English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama

Abstract

Drawing on classical and contemporary medical texts, histories, and cosmographies, Mary Floyd-Wilson demonstrates that the Renaissance understanding of identities contradicted many modern stereotypes concerning racial and ethnic differences. English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries labored to reinvent ethnology to their own advantage, paving the way for the invention of more familiar racial ideas. Floyd-Wilson highlights these English revisionary efforts in her transformational readings of the period's drama; including Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, and Shakespeare's Othello and Cymbeline.