Barbarous play : race on the English Renaissance stage / Lara Bovilsky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bovilsky, Lara, 1973-

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Race in literature.

English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600--History and criticism.

English drama.

English drama--17th century--History and criticism.

Theater--England--History--16th century.

Theater.

Race in the theater.

History.

England.

Theater--England--History--17th century.

Race in the theater--England--History.

Physical Description:

x, 218 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2008]

Summary:

Like our own, early modern beliefs about race depended on metaphorical, selective, and contradictory understandings of how membership in groups is determined. Although race took distinctive forms in the past, the fallacies that underlie early modern racial experience generally are precisely-and surprisingly-the same as those in contemporary culture.

Exploring the similar underpinnings of early modern and contemporary ideas of difference, Barbarous Play examines English Renaissance understandings of race as depicted in drama. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, and Middleton, Lara Bovilsky offers case studies of how racial meanings are generated by narratives of boundary crossing-especially miscegenation, religious conversion, class transgression, and moral and physical degeneracy. In the process, she reveals deep parallels between the period's conceptions of race and gender.

Barbarous Play contests the widely held view that race and racism depend on modern science for their existence and argues that understanding just what is false and figurative in past depictions of race, such as those found in Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The White Devil, and The Changeling, can clarify the illogic of present-day racism.

Contents:

Introduction: Race on the Renaissance Stage 1

1 Desdemona's Blackness 37

2 Exemplary Jews and the Logic of Gentility 67

3 The English Italian 103

4 Race, Science, and Aversion 135.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-210) and index.

ISBN:

9780816649648

0816649642

9780816649655

0816649650

OCLC:

191760080