Chapter Title: Introduction

Book Title: Things of Darkness

Book Subtitle: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England
Book Author(s): KIM F. HALL
Published by: Cornell University Press

Stable URL: [Link]

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@[Link].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
[Link]

Cornell University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Things of Darkness

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction

Or when we deride by plaine and flat contradiction, as he that saw a

dwarfe go in the streete said to his companion that walked with him:
See yonder giant: and to a Negro or woman blackemoore, in good sooth
ye are a faire one ...
-George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie ( 1589)

He that cannot understand the sober, plain, and unaffected stile of the
Scriptures, will be ten times more puzzl'd with the knotty Mricanisms,
the pamper'd metaphors, the intricat, and involv'd sentences of the
Fathers ...
-John Milton, Reformation Touching Church Discipline ( 1641)

I n Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lysander rejects his

"dark" lover, shouting, "Away, you Ethiop!" and "Out, tawny Tartar"
(3.2.257 and 263). 1 Typically, scholars have replicated Lysander's dis-
missal of the "Ethiop" by refusing to consider such remarks in the context
of the elements of race, sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery, which
form a prominent set of "subtexts" to the play Qameson 81). A survey of
scholarly editions of Shakespeare's works demonstrates how modern lit-
erary criticism remystifies the appearance of blackness in literary works by
insisting that references to race are rooted in European aesthetic tradition
rather than in any consciousness of racial difference. For example, Harold
Brooks, editor of the Arden edition of the play, is typical in seeing Lys-
ander's gibes as only a commentary on Hermia's beauty: "Hermia is con-
scious of what in unsympathetic eyes may be considered her 'bad points'
... and Lysander has attacked one of them, her unfashionable dark com-
plexion. " 2
Similar evocations of blackness-with similar critical effacement-occur
with startling regularity throughout a broad range of Renaissance texts.

1. All references are to The Riverside Shakespeare unless otherwise noted.

2. A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Harold Brooks, cviii.

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 2 Introduction

From Puttenham's early example of antiphrasis through Milton's adm~

nitions against the "knotty Africanisms" of biblical commentary lies a
broad discursive network in which the polarity of dark and light articulates
ongoing cultural concerns over gender roles and shifting trade structures. 3
I argue that descriptions of dark and light, rather than being mere indi-
cations of Elizabethan beauty standards or markers of moral categories,
became in the early modern period the conduit through which the Eng-
lish began to formulate the notions of "self" and "other" so well known
in Angl~American racial discourses. This argument complements Win-
throp Jordan's landmark contribution, White over Black: American Attitudes
toward the Negro, both by refining his contention that the language of dark
and light is racialized in this period and by examining the ways in which
gender concerns are crucially embedded in discourses of race. More sig-
nificant, the following chapters suggest a crucial interrelationship between
race and gender that is deeply embedded in language deployed in the
development of the modern-that is to say, white, European, male-sub-
ject. Frequently the "dark" side of this polarity is figured in specific ge-
ographic and racial terms, as in Puttenham's use of "Negro or woman
blackemore" and Milton's rebuke against "Africanisms" in biblical exe-
gesis. In this Introduction I first outline the political import of what I am
calling tropes of blackness and then examine the evidence for England's
involvement with dark-skinned Africans. I conclude by returning to my
opening text, A Midsummer Night's Dream, to discuss the questions raised
by an acknowledgment of its racialized language.
If, as poststructuralists have argued, part of the process of stabilizing
meaning is the "identification of difference as polarity" (Belsey, "Dis-
rupting Sexual Difference" 177), the binarism of black and white might
be called the originary language of racial difference in English culture. 4
The deconstructionist Barbara Johnson has insightfully noted that binary
oppositions undergird Western culture's logic about both race and sex.
This binarism certainly pre-dates the Renaissance, but during this period
it becomes increasingly infused with concerns over skin color, economics,
and gender politics. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Oxford English

3· Milton's work is particularly interesting in this regard because it is part of a larger

diatribe against obscurantism in biblical commentary, in which he draws heavily upon the
language of dark and light. For example, he claims that the difficulties of Scripture are
attributable to the nature of man rather than to the text itself: "The very essence of Truth
is plainnesse, and brightnes; the darknes and crookednesse is our own" (566). In his Blank
Damness, Christopher Miller analyzes the word "Mricanism," particularly in its difference
from "Orientalism" (14).
4· Interestingly, the dichotomy of black and white seems to be one of the few not taken
up in deconstructive analysis. See, for example, Catherine Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Differ-
ence: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies."

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 3

Dictionary locates the first use of "fair" as a tenn of complexion in Thomas

Wilson's manual The Ruk of &ason. 5 It defines his use of "faire" as "Of
complexion and hair: Light as opposed to dark" and, with some puzzle-
ment, states that this meaning is "apparently not of very early origin,"
therefore suggesting that this opposition between fair and dark, typical in
discussions of beauty, happens in the 1550s. This semantic shift appears
just at the moment of intensified English interest in colonial travel and
African trade. 6 That moment also happens to be a time when England
itself had a heightened nervousness about group identity and power and,
as Peter Fryer maintains, was thus ripe for the development of race prej-
udice:

But race prejudice ... is specially persistent in communities that are ethnically
homogeneous, geographically isolated, technologically backward, or socially
conservative, with knowledge and political power concentrated in the hands
of an elite. Such communities feel threatened by national or racial differ-
ences, and their prejudices serve to reassure them, to minimize their sense
of insecurity, to enhance group cohesion. England in the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries was a classic instance of such a community-though its
geographical isolation was rapidly being overcome and its technology was
about to leap forward. ( 133)

Although Fryer pays less attention to England's movement out of its iso-
lation and into its great development as a naval power, I would suggest
that it is England's sense of losing its traditional insularity that provokes
the development of "racialism." 7 This moment of transition-England's
5· For a more detailed discussion of this moment in Wilson, see my essay " 'I rather would
wish to be a Black-moore': Race, Rank, and Beauty in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania," 178-79.
6. Other scholars place England's black presence and its "racial" consciousness much
earlier. Paul Edwards finds evidence of blacks in the Romano-British period. Christian De-
lacampagne sees the origins in European racial discourses in classical antiquity: "Racist dis-
course, as we have known it in Europe since the nineteenth century, did not appear ex
nihilo. It is the fruit-or the inheritor-of other, older discourses, whose first elements can
be located in the philosophers of antiquity and whose course can be charted through the
theologians and scholars of the Middle Ages" (83). Delacampagne's view silently rebuts the
classicist Frank Snowden's more well known position that ancient Greeks did not exhibit race
prejudice. Snowden argues that the common association of blackness with death "does not
seem to have had a negative effect on the generally favorable view of blacks dating back to
the Homeric poems, or to have given rise to a serious anti-black sentiment" (Befure Colar
Prejudice 101), and he concludes that "antiquity as a whole was able to overcome whatever
potential for serious anti-black sentiment there may be in color symbolism" (101). I do not
think that Delacampagne's view necessarily precludes mine. He later states that "the medi-
evals knew nothing of their ancient predecessors'' (84). If he is correct, then it would suggest
that the humanist project and its revivification of classical antiquity would also promote a
belief in "a system of thought that strove to be rational" with its oppressive implications.
Allison Blakely has also challenged Snowden's thesis (xviii, 28g--go).
7· I borrow the term "racialist" from Anthony Appiah, who sees it forming only in

