Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England 9781501725456

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Things of Darkness

THINGS OF DARKNESS Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England KIM F. HALL

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright© 1995 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1996 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1996 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hall, Kim F., 1961Things of darkness : economics of race and gender in early modern England I Kim F. Hall p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN o-8014-3117-4 (cloth: alk. paper)- ISBN o-8014-8249-6 (paper: alk. paper) 1. English literature-Early modern, 150o-1 7oo-History and criticism. 2. Race in literature. 3· Feminism and literature-England-History. 4· Literature and societyEngland-History. 5· Women and literature-England-History. 6. Sex role in literature. 7. Blacks in literature. I. Title. PR{28.R35H35 1995 82o.9'353--dc2o 95-36592 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. Books that bear the logo of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) use paper taken from forests that have been inspected and certified as meeting the highest standards for environmental and social responsibility. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

3 5 7 9

Paperback printing

1o 8 6 4

for my parents, Lawrence H. Hall and Vera P. Webb Hall

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

IX

xi

Introduction

1

Who Is English? The Black Presence in England 11 Pirates, Poets, and Traders: England and African Trades 1

16

A World of Difference: Travel Narratives and the Inscription of Culture Writing Africa: Native Informants and Narrative Anxiety 28 Enterprise and Conversion: Ordering the World in Hakluyt and Purchas 44

2

25

Fair Texts/Dark Ladies: Renaissance Lyric and the Poetics 62

~C~m

Astrophel and Stella: "New Found Tropes with Problemes Old" 73 The Traffic in Fairness: Cosmetics and Blackness 85 Sunburn: Anxieties of Influence/Anxieties of Race 92 Washing the Ethiope White: The Song of Songs 107 Aethiopissa and Her Sisters 116

3

"Commerce and Intercourse": Dramas of Alliance and Trade The Masque of Blackness and jacobean Nationalism Marriages of State: The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra 141 Colonialism and the Economics of Marriage 160 vii

128

123

viii

4

Contents

The Daughters of Eve and the Children of Ham: Race and the English Woman Writer

177

The "Other" Woman: Beauty, Women Writers, and Cleopatra 178 Blackness and Status in the Urania 187

5

"An Object in the Midst of Other Objects": Race, Gender, Material Culture Male Portraits, Property, and Colonial Might Beauty, Colonialism, and the Female Subject

240

Epilogue: On "Race," Black Feminism, and White Supremacy Appendix: Poems of Blackness Works Cited Index

2 11

226

254

Illustrations

1. Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby d'Eresby 2. Arms of Sir John Hawkins 3· "Aethiopem lavare," from Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of

Embkmes

4· 5· 6. 7. 8. g. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14· 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Engraving from Bulwer's Anthrop011U!tamorphosis Lady Raleigh as Cleopatra Gem with scarabs Moor and emperor cameo Black cameo Diana cameo Gresley jewel-outer locket Gresley jewel-inside view Drake jewel Drake jewel-inside view Sir Francis Drake, by Gheeraerts Prince Rupert, by Mytens William Fielding, first earl of Denbigh, by VanDyck Cecil Calvert, by Soest George Calvert, by Mytens Charles I and Henrietta Maria, by Mytens Machomilia en Turk, engraving by Diepenbeck Anne of Denmark, by van Somer 2 2. Woman in an Arched Stone Aperture, anonymous portrait by Netscher 23. Anonymous woman by Gignes ix

5 20 68 88 186 216 217 218 219 220 22 1 223 224 225 229 231 233 234 236 237 239 243 245

x

fllustrations

24. Barbara Villiers, duchess of Cleveland, by Lely 25. Portrait by Wissing, possibly of Hortense Mancini de Ia Porte, duchess of Mazarin 26. Louise Renee de Keroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, by Jacques D'Agat 27. Louise Renee de Keroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, by Mignard

