Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Ayanna Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135908546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage provides the first sustained reading of Restoration plays through a performance theory lens. This approach shows that an analysis of the conjoined performances of torture and race not only reveals the early modern interest in the nature of racial identity, but also how race was initially coded in a paradoxical fashion as both essentially fixed and socially constructed. An examination of scenes of torture provides the most effective way to unearth these seemingly contradictory representations of race because depictions of torture often interrogate the incongruous desire to substitute the visible and manipulable materiality of the body for the more illusive performative nature of identity. In turn, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage challenges the long-standing assumption that early modern conceptions of race were radically different in their fluidity from post-Enlightenment ones by demonstrating how many of the debates we continue to have about the nature of racial identity were engendered by these seventeenth-century performances.

1 Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

Antonin Artaud's second manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty cries out for a theatre that will depict “great social upheavals” and “conflicts between peoples and races.”¹ Opposed to “disinterested” theatre, Artaud designed the Theatre of Cruelty to depict and affect not only the “tortured victims,” but also the “executioner-tormentor himself.” Artaud viewed both as trapped by “a kind of higher determinism” which he sought to alter through the Theatre of Cruelty (102). To usher in this new theatrical tradition, Artaud declared that the “first spectacle of the Theatre of Cruelty will be entitled: The Conquest of Mexico” (126). Explaining his choice for the inaugural event, Artaud wrote, “From the historical point of view, The Conquest of Mexico poses the question of colonization. It revives in a brutal and implacable way the ever active fatuousness of Europe. It permits her idea of her own superiority to be deflated” (126).

In his discussion of the Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud explicitly linked depictions of cruelty/torture with depictions of racialized subjects. The intersection of these events and depictions was chosen, Artaud explained, “because of its immediacy . . . for Europe and the world” (126). Writing in the 1930s and 1940s, Artaud experienced a Europe that was united by its colonial endeavors throughout much of the southern hemisphere. Consequently, Artaud was explicitly challenging the racist justifications for these colonial projects. “By broaching the alarmingly immediate question of colonization and the right one continent thinks it has to enslave another,” Artaud intoned, “this subject [of The Conquest of Mexico] questions the real superiority of certain races over others and shows the inmost filiation that binds” them (126–127).

In his first manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud explained his plans to stage an “adaptation of a work from the time of Shakespeare, a work entirely consistent with our present troubled state of mind,” a work “stripped of [its] text and retaining only the accouterments of period, characters, and action” (99, 100). Thus, Artaud's decision to adapt John Dryden's 1665 play, The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, for the Theatre of Cruelty had an intrinsic logic because it not only depicted “great social upheavals” and “conflicts between peoples and races,” but also was “consistent with our present troubled [i.e., colonial] state of mind.” The sequel to his popular play The Indian Queen, Dryden's Indian Emperour contained exactly what Artaud desired to depict: an explicit scene of torture motivated by a sense of entitlement and racial superiority.

Pizarro: Thou hast not yet discover'd all thy store.

Montezuma: I neither can nor will discover more;

The gods will punish you, if they be just;

The gods will plague your sacrilegious lust.

Christian Priest: Mark how this impious heathen justifies

His own false gods, and our true God denies!

How wickedly he has refused his wealth,

And hid his gold from christian hands, by stealth.

Down with him, kill him, merit heaven thereby.

Indian High Priest: Can heaven be author of such cruelty?

Pizarro: Since neither threats nor kindness will prevail,

We must by other means your minds assail;

Fasten the engines; stretch ’em at their length,

And pull the straiten'd cords with all your strength.

[They fasten [Montezuma and the Indian Priest] to the rack, and then pull them.]

Montezuma: The gods, who made me once a king, shall know

I still am worthy to continue so.

Though now the subject of your tyranny,

I'll plague you worse than you can punish me.

Know, I have gold, which you shall never find;

No pains, no tortures shall unlock my mind.

