Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture) [1 ed.] 0415957214, 9780415957212

Citation preview

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Ayanna Thompson

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 1. Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre

9. Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

P. A. Skantze

Ayanna Thompson

2. The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson Mary Ellen Lamb

3. Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Lethe’s Legacies Edited by Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams

4. Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture Thresholds of History Edited by Theresa Krier and Elizabeth D. Harvey

5. Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America Circles in the Sand Jess Edwards

6. Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse Grace Ioppolo

7. Reading the Early Modern Dream The Terrors of the Night Edited by Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’ Callaghan, and S. J. Wiseman

8. Fictions of Old Age in Early Modern Literature and Culture Nina Taunton

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Ayanna Thompson

New York London

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

© 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Transferred to Digital Printing 2008 International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-95721-2 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thompson, Ayanna, 1972Performing race and torture on the early modern stage / Ayanna Thompson. p. cm. -- (Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-415-95721-2 (alk. paper) 1. English drama--17th century--History and criticism. 2. Race in literature. 3. Torture in literature. 4. Other (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title. PR698.R34T48 2007 822’.409355--dc22 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge.com

2007001483

For Derek and for Dashiell

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Contents

Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

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

25

When Race is Colored: Abjection and Racial Characterization in Titus Andronicus and Oroonoko

51

Racializing Civility: The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards

75

Racializing Mercantilism: Amboyna: or, The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants

99

3

4

5

6

Combating Historical Amnesia: On the Images of Prisoner Abuse from Abu Ghraib

Notes Bibliography Index

1

121 147 163 171

vii

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Illustrations

1.1 Saints Savinus and Cyprian Tortured on the Wheel, wall painting from the crypt of the church at Saint-Savin-surGartempe, French (Poitiers), early twelfth century. 1.2 Hans Memling, The Passion, Turin, Galleria Sabauda, fi fteenth century. 1.3 Geertgen Tot Sint Jans, The Burning of John the Baptist’s Bones, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, fifteenth century 2.1 Engraving from John Foxe’s 1563 edition of The Book of Martyrs, depicting the torture of Cuthbert Simpson. 2.2 Broadside for Elkanah Settle’s Pope-Burning Pageant, “The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope Cardinalls Jesuits Fryars &c: through the Citty of London November the 17th 1680” (London, 1680). 2.3 A detail from the broadside for Elkanah Settle’s PopeBurning Pageant, depicting the Pope with “instruments of torture” (London, 1680). 2.4 A “Sculpture” by William Dolle included in Elkanah Settle’s 1673 edition of The Empress of Morocco, depicting a Moorish dance. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 2.5 A “Sculpture” by William Dolle included in Elkanah Settle’s 1673 edition of The Empress of Morocco, depicting Muly Labas and Morena in a dungeon. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 2.6 Final “Sculpture” by William Dolle included in Elkanah Settle’s 1673 edition of The Empress of Morocco, depicting the torture of Crimalhaz “cast down on the Gaunches, being hung on a Wall set with spikes of Iron.” By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

12 13 14 30

32

33

35

36

41

ix

x

Illustrations 5.1 Frontispiece to Amboyna in the 1735 edition of The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, depicting the “fair” Ysabinda being freed from danger by Towerson. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 114 6.1 Abu Ghraib Prison photo, constructing the detainees as sodomites, November 7, 2003. 124 6.2 Abu Ghraib Prison photo taken by Sabrina Harman of Lynndie England and a “RAPEIST” (sic), November 7, 2003. 125 6.3 The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana. Courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection. 129 6.4 Abu Ghraib Prison photo of Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman in front of the infamous “dog pile,” November 7, 2003. 130 6.5 Abu Ghraib Prison photo taken by Charles Graner of Sabrina Harman with a video camera, capturing the “dog pile,” November 7, 2003. 140 6.6 Abu Ghraib Prison photo taken by Sabrina Harman of the famous “Hooded Man,” but with Ivan Frederick with his camera, November 4, 2003. 141 6.7 Abu Ghraib Prison photo taken by Charles Graner of Lynndie England with “Gus” on a leash, but with Megan Ambuhl looking on, October 24, 2003. 142 6.8 The bludgeoned body of an African American male, propped in a rocking chair, blood-splattered clothes, with dark paint applied to face, circular disks glued to cheeks, cotton glued to face and head, shadow of man using rod to prop up the victim’s head. Circa 1900, location unknown. Courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection. 143

Acknowledgments

As this project has been a while in the making, I am indebted to many friends, colleagues, and family members who have had sustained conversations with me about these complex and often difficult topics. The fi rst conversations I had were in graduate school with my dream-team advisors: Marjorie Garber, Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara Lewalski, and Werner Sollors. They challenged me in the most stimulating and constructive ways, and I am deeply grateful for their intellectual engagement. I am also indebted to the members of the Renaissance Colloquium at Harvard University for responding to the earliest versions of this project: Sophie Gee, Marie Henson, Wendy Hyman, Scott Newstok, John Parker, Bryan Reynolds, Marc Shell, Gabrielle Starr, Henry Turner, and Sarah Wall-Randell. I also remember having particularly informative conversations with Aviva Briefel, Monica Miller, Rachel Rubinstein, and Catherine Toal, while at Harvard. More recently, the most stimulating and helpful conversations have been with my generous colleagues at Arizona State University: Cora Fox, Ian Moulton, Curtis Perry, and Bradley Ryner. All of them have read, discussed, and/or commented on this project at length. I could not have asked for better colleagues in Renaissance studies at ASU. I also benefited immensely from ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research reading/research group, Racial Formations. The group read various chapters from this project and offered extremely salient advice, and I especially want to thank: Lisa Anderson, Myla Vincenti Carpio, Crystal Griffith, Karen Leong, H.L.T. Quan, and Tisa Wenger. Over the years, there have been four friends who have offered their support: Jonathan Gil Harris, Scott Newstok, Bryan Reynolds, and Henry Turner. All four read drafts of various chapters, and all four offered encouragement and advice. Thanks for being good friends and colleagues. I have also benefited from generous institutional support during the various phases of this project. First, I would like to thank Bowdoin College and their Department of English for granting me their Minority Scholar in Residence Fellowship to complete the fi rst version of this project. Second, I would like to thank the Law and Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholar Workshop (sponsored alternately by xi

xii

Acknowledgments

Columbia Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, UCLA School of Law, and USC Center for Law, History, and Culture) for sponsoring my participation in the workshop. The advice and comments I received from my respondents, Rebecca Lemon and David Theo Goldberg, were invaluable. In addition, the conversations I had with Ariela Gross, Katherine Franke, Nan Goodman, Sally Gordon, Hilary Schor, Clyde Spillenger, and Nomi Stolzenberg helped shape the fi nal version of this project. Third, I would like to thank the English Department at Arizona State University for awarding me a Junior Research Leave to complete the project. The time the leave granted me was incredibly generous and immensely beneficial. I also owe great thanks to my research assistant Melissa Leary for her help in the fi nal stages. Finally, I owe the most thanks and debt to my loving family. My mother, Nina Parish, has had to endure long diatribes about race and torture, and she always greeted them with good will. She even got into it a bit, sending me articles about torture whenever she came across them in the popular media. Thanks, Mom, for being so supportive! The biggest debt, however, is owed to my husband, Derek, and my son, Dashiell. As my intellectual, spiritual, and romantic soul-mate, Derek has inspired me the most. He has read, discussed, and commented on various versions of this project and has been my number one cheerleader. Thank you for your perfect love, Derek. And to my son, Dashiell, stay strong, proud, and loving. Your love is as perfect as your father’s, and no one could hope for more.

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 “fi rst 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 fi rst 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 “confl icts between peoples 1

2

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

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 fi nd; 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 seventeenthand 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

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

3

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 “fi liation.” 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.

4

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

In defi ning race, and in thinking about the connections between preand post-Enlightenment defi nitions 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 defi nition. 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 defi nition 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

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

5

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 seventeenthcentury 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-fi rst-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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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

6

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

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 defi nition that includes not only physical acts but also the mental acts of intimidation, punishment, and coercion, it is commonplace today to discuss the multifaceted nature of torture: 4 feminist human rights advocates, for example, have recently argued to include rape as an explicit act of torture. I follow several historians’ lead by attempting to forge a clearly defi ned and limited defi nition of the word “torture.” In this work “torture” will be used in a limited definition as the infl iction of physical suffering where such infliction is intended to elicit information regarding military, civil, and/or ecclesiastical matters. While harsh punishments were a way of life in early modern England, torture was necessarily different from cruel punishments (which are today considered part and parcel of our understanding of it); torture was not used as an end but as a means. The former Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London, Geoffrey Abbott, writes, “Torture . . . was not a punishment, but a forcible persuasion to compel the

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

7

offender to admit guilt or reveal the names of accomplices.”5 In the same manner, the historian John Langbein warns, “We repeat that no variety of punishment infl icted as a sanction following a conviction, no matter how brutal, should be regarded as torture, because punishment is not directed to extracting evidence or information.”6 Thus, for an historical understanding of torture in early modern England one must exclude the stocks, the scold’s brace, and any other cruel device of punishment. And likewise, one must exclude all manners of execution, no matter how cruel and inhumane, because torture was not a method of punishment, but a method of interrogation. Likewise, it is important to emphasize that torture was not a public act. Unlike scenes of punishment which often occurred in town squares as events for public entertainment/containment, torture was conducted in secrecy in dungeons, towers, and prisons out of the sight of the public: no audiences were admitted. Part of the difficulty of theorizing the performance of torture stems from the fact that our language constructs torture as an “act” and a “performance.”7 Our language equates real torture with performances of torture, thus minimizing the horrors of the employment of torture by privileging the performative aspects of the “act.” While critics have attempted to redress this linguistic construction by documenting the history of torture and its public concealment, few have addressed the significance of true performances of torture. How does one theoretically distinguish between these two “acts” and these two “performances”? In this section, I address the ways that torture has been approached by various critics in order to bring to light the ways that the performances of torture have been neglected by historians and theorists. By focusing on revealing the actual use of torture, these critics construct themselves as combating the silence that surrounds torture. This construction, however, is only possible if critics elide how often torture is performed in the arts; they must disavow the fact that there is no silence surrounding torture in performance. In addition, these performances make it difficult to discuss torture without discussing the construction and depiction of race. I include a discussion of early modern English constructions of torture in order to demonstrate how often anxieties about nationality were folded into the earliest constructions of torture in England. Then I conclude with a brief analysis of medieval artistic renderings of torture because performances of torture have materialized and racialized this construction of nationality. Historians often treat torture as a political event that needs to be brought to light in order to prevent its future use. John Langbein, for example, pioneered research into legal treatments of torture in early modern Europe, focusing on the changing standards of juridical proof. 8 Explicit in Langbein’s argument is the notion that these legal justifications should not be permitted again. “The European law of torture was suffused with the spirit of safeguard,” Langbein writes, “yet it was never able to correct for the fundamental unreliability of coerced evidence. . . . History’s important

8

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

lesson is that it has not been possible to make coercion compatible with truth.”9 Similarly, John Conroy, in his recent book Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture, documents three cases of torture in the late twentieth century, exploring how various torturers justified their actions. Historical analyses of the “Dynamics of Torture,” Conroy argues, should force modern societies to challenge all justifi cations for torture because they allow it to become “the perfect crime . . . [for which] in the vast majority of cases, only the victim pays.”10 Although the goals of legal historians are commendable, Conroy’s title highlights the dilemma that faces many of them: while torture may be an “unspeakable act” legally, it is not one artistically or performatively. The history of torture is the history of secrecy and silence because public officials often try to conceal the documentation of torture, and the public follows suit with its unwillingness to discuss the uncomfortable, and potentially politically dangerous, subject matter.11 And yet, torture does not exist as an unactable or unstageable event. Scenes of torture appear in many popular media: art, drama, television, and fi lm. During the seventeenth century, the primary historical nexus for this book, onstage depictions of torture were enacted frequently. Summing up the theatrical trend of the period, one nineteenth-century scholar called staging torture “the custom of the age.”12 But what enables the staging of these unspeakable acts? How exactly does the dramatization of torture change the nature of its unspeakability? Theorists, like legal historians, have failed to address this distinction. For example, Elaine Scarry’s work on the connections between torture, language, and the construction of our world, The Body in Pain, theorizes the deconstructive nature of torture. She argues that “Physical pain . . . is language-destroying. Torture infl icts bodily pain that is itself languagedestroying, but torture also mimes (objectifies in the external environment) this language-destroying capacity in its interrogation, the purpose of which is not to elicit needed information but visibly to deconstruct the prisoner’s voice.”13 Scarry’s discussion of the performativity of torture, however, is completely reserved for the performative aspects of actual torture. She does not explore how artistic performances of torture complicate these performative aspects. Similarly, Michel Foucault’s seminal book, Discipline and Punish, analyzes the important cultural changes that occurred when government sanctioned disciplines evolved from public events to private punishments; but he does not move the argument in the other direction to discuss what happens when private punishments become fictive public entertainment.14 Even theorists with a more focused historical analysis have ignored performances of torture. Lisa Silverman, for example, argues that the end of torture in early modern France signaled a larger epistemological question about the relationship between free will and evidence; but she does not address how this epistemological question is further problematized by performances of torture.15 Performances of torture, however, function in fundamentally different ways from the actual employment of

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

9

torture because of their artistic and public natures. Needless to say, it is important to explore the ways a cultural history gets translated into and affected by artistic media. Literary critics, of course, have attempted to bridge the divide between cultural history and cultural productions. Early modern literary scholars have compared the historical and artistic representations of torture through analyses of the descriptions, warrants, and depictions of torture. In similar arguments, Katharine Eisaman Maus and Elizabeth Hanson have examined torture as a symptom of post-Reformation England’s preoccupation with a private self. According to Maus and Hanson, private worship and a personal relationship with God point to a new early modern concept of inwardness, and the use of torture in early modern England points to a belief that a hidden interiority exists and can be discovered.16 Both critics position torture and dramatic depictions of torture together because, they argue, these venues are dependent on notions of individual interiority and/ or subjectivity. There seems to be something more at stake in these representations, however. It is not only a notion of subjectivity that emerges but also an idea of subjectivity that is nationalized and, as I will argue later, racialized. The language from early modern English torture treatises reveals anxieties about the relationship between domestic policies and foreign influences. These anxieties, of course, expose the interconnected nature of subjectivity and nationality. In other words, subjectivity emerges in nationalized and racialized discourses: these discourses enabled the emergence of each other. In addition, the language reveals how torture was never constructed solely out of a preoccupation with hidden interiority. Instead, it reveals that when torture was discussed, there was always a preoccupation with a notion of foreignness. Legal historians from the early modern period anxiously linked the employment of torture in early modern England with unwanted foreign influences. From the earliest discussions about torture in England in the fi fteenth century, it was never solely about interiority, but was, instead, always about foreignness and difference. Because torture was a judicial procedure commonly used on the Continent, English legal historians had to account for England’s adoption of this foreign procedure (torture) and device (the rack). In addition, the recurring and seemingly gratuitous references to familial relations in these documents demonstrate how torture was consistently constructed within hierarchical familial paradigms: paradigms that were frequently used as analogues for the English state. Sir Edward Coke’s influential legal history, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, records an anecdote about how torture was introduced to England in the fifteenth century. The “Duke of Exeter being Constable of the Tower,” Coke wrote, “first brought into the Tower the Rack or Brake . . . and thereupon the Rack is called the Duke of Exeter’s daughter, because he fi rst brought it thither.”17 While Coke goes on to declare that “there is no law to warrant tortures in this land, nor can they

10

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

be justified by any prescription being so lately brought in” (35), he attempts to suture over this lack of legality by constructing the rack in a familial paradigm. Masking an anxiety about incorporating a foreign device into domestic policy, Coke attempts to assimilate the rack into a familiar family hierarchy. While eliding from whence the Duke of Exeter “brought” the rack (and it was indeed brought from the Continent), Coke emphasizes that the rack has been fully adopted as an English device. In other words, in renaming the rack as the “Duke of Exeter’s daughter,” Coke attempts to sublimate the discussion of the foreign influences inherent in this adoption. The sublimation, however, is unsuccessful because the use of the familial paradigm also reveals anxieties about the power and autonomy of the English state. As Coke’s history makes clear, this attempted adoption did not occur peacefully. More often than not torture was depicted as challenging these important hierarchical structures. Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Anglie (ca. 1470), for example, is often listed as the first document to address the use of torture in England. Written as a dialogue between a young prince and an older chancellor, De Laudibus seeks to identify and differentiate between the civil and criminal procedures in England and those in Europe. The young prince begins thinking that an autocracy is the most effective way to govern a state, but the chancellor guides the prince to recognize his errors by demonstrating the “baseness” of the European (especially French) systems; torture is cited as exemplifying these important differences. Relating an anecdote about a criminal who is tortured to name his accomplices, the chancellor explains how that criminal falsely accused a “faithful knight.” According to the chancellor, the criminal later said that “the pain . . . that he had endured at the time of his accusation had been so atrocious that, rather than experience it again, he would accuse the same knight once more, and indeed would accuse his own father, albeit he was now come to the threshold of death, which he believed he could no longer escape.”18 Fortescue implies that judicial torture necessarily threatens the sanctity and, more importantly, the hierarchy of the family: the son could even overthrow the father with this false confession. The imagined threat to the familial hierarchy, however, is also symbolic of the imagined threat to the English state. Implied in the argument is the notion that the adoption of this European judicial technique — torture — could threaten the hierarchy (i.e., the very Englishness) of the English state. About a century later Sir Thomas Smith, in an infamous passage in his De Republica Anglorum (ca. 1565), denied that torture was ever used in England, and his argumentation resembles Fortescue’s in telling ways. Smith exclaims that “Torment or question which is used by the order of the civill law and custome of other countries to put a malefactor to excessive paine, to make him confesse of him selfe, or of his felowes or complices, is not used in England, it is taken for servile.” The problem, as Smith sees it, is that a tortured man “will confesse . . . to have done any thing, yea, to have

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

11

killed his own father, [rather] than to suffer torment . . . .”19 Like Fortescue’s treatise, Smith’s words are jingoistic and self-congratulatory, celebrating the superiority of the English over the “servile” practices of the French. And once again, torture is figured as that which threatens the authority of the English family; under torture a man will even falsely confess to having “killed his own father.” Jeopardizing the essence of English identity, which “will not abide” such “servile” actions, torture promotes the demise of the core of that identity — the father. The recurring references to the French employment of torture signal another deep-seated fear about England’s hierarchical structures: if the English borrow French judicial practices not only will they become “servile” like the French, but also they will become servile to the French. While the explicit argument in these treatises is that the employment of the rack affects familial hierarchies, the implicit argument is that the rack affects international hierarchies. Reading these passages by Coke, Fortescue, and Smith together, one can detect both of these fears. No longer the father to her state, these writers imply, England could become the child to foreign influences by adopting this continental legal system, symbolized by the rack. In other words, these treatises not only express early modern England’s new concept of interiority/subjectivity but also the fears about the relationship between subjectivity and nationality. Artistic depictions of torture replicate the anxieties about the relationship between torture, subjectivity, and nationality. If torture was discursively constructed in nationalized terms, then artistic depictions of torture materialize — provide a body for — these constructions: and the nationalized body becomes racialized. Unlike the early modern treatises that discuss torture in philosophical, legal, and even jingoistic terms, artistic depictions of torture necessarily highlight the bodiliness of the act. This is an important factor that many critics who have written about torture have overlooked. Historically the employment of torture has been a secretive affair, with the victim’s body hidden from public viewing. And while philosophical and legal discourses about torture highlight the relationship between subjectivity and nationality, these differences are never described in a material way. Depictions of torture, on the other hand, provide a body for surveillance. Where the actual employment of torture conceals the victim’s body, depictions of torture reveal that body. Once one distinguishes between the employment of torture and the performance of torture (despite the fact that both are labeled as “acts” and “performances”), one can theorize the literal construction of subjectivity through the body. The transformation from an unseen political-interrogative act to a viewed representation/performance not only enhances the construction of subjectivity but also the construction of subjectivity in physical and racialized ways. This incongruous duality — a belief in the significance of both a hidden interiority and an exposed/exposing physical appearance — is displayed most clearly in artistic representations of torture. Medieval paintings

12

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Figure 1.1. Saints Savinus and Cyprian Tortured on the Wheel, wall painting from the crypt of the church at Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, French (Poitiers), early twelfth century.

depicting the torture of Christian martyrs represent this tension. While the torturers depicted in the paintings are condemned for their cruelty, they are nevertheless rendered useful by revealing the divinity within these Christian victims. As in Figure 1.1, their bodies may be broken, but the Christians’ souls are saved, as is evidenced by their halos. As Jody Enders has convincingly argued, medieval representations of torture reveal the ambiguous relationship between torture and truth. While Christian victims are tortured to give false evidence against Christ, their tortures ultimately do reveal the truth of his divinity. Enders argues, “the torture of Christian transgressors is but an affi rmation of the truth of their faith.”20 While the information elicited from these interrogations is rendered suspect (i.e., they elicit lies about Christ), the act itself helps reveal the ultimate truth of Christian faith — the promise of salvation. “In the verisimilar performance of a true event,” Enders argues, the artistic representation “condemns pagan tortures that oppress Christian martyrs even as it must, at least at some level, subtly praise torture as a means” to gather “true” information (60). Although one might not expect to fi nd this, constructions of racialized subjects are not wholly absent from these medieval depictions of torture. As Enders has shown, the devil was often depicted as the creative genius behind these tortures (51). And as Anthony Barthelemy has argued, the devil in medieval mystery and miracle plays was often depicted in black-

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

13

Figure 1.2 Hans Memling, The Passion, Turin, Galleria Sabauda, fi fteenth century.

face.21 While some may argue that these stagings were merely symbolic and not racially coded, there are paintings of the torture of Christian martyrs from the period which explicitly racialize some of the torturers. Far from representing a merely symbolic darkness, the presence of African Moors in these scenes of torture serves to draw attention to the pagan nature of the torturers. Whether the Moors are depicted as the torturers themselves or merely the servants of the torturers, their blackened presence easily encapsulates all of the differences between the Christians and their tormentors. The differences are written on their black skins, just as the Christian saints’ and martyrs’ holiness is written on their haloed white bodies (see Figures 1.2 and 1.3). The realistic nature of these medieval portraits effectively challenges the arguments that blackness was only understood in a symbolic way in medieval England. Clearly a notion of color was emerging that begins to demonstrate what Joyce Green MacDonald refers to as “the fluidity of racial identity.”22 The black Moors are included in these paintings because their skin color announces their symbolic as well as religious, cultural, and physical differences. In these medieval paintings, then, the body takes on multiple significations. In fact, there is a way in which the multiple significations challenge the torturers very need to torment their Christian victims. If the bodies of both the torturers and the victims reveal so much about their religious, cultural, and racial identities, why is torture necessary? The tension that torture reveals between the relationship of the body and the soul is highlighted by the presence of African Moors in these medieval paintings. Without even mentioning the fiction that lies behind the notion that physical pain

14 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Figure 1.3 Geertgen Tot Sint Jans, The Burning of John the Baptist’s Bones, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, fi fteenth century.

elicits truthful responses to interrogations, these representations implicitly critique the torturers’ unwillingness to read the bodies of their victims correctly. If they had, the truth of their Christian victims’ faith would be as readily apparent as the differences between black and white: it would be as readily apparent as the visual differences between the white Christians and the black Moors depicted. In other words, in medieval representations, race becomes a central component in exposing the horrors and fallacies of torture. While the actual employment of torture privileges searching out the hidden plot, performances of torture reinscribe the primacy of that act upon a body by making that body publicly accessible. This is the crucial difference between the employment of torture and the performance of it. The torturer’s and the victim’s body are made primary through the audience’s gaze. The audience is permitted to view and interpret the semiotic significance of racialized bodies through the act of torture. While these medieval paintings convey these complex constructions, they are not performance pieces. One must examine early modern dramatic pieces to see how performances of torture racialize the body in a contradictory fashion.

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

15

PERFORMING RACE The stage rack, the principal instrument of torture employed on the early modern stage, provided the ideal way to highlight the racialized bodiliness of both the torturers and the victims. A quintessentially seventeenthcentury theatrical device, the stage rack was only made possible with the invention of moveable sets. Highlighting their outward racial differences, the rack displayed these foreign bodies in extremely open, exposed, and vulnerable ways. Victims were often stripped of most of their clothing, and if one imagines the stage rack as holding the victim up vertically to be seen by the audience, the intense focus on the stretched and controlled body is even more vivid. The disparity between the historical reality of torture and the dramatic presentation of such reveals a growing desire to displace the focus from discovering an unseen, and potentially hidden, inwardness to displaying a readily apparent, and potentially revealing, outward manifestation. Likewise, if the victim’s body represented a normalized and antiracialized English figure (like Tamira in Xerxes or Towerson in Amboyna), the torturer’s body was implicitly and explicitly racialized. The exposure of the normalized body, then, helps to construct the torturer as Othered. In both instances, however, the semiotic significance of the body swings between essentialist and discursive terms. While the threateningly foreign became something that was essential and needed to be ferreted out, something that was not readily apparent (like the actions of the heretic, traitor, and counterfeiter), 23 it also became something that was visibly performed (like Montezuma’s readily apparent cultural and racial differences).24 But, of course, the racialized foreign bodies on the seventeenth-century stage were not foreign at all; they were English actors in exoticized costumes and various shades of brown- and blackface. It is important to foreground the performative aspects of this early modern construction of race in order to emphasize that race was initially constructed and presented in performative discourses. Although there were some Moors, American Indians, and Africans in early modern England, their numbers were few. It seems clear that most people living in England at the time would not have known or even seen one of these foreigners. Although there were various literary forms that explored national and racial alterity, these genres were nonvisual and nonperformative. For most people in seventeenth-century England, then, all of their visual and physical “contact” would have occurred in the theatre, if at all. Thus, it is not simply that these performances rehearsed emerging notions of race: the coalescence of these performances helped to create the actual discourses for the physical constructions of race. While there have been more theoretical treatments of performances of race than there have been for performances of torture, this area still needs further analysis, especially with regards to the relationship between the early modern performances of race and the modern constructions of racial identity. In this section, I examine how performance theorists have

16 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage treated the issue of race. I then analyze the historical underpinnings for these theories and challenge the simplistic binary that many critics have established for constructions of race: the supposed fluidity of early modern constructions of race and the concrete nature (i.e., based on science) of modern defi nitions of race. Addressing the various questions she received about the significance of bodily materiality in performance theory, Judith Butler considers certain aspects of race and racial identity in her book Bodies that Matter. Butler admits that her original conception of performance theory did not take race into account, only gender, but she finds that “the unanticipated reappropriations of . . . [the] work in areas for which it was never consciously intended are some of the most useful.”25 Complicating the argument she set forth in her previous work, Gender Trouble, 26 Butler rejects “models of power which would reduce racial differences to the derivative effects of sexual difference” (18). Butler wants to rectify “some feminist positions . . . [that] have problematically prioritized gender as the identificatory site of political mobilization at the expense of race . . .” (116). Instead, she analyzes the “racialization of sexuality,” by asking what it would mean “to consider the assumption of sexual positions . . . as taking place not only through a heterosexualizing symbolic . . . but through a complex set of racial injunctions” (167). Taboos of miscegenation, Butler goes on to argue, indicate the performative nature of race because “race itself is figured as a contagion transmissable through proximity” (171). In other words, fears of miscegenation signal that race is never solely defined by a physical materiality and is, instead, defi ned by a cultural, discursive construction: an “effect of power” (2). Although Butler attempts to eschew the “narrowness” of the genderfocused origins of performance theory, many black scholars have been loath to think about race as solely a cultural and discursive construction. As the black performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson has argued, there is a “gap between those who view race as biological essence and those who view race as a discursive category.”27 Arguments by scholars like Butler have failed to convince those in the “essence” camp, Johnson argues, because they “eclipse” the “corporeality and materiality” of the black body (20). As Johnson explains, “the black body has historically been the site of violence and trauma. It is these consequential aspects of bodily harm that I believe racial performativity fails to account for” (40). In an attempt to rectify this oversight, Johnson calls for a theory that refuses “to privilege identity as either solely performance or solely performativity . . . by demonstrating the dialogic/dialectic relationship of these two tropes housed in and by the body” (42). Johnson’s focus on the historical violations of racialized bodies makes the materiality of those bodies theoretically relevant in ways that Butler did not account for in her own discussions of performance theory: he makes the racialized body a “site of discursivity and corporeality” (20).

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

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While I fi nd Johnson’s appropriation and revision of performance theory compelling — especially his attention to the conjunction of “discursivity and corporeality” — there is a way in which all performance theories seem overly invested in modern performances of race. Despite the fact that performance theories make universalizing claims (e.g., gender and race are performative), the arguments end up being dependent upon a specific historical moment. Butler admits, for example, that her reading of the “racialization of a sexual confl ict” “calls to be contextualized within . . . [the] historically specific constraints” of the early twentieth century (174). Likewise, Johnson contextualizes most of his theories about the convergence of “discourse and flesh” in the “popular . . . eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American imaginary” (43). For Johnson, the history of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries informs all performances of race in America. Explicit in these arguments is the idea that constructions of race are necessarily formed by “specific” historical “constraints,” and implicit is the idea that this “specific” moment is a post-Enlightenment/post-slavery one. The critics’ desire to contextualize, I believe, stems from the belief that modern constructions of race have been formed by a post-Enlightenment history, discourse, and culture. Although not writing from the vantage point of performance theory, but similarly informed by an interest in the connections between psychoanalysis and race, Homi Bhabha makes explicit what performance theorists leave implicit: he labels the problem as unique to “post-Enlightenment man.”28 In “Interrogating Identity,” Bhabha voices his surprise that Frantz Fanon “rarely historicizes the colonial experience.” Bhabha believes that Fanon’s “process of identification” is specific to the “post-Enlightenment man” (63). Likewise, Omi and Winant characterize the pull between arguments for essence and illusion as “particularly” American by arguing: There is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence, as something fi xed, concrete, and objective. And there is also an opposite temptation: to imagine that race is a mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate. It is necessary to challenge both these positions. (54) Omi and Winant, of course, locate these positions as being not only postEnlightenment ones but also postmodern ones: ones from the American culture of the 1960s onward. What would it mean if modern notions of race, including the confl icting idea that race is both biological/essential and discursive/performative, were codified in the performance of racialized characters in early modern England? What would it mean if the very conjunction of the “discursivity and corporeality” of race stemmed from the fact that racial subjectivity was fi rst experienced most frequently in the English speaking world onstage? What would it mean if there is no split between pre- and post-Enlightenment

18

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

constructions of racial identity? These ideas would not necessarily challenge performance theory, but they would complicate the notion of performance. If race was fi rst experienced most frequently through dramatic performances, then the strange combination of “discursivity and corporeality” takes on new and significant meanings. If race was fi rst constructed through dramatic performances, then the difficulty of “authenticating” racial identity would stem from the fact that racial differences were never constructed as being authentic in the fi rst place.29 The argument I am making offers a departure from those posited by most other early modern race scholars. Most scholars have offered the caveat that modern conceptions/perceptions of race differ from early modern ones in significant ways. Although there is quite a range in the ways critics describe the differences, most end up stressing the divergences nonetheless. Mary Floyd-Wilson, for example, offers one of the more stark analyses of these differences. She “attempts to retrieve the counterintuitive notions of ethnicity and ‘race’ that the now-dominant narrative of oppression aimed to erase: the representations of northern ‘whiteness’ and English identity as barbaric, marginalized, and mutable, and the long-neglected perceptions of ‘blackness’ as a sign of wisdom, spirituality, and resolution.”30 Far from drawing lines that connect early modern and modern constructions of race, Floyd-Wilson creates a chasm between them, arguing that the “geohumoralism” that dominated early modern constructions of race is radically different from the “now-dominant narrative of oppression.” While most critics have not gone as far as Floyd-Wilson’s argument, they have maintained a divide between early modern and modern constructions of race: this divide is usually described as being separated by eighteenthand nineteenth-century “developments.” Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, in their introduction to the influential collection Women, “Race,” and Writing, argue that “race as a term developed . . . [as] a highly unstable term in the early modern period.”31 They divide this “unstable term” from “its eventual development into later forms of racism and racial distinction” (2). The implication of Hendricks’s and Parker’s rhetoric, of course, is that early modern constructions of race were fluid, while modern constructions of race are solidified. Kim Hall, too, alludes to this with her call to create a practice of early modern race scholarship that is “strategically anachronistic.”32 As a black feminist, Hall wants her research to have an impact in the present moment but sees early modern constructions of race as somehow divided from current constructions. In order to accomplish her goal, therefore, she must be “strategically anachronistic” and gloss over the differences that she believes exist between them. Ania Loomba comes closest to articulating a more direct link between the early modern and modern. She argues that “The rise of modern racism is often seen in terms of a shift from a cultural (and more benign) to a more biological (and inflexible) view of racial difference. But although the biological understanding of race made it more pernicious, we should be wary

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

19

of positing a simple opposition between nature and culture or suggesting that a ‘cultural’ understanding of race is somehow benign and flexible.”33 Like Loomba, I think it is important to deconstruct the simplistic binary between early modern cultural constructions of race and modern biological constructions of race. This binary, as Loomba suggests, creates the false impression that cultural constructions are more “flexible.” I diverge from Loomba’s argument, however, by claiming that fl exibility is a less accurate formulation for early modern constructions of race than contradictory is. In other words, early modern constructions of race were not more flexible than modern ones: instead, they helped to codify the contradictory codings that can seem at once both flexible and unyielding. I am arguing that early modern performance created race in a contradictory fashion precisely because it was an act. Thus, race ends up being constructed in the contradictory terms of “discursivity and corporeality”: it is a performance, a discourse, but a performance in which the body is privileged. The audience’s gaze upon the racialized characters’ bodies licenses the materiality of those bodies, but the performance — white actors in costumes and make-up — simultaneously deconstructs that materiality. The pseudo-scientific race theories of the nineteenth century, which constructed race as a biological essence, did not reject or supplant this model: instead, they replicated it by maintaining the strange vacillation between physical materiality and hidden essence. Biological theories of race, for instance, both privilege and deconstruct race as a visible, physical reality by cataloguing physical markers of race, while simultaneously emphasizing the hidden and unseen essences of race (like blood). Similarly, the desire to authenticate and verify race in these pseudo-scientific race theories rehearses the anxiety about authenticity from these early modern performances. Because race was fi rst constructed and experienced most frequently in performance, the conundrum about racial authenticity is always contained within these constructions. The mistake many critics have made in their thinking about race is assuming that race has a stable meaning in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: a stable meaning that is different from that of the seventeenth century. The stagings of torture in the early modern theatre, however, effectively dismantle these assumptions. The use of torture almost always obsessively rehearses the relationship between outward appearances and inner essences. While Joyce Green MacDonald has argued that “the fluidity and multiplicity of notions of what race meant is one of the most salient features of Renaissance racial discourse,” I would modify her argument by contending that the most salient feature of racial discourse in early modern England is the contradictory way race gets coded (166). While there are times when the body (and sometimes the color of the body) represents the most important signifier for racial difference, this is far from a consistent presentation or signification. There are just as many times when race is signified by something that is unseen, hidden, and/or invisible. This is why stagings of torture are so significant within the theorization of constructions

20

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

of race: sometimes the racialized victims are tortured because their bodies clearly signify the differences between themselves and their torturers, and sometimes the racialized victims are tortured because their bodies do not reveal enough of these differences. Likewise, sometimes the racialized torturers are violent because their bodies reveal the essential evil nature of their souls, and sometimes they torture because the act alone reveals their alterity. Race does not necessarily get performed in fluid terms, but it does get performed in contradictory terms: racial identity is both performed and essentialized. When theorizing the performance of torture, I highlight the audience’s role. The audience’s ability to view the torture was as much a part of the performance of torture as the act itself was. Likewise, the role of the audience is central in the construction of race: the act of viewing the performance creates these contradictory constructions. This theory, of course, seems to privilege the “white” gaze, creating race from the “majority” position. This is defi nitely the case for the early modern moment I am examining. I am not addressing how (if at all) Moors, American Indians, and Africans in the early modern period constructed and defi ned their own identity positions with regards to race: attention to this area would require and create a different type of project.34 The racializing epistemology that these plays help to codify serves to empower the white/right gaze, which implicitly normalizes and, as I will argue, anti-racializes the English gaze. The series of plays I analyze in Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage moves between racializing the victims and racializing the torturers not only to disavow the recent history of torture in early modern England (especially under Queen Elizabeth), but also to unify and empower the English audience. Recovering from the national trauma of the trial and execution of Charles I, the Interregnum, and the Restoration of Charles II, late seventeenth-century England required a unifying measure. The Restoration plays I analyze, thus, serve to create a unified and nationalized identity by codifying the power and entitlement of the anti-racialized white/right gaze: nationality is racialized. Far from merely having an impact on a white, English audience, however, these plays affect and continue to affect multiple, diverse audiences. I do not want to suggest that these constructions are universal and/or timeless. I am certainly not invested in denying anyone’s ability to self-identify. I truly believe these constructions can be changed. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge how often people of color have consumed these constructions. Although writing about blacks in the contemporary United States, Elizabeth Alexander’s words offer a relevant rejoinder: “Black bodies in pain for public consumption have been an American spectacle for centuries. . . . White men have been the stagers and consumers of the historical spectacles . . ., but in one way or another, black people have been looking, too, forging a traumatized collective historical memory which is reinvoked, I believe, at contemporary sites.”35 The legacy of constructing

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

21

race through performance, in other words, has survived beyond the initial English audiences. This is a legacy that we must all confront now.

RACING THE RACK Throughout this chapter, I have emphasized the importance of the audience’s gaze in performances of torture and race. The public nature of these performances, unlike the private nature of the actual employment of torture, necessarily highlights the audience’s role in receiving, judging, and/or appropriating these constructions. In Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, I theorize the relationship between audience reception and constructions of race. Like performance theory, reception theory aims to be universal but is actually tied to a modern historical and cultural moment.36 One must, however, analyze how reception in the early modern moment helped to form reception in the modern moment. Reception does not simply occur in an isolated historical moment; rather, it is created through a complex amalgamation of the real and perceived histories of past performances and receptions. I have organized Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage into chapters that focus on small sets of plays and texts that highlight the various ways race was constructed and performed in the seventeenth century. The chapters build upon each other, resisting simplistic readings of the semiotic significance of the racialized body in performance. Scenes of torture, as I argue, provide the most salient and palpable examples of the contradictory ways race was encoded and constructed. In chapter 2, “A Matter that is No Matter,” for example, I analyze how the theatrical innovations of the Restoration theatre affected constructions of racialized identities. Although plays like Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco and Colley Cibber’s Xerxes are clearly attempting to distance and exoticize torture by projecting it onto the historically, culturally, religiously, and racially distant lands of Morocco and ancient Persia, these plays construct race in both material and immaterial terms. Despite the fact that several scholars have claimed that race is not a factor in these plays because color differences are not highlighted in them, I argue that race is constructed as a matter that is no matter. The projection and conversion of older religious models — particularly ones that demonize Catholics as being ruthlessly power hungry — identifies the differences between Muslims and Christians as immaterial. In these plays, the followers of Islam may have black souls, but these differences are not material or visible ones. On the other hand, the significance of the torture victim’s physical whiteness, especially when the victim is portrayed by a white actress, cannot be ignored. The starkness, the essential quality of the differences between East and West, is expressed most clearly when the materiality of the color of that body is identified metatheatrically. Scenes of torture bring this vacillating

22 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage racialized epistemology to the fore because torture necessarily interrogates the relationship between the body and identity. As Katharine Maus notes, there are two confl icting fantasies in early modern England: “one, that selves are obscure, hidden, ineffable; the other, that they are fully manifest or capable of being made fully manifest” (28–29). I extend her argument by demonstrating that this confl ict helped to create the contradictory modern perception that race resides both within the individual (an invisible essence that must be discovered) and on the outside of the person (a materiality that is in some way performative). In chapter 3, “When Race is Colored” I analyze two plays that do seem to emphasize the centrality of the semiotic significance of color for a racialized epistemology. Moving from an analysis of the semiotic signifi cance of the white female actress’s body to the blackfaced white actor’s body, I examine the contradictory ways the significance of color is encoded on the stage. Far from stabilizing a notion of race, the employment of color merely replicates the contradictory swings between essentialism and social constructivism. Despite the fact that Edward Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko are separated by their generic structures and their political sensibilities, they both include the abjection of the black male body through the enactment of torture. In this chapter I analyze how it is possible that these disparate plays are able to incorporate such similar theatrical denouements. In the end, I argue that the performative mode of blackface does not simply represent the performative nature of race. Instead, the white actor in blackface may challenge essentialist views while simultaneously reconstructing a belief in the inaccessibility and essential differences between white and black. In addition, I emphasize that no matter how one interprets the semiotic significance of the performance of blackness — whether in terms of celebration or condemnation — the portrayal of violent abjection enables the construction of the white/right gaze. While I argue in chapter 2 that a racializing epistemology is necessarily one in which the Other is continuously caught out, this racializing epistemology implicitly works by codifying the power of the white/right gaze. The white/right gaze is invested and endowed not only with the power to control the gaze, but also with the power to determine whether the object in the gaze is read as fi xed/essential or alterable/constructed. The white/right gaze, thus, always works to codify its own normalization and power. I develop this idea more fully in chapter 4, “Racializing Civility,” through an analysis of the embedded role the English audience plays in John Dryden’s The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico. By focusing on a performance model, I tease out the subtle ways that racial discourses were written into The Indian Emperour. Beginning with an analysis of William Davenant’s Interregnum “pseudo-masque,” The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, I analyze how Dryden attempted to re-construct the certainty of racial essentialism. Eschewing the fantasy model that Davenant established,

Interrogating Torture and Finding Race

23

Dryden could only figure his racial essentialism on the fringes of his play: in the dedications, prologues, and epilogues. If the differences between pagan and Christian, and brown and white are so easily manipulated, then Dryden seeks to construct something that is not — an Englishness that is demonstrated by an appropriate affective response, good manners, and a practiced wit. Thus, Dryden’s play helps to racialize the Other by codifying and empowering the white/right gaze of the English audience. The focus on the essential differences of the English civility and affect serves to construct a racializing epistemology: the English become normalized, as I said before, anti-racialized, and the Spanish and Indians become Othered. But as this Englishness is always relegated to the frameworks outside of the plays (the audience and the patrons), the tensions about race are always present and palpable within the plays themselves. In chapter 5, “Racializing Mercantilism,” I analyze the one play that seems to stage the torture of an explicitly English body: John Dryden’s Amboyna: or, The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants. Unlike Cibber’s Xerxes, which, I argue, implicitly links the white actress’s body to English identity, Amboyna stages the literal torture of English merchants by Dutch merchants. Building on the notion that these plays help to normalize and anti-racialize the white/right gaze, I read Amboyna as an attempt to racialize the mercantilist interests of the Dutch in both material and immaterial ways. By racializing mercantilism, Dryden not only projects race onto the Dutch — those rivals with whom the English were often confused abroad — but also consolidates a normalized, non-racialized identity, for the English. Race, then, was constructed on the seventeenth-century stage not merely through color, but through a complex set of discourses and performances that ultimately served to construct an English identity that was uniquely normalized. This normalization of the English, what I refer to as the anti-racialization of the English, did not occur through a stable construction of race. Rather, it occurred through the bizarrely consistent vacillation between essentialist and social constructivist terms. I conclude with a sixth chapter about postmodern performances of torture and race, “Combating Historical Amnesia.” As I said at the beginning of this chapter, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage is less an historical project than a theoretical one. Although rooted in seventeenth-century texts, this project aims to demonstrate how early modern performances of torture and race have created the discourses, portrayals, and receptions that we continue to employ. Thus, I am examining the digital images of prisoner abuse taken at Abu Ghraib in order to apply pressure to the relationship between “fiction” and “fact”: the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib were, after all, staged. These staged images serve to racialize the Other by codifying the power of the white/right gaze. They exemplify how the postmodern world continues to construct race performatively as something that is essential/fi xed and illusory/performative. Until we acknowledge this contradiction, there will be those (both artists

24

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

and soldiers) who will continue to exploit the desire to search out racial identity through the application of torture. In the end, I discuss specific strategies for appropriating performances of race and torture. Although the work will be difficult and painful, the political and cultural stakes are too high to be ignored. Recently, the African American literary scholar Dwight McBride has argued that with the “advent of poststructuralism . . . ‘race’ and ‘experience’ themselves become sites of critical contestation.”37 He goes on to argue that “Even in the literary and cultural critiques by African Americans that are informed by much poststructuralist thought, these scholars, almost without fail (and out of political necessity), pause to genufl ect before the shrine of essentialism” (166). Thus, McBride locates a tension between the desire for race to be an immaterial construct and an essential and authoritative reality. In fact, a great deal of McBride’s book, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch, addresses precisely this tension. In Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, I want to ponder what it means if thinking about race and racial identity is consistently contradictory in nature. Perhaps the very ideas of race and racial identity have been (and will always be) constructed to contain confl icting significations. Perhaps race will always be understood as both essential and a construction, both fi xed and illusory, and both material and immaterial. Perhaps this is the very essence of racializing epistemologies. As I will show throughout Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, notions of racial identity necessarily fluctuate in contradictory fashions. Although I think it would be an overstatement to argue that this vacillation is intentionally constructed — the vacillations, in fact, often seem accidental and unintentional, like the deconstructive elements of many essentialist arguments — it is important to recognize that this vacillation, nonetheless, works to keep the racialized Other disempowered and caught out. How can one fight this racializing epistemology if the very terms for race keep changing between two binaristic poles? The swing between these contradictory constructions, then, serves to empower the normalized and anti-racialized viewer, even if the contradictory terms seem at odds. Keeping this power play in mind, I hope the reader will realize that it is time to address our society’s desire to consume the conjoined performances of torture and race. The problem stems from performances that enable the audience to disavow the need for torture while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of constructing a controlled, approachable, and abject racialized victim.

