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mages of racial, national, religious, and cultural difference haunt Renaissance theatricals. Indians and Moors, gypsies and Jews, Ethiopians and Moroccans, Turks, Moors, Jews, ‘savages’, the ‘wild Irish’, the ‘uncivil Tartars’, and other‘outsiders’ were repeatedly conjured up on early modern English stages, both public and private. Sometimes such outsiders occupied the centre-stage, in plays such as Shakespeare’s Othello, or Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, or in court masques such as Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness, or in the pageants such as Thomas Middleton’s Triumphs of Truth which were enacted before the citizens of London when a new Lord Mayor was appointed. At other times they played smaller roles, like the black Moor Aaron in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (whose picture, drawn by Henry Peacham, is the only surviving image from this time of a black character on the stage) or Portia’s suitor, the Prince of Morocco, in The Merchant of Venice, whose blackness the upright lady fears and loathes: ‘If he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me’ (1.2.109–10). Some were just shadowy presences that were evoked but never appeared on stage such as the ‘lovely boy stol’n from an Indian king’ over whom Titania and Oberon fight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1.22) or the Moorish woman who, we are told, has been made pregnant by Lancelot in The Merchant of Venice. Sometimes outsiders are only figures of speech, conjured up to establish a point of view: in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, for example, Claudio affirms his decision to marry Leonato’s niece whom he has not seen by declaring, ‘I’ll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope’ (5.4.38) and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lysander spurns Hermia by calling her an ‘Ethiope’ and a ‘tawny Tartar’ (3.2.258, 264).1
Shakespeare criticism has long commented on such images and figures but, until fairly recently, many influential critics insisted that racial outsiders are inci-dental to the themes usually regarded as central to the study of Shakespeare:
‘Europe is Shakespeare’s centre, and although things outside intrude now and then, like spectres from another world, his plots, themes, and scenes are almost exclusively European.’2Only in the last two decades or so has Shakespeare crit-icism (perhaps as a result of a wider scholarly as well as political focus on the genesis as well as effects of empire) come to pay more systematic attention to the
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ways in which representation of outsiders shapes the meaning and form of Shakespearian drama, both in its own context and subsequently.3
Such a critical history derives from the fact that since the early eighteenth century, Shakespeare has been widely regarded as the ‘national poet’ of England, which means that the connection between his writings and something called
‘Englishness’ has been posited as organic. Both Shakespeare and Englishness had to be moulded in particular ways in order for this alignment to appear natural and inevitable.4Shakespeare’s centrality to ‘English culture’ was established in part by purging the plays, early modern England, and even Shakespeare’s own life of anything that might be considered ‘foreign’ or un-English. For example, Sir Walter Raleigh, the first professor of English literature at Oxford, suggested that Shakespeare’s bloodline could ‘be traced straight back to Guy of Warwick and the good King Alfred’. During the First World War, Raleigh also interpreted Caliban, the ‘deformed and savage slave’ ofThe Tempest, not as a native of the New World but as a German.5Such an interpretation presumes that The Tempest portrays Caliban unambiguously as a brute and endorses his enslavement by Prospero, but it also demonstrates how outsider-figures become flexible tem-plates of ‘otherness’ which can be made to fit the changing requirements of Englishness or Western civilization.
Not so long ago, students reading Othello were informed that Shakespeare had never seen a black man, and therefore could not have intended to portray Othello as a ‘veritable Negro’. Such an assertion was provoked by the presumed contra-diction between a high moral stature and blackness: if Othello is meant to be a noble and tragic hero then it follows that he cannot be black. The suggestion that early modern England had no black presence works to the same effect as read-ings which flatten Shakespeare’s outsiders into simply evil or inferior beings:
both create a ‘merry England’ which was either literally or ideologically homo-geneous, where foreigners didn’t exist or were hated or, at the very least, were completely unimportant to the lives and ideas of Shakespeare and his contem-poraries. In numerical terms, there were indeed very few Africans or Turks or Jews in England during Shakespeare’s time. However, the significance of black-ness or Jewishblack-ness in English culture cannot be reckoned by numbers alone.
