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Emily C. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to OthelloSpeaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello. Emily C. Bartels. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. vii+252.Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. Lara Bovilsky. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Pp. ix+218.

2012; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 110; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/668508

1545-6951

Susan E. Phillips,

Financial Crisis of the 21st Century

Previous articleNext article FreeEmily C. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello Speaking of the Moor: From to . Emily C. Bartels. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. vii+252. Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello. Emily C. Bartels. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. vii+252. Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. Lara Bovilsky. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Pp. ix+218.Susan E. PhillipsSusan E. PhillipsNorthwestern University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe publication of Kim Hall’s Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) precipitated the moment in which race became a central and, at times, defining topic for early modern studies. The systematic exploration of race in the period has yielded a rigorous, wide-ranging body of scholarship that has fundamentally changed the way we interpret early modern textual and cultural practices. The work of Lynda Boose, Mary Floyd-Wilson, Barbara Fuchs, Anita Loomba, Nabil Matar, Michael Neill, Karen Newman, Patricia Parker, and Daniel Vitkus, among many others, has enriched our understanding of early modern culture by dissecting the period’s racial discourses, illuminating early modern multinational and cross-cultural encounters, and attending to the ways in which conceptions of race are inextricably linked to other discourses of cultural identity, such as gender, religion, class, ethnicity, and nation. It is on this rich body of scholarship that Emily Bartels’s Speaking of the Moor and Lara Bovilsky’s Barbarous Play build as the authors explore the complex and constantly shifting discourse of race deployed on the early modern stage.Both Bovilsky and Bartels seek to reframe prevailing narratives about the discourse of race in early modern England, yet the two approach the subject from fundamentally different perspectives. Bovilsky seeks to expose the fallacy she sees as having unduly influenced the landscape of critical race studies: the “periodization of race” (2), the assumption that racism depends on the systemizing classifications of modern science and that early modern inchoate representations of racial difference cannot, therefore, rise to the level of “truly racist expression” (136). Bartels’s intervention lies in recovering the specificity and historical contingency that define representations of the Moor, a figure without a “single or pure, culturally or racially bounded identity” (5) who was “uniquely poised to negotiate, mediate, even transform the terms of European culture” (15). Where Bartels focuses on the myriad depictions of a particular racial other, Bolivsky investigates the complex mechanisms of racial othering. There is of course a great deal of productive overlap between the two projects. Both scholars insist on the centrality of flexibility, instability, and above all contingency to the discourse of race; both argue for the ability of early modern formulations to inform modern understanding of race and cross-cultural encounters; and both assert that drama is the most effective vehicle for conveying and analyzing this subject. Yet Barbarous Play and Speaking of the Moor offer two quite disparate methodologies for the study of race.The distinct advantages of the two projects are evidenced by their treatment of a common text: that lightning rod of early modern scholarship on race, Othello (ca. 1604). Both scholars test their arguments against the most virulently racializing language in the play, with compelling and provocative results. Through Bartels’s incisive analysis, even Iago’s “corrosive” racial slurs (159) come to demonstrate both “the contingency of cultural identity” (194) and the improvisational and far-from-inevitable nature of racial discourse in this play. Under Bovilsky’s keen eye, the very same passages serve to illustrate “the dense coarticulation of gendered sexual morality and racist metaphysics” (58). Bartels focuses on Othello as the “stranger / Of here and everywhere” (1.1.135–36); Bovilsky concentrates on Desdemona and her “gross revolt” (1.1.133). This dramatic shift in perspective results in radically different assessments of the play. To insist that Othello is a “stranger / Of here” and not simply of everywhere else, Bartels argues, is “to rethink what it means to be a ‘stranger,’ to review where and how we draw the lines around his and Venice’s cultural position, and…to recognize that the exchange between Venice and the Moor is a mutual exchange, as central to Venice’s identity as it is to the Moor’s” (175). Calling into question Othello’s outsider status, Bartels contends, allows us to see the play’s emphasis on “the domestic edges of Iago’s fictions and Othello’s fall” (183) and to recognize that it is not the “more amorphous terms of race and culture” (182) that undo the Moor but rather the “more conventional,” “more inclusive and precise,” and, indeed, “more persuasive” discourses of misogyny (182). Bovilsky’s conclusions could not be more different. For her, Desdemona’s “progressive and virulent racialization” (39) demonstrates that the “links between the ideologies of race and