2

A Matter that is No Matter Religion, Color, and the White Actress in The Empress of Morocco and Xerxes

I am aware that the central premise of this book is controversial. It is reasonable to ask how one can know whether race is being invoked in Restoration plays depicting torture if (1) the historical meaning of race is debated and (2) the staging conventions of the Restoration are remarkably different from Renaissance, modern, and postmodern ones. There are many critics who have argued that race simply was not a factor on the Restoration stage. I cite three such critics not to create straw figures against whom I can debate, but to emphasize how persuasive and logical their arguments are. In the hugely influential book, The Complexion of Race, for example, Roxann Wheeler writes: Skin color was not the only — or even the primary — register of human difference for much of the eighteenth century. . . . Britons’ understanding of complexion, the body, and identity was far more fluid than ours is today. I have purposely featured examples of the elasticity accorded black and white skin color and of the mutability of identity because they belie our current sense of color’s intractability.1 Bridget Orr offers a similarly persuasive point in her book, Empire on English Stages, 1660–1714: One of the obvious issues at stake here is the question of “race” in the Restoration theatre. It seems to me difficult to demonstrate that racial difference functions in recognizably modern terms in drama produced during this period, although cultural alterity is of absorbing interest. . . . In a wide variety of texts including travel accounts, histories, poetic and dramatic narratives about non-Europeans produced in the Restoration, skin color simply does not appear as the crucial marker of identity it is now.2 Finally, Derek Hughes in an essay about the scholarly treatments of race and gender in Aphra Behn’s work, provides a slightly harsher assessment, arguing that there is an “ever-growing list of works whose secret agenda 25

26

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

turns out to be race and colonialism. . . . Nowadays text after text is lopped and stretched to yield a similar agenda. . . . Modishness creates a carnival license, suspending the rules of evidence and even of good scholarly practice.”3 Hughes then adds: Restoration tragedy often romanticised interracial marriage. . . . Miscegenation simply is not a focus of unease on the Restoration stage. . . . Almost every Restoration play portraying Europeans and non-Europeans favourably portrays love between them. An unscholarly orthodoxy has been constructed out of less than nothing. (5, 6) Taken together, one gets the sense that during the Restoration there were plentiful depictions of interracial relationships. These depictions were not a “focus of unease” because skin color was not the “crucial marker” it is today. Explicitly and implicitly these critics suggest that an interest in examining early modern notions of race is fueled not only by the “current sense” of color’s significance, but also by the scholar’s own political “agenda” that blinds the scholar to the “rules of evidence” and “good scholarly practice.” These arguments are even more persuasive when read alongside certain comments from Restoration writers. Attacking Elkanah Settle’s wildly popular play, The Empress of Morocco (c. 1673) when it fi rst appears in print, John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, and John Crowne anonymously publish Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco. Or, Some few Errata’s to be Printed instead of the Sculptures with the Second Edition of that Play, a seventy-two page quarto devoted to an exacting line by line critique of the play. 4 Aside from attacking Settle’s poor poetry, his “false grammar, improper English, strain’d hyperboles, and downright Bulls,” his critics focus on the irrationality of his plot, claiming that the events depicted in The Empress of Morocco are far too romantic and fantastic to be believable.5 They argue that Settle depicts the exotic at the expense of any realistic and verisimilar characterizations and plots. What disturbs the critics even more, however, is the idea that Settle promises the exotic, but delivers the familiar. I think it is possible to read this critique as one that implicitly involves burgeoning concepts of race: that is, Settle does not provide the exotic, racialized Other that he promises. Dryden, Shadwell, and Crowne argue: His Art . . . may be esteemed a Curiosity in its kind. . . . And for this no doubt it was that our Poet was so much courted, sent for from place to place . . . as if he had lately come out of Asia or Affrica with strange kinds of Dromedaries, Rhinoceroses, or a new Cambises, a Beast more monstrous than any of the former. Nay, both the Play-houses contended for him, as if he had found out some new way of eating fi sh. No doubt their design was to entertain the Town with a rarity. . . . But as

A Matter that is No Matter

27

he that pretended he would shew a Beast, which was very like a Horse, and was no Horse, set people much admiring what strange Animal it should be, but when they came in, and found it was nothing but a Grey Mare, laught a while at the conceit, but were ready after to stone the Fellow for his Impudence. (17) Settle’s critics admit that the Restoration theatre managers and audiences are drawn in by the “curiosity” of the “new,” “rar[e],” and “strange” spectacle of the play’s setting in Morocco. As they see it, Settle’s purported exotic topic affords him the respect of an explorer (“as if he had lately come out of Asia or Affrica with strange kinds of Dromedaries [or] Rhinoceroses”) when, in fact, he peddles nothing but the old, familiar, and stale “Fardel of non-sense” (17). Thomas Duffet’s send-up of Settle’s play, The Empress of Morocco: A Farce (1674) makes explicit that it is not only Morocco that is promised in Settle’s play, but also Moroccans. Mocking Settle’s doggerel verse in the prologue to the farce, Duffet writes: Dim eyes are Stars, and Red hairs Guinnies And thus described by these Ninnies, As they sit scribling on Ale-Benches, Are homely dowdy Country Wenches. So when this Plot quite purg’d of Ale is, In naked truth but a plain Tale is; And in such dress we mean to shew it, In spight of our damn’d Fustian Poet. 6 Transporting Morocco to London’s Hot-Cockles, Duffet describes all of the dramatis personae in two ways — in their true Hot-Cockles position and in their formal position within the Moroccan court. Muly Labas, for example, is a “Corn-cutter [and] Emperour of Morocco.” Muly Hamet is “a Dray-man, and General of the Emperours Armies.” Crimalhaz is “a Strong-water-man, and Gallant to Queen-Mother.” Laula is “an Hostess [and] Queen-Mother.” Mariamne is “a Scinder Wench [and] Daughter of the Empress.” And Morena is “an Apple-Woman [and] young Empress.” Thus, Duffet successfully displays the “naked truth” of Settle’s plot “purg’d of Ale” and purged of any pretense of portraying Moroccans. The critical and farcical treatment of Settle’s play from the Restoration seems to support the arguments that critics like Roxann Wheeler, Bridget Orr, and Derek Hughes have leveled. Race was not a factor on the Restoration stage, so the argument goes, because playwrights and critics from the period not only do not mention color, but also suggest that the “exotic” did not truly exist on the stage. While this line of argumentation is persuasive, it nonetheless rests on a set of assumptions that warrant investigation. First, it is worth questioning if there is one coherent modern sense of race. It might seem strange to begin with an argument about the

28 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage present historical moment, but critics like Wheeler, Orr, and Hughes base their objections on a belief that there is a stable notion of race today: one that is radically different from what existed (or did not exist) in the seventeenth century. It is important to counter, however, that modern notions of race are no more “intractabl[e]” than early modern ones. The fields of critical race theory, performance studies, and race studies exist precisely because there are confl icting, unstable, and tractable notions of race that exist today culturally, theoretically, and even legally. Skin color, in fact, is only one of several defi nitions and terms used, ranging from cultural upbringing to social conditioning to essential being. The second assumption that warrants investigation is the idea that race does not exist on the Restoration stage because skin color is not emphasized in the productions. Scholars like Wheeler, Orr, and Hughes warn against reading too much into the plays, seeing color when it is not really there, or, conversely, misinterpreting the significance of color when it is there. This type of argument, however, limits race to color. To the contrary, I agree with Wheeler’s assessment that “complexion, the body, and identity” should not be understood in fi nite terms. My analysis attempts to show that race is never constructed in fi nite terms precisely because it is not in dominant society’s interest to do so. Resisting a simplistic notion of race in defi nitive and fi nite terms, one can see how constructions of race vacillate to suit the political, social, and cultural moment. Thus, one must begin to think about the multiple ways race can be signified in performance, not limiting oneself to color alone. The third assumption that warrants investigation is the idea that the copiousness of the representations of “interracial” relationships on the Restoration stage signals that race is not a factor in these theatrical constructions. The opposition of the terms “interracial” and “race” in this argument, however, belies its inherent contradiction. Even if one accedes that the limitations of the English language may account for this contradiction, one still must ask if the popularity of these constructions necessarily means either that race is not an issue or that these constructions do not provoke “unease.” It seems just as easy to surmise that the copiousness of these representations signifies obsession, anxiety, and/or the desire to digest and purge that which is perceived and constructed to be different. Moreover, what seems missing from these discussions is an analysis of the actual performance strategies of the Restoration stage. Critics, who are otherwise extremely attentive to the import of the theatrical innovations of the Restoration, have not examined how these innovations can inform one’s understanding of early modern notions of race. The overriding assumption that race simply is not a factor in the period often disables a radically different line of inquiry: can the theatrical innovations of the Restoration inform an analysis of early modern notions of race? This type of work has been conducted for earlier time periods. Theorizing the significance of the semiotics of blackness in English Renaissance

A Matter that is No Matter

29

theatre, for example, Ian Smith reminds his reader that the bodies on the stage were not naturalized but, rather, “prosthetic black bodies.”7 The use of the prosthetics of died fabrics, vizards, and face paints to signify blackness encourages a type of double-consciousness in the audience, Smith argues: they see both the performance of blackness and the white actor beneath the prosthetics. Smith writes: A spectacular seizure of the will erupts in an English audience confronted with the sight of the white body in black prosthetics. A corporate lack in identity in the audience translates the will to restore native whiteness beneath the forms of blackness. . . . The anxious will to reconnect to the whiteness beneath . . . I would define as race. . . . In this view, blackness is at once a material convenience and irrelevance. (59) Smith, following the lead of recent theatre studies that focus on cross-dressing and transvestism, insists that one acknowledge the performance techniques used to convey race. As he argues, these performances register for audiences in both material and discursive ways because they are so obviously performances achieved with highly visible prosthetic devices. This type of theorization has revolutionized Renaissance theatre studies because critics now must attend to how actual performance techniques affect constructions of race. This type of theorization of the performance of race has not yet occurred in Restoration theatre studies, though. Although it is tempting, one cannot simply apply Smith’s theorization to Restoration performances without fi rst taking into account how performance strategies changed after the Interregnum. These innovations, as I argue, affected and altered the way the materiality of the body was understood. Scenes of torture, which expose and exploit the victim’s body, provide a unique opportunity to analyze how these theatrical innovations impacted racial constructions. William Davenant’s theatrical innovations during the Interregnum forever changed the course of the early modern theatre by introducing many of these innovations. 8 The newly opened theatres were smaller, enclosed spaces lit by candlelight with proscenium arched stages, movable and changeable sets, and elaborate machinery like flying devices. Of course, the stage rack, or strappado, only became possible with the invention of moveable set pieces. As Elizabeth Howe writes, “The creation of each ‘scene’ involved, not scenery in the sense of a single backdrop behind the players, but an arrangement of sets of shutters in the wings and at the back which could be pushed shut along grooves to create a particular scene, or opened to reveal some kind of action or tableau behind.”9 As Howe goes on to explain, there were probably three to four sets of shutters employed to create different scenes, and they were probably “wide enough apart to allow players to act behind one set and in front of another” (4). These innovations allowed for radically different performance strategies from those on the

30 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage Renaissance stage, including the employment of stage racks. In turn, this innovation enabled the audience to think about the semiotic and material significance of the body in new ways. The other innovation that dramatically changed the stage in the Restoration was the admission of actresses onto the stage. The presence of female bodies on the stage, of course, also facilitated an interrogation of the semiotic and material significance of the body. Howe argues that female roles were rewritten in the period to encourage a salacious voyeurism. There were more rape scenes, more scenes in nightgowns, and more breeches roles: they “seem to have been designed to show off the female body” (Howe, 56). Anticipating later theorizations of cross-dressing and blackface, Pat Rogers highlights the double-consciousness that breeches roles enable. Rogers argues, “it was central to the effect that the actress’s femininity showed through” her breeched costume and role.10 In other words, the audience was encouraged to keep the breeched actress’s gender in mind, emphasizing the performance of masculinity. Thus, the body on the Restoration stage was foregrounded in new and complicated ways. Furthermore, it is important to remember that actresses were not allowed to perform African, Indian, and Moorish roles in the same way their male counterparts did. As Heidi Hutner saliently points out: For Shakespeare and Fletcher, there were no actresses on the stage; for Restoration playwrights, women could play women, but women could not wear black face. The other woman looked white, yet she was supposed to be of color (but was she/was she not?). . . . Dramatists were simultaneously enunciating and erasing, calling attention to and deny-

Figure 2.1 Engraving from John Foxe’s 1563 edition The Book of Martyrs, depicting the torture of Cuthbert Simpson.

A Matter that is No Matter

31

ing, iconizing and debasing, interracial contact and erotic desire for the other woman.11 The performance strategies, in other words, were different for actors and actresses on the newly opened Restoration stages. By necessity this allowed the seventeenth-century audience to question the significance of the semiotics of the body with regards to race and gender. This, of course, does not mean that race was not a factor on the Restoration stage. Rather, it means that the still burgeoning notions of race were being constructed in contradictory ways. By privileging color as the most significant signifier of race on the Restoration stage, one runs the risk of neglecting the way race was signified (and, as I will show in the fi nal chapter, continues to be signified) in various, often contradictory, fashions. And although Smith’s brilliant theorization of the use of blackface in the Renaissance moves the analysis of constructions of race forward immensely, it is time to question if, how, and why race was conveyed theatrically without the use of color.

WHAT’S RELIGION GOT TO DO WITH IT? If scenes of torture provide unique opportunities to analyze how race was constructed, it is worth asking how constructions of race and religion differ and coincide theatrically. Are there distinctions between theatrical constructions of religious difference and racial difference? If so, how can one determine which is being invoked if race is not solely constructed and performed through the use of color? What is the difference between pejorative representations of Catholics and pejorative representations of Persians, Moroccans, and Muslims in general? Torture, of course, was not only used in constructions of racial difference. Most critics would think of discussions and depictions of religious difference when asked to imagine why torture is employed (in the theatre or in reality). In the Renaissance, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, touching Matters of the Church (popularly known as the “Book of Martyrs”) went through four editions between 1563 and 1583 with literally hundreds of plates of wood engravings depicting scenes of Catholics torturing Protestants (see Figure 2.1).12 Of course, as many Catholics were tortured during Elizabeth I’s reign as Protestants were during previous Catholic reigns. One fascinating narrative of the English torture of Catholics is captured in John Gerard’s life story, posthumously entitled, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan.13 The realities, accusations, and theatrical depictions of torture based on religious bias, of course, continued into the Restoration. Supported by the Earl of Shaftesbury to help promote the Exclusion Bill to prevent Charles II’s Catholic brother James from succeeding him to the throne, Elkanah Settle wrote Pope-Burning Pageants in 1679 and 1680, and in 1681 he

32

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Figure 2.2 Broadside for Elkanah Settle’s Pope-Burning Pageant, “The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope Cardinalls Jesuits Fryars &c: through the Citty of London November 17th 1680” (London, 1680).

penned several incendiary pamphlets like, The Character of a Popish Successor and what England May Expect from Such a One.14 His pageants and pamphlets hark back to an older fear of a universal monarch, one who threatened to destroy the world through his lust for power.15 On November 17, 1680, for example, Settle was the master of an elaborate and expensive Pope-Burning ceremony. Celebrated annually on the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation day, the Pope-Burning pageants looked back to a time when “the Protestant Religion, and the true English interest, were more conspicuously and candidly minded.”16 In the pageant various figures were dressed in Catholic religious costume, making infl ammatory statements like, “Lo Here you may have heaven for money,” and “This is the King of Kings . . . our God the Pope.” The Pope could be seen in the pageant being advised by the devil, and an “Abundance of Crowns and Scepters [were] strowed before his feet, to be distributed to those poor slavish Princes that will hold their kingdoms in villenage” (see Figure 2.2). At the end of the pageant, the broadsheet declares, “In [the] foregoing ones you have seen the Charming Voice, Fineries of the Popish Circe and Syrenes, now you have her Cruelties in this Pageant, representing the Fathers of the Inquisition, condemning a Martyr to the Stake for Reading the Scripture, or judging by that Word of their new Forgeries.” Beneath the various torture instruments displayed in the fi nal pageant on the broadsheet, the inquisitors declare, “Bring the wretch to the strappado” (see Figure 2.3). Torture becomes a central component for this elaborate pageant. Capitalizing on the fears that the Papists aimed to take over the English throne through the succession of James II, Settle depicts the Catholic will to power

A Matter that is No Matter

33

in the most derogatory terms possible. A symbol of the Papists’ evil desire to conquer the world through their religio-political movement, torture emblematizes the most brutal technique employed in the religious wars. Torture represents unadorned Catholic ambition: the dreaded universal monarch seeks to conquer and convert through any means necessary, even through the employment of the strappado. In the pageant, these horrors were only abated when the procession came before the statue of Queen Elizabeth that was “adorn’d with a Crown of Laurel, and a Shield, on which was inscrib’d Protestant Religion and Magna Charta.” The pageant seems to declare that freedom from torment is only afforded when the “martyrs” fi nd England’s mixture of Protestantism and political rights. Thus, there is clearly a discourse available that links torture with religious bias. On the Restoration stage, however, the connections between religious difference, ambition, and torture mutate in fascinating ways. While religious differences do not disappear, they are projected onto Eastern empires. This projection, I argue, offers a clue into how a racialized epistemology emerges. In this chapter I examine three Restoration plays that some critics have argued are not about racial politics. To the contrary, I argue that the depiction of stage torture in plays set in the Near East and North Africa demonstrates how in the late seventeenth century the English were still struggling to make essential the differences between East and West, Africa and Europe. Plays like The Empress of Morocco (c. 1673), The Heir of Morocco (c. 1682), and Xerxes (c. 1698), which are set during

Figure 2.3 A detail from the broadside for Elkanah Settle’s Pope-Burning Pageant, depicting the Pope with instruments of torture (London, 1680).

34

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

struggles for power in Morocco, Algeria, and Persia, respectively, reveal that the English were not only engaging with notions of “alterity,” but also constructing alterity in racialized terms. By focusing on a performance model, I demonstrate how and why race is constructed in both material and immaterial terms and ways on the Restoration stage.

RACIALIZING AMBITION: THE EMPRESS OF MOROCCO AND THE HEIR OF MOROCCO Anthony Barthelemy, writing about the representational history of black figures on the early modern stage, argues that there were not many new plays with black characters on the Restoration stage: “Oddly enough, however, it was mostly through the older plays or adaptations of them that this vision of black men was represented on the stage in the second half of the seventeenth century. . . . Excluding Behn’s and Ravenscroft’s adaptations, only a few Restoration playwrights used black characters in their plays.”17 Barthelemy goes on to note that Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco stands as a remarkable exception. A discussion of racial depictions with regard to color in The Empress of Morocco, however, is fraught with tensions. While the play is set in Morocco with only Moroccan characters, their racial identities and depictions are disputed. In the second act of The Empress of Morocco, for example, the King and Queen of Morocco are treated to a masque and dance performed by Moors. The original stage direction reads: A Stage is presented, the King, Queen and Mariamne seated, Muly Hamet, Abdelcador and Attendants, a Moorish Dance is presented by Moors in several Habits, who bring in an artificial Palm-tree, about which they dance to several antick Instruments of Musick; in the intervals of the Dance, this Song is sung by a Moorish Priest and two Moorish Women; the Chorus of it being performed by all the Moors.18 It is difficult to interpret from this brief description how exactly the “Moorish Dance” was performed. Interestingly, though, the “sculptures” or engravings by William Dolle included in the fi rst edition of the play provide another interpretative lens and depict the scene in a fascinating way.19 In Figure 2.4, a palm tree looms large in the center of the engraving with clearly blackened figures dancing around it with what look like tambourines and drums; the dancers are so blackened that they hardly have any distinguishable facial features like eyes, noses, or mouths. The female dancers are wearing small tops and skirts which reveal their black arms and legs, and a few men wear only skirts, exposing their black torsos. Sitting behind the dancers, however, is the Moroccan court (the King, Queen, Mariamne, Muly Hamet, and Abdelcador), and they are clearly white — with dis-

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Figure 2.4. A “Sculpture” by William Dolle included in Elkanah Settle’s 1673 edition of The Empress of Morocco, depicting a Moorish dance. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

cernable facial features and elaborate Restoration wigs. Although most of their outfits are blocked by the foregrounded dancers, a few glimpses of European Restoration dresses and frocks can be seen. An earlier engraving depicting Muly Labas’s imprisonment in Act One reinforces the notion that English Restoration outfits rest on the shoulders of the Moroccan court. Muly Labas and Morena are seen within the Moroccan dungeon wearing the outfits of an English courtier and lady-in-waiting — wigs, doublets, pantaloons, and corsets (see Figure 2.5).

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Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Figure 2.5 A “Sculpture” by William Dolle included in Elkanah Settle’s 1673 edition of The Empress of Morocco, depicting Muly Labas and Morena in a dungeon. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Reading these engravings in terms of color, one might assume that critics like Wheeler, Orr, and Hughes are right. While there appear to be actors in blackface performing the “Moorish Dance,” the actors who make up the Moroccan court do not look racialized in terms of color or costuming. Thus, this line of argumentation goes, the play does not address issues of race. Likewise, it might be tempting to read these engravings in terms of “white Moors” and “black Moors.” While the distinction between these

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“races” was tenuous in early modern England, clearly not all Moors were conceived as black.20 Elliot Tokson, for example, argues that the villains of The Empress of Morocco, Crimalhaz and Laula the Queen Mother, were probably staged as black, while the heroes and heroines would have been staged as white. 21 These types of arguments, however, place too much emphasis on color as the sole marker for constructions of racial difference. Instead of limiting racial constructions to one factor like color or costuming, I analyze how The Empress of Morocco traffics in constructions that both emphasize and deconstruct a material understanding of race. The plot of The Empress of Morocco is typical of Restoration tragedies written to please the newly restored court. The play condemns ambition as an impulse that leads to personal and political dissent, violence, and usurpation and celebrates the birth right of monarchs: there are discussions of “Royal Blood” and an “Imperial Race” (3.1.153; 5.1.22). The play ends with a clear condemnation of political usurpation. One victor notes: See the reward of Treason; Death’s the thing Distinguishes th’Usurper from the King. Kings are immortal, and from Life remove, From their Low’r Thrones to wear new Crowns above; But Heav’n for him has scarce that bliss in store: When an Usurper dies he raigns no more. (5.2.213–218) While this narrative would have been familiar to anyone who survived the execution of Charles I, the rise of Cromwell as Lord Protector, and the restoration of Charles II, the setting in Morocco projects these familiar events to a distant and foreign land. In addition, in The Empress of Morocco the primary instigator is the Queen Mother, thereby projecting political instability onto women. Something more than projection and distancing occurs in The Empress of Morocco, however. The play vacillates about the significance of physical materiality, and this vacillation, I argue, is the primary signifier of a racializing epistemology: a mode that attempts to thwart one clear, stable, and fi nite notion of race. Throughout The Empress of Morocco Laula, the Queen Mother, who murdered her husband to get closer to the power of the throne, and Crimalhaz, her lover, scheme to rule Morocco together, and it is they who are most associated with “black” color referents. These referents, however, are all religiously based and increasingly serve to draw attention to the essential and yet invisible significance of the color. Laula and Crimalhaz frequently discuss their ambition in terms of blackness, referring to one scheme as being fi lled with a “black intent” (4.3.49). When Crimalhaz revels in the success of his plans, for example, he offers this speech to Laula: That Politician who to Empire climbs, With Virtues Dress should beautifie his Crimes. Our guilded Treason thus like coral seems;

38

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage Which appears Black within its native Streams: But when Disclos’d it sees the open Air; It changes Colour, and looks Fresh and Fair. (3.1.322–327)

Although Settle’s critics note his strange mixture of images in this passage, it is important to recognize Crimalhaz’s willingness to offer a color to his treason.22 The coral of his ambitious treason looks “Black within its native Streams,” which Crimalhaz implies is its (and his) natural color; only “guilded” beautification will make it (and him) seem “Fresh and Fair.” Clearly, a metaphorical understanding that blackness signifies the demonic explains the use of “Black” here. Likewise, Laula’s private statements of ambition are marked with an acute awareness of the religious significance of the color black. She refers to the date of one crime as being marked as a “black Day” (3.1.148) and plots her own son’s death with this Satanic prayer: Go easy Fool, and Dye, and when you Bleed, Remember I was Author of the Deed. T’enlarge Fates black Records, search but My Soul: There ye Infernal Furies, read a scrowl Of Deeds which you want Courage to Invent. (4.1.89–93) “Black” here, as in other instances in The Empress of Morocco, is clearly aligned with Hell and the demonic. In order to be able to see this essential difference, however, one must “search . . . [a] Soul.” In other words, it is not readily apparent to the naked eye: it is hidden beneath the material surface of one’s body. Nevertheless, as the play continues, references to blackness build and seem to reveal how its significance is socially constructed and not essential. When Laula falsely accuses Muly Hamet of raping her after he catches Crimalhaz in her “seraglio” (3.1.45), she skillfully colors him black. Laula lies that: His altered Brow Wore such fierce looks, as had more proper been To lead an Army with, than Court a Queen. And, as a Ravisher, I abhorr’d him more In that black form, than I admir’d before. (3.1.181–185) Laula’s accusation of the attempted rape is not enough to condemn Muly Hamet; she adds a simplistic color referent to ruin him fully. Laula imagines her audience will understand Muly Hamet’s impious designs because she provides a color to his “black form,” an essential difference that is revealed by the blackness of his soul. This plot, however, works on another, perhaps unexpected, level. Laula’s lie about the attempted rape reveals how easily this understanding of blackness can be manipulated. The color referent begins to resemble a social construction more than an essential element in her scheming hands.

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This sense heightens by the fourth act when Laula stages a court masque that depicts the rescue of Eurydice from “Hell” by Orpheus (4.4.6). Laula stages the masque in order to kill everyone who stands between her and the throne. At the same time she plots to make the innocent Young Queen look guilty of the murders. Like many plays from the early modern period, the text necessarily links playing, plotting, and theatricality with political subversion and dissension. The fusion of theatre and reality, through a masque in which people actually die, serves to question the semiotics of performance and the semiotics of the material in performance. Moreover, this moment of metadrama is heightened by an inclusion of a discussion of blackface. As Laula plots with Crimalhaz, she schemes: Now in her [the Young Queen’s] Death we must some way invent, That of this blood we may seem Innocent. First let her Face with some deep poys’nous Paint, Discolour’d to a horrid black be stain’d. Then say ’twas as a mark of Vengeance given, That she was blasted by the hand of Heaven. And as a publick Spectacle expos’d, Let her be in a burning pile inclos’d. And whil’st the clouded Air reeks with the smoke, Hire a magician by his art t’invoke A train of Devils (4.4.170–180) Laula trusts that the blackness of the Young Queen’s skin will signal her guilt to everyone who sees her in the court. While Tokson and Barthelemy offer different readings of this passage — Tokson reads Laula’s plot as an example of a religious understanding of race, and Barthelemy reads Laula’s plot in a more metaphorical way — I think they both miss an opportunity to discuss the fascinating metadramatic aspects of this speech (Tokson, 54–68; Barthelemy, 198). No matter how Laula imagines the Young Queen’s blackness will be interpreted, she discusses the application of blackness in theatrical terms: as something that can be applied for effect, a “poys’nous paint.” Where Laula previously relied on the power of the language of color (i.e., merely calling people “black”), here she takes the next step by employing color literally. Furthermore, the plot renders blackness as something that is essentially material and performatively constructed: a matter that is no matter. After all, this plot also requires the “art” of a magician who can conjure theatrical “Devils.” Thus, The Empress of Morocco deconstructs the very certainty of the association between blackness and the demonic. Instead, the semiotic significance of blackness is shown not only to be a social construct but also a manipulable performance device. Moreover, the metadramatic nature of the deconstruction serves to make the very materiality of performance suspect. The play, however, ends on a note that seeks to reconstitute the audience’s ability to interpret material significance.

40 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage The play ends in a way that many Renaissance texts promise but few actually deliver: an onstage scene of torture. To discover the extent of the usurpation plot, Muly Hamet, the new Emperour of Morocco, tortures Crimalhaz. The stage direction reads: “Here the Scene opens, and Crimalhaz appears cast down on the Gaunches, being hung on a Wall set with spikes of Iron” (5.2). Importantly, there is no scene of interrogation. Instead, the visual effect of Crimalhaz’s naked body exposed on “spikes of Iron” is substituted for the certainty of confession. Abdelcador and Muly Hamet provide unambiguous condemnations of “Treason” (5.2.213), as if certainty, stability, and political prosperity are assured because the villain’s body has been tortured and exposed. This fi nal scene — the Restoration theatre’s shutters open onto a horrific scene of torture as the ultimate view for the play — serves to stabilize the significance of the material. Certainty and stability, the scene implicitly promises, are provided through the body. The threat to Morocco has been fully purged, and the audience is sure of this fact because the audience is allowed to witness the usurper’s physical abjection. It must be remembered, however, that the body exposed in that fi nal scene was that of the white, English actor who played Crimalhaz, Thomas Betterton. And as the William Dolle engravings seem to indicate, Betterton did not portray this role in blackface (see Figure 2.6). Through the play’s continued and conspicuous destabilization of the performance of cultural “alterity” (to use Bridget Orr’s preferred terminology) as physical materiality, the fi nal scene of torture highlights the ways constructions of racial differences vacillate between being highly material (color-based) and immaterial (culturally-defi ned). The scene of torture, in other words, underscores the way the actor’s white, English body can still signify racial difference, even when color is not employed theatrically. In fact, leading up to this scene of torture the terms “Savage,” “Infidel,” and “Barbarous” are increasingly bandied about (over ten times after the third act and none whatsoever in the fi rst two acts). Likewise, there are various prayers to “Our holy Prophet,” “our great Prophet,” and “Mahomet” in the latter acts of the play (3.2.362; 4.2.50; 4.2.59). Thus, the play emphasizes the essential alterity of the Moroccan court as it moves towards a conclusion that also essentializes the body. The performance techniques of the play, however, enable one to see the contradictory nature of this move. The mixture of the desire to locate essential differences in the physical with the desire to defi ne differences as socially constructed is a racializing maneuver. In the end, The Empress of Morocco allows the English audience to feel removed from and superior to all of the characters in the play because it engages in this racializing epistemology. Muly Hamet provides the fi nal words of the play, and they do not reassure the audience that Morocco’s problems have been eradicated with the deaths of Laula and Crimalhaz. Muly Hamet concludes the play, saying:

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Figure 2.6 Final “Sculpture” by William Dolle included in Elkanah Settle’s 1673 edition of The Empress of Morocco, depicting the torture of Crimalhaz “cast down on the Gaunches, being hung on a Wall set with spikes of Iron.” By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The Charm of Crowns to Love but dull appears: Raigning’s a whole lifes toyl, the work of Years. In love a day, an hour, a minut’s Bliss, Is all Flight, Rapture, Flame, and Extasies. Love’s livelyer Joyes so quick and active move; An Age in Empire’s but an Hour in Love. (5.2.223–228)

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Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Although Muly Hamet stands alone as the successor to the Moroccan throne, he seems reluctant to take up the position: he values love so much more than political power. This sounds promising because the play roundly condemns political ambition, and, yet, this repositioning of desire is not as reassuring as it should be. Ambition and desire have not been eradicated from the Moroccan court with the deaths of Laula and Crimalhaz. They have merely been transferred to this burning love of “Flight, Rapture, Flame, and Extasies.” In other words, the fi nal torture scene does not function as a purgation of the former excesses of the court. Instead, the audience witnesses the continuation of what increasingly resembles an inalienable Moroccan foreignness. Like the “Savage Infidel” whom he helped interrogate, Muly Hamet ends the play worshipping a false god — unrestrained desire. The fact that the Moroccans look white on this Restoration stage does not whitewash their racialized portrayal. They are depicted as being essentially un-English.

WHITE ACTRESS/WHITE FACE Settle ensured that the threat of his Moorish universal monarchy did not die with Crimalhaz’s torture by writing a sequel to The Empress of Morocco in 1682 entitled The Heir of Morocco.23 In fact, the scope of the sequel serves to emphasize the potential vastness of the eastern empires that are connected through both conquest and trade. Although the action of The Heir of Morocco takes place in Algeria, several other countries are implicated in the plot. The tragic hero Altomar, for instance, is raised in Egypt, fights to defend Algeria, and is revealed to be the true heir to the Moroccan empire. Likewise, the king of Algeria plans to marry his daughter to Gayland, “that great subverter of the Africk empire” (1.1). Although the king’s plans are thwarted, through a tragic turn of events, the next heir to the Algerian and Moroccan empires is Altomar’s brother who has been a “soldier in the Persian Sophy’s camp” (5.1). These foreign empires — Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, “Africk,” and Persia — are not simply distant lands. Rather, they are marked as religiously different as well. Characters repeatedly pray to “Alla” and refer to evil-doers as “barbarous,” “savage,” and “infidel,” thereby providing a specific religious — Muslim — affi liation to this eastern empire: an empire that could encompass the majority of the trading posts in the Near East and North Africa. And once again a racializing epistemology emerges in which difference is constructed in contradictory terms as both a material presence and an immaterial essence. While the play makes much more of the religious aspects of this Algerian empire, there is also a heightened application of the language of color in describing self-proclaimed “ambitious” figures. After hearing her father’s plans to marry her off to Gayland in order unite their Muslim kingdoms, Artemira retorts:

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Darest thou presume to talk, thou black Incendiary? But to confute all thou darest say or think, Know the least Thought of Altomar I value ’Bove Gayland’s Crown, and all his Africk World. (2.2) Artemira does not hesitate to name a color to her father’s ambition: it is “black.” Likewise, the king’s chief henchman Meroin is described by the tragic hero Altomar as a “Triumphant Infidel” with a “black Soul” (3.1). Thus, the characters who scheme to create a united-Muslim empire — the Algerian king, his loyal henchmen, and Gayland (the “terror of the Africk world” is specifically designated as “Numidian” in the text (4.1)) — are all described at various points in the play as “dark” or “black.” Like the religious/metaphorical use of “black” in The Empress of Morocco, the use of color in The Heir of Morocco walks a fi ne line between providing a specific physical color referent to the characters described and a metaphorical reference to the damnation of souls. Added to all of this color language play is another scene of interrogatory state torture. Altomar, refusing to forego his love for Artemira, is tortured by her father. Stretched on the rack onstage for the majority of the fi fth act, Altomar refuses to apologize for killing Gayland and subsequently killing the hopes of a pan-African empire. Watching the horrific scene, Morat links the debased nature of the act to the barbarousness of the entire empire. He mourns: What Hearts of Flesh, with Eyes of Sense and Pity Could stand to see the God-like Martyr Stretcht Upon a Wrack, fi xt on a publick Scaffold; And then behold from all his tortur’d Limbs, His manly Flesh torn off with burning Pincers. Oh more than barbarous King: the Sooty Cyclops, Who Sweating at the Anvil, points to lightning, And mould the Bolts of th’ angry Thunderer Ne’er Shaped a Mettal for a work so dismal. (5.1) The language of color once again seeps into this description of the “barbarous King”: he is likened to the “Sooty Cyclops” of ancient legend. Maintaining the strange vacillation between the metaphoric and the physical, this scene necessarily highlights the body and the constructed ways one interprets the significance of that body. Unlike the scene of torture in The Empress of Morocco, this scene depicts the play’s hero being put to the rack, not the play’s villain. This difference is crucial because it enables the audience to question the validity of using the body to discover truth. The relationship between one’s body and one’s essential being is interrogated in scenes in which innocent, heroic figures are tortured. What happens when the torture victim is a white actress performing in white face in a play that is set in a Muslim country? While Artemira,

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Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

the king’s innocent daughter in The Heir of Morocco, is not tortured, she is described by Gayland as having “white Charms” for hands (2.2). One could read this in terms of the disappearing African woman in early modern narratives of exploration. Joyce Green MacDonald, for example, traces the whitening of African female characters in early modern theatre. 24 Like in Heidi Hutner’s work on Stuart drama, however, I think it is important to think about the staging techniques employed on the Restoration stage. The actress playing Artemira could not perform in blackface, and the whiteness of the Muslim princess serves to highlight how this racializing epistemology keeps the connections between race, gender, the body, and color in a constant state of flux. In this section I analyze what happens when the white actress in white face is tortured. Colley Cibber’s unsuccessful play Xerxes provides the most shocking and literal depiction of the tortured white actress. The story of a fi fthcentury B.C. Persian king who suffers defeat at the hands of the Greeks, Xerxes closely relates the corrupt ambition of its titular character with stereotypical views of the Near East. The cruelty that marked the older model of the Catholic universal monarch is enhanced with an unrestrained libido in this new racialized model. While the fear of the universal monarch in the late sixteenth century constructed torturers and inquisitors as Catholics (in many English eyes), these fears rarely contained a sexual component. With the projection and conversion (both figuratively and literally) of the universal monarch in the late seventeenth century, however, the old tales of unbridled sexual appetites that could only be sated in libidinous seraglios in the East became incorporated into the re-construction of it. Sitting at the mouths of the East and West, Persia symbolized not only the movement and trade between the civilizations but also the possible influences one could exert over the other. While the universal monarch was often figured in economic terms in the late seventeenth century (as the figure who controlled the world’s trade), these plays seem to link movement, trade, and influence with sexual rabidity. Furthermore, the stage convention of English actresses not performing in blackface lends itself to constructing a racialized universal monarch that vacillates between locating racial difference in physical and non-physical ways. In other words, the fear of the universal monarch who devours crowns and scepters became linked with the Eastern monarch who purportedly devoured white virgins. In the late seventeenth century, when Protestant England looked back wistfully to the reign of their late virgin, Protestant queen, the English could view their own country as the white virgin in danger. Xerxes seems to have had only one performance at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In a mock inventory of theatre properties in 1709, The Tatler includes “the imperial robes of Xerxes, worn but once.”25 Cibber, who was contracted to offer all of his new plays to Christopher Rich, the Drury Lane manager, arranged in 1698 to have his fi rst serious drama, Xerxes, produced at the rival playhouse, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Like the other plays I discuss in this

