"Race" and the Construction of English National Identity: Spaniards and North Africans in English Seventeenth-Century Drama

In 1601 Queen Elizabeth appointed the merchant Casper Van Zeuden to transport all "Negars and blackamoors" out of England. Previously, on the so-called "Evil May Day" in 1517, the common people of London had attacked foreigners and destroyed their properties. Between 1517 and 1595 at least six riots and demonstrations of some importance had taken place, especially in London, to protest the presence of foreigners, most of whom were Germans, French, Dutch, and Flemish working as highly skilled artisans in a technologically backward England. The Parliament reacted in order to appease the people, and in 1575 Flemish refugees were expelled from England. In the following years several bills reducing the rights of foreigners were passed.¹ Meanwhile, Spaniards were consistently depicted in English drama and pamphlets throughout the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries as a corrupt nation of devilish assassins, cruel parricides, and deceitful traitors and tyrants.²

Between 1500 and 1700 England was manifestly backward in relation to Spain, the Ottoman Empire,³ Morocco, and, at least technically, France and the Netherlands, and these violent reactions were ways to confront those communities that the English perceived as more powerful, more advanced, and dangerously close, in different ways and senses, to them.⁴ Indeed, England had reason to feel threatened as Turkish and Spanish imperialistic designs were actually aimed at her. This essay argues that, at this point in Early Modern history, England and the English were anxiously trying to find a way to circumscribe their territorial and symbolic space (their "semiosphere," as I will explain) in order to create and foster an identity in opposition to the rest of the known world. The mechanism devised to do this is particularly complex, since it establishes a boundary that excludes foreigners but includes the colonies, producing and alienating not one but various Others that are invested with a gradation of symbolically significant and sometimes conflicting features.

I suggest that some of the drama written in this period functions as a way to exorcize the fears created by all these foreign dangers and to reassure the English about their place in the world by producing in the figures of Spaniards and (North African) Muslims a repository of non-white others that help to define a white Early Modern (English and/or European) self.⁵ England is thus defined by differences to other imagined communities, and these differences, I am persuaded, are not only religious but also based on skin color or "race."

With Joyce MacDonald, I believe that "race" is a labile term.⁶ For that, like Kim Hall, I feel it is necessary to explain that its appearance here does not imply at all the belief in the existence of something that, based on biological differences, we can call "human races";⁷ in fact, this piece works to expose some of the ideological maneuvers produced, among other things, to justify such a spurious concept. My contention is that, given that language helps to create differences in society, it is possible to encounter actual instances of racial definition and classification in some of the writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (definitions that have too often been explained away or effaced as instances of cultural conventions) that establish a hierarchy that, in turn, consolidates inequality. This constitutes from my perspective the backbone of later forms of racism and indicates that in this Early Modern period we can at least speak of a proto-racist (or "racialist")⁸ thinking that is made visible by means of the production of a (creative) writing of racial difference.⁹

I will discuss this process of symbolic construction of identity in William Rowley's All's Lost by Lust (1633) and Thomas Dekker's Lust's Dominion (1598)¹⁰ in the context of a notion that has been historically known as the "loss of Spain" motif (or the "loss of Spain topos").¹¹ By "loss of Spain," applied to the two plays under discussion here, I not only take into consideration the Muslim invasion of the...