The English Moor and the black Briton
Critical IntroductionExisting as an interlude between the progressive negative black markings of the Elizabethan period and those of the later seventeenth century, that is, as a moment of respite in the history of its English oppression, a brief moment of brightness between two enveloping epistemes of desolation, the locus of black growth in the first half of the seventeenth century could, at risk of straining a now unfashionable literary metaphor, be described as a renaissance of English black people in the early modern age.n105951The English Moor, a comedy in which a husband, fearful of being cuckolded, forces his wife to disguise herself as a black woman, is an exploration of race, and of the power of the idea of race. As such it forms part of the wave of plays, of which the best-known are perhaps Othello and The Tempest, which explore the idea of black personhood in early modern England. It is, deservedly, one of Brome's most discussed works. 2On the one hand, as this introduction will point out, there is more to The English Moor than its racial dimension. The play is experimental in terms of its genre, looking to marry Brome's accustomed realistic, satirical city comedy with elements of Fletcherian tragicomedy. It pursues in new directions some of Brome's favourite themes of drama and metadrama. It is a surprisingly provocative play not just in its representation of race but also in its representation of disability, in the form of Quicksands' son, Timsy the changeling. And yet on the other hand, it will be argued, the racial elements of the play do indeed merit the considerable scholarly attention that they have had. What follows will review the existing and richly rewarding scholarly approaches to the motif of the woman in blackface, approaches which have explored the play in terms of the early modern cultural dichotomy of fairness and blackness; in terms of attitudes to skin colour, female cosmetics, and sexuality; and in terms of emerging ideas of Africa and the exotic in the period. More than that, a new and specific claim will be made here about the play's discourses of race, drawing attention to the fact that the play is set not, like its Shakespearean colleagues, in Venice or on a magical island, but in a sharply observed contemporary London. Thus this play intersects directly with the history of black Britain described by the scholar Imtiaz Habib in the epigraph above. In particular, it relates to the historical moment of the first half of the seventeenth century, when London supported a growing and, for the moment, increasingly tolerated black community. The English Moor, it will be argued, is an important landmark in British race relations: the moment when the British cultural imagination first turns, specifically, to the phenomenon of the black Briton.Date3The English Moor was acted "by Her Majesty's servants", according to the 1659 title-page, which places its first performance between October 1637, when the company in question adopted that name and reopened after an seventeenth-month plague closure, and Easter 1640, when Brome's relationship with the company broke down completely.n10596 Furthermore, two contemporary allusions to the play on the stage suggest that the first performance took place reasonably early in that window. There is an allusion to The English Moor in the Praeludium of Thomas Goffe's The Careless Shepherdess, acted at some point around 1638 at Salisbury Court. In the Praeludium, possibly written by Brome himself, one of the characters, Landlord, praises the performance of the clown at Salisbury Court:Why I would have the fool in every act,
Be't comedy or tragedy. I have laughed
Until I cried again, to see what faces
The rogue will make. O, it does me good
To see him hold out's chin, hang down his hands,
And twirl his bauble. There is ne'er a part
About him but breaks jests. I heard a fellow
Once on this stage cry "Doodle, Doodle, Doo",
Beyond compare; I'd give the other shilling
To see him act the changeling once again.4His interlocutor agrees:And so would I, his part has all the wit,
For none speaks craps and quibbles besides him:
I'd rather see him leap, laugh, or cry,
Than hear the gravest speech in all the play.
I never saw Read peeping through the curtain
But ravishing joy entered into my heart.n105975From this exchange it may be deduced that the comic actor Timothy Read played Buzzard, who, disguised as the changeling, sings "Toodle, loodle, loo", in The English Moor.n105986A second allusion to the performance of The English Moor can be found in another play from the 1637-40 window, Brome's own The Damoiselle. There, one character complains of another's deportment, "See how you carry de hands like de comedien dat act de shangling".n10599 This self-referential allusion suggests that, at the time of The Damoiselle, The English Moor had already been staged. In order, then, to predate both the Praeludium and The Damoiselle in the 1637-40 window, The English Moor must have been acted, and must have established itself as a success, reasonably early within that window, and probably not long after the start of it: the resumption from the plague closure. More specifically, many accounts of the play, basing their argument upon the prologue which appears in the printed edition, identify it as the first to be performed by the Salisbury Court company after the closure. As will be seen in the Textual Introduction, the basis of this particular assumption is shaky: but, nonetheless, the proposition that the play's first performance dates to late 1637 or to 1638 seems secure.n106007In that case, the play would probably have been composed during the 1636-7 plague closure, along with perhaps Brome's most famous play, The Antipodes. The two plays have many similarities, and can be seen as a mutually illuminating pair. At an extra-diegetic level, both plays have a conspicuous connection to William Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the dedicatee of the manuscript version of The English Moor and of the 1640 printing of The Antipodes.n10601 But the similarities do not stop there. Both plays explore the idea of the geographically exotic, and both do so by imagining a London-dwelling eccentric who creates within his house quasi-theatrical deceptions invoking distant lands. In The English Moor this deception is a partial one - the creation of the imaginary black woman, Catalina, and seven other equally illusory black servants - while in The Antipodes it is immersive, putting Peregrine in an entire fictional country: but both plays are interested in the ways in which the foreign provokes the armchair traveller's imagination and probes their sexual desire. And in both plays, the illusion gets out of control. Letoy is surprised when his entertainment diverges entirely from its script, while Quicksands finds that the black woman he has created has, one might say, a life of her own. The Antipodes and The English Moor can usefully be seen as companion pieces from the same period of Brome's career.Sources, style and form8Criticism of The English Moor from the nineteenth century up until around 1980, while remarkably silent on the subject of the play's treatment of race, has said a good deal about this play in terms of its sources; its style; and what might be called its formal qualities, all of which provide important foundations for further discussion. In terms of sources, the play is often said to bear the marks of what R. J. Kaufmann calls Brome's "long-remembered training in the craft" under Jonson, and this indebtedness to Brome's erstwhile master comes through most obviously in its apparent referencing of Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, staged in 1605, and specially commissioned so that Queen Anne and her retinue could have an opportunity to experiment with blackface disguise by impersonating Africans. It is surely this masque that Quicksands is thinking of when he boasts that "Illustrious persons, nay, even queens themselves" have adopted blackface disguise for artistic purposes.n10602 In a second Jonson parallel, the Inductor of the masque that Quicksands commissions is an "Egyptian" who claims to have the power of palm-reading, and who reads the palms of members of the audience, making rhymed comments on them as he does so: he bears a strong resemblance to the palm-reading gypsies of Jonson's masque Gypsies Metamorphosed, staged in 1621.9Apart from these two specific debts, the most important reference point in the Jonson canon is generally reckoned to be Epicœne, with which this play shares a miser who attempts to insulate himself from the city in which he belongs, but who is bothered by noisy and hostile visitors. Like Epicœne's Morose, Quicksands enters into marriage with a much younger woman, which compromises his privacy; and at the end of the play, both marriages are dissolved without having been consummated. As Lucy Munro documents, Epicœne is also important in the background of The Demoiselle, written shortly after The English Moor. Brome finds Epicœne a particularly interesting play in this section of his career, perhaps because of its exploration of ideas of privacy and urban space.n1060310As well as referencing the Jonson canon, the play is immersed in other contemporary drama, referring with ease not just to individual plays (such as George Wilkins's The Miseries of Enforced Marriage) but to whole genres, as when Rashley denies that his disappearance has merely been a ruse of the sort familiar from contemporary prodigal drama:And then the dead by pulling off a beard,
After a little chiding and some whining,
To set the living on their legs again,
And take 'em into favour: pish, old play-plots.
