ABSTRACT

Title of Document: FROM THE AETHIOPICA TO THE RENAISSANCE:

RECOVERING A STAGE TRADITION OF POSITIVE
REPRESENTATIONS OF AFRICANS IN EARLY
MODERN ENGLAND

Margaret Sinclair, 2012

Directed by: Prof. Jane Donawerth, Department of English

This dissertation looks at the connection between Heliodorus’s fifth-century prose

romance, An Aethiopian History, certain Renaissance texts, and how these texts helped

influence an alternate representation of Africans in the early modern world. Through

their portrayals of Africans, early modern English playwrights frequently give the

impression that Africans, especially black Africans, were people without

accomplishments, without culture. Previously, however, this was not the case. Africans

were depicted with dignity, as a tradition existed for this kind of representation--and

Renaissance Europe had long been acquainted with the achievements of Africans, dating

back to antiquity. As the source of several lost plays, the Aethiopica is instrumental in

dramatizing Africans favorably, especially on the early modern stage, and helped shape a

stage tradition that runs alongside the stereotyping of Africans. This Heliodoran tradition

can be seen in works of Greene, Heywood, Jonson, Shakespeare, and others in the motifs

of crosscultural and transracial romance, male and female chastity, racial metamorphosis,

lost or abandoned babies, wandering heroes, and bold heroines.

In Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty, I establish a connection

between these two masques and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica and argue for a Heliodoran
stage tradition implicit in both masques through the conceit of blanching. In The English

Moore, I explore how Richard Brome uses the Heliodoran and Jonsonian materials to

create a negative quality of blackness that participates in the dramatic tradition of the

degenerate African on the English Renaissance stage. With Othello, I contend that it is a

drama that can be seen in the Heliodoran tradition by stressing certain motifs found in the

play that derives from the Aethiopica. Reading Othello this way provides us with a more

layered and historicized interpretation of Shakespeare’s protagonists. Othello’s

nationality and faith make his exalted position in Venice and the Venetian army credible

and logical. His nobility and heroic status become more sharply defined, giving us a

fuller understanding of the emphasis he places on chastity—both for himself and for

Desdemona. Instead of a traditional, compliant, and submissive Desdemona, a

courageous, resourceful, witty, and pure heroine emerges--one who lives by the dictates

of her conscience than by the constraints of societal norms.

Recovering the tradition of positive portrayal of Africans that originated from the

Aethiopica necessitated an examination of eleven plays that I contend helped to frame the

dramatic tradition under investigation. Six of these plays are continental dramas, and five

are English. Although three of the English plays are lost and the other two are

seventeenth-century dramas, their titles and names of their protagonists, like those of the

six extant continental plays, share the names of Heliodorus’s hero and heroine, making an

exploration of the continental plays imperative to facilitate their use as paradigms in

reconstructing the three lost English plays. These continental dramas show that plays

whose titles derive from the Aethiopica itself or reflect the names of its major characters

follow Heliodorus’s text closely, enabling an investigation of the Heliodoran tradition on

the early modern English stage. Recovering the Heliodoran tradition adds to the

exploration of racial politics and the understanding of the dramatic tradition that

constrained and enabled Renaissance playwrights’ representation of race and gender.

 FROM THE AETHIOPICA TO THE RENAISSANCE: RECOVERING A STAGE
TRADITION OF POSITIVE REPRESENTATION OF AFRICANS IN EARLY
MODERN ENGLAND

By

Margaret Sinclair

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the

University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2012

Advisory Committee:
Prof. Jane Donawerth, Chair
Prof. Emeritus Maynard Mack, Jr.
Prof. Theresa Coletti
Prof. Laura Rosenthal
Prof. Judith Hallett
© Copyright by
Margaret Sinclair
2012
 ii

Acknowledgements

Before I was a humbled dissertation writer, one of my professors told me that

writing a dissertation will be the hardest thing I would ever do. Being ignorant and

arrogant, I inwardly dismissed his idea. Many years have passed and I have walked the

path of enlightenment and humility. Writing a dissertation is indeed the hardest thing I

have ever done or anything I am ever likely to do. My path, made difficult with financial

and other constraints, was at times impassable, except, of course, for encouragement and

help from supporters.

I have been fortunate to have Professor Jane Donawerth as my advisor. Her

support has been unstinting at every level. When pecuniary matters forced me to

interrupt my studies, Professor Donawerth spoke on my behalf, and she forbore with the

difficulties I had in writing the dissertation. I am inclined to think that another advisor

would have given up on me. I also thank Professor Maynard Mack for the challenges he

posed and for making me work as hard as I did. I am also thankful for Prof. Hallett’s

support and the time and contributions of the other members of my committee.

Without the help of Patricia Herron, the librarian for the humanities at McKeldin

library, I could not have written this dissertation. Perhaps I would have written another

dissertation—but certainly not this one. It took the two of us, with Pat frequently in the

vanguard, at least a year to track down and retrieve the six obsolete plays that are vital to

my dissertation from some obscure and forsaken nook and cranny of the universe. Pat,

generous and always understanding, was instrumental in procuring some of those plays

from European libraries. The others we ferreted out from Internet caches. Frequently, I

would turn up at McKeldin without an appointment and Pat’s help would be forthcoming.
 iii

I am indebted to my niece, Professor T.K. Whittingham (the “Enforcer”). She

held me accountable and provided financial and emotional support. Special thanks to Jim

Berry for his unwavering kindness and to Joanne Desiato for her support. My friends

Jodean Marks, Heather Archibald, Sophia Rutty, H. R. Clarke, Kevin Jordan, and James

Ocita were Gibraltars. They tolerated my lamentations and idiosyncracies and were

generous in their financial and intellectual support.

When I was about 13, I conceived the impossible dream of having a Ph. D. This

was literally an impossibility then. Throughout the years, however, my brother Lancelot

Anthony Sinclair (affectionately, Gary) toiled to remove all obstacles in the way.

Without Gary, my dream could never be a reality. He made this journey and the journeys

of my other brothers and sisters a reality. I am privileged to be his sister, and I am a

better person for knowing him.