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 4 Introduction

movement from geographic isolation into military and mercantile contest

with other countries8 -sets the stage for the longer process by which
preexisting literary tropes of blackness profoundly interacted with the fast-
changing economic relations of white Europeans and their darker "oth-
ers" during the Renaissance.
The economic expansion of England was a linguistic and, ultimately,
an ideological expansion in which writers and travelers grappled with ways
of making use of the foreign materia "produced" by colonialism. Tropes
of blackness were discovered by white English writers (both male and
female) to be infinitely malleable ways of establishing a sense of the
proper organization of Westem European male and female in the Ren-
aissance: notions of proper gender relations shape the terms for describ-
ing proper colonial organization. Further, the English/European division
of beauty into "white" or "black" not only served aesthetic purposes but
supported an ideology that still continues to serve the interests of white
supremacy and male hegemony. 9
This is not to dismiss the traditional association of blackness in conven-
tional Christian symbolism with death and mouming, sin and evil. 10 On
the contrary, it is to say that the culture recognized the possibilities of this
language for the representation and categorization of perceived physical
differences. Thus traditional terms of aesthetic discrimination and Chris-
tian dogma become infused with ideas of Africa and African servitude,
making it impossible to separate "racial" signifiers of blackness from tra-
ditional iconography. For example, in a posthumous portrait of Lord Wil-
loughby d'Eresby (see figure 1), the association of black people with the

eighteenth-<:entury scientific notions of race which were rooted in the belief that one "could
divide human beings into a small number of groups, called 'races,' in such a way that all
members of these races shared certain fundaniental, biologically heritable, moral and intel-
lectual characteristics with each other that they did not share with members of any other
race" ("Race" 276). While I disagree with Appiah that racialism began in the eighteenth
century, I find his term useful because it suggests a way of talking about notions of human
difference that have political and social effects and that are different from more institution-
alized forms of racism. The idea of absolute separation seems key to this definition, as it is
to the black/white binarism.
8. Knorr, in particular, argues that colonial/mercantile theory was rooted in an antag-
onistic contest based on the common belief that resources were limited and that the gain of
resources by one country always meant loss by another.
g. I use the term "white supremacy" with full awareness of its implications. "Racism"
does not adequately cover the networks of power and behavior we see in early modem texts
that are often not overtly or directly discriminating against or exploiting black people. See
bell hooks, "overcoming white supremacy: a comment," and Doris Davenport, "The Pa-
thology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin."
10. We should, however, keep in mind that this language is never without political, racial
consequences. African-Americans in particular have always been keenly sensitive to the di-
nigration of black bodies in Western culture.

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 5

Figure 1. Anonymous portrait of Peregrine Bertie, lord Willoughby d'Eresby

(1555-1601). It is undated but the memento mori carried by the attendant iden-
tifies it as posthumous. Willoughby was celebrated for his valor (particularly in the
war in the Netherlands) for years after his death. (The Trustees of the Grimsthorpe
and Drummond Castle Trust; photograph, Courtauld Institute of Art.)

conflated imagery of blackness and death is quite apparent. The portrait

depends on the contrast of white and black and the association of the
servant's dark skin with the death indicated by the black memento mori.
Such images suggest how aesthetic concerns easily become a semiotics of
race. Albert Boime suggests in his discussion of nineteenth-century art that

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 6 Introduction

"the famous chiaroscuro, or light and dark polarity, is intimately as-sociated

with the religious dualism of Good and Evil" (2); it is also part of a racial
hierarchy in which blackness and black men serve to heighten the white-
ness of Europeans. Here, too, the painting works to glorify English white-
ness and literally to marginalize blackness as associated with black people.
The black figure barely escapes being cut off by the painting's frame. He
follows, rather than leads, and is situated not near the rider but behind
the bridled horse. Even before the Renaissance, tropes of blackness drew
their primary force from the dualism of good and evil and its association
with African cultures and peoples.U The insistent association of "black"
as a negative signifier of different cultural and religious practices with
physiognomy and skin color is precisely what pushes this language into
the realm of racial discourse.
Despite contemporary disagreement about the very existence of "races"
and therefore the viability of "race" as a term in cultural or literary stud-
ies, I hold onto the idea of a language of race in the early modem period
and eschew the scare quotes so popular in contemporary writings on race.
The easy association of race with modem science ignores the fact that
language itself creates differences within social organization and that race
was then (as it is now) a social construct that is fundamentally more about
power and culture than about biological difference. Most theorists of race
do agree that racist thought involves a degree of classification and exclu-
sion used to exercise or to justify control over (or exploitation of) people
of other cultures. 12 Even in the Anglo-American scientific discourses priv-
ileged in analyses of race, "race" has been used invariably to rationalize
property interests, either in the use of humans as property, as in slavery,
or in the appropriation of land or resources, as in colonization.
The trope of blackness had a broad arsenal of effects in the early mod-
em period, meaning that it is applied not only to dark-skinned Africans

11. John Hodge asserts: "In Western societies dualist justifications typically take a partic-
ular form as a consequence of the identification of good with reason, law, and rationality,
and bad with emotion, chance, spontaneity and nature" (g6).
12. Gerda Lerner is particularly cogent in this regard (although I would add to her for-
mulation that one does not need to use the word "race" for the dynamic to exist): "The
essence of racism is to divide the world according to groups with certain political character-
istics, call these groups 'races,' and then classifY them or rank them according to superiority
or inferiority" (92). See also Etienne Balibar, "Racism and Nationalism,'' who sees classifi-
cation as a fundamental operating principle in racism and reminds us that "classification is
presupposed by any form of hierarchical ranking. And it can lead to such a ranking, for the
more or less coherent construction of a hierarchical table of groups which make up the
human race is a privileged representation of its unity in and through inequality" (55-56).
From both views, one can see the placement of people with dark skins on the lowest levels
within a hierarchical system (or the exclusion of them) as a precursor to later, more overtly
racist, scientific classification.

