “Slave Princes and Lady Monsters” is one example of recent criticism which attempts to resolve this perceived tension between writing about women and writing about race. Although she is careful to emphasize, as does Todd, the improbability of a seventeenthcentury woman writer being able to proclaim a liberatory and egalitarian racial politics (which she somewhat trivializes as “a late twentieth-century vocabulary of political correctness”), Pearson does not hesitate to make large claims for Behn’s capacity as a woman writer “to disrupt received stereotypes of class, of race, and of gender” (). Such an account of Behn’s achievement of authorship submerges the racial transactions such achievement may have involved into an





the damage she asserts has been done to feminist criticism by post-structuralist method and by postcolonial political agendas, Wiegman cites the lack in Gubar’s piece of a “systematic analysis of race as a mode of domination” (); without the readiness to conceive the ideological and material utility of race, Gubar’s paper can regard “all analytical moves made by feminists of color” only as “assaults against feminism” (). e.g., Brown, Ends of Empire; Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge University Press, ); Nussbaum, Torrid Zones; and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others. In The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn (Columbia, S. C.: Camden House, ), Todd roughly divides current work on Behn into two camps, a British one concentrating on the recovery of Behn’s Restoration political and social contexts, and an American one more interested in the information her texts can contribute to a growing critical discourse on race and colonialism in literary studies ( p. ). The topics of these American-influenced articles tend to be “the general and prevailingly fashionable ones of gender, race, body, cross-dressing, and masquerade” ( p. ).

Sexual and racial difference and Behn’s Abdelazer



essentialized notion of white womanhood. Naturalizing the narrator’s (and author’s) white Englishness, Pearson apparently perceives race as inhering only in characters who are identified as nonwhite. More to my earlier point about the challenges racial difference can explore to a unitary idea of women, Pearson’s reading of Oroonoko also fails to explain the narrative’s insistence on Imoinda’s difference from the white women of Surinam, with her facial scarification, her history of sexual objectification in the harem of her husband’s grandfather, and her Amazonian fight for freedom in the slave rebellion. The silence on Imoinda points to the kinds of difficulties an author-centered feminist criticism may have in accounting for such crucial differences between women as exist between Oroonoko’s bride and the white narrator who tells us about her. Pearson explores the effects of the persistent coupling of Shakespeare with Behn and other women writers in another essay in which she characterizes Restoration and eighteenth-century women writers’ appropriations of Othello as a revisionary play with received cultural materials. These writers claimed the opportunity to see “Othello . . . as symbolically feminized, even as providing potentially resonant self-images for women writers who were also aware of prejudice and were anxious about transgressions of their assigned roles.” She includes such plays as Mary Pix’s The False Friend () among early modern women’s works which rework Othello to express “the sympathetic identification . . . between women and other cultural outsiders” (“Blacker than Hell Creates,” ) these writers experienced as women struggling “to take control of male texts” (“Slave Princes,” ). As does Behn’s Europeanizing of Oroonoko, Pix’s play “celebrates difference rather than using it to naturalize repressive hierarchies” (“Blacker than Hell Creates,” ). In fact, the symbolic feminization of Othello begins in Shakespeare’s text, as the Moor is fatefully controlled by his belief in the feminine erotic magic which animates the handkerchief his mother passed on to him. This feminization also occurs in the play’s rich performance 





Pearson, “Slave Princes,” recognizes the black Imoinda as a problem for her reading of Oroonoko: “There has been a certain amount of uneasy commentary on the fact that, although Imoinda is allowed to be a fully African woman even to the extent of having tribal tattoos . . . Oroonoko in order to be the hero has to be Europeanized, presented as ‘more civiliz’d, according to the European mode’ . . . and given . . . even European facial features” (–). But having raised the issue of Imoinda’s African identity in the text, Pearson immediately declines to explore it, quickly passing over the subject of racial difference as it is literally embodied in Imoinda in favor of asserting Behn’s evacuation of stable racial meanings from her text. On this connection, see the essays in W. R. Owens and Lizbeth Goodman (eds.), Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon (London: Routledge, ), and in a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly edited by Elizabeth Hageman and Margaret Hannay, “Teaching Judith Shakespeare,”  (). “Blacker Than Hell Creates: Pix Rewrites Othello,” in Quinsey (ed.), Broken Boundaries, p. .

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

history, where it manifests in the hysterically passionate nineteenthcentury Othellos of Kean and Salvati – Othellos who were played in tawny, rather than dark, face-paint and whose racial difference from a white wife and a white audience was thus semiotically obscured at the same time it was performatively underlined. The feminization of Othello which Pearson traces to the late seventeenth century is a broad theatrical as well as textual phenomenon, one powerfully linked to the racial identities and convictions of actors and perhaps especially audiences, as Summers’  remarks attest. To see this process of feminization as only emancipatory and subversive of an oppressive social order is to fail to perceive how deeply the gendering of responses to Othello was grounded in the manipulation of tropes of race, tropes equally applicable to Pearson’s white writing heroines and Shakespeare’s black hero. Her posited equivalence between these authors’ experiences of misogyny as they attempted to circulate their plays and the exploitation of black people in seventeenth-century slave economies (“sympathetic identification . . . between women and other cultural outsiders”) is inaccurate at best, naive at worst, assuming as it does that this identification worked either to produce positive and “sympathetic” portraits of nonwhite characters, or entirely to transcend the racial and colonialist contexts of Restoration culture (“to disrupt received stereotypes of class, of race, and of gender”). “Women writers,” Pearson asserts, “in producing more sensitive representations of black characters, were also subtextually presenting more positive representations of themselves” (“Blacker than Hell Creates,” ). In seeking to reconcile the perceived conflict between feminism and the claims of race in women’s writing, Pearson’s readings too hastily conflate the work race is asked to perform in women’s texts with Englishwomen’s strategies of achieving authorship, collapsing distinctions between race – particularly as physically marked by a black African origin – and white femininity as socially marginal categories in early modern England. My intention here is certainly not merely to reverse this conceptual error by giving race priority over women and gender in formulating a response to Abdelazer. I will be arguing rather that race becomes a powerful tool in the construction of women’s writing identities in the period, and that Behn deploys racial principles – as embodied in the Moor, as understood by Philip, and as violated by Isabella – in the 

Wiegman, “Second Opinion,” describes one of the political responsibilities of “white feminism” as “the necessity of disarticulating the history and meaning of academic feminism from the prototypical plot of white women’s subjectivity” ().