Others who helped my intellectual journey include my sister Beverly E.

Whittingham (whose concern for my early education and summertime reading of the

Romantics and Victorians instilled in me the love of literature) and the late Professor

Sondra Godfrey (who inspired me).

To all those who have had to endure my tenacity during these turbulent years,

especially the staff at McKeldin, and in particular Charles Wright, I ask forgiveness.
 iv

Table of Contents

Table of Contents Page

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv
Introduction ........................................................................................................................1
Summary of the Aethiopica .................................................................................................6
Use and Influence of the Aethiopica during the Renaissance ..............................................8
A Lost Tradition .................................................................................................................22
Outline of Dissertation Chapters ........................................................................................36
Chapter 1 ..........................................................................................................................39
Plays Whose Titles Reflect Their Derivation and Help to Establish
a Dramatic Tradition Stemming from the Aethiopica..................................................46
The Aethiopica as Source for Popular Renaissance Plays ................................................74
Black Africans on the English Renaissance Stage .............................................................90
Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................100
The Aethiopica as Template for Blackness and Beauty ...................................................102
The Ambi-valence of Blanching in Jonson’s Twin Masques and the Heliodoran
Stage Tradition ...........................................................................................................108
The Intertextuality of the Aethiopica, Blackness, and The English Moore .....................132
Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................149
Othello, An Ethiopian? ....................................................................................................153
Othello, a Play in the Heliodoran Tradition .....................................................................165
Similarities Yet Differences in Desdemona and Othello’s Relationship to the
Heliodoran Tradition ..................................................................................................192
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................200
Appendix A .....................................................................................................................209
Appendix B .....................................................................................................................222
Bibliography ...................................................................................................................223
 1

Introduction

I.

“What schole-boy, what apprentice knows not Heliodorus?” So demands Joseph

Hall during the early part of the seventeenth century.1 Hall’s rhetorical demand

highlights the popularity of Heliodorus’s An Aethiopian History during the Renaissance.

The Aethiopica and other Greek manuscripts found their way to Europe through a

concatenation of events. In 1453, Mohamet II invaded Byzantium, causing its

intellectuals, who were ardent admirers of the Greek novel,2 to flee to Italy and other

European countries, presumably taking Greek codices with them. When in 1526,

Suleiman the Magnificent sacked the Hungarian city of Buda and destroyed King

Matthias’s royal palace, “an unnamed, low-ranking German mercenary soldier . . .

snatched the manuscript containing Heliodorus’s Ethiopian History from the smouldering

ruins of King Matthias’s Bibliotheca Corviniana.”3 As Gerald Sandy observes, that

manuscript became the basis of Vincentius Obsopoeus’s 1534 editio princeps, which was

printed in Basel and in turn served as “the sole basis of the first translation of the

Ethiopian Story” in 1547 by Jacques Amyot. In 1551, the Polish humanist Stanislaus

1. Joseph Hall, “Honour of the Married Clergy Maintained,” The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall
Vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1863), 559. Hall was a seventeenth-century Anglican bishop and satirist.
Gerald Sandy, “The Heritage of the Ancient Greek Novel in France and Britain,” The Novel in the Ancient
World, ed. Gareth Schmeling (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 735; and Margaret Ann Doody, The True Story of
the Novel (New Brunswick, Rutgers UP, 1996).
2. By calling the Aethiopica and other Greek works “novels,” I follow Gerald Sandy, John Morgan, Carol
Gesner, Margaret Ann Doody, and other classicist and Renaissance scholars. In fact, Doody’s opening
sentence in The True Story of the Novel sweeps aside any distinction between romances and novels:
“Romance and the novel are one” (15).
3. Sandy, “The Heritage of the Ancient Greek Novel in France and Britain,” 173; see, also, Doody,The
True Story of the Novel, 233-34; Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, “Persiles and Allegory,” Cervantes: Bulletin of
the Cervantes Society of America 10, no.1 (1990):7; Peter Burke, The European Renaissance: centers and
peripheries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998),146-47; Wolgang Stechow, “HELIODORUS’ Aethiopica in Art,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16, no. 1/2 (1953): 144; Mara Hatzopoulou-Yanni, “The
Elizabethan View of the Greek Romances,” Ellinika (Institute of Balkan Studies) 34 (1982-83): 46.
 2

Warschewiczki translated the Aethiopica into Latin, and German and Spanish (1554),

Italian (1556), and English (1567) translations soon followed.4

The Aethiopica gained popularity in Continental Europe, especially in France,

long before it did in England. Because of the Byzantine intellectuals’ flight to Europe

and Charles VIII’s military campaign in Italy, where he became acquainted with

Hellenism, Hellenistic thought found its way into France. When Charles returned to

France, the Hellenist and Byzantine intellectual Janus Lascaris accompanied him.5

Lascaris, an employee of the crown from the time of Charles VIII to that of Francois I,

took “some 40” Greek manuscripts to France, helped improve the teaching of ancient

Greek, and taught others “who were positioned to influence the development of ancient

Greek in France” (Sandy 740).

By contrast, the Aethiopica’s route to Britain was long and circuitous, taking more

than twenty-two years before reaching English shores; having no direct access to Greek

manuscripts, English writers resorted to French, Italian, and/or Latin translations. In

1567, James Sandford published a versified retelling of Book 4 of the Aethiopica, and by

1569 Thomas Underdowne Englished Warschewiczki’s Latin translation6 of Heliodorus’s

text and reissued it several times thereafter. As we shall see, Underdowne’s translation of

Warschewiczki’s text provided literary manna for many English writers.

