This book is about the ways in which black women appear and disappear in Shakespeare. When I first started writing about race in early modern texts, the absence of black female characters in the plays based on Roman history that particularly interested me then both intrigued and annoyed me, especially as I started thinking more about the significance of notions of “fairness” in a Renaissance poetic vocabulary.¹ My first hunch was that characters who should historically have been dark-skinned were often instead represented as fair, and that this whitening was a racially motivated choice made near the beginnings of England’s colonial encounters with Africa and the New World.

These years later, though, I want to return to that Shakespearean absence itself, and look at what it means. Two factors provoke my discussion of what is physically not there. First, even though black characters are thin on the ground in the plays, they are nonetheless always being talked about, invoked, referred to.² Next to Silvia, with whom he is suddenly obsessed, Proteus’ former love Julia is “but a swarthy Ethiope”; accepting his just punishment for having apparently slandered Hero to death, Claudio is determined to marry Leonato’s unseen niece even “were she an Ethiope”; Phebe’s harsh letter to “Ganymede” in As You Like It seethes with “giant-rude invention… / Ethiope words.” In a striking change of mood, for Florizel Perdita’s unadorned yet dazzling beauty is as “soft as dove’s down and as white as it, / Or Ethiopian’s tooth.”³ Such obsessive reference to people who aren’t actually present, and in such a variety of tones—from disgust to Florizel’s awe—indicates that “Ethiopes” occupied significant space in the plays’ imagination. These invisible Ethiopes emerge as necessary props for making the whiteness of the speakers morally and ethically, as well as physically, legible.⁴

We can see an example of how black people, and black women in particular, are necessary to the productions of notions of white value and virtue—indeed, of value and virtue as white properties⁵—in The Merchant of Venice . When Lancelot Gobbo absurdly rebukes Lorenzo for driving up the price of bacon by converting Jews like Jessica, Lorenzo retorts that the economic aftereffects of mass conversion would be easier to justify to the commonwealth than the fact that Gobbo has gotten Jessica’s black maidservant pregnant. Although Merchant’s racially articulated romantic comedy of conversion is dedicated to celebrating what love can do, Lorenzo’s non sequitur implicitly admits that there are strict limits to love’s power. Jessica “shall be saved” by Lorenzo, both through his love and through his helping her to convert to Christianity, but the offstage coupling between Gobbo and the nameless “Negro” is not available to the same kind of romantic enchantment (3.5.17, 37). Even though he acknowledges that she is a better woman than he took her for when he first slept with her, she remains “less than an honest woman” (3.5.39): useful for sex only, outside the reach of comic transformation because of who she is, and her incapacity to become anything else.⁶ (As Patricia Akhimie has persuasively suggested, Gobbo’s class position as a servant clown also racializes him. Illicitly linked to an Ethiop who can’t be morally washed clean—as Lorenzo has “saved” Jessica—he stands with her outside the pale of properly cultivated behavior that was one of the period’s markers of whiteness.⁷)

Characters like the offstage “Negro” maid who helps Merchant clarify what it can and cannot mean by love and transformation play important conceptual roles in delineating the imaginative limits of Shakespearean drama. Shakespeare’s plays emerged at the beginning of a period in which black women and their labors—agricultural, domestic, sexual, reproductive—would become central to the slavery-based maintenance of an overseas empire. Yet, as historians like Sowandé Mustakeem, Marisa Fuentes, and Jennifer Morgan have shown, it is difficult to find traces of these women’s lives, or to understand the traces of these lives when we see them, in a colonial archive, given the purposes and interests of those assembling that archive.⁸ That so many of these black women disappeared—sometimes even beyond the capacity of present-day descendants to recover the lives and stories of ancestors swallowed by the void of the Middle Passage and its works—speaks to the virtual erasure of their standing as human beings, their reduction to mere “flesh,” their flickering survival as only the occasions for stories of their subjection, sedimented over the already ancillary status to which they were reduced in a Renaissance racial imaginary.⁹ The spectral quality of black women in our Shakespearean archive—physically absent, but socially present, and called on to do various kinds of work in establishing social, sexual, and racial hierarchies—develops within the history of this colonial abjection.¹⁰