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 7

but to Native Americans, Indians, Spanish, and even Irish and Welsh as
groups that needed to be marked as "other." However, I assert that in
these instances it still draws its power from England's ongoing negotia-
tions of African difference and from the implied color comparison
therein. Thus the Irish may be called "black" and an English woman may
be called "Ethiopian," but these moments always depend on a visual
schema that itself relies on an idea of African difference. In practice, this
means that although I concentrate primarily on representations of Africa
and Africans and descriptions of "black" skin, it is impossible to look
solely at a single broad group, for the investigation of one difference
inevitably opens up inquiry into other cultural, religious, and ethnic dif-
ferences. My discussion, therefore, often expands to include Muslims, Na-
tive Americans, Indians, white North Africans, and Jews. During the
period, the designation "Moor" very often stood alternatively for many
of these categories, especially as it became a general term for the ethni-
cally, culturally, and religiously "strange" (Barthelemy 17).
Similarly, I will use "blackness" and "black" to cover both social prac-
tices and cultural categories. 13 I also will use the term "black" to refer to
Africans and African-descended people in England, the Caribbean, and
the Americas. Although this practice might leave me open to the charge
of reifying the very binarism I am trying to deconstruct, I prefer to think
of my usage of "black" as a term that opposes the dominance of white/
light and that foregrounds the role of color in organizing relations of
power. Audre Lorde articulates this position with some sympathy but sug-
gests that it is problematic:

I see certain pitfalls in defining Black as a political position. It takes the

cultural identity of a widespread but definite group and makes it a generic
identity for many culturally diverse peoples, all on the basis of a shared op-
pression. This runs the risk of providing a convenient blanket of apparent
similarity under which our actual and unaccepted differences can be distorted
or misused.... There must be a way for us to deal with this, if only on the
level of language. For example, those of us for whom Black is our cultural
reality, relinquishing the word in favor of some other designation of the M-
rican Diaspora, perhaps simply African. (Burst of Light 67)

13. It is perhaps fitting that multicultural coalitions in Britain are adopting "black" as a
term of both solidarity across cultures and resistance to cultural hegemony. See, for example,
the preface to Charting the Journey: Radical Writings by Black and Third World Women, in which
the editorial group envisions a solidarity rooted in the experience of exile and colonization:
"Thus began the business of transforming transplanted ways of being, seeing and living-
ways of life both determined by, and opposed to, colonial domination-into a 'Black British'
way of being" (Grewal et al.). See also Stuart Hall's comment on the "Black British" move-
ment and its possibilities for rethinking ideas of race in "New Ethnicities" in Kobena Mer-
cer's Black Film, British Cinema.

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 8 Introduction

Even while I agree with Lorde's reservations about the term "black," her
suggested alternative, "African," carries similar problems. It replaces a
generic term of color with a term of geography that is in fact no less
generic when we think about the organization of communities within the
continent. This usage is particularly vexed for the early modern period,
since Africa, as we see it in modern cartography, did not exist for the
writers with whom I am dealing.
Although, as Lorde points out, I risk erasing very real and significant
cultural differences, for this project that risk is superseded by the problem
of working with representations of diasporic people whose self-determined
cultural identity is largely lost to me. "Black" encompasses the peoples of
the African diaspora without having to make attributions of nationality
and culture that have been erased from historical records or do not ob-
tain in the early period. For example, is an African just brought to the
American colonies "African-American"? Similarly, should African slaves
brought to England (and expelled) before 16oo be called Afro-English
or Afro-British? Rather than negotiate such tangled thickets in this space,
I adopt the simple, albeit problematic, nomenclature: "black."
The critical dismissal of an aesthetic of fairness as mere "fashion"-
and thus not to be taken seriously-overlooks the ways in which "fashion"
also works to circumscribe women. 14 Even scholars of the black presence
in the period who have made the link between the language of dark and
light and the representations of darker-skinned peoples pay only cursory
attention to the ways in which this language, especially in connection to

14. Leslie Fiedler's The Strangt!T in Shakespeare is perhaps the best-known example of a
scholarship that insists on the importance of "difference" or "Others" but denies the racial
politics of this presence; he resorts to complex verbal gymnastics to "prove" that the black/
fair dichotomy is far removed from modem notions of race. In attempting to disassociate
OtheUo from American ideas of miscegenation, he somewhat perversely asserts that the use
of the word "fair" as an antonym to "black" is precisely what indicates that the language is
not racialized. This assertion is bolstered with Fiedler's claim that Shakespeare uses the terms
"hue" or "complexion" when speaking of black or fair and that because these terms derive
from humoral discourse, they are consequently not racialized. Paradoxically, he reads Othello
as Mrican but not as a racial subject: "But this means that for Shakespeare 'black' does not
primarily describe an ethnic distinction (though, of course, Othello is meant to be perceived
as an African, thick-lipped as well as dusky-hued), but a difference in hue-and tempera-
ment-distinguishing from another even what we would identifY as members of the same
white race'' ( 17fr7 1). Fiedler's attempt to explore the idea of the ''stranger'' while resolutely
denying Anglo-American racial formations politically aligns it with more contemporary strat-
egies of erasing race, a point I will take up in the Epilogue. On the Othello question Karen
Newman's essay" 'And wash the Ethiop white': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,"
in its upfront acknowledgment not only of Othello's "blackness" but of the way ideologies
of white and black work together, offers a welcome corrective to Fiedler's approach even
though she privileges gender difference over race at the same time that she provides evidence
for the profound interaction of the categories.

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 9

race, is highly gendered. Frequently, "black" in Renaissance discourses is

opposed not to "white" but to "beauty" or "fairness," and these terms
most often refer to the appearance or moral states of women, as in Put-
tenham's derisive example that a black woman is the opposite offair. This
is not to say that men are not "fair" or "black" in this discourse, but that
the terms acquire a special force when they are turned to women and
that they are most frequently used in relation to women. Peter Fryer,
drawing from Winthrop Jordan, begins his discussion of the "demonology
of race" with the dark/light polarity: "The very words 'black' and 'white'
were heavily charged with meaning long before the English met people
whose skins were black. Blackness, in England, traditionally stood for
death, mourning, baseness, evil, sin and danger .... White, on the other
hand, was the colour of purity, virginity, innocence, good magic, flags of
truce, harmless lies, and perfect human beauty" (135). Most of the terms
associated with white in Fryer's list are also the issues that are primal
concerns in early modern culture. Moreover, "white" is attached to val-
ues-purity, virginity, and innocence-represented by (or notably absent
in) women.
In practice this means that the polarity of dark and light is most often
worked out in representations of black men and white women. The black/
white opposition posits a special relationship between white femininity
and black masculinity that is negotiated in artistic representation, discur-
sive practices, and social modes. This dependence on black men to define
fairness appears most startlingly in the black servant portraits I discuss in
the last chapter. Concern over the whiteness of English women and the
blackness of Mrican men (and the mixture of both) projects onto the
bodies of white women the anxieties of an evolving monarchial nation-
state in which women are the repository of the symbolic boundaries of
the nation (Enloe 42; Yuval-Davis g-10). When white women bear the
symbolic weight of the culture in this way, attention is deflected from the
equally vulnerable bodies of white men and the potentially threatening
bodies of black women. For example, john Evelyn's diary describes a din-
ner party with a Moroccan ambassador that ''placed about a long Table
a Lady betweene two Moores: viz: a Moore, then a Woman, then a Moore
&c ... " (4:268). The practice, as well as Evelyn's description, suggests
that whiteness and fairness must be made visible with the addition of
"Moores" whenever the opportunity arises and that the black/white bi-
narism shapes social occasions as well as discursive practices. Instead of
merely focusing on the dominant conjunction of black men and white
women, as in Evelyn's entry, this book questions the ways in which such
representations work to configure silently the whiteness and masculinity
that, as in the case of Evelyn, controls the representation.