4. See Sandy, 735; see, also, Doody, 234; Bautista Avalle-Arce, “Persilles and Allegory,” 7-9; Burke, 146;
Stechow, “HELIODORUS’ Aethiopica in Art,” 144; Hatzopoulou -Yanni, “The Elizabethan View of the
Greek Romances,” 46.
5. Sandy, 739-40.
6. Elizabeth McGraw claims that Underdowne translated the Aethiopica from Amyot, not Warschewiczki:
“The Black Andromeda,” Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 55 (1992):1-18. Darlene C.
Greenhalgh makes a similar suggestion in “Love, Chastity, and Woman’s Erotic Power: Greek Romance in
Elizabethan and Jacobean Contexts,” Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570-1640,
ed. Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 18. This,
however, is not the consensus among scholars.
 3

This dissertation illuminates why Heliodorus is of interest to the Renaissance and

how our understanding of the Renaissance is enhanced by recovering him. To

accomplish this, I argue that Heliodorus was known by and important to a group of early

modern writers and that his novel An Aethiopian History is the direct source of several

plays that established a dramatic tradition for a positive portrayal of black Africans. I

also argue that early modern adventure or Mediterranean plays (i.e., dramas set in the

Mediterranean which generally feature encounters between European males and native

females involved in novel or risky undertakings) are the progeny of Greek novels, and I

further explore how Othello may be read as an adventure drama in the Heliodoran

tradition.

The project has two parts. First, I establish that the Aethiopica was a common

text throughout the Renaissance and is the direct source of many plays because it was

widely known by the Italian poets Ariosto and Tasso, the English poets Sidney and

Spenser, and quite probably the English playwrights Shakespeare, Heywood, Jonson, and

others. Thus, I look at the relevant works of these authors using analyses of their writings

and the findings of various scholars to delineate similarities between Heliodorus’s novel

and their works. Second, I analyze the eight extant European and English plays that

derive directly from Heliodorus to help reconstruct the three lost plays which enable us to

posit a tradition of positive portrayal of black Africans on the English stage. By

establishing the importance and popularity of the Aethiopica and showing that all extant

plays that have the protagonists’ names in their titles follow the plot and storyline of
 4

Heliodorus’s novel, I provide a necessarily speculative7 yet nonetheless strongly justified

reconstruction of the three lost plays.

Following the introduction, this dissertation is divided into three chapters, each

fleshing out specific themes from Heliodorus while showing that topic’s connection to

the Aethiopica in order to argue for his importance to a certain group of writers and a lost

stage tradition. Chapter 1 has three sections. The first section discusses plays whose

titles reflect their indebtedness to the Aethiopica; they help to establish a dramatic

tradition that originates from this Greek novel and that presents a positive representation

for Africans on the English Renaissance stage. The second section contends that the

Aethiopica is the source of three popular Renaissance plays by analyzing the connection

among these three plays, their other sources, and the Aethiopica. The final section

examines the positive representations of Africans on the English Renaissance stage in

relation to the Helidoran tradition. It also argues that the base African on the early

modern English stage is an anomaly, not the norm, in this stage tradition. The second

chapter looks at two masques by Ben Jonson and one play by Richard Brome, all of

which have affinities with the Aethiopica and, consequently, further the connection

between Heliodorus and several dramatists of the early modern period. It also explores

the English Renaissance commonplace of associating ugliness with Ethiopians, using the

conceit of blanching (a technique that transforms what is undesirable) found in Jonson’s

twin masques to illuminate issues of gender and race. The final chapter interprets

7. Scholars frequently use speculation as a tool of argumentation. To make her argument that Sidney drew
upon the tale of Euphimia of Corinth from Giraldi Cinthio as a source for Plangus, Jane Kingsley Smith
speculates that Sidney read Cinthio to improve his Italian but “also found in the novelle a source” for
Plangus: “Sidney, Cinthio, and Painter: A New Source for the Arcadia,” The Review of English Studies 57,
no. 229 (April 2006): 169-75. In trying to establish a firm date for the Aethiopica as well as to “reconstruct”
a “biography” of Heliodorus, John Morgan uses conjectures: “Heliodorus,” The Novel in the Ancient
World, ed. Schmeling, 419-20.
 5

Shakespeare’s Othello as an adventure drama that can be read in the tradition of the

Aethiopica. To support this interpretation, the chapter identifies sections in Othello that

are not in Cinthio but can be traced to the Aethiopica. In a move that can cast new light

on one of Shakespeare’s most famous women and provide us with a deeply historicized

and fresh angle on the vision of Desdemona, I examine the similarities between the

female protagonists of the Aethiopica and Othello. The chapter concludes by probing the

similarities and differences between Desdemona and Othello’s relationship and those of

major characters in the Heliodoran tradition, especially that of Charicleia and Theagenes.

In this dissertation, I follow particularly the arguments of Carol Gesner’s

Shakespeare and the Greek Romance, Daniel Vitkus’s Turning Turk: English Theater

and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630, Jonathan Burton’s Traffic and Turning

Islam and English Drama, 1579-1627, and Jean Howard’s “Gender on the Periphery” by

contending that Greek writers influenced Renaissance dramatists. I also argue that race,

religion, and gender are issues that separate peoples and generate conflict in

Mediterranean plays during the English Renaissance.8 I depart from their arguments by

tracing a dramatic tradition stemming from Heliodorus to the English Renaissance. The

chapters that follow show the stretch of the dramatic tradition from Ettiore Pignatelli’s

Cariclea (1582), Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso (1594), Alexandre Hardy’s Les

chastes amovrs de Theagene et Cariclee (1601), to the anonymous Thracian Wonder

(1661) and the various ways in which early modern dramatists followed, departed from,

and reworked the Heliodoran tradition. While English Renaissance dramatists often

imitate Heliodorus’s representation of white-skinned Africans, they frequently depart

8. Plays that deal with their protagonists’ involvement in novel, risky, and often dangerous and exciting
events in the Mediterranean.
 6

from his portrayal of black-skinned Africans by presenting them as lecherous,

dishonorable, and evil so as to demonize and belittle them, thereby asserting

English/European superiority.