Nevertheless, this book is dedicated to finding black women in Shakespeare, and participates in the ongoing critical project of analyzing the operations of race in the early modern world. Beginning, perhaps, with Eldred Jones’ 1965 Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama and its documentation of Renaissance playwrights’ fascination with black characters and the idea of blackness, early modern race studies have been committed not only to attesting to the degree that racial identity and difference were pervasive Renaissance concerns¹¹ but also to developing applications of race as a powerful analytic tool for studying the formation of racial identities.¹² Scholarship particularly focused on women and race, with its careful attention to how ideas about race and ideas about sexuality worked together to make each other socially legible, has been an engine for much of my own thinking.¹³ Adding material detail to critical discussions, a more recent analysis has revealed the extent to which African-descended people were physically present in Renaissance England, and what the state made of them.¹⁴ But still, even buttressed by a critical method whose variety, breadth, and subtlety continue to reveal themselves, I found myself returning to the repeated indirection, misdirection, and absence surrounding black women—or the idea of black women—in Shakespeare. In The Winter’s Tale , after Florizel rapturously describes the beauty of Perdita’s white hand by comparing it to “dove’s down” or “fanned snow” or the white tooth of an imaginary Ethiopian shining against dark skin, he arrives at the Sicilian court and introduces her to her father as the daughter of “the warlike Smalus” (5.1.156), king of Libya. That the blackness of a lyric Ethiopian should have served as foil for Perdita’s white beauty earlier in the play stood out, but didn’t really surprise me the first time I noticed it. But what are we to make of this throwaway fifth-act imposture, after Florizel has made it clear to us that she is nowhere near as dark as the daughter of a Moorish king would be (even though her white beauty depends on blackness for its articulation), and even though she would have been played by a white youth who may have been wearing some kind of face paint to emphasize Perdita’s fairness even further? Knowing this, one modern editor suggests that Florizel’s “racial joke may have brought the house down.”¹⁵ That, I could believe. But what was the joke about?

In a way, the attempt to figure out what the joke was/is and why the first audience of The Winter’s Tale may have found it funny brings me to this book’s second driving conviction: that studying adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in concert with the Shakespearean text can offer paths into finding and naming what is simultaneously there, and not there. Margaret Kidnie has argued that adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays offers a means of emphasizing their status as the object and locus of dynamic processes of interpretation and reception.¹⁶ For her, the “strongly motivated interventions” we see in Shakespearean adaptation themselves work to unfix the notion of the original text’s unchanging political or ideological authority, since “the site of adaptation keeps getting entangled in the work’s ongoing development” (9). This book conceives of the site of Shakespearean adaptation as the place where it can begin to admit black women into onstage presence. Texts in which they are conceptually central—the Libyan king’s fictive daughter who brings Perdita’s beauty, innocence, and nubility into sharper relief—but usually literally absent can offer ways in to making their stories visible in the work that the institution of Shakespeare did for emerging race-based colonial orders, and for the societies that those orders would create. Writing black women’s stories into reworked Shakespeares is a way of writing them into a history that has worked to efface or misvalue them, their works, and their lives. Animated through performance, they escape the “house arrest”¹⁷ under which archival information is held for the purposes of state constructions of the past, and emerge into our sight.

The reanimated shades of black and white women who do not appear in Othello , or, if they do appear, do not tell us their whole stories there, occupy much of Toni Morrison’s script for the extraordinary theatre piece Desdemona, which reimagines Shakespeare’s heroine as she tells her own story from the afterlife. We meet both Desdemona’s mother and Othello’s mother in a “dark place,” bound by grief for their dead children.¹⁸ After her first shock, Signora Brabantio invites Soun, Othello’s mother, to kneel with her at their children’s graves, but Soun demurs: among her people, “we obey nature and look to it for the language of the gods.” Instead of praying for mercy and the ability to withstand grief, Soun ...