Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage, and: Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (review)

In early modern race studies, two recurrent and related issues have preoccupied literary historians. First, an assumed pre- and post-Enlightenment divide is predicated on the notion that later so-called “scientific” definitions of race and the attendant dominance of skin color are fundamentally at odds with earlier manifestations of cultural difference and xenophobia. Second, since it has become obvious that color is not the necessary or only racial marker in the early modern period, a fluid, multiple-category approach to racial identity has emerged. These two broad concerns are central to both works reviewed here—Ayanna Thompson’s Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage and Lara Bovilsky’s Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage—pointing to the longevity of the anachronism debate since it arose in the 1990s and the continued investment of critical energies in refining methodologies to advance the field.

Thompson strikes an original note in her study of race and torture on the Restoration stage. While historical acts of torture (the subject for most legal historians and cultural theorists) are designed to extract hidden information, thereby promoting the significance of interiority, staged performances of torture emphasize the “expressly exterior—the racialized body” (4). That is, the artistic performance of torture is an expression of a cultural fantasy: the revelation of hidden information is purportedly manifested in the tortured racialized bodies of foreigners when interiority and exteriority converge in the overdetermined racial and semantic plenitude of the human physique. Thompson’s study does not, therefore, require the “semiotically charged interpretation of color so much as a semiotically charged interpretation of bodiliness” (4). In addition, staged torture foregrounds the complementarity of performance and reception theory; the Restoration audience, Thompson asserts, is collectively shaped by plays that “create a unified and nationalized identity by codifying the power and entitlement of the anti-racialized white / right gaze” (20). This “anti-racialized” audience, one that imagines itself as untouched by race, directs judgment not against real, historical others, but often against white actors in black- and brownface, resulting in the vacillation between essence and construction that is endemic to racial epistemology. Diverging from the critical consensus surrounding racial fluidity in the early modern period, Thompson argues instead for the contradictory formulations of race “as both essential and a construction, both fixed and illusory, and both material and immaterial” (24).

With Sir William Davenant’s introduction of movable sets and stage machinery during the Interregnum, the Restoration theater was mechanically equipped to effectively represent torture. Continuing anti-Catholic sentiment provoked opposition to James II’s ascension to the throne; inflammatory pamphlets and Pope-burning pageants, showing the Pope using instruments of torture to signify “unadorned Catholic ambition” (33), followed in the wake of the 1678 Popish Plot. But longstanding European religious controversy, Thompson contends, was projected onto Eastern empires in Restoration drama, and religious difference, in turn, registered international contests for power and territories to “reveal that the English were not only engaging with notions of ‘alterity,’ but also constructing alterity in racialized terms” (34). Although chapter 2, “A Matter that Is No Matter,” addresses the Eastern contexts of Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco (ca. 1673) and Colley Cibber’s Xerxes (1699) where religion has a racializing force, tortured white bodies that symbolize Western, and especially English, identities also contrast the torturer’s foreignness through a spectacle of racialized cruelty. Chapter 3, “When Race Is Colored,” develops the idea that black bodies, following Renaissance and medieval religious codes, are self-revelatory; torture enacts the desire for control through forced bodily access on which white power rests in Edward Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus, or The Rape of Lavinia (1678) and the colonial context of Thomas Southerne’s 1695 theatrical adaptation...