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chapter, spectacular staging demands play a large role in the history of this drama. Drury Lane was recovering from a fi nancially disastrous season in 1697-1698, and Rich may have wanted to avoid another expensive production.26 Timothy Viator argues that Betterton’s company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields may have accepted Xerxes for the same reason that Rich rejected it: the need to recover from a poor theatrical year.27 Xerxes was one of the few new tragic productions mounted in the 1690s, and Betterton probably hoped that the audacious spectacle would attract audiences. Unfortunately, Lincoln’s Inn Fields was not suited for a play driven by spectacle. It was too small and cramped to “accommodate the processions, the masques, and the crowd scenes” and was not “equipped to handle special effects, such as the thunderstorm and the Magi’s cave” (Viator, 157). That a torture scene lies at the heart of a play driven by spectacle should come as no surprise. Depicting the exotic excesses and demise of a fifthcentury B.C. Persian King, Xerxes is offered as a type of didactic lesson against the pleasures of excess. 28 The prologue includes these instructions for viewing the play: Wou’d you but come with minds attentive, bent To laugh at follies, vices to resent; Warn’d by the dangers painted, wou’d you learn To shun abroad what’s here the wise man’s scorn.29 The audience is meant to see Xerxes’ “follies” and “vices” as “dangers” to be shunned, but the emphasis in the last line promotes the distance of time, location, and nationality as the true benefit to the English audience; they are able to “learn” to shun dangers when they are depicted (“painted”) as taking place “abroad.” Everything about Xerxes is exotic and distanced from the English norm: it is set in ancient Persia; Xerxes maintains a seraglio; and his highest ambition is to rape a virtuous woman. Xerxes is depicted as the type of tyrannical leader who leads his country according to the dictates of his desires. And because his desires more often than not run in a libidinous fashion, Cibber begins to re-construct the universal monarch. The seraglios and grand court entertainments mark Cibber’s Persia as an empire inherently flawed. The structure of the civilization itself becomes implicated in creating Xerxes’ excesses. Cibber enhances Xerxes’ role as a new model for a universal monarch by adding an explicitly sexualized component to his will to power. Once again the opulence of the spectacle helps to code this new universal monarch as Muslim: a decadent court masque is enacted in which Luxury declares stolen Virtue as the greatest joy in life (“Then steal a mistress, break all ties / That would confi ne your love to rules” (2.1)). The sight of Xerxes as performed by John Verbruggen — the renowned Restoration actor who became famous for his blackfaced portrayal of Oroonoko (discussed in Chapter Three) — bedecked in fi ne silks and adorned with hookahs and lush floor pillows must have been quite a spectacle, but the plan to “steal a

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Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

mistress” must have cemented the new construction of the universal monarch. When his own Persian warriors fi nally publicly protest his excesses (“a benumbing lethargy has seiz’d your soul / And sunk your glory in unmanly pleasures: / That women, flatterers, and servile poets, are / Your only favorites now” (2.1)), Xerxes expels the soldiers for their challenge. Finally Xerxes’ excesses, which had thus far only exhibited themselves in his language (threats of torture) and entertainment (sex parties), become enacted on the body of Tamira, who was performed by the famous Restoration actress Elizabeth Barry. The virtuous woman, who has resisted Xerxes’ advances, Tamira hides her husband, Artabanus, within the court walls so that he can lead a rebellion against their wanton leader. Suspecting that she has performed this insubordination, Xerxes, in a fit of passion, declares: The traitress knows I love [her], and therefore she insults: But thus I tear the passion from my breast, And in its room take full revenge and hate! Bring in the rack! I’ll try if that can make A woman speak her mind. (3.1) Xerxes begins by discussing his own lust in figurative terms (“But thus I tear the passion from my breast”), but he ends by literalizing the tearing at his heart by bringing in the rack for Tamira. Xerxes’ corrupt nature is fully revealed by his willingness to mix metaphorical expressions of torture with the actual deed; he displaces the actual physical pain that Tamira will suffer (“Bring in the rack!”) with his own mental suffering (“But thus I tear the passion from my breast”). The rack becomes the engine for Xerxes’ excesses. Although he declares that the rack will “make / A woman speak her mind,” his language reveals that it is used to force his “passion” onto Tamira. By focusing on his desire for Tamira, Xerxes reveals the problematic nature of torture. Although Xerxes ostensibly tortures Tamira to discover Artabanus’s secret location, his discussion of torture focuses on his solipsistic desires. The tension between the victim’s body and the torturer’s passion continues as Tamira is bound to the rack onstage. The original stage directions from the first edition spell out that the torture begins onstage. Xerxes repeatedly calls for the rack to be brought onstage, “Bring in the torture!” and “Bring in the rack!” To which Memnon replies, “’Tis here, my lord.” The stage direction then reads, “They bind her [Tamira]” to the rack. Only then is “she is carried off.” As Tamira’s torture continues offstage, Xerxes and his henchman provide the only access to the pain Tamira endures. They narrate Tamira’s torture to the audience as she suffers in the wings, declaring: Cleontes: You are not reveng’d! — She mocks the torture! Now, Sir, may I advise —

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Xerxes:

Advise me! What! Not ev’n the damn’d can groan With more variety of pain — Look there! Cleontes: I see, my lord, and plainly see from this, Were she in your arms, she’d feel at once A greater pain, and you a sweeter vengeance. Methinks she’s lovely yet! Her charms new pointed! See, how her snowy bosom heaves and swells With inward pains, disdaining to confess ’em. O miracle of distressful beauty! Xerxes: Not yet a groan! No sigh or tear for mercy! Reveal thy husband yet, and I forego My justice! — By yon heav’n she’s dumb and dauntless! See, how she gnaws her lips, and fi rms her brow! With sullen virtue she supports her soul, And bears it with unheeded resolution! (3.1) Cleontes and Xerxes read, interpret, and construct Tamira’s body in a fascinating way. The rack provides Cleontes and Xerxes with an uninterrupted view of Tamira’s white body (“snowy bosom”), and unlike the audience, they are free to gaze upon her without any barriers. Her tortured body reconfi rms her desirability: she has remarkable breasts, lips, and brow. But Cleontes and Xerxes also interpret Tamira’s beauty as a symbol of her concealed knowledge and hidden resolution (“Methinks she’s lovely yet!” “See how she gnaws her lips, and fi rms her brow! / With sullen virtue she supports her soul”). The uninterrupted view of Tamira’s body allows the villains to construct her beauty into their own fears — as a symbol of her disloyalty to the crown (“O miracle of distressful beauty!”). The metadramatic reference to Elizabeth Barry’s white body, however, also highlights the imagined threat the Muslim universal monarch poses to English whiteness. The racialization of ancient Persia occurs not through the coloring of blackface or extensive religious referents. Rather, the racialization of ancient Persia occurs through the focus on Elizabeth Barry’s white body, especially in this scene of torture. Barry was known for her ability to project pathos in tragic roles. As Colley Cibber remarks in his autobiography, “In the Art of exciting Pity, she [Elizabeth Barry] had a Power beyond all Actresses I have yet seen, or what your Imagination can conceive.”30 The moment when Tamira appears on the rack, then, the audience is invited to see Barry’s body as representing both the virtuous ancient Persian wife and the white English actress. Because Cibber skillfully allows the audience to see the beginning of the torture, Tamira being bound to the rack, the narrated discussion of her suffering emphasizes the constructed nature of the account. Cibber reveals Xerxes’ corruption through his reading and interpretation of Tamira’s suffering. Torture, an old emblem for the corruption of the universal monarch, gets translated into a new emblem with the addition of these sexualized

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Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

and racialized components. No longer merely a symbol for the universal monarch’s lust for cruelty, torture becomes a symbol for the Moorish sexual lust for white, English women. Xerxes’ downfall comes about when the citizens of Persia begin to assert their own interpretations, and once again the torture of Tamira lies at the heart of the battle. The banished Persian soldiers return to incite the unrest of the population, and they use Xerxes’ instruments of punishment and torture to exemplify his tyranny. One of Xerxes’ loyal henchmen delivers the alarming news, declaring: Cleontes: Arm! arm, my lord! the city’s in a tumult; Aranthes, having forc’d the prison gates, Has freed Mardonius from the dungeon, Who drags his chains along the crowded streets, And calls ’em brave rewards for loyalty. Xerxes: Insulting traitor! Cleontes: Another party here produced the rack, Stain’d with the blood of fair Tamira’s wounds! Here in another place, Three dead virgins, whom you had lately ravish’d, In spiteful pomp were carry’d round the streets, To turn the people’s hearts against you; And I much fear, their fury will be fatal. (5.1) The chains from the dungeon, the blood stained rack, and the corpses of the three virgins fuel the outrage of the Persian citizens, and Mardonius leads the revolt by renaming his chains as the “brave rewards for loyalty.” Suddenly the instruments of Xerxes’ power come to symbolize his unjust tyranny and fuel the “fury,” turning “people’s hearts against [him].” The rack, which had convinced Xerxes of Tamira’s sexual worth, convinces the citizens of his corruption. Like the “three dead virgins, whom [Xerxes] had lately ravish’d,” who are defined as “virgins” despite Xerxes’ actions, Tamira’s virtue is not challenged but verified by the blood-stained rack itself. And once again, Tamira’s fairness is emphasized in a strikingly metadramatic way. The audience’s attention is drawn not only to the fact that Tamira’s wounds are exposed, but also to the fact that wounds are exposed on her “fair” body. Although Cibber never mentioned Xerxes in his lengthy autobiography, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (1757), critics often discuss the reasons for Xerxes’ failure. In comparing the plays that failed during the last years of the seventeenth century, Robert Hume blasts Xerxes: “Even greater heights of melodramatic bombast are achieved by Cibber in Xerxes (March 1699), a failure” (449). Likewise, Richard Barker claims that Xerxes “owes something to Dryden and Otway, but like many tragedies of the period, it never rises above melodrama” (33). And Timothy

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Viator writes, “Uninterested in characterization . . . the tragedy revels in the king’s melodramatic evil” (155). Interestingly, Viator argues that Xerxes needed the grandeur of the Drury Lane theatre with the fi ne melodramatic actors from the Lincoln’s Inn Fields company (Thomas Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, John Verbruggen, and others). In the small Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre, Viator argues, “a production [must rely] upon intense characterization and dialogue, elements that Cibber’s plays rarely emphasize” (158). In other words, the true spectacle of the show was never achieved in Lincoln’s Inn Fields because the excessive nature of Xerxes’ and Xerxes’ exploits could not have been staged effectively. I would enhance Viator’s point by arguing that the spectacle of Xerxes — the grandeur of the production — provides the key for characterization. The largess of everything in the play — the masques, the thunderstorm, the magi’s cave, the torture scene — reflects the magnitude of Xerxes’ ambition. Cibber conveyed distance and foreignness of character through the spectacle, of which the torture of “fair” Tamira lies at the heart. Cibber creates a racialized portrait of the Persian court by emphasizing the violence committed against a white body. Thus, he both deconstructs and emphasizes the importance of color as a signifier of racial difference: white and fair become the most important colors in the play. The Persian court does not look any different from the English court until Tamira/Elizabeth Barry’s body is exploited. Xerxes provides a key to understanding the transformation of the construction of the universal monarch in seventeenth-century England. While the play distances the threat through the exotic staging, the focus on the white actress’s violated body once again emphasizes the materiality of race.

IN CONCLUSION In the end, The Empress of Morocco, The Heir of Morocco, and Xerxes help defi ne early modern notions of race as a matter that is no matter: a racialized epistemology that locates differences as both material and immaterial. The projection, and conversion, of older religious models — particularly ones that demonize Catholics as being ruthlessly power hungry — identifies the differences between Muslims and Christians as immaterial. In these plays, the followers of Islam may have black souls, but these differences are not material or visible ones. On the other hand, the significance of the torture victim’s physical whiteness, especially when the victim is portrayed by a white actress, cannot be ignored. The starkness, the essential quality of the differences between East and West, is expressed most clearly when the materiality of the color of that body is identified metatheatrically. Scenes of torture bring this vacillating racialized epistemology to the fore because torture necessarily interrogates the relationship between the body and identity.

50 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage Returning for a moment to the arguments articulated by critics like Roxann Wheeler, Bridget Orr, and Derek Hughes, I think it is important to acknowledge that race is not simply defi ned in terms of color. Early modern race scholars will do well to heed their warnings that an over attention to color may lead to misreadings of some of these texts. Yet, it is likewise important to recognize that race was not merely constructed in immaterial ways. The vacillation between these extremes — constructing racial difference both on and off the body — is the defi nition of race itself because it ensures that the racialized can never be fully incorporated as an equal. As the construction swings between being material and immaterial, the Other is always caught out. While the swing between these two poles may not be an intentional construction, the maintenance of the vacillation, nonetheless, helps to bolster power inequities. So why is it important to call this construction “race” instead of “complexion” or “alterity,” especially if color is not what it is all about? The desire to call a racialized epistemology by any other term disables one’s ability to fight the power of the Scylla and Charybdis of this system. Instead, it lures one to focus on only one set of constructions, leaving one vulnerable to be devoured by the other. Of course, I mean this in both a scholarly sense and a political one. In the next chapter I focus on two plays that emphasize the importance of blackness, and I will continue to demonstrate that constructions of race were always constructed in vacillating and often contradictory terms to maintain a hierarchy that valued an English, Christian whiteness above all else.

3

When Race is Colored Abjection and Racial Characterization in Titus Andronicus and Oroonoko

While in chapter 2 I examined plays in which the performance of blackness was clearly not a function in the performance of racial alterity, in this chapter I examine plays in which blackness as a color is a clear sign for race. As I demonstrated in chapter 2, critics have traditionally argued that skin color was not the crucial marker it is today. Thus, the argument follows, race was not a factor on the early modern stage. Because I began with the contention that race was performed even when color was not employed, in this chapter I examine the difference color makes when it is clearly being employed as a marker for alterity. Moving from an analysis of the semiotic significance of the white female actress’s body to the blackfaced white actor’s body, I examine the contradictory ways the significance of color is encoded on the stage. Far from stabilizing a notion of race, the employment of color merely replicates the contradictory swings between essentialism and social constructivism. Edward Ravenscroft’s rewriting of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1678) and Thomas Southerne’s adaptation of Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko (1695) are separated not only by their generic structures (revenge tragedy vs. romance), but also by the way they present and defi ne blackness: while Ravenscroft’s Aaron the Moor is often associated with a type of absolute essentialism, Southerne’s African prince is often associated with a type of flexible social constructivism. If these plays differ generically and politically, then why do both include the abjection of the black male body through the enactment of torture? How is it possible that these disparate plays are able to incorporate such a similar theatrical denouement? Because I am offering more of a theoretical reading of these plays than an historical one, I will provide only the barest historical contextualization to emphasize the liminality of the period in which these performances were constructed. As Jean Marsden has argued, during the Carolean era “the number of adaptations written and produced increased dramatically . . . [and] almost all of them [dealt] directly or indirectly with the problem of factions and rebellions.”1 In his address “To the Reader,” Ravenscroft makes explicit the political intent of this adaptation. His rewrite, he notes, “fist appear’d on the Stage, at the beginning of the pretended Popish Plot, 51

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when neither Wit nor Honesty had Encouragement: Nor cou’d this [play] expect favour since it shew’d the Treachery of Villains, and the Mischiefs carry’d on by Perjury, and False Evidence.”2 Although the play was first published in 1687, Ravenscroft dates the performance of his play around 1678. Linking Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia with the Popish Plot, Ravenscroft emphasizes the “Treachery of Villains” who spread “False Evidence.” When in 1678 Titus Oates, a rogue Anglican cleric, spread the story that he had discovered a Jesuit plot against the king’s life, a fervor of anti-Catholic sentiment spread throughout England. I am less interested in the connections between Ravenscroft’s rewriting and the fear of the Popish Plot, however, than in the way anxieties about religious alterity are rewritten onto a specifically and literally colored body. Likewise, although critics like Jean Marsden and Jonathan Bate have read Ravenscroft’s rewrite in terms of the Popish Plot, few have analyzed the play in terms of the growing violence experienced in the British colonies. 3 The narratives of violence from the colonies, however, clearly seem to inform the constructions of both Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia and Oroonoko. This chapter seeks to explore the connections between constructions of race, violence, and the literally colored body. Marcus Wood’s treatment of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual representations of slavery helps to begin to explain this complex relationship. He theorizes that “The slave emerges predominantly as an object afflicted, not as a subject capable of describing his or her affliction. The pain of slaves, when translated into imagery and visual narrative, is most commonly related to, and imparted through, a series of objects.”4 The objects of torture, he argues, become fetishized at the expense of black subjectivity. Wood’s work challenges an uncomplicated and untheorized approach to these horrific images in which there are often “objects that feel and bodies as objects” (280). The action of “looking, as opposed to reading,” he argues, “has not, in the context of slavery, been described as an exceptionally problematic activity. . . . Rarely, even in serious scholarly studies of the slave trade, abolition, slave narrative or plantation life, does the writer subject quoted imagery (that is to say, reproduced imagery) to the sorts of close reading or technical and theoretical analysis which are applied to quotations from written sources” (6). I would qualify Wood’s argument by adding that the same lack of critical attention has been paid to early modern performances of race and torture. All too often these scenes have been treated as either bizarre anomalies or historically/culturally specific fads. By placing Ravenscroft’s and Southerne’s texts together, however, I challenge these undertheorized approaches. Despite the fact that the audience of Ravenscroft’s play is expected to cheer at Aaron’s torture and the audience of Southerne’s play is expected to abhor Oroonoko’s mistreatment, both plays construct the depiction of torture as a way to gain access to that which is foreign and unfamiliar: the black male body. As Wood has shown, these visual images serve to make the black body into an object. My work

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on early modern theatre, however, pushes Wood’s theory in a new direction by exposing how dialectical definitions of race (constructed/performed vs. essential/fi xed) collapse under performance pressures to make the black body markable through abject torture. If seventeenth-century plays were distancing and racializing torture through an exoticization of the characters depicted, then performances of torture were also rendering the racialized body as something accessible, controllable, and penetrable. Unlike the plays discussed earlier in this book, both Titus Andronicus and Oroonoko are careful to construct race in terms of color. In other words, the characters in the plays discuss Aaron’s and Oroonoko’s races in terms of their black skins. Nevertheless, both plays employ contradictory discourses for race, as perceived via color: racialized color is constructed as both revealing and concealing essence; it is both a meaningful signifier and an impenetrable one; and it is both essential and performative. While torture is staged in these plays to help make the meaning of the racialized body certain, the use of torture ends up revealing a deep anxiety about the meaning(s) of and connections between color, identity, and race. Attending to performance strategies, of course, one must remember that the abject black male bodies on these stages were not black at all: they were white English actors in blackface. While I am attentive to performance strategies, I will challenge arguments that espouse that the presence of white actors in blackface necessarily contests the presence of essentialist ideologies. It is true that no matter how naturalized a blackface performance is, as long as the audience is aware that it is a performance they are implicitly invited to interrogate essentialist notions of identity through the exposure of the performative nature of race. 5 And yet, plays like Titus Andronicus and Oroonoko invite confl icting responses to race through their depictions of torture. In the end, the unifying racializing epistemology is the establishment of the white/right gaze.

CUNNING TONGUE/BLACK BODY Despite the fact that many early critics of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus dismissed the play for its sanguinary and violent depictions, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587) and John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1600), the closest revenge tragedy contemporaries to Titus Andronicus, are no less violent, sanguinary, and disgusting. What makes Shakespeare’s play unique within the genre is his interweaving of a revenge plot with racial politics. Revenge tragedies rarely contain racialized characters even though the genre thrived in a period when such depictions were popular. Although Joyce Green MacDonald uses the phrase “vengeful Moor,” and despite the fact that Virginia Mason Vaughan has a chapter in her book entitled “Avenging villains,” neither critic actually addresses the revenge

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tragedy genre. 6 Instead, they discuss the notion of the wrathful Moor who acts from “clearly defi ned motives” (Vaughan, 138). In a genre that is obsessed with bodies, corpses, and body parts it is amazing how uninterested revenge tragedies are in race. As John Kerrigan has argued, revenge tragedies are inherently invested in interrogating the individual’s desire for equity and parity. The revenger, according to Kerrigan, is motivated by a desire to make his victim admit the similarities in their positions: if A commits a crime against B, then part of B’s motive for revenge is to make A see B as an equal. “The object of retribution,” Kerrigan explains, “does not just suffer from what is being done to him but from perceiving in what is done to him what he did to his victim, and from enduring that knowledge.”7 While Aaron the Moor does not easily fit into either the A or B role, Shakespeare is one of the few revenge tragedians to capitalize on the potential connections between the genre’s interest in the individual’s desire for equity and the early modern fascination with racial difference. In other words, Shakespeare invites the audience to question the relationship between the desire for equity and the racialized body. I think Cynthia Marshall’s claim that “to understand bodies we need to ‘read’ the engagements and responses of viewers as they process the signifying corporeality on stage,” and that “the spectatorial crises recurring in productions of Titus Andronicus register the impact of images of bodily disintegration,” is absolutely correct. 8 Her failure to discuss Aaron the Moor’s interesting corporeal position within the play, like Kerrigan’s own failure to address this fact, is even more troubling in light of this attention to performative corporeality. Edward Ravenscroft’s address “To the Reader” in his rewriting of Titus Andronicus gives voice to a discomfort with Shakespeare’s construction of the revenge tragedy. In fact, he claims “’tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his Works” (A2). Ravenscroft’s aim, then, is to construct a play that is both correct and digested. His rewriting is largely derivative but culminates in one of the few original scenes in Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia — the onstage racking and burning to death of Aaron the Moor. It is important to interrogate how and why this original scene helps correct and digest this play. I argue that Ravenscroft believed only the radical addition of onstage torture could fully stabilize the weakened linguistic and political systems of Titus Andronicus. In addition, I argue that Ravenscroft’s attention to and revision of Aaron’s rhetoric — what I will refer to as his linguistic miscegenation — reveals an anxiety about an essentialized reading of color. Instead, Ravenscroft’s revisions suggest that his interpretation of Shakespeare’s construction of race in the original Titus Andronicus allowed for a more socially constructed view of race: race could be a rhetoric that metaphorically created new offspring. Far from being merely gratuitous or representative of the custom of the age, Ravenscroft’s addition of the torture of Aaron serves to make the black body digestible by challenging the revenge tragedy genre’s interest in equity. Depictions of torture, as I will demonstrate throughout this chapter, are invested in exposing

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how radically unequal individuals are in societies: the act of torture reveals in an extremely palpable fashion these disparities in power. The desire for digestibility through the representation of physical abjection, however, helps to construct racialized identity in a contradictory manner as both fi xed and alterable. In this section I analyze how Shakespeare’s characterization of Aaron the Moor undermines a simplistic notion of racial essentialism. The power of Aaron’s linguistic dexterity, which I call a linguistic miscegenation, reveals how identities can be rhetorically constructed. The rhetorical revisions in Edward Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia are notable for their lack of language play. Ravenscroft creates a play in which literal language is revealed to be powerful and effective. I read these revisions as an attempt to reinscribe a notion of essentialism through a clear linking and unity between the signifier and the signified. The onstage racking of Aaron the Moor literally embodies this attempt. In the end, however, the performance cues that relate to race and color in Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia ultimately undermine the play’s faith in essentialism. Many critics have written about Aaron as a theatrical descendant of the evil “black man” from medieval religious dramas. Anthony Barthelemy in Black Face, Maligned Race, for example, traces the “association of blackness with evil” in medieval miracle plays, in which “the souls of the damned were represented by actors painted black or in black costumes,” and in medieval mystery plays, in which “Lucifer and his confederate rebels, after having sinned, turn black.”9 Shakespeare seems to capitalize on the audience’s belief that a black face bespeaks an evil soul: that race, as perceived through skin color, is essential and therefore revealing. Of course, Aaron himself is acutely aware of this belief and seems to promote a notion of racial essentialism when he declares: For all the water in the ocean Can never turn the swans black legs to white, Although she lave them hourly in the flood. (4.2.103–105)10 Promoting an impermeable definition of race, Aaron boasts the fact that “black legs” can never be washed white.11 Likewise, if paternity was always an uncertainty before the advent of DNA testing, Aaron celebrates the assurances provided by the essential stamp of color. Aaron loves the illegitimate child Tamora bore him precisely because he can clearly see himself in him. Again, a type of racial essentialism is promoted in the following speech: He is your brother, lords, sensibly fed Of that self blood that fi rst gave life to you, And from that womb where you imprisoned were He is enfranchised and come to light: Nay, he’s your brother by the surer side, Although my seal be stamped in his face. (4.2.124–129)

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The color of the child provides an unexpected proof of paternity. The baby’s lineage is assured on both sides — “the surer” side of the mother, and the racially “stamped” side of the father. This defi nition of race as impermeable promotes the notion of the body as evidence; it promotes a belief that color publicizes essence. As Eugene Waith has written, the critical attention to the language of Titus Andronicus splits those who believe Shakespeare’s use of literary conventions is “fit only for ‘vulgar audiences’” and those who believe he is deliberately exploring the limits of an “excess of refi nement.”12 The scenes most often cited for being “out of control,” however, deal with unexpected confrontations with violated bodies — corpses, mutilated bodies, and body parts — thereby demonstrating the close ties between the corporeal and the linguistic. Of all the characters in Titus Andronicus, of course, Aaron the Moor is the most aware of the possibilities of language. Aaron’s fi rst words in Titus Andronicus do not appear until the second act, but they reveal a rhetorical flare that is absent from the language of the fi rst act. Aaron’s power stems in part from his ability to control and construct this society rhetorically. After celebrating Tamora’s ascension to empress of Rome in a beautiful metaphor about climbing Olympus, Aaron declares: Then, Aaron, arm thy heart, and fit thy thoughts, To mount aloft with thy imperial mistress, And mount her pitch, whom thou in triumph long Has prisoner held, fettered in amorous chains, And faster bound to Aaron’s charming eyes, Than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus. Away with slavish weeds and servile thoughts! I will be bright, and shine in pearl and gold, To wait upon this new-made empress. To wait, said I? to wanton with this queen. (2.1.12–21) Aaron’s interest in the flexibility of language is immediately apparent with his use of puns. “Mount her pitch,” a hawking term meaning to rise to a height, is also, of course, a sexually suggestive phrase. What is often overlooked, however, is the fact that it is also a racially suggestive phrase with the term pitch originally meaning a “tenacious resinous substance, of a black or dark brown color,” which comes to mean blackness in general and defilement in particular.13 In Henry IV, for instance, Falstaff uses pitch in this manner. Playing the part of the King, Falstaff warns young Hal that “There is a thing, Henry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch. This pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defi le. So doth the company thou keepest” (2.5.375–378).14 Pitch defi les by marking one black. Thus, with the turn of a phrase, Aaron yokes several disparate understandings in his pun — the hunt, sexual intercourse, and racial essentialism.15

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Aaron goes on to explore linguistic possibilities when he employs the old metaphor of being a slave to love. The irony of the old metaphor appeals to Aaron, who is literally a slave. Aaron draws attention to this fact by disrupting our expectation that he is the slave, making Tamora his slave (“fettered in amorous chains”) instead. And then he further disrupts our expectations by blowing apart the metaphor entirely, admitting to himself and to the audience that he is still the true slave: “Away with slavish weeds and servile thoughts.” Aaron even clothes himself in the stereotypical accoutrements of the spoils of empire — pearls and gold. In this fi rst speech, Aaron demonstrates his own complex relationship with and understanding of language. The power of Aaron’s presence in Titus Andronicus, then, stems not only from his visible difference but also from his linguistic difference: he threatens a linguistic miscegenation as much as a racial one. In fact, all of the “out of control” speeches offered by the Roman characters take place after Aaron has introduced the excesses of fi gurative language to Rome. Before Aaron’s belated fi rst speech, the language of the play was straightforward and literal. Only one pun appears in all of Act One: Marcus requests Titus to “help set a head on headless Rome” (1.1.186). This pun, of course, is not realized until much later in the play when there are various decapitations. In fact, imperatives and directives govern the entire fi rst act of Titus Andronicus: “Open the gates and let me in” (1.1.65); “Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths, / That we may hew his limbs” (1.1.99-100); and “This day all quarrels die, Andronicus” (1.1.470). Aaron’s presence threatens Rome not only with a racial miscegenation but also with a linguistic miscegenation: his pitch will defi le not only visually but also aurally. In other words, Shakespeare constructs a racialized figure whose power, strength, and threat lie not only in his skin color but also in his rhetorical ability. Ultimately, this linguistic dexterity challenges Roman notions of racial essentialism because although his linguistic miscegenation threatens to create new offspring among the Romans, the exact nature of the offspring is unclear. Are they essentially different and thus un-Roman? Or, are they merely altered socially and thus potentially convertible again? In fact, Shakespeare’s play seems to ponder if this notion of racial essentialism is merely a product of Aaron’s linguistic dexterity. Titus Andronicus creates a space for the audience to interrogate the comforting, yet simplistic, notion of the absolute and essential differences between white and black because Aaron also promotes a notion of social constructivism. Turning his own rhetoric on its head, Shakespeare allows Aaron to reveal how identities are ultimately constructed through language. This comes to the fore most clearly when Aaron devises a scheme to protect his black baby boy. After killing the nurse who brought the child to him, Aaron reveals his plan to swap babies:

58

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage And now be it known to you my full intent. Not far, one Muly lives my countryman His wife but yesternight was brought to bed; His child is like to her, fair as you are: Go pack with him, and give the mother gold, And tell them both the circumstance of all, And how by this their child shall be advanced, And be received for the emperor’s heir, And substituted in the place of mine, To calm this tempest whirling in the court; And let the emperor dandle him for his own. (4.2.153–163)

Whether or not the African Muly, his Roman wife, and their fair baby truly exist — it is unclear if this story is merely a ruse to appease Tamora’s bloodthirsty sons — it is clear that the plan is not completely implausible. Chiron and Demetrius are temporarily appeased, which affords Aaron time to escape with his child. This story exists without comment from Chiron and Demetrius, and Muly and his family are never mentioned again in the course of Titus Andronicus. And yet this brief mention of the existence of a fair biracial baby, who can be a stand-in for a white child, undermines the entire notion of race as an indelible mark of color. In direct contrast to his words fifty lines earlier, “Coal-black is better than another hue, / In that it scorns to bear another hue,” Aaron now promotes the uncertainty and flexibility of his own color (4.2.101–102). An African may not produce a “coal-black” heir. In fact, one’s race, like one’s lineage in general, can be socially constructed. The only thing that makes an emperor’s child is a collective willingness to treat the child as such. As if disproving the claims and theories of those who espouse racial essentialism, Aaron now presents a more manipulable and flexible picture of race and identity.16 Importantly, it is through persuasive rhetoric (both speeches were constructed to convince Chiron and Demetrius to act in a certain manner) that Aaron reveals these confl icting defi nitions for racial difference. Thus, Shakespeare creates a character who both literally and figuratively works to destroy the Roman society: Aaron literally creates an offspring that cannot be assimilated into the society, and more insidiously, his mastery of rhetoric figuratively suggests that the society itself is an unstable entity. It is Aaron’s tongue that ultimately challenges Titus’s ancient Rome the most, and Shakespeare suggests that racial and linguistic politics cannot be separated because he places this tongue in the racially marked mouth of this Moor. It is the untidiness of the racial and linguistic politics of Titus Andronicus that admitted Shakespeare’s earliest critics into the play. The zeal for Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare saw Edward Ravenscroft restoring Titus Andronicus to a more tidy form in his Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (1678). Although Ravenscroft, in his address “To the Reader,” claims to have altered Shakespeare’s play drastically (“Compare the Old

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Play with this, you’l fi nde that none in all that Authors Works ever receiv’d greater Alterations and Additions”), the rewriting of Titus Andronicus is much more derivative than original. While several scenes are reordered in order to change the structure of the plot, the largest set of revisions comes with the removal and/or alteration of the “problem” speeches in Shakespeare’s original — the speeches that elicit uncomfortable laughs at seemingly inappropriate moments. Titus, for example, no longer tests his punning tongue by saying, “Mark, Marcus, mark!” when he offers to console Lavinia. Instead, he simply states, “Look, Marcus, look” (4.1).17 In the same vein, Ravenscroft edits out the entire second scene of Shakespeare’s third act (the fly killing scene), in which Titus protests: O, handle not the theme to talk of hands, Lest we remember still that we have none. Fie, fie, how franticly I square my talk. (3.2.29–31) In Ravenscroft’s revision, Titus does not rail against Marcus for his linguistic insensitivity because his words would admit his own willingness to test the limits of linguistic expression. Likewise, Ravenscroft does not allow Lavinia to be Titus’s literal handmaiden, carrying off his hand in her mouth. Instead he has Titus order, “And Junius too, share in this Ceremony, / Bring thou that hand — and help thy handless Aunt” (4.1). These excisions point to Ravenscroft’s rejection of the use of punning and word play by his heroic figures. John Kerrigan has argued that Ravenscroft’s revisions “squandered the effect” of Shakespeare’s “structural wit” and “rhym[ing] orchestrations” (198, 199). While I agree with Kerrigan’s general assessment that Ravenscroft “assumed a state of chaos whenever he found bloodshed,” I think it is important examine why so many of the revisions have to do with Aaron’s function in the play (198). Aaron the Moor, of course, provided the linguistic model for the power of the punning tongue in Shakespeare’s original. It is clear from the beginning of Ravenscroft’s play that Aaron’s language has been altered because, instead of holding his tongue until the second act, Ravenscroft allows him to speak early in the fi rst act (1.2). Unlike Shakespeare’s Aaron whose language was fueled by a self-conscious awareness of the power of rhetoric, the language of Ravenscroft’s Aaron is fueled more by a self-conscious awareness of the absolute and essential signification of his blackness. Aaron’s fi rst speech in Shakespeare’s version of the play, for example, is altered by Ravenscroft to include a more self-conscious reference to his race. Hence abject thought that I am black and foul, And all the Taunts of Whites that call me Fiend, I still am lovely in an Empress Eyes, Lifted on high in Power, I’le hang above Like a black threatening cloud o’re all their heads That dare look up to me with Envious Eyes. (2.1)

60 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage Ravenscroft edits the speech in such a way to emphasize Aaron’s awareness of his difference in terms of color. It is especially telling that Ravenscroft has Aaron compare his blackness to the “Whites that call [him] fiend.” Unlike medieval and Renaissance racial constructions which often define blackness in Christian terms (blackness = obscurity = evil), thereby conflating racial and religious politics, Ravenscroft highlights color as a racial difference. To employ white as a racial signifier was not commonly used until the late seventeenth century.18 Some critics have analyzed this speech as an attempt to psychologize Aaron’s malignancy. Joyce Green MacDonald, for example, argues that “the ineradicable problem” of the play is the fact that “audiences identif[y] with Aaron’s point of view . . . [despite the fact that] the racialist discourse out of which Shakespeare shaped him posits an absolute gap between the racial selves it denominated as ‘black’ and ‘white.’”19 I think the speech signals a significant linguistic change in the play, however. Far from being mere additions to the play, Aaron’s statements about his race are substitutions for his linguistic dexterity. Through this early speech by Aaron, Ravenscroft seeks to reinstate the certainty of a type of linguistic essentialism. Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus cuts Aaron’s powerful tongue from his mouth, and, of course, one can read this as a type of linguistic and theatrical castration: the organ and symbol of his power is ritualistically removed. While Aaron instigates almost all of the malicious events in the play, his threatening power is no longer located in his linguistic dexterity. Indeed, unlike Shakespeare’s original, Ravenscroft’s rewrite contains no orders to stop Aaron’s mouth by the end of the play because there is no need; he does not pun on washing, cutting, and trimming Lavinia’s body, and he does not curse to be a devil in hell in order “to torment [Lucius] with [his] bitter tongue” (5.1.150). Ravenscroft transforms Aaron’s “bitter tongue” into the consuming tongue of a cannibal. After Tamora has killed their biracial baby, Aaron wails: She has out-done me in my own Art — Out-done me in Murder — kill’d her own Child. Give it me — I’le eat it. (5.1) These words lack any playfulness; they do not attempt to yoke the realistic horror of the situation with a figure of speech. Instead, Aaron ends with a mouth that desires to consume. But unlike the threatening cannibalistic symbol of the pit in Shakespeare’s original, Aaron’s desire for cannibalism in Ravenscroft’s revision is contained and containable. 20 He only wants to eat his own. His cannibalism would in fact free Rome from the racially (and therefore linguistically) unstable body — this biracial corpse. Marcus’s words, which close the scene with the flaming pyre set around the Moor, taunt Aaron’s linguistic ineffectiveness: “Snarle on, and like a Curs’d fell dog, / In howlings end thy life” (5.1). Unlike Lucius’s admonition at the end of Shakespeare’s play to stop one’s ears against Aaron’s cries for food or

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pity, Ravenscroft makes it clear that Aaron’s language has no power over the Romans, who invite his “Snarle[s]” and “howlings.” Ravenscroft removes the language play and linguistic miscegenation of Shakespeare’s original in order to restore and reinstate the power of literal language: a type of linguistic essentialism. He explores literal language in explicit ways that Shakespeare’s original did not. Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia has a sharp undercurrent of literal (and explicit) language, as is evidenced in the revised title. This rewriting becomes clear early in the play when Titus’s two sons, Quintus and Martius, are framed for killing Bassianus; they are sent to the “scaffold” (4.1) and await their “punishment” (4.1) from the “Executioner’s Axe” (4.1). And when Titus attempts to “ransom them from punishment” (4.1), Aaron provides an “Executioner with his Axe” to cut off Titus’s hand (4.1). Likewise, Saturninus asks the tribunes to “drag [Titus] round the City with wild Horses” (5.1) and to “take him away, and hang him” (5.1) when Titus feigns madness. Although executions were commonplace in revenge tragedies, this exact and literal language about the workings of executions did not occur in Shakespeare’s original: Ravenscroft added them all.21 The most shockingly literal language occurs in the fi nal scene of the play in which Titus has Aaron tortured on the rack and then burned to death onstage. In a mock trial, Titus sets a scene in which he plays the grand inquisitor. Titus’s discourse is remarkably different in Ravenscroft’s play because it has an alarmingly active quality: the torturer’s language promises that specific actions will occur. The torturer’s power lies in the fact that his language palpably demonstrates the differences between his victim and himself. Unlike his victim, the torturer’s words become deeds. Thus, Titus questions Aaron: What! Monster art thou sullen? But this and more, much more thou shalt confess. Drag him from hence, within there is a rack, Go bind him to’t, that shall extort from him Each secret that lies hid in his dark soul. (5.1) Ravenscroft creates an active discourse which seeks to discover information by emphasizing disparities in power. It is interesting to note that the characters of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus repeatedly demonstrate the tyranny of their desire to make language into action by forcibly silencing their adversaries. Tamora has Lavinia gagged when she asks for clemency, and then Chiron and Demetrius cut out her tongue. Saturninus orders Quintus and Martius’s mouths stopped so they cannot plead their innocence. Lucius stops Aaron’s mouth to prohibit his tirade of curses. And Titus binds Chiron and Demetrius’s mouths to silence their cries of pain. The tyranny of the belief in the active force of language is demonstrated most palpably in Titus Andronicus when language is denied — when the tongue is literally

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and figuratively split from the body. The desire to silence, however, implies that the speaker and the speaker’s words have a certain power. In other words, through silencing, the characters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus implicitly acknowledge the parity between individuals because personal narratives and pleas are potentially individuating and uniting. In Ravenscroft’s rewrite, however, Titus plays the part of the torturer and begins by questioning (“art thou sullen?”) and ordering (“thou shalt confess,” “Drag him from hence,” “Go bind him to’t,” etc.). The force of the imperatives is not to silence but to engage and reveal. Titus seeks to “extort” the secrets that hide within Aaron’s “dark soul.” The reference to Aaron’s darkness reveals how closely Ravenscroft related Aaron’s race with the opacity of his motives. In other words, the darkness of his skin color is interpreted as obscuring meaning, and therefore necessitates the employment of torture. In addition, Titus’s words and actions serve to construct the fundamental differences between himself and Aaron: his use of torture is meant to erase the possibility of equity between them. His torture will reveal the truth by finally uniting the signifier with the signified in his confession. Saturninus asks, “If she [Lavinia] was ravish’d, tell by whom?” (5.1). To which Titus responds, “That can Aaron tell” (5.1), and the stage direction reads, “The Moor discover’d on a Rack.” Titus begins: Empress keep your seat, What here you see is now beyond redress. Moor confess the ravishers. [Aaron shakes his head in sign he will not]22 No! Stretch him. – By whom hadst thou this black brat, This babe of darkness? [Aaron shakes his head again] Nor that either: Disjoynt his limbs. Say now, did not Chiron and Demetrius By thine and this Empress advice, Wrong my Lavinia, and prompted By you two, murder Bassianus? (5.1) Titus’s unambiguous, single-meaninged words (“Stretch him” and “Disjoynt his limbs”) carry a force that was absent in the language of Shakespeare’s play. His words are action; the language of the torturer is necessarily the language of imperatives, which rely on action and force. The explicit stage directions (“Aaron shakes his head in sign he will not”) emphasize the force of the imperatives. Although the term is anachronistic, the stage direction’s imperatives mimic the force of the verbal commands. The language (ordering) and action (viewing) of the torture of Aaron stabilize the Roman society in a way that was impossible in Shakespeare’s original. Aaron’s confession (“Twas [Tamora’s] two sons that murder’d Bassianus. / They cut Lavinia’s tongue and ravish’d her. / . . . / Indeed I was their tutor to instruct them” (5.1)) is neither playful nor punning, but the

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desired revelation sought by the torturer’s inquiry. Aaron’s confession unites the signifier with the signified which his linguistic miscegenation inevitably served to separate and shatter in Shakespeare’s original. But, of course, torture does not only exist in a linguistic framework. The onstage torture of Aaron reinforces the connections between racial designations and linguistic (in)stabilities. Titus does not find it necessary to torture (either onstage or off) the two rapists, Chiron and Demetrius. Despite the fact that they never confess to Lavinia’s rape, Titus does not require them to profess their crimes. Not only have their crimes been literally publicized and written on the ground by Lavinia, but also they have been figuratively publicized by Chiron and Demetrius’s white skins. Like Aaron’s understanding of their whiteness as lucidity (“What, what, ye sanguine-hearted boys! / Ye white-limed walls! Ye alehouse painted signs!” [4.2.99–100]), Titus reads their white skins as transparent. In other words, their whiteness, their ability to blush and reveal the “close enacts and counsels of [their] hearts” (4.2.120), renders them translucent and easy to understand. The onstage torture of Aaron demonstrates the fear of the opacity of blackness and a desire to read the racialized body in an explicitly linguistic and physical way. In other words, it is not enough to receive Aaron’s confession; we must see his tortured body as well. It is important to remember that although there were (and still are) many variations of the rack, the basic principle was always the same. A victim’s hands were secured by ropes to a beam at one end, and cranks and ropes attached to the feet at the other end gradually stretched the body. While it is obvious that the rack renders the victim vulnerable through excruciating physical pain, the rack also tortures by exposing the body to the unmediated gaze. The onstage torture of Aaron refocuses the entire gaze on the body in Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus. The audience is allowed to gaze upon his body and the altering of his body in a way that is not provided for with the other characters. Despite the fact that one critic has argued that the play “used the growing fashion for female actresses to display the human body in extreme forms,” the rape and mutilation of Lavinia still occur offstage in Ravenscroft’s play.23 In addition, Ravenscroft removes Titus’s self-mutilation, the cutting off of his own hand, from onstage and places it outside of the audience’s viewpoint offstage. It is the racking and stretching of Aaron, however, that moves onstage in to view. His torture is not provided as a substitution for Lavinia or Titus’s pain — a way of understanding their suffering — but rather as a marked difference from theirs. The audience is expected to revel in his racking and feel secure with his fi nal burning, a visible purgation of evil from Rome, an evil that is made visible through Aaron’s blackness. Ravenscroft needs his audience to view Aaron’s body in this open, vulnerable, and exposed way in order to demystify Aaron’s power once and for all. Shakespeare’s Aaron, the demi-devil with the forked tongue, exists in Titus Andronicus as a force that cannot be fully controlled and contained;

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he lives beyond the scope of the play despite Lucius’s promise of a prolonged execution of being buried alive. And Aaron’s child, the offspring that Aaron reads as his double — “The vigour and picture of my youth” — also outlives the play, an unknown threat that still dwells within Rome. Aaron and his child, then, begin to resemble the black man/devil in medieval dramas: the devil can be thwarted but never killed. Aaron is dismayed, but still lives in Shakespeare’s play. The onstage torture and killing of Aaron in Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia removes all of these medieval implications of the black man as devil. While Aaron’s color may be an outward manifestation of his evil nature, it is no longer a sign of his demonic and mystical status. The audience sees him tamed, controlled, and undeniably vulnerable. The voyeuristic gaze is satisfied with this visual feast, the consuming of the black man’s body. The audience is repulsed and excited by Aaron’s desire to eat his dead son’s body — “Give it me — I’le eat it” — because Titus’s bloody dinner party would be complete and all of the dishes scraped clean. Ravenscroft, after all, critiqued Shakespeare’s original for being an “indigested piece.” In his revision, the black body becomes digestible in that it is transformed into something consumable. Emphasizing the disparity between himself and Aaron, Titus transforms Aaron into burned flesh as meat. 24 No longer an individual with extraordinary linguistic skills that called one to recognize the potential for equity, Ravenscroft’s Aaron the Moor becomes meat; that which is consumed specifically because it has been denied equity. The relationship between color, rhetoric, and notions of race, then, is extremely complex. Although one might assume that a play like Titus Andronicus — one that pays so much attention to color as a signifier for race — would present a stable notion of race, the exact opposite appears to be true. More like than unlike the plays I discussed in chapter 2 that do not associate race with color, these texts vacillate between ways to defi ne race. Color, far from presenting a stabilizing signifier, remains as unstable as any other signifier as is evidenced by the linguistic miscegenation promoted by Shakespeare. Ravenscroft sought to digest the uncertainty of the semiotic significance of color by constructing the white/right gaze that scenes of torture enable. Nevertheless, the semiotic significance of race as represented through color still invites a confl icted reading.

