Description
(Text)
The English Renaissance is a time of change and discovery. Among the greatest challenges that the newly shaping nation has to rise to, is the close contact with foreign places and peoples. The imported images of strangers, together with the foreigners living in London, do not only influence English historical realities, but also occupy the thoughts of the English. These versions and visions of strangers quickly find their way into one of the most important institutions of the early modern period - the theatres.
What roles do Non-European strangers play on the stages of the English Renaissance? The foreigners appear in various different shapes. They are feared and desired as the Others, the necessary counterparts essential in self-forming. While the fictional strangers are often more revealing about the strengths and weaknesses of the Europeans themselves, the foreign figures created are not simplistic characters. They are human beings capable of reason and emotion. They surpass their real-life models in positive and negative traits. Therewith English early modern drama designs its own discourses of foreignness and is trendsetting in many ways.
The first part of this book examines the depictions of foreigners in early modern travelogues and discusses methodological and theoretical terms. The second part analyses diverse early modern plays to show the wide range of foreignness as a relevant cultural topic.
(Table of content)
Contents
I. Theoretical Analysis 1
1. Introduction 1
2. Methodology 20
3. Theory 33
3.1. Race 33
3.2. Ethnicity 46
4. Self and Alter 55
4.1. Colonialisms 55
4.2. Postcolonialisms 91
4.2.1. Orientalism 96
4.2.2. Colonial Females 100
4.2.3. Hybridity, Colonial Mimicry 104
II. Textual Analysis 111
1. Conversion and Contamination. The Metamorphosis of a 'Spice Girl' - John Fletcher's The Island Princess 111
1.1. Of Spice and (Wo)Men: Miscegenation and Segregation, Affirmation and Subversion 111
1.1.1. Permanent Ambivalences 118
1.1.2. Immanent Ambivalences 120
Beauty and Skin Colour 120
Nature and Character, Norms and Values 125
1.1.3. Meta-Textual Ambivalences 127
1.1.4. Genre 136
1.2. Colonial Couples 143
1.2.1. Other and Other 144
1.2.2. Self and Other 151
The Princess and the Portuguese 152
The Princess and the Portuguese? 158
1.2.3. Self and Self 161
1.3. Confusing Conversions 165
Connected with the Intertexts The Renegado by Philip Massinger and A Christian Turned Turk by Robert Daborne 165
Christian Clashes 181
1.3.1. Intertext I - The Renegado 188
1.3.2. Intertext II - A Christian Turned Turk 198
2. Loving or Leaving the (New) 'Turks'? William Percy's Mahomet and His Heaven 211
2.1. "The Better Savage" - Making Mahomet 211
2.1.1. Genre 212
2.1.2. Mohammed and Other Savages 216
2.2. "From East to West, from West to East" 244
2.2.1. Turkishness and Englishness 244
2.2.2. Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism 253
3. Staging the Stranger. Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness 259
3.1. 'Black is Beautiful' - The Literary Inversion of an Ideal? 259
3.1.1. (Ab)using 'The Blackamoores' 259
3.1.2. Genre 261
3.1.3. Implications and Evaluations of 'Blackness' 265
3.1.4. Masking 'Blackness' 281
3.2. Allegorizing Albion 292
3.2.1. "To Blanche an Ethiop and Revive a Corpse" - A Masque for King James I 292
3.2.2. "Conquer in Great Beauty's War - A Masque for Queen Anne 296
4. Conclusion 309
III. Bibliography 313
1. Primary Literature 313
2. Secondary Literature 316
IV. Index 334