No, sir, our business runs another course. n1060411One specific intertext for The English Moor from the world of contemporary drama is to be found in Middleton and Rowley's tragedy The Changeling, which informs Rafe's attempt to attain power over Dionysia as De Flores over Beatrice, and which is half-referenced by Rafe in this connection.n10605 It is tempting, too, to connect the two plays together in terms of their representation of "changelings", since, in both, a supposedly mentally disabled character has an important role. Steen notes a general resemblance, perhaps as an analogue rather than a source, to a contemporary comedy, Shakerley Marmion's A Fine Companion, with which this play shares the device of a virtuous woman forced to pretend to be lecherous so as to deter the sexual advances of her husband. But no source has yet been discovered for the main plot engine of the play, the idea of a man who disguises his wife as a black woman. On the analogy of Bradley C. Ryner's recent work on A Mad Couple Well Matched, it is possible that such a source remains to be recognized.n1060612In approaching The English Moor's formal qualities, A. C. Swinburne's commentary on the play offers an excellent starting-point which, in its general approach, sets the agenda for much subsequent scholarship:The English Moor, or The Mock Marriage, is an ingenious and audacious comedy of ill-contrived and ill-combined intrigue, at once amusing and confusing, which might have been better than it is if both characters and incidents had been fewer, but more neatly and lucidly developed and arranged; rich in good suggestions and good possibilities, but imperfect in evolution and insufficient in impression through overmuch crowding and cramping of the various figures and the complicated action.n1060713For Swinburne, the play is overburdened with plotting and incident, and no one line of the plot dominates over the others. Particularly troubling, from the point of view of the play's unity, is the coexistence in it of different dramatic categories: and the challenge for critics is to find organic unity in a play which seems "ill-combined" from incompatible ingredients.14One might start, in analysing these ingredients, by looking at the extremes: at Quicksands and Dionysia. The old usurer Quicksands is handled in, basically, a realist, satirical style, typical of Brome's usual city comedy: he is elderly, miserly, lecherous and dishonest. As R. J. Kaufmann has demonstrated, the treatment of Quicksands also has emblematic elements, since he is associated with details which link to rather older traditions of anti-usurer invective in homily and drama: but, nonetheless, although Brome "rather cleverly exploits the stereotype prejudices towards the usurer to get his play underway", the primary note is more realist than emblematic.n10608 Dionysia, on the other hand, is depicted with much less concern for social realism. She is a creature of a Caroline dramatic style influenced by Fletcherian tragicomedy, at the mercy of conflicting impulses of violent revenge and "all-conquering Love" [EM 5.2.speech951]. Theophilus, too, whom she desires, is chronically overpowered by his emotions. While not unheroic, he also weeps and swoons in ways which make him quite unlike the harder-edged, more pragmatic characters who populate the other parts of the play. 15Brome has an uneasy relationship with contemporary tragicomedy, experimenting with it in several plays, notably The Queen’s Exchange, The Queen and Concubine, and that satire upon the whole concept, The Love-Sick Court. The Dionysia-plot, with Theophilus as part of it, is perhaps Brome's most extensive effort to make Fletcherian tragicomedy work within a city comedy frame. But here, too, the difficulties show, because of the fundamental realism of the London setting. Rafe, Dionysia's henchman, is bemused by the whole rhetoric both of love and of honour, constantly deflating the rhetoric with his more earthy perception of Dionysia's charms. For Dionysia, desire is a matter of epic and competing emotions: for Rafe, it is an "itch" which he would like to scratch by getting Dionysia into bed.n10609 The juxtaposition is a jarring one. Indeed, Brome seems to have been particularly dissatisfied with this strand of the play. Some small but significant revisions made in the printed edition, and detailed here in the Textual Introduction, look to downplay Rafe's impact, and in particular he loses the one line of dialogue he had in the scene which provides the dénouement of the Dionysia-plot. The play as presented in the printed edition, then, takes steps towards silencing Rafe, presumably because his perspective, even in a single line, was found too corrosive to the tone of the climactic episode of this part of the play. Even with this change made, though, it is still difficult to take the swelling passions of Dionysia and Theophilus entirely seriously in the context of the rest of the comedy.16In short, the worlds of Dionysia and of Quicksands do not easily coexist, and it is no accident that these particular two characters are kept apart throughout until the last moments of the play. Another symbol of this disjunction is the Othello-like double time scheme on which the play operates. For Dionysia, three days elapse between Millicent's wedding and the climax of the play, while for Quicksands and those around him, a month goes by. Other characters are variously caught up in the temporal contradictions that this produces. To that extent, Swinburne's accusation that the play is "ill-combined" seems well founded.17One way of defending the play against further charges of lack of unity is to take up the discussion in Swinburne's own terms and to search for unifying thematic factors within the drama, as Catherine M. Shaw does in a detailed analysis of the "three dramatic levels" of the play, based around the three marriages of Lucy, Millicent, and Phillis. Shaw observes, for instance, the ways in which parts of the plot balance each other, so that Dionysia is not merely a foil for Millicent, but also, in her selfishness and emotional naivete, open to comparison with Quicksands himself, the other blocking character.n10610 And such analysis could certainly be extended: for instance, the thing that gives particular spice to the scene where Dionysia goes to kill her enemy, but instead falls in love with him, is her discovery that she and Theophilus are so similar in their reckless, passionate nature. This is not a similarity that works entirely to Theophilus's advantage. The English Moor is a play made up of such troubling equivalences and comparisons. 18This awareness of equivalences can be particularly illustrated when it comes to Nathaniel, the wild young gallant who has run into debt and ruined the reputation of his mistress Phillis. At a simple level, Nathaniel is a variation on a recognizable stage type: the lecherous but ultimately good-hearted prodigal. His antecedents might be said to include the hero of Lording Barry's Ram Alley (1608), who also has a deflowered mistress in tow, or even the morally ambiguous Wittipol of Jonson's The Devil is an Ass (1616). His closest relatives in the Brome canon might include Valentine Askall in The New Academy (1636) and Careless in A Mad Couple Well Matched (1639). Later in the same family come the rake-heroes of much Restoration comedy. To an extent all of these figures, including Brome's gallants, have some family resemblance, variations on a basic pattern of sexual, social and financial profligacy followed by redemption and perhaps also marriage.n1061119And yet, with Nathaniel, Brome provides an interesting twist on the usual pattern by giving him some interiority. Brome creates a character who suffers from an inchoate but increasingly pressing sense that there is something missing in his life, and in particular one sees this in the implicit comparisons between him and Quicksands. Nathaniel may seem at first the antithesis of the lonely old miser: but, as the play starts to sketch in, and as Nathaniel too starts to realize in Act Three, Quicksands is a young rake grown old. Both men have a history of fornication (specifically being called "whoremaster"). Both men are sexually attracted to Millicent and, more grudgingly, to Phillis. To that extent, the two men are paired with each other. When Nathaniel talks about his unwillingness to marry, he himself becomes half-aware that he is on a course to inherit "the fate / Of a stale doting bachelor… Quicksands' curse."n1061220And this is what makes Nathaniel slightly different from his brethren: unlike Askall, Careless, and the other rakes described above, the audience get to observe Nathaniel's faint, but growing, and increasingly uncomfortable, sense of ennui with the pleasures of rakishness. In 3.3, Nathaniel talks, in soliloquy, and the point is that there is something in his speech that he can't identify himself. Sweet mirth, thou art my mistress. I could serve thee,
And shake the thought off of all womankind,
But that old wonts are hardly left…21In even considering giving up womanizing, only to reject it, Nathaniel is starting to shift his mental ground. He has an uncomfortable conversation with Arthur, who probes him on his continuing libertinism:ARTHUR:'Tis all your glory, that: and to make boast
Of the variety that serves your lust:
Yet not to know what woman you love best.