Sexual and racial difference and Behn’s Abdelazer

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play’s vision of royalism under internal siege. The play’s conviction of monstrous female sexuality may be a large part of the reason why contemporary feminist critics have not written about it, but my goal here is to discuss the co-existence of the play’s violent sexual and racial politics. Bodies in Abdelazer – physical bodies, not merely the bodies of critical discourse which have interested me to this point – are raced as well as gendered. I seek to demonstrate the instrumentality of this unevenly and inconsistently constituted hybrid to the play’s royalist and patriarchal agenda. The kind of critical history I have outlined above is only one force – a powerful one, but only one – militating against the recovery of race in Abdelazer. Another relevant factor is surely the conflicted expression of political faction in Behn’s own day. The facts of regicide and Restoration had displaced Stuart patriarchalism as a meaningful political theory, but the language of royal patriarchs and patriarchal families retained much of their ideological hold, so that it had been virtually impossible to conceive of a public order after Cromwell’s death in terms which did not derive from divine right and patrilineal inheritance. Susan Owen has emphasized the provisional nature of royalist heroic plays of the s: given the difficulties of reconstructing and reproducing patriarchal Stuart ideologies in a radically changed political atmosphere, an atmosphere in which many of the challenges to that ideology were generated from the conduct of the new monarchy itself, these plays’ strenuous endorsement of monarchical and patriarchal order can be seen as responding to, and defending against, the threat of dissolution and even erasure under which they were felt to be laboring. In the 



 

Pearson, “Slave Princes,” acknowledges that “to a superficial examination [Abdelazer] certainly seems puzzlingly anomalous among Behn’s plays in its presentation of racial and gender Others since, like its original, it seems to use the identification to demonize both the Black and the woman” ( p. ). Melinda Zook, “Contextualizing Aphra Behn: Plays, Politics and Party, –,” in Hilda Smith (ed.), Women Writers, p. , believes that Behn’s “devotion to monarchy did not rest on patriarchal theories,” but instead that her royalism grew out of “an idealized aristocratic ethos that liberated the individual from the tyrannies of dull customs and traditions, things acceptable for the common castes of society, but which shackled the noble mind and heart.” Zook is writing about Behn’s comedies, but her thesis about Behn’s insistence on individual freedom from outworn social custom obviously does not apply to Abdelazer. See Gerald MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, – (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), pp. –. Owen, Restoration Theatre, pp. –, –. M. L. Donnelly, “Caroline Royalist Panegyric and the Disintegration of a Symbolic Mode,” in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.),‘The Muses Common-Weale’: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ), places this loss of ideological efficacy even earlier, during the reign of Charles I when “the Stuart monarchical style of representation” came to be newly countered

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

patriarchal vocabulary of Stuart politics, royal sexuality becomes the particular property of sovereignty. The disciplining of the ruler’s sexuality through the instruments of marriage and fatherhood make it a worthy vehicle for the manifestation and sanctioned transmission of his fatherly authority. But what makes Abdelazer such a fascinating case study for inquiry into what happens to royal families in a moment of political crisis is the resonance it attaches to the figures of women as mothers and wives. Written before the later eighteenth-century’s ideological reproduction of English motherhood as an exclusively private, bourgeois, and white social function, Abdelazer nonetheless places its vision of Isabella’s deviant royal motherhood at the heart of its depiction of sovereignty in crisis. Her powerful sexuality spills out of her marriage bed and across racial lines, overflowing into the state to destroy her family and provoke her second son’s rebellion, ultimately leading to her own death. Despite the fact that her black lover experiences her passion as draining and degrading – he feels mocked by observers who regard him only as “the Minion of the Spanish Queen” () – her obsession with him is such as to cause her to agree to his plan to declare young Philip a bastard, regardless of the damage the lie will do to her own reputation. This “too cruel Mother” () puts her miscegenous lust before her husband’s possession of and her sons’ claim on the throne. And yet, despite Philip’s public accusation that she has “abus’d my Royal Father,/For such a sin the basest of your Slaves/Wou’d blush to call you Mother,” () the news of her affair is curiously severed from any of the civic and social consequences it may have been expected to carry. In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, for example, another play about a white queen’s adulterous affair with a black man, the Goth queen Tamora – now become Empress of Rome – reacts to the birth of her illegitimate son by her lover Aaron with horror. News of the baby’s birth will not only “shame” her, but also cause “stately Rome’s disgrace,” and she asks that her grown sons kill it (..). In Abdelazer, after Philip’s declaration of Abdelazer’s involvement with the queen, the Moor is indeed stripped of the offices given him by the old king, but not because of the bombshell 



in the public arena by such increasingly “potent” discourses as Parliamentary debate, religious polemic, and legal analysis ( p. ). Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge University Press, ), discusses the uses of royal marriage in Caroline court entertainments as a way of dramatizing social and religious concord, pp. –. Here, see, for example, Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, pp. –; Ruth Perry, “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of the History of Sexuality  (), –; and Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, – (Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –.

Sexual and racial difference and Behn’s Abdelazer

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Philip has just dropped about the affair. Rather, Cardinal Mendozo characterizes the dismissal as punishment for Abdelazer’s being an “Unbeliever,” () and he is at any rate quickly reinstated by the new king, Philip’s older brother Fernando. Isabella’s adulterous affair thus remains somehow meaningless even after it has been made known, and once it is made known, nobody but Philip seems to care. That the idea of racial difference should be so sensationally available to this story about trespasses against royal authority, and yet so strikingly irrelevant to the story of those trespasses’ punishment, points to the fictional quality that race possesses in Abdelazer. Abdelazer’s blackness simultaneously explains nothing and accounts for everything, embodying the unstable barriers between private sexual matters and public matters of state invoked in the play, and of a vital moment in the politics of Behn’s own day. The proper uses of the monarch’s natural body were, of course, a powerful political and social issue during the reign of King Charles II. Detailed gossip about the sexual conduct of the court was in free circulation: Pepys records in his diary that the king’s avid pursuit of sexual pleasure is the natural result of his possession of “a large -----,” and that Lady Castlemaine, the maitresse en titre of the first part of the reign, “hath all the tricks of Aretin that are to be practised to give pleasure.” The king did not bother to conceal the extent of his extramarital involvements or the amount of political influence he allowed Castlemaine to exercise. To the degree that Charles’ desire was felt to lead him into overindulgence of his mistresses’ hunger for power and place, or that the country was expected to support the costs of raising his many illegitimate children while his lawful queen remained barren and a Protestant succession unsecured, the monarch’s sexuality was politicized in ways which ran distinctly counter to means of publicly producing its meanings during the reigns of his father and grandfather. Both Jacobean patriarchal primacy and the marital ideal of harmonious co-dominion that marked the  

