English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama

In English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, Mary Floyd-Wilson outlines what we might call scientific conceptions of racial and ethnic differences in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writing. Drawing on classical and contemporary medical texts, histories and cosmographies, Floyd-Wilson demonstrates that Renaissance understandings of racial and ethnic identities contradicted many modern stereotypes concerning difference. Southerners, Africans, in particular, were identified as dispassionate, cool-tempered and wise, whereas the more northern English were understood to be unruly, impressionable and slow-witted. Concerned with the unflattering and constraining implications of this classically derived knowledge, English writers laboured to reinvent ethnology to their own advantage - a labour that paved the way for the invention of more familiar racial ideas. Floyd-Wilson highlights these English revisionary efforts in her surprising and transformational readings of the period’s drama, including Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness and Shakespeare’s Othello and Cymbeline.

• Provides an entirely new way of understanding how ethnic and racial differences were conceived and perceived in the English Renaissance • Provides a startling new reading of Shakespeare’s Othello • Argues that medical discourse, or humoralism, was primarily a mode of ethnology in early modern England

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the marginal English; Part I. Climatic Culture: The Transmissions and Transmutations of Ethnographic Knowlege: 1. The ghost of Hippocrates: geohumoral history in the West; 2. British ethnology; 3. An inside story of race: melancholy and ethnology; Part II. The English Ethnographic Theatre: 4. Tamburlaine and the staging of white barbarity; 5. Temperature and temperance in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness; 6. Othello\'s jealousy; 7. Cymbeline’s angels; Notes; Index.