Outsiders provoked more debates, anxieties, and representations than the popu-lation statistics might warrant. In this essay, rather than discuss particular out-sider-figures in Shakespeare’s plays, I want to indicate the contemporary resonance of issues of racial, religious, national, or cultural difference and outline the cultural vocabulary from which Shakespeare fashioned his own language of difference. We can then decide for ourselves to what extent he used the cultural language available to him and to what extent, in creating characters such as Othello, Caliban, Cleopatra, or Aaron, he departed from it.
It is not possible, in the space of a short essay, to convey the density or the details of the multiple histories and ideologies that contributed to such a lan-guage. However, I will indicate how attitudes to particular groups of outsiders, 148 Ania Loomba
as well as the meaning of outside-ness in general, were fashioned from several intersecting histories – those of English nationalism, religious strife, overseas trade and empire, intra-European rivalry, and gender as well as class. I will suggest that if we examine attitudes to racial and religious outsiders in Shakespeare’s England and their representations in drama, travelogues, and other literature, we can see how ideologies of ‘race’ and ‘nationhood’ changed during this period into something approaching their modern meanings; these changes were ushered in, in part, by the advent of colonial trade and settlement, which reworked older histories of contact between Europeans and those they considered foreign.
Questions of identity and difference became especially urgent in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English culture because at this time the idea of an English nation developed and was articulated through a variety of media such as literature, law, cartography, or travel writing.6Liah Greenfeld suggests that ‘A whole class of people emerged whose main preoccupation was to do research and write – chronicles, treatises, poems, novels and plays – in English about England . . . Everything English became an object of attention and nourished a new feeling of national pride.’7But ‘everything English’ was not a stable given: as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so in the early modern period, Englishness was defined, in part, in opposition to everything not English. I want to suggest that the idea of difference is important in complicating our under-standing of the emergence of an English nation and in showing to what extent this was the result of an ongoing struggle to colonize, marginalize, or incorpo-rate different groups of people who lived both within and outside the geographic boundaries of England.
The idea of an English nation as such was itself relatively new in Shakespeare’s time. Until 1534, when King Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church, the religious head of England (the Pope) was not English at all. Monarchies in feudal Europe constantly warred and married with one another, and their wrangling and alliances remoulded the shapes of their nations. Thus, the monarch of one country could also become the sovereign of another, as happened in 1580 when Philip II of Spain also became King of Portugal, or indeed in 1603 when Elizabeth I died, and James VI of Scotland became James I, monarch of England.
Benedict Anderson has suggested that the nation is an ‘imagined community’, born precisely by breaking from such a pan-European religious and feudal order in which the ruling elite bonded across national or linguistic boundaries, and by the forging of a different notion of community, in which people of different classes are supposedly united within a more bounded geography.8 Although Anderson discusses a much later period, it is possible to view Elizabethan and Jacobean England as the crucible within which the English nation was beginning to be forged.
As Anderson reminds us, nations are imaginatively projected before they are realized. In Shakespeare’s plays one of the most passionate evocations of Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England 149
‘England’ is put into the mouth of a dying John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster in Richard II. Lamenting its imminent dissolution, Gaunt celebrates England:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise . . .
This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England. (2.1.40–50)
Ironically, Shakespeare’s play appropriates as a spokesman for England a fourteenth-century figure who had, in real life, pan-European rather than
‘English’ affiliations – the historical John of Gaunt’s second wife was from Castille, and one of his daughters married the King of Portugal, the other a Spanish nobleman.