Turner, “Pepys,” cites the  May  entry from Pepys’ diary on p.  (Castlemaine) and p.  (the king). Harold Weber, Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship Under Charles II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, ), argues that Charles’ public reputation for libertinage worked to create a “radical gender instability” ( p. ) which eventually undermined confidence in his power to wield sovereign authority. Turner, “Pepys,” further suggests that ideas of masculine sexuality and their relation to self-control and the exercise of domestic and political sovereignty were profoundly troubled by the king’s behavior, resulting in an uneasy shifting of the bounds between what had previously been considered public and private: “The priapism of the king and the Duke of York enhances their glamour . . . but at the same time the royal charisma is dissipated by their public acknowledgment of the private parts, associated with negligence, laxness, and irresponsibility” ( p. ).

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

courtly entertainments of Charles I and Henrietta Maria were perforce set aside in favor of a much more conflicted and anxious notion of royal sexuality, one which saw the exercise of male sexual potency as leading to effeminate weakness, both physically and politically. The king’s newly fashioned projection of his sexuality into the public sphere flickered through a series of political crises for the monarchy which turned on renewed conflicts between notions of domestic and foreign, male and female, legitimate and illegitimate. What was, or had been, a mystery of state, entered public discourse. Abdelazer takes the rising anti-Catholic and anti-French hysteria of the s and refocuses it, through the existing medium of Lusts Dominion, onto women instead of the dangerous flashpoints of nationality and religion. Public ill-ease with transgressions of rules of sexual behavior are pried loose from the figure of King Charles and focused on the evil fictional queen Isabella, so that the royal prerogative the king embodied for Behn is purified of the potential for degradation presented by Charles’ uncontrolled lust. What the play examines instead is this reassignment of kings’ weakness to the women whose sexual insatiability causes it. That Abdelazer feels himself to have poured out his soul to “cool” () the lust that burns in Isabella’s eyes recapitulates the fiery Petrarchan imagery of “Love in Phantastique Triumph Sat,” the lyric which opens the play. In the poem, Love “took his fires,/Which round about in sport he hurl’d,” from the cruel mistress’ “bright eyes,” but from the frustrated lover’s eyes, Love “took his sight and tears,” “his languishment and fears” (). Abdelazer’s complaint that Isabella’s lust has “Made an extraction of ” his soul, stolen his essence to quench a fire that his offering will paradoxically only “feed,” () uneasily physicalizes the sexual exchange that the Petrarchan conventions of the lyric leave in the abstract. This distaste for Isabella’s sexual appetite is further underlined by Abdelazer’s assertion that it has made them both deviate from their socially proper roles. Recall that Abdelazer, a prince in his own country, humiliatingly believes that others will see him as having been reduced to the status of the queen’s “Minion” by his sexual subjection: 

These crises included the Popish Plot of , in which Catholic agents, including members of the queen’s household, were accused of planning to assassinate the king and his brother James, the Duke of York, and deliver the country to French rule; the Exclusion Crisis of –, which opposed Parliament’s resolution to exclude the Duke from the succession and the King’s determination to maintain his Catholic brother in the succession as the only legitimate Stuart heir; the Rye House Plot of , in which Whiggish leaders in Parliament were supposed to have conspired with the king’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, to assassinate the royal brothers; and Monmouth’s Rebellion of –, which the late king’s illegitimate but Protestant son attempted to raise against the succession of his father’s brother as James II.

Sexual and racial difference and Behn’s Abdelazer

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I cannot ride through the Castilian Streets, But thousand eyes Throw killing looks at me; – And cry, – That’s he that does abuse our King; – There goes the Minion of the Spanish Queen Who, on the lazie pleasures of his Love, Spends the Revenues of the king of Spain: – This many-headed-beast your Lust has arm’d. – ()

Early modern definitions of “minion” concentrate on the sensuality and triviality implied by the term. Thomas Thomas’  Latin-English dictionary defines deliciæ as “all thinges whrein one taketh singular pleasure,” such as “sportes, toyes, a minion and dearling, a wanton or wantonnes.” Florio’s Italian-English dictionary () defines Pedrolina as “a strumpet, a harlot, a trull, a minion, a flurt, a minx.” For Florio, zugo can mean “a gull, a dunce, an asse,” but also “a pillicocke, a darling, or a wanton, or a minion.” The OED defines “minion” as the “favourite of a sovereign, prince, or other great person; esp. opprobriously, one who owes everything to his patron’s favour, and is ready to purchase its continuance by base compliances.” The term also figured, not always opprobriously, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century characterizations of the nature of one type of erotic bond between men, to describe the younger or less socially distinguished of a pair of male lovers. Behn’s usage both underlines Abdelazer’s sexual servitude, and characterizes the state as an unnatural and unjust effeminization: in the eyes of the world, he will be seen as someone capable of providing only “lazie” sexual pleasures, rather than performing acts more worthy of his royal blood. More strikingly, the term may also implicitly masculinize the queen. Its use imaginatively places her in the role of the older, more dominant partner who traditionally initiated a young man into the pleasures and status of adult manhood. As a  satire on Charles II’s passion for his last mistress, Louise de K´ero¨ualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, had it, the king’s fair soul, transform’d by that French dame, Had lost all sense of honor, justice, fame. Like a tame spinster in seragl’ he sits, Besieg’d by whores, buffoons, and bastard chits; 

See Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (University of Chicago Press, ), pp.  –.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts Lull’d in security, rolling in lust, Resigns his crown to angel Carwell’s trust.