246 249 250 252

Acknowledgments

0

ne benefit of working on a project over an extended period of time is that it increases one's opportunities to refine and, one hopes, improve ideas through the alchemy of conversation. It has been my great fortune to work on this project with three fine groups of scholars and to have benefited from their insight and support. This book began while I was at the University of Pennsylvania, where I had the benefit of an energetic Renaissance discussion group that included Greg Bredbeck, Rebecca Bushnell, Juliet Fleming, Gwynne Kennedy, Janet Knepper, Cary Mazer, Robert Turner, Wendy Wall, and Georgianna Ziegler. This group also included Margreta deGrazia, whom I thank for her unwavering critical eye; Maureen Quilligan, for showing me that there was a place for me in the academic community when I was ready to give up and for her unwavering support and complete enthusiasm when I went into the then-untested waters of race in the Renaissance; and Phyllis Rackin, for many things, but most of all for showing me that excellent scholarship does not have to come at the sacrifice of politics, humanity, or integrity. A postdoctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation afforded me the opportunity to think and learn about visual culture and to work in the English Department at Columbia University in 1992--93. I am grateful to the Renaissance faculty and graduate students there who made me a part of their community for the year. Special thanks go to Jean E. Howard for serving as my official mentor and for generously giving me her time and friendship as well as challenging my thinking in countless ways, and to xi

xii

Acknowledgments

John Michael Archer for reading my work and sharing his own research with me. My Georgetown colleagues old and new, faculty and students, have been invaluable sources of intellectual community and friendship: Valerie Babb, Gay Gibson Cima, Pamela Fox, Lindsay Kaplan, Patricia O'Connor, Connie M. Razza, Amy Robinson, Jason Rosenblatt, Lisa Silverberg, Bruce Smith, and Norma Tilden. I am particularly thankful for the sustaining friendships of Leona Fisher, who unselfishly served as my sounding board and who kept up her enthusiasm for the book even when my own was fading, and of Michael Ragussis, who gave me the benefit of his unerring critical judgment, sound advice, and excellent pasta in equal and generous proportions. My chair,James Slevin, has been a staunch supporter of mine since I came to Georgetown. I was able to complete much of this work with the help of summer grants from Dean Robert Lawton, SJ., and the graduate school. Tiffany Gill, Marsha Fausti, Janelle Walthour, Bonnie Billman, and Brigette Craft lent invaluable assistance at crucial times. Many people have shared with me their discoveries about race and I thank them for their material and their insights; even items that did not make it into the book were nonetheless helpful. My colleague Dennis Todd, whose findings often took me into new areas of inquiry, and Gwynne Kennedy, who kept me supplied with new things to think about and always had time to listen to those thoughts, have been particularly outstanding in this regard. Jennifer Brody's thinking on this subject has been influential in subtle and profound ways. I also thank my Comell editor, Bemhard Kendler, for his unfailing patience, and the manuscript readers, Peter Erickson and Mary Ellen Lamb, for their speed, enthusiasm, and excellent advice. The staffs of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Portrait Gallery Archives, and the Courtauld Institute of Art have been unfailingly generous. Denise Albanese, Alison Byerly, Ellen Garvey, Robert Gibbs, Steve Jensen, Jacqueline Jones, Caren Kaplan, Alison Lane, Kimberly Robinson Morton, Carmen Sanchez, Eric Smoodin, and Susan Zlotnick are all friends whom I see too little of, yet they enrich my life beyond measure. My immediate family, Reginald Lawrence Hall, Ranota Hall, and Andrew Lawrence Hall, always remind me that life is not only about work while respecting the time needed for the work. My extended family and what my grandmother called "family connections" are too many and support me in ways too numerous to mention here, but they are always in my thoughts. I thank them all for overlooking the missed family events, the distraction, and the (I hope only occasional) thoughtlessness caused by my involvement in this project.

Acknowledgments

xiii

Sections of chapters 3 and 4 have appeared in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice," Renaissance Drama 2 3 ( 1992): 87-111; "Sexual Politics and Cultural Identity in The Masque of Blackness," in The Performance of Power, ed. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 318; and "'I rather would wish to be a Black-moore': Race, Rank, and Beauty in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania," in Women, ''Race," and Writing, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 178-194· In the interests of clarity, I have silently changed f to s, y to i, and v to u throughout and slightly modernized the least accessible texts.