NATHANIEL:Not I, cadzooks, but all alike to me,
Since I put off my wench I kept at livery. n1061322Arthur's comment is given extra force by its similarity to his verdict on Quicksands as "that man who had, and could not know" his wife: and Nathaniel's reply, which ought to be a straightforward rejection of the idea of love, is legible to Arthur, and the stage audience, as actually revealing feelings of love for Phillis that Nathaniel himself cannot identify. n1061423Nathaniel goes on to reflect that he has now experienced the love of almost every type of woman, with the exception of dead ones, and again the audience can see more clearly than the character where this exhaustion of novelty is leading. Indeed, part of what pushes him to seduce Catalina is the sense that her blackness is one of the few novelties left to his jaded palate. Then, having seduced her, he blurts out: "I love her, and will justify my act".n10615 His impulsive decision to marry Catalina after a few moments' acquaintance is an inexplicable volte-face insofar as one thinks of him merely as a stereotype, but it does make sense in terms of him as a growing character, with a sketched-in narrative of a mental process that is not transparent even to him.24Of course, the decision to marry Catalina should be seen, within the world of the play, as a bad one. The woman with the blackened face is an emblem not just of Quicksands' failure to treat women properly, but also of Nathaniel's: Nathaniel, in the end, snatches at marriage with a woman, any woman. This is confirmed by the way that, having decided to marry, Nathaniel is not at all dismayed when he discovers he may be marrying Millicent rather than Catalina. Furthermore, while initially alarmed to find he is marrying Phillis after all, he seems to come to terms with the fact quite quickly, and finishes the play not in the muteness of Angelo from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, but volubly declaring that he is happy with the outcome and will turn over a new leaf. He has been saved by Phillis's continuing willingness to love him, and by his decision to stand by her in the last speeches of the play. In that decision, he closes off the possibility of himself turning into Quicksands.25In Quicksands and Nathaniel, then, characters who appear to be opposites turn out to have potentially troubling similarities. In such formal parallels and contrasts, the play, considered for the moment without reference to race and disability, may be said to possess a rather subtle moral sensibility.Theatricality and metatheatricality26The discussion so far has focussed mainly on "literary" approaches to the play, but one of the emerging themes of this Brome project as a whole has been the importance of Brome's theatrical and metatheatrical awareness. In the section that follows I start to explore some of these issues in the play, with particular reference to the two scenes where Quicksands' house becomes the venue for dramatic entertainments: 1.3, where Quicksands is tormented by a masque of cuckolds, and 4.5, where Quicksands stages a masque of moors for his guests which is interrupted by the arrival of the singing, dancing Timsy.27These two scenes are particularly challenging because the Salisbury Court stage appears to have been extraordinarily small.n10616 The playhouse itself was a four-sided, roofed structure, around forty by fifty-five feet in size. As reconstructed by John H. Astington, the playing area occupied, in effect, one corner of the rectangle of the interior space, with a wide but shallow stage, slightly trapezoidal in shape, in front of a roofed and curtained area which served as the music room and discovery space. The two exits which formed the "doors" were at the extreme left and right of the playing area. Astington offers rough estimates of the size of the stage:the rear of the stage might be twenty or more feet wide, tapering to fifteen feet or more at the front. The depth is harder to calculate, but it is unlikely to have been deeper than about twelve feet.n1061728On the whole, Brome's play is actually rather conservative in its staging demands. Most of its scenes take place in domestic interiors, and there are no explicit requirements for a discovery space, trapdoor, upper playing area, or any of the more exotic effects available to the Renaissance dramaturge. But the staging challenges it offers are brought into sharp focus by the discovery that the original stage was probably less than twelve feet deep: so constrained that it lent itself, as Astington notes, to "a chiefly lateral grouping of figures" rather than an arrangement in terms of upstage and downstage. 1.3, as we shall see, exemplifies both the challenges of putting on set-pieces on the Salisbury Court stage, and also the virtuoso dramaturgy with which Brome handles smaller and more intimate dialogues. 29In narrative terms, 1.3 is also potentially difficult, because, while it performs valuable work of exposition, it is fundamentally about something not happening: Quicksands failing to get Millicent into bed. Brome puts life into the scene by structuring it into a series of distinct episodes. In the first part of the scene [EM 1.3.speech128-147], Testy is in command, doing most of the speaking and addressing, in about equal measure, Quicksands and Millicent, as he attempts to get them to consummate their marriage at once. Each replies rather meekly, and only really to him: husband and wife hardly address each other at all in this first section of the scene. In the second part, [EM 1.3.speech148-169], where Millicent decides to play at being lascivious, she takes control of the vocal space, and at last repeatedly addresses her husband. She gets, though, almost no direct replies. Quicksands' speeches are almost without exception either asides, or else spoken to Testy, while Testy still addresses each of the other two in turn, trying to regain control of the situation. This very obvious formal change in the dialogue lends itself, of course, to stage business: in the first part, one may visualize, Testy stands between the other two, trying to pull them together, while in the second, Millicent pursues Quicksands around Testy. This second movement, as one might call it, is interrupted by the bewilderingly rapid arrival of the masquers in the masque of cuckolds.30Onto a stage already containing four actors, in the persons of Quicksands, Millicent, Testy, and now Buzzard, pour another nine; one to be the Prologue; and eight to dance in assorted costumes in their four couples. Music, in the form of "merry pipe and crowd", is provided by the orchestra concealed, according to Astington's research, in the tiring-house, previously silent, which now bursts into acoustic life [EM 1.3.speech183]. The suddenness of the entry is of the essence. With the horns worn by the four cuckold-actors as part of their costumes, and the relatively narrow space through which they all have to enter and exit, this must have been quite difficult to arrange. Swinburne, as we have seen, talks in a literary sense about "the crowding and cramping of the various figures", but, given the extreme smallness of the available stage, this is also a valid comment in theatrical terms. Indeed, it forms part of the visual impact: there is a chiaroscuro-like effect in the sudden alternation between the small-group scene, and the stage packed with dancers. The invasion of Quicksands' personal space is represented visually on the stage. On such a crowded platform, one might reasonably speculate, Quicksands would be forced, against his will, to be physically crowded up against his irritable uncle and his sexually rapacious new wife, providing opportunities for physical comedy not explicitly scripted in the dialogue.n10618 When the masquers exit, with a conspicuous suddenness referred to in the dialogue, they leave a vacuum behind them