No “bastard chits” haunt Abdelazer, but the satiric poem’s sense of the damage done to royal prerogative by women’s sexual power is strikingly similar to what happens there. In the play, the old king’s failing body – he is dying as the result of the evil spells Isabella has had cast on him – is a literalization of the erosion of male sovereignty, royal and personal, wrought by unbridled female appetite. Further, Abdelazer, the ostensible villain of the piece, is the first one who voices sexual dread and disgust about Isabella’s behavior. At the same time that Isabella’s culpability as an unnatural woman is far more strenuously underlined than is Abdelazer’s own standing as a racial enemy of the Spanish state, the danger posed to the political order by a black man’s mere presence at court is apparently minimized. In fact, Abdelazer’s liaison with Isabella is not even the only example of interracial sexuality in the play. He is married to the Spanish lady Florella who, feeling herself to have been unworthy of an offered marriage to the late king’s eldest son Fernando, instead weakly chose “death, or the Moor, or any thing” (). Abdelazer stands ready to use Fernando’s continuing lust for his wife as a weapon of revenge against the royal family, and Florella is murdered by Isabella just after threatening Fernando with a knife to make him understand she intends to remain faithful to her husband. Although certainly predominantly passive, unaware of the allure she involuntarily exercises on virtually every man who encounters her, Florella is ultimately willing to kill to defend her right to live as a chaste wife. She dies a martyr to the outlaw female sexuality embodied in the queen. Women’s sexuality in Abdelazer is thus divided against itself, between Florella’s faithful docility and Isabella’s clamorous lust. But this apparent sexual difference between women is neutralized by an equally firm conviction of racial difference between Moor and Spaniard, which Isabella’s son Philip invokes to condemn both women equally. Under the terms of race, neither chastity nor lasciviousness figures significantly in itself; all female sexuality signifies only insofar as it yields itself to the causes of national sovereignty and white racial purity. Philip takes every  

“Carwell” here is an Anglicization of “K´ero¨ualle.” Weber, Paper Bullets, quotes John Ayloffe’s “Britannia and Raleigh” on p. . Again, Titus Andronicus offers a relevant contrast. There, after Tamora is killed by Titus, her body is not decently buried but flung outside the walls of Rome for “beasts and birds to prey” (..).

Sexual and racial difference and Behn’s Abdelazer

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opportunity to castigate Florella as a slut. He falsely accuses her of sleeping with Fernando, mockingly invites her brother Alonzo to give Abdelazer “another Sister” after having so successfully served as “Pimp for him to my Mother” (, ), and, after Abdelazer tells her at a banquet that it is time for bed, mockingly announces that everyone else may now depart, since “the Moor has ta’en away . . . the fine gay play-thing, that made us all so merry” (, ). Despite the fact that both Florella’s father and the late king thought her match perfectly appropriate, he speaks of her as though she were sexually available to any man, instead of committed to only one. Philip is convinced that her marriage to Abdelazer is a public announcement of her whoredom. Philip’s belief that marriage to Abdelazer is no marriage at all evolves from the belief that under a properly rigorous Spanish dominion the Moor would not have been regarded as a proper partner; because he cannot be, Florella can be no honest wife. But if Florella’s marriage to Abdelazer rouses his disgust, he finds the possibility that his mother may marry Abdelazer herself horrifying: “all that reverence Children owe a Parent,/Shall henceforth be converted into Hate” (). A measure of just how disturbing he finds the rumored marriage to be may be found in his illogical conclusion that if the union takes place, it will “confirm” the rumor that he is “basely born,” () and not the biological child of his mother’s husband. Apparently, his mother’s marriage to Abdelazer would retroactively impugn his dignity, as well as destroy her own in the present. Behn’s young Philip is the only character who speaks out against a state of sexual affairs whose political implications other members of the court cannot recognize. The other side of Philip’s recognition of the racial contamination of his mother as the sanctioned vessel for his father’s royal seed is his own passionate desire to be recognized and known as his father’s son. His filial rage against his mother is preceded by violent grief for his father, grief he tries to soothe by reassuring himself that the king’s departing soul “did inform his body/That I, his darling Philip was arriv’d/With Conquest on my Sword” (). He turns immediately from this declaration of phallic likeness to his father to attacking his mother for her connection to Abdelazer, a connection secret and sexual where the father-son bond was public and martial. Isabella’s affair has mocked his father’s exertions in “numerous Battels ’gainst the Enemy,” his many efforts “To bring Titus’ daughter, raped and mutilated by Tamora’s grown sons at their mother’s urging, is named Lavinia, as was the bride of the hero who founded Rome: the sexual violence committed against her images an assault on the marital and familial foundations of empire.

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

confusion on the faithless Moors,” and made her “too foul” for the name of queen or mother (). She, enjoying the “soft peace” secured by his father’s sword, betray’d His name to everlasting Infamy; Suffer’d his Bed to be defil’d with Lust, Gave up [her] self, [her] honour, and [her] vows, () To wanton in yon Sooty Leacher’s arms.

If the queen has refused an honorable life as consort of a king who has declared his patriotism by defeating his enemies on the battlefield, Philip also conceives his own place under a proper Spanish order in military terms. Having fallen into Abdelazer’s hands, he expresses his sorrow at having been deprived of the proper end of a sought-after union with martial prowess. He had always imagined he would have had a Tomb hung round With tatter’d Ensigns, broken Spears and Javelins; And that my body with a thousand wounds, Shou’d have been borne on some Triumphant Chariot, With solemn Mourning Drums and Trumpets sounding, Whilst all the wondring World with grief and envy, Had wish’d my Glorious Destiny their own: But now, Alonzo, – like a Beast I fall, () And hardly Pity waits my funeral.

Here, his body’s “thousand wounds” would have offered ocular proof of his submission to the stern dictates of Spanish manhood. The physical integrity of his body and the moral integrity of his self-image as son and warrior would have fallen victim only to the masculine instruments of war, in ecstatic consummation with the example set by his father’s valor. Instead, captured by Abdelazer, Philip imagines himself in abjectly feminized terms. He is Divested of all Power! all Liberty! And here . . . Chain’d, like the sad Andromede, To wait destruction from the dreadfull Monster! ()  

In Lusts Dominion, the corresponding last line here reads simply “leachers armes”; the qualifying racial adjective is Behn’s addition. My thinking here about the cultural and sexual value of Philip’s wounded body is influenced by Diane Purkiss, “Dismembering and Remembering: The English Civil War and Male Identity,” in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ), pp. –.