In the rest of this introduction, I outline the widespread use and influence of the

Aethiopica on Renaissance artists, focusing on French writers and English playwrights

because the French were instrumental in advancing the popularity of the Aethiopica and

because my primary concern is with the English Renaissance stage. The English knew

the Aethiopica through French and Latin translations, especially through Thomas

Underdowne’s Englishing of Stanislaus Warschewiczki’s 1551 Latin translation. In close

readings of certain passages, I reference both of these translations. Other times, however,

I use the more modern translation of Moses Hadas’s text of the Aethiopica because it is a

direct translation of Heliodorus’s text and is closer to Warschewiczki’s translation of

Helidorus than Underdowne’s is. In the final sections of the introduction, I also discuss

the use and influence of the Aethiopica during the Renaissance, the lost stage tradition

that derived from Heliodorus’s text, and end with an outline of each dissertation chapter.

But first let me provide a brief summary of the Aethiopica to familiarize my audience

with the novel and to facilitate an examination of the text in order to establish what I

argue as one of its main concerns.

II.

Summary of the Aethiopica9

Fearing charges of adultery, Queen Persinna of Ethiopia abandons her newborn

daughter because she is born “white.” A priest finds the child and eventually gives her to

9. For a detailed summary of the Aethiopica, see the Appendix.

 7

a Greek priest to raise as his own daughter. She grows up as a priestess of Diana in

Athens, and at the festival of Neoptolemus, the young princess, Charicleia, meets and

falls in love with Theagenes, a Thessalian prince and direct descendant of Achilles.

With the aid of the Egyptian savant Calasiris, they elope, leaving her adoptive

father, Charicles, heartbroken. Charicles’s household as well as the the city are in uproar.

Meanwhile, Calasiris, Theagenes, and Charicleia are stowaways on a Phoenician ship.

They are shipwrecked, attacked by pirates and brigands. Theagenes and Charicleia are

captured repeatedly by opposing factions and are separated from each other; they also

endure attacks upon their virtue, wander in search of each other, and reunite in Memphis,

where they become house-captives to Arsace, the wife of the Persian general and the

interim ruler of Memphis.

Hearing of the beauty of Charicleia, the Persian general and governor of Egypt,

Oroondates, dispatches messages and soldiers to his wife, commanding her to surrender

her two prisoners. On their return, the Persian soldiers are ambushed by Ethiopian

soldiers, who capture and take Charicleia and Theagenes to Hydaspes, the king of

Ethiopia.

As spoils of war, Charicleia and Theagenes are prisoners to be sacrificed to the

gods for granting Hydaspes victory over Persian Egypt. Returning to a jubilant nation,

Hydaspes orders the braziers to be brought out to test the sacrifices for purity:

prospective sacrifices walk a heated iron brazier; those who are unharmed are deemed

pure. When the flames flee from Charicleia and Theagenes, the people, astonished at the

pair’s beauty and chastity and, believing Charicleia to be a goddess, demand that she not

be sacrificed, prompting the High Priest Sisimithres to caution the king about the gods’
 8

displeasure with human sacrifice. But Hydaspes wants to continue the ritual. Before the

priests could leave, Charicleia, to the king’s chagrin, asks the high priest to intercede by

claiming Ethiopian heritage. When she displays the tokens of her Ethiopian lineage,

Persinna and Sisimithres avow that she is the abandoned daughter. An incredulous

Hydaspes sends for the painting of Andromeda to confirm the queen’s story and his

paternity. When the people plead to spare Theagenes’s life and abolish the sacrificial

system, all are saved. The king learns that Theagenes and Charicleia are betrothed. The

people rejoice at the king’s and queen’s good fortune and the imminent marriage of

Charicleia and Theagenes.

III.

Use and Influence of the Aethiopica during the Renaissance

The Aethiopica was the most popular Greek text throughout the Renaissance,

reaching into Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Holland, England, Hungary, Bulgaria, the

former Yugoslavia, and Asia Minor.10 There are several reasons for the pre-eminence of

the Aethiopica over the other Greek novels. Despite elements of plot--such as piracy,

kidnapping, shipwrecks, and elopement--shared with other Greek novels, the Aethiopica

alone begins in medias res, has a delayed denouement, and a complex narrative with

multiple narrators whose stories are intertwined and revolve around various characters

who tell their stories through flashbacks, dialogues, histories, and/or straight narratives.

These features distinguish Heliodorus’s novel from all other Greek novels. The

10. Sandy, 735; Stechow, 145; Avalle-Arce, 7; Greenhalgh, “Love, Chastity, and Woman’s Erotic Power:
Greek Romance in Elizabethan and Jacobean Contexts,” 15-20; Doody, 234, contends that “Heliodorus had
a strong and constant readership throughout the Eastern Empire.” Given that the Byanzantine intellectuals
fled to various European countries and that the Greek novel was brought from Hungary to Western Europe,
Doody’s claim is not surprising.
 9

popularity of the Aethiopica also resulted from the strangers and foreigners who inhabit

its pages, its incorporation of sufficient adventure to satisfy the demands of a public

reared in the tradition of imitation of the Amadis11 (thirteenth- to sixteenth-century

chivalric romances from the Iberian peninsula, featuring star-crossed lovers, illegitimacy,

and knightly combat with the Turks in Constantinople), its emphasis on plain virtues, and

the compatibility of its values with those of Christianity. To these, Mara Hatzopoulou-

Yanni adds a few other reasons: “the Aethiopica provided the Elizabethans . . . with a

conception of love similar to the courtly, and reinforced the belief in a divinely ordered

universe” alongside “the loftiness of context and the epic structure.” 12 Additionally, the

Aethiopica’s popularity came about in England because of England’s burgeoning trade

with the Moors and Turks and the novel’s Mediterranean setting--both place and people

held a special fascination in the minds of the English. All of these characteristics of the

Aethiopica along with its popularity and appeal made it an ideal source to many

Renaissance playwrights, who wrote plays that were based on it, thus generating a

dramatic tradition that represented Africans favorably on the stage.

