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 âfairnessâ 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 Englandâs 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, Proteusâ former love Julia is âbut a swarthy Ethiopeâ; accepting his just punishment for having apparently slandered Hero to death, Claudio is determined to marry Leonatoâs unseen niece even âwere she an Ethiopeâ; Phebeâs harsh letter to âGanymedeâ in As You Like It seethes with âgiant-rude invention⊠/ Ethiope words.â In a striking change of mood, for Florizel Perditaâs unadorned yet dazzling beauty is as âsoft as doveâs down and as white as it, / Or Ethiopianâs tooth.â3 Such obsessive reference to people who arenât actually present, and in such a variety of tonesâfrom disgust to Florizelâs aweâindicates that âEthiopesâ occupied significant space in the playsâ 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 virtueâindeed, of value and virtue as white properties5âin 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 Jessicaâs black maidservant pregnant. Although Merchantâs racially articulated romantic comedy of conversion is dedicated to celebrating what love can do, Lorenzoâs non sequitur implicitly admits that there are strict limits to loveâs power. Jessica âshall be savedâ by Lorenzo, both through his love and through his helping her to convert to Christianity, but the offstage coupling between Gobbo and the nameless âNegroâ 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 âless than an honest womanâ (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, Gobboâs class position as a servant clown also racializes him. Illicitly linked to an Ethiop who canât be morally washed cleanâas Lorenzo has âsavedâ Jessicaâhe stands with her outside the pale of properly cultivated behavior that was one of the periodâs markers of whiteness.7)
Characters like the offstage âNegroâ 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. Shakespeareâs plays emerged at the beginning of a period in which black women and their laborsâagricultural, domestic, sexual, reproductiveâwould become central to the slavery-based maintenance of an overseas empire. Yet, as historians like SowandĂ© Mustakeem, Marisa Fuentes, and Jennifer Morgan have shown, it is difficult to find traces of these womenâs 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 disappearedâsometimes 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 worksâspeaks to the virtual erasure of their standing as human beings, their reduction to mere âflesh,â 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 archiveâphysically absent, but socially present, and called on to do various kinds of work in establishing social, sexual, and racial hierarchiesâdevelops 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 Jonesâ 1965 Othelloâs Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama and its documentation of Renaissance playwrightsâ 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 womenâor the idea of black womenâin Shakespeare. In The Winterâs Tale , after Florizel rapturously describes the beauty of Perditaâs white hand by comparing it to âdoveâs downâ or âfanned snowâ 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 âthe warlike Smalusâ (5.1.156), king of Libya. That the blackness of a lyric Ethiopian should have served as foil for Perditaâs white beauty earlier in the play stood out, but didnât 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 Perditaâs fairness even further? Knowing this, one modern editor suggests that Florizelâs âracial joke may have brought the house down.â15 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 Winterâs Tale may have found it funny brings me to this bookâs second driving conviction: that studying adaptations of Shakespeareâs 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 Shakespeareâs plays offers a means of emphasizing their status as the object and locus of dynamic processes of interpretation and reception.16 For her, the âstrongly motivated interventionsâ we see in Shakespearean adaptation themselves work to unfix the notion of the original textâs unchanging political or ideological authority, since âthe site of adaptation keeps getting entangled in the workâs ongoing developmentâ (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 centralâthe Libyan kingâs fictive daughter who brings Perditaâs beauty, innocence, and nubility into sharper reliefâbut 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 womenâs 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 âhouse arrestâ17 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 Morrisonâs script for the extraordinary theatre piece Desdemona, which reimagines Shakespeareâs heroine as she tells her own story from the afterlife. We meet both Desdemonaâs mother and Othelloâs mother in a âdark place,â bound by grief for their dead children.18 After her first shock, Signora Brabantio invites Soun, Othelloâs mother, to kneel with her at their childrenâs graves, but Soun demurs: among her people, âwe obey nature and look to it for the language of the gods.â Instead of praying for mercy and the ability to withstand grief, Soun ...