both in terms of noise and in terms of stage space: the characters who have been onstage throughout are now thrown back to centre stage.31In the true fashion of musicals, the dance has not merely entertained, but it has also pushed the plot forward in that it has changed the dynamic between these characters. In the fourth movement of the scene [EM 1.3.speech184-211], Quicksands and Testy have recovered a little of their poise, but only enough that they are now attempting to save face in the situation of Millicent's continuing inappropriate behaviour. Their efforts to do so are made more pressing by the presence on stage of a new member of the group, Buzzard, who offers a running commentary on events, as well as changing the available stage groupings and generally getting in the way. Finally, after more than eighty speeches in all, the characters negotiate their way to their different beds. There are thus what one might call four movements within Act One Scene Three of the play, each offering modulations of grouping and technique. Such variation and development is a central part of Brome's stagecraft.32This awareness of stagecraft, throughout Brome's oeuvre, goes hand in hand with an awareness of the metatheatrical possibilities of drama. 4.5 offers a particularly layered example of this metatheatre, and is worth extended consideration in this connection, especially as it starts by offering a visual reversal of 1.3: a second entertainment in Quicksands' house. This time, however, Quicksands seems to have the whip hand. 33"Now to our revels", announces Quicksands to his three victims at the start of the scene. "Sit ye, sit ye, gallants…".n10619 From the start, then, the scene is phrased in terms of "revels", and as the eight participants in the masque come on, the total number on stage swells to thirteen, equalling the crowdedness of 1.3. But whereas in 1.3 there was one onstage audience, whose reactions to the inset masque provided entertainment to the "real" theatre audience, this time the effect has been doubled, so that the onstage audience itself has two layers. The primary audience are the gallants, stuck watching the entertainment of moors, and the secondary audience are Testy and Quicksands, whose main pleasure lies not so much in watching the entertainment as in watching the reactions to it of the gallants. The snide rhymes delivered to the gallants personally by the Inductor are followed by, in unexpected contrast, the wild dancing of the six moors, filling the stage with "action of mockery and derision against the three gentlemen".n10620 Quicksands, in particular, relishes his role as secondary audience, assuming a Prospero-like omniscience throughout this part of the scene as he enjoys the gallants' discomfiture, instructing Testy to "mark my jeers". We know, however, that that assumption of omniscience, of being the master of the fiction, is already mistaken. He still thinks that Catalina, at the centre of the inset entertainment, is Millicent in disguise, and the "real" theatre audience, watching the masque and also these two fictitious audiences of it, know better. It is an effect of nested onstage audiences which might recall the mise en abŷme of Hamlet, or the climactic play-within-a-play of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy.34As the moors complete their dance and exit, clearing some breathing space on the stage, Quicksands loses the initiative with startling speed. Nathaniel moves from audience to performer, exploiting the conventions of the masque to take Catalina for a dance, and dancing so vilely that the two old men are overcome by their laughter, before making his escape. Meanwhile, "the music continuing", Buzzard enters disguised as Timsy, and now Quicksands and Testy have become the primary audience for his performance, while the gallants are in the pleasant position of the secondary audience, privileged with the secret of Timsy's real identity, and commenting on the spectacle of the other characters: "now it works", comments Vincent to Edmund, watching the reactions of Testy and Quicksands.n10621 The whole relationship of the two onstage audiences is, in effect, precisely reversed. The two episodes, of the masque of moors and the "antic" of Timsy, are juxtaposed, and they are linked almost seamlessly by the onstage "music continuing" that goes over the transition between the two.35By the climax of the scene, when the moors have re-entered, hauling Nathaniel and Phillis back in, there are fifteen characters on stage in chaotic, broken groups. More than half of them are wearing blackface. The six dancers and the Inductor are back on, as are Nathaniel, Edmund, Vincent, the disguised Arnold, Testy, and Quicksands himself. Phillis, disguised as Catalina, and Buzzard, disguised as the irrepressible Timsy, add to the confusion. The dance music may indeed still be playing, since it is never given a specific cue to finish. Wherever Quicksands moves he will be crowded by one or another of the other characters, most of whom, to some degree, are now tormenting him. The fact that the stage of the first performance is so strikingly shallow from front to back serves in fact to accentuate this scene, and its claustrophobic feeling: Quicksands, it shows, is a man trapped in chaos in his own house. 364.5, in many ways the comic climax of the play, is conducted, then, almost as a diptych of dramatic entertainments. Both entertainments, moreover, revolve around a character who is, even intra-diegetically, in disguise. Phillis is disguised as a moor, and the other characters think they are watching a masque of moors laid on to celebrate a moor: Buzzard is disguised as a changeling, and Quicksands and Testy think they are watching a song and dance routine performed by a changeling. Dramatic illusion goes hand in hand with as-yet undetected deceptions about identity. In addition to these two deceptions, elsewhere in the play Phillis can counterfeit with ease alterations to her regional accent and social class; the cross-dressing Dionysia successfully conceals her true gender, participating as she does so in the whole Shakespearean tradition of cross-dressing. The ease with which anyone, it seems, can pose as anything, in the world of The English Moor, the difficulty of remaining a spectator and not becoming an object of spectacle, might make one entertain radical doubt about the true nature of observed reality.37This is a line of thought developed, for instance, by Jackson I. Cope, who praises Brome as an explorer of "the terrible and triumphant power of the imagination as a faculty of total re-creation"n10623. Such a reading of this play would certainly cohere with the play's links to The Antipodes, a play in which personal identity can be completely renegotiated in a world of almost solipsistic epistemological uncertainty. But what I think is interesting about The English Moor is that it tests the limits of such ideas of personal freedom, by pitching them against a sharply observed contemporary cultural reality. In particular, it uses the very technique of metadrama to represent two forms of personal identity seemingly so powerful, and so marginalizing, that they cannot even be represented directly in the world of the play. These are race and disability.38In the following analysis of, first, disability, and, secondly race in The English Moor it will be helpful to speak of Timsy and Catalina as "real" characters, although both are, technically, only impersonations when they appear in the action of the play. Timsy, at least, is real within the world of the play, although the audience only sees him at second hand, through Buzzard's impersonation of him. "Catalina" is fictitious. But both Catalina and Timsy, for the duration of their appearances, are believed by almost all of the other characters to really exist, to be "really" what they appear to be. Both the blackness that Catalina does not truly embody, and the profound disability that Timsy does not actually have, seem so threatening and in some ways so powerful that they can only be represented at two removes even within the artificial London of Brome's play. Metadrama, in this play, functions as a way of confronting two forms of personal identity in England that most conventional drama would simply not include.Disability39Timsy, Quicksands' illegitimate son, is one of the most interesting representations on the early modern stage of a person with profound mental disability. 