Nation-making was neither smooth nor free of contradictions. James I, a self-proclaimed father to a Protestant English nation, was Scottish and seen as pro-Catholic, and his attempt to effect a union between England and Scotland met with resistance from the House of Commons. James also tried to ensure that Scottish subjects born after his accession to the English throne in 1603 would be considered English subjects. The jurist Edward Coke suggested that one of the defining features of a subject was allegiance to the king, which could be either natural (that is stemming from birth) or acquired (when newly conquered or immigrated subjects transferred allegiance to the new ruler).9Such discussions generated as many contradictions as they attempted to negotiate – by paving the way for the Scots to be incorporated within the English (later British) nation, Coke’s formulations also muddied the notion of a clear-cut, God-given natural Englishness. They could also potentially be used to argue for the admittance of Jews or Moors or Americans into the nation.
Nationalism attempts to create a community among people who have never met and who do not necessarily have interests or outlooks or even a language in common; historically, newspapers, novels, and other new forms of communica-tion which Anderson calls ‘print capitalism’ were the channels for creating such shared culture, interests, and vocabularies. However, Anderson, as his critics have remarked, does not pay sufficient attention to the manner in which attempts to forge national identities also enact exclusions and create internal hierarchies within the newly formed community. Specifying who is part of the nation also entails identifying who may not be part of it, or who may be its ‘lesser’ member.
In early modern England, the representation of outsiders, especially in travel-ogues and in the theatre, contributed to the creation of ‘English’ identity pre-cisely by exploring, locating, indeed constructing notions of ‘difference’ and of a hierarchy of peoples, religions, and cultures.
Like the earlier epic and later the novel and newspapers, early modern travel-ogues take their readers through diverse landscapes, inviting them to view the unknown through the reassuring perspective of a familiar protagonist or narra-tor, making sense of the bewildering variety of the world by describing it in 150 Ania Loomba
familiar terms. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, travel narratives began to circulate on an unprecedented scale: Richard Hakluyt’s monumental collection of voyages, Principal Navigations (1589; second edition 1599) made available the writings of both older travellers and newer voyagers, fables and maps, outlandish stories about ‘men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (Othello1.3.143–44) as well as precise lists of foreign commodities and currencies. Hakluyt reminded his countrymen that they had lagged behind other European nations in gather-ing the riches of the two Indies, and he ardently advocated English participation in both ‘Eastern trade’ and ‘Western planting’. Earlier, Richard Eden’s notable collection The History of Travayle in the West and East Indies (1577) had also pleaded for English expansion overseas. But Hakluyt not only invited English people to contemplate their relationship to, and participate in, the European scramble for a fast-changing ‘rest of the world’ but he also (to use Richard Helgerson’s evocative phrase) cast ‘the nation as universal voyager’ (p.153).
English readers were invited, in Hakluyt’s pages (and later in the collections edited by Samuel Purchas) to view the rest of the world from the shared perspec-tive of their common investments in overseas enterprises and to enjoy the pros-pect of future global success.
Overseas ventures, both colonial and mercantile, had intensified English contact and conflict with other European peoples, like the Spanish or the Dutch, and with a wide range of non-European and non-Christian peoples of far-away lands – Africans, Turks, native Americans, Indians, Moluccans, and others.
Contact with the latter helped create the sense of a shared European or Christian culture; yet, somewhat contradictorily, it also heightened the rivalry between different European nations and Christian sects. Thus, for example, the differ-ences between the Iberians and the English (and Roman Catholics and Protestants) are played up in travelogues or plays dealing with the Moluccas or North Africa, and yet they are also blurred as a wider gap is suggested between dark- and light-skinned peoples, Moors or heathens and Christians, non-Europeans and non-Europeans. At the same time, England’s always volatile relation-ships with the peoples nearer or within home – the Welsh, the Scots, and especially the Irish – became even more fraught as English authorities grappled with the problem of how these people could be contained within the nation.