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 1o Introduction

Although this book outlines a semiotics of race in early modem English

culture generally, this discursive network manifests itself most obviously
within certain literary conventions. I have thus found it advantageous to
arrange the chapters by genre, not so much to focus on genre per seas
to use the perspectives of different genres to reveal clearly certain themes
and tropes. The first chapter grounds the discussion by focusing on travel
narratives, particularly descriptions of Africa, and demonstrates that the
dissemination of cultural myths of race rests on gendered representations
of alien cultures through the submission of those cultures to the discipline
of European rhetorical and cultural order. Chapter 2 then turns to lyric
poetry, focusing particularly on the language of English Petrarchism that
provides the basic "grammar" for the discursive field of race. More spe-
cifically, I contend that the English sonnet relies on a process of conver-
sion of black to white that supports English competition for new world
trade and that works to alleviate particularly aristocratic anxieties over
their unusual involvement in merchant trade as well as more general anx-
ieties over extending traditional patterns of commerce and diplomacy to
stranger nations. Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella is the touchstone
of the chapter, and I use the individual poems in the sequence as catalysts
for larger discussions of three conceits-sunburn, cosmetics, and white-
washing-which specifically work to introduce and structure racial atti-
tudes. The chapter closes with a survey of later poems that are either
specifically on African difference and miscegenation or that trope African
difference in striking ways. These poems (reprinted in the appendix)
clearly are the heirs to the poetic challenges and the more elusive prac-
tices of the sonnet; moreover, their appearance retroactively suggests that
poets and their readers understood the racial valences of the sonnet lan-
guage at its inception.
The third chapter turns to the play of race on stage, suggesting that
James I brought to England his own fascination with Africans and exotic
commodities and that blackness in the Jacobean period mediates cultural
anxieties over England's imperial expansion, particularly the creation of
Great Britain. Whereas this chapter is more concerned with attempts to
bridge the black/white polarity with images of "mixture," the final two
chapters focus on ideologies of fairness and the specific ways in which
blackness is used to create a value for whiteness. Chapter 4 demonstrates
that fairness becomes a necessary medium for shaping the subjectivity of
white English women through a reading of blackness in Lady Mary
Wroth's The Countess ofMontgomerie's Urania and points out in Wroth's work
a specifically female investment in and resistance to England's imperial
project. Chapter 5 examines blackness in visual culture and contends that
certain representations draw upon Petrarchan dynamics to negotiate is-

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 11

sues of gender and property. It finds in the popular black cameos that
circulated in Elizabeth's court a visual analogue to the language of black-
ness in the sonnets and then turns to a specific genre-the black servant
portrait-to examine how Petrarchan poetics and ideas of white power
and black servitude are incorporated into this key signifier of white aris-
tocratic wealth and identity.

Who Is English? The Black Presence in England

I my selfe have seene an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole brought into

England, who taking a faire English woman to wife, begat a sonne in all
respects as blacke as the father was, although England were his native
countrey, and an English woman his mother: whereby it seemeth this
blacknes proceedeth rather of some natural infection of that man, which
was so strong, that neither the nature of the Clime, neither the good
complexion of the mother concurring, coulde any thing alter, and there-
fore, we cannot impute it to the nature of the Clime.
-George Best, in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations

The evidence for the black presence, particularly in the Tudor period,
is often gathered from narratives such as this description of an Ethiopian-
English marriage printed in George Best's 1578 description of Frobisher's
search for a northwest passage. Since travel and trade with African cultures
was often not reciprocal (that is, English traders went to the markets of
Guinea and Barbary, but African traders rarely went to England) and
blacks were not necessarily recognized even as a marginalized population
(unlike servants, the poor, witches, etc.), evidence for an African presence
is minimal. There are no extant firsthand accounts from the black Tudor
population. However, the status of black people as curiosities or oddities
meant that they were considered both as individual "cases" and as em-
blematic of a larger group. Best's anecdotal evidence that the blackness
of this Ethiopian man is due not to exposure to the sun but to an "in-
fection" is less important for its evidence that there was racial inter-
marriage in England than for its articulation of the cultural anxieties-
about complexion, miscegenation, control of women, and, above all,
"Englishness" -brought out by the presence of blacks.
Best's attempt to locate the nature of human somatic differences is not
an innocent involvement with the "other." This passage demonstrates the
"binary system of representation [that] constantly marks and attempts to
fix and naturalize the difference between belongingness and otherness"
that is typical of racist discourse (S. Hall, "New Ethnicities" 28). There

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 12 Introduction

are certain value judgments already at work when Best notes the lack of
efficacy of the land and the woman, "neither the good nature of the
clime, neither the good complexion of the mother concurring." Both the
complexion of the "faire English woman" and the clime are characterized
as "good," which immediately positions white/black on the same concep-
tual grid as the good/ evil dichotomy. His formulation also associates Eng-
land with whiteness, because "the nature of the Clime" is rhetorically
associated with the "good complexion" of the mother. To heighten the
threat of blackness, it is paradoxically seen as invisible, as an infection, a
troping that works to naturalize the difference between the black man
and his white wife as well as to demonstrate the seeming vulnerability of
female bodies.
That Best's ultimate proof of the power and stability of blackness is
found not in Mrica but in England, in the marriage of an Ethiopian to a
"faire English woman," indicates that blackness for him really has mean-
ing only in relation to whiteness. This particular passage is part of Best's
attempt to assure his readers that English adventurers will not be affected
by Mrican climates: "Wee also among us in England have blacke Moores,
}Ethiopians, out of all partes of Torrida Zona, which after a small contin-
uance, can well endure the colde of our Countrey, and why should not
we as well abide the heate of their Countrey?" (Hakluyt, Principal Navi-
gations 5:172). This anxiety over the significance of whiteness is also linked
to his concern over the meaning of Englishness. "England" and "Eng-
lish" are repeated obsessively in the previous passage, and the repetition
only heightens the son's exclusion from the category "English" because
of his blackness ("although England were his native countrey"). To in-
clude him in the nation would be to break the desired homology between
land, skin, and group identity, thereby overturning the associations of
England with whiteness and fairness. As Paul Gilroy notes for a later pe-
riod, the passage acts "to reproduce blackness and Englishness as mutu-
ally exclusive categories" (55).
These concerns with the nature and origins of blackness crop up again
and again in Renaissance texts. Fifty years later, Sir Thomas Browne de-
votes three chapters of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica to "the blackness of Ne-
gros," querying "Why some men, yea, and they a mighty and considerable
part of mankinde, should first acquire and still retaine the glosse and
tincture of blacknesse?" (508). Returning to Best's initial inquiries,
Browne uses emergent scientific method to bring to the forefront what
was only implied in Best's text: the opposition of blackness to fairness and
beauty. He ends his second chapter on blackness with a digression on
beauty, indicating that the categories of blackness and beauty are mutually