Sexual and racial difference and Behn’s Abdelazer

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Andromeda was the daughter of the arrogant Cassiopeia, who claimed her child was more beautiful than the Nereides, wives of Poseidon’s brothers. In punishment of Cassiopeia’s false pride, Poseidon seized Andromeda, chaining her to a cliff where she would be devoured by a sea monster. Philip at this moment is another innocent victim of maternal betrayal, delivered into “destruction” by Isabella’s choice of her “dreadfull” lover. He would have gladly embraced his death on the battlefield as the logical end of his devotion to his father’s example; but he can only experience a death at the hands of the man who replaced his father in his mother’s bed as a denial of his claim to paternal likeness – indeed, of all active manhood. Like Abdelazer, Philip is tormented by the feminine. The two of them use the same word, “abuse,” to describe their shared belief in the sexual harm women pose to men’s integrity: Philip accuses his mother of having “abus’d” his father, while Abdelazer is certain that ordinary Spanish citizens deride him as the one “that does abuse our King.” Philip’s standing as his father’s son is conflicted by his dependence on feminized images of subordination. The rejected son of a “cruel” mother, he experiences his abandonment as an effeminate weakness and victimization, and yet he also imagines the fullest fruition of his identity as a wounded body joyously done to death by phallic authority. Women and the dangers they represent in the play are contained easily enough: Florella and Isabella both die, and Philip’s sister Leonora will be saved from the threat of rape by Abdelazer and survive to marry Florella’s brother Alonzo. This proper marriage, ordained by Philip, will go toward repairing the errors of sexual and racial disposition condoned by the old regime. Philip himself, however, will apparently continue unmarried. Under a new political order, royal sovereignty will be rehabilitated and purified by divesting it of its dependence on women for its continuance. No one’s son, no one’s wife, no one’s mother: broken families litter Abdelazer’s putatively patriarchal landscape, and Philip, at least, strongly indicts female sexual transgressions in this destruction. But Philip is also convinced that Abdelazer’s identity as a Moor augments the crimes 

In her discussion of men’s imaginations of women’s sexuality in King Lear, Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, describes “a bizarre fantasy in which social anxieties about illegitimacy and patriarchal inheritance are fused with psychological anxieties about sexuality and masculine identity” ( p. ). This remark strikes me as an accurate characterization of the state of affairs in Abdelazer, although Behn’s play adduces extra anxiety to the relationship between women’s sexuality and men’s patriarchal rights because of its concern with the royal succession. Also see Gordon Schochet, “The Significant Sounds of Silence: The Absence of Women From the Political Thought of Sir Robert Filmer and John Locke (Or, ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’),” in Hilda Smith (ed.), Women Writers, pp. –.

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against gender and political order committed by Isabella and Florella; the women’s sexual outlawry becomes only more shockingly visible because they commit it with a black lover. Because, as I have suggested, Abdelazer is both somehow ancillary and metaphorically central to the play’s concerns with the decadence of the Spanish political order, the threat he represents to this order is not as easily contained as is the women’s renegade sexuality. His racial identity signifies both sexual and political threats to Spain, as well as the cultural alterity his customary outfit of a “Moorish Robe” () makes defiantly clear to other members of the Spanish court. Oddly, he occupies some of the same psychic territory as Philip, feeling as reduced to passive subordination by Isabella’s sexual use of his body as Philip does by his knowledge of the affair. It is no surprise, then, that the first military confrontation between these evenly matched antagonists ends inconclusively. Each man is willing to stake the entire outcome of the day’s battle on their hand to hand combat, but the scene of their first engagement is peculiarly anticlimactic, as the stage directions indicate: “They fight; both their Parties engage on either side; the Scene draws off and discovers both the Armies, which all fall on and make the main Battel : Philip prevails, the Moors give ground: then the Scene closes to the Grove ” (). The confrontation is upstaged by a crowd of supernumeraries and the technical resources of the playhouse; the play declines to provide the satisfaction of a clear performance of Philip’s revenge. Although Abdelazer is killed at the end of the play, the final confrontation also seems to me to lack satisfaction of the personal vengeance Philip has been crying for throughout the play. In the fifth act, Philip at first welcomes the opportunity to “defie” () the Moor in single combat, but is persuaded by Alonzo to refuse to rise to Abdelazer’s baiting invitation; after all, the Moor is “such a Villain,/As shou’d receive his death from nought but slaves” (). Knowing his enemy, however, Abdelazer forces Philip to engage with him by naming the sexual crimes which form the heart of Philip’s resentment against him. It is his confirmation of the affair with the queen – that is, confirmation of what Philip already “knew before” () – that shakes the superiority Philip has just claimed. Abdelazer’s flippant admission that he “whor’d the Queen thy Mother” () elicits paralyzing shame: If thou hadst murder’d fifty Royal Ferdinands, And with inglorious Chains as many years Had loaded all my limbs, ’t had been more pardonable () Then this Eternal stain upon my name[.]

Sexual and racial difference and Behn’s Abdelazer



The breathless indirection of Philip’s next question bespeaks his continuing anxiety over the state of his connection to his mother, an eagerness to know the worst from the only person who might know which contradicts his previous relegation of Abdelazer to the status of his natural inferior. He passes relatively quickly over his reaction to the news that Abdelazer caused his father to be poisoned in his compulsion to “know; not that I doubt, by Heaven,/That I am Philip’s Son” (). Abdelazer’s boastful recital of his crimes against the Spanish royal family is a more strictly domestically focused version of the similar scene at the end of Titus Andronicus where Aaron the Moor boasts of his criminally violent way of life. Captured by the Romans, he regrets only that he has not had the opportunity to commit “a thousand more” (..) outrages: Even now I curse the day – and yet I think Few come within the compass of my curse – Wherein I did not some notorious ill: As kill a man, or else devise his death, Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it, Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself, Set deadly enmity between two friends, Make poor men’s cattle break their necks, Set fire on barns and haystalks in the night, And bid the owners quench them with their tears. (., –)

The scene of Aaron’s confession initiates the play’s sensational final act, in which Tamora is killed after having unknowingly eaten the flesh of her murderous sons baked into a pie, and the Goths and Aaron are extirpated from a new Roman order. Aaron will be buried breast-deep in a pit and allowed to die of starvation, his decaying body a physical emblem of the punishment due to those who assault the integrity of Roman families and the Roman state. In Abdelazer, however, where the scope of the Moor’s crimes has been reduced to the dimensions of Philip’s family, no such public punishment is ordained. Rendered speechless by his obsessive return to the central facts of his mother’s adultery and her willing participation in the plot to deny his legitimacy, Philip is only roused from his rage by Abdelazer’s revelation of his passion for Leonora. This threat to repeat the violation of his family in the next generation is what makes Philip master his rage and shame and determine to kill Abdelazer:



