Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

Abstract

Joyce Green MacDonald discusses the links between women's racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. She examines the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. The coverage also includes texts from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, by, among others, Shakespeare, Jonson, Davenant, the Countess of Pembroke, and Aphra Behn. MacDonald articulates many of her discussions of early modern women's races through a comparative method, using insights drawn from critical race theory, women's history, and contemporary disputes over canonicity, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism. Seeing women as identified by their race and social standing as well as by their sex, this book will add depth and dimension to discussions of women's writing and of gender in Renaissance literature.

Past the Size of Dreaming? Shakespeare’s Rome

“…80 Joyce Green MacDonald devotes a chapter to this c o n t r o v e r s yb e f o r ed i s m i s s i n gi tf o rS h a k e s p e a r e , concluding that Antony and Cleopatra 'is finally so convinced of the cosmic import of Cleopatra'sracial difference from the Romans that it cannot be bothered to be consistent about her skin color'. 81 Perhaps, but directors and actors have usually chosen to cast an actress of one colour or another in the role and this decision has consequences. Celia R. Daileader surveys the various impersonations of blackness in the history of modern stage Cleopatras.…”

Invoking Cleopatra to examine the shifting ground of leadership

“…Post-structural analyses have focused on the dynamics of difference in gender and race (e.g. Hamer, 1993;MacDonald, 2002;Royster, 2003, Trafton, 2004. Psychoanalytic analyses of her representations as the object of both subordination and desire have drawn on the works of Freud, Lacan and Zizek (e.g.…”

“…This is also entwined with change in women's voice and its political and literary influence. Over the last decade, much of the critical analyses of Cleopatra's representation (Hamer, 2001;Jones, 2006a;Kleiner, 2005;MacDonald, 2002;Royster, 2003) as well as historical accounts that depict her simultaneous leadership and seduction -several in 2008 alone (e.g. Fletcher, 2008;Preston, 2008;Tyldesley, 2008) -have been authored by women.…”

“…Unlike Plutarch who cannot fathom a woman in political leadership, Shakespeare can. Authors have posited that Shakespeare's political context, shortly after the reign of a powerful queen Elizabeth I, played a role (MacDonald, 2002;Rosenberg, 2006a). He repeatedly reminds the audience that she was a monarch through many titles: "Queen", "royal", "majesty", "highness", "empress", "Royal Egypt".…”

“…Soon after the Newsweek article appeared, two productions of his play had a black actress in the lead role -one of them arguing that Cleopatra's fabled whiteness was simply a way of bleaching history (Hughes-Hallet, 2006). Yet, here again, Shakespeare has rendered her paradoxical (Archer, 2001;MacDonald, 2002). He describes her "tawny" skin and he makes her reflect on how she had turned "black" by the sun's amorous pinches.…”