gender operating on the early modern English stage” are “far more literal and materialist than has been generally been believed” (51). What is more, she argues, racial difference not only “echoes the logic of sexual difference,” it “is dramatized by marriage itself, in which the ideal of a union of likenesses (clime, complexion, degree) cannot fully accommodate period beliefs about gender difference” (48–49). Where in Bartels’s assessment Othello reveals a “process of cross-cultural exchange that not only opens out but also opens in, to the improvised interiors of domestic life” (189), in Bovilsky’s it illustrates nothing short of “the exogamous potential of all heterosexual marriage” (49).Bovilsky’s discussion of Othello inaugurates and sets the tone for Barbarous Play. Each of the book’s four chapters takes up the intersection of race with a particular early modern category of “personal and corporate experience” (160). Chapter 1 explores the intersection of race and gender in Othello, while chapter 2 investigates the complicated interaction between class and race in The Merchant of Venice (1596–98). Chapter 3 takes up the topic of nation, revealing how racializing and nationalistic rhetorics are mutually constitutive in both the Italianate drama of the period (represented by John Webster’s The White Devil [1612]) and in English Petrarchism. Finally, chapter 4 uses Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (1622) and The Merchant of Venice to dissect the relationship between scientific and racializing discourse in the period, a mutual dependence with a palpable modern legacy. While each chapter takes up a different identity discourse, the intersection of race and gender serves as a unifying bridge throughout Barbarous Play, whether it be in Desdemona’s “blackening,” Jessica’s complicated and continual complexion shifting, the equation of moral and cosmetic darkness in Vittoria, or the contamination of Beatrice’s blood.Extending the argument of the opening chapter on Othello, the book’s second chapter investigates the ways in which class discourse shapes and complicates the gendered racial politics at work in The Merchant of Venice. Rather than focusing on Shylock as the quintessential early modern representation of the Jew, Bovilsky turns to his daughter, Jessica, through whom she unravels the complex knot of race, class, and gender at the heart of the play. Race and class are synonymous in Merchant, she contends, for “the boundary between Jewishness and Christianity” it depicts “trades on an equation of Christianity and gentility” (80). Both this equation between gentle and Gentile and the racial boundary it marks are most clearly delineated and closely contested around the play’s female characters. The two central female figures are foils for one another; Portia’s drawn-out process of selecting a husband reveals the limits of Jessica’s conversion. Although Merchant initially appears to offer “powerfully linked fantasies of exogamous alliance and familial estrangement,” Bovilsky demonstrates that “the possibility of a full transfer of identity is progressively abandoned as Shakespeare endorses a troubled endogamy, one always implied by the play’s vocabulary of human classification” (101–2).As suggestive as these readings are, it is in the book’s final two chapters that Bovilsky’s argument comes to fruition and that the centrality of the early modern stage to both early modern and modern racialist formulations is most powerfully on display. Chapter 3 investigates the intersection between racism and nationalism embodied in the popular English dramatic practice of impersonating Italians. Building on the work of Richard Helgerson and Claire McEachern, Bovilsky approaches the question of early modern English nationalism from a different angle, illustrating the significant influence that “English figurations of other nationalities” had on the formation of an English national identity (107). “Italianate identification,” she argues, was itself “fundamentally English” (107) and had wide-reaching implications: not only did Italy offer English writers a dizzyingly wide array of associations, from “radical and racialized” (104) immorality to intellectual and cultural virtuosity, but “Italian subjectivity was depicted in as charged a discourse of otherness as the English xenophobic imaginary had to offer” (108). Bovilsky does not restrict her discussion to dramatic texts, as she uses Milton’s Italian sonnets (ca. 1628) to broaden her discussion of Italian impersonation. Where English Italianate drama manifests “a dense combination of dis- and cross-identification, English and Italian, nation and race,” teaching English audiences to “read national difference as constitutively racialized” (118), Milton’s sonnets reveal the “fine line between Englishness and otherness” (117). The inclusion of Milton’s poetry here opens up the chapter in such a productive way that it left me wishing that Barbarous Play had incorporated other nondramatic subjects, such as the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets.Bovilsky’s final chapter returns explicitly to the questions raised in her introduction about the “periodization of race” and the oft-overlooked modern legacy of early modern racial formulations. Reading Shylock’s claim of humoral enmity toward Antonio against the humoral poetics of aversion in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, Bovilsky reveals how the characters of both plays “exploit a period notion of humoral antipathy in order to blur inclination and instinct” (153). In doing so, they demonstrate the potential of humoral theory to naturalize attraction and revulsion “by connecting the perception of psychical and physical differences to systems of affect” (139). Underscoring