K. F. H.

Things of Darkness

Introduction Or when we deride by plaine and flat contradiction, as he that saw a dwarfe go in the streete said to his companion that walked with him: See yonder giant: and to a Negro or woman blackemoore, in good sooth ye are a faire one ... -George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie ( 1589) He that cannot understand the sober, plain, and unaffected stile of the Scriptures, will be ten times more puzzl'd with the knotty Mricanisms, the pamper'd metaphors, the intricat, and involv'd sentences of the Fathers ... -John Milton, Reformation Touching Church Discipline ( 1641)

I

n Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lysander rejects his "dark" lover, shouting, "Away, you Ethiop!" and "Out, tawny Tartar" (3.2.257 and 263). 1 Typically, scholars have replicated Lysander's dismissal of the "Ethiop" by refusing to consider such remarks in the context of the elements of race, sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery, which form a prominent set of "subtexts" to the play Qameson 81). A survey of scholarly editions of Shakespeare's works demonstrates how modern literary criticism remystifies the appearance of blackness in literary works by insisting that references to race are rooted in European aesthetic tradition rather than in any consciousness of racial difference. For example, Harold Brooks, editor of the Arden edition of the play, is typical in seeing Lysander's gibes as only a commentary on Hermia's beauty: "Hermia is conscious of what in unsympathetic eyes may be considered her 'bad points' ... and Lysander has attacked one of them, her unfashionable dark complexion. " 2 Similar evocations of blackness-with similar critical effacement-occur with startling regularity throughout a broad range of Renaissance texts. 1.

2.

All references are to The Riverside Shakespeare unless otherwise noted. A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Harold Brooks, cviii.

2

Introduction

From Puttenham's early example of antiphrasis through Milton's adm~ nitions against the "knotty Africanisms" of biblical commentary lies a broad discursive network in which the polarity of dark and light articulates ongoing cultural concerns over gender roles and shifting trade structures. 3 I argue that descriptions of dark and light, rather than being mere indications of Elizabethan beauty standards or markers of moral categories, became in the early modern period the conduit through which the English began to formulate the notions of "self" and "other" so well known in Angl~American racial discourses. This argument complements Winthrop Jordan's landmark contribution, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, both by refining his contention that the language of dark and light is racialized in this period and by examining the ways in which gender concerns are crucially embedded in discourses of race. More significant, the following chapters suggest a crucial interrelationship between race and gender that is deeply embedded in language deployed in the development of the modern-that is to say, white, European, male-subject. Frequently the "dark" side of this polarity is figured in specific geographic and racial terms, as in Puttenham's use of "Negro or woman blackemore" and Milton's rebuke against "Africanisms" in biblical exegesis. In this Introduction I first outline the political import of what I am calling tropes of blackness and then examine the evidence for England's involvement with dark-skinned Africans. I conclude by returning to my opening text, A Midsummer Night's Dream, to discuss the questions raised by an acknowledgment of its racialized language. If, as poststructuralists have argued, part of the process of stabilizing meaning is the "identification of difference as polarity" (Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Difference" 177), the binarism of black and white might be called the originary language of racial difference in English culture. 4 The deconstructionist Barbara Johnson has insightfully noted that binary oppositions undergird Western culture's logic about both race and sex. This binarism certainly pre-dates the Renaissance, but during this period it becomes increasingly infused with concerns over skin color, economics, and gender politics. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Oxford English 3· Milton's work is particularly interesting in this regard because it is part of a larger diatribe against obscurantism in biblical commentary, in which he draws heavily upon the language of dark and light. For example, he claims that the difficulties of Scripture are attributable to the nature of man rather than to the text itself: "The very essence of Truth is plainnesse, and brightnes; the darknes and crookednesse is our own" (566). In his Blank Damness, Christopher Miller analyzes the word "Mricanism," particularly in its difference from "Orientalism" (14). 4· Interestingly, the dichotomy of black and white seems to be one of the few not taken up in deconstructive analysis. See, for example, Catherine Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies."