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 13

dependent. Although Browne shows a good deal more cultural relativism

(for example, he reminds the reader that blackness cannot properly be
called a curse, because of its "neither seeming so to them, nor reasonably
unto us" [520]), his language is as infused with value judgments related
to color as is Best's; he claims that "they of Europe in Candy, Sicily, and
some parts of Spaine," while dark, do not deserve "so low a name as
Tawny" and that the inhabitants of the "torrid zone" "descend not so
low as unto blacknesse" (512). Both Best's and Browne's concerns about
the blackness of Africans ultimately spring from larger concerns about the
stability of whiteness. They also share the assumption that blackness is an
aberration and whiteness the original: in Browne's words, blackness is a
trait "acquired" by Mricans. The methods of both of these authors sug-
gest that the traditional assumption that the religious difference of
"Moors" is the primary threat to English culture does not tell the whole
storyY Clearly, what interests Best, Browne, and the many writers who
participated in this debate, even indirectly, is the problem that dark skin
and certain physical features posed for a culture that believed that God
made man in his own image.
Mricans in early modem England often exist for contemporary readers
of the period in the realm of the anecdote. As with Best's description,
they appear-in isolated entries of parish records and diaries or in fleet-
ing moments in literary texts-unnamed (or renamed) and stripped of a
history of their own. Their personal histories are often replaced with a
more overtly symbolic function than is seen in Best. For example, the
records of the Sackville family indicate a hundred-year tradition of having
a servant who was always named ''John Morocco," which suggests that he
is valued not so much for his status as laborer as for his symbolic capacity
(Sackville-West 191-92). 16 So too, the masque in Love's Labour's Lost calls
for "blackmoors with music" (5.2), which indicates that their blackness
was integral to their performance. Even in moments that would seem to
demonstrate that black people were a larger cultural presence, such as

15. This assumption is even more perturbing when it comes from someone who would
be expected to think more critically about the problem. See, for example, Anthony Appiah's
entry "Race" in Critical Terms fur Literary Study. He claims, "There is good reason, then, to
interpret these Elizabethan stereotypes, which we might naturally think of as what I have
called "racialist," as rooted far less in notions of inherited dispositions and far more in the
idea of the Moor and the Jew as infidels, unbelivers whose physical differences are signs (but
not causes or effects) of their unbelief' (278).
16. The diary of Lady Anne Clifford also records a black laundress named Grace Rob-
inson. Obviously, her presence was more directly tied to labor and contributes to her invi-
sibility. For a discussion of this diary and of the intersections of race and gender, see my
essay "Reading What Isn't There: 'Black' Studies in Early Modem England."

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 14 Introduction

Elizabeth I's attempted expulsion of the Moors in 1596 and 1601, their
significance is belied by their actual numbers. 17 These elusive appearances
resonate throughout the texts of English culture and have an importance
that is belied by the seeming arbitrariness of their presentation. Just as
Toni Morrison discovers in American literature that "even, and especially,
when American texts are not 'about' Mricanist presence or characters or
narrative or idiom, the shadow hovers in implication, in sign, in line of
demarcation" (Playing 46--47), I find that the impact of the Mricanist
presence on white English subjectivity can never be fully understood if
one focuses only on the texts (such as Othello) that are "about" blackness.
In this book I am especially concerned with just those "shadows" and
"lines of demarcation" that Morrison outlines rather than with the more
obvious Africanist presences. I am more interested in discerning the ways
in which the Mricanist presence is embedded in language than with prov-
ing the nature of the black presence in England. In his recent study of
racial imagery in the Dutch world, the historian Allison Blakely finds that
"the existence of color prejudice in a predominately 'white' society does
not require the presence of racial conflict or even of a significant 'colored'
population" (xvi). I too have found that the significance of blackness as
a troping of race far exceeds the actual presence of Mrican-descended
people in England. Methodologically, the existence of blacks in narrative
or fragmentary moments means that this project has been greatly in-
debted to reading practices grouped under the rubric "new historicism."
In particular, the reliance of "new historicism" on anecdotes as narratives
with particular cultural weight and resonance has meant that one can
bring figures into history whose significance might be lost with traditional
literary criticism and historiography. 18
Ironically, despite their interest in the "alien" or "marginal" in English
culture, many of the more prominent new historicists have paid little more
than cursory attention to the role that both gender and racial assumptions
played in developing notions of identity. 19 Although they have brought

17. For a discussion of the proclamation of expulsion, see my essays "Guess Who's Com-
ing to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant ofVenice' and "Reading What
Isn't There: 'Black' Studies in Early Modern England."
18. "Taking their cue from Geertz's method of 'thick description' they [new historicists]
seize upon an event or anecdote ... and re-read it in such a way as to reveal through the
analysis of tiny particulars the behavioral codes, logics, and motive forces controlling a whole
society" (Veeser xi).
19. See, for example, the opening of Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which out-
lines the shaping of aristocratic identity against a projected other: "Self-fashioning is achieved
in relation to something perceived as alien, strange or hostile. This threatening Other-
heretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist-must be discovered or invented in order

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 1 5

heretofore unseen populations to literary analysis, they provide little guid-

ance in understanding the complexities of early modem racial discourses.
Thus although my work might be recognizable as new historicist, it is
rooted in feminist practices and is more indebted to the work of women
of color within feminist movement than traditional scholarly forms of rec-
ognition would indicate. As Patricia Williams has claimed for her current
work, I, too, have found that "extrinsic sources and intuitive means of
reading may be the only ways to include the reality of the unwritten,
unnamed, nontext of race" (117). Here Williams articulates a practice of
resistant reading that seems key to an enterprise of this sort. To claim
that there is a "text of race" means at times to refuse to accept both the
authority of the writers I work with and to resist the hegemony of white
male knowledge in the academy. I use "intuitive means of reading" in
the sense that my reading of dominant culture is fundamentally shaped
by knowledge that is in fact taught in African-American communities
about "white" culture. 20 I also draw from "extrinsic sources" when I sug-
gest alternative readings and viewpoints regarding the subjects of colonial
rule that are largely absent in the period: these "alternative viewpoints"
rely heavily on black feminists such as bell hooks, Angela Davis, and the
late Audre Lorde, who have been clear voices of opposition to modem
imperialist and racist practices. 21 I argue in the Epilogue for the impor-
tance of black feminist methodology in this type of work and here will
simply say that the entire project is built on black feminists' insistence on
both the interconnection of race, gender, and other forms of oppression
and on the need to interrogate whiteness as a social construct. 22