the legacy of early modern metaphors of race for nineteenth- and twentieth-century racializing discourses, these two plays provide “early examples both of an attempted naturalization/biologizing of the origins of racial antagonism and of the mystification of the social motivations in fact underlying that attempt” (137). It is here that Bovilsky brings her argument most forcefully home, here that she exposes most convincingly the fallacies inherent in the “periodization of race” and demonstrates how deeply “we still feel the effects of early modern metaphors of race” (154).Whereas as Othello serves as the point of departure for Barbarous Play, it marks the final destination of Bartels’s Speaking of the Moor, the culmination of a rigorously structured and beautifully written investigation into early modern representations of this “culturally complex” racial other (20). Depth rather than breadth is the project’s goal: Bartels restricts the scope of her inquiry to a sixteen-year period (1588–1604) in which “the Moor seems to have captured England’s imagination newly and urgently” (19). Focusing on the moment “just before New World colonization set the terms” (20) of both global expansion and racializing representation, her chapters unfold the early modern story of the Moor, exposing not only “its unique emphasis on cultural crossing” (16) but also its centrality to early modern globalization. The book is organized around studies of four plays, each of which is treated in a separate chapter: George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1588–89); Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1593–94); Lust’s Dominion; or, The Lascivious Queen (ca. 1599), by Thomas Dekker and his collaborators; and Othello. Interspersed between discussion of the plays are chapters investigating the depiction of the Moor in three historical texts: Richard Haklyut’s The Principall Navigations (1589), Elizabeth I’s series of decrees deporting “Negars and Blackamoors,” and John Pory’s The History and Description of Africa (1600), a translation and expansion of A Geographical Historie of Africa (1526), by al-Hasan ibn Mohammed al-Wezâz al-Fâsi (“Leo Africanus”).Throughout the Speaking of the Moor, Bartels works against the grain of scholarly consensus, reading unexpected flexibility as well as political and economic contingency in texts that have conventionally been seen as rigidly and unilaterially racializing. Thus, in the book’s first chapter, she attributes Peele’s demonization of Muly Muhamet, the character Nabil Matar has called the “formative Moor in English dramatic imagination” (Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 [Gainesville: University of Press of Florida, 2005], 16–17), not to the racial markers that accrue to him but to his political orientation. As Bartels explains, The Battle of Alcazar pays deference to the instrumental role that Morocco played in England’s precolonial global ambitions, celebrating figures who advance those goals and exhibiting hostility toward those who thwart them. Muly Mahamet’s “naive and atavistic isolationism” (33) thus stigmatizes him as the play’s villain, in stark contrast to the positively portrayed Abdelmelec, Muly Mahamet’s Moorish uncle, who eagerly embraces global alliances. By juxtaposing the political orientations of these two Moors, she concludes, Alcazar “presses its spectators to look beyond the bounds of race, religion, and nation, to see a Mediterranean ‘world’ improvised from the unpredictable intersections of Europeans and non-Europeans” (43). Similarly, in chapter 2, Bartels’s attentiveness to the vicissitudes of early globalization uncovers an unexpected porosity in Haklyut’s The Principall Navigations. In this text that so shaped England’s “fantasies of cross-cultural domination” (45), she reveals not the consistent racialization and codification of the Moor but multiplicity and contingency. Haklyut’s “fragmented and unfocused” (47) depictions of the Moor illustrate for Bartels “the improvisational nature, the political and ideological openness and uncertainty of these early approaches, which had no established scheme for colonial domination or for economic development behind them” (51).In the book’s third chapter, Bartels tackles a figure who might at first appear to resist her argument about flexibility in racial representation: Titus Andronicus’s Aaron. Titus, she argues, “offers a radical experiment in representation” (89), in which race is “predicated not on a sacrosanct purity but rather on cross-cultural intermixing and exchange” (92). Rejecting the critical commonplace that, as a Moor, Aaron is by definition “out of place,” she insists on the contingency of his outside status, demonstrating that “interpretations of the Moor happen inside, not outside, the cultural moment” (99). For Bartels, the play’s central crisis is precipitated not by the presence of an alien within the culture but by the “dangerously reactionary” (69) attempt to install an ideal of cultural purity. Political expediency rather than fear of miscegenation criminalizes Aaron’s interracial adultery. And even in the midst of the play’s racially charged conclusion, Bartels argues, Titus critiques a “discriminatory fantasy of cultural purity” (69), for the focus shifts “from who the Moor categorically is to what this particular Moor has done, thus displacing and replacing discrimination with recrimination” (97).Moving from recrimination to deportation, chapters 4 and 5, treating early modern fantasies of racial banishment, are the most compelling in the book. In the first, Bartels offers a richly textured and historically grounded account of Elizabeth I’s three letters demanding the immediate deportation of “certain blackamoors” from her