The popularity of the Aethiopica prompts Wolfgang Stechow to observe that “the

status of the Aethiopica is that of a colossus, and its influence practically boundless”

(145), and Sandy, Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, and others to note that it is impossible to

overestimate the importance of Heliodorus on the Renaissance. As we shall see, the

11. It would appear that even Amadis de Gaul is an imitation of the Greek novel, especially of Longus
and/or Heliodorus but closer to the latter. Like Charicleia’s mother, Amadis’s mother exposed her newborn
for fear of shame but left him with tokens, including a ring, that would help identify him and his lineage.
Amadis also echoes the biblical story of Moses who, as a babe, was committed to sea in a basket that also
served as a cradle. See John Dunlop, The History of Fiction: being a Critical Account of the most
Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age, 3rd
ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845), 145-47; Exodus 2:1-5 (NKJV).
12. Stechow, 145. Burke, 146, attributes the popularity of the Greek novel to those factors as well as these:
transformation of the romance, introducton of new practices and values, chaste love intertwined with
adventure. See, also, Hatzopoulou-Yanni, 46-47.
 10

statements of Stechow and others are not hyperbolic, for very seldom, if ever, has a text

been as widely used across genres and fields: prose, poetry, drama, music, and painting.

Among European nations, France led the way in Greek and Hellenistic culture

during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by promoting Greek literature and

language, which explains why the influence of the Aethiopica on the Renaissance began

mainly with French prose writers. Of those who imitated the Aethiopica, Nicolas de

Montreux, according to Sandy and Stechow, was the first. His three-part novel13 Oeuvre

de la chastété (1595), especially the second part, Le amours de Criniton et Lydie (1597),

derives structurally and thematically from the Aethiopica. Like Heliodorus, Montreux

begins his novel in medias res and utilizes innumerable scenes, including characters

unburdening themselves of their histories to others, and the heroine’s tactical deferment

of marriage, and the “cave scene.” In Book 1 of the Aethiopica, rival pirates attack

Thyamis and his brigands, prompting Thyamis to order Charicleia’s concealment in a

cave. Realizing the futility of victory and determined that no other man should have

Charicleia because of his misapprehension of a dream, Thyamis makes his way to the

cave where he mistakenly kills another woman whom he believes to be Charicleia.

Similarly in Montreux’s novel, when rival factions war with each other, the love-struck

brigand who captures Domiphile rushes to the cave where she has taken refuge, but is

thwarted in his attempt to claim her. As in Heliodorus, Charicleia stalls Thyamis’s

marrying her by claiming that she needs time to put aside her religious vestments in order

13. According to Doody, 236-37, “Renaissance novelists tend to write books that have continuations, which
is not a part of the original concept,” but is instead a genuine “new part” that is both continuous and
disjunctive.” As a result, the reader is able to see how “a thinking mind” changes over time. Don Quijote
and The Arcadia are exempla. Part II of Quijote parodies yet comments on Part I, while dealing with
material in the same way and differently. Sidney’s revisions to the original Arcadia made it an almost
“new, more moral and stately and much longer work,” which underwent more revisions to become The
New Arcadia, and with additional revisions ended up as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593).
 11

to prepare for the marriage; so, too, does Montreux’s Domiphile to the king of Epirus,

claiming that she needs to offer sacrifice to Isis in preparation for the marriage. In

Montreux, Cleandre, like Theagenes in Heliodorus, claims that his betrothed is his sister

to ward off the amorous advances of a princess.14

Other sixteenth- and seventeen-century writings whose plots have affinities with

Heliodorus’s include Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (1560), Martin Fumée’s Du Vray et

Parfait Amour (1599), J. Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607-1628), Jean Boudoin’s

Histoirie Negre Pontique Contenant la vie, et les Amours d’Alexander Castriot

arriereneveu de Scanderberg et d’Olimpe la belle Greque (1631), Cervantes’s major

works--especially Persiles and Sigismunda--and writings by, among others, Madeleine de

Scudéry. Both Fumée and Boudoin borrow their opening lines from Heliodorus’s novel.

In Fumee’s case, the opening line of his novel mirrors the Aethiopica’s:

[DAY HAD BEGUN TO SMILE and the sun was shining upon

the hilltops when a band of armed men scaled the mountain which

extends the mouth of the Nile called the Heracleot, where it empties

into the sea.15]

14. See Sandy, 752-53, for a comprehensive summary of the similarities between both works.
15. Bracketed translations in English that follow the Greek text of the Aethiopica are taken from Moses
Hadas’s translation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1957).
 12

In Fumée:

Des-is la belle lueur du Soleil prest a se monster sur la terre.

[The beautiful shining light of the sun was ready to show itself to the

earth.]

While Fumee patterns his opening line on Heliodorus’s, Boudoin borrows from Book 5

of the Aethiopica for his opening. In typical Heliodoran suspense, Book 5 of the

Aethiopica begins with the intrigue of darkness, furtive movements, and stowaways:

[In the dark of the night I collected the young pair and took them, just as

they were, down to the sea and embarked them on a Phoenician ship,

which was ready to loose its moorings; though day was just beginning to

dawn, the Phoenicians thought they would not be transgressing their

engagement to me . . . 16]

And Boudoin imitates the Heliodoran mystery in his novel:

A nuict n’estoit pas encore bien fermee, & le soliel sembloit auoir de

regret de laisser les royalles pompes d’Alger ensueties dans les tenebres

quand trios ou quatre personnes ayant le visage enueloppé, fortirent du

16. Hadas, Bk. 5, p. 109.

 13

grand Serrail par la porte des jardinages, & venant tout doucement a la

marine, fe faifîrent de la premiere chaloupe, qui les conduisit à force de

rames auprés d'un vaisseau de moyenne grandeur, ancré demi-mille hors

de l'emboucheure du port, là où s'embarquans à la haste, avec l'ayde des

matelots, ils firent voile selon qu'il pleust au vent de les conduire , n'ayant

point à l'heure d'autre soucy que celui d'aller viste, &: tenant pour la

meilleure de leur route, celle qui les eslongneroit le plustost d'Alger.

[The night was not yet finished and the sun seemed sorry to leave the royal

richness of Algier when three or four people with their faces covered

exited the marketplace from the door of the garden that led slowly to the

sea. They entered the first boat that brought them and rowed toward a

ship anchored five hundred miles outside the port. They embarked

quickly with the help of sailors and sailed according to the wind. They

had no worry, except leaving Algier.]