DECONSTRUCTING ESSENTIALISM/ RECONSTRUCTING ABJECTION In some ways, Thomas Southerne’s 1695 stage adaptation of Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko can be read as a critique of Ravenscroft’s depiction of blackness in Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia. Oroonoko exposes as fallacious the belief that torture affords control of the foreign and racialized body. In fact, Southerne’s play depicts the African prince Oroonoko

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in such heroic terms that his torture at the hands of the white planters in Surinam can only be interpreted as a heinous crime. This fact was so readily apparent that the novella and play were revised into explicitly-identified abolitionist texts used to promote the freedom of slaves and the end to the use of cruel and inhumane treatments of them.25 Southerne’s play works to reveal the hypocrisy behind essentialist beliefs by demonstrating that torture is often employed because torturers desire to mark and control the body of the victim. In other words, Oroonoko exposes the social constructivist heart of torture. This revelation, however, can only be achieved through the depiction of torture itself, thus, constantly restaging the abjection of the racialized victim. Thomas Southerne adapted Behn’s romance for the Restoration stage in 1695. A friend of Behn’s and an experienced adapter of her work (he had already created a stage production of The History of the Nun, or the Fair Vow Breaker in 1694), Southerne criticized Behn’s failure to stage Oroonoko. In his dedicatory epistle to William Cavendish, Southerne wrote that he “often wondered that [Behn] would bury her favorite hero in a novel when she might have revived him in the scene.”26 Although the ending is much less graphic, Southerne’s adaptation of Oroonoko sticks closely to Behn’s plot. His various alterations, however, reveal a good deal about his construction of race. Imoinda, for instance, is no longer the “black Venus” Behn created in the romance, 27 but is instead described as the daughter of a “white” man who happened to live in Coramantien (2.2.71–94). 28 In addition, Southerne layered over the tragic plot with a comic one, relating the story of the English Welldon sisters who travel to Surinam in search of rich husbands.29 While I fi nd these alterations fascinating, I will primarily explore Southerne’s transformation of Oroonoko’s torture to the stage and analyze how it impacts his construction of Oroonoko’s racial identity. It is clear that Southerne constructs Surinam as a colony painfully aware of racial differences. It is not simply that the colony’s economy runs solely on a forced African labor pool, but also that everyone discusses the differences between the Europeans and Africans in terms of black and white: the differences are not addressed in terms culture or religion so much as they are discussed in terms of the external marker of color. Likewise, the text posits that Oroonoko’s blackness inspires fear and violence in the “white” captain and planters. Because Oroonoko’s difference is understood as essential, the colonists feel the need to chain and torture him at various points in the play. For instance, when Oroonoko is fi rst introduced by the English captain who tricked him into slavery, Stanmore and Blanford insist that Oroonoko’s princely status should dictate that he be treated better than the common slaves. Captain Driver, however, insists that he originally intended Oroonoko as a showpiece in England but that he found him too troublesome to carry further (1.2.184–186). Immediately following this revealing exchange, Southerne’s stage directions read: “Black slaves, men, women, and children, pass across the stage by two and two; Aboan,

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and others of Oroonoko’s attendants two and two; Oroonoko last of all in chains” (1.2). Oroonoko’s fi rst presentation, then, highlights how Captain Driver interprets race in an essentialist way: Oroonoko’s black skin is the only signifier Captain Driver is willing to acknowledge. Despite the fact that he is aware of Oroonoko’s princely status, Driver reads his blackness as more significant than his social position. Oroonoko’s black skin can be commodified by the captain (either as a show piece or a slave), but containment through chains is the only way the captain can imagine the potential commodification of this essentially different being. Stanmore and Blanford’s reactions of horror, of course, are meant to reveal the baseness of the captain’s belief in racial essentialism, and the play works to reveal how a belief in racial essentialism invites violence. Oroonoko is chained at various points in the play when his color, and not his actions, is interpreted as a threat. When the Indians begin to revolt in Surinam, for example, Oroonoko had been sitting with the lieutenant governor, watching the slaves “sing and dance” for Imoinda’s entertainment (2.3.77). Despite the fact that he had been a peaceful guest of the lieutenant governor, Oroonoko’s blackness is interpreted as a threat that must be quelled through chains. Upon hearing of the uprising, the lieutenant governor declares: There’s no danger of the white slaves; they’ll not stir. Blanford and Stanmore, come you along with me. Some of you stay here to look after the black slaves. (2.3.122–124) The blackness of the African slaves marks them as potentially dangerous, unlike their more tractable “white” counterparts who inhabit the same slave status. It is no wonder then, that Captain Driver and the planters immediately seize Oroonoko after the lieutenant governor has run off to quell the revolt. Captain Driver orders: Bring the irons hither. He has the malice of a slave in him and would be glad to be cutting his masters’ throats; I know him. Chain his hands and feet that he may not run over to ’em [the other black slaves]. (2.3.130–133) According to Captain Driver, Oroonoko’s blackness alone serves as the true indicator for his hidden desire (“to be cutting his masters’ throats”). In Driver’s analysis, actions are false signifiers: it does not matter that Oroonoko had been peacefully sitting by his masters’ sides only moments before. Instead, his threatening motives are always clearly revealed by his dark exterior: his blackness reveals the essential quality of his difference from and danger to the white Europeans. Far from presenting this essentialist view as unique to the captain, the play seems to suggest that a belief in racial essentialism fuels the entire

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colony. While the captain and the lieutenant governor may express this belief in the most violent ways, even the Welldon sisters seem to read color as revealing essential differences. Understanding the fact that Southerne critiques the entire colony’s reliance on essentialism, one can see why he transformed Behn’s female narrator into the two Welldon sisters. Lucy and Charlotte seek rich husbands in Surinam, but they never seem attracted to Oroonoko in Southerne’s adaptation. Unlike Behn’s female narrator who rhapsodizes about Oroonoko’s beauty, Lucy and Charlotte seem immune to Oroonoko’s charms. They focus on white objects instead because Southerne constructs their society as viewing blackness as a clear signifier for danger. Like Shakespeare’s/Ravenscroft’s Aaron the Moor, Oroonoko recognizes that the English have constructed their colonial society in essentialist terms. He acknowledges that his condition as a slave in this society has been determined through a belief that there are essential differences between white and black. And like Aaron the Moor, Oroonoko’s fi rst reaction to this knowledge is to invert the essentialist terms: he lauds blackness for being unable to reveal a blush. Attempting to create a space for pride in his black color, Oroonoko gives voice to the differences that exist between the planters and himself. Upon fi rst seeing the African prince, the English planters in Surinam exhibit their interest in Oroonoko’s blackness by “pulling and staring” at him (as the stage direction explicitly dictates in 1.2), while he proudly responds: Let ’em stare on. I am unfortunate but not ashamed Of being so. No, let the guilty blush, The white man that betrayed me. Honest black Disdains to change its color. (1.2.240–244) In some of the fi rst words he delivers in the play, Oroonoko acknowledges the importance and preeminence of visual cues in this society. The planters are not discussed in terms of their Christianity, Englishness, or class — markers which Southerne (and Behn before him) emphasizes at various points in the play — but solely in terms of their whiteness. The colony on Surinam, then, is presented as creating a society in which both the African slaves and the English colonists agree that color reveals essence. Southerne’s play, of course, presents this essentialist discourse as hypocritical. For example, Captain Driver does recognize that there is something different about Oroonoko. Driver’s initial plan to exhibit Oroonoko reveals that he could differentiate between Africans: their blackness did not make them all essentially the same. The play also works to expose the hypocrisy of Oroonoko’s espoused essentialism. He is after all married to a “white,” and Oroonoko does not treat Imoinda’s whiteness as a sign that she is less “honest” because she can “blush.” While some critics have argued that “Miscegenation simply is not a focus of unease on the Restoration stage,”30 Southerne’s transformation of Behn’s “black Venus”

68 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage into a “white” serves several important points. Not only does it serve to lessen anxieties about the English planters’ desire for Imoinda, but also it serves to reveal the hypocrisy of Oroonoko’s essentialism. Far from merely reflecting the “culture” of the Restoration stage which “often romanticized interracial marriage,” Southerne’s play employs an interracial marriage in order to challenge simplistic notions of essentialism (Hughes, 5). Southerne increases the pressure he places on essentialist beliefs through increased portrayals of violence in Oroonoko. Because this society almost exclusively interprets methods of distinction in terms of color and because blackness is read as signifying a potential danger, chains become the chosen method for containing the perceived threat. Oroonoko’s chains begin to signify another form of containment in Southerne’s final act, however. Throughout the play, the chains had been temporary measures employed by the base captain and planters. By Act Five, however, they begin to resemble a more systematized method of denigration and debasement employed by the state — torture. Southerne’s stage direction states, “The scene drawn shows Oroonoko upon his back, his legs and arms stretched out, and chained to the ground. Enter Blanford, Stanmore, [Widow Lackitt, Charlotte] and others” (5.3). As Bridget Orr has convincingly argued, this scene eerily echoes Cortez’s discovery of Montezuma’s racking at the end of John Dryden’s The Indian Emperour (I discuss this incident and play in detail in chapter 4). According to Orr, “By mirroring Montezuma’s racking in Oroonoko’s (by means of identical timing, means of torture, and discovery by well-meaning Europeans), Southerne leaves little room for an English audience’s comfortable presumption that such barbarities were a peculiarity of Spanish conquistadores.”31 Pushing Orr’s argument a little further, however, I want to emphasize how confl icted the text is about the connection between Oroonoko’s color and the torture he must endure by the state’s top representative, the lieutenant governor. The depiction of torture is employed not only to deconstruct the idea that colonial barbarism was only a Spanish “peculiarity,” but also to reveal that essentialist beliefs often collapse into social constructivist ones. Historical sources reveal that the treatment of African slaves in the colonies was becoming an increasing source of anxiety in England. George Warren, writing about black slaves in Surinam, did not hesitate to name their treatment as a torture. In a text that probably influenced Aphra Behn, Warren declared that African slaves were: sold like Dogs, and no better esteem’d but for their Work sake, which they perform all the Week with the severest usages for the slightest fault. . . . These wretched miseries not seldome drive them to desperate attempts for the Recovery of their Liberty, endeavoring to escape, and, if like to be re-taken, sometimes lay violent hands upon themselves; or if the hope of Pardon bring them again alive into their Masters power, they’l manifest their fortitude, or rather obstinacy in suffering the most

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exquisite tortures can be infl icted upon them, for a terrour and example to others without shrinking.32 Warren makes it clear that the “most exquisite tortures” devised by the colonists in Surinam were used as a method to subdue the other African slaves. Southerne clearly echoes these lines when he has Aboan warn Oroonoko that their plan to escape risks torture if they are captured: “For now if we should fall into their hands, / Could they invent a thousand murd’ring ways / By racking torments, we should feel ’em all” (3.4.63–65). But what lies behind Warren’s text, and Southerne’s play as well, is the fact that the Africans’ blackness becomes the mark that necessitates the “exquisite tortures.” The slaves are not suspected of some hidden perfidy if they are captured after an attempted escape: their perfidy would be publicized and well known at that point. Instead, the employment of torture exposes the contradictory way that racial identity was understood. While the blackness of the body was read as revealing a corrupt interior, the use of torture exposes a desire to read identity as socially controllable and, therefore, socially constructed: torture becomes a way to mark an already marked body. While torture was (and is) often employed in the hopes of discovering a secret plot, Warren’s and Southerne’s depictions of torture in Surinam describe a different kind of torture — a torture that is necessitated by something other than hidden knowledge or a hidden interior. This torture is necessitated simply by the fact that difference is constructed in essentialist terms. When the color of a body is understood in essentialist terms, differences are understood as being visible and easily detectable, on the one hand, and indelible and ineradicable, on the other. It is important to remember that Oroonoko was performed in blackface by John Verbruggen: a role for which he became famous. Torture, however, allows one to expose, control, and alter that body. Thus, torture becomes a way for the colonists to place their own distinctive mark upon the racialized body. Southerne’s Oroonoko articulates his understanding of this when he is discovered on the rack: Forget! Forgive! I must indeed forget When I forgive; but while I am a man In flesh that bears the living mark of shame, The print of his dishonorable chains, My memory still rousing up my wrongs, I never can forgive this governor, This villain. (5.3.45–51) Oroonoko understands that the lieutenant governor used the rack and chains to attempt to “mark” the African prince as his own: Oroonoko reads the “print” of the chains as “living mark[s] of shame” and dishonor precisely because of this fact. Thus, Southerne employs the stage rack to reveal how a belief in racial essentialism deconstructs itself in a colonial

70 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage setting. To put it crudely, it is not in the master’s best interest to believe that the racial body signifies an indelible mark of difference because this would prevent the master from marking the slave in his own image. Southerne’s play, Oroonoko, exposes the fallacy at the heart of essentialist ideologies: a belief in essentialism does not allow for change, control, or even access. Thus, the play suggests, those who subscribe to essentialism inevitably fall into social constructivism when it suits them most — when they desire the ability to change, control, and access the racialized Other. While Southerne’s depiction of the collapse of essentialism in the face of the desire to mark/make the Other is impressive for its insightfulness, the play nevertheless constructs the abjection of Oroonoko as essential to understanding this collapse. While the aristocracy greets the torture of Oroonoko with disgust and disbelief, it nevertheless takes his torture to win them fully to his side. Upon seeing Oroonoko on the rack, Blanford cries, “O miserable sight” (5.3.1), and Stanmore protests, “We are not guilty of your injuries, / No way consenting to ’em, but abhor, / Abominate, and loathe this cruelty” (5.3.7–9). At this moment it is clear that the audience is supposed to feel the aristocracy’s disgust and contempt for the senselessly cruel treatment of the African prince. Blanford and Stanmore give voice to the notion that the use of violence against African slaves does not socially construct them into controlled and controllable beings: marking slaves does not remake them. Until the aristocracy sees Oroonoko’s torture, however, this belief was not fully entrenched for them. Lucy and Charlotte, for example, do not at fi rst fear the potential ramifications of the slave rebellion. When Lucy reports, “There’s something the matter too with the slaves, some disturbance or other; I don’t know what ’tis” (4.1.210–211), Charlotte reads the “disturbance” as an opportunity to further their own marriage plots: “So much the better still. We fish in troubled waters; we shall have fewer eyes upon us” (4.1.212–213). Far from abhorring the violence that will be sparked by the rebellion, Lucy and Charlotte pragmatically plan to use it to their advantage. By the time that Oroonoko’s torture has been revealed to Lucy and Charlotte, however, they both sue for his sake, proclaiming to the lieutenant governor, “We all petition for him” (5.2.25). Despite the fact that Southerne critiques the use of torture on both essentialist and social constructivist terms, the revelation of Oroonoko’s tortured body becomes the only way to transform the aristocracy fully. In other words, Blanford, Stanmore, and the Welldon sisters need to see Oroonoko’s debasement in order to change their own viewpoints. While I fundamentally agree with Joyce Green MacDonald’s analysis in her article “The Disappearing African Woman” that the violence enacted upon Oroonoko serves to make his black body more easily “assimilable” into the seventeenth-century English understanding, I want to point out how conflicted the play remains about the nature of Oroonoko’s identity

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(81). In some ways, by deconstructing both essentialist and social constructivist notions of racial identity, the play ends with Oroonoko’s race and identity as wholly separate from those of his white, English counterparts. Southerne creates Oroonoko as a figure who is able to keep his identity and interiority inaccessible, despite the treatment he receives. The audience learns this early in the play when Oroonoko is fi rst paraded across the stage in chains. Although Blanford suggests that Oroonoko will receive special treatment from the actual governor (whenever he will arrive on the chaotic scene), Oroonoko suggests that the way he is treated will have no bearing on his self (i.e., internal) identity. Tear off this pomp and let me know myself. The slavish habit best becomes me now. Hard fare and whips and chains may overpow’r The frailer flesh and bow my body down. But there’s another, nobler part of me, Out of your reach, which you can never tame. (1.2.250–255) Southerne is only able to deconstruct the lieutenant governor’s desire socially to mark Oroonoko as his subject and property by creating a character who believes in his own inaccessible interiority. Not only does Oroonoko emphasize that his perception of himself is more important than anything imposed on him (“let me know myself”), but also he stresses that he will never be accessible to the English colonists (he is “out of [their] reach”). Southerne creates a character that is unrepresentable because there exists a part of him that is inaccessible, unknowable, and uncontrollable, and this, of course, ends up recreating an essentialist ideology. Southerne posits that it is important to witness the African prince’s abjection in order to understand the hypocrisy behind essentialist beliefs, on the one hand. And on the other hand, he ends up re-constructing this essentialist ideology in order to allow his prince to remain unchanged. While Stephanie Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarcon contend that Behn often collapses the notion of protecting with that of violating because “there is no easy distinction between honor and horror,” I believe that Southerne’s play connects honor and horror because Oroonoko’s identity is represented as unrepresentable.33 The moment when Oroonoko is revealed upon the rack exposes not only the cruelty of the act, but also the muddled reasons for depicting the act: it is both deplorable and necessary because race vis-à-vis color is coded as both an important and insignificant marker. In the end, Oroonoko’s debasement must be enacted to get this contradiction across. The debasement of the powerful black man must always be staged to expose the confused construction of race, and when it is exposed it necessarily exploits the construction once again, constantly reconstructing what it attempts to deconstruct. Thus, while Oroonoko seems to challenge the racial construction established in Titus Andronicus, both plays end up

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cycling through the same dialectical terms for race. Far from representing a post-Enlightenment/modern obsession, then, the pull between essentialism and social constructivism seems (dare I say it?) essential. Of course, there have been critics who point to the performance of race on the early modern stage — white male actors in blackface — as evidence that race was always understood in performative terms. As I mentioned before, we know that Oroonoko was played by John Verbruggen in blackface to great success. Attending to the obsessive language of color in Othello, for example, John Ford and Virginia Mason Vaughan have both argued that color referents in early modern drama should be read as metatheatrical moments that point to performance and reception cues.34 Understood in this light, these critics argue, one should be wary of arguments that discuss early modern notions of race in essentialist terms: the very performance techniques used to represent race on the early modern stage would have highlighted the performative nature of it. While I think this line of argumentation is absolutely right on one level, I think that it misses the way performance can reconstruct ideologically what it deconstructs performatively. In other words, the white actor in blackface does not simply represent the performative nature of race. Instead, the white actor in blackface may challenge essentialist views while simultaneously reconstructing a belief in the inaccessibility and essential differences between white and black. In addition, I think it is important to emphasize that no matter how one interprets the semiotic significance of the performance of blackness — whether in terms of celebration or condemnation — the portrayal of violent abjection enables the construction of the white/right gaze. While I argued in chapter 2 that a racializing epistemology is necessarily one in which the Other is continuously caught out, this racializing epistemology implicitly works by codifying the power of the white/right gaze. The white/ right gaze is invested and endowed not only with the power to control the gaze, but also with the power to determine whether the object in the gaze is read as fi xed/essential or alterable/constructed. The white/right gaze, thus, always works to codify its own normalization and power. I develop this idea more fully in chapter 4 through an analysis of the embedded role the English audience plays in John Dryden’s The Indian Emperour. In that heroic play the performance of torture racializes the victim in order to codify the white/right gaze. Marcus Wood concludes his analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury artistic representations of pain and torture inflicted on slaves by addressing how unstable the black body is in Western iconography. In a brilliant reading of the famous 1863 photograph, Gordon, of a black slave’s scarred and raised whipped back, Wood argues that representations of black physical suffering “emerge as an unstable phenomenon” (269). Extending this type of analysis, I have shown not only how prevalent these issues were in early modern theatrical depictions, but also how critics have

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turned a blind eye to the implications of these theatrical representations. The use of torture in both Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia and Southerne’s Oroonoko reveals how the disparate desires to bolster and challenge essentialism maintain the constant dialectical sway between essentialism and social constructivism, even when color is employed as a clear signifier for racial difference. While these plays are working from vastly different ideological viewpoints, both seem to bolster the power of the white/right gaze. Like the artistic depictions of slavery Wood analyzes, these plays are ultimately united through the codification of an implicitly empowered and erased (white) gaze.

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4

Racializing Civility The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards

Despite the fact that John Dryden publicly criticized Elkanah Settle’s use of the exotic and spectacular in The Empress of Morocco, Dryden himself was the target of a very similar attack at almost exactly the same time. Writing about The Conquest of Granada in particular, but aiming his derision at Dryden’s heroic plays in general, Richard Leigh anonymously published The Censure of the Rota in 1673. Attacking Dryden’s propensity for writing plays set in the New World, Africa, and the Indies, Leigh argues: He was the man Nature seem’d to make choice of to enlarge the Poets Empire & to compleat those Discovery’s others had begun to Shadow. . . . This Zany of Columbus has discover’d a Poeticall World of greater extent then the Naturall, peopled with Atlantick Colony’s of notional creatures, Astrall Spirits, Ghosts, & Idols, more various then ever the Indians worshipt, and Heroes, more lawless than their Savages.1 The heroic tragedy, a genre made popular during the Restoration, celebrated quests and conquests in foreign and exotic lands, but Leigh argues that Dryden employed the genre to attempt to fashion himself as the ultimate explorer and hero. This is a vital point to which I will return in a moment, but it is important first to note that Leigh argues that depictions of horrible scenes of violence (in these newly discovered “poeticall” lands) are central to the genre. Satirizing the way to construct one of Dryden’s heroic plays, Leigh names various horrible acts that must be displayed and enacted onstage. Rapes, kickings, rebellions, and violent killings are all named as essential to the creation of one of Dryden’s heroic plays. It is Leigh’s focus on Dryden’s role as a type of authorial and dictatorial torturer who enjoys presiding over a gruesome realm of exotic victims (“This Zany of Columbus”) that warrants further attention, however. Dryden seeks to “enlarge the Poets” role, according to Leigh, by creating outlandishly pagan Indians and “Heroes more lawless than their Savages.” The heroic tragedy functions, thus, not by constructing heroes within the play, but, rather, by constructing a hero outside of it — the author himself. 75

76 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage Leigh acknowledges the connections I have presented in earlier chapters: the foreign, the exotic, and the racialized were often constructed theatrically through scenes of violence and torture, but he adds an interesting twist. All of the figures represented in the heroic tragedy become foreign, exotic, and racialized. Only the author and, as I will argue, the audience become the heroic, and, of course, the heroic becomes codified as essentially English through the establishment of the white/right gaze: it becomes domestic, English, and the antithesis of the racialized Other. Even Dryden’s supporters, when defending him against Leigh’s attacks, confi rm the importance of the heroic outside of the play. Seizing on the image of Dryden as torturer, an anonymous defender of his sought to depict this characterization as a gross projection of the violence perpetrated instead by literary critics. The anonymous writer of A Description of the Academy of the Athenian Virtuosi (1673) claims to have visited the coffeehouse where Leigh and his fellow “virtuosi” convened to discuss literature. He describes their horrific habit of wearing fake teeth and nails to enhance their “biting and tearing other mens works.”2 Making the projection of their interest in violence and torture explicit, the author writes: But a little further we beheld many engins of torture: here indeed was the scene of death, here was one book suspended, another torn upon a tenterhook, a third dead from a stab receiv’d from a cruel Penknife; drawing nearer I found them all belonging to Mr. Dryden. Here lay Almanzor stretcht upon the rack, that pain might force out words far distant from his thoughts . . . and there the Indian Emperour was defac’d with the scratches of a barbarous stile. (13) The coffeehouse inhabited by the critics becomes a veritable torture chamber with characters and books visibly put to the torment. In addition, two of the tortured figures depicted are important foreign characters from Dryden’s plays — Almanzor and Montezuma. What becomes evident from the publicized debates about Dryden’s heroic plays is the extent to which the discourses employed for the heroic tragedy genre were deeply enmeshed in the discourses for race and torture. The critics who attack the Indian Emperour (see below for more about the conflation of the play’s title with the eponymous character) with a “barbarous stile” are linguistically linked with Leigh’s notion that the “Heroes [are] more lawless than their Savages,” thereby validating the idea that the author and audience are responsible for modeling heroism. The problem with Dryden’s detractors, the pamphlet implies, is their willingness to act in a barbaric fashion, like both the “Savages” and the conquistadors. Nonetheless, both the critics and defenders of Dryden’s work fashion their arguments in terms of the power, importance, and entitlement of the white/right gaze of the English audience. A racialization of the Other occurs through the codification of the right of some

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to gaze on Others as objects. Thus, this racializing epistemology always privileges those entitled to gaze. The Restoration’s preeminent tragedian, John Dryden, explores the politics of torture in two heroic tragedies, The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1665) and Amboyna, or The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants (1673). If English playwrights were distancing torture through exotic stagings, Dryden’s heroic tragedies demonstrate how difficult and complex this distancing process was. Despite the fact that heroic tragedies were known for celebrating conquests in foreign lands and for collapsing racial, religious, and cultural differences for the sake of the genre’s heroic structure, The Indian Emperour and Amboyna (discussed in chapter 5) exemplify how the conceptions of racial difference taxed the creation of the genre. Perennial rivals such as the Spanish and the Dutch were depicted as cruel and unheroic figures that used torture to satisfy bizarre bloodlusts. In these plays the rack appears on the stage as a device designed by England’s political rivals to aid in their unheroic conquests abroad. Like the pamphlet wars about Dryden’s use of the heroic tragedy discussed above, issues of race become eerily entwined in these depictions of torture. In these plays, however, race has less to do with the color, nationality, or religion of the characters depicted than the explicit inscription of the English audience’s normalization: one might even call it the anti-racialization of the English audience’s white/right gaze. Critics like Anne Barbeau have urged that the racking of Montezuma should not be “overemphasized,” because the Spanish cruelty merely mirrors the “bloody sacrifice” performed by the Indians at the beginning of the play: “Thus, the play opens and closes with two forms of abuse in the name of religion.”3 It is important to note, however, how Dryden distinguishes these two “bloody” acts theatrically: the Indian sacrifice of “Five hundred captives” occurs offstage (the Indian High Priest simply relates the past events by declaring, “The Incense is upon the Altar plac’d, / The bloody sacrifice already past” (1.2.3–4)), while the Spanish-devised torture occurs onstage during 150 lines of dialogue. 4 When critics do acknowledge this distinction, they often discuss it as anomalous. Bridget Orr, for example, argues that the torture of Montezuma disrupts the heroism of the play, and contends that the scene “break[s] into and disrupt[s] the formal harmony of a text whose representational strategies are intended precisely to displace and idealize such processes.”5 I argue, instead, that the scene of torture highlights the impossibility of “formal harmony” within the text itself. Dryden goes to lengths to locate heroism outside of the play precisely because of his fissured construction of racial differences: once again there is a vacillation between essentialist and social constructivist discourses for race. Like Joseph Roach, I read the heroic play as a narrative of “superabundance and sacrifice” that serves to “normaliz[e] regimes of whiteness.”6 Similarly, I see certain objects in these plays, like feathers and, I would add, stage racks, as being imbued not only with “the predication of overarching symbolic systems on the

78 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage material basis of wealth” (Roach, 131), but also with a racializing logic that anticipates late eighteenth-century fears of contamination and impurity. In the end, the differences between the English and the Spanish are inscribed in these heroic plays as an assumption of the English audience’s distance from the sites of contamination and impurity. In addition, the English audience’s civility, which is implicitly linked with a racialized construction of heroism, is consistently written onto the peripheries of the plays in the forms of dedications, prologues, and epilogues. Race, then, is constructed in The Indian Emperour as both essential and performative. I begin my examination of the heroic tragedy with its birth during the Interregnum through an analysis of William Davenant’s The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru. Like most critics who address Dryden’s Indian Emperour, I fi nd it instructive to begin with Davenant’s text not only because of Dryden’s obvious employment of it but also because of Dryden’s deviations from it. While Davenant includes a fantastical scene of Englishmen conquering the New World, Dryden notably does not include this fantasy. This difference helps reveal Dryden’s anxieties about contamination and the importance distance plays in The Indian Emperour. From there I will examine how Dryden frames The Indian Emperour in order to analyze how he constructs and implicitly normalizes the English audience. Then I will delve into the specific torture scene included in The Indian Emperour to see against what Dryden attempts to frame the English audience — the proximity of barbarism in conquest. This construction, of course, keeps both essentialist and social constructivist discourses of race in continued suspension in order to maintain a racialized power hierarchy. Dryden does not write race out of this play, as many have argued. Rather, he deconstructs a stereotypical view of the Spanish belief in racial essentialism only to reconstruct a type of essentialism that promotes the English white/right gaze and civility.

DAVENANT’S THE CRUELTY OF THE SPANIARDS IN PERU Sir William Davenant, Dryden’s theatrical and literary mentor as well as predecessor as poet laureate, staged The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru in 1658. A theatrical event which still evades clear definition, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru has been referred to as “historical dancing,”7 “more a propaganda documentary than a play,”8 and a “pseudo-masque.”9 The piece contains six entries instead of acts, which consistently follow a similar pattern, including a symphonic opening, a revelation of a scene within a frontispiece or arch, a speech delivered by the Inca Priest of the Sun, a song, and a concluding dance. Written during the Interregnum when acting was prohibited, Davenant’s experimental theatrical piece was originally billed as “The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru; exprest by Instrumentall and Vocall Musick, and by Art of Prospective in Scenes, &c. Represented

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Daily at the Cockpit in Drury Lane.”10 Although the piece has no plot, The Cruelty promotes a propagandistic view of the Spaniards’ destruction of the Incan Empire and therefore was allowed because it “supported [Cromwell’s] anti-Spanish policies.”11 As the title clearly states, Davenant’s piece condemns the Spaniards for their unjust treatment of the Indians. What might be less clear, however, is the fact that racial difference had to be conveyed not by actions or words — this was not a play after all — but through props and costumes alone. In my analysis of Davenant’s “pseudo-masque” I will highlight how Davenant attempts to imbue props and dances with racial signification. This was a politically astute maneuver that served to construct race in both essentialist and discursive terms. Recognizing how difficult it would be to convey his “plot” without any true action in the “morals in dumb show,” Davenant provides his audience with an “Argument of the whole design.” The “Argument” reads: The Design is fi rst to represent the happy condition of the People of Peru anciently, when their inclinations were govern’d by Nature; and then it makes some discov’ry of their establishment under the Twelve Incas, and of the dissentions of the two Sons of the last Inca. Then proceeds to the discov’ry of that new Western World by the Spaniard, which happen’d to be during the dissention of the two Royal Brethren. It likewise proceeds to the Spaniards Conquest of that Incan Empire, and then discovers the cruelty of the Spaniards over the Indians, and over all Christians (excepting those of their own Nation) who landing in those parts, came unhappily into their power. And towards the conclusion, it infers the Voyages of the English thither, and the amity of the Natives towards them, under whose Ensigns (encourag’d by a Prophecy of their chief Priest) they hope to be made Victorious, and to be freed from the Yoke of the Spaniard.12 In this “historical danc[e]” Davenant explores the way the blending of music, songs, static images, rhetorical speeches, and dances captures the feeling and sentiment of historical writing. Davenant based his theatrical piece on a popular propaganda text, John Phillips’s 1656 translation of Bartolome de las Casas’s work, newly titled The Tears of the Indians. Phillips’s translation was carefully constructed in order to justify Cromwell’s war with Spain. In his dedication to Cromwell, Phillips declares that his decision “to publish this Relation of Spanish Cruelties . . . [will enable] all good men . . . [to] see and applaud the Justness of Your [Cromwell’s] Proceedings.”13 The difficulty Davenant faced, of course, was in how to convey this interpretation of history through a non-dramatic performance medium. His heavy reliance on supplemental arguments reveals an anxiety that the music, dumb shows, and dances would not adequately capture and convey this history.

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In the beginning of The Cruelty the audience is presented with the perspective scene in which “the Natives, in feather’d Habits and Bonnets, [are] carrying in Indian Baskets, Ingots of Gold, and Wedges of Silver. Some of the Natives being likewise discern’d in their natural sports of Hunting and Fishing . . . [by] Coco-Trees, Pines, and Palmitos; and on the boughs of other Trees are seen Munkies, Apes, and Parrots; and at farther distance, Vallies of Sugar-Canes” (A3). Feathered habits, pieces of gold and silver, coco-, pine-, and palm trees, monkeys, apes, parrots, and sugarcane fields are all used to convey the differences between the New World and the Old. Like Joseph Roach, I read certain objects as being imbued with a racializing aesthetic. It is not merely alterity that is being expressed but also a difference that is racialized. In this way, racial difference is coded with specific materialist objects. If race could not be constructed through actions or language, then Davenant sought to signify racial difference through objects that are defamiliarized. Likewise, the Spaniards are racialized through the objects with which they are associated: their guns, dress, and instruments of torture. In the fourth perspective the Spaniards are depicted beginning their conquest: “for the Spaniards having fi rst bred an amazement in the Natives, by the noise and fi re of their Guns, and having afterwards subverted the elder Inca by assisting the younger, did in a short time attain the Domination over both by Conquest” (15). As many critics have noted, Davenant’s “pseudomasque” implies that the New World conquered itself through poor leadership and a civil war. The Spanish, thereby, were not heroic conquistadors, but fortunate opportunists. Augmenting this line of criticism, I want to highlight how Davenant racializes not only the Indians, but also the Spanish. If a racialized sense of Indian-ness is conveyed through objects, like material wealth, exotic costumes, and exotic settings, then the Spaniards do not escape this semiotic system. In other words, the Spanish are not represented in a normalized fashion — that is, in a way that makes their identity literally unremarkable. Rather, Spanish-ness, like Indian-ness, is emphasized, literally written into the script, through objects that are de-familiarized: guns that breed “amazement” and “Domination,” for instance. In the fi fth entry, Davenant presents the audience with a shocking scene of Spanish brutality, and the racialization of the Spaniards is accomplished through the use of specific objects. The scene description reads: A doleful Pavin is play’d to prepare the change of the Scene, which represents a dark Prison at great distance; and farther to the view are discern’d Racks, and other Engines of torment, with which the Spaniards are tormenting the Natives and English Mariners, which may be suppos’d to be lately landed there to discover the Coast. Two Spaniards are likewise discover’d, sitting in their Cloaks, and appearing more solemn in Ruffs, with Rapiers and Daggers by their sides; the one turning

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a Spit, whilst the other is basting an Indian Prince, which is roasted at an artificial fi re. (19) Davenant exposes the fraudulent nature of the Spaniards’ claims to heroic conquest. The apparel and accoutrements of the hero — cloaks, ruffs, rapiers, and daggers — are thrown aside for the devices of the torturer — the rack and the spit. As Roxann Wheeler has convincingly argued, civility was often constructed in racialized terms in the period. “Racial ideology,” she argues, “forms mainly around English responses to certain customs, dress, religion, and especially trading — in short, around a concept of civility.”14 Although I disagree with Wheeler’s assessment that “skin color . . . was not the primary issue when the British considered human difference in the fi rst half of the eighteenth century” (136) because, as I have argued, the emphasis on the material and discursive vacillates and the discourses are frequently substituted for each other, I think it is instructive to acknowledge the props that Davenant highlights in this scene. The presence of “Racks, and other Engines of torment,” alongside the misuse of “Rapiers and Daggers,” signals a loss of civility on the Spaniards part that racializes them as being unworthy of trade, colonies, and power in general. They are the Othered cannibal, after all. Of course, Davenant emphasizes the racialization of this loss of civility through the unexpected presence of the English mariners who “may be suppos’d to be lately landed there to discover the Coast.” While it would be horrific to depict the Spanish torturing and eating the Indians, it is not enough to emphasize their complete loss of civility. By placing English bodies next to Indians on the “Engines of torment,” Davenant underscores the Spanish cruelty: they are unable, or, worse, unwilling to discern the appropriate treatment for fellow Christians. The pairing of English bodies and Indian bodies on the rack, however, poses a meta-theatrical challenge. Because The Cruelty is not a dramatic piece — it is not a play but a “pseudo-masque” — props and costumes have to convey more meaning semiotically than they normally would in the theatre. Nevertheless, one must ask what the difference is between Spanish, English, and Indian bodies in this “pseudo-masque” if a set of props, like feathers, racks, cloaks, rapiers, and daggers, is what is imbued with racial meaning? Davenant’s emphasis on objects shows how easily these objects can be transported, both literally across oceans and figuratively onstage. The moment in The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru when Davenant seeks to create the clearest and most essential distinctions between the English, Indians, and Spanish is also the moment that deconstructs these distinctions. Perhaps because of this difficulty, this scene is not the climatic ending of the “historical danc[e]” as one might imagine it would be. The meta-theatrical crisis that occurs with the racking of Indian and English soldiers in the fi fth entry seems to challenge Davenant’s ability to

82 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage create a clear visual racial discourse. Thus, in the end, Davenant attempts to racialize the civility of actions over objects. This change signals an alteration of the performance strategy: a change from emphasizing static scenes, in which objects are imbued with a greater semiotic weight, to ones of motion and action. Moreover, this change signals the way materialist and discursive constructions of race are so often substituted for one another. The fi nal entry reads: This Song being ended, an Ayr consisting of three Tunes, prepares the grand Dance, three Indians entring fi rst, afterwards to them three English Soldiers, distinguished by their Red-Coats, and to them a Spaniard, who mingling in the measures with the rest, does in his gestures express pride and sullenness towards the Indians, and pays a lowly homage to the English, who often salute him with their feet, which salutation he returns with a more lowly gravity; whilst the English and the Indians, as they encounter, salute and shake hands, in sign of their future amity. (22–23) Davenant establishes a highly stylized social language that serves to racialize the Spaniards by distinguishing them from the normalized and empowered English. It is important to note that there are almost no objects mentioned in this description of the fi nal entry. Unlike the earlier descriptions which were so often weighted with physical objects imbued with a racialized semiotic significance, this entry is devoid of these objects. The differences between the English, Spanish, and Indians, then, are not in the objects they possess, even if the English are “distinguished by their Red-Coats,” but in the way they conduct themselves with the Indians. The Spaniards “express pride and sullenness,” while the English and Indians “salute and shake hands, in sign of their future amity.” In the end, it is the performance of civility that marks a crucial difference in Davenant’s construction of empire and race. Likewise, the performance itself had to change in order to accommodate this new racial signification process. This fantasy of benign conquest is acknowledged by Davenant to be just that; a fantasy. He writes in the argument for the sixth entry that “These imaginary English Forces may seem improper, because the English had made no discovery of Peru, in the time of the Spaniards fi rst invasion there; but yet in Poetical representations of this nature, it may pass as a Vision discern’d by the Priest of the Sun, before the matter was extant, in order to his Prophecy” (23–24). Representing a strange alliance between an Englishman (the dramatist, Davenant) and an Indian (the soothsayer, the Sun Priest), the fantasy is explained as both a “Poetical representation” and a “Prophecy” by the Indian Sun Priest. Critics have read the ahistorical and fantastical union of the English and the Indians in various ways.15 Susan Wiseman, for example, argues that the fantasy of colonial aggrandizement that Davenant expresses in his Interregnum dramas stems from his royal-

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ist need to displace his desire for a dominant cultural myth of absolute power.16 Wiseman argues that ultimately Davenant’s Interregnum plays like The Cruelty resist analysis in terms of royalist versus republican antagonisms because of this displacement of myths. Janet Clare, on the other hand, views The Cruelty as an explicitly royalist text. Clare writes that “Davenant’s presentation of the English army’s arrival in Peru, represented by the red-coated soldier of the New Model Army . . . may, in the light of the shrunken ambition of the Protector’s Western design, have signified to its audience not only a colonialist fantasy . . . but also . . . the anachronism of New World expansion nurtured by the Protectorate” (836). It is important to realize, however, that Davenant’s desire to demonstrate the cruelty of the Spaniards disrupts his original conception of the relationship between the Old and New worlds. The incongruous depiction of the English being tortured by the Spaniards creates a moment of representational crisis. The differences between the Indians and the English have to be collapsed completely in order to emphasize the cruelty of the Spaniards. The objects that had been imbued with racialized meanings to establish the distance between Europe and the New World have to be abandoned in order to show the schisms within Europe itself. The fact that this representational crisis occurs precisely when the body is exposed on the rack reveals a deep anxiety about the authenticity of these racial (and theatrical) differences. In the end, the play posits that true differences may only be social constructions (expressions of pride vs. handshakes).