Christian Priest: Pull harder yet; he does not feel the rack.²

Dryden's Indian Emperour contains all of the “brutal” and “active fatuousness” that Artaud sought to highlight. The play virtually brutalizes its audience by forcing her/him to witness Montezuma stretched on the rack in full-view onstage. The horrific nature of this scene, however, does not fit easily or comfortably into Artaud's vision for the Theatre of Cruelty. Despite the fact that Artaud's desire to create a link between seventeenth-and twentieth-century colonial psychologies explains his decision to adapt an early modern text, Dryden's Indian Emperour does not exactly permit Europe's “idea of her own superiority to be deflated.” In fact, Dryden's play reveals the complexities inherent in constructing racialized identities through staged scenes of torture. How does one control or even predict how the audience will receive the racialized, tortured body, for example? Despite the fact that Artaud imagined the sight of the tortured body would elicit sympathy, Montezuma's body made abject on the rack could nonetheless elicit a number of less generous responses, including fetishization and objectification. Likewise, how does the triangulation of racial constructions affect audience response/identification? Dryden's popular English play potentially could have created an environment in which the English audience disavowed connections with both the triumphant yet cruel Spaniards and the defeated yet honorable Indians. Instead, the audience could have witnessed the events with a distanced aloofness that would have permitted a feeling of superiority: precisely the affective response Artaud attempted to redress. In addition, do theatrical performances of racial subjectivity in brown/blackface differ from those by actors of color? The distinctions in these performances, after all, do call for theorization with regards to reception. Dryden's Montezuma was portrayed by the English actor John Verbruggen in an Indian costume and brownface, but Artaud never stipulated how his Montezuma would perform his Indian-ness in The Conquest of Mexico. Artaud left the performance of race untheorized. And finally and perhaps more fundamentally, if the seventeenth and twentieth centuries are linked, as Artaud imagined, how can one appropriate and alter these early modern theatrical constructions and performances of race? What does it mean to adapt a play that has in some ways already formed the parameters for racial construction? In his theory, Artaud sutured over these multifaceted complexities out of a desire to create a portrait of racial “filiation.” And in his description of the adaptation of The Conquest of Mexico, Artaud sutured over the multifaceted complexities of Dryden's original text in order to create a production that ends with “Spaniards . . . squashed like blood against the ramparts that are turning green again” (132).

In Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, I delve into the intricate web of complexities that encase the conjoined performances of torture and race in order to attend to the questions that Artaud left unanswered in his theory. It is my belief that explicit theatrical depictions of torture provide the perfect device to interrogate how race developed with contradictory significations in the early modern period: race became both essential and a construction. This book challenges the notion that conceptions and depictions of race are divided into pre- and post-Enlightenment discourses. Instead, this project demonstrates how these seemingly disparate discourses are united by a consistently vacillating construction of race that swings between the concrete and the illusory. Torture, which operates on the principle that that which is hidden can be extracted through the application of bodily harm, provides a disturbingly relevant correlation for this paradoxical construction of race. The employment of torture, in other words, often stems from the desire to substitute the visible and manipulable materiality of the body for the more illusive performative nature of identity. In addition, because staged scenes of torture invite the audience to see something that is normally hidden—the victim's tortured body—they allow the audience to ponder the semiotic significance of both bodies—the victim's and the torturer's.

In defining race, and in thinking about the connections between preand post-Enlightenment definitions for race, I am indebted to the work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant in Racial Formation in the United States. Despite the fact that Omi and Winant focus on a clearly modern and post-Enlightenment moment (the 1960s to the 1990s), their discussion of race works well for the seventeenth-century moment I am analyzing. In fact, I think it is possible to accept their terms while mentally excising any temporal and geographical specifications they place on their definition. They begin their analysis by arguing, “In general, theoretical work on race has not successfully grasped the shifting nature of racial dynamics in the postwar U.S. . . . [and exhibits] an inability to grasp the uniqueness of race, its historical flexibility.”³ I agree with their assessment, too, that “claims that race is a mere matter of variations of human physiognomy, that it is simply a matter of skin color” are wholly “inadequate” (54). Omi and Winant end up defining race as a “concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (55). Thus, a racialized epistemology does not necessarily have to be based on a semiotically charged interpretation of color so much as a semiotically charged interpretation of bodiliness. In discussing theatrical depictions of race, then, I would add to this definition the notion that a racialized epistemology is further constructed through the codification, empowerment, and normalization of the white/right gaze of the English audience. The seventeenth-century theatrical scenes of torture I analyze in Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage allow the audience to ponder the semiotic significance of the bodies of the victims and the torturers in racialized terms by implicitly constructing an anti-racialized identity for the English audience.