Fumée’s setting is early morning: he mentions that “the sun was ready to” shine--an

association easily made with sunrise. Boudoin’s opening specifically resembles that of

Book 5 where three people steal away from Athens during the night aboard a Phoenician

ship, but it has distant echoes of the opening line in Book 1 as well: just as “the

Heracelot empties into the sea,” Boudoin’s “garden leads slowly to the sea.” Boudoin

also replicates the sense of mystery and intrigue found in Heliodorus’s opening sentence

of Book 1: Heliodorus’s “band of armed pirates” scaling the mountain conjures

adventure and danger as do Boudoin’s “three or four people with their faces” hidden

stealing away from Algiers under the cover of darkness.

 14

17
Almost all of Heliodorus’s imitators utilize the scene in which one character

unburdens himself of his history to another, such as Cnemon to Theagenes and Charicleia

or Calasiris to Cnemon. In the latter scenario, Calasiris, at Cnemon’s request, relates how

he came to be looking for Theagenes and Charicleia. In Fumée and Boudoin, both

secondary narrators relate their stories to others. Heliodorus’s influence on French

writers was so pervasive that, as Stechow notes, it prompted Balzac to complain that most

of the French novels then were “nothing but disguised Heliodoruses, degenerate children

of Theagenes’s lineage” (145).

Italy, Germany, and Holland provided their share of admirers: Lodovico

Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516), Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581),

Martinus Crusius’s Martinus Crvsii Aethiopicae (1584),18 and Matthys van (de?)

Velden’s Calasires Sterfdagh (1631). Arisoto modeled the love affair between Orlando

and Angelica on that of Theagenes and Charicleia, and Tasso was so impressed with the

Aethiopica that he included an entire episode from it in Canto XII of his epic, which has

several sections, including the life and death of Clorinda, who is the daughter of the

Ethiopian king and queen. Fearing charges of adultery from her jealous husband, the

queen places the baby princess in the safe keeping of the eunuch, Arsetes. The parallels

between Charicleia and Clorinda are striking and significant: 19 both women are of

17. According to Sandy, the most frequently borrowed scene from the Aethiopica is the cave scene, in
which Thyamis stores Charicleia and returns to retrieve her but is unsuccessful. See “Heritage,” 752.
18. Unlike the other works, Martinus Crusius’s is a summary of the Aethiopica. See Martini Crvsii
Aethiopicae Heliodori Historiæ Epitome. Cum observationibus ejusdem. Ejusdem de parentibus suis
narratio. (Francofurti,1584); Doody, 224.
19. For in-depth comparisons, see the conference paper of Michael Paschalis: “Torquato Tasso and
Heliodorus: A Re-examination of Theoretical Issues,” International Conference on the Ancient Novel IV
(Summer 2008). For a detailed comparison between Charicleia and Clorinda, see Dante Della Terza,
“History and Epic Discourse: Remarks on the Narrative Structure of Tasso’s Gerusalemme,” The Canadian
Society for Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (1980): 1-16; Marilyn Migiel, Gender and Genealogy in Tasso’s
Gerusalemme Liberata (Levinson: NYU, 1993), 31.
 15

Ethiopian royal descent, are born “white,” are abandoned by their mothers for fear of

charges of infidelity, and are protected by an Egyptian. They are virtuous, martial

maidens, though Clorinda far exceeds Charicleia in arms. Tasso maintains the cross-

cultural and transracial love interest between an Ethiopian princess and a Western prince.

Enthusiasm for the Aethiopica also registered in sixteenth- and seventeenth-

century continental European drama. Italy produced the first play based on the

Aethiopica: Ettore Pigatelli’s Cariclea (1582); eight years later, Battista Guiarini’s Il

Pastor Fido (1590)20 followed. In 1605, Wolgang Waldung’s play Aethiopicus Amor

Castus was published, followed in 1608 by Johannes Schlovin’s Aithiopissa:

Tragicocomedia Nova, Ex Historia Aethiopica Heliodori Espicopi Tricensis. Six years

later, his German compatriot Caspar Brülow’s Caricleia (1614) came out. Written and

performed in 1601 but published in 1623,21 Alexandre Hardy’s Le chastes amovrs de

Théagène et Cariclée is an anthology of plays based on the Aethiopica; according to

Stechow, Hardy “squeezed a sequence of no less [sic] than eight plays out of

Heliodorus’s novel” (145). In 1609, the French dramatist Octave-Cesar Genetay

published his L’Ethiopique. Racine also wrote a play on the Aethiopica, but it is lost.22

Spain produced dramatic works based on the Aethiopica as well: Francisco de Rojas

Zorilla’s Persiles and Sigismunda (1633)23 along with Pedro Calderón de la Barca and

20. Only a small section of Il Pastor Fido seems to derive from the Aethiopica. In Heliodorus, Charicleia
is about to be sacrificed by her father; similarly, Miritillo is about to be sacrificed by his father, who turns
out to be his adoptive sire. See Il Pastor Fido, trans. Dr Thomas Sheridan, edited and completed by Robert
Hogan and Edward A. Nickerson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), Act 5, scene 4. There are
no line numbers in this edition.
21. Charles Hastings and Frances A.Welby, The Theatre: Its Development in France and England, and a
History of Its Greek and Latin Origin (London: Duckworth and Co. 1902), 54, 220.
22. According to Stechow, 145, claimed that the Aethiopica was his favorite book. The story goes that, as a
member of the Jansenist order, Racine was forbidden to read the novel, a command which he ignored. By
the time the novel was finally confiscated from him, Racine claimed to have memorized all of it.
23. Zorilla’s play derives directly from Cervantes’s novel of the same name, which is based directly on the
Aethiopica.
 16

Juan Pérez de Mantalbán’s Los hijos de la fortuna, Teagenes y Cariclea (1664). In

keeping with the Aethiopica, these Continental dramas depict black Africans favorably on

the Renaissance stage. Additionally, two of them portray the wisdom and courage of

African women of royal blood.