Women and Race in Early Modern Texts I’le let thee see how vain thy boastings are, And unassisted by one single rage, Thus – make an easie passage to thy heart. ()

Even here, however, hopes for a final confrontation between these two go unfulfilled. Although Philip makes a run at Abdelazer in his new spirit of cool revenge, the stage directions indicate that his action is once again obscured in a busy tableau: “Runs on him, all the rest do the like in the same minute: Abd. aims at the Prince, and kills Osmin: and falls dead himself ” (). The “rest” here are Alonzo and Cardinal Mendozo; Osmin is the Moor who, finally repelled by Abdelazer’s destructive behavior, abandons his loyalty to him and releases Philip. These directions mark Osmin’s reward very clearly, but they do not make clear who is responsible for Abdelazer’s death. It could have been any one of the three men who have been sexually injured by Abdelazer’s depredations: Alonzo, who is engaged to marry Leonora; the Cardinal, who was falsely named as Philip’s real father; or Philip, whose mother has been “whor’d” and whose sister threatened with rape. The end of the vengeful Moor thus enacts a kind of corporate revenge against him, one in which the particular injuries he has done to any individual lose significance in comparison to the harm his sexual crimes have done against the social order which has been supposed to govern the sexual exchange of women and the affirmation of racial and national hierarchies. The private nature of these crimes is confirmed by Leonora’s exhortation to her brother to leave the chamber where Abdelazer has just been killed – “For here methinks we are in danger still” () – in favor of a public appearance to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. (Leonora has been in the room where her brother and Abdelazer have their final meeting and where Abdelazer is killed, but she has no lines from Abdelazer’s entrance until after his death.) Abdelazer has been present in the play, this strangely deflated ending would suggest, largely as an agent of forces of sexual disorder. But he has also been their victim. This play is entitled Abdelazer, Or The Moor’s Revenge, but the antihero’s blackness functions here as a kind of visual shorthand for other issues of sexual and gender ill-ease. These issues are in some part raised as an effect of Abdelazer’s racial difference from the Spaniards – a difference which includes custom and religion as well as skin color – but they also, surprisingly, mark him as strongly as they mark Philip. Race is as ideologically available as are notions of proper and deviant female sexuality to the play’s interests in dramatizing a crisis in political sovereignty;

Sexual and racial difference and Behn’s Abdelazer



but the employments of Abdelazer’s racial difference from the Spanish court, I would argue, must finally be distinguished from those of gender in this dramatization. What Abdelazer and Philip have in common is their shared subjection to the operations of women’s sexual appetite. I do not mean by this remark that gender finally matters more in Abdelazer than race. To make such an assertion would only return us to supposing that they can be clearly segregated in their early modern social functions; and I do not believe that they always can be. Black Abdelazer, physically visible for much of the play and yet finally curiously secondary in its enactment of Philip’s revenge against the dangerously miscegenized order brought into being by the queen’s adulterous lust, serves – even when his presence is muffled – as a reminder of the fragility and provisionality of the community of white patriarchal believers Philip calls into action. Defeating him announces the triumph of the values of chastity, patrilineality, and racial segregation that Philip champions – or at least aims at doing so, but I note again Philip’s lack of issue, his lack of success in willing his beleaguered imagined community back into national life. Writing about the elaborate Westminster Abbey funeral of Thomas Betterton, the actor who created the role of Abdelazer, Joseph Roach characterizes the ceremony and public response to it as a powerful demonstration of “summoning an imagined community into being . . . the burial of an actor, a practitioner of a despised profession, in the cathedral of English dynastic memory suggests a cultural use of marginal identities to imagine a new kind of identity” (Cities of the Dead, , ). In Behn’s Abdelazer, it is the titular hero himself who is marginal, and visually marginalized in the play’s chaotic climax, yet who is instrumental in the attempted performance of Philip’s new compact. That the performance is only a partial success – Philip, who so cherishes his connection to his dead father, leaves the play unmarried and childless – may well underline the play’s haunting by the spectre of miscegenation, and by Philip’s disgusted recognition that the threat of his and his father’s erasure became real through the willing cooperation of female members of his own race. Dead, Abdelazer has the last word. The long afterlife of his potency, the potency he experiences as endangered, is suggested by Summers’ ready reading of Othello – and a nineteenth-century Othello at that – into Behn’s Restoration play. 

The term “imagined community” comes from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, ). Anderson discusses the role of mass media, especially newspapers, in creating a new kind of national community which supersedes previous dynastic and sacred models, pp. –. Following Roach, I cite the public theatre as another medium through which new national identities are rehearsed and transmitted.

Conclusion: “The efficacy of Imagination”

In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Sir Thomas Browne goes to some lengths to deny the factual basis of the story about Phaethon that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra invokes (in a deliberately misremembered form) as an explanation of the black skin she says she has. Clearly deeply interested in the question of the origins of the observable marks of racial difference, he also rejects the Biblical story about Noah’s disobedient son Cham that George Best and others advanced as the master explanation of why some people in the world are black. For Browne, this story “is sooner affirmed than proved, and carrieth with it sundry improbabilities. For first, if we derive the curse on Cham, or in generall upon his posterity, we shall Benegroe a greater part of the earth than ever was, or so conceived” (). When it comes to advancing his own explanation of this natural phenomenon, he suggests a genetic explanation: “[W]ee may say that men became blacke in the same manner that some Foxes, Squirrels, Lions first turned of this complexion . . . All which mutations however they began, depend on durable foundations, and such as may continue forever” (). But he also seems ready to reject scientific explanations altogether, suggesting instead that the origins of blackness lie in “the power and efficacy of Imagination, which produceth effects in the conception correspondent unto the phancy of the Agents in generation, and sometimes assimilates the Idea of the generator into a realty [sic] in the thing ingendred.” He cites a story from Hippocrates, where “wee reade of one, that from the view and intention of a picture conceaved a Negroe; and in the history of Heliodore of a Moorish Queene, who upon aspection of the picture of Andromeda, conceaved and brought forth a faire one” (). After completing this book, I can certainly identify with Browne’s embrace of mystery as the truest explanation for something which otherwise seems too difficult to analyze fully through existing methods. His story about the connection between race and “phancy” is notable for not only explaining why some people are black, but also why some are white: 