to be attacked and destroyed" (g). His formulation, oddly enough, omits race, even though
it includes almost every other possible category.
20. Patricia Hill Collins speaks more specifically about the "everday" knowledge of black
feminists: "The ideas we share with one another as mothers in extended families, as other-
mothers in Black communities, as members of Black churches, and as teachers to the Black
community's children have formed one pivotal area where Mrican-American women have
hammered out a Black woman's standpoint" (15).
21. Unlike Ronald Sanders, who outlines similar methodological problems in his Lost
Tribes and Promised Lands, I do not feel that my viewpoint must be shaped by the materials I
work with as he claims: "Now, in the case of two of our main characters-the Black and the
Indian-such firsthand written material does not really exist from this period. We are forced,
for the most part, to adopt the viewpoint of the oppressive but highly articulate white man"
(xiv). Rather, I adopt from Patricia Hill Collins the reminder that much of the knowledge
produced by the ''highly articulate white man'' is ''permeated by widespread notions of black
and female inferiority" and that these notions make resistant projects such as this one im-
mediately suspect.
22. Toni Morrison has been the most recent advocate of the necessity of analyzing white-
ness. In Playing in the Dark, she argues: "We need studies of the technical ways in which an
Mricanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of white-

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 16 Introduction

Pirates, Poets, and Traders: England and Mrican Trades

While the anecdote and "thick description" popularized in literary crit-
icism by Clifford Geertz have proved useful for unearthing a cultural dis-
course of blackness and discerning its potential significance, they do not
tell the entire story and may imply that black people were viewed only as
singular or strange and were therefore only peripheral to the culture. In
actuality, Mrica, particularly the darker peoples of the central interior and
southern portions of the continent, played a key role in the rapid change
of England from "an underdeveloped country" in its own right to the
empire that would dominate the globe for the next two centuries (Rabb
1). This period saw the beginnings of England's exposure to the African
interior that culminated in the later journeys of Stanley and Burton in
the Victorian era.
The rise in English travel and trade and the consequent emergence of
England as a naval power greatly shaped the English character and was
the focus of much of its energies. The historian James Williamson notes,
"The search for markets wider than Europe could offer became a national
duty and instinct" (34). Nonetheless, most work done on early modern
English colonialism, particularly by new historicists, focuses on the newly
discovered lands and colonies in the Americas. While the Spanish-
American trade was massive, it was rivaled in potential by the Portuguese
trade with Mrica (Andrews 11). The many ways in which Mrican trade
provided the practice, theory, and impetus for English trade remain un-
remarked. Geographically and conceptually, Mrica was crucial to English
travel in the Atlantic. Three of the four major routes to the Americas
involved passage through African waters, and it was the attempt to avoid
the arduous journey around the Cape of Good Hope (a route controlled
by the Portuguese) that generated the frantic search for alternative routes.
Charles Verlinden notes the primacy of Africa in the change from a Med-
iterranean to an Atlantic economy: "Mrica is fatally linked to this zone
by the early and even present maritime transportation systems, since its
economic connections with the rest of the world have been vital to its
existence from the moment when European expansion forced it into con-
tact with the exterior world" (75). The map literally changed almost mo-
ment by moment, and although the most interior parts of Africa had not
been explored by the English, more and more of the interior was being
explored and charted by European traders and cartographers.

ness" (52). See also Peter Erickson's discussion of Playing in the Dark in his essay "Profiles
in Whiteness."

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 17

England began its involvement in what was known as the Barbary and
Guinea trades during Elizabeth I's reign when merchants who dealt in
Iberian trade began to see and act on the weaknesses of Portugal's hold
on Mrica. In his study of Elizabethan privateering, Kenneth Andrews finds
that "in the fifties the commercial penetration of Morocco and Guinea
assumed serious proportions, and the leaders of this movement in Eng-
land were the Iberian traders" ( 11). Andrews goes on to note that this
trade differed from ordinary commercial practices "not only in scale but
kind," offering unheard-of profit as well as new goods (11). As we shall
see, this sense of wealth and novelty infuses English literature and is tied
to representations of race. The region known as Barbary covered most of
the coastline between Tripoli and the Atlantic (Willan 92). The meeting
ground between the eastern trade and Mrican lands to the south, it was
a key route for the ancient trade in black slaves and gold (Clissold 17).
Mter the colonization of the Americas the area known as Barbary in-
creased in importance because it became the site where Spain and Por-
tugal maintained their connections with the ''mines of India'' evoked with
such regularity in English texts.
Both the Barbary and Guinea trades developed sporadically and were
unregulated for over thirty years, largely because Portugal still maintained
its (repeatedly ignored) entitlement to the trade. Consequently, both
trades involved ongoing patterns of complaint and reply from Portugal to
England: the Portuguese tended to couple Morocco and Guinea together
in their protests against English trade with Africa, but in doing so they
laid much greater stress on their claim to a monopoly of the Guinea trade
than on their claim to exclude others from the Moroccan trade (Willan
140). Travel in these areas gave rise to both legitimate, negotiated trade
and the privateering so characteristic of the age. This is particularly true
of the Moroccan trade because it crossed the Spanish routes to the Indies,
which meant that English traders would have had access to the slave trade
in Spain (Willan 220). As a model that England both followed and dis-
tanced itself from, Spain has a particularly complex role: it fostered the
lucrative trade in gold and slaves and had its own involvement with a
threatening darker "other" through its history of Moorish invasion and
conquest. Having no African properties of its own, Spain relied on Por-
tugal for the steady supply of slaves to run the sugar mills and gold mines
that were the source of its jealously guarded wealth.
England's increasing involvement with these trades was a source of con-
tention between English traders as well as between England and other
European countries. In 1589, one ofWalsingham's staff complained about
the overabundance of English merchants: "Outbidding one annother in

