English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama

This 2003 volume outlines 'scientific' conceptions of racial and ethnic differences in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writing.

Mary Floyd-Wilson (Author)

9780521810562, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 February 2003

270 pages, 10 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.56 kg

"Mary Floyd-Wilson's study of English ethnicity offers an important contribution to the study of race in the early modern period. Its account of geohumoral ethnology is innovative and fascinating." Seventeenth-Century News

In English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, first published in 2003, Mary Floyd-Wilson outlines what we might call 'scientific' conceptions of racial and ethnic differences in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writing. Drawing on classical and contemporary medical texts, histories and cosmographies, Floyd-Wilson demonstrates that Renaissance understandings of racial and ethnic identities contradicted many modern stereotypes concerning difference. Southerners, Africans, in particular, were identified as dispassionate, cool-tempered and wise, whereas the more northern English were understood to be unruly, impressionable and slow-witted. Concerned with the unflattering and constraining implications of this classically derived knowledge, English writers laboured to reinvent ethnology to their own advantage - a labour that paved the way for the invention of more familiar racial ideas. Floyd-Wilson highlights these English revisionary efforts in her surprising and transformational readings of the period's drama, including Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Jonson's The Masque of Blackness and Shakespeare's Othello and Cymbeline.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: the marginal English
Part I. Climatic Culture: The Transmissions and Transmutations of Ethnographic Knowlege: 1. The ghost of Hippocrates: geohumoral history in the West
2. British ethnology
3. An inside story of race: melancholy and ethnology
Part II. The English Ethnographic Theatre: 4. Tamburlaine and the staging of white barbarity
5. Temperature and temperance in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness
6. Othello's jealousy
7. Cymbeline's angels
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]