FRAMING THE INDIAN EMPEROUR With an explicit scene of torture staged in the fi fth entry, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru set the stage for John Dryden’s interest in the theatrical possibilities for staging torture.17 In January 1664 John Dryden’s heroic play The Indian Queen, a Tragedy opened at the Theatre Royal, and for the next twenty years the play enjoyed great popularity. The story of a fi ctitious war between the Inca of Peru and the Indian Queen of Mexico was staged with all the greatest possible magnificence; no expense was spared for the sets and costumes. Aphra Behn even donated a set of wreaths and feathers from Surinam for the production.18 The following year in April 1665 Dryden produced a sequel to The Indian Queen, entitled The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. The Indian Emperour differed from its predecessor in that it staged the semi-historical events of the conquest of the New World by the Spanish, with the creative addition of a fantastical triumvirate comprised of Cortez, Vasquez, and Pizarro. Although the sets and costumes were the same as those used in The Indian Queen, The Indian Emperour surpassed its predecessor in popularity. King Charles II was said to have frequented the play often, and

84 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage different productions could be seen well into the middle of the eighteenth century. I begin with a discussion of the frames that surround The Indian Emperour because these extra-textual materials begin to inform the reader just how differently Dryden viewed his historical, heroic drama from Davenant’s “pseudo-masque.” Furthermore, I begin my discussion of the frames with one that Dryden clearly did not intend: Sir Walter Scott’s commentary on the nature of Dryden’s heroic drama. Written about 150 years after the fi rst production of The Indian Emperour, Scott’s comments have framed and influenced the notion of the heroic tragedy for many scholars of seventeenth-century literature. Interestingly, Scott was the fi rst critic to ask how the heroic drama could accommodate representing racial and cultural differences. In his edited collection of Dryden’s works, Scott writes: Neither is any circumstance of national character, or manners, allowed as an apology for altering the established character, which must be invariably sustained by the persons of the heroic drama. The religion and the state of society of the country where the scene is laid, may be occasionally alluded to as authority for varying a procession, or introducing new dresses and decorations; but, in all other respects, an Indian Inca, attired in feathers, must hold the same dignity of deportment, and display the same power of declamation, and ingenuity of argument, with a Roman emperor in his purple, or a feudal warrior in his armour; for the rule and decorum of this species of composition is too peremptory, to give way either to the current of human passions, or to the usages of nations.19 I begin with Scott because he frames the way the heroic tragedy has been addressed critically: with an assumption that heroism is, in fact, represented in the plays. Although few modern critics have taken up Scott’s barely concealed racism (“an Indian Inca, attired in feathers, must hold the same dignity of deportment . . . with a Roman emperor”), many have accepted Scott’s notion that all of the figures in the heroic tragedy are represented with “dignity.” Differences, according to Scott, were relayed through “new dresses and decorations,” but in all other respects “all the men, from Montezuma down to Pizarro, are brave warriors [who] only vary in proportion to the mitigating qualities which the poet has infused into their military ardour” (292). Scott’s argument, thus, makes The Indian Emperour seem remarkably close to Davenant’s The Cruelty: props and costumes carry a greater semiotic weight because the action is limited (necessarily in Davenant’s case and needlessly in Dryden’s case, according to Scott). This analysis, however, flattens the action of The Indian Emperour and disregards the performance strategies of the play. It is important to question how heroism figures in The Indian Emperour. The various frames that Dryden placed around the play, the dedicatory epistle, prologue, epilogue, etc., signal a

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certain uneasiness about the genre, and I think the issues of race and heroism lie at the heart of this uneasiness. While Dryden was clearly working from some historical sources such as New World accounts by Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Gonzalo de Tapia, Gonzalo de Umbria, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, and the letters of Cortez, he was also using English propaganda pieces about Spanish cruelty in the New World — Phillips’s translation of de las Casas and Davenant’s The Cruelty. Inga Clendinnen has shown how complicated and mysterious the actual historical events of the Mexican conquest were. She posits that “the subtle, powerful, insidious human desire to craft a dramatically satisfying and coherent story out of [the] fragmentary and ambiguous” historical information is the true tale of the conquest. 20 Of course, Dryden was self-consciously aware of his “desire to craft a dramatically satisfying and coherent story,” writing in “Of Heroic Plays” that “an heroic poet is not tied to a bare representation of what is true, or exceeding probable.”21 Dryden emphasizes the liberating aspect of heroic drama when he writes: The laws of heroic poem did not dispense with those of [the common drama], but raised them to a greater height, and indulged him a farther liberty of fancy, and of drawing all things as far above the ordinary proportion of the stage, as that is beyond the common words and actions of human life. (10) Acknowledging that plays do not spring fully formed out the head of Jove (or even the author), Dryden openly discusses the special place that heroic dramas have on the stage. They are not tied to “the ordinary proportion of the stage” and permit a “farther liberty of fancy.”22 It is interesting to note, however, that this “liberty of fancy” did not steer Dryden to create the same type of fantasy as Davenant’s when staging the conquest of the New World. Despite the fact that Dryden’s notion of this “liberty of fancy” would have explained the type of fantastical history of English conquest that Davenant created in The Cruelty, in The Indian Emperour Dryden creates an all-Spanish, if fantastical in their union, conquest. If many accounts of the 1521 conquest of Mexico had circulated in England by the time of The Indian Emperour’s debut in 1665, it is worth asking why Dryden constructed the historical events in this fashion, and what pressures he had to place on the heroic tragedy genre in order to accomplish this construction. In his dedicatory epistle for The Indian Emperour to Anne, Duchess of Buccleuch, Dryden describes his relationship with the court’s patronage as a poor man bestowing his “Child on some wealthy Friend, who can give it better Education.”23 Moreover, twice in the dedication Dryden claims that his creation is in need of the Duchess’s “protection” (23, 25). The child in this metaphor is presumably the play, but the substitution in this dedicatory epistle of the name Montezuma for the name of the play, The Indian Emperour, complicates the identification of Montezuma, the relationship

86

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between the author and the subject, and the metaphors that can contain that relationship.24 In addition, the dedication seems to serve to mask an anxiety about England’s lack of participation in the conquest of the New World. Dryden writes: Under your Patronage Montezuma hopes he is more safe than in his Native Indies: and therefore comes to throw himself at your Graces feet; paying that homage to your Beauty, which he refus’d to the violence of his Conquerours. He begs only that when he shall relate his sufferings, you will consider he is an Indian Prince, and not expect any other Eloquence from his simplicity, then that, with which his griefs have furnished him. His story is, perhaps the greatest, which was ever represented in a Poem of this nature; (the action of it including the Discovery and Conquest of a New World). (25) In this passage the name Montezuma shifts between several different significations. Montezuma, as the Indian Emperor of Mexico, is substituted for the proper name of the play itself, and therefore represents Dryden’s creation. But the passage also seems to invite a reading in which the name Montezuma represents the man himself. The man alone can pay “homage” to the Duchess’s beauty. This reading in which the name Montezuma represents the man himself invites a strange homage to passivity over action. Dryden contrasts the Duchess’s beauty with the violence of the Spanish conquistadors when Montezuma “comes to throw himself at [the Duchess’s] feet, paying that homage to [her] Beauty, which he refus’d to the violence of [the Spanish] Conquerors.” Unlike Davenant’s “historical danc[e]” which included the fantastical participation of the English in the conquest of the New World, Dryden’s play moves England’s participation into the dedication, the frame of the text. Thus, the English are both present and absent from the conquest of the New World, and the play implicitly asks if the Spanish conquest can truly be considered heroic if the play begins with this praise of an alternative form of conquest: one that is constructed as being more appealing to Montezuma himself. The passage also seems to identify the name Montezuma with the poet: “He begs only that when he shall relate his sufferings, you will consider he is an Indian Prince and not expect any other Eloquence from his simplicity.” The subject of this sentence, disclaiming his ability to express himself eloquently, sounds remarkably like a poet, like Dryden, who claims to be a poor man in need of patronage. In an interesting twist, however, Montezuma’s apology for his simplicity effaces Dryden’s role as the creator. Montezuma is both the created and the creator. In a bold fi nal move Montezuma is also identified with a conqueror: “His story is, perhaps, the greatest which was ever represented in a Poem of this nature; (the action of it including the Discovery and Conquest of a New World).” By eliding the Spaniards’ role in the “discovery and conquest”

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of this New World, Dryden makes “his story,” Montezuma’s play, seem self-propelled and self-revealing. Once again, the heroism of the Spanish conquest is called into question before the heroic tragedy has even begun. But the instability of the signification of the name Montezuma complicates Dryden’s ability to inscribe the English into this conquest. If the name Montezuma represents the play or the man himself, then the relationship between the creator and the created is unequivocal: the English audience and English author, then, are heroic. If the name Montezuma represents the poet or the conqueror, however, then the relationship between Dryden and Montezuma is ambiguous; and the role of the English play in this conquest is unclear. Who is the conqueror and who conquered? Who is active and who passive? And, ultimately, who is heroic? It is interesting to note that Dryden goes on to discuss the relationship between history and poetry in the next sentence of the dedication to the Duchess of Buccleuch. Dryden opines, perhaps too fervently: In it I have neither wholly follow’d the truth of the History, nor altogether left it: but have taken all the liberty of a Poet, to adde, alter, or diminish, as I thought might best conduce to the beautifying of my work; it being not the business of a Poet to represent Historical truth, but probability. But I am not to make the justification of this Poem, which I wholly leave to your Graces mercy. (25) The shift between the use of the unstable signifier, Montezuma, and this authored “work,” an emphatically self-conscious construction of history, is quite sharp. Dryden reinforces the role he himself as the poet plays in creating this heroic drama. Suddenly we are in the fi rst person, and Dryden no longer identifies his play as an orphaned offspring, but refers to it as “my work,” a work of poetry that is more interested in poetic constructions than historical truths. In this fi nal bold assertion Dryden depicts himself, the author, as the true hero — the craftsman of this conquest. Dryden’s fi nal concession that he cannot “make the justification,” because that is the province of “your Graces mercy,” further emboldens and ennobles the audience. If Dryden does not write a fantasy, as Davenant did, then the role of heroism itself must be rewritten: the English author and audience must model that behavior, Dryden’s dedication implies. As I demonstrated at the beginning of this chapter, however, Dryden’s critics like Richard Leigh in The Censure of the Rota received this assertion with a certain degree of skepticism (“This zany of Columbus”) that locates the uncertainty of creating an heroic tragedy out of events in which the English were conspicuously absent. Despite the fact that Dryden sees the heroic drama as affording him the “liberty” that “Historical truth” is incapable of, his positioning of the play in this dedication reveals a great deal of anxiety about the role that heroism plays both within the play and outside of it. Dryden’s depiction of the conquest of the New World in The Indian

88 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage Emperour struggles with heroism precisely because he wants to define race in both essentialist and social constructivist discourses. Because he is depicting events in which the English were not involved, he must create ways to distinguish between the Spanish, Indians, and English. Although he does not include the English in the play itself, he nonetheless employs Davenant’s racialization of civility. The difference, of course, is that Dryden attempts to racialize civility outside of the text itself, making the audience into the heroes of his drama. The Spaniards and the Indians in the play, then, become both essentially and socially racialized. The objects, actions, and reactions to torture are central to Dryden’s vacillating constructions of race in The Indian Emperour.

TORTURING THE NEW WORLD If Dryden frames The Indian Emperour with a dedication to the Duchess of Buccleuch in order to racialize civility and inscribe the English into the conquest narrative, then the play begins in a markedly different way. Unlike the Duchess who is figured as a patroness, who will offer Montezuma “protection” and accept his “homage” in return, Cortez, Vasquez, and Pizarro are figured as being unable to identify the proper relationship their Old World should have with the New World. In the fi rst scene of the play, when Cortez, Vasquez, and Pizarro land in Mexico, Cortez begins: On what new happy Climate are we thrown, So long kept secret, and so lately known; As if our old world modestly withdrew, And here, in private, had brought forth a new! (1.1.1–4) For Cortez, the Old World is figured as a woman who conceals her pregnancy. She modestly withdraws to some secret location and delivers forth the New World, her infant. It is important to note that Cortez’s remarks are in the conditional (“As if”), rendering this birthing metaphor inadequate and imprecise as an explanation for this new environment. The uncertainty of the conditional sentence structure highlights the constructed nature of the metaphor: the parent-child metaphor is denaturalized by Cortez’s uncertainty. Max Harris notes that Dryden borrows this metaphor from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, but implicitly “questions the words of Lucretius.”25 As these are the fi rst words of The Indian Emperour, the questioning tone sets the tenor for the entire play. Certainty in the relationship between the two worlds is lacking, and, consequently, certainty in the proper behavior towards this New World is also lacking. Vasquez attempts to clarify matters by responding to Cortez’s uncertainty with a clear declaration, but he too slips back into the conditional when he employs a metaphor for the Old and New worlds. He answers:

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Corn, Wine, and Oyl are wanting to this ground, In which our Countries fruitfully abound: As if this Infant world, yet un-array’d, Naked and bare, in Natures Lap were laid. No useful Arts have yet found footing here; But all untaught and salvage does appear. (1.1.5–10) Vasquez begins declaratively with a statement about the products the land lacks. Following this, he continues the New-World-as-orphaned-childof-the-Old-World metaphor: once again in a conditional structure that emphasizes the uncertainty of his position within this New World. But then Vasquez rejects the mother and child metaphor because the New World seems so unfamiliar to him that he can only describe it as “salvage” (i.e., an archaic form of “savage”). While Vasquez’s description of the New World as an “Infant” who is “Naked,” “bare,” and “untaught” does not convey a threatening image, his sudden use of “salvage” conjures all of the horror of the unfamiliar. His return to a declarative structure at the end of this speech, however, marks his attempt at certainty: the New World is savage. Not blindly following along, Cortez chastises Vasquez for his inability to sustain the metaphor, saying: Wild and untaught are Terms which we alone Invent, for fashions differing from our own: For all their Customs are by Nature wrought, But we, by Art, unteach what Nature taught. (1.1.11–14) While the birthing metaphor, as an invention did not offend Cortez, the terms “wild and untaught” register as a construction to him. 26 Cortez, thus, provides an explicit meta-commentary on the difficulties they are having both conceptualizing and constructing the New World linguistically. A far cry from the Duchess of Buccleuch, who is fashioned in an uncomplicated way, as both a patroness and protector of Montezuma, Cortez cannot seem to fi nd the appropriate way to address the New World. Pizarro attempts to ameliorate Cortez’s anxiety in the next lines by returning to the birthing metaphor. He adds to the conversation: In Spain our Springs, like Old Mens Children, be Decay’d and wither’d from their Infancy: No kindly showers fall on our barren earth, To hatch the seasons in a timely birth. Our Summer such a Russet Livery wears, As in a Garment often dy’d appears. (1.1.15–20) Pizarro figures Spain’s spring as a child of an old man; a child who is “Decay’d and wither’d from [her] Infancy.” Interestingly, Pizarro creates a new metaphor in which the Old and New worlds are both infants; he rejects the parent and child metaphor for a metaphor of sickly and healthy

90 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage children. If the Old and New worlds are both children, however, then Pizarro implicitly rejects the power relationship afforded in a parent/child metaphor, fi rst introduced by Cortez, for a more equitable relationship between the worlds. Vasquez fi nally attempts to construct yet another metaphor for the New World when he says: Methinks we walk in dreams on Fairy Land, Where golden Ore lies mixt with common sand; Each downfal of a flood the Mountains pour, From their rich bowels rolls a silver shower. (1.1.27–30) Disregarding his earlier claims that the land was barren, wild, and untaught, Vasquez now constructs the land as overabundant with riches. The birthing imagery, however, becomes translated into an act of defecation — the mountains spill “silver showers” from their “rich bowels.” Rejecting the inventions of the parent/child and the sickly/healthy children, Vasquez creates an invention of putrid self-creation. At this point in their discussion, the metaphors for “old” and “new” have been completely evacuated of their meaning (pun intended!). In this fi nal metaphor for the New World, the Old World plays no part; no longer in need of a parent or a sibling, the New World is self-perpetuating. In the end of this scene Cortez does not attempt to revive the birthing metaphor, nor does he attempt to revive the old/new dichotomy; instead he refers to Mexico as a “New Found World” (1.2.34). This opening scene painstakingly reveals how difficult it was for the Spaniards to conceptualize the signification of the New World. Far from an heroic response to conquest — a response that would mirror the construction of the relationship between Montezuma and the Duchess of Buccleuch — Dryden constructs Cortez, Vasquez, and Pizarro as essentially failing to live up to the heroic codes of conquest. They literally and figuratively do not know their place. While many critics have argued that Vasquez and Pizarro are figured unheroically, as Cortez evolves into one of the play’s true heroic figures, the distinctions these critics make between the Spaniards often elide how uncertain all three remain about their relationship with the New World and its inhabitants. The uncertainty with which Dryden paints the triumvirate in the fi rst scene of the play does not dissipate; rather, it persists, and marks the Spanish conquest of the New World as decidedly unheroic because they never seek to provide “patronage.” This, of course, becomes most apparent in the infamous torture scene. Act V, scene ii opens with the stage direction: “Montezuma, and Indian High Priest, bound; Pizarro, Spaniards with swords drawn, [and] a Christian Priest. . . . [The Spaniards] fasten [Montezuma and the Indian High Priest] to the rack, and then pull them.” The literalness of the scene cannot be ignored; it does not occur offstage with a messenger revealing the gruesome details to the audience. Instead it occurs in front of our eyes. Depicting interrogatory state torture,

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the scene displays Pizarro and a Catholic Priest interrogating Montezuma and an Indian Priest about the location of their gold. Pizarro: Thou has 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 refus’d his wealth, And hid his Gold, from Christian hands, by stealth: Down with him, Kill him, merit Heaven thereby. Indian 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 ’um at their length, And pull the streightned Cords with all your strength. [They fasten them to the racks, 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’le Plague you worse then you can punish me. Know I have Gold, which you shall never fi nd; No pains, no Tortures shall unlock my Mind. (5.2.1–20) We see and hear the Spanish Priest crank the rack and say, “Pull harder yet; he does not feel the rack” (5.2.21). And we see and hear the Indian Priest’s dying words, “Give leave, O King, I may reveal thy store, / And free myself from pains I cannot bear” (5.2.101-2). With this, the scene skillfully collapses many of the assumed differences between Indians and Europeans. As Joseph Roach argues, “The Indian Emperour draws on the horrors of human sacrifice to establish not only the uncanny otherness of the Indians but also their uncanny familiarity” (148). Despite the fact that Pizarro and the Christian Priest employ the rhetoric of religion in an attempt to justify their actions, their rhetoric is exposed to be just that: a sophistic attempt to extort gold from the Indians. While the Christian Priest calls Montezuma an “impious Heathen” and trusts that his “true God” will reward his actions with “Heaven,” Montezuma calls upon his own “gods” and names the Spanish search for gold as one fueled by “Sacrilegious Lust.” The parallel structure of the scene, of course, with two priests and two noblemen, seeks to deconstruct simplistic notions of savages and nobles. Likewise, the Spanish, who were constructed at the beginning of the play as less than heroic through their inability to think of Montezuma and the New World as needing patronage (as contrasted to the way Dryden constructs himself and the Duchess of Buccleuch in the dedication), suddenly become the

92 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage embodiment of savagery. Far from their earlier position, wondering how to construct the New World and their relationship to it, in this moment the Spaniards no longer wonder: it is clearly one of superiority that invites and allows brute force. As I mentioned earlier, other critics have argued that Pizarro’s actions are not representative of the entire conquest: they see Cortez as separated from this brutality and violence. After all, Cortez does come to rescue Montezuma from the rack. An argument for Cortez’s heroism and exceptionalism, however, ignores the way this scene of torture is highlighted performatively in the play. Act V, scene ii is the fi nal scene of The Indian Emperour. Not only does the Indian Priest die on the rack, but, presumably, the rack and his corpse stay on stage throughout the play’s resolution. Consequently, none of the “heroic” outcomes of this conquest — Cortez’s rescue of Montezuma, the retreat of Alibech and Guyomar, and the union of Cortez and Cydaria — can escape the taint of this most unheroic action — the racking of Montezuma and the Indian Priest. The prominence of the rack serves as a visual symbol for the problems with this type of conquest. The visual prominence of the rack invites the audience to think about the ways physical conquests necessitate brutality. Despite the fact that critics like Heidi Hutner have argued that Cortez “ultimately represents the ideal ruler in the play” (65), he is implicated in the brutality of this conquest when the rack remains onstage throughout his final conquest of “Indian Country.”27 After Cortez frees Montezuma from the rack, he hopes that Montezuma will resume his reign under Spanish control. Montezuma’s death speech belies the heroism of this offer. Freed from the rack, but nonetheless under Spanish rule, Montezuma declares: Name Life no more; ’Tis now a Torture worse than all I bore: I’le not be brib’d to suffer Life, but dye, In spight of your mistaken Clemency. I was your Slave, and I was us’d like one; The Shame continues when the Pain is gone: But I’m a King while this is in my Hand — [His Sword] He wants no Subjects, who can Death Command: You should have ty’d him up, t’have Conquered me; But he’s still mine, and thus he sets me free. [Stabs himself] (5.2.228–237) Montezuma’s suicide pact exposes Cortez’s offer as a “mistaken Clemency” that merely continues to “Torture worse” than the literal rack. According to Montezuma, there are no differences between Cortez, Pizarro, and the Christian Priest. Rather, all of the Spaniards require him to be a “Slave” because that is the only outcome for this type of physical conquest. Death is the only possibility for freedom from physical conquest. Although Cortez mourns Montezuma’s death, his fi nal words (and the fi nal words of the

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play) signal his tacit acceptance of Montezuma’s terms. Cortez concludes the play with a promise to give thanks “to the powers above, / Thus doubly Blest, with Conquest, and with Love” (5.2.378–379).

“YOUR PRACTIC’D WIT” The Indian Emperour’s depiction of the materiality of the Spanish conquest of the New World through the onstage depiction of the torture of the Indians serves both to highlight and deconstruct the significance of racial essentialism. On the one hand, the prominence of the exposed tortured Indian bodies on the stage rack invites the audience to think about the essential nature of racial differences as something literally written on the body. On the other hand, the barbaric behavior of the Spaniards, employing the rack simply in the quest for material wealth, invites the audience to interrogate a simplistic belief that there are essential differences between human beings. If anything, the construction of the horrific Spanish behavior allows the audience to see the gross similarities between the Old and New worlds. It is worth asking why Dryden would construct an heroic tragedy in which heroism itself seems racked. This is not a purely historical play in which the English experience the unfamiliar New World for the fi rst time; there were at least ten plays prior to The Indian Emperour which depicted the New World. 28 Nor was this a play in which the heroic aspects of discovery are emphasized so as to inspire the English to conquer; the scenes with the rack highlight the English view of the Spanish barbarity and destabilize the heroic aspects of the play. 29 The text is neither purely historical nor heroic. By 1665 the English were much more involved in the exploration and colonization of the New World. Journals, narratives, and dramas about these endeavors were prevalent and popular. It is precisely at this moment — when a poet looks back in history — that one would expect the most comfort and ease with a construction of the endeavor. While most critics have gone to lengths to prove that Montezuma and/or Cortez represent the ideals of heroism in The Indian Emperour, I want the reader to think outside of the parameters of the play. Dryden does not make the distinctions between Old and New worlds completely oppositional as a means to justify a physical conquest. Anxiety over this type of conquest, as I have argued, gets expressed most clearly during Montezuma’s torture when the Spaniards are more “salvage” than the “Heathen” Indians. All of the cultural, religious, and racial distinctions between the Spaniards and Indians are collapsed in this scene of torture; these differences cannot be maintained when Montezuma’s suffering is enacted and expressed in such universal terms. Despite the fact that many critics have read Cortez’s fi nal union with Montezuma’s daughter Cydaria as both a way to legitimize his conquest and, thus, a successful depiction of an interracial relationship, I see

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the collapse of cultural, religious, and racial categories during the torture scene as Dryden’s construction of a disturbingly unheroic moment. In some strange way, only this scene of horrific torture could erase all of the distinctions between Spaniard and Indian and pave the way for Cortez’s union with Montezuma’s daughter Cydaria. This marriage, which ultimately legitimizes the Spanish claim to Mexico in The Indian Emperour, is only made possible through the collapse of cultural and racial distinctions afforded by Montezuma’s torture. This is not to say that race is effaced or erased; rather, both the Indians and the Spanish are racialized in this moment. I have focused on the torture scene in The Indian Emperour because it clearly depicts the moment when essentialist and social constructivist discourses for race intersect. The unheroic nature of the Spanish conquest allows the audience to ponder if physical conquest in some ways contaminates the conqueror. Like all contamination narratives, the contradictory discourses for race become conflated: is race an essential element that is somehow revealed? Or, is it a social construction that is altered in the new environment? Regardless, the value of the proximity of physical conquest is undermined: it either reveals an essential difference between certain beings; or, it creates, socially constructed, unacceptable differences. Dryden, however, does leave intact one essentialist distinction. If we gaze out to the playwright in the wings and the audience in the theatre boxes, then we can locate what Dryden offers as a substitute for heroism — the English judgment of the events. Heroism lies outside of the heroic tragedy; it resides in the master playwright who constructs the tale and the cultured English audience who receive the tale. Unlike the Spaniards in The Indian Emperour, Dryden constructs the English audience as offering a cultural conquest: one that does not require either proximity or physical contact; and one that reconstructs a notion of racial essentialism. It is important, then, to return to Dryden’s framing of the play to see how exactly he constructs this alternative conquest model that serves to construct the English audience as heroic and the anti-racialized. Dryden ostensibly explains his reasons for representing this New World in the epilogue to The Indian Queen. Heidi Hutner has argued that the “Prologue is (dis)placed before The Indian Queen — a play about conquest and usurpation. This war is only among Indians themselves, as the Europeans do not arrive until the sequel, The Indian Emperour” (79). I would extend her argument to highlight that the epilogue to The Indian Queen, that bit of text that appears after the play is completed, anticipates the necessity of the sequel. Thus, The Indian Emperour is always already written into The Indian Queen. The epilogue, spoken by Montezuma, reads: You see what Shifts we are enforc’d to try, To help out Wit with some Variety; Shows may be found that never yet were seen, ’Tis hard to finde such Wit as ne’er has been:

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You have seen all that this old World cou’d do, We therefore try the fortune of the new, And hope it is below your aim to hit At untaught Nature with your practic’d Wit: Our naked Indians then, when Wits appear, Wou’d as soon chuse to have the Spaniards here: ’Tis true, y’have marks enough, the Plot, the Show, The Poets Scenes, nay, more, the Painters too: If all this fail, considering the cost, ’Tis a true Voyage to the Indies lost: But if you smile on all, then these designs, Like the imperfect Treasure of our Mindes, Will pass for currant wheresoe’re they go, When to your bounteous hands their stamps they owe.30 In the epilogue Dryden sets up a binaristic relationship between the Old and New worlds. The experienced audience opposes the naïve natives; the lettered audience opposes the unlettered subjects; and the wit of the audience opposes the naturalness of the subjects. These binaries serve not only to emphasize the newness of the dramatic plot, but also to reinforce the rivalry between the English and the Spanish.31 The English audience becomes the potentially conquering force — replacing the Spaniards, not with guns and weapons, but with a “practic’d wit” which may “hit” the unlettered and naked Indians. Likewise, the English stage provides a “true Voyage to the Indies” through the “Treasure of our Mindes.” This framework provides a new model for conquest which simultaneously reconstructs the binaries between the Old and New worlds. This logic is continued in the prologue to The Indian Emperour that textually creates a continuous arc with the epilogue to The Indian Queen. Dryden returns to the image of the English wit, writing that the audience must have “kind Wits” and be “easie Judges” (prologue 14, 22). The epilogue to The Indian Queen and the prologue to The Indian Emperour suggest that representing the New World and its inhabitants provides a realm and a theatre for the English to experience exploration in their own way. Steven Mullaney has made much of the now famous quote by the Swiss traveler, Thomas Platter, who visited London in 1599. 32 Platter wrote, “with these and many more amusements the English pass their time, learning at the play what is happening abroad . . . since the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their own pleasures at home.”33 But The Indian Emperour strives to be much more than a didactic tool that simply explains what is occurring abroad. The epilogue and prologue argue that the stage is a realm in which the English audience can demonstrate their superiority over both the Indians and the Spanish. Dryden posits English wit against Spanish force, and

96 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage the distance that is afforded in this uniquely English brand of conquest is shown to be more valuable than anything the Spanish achieved. The heroic tragedy, which had been developed by Davenant and which had become the dominant Restoration tragedy genre, was refi ned and popularized by Dryden. His five heroic plays helped to solidify the genre and its popularity during the 1660s and 1670s, and, yet, Dryden could not make the Spanish conquest of Mexico fit neatly within the heroic tragedy genre. The complex politics of race, torture, and conquest test the limits of heroic tragedy. While Davenant created a fantasy in The Cruelty in which the English challenge and conquer the Spanish brutality through their good manners, Dryden does not include the English within the text of The Indian Emperour. The structural framework for the play — the dedications, prologues, and epilogues — provides the instructions for the English to substitute their wit and judgment for the purported Spanish heroism. By literally rewriting history, Dryden creates a space in which the English conquer by their social graces: a cultural and non-physical conquest. But again, one must question the notion of the heroic drama if heroism is completely deconstructed within the genre only to be reconstructed outside of it through an appeal to the English audience’s wit and culture. By focusing on a performance model, I have tried to tease out the subtle ways that racial discourses were written into The Indian Emperour. Although some critics have argued that Dryden’s plays do not address race, I think this performance model reveals how anxious Dryden was about racial signification.34 Unlike Davenant who had to imbue various props and images with a type of racialized semiotic significance, Dryden was not restricted by the anti-acting laws of the Interregnum. As I have shown, Davenant’s “pseudo-masque” unwittingly posed the meta-theatrical challenge that race is purely a social construction: an association with a series of props, costumes, and exotic settings. Not limited in the way his theatrical predecessor was, Dryden attempted to reconstruct the certainty of racial essentialism. Eschewing the fantasy model that Davenant established, however, Dryden could only figure his racial essentialism on the fringes of his play: in the dedications, prologues, and epilogues. If the differences between pagan and Christian, and brown and white are so easily manipulated, then Dryden seeks to construct something that is not — an Englishness that is demonstrated by an appropriate affective response, good manners, and a practiced wit. In addition, Dryden’s play helps to racialize the Other by codifying and empowering the white/right gaze of the English audience. The focus on the essential differences of the English civility and affect, thus, serves to construct a racializing epistemology: the English become normalized, as I said before, anti-racialized, and the Spanish and Indians become Othered. But as this Englishness is always relegated to the frameworks outside of the plays (the audience and the patrons), the tensions about race are always present and palpable within the plays themselves.

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In the end, Dryden’s original detractors, like Richard Leigh with whom I began this chapter, may have been all too astute in their assessment of Dryden’s heroic plays. The meaning of Montezuma’s difference is only achieved by looking at the author’s construction of himself. Heroism is reserved for the author and the English audience because that was the only way Dryden could reconstruct essentialism. “This Zany of Columbus,” as Leigh so aptly named Dryden, emphasized the power of a cultural conquest over a physical one in order to create an essential distinction between the English and Spanish. Consequently, Dryden racializes unheroic behavior. Only the English audience, which maintains its distance from physical conquests, can claim to be heroic, pure, and essentially white/right.

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5

Racializing Mercantilism Amboyna: or, The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants

Writing about the formation of hegemonic mercantilist powers, Immanuel Wallerstein claims that “Hegemony is a rare condition” because “there is only a short moment in time when a given core power can manifest simultaneously productive, commercial, and fi nancial superiority over all other core powers. This momentary summit is what we call hegemony.”1 In order to emphasize the rarity of this event, Wallerstein argues that there have been only three “hegemonic powers in the capitalist world-economy” (38). Wallerstein claims that between the years 1625 and 1675 the Dutch were “the first hegemonic power after the collapse of the attempt on the part of Charles V to convert the world-economy into a world-empire” (38). The Dutch achieved a “circular reinforcement of advantage” by dominating fishing, agriculture, and industrial production (in particular with ship building) in the seventeenth century. In addition, Dutch mercantilism seems to have spread from the “Christian Mediterranean” to the “Levant” and finally to the “Atlantic,” culminating in the fi rst major slave trade “in order to furnish manpower for the sugar plantations” in the New World (50, 52). Despite the fact that he eschews reviewing the multiple and often conflicting definitions ascribed to mercantilism, Wallerstein does proffer this pithy and useful definition: “Mercantilism involved state policies of economic nationalism and revolved around a concern with the circulation of commodities” (37). The notion of economic nationalism will play a large role in my analysis of John Dryden’s play Amboyna: or, The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants (1673) because I see Dryden’s construction of mercantilism as being forged in both nationalistic and racialized discourses. I begin with this brief overview of hegemonic mercantilism in order to emphasize not only the dominance of the Dutch in seventeenth-century trade and commerce, but also the English awareness of this hegemonic preeminence. In fact, Wallerstein argues, “There were no more careful observers of the Dutch scene in the seventeenth century than the English” (44–45). Although the English became the second of the three nations to achieve hegemonic supremacy in the world economy (the third being the United States), in the time period under examination the English were dominated by Dutch mercantilism, even to the extent that “Dutch merchants could 99

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sell Baltic goods in England more cheaply than English merchants could” (53). To some extent, then, my examination of Dryden’s play Amboyna and the pamphlets leading up to its creation focuses on how the English constructed narratives about the Dutch mercantilist hegemony. I argue that the economic nationalism that under girds mercantilism is translated by the English into a narrative that racializes the Dutch. Despite the fact that the events in Amboyna take place on what is now called Ambon Island, part of the Maluka Islands of Indonesia, Dryden is careful to racialize only the Dutch: not the Amboynese, Japanese, or Portuguese present on the island. Writing about “the sequence of Dutch advantages” as being “productive, distributional, [and] financial,” Wallerstein notes how often the distributional and fi nancial advantages have been cast in religious terms: If the fi rst part of the sequence is controversial, the second is conventional wisdom; but it is often presented as something a bit shameful, the transformation of the noble, ascetic (commercial) entrepreneur into an ignoble, luxury-loving rentier, the betrayal of the Protestant Ethic of Zion itself, the explanation why Holland was cast out from the Garden of Eden. (57) Although Wallerstein is writing about modern economic history and theory, I think it is possible to read this narrative back in seventeenth-century English accounts of Dutch hegemony. The Dutch succeed, the seventeenthcentury English argument goes, because they have turned their backs on their religion and, I would add, race. The English, who, as Wallerstein notes, were obsessed with the Dutch mercantile hegemony, were careful to construct narratives about how to distinguish between these two Protestant trading nations: the Dutch were tainted by their mercantilism, while the English remained pure. In this sense, then, mercantilism becomes racialized. Although some critics dispute the fact that Amboyna actually addresses issues of race, I argue that an acute awareness of and anxiety about racial issues is manifest in the strange displacements and reassignments of racial designations. In fact, I would argue that the only way critics have been able to maintain arguments about an absence of a racialized rhetoric in Amboyna is through an unconscious disavowal of the actual performance practices of the play. When one attends to the performance techniques cued within the play, however, the complexity of the discourses of race becomes not only relevant but also central to one’s understanding of it. One way to think about the production and reception of a racialized performance is to analyze the casting of the fi rst performance. As both The Indian Emperour (discussed in chapter 4) and Amboyna were staged within eight years of each other by the same theatre company (the King’s Company), it is possible to compare casts. The principal actors are, in fact, by and large the same. Six principal actors appear in both plays: Nicholas Burt, William

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Cartwright, Charles Hart, Edward Kynaston, Michael Mohun, and William Wintersel. I will briefly focus on three of these actors to argue that a racialized performance may have been interpreted by the audience through casting. For example, Nicholas Burt performed as Vasquez in The Indian Emperour and Perez in Amboyna, and both roles seem to indicate a willingness to betray Christian ethics: Vasquez, of course, commits atrocities in The Indian Emperour, and Perez serves as a spy in Amboyna. Likewise, Edward Kynaston played the roles of Guyomar in The Indian Emperour and Harman Junior in Amboyna. Although the roles are very different, both characters fail in their opportunities to rule: Guyomar gives up his chance to rule to wander the earth looking for isolation, and Harman Junior betrays his power by seeking hedonistic pleasures. And fi nally, William Wintersel performed as Odmar in The Indian Emperour and Fiscal in Amboyna, another two figures that are governed by irrational desires and lusts. As I have argued throughout this volume, racializations can occur through performances of religious differences, bodily color, and/or constructions of civility. I do not want to suggest that a simplistic attention to casting is the ultimate key to unlocking or revealing all racialized performances. In fact, I think casting can sometimes be deliberately counterintuitive: Michael Mohun’s performances of the Indian Montezuma in The Indian Emperour and the English Beaumont in Amboyna, for instance, seem to challenge a simplistic interpretation of casting’s relation to performances of race. Instead, I want to argue that an attention to performance strategies may enhance one’s understanding of the construction of race, and once again torture lies at the heart of these performances. Amboyna is remarkably different than all of the other plays discussed in this book because it presents the torture of English bodies. Unlike the exposure, control, or alteration of the Othered bodies in plays like The Empress of Morocco, Xerxes, Titus Andronicus, Oroonoko, or The Indian Emperour, Amboyna portrays the violation of English bodies on the rack. This crucial difference goes a long way in constructing the Dutch interest, power, and dominance in mercantilism in racialized terms. Because torture had become inextricably linked with the exposure of the spectacular excesses of foreign cultures (through the onstage revelation of the racial body stretched on the rack), Dryden was faced with the challenge of reconstructing historical accounts of torture perpetrated by Europeans on other Europeans. Interested in reinvigorating the memory of the Dutch cruelty to the English at Amboyna at the start of the third Anglo-Dutch War, Dryden remade the image of the torturer in Dutch terms. Far from neglecting a discourse on race, however, Dryden actually eschewed the typical essentialist discourse in favor of a social constructivist one. Although critics often identify the failures of Dryden’s play as stemming from the insurmountable tasks he faced in creating an heroic play out of mercantile events, I contend that the play’s unevenness stems from an anxious attempt both

102 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage to erase and reassign the racial politics inherent in the events at Amboyna. The depiction of the onstage torture of English merchants at Dutch hands both creates and reveals these anxieties about race. In Amboyna all of the potential discussions about cultural and racial differences that occur during any trading mission in culturally foreign lands are meticulously elided; instead, all of the language of racial and cultural difference is reserved for the Dutch in order to emphasize the disparity between the two Protestant European trading nations present in Amboyna. Not even Dryden’s hybrid genre of “unabashed propaganda cast into the form of heroic tragedy” could mask the tensions created by this simultaneous elision and projection of racial difference. 2 I begin with an examination of Dryden’s primary source in order to trace how the faultlines between race, torture, politics, and genre were present in nascent forms in the source pamphlet Dryden employed. Then I will address how the actual performance of Amboyna served to widen these faultlines. As I will argue, Dryden’s play has too often been treated as a text instead of a performance piece: a fact that has left the performance strategies of the play underanalyzed.3

DUDLEY DIGGES AND “SOME PROBABLE FICTION” In 1624, Sir Dudley Digges, a prominent shareholder in the East India Company, wrote a pamphlet exposing the “barbarous proceedings [by the Dutch] against the English at Amboyna.” The first text to publicize the horrific events at Amboyna, Digges’s pamphlet alerted an otherwise complacent English population to the dangers faced by English merchants abroad. After years of negotiations with the Dutch for access to trade ports in the Spice Islands, the English fi nally gained the right to share the ports on the small but centrally located island of Amboyna. The Dutch merchants who were already established on the island, however, devised a scheme to sabotage the treaties by concocting a plot about the English desire for sole domination of the trading port. By putting various native “Amboyners,” foreign laborers, and English merchants to torture, the Dutch eventually gained false confessions to support their claims. When the news of the torture of the innocent English merchants reached England, outrage over the events grew steadily. Despite the fact that Digges’s excoriation of the Dutch did not affect an immediate martial campaign against them, the pamphlet gained notoriety. A True Relation of the Unjust, Cruell, and Barbarous Proceedings against the English at Amboyna was reprinted in Samuel Purchas’s Purchas his Pilgrimes in 1625 and served as the main source for numerous skits, poems, and diatribes against the Dutch published throughout the three Anglo-Dutch wars. Amboyna, in fact, became a rallying cry against the Dutch for over fifty years. 4 Written around the same time as Sir Edward Coke’s The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, the fi rst English text to question the