Conclusion: “The efficacy of Imagination”



the fixation on color which will come to dominate discussions of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is here subordinated to the operations of a higher power, operations which encompass and produce both black and white subjects, so that he denies any particular priority to whiteness. Browne’s account is also a story about the power of representation: observation of visual images causes a spontaneous generation of the thing observed, regardless of the genetic contribution of the observer. Finally, he also tells a story about the materiality of the subject born into race, regardless of the murkiness of that subject’s origins. When I first began trying to write about racial matters in early modern culture, I was much attracted to explanations such as Browne’s, which fall back on the ineffable mystery of race’s origins. But I think now – although Browne’s scientific mood keeps him from inquiring into the social effects of the physical phenomena he discusses – that acceding too quickly to the mystery of origins is too uncomfortably near assuming that the effects of observations of racial difference are equally resistant to analysis or understanding. Unlike Browne, I am no natural philosopher, and so my object has not really been to delve into the first causes of things. What I have tried to do here instead has been to describe and discuss some of the textual effects and behaviors which have followed from early modern understandings of the existence of racial difference. I began this book by arguing that ideas about race, particularly raced bodies, play important roles in the constitution of disciplinary knowledge. I ended it by pointing to how disruptive this racial knowledge can be to emerging or reconfigured disciplines, even when the two may in fact be conjoined. In between, I pointed to a series of early modern texts in which my two main themes – race’s presence and use, and the threat it can present to other agendas – appear and reappear. Throughout my discussions, I have attempted to avoid separating my talk about race too completely from the bodies in which it becomes visible. If, as I believe now more than ever, race performs cultural work, it needs to have a body for its execution. Most often in this book, this raced body has been a sexual body, so that social aspects of sexual behavior – including but not necessarily limited to procreation, monogamy, infidelity, and the inheritance of property and goods – have often been simultaneously racialized. Characters’ means of experiencing and acting upon sexual desire have also entered the wide domain of racial discourse, often in unexpected or bizarre ways. Thomas Trapham’s disgust at those “Lords of the Creation” who fell so far away from the superiority with which they were endowed by God as to be intrigued by the resemblance

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

of lesser primates to the human race and thereby spontaneously generating the “Venereal affects” so common among Africans and natives of the New World comes immediately to mind. Less sensationally, so does the unstable desire of Elizabeth Cary’s Mark Antony, which swerved from one politically inappropriate object – Mariam’s brother Aristobulus – to another, the “brown” and calculating Cleopatra, to the ruin of Mariam’s dynasty. But the raced sexual bodies I have noted can also appear as political bodies, their sexual motions dictating civic destinies in clearly articulated, unmysterious ways. Or at least, they more frequently seem to appear in this triple aspect in pre-Restoration texts. I believe this is so because these texts were written during a precolonial, or protocolonial, period: the structures of an overseas empire supported by slavery were not yet fully in place, so that textual reproductions of the consequences of exogamous encounter were freer to imagine these encounters in much larger terms than they were after the lines of the triangle trade and hardening racial regulations in the colonies were laid down. I do not mean by this that race somehow does not emerge before the legal and social structures of colonialism were in place to dictate its meanings – indeed, the fluidity and multiplicity of notions of what race meant is one of the most salient features of Renaissance racial discourse – but only that after the institutionalization of slavery, it becomes less possible to imagine racial difference in cosmic or civic terms, because it has been so firmly set into one moral and social place. In Southerne’s Oroonoko or in the English productions of Antony and Cleopatra which have fetishized the Egyptian queen’s allure in resolutely Anglo-Saxon terms, physically white heroines speak the triumph of a colonialist imaginary, the elimination of racial difference as a meaningful factor in the representation of colonial encounter and control. And yet, even in Restoration texts, the racially repressed manages to return. However inconclusively, Abdelazer’s race is an issue in the play which bears his name, and is connected to the play’s larger senses of national destiny and sexual continency. Davenant immediately recognizes and mocks the degree to which Katherine Philips has sacrificed race in order to produce her Cleopatra within her new vision of sexual discipline and self-sacrifice. Looking back at this book, I hope that the texts I have chosen and the balance of my analyses do not tend toward simplifying sixteenth- and seventeenth-century explorations of the complex bonds between women and their races. Most of the texts I discuss here present women as either black or white (except for Nabbes’ wild Spanish girl and Shakespeare’s

Conclusion: “The efficacy of Imagination”



iridescent Cleopatra), which both excludes a whole range of racially identified women from discussion, and also artificially narrows and stabilizes discussion of race around a black-white binary. The primacy I have placed on race and on the Rome-Egypt pairing which articulates so many racial meanings in my period may also have resulted in my not paying enough consistent attention to the ways in which race involved Europe with Asia, rather than only with Africa and the New World. During the process of writing, I have also found myself struck by the ways in which texts write back to each other – not only as a Davenant, say, returns to Philips, or a Fletcher to Shakespeare, but also as texts written from within the colonized world talk back to the master texts of the colonizer. Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile is only one example of the insistent postcolonial revision of Shakespeare, a process which has powerfully reopened the arbitrary and premature racial closure imposed on texts from the end of my period here, and forces as well a new address of ways in which gender and desire may be the products of colonialism. But I wanted to take this last opportunity not so much to talk about what I could have done, as to try to put into words what has made me do what I have here. I started writing about race in Renaissance drama near the beginning of my career. Between my first publication and my second, which was on the Restoration adaptation of Titus Andronicus, I had begun attending scholarly meetings and listening to the presentations of my peers with new attentiveness. I was pleased to discover I was part of a group of sympathetic contemporaries, but I also saw for the first time that there weren’t many other people of color in attendance at the meetings I frequented. Indeed, even the term “people of color” can be heard to affirm the assumption that being white is not a color or a race but a transparently obvious state of being, that what was noteworthy in those early meetings was the fact that some people in attendance could be described as colored, but that the vast majority just were. I can’t pretend that it was a conscious decision on my part, but it became apparent to me that since I was visibly embodied in these professional forums, it might be wise if I dictated more of the circumstances under which this embodiment was going to take place. I wanted to embody my work and my voice, as I have remained interested in embodying race in this  

On this topic, see Roxann Wheeler, “The Complexion of Desire: Racial Ideology and MidEighteenth-Century British Novels,” ECS  (), –. One interesting recent discussion here is Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen (New York: Columbia University Press, ).