The Aethiopica’s popularity moved beyond the world of literature, spreading to

the realms of music and painting. The Dutchman Frans Demaret composed the 1695

opera Theagene et Chariclee. Earlier in the century, however, the French led the way

with cycles of paintings based on the Aethiopica. Between 1600 and 1606, Ambroise

Dubois did a set of paintings commemorating the birth of Louis XIII, who was born at

the Chateau de Fontainebleu, Fontainebleu, in the Fontainebleu room, which the

paintings were commissioned to decorate. Dubois used scenes from the Aethiopica for

his compositions, and with the help of his students completed at least forty-six large

paintings, thirteen of which still hang in the Gallery of Frescoes and in the Fountainbleau

(or Louis XIII) room.24 He seemed to have captured the entire story of the Aethiopica on

canvas. In one painting, Histoire des amours de Théagène et Chariclée:

L’Embarquement de Théagène, Chariclée et Calasiris pour retourner en Egypte, all three

characters are boarding a ship (the Phoenician merchant ship in Bk. 5 of the Aethiopica

that will take them to Egypt). Both Theagenes and Calasiris are solicitous of Charicleia’s

safety as they help her aboard the vessel. Theagenes stands abreast of her with his arms

wrapped around her for support while Calasiris stands anterior to but below her and

stretches out his hands to aid her descent into the ship. The background and foreground

24. Dubois founded a line of artists; his sons and grandsons were pensioners of Louis XIII and Louis XIV.
See Alphonso–Jules Wauters and Mrs. Henry Reed, Flemish School of Painting (London: Cassel & Co.
1886), 189.
 17

are peopled with sailors. Some look on, and others, with sacks across their backs, load

the ship.

In another painting, L’Enlèvement de Chariclée par Théagène,25 a young man

holds a helpless looking Charicleia, whose left arm drapes over his shoulders. The young

man and his captive occupy the center of the painting while the others form a sort of

linear blockade as if to ensure that the “l’enlevement” is successful. All eyes dart in

different directions while the young man, sword sheathed at his side, plants his right foot

on the step. Like Dubois, Pierre Vallet drew upon Heliodorus’s novel for his 120

etchings (1613), which he presented to Louis XIII in the form of a book, Les aventures

amoureuses de Theagenes et Cariclée sommairement décrites et représentées par figures.

A shortened version of Heliodorus’s story accompanies each print. In one of the

etchings, Vallet conflates two scenes from the Aethiopica: the birth of Charicleia and the

recognition scene (fols. 111 and 112),26 in which the painting of Andromeda is pivotal.

In Vallet’s rendering of the scenes, the painting of Andromeda hangs on the wall.

Vallet’s pictorials in turn influenced another set of Aethiopica prints, including those of

Crispin de Passe and others in 1620. Jean Mosnier, painter and protégé of Marie de

Medici, also executed a cycle of paintings (1630-1635) based on the Aethiopica for the

Chateau de Cheverny. Mosnier’s paintings, according to Stechow, totaled thirty and “are

carefully chosen from the main action of the novel and well arranged” in chronological

order (148). The last French painter in the Aethiopica series was Nicolas Mignard; his

paintings disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1633, Paul de Fortia

25. The scene comes from Book 4 of the story, in which Charicleia colludes with Calasiris and Theagenes
to “kidnap” her from her home. For this and other images of Dubois’s paintings, see
www.notrefamille.com/collection-privee/oeuvres/Dubois+Ambrose+/L%27Enl%E8 (downloaded
7/21/2009).
26. McGrath, 1, n. 4.
 18

commissioned Mignard to do a series of eighteen paintings from the Aethiopica for the

Hotel Montréal in Avignon.

Dutch painters Abraham Bloemaert, Gerard Honthorst, and Karel Van Mander

also lauded the Aethiopica with their brushes. In 1625 to 1626, Bloemaert painted two

scenes from the Aethiopica for Frederick Henrik of Orange. In “Theagenes and Chariclea

on the Beach,” a ship is moored in the background, and to its left is a table spread for a

banquet, evocative of a celebration. In the foreground, bodies litter the beach, while atop

the hill are men with weapons. Almost in the center but veering slightly to the left are a

wounded Theagenes and a solicitous Chariclea. The painting recalls the scene from Book

1 in which the pirates, divided in their loyalty to Trachinus and Pelorus as to which man

should marry Charicleia, slaughter one another. The second painting, “The Crowning of

Theagenes,” pictures Theagenes kneeling at Charicleia’s feet and kissing her hand.

Seated under a canopy, with a staff in her left hand, Chariclea is surrounded presumably

by judges, while in the background, the rest of the runners make their way home--flanked

on either side of the track by spectators.27

Approximately ten years later, Honthorst crossed the channel to paint a cycle

from the Aethiopica for the wedding of Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth, prospective queen of

Bohemia. Van Mandel’s cycle of ten paintings includes “Persinna and Hydaspes

embracing” and “The Recognition of Chariclea,” from Books 4 and 10 of the Aethiopica.

In the former, an amorous Hydaspes indulges in foreplay while a somewhat distracted

Persinna gazes at the painting of Andromeda in the background. In the latter, Chariclea

bares her right arm to reveal the vestigial black skin as proof that the king is her father as

27. The scene is from Bk.4, in which Theagenes defeats the champion to claim the prize; he had vowed that
no man, except him, would receive the prize from the hands of Charicleia.
 19

a puzzled Hydaspes surveys his daughter’s arm and, presumably, the Andromeda

painting beside her for confirmation of Persinna’s explanation and his paternity. When

Van Mandel died, a copy of the Aethiopica was discovered in his pocket.28

By the time the Aethiopica reached England’s shore, according to Sandy, it “had

been discovered, studied, translated, plundered and adapted in France” and other

continental countries “before extended prose fiction made its way in Great Britain” (764).