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use of torture on a legal basis, Digges’s pamphlet provides an unusually sensational and graphic account of torture. An obvious propaganda piece against the Dutch (“Where, in the united Provinces, is that drowning with water in use? or the torture with fire”5), Digges builds his narrative about the dissolution of the treaties of 1613, 1615, and 1619, in which the Dutch agreed to give one-third of the trade of the Spice Islands to England, to culminate in this graphic description of the torture methods devised by the Dutch. I must quote passages from Digges at length to reveal his construction of both the Dutch and the use of torture. First they hoised him up by the hands with a cord on a large dore, where they made him fast upon two Staples of Iron. . . . Being thus made fast, his feete hung some two foote from the ground. . . . Then they bound a cloth about his necke and face so close, that little or no water could go by. That done, they poured the water softly upon his head untill the cloth was full, up to the mouth and nostrils, and somewhat higher; so that he could not draw breath, but he must withall suck-in the water: which being still continued to be poured in softly, forced all his inward parts, came out of his nose, eares, and eyes, and often as it were stifl ing and choaking him, at length took away his breath, & brought him to a swoune or fainting. Then they tooke him quickly downe, and made him vomit up the water. . . . In this maner they handled him three or foure severall times with water, till his bodie was swolne twice or thrice as bigge as before, his cheekes like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead. . . . Afterwards they hoised him up againe as before, and then burnt him with lighted candles in the bottome of his feete, untill the fat dropt out the candles . . . untill his inwards might be evidently seene. (10–11) Digges’s description of the torture is remarkable for its attention to detail. Although he was not present during these events, Digges creates a vivid picture through the aesthetics of horrific detail. The exacting descriptions of the positioning of the door posts, staples, limbs, and cords along with the details about the timing, pouring, reviving, and burning relies on a vivid visual aesthetic: Digges fills in every inch of the canvas of this scene. Digges also draws on the aesthetic of the grotesque. In a strange perversion of Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque body, the English victims are made to consume indiscriminately (“he must withall sucke in the water . . . forc[ing] all his inward parts [to come] out of his nose, eares, and eyes”). 6 The Dutch force their victims to drink until their bodies become bloated and distended beyond recognition (“his bodie was swolne twice or thrice as bigge as before, his cheekes like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead”). Moreover, they force their victims to vomit up their excesses only to enable further consumption. Then with the burning of the body, the Dutch expose how fluid and open their

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victims can be; their fat drips, putting out the candles, and the distinction between internal and external is completely negated (“his inwards might be evidently seene”). In addition, Digges portrays the Dutch as attempting to feminize their English victims by transforming them into the misogynistic concept of the leaky vessel — the feminized body that cannot be trusted to contain anything (bodily fluids, secrets, etc.).7 But a true example of the carnivalesque and grotesque body would naturally involve voluntary consumption — the desire to transform oneself through indiscriminate consumption. The coercion, the torture, obviously removes many of the carnivalesque elements. Digges emphasizes this anti-bacchanalian twist by showing that the English have only bodily fluids to release and expose. According to Digges, the English were not plotting to take over the Dutch fort and therefore had nothing to confess. Because of this lack of conspiratorial plotting, only their bodies could be transformed into leaking vessels. The “confessions,” the statements that the Dutch wrought from the English under torture, are deemed by Digges to be merely “some probable fiction” that would appease the Dutch (9). Digges provides an extended account of the torture and interrogation of Edward Collins as an exemplary tale. Again, I find it necessary to quote from Digges at length to recreate his attention to detail. Digges writes: Being let downe, hee againe vowed and protested his innocencie; yet said, that because hee knew that they would by torture make him confesse any thing, though never so false, they should doe him a great favour, to tell him what they would have him say, and hee would speake it, to avoide the torture. The Fiscall hereupon said; What, doe you mocke us? and bad, Up with him againe; and so gave him the torment of water: which hee not able long to endure, prayed to bee let downe againe to his confession. Then he devised a little with himselfe, and tolde them, that about two monthes and a halfe before, himselfe, Tomson, Johnson, Browne, and Fardo, had plotted, with the helpe of the Japoners, to surprise the Castle. Heere hee was interrupted by the Fiscall, and asked, whether Captaine Towerson were not of that conspiracy. He answered, No. You ly, said the Fiscall: did not he call you all to him, and tell you, that those daily abuses of the Dutch had caused him to thinke of a plot, and that he wanted nothing but your consent and secrecie? . . . Then they bade make him fast againe: whereupon he then said, All was true that they had spoken. . . . Then the Fiscall asked him, by what meanes the Japoners should have executed their purpose. Whereat, when Collins stood staggering and divising some probable fiction, the Fiscall holpe him, and said, Should not two Japoners have gone to each point of the Castle, and two to the Governours chamber doore; and when the hurly-burly had bin without, and the Governour comming to see what was the matter, the Japoners to have killed

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him? Here one that stood by, said to the Fiscall, Do not tell him what he should say, but let him speake of himselfe. Whereupon the Fiscall, without attending the answer to his former question; asked what the Japoners should have had for their reward. Collins answered, 1,000 Ryals a peace. Lastly, he asked him, when this plot should have beene effected. Whereunto, although he answered him nothing (not knowing what to devise upon the sudden) yet hee was dismissed, and very glad to come cleere of the torture, though with certaine beleefe that he should die for this his confession. (8–10) Digges is careful to construct the scene in such a way that reveals that both parties (victim and torturer) are aware of the fiction of the confession. Collins wants to know exactly what the Dutch need him to confess so that he can end his torment (“they should doe him a great favour, to tell him what they would have him say, and hee would speake it, to avoyd the torture”). And the Fiscall wants Collins to confess to specific actions so that they can charge the English with conspiracy (“the Fiscall holpe him, and said . . . ”). A delicate balance must be maintained, however, in which neither party acknowledges the fiction of the confession. The confession functions like a dramatic piece that one sees on the stage, in which the actors and audience agree to suspend disbelief in order for the fiction to function. In this case, when Collins asks, “what they would have him say,” the Fiscall responds, “What, doe you mocke us” and demonstrates the power and brute force of this “fiction” by torturing Collins again. Collins quickly learns the rules and begins “devis[ing] a little with himself” about “some probable fiction.” In the end Collins and the Dutch Fiscall achieve the delicate suspension of disbelief, recognizing the complete collapse of the distinctions between fiction and reality. When a Dutchman warns the Fiscall not to “tell [Collins] what he should say, but let him speake for himselfe,” Collins continues with his “confession” anyway. And likewise, when Collins is unable to “devise upon the sodaine” an answer to another question, the Fiscall pretends not to notice and dismisses him without further torment. By emphasizing the “fiction” of the “confessions,” however, Digges allows the English merchants to maintain an intact and unassailable interiority. Both the Fiscall and Collins recognize that the confessions are fabrications and, therefore, implicitly acknowledge a privacy that cannot be accessed (unlike the leaky vessel that constantly spills forth its contents). Digges constantly reinforces the performativity of the torture, interrogation, and confession. Fiction making, storytelling, and the suspension of disbelief are shown to coincide with and even bolster the brutal realities of torture. In the background of this dramatically constructed world is a complex portrait of race relations in the East Indies, and once again Digges maintains a genre defying mixture of fantastical improbability and physically grounded reality. While the relationship between the ability to provide specific details and the art of fiction making is called into question by both the

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scenes of torture portrayed and Digges’s third-hand narrative itself, this relationship is shown to be even more problematic with the portrayal of race relations on the island (and in the narrative). There are the “Japoners (of whom there is not thirty in all the Iland)” who were “apprehended upon suspicion of Treason, and put to the Torture” (4, 5). There is “a Portugall, the Guardian of the Slaves under the Dutch,” who is also tortured (5). There are the “Mardikers (for so they usually call the free Natives)” who inhabit the various islands under dispute (3). And, of course, there are the English and the Dutch. Digges takes pains to note the various ethnic groups populating the island, delineating each group specifically within the fi rst five paragraphs of his pamphlet. And yet he does not provide physical or racialized descriptions of these various inhabitants, maintaining a defiantly nonspecific representation of his racial and ethnic cast of characters despite his amazing attention to detail elsewhere in the narrative as evidenced by the lengthy citations included above. Not surprisingly, the only physical/racialized description that appears in Digges’s pamphlet blends fictional and reality-based referents. After enumerating the various torments that John Clarke endured at Dutch hands, Digges includes a rare reference to color that can be read as a racializing rhetoric: “Having thus martyred this poor man [Clarke], [the Dutch] sent him out by foure Blacks; who carried him between them to a dungeon, where he lay five or six daies without any Chirurgion to dresse him, untill (his flesh being putrified) great Maggots dropt and crept from him in a most lothsome & noysom maner. Thus they fi nished their Sabboth daies worke” (12). As Robert Markley suggests, the term “Blacks” emerges as a “generic term for Asians as early as the 16th century in correspondence from Jesuit missionaries in India” (no. 20, 17). While Digges does not mention the “foure Blacks” again, it is safe to assume that he is referring to the “Mardikers,” the “free Natives” who served the Dutch. But he leaves the referent ambiguous in order to conjure up various other ways of reading color distinctions. With the emphasis on Clarke’s martyrdom and the “Sabboth daies worke,” Digges allows the “foure Blacks” to resemble Satanists at a Black Sabbath. Even more ominously, however, the “foure Blacks” seem to conjure images of the devil himself, especially literary and dramatic presentations of the devil. The “foure Blacks” are after all dragging Clarke down into a hell-like dungeon where his body will decompose into maggots’ flesh. At any rate, it is clear that Digges’s invocation of a color description at this moment in his pamphlet exhibits many of the complex formulations that created racialized discourses. 8 More often than not, however, Digges works to demonstrate how the various racial and ethnic groups were united by the brutality of the Dutch. This is not to suggest that Digges portrays the English joining forces with the “Natives” or “Japoners,” but that his construction of their shared oppression allows him to elide almost completely their racial and ethnic divisions. After Digges relates Clarke’s torture, for example, he goes on to

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explain that he was not alone in the dungeon. Being joined by more Englishmen, “Clarke and the rest, were accompanied with the poore Japoners, lying in the putrifaction of their tortures” (12). Like Clarke one sentence earlier, whom Digges referred to as “this poore man,” the “poore Japoners” also suffer from “putrifaction of their tortures.” Likewise, in giving a brief history of the Dutch destruction of the English islands, Digges emphasizes that the “Natives” were handled in a similar fashion. He writes that the “Orankeyes . . . were presently brought to the torture of water and fi re, even in the same sort as our people were afterwards at Amboyna” (29–30; emphasis mine). Although Digges does differentiate between “our people” and the “Orankeyes,” all explicit physical and racial distinctions are elided to stress the brutality of the Dutch. Needless to say, the only signifi cant difference that is allowed to flourish in Digges’s text is the difference between the victims and their vile torturers, the Dutch. Careful not to indict the entire country, but desiring to incite an outraged English response, Digges portrays the Dutch in the East Indies as “lewd drunken debauched persons” (31). Such pejorative descriptions were commonplace in early modern England. Shakespeare makes several jokes in his plays about the unrestrained Dutch appetite. In The Second Part of Henry IV, Prince Harry puns on Holland, the Low Countries, and the Netherlands to insult Poins’s unrestrained desires.9 And in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff jokes about Dutch cooking: “And in the height of this bath, when I was more than half stewed in grease like a Dutch dish, to be thrown into the Thames and cooled, glowing-hot, in that surge, like a horseshoe” (3.5.101–104).10 Thus, Digges continues the line of mocking the Dutch, when he explains that they “use the Indies as a Tucht-house or Bridewell, to manage their unruly and unthriftie children & kindred; whom when they cannot rule & order at home, they send to the Indies, where they are preferred to offices and places of government” (30). Uniting the English with the “Natives” against the tyranny of the Dutch once again, Digges declares that the “lewd drunken debauched persons . . . must be Judges aswell of our English, as the poor Indians there” (31; emphasis mine). In other words, Digges carefully elides any discussions of race or the complexity of race relations on Amboyna in order to emphasize the horrific nature of the Dutch. Part of Digges’s condemnation of the Dutch stems from their unwillingness to differentiate between their native, European, and English victims: they abuse and torture all in the same manner. But this distinction is not allowed to flourish in Digges’s text because a grave anxiety lurks within the pamphlet about the Dutch and English mercantile endeavors as a whole. In explaining how the Dutch attempted to incite a battle over the Spice Islands, Digges includes the Dutch dealings with the “Ilands of Banda” in 1619. Although the Dutch controlled the island cluster, the English had gained control of one of the islands, Polaroon, which was to be theirs according to the treaty of 1619. Digges explains:

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Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage After the treaty came unto the Indies, the Hollanders forbare publishing thereof in the Ilands of Banda, untill they had taken Polaroon. But, knowing that it must be restored againe, according to the treaty, they fi rst take all courses to make the Iland little or nothing worth: they demolish & deface the Buildings, transplant the Nutmeg-trees, plucking them up by the roots, and carrying them into their owne Ilands of Nera and of Poloway, there to bee planted for themselves; and at last fi nde a means to dispeople the Iland, and to leave it so, as the English might make no use of it, worth their charge of keeping. (28)

The anxiety revealed here is that the Spice Islands are not the Edenic paradise the original shareholders of the East India Company had promoted. The islands may not have enough materials to support both the Dutch and the British if there is a need to “transplant the Nutmeg-trees” to other “Ilands of Nera and of Poloway.” What is even more disturbing to Digges is the “dispeopl[ing]” of the island. A few paragraphs later he repeats this notion in even more anxietyfi lled terms: Forthwith, the [Dutch] Governour caused the wives, children, and slaves of those of Polaroon, to be all carried out of the Iland, and distributed in other Ilands subject to the Dutch; and so have made a cleer Country for the English; where they may both plant and gather themselves, destitute of the help of any of the Country-people; without whom, neither the English nor Hollanders can maintaine their trade in the Indies. (30) The Dutch literally “cleer [the] Countrey for the English” by carrying away the native wives, children, and slaves and distributing them to their other islands. Digges does not specify whether the Dutch transplant the natives out of a need for an increased labor force or out of mere malice to the English, but either way he portrays the Dutch as making good use of the extra labor, spreading the natives among their other islands. The fi nal sentence contains all of the horror of the situation for Digges. He declares that the English must “plant and gather themselves, destitute of the helpe of any of the Country-people.” The declaration anxiously obscures whether the English are doomed to labor themselves into destitution, or whether they are merely destitute of help. The Sisyphean image of the never-ending labor, however, haunts the last sentence in which the English and Dutch are fi nally united in their inability to “maintaine their Trade in the Indies” without the “Countrie people.”11 In the end, Digges’s pamphlet expresses more anxiety and ambiguity about the events at Amboyna than one would expect in a propaganda piece. The distinctions between the “barbarous” Dutch and the “martyred” English seem to collapse in the face of their similar mercantile endeavors. Thus, the economics of trade serves to complicate

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conceptions of race. Digges’s text simultaneously constructs and deconstructs clear racialized divisions when discussions of trade are highlighted. Racialized discourses, then, cannot be divorced from economic ones.

DRYDEN’S CONSTRUCTION AND PERFORMANCE OF DIFFERENCE On the one hand, it is not surprising that English Hollandophobics turned to Digges’s text to incite fear and indignation at home: the events at Amboyna were that egregious. On the other hand, Digges’s anxieties about the nature of fiction making and the ultimate similarities between the Dutch and English would seem to pose challenges to the blind Hollandophobia of the late seventeenth century. The appeal of rewriting, appropriating, and revising, however, saw many attempting to recover Digges’s ambiguous text. The strange mixture of fantasy and reality in Digges’s pamphlet, in fact, may have made it the perfect source for the dramatization of these events. When the English declared war against the Dutch in March of 1672, John Dryden turned to Digges’s account of the massacre of the English at Amboyna to create the heroic tragedy, Amboyna: or, The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants. Dryden claimed to have written the prose-play in one month, enabling it to be staged by 1673 in order to fuel the burgeoning war. Critics have roundly condemned the play for being so politically embroiled. According to Montague Summers, despite the fact that Amboyna was a “great success,” there has never been a revival.12 Part of the condemnation of the text stems from its sensationalized representation of violence and torture. Sir Walter Scott in his introduction to Amboyna in his collection, The Works of John Dryden (1821), wrote about his distaste for the violent subject matter. Explaining the history behind the text, Scott wrote, “I will not pollute my page with this monstrous and disgusting detail.”13 He eventually softened his criticism, however, by writing, “For the horrible spectacle of tortures and mangled limbs exhibited on the stage, the author might plead the custom of his age,” and he cites both Davenant’s and Ravenscroft’s use of stage torture as the theatrical “custom” (4). But in the end, Scott could not maintain this historically sensitive position. He concluded his introduction with this pithy condemnation: “This play is beneath criticism; and I can hardly hesitate to term it the worst production Dryden ever wrote” (4). More recently critics have argued that Amboyna fails because of the difficulties Dryden faced in creating an heroic play from events based on merchant trading. Bridget Orr, for example, argues that “the actors in this tragedy were merchants, not soldiers, and as such inappropriate for heroic representation.”14 But while critics like Scott and Orr have roundly condemned Amboyna, few have examined how the tensions around the complex economic relations of the events portrayed were translated into a racialized discourse,

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rhetoric, and staging. In addition, these critics have failed to address how the performances of torture and race complicated the propagandistic desires of this heroic drama. In other words, the problems with Amboyna do not stem from the generic expectations of making heroic mercantilist events; rather, the problems stem from the attempt to stage and perform events which were originally narrated with confl icting racial signifiers and discourses because of the economic strains of the events. One cannot analyze the heroic genre and mercantile events without taking into account the way these factors influence a racialized discourse because they are so deeply entwined. I argue that Dryden attempted to appropriate Digges’s ambiguities by “dispeopl[ing]” the island of Amboyna in order to avoid a more clearly essentialist construction of racial difference. Instead, Dryden projected all of the racial discourse onto the Dutch in order to make the distinctions between the Dutch and English seem black and white (literally), while he simultaneously presented racial differences in a social constructivist discourse. In the end, however, Dryden’s deviations from the pamphlet reveal how the politics of race, economics, and torture disrupted his generic sensibilities. In his descriptions of the East Indians, for example, Dryden follows Digges’s lead by eliding almost all racial referents. However, Ysabinda, described in the dramatis personae as “an Indian Lady,” who is “betrothed to [the English] Towerson,” is the only native of Amboyna who speaks in the play. All the other islanders remain dumb and silent, making only one grand appearance in a dance celebrating the Englishmen’s return. In Act I, scene i, music is heard from within which comes “from [the English] factory; some sudden entertainment . . . for [their] return.”15 The stage direction then reads, “Enter Amboyners, Men and Women, with Timbrels before them. A Dance.” Used only in this moment of tamed exoticization, the indigenous people of Amboyna are almost completely written out of Dryden’s play. Robert Markley writes about the absence of Amboynese men in the text, arguing that the black out of any dark masculine faces exemplifies the challenges Dryden felt in creating his Edenic portrayal of Amboyna. Markley writes, “Asian rulers and traders must disappear from Dryden’s play because the challenges posed by the political and commercial culture of Southeast Asia call into question the oppositional models of intra-European confl ict — good Englishmen versus evil Dutchmen — that dominate the play” (9). While I fundamentally agree with his assessment, Markley often treats Dryden’s play as if it were generically similar to the pamphlet from which it was derived. He does not address how the performance of this “dispeopl[ing]” is different from a propagandistic pamphlet. Amboyna, however, must be analyzed in performance terms in order to parse the complexity of this “dispeopl[ing].” The addition of an ahistorical love plot between the English captain Towerson and the Amboynese woman Ysabinda exemplifies how the performance of these events was radically different from the non-performative

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propagandistic materials by Digges and others. Critics have read Dryden’s addition of a cross-cultural love plot in various ways. Laura Brown, for example, comments on the need for weak women in early modern depictions of colonial expansion.16 Heidi Hutner writes about Dryden’s reliance on a familiar topos, the figure of the native queen, to restage European conquests in terms of individual tragedies of love and honor.17 And Robert Markley writes about how Dryden attempts to create Ysabinda in a synechdocal representation with the Dutch tyrannical appropriation of the East Indies. While I agree with these arguments, I think it is important to emphasize how Dryden’s text avoids any direct discussion of Ysabinda’s role as an Amboynese woman, culturally and racially. More importantly, however, the performance avoided these issues by having Ysabinda performed by a white actress without brown-/blackface. We know from contemporary accounts, for example, that Ysabinda was originally played by the English actress Rebecca Marshall, whom Samuel Pepys described as “mighty fi ne and pretty, and noble.”18 Marshall’s Ysabinda, it seems, did not perform her cultural, racial, and religious differences in any way that was essentially visible. How exactly do we interpret this performance, then? Critics like Joyce Green MacDonald and Celia Daileader have examined how early modern racist-patriarchal cultural constructions challenged the depiction of interracial couplings involving women of color, but their works tend to elide important performative changes in the later seventeenth century.19 While gender and race were always rendered performatively on the Renaissance stage with the use of boy actors in women’s clothes and adult white male actors in blackface, both gender and race took on new performative strategies and meanings in the Restoration with the inclusion of white actresses on the stage. 20 Appropriately, neither Towerson nor the other Englishmen ever discuss Ysabinda’s race. The fi rst discussion of her, in fact, encapsulates the way Dryden skillfully sidesteps any discussions of race. In Act I, scene i, when Beamont and Collins inform the Dutch of Towerson’s return to Amboyna, Van Herring asks, “Did he not leave a mistress in these parts, a native of this island of Amboyna?” (1.1.118–119). Collins responds that “they call her Ysabinda, who received baptism for his sake” (1.1.120–121). When Captain Harman declares that Towerson deserves her because she is “beauteous, rich, and young” (1.1.124), even though her friends oppose the union, Beamont responds: Were I to chuse of all mankind, a Man, on whom I would relie for Faith and Counsel, or more, whose personal aid I wou’d invite, in any worthy cause to second me, it shou’d be only Gabriel Towerson; daring he is, and thereto fortunate: yet soft and apt to pitty the distress’d; and liberal to relieve ’em: I have seen him not alone to pardon Foes, but by his bounty win ’em to his love. (1.1.125–132)

112 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage At the beginning of the conversation the emphasis is on Ysabinda. She is a “native” who “received baptism” against the advice of her friends. This is clearly the beginning of a discussion about cultural and perhaps racial differences, but Beamont carefully turns the conversation away from Ysabinda to a panegyric on Towerson. He emphasizes Towerson’s magnanimity while completely neglecting Ysabinda’s individual identity, and in a moment of complete elision substitutes himself for Ysabinda (“Were I to chuse . . . ”). Thus, while Dryden includes this important cross-cultural relationship, he constructs it in such a way that the English characters never address it as such. The Dutch are the only characters in Amboyna who are willing to discuss the differences between the Amboynese and the Europeans, and Dryden depicts this willingness not only as a symbol of their crassness and cruelty, but also as a symbol of a racialized mercantilism. Unlike Digges’s portrayal of the Dutch as a group only too willing to see English and Asian alike, Dryden condemns the Dutch for seeing too many distinctions between them. Despite the fact that the Dutch character Harman Junior pledged his honor and loyalty to Towerson for saving his life at sea, he tries to win Ysabinda’s love. The second act begins: Har. Jun.: I heard him [Towerson] say he never had return’d, but that his Masters of the East-India Company, proffer’d him large conditions. Ysabinda: You do belye him basely. Har. Jun.: As much as I do you, in saying you are fair; or as I do myself, when I declare I dye for you. (2.1.8–13) Harman Junior is lying when he says that Towerson only returned to Amboyna for the profits promised by the EIC. We know from Towerson’s fi rst appearance that he is only concerned with Ysabinda (“You have said all in that, my Ysabinda, if she still be so” [1.1.203–204]). But Harman Junior sets up a rhetorical structure in which if he lies about Towerson’s motives then he lies about Ysabinda’s fairness and his own willingness to die for her. We know Harman Junior’s fi nal statement is metaphorical, declaring that he will die for Ysabinda, and is necessarily a false statement — a figure of speech. So what does this say about Ysabinda’s fairness? Is it merely metaphorical and figurative as well? Or does it carry a greater signification? Kim Hall has written brilliantly about the use of “fair” in early modern English poetry, and she has shown that it often carries racial signification.21 This scene, however, is predicated on Harman Junior’s willingness to be dishonorable in order to sate his desires. Although Harman Junior calls Ysabinda “fair,” the play seems to suggest that part of the Dutch problem is their unwillingness to treat her as a “fair” woman. It would make sense, then, to infer that the performance of Ysabinda was indeed “fair” to emphasize just how corrupt Harman Junior’s readings

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of and motives towards her body are. This would also support the Englishmen’s lack of discussions about Ysabinda’s race: she was performed as “fair.” The play, and, I imagine, the performance of it, emphasizes Harman Junior’s unwillingness to see Ysabinda’s fairness as stemming from his (and the Dutch’s) gross mercantilism: his interest in trade and profit racializes him and his view of the world. In the end, when the Dutch Fiscal convinces the lecherous Harman Junior to take Ysabinda by force, his willingness to draw lines between the natives and the settlers is shown to be the basest aspect of Dutch perfidy. Fiscal advises Harman Junior to kill Ysabinda after the rape in order to protect himself, arguing: Pray what makes any thing a sin but Law; and, What Law is there here against it? Is not your Father Chief? Will he condemn you for a petty Rape? The Woman an Amboyner, and what’s less, now Marry’d to an Englishman: Come, if there be a Hell, ’tis but for those that sin in Europe, not for us in Asia; Heathens have no Hell. (4.4.52–57) For Fiscal the distinctions between Asia and Europe are so absolute, so essential, that crimes cannot be committed in Amboyna. As an “Amboyner” and a “Heathen,” Ysabinda is afforded no protection from rape and murder. Again, the horror of this situation is heightened if one realizes that Rebecca Marshall, who originally performed as Ysabinda, did not make Ysabinda’s differences from the Europeans visible. The performance of Amboyna, thus, serves to racialize the Dutch by implying that their distinctions between “fair” Amboyners and Europeans stem solely from their greed and interest in trade (see Figure 5.1). Presumably the Dutch employ torture because of this belief in the absolute distinction between Asia and Europe. While Digges’s pamphlet aligned the English with the natives in order to enhance their comparable martyrdom and their vast differences from the Dutch, there was nevertheless an anxiety in the pamphlet about the similarities between the English and Dutch. Neither group could exist in the Spice Islands without the presence of the native populations to do their manual labor. But Dryden for all intents and purposes removes the indigenous population from Amboyna and creates a discourse that shuns racial essentialism. In addition, in Amboyna only the English get tortured. As we view Englishman after Englishman put through their ordeals, it becomes clear that the only differences that Dryden wants to emphasize are those between the English and the Dutch. The Amboynese, as represented by Ysabinda, are literally whitewashed in the process of emphasizing this binary. The onstage depictions of torture, then, end up exposing the Dutch desire to make the English body abject, and this horrific desire becomes emblematic of the differences between the two European powers. Moreover, it becomes clear that Dryden elides all

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Figure 5.1. Frontispiece to Amboyna in the 1735 edition of The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, depicting the “fair” Ysabinda being freed from danger by Towerson. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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of the historically racial components of the plot in order to racialize the Dutch. Dryden links the Dutch interest in trade with a gluttonous hedonism, senseless cruelty, and a desire to convert the world into a race of their doubles. This racialization of the Dutch, however, does not occur in essentialist terms. Instead, the discourse around the Dutch “race” is formed in social constructivist terms to emphasize that the Dutch chose this baseness. From the fi rst scene of Amboyna we are presented with a race of people who have a suspicious interest in the pleasures of the body. Harmon Senior, for example, is marked by his obesity. In Act I, scene i when he desires to hear Fiscal’s plan to rid Amboyna of the English, he says, “Now I am famish’d for my part of the laughter” (1.1.23). To which Fiscal responds, “Then, my brave Governor, if you’re a true Dutchman, I’le make your fat sides heave with the conceit on ’t, till you’re blown like a pair of large Smith Bellows” (1.1.24–26). Likewise, in Act Five after being tortured, an English page remarks on the governor’s rotundity, calling him the “Sir John Falstaff of Amsterdam” (5.1.202–203). Their interest in trade and mercantilism, then, is read as a way to fuel their gross hedonism. Complementing the descriptions of Dutch hedonism, Dryden presents the audience with several scenes of Dutch excess. They are constantly drinking, smoking, and expressing their need to relieve their bodies both in figurative and literal ways. In Act One, Van Herring hears how they have taken the English East India Company for a great deal of money, and he expresses his exuberance by saying, “This is news wou’d kindle a thousand Bonfi res, and make us piss ’em out again the Rhenish Wine” (1.1.35–36). And in Act Five, when they are about to enact the tortures, Harman Senior makes Van Herring’s figurative language literal. He orders his boy to bring him “some tobacco, and a stope of Wine,” and adds at the last moment, “And a Tub to leak in Boy; when was this Table without a leaking Vessel” (5.1.77, 79–80). Of course, the ultimate example of the Dutch hedonism comes with Harman Junior’s brutal rape of Ysabinda. Fiscal guides Harman Junior in his brutal behavior by advising, “You’l get nothing of her, except it be by force. . . . [R]emember you are a Man, and she a Woman; a little force, it may be, wou’d do well” (4.2.23, 28–29). Their hedonistic desires, which inspire their love of trade and mercantilism, therefore, also lead to their willingness to employ force. In Digges’s pamphlet the Dutch were depicted as attempting to make their victims into the grotesque. In a strange perversion of the carnivalesque, the Dutch wanted to force the English to be bloated, leaky, and emasculated. But Dryden twists this perversion in order to enhance the vileness of the Dutch. He skillfully displaces all of these characteristics onto the Dutch themselves; they are fattened with excessive eating, bloated with excessive drinking, and in need of leaking both physically and sexually. The horror comes with the torture devices the Dutch employ: these devices reflect the

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Dutch desire to make the English into their doubles and foils. The Dutch description of their torture techniques reveals this desire: Van Her: In a few words, Gentlemen confess. There is a Beverage ready for you else, which you’l not like to swallow. Collins: How’s this? Harman: You shall be muffl’d up like Ladies, with an Oyl’d Cloath put underneath your Chins, then Water pour’d above; which either you must drink, or must not breath. 1 Dutch: That’s one way, we have others. Harman: Yes, we have two Elements at your Service, Fire, as well as Water; certain things call’d Matches to be ty’d to your Fingers ends, which are as soveraign as Nutmegs to quicken your short Memories. (5.1.137–147) The Dutch euphemistically describe their water torture as a “Beverage,” thereby allowing their victims to drink and leak as much as they do. They also want the English to be emasculated (“muffl’d up like Ladies”) in order to afford them the pleasure of dominating the English sexually. And finally, with the fire torture the Dutch create another strangely inverted double for themselves — men who are governed by their physical desires (the fire is “soveraign” over their “Memories”). In the end, when the Dutch try to light their pipes with the “wick [that was] fed with English Fat,” their desire to conflate Dutch and English identity is fully revealed (5.1.365–366). In dramatizing the events in Amboyna, Dryden not only depicts the Dutch as attempting to force the English to be grotesque, but also he depicts them as attempting to force the English to be grotesquely Dutch. The attempted conversion, of course, is never discussed in terms of essentialism; instead, the Dutch attempt to construct their grotesque doubles through the act of torture. The commercialism of the Dutch was often connected with explicitly racialized discourses in late seventeenth-century English texts: the implication was that too much interest in money and trade actually revealed a literally darker side to the Dutch. In the anonymous Hogan-Moganides: Or, the Dutch Hudibras (1674), for example, the Dutch “conscience” is described as having been given up for “commerce.” [The Dutch religion] was trade ... Where saint and devil link together, Turk, Jew; and makes no matter whether, As far as their ends they make Not conscience, but for commerce-sake.22 According to this poem, not only is the Dutch crime their willingness to elide the differences between Turk and Jew in matters of trade, but also their proximity and resemblance to these non-Christians. Another pam-

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phlet written at roughly the same time makes the connections between the Dutch and the Turks even more explicit. William De Britaine thought the Dutch were the “scourge of Europe” who had “made greater distempers and confusions, and caused more effusion of blood, and expense of treasure in Europe, than the Great Turk hath done in 500 years.”23 In both of these texts the Dutch interest in trade makes them un-Christian and akin to religious and racialized others. Again, this difference is not expressed in essentialist terms; rather, the rhetoric of race is fashioned in a more social constructivist discourse. The problem with the Dutch is their willingness to act like the Other because of their interest in trade and mercantilism. In this light, Dryden’s depiction of the gluttonous Dutch takes on an even greater meaning. Shortly after the Dutch reveal their employment of torture (the infamous stage direction reads, “The scene opens, and discovers the English tortured, and the Dutch tormenting them”), Towerson makes this speech: Are you men or devils? D’Alva, whom you condemn for cruelty, did ne’er the like; he knew original Villainy was in your Blood: your Fathers all are damn’d for their Rebellion; when they Rebell’d, they were well us’d to this: these Tortures ne’er were hatch’d in Humane Breasts, but as your Countrey lies confi n’d on hell, just on it Marches, your black Neighbors taught ye, and just such pains as you invent on Earth, Hell has reserv’d for you. (5.1.310–317; emphasis mine) While it is clear that “black” has primarily a religious referent in this speech (the Dutch country “lies confi n’d on hell” with “black Neighbors” who teach “Tortures [that never] were hatch’d in Humane Breasts”), the emphasis on the Dutch hedonism and its continued figuration in racial terms lends another sense to this passage. Like the authors of Hogan-Moganides and The Dutch Usurpation, Dryden carefully racializes the Dutch by placing them in such close proximity to “black Neighbors.” Despite the fact that Asians, East Indians, Africans, and American Indians were referred to as “blacks” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Dryden never uses this language for any of the east Indians and Asians on Amboyna. 24 Instead, he reserves it solely for the Dutch. Dryden condemns the Dutch for their willingness and ability to behave like “black[s].” Although black still remains an essentialist term in this construction, Dryden condemns the Dutch for adopting a performance of blackness that is registered in social constructivist terms. Yet Dryden’s attempted displacement of the taint of color can only exist in a figurative and metaphorical sense within Amboyna. In other words, the Dutch cannot become literally black in the performance; they can only be linked with blackness rhetorically. Thus, he strives to create a distinction that is more literal. As he watches the horrors of the torture unfold, Towerson comments on the theatrical connections and connotations of torture.

118 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage In his fi rst theatrical reference Towerson notes the affects that divide the Dutch from the English, declaring: I could weep tears of Blood to view this usage; but you, as if not made of the same Mould, see with dry eyes the Miseries of Men, as they were Creatures of another kind, not Christians, nor Allies, nor Partners with you, but as if Beasts, transfi x’d on Theatres, to make you cruel sport. (5.1.319–324) While the scenes of torture move Towerson to tears, his Dutch counterparts are unmoved as if “transfi x’d on Theatres.” Not only do they see reality as fantasy, a “cruel sport” without actual ramifications, but also they fail to see their victims as “Christians” and “Partners” with them. Once again Dryden emphasizes the differences between the Dutch and English in social constructivist terms. It is not that the Dutch race is essentially different from the English; rather, it is that the Dutch have chosen to construct the English as a different race. Towerson goes on to uphold this distinction of affect by saying, “We have friends in England, who wou’d weep to see this acted on a Theatre, which here you make your pastime” (5.1.368–369). Even if this were theatre, Towerson adds, the English would treat the subject matter with greater reverence than do the Dutch. While Digges’s text anxiously revealed the connections between the Dutch and the English mercantile endeavors through their mutual reliance on the native labor force, Dryden’s play effectively removes the native labor force in order to emphasize the differences between the Dutch and the English. He deconstructs the notion that the Amboynese are essentially (racially) different through the “dispeopl[ing]” of the island and through the performance of the “fair” Ysabinda. Thus, race becomes constructed in social and affective ways. This does not mean, however, that Dryden’s employment of social constructivism was more benign, and therefore less harmful, than an essentialist view. Instead, Amboyna demonstrates not only how Dryden attempted to reassure his audience of their differences from the Dutch — their chosen, affective responses to torture — but also that the play is engaged in a sophisticated discourse about racial politics. The exposure of the torture of the English body, of course, can only occur when the torturer is racialized. Despite the fact that English citizens were tortured in England in the early modern period, the plays of the seventeenth century always disavow this occurrence by distancing torture to foreign lands: Africa, the Near East, and the New World. Amboyna is a remarkable play because it actually contains the victimization of English citizens, in particular white male bodies. The white male body can only be victimized, however, when the torturer becomes Othered. By racializing mercantilism, Dryden not only projects race onto the Dutch — those rivals with whom the English were often confused abroad — but also consolidates a normalized, non-racialized identity, for the English. Race, then,

Racializing Mercantilism

119

was constructed on the seventeenth-century stage not merely through color, but through a complex set of discourses and performances that ultimately served to construct an English identity that was uniquely normalized. This normalization of the English, what I have referred to previously as the antiracialization of the English, did not occur through a stable construction of race. Rather, it occurred through the bizarrely consistent vacillation between essentialist and social constructivist terms. Returning to Wallerstein’s defi nition of mercantilism as an “economic nationalism,” one can detect how discourses and presentations of nationalism were perverted into discourses and presentations of race. Torture, then, reveals a deep faultline in Dryden’s play. It is not simply that the heroic tragedy genre is stretched when depicting a “mercantile morality play”; it is also that the actual performance and staging of this play challenges simplistic views of early modern racial politics through the racialization of mercantilism. Despite the fact that critics often discuss Amboyna as a play that eschews addressing the racial politics involved in East Indian trade, the employment of the stage rack actually reveals Dryden’s tortured thinking and presentation of race relations on Amboyna. While he does forego a type of racial essentialism in order to create a union between the English and the Amboynese, he does not eschew all racial discourses. Rather, he reinscribes the importance of acting “fair.” As I have shown in chapter 4, because this Englishness is always relegated to the frameworks outside of the play (e.g., in the audience), the tensions about race are always present and palpable within the play itself.

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6

Combating Historical Amnesia On the Images of Prisoner Abuse from Abu Ghraib

They started to take photographs as if it was a porn movie. And they treated us like animals not humans. They kept doing this for a long time. No one showed us mercy. Nothing but cursing and beating. . . . The fi rst night when they stripped us naked they made us get on our hands and knees and they started to pile us one on top of the other. They started to take pictures from the front and from the back. And if you want to know the details of this, take the negative from the night guard and you will fi nd everything I said was true. . . . Again, watch the pictures in his belongings. Nori Al-Yasseri, Statement from Abu Ghraib, January 2004 Hundreds of Kodaks clicked all morning long at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope under the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway Bridge. Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. “Lynching,” Crisis, June 1915 The digital images of prisoner abuse from the Baghdad Correctional Facility at Abu Ghraib have been widely circulated since their initial release in late-April, early-May 2004. There are approximately 280 digital images and 20 digital videos that document events from various days in October, November, and December of 2003. The images were captured on five different digital cameras owned and operated by American soldiers in the 320th Battalion of the 800th Military Police Brigade. When Specialist Joseph Darby received CDs with the digital images on them, he turned them over to the Criminal Investigation Command (CID) and an official investigation was launched in January 2004. As Seymour Hersh notes, however, “The images, it was soon clear, were being swapped from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion.”1 Far from being the dirty little secret of 121

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a few American soldiers, the digital images were shared, circulated, and even manipulated into art: one military intelligence officer used the naked pyramid photo as the screen saver on his computer.2 The release of the images by CBS News on April 28, 2004, and The New Yorker on May 12, 2004, followed by the September 2005 U.S. District Court ruling that all of the images were protected by the Freedom of Information Act, ensured the continued circulation of the images. I am concluding my analysis of staged depictions of torture and race on the early modern stage with this deliberately anachronistic moment to emphasize the horrifying continuity of the desire to construct and control the racialized Other through staged scenes of violence. While it is important to acknowledge that different performance modes from different historical eras should be read in terms of their specific cultural and historical contexts, it is also important to acknowledge that certain forms of resistance are disabled by an overly staunch promotion of historical singularity and uniqueness. I recognize the important differences between photography and theatre, real depictions of torture and staged ones, and modern torture cells and seventeenth-century stage racks. Yet, I wonder if a type of historical amnesia is enabled by focusing too sharply on these disparities. Instead, I examine the strange continuities between these seemingly disparate modes, cultures, and histories in order to foster a type of analytical and performative resistance to depictions of torture that racialize the Other. In this chapter I will analyze the images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib in terms of race by linking them to the history of lynching photographs that were popular in the early twentieth century. Despite the fact that several prominent scholars like Hazel Carby and Henry Giroux have made this link and discussed the importance of combating historical amnesia, I argue that a larger amnesic ethos occurs through the localization of these images as uniquely American. Instead, I read the images of prisoner abuse in terms of the contradictory construction of race that I have traced throughout this book. As I have argued, definitions of race often vacillate between the essential and the discursive in order to maintain the disempowerment of the Other. In the end, I theorize methods for recovering these images in pedagogic settings. As a black-activist scholar, I think it is important to engage seriously with the potential risks, ramifications, and unintended effects of the reproduction of these performance pieces. Critical engagements with performances of race and torture do not occur on their own: we, as scholars, teachers, and activists, must not only combat the passive ways of viewing that are often promoted by the media but also facilitate the active ways of viewing that expose their own frames of construction.