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

book: to acknowledge that the work was being produced from within the consciousness of a black woman. The terms “black” and “woman” are not self-explanatory and absolute, nor do I use them to imply that I read from some impeccably privileged and insightful position. Rather, they are my particularities, my identity politics, which immediately confront the notion of a universal, unchanging body of knowledge which I contested in the first chapter of this book. I implied there that universals are false, only brought into being through principles of exclusion and segregation. My interest here in noncanonical texts and in works by women writers has been one way of bringing this resistance to false universals into the body of the book. My self-identification as a feminist critic who in many cases has had to read against common feminist positions in order to say what seems important about some of the texts I treat is another example of my attempts to repudiate inaccurately majoritarian or absolutist formations of knowledge. But I haven’t been interested in the noncanonical texts which appear here, or in the subject of race generally, just to stake out a contrarian position. What has mattered more to me, I see now, is to do work which tries to illustrate what reading against whiteness or against canons which are not just closed, but barred and locked, might mean. I am not interested in substituting a new orthodoxy for the old; in many ways Shakespeare remains the touchstone of my critical practice, and much of what I have had to say about Aphra Behn or Thomas Southerne or John Marston has been or could be exported to Shakespeare studies. Reading a broader canon is not just about including more texts and authors, although it is about that. It is also about reconfiguring our understanding of what remains, a reconfiguration that often proceeds through bringing apparently disparate texts into juxtaposition and dialogue with each other. Part of what I’ve done here is to force that dialogue, to listen for texts’ other voices and carve out a response to what is frequently not openly or directly said. We need to become more responsive listeners, both to the ventriloquized voices in early modern texts, and to each other, when they – and we – speak about race.

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Index

abolitionism, ,  Adelman, Janet, ,  Aeneas, , , , , ,  Aeneid, –,  Africa (Petrarch), –,  Afrocentrism, , , –, –, , , ,  American Renaissance, ,  Andromeda, –,  Ane Blak More (Dunbar),  apes, –, – Appiah, Kwame Anthony, – Asante, Molefi Kete, ,  Ausonius,  Ballaster, Ros,  Behn, Aphra, –, , – Abdelazer, , –, –, –, – “Love in Phantastique Triumph Sat,”  Oroonoko, , , , –, , , , , – The Widdow Ranter,  Bernal, Martin,  Black Athena, ,  Betterton, Thomas, –,  Bhabha, Homi, ,  blackface performance, –,  blazon, ,  Boose, Lynda, , ,  Bordo, Susan,  Brace, C. Loring,  Branch of the Blue Nile (Walcott), ,  Butler, Judith, ,  Caesar’s Revenge, – Carby, Hazel,  Carthage, , , , , , , ,  Cary, Elizabeth, Lady Falkland, , ,  Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry, – Cato (Addison), –

Cixous, Hel`ene,  closet drama, – Corneille, Pierre,  La Morte de Pomp´ee, , , – Cotterell, Charles, , , ,  Daniel, Samuel,  Delia,  Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius, , , ,  Tragedie of Cleopatra, , –, ,  Davenant, William,  Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, – The Play-house to be Lett, – Deane, Seamus,  Dering, Edward, , ,  Discourse of the State of Health in the Island of Jamaica (Trapham), –,  Dollimore, Jonathan,  Dryden, John,  All for Love, –,  duCille, Ann,  Duncan-Jones, Katherine, n,  Elissa, ,  exchange of women, , –, –, , –, – False Friend (Pix),  False One (Fletcher), –,  fantasy,  female slaves, , , – Gallagher, Catherine, ,  Garnier, Robert, ,  Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ,  Genovese, Eugene,  Gentleman, Francis, ,  Hageman, Elizabeth,  Haley, Shelley, –





Index

Hall, Kim, ,  Hall, Stuart,  Hannibal and Scipio (Nabbes), –,  Harris, Jonathan Gil,  Hartman, Saidiya, – Holland, Philemon, ,  Of Isis and Osiris, , – Hughes, Derek,  Iarbas, , , , ,  James IV, King of Scotland, , , , , ,  K´ero¨ualle, Louise de, Duchess of Portsmouth,  Kyd, Thomas,  Lavinia (Aeneid ), ,  Libya,  Livy, , ,  Lusts Dominion,  Marsden, Jean, ,  Masque of Blacknesse ( Jonson), –,  May, Thomas, ,  miscegenation, ,  in Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius, ,  in Oroonoko,  in The Play-house to be Lett, – in Tragedie of Cleopatra,  More, Elen, , ,  motherhood, – Mulvey, Laura,  Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, – nationalism, ,  Neill, Michael, , – Not Out of Africa, –, – Nussbaum, Felicity,  orientalism, , –, n in Oroonoko,  Oroonoko, A Tragedy (Hawkesworth), , , , , –, –,  Owen, Susan, ,  Palmer, Barbara, Lady Castlemaine,  Pearson, Jacqueline, , , , ,  petrarchanism, , , , , ,  see also whiteness Pharsalia (Lucan), – Philips, Katherine,  Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus, ,  Poems. By the Incomparable Mrs. K. P., 

Pompey, –, , , , , , , – Prince of Angola (Ferriar), , –, , –,  Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Browne), – Punica, , ,  rape, – Roach, Joseph,  Rogers, Joel A.,  Rosenthal, Laura,  Royster, Francesca,  Sanders, Eve Rachele,  Sandys, George,  Shakespeare, William,  Antony and Cleopatra, –, , –, , , –, –,  Othello, –, , , –, , – Rape of Lucrece, – Tempest, – Titus Andronicus, ,  Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, , –, , ,  Antonius, –, ,  Snowden, Frank, Jr.,  Sophonisba, Or Hannibal’s Overthrow (Lee), –,  Southerne, Thomas, , , ,  Oroonoko, –, , , – Summers, Montague, , ,  Sununu, Andrea,  Taylor, Jared, ,  Third Part of the Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch, Entituled Amintas Dale (Fraunce),  Todd, Janet, ,  Troy, , , ,  True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie (Best), – Turner, James Grantham,  Tyre, , ,  Verbruggen, Mrs., ,  Waller, Edmund, – whiteness, , –, – in Africa, – in Antonius, –, ,  and Englishness, – in Mariam, ,  in Oroonoko, , , , , , –, –,  in Sophonisba, Or Hannibal’s Overthrow, – Wonder of Women or The Tragedie of Sophonisba (Marston), –, , 