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 18 Introduction

the price of Barbary commodityes thorough the envy and mallice that
raigneth among them" (quoted in Willan 268). Although they began as
individual ventures, trading voyages into Africa became increasingly reg-
ulated during Elizabeth's reign: companies formed by traders and aristo-
crats were given monopolies for various trades. Most of these ventures
were formed by royal charter, and their precarious fortunes culminated
in establishment of the Royal Company of Adventurers Trading into Africa
in 1663, which was the first such company that had an expressed purpose
of slave trading. 2s
The late Tudor-early Stuart periods were the site of "the most striking
transformations in economic history" (Rabb 2). These transformations
were particularly notable in the wide use of joint-stock companies and the
involvement of aristocrats to a degree unprecedented anywhere in Eu-
rope. Thus the class that was in great part responsible for the great flow-
ering of vernacular literature in the Elizabethan period was simultaneously
involved in laying the groundwork for Britain's future economic advance-
ment. The aristocracy and landowning gentry helped shape England's
trade through their involvement in joint-stock companies and their sup-
port of privateering ventures (Andrews 11-13). Elizabeth's powerful
adviser and noted literary patron, the earl of Leicester, was given unprec-
edented power in the formation of the Barbary Company in 1585 (Willan
187). One of the century's leading figures, Sir Philip Sidney, attempted
to use Sir Francis Drake's voyage to the West Indies as an outlet for his
frustrated ambitions. Princes, privateers, and poets were all connected in
court and diplomatic politics, and many sought to enrich themselves
through encroaching on the Portuguese monopoly on African trade. Al-
though this book does not deal as directly with class differences, it must
be said that the discourses of fairness were by and large shaped by this
aristocratic class, which may have been anxious over its novel involvement
in mercantile adventure.

23. In 1588, rights to the trade of the Guinea Coast between Senegal and the Gambia
were granted to a company of London and west-<:ountry merchants (Willan 139). The trading
giant, the East India Company, began as a modest enterprise in 16oo. The West Mrica
Company was incorporated in 1618 for trading in Guinea and Benin (Lipson 354). In 1631,
Charles I began the precarious Royal African Companies, which had as their main purpose
the trade in gold and ivory. By the next year, the English had a factory at Winneba, and they
began their first fort in Coramantin in 1638 (Davies 115). That company was superseded by
the "Company of Royal Adventurers into Mrica," formed in 166o, and was itself reformu-
lated-with the first explicit mention of slaving in the company charter-as the Royal Com-
pany of Adventurers Trading into Mrica in 1663. Although slaving was a by-product of the
African trade in the earlier companies, after the Restoration the trade became more domi-
nated by slave trade as merchants attempted to fill the demand for slaves in England's West
Indian colonies (Lipson 271).

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 19

Mrican voyages were truly the nursery to English seamen. Later mari-
time luminaries such as Sir Francis Drake and Martin Frobisher got their
first sea experience on the African voyages of those founding fathers of
the English slave trade-the Hawkins family. Mrican trade became a way
for such merchants to rise in class and was early on a marker of wealth
and identity. The colonization of the Gold Coast by Portugal began in
1471 with the concession of Sierra Leone to Fernao Gomes, who was
rewarded with a title and a coat of arms showing "the heads of three
negroes wearing collars and pendants of gold" (Vilar 53). John Hawkins,
who demonstrated the weakness of Portugal's hold on those colonies and
initiated England's involvement in the slave trade, was similarly rewarded
with a coat of arms: "Sable, on a point wavy a lion passant or; in chief
three bezants; for a crest, a demi-Moor proper bound in a cord" (Wil-
liamson 113-14) (figure 2). The use of not only blackness but black peo-
ple with badges of slavery is an ongoing way of demarcating status. As we
shall see later, many aristocratic portraits included servants also wearing
gold or silver collars, bringing to bear a similar set of associations between
aristocratic white bodies, black servitude, and foreign wealth.
England was also connected in both direct and indirect ways to the
traffic in slaves and the opening of heretofore unknown sections of Africa.
That England's first involvement in slave trading occurs in the 1550s sug-
gests that slave trading was from the first an integral part of the Mrican
trade. England's domestic politics, economy, and international affairs and
the European slave trade in Africa increasingly met and became sites of
contest in the Elizabethan period. England's trading practices in Africa
soon put it into dispute with Spain and Portugal. Much of the conflict
with Portugal over England's African trade centered on English attempts
to break into the traffic in slaves. During Mary's reign, the Portuguese
dominated African trade, supplying slaves to the Spanish Indies in
exchange for gold and goods throughout Europe both by right of first
exploration and by military might. This right was also confirmed by papal
dispensation, and under the Catholic Mary there was virtually no involve-
ment in slave trafficking. Nonetheless the potential profits of the trade
held some allure for Englishmen, and a syndicate of London fitted out
five ships to explore the Guinea coast in 1554 (Donnan g). 24

24. Elizabeth Donnan notes an early, abortive attempt at the slave trade: "In 1481 rumor
reached Portugal that two Englishmen, William Fabian and john Tintam, were equipping an
expedition for Guinea trade. John II. of Portugal promptly protested that this violated the
terms of his papal privileges, and the voyage was stayed. About the same time Edward IV. of
England asked the pope for permission to trade in Mrica but nothing came of his request"
(1:6).

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 20 Introduction

Figure 2. A re-creation of the Hawkins coat of arms. It was augmented

after Sir John Hawkins's (1532-1595) second slave trading voyage with
a crest described as "a demi-Moor proper bound in a cord." (Library of
Congress.)

It was under Elizabeth that England gained a foothold in the Atlantic

trade. In 1552,john Lok sold the first slaves that he captured in Guinea.
In 1562, John Hawkins sounded the death knell to Portugal's hold over
its trade routes by taking three hundred slaves pirated from Portuguese
ships to the West Indies. Mterward, some of Elizabeth's closest advisors,
such as Robert Dudley and William Cecil, expressed interest in the trade
(Donnan 4 7), and Elizabeth herself surreptitiously supported the voyages.
Of necessity, Elizabeth's reign was characterized by official reticence and
actual aggression toward the Mrican trade. Often during the next forty

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 21

years Portugal complained of English piracy and encroachments. Mter

one such protest, Lord Cecil told the Spanish ambassador, Guzman de
Silva, that he was offered a role in the trade, "but that he refused as he
did not like such adventures" (de Silva; 5 November 1565 in Donnan
1 :59). Likewise, even as Elizabeth officially ordered Hawkins not to at-
tempt the Guinea trade she lent him ships and equipment necessary for
his privateering. 25 The Guinea Company, which became the first organ-
ized, legitimate venue for the Mrican trade, was formed after Elizabeth's
recognition of Don Antonio as king of Portugal (Willan 139).
Unfortunately, the importance of the early slave trade is underdocu-
mented because of its surreptitious nature. However, there is evidence
that merchants had detailed knowledge of the mechanics of the trade.
The depositions surrounding Hawkins's third voyage reveal specifics of
the capture and sale of slaves. Merchant William Fowler of Ratcliffe in
1569 alleged that "the best trade in those places [Vera Cruz and the West
Indies] is of Negros" and describes the trade:

That by the experience of the trade which he hathe had to and at the saide
place called Vera Crux and other the cheiffe of the West Indias as is aforesaid
this deponent knowethe that a Negro of a good stature and yonge of yeres
is worthe and is commonlie bought and soulde there at Mexico and the
maine Iande of the West Indias for iii<v< and vi< pesos. For if a negro be a
Bossale that is to say ignorant of the spanishe or Portugale tonge then he or
she is commonlye soulde for iiii< and iiii< L [450] pesos. (Donnan 1:72)