40His disabilities are congenital. Buzzard says of him, "It is the arsy-versiest oaf that ever crept into the world. Sure, some goblin got it for him [i.e. for Quicksands]; or changed it in the nest, that's certain". He is referred to as a "changeling" - a euphemism which again denies him fully human status - an "idiot", and a "natural". Although twenty-seven years old, he is still beardless, and he is still dressed in the "long coats" that were the costume of children and of mentally impaired adults. His costume on stage thus marks him out as different, as does his posture: he goes, according to Buzzard, "a thissen", and the two contemporary references to The English Moor in performance (discussed above) draw attention to a held-out chin and hanging-down hands. A good mental image of his likely appearance can be gained from the sketch of "Changeling" which appears on the engraving accompanying Francis Kirkham's The Wits (1662) [IMAGE EM_4_1].n1062241What's more, Timsy is almost without language. Certainly, no-one except his keeper even tries to talk to him, and his recorded utterances consist almost entirely of noises rather than words, principally the noises "Hay toodle loodle loo" and "O". He speaks a few nonsensical scraps of English; he sings a snatch of song in character ("Hey diddy daddy…"); and we should bear in mind the possibility that the song he sings while dancing with his distaff had words that are now lost to us. But otherwise, it appears, Timsy is incapable of coherent speech.42This makes him, in fact, markedly different from other Renaissance stage representations of "changelings", including Antonio, the eponymous character in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, described as an "idiot" (although he, like Timsy, is "really" a non-disabled person in disguise even within the terms of reference of the play), and John of the Hospital, the surprisingly sympathetically drawn character in Robert Armin's comedy The Two Maids of Moreclack.n10624 Both of these, though, can enter into conversations: their language may be differentiated from the norm, and their responses are perhaps childlike, but they can talk. Often, indeed, what they say contains an Erasmian form of foolish wisdom, in an example of the trope perhaps most familiar from the fool in King Lear. Antonio and John, in turn, as well as Timsy himself, are members of a wider and ill-defined group of "natural fools" in Renaissance drama, often seen principally in conversation with a keeper or minder: examples of this wider group might include the Ward in Women Beware Women, Nehemiah in Brome's own The New Academy, and perhaps also Cokes in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. But all of this group, apart from Timsy, have language. Timsy is a particularly disabled character by the standards of the early modern stage.43Insofar as the other characters' reaction to Timsy is specified, they react to him with a venom that modern readers will find disturbing. Quicksands sees him as an occasion for "grief and shame", while Edmund opines that Timsy is one of the "punishments/ That haunt the miscreant [Quicksands] for his black misdeeds".n10625 One would like to think that Brome the author does not necessarily entirely share Edmund's smug conclusion here, as the gallants, financially and sexually profligate themselves, are not really morally authoritative commentators. (Indeed, since they believe Quicksands' principal misdeed to be his hard-nosed money-lending to foolish gallants like themselves, and in that they can only see Timsy in those terms, they themselves are judged by their limited judgement). All the same, they correctly recognize in Timsy something peculiarly powerful, because repressed, and peculiarly toxic to Quicksands. This toxicity is worth a little further investigation.44Timsy is partly a reminder that Quicksands has been a fornicator in the past - a fact which enrages Testy, for instance, when he learns of Timsy's existence. Testy is horrified to find that he has given Millicent to a man with this immoral past: "have you been a bastard-getter, and marry my niece?".n10626 But the damage Timsy does to Quicksands runs deeper than that. Quicksands likes to see himself as sophisticated, civilized, and - that key Renaissance word - witty, but the inarticulate Timsy is the antithesis of those qualities. Even worse, Timsy's own ill-concealed libido, and his success in impregnating no fewer than sixteen of his co-workers in Norfolk, is an analogue for and pointer to Quicksands' own continuing, undisciplined lust (seen in his desire to seduce Phillis). But above all, I would suggest, Timsy challenges Quicksands' implicit assumption of the natural superiority of people of his own race.45Particularly interesting in this connection is the invocation, in a play so consistently conscious of colour imagery, of the word "black" in Edmund's description of Timsy as punishment for Quicksands' "black misdeeds". As Robert Hornback has recently argued, blackness, and in particular black skin, can have two different significations in medieval and Renaissance symbolism. The first, and better known, is as a shorthand for evil and depravity. But the second is as a shorthand for foolishness and stupidity:With disturbing consistency, blackface served as one commonplace mark of foolishness in the iconography of the so-called "natural" fool - in medieval and Renaissance parlance, a butt, laughed at because he was mentally deficient (whether ignorant, dull-witted, or mad) and often physically different as well… it was the blackface tradition that underwrote early slavers' inexplicable assumption that Africans were utterly irrational and, hence, could be treated as beastlike.n1062746Quicksands, like those slavers, tends to think about black people in terms of ugliness and lack of independent reason. But his own flesh and blood, his son Timsy, is obviously ugly and in some ways far more beastlike. Thus, one can offer yet another answer to Swinburne's complaint about a lack of thematic unity in this play, by studying the treatment of Timsy and Catalina. As well as the similarities in how they are presented, at second hand through impersonators; as well as the similarities in how they are marginalized by their inarticulacy; there is also a thematic bond between them. Timsy embodies the ugliness and natural foolishness that a Renaissance viewer might expect to find in Catalina. More work remains to be done on Timsy from the point of view of a disability studies approach, but for the moment one may conclude by observing that his very presence on stage is an implicit rebuke to the assumption that foolishness necessarily comes in a black skin.Race47At last, then, we reach the play's treatment of blackness, the aspect that has made it particularly interesting to recent scholarly work. In the first of a series of racially provocative scenes, Quicksands applies black make-up to his wife, linking as he does so race to ideas of gender:Why, thinkst thou, fearful beauty,
Has heaven no part in Egypt? Pray thee tell me,
Is not an Ethiop’s face his workmanship
As well as the fair’st lady's? nay, more too
Than hers, that daubs and makes adulterate beauty?
Some can be pleased to lie in oils and paste
At sin’s appointment, which is thrice more wicked.
