In English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, 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.
目錄:
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.