The development of ‘Englishness’ depended on the negation of ‘Irishness’, argue Andrew Hadfield and Willey Maley.10A wide spectrum of work has iden-tified similar processes of English identity formation through the negation of other ‘outsiders’, whether they belonged to far-away lands, such as various
‘Indians’ and ‘Moors’, or lived in closer proximity, such as the Irish; whether they wandered like the Gypsies, or were hard to define, like the Jews. Such scholarship has been undertaken in the wake of Michel Foucault’s work on a range of ‘divid-ing practices’ which define an inner normative territory by indicating what lies outside, or is deviant.11Edward Said extended Foucault’s insights to suggest that colonial Europe’s self-definition was crucially dependent upon its construction Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England 151
and ‘othering’ of the Orient.12 Shakespeare scholarship has productively amplified such perspectives on ‘otherness’ to review the question of ethnic, relig-ious, and national difference in the early modern period. Stephen Greenblatt’s view that the Renaissance aristocratic and upper-class self was fashioned at least partly against the image of the newly discovered ‘natives’ of the New World has been extremely influential.13 More recently, Kim Hall has shown that poetry (including Shakespeare’s sonnets to the dark lady), plays, masques, paintings, jewellery, and travel writings reveal the growing obsession to define and grasp an elusive white English self that can only be represented or defined by being juxta-posed and contrasted with images of blackness.14
Normative or deviant sexual behaviour was also shaped, in part, by being com-pared with real or imagined foreign sexual practices. New World, African, or Eastern peoples were widely believed not only to be more libidinous than Europeans but also to indulge in same-sex erotic practices and to live in strange familial arrangements involving harems, polygamy, wife-sharing, and occasion-ally polyandry. These practices were demonized (and more rarely idealized) to construct pictures of normative families, women, and sexualities at home.
Descriptions of African or Turkish ‘tribades’ were evoked to police same-sex eroticism in England, and fed into the construction of the ‘lesbian’ in Europe.15 Accounts of Turkish repression of women served simultaneously to demonize the brutal Turks, to congratulate the English for their kindness to women, and to suggest that Englishwomen were given too much freedom and needed to be policed more strictly.
By this time, English voyagers such as John and Sebastian Cabot, Martin Frobisher, Sir Francis Drake, and Sir Walter Ralegh had literally charted new worlds for English consumption. Accounts of the New World, such as Walter Ralegh’s ‘Discovery of the large, rich and beautiful Empire of Guiana’, painted elaborate pictures of the fabled Inca wealth and assured English authorities that, whoever conquered this new land, ‘that Prince shall be Lord of more gold, and of a more beautiful Empire, and of more cities and people, than either the King of Spain, or the great Turk’, reminding us that Spain and Turkey were the models for, as well as the greatest threats to, English imperial ambition.16 Edmund Spenser described Ireland in almost identical terms as ‘a most beauti-ful and sweet country as any is under heaven’; so beauti-full of nature’s bounties that ‘if some princes in the world had them, they would soon hope to be lords of all the seas, and ere long of all the world’.17The spectacular profits made by the first voyages to the East confirmed the promises of older travel stories – in March 1588, The Hercules returned from Tripoli in Syria, ‘the richest ship of English merchant goods that ever was known to come into this realm’.18On 31 December 1600 the East India Company was set up with a capital of £50,000, four years after its Dutch counterpart. Queen Elizabeth granted monopoly of trade with the East to the company ‘for the honour of our nation, the welfare of the people, the increase of our navigation, and the advancement of lawful traffic to the 152 Ania Loomba
benefit of the commonwealth’.19By 1620, the company had trading stations in Sumatra, India, Japan, Java, Borneo, Malacca, Siam, and Malabar, among other places.
In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff announces his inten-tion to make simultaneous love to two women by declaring: ‘They shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both’ (1.3.63–5). Like Falstaff, England also seized the opportunity to traffic in both regions, although its modus operandi in each differed significantly. In the East, the English struggled to set up trading stations whereas in the Americas, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the imperial hallmarks of settlement and dispossession, violence, and
In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff announces his inten-tion to make simultaneous love to two women by declaring: ‘They shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both’ (1.3.63–5). Like Falstaff, England also seized the opportunity to traffic in both regions, although its modus operandi in each differed significantly. In the East, the English struggled to set up trading stations whereas in the Americas, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the imperial hallmarks of settlement and dispossession, violence, and