This, which is sacred, is for sin’s prevention… [EM 4.1.speech434]48Subsequently, Millicent re-enters in full blackface disguise, and speaks in blackface dialogue under the assumed identity of "Catalina"; Phillis, taking up the disguise of Catalina, is taken off stage, seduced by Nathaniel, and hauled back onstage in a disheveled state; Phillis appears at the trial scene still in her black make-up, and exits before re-entering with her blackface quickly removed. Pioneering studies including those of Kim F. Hall and Anthony Berthelmy have examined the play in the context of other representations of black-skinned characters in early modern drama. Indeed, Virginia Mason Vaughan has drawn attention to it as a play that examines the mechanisms of putting on blackface, the technique that underpins all the period's theatrical representations of black characters proper.n10628 Among important recent articles, Athena Efstathiou-Lavabre has analysed The English Moor in terms of Renaissance ideas of "black beauty", drawing attention too to the play's metatheatricality. Farah Karim-Cooper, on the other hand, moves the terms of reference away from race and towards gender, arguing that the blackface enables an exploration of the relationship between discourses of cosmetics, beauty, and female chastity.n10629 All of these approaches explore the richness of the dramatic symbol of the blacking-up scene. In what follows, I want to propose another, more local frame for this play's particular importance, in the play's interest in the emerging black community of London.n1063049In connection with Shakespeare's Othello, it used to be said that early modern Londoners would hardly ever see a black face. Recent scholarship has started to suggest that this is far from being the case. Othello itself, of course, is part of the reason: one of dozens of surviving plays performed upon the professional stage that put on stage a white actor in blackface impersonating a black person. Renaissance playgoers would have seen black men represented, in supporting parts and in leading characters ranging from the problematically noble Othello to the charismatic, clowning villain Eleazer in Lust's Dominion. They would have seen black women, too, such as the forthright and lustful Zanche in Webster's The White Devil and the maidservant Jaconetta/Jacomo in Brome's own earlier play The Novella.n10631 Outside the playhouse, black African faces hung in the street in the signboards of London taverns such as the Labour in Vain (mentioned in this play), whose emblem showed two women washing a negro, and the Blackamoor's Head.n10632 Yet a third manifestation of specifically African-inflected black faces is to be found in the fashion for amateur entertainments in which the participants took on the costume of moors. The prime exhibit here, of course, is The Masque of Blackness, but The Masque of Blackness was not unique: there survives, for instance, an anonymous entertainment entitled Mr Moore's Revels, acted at Oxford in 1636 (the year before The English Moor), in which a group of students blacked themselves up so as to celebrate, punningly, a student named Moore.n1063350The three categories of representation highlighted here - professional theatre, inn-signs, and amateur drama - all, in their different ways, attest to the same fascination with the idea of people with black faces. All, for sure, incorporate elements which aren't directly products of English contact with Africa, but rather of a more pervasive cultural dichotomy in which fair skin is associated with light and goodness, and dark skin with darkness with moral evil. (Here, too, it is worth bearing in mind Hornback's idea of the alternative cultural value of blackness as denoting natural foolishness). But at the same time, in Kim F. Hall's persuasive formulation, all such wider cultural valencies of dark and light contribute to and feed into the specifically African dimension of the early modern British writing which touches on race:[In early modern English literature] the polarity of dark and light articulates ongoing cultural concerns over gender roles and shifting trade structures… England's moving from geographic isolation into military and mercantile contest with other countries… sets the stage for the larger process by which pre-existing literary tropes of blackness profoundly interacted with the fast-changing economic relations of white Europeans and their darker "others" during the Renaissance.n1063451These fast-changing economic relations directly illuminate The English Moor. 52There was extensive, and growing, English trade with Africa, both directly by sea, and indirectly through intermediate ports. Perhaps the major staging post for traders between Europe and Africa was the city of Venice, which is, not coincidentally, a setting in many of Shakespeare's plays testing the boundaries of race such as Othello and The Merchant of Venice. In The English Moor, too, Venice is an important part of the mental landscape: it was there, Quicksands says, that he worked in his youth as a factor, and from there that he takes the idea of disguising his wife as a black woman. Quicksands is thus directly implicated in English trade with Africa. And he is implicated in the trade in a second way, too, since the most important of English exports along this trade route was woven broadcloth, the powerhouse of which industry was in East Anglia.n10635 Within the play, Quicksands has some sort of interest in the spinning industry of East Anglia, since he chooses it as the place to conceal Timsy, who returns to torment him with spinning-related songs and lewd dancing with distaff and spindle: the tools which create the exports which enable imports from Africa. The East Anglian dimension of The English Moor has generally been considered, when it has been considered at all, as a rather arbitrary piece of regional colour, to put beside the West Country accents of The Asparagus Garden or the Northern origins of the eponymous heroine of The Northern Lass. However, one might reasonably note that it also speaks to the origins of the slaving trade whose end product is the deracinated Catalina.53And yet it is important to bear in mind that there was not yet a major English slave industry, in the sense in which it took hold later in the seventeenth and through the eighteenth century. There certainly was some systematic abduction of people from Africa - for instance, in 1630 Charles I granted to a group of merchants a thirty-year monopoly to trade in Guinea, Benin, and Angola, a trade which included slaving.n10636 But at the same time, the principle that slavery was illegal, or at least illegal within England, seemed to be established in centuries of English law. Imtiaz Habib, the most extensive chronicler of the early black presence in Britain, has argued that there was an important change in British race relations from the mid-seventeenth-century onwards, and a hardening of British attitudes towards black people. The cause of the hardening was the hugely lucrative "Triangular Trade" which developed at this later date, exporting thousands of slaves from Africa to the new British plantations in the West Indies. Habib contraststhe inadvertent English disregard of the black presence in the Jacobean years, which facilitates an innocuous black settlement and integration, and the purposeful importation of black people for organized commercial slave supply to the American plantations from the middle of the Civil War years54which led in 1677 to legal enshrining of the principle that "Negroes, being usually bought and sold by merchants, and so merchandise", could indeed be considered as unentitled to human rights.n1063755Before then, though, those black people who found themselves in Britain, whether through travel or through forcible abduction by traders, were in a strange position. They were, to be sure, at massive social and cultural disadvantages, but they did not yet have the formal legal status of an unperson. Habib describes a lost first wave of black Britain, in which individuals and groups of people of colour, often almost invisible in documentary records, attempted to accommodate themselves within the sometimes benign neglect of Tudor and Stuart Britain.56Habib collects 448 documentary records, of many varieties, which seem to attest to the presence in Britain of numbers of black people between 1500 and 1677. This evidence is remarkable in its own right, but a number of entries are of particular interest, because they demonstrate the extent to which details in this play, The English Moor, chime with the contemporary experience of black Britain. As a black character on the English stage, Catalina is in one vital respect different from her predecessors, from Othello, Eleazer, and all of the others: unlike them, she lives in London. Catalina is, as far as is known, the first black resident of Britain to be depicted on the British stage, or in British literature at all. As such, it is striking how much what is revealed about her chimes with the archival traces of the experience of the first black Britons.57This starts with something as fundamental as her name. 