Complicating the idea that the application of torture in early modern England signaled an emerging notion of inwardness, I argue that the performance of torture on the early modern stage also demonstrates an interest in the expressly exterior—the racialized body. The actual employment of torture in early modern England exemplifies the fear of the hidden thought and secret threat. From 1540 to 1640, when torture was used most frequently in England, heretics, traitors, and counterfeiters were the primary victims. These disparate criminal groups were united in torture because the state feared they relied on a certain covert interiority. One could not distinguish a Catholic from a Protestant by looking at him or her. In fact, Catholics could, and did, lurk undetected within the English population, secretly praying to “idolatrous” images of the Virgin Mary and pledging allegiance to the Pope. Likewise, the traitor, who was committed to enacting seditious plots, could only succeed if he/she blended in with true loyal citizens. And the counterfeiter made a living by creating objects that looked authentic but which concealed forged and corrupt interiors. In other words, the heretic, the traitor, and the counterfeiter functioned by concealing themselves and their actions. In addition, these criminal groups, which suffered the torments of torture at the hands of the English government, were united by their Englishness; in early modern England, torture was used to detect secrecy within its own population. The unspoken fear that lies below the surface of this history is the belief that the heretics’, traitors’, and counterfeiters’ Englishness served as the ideal mask for these hidden, secret, and treacherous motives and actions.

When representations of torture were staged, however, the victims’ and torturers’ roles were rewritten. No longer representing the threat within, the theatrical victims of torture were primarily constructed as racialized figures. Unlike the historical victims who supposedly hid behind a concealing mask of Englishness, these victims could not hide their differences: they were Moors, American Indians, and Africans. Characters, like Aaron the Moor in Edward Ravenscroft's rewriting of Titus Andronicus, Crimalhaz in Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco, Montezuma in John Dryden's The Indian Emperour, and Oroonoko in Thomas Southerne's stage adaptation of Oroonoko, were all tortured in full-view onstage. Although many of these characters are depicted as having a hidden or threatening inwardness (like Montezuma's knowledge of the hidden troves of gold), the plays simultaneously highlight the physical materiality of their differences. These figures are tortured in part because of the apparent, depictable, and stageable differences of their cultures, religions, and races.

In Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, I privilege early modern dramatic depictions of torture because, like Artaud, I see the “immediacy” of these “brutal and implacable” texts. These seventeenth-century texts not only seem “consistent with our present troubled state of mind,” but also seem to have helped to create the very discourses we use to express, and attempt to work through, these troubles. This project, however, aims to be more theoretical than historical. While I primarily investigate early modern texts, my theoretical interest allows me to venture into twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts as well. I am interested in the conjoined performances of torture and race because I want to investigate how they create and inform one another, and early modern texts provide the first concentrated conjunction of these performances. This is not to suggest that all early modern depictions of torture include racialized discourses/depictions. Likewise, I am not suggesting that all discourses/depictions of race involve scenes of torture. I do want to argue, however, that the conjunction of the performances of torture and race provides the most effective way to analyze the long-standing contradictory constructions of both. In addition, it is important to emphasize that these seventeenth-century plays are not the first texts to construct race in this contradictory fashion. Nevertheless, the coalescence, in this historical moment, of this series of plays with explicit scenes of torture and racialized characters argues for a certain concentration of meaning theatrically, semiotically, and historically.

In these introductory pages, I examine the various and often disparate theoretical challenges one must address when analyzing performances of torture and performances of race. Performances of torture have been almost completely neglected theoretically. Consistently privileging the actual employment of torture, most critics have neglected to address how performances of torture function differently. Performance theories for race, on the other hand, are not lacking. Although claiming to be universal, however, these theories completely elide early modern performances of race. Performance theorists are often so invested in modern theatre that they have failed to examine how modern performativity grew out of the early modern era. In addition, the theoretical discourses employed for torture and race rarely intersect. By bringing them together, I demonstrate the importance of these early modern performances and challenge the assumed divide between pre- and post-Enlightenment racial theories. It is my hope that Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage will highlight how performances of torture and race have functioned, and still continue to function, together. But I also hope that this book will provide a way to challenge the conjunction of these performances. Torture as a form of performance entertainment is troubling because it inures the audience to horrific scenes of violence and inculcates them in the false belief that the racialized Other can be understood through violence. In other words, these performances signal that racialized characters become less opaque and more transparent when they are depicted as controlled and vulnerable on the rack. I will demonstrate how the contradictory formulation of race—as both performative and essential—disrupts clear methods of identification while simultaneously enabling a desire for abjection.

PERFORMING TORTURE

When discussing torture, I am intentionally applying a very limited definition. Because Article 1 of the United Nation's Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment enables a broad definition that includes not only physical acts but also the mental acts of intimid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Interrogating Torture and Finding Race
• 2 A Matter that is No Matter: Religion, Color, and the White Actress in The Empress of Morocco and Xerxes
• 3 When Race is Colored: Abjection and Racial Characterization in Titus Andronicus and Oroonoko
• 4 Racializing Civility: The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards
• 5 Racializing Mercantilism: Amboyna: or, The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants
• 6 Combating Historical Amnesia: On the Images of Prisoner Abuse from Abu Ghraib
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index