James I created the Company of Adventurers of London Trading into

Parts of Mrica in 1618 and granted to Robert Rich "control over the trade
on the explored east coast of Barbary" (Donnan 78). This company would
build the first English factory in Africa. Between 1624 and 1630 the
Guinea trade was legitimized, and by 1637 the Guinea Company com-
plained that another group was infringing on its monopoly: "Resolving
under pretence of going to Barbary to trade upon the coasts of Guinea
and to take nigers, and to carry them to other foreign parts" (Thirsk and
Cooper 489), indicating that slave trading was a lucrative part of their
business. Although it was not until the late seventeenth century that Eng-
land became a major participant in the slave trade, the weakening of
Iberian control over the trade meant that the English, the French, and

25. In a letter to Philip II (12 July 1567), the Spanish ambassador Guzman de Silva
reports: "I hear that the ships Hawkins is going to take out are being got ready rapidly and
I am now told that there are to be nine of them, four of the queen's and five which Hawkins
has in Plymouth, where they say the others are to join them" (Donnan 63).

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 22 Introduction

the Dutch began redrawing its configuration and competing for the cru-
cial rights to the slave trade that would provide the necessary labor to
buttress their other colonial ambitions.

To return to my opening, how, then, do we read "the unnamed, non-

text of race" of A Midsummer Night's Dream? Rather than see Lysander's
denigration and dismissal of Hermia ("Away you Ethiop"; "Out, tawny
Tartar") as an isolated reference to brunette hair, we might look at it in
conjunction with the play's concerns with trade and gender politics. Louis
Montrose's influential reading of the play has already exposed it as a site
of gender struggle that works out anxieties of male subjects to a powerful
queen. What is also apparent is that here threatening female sexuality and
power is located in the space of the foreign: male, Grecian order is op-
posed to the dark, feminine world of the forest, which is also replete with
Indians, Tartars, and "Ethiops."
A play about marriage and the proper pairing of male and female, A
Midsummer Night's Dream is rooted in questions about the value of women
who are the means for the appropriate transfer of property and forming
of bloodlines (Parker 122-23). As Puttenham's remark in my opening
epigraph suggests, "black" women-real or rhetorical-are coded as the
ultimate in undesirability and thus are not suitable objects of social
exchange. Lysander's "Away you Ethiop" assigns a value to women as
property and resonates more powerfully than the gibe about Hermia's
height (particularly since the now-desired Helena is "this princess of pure
white, this seal of bliss!" [3.2.144; Erickson 518]). The Ethiop and the
Tartar are undesirable partners in marriage, and the epithet evokes the
unlawful mixing that so much of the play is about. None of the women
marked with the language of blackness are at that moment desired part-
ners in marriage. Oberon is married to the temporarily disobedient Ti-
tania rather than to the "buskin'd warrior"; Theseus is about to be
married to a tamed Amazon, and at the moment that he is affected by
the drug Lysander characterizes his love as an Ethiop to denote her ab-
solute undesirability as a sexual or marriage partner: "Who will not
change a raven for a dove?" (2.2.114). In his study of how the dark/light
dichotomy marks Shakespeare's love comedies, Peter Erickson notes that
"this language is sharpened by the edge Lysander gives to his dismissal
of Hermia" (518). Conversely, at the height of Hermia's desirability, He-
lena obsessively comments on Hermia's "fairness" as a sign of male ap-
proval. In both instances, the evocation of blackness serves to racialize
whiteness and make it visible.
As I have attempted to indicate, most tropes of blackness operate within

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 Introduction 23

a larger discursive network; in this play blackness is associated with fe-

maleness, foreignness, political upheaval, and chaos. More specifically, the
"Ethiop" epithet must be read along with the presence of the Indian maid
and the eroticized language of merchant adventure that is associated with
her. "Indian trade" often involved some trade with Africa. For example,
the "East Indies" often took in "the whole littoral of East Africa and of
Asia" in merchant discourse (Furber 7). Furthermore, this eroticized lan-
guage of merchant adventure appears in conjunction with a disturbance
of traditional wooing and marriage in much the same way that The Mer-
chant of Venice interweaves trade with other lands with the traffic in women.
We might then tum to a little-discussed context for the play that sug-
gests a historical use of black people as decorative signifiers. Many of the
play's editors have made the link between the mechanicals' concerns that
Snug's lion would frighten the ladies in the audience and an entertain-
ment at the christening of James I's son, Prince Henry Frederick, which
was planned to include a chariot ''which should been drawne in by a
lion" (Scott 179). In the actual entertainment, the lion was removed for
fear he would disrupt the performance: ''(but because his presence
might have brought some feare to the nearest, or that the sight of the
lights and torches might have commoved his tameness) it was thought
meete that the Moor should supply that roome" (Scott 179). A "black-
moor" thus became the chief feature of the feast, bringing the last
course, or banquet:

Now, being thus in a very honourable and comely order set, and after a while,
having well refreshed themselves with the first service, which was very sump-
tuous, there came into the sight of them all, a blackmoor, drawing (as it
seemed to the beholders) a triumphal chariot, (and before it the melodious
noise of trumpets and hautboyes) which chariot entered the hall; the motion
of the whole frame (which was twelve feet long, and seven feet broad) was
so artificial within itself, that it appeared to be drawne in, onely by the
strength of a Moor, which was very richely attired; his traces were great
chaines of pure gold. (Scott 179)

Upon this chariot was finely and artificially devised, a sumptuous covered
table, decked with all sorts of exquisite delicates and dainties, of patisserie,
frutages, and confections.
About the table were placed six gallant dames, who represented a silent
comedie ... (Scott 179)

Instead of a tamed lion, this audience is given a "blackmoor," here dis-

played "with pomp, with triumph and with revelling" (Midsummer Night's

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]
 24 Introduction

Dream 1.1.19). The entertainment demonstrates the "aesthetic" uses of

enslaved black people; the man's "traces" or bridle "of pure gold" are
merely a more aestheticized version of the chained blackmoors added to
Sir William Hawkins's coat of arms. The banquet itself, like Titania's "In-
dian maid" speech, enacts the desires of merchant trade when the ship
enters with Neptune, dressed in "Indian silks," on its bow. Both enter-
tainments rely on a display of women as audience and spectacle; more
important, both offer a troping of blackness, a use of difference associated
with Mrica to express European luxury, wealth, and beauty. The actual
appropriation of the Moor's body in James's court resurfaces in the rhe-
torical evocation of Ethiopes and Tartars in Elizabeth's.

This content downloaded from

[Link] on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:09:41 UTC
All use subject to [Link]