'Catalina' is the Spanish form of Katharine, and using Habib's work, one can demonstrate that this was a name actually borne by at least two black women in early modern England. In 1624, the parish registers of St. Margaret's, Westminster, record the burial of "Cattelina, a blackamoor", of whom Habib comments that she "retains in her name a trace of her Iberian background"; Spanish merchants trading in Africa were a major part of the web of commerce which brought abducted Africans to Britain. In May, 1625, the year after Cattelina's death in Westminster, the second person, "Catellena a single negro woman," died in Almondsbury, Gloucestershire, leaving behind her goods to the value of £6 9s 6d. This is a record which Habib convincingly contextualizes in terms of the trade associated with the nearby city of Bristol. Catalina's name, then, has a surprising authenticity: it is a name borne by black woman in Britain.n1063858Catalina is from Africa. The best clue to her origins is given by Quicksands, who claims: "I have borrowed other moors of merchants / That trade in Barbary, whence I had my own here".n10640 Whether Quicksands' "whence" refers directly to Africa, or to the merchants, it is clear (given that Quicksands himself is a merchant) that Catalina has reached England as a result of English mercantile activity. Nor is she alone in this: Quicksands claims that he is able to borrow seven other black servants for his entertainment (even though these black servants, like Catalina, turn out to be white people in disguise). The central importance of merchants is in line with what Habib records: merchants were not merely the main movers in bringing black people to Britain, but also feature prominently in the records of those who had black servants in their households.n1063959Quicksands had a particular motive for acquiring Catalina, he states: he wanted a lady's maid for his new wife, Millicent. Again, this parallels historically documented cases. For instance, at some point in Elizabeth's reign, a merchant named William Offley obtained a negro servant who acted as a lady's maid for his wife. The servant is only recorded because, on her death in 1625, still in the service of Offley's wife, she bequeathed a sum of money to the poor of Putney.n10641 But Quicksands' wife has died within days of Catalina's arrival, so that Catalina has outlived the original reason for Quicksands acquiring her. She is still, seemingly, in Quicksands' household, but her future must be uncertain: one wonders if she, like Madge and Phillis, may soon be seeking out the employment agency in Bow Lane.60The social milieu outlined in cases like this, of well-to-do merchant society obtaining black servants as cultural trophies, is reinforced by another detail within a line only present in the manuscript of the play, when Quicksands is referred to as "The Jew /Of Mark Lane yonder, that devouring Quicksands".n10642 Quicksands, then, lives in "Mark Lane" or Market Lane, a notably wealthy street in central London favoured by successful merchants. Again, one is remarkably close to the surviving records, since as it happens a Jacobean citation places a black servant working in a house on this very street. The parish register of St. Botolph's, Aldgate, records the burial, on 24 July 1614, of "John Matthews a black moor lodging in the precinct next to the Tower servant to one Mr Kellet in Market Lane".n10643 Given the patchiness of the surviving records, the coincidence is remarkable.61If Catalina is a trophy possession, then one of the ways in which Quicksands intends to show her off is to get her to dance in her alien, uncouth style. He offers the black servants' dancing as one of the major attractions of the evening he is planning: "And you shall see their way and skill in dancing". In particular, he looks forward to Catalina's dancing: "When she dances, how you will admire her!"n10644 It is hard not to read these repeated references to dancing against other allusions to making one's black servants dance, such as that made by Samuel Pepys. On 27 March 1661, Pepys wrote a note concerning the black servants of two of his colleagues, Sir William Penn and Sir William Batten: "At last we made Mingo, Sir W. Batten’s black, and Jack, Sir W. Pen’s, dance, and it was strange how the first did dance with a great deal of seeming skill."n10645 Catalina's dancing, like the dancing of the seven other moors in Quicksands' entertainment, and like the dancing required from Mingo and Jack, is it seems, one of the bonuses of owning a black servant.62Unfortunately for Catalina, while being showed off by Quicksands she comes to the attention of Nathaniel. Earlier in the play, Nathaniel muses at length upon his previous sexual conquests, boasting that he has loved woman of all kinds,of all ages that are pressable
From sixteen unto sixty, and of all complexions
From the white flaxen to the tawny-moor;
And of all statures between dwarf and giantess…63Later, he returns to the theme: "Tawny and russet faces I have dealt with, / But never came so deep in darkness yet".n10646 What is most eye-catching about these remarks, from the perspective of the black experience in early modern London, is that Nathaniel seems very aware that he lives in a city containing a variety of skin colours. As always, uncertainty surrounds the exact extent to which words like 'black' and 'tawny' should be treated as metaphors for different complexions within whiteness, or as literal markers of racial difference. (This uncertainty is discussed at length by writers including Habib and Salkeld, with particular reference to records of apparently black female sex workers).n10647 But Nathaniel, at least, feels no significant reluctance towards the idea of seducing a black woman, seeing it just as an extension of his existing territories of female conquests. Interestingly, while Quicksands and Millicent are convinced of the fundamental hideousness of black people (although in Quicksands' case this seems to coexist with an erotic sense of the humiliation of blacking someone up), Nathaniel, Edmund, and Vincent have a less consistently precious sense of the relationship between racial distinctiveness and sexual attractiveness. For them, Catalina is a "pretty little rogue", and while Nathaniel is aware of Catalina's racial characteristics, even commenting on her supposedly camois nose, he finds her attractive.n1064864Even more strikingly, though, Catalina seems available not just as an object of sexual conquest but as a potential marriage-partner. Testy, for instance, suggests that Quicksands might already have married Catalina: and Nathaniel, of his own free will, does announce an intention to marry her which all present seem to take seriously.n10649 One might think that such interracial marriage is obviously unthinkable in practice in Renaissance England, but several such marriages are documented by Habib across the period under discussion. As early as 1578, George Best referred to one:I myself have seen an Ethiopian as black as a coal brought into England, who taking a fair English woman to wife, begat a son in all respects as black as the father was, though England were his native country.n1065065Habib records various other possible interracial marriages in parish records. Nathaniel's decision to marry Catalina may well not be, within the world of the play, a good one, but neither is it completely out of the question.66Symbolic of the process by which the black presence appears to be integrating itself in Britain is the speed with which Catalina's English improves. At first, she appears mute, before, unexpectedly, speaking to Nathaniel in obviously broken English [EM 4.4.speech719]; on her second appearance, she speaks again, in two lines which are grammatically and idiomatically correct, merely accented [EM 4.5speech804], [EM 4.5.speech807]; and on her third appearance, her one line is in perfect, unaccented English, prompting the puzzled Nathaniel to observe, "Thou speakest good English now" [EM 4.5.speech887]. As