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY Public debates about the images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib fall into two primary categories: political and cultural. In the political analy-

Combating Historical Amnesia 123 ses of the events, critics tend to focus — whether on the political Left or Right — on whether the images were random acts of violence or part of a systemic promotion of alternative interrogation techniques. In the cultural analyses of the events, critics tend to focus on the sexual nature of the images, speculating that contemporary pornography, television, and popular culture in general helped to create a space for these sexually charged staged constructions of violence. Whether politically or culturally charged, however, the debates about the images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib seem to elide discussions of race in favor of discussions of sex. Typical of the type of analysis that attempts to link the cultural with the political, Seymour Hersh highlights the sexual nature of the images, arguing: there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything — including spying on their associates — to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. (39) Digital images, such as the following image taken on November 7, 2003, clearly expose how some American soldiers created posed scenes that were highly charged in a sexual manner. In Figure 6.1, the prisoners were made to simulate acts of homosexual oral sex. Many critics have analyzed the use of the camera and digital camera as a performance vehicle, one that does not necessarily reveal the truth so much as constructs a vision of it. It is instructive to read the sexualized nature of this image in these terms. While most of the prisoners are hooded, as is the prisoner standing in the photo, the man kneeling in front of him has his hood off so that he appears to be engaging in oral sex. The photo, nonetheless, reveals its staged, posed, and constructed nature by including the hood on the standing prisoner: the hood reveals the vulnerability of his position as a prisoner, one who is not free to make his own choices, even with regards to the donning of a hood. In addition, the (accidental?) inclusion of the two other prisoners in the left side of the frame works to expose the image’s construction. Despite the fact that these two men are not fully included in the frame of the lens, their positions, one standing with a hood on his head and one kneeling with a hood in his hands, set the scene for another staged, recreated, and perhaps even duplicated image of homosexual oral sex. The revelation of the possibility of this restaged duplication uncovers the performativity of the images: they have been staged by the soldiers taking the pictures. These images are not simply about sexuality, however. While Hersh’s argument about the sexual nature of the posed photographs highlights the ways cultural norms and taboos can be, and are, manipulated for political gains, his argument, and arguments like his, elides how the very-posed nature of the images simultaneously constructs and manipulates notions of racial alterity. The inclusion of the smiling, thumbs-up giving, white, female American soldier in many of these images relies on old racist notions of the sanctity of white, female sexuality (see Figure 6.2). The brown, nude,

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Figure 6.1 Abu Ghraib Prison photo, constructing the detainees as sodomites, November 7, 2003.

hooded, male bodies of the prisoners are constructed as racially Other through the inclusion of the white, clothed, female bodies of the soldiers controlling them. Likewise, the explicit use of the word “RAPEIST” (sic), written onto the body of one of the prisoners, serves to link the racialized male Other with a threat to white female sexuality. Despite the fact that the prisoners were being abused for allegedly raping a young male inmate, the image constructs the prisoners as contained threats to white-female sexuality. Thus, the images are certainly linked with popular culture’s interest in hyper sexualization. Yet, most constructions of hyper sexualization occur through a racialized visual rhetoric as well. Furthermore, the statements the abused prisoners made to the investigating team in January 2004 support my reading of the racializing nature of the posed images. Many of the prisoners describe their abuse with explicit references to the races of the soldiers. One prisoner declares, “I kept thinking what is he going to do to us the next night, this white man with white glasses. . . . He and the two short female soldiers and the black soldier during this dark night.”3 Another testifies, “And when I was tied up in my room,

Combating Historical Amnesia 125

Figure 6.2 Abu Ghraib Prison photo taken by Sabrina Harman of Lynndie England and a “RAPEIST” (sic), November 7, 2003.

one of the girls, with blonde hair, she is white, she was playing with my dick. . . . And they were taking pictures of me during all these instances.”4 Yet another swears, “Then one of them took me to the shower, removed the sand bag, and I saw him; a black man, he told me to take a shower and he said he would come inside and rape me and I was very scared.”5 It is not merely that the prisoners mention color in these statements as indications of their attention to race. Rather, it is the way the events described seem to inform their interpretations of the meanings of the soldiers’ races. The integrated group of soldiers described in the fi rst statement — integrated both by race and gender — seems to threaten the prisoner precisely because of the promiscuity of the group’s make up: the prisoner’s rhetoric implies that anything could happen on this “dark night” because of this mixture. Likewise, in the second statement the prisoner’s rhetoric implies that there is a connection between the blonde-ness and white-ness of the female soldier, the sexual abuse that occurs, and the digital images that are being taken. He implies that he is being set up as a non-white sexual deviant in the images, despite the fact that the blonde is “playing with [his] dick” to

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make it appear erect in the photographs. And fi nally the rhetoric in the third statement implies that the removal of the prisoner’s hood was deliberate in order to expose the prisoner to the black soldier who threatened (what else could it possibly be?) rape. In other words, the black soldier seems to be playing off of the stereotype of aggressive black male sexuality, and the prisoner seems to accept the stereotype whole-heartedly, declaring, “I was very scared.” Clearly, everyone involved in the Baghdad Correctional Facility at Abu Ghraib was sensitive to the racial dynamics of the key inhabitants: prisoners, soldiers, and members of other governmental agencies (OGAs). Whether or not one believes the photographs were random or systemic, the posed, staged, and constructed nature of the images cannot be disputed: they bring to light how performance pieces, like photographs, often conflate sexuality, gender, and religion to construct a racialized Other. Moreover, they bring to light the contradictory construction of race. While the images attempt to capture the essential differences between the soldiers and the prisoners, they nonetheless reveal the constructed-nature of these differences. The differences, after all, can only be revealed in posed and staged images: they always reveal their performativity. It is interesting to note, too, how often critics have focused on class, without addressing issues of race. In fact, many critics have written about the 320th Battalion’s rural Maryland base. They argue both explicitly and implicitly that the soldiers involved had poor, non-cosmopolitan backgrounds and that this was a factor in the crimes committed. This narrative is not a complete fiction — statistics show that most soldiers in the armed forces today come from lower socio-economic backgrounds — but it nonetheless continues to elide a discussion of race. 6 Thus, those who have analyzed the political and cultural import of the sexualized nature of the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib — without regard for how the sexualized creates the gendered and racialized as well — often conclude their analyses with arguments about the aberrant nature of these crimes. For example, James Schlesinger famously declared that the events from Abu Ghraib were like “Animal House on the night shift”: events as abnormal, unique, and unsanctified as the events in the infamous frat movie Animal House.7 While critics like Mark Danner and Seymour Hersh have derided this type of logic for enabling the disavowal of the larger systemic problems of the War on Terror, I think arguments that appeal to the aberrant and exceptional quality of these abuses also invite what Hazel Carby calls an “historical amnesia, a denial of how integral the torture of brown bodies has been to the building of ‘the land of the free.’”8 Likewise, they implicitly deny how purposefully these images were staged. Again, I agree with the logic of Carby’s argumentation: The fact that in these images the bodies are often very carefully posed emphasises that pleasure is not produced spontaneously; rather, in

Combating Historical Amnesia 127 both lynching photographs and in the photographs from Abu Ghraib we can see a consciously staged and highly ritualised performance as if the actors were following a script. (4) Highlighting the sexualized nature of the images from Abu Ghraib, one can easily elide what Carby refers to as the ritualized elements of the performance that have historically been employed to construct racialized and disempowered identities for the Other. The digital images from Abu Ghraib, however, should facilitate conversations about the connections between race, class, sexuality, and gender. For example, Sergeant Javal Davis, a black soldier from New Jersey, was named over and over again in the statements by the prisoners as one who was often involved in the violent abuses: he is mentioned by name in at least two statements. Nevertheless, Davis can be found in less than five of the 280 digital images recovered, and in none of the images that ritualize the gaze: he cannot be found smiling, giving the thumbs up, or even posing in any of the images. Instead, he is captured in a few candid/action images. While it is impossible to know whether Davis’s absence from the staged and posed photographs from Abu Ghraib was intentional on his part or anyone else’s, his absence from them does help to codify the racialization of the prisoners. Once again, by ignoring this fact, critics have bolstered, supported, and enabled the white/right gaze to exist and persist. By analyzing the ritualized components of these performances, I hope to combat the historical amnesia that enables the compartmentalization of discussions of sexuality, gender, and class from race.

VIOLENCE, RITUAL, AND THE WHITE/RIGHT GAZE One way to encourage a type of historical remembering is to analyze the ritualistic, ceremonial, and iconic nature of staged scenes of violence. Analyzing the “cultural logic” of lynching photographs from the early twentieth century, for example, Jacqueline Goldsby argues that lynching photographs, postcards, and real photo postcards codified the differences between those who could see and those who could be seen. If black men could be lynched for the “reckless eyeballing” of white women, then the staged lynching images constructed the white/right way to look.9 The image of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith epitomizes what Goldsby argues is “an explicit exercise in racial domination” through the knowledge that the images “were circulating throughout public domain” (249). Goldsby theorizes: Indeed, the secretion of lynching photographs codified what was emerging at the turn of the nineteenth century as the civil right to look at and interpret the world in ways that perfected racism’s hierarchies of privilege. (249)

128 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage As Goldsby argues, the centrality of the white audience members’ gaze in lynching photographs creates not only a message about the right to gaze and the implicit racial hierarchies imbedded therein, but also a message that helps to construct an iconic image of gazing. Of the large collection of lynching images collected by James Allen in the Without Sanctuary Collection, only about 20 percent of the images do NOT contain white spectators.10 The genre of lynching photographs, as Goldsby argues, aims to codify the white/right gaze in a threateningly modern world.11 I agree with Hazel Carby’s assessment that “The pictures of the tortured bodies of Iraqis, rather than being unique or novel, are the direct descendents of the postcards of lynched black bodies” (3). And the easiest way to connect this lineage is through the connective DNA, so to speak, of the constructed white/right gaze that is empowered through the ritualized, ceremonial, and iconic inclusion of the abject nude body, the masked gaze, and the literally scripted body. I analyze the ritualization of these elements in both lynching photographs and the photographs from Abu Ghraib in order to demonstrate that race is invoked, constructed, and controlled through a white/ right gaze. Again, it is not necessarily the color of the victims portrayed that reveals the racialization of them so much as the normalization of the gaze that is fostered by them. As scholars and historians have noted, many African American lynching victims were castrated after they were lynched. It is important to stress that the photographic images of these victims, however, do not reveal the castration directly. Instead, they imply the violent removal has been successful by focusing on absence elsewhere. Thus, photographic images taken at lynchings often feature black male bodies with pants gaping open, indicating, but not completely revealing, absence. Alternatively, lynching victims were stripped of all of their clothing before the lynching and mutilation only to be draped with a sheet, blanket, or skirting material afterwards (see Figure 6.3 in which Abram Smith’s body is draped in a bloodied sheet). As Calvin Hernton argues, “through the castration rite, white men hope to acquire the grotesque powers they have assigned to the Negro phallus, which they symbolically extol by the act of destroying it.”12 The draping of the nude or semi-nude corpses of lynching victims, thus, serves to function as a sign for the repossessed phallus (a sign in and of itself!). As a symbol, it can never fully be revealed (it is a sign and not the signifi ed), but the abjection of the (semi-)nude body must always be exposed: its inclusion becomes ritualized in order to racialize the victim as the disempowered Other. Similarly, the digital images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib traffic in the ritualization of the abject nude body. Although the majority of the digital images from Abu Ghraib capture prisoners who are alive (there seems to be only one set of thirty images featuring a corpse), many of them expose the prisoners to a similar scopophilic gaze as that constructed in lynching photographs. The vast majority of the images, in fact, show the prisoners in Abu Ghraib naked: approximately 75 percent of the images. In

Combating Historical Amnesia 129

Figure 6.3 The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana. Courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection.

addition, many of the images attempt to construct the prisoners as abject in terms of sexual depravity, and their nudity is central to this construction. Many prisoners were made to simulate masturbation, oral sex, and anal penetration. The white/right gaze is constructed through the abjection of these bodies. For example, the infamous image of the prisoners arranged and stacked into a pyramid (see Figure 6.4), what Lynndie England referred to as the “dog pile,” constructs the white/right gaze.13 The prisoners have been positioned in such a way that highlights that they are naked with the exception of their hoods, thereby emphasizing that they have been denied the right to control their own gaze and the gaze of anyone else. Like the draping of lynching/castration victims, these images ritualize the abject, nude body in order to racialize the victims and codify the controlling power of the white/right gaze. The ritualized inclusion of the masked gaze of the victim also serves to racialize the victims by establishing the power of the white/right gaze. In lynching photographs this was accomplished through the focus on the victims’ inability to return the gaze of the camera. As Dora Apel argues, “Few surviving photographs record the black victim both before and after death” because those images would endow the victim with “the right to return the ‘look’ of his white torturers for whom the cameraman is a surrogate.”14 Thus, the faces of lynching victims were often exposed in the photographs and postcards because they emphasized the one-sided nature of the gaze: corpses cannot look back. In the Abu Ghraib digital images, however, the ritualized inclusion of the masked gaze occurs in a different manner. As

130 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Figure 6.4 Abu Ghraib Prison photo of Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman in front of the infamous “dog pile,” November 7, 2003.

I said before, for the most part the digital images from the prison in Abu Ghraib do not capture corpses. Nevertheless, the gaze of the victim is still occluded. It is fascinating to examine how many of the images from Abu Ghraib contain hooding and/or face coverings. In one series of images, for instance, a naked prisoner, whose arms are shackled to the top of a wire bunk bed, has his face covered with a pair of women’s white underwear, again, emphasizing and ritualizing the right to gaze in racialized terms. The naked bodies of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib are exposed, but their eyes are not allowed to gaze back. Finally, the ritualized scripting of these scenes of violence also serves to racialize the victims and codify the power of the white/right gaze. Not only are the images scripted in the sense that they are staged, posed, and constructed, but also they often contain writing in or on the images literally to script a photographic narrative. Around half of the images in the Allen-Littlefield Without Sanctuary Collection contain captions on or around the lynching photographs, postcards, and real photo postcards. For example, Figure 6.3 contains the caption, “Marion, Indiana August 1930.” In another copy of this same image, the photo was placed within framed matting, with the inscriptions, “Bo pointin to his niga” and “klan 4th joplin, Mo. 33.” Furthermore, locks of the victim’s hair were flattened between the glass and double mattes. These types of narrative interventions seek to control the meaning of these images. Several of the lynch-

Combating Historical Amnesia 131 ing photographs, for instance, are labeled with the captions “Lynching,” “Warning,” and “Lynched,” implying that the recipient of the image might not be able to read its significance independently.15 What is the difference between the image of a suicide by hanging and a lynching, after all? Similarly, the images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib frequently contain scripted messages within them. Like the lynching postcards, the images from Abu Ghraib were circulated through the mail (although this time via e-mail) and often contained commentary on the images. I am more interested in the built-in scripts though (see Figure 6.2). The soldiers involved did not fi nd it enough to pose scenes of violent abjection. Instead, they needed to script a way to interpret the abused prisoners: “RAPEIST” and “The Claw” are just two scripts written onto the bodies of the prisoners.16 Once again the inclusion of this element has a ritualized, ceremonial, and iconic nature that helps to racialize the victims by establishing the power of the white/right gaze: the scripts reveal the literal power of the white/right gaze to construct meaning. Thus, the images of prisoner abuse taken at the Baghdad Correctional Facility at Abu Ghraib serve to racialize the victims by codifying the power of the white/right gaze through the ritualized inclusion of bodies made abject, gazes that are masked and denied, and bodies that are literally scripted. It is disingenuous to focus on the sexualized, gendered, classed, and/or religious elements of the images without analyzing them in terms of the racializing visual rhetoric included. By neglecting race in their analyses of the images from Abu Ghraib, critics have implicitly enabled and empowered the normalization of the white/right gaze. It is important to note that the ritualized inclusion of these elements that codify the power of the white/right gaze also reveals an anxiety about the viewer’s ability to recognize essential differences: the racialized body must be made abject, the gaze of the racialized victim must be denied, and the semiotic significance of the violence portrayed must be literally spelled out. Despite the fact that these images attempt to essentialize differences in visual ways, the ritualization of these elements reveals an anxiety about the possibility of misinterpreting the significance of visual cues. The images from lynching and Abu Ghraib, after all, are never naturalized: they are exaggerated, deliberately grotesque, and purposefully staged. Once again, the notion of race hangs between contradictory defi nitions: the images attempt to reveal essential differences, but those differences can only be revealed in a ritualized (i.e., constructed) fashion.

HISTORICAL AMNESIA The critics who have attempted to combat historical amnesia by linking the images from Abu Ghraib with lynching photographs, however, often localize their arguments in terms of a unique American history. Hazel Carby,

132 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage for instance, writes that there is “a direct, but hidden, line connecting Abu Ghraib, the Rodney King video, and the photographs and ‘postcards’ of lynchings which circulated widely in the early 20th century” (2). Then she qualifies this “line” by localizing it, arguing: The starting point of a recovery of memory is awareness of the unacknowledged but intimate interdependence between two currents in American history: the enlightenment principles of individual freedom . . . ; and the horrors of non-freedom, of the enslavement and dispossession of the not-fully human who were excluded from the constitution drawn up by the ‘founding fathers.’ It is these enslaved and dispossessed . . . who have lived the consequences of this Janus face of American freedom and non-freedom. (2) For Carby, then, these images come out of these specific “currents in American history.” Similarly, Max Gordon implies that there is a distinct American quality to the photographs from Abu Ghraib. In fact, he employs the metaphor of the “family album” to identify the distinguishing characteristics of these images: Placed together, the photographs form an American family album of racist, pornographic iconography: a hooded Iraqi man standing with arms extended and wires attached to his body recalls a naked African man standing on an auction-block awaiting sale; . . . an Iraqi man curled up on a prison floor and held at the end of a leash is the lynched body of a black southerner, freshly cut down from a tree in Mississippi, or James Byrd, dragged to death until he was decapitated, in Jasper County, Texas.17 For Gordon, the images from Abu Ghraib fi ll in another page of a uniquely American history book. Likewise, Henry Giroux emphasizes the American nature of the images from Abu Ghraib. Although he begins by arguing that the images are reminiscent of “images of the Spanish Inquisition, the French brutalization of Algerians, and the slaughter of innocent people at My Lai during the Viet Nam war,” he ends in a much more specific and localized place: the images shed critical light on the often ignored connection between American domination abroad, often aimed at the poor and dispossessed, and at home, particularly against people of color, including the lynching of American blacks in the fi rst half of the twentieth century, as well as the increasingly brutal incarceration of large numbers of youth of color that continues into the new millennium.18

Combating Historical Amnesia 133 For Giroux, the images recall the history of “American domination.” While I agree with Carby, Gordon, and Giroux that there is a “line” that connects the digital images from Abu Ghraib with other iconic events/images that help to dispossess a racialized portion of society, I am not sure that the localization of this “line” or “family album” as uniquely and distinctly American helps to set the course for a new “line” or “family album.” In fact, I wonder if the localization of these tendencies as American does not invite the creation of another form of “historical amnesia”: one that enables a larger, violent racializing mechanism to remain intact. What would it mean to appropriate Leon Litwack’s warning — against the dangers of viewing lynching photographs as aberrations from a distant historical past — to a longer and larger historical narrative about the construction of racialized disempowerment through staged scenes of torture? Here is Litwack’s warning: Obviously, it is easier to choose the path of collective amnesia, to erase such memories, to sanitize our past. It is far easier to view what is depicted on these pages as so depraved and barbaric as to be beyond the realm of reason. That enables us to dismiss what we see as an aberration, as the work of crazed fiends and psychopaths. But such a dismissal would rest on dubious and dangerous assumptions.19 It is always easier to distance and pathologize cultural-historical events that address systemic power disparities based on a racialized epistemology. In fact, the underlying assumptions of inequality that enable the racialization of certain groups of humans may prevent our ability to remember, let alone rectify, inequities. Theorizing the connections between violence, mourning, and politics in her book that was published before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Judith Butler argues that the “derealization” of certain groups of humans has made it easy not only to perpetrate violence against them but also to forget that it ever occurred. If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never “were,” and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. The derealization of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. 20 The spectral nature of the derealized Other enables the disavowal or forgetting of past violent crimes. An active “realization” of the Other, then,

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means an acknowledgement and acceptance of larger cultural-historical narratives that have contributed to the derealization of the Other: it means actively connecting seemingly disparate points in a cultural-historical arc. Uniting Carby’s notion of historical amnesia with Butler’s notion of the “interminably spectral,” I challenge the assumption that the photographs of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib represent a uniquely American form of racism. By arguing that the digital images from Abu Ghraib reveal a distinctive American cultural history, critics like Carby, Gordon, Giroux, and others unwittingly enable the forgetting and disavowal of a larger historical arc that constantly keeps the very idea of race fluctuating between two contradictory defi nitions. In Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, I have tried to deconstruct the simplistic, prevailing division between pre- and post-Enlightenment notions of race. Instead, I have tried to analyze how seventeenth-century theatrical depictions of torture helped to codify a racializing epistemology that is characterized by contradiction and vacillation. Attempting to facilitate historical remembering, I have constructed this book in terms that are both historical and theoretical, while constantly questioning the relationship between the two. In chapter 2, “A Matter that is No Matter,” for instance, I tracked how the theatrical innovations of the Restoration stage affected constructions of race. These innovations — moveable sets, female actresses, and new acting techniques — highlight how race was consistently being defined in a binaristic fashion as both essential and constructed. My focus on the inclusion and employment of white female actresses in these plays allowed me to analyze the ways difference was a matter and no matter. Racialized constructions were never simply and solely about color, I argue, because the racializing epistemology was about the codification and normalization of the anti-racialized white/right gaze. By focusing on theatrical depictions, moreover, I emphasized that the visual rhetorics for race were never constant. The force and purpose of this model, I argue, was to create alterity in terms that were constantly shifting and contradictory, thereby disabling resistance: the Other was always caught out. In chapter 3, “When Race is Colored,” I focused on performances that specifically construct a racialized epistemology through color. Although the performances of Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia and Oroonoko, unlike The Empress of Morocco and Xerxes discussed in chapter 2, stress the importance of color as a sign of alterity, I demonstrate how equivocally these plays treat the significance of this sign. Far from presenting a singular and uniform interpretation of color’s significance, these plays reveal the contradictory construction of race as both fi xed and alterable, even when color is imbued with a racialized signification. Precisely the moment when England’s burgeoning slave trade was taking off, the plays from the period show a remarkable ambivalence about the significance of reading race as color.

Combating Historical Amnesia 135 In chapter 4, “Racializing Civility,” I moved on to explore the importance of objects and props as racializing tools on the seventeenth-century stage. These props, like stage racks, are meant to materialize race in a specific and fi xed manner but also reveal the constructed nature of race by showing how easily material objects can be transferred and performed. The anxiety over this lack of stability, I argue, forces Dryden to invest Indian Emperour and Amboyna with a notion of essential English identity. By constructing affect as an essentializing marker, however, Dryden reveals the conflicted heart of this racializing epistemology: affect is performative, after all. And fi nally, in chapter 5, “Racializing Mercantilism,” I analyze how the English constructed mercantilism into a racializing epistemology. Arguments for essentialism, as evidenced by my reading of Dryden’s Amboyna, often deconstruct themselves by exposing their reliance on performative aspects of identity. Despite the fact that Dryden wants to present the Dutch as being essentially different from the English, he creates a performance piece that emphasizes the economic factors that end up affecting identity. Torture, and more specifically the stage rack, stands at the center of all of these performances, inviting the audience to think about the connections between identity and the body. These seventeenth-century plays have all too often been treated as aberrations from a distant historical past. Critical, pedagogical, and theatrical neglect have enabled “the path of collective amnesia” that “sanitizes our past,” as Litwack warns. Yet, the images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib require that we think beyond American history when analyzing the violent, racializing visual rhetoric of the digital performance pieces. The “realization” of the Other may only occur when we acknowledge the larger cultural-historical arcs that influence contemporary constructions of race. By deconstructing the simplistic, binaristic division so often constructed between pre- and post-Enlightenment defi nitions for race, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage seeks to create this larger cultural-historical arc.

RECOVERY/RECOVERING So how exactly can one enable others to recognize the ways staged scenes of torture have been employed to construct race in contradictory terms? Is it possible to recover these staged scenes of violence in a way to proffer an effective strategy for resistance? It is important to keep reminding ourselves that these performances — whether from the seventeenth century or the twentyfirst century — are meant to codify and solidify differences and power structures. As Dora Apel saliently argues about lynching photographs: these images were teaching tools meant to illustrate the unbridgeable, terrifying gulf between the “races.” A white child was invited to iden-

136

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage tify either with the powerful “white race” or the abject and dehumanized “black race.” The images were as much about controlling whites as they were about controlling blacks. (42)

Thus, these performances of race are designed to control multiple audiences: it is never merely the derealized Other, to return to Butler’s phrase, who is affected by these performances. Can these types of performances truly be appropriated, or does exposure to them merely reinforce their controlling apparati? Although I have fervently argued that it is important to create a larger cultural-historical narrative in order to combat historical amnesia, I wonder if this larger arc and narrative inevitably enables its own ethos of amnesia. Might this larger narrative, in fact, implicitly universalize and, thus, normalize these racializing performances? Writing about images from the Vietnam War, John Berger warns: But the reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own personal moral inadequacy. And as soon as this happens even his sense of shock is dispersed: his own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the crimes being committed in the war. Either he shrugs off this sense of inadequacy as being only too familiar, or else he thinks of performing a kind of penance. . . . In both cases, the issue of the war which has caused that moment is effectively de-politicized. The picture becomes the evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody. 21 If the horror of certain images invites a universalizing ethos/rhetoric that de-politicizes the events staged, then can one ever appropriate these images as tools for resistance? Do staged scenes of violence that serve to construct racialized Others inevitably invite amnesia? Is the amnesia consistent and merely its shape different, enabling interpretations that vacillate solely between the wholly aberrant and the universal? I have to admit that I have felt awkward and embarrassed spending so much time looking at the photographs of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib. I resisted saving all 280 digital images on my computer because I did not want someone to “catch” me with them on my “work” computer: I save only the images I am working with directly; I quickly minimize the images whenever anyone comes into my office; and I do not print them out until I send them off to the publisher. Despite the fact that this entire project rests on the supposition that these violent constructions of race can be combated if acknowledged and recognized historically, locally, and theoretically, I nonetheless have felt compromised by the images. I feel guilty looking at them. Because of these feelings, I fear that my ardent arguments about the need to examine the larger cultural-historical arc of violent constructions

Combating Historical Amnesia 137 of race becomes a type of crutch that implicitly deconstructs my ability to address them without universalizing them. Although I have at times felt awkward describing my project to nonacademics (“What’s your book about?” “How staged scenes of torture reveal the contradictory constructions of race.” “Oh, that’s depressing.”), the immediacy of the photographs from Abu Ghraib has disturbed me more than any of the seventeenth-century texts have. The difference in my reaction, I think, stems from two different but interrelated issues. First, the plays I write about in this book are close to four hundred years old and almost none of them have been revived. There is no immediate visual reference for these plays: thus, the images included in my work are as old as the plays themselves — engravings, broadsides, frontispieces, etc. The plays exist as distant historical documents instead of un-dead, revivable, zombie-like performance pieces that constantly recreate themselves and the audience. Of course, this book is an attempt to reveal, expose, and make apparent the zombie-like narratives and constructions that these plays help to create: narratives and constructions, I have argued, that still have a powerful hold on contemporary discourses for race. The performance history of the plays (or the lack thereof!) and the lack of contemporary visual narratives about them invites one to see them as distant, and I think I welcomed that distance when it was emotionally convenient. Second, and related, there are differences between theatre and photography as performance modes. This concluding chapter was deliberately conceived to be provocative. By ending in the twenty-fi rst century, I wanted to challenge a neatly historicized narrative that enabled, even fostered, a distanced conception of racialized constructions. Despite the fact most early modern race scholars have been chastised for making connections between early modern notions of race and modern ones, I have always seen a strange connection in the way that race has been consistently redefi ned, three-card-Monte style. In other words, defi ning race has become a confidence game in which the mark is tricked into betting that s/he can fi nd the defi nition among the face-down cards. Yet, the performances of seventeenth-century theatre and twentyfi rst-century digital imaging are different: one does not, and cannot, boil down to a shameful image I am afraid to have open on my computer, while the other does. I know these performance modes are different, and perhaps I deliberately whitewash the differences to be able to sustain my activist stance and arguments. I have included these personal confessions because they exemplify the problems one faces when analyzing performances of race: creating a larger cultural-historical arc threatens to universalize performances and separating performances from disparate historical moments threatens to localize them too much, enabling arguments about aberrations and disarming politically engaged readings. Henry Giroux’s discussion of the important role pedagogy plays in informing and shaping the way individuals read

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performances provides an important intervention here. Writing specifi cally about the photographs of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib, Giroux argues: Photographic images reside neither in the unique vision of their producer nor in the reality they attempt to capture. Representations privilege those who have some control over self-representation, and they are largely framed within dominant modes of intelligibility. . . . What is often ignored in the debates about Abu Ghraib, both in terms of its causes and what can be done about it, are questions that foreground the relevance of critical education to the debate. (8, 9) Like Giroux, I believe that images and performance pieces are never static in their meaning. While power structures clearly influence who has access to producing images/performances and how they are viewed, pedagogy affects these very power structures by making them transparent and revealing their constructed natures. Giroux continues: pedagogical conditions need to be in place to enable people to view the images of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison not as part of a voyeuristic, even pornographic, reception, but through a variety of discourses that enable them to ask how people learn to participate in sadistic acts of abuse and torture [and] internalize racist assumptions that make it easier to dehumanize people different from themselves. (9) Following Susan Sontag’s seminal argument about the human need to create narratives for photographic images, Giroux contends that one need not control the images themselves, only the “discourses” about them. 22 The creation of these alternative discourses, of course, has been one of my goals in writing Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage. Nevertheless, one must still ask how dominant discourses are formed when certain images and performances saturate society. It is interesting to note that the United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld expressed an anxiety about the medium used to reveal the abuses at the Baghdad Correctional Facility at Abu Ghraib: digital photography. On May 7, 2004, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee: I feel terrible about what happened to these detainees. They are human beings. . . . We’re functioning in a [war] with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a war-time situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.23

Combating Historical Amnesia 139 For Rumsfeld the problem was that the soldiers were “running around with digital cameras” that have the capability to reproduce, disseminate, and then saturate various media outlets — print media, online media, television, cinema, home computers, etc. — before the people in the Pentagon had even seen them. In other words, the profusion of the images threatened the government’s ability to control the discourses and narratives used to make sense of, justify, and/or excuse them, Rumsfeld implies. Mass reproduction, in this sense, seems to offer the hope of a more democratically and/or socially informed narrative about performance. Following Judith Butler’s work in Excitable Speech, Dora Apel advocates for the power of repetition not only to heal social injustices but also to appropriate power from dominant groups and structures.24 Although the potential risks are plentiful — reinforcing exclusive hierarchies, for example — the risks of not appropriating discourses and performances are equally plentiful. Quoting Butler’s discourse about performance to appropriate it to one about photography, Apel writes: Butler concludes: “That such language carries trauma is not a reason to forbid its use. There is no purifying language of its traumatic residue, and no way to work through trauma except through the arduous effort it takes to direct the course of its repetition.” Similarly, directing the course of the repetition of these visual images seems the only way, although painful and arduous, to make visible and work through a central but largely unacknowledged feature of traumatic American history. (13) Repetition, then, offers the hope of appropriation. Although the work of repetition will not be without pain or labor, the end result could be the healing of trauma instead of the continued infliction of it. Like Rumsfeld’s anxious statement quoted above, Butler and Apel see the potential destabilizing force of repetition: reproduction, dissemination, and saturation have a power of their own that cannot be fully contained by any dominant structure. The “arduous effort it takes to direct the course of repetition,” however, may be made slightly less arduous by employing performances that expose their own constructed-ness. While all performances are constructions, some are masked as being more natural than others. One might argue that the entire focus of Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage is to lift these masks to expose the artifice of performances of torture that racialize the Other while normalizing the white/right gaze. My readings of The Empress of Morocco, Xerxes, Titus Andronicus, Oroonoko, The Indian Emperour, and Amboyna, like my reading of the digital image from Abu Ghraib in which the prisoners are positioned as perverted sodomites (see Figure 6.1), seek to reveal the inner workings of the constructions of these performances of race and torture. There are performances that have more visible faultlines than others, and it is interesting to note

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Figure 6.5 Abu Ghraib Prison photo taken by Charles Graner of Sabrina Harman with a video camera, capturing the “dog pile” of prisoners, November 7, 2003.

how often these performances are under-analyzed. The infamous “dog pile” image from Abu Ghraib (see Figure 6.4), for instance, was widely circulated in the media. Yet, another image of that pyramid of hooded, nude, and stacked bodies more readily reveals what went into creating it. Sabrina Harman’s presence, standing under the artificial glow of rows of fluorescent lights and in front of an artificial pile of human bodies (see Figure 6.5), helps the viewer deconstruct the mask of normality. Holding a digital video camera and obviously attempting to frame the rear shot of this human pyramid, Harman makes conscious to the viewer the framing of the image. The viewer’s ability and desire seamlessly to suture over the camera lens is challenged when another frame is included.25 Although many of the images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib feature soldiers within the frame watching and constructing the horrific incidents, the images that have become the most iconic do not feature them. As Mark Danner explains: They have long since taken their place in the gallery of branded images . . . : Hooded Man, a dark-caped figure tottering on a box, supplicant arms outstretched, wires trailing from his fi ngers; and Leashed Man, face convulsed in humiliation above the leather collar, naked body twisted at the feet of the American female in camoufl age pants

Combating Historical Amnesia 141 who gazes down at him without expression, holding the leash casually in hand. (26–27) I would add the “dog pile” photo to this list of “branded images” from Abu Ghraib. Despite the fact that Lynndie England is featured in the “Leashed Man” image, I would argue that it is precisely these images that have become iconic because they depict the complete abjection of the Other without fully implicating a source for this abjection: these images attempt to deny that there is an agent, an active subject, who has constructed, staged, and blocked these scenes. One must ask why the “Hooded Man” image with which we are so familiar was circulated and made iconic over this other “Hooded Man” image featuring Ivan Frederick with his Deluxe Classic Cam, which, by the way, was used to take some 20 percent of the images of abuse from Abu Ghraib (see Figure 6.6). Likewise, if Lynndie England’s presence in the “Leashed Man” image seems to challenge my supposition that the iconic images are those that construct abjection without agency, then why are we less familiar with another image of the “Leashed Man,” featuring Megan Ambuhl looking on (see Figure 6.7)? England’s expression seems to communicate a complete lack of self-consciousness, and so she has been scapegoated as a type of naïve, shallow, and even slow girl from West Virginia, who clearly could not have devised these things herself.26 In a sense, the narrative about the “Leashed Man” image has become one of a lack of agency, despite England’s hold on the leash. Megan Ambuhl’s presence on the side of this frame, however, implicitly challenges the interpretation of England’s lack of agency. Ambuhl, looking

Figure 6.6 Abu Ghraib Prison photo taken by Sabrina Harman of the famous “Hooded Man,” but with Ivan Frederick holding his camera, November 4, 2003.

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Figure 6.7 Abu Ghraib Prison photo taken by Charles Graner of Lynndie England with “Gus” on a leash, but with Megan Ambuhl looking on, October 24, 2003.

on but not holding the leash herself, makes England look all too active: the clear agent in this performance. The non-iconic images of “Dog Pile,” “Hooded Man,” and “Leashed Man,” however, discourage the viewer from suturing over the agency behind the lens by revealing other hands with other cameras and/or other eyes recognizing agency. As I argued before, it is important to analyze performances of torture that racialize the Other in terms of the white/right gaze. Likewise, it is important to analyze these performances in terms of the agents of staging. Figure 6.8 demonstrates most palpably and literally the way an agent or subject had to construct and stage the scene. The corpse of an old man is disguised as a “good ole darkey,” through costuming and a type of theatrical blocking. The presence of the white hand, holding the stick that enables the performance of submission, discloses the performative nature of the scene. It deconstructs the intended message — that the Other will be made into the desired object, even if it has to be in death — even as it attempts to codify it. Judith Butler, expanding Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the “face,” argues that a recognition of the Other’s humanity occurs through the failure of representation. Butler argues: the human is indirectly affi rmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure . . . The

Combating Historical Amnesia 143

Figure 6.8 The bludgeoned body of an African American male, propped in a rocking chair, blood-splattered clothes, with dark paint applied to face, circular disks glued to cheeks, cotton glued to face and head, shadow of man using rod to prop up the victim’s head. Circa 1900, location unknown. Courtesy of the Allen-Littlefield Collection.

critical image, if we can speak that way . . . must not only fail to capture its referent, but show this failing. (Butler 2004, 144, 146) The plays, photographs, and digital images — the performances — I have addressed in this book show the failings of their representations. Thus, it is not merely reproduction, dissemination, and repetition that will foster the recovery of these performances. Rather, it is the reproduction, dissemination, and repetition of specific self-revealing performances that must be actively recovered. The dominance and power of the white/right gaze can be challenged most effectively by exposing and de-naturalizing the hands, eyes, and agents behind racialized constructions. Despite the fact that his analysis actually serves to recodify the normalization and anti-racialization of the white/right gaze, Arthur C. Danto analyzes the Colombian artist Fernando Botero’s collection of oil paintings based on the photographs from Abu Ghraib in terms of the failure of their representations. The paintings include Botero’s signature “blimpy figures,” heavy “upscale folk art” bodies, in poses made familiar by the digital images of prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib. 27 The soldiers who committed and staged the scenes have been completely removed, with only disembodied, blue-gloved hands visible in a few of the paintings. Writing about the show and the show book, entitled Botero Abu Ghraib, 28 Danto calls the paintings:

144 Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage masterpieces of what I have called disturbatory art — art whose point and purpose is to make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts. Botero’s astonishing works make us realize this: We knew that Abu Ghraib’s prisoners were suffering, but we did not feel that suffering as ours. (23) The fact that Danto assumes that his view is the universal view (“our most frightening subjective thoughts,” “make us realize,” “We knew . . . but we did not feel”) clues his reader into the fact that race is completely erased from his analysis: Danto never discusses how race (dis)fi gures the photographs and paintings. In fact, I was left with the queasy suspicion that Danto is attracted to the paintings precisely because he subconsciously sees race removed from them. When he writes that the bodies in Botero’s paintings, with the “prisoners’ heavy flesh” that “look all the more vulnerable to the pain infl icted,” I want to ask more vulnerable than what: the racialized victims in the digital images (24)? These questions, I hope, reveal how the failure to convey the human must still be analyzed in an appropriative fashion in order to combat depictions of torture that continue to reconstruct the racialized Other and the normalized, anti-racialized white/right gaze. My analysis of the plays in Performing of Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, thus, seeks actively to reveal the agents of racializing epistemologies: these plays show their failings clearly, but one must actively interpret these failings, nonetheless. In chapter 2, for instance, I highlight how the use of white actresses on the Restoration stage challenged a simplistic understanding of the semiotic and material significance of the body. The employment of white actresses in plays set in Africa and the Near East, like The Empress of Morocco and Xerxes, renders the relationship between gender, race, nationality, religion, and color ambiguous. The use of the stage rack in these plays, moreover, reveals the violent desire to rip/script the body of the Other. The stage rack, in other words, literally rips these plays and the constructions of race apart. As I indicated before, however, these plays have not had recent performance revivals. They exist largely as historical performance pieces that are read but not performed, seen, and/or revived: they exist solely in the purview of the academic, historian, and/or archivist, but not in the purview of the director, performer, or theatre critic. In fact, many of them do not exist in modern editions. Although I did not envision this conclusion when I started this project, I want to call for a revival of these horrifically violent and racist plays because they fail in their representations so perfectly. If it is possible to employ alternatives for the iconic “Hooded Man,” “Leashed Man,” and “Dog Pile” images from Abu Ghraib, and it is possible to employ alternatives for lynching photographs in order to highlight the agency of the white/right gaze, then it is possible to think about the plays addressed in this book as alternatives to the universalized and often de-politicized presentations and interpretations of plays by William Shakespeare, William

Combating Historical Amnesia 145 Wycherly, and William Congreve. It is not that the plays by Elkanah Settle, Colley Cibber, Edward Ravenscroft, Thomas Southerne, and John Dryden I have analyzed are any better or worse as theatrical pieces; rather, the faultlines they present around scenes of torture unwittingly reveal their constructions of race. Like the white hand seen propping up the corpse of the “good ole darkey” in Figure 6.8, these plays expose the failure of their representation through the revelation of agency. And these revelations may combat the universalized and de-politicized treatment of many texts by more canonical early modern writers. The fi rst step in recovering these plays must be the creation of modern editions (I would love to read, teach, and cite from a volume entitled Restoration Race Plays!). The second step is the dissemination of these plays in classrooms, university theatrical productions, and perhaps historicallyinvested repertory companies like the Globe in London and Blackfriars in Staunton, Virginia. The third step is an active debate among theatre practitioners, theatre historians, performance theorists, and theatre critics about how to stage these plays. How should race be conveyed onstage in a twenty-fi rst century production of a little-known seventeenth-century play? Should it be naturalized with actors of color playing the racialized roles? Or, should blackface be invoked? Or, should a combo be created with actors of color in blackface? Should the productions be performed in historical dress? How does that affect the racial casting? How should the violence and torture be represented? Should it be highly symbolic, realistic, or something in between? Again, how does that decision affect the racial casting? I am not invested in dictating one model for racial casting: rather, I am invested in creating a dialogue about the complexities of these issues. 29 The benefits and the challenges are that these plays have been neglected and thus rendered noncanonical. One need not battle years of performance history and convention to recover these plays. Yet, one must battle the notion that they are not worthy of recovery. I am ending on a deliberately polemical note because I think there is a great deal at stake in the disturbing performance arc I have described. While Hilton Als, writing in the Without Sanctuary collection book, questions why he is asked “to be Negro on the page” to “authenticate” projects about race, there are not many in early modern academia who have even considered the idea that a racialized point of view is valid, necessary, or even authenticating.30 If early modern race studies have become somewhat familiar and acceptable within the academy, why is there still resistance in scholarship on the later seventeenth century and the Restoration? Let us think about recovering these performances as a way not only to heal traumatic histories and constructions of history, but also to heal historically restricted and restrictive fields of study.

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Notes

CHAPTER 1 1. Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty (Second Manifesto),” in The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 123. Although taken from different essays and letters about the Theater of Cruelty, all citations from Artaud will come from this edition of The Theater and Its Double: only page numbers will be provided parenthetically. 2. John Dryden, The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1665) in The Works of John Dryden, Vol. IX, eds. Edward Niles and H.T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 5.2.1–21. 3. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 2. 4. United Nations, Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Article 1 (New York: United Nations, 1984). 5. Geoffrey Abbott, Tortures of the Tower of London (Newton Abbot: David and Charles Press, 1986), 7. 6. John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 76. 7. See, for example, a recent press release from the United Nations’ Committee Against Torture, in which the phrase “perform an act of torture” is used frequently. United Nations Press Release, 4 May 2005. 8. John Langbein’s analyses of proof, prosecution, and torture in early modern Europe still hold enormous sway. John Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). Narrowing this type of analysis, James Heath examined England’s unique and limited use of torture primarily under the Tudors and Stuarts. James Heath, Torture and English Law: An Administrative and Legal History from the Plantagenets to the Stuarts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). 9. John Langbein, “The Legal History of Torture,” in Torture: A Collection, ed. Sanford Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 101. 10. John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 256.