realm. Teasing out the intricacies of Elizabeth’s fluctuating rhetoric, she charts “an important shift” (112) from economic expediency to discriminatory ideology: the letters move “from the contingent to the absolute, the practical to the ideological, the economic to the racial, ultimately coming as close as contemporary texts will come to categorically defining a ‘black’ race” (116). Yet these three letters do not in Bartels’s opinion “provide a representative measure of the racist sentiment in England”; instead, they reflect in their telling repetitions “how seriously Queen Elizabeth’s attempts to activate that sentiment were molded and challenged by competing political and economic circumstances” (116). At the turn of the sixteenth century, she concludes, the “accommodation as well as the alienation of a black population” was constantly “under revision, inevitably contingent on the practical, political, and economic needs of the moment” (117). Ending with the banishment Elizabeth seeks to enact, Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion, the subject of chapter 5, “takes the issue of discrimination to its limits” (119). Yet, as Bartels argues, “if the desire to banish the Moor drives the play’s fantasies, the Moor’s ability both to penetrate and to represent Spain constitutes its realities” (127). Indeed, the play repeatedly exposes the “implausibility” (120) of its own discriminatory fantasies, for if the Moor can be banished, he can also sit on Spain’s throne. In a series of deft readings, Bartels reveals how Eleazar’s meteoric rise to power reveals “the permeability not simply of Spain’s border and bodies but also of its defining identities and ideologies” (136). Thus, instead of “the potentially alienable Spanish Moor,” Lust’s Dominion depicts “an essentially inalienable Spanish Moor” (120).The book’s final historical chapter reads Pory’s The History and Description of Africa. For Bartels, what sets The History apart from its predecessors is “its insistence on the diversity of Africa’s peoples and the permeability and mutability of their cultures” (152). Through its emphasis on detail and difference, she claims, Pory’s text “‘unmoors’ the Moor from constructs of color, religious or ethnic purity, and place, giving precedence and prominence to the unpredictable dynamics of cultural change and exchange” (143). The History represents Africa as “a place of transformation” (146), defined by “ongoing cross-cultural commercial exchange” (147). Although The History “encodes” various religious and racial prejudices, its “insistence on the primacy and contingency of Africa’s discrete communities” (150), Bartels argues, continually complicates and potentially undermines those prejudices. In this chapter, as throughout Speaking of the Moor, Bartels demonstrates convincingly that during the brief moment before New World colonization refigured both economic priorities and rhetorical strategies, the Moor had a “close, ameliorating, and complicating connection to Europe” (14); indeed, on the early modern stage, he was “the motivating agent of cultural change” (193).The different approaches of Barbarous Play and Speaking of the Moor yield provocative and convincing results, yet each comes with its own risks. The danger of one is to “err on the side of wanting early modern drama and culture to be more radical, more liberal than it finally was” (Bartels, 19), to lose the negative cumulative effect of early modern representations of racial others in the surprising contingency of their details. The danger of the other is to overidentify racializing discourse, potentially diluting it—and the “truly racist expression” (Bovilsky, 136) to which it attests—to the point that it becomes nonspecific. These methodological susceptibilities sometimes lead to attendant shortcomings in argumentation. The pages of Speaking of the Moor are filled with compelling, perfectly paced readings that offer new insight into overly familiar passages. At times, however, Bartels resists the conclusions that would give her readings greater collective force, neglecting to provide a full sense of the implications of her argument both for the early modern period and for contemporary discussion about race. By contrast, while Barbarous Play is wonderfully assertive and persuasive in its conclusions and their implications for the study of race, hurried local argumentation at times results in individual readings that are less convincing than the book’s overarching claims, particularly in its first two chapters. Yet even if these two scholars occasionally succumb to the vulnerabilities of their respective approaches, the advantages of both and the discoveries that result from them far outweigh the weaknesses, for Bartels and Bovilsky not only illuminate the texts of the early modern stage; they also shift the terms of the current critical debate about race.Speaking of the Moor and Barbarous Play are certain to become invaluable resources for scholars interested in a wide range of topics, from early modern drama to critical race theory, from globalization to early modern science. The two introductions alone provide a rigorous, exhaustive, and up-to-date survey of the literature, essential reading for any scholar interested in these fields. Moreover, with chapters that can be readily uncoupled from their larger projects and thus adapted both to broader discussions of race as well as to the to specific analysis of individual texts, both books are sure to make frequent appearances on graduate and undergraduate syllabuses alike. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 3February 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/668508 Views: 525Total views on this site © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.