Race Tricks: Skill and Spectacle in the Blackfriars Boys' Repertory, 1600-1608
Open AccessThis dissertation analyzes the strategies that boy actors used to perform race on the early modern English stage. I argue that the plays of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, a youth company that performed at London’s Blackfriars theatre in the early seventeenth century, contain a neglected and significant archive of references to emergent racial difference, despite the fact that only one of their plays, John Marston’s Sophonisba, contains overtly racialized characters. In the rest of their plays, the children’s performance of race hinges on their employment of “race tricks”: displays of skill and spectacle that hide their racial meanings in plain sight. I argue that racialization becomes visible through spectacular displays of skill shaped by the system of repertory. Repertory studies of English drama organizes plays by the company that performed them rather than by their author. This approach puts play texts into a network of performances that required the same bodies of actors and material things like props and costumes to be used repetitively by a company and often viewed by the same audiences. The repetition of “intertheatrical” figures like Greek gods and animals across the repertory of this company created a web of racialized associations, and these figures were the engines that powered these racemaking moments of spectacle, ability, and skill in the children’s repertory. The project is structured around figures who feature prominently across the Blackfriars repertory and participate in skilled “tricks” of imitation, transformation, deception, and disguise. Chapter 1, “Youthful Tricks: Cupid at the Blackfriars,” unfolds in two parts: first, to expand on how the company’s relationship to the Blackfriars audience and the court is invested in early modern racecraft, and second, how portrayals of Cupid in Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels alongside other plays by Marlowe and Lyly make him a figure akin to the boy player himself in his role as enforced laborer subject to discipline and punishment. Chapter 2, “Mimic Tricks: Aping the Moor in Poetaster,” looks at the parody of George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar by the boys in Ben Jonson’s play and the gaps between the perceived capacity of the boy actor’s diminutive size and imitative skill set (associated with the ape) and the successful presentation of the “Moor” character type. In Chapter 3, “Transforming Tricks: Protean Performance in The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” I argue that the god Proteus’s transformational skill, just like that of the apprentice-turned-player Rafe, is a reaction to his captured or bound status and resonant with the role of freedom and agency in racializing practices. Chapter 4, “Sooty Tricks: Vulcan as Chimney Sweep in May Day,” focuses on intersections of class and race represented in the spectacle of the blackened chimney sweep and other sooty figures in early modern drama like Vulcan, the deformed and cuckolded god of fire, and Othello. Through reading plays by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont with an intersectional methodology, I show how the materiality of early modern racecraft depends upon developing constructs of gender, sexuality, class, and ability in performance. By viewing child players and their dramatic repertory through the lens of early modern race and performance studies, I track the multiple and flexible ways that racial meanings were formed on the early modern stage, not only through the representation of racialized characters, but also through the employment of embodied theatrical skill and material spectacle.
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.