147

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Notes

11. John Conroy’s book documents both of these phenomena in a convincing manner. See his chapter 16, “Bystanders,” for the nine-stage response that governments provide for torture and the social-psychological reasons for witness passivity. 12. Sir Walter Scott, Introduction to Amboyna in The Works of John Dryden Now First Collected in Eighteen Volumes, Vol. V, ed. Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Co, 1821), 4. 13. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 19–20. 14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Allan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977). 15. Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001). 16. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also, Molly Easo Smith, Breaking Boundaries: Politics and Play in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1998) for a similar type of argument. 17. Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England: concerning high treason, and other pleas of the Crown, and criminall causes (London: Printed by M. Flesher for W. Lee and D. Pakeman, 1644), 35. 18. Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Anglie (ca. 1470) in On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. and trans. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 33. 19. Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (ca. 1565), ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 117–118. 20. Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 55. 21. Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1987). 22. Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18. 23. A typical early modern torture warrant for a heretic would claim that he/she was somehow connected with a foreign power. For example, the April 15, 1597, warrant issuing the torture of an English Catholic priest named John Gerard claimed, “yt hath been discovered to her Majestie he verie latelie did receive a packet of letters out of the Lowe Contryes which are supposed to come out of Spayne, being noted to be a great intellegencer and to holde correspondence with Parsons of Jesuite and other traitors beyond the seas.” From Acts of the Privy Council in England, ed. John R. Dasent (London: Printed for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1890). 24. Aphra Behn, for example, famously remarked that she supplied the headdresses for The Indian Queen and Indian Emperour, thus signaling that the Indians in the plays were depicted as physically different from their Spanish conquerors. Behn emphasizes the exotic nature of this gift. Equating the enormous Indian headdresses with strange cultural differences like body piercing, Behn writes, “Then we trade for feathers, which they order into all shapes, make themselves little short habits of ’em, and glorious wreaths for their heads, necks, arms and legs, whose Tinctures are unconceivable. I had a set of these presented to me, and I gave ’em to the King’s theater, and it was the dress of the Indian Queen, infi nitely admired by persons of quality,

Notes

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

149

and were unimitable. Besides these, a thousand little knacks and rarities in nature, and some of art, as their baskets, weapons, aprons et cetera. We dealt with ’em with beads of all colors, knives, axes, pins and needles, which they used only as tools to drill holes with in their ears, noses, and lips, where they hang a great many little things. . . .” Aphra Behn, Oroonoko or, The Royal Slave (1688) in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1, 6th ed., ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 1867. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 19. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 12. Homi Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity,” The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge 1994), 62. For a fascinating discussion of debates about racial authenticity see E. Patrick Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness. Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, “Introduction,” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1. Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 261. Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 38. There are not enough extant documents from the period sufficiently to create this portrait. Some scholars have called for more research in this field, but there are several logistical hurdles, including access to the documents. Elizabeth Alexander, “‘Can You Be Black and Watch This?’ Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” in Black Male: Representations of Black Masculinity in Contemporary Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, 1994), 92–93. In her book, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, Susan Bennett makes this point abundantly clear. She writes that her study “is a testimony to the contemporary emancipation of the spectator.” Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 213. Emphasis mine. Dwight McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 163–164.

CHAPTER 2 1. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 5–6. 2. Bridget Orr, Empire on English Stages, 1660–1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18. 3. Derek Hughes, “Race, Gender, and Scholarly Practice: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Essays in Criticism 52 (2002): 1, 2–3.

150

Notes

4. For a discussion of the authorship of Notes and Observations on The

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

Empress of Morocco see: Anne Doyle, “Dryden’s Authorship of Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 6 (1966): 421–445; H.H.R. Love, “The Authorship of the Postscript of Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco,” Notes and Queries 13 (1966): 27–28; and Maximillian E. Novak’s Introduction to The Empress of Morocco and Its Critics (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark, 1968), i–xvii. All citations from John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, and John Crowne’s The Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco (1674) are from Maximillian E. Novak’s Augustan Society Reprint edition of The Empress of Morocco and Its Critics (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark, 1968). All citations from The Empress of Morocco A Farce (1674) are from Maximillian E. Novak’s Augustan Society Reprint edition of The Empress of Morocco and Its Critics (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark, 1968). Ian Smith, “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage,” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 36. Philip Bordinat’s book Sir William Davenant provides an excellent analysis of Davenant’s theatrical innovations. Philip Bordinat, Sir William Davenant (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981). Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660– 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3. Pat Rogers, “Breeches Roles,” in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1982), 255. Heidi Hutner, Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 16–17. John Foxe, Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church, wherein ar comprehended and decribed the great persecutions [and] horrible troubles, that haue bene wrought and practised by the Romishe prelates, speciallye in this realme of England and Scotlande, from the yeare of our Lorde a thousande, vnto the tyme nowe present. Gathered and collected according to the true copies [and] wrytinges certifi catorie, as wel of the parties them selues that suffered, as also out of the bishops registers, which wer the doers therof. (London: By Iohn Day, dwellyng ouer Aldersgate. Cum priuilegio Regi[a]e Maiestatis, 1563). The oddities of John Gerard’s “autobiography” stem from various factors: the original seventeenth-century Latin text has been lost; while an eighteenth-century copy of the manuscript is supposed to exist, there are several confl icting translations of the text; and a seventeenth-century Latin text which purportedly cites from the original Latin text is much briefer than recent English translations. See Matthias Tanner’s Soceitas Jesu apostolorum imitatrix (Prague: Charles-Ferdinand University Press, 1694), 677, for the abbreviated seventeenth-century citation. See John Morris’s Condition of the Catholics under James I, Father Gerard’s narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1872) for an early English translation. And Philip Caraman’s two modern English editions: John Gerard, the Autobiography of an Elizabethan (London: Longmans, Green, 1951); and An Autobiography of a Hunted Priest (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1952). Elkanah Settle, The Character of a Popish Successor and what England may expect From Such a One (London: Printed by an A. Banks, 1682). Elkanah Settle, A Vindication of the Characters of a Popish Successor: in a Reply to Two Pretended Answers to it. By the Author of the Character (London:

Notes

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

151

Printed for R. Dew, 1681). Likewise, John Phillips wrote two pamphlets supporting Settle’s views: John Phillips, The character of a popish successor, and what England may expect from such a one: part the second: or the dispute of the succession moderately discuss’d upon the considerations of national practice, reason, and the statutes of the realm: with some refl ections upon Mr. L’Estrange’s, and another, answer to the fi rst part of the character, etc. (London: Printed and to be sold by Richard Janeway, 1681); John Phillips, The Character of a Popish Successor Compleat: in Defence of the First Part, against Two Answers, one Written by Mr L’Estrange, called The Papist in Masquerade, &c. And another By an Unknown Hand (London: Printed for J. Graves, 1681). For a more extended discussion of these pageants see Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 120–128. All quotations from the 1680 pageant are taken from an anonymous engraving: The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope Cardinalls Jesuits Fryars &c: through the Citty of London November the 17th, 1680 (London, 1680). Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 173. Elkanah Settle, The Empress of Morocco (1673) in The Empress of Morocco and the Controversy Surrounding It, ed. Anne T. Doyle (New York and London: Garland Press, 1987), 2.1. All quotations from this play will come from this edition. For a discussion of the “Sculptures,” or engravings accompanying the first edition of The Empress of Morocco see: “The Plates in Settle’s The Empress of Morocco” in The Times Literary Supplement 11 July 1935: 418; and Edward Langhans, “The Dorset Garden Theatre in Pictures,” Theatre Survey 6 (1965): 134–146. Anthony Barthelemy provides the best discussion of the tenuous distinction between white and black Moors. He devotes the fi nal chapter of Black Face, Maligned Race to a discussion of white Moors (182–199). Tokson implies that Laula the Queen Mother was probably represented in blackface because she has so many devilish qualities. He argues that blackness was often understood as a mark of “punishment inflicted by God on an evildoer,” and offers Laula as an example of just such a representation. Elliot Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688 (Boston: GK Hall and Co, 1982), 43, 66. In Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco (1674) Settle’s critics write, “Here he makes a Guilded thing look like Coral; and like a Thing which fi rst looks Black, and then looks Fair” (29). Elkanah Settle, The Heir of Morocco with the Death of Gayland (London: Printed for William Cademan, 1682). Because there is no modern edition of this play, I will cite references with act and scene numbers only. Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The Tatler 41, 16 July 1709. Cibber’s biographers almost always quote or paraphrase this joke as evidence of Xerxes poor reception. See Richard Barker, Mr. Cibber of Drury Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 34; Helene Koon, Colley Cibber (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 36; and Leonard Ashley, Colley Cibber: Revised Edition (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 30.

152 Notes 26. For an excellent account of the fi nancial, social, and artistic history of play-

27. 28.

29.

30.

houses in the late seventeenth century see Judith Milhous, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1695–1708 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979). Timothy Viator, “The Stage History of Cibber’s Xerxes,” Theatre Notebook 46 (1992): 155–159. Quoting one of Dryden’s defi nitions of tragedy, Robert Hume comments on the didactic nature of seventeenth-century drama: “Late seventeenth-century defi nitions of tragedy display remarkably few open contradictions. However messy the practice, theoretical cliches are neat enough . . . [with] the assumption of an essential didactic function, the idea of an exalted subject matter, and especially the concern with the response evoked by the spectator.” Robert Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 150–151. All citations from Xerxes (1698) come from The Dramatic Works of Colley Cibber, Esq. In Five Volumes, vol. 5 (New York: Ames Press Inc, 1966). Because there is no modern edition of this play, I will cite references with act and scene numbers only. Colley Cibber, An apology for the life of Mr. Colley Cibber, comedian, and late patentee of the Theatre-Royal. With an historical view of the stage during his own time. Written by himself. (London: printed by John Watts for the author, 1740), 95.

CHAPTER 3 1. Jean Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 41. 2. Edward Ravenscroft, “To the Reader,” in Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia, the Cornmarket Press Facsimile from the Birmingham Shakespeare Library (London: Cornmarket Press Limited, 1969), A2. 3. See Jonathan Bate’s “Introduction” to Titus Andronicus in Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1995). 4. Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 216. 5. Recently, the television show, Black. White., demonstrates this point most palpably by transforming a white family into a black family and a black family into a white family through the use of elaborate cosmetics. The people with whom the families interact on the show are unaware of the switch, but the audience is made hyper-aware through various means: promotional materials, discussions of the racial prosthetics, and discussions about the significance of the changes. In other words, the show operates through this disparity of knowledge. Black.White., FXNetwork, March 2006. See the official Web site for more details: http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/blackwhite/main.html. 6. Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 146. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 130–148. 7. John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6.

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8. Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 108. Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 3–4. Three other foundational early modern race scholars who have examined the links between Shakespeare’s fi rst black character and the medieval presentations of blackness are: Eldred Jones in Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); Winthrop Jordan in Whiter Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969); and Elliot Tokson in The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688 (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982). William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). All citations to this play will come from this edition. Of course, this line is echoed in Shakespeare’s history play Richard II, a play that is equally obsessed with the notion of essentialism. When King Richard hears that his cousin Bolingbroke is amassing an army to fight against him, he takes comfort in his essential identity as King: “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm from an anointed king” (3.2.50–51). William Shakespeare, Richard II in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). Eugene Waith, “The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 39. Oxford English Dictionary 2d ed., see pitch. William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). Celia Daileader offers an insightful commentary on the early modern proverb “pitch defi les.” She argues it “has everything to do with the addressee of the proverb, the potential handler of pitch” and goes on to demonstrate that the addressee was often imagined as female. Celia Daileader, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4. Theorists of racial essentialism were common in early modern England. The sixteenth-century English explorer George Best, for example, claimed that blackness was “some natural infection” that “neither the nature of the Clime, neither the good complexion of the mother concurring, coulde anything alter.” Quoted in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffi ques & Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), Vol. V (London: J.M. Dent, 1910), 180. Edward Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia, the Cornmarket Press Facsimile from the Birmingham Shakespeare Library (London: Cornmarket Press Limited, 1969). All quotations from this play will come from this edition. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. See white. For a fascinating and thorough treatment of the notion of whiteness as racialized see Gary Taylor, Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip-Hop (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

154 Notes 19. Joyce Green MacDonald, “The Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn,” ELH 66 (1999): 74. 20. Many critics have written about the sexualized nature of the pit, a feminized devouring symbol. Heather James, for example, provides a wonderfully complex reading of the pit as both a “vagina dentata” and a “semiotic black hole” in her essay, “Cultural Disintegration in Titus Andronicus: Mutilating Titus, Vergil, and Rome,” Violence in Drama, Themes in Drama 13 (1991): 123–140. 21. Francis Barker provides an intriguing reading of the killing of the clown in his book, The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 143–206. He argues that the clown’s offstage execution demonstrates that “Elizabethan power certainly did not operate by theatrical spectacle, cultural display, or circulation/exchange alone” because brutality was so often “occluded by it.” 22. These are the actual stage directions from the 1687 quarto of Ravenscroft’s play. 23. Louis A. Knafla, “Ravenscroft, Edward (fl. 1659–1697),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 24. For an interesting account of the theatrical treatment of bodies as flesh see Francesca Royster, “The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s Rose Rage: Whiteness, Terror, and the Fleshwork of Theatre in a Post-Colorblind Age,” Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 221–239. 25. For an excellent overview of the abolitionist appropriations of Oroonoko see MacDonald 2002, 122–156. 26. Thomas Southerne, “To His Grace, William, Duke of Devonshire, &c. . .” in Oroonoko, eds. Maximillian Novak and David Stuart Rodes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 4. 27. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko or, The Royal Slave (1688) in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1, 6th ed., ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), 1871. 28. Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko (1695), eds. Maximillian Novak and David Stuart Rodes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976). All citations will come from this edition. 29. As early as 1702 critics found fault with Southerne’s split plot. In A Comparison between the Two Stages, Charles Gildon remarked that “tis . . . certain that the Comick part is below the Author’s usual Genius” (19). By the middle of the eighteenth century it became commonplace to criticize Southerne’s split plot. One critic wrote that the mixture was “absurd and most unnatural. . . . By introducing an under plot of the comic kind, though complete in all its parts, by exhibiting mirth in one scene and distress in another, our attention is too much diverted from the main story, and our concern for those who suffer too much weakened by such quick transitions” (163). Charles Gildon, A Comparison between the Two Stages (London, 1702). “Observations on the Tragedy of Oroonoko,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 22 (1752). 30. Derek Hughes, “Race, Gender, and Scholarly Practice: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Essays in Criticism 52 (2002): 6. 31. Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage, 1660–1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 276. 32. George Warren, An Impartial Description of Surinam upon the Continent of Guiana in America (London: Printed by William Godbid for Nathaniel Brooke, 1667), 19.

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33. Stephanie Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarcon, “Oroonoko’s Gendered Economies of Honor/Horror: Reframing Colonial Discourse Studies in the Americas,” American Literature 65 (1993): 417. 34. John R. Ford, “‘Words and Performances’: Roderigo and the Mixed Dramaturgy of Race and Gender in Othello,” Othello: New Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (London and New York: Routledge, 2002): 147–167. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 94–95.

CHAPTER 4 1. Richard Leigh, The Censure of the Rota. On Mr Driden’s Conquest of Granada (Oxford: Printed by H.H. for Fran. Oxlad junior, 1673), 13–14. 2. A Description of the Academy of the Athenian Virtuosi: with a Discourse held there in Vindication of Mr. Dryden’s Conquest of Granada; Against the Author of Censure of the Rota (London: Printed for Maurice Atkins, 1673), 15. 3. Anne T. Barbeau, The Intellectual Design of John Dryden’s Heroic Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 83, 89. 4. John Dryden, The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1665) in The Works of John Dryden, eds. Edward Niles Hooker and H.T. Swedenberg, Jr., Vol. IX (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1966). All quotations will come from this edition. 5. Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage 1660–1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 151. 6. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performances (New York: Columbia, 1996), 131. 7. In his compilation play, The Play-house to be Let, Davenant has a dancing master propose The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru as “historical dancing” and “plain history / Exprest in figures on the floor, a kind / Of morals in dumb shows by Men and Beasts.” Sir William Davenant, The Play-house to be Let in The Works of Sir William Davenant Consisting of Those which were formerly Printed, And Those which he design’d for the Press: Now Published Out of the Authors Originall Copies (London: Printed by T.N. for Henry Herringman, 1673). 8. Philip Bordinat, Sir William Davenant (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 119. 9. Janet Clare, “The Production and Reception of Davenant’s Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru,” Modern Language Review 89 (1994): 832. 10. Philip Bordinat’s book Sir William Davenant provides a good analysis of Davenant’s theatrical innovations. 11. Heidi Hutner, Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 70. 12. Sir William Davenant, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (London: Printed for Henry Herringman, and are to be sold at his shop at the Anchor in the Lower walk in the Exchange, 1658), A2. All quotations will come from this edition. 13. John Phillips, Dedication to Cromwell in his translation of Bartolome de las Casas, The Tears of the Indians (London: Printed by J.C. for Nath. Brook, 1656), A5v.

156

Notes

14. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 92. 15. W. R. Richardson in 1934, for example, was the fi rst critic to write a concise and comprehensive account of Davenant’s historical connection with the New World. The exiled Charles II appointed Davenant treasurer of Virginia in 1650; he was also named Lieutenant Governor of Maryland when it was discovered that Lord Baltimore sympathized with the Parliamentarians. During his voyage to the New World, however, Davenant was captured and imprisoned. W. R. Richardson, “Sir William Davenant as American Colonizer,” English Literary History 1 (1934): 61–62. 16. Susan Wiseman, “History Digested: Opera and Colonialism in the 1650s,” Literature and the English Civil War, eds. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 189–204. 17. Colin Visser notes an interesting connection between Davenant’s Interregnum pieces and Dryden’s early Restoration plays. He speculates that when Dryden’s company, the King’s Company, was burned out of the Theatre Royal in 1672 and moved into Davenant’s old theatre, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, they found many of Davenant’s old sets abandoned there. Visser argues that Dryden may have devised plays that could utilize the abandoned sets of Davenant’s company while he and his company were housed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields from 1672–1674. Colin Visser, “John Dryden’s Amboyna at Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Research 15 (1976): 1–11. Of course, this argument does not take into account the fact that this earlier play, The Indian Emperour (1665), already employed a stage rack. 18. Aphra Behn writes in the fi rst paragraphs of Oroonoko or, the Royal Slave (1688): “we trade for feathers, which they [the natives of Surinam] order into all shapes, make themselves little short habits of ’em, and glorious wreaths for their heads, necks, arms and legs, whose tinctures are unconceivable. I had a set of these presented to me, and I gave ’em to the King’s theater, and it was the dress of the Indian Queen, infi nitely admired by persons of quality, and were unimitable.” Aphra Behn, Oroonoko or, The Royal Slave (1688) in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, Vol 1., 6th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), 1867. 19. Sir Walter Scott, Introduction to The Indian Emperour in The Works of John Dryden Now First Collected in Eighteen Volumes, Vol. II, ed. Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Archibald & Co., 1821), 291. 20. Inga Clendinnen, “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico,” New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993), 14. 21. John Dryden, “Of Heroic Plays” (1672) in The Works of John Dryden, Vol. XI, eds. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1956), 12. 22. James Winn saliently warns that Dryden was “constructing a theory [for heroic drama] after the fact” because “Of Heroic Drama” was written in 1672, eight years after the production of his fi rst heroic drama. James Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 146. 23. John Dryden, “To the Most Excellent and Most Illustrious Princess Anne, Dutchess of Monmouth, and Countess of Bucclugh, Wife to the Most Illustrious and High-Born Prince James, Duke of Monmouth” (1667) in The Works of John Dryden, Vol. IX, eds. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1966), 25. All quotations will come from this edition.

Notes

157

24. Eugene Waith argues that Dryden’s elaborate dedications to nobility were an

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

attempt to “appeal to what was noble in the audience . . . to create an audience of heroes.” In other words, “the heroic compliments of these dedications serve not only a practical purpose . . . but also a rhetorical one.” Eugene Waith, Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (London: Routledge, 1971), 207. Of course, my argument seeks to understand how heroism also becomes racialized in this rhetorical function. Max Harris, “Aztec Maidens in Satin Gowns: Alterity and Dialogue in Dryden’s Indian Emperour and Hogarth’s The Conquest of Mexico,” Restoration 15 (1991): 62. Harris also notes that this speech (about the differences between nature and art) is taken from Montaigne (62). I borrow this phrase from Dryden’s own stage directions at the beginning of the play. The stage directions read: “The scene a pleasant Indian Country” (1.1). Although he focuses on representations in eighteenth-century literature, Benjamin Bissell provides an informative analysis of dramatic portrayals of American Indians in the early modern period. Benjamin Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925). In his discussion of “the savage critic,” Anthony Pagden cites the torture of Montezuma as the quintessential example of the anti-heroic. Anthony Pagden, “The Savage Critic: Some European Images of the Primitive,” The Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1993): 32–45. John Dryden, The Indian Queen (1664) in The Works of John Dryden,Vol. VIII, eds. Edward Niles Hooker and H.T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1962), epilogue 1–18. John Loftis argues that exoticism suits heroic drama well because of its grand sets and costumes. Loftis writes “the magnitude of the peninsular accomplishment of the Renaissance” was exactly what appealed to Dryden. According to Loftis, Dryden sought a history that dealt with “the superlatives of experience with qualities of character demonstrated in momentous action.” John Loftis, The Spanish Plays of Neoclassical England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 179. For his take on the significance of Platter’s comments, see: Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). Quoted in Mullaney, 75. See Bridget Orr’s book for a representative argument against the presence of racial discourses in these plays.

CHAPTER 5 1. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 38, 39. 2. Robert Markley, “Violence and Profits on the Restoration Stage: Trade, Nationalism, and Insecurity in Dryden’s Amboyna,” Eighteenth Century Life 22 (1998): 8. 3. Although I think many critics who have analyzed Amboyna are guilty of ignoring how it works as a performance piece, Blair Hoxby’s chapter, “From Amboyna to Windsor Forest,” offers the clearest example of this critical

158 Notes

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

neglect. Hoxby often reads Amboyna as if it were a treatise about trade instead of a performance piece about trade. The difference, as I will show, is remarkable, however. Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). A list of texts from 1672 exemplifies how much of a rallying cry Amboyna continued to be throughout the Anglo-Dutch wars. Each of the following texts makes extended references to the Dutch torture of the English at Amboyna: William Lilly, The Dangerous Condition of the United Provinces (London: printed for W. Whitwood at the signe of the Golden Bell in DuckLane near Smithfield, 1672); George Downing, A discourse written by Sir George Downing, the king of Great Britain’s envoy extraordinary to the States of the United Provinces (London: Printed for Dorman Newman, at the King’s Arms in the Poultrey, 1672); Theophilus Philalethes, Great Britains Glory, or, A brief description of the present state, splendor, and magnificence of the Royal Exchange (London: Printed by Tho. Ratcliffe, and Nat. Thompson, for Jonathan Edwin, 1672); William De Britaine, The Dutch Usurpation, or, A brief view of the behaviours of the States-General of the United Provinces, towards the kings of Great Britain (London: Printed for Jonathan Edwin, 1672); Barnaby Googe, A Prophecie Lately Transcribed From an Old Manuscript by Dr. Barnaby Googe that lived in the reign of Qu. Elizabeth (London: Printed by J.C. for R. Robinson, 1672); A Familiar Discourse Between George, a True-Hearted English Gentleman and Hans a Dutch Merchant concerning the present affairs of England (London: Printed by T.N. for Samuel Lowndes, 1672). Sir Dudley Digges, A True Relation of the Unjust, Cruell, and Barbarous Proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies, by the Neatherlandish Governour and Councel there. Also a copie of a Pamphlet, set forth fi rst in Dutch and then in English, by some Neatherlander; falsly entitled, A True Declaration of the News that came out of the East-Indies, with the Pinance called the Hare, which arrived at Texel in June, 1624. Together with an Answer to the same Pamphlet (London: Printed by H. Lownes for Nathanael Newberry, 1624), 27. Bakhtin constructed his notion of the grotesque body in his analysis of the carnivalesque in Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). See Gail Kern Paster’s article, “Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy,” for an introductory discussion of the early modern notion of the leaky vessel, or see her 1993 book for a more extensive treatment of the subject. “Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy,” Renaissance Drama 18 (1987): 43–65. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Ania Loomba lucidly enumerates the various early modern discourses of race in her book Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). In the fi rst chapter, “The Vocabularies of Race,” she goes through lineage, faith/nation, gender and sexuality, class, and color (22–44). Prince Harry declares: Belike then my appetite was not princely got; for, by my troth, I do now remember the poor creature small beer. But indeed, these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness. . . . But that the tennis-court keeper knows better than I, for it is a low ebb of linen with thee when thou keepest not racket there; as thou hast not done a great while, because the rest of thy low countries have made a shift to eat up thy holland. (2.2.9–20)

Notes

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

159

William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). Michael Neill, in his brilliant article, “Putting History to the Question: An Episode of Torture at Bantam in Java, 1604,” concludes his analysis of Edmund Scott’s 1606 account of the English torture of several counterfeiters in Bantam with a discussion of the complex racial politics on the island. He notes with irony the fact that twenty years later the Dutch were torturing the English in Amboyna, threatening to collapse the already delicate distinction between “white men” and “barbarous Others.” Michael Neill, “Putting History to the Question: An Episode of Torture at Bantam in Java, 1604,” English Literary Renaissance 25 (1995): 45–75. Montague Summers, Introduction to Amboyna in Dryden the Dramatic Works, Vol. III, ed. Montague Summers (London: Nonesuch Press, 1932), 347. Sir Walter Scott, Introduction to Amboyna in The Works of John Dryden Now First Collected in Eighteen Volumes, Vol. V, ed. Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1821), 3. Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage 1660–1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 157. John Dryden, Amboyna (1673) in The Works of John Dryden, Vol. XII, eds. Edward Niles Hooker and H.T. Swedenberg (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1994). All quotations will come from this edition. Laura Brown, “Defenseless Woman and the Development of English Tragedy,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22 (1981): 429–443. Heidi Hutner, “Revisioning the Female Body: Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Parts I and II,” Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlotsville: University of Virginia, 1993), 102–120. Pepys goes on to comment on Rebecca Marshall and Nell Gwyn together: “Lord, their confidence, and how many men do hover about them as soon as they come off the stage, and how confident they [are] in their talk.” Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 8, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970–1983), 189. Celia Daileader, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For two interesting accounts of the performance of gender and race in the Renaissance see: Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Kim Hall, “‘These bastard signs of fair’: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Post-Colonial Shakespeares, eds. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 64–83. Hogan-Moganides: Or, the Dutch Hudibras (London: Printed for William Cademan, 1674), 97–99. William De Britaine, The Dutch Usurpation, or, A brief view of the behaviours of the States-General of the United Provinces, towards the kings of Great Britain (London: Printed for Jonathan Edwin, 1672), 23, 33–34.

160

Notes

24. Anthony Barthelemy writes convincingly about the confusion and confl ation of various racial groups in early modern England. Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1987), 1–18.

CHAPTER 6 1. Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 25. 2. Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), 45. 3. Statement by Nori Al-Yasseri, 17:31/17 January 2004, quoted in Danner, 236–237. 4. Statement by Unknown (detainee name and number have been blacked out), 14:30/21 January 2004, quoted in Danner, 248. 5. Statement by Ameen Sa’eed Al-Sheikh, 17:22/16 January 2004, quoted in Danner, 226. 6. David R. Segal and Mady Wechsler Segal, “America’s Military Population,” Population Bulletin 59 (2004): 3–40. 7. James Schlesinger, “Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations (The Schlesinger Report),” August 24, 2004. Reprinted in Danner, 329–402. 8. Hazel Carby, “A Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture,” openDemocracy: Free Thinking for the World, October 11, 2004, http://www. openDemocracy.net. 9. Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 249. 10. James Allen’s collection of lynching imagery was organized into a touring museum installation in 2000. The show’s collection book is: James Allen, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palm Publishers, 2000). 11. Goldsby offers a fascinating analysis of the inclusion of markers of modernity — rail and car bridges, light posts, street signs — in lynching photographs. 12. Calvin Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 115. 13. “England told the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (CID) on Jan. 14, 2003, that she had visited the military intelligence wing in the early morning hours of Nov. 8, because it was her birthday and she wanted to see her friends. She said Graner and Frederick told her they were bringing in seven prisoners from a riot at Ganci. ‘The prisoners were brought in in handcuffs and bags on the heads and wearing civilian clothes,’ England said. She said she initially watched the ordeal from a higher tier. ‘Everyone else was downstairs pushing the prisoners into each other and the wall. Until they all ended up in a dog pile.’” Michael Scherer and Mark Benjamin, “Dog Pile,” Salon.com, March 14, 2006. See: http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_6/print.html. 14. Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 33, 34. 15. See James Allen, et al, images 27, 74, and 28. 16. See Salon.com for a complete list of the digital images and videos from Abu Ghraib: http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction/.

Notes

161

17. Max Gordon, “Abu Ghraib: Postcards from the Edge,” openDemocracy: Free 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

Thinking for the World, October 14, 2004, http://www.openDemocracy. net. Henry Giroux, “What Might Education Mean After Abu Ghraib: Revisiting Adorno’s Politics of Education,” Comparative Studies of South Africa, Africa, and the Middle East 24 (2004): 4–5. Leon Litwack, “Hellhounds,” Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palm Publishers, 2000): 33–34. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 33–34. John Berger, “Photographs of Agony,” About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 39–40. Susan Sontag revised the principal claims of On Photography (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1977) in Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003). To see a copy of the United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s prepared statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 7, 2004, see: http://armed-services.senate.gov/testimony.cfm?wit_id=187&id=1184. The prepared statement differs slightly from the statement he actually offered. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). For a discussion on suture theory as it relates to performances of race see: Ayanna Thompson, “Suture, Shakespeare, and Race: Or, What Is Our Cultural Debt to the Bard?” Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television, ed. James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004), 57–72. Despite his good intentions to investigate the larger systemic problems that created the environment in which these abuses could occur, I think Seymour Hersh’s book often falls back onto this type of argument. Arthur C. Danto, “The Body in Pain,” The Nation (27 November 2006): 23. David Ebony, Botero Abu Ghraib (London and New York: Prestel, 2006). See my edited collection for the fi rst sustained analysis of contemporary racial casting of early modern texts: Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Hilton Als, “GWTW,” Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palm Publishers, 2000): 39, 40.

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Index

A Abbott, Geoffrey, 6–7 Abu Ghraib, 23 public debates about, 122–123, 126–127 ritualized elements in photos, 127–134 teaching approaches, 138–145 Actress, Restoration, 30–31, 111 see Barry, Elizabeth see Marshall, Rebecca African(s), 5, 13–15, 20, 30, 43, 44, 51, 58, 64–71, 117, 132 Alarcon, Daniel Cooper, 71 Alexander, Elizabeth, 20 Allen, James, 128, 160 (no. 10, no. 15) Allen-Littlefield Collection, 129, 130, 143 Als, Hilton, 145 Amboyna, see Dryden, John Ambuhl, Megan, 141–142 Amnesia, Historical, 122, 126, 127, 131–136 Apel, Dora, 129, 135–136, 139 Artaud, Antonin, 1–3, 5 Ashley, Leonard, 151 (no. 25) Athey, Stephanie, 71 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 103, 158 (no. 6) Barbeau, Anne, 77 Barker, Francis, 154 (no. 21) Barker, Richard, 48, 151 (no. 25) Barry, Elizabeth, 46–47, 49 Barthelemy, Anthony, 12–13, 34, 39, 55, 151 (no. 20), 160 (no. 24) Bate, Jonathan, 52

Behn, Aphra, 25–26, 34, 51, 64–65, 67, 68, 71, 83, 148 (no. 24), 156 (no. 18) Bennett, Susan, 149 (no. 36) Berger, John, 136 Betterton, Thomas, 40, 45, 49 Bhabha, Homi, 17 Blackness, 13–14, 16, 18, 20–22, 28–30, 34, 106, 110, 124–127 blackface/brown-face, 3, 12–13, 15, 22, 30–31, 36, 39–40, 44, 45, 47, 51, 53, 69, 72, 111, 145, 151 (no. 21) in lynching photographs, 127–131 in Oroonko, 64–73 religious interpretations, 37–39, 42–43, 49, 106, 117 in Titus Andronicus, 53–64 Bissell, Benjamin, 157 (no. 28) Bordinat, Philip, 150 (no. 8), 155 (no. 10) Botero, Fernando, 143–144 Brown, Laura, 111 Buccleuch, Anne, Duchess of, 85–87, 88, 89, 90, 91 Burt, Nicholas, 100, 101 Butler, Judith, 16–17, 133–134, 136, 139, 142–143 C Cannibal, 60, 81 Callaghan, Dympna, 159 (no. 20) Carby, Hazel, 122, 126–127, 128, 131–132, 133, 134 Cartwright, William, 100–101 Casas, Bartolome de las, 79, 85 Charles I, King of England, 20, 37

172 Index Charles II, King of England, 20, 30–31, 37, 83–84, 156 (no. 15) Cibber, Colley, 145 An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, 47, 48 Xerxes, 15, 21, 23, 44–49, 101, 134, 139 Clare, Janet, 83 Clendinnen, Inga, 85 Coke, Sir Edward, 9–10, 11, 102 Colonialism/colonialists, 1–3, 17, 25–26, 52, 65–69, 71, 75, 76–83, 85–95 Congreve, William, 144–145 Conquest of Mexico, 1–3 Conroy, John, 8, 148 (no. 11) Crime, 8, 54, 63, 65, 113, 116, 126, 133, 136 criminal, 4–5, 10–11 Cromwell, Oliver, 37, 79 Cross-Dressing, 29, 30 Crowne, John, 26–27 Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, see Davenant, William D Daileader, Ceilia, 111, 159 (no. 15) Danner, Mark, 126, 140–141 Danto, Arthur, 143–144 Davenant, William, 29, 109 The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, 22–23, 78–83, 88, 96 Davis, Javal, 127 De Britaine, William, 117 Digges, Sir Dudley A True Relation of . . . Amboyna, 102–109, 110, 11, 113, 115, 118 Dolle, William, 34, 35, 36, 40–41 Downing, George, 158 (no. 4) Doyle, Anne, 150 (no. 4) Drury Lane, 44–45, 49, 79 Dryden, John, 1–3 Amboyna, 15, 23, 77, 99–102, 109–119, 135, 139 Conquest of Granada, 75 “Of Heroic Plays,” 85 Indian Emperour, 1–3, 5, 22–23, 26–27, 68, 72, 76, 77–78, 83–93, 101, 135, 139 Indian Queen, 2, 83, 94–95 Notes and Observations, 26–27 Duffet, Thomas, 27 Dutch, 23, 99–102, 109–119, 135

E East India Company, 102, 108, 112, 115 Ebony, David, 161 (no. 28) Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 20, 31, 32–33, 44 Empress of Morocco, see Settle, Elkanah Enders, Jody, 12 England, Lynndie, 125, 129, 141–142 English-ness, see Race Exclusion Bill, 31–32 F Fanon, Frantz, 17 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 18 Ford, John, 72 Fortescue, Sir John, 10–11 Foucault, Michel, 8 Foxe, John, 30, 31 Frederick, Ivan, 141 G Gerard, John, 31, 148 (no. 23), 150 (no. 13) Gildon, Charles, 154 (no. 29) Giroux, Henry, 122, 132–134, 137–138 Goldsby, Jacqueline, 127–128, 160 (no. 11) Googe, Barnaby, 158 (no. 4) Gordon, Max, 132–134 Graner, Charles, 130, 140, 142 H Hall, Kim, 18, 112 Hakluyt, Richard, 153 (no. 16) Hanson, Elizabeth, 9 Harman, Sabrina, 125, 130, 140, 141 Harris, Max, 88, 157 (no. 26) Harris, Tim, 151 (no. 15) Hart, Charles, 101 Heath, James, 147 (no. 8) Heir of Morocco, see Settle, Elkanah Hendricks, Margo, 18 Hernton, Calvin, 128 Hersh, Seymour, 121, 123, 126 Howe, Elizabeth, 29–30 Hoxby, Blair, 157 (no. 3) Hughes, Derek, 25–26, 27–28, 36, 50, 67–68 Hume, Robert, 48, 152 (no. 28) Hutner, Heidi, 30–31, 44, 92, 94, 111

Index

173

I Indian Emperour, see Dryden, John Indian Queen, see Dryden, John Indian(s) American Indians, 3, 5, 15, 20, 23, 30, 66, 75, 77, 79–84, 91–96, 101 East Indians, 110, 117

Moors, 5, 13–15, 20, 30, 34–37, 42, 48, 53–54 Aaron the Moor, see Ravenscroft, Edward and/or Shakespeare, William Morris, John, 150 (no. 13) Mullaney, Steven, 95, 157 (no. 32)

J James II, King of England, 31–33 James, Heather, 154 (no. 20) Johnson, E. Patrick, 16–17, 149 (no. 29) Jones, Eldred, 153 (no. 9) Jordan, Winthrop, 153 (no. 9)

N Nationalism, Economic, 99–100, 119 Neill, Michael, 159 (no. 11) Novak, Maximillian, 150 (no. 4)

K Kerrigan, John, 54, 59 Knafla, Louis, 154 (no. 20) Koon, Helene, 151 (no. 25) Kyd, Thomas, 53 Kynaston, Edward, 101 L Langbein, John, 7–8, 147 (no. 8) Langhans, Edward, 151 (no. 19) Leigh, Richard, 75–76, 87, 97 Levinas, Emmanuel, 142 Lilly, William, 158 (no. 4) Lincoln’s Inn Field, 44–45, 49, 152 (no. 26), 156 (no. 17) Litwack, Leon, 133, 135 Loftis, John, 157 (no. 31) Loomba, Ania, 18–19 Love, H.H.R, 150 (no. 4) Lynch(ings), 121–122, 127–133, 135, 144, 160 (no. 10, no. 11) M MacDonald, Joyce Green, 13, 19, 44, 53–54, 60, 70, 111, 154 (no. 25) Markley, Robert, 106, 110–111 Marsden, Jean, 51, 52 Marshall, Cynthia, 54 Marshall, Rebecca, 111, 113, 159 (no. 18) Marston, John, 53 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 9, 22 McBride, Dwight, 24 Mercantilism, 99–102, 107–110, 112–119, 135 Milhous, Judith, 152 (no. 26) Mohun, Michael, 101 Monarch, Universal, 32–34, 44–49

O Oates, Titus, 52 Omi, Michael, 4, 17 Oroonoko, see Southerne, Thomas Orr, Bridget, 25, 27–28, 36, 40, 50, 68, 77, 109, 157 (no. 34) P Pagden, Anthony, 157 (no. 29) Parker, Patricia, 18 Paster, Gail Kern, 158 (no. 7) Pepys, Samuel, 111, 159 (no. 18) Philalethes, Theophilus, 158 (no. 4) Phillips, John, 79, 85, 151 (no. 14) Platter, Thomas, 95 Purchas, Samuel, 102 R Race anti-racialized, 4, 20, 21–24, 77, 118–119, 134 and authenticity, 17–19, 145 defi ning, 4, 18–21, 49–50, 137 and performance theory, 15–21, 72–73 racialized epistemology, 4, 20, 22, 33, 37, 40–42, 44, 49–50, 72–73, 96–97, 133–135, 144 and religion, 13–14, 21, 31–34, 126, 131, 144 and rhetoric, 54–64 Rack, see Torture Ravenscroft, Edward, 109 Titus Andronicus, 5, 22, 51–55, 58–64, 67, 71, 73, 101, 134, 139, 145 Revenge Tragedy Genre, 53–54 Richardson, W.R., 156 (no. 15) Rich, Christopher, 44–45 Roach, Joseph, 77–78, 80, 91 Rogers, Pat, 30

174 Index Royster, Francesca, 154 (no. 24) Rumsfeld, Donald, 138–139 S Scarry, Elaine, 8 Scherer, Michael, 160 (no. 13) Schlesinger, James, 126 Scott, Sir Walter, 84, 109 Segal, David, 160 (no. 6) Settle, Elkanah The Empress of Morocco, 5, 21, 26– 27, 34–42, 49, 75, 134, 139, 144 The Heir of Morocco, 42–44, 49 Pope–Burning Pageants, 31–33 Shadwell, Thomas, 26–27 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 31 Shakespeare, William, 1, 30, 51, 144 Henry IV, Part I, 56 Henry IV, Part II, 107, 158–159 (no. 9) The Merry Wives of Windsor, 107 Richard II, 153 (no. 11) Titus Andronicus, 53–59 Silverman, Lisa, 8 Slave(ry), 17, 52, 57, 65–70, 72–73, 92, 99, 106, 108, 134 Smith, Abram, 127–128 Smith, Ian, 29, 31 Smith, Molly Easo, 148 (no. 16) Smith, Sir Thomas, 10–11 Sontag, Susan, 138, 161 (no. 22) Southerne, Thomas, 145 Oroonoko, 5, 22, 51–53, 64–71, 101, 134, 139 Strappado, see Torture Summers, Montague, 109 T Tanner, Matthias, 150 (no. 13) Taylor, Gary, 153 (no. 18) Theatre of Cruelty, 1–3 innovations see Actresses movable sets, 15, 29–30, 156 (no. 17) stage rack, see Torture Thompson, Ayanna, 161 (no. 25, no. 29) Titus Andronicus, see Ravenscroft, Edward and/or Shakespeare, William Tokson, Eliot, 37, 39, 151 (no. 21) Torture

in art, 11–14 defi ning, 6–7 history in England, 9–11 and performance theory, 6–14, 105 rack in Amboyna, 116–119 in Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, 80–83 in Empress of Morocco, 40–42 in Heir of Morocco, 43 in Indian Emperour, 77, 90–93 in Oroonoko, 68–70 in Titus Andronicus, 61–64 in A True Relation of . . . Amboyna, 103–106 in Xerxes, 46–49 stage racks, 15, 29–30, 135, 144 strappado, 29, 32–33 U United Nation’s Convention against Torture, 6, 147 (no. 7) V Vaughan, Virginia Mason, 53–54, 72, 159 (no. 20) Verbruggen, John, 3, 45–56, 49, 69, 72 Viator, Timothy, 45, 48–49 Visser, Colin, 156 (no. 17) W Waith, Eugene, 56, 157 (no. 24) Wallerstein, Immanuel, 99–100, 119 Warren, George, 68–69 Wheeler, Roxann, 25, 27–28, 36, 50, 81 Whiteness, 13–14, 18–19, 21–24, 34–47, 58, 110, 136 in Abu Ghraib images, 123–126 actresses, 30–31, 43–50 in Oroonoko, 66–68 in Titus Andronicus, 58–60, 63 white/right gaze, 4, 20, 22, 53, 64, 72–73, 76, 77, 78, 96–97, 127–131, 139, 142–145 Winant, Howard, 4, 17 Winn, James, 156 (no. 22) Wintersel, William, 101 Wiseman, Susan, 82–83 Wood, Marcus, 52–53, 72–73 Wycherly, William, 144–145 X Xerxes, see Cibber, Colley