Introduction

3

Dictionary locates the first use of "fair" as a tenn of complexion in Thomas Wilson's manual The Ruk of &ason. 5 It defines his use of "faire" as "Of complexion and hair: Light as opposed to dark" and, with some puzzlement, states that this meaning is "apparently not of very early origin," therefore suggesting that this opposition between fair and dark, typical in discussions of beauty, happens in the 1550s. This semantic shift appears just at the moment of intensified English interest in colonial travel and African trade. 6 That moment also happens to be a time when England itself had a heightened nervousness about group identity and power and, as Peter Fryer maintains, was thus ripe for the development of race prejudice: But race prejudice ... is specially persistent in communities that are ethnically homogeneous, geographically isolated, technologically backward, or socially conservative, with knowledge and political power concentrated in the hands of an elite. Such communities feel threatened by national or racial differences, and their prejudices serve to reassure them, to minimize their sense of insecurity, to enhance group cohesion. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a classic instance of such a community-though its geographical isolation was rapidly being overcome and its technology was about to leap forward. ( 133)

Although Fryer pays less attention to England's movement out of its isolation and into its great development as a naval power, I would suggest that it is England's sense of losing its traditional insularity that provokes the development of "racialism." 7 This moment of transition-England's 5· For a more detailed discussion of this moment in Wilson, see my essay " 'I rather would wish to be a Black-moore': Race, Rank, and Beauty in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania," 178-79. 6. Other scholars place England's black presence and its "racial" consciousness much earlier. Paul Edwards finds evidence of blacks in the Romano-British period. Christian Delacampagne sees the origins in European racial discourses in classical antiquity: "Racist discourse, as we have known it in Europe since the nineteenth century, did not appear ex nihilo. It is the fruit-or the inheritor-of other, older discourses, whose first elements can be located in the philosophers of antiquity and whose course can be charted through the theologians and scholars of the Middle Ages" (83). Delacampagne's view silently rebuts the classicist Frank Snowden's more well known position that ancient Greeks did not exhibit race prejudice. Snowden argues that the common association of blackness with death "does not seem to have had a negative effect on the generally favorable view of blacks dating back to the Homeric poems, or to have given rise to a serious anti-black sentiment" (Befure Colar Prejudice 101), and he concludes that "antiquity as a whole was able to overcome whatever potential for serious anti-black sentiment there may be in color symbolism" (101). I do not think that Delacampagne's view necessarily precludes mine. He later states that "the medievals knew nothing of their ancient predecessors'' (84). If he is correct, then it would suggest that the humanist project and its revivification of classical antiquity would also promote a belief in "a system of thought that strove to be rational" with its oppressive implications. Allison Blakely has also challenged Snowden's thesis (xviii, 28g--go). 7· I borrow the term "racialist" from Anthony Appiah, who sees it forming only in

4

Introduction

movement from geographic isolation into military and mercantile contest with other countries8 -sets the stage for the longer process by which preexisting literary tropes of blackness profoundly interacted with the fastchanging economic relations of white Europeans and their darker "others" during the Renaissance. The economic expansion of England was a linguistic and, ultimately, an ideological expansion in which writers and travelers grappled with ways of making use of the foreign materia "produced" by colonialism. Tropes of blackness were discovered by white English writers (both male and female) to be infinitely malleable ways of establishing a sense of the proper organization of Westem European male and female in the Renaissance: notions of proper gender relations shape the terms for describing proper colonial organization. Further, the English/European division of beauty into "white" or "black" not only served aesthetic purposes but supported an ideology that still continues to serve the interests of white supremacy and male hegemony. 9 This is not to dismiss the traditional association of blackness in conventional Christian symbolism with death and mouming, sin and evil. 10 On the contrary, it is to say that the culture recognized the possibilities of this language for the representation and categorization of perceived physical differences. Thus traditional terms of aesthetic discrimination and Christian dogma become infused with ideas of Africa and African servitude, making it impossible to separate "racial" signifiers of blackness from traditional iconography. For example, in a posthumous portrait of Lord Willoughby d'Eresby (see figure 1), the association of black people with the eighteenth-