Habib notes, very little is preserved, even indirectly, of the ipsissima vox, the speech itself, of early black British women. In some ways, Catalina's surviving words, mediated and deeply inauthentic, are typical of that wider situation, but they are also symbolic of a black presence starting to integrate itself into a white English city. And lurking behind Catalina, still more shadowy, is a whole network of people of colour in Caroline London: the seven male black servants supposedly borrowed by Quicksands for the masque, the tawny-faced women of Nathaniel's previous sexual encounters. We even know the street Catalina lives in, set in a matrix of other references to specific streets and taverns, all within a mile or so of the doors of the theatre inside which the play is being acted. In one sense, the oxymoronic "English Moor" of the play's title is Millicent, an Englishwoman posing as a moor: in another sense, though, it is Catalina herself, one of the growing number of moors who are living in England.67The English Moor is, without doubt, a thoroughly racist text. Millicent, arguably the moral centre of the play, expresses strongly racist views, and the play as a whole does not seek to overturn the polarities of dark and light skin colour described by Hall.n10651 And yet comedy of intrigue is always, potentially, an egalitarian form, since it is predicated on parallels between characters, mistaken identities, reversals of role and substitutions of lover. It depends on the assumption that people are, if not necessarily morally equal, at least ontologically comparable. And once Catalina enters, even tentatively, the comic calculus of The English Moor, she joins, for instance, the categories of 'servant' and 'sexually vulnerable single woman'. Both of these categories, it has been argued elsewhere, are treated by Brome in general with unusual sympathy and respect: and one looks at the sort of innovations in city comedy made by Brome in earlier plays such as The Northern Lass, where Constance Holdup, a prostitute and a member of a class usually considered outside the remit of sympathy, is given asides, a backstory, and dignity.n10652 Catalina is not treated in that way yet, but she is available as a potential sexual partner and as a potential marriage partner. In entering, even once, into the structure of a comedy, the black Catalina becomes available in the future for other forms of plot device and characterization. 68The English Moor, then, shows the theatre, the thinking machine of Caroline England, starting to process the idea of black Londoners. Even in joking about racial integration and interracial marriage in Britain, imagination of those possibilities (which are also emerging realities) starts to become more concrete. Of course, the Civil War, followed by the emergence of the slave trade proper, meant that the play documents, in a sense, a false start towards integration: a road not taken in British culture. Nonetheless, The English Moor has a particular importance as one of the few literary texts to bear directly on the world of the black residents of London in the days before the slave trade became a major industry. It is one of the most considerable creative traces of what Imtiaz Habib calls the lost black renaissance of earlier seventeenth-century England.
n10595 Existing as an interlude between the progressive negative black markings of the Elizabethan period and those of the later seventeenth century, that is, as a moment of respite in the history of its English oppression, a brief moment of brightness between two enveloping epistemes of desolation, the locus of black growth in the first half of the seventeenth century could, at risk of straining a now unfashionable literary metaphor, be described as a renaissance of English black people in the early modern age.
n10596 when Brome's relationship with the company broke down completely.
n10597 And so would I, his part has all the wit, For none speaks craps and quibbles besides him: I'd rather see him leap, laugh, or cry, Than hear the gravest speech in all the play. I never saw Read peeping through the curtain But ravishing joy entered into my heart.
n10598 From this exchange it may be deduced that the comic actor Timothy Read played Buzzard, who, disguised as the changeling, sings "Toodle, loodle, loo", in The English Moor.
n10599 There, one character complains of another's deportment, "See how you carry de hands like de comedien dat act de shangling".
n10600 performance dates to late 1637 or to 1638 seems secure.
n10601 the 1640 printing of The Antipodes.
n10602 have adopted blackface disguise for artistic purposes.
n10603 ideas of privacy and urban space.
n10604 And then the dead by pulling off a beard, After a little chiding and some whining, To set the living on their legs again, And take 'em into favour: pish, old play-plots. No, sir, our business runs another course.
n10605 half-referenced by Rafe in this connection.
n10606 it is possible that such a source remains to be recognized.
n10607 complicated action.
n10608 the primary note is more realist than emblematic.
n10609 getting Dionysia into bed.
n10610 the other blocking character.
n10611 followed by redemption and perhaps also marriage.
n10612 "the fate / Of a stale doting bachelor… Quicksands' curse."
n10613 NATHANIEL:Not I, cadzooks, but all alike to me, Since I put off my wench I kept at livery.
n10614 revealing feelings of love for Phillis that Nathaniel himself cannot identify.
n10615 "I love her, and will justify my act".
n10616 These two scenes are particularly challenging because the Salisbury Court stage appears to have been extraordinarily small.
n10617 the rear of the stage might be twenty or more feet wide, tapering to fifteen feet or more at the front. The depth is harder to calculate, but it is unlikely to have been deeper than about twelve feet.
n10618 providing opportunities for physical comedy not explicitly scripted in the dialogue.
n10619 "Sit ye, sit ye, gallants…".
n10620 "action of mockery and derision against the three gentlemen".
n10621 Quicksands.
n10623 "the terrible and triumphant power of the imagination as a faculty of total re-creation"
n10622 A good mental image of his likely appearance can be gained from the sketch of "Changeling" which appears on the engraving accompanying Francis Kirkham's The Wits (1662) [IMAGE EM_4_1].
n10624 the surprisingly sympathetically drawn character in Robert Armin's comedy The Two Maids of Moreclack.
n10625 Timsy is one of the "punishments/ That haunt the miscreant [Quicksands] for his black misdeeds".
n10626 "have you been a bastard-getter, and marry my niece?".
n10627 could be treated as beastlike.
n10628 the technique that underpins all the period's theatrical representations of black characters proper.
n10629 and female chastity.
n10630 the emerging black community of London.
n10631 Brome's own earlier play The Novella.
n10632 whose emblem showed two women washing a negro, and the Blackamoor's Head.
n10633 a student named Moore.
n10634 and their darker "others" during the Renaissance.
n10635 East Anglia.
n10636 There certainly was some systematic abduction of people from Africa - for instance, in 1630 Charles I granted to a group of merchants a thirty-year monopoly to trade in Guinea, Benin, and Angola, a trade which included slaving.
n10637 could indeed be considered as unentitled to human rights.
n10638 it is a name borne by black woman in Britain.
n10640 "I have borrowed other moors of merchants / That trade in Barbary, whence I had my own here".
n10639 but also feature prominently in the records of those who had black servants in their households.
n10641 the poor of Putney.
n10642 "The Jew /Of Mark Lane yonder, that devouring Quicksands".
n10643 "John Matthews a black moor lodging in the precinct next to the Tower servant to one Mr Kellet in Market Lane".
n10644 "When she dances, how you will admire her!"
n10645 "At last we made Mingo, Sir W. Batten’s black, and Jack, Sir W. Pen’s, dance, and it was strange how the first did dance with a great deal of seeming skill."
n10646 "Tawny and russet faces I have dealt with, / But never came so deep in darkness yet".
n10647 (This uncertainty is discussed at length by writers including Habib and Salkeld, with particular reference to records of apparently black female sex workers).
n10648 even commenting on her supposedly camois nose, he finds her attractive.
n10649 which all present seem to take seriously.
n10650 though England were his native country.
n10651 the polarities of dark and light skin colour described by Hall.
n10652 a backstory, and dignity.