In spite of the work’s popularity on the Continent, the English would plunder the

Aethiopica anew: both major and minor dramatic (and non-dramatic) writers would find

Heliodorus’s text an invaluable source from which to cull material for the stage and in the

process would develop a stage tradition that, among other things, portrayed Africans

favorably on the English Renaissance stage. As it did for continental European writers,

Heliodorus’s novel influenced both major and minor English writers, which occurred

mainly through the second-hand translation of Thomas Underdowne and the subsequent

reprintings of his translation. Unlike the French who could read Greek and had access to

Greek codices, the English had no access to Greek codices and relied on French and Latin

translations for their knowledge of the Aethiopica. Following his 1567 Englishing of

Warschewiczki’s Latin translation, Underdowne’s was reprinted in 1577, 1578, 1605,

1622, and 1627.29 Underdowne’s 1567 version, as Samuel Lee Wolff points out, “brings

the “Aethopica” [sic] into Elizabethan hands in plenty of time” (459).

Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Greene made copious use of the Heliodoran
30 31
material. Greene, as Wolff points out, is full of “matter” from Heliodorus, and

28. McGrath, 5.
29. Greenhalgh, 18.
30. The other three major writers of Elizabethan fiction—Lyly, Nashe, and Lodge—made little use of the
Aethiopica. See Sandy, 765.
 20

Sidney himself echoes Scaliger in the “Defence,” calling the Aethiopica a “heroical

poem” and imitating it in both versions of his Arcadia and even recasting the New

Arcadia in the structural mold of the Aethiopica. While the Old Arcadia borrows

Heliodorus’s expansive linguistic style, rhetorical embellishments, dialogues, disguises,

kidnapping, and the concluding scene in which a father unwittingly condemns his child,

the New Arcadia appropriates the thematic and structural elements of the Aethiopica.

Sidney’s Arcadia, according to Moses Hadas, “was the principal model for his

successors,” influencing, as Donald Stump points out, in particular “nine playwrights,

including Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher.”32

Sidney’s influence is observable in James Shirley’s Arcadia and Beaumont and

Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge. Shirley’s Arcadia is Sidney’s Arcadia, dramatized. In both

Sidney’s pastoral and Shirley’s play, King Basilius of Arcadia tries to confound the

oracle by retreating to the forest with his wife and two daughters to preserve his life.

Shortly thereafter two suitors, Prince Pyrocles of Macedonia and his cousin Prince

Musidorus of Thessaly, arrive in disguise: Pyrocles as the Amazon Zelmane and

Musidorus as the shepherd Dorus. Complications ensue when Basilus and Gynecia, who

sees through the prince’s disguise, fall in love with Zelmane/Pyrocles. To disentangle

himself, Pyrocles invites Basilius and Gynecia to a cave but leaves to pursue his interest

in Philoclea; both princes “kidnap” the princesses. Basilius and Gynecia reconcile, and

she gives him a “love potion” and Basilus “dies” from poison. Gynecia and the princes

are arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. After condemning all three, Eucharius, king of

31. Samuel Lee Wolff, The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Fiction (New York: Burt Franklin, 1961), 376.
Although Heliodorus exerted significant influence on Sidney and Greene, only Greene receives a full
treatment in chapter 1 because of the relevance of his play to this study.
32. See Hadas, vii; Donald Stump, C. S. Hunter, Jerome S Dees, eds. http://bibs.slu.edu/Sidney/history.
html (downloaded October 2009).
 21

Macedonia, discovers that he has condemned his own son; however, the sentences must

be executed. As the condemned are led to their deaths, Basilius revives and sits up on his

funeral bier, thus fulfilling the oracle that he had tried to thwart.

These episodes of Sidney and Shirley combine several of Heliodorus’s, drawing

primarily on those of Cnemon-Demainete and Arsace-Theagenes. In Sidney and Shirley,

a husband and wife desire the same stranger; however, something of the reverse occurs in

Heliodorus: a wife desires a father and son. In this ménage à trois, similar complications

develop in Heliodorus as in Sidney: the desired lover, Cnemon, rejects the advances of

his desiring stepmother Demainete. Enraged, she plots his destruction; through her

machinations Cnemon bursts into her bedroom threatening to stab her lover, who, as it

turns out, is Aristippus, his father and Demainete’s husband. Cnemon is arrested, tried,

and sentenced to death. But the sentence is commuted to exile. Aristippus eventually

discovers that he has condemned his son unjustly and seeks to repeal his exile. In the

Arsace-Theagenes episode, Arsace “kidnaps” Theagenes and Charicleia and tries to

poison Charicleia. Arsace schemes to have Charicleia tried and sentenced to death.

Failing to kill Charicleia, she tosses Charicleia and Theagenes in the palace dungeon, but

word of their captivity reaches Oroondates, Arsace’s husband, who orders their release.

Returning to Oroondates, the Persian soldiers are ambushed by Ethiopian soldiers, who

take Charicleia and Theagenes to King Hydaspes. By imprisoning and condemning

Charicleia and Theagenes, Arsace unwittingly plays a part in fulfilling the oracle that

predicts Charicleia and Theagene’s travel to and happy union in Ethiopia.

In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge, Duke Leontius of Lycia suspends

the worship of Cupid, the patron of the land, at the urging of his daughter and son. A
 22

vengeful Cupid causes the destruction of the royal family. On his deathbed, Leucippus

reverses his father’s edict. Because Shirley’s Arcadia and Beaumont and Fletcher’s

Cupid’s Revenge utilize a common source, overlaps such as the missing ruler and the

competition between him and another family member for the love of the same person are

noticeable. This episode has traces of the Demainete-Cnemon-Aristippus encounter, but

also that of Trachinus-Pelorus-Charicleia, when both the pirate and his deputy fall in love

with the same woman and both die as a result. Given that Heliodorus influenced writers

who in turn influenced other writers, his tertiary influence is conceivably larger than his

direct influence.

IV.

A Lost Tradition

Unlike the English Renaissance writers, the Greeks regarded Ethiopia and its

inhabitants with awe, both “as a far-off realm and one inhabited by [a] remarkable

people.” 33 Accordingly, the degradation of black Africans that resonates throughout the

literature of the English Renaissance is sparse in the ancient world. The ancient Greeks

thought of the Ethiopians “as the best people in the world”34 and Homer, Herodotus,

Aeschylus, Ovid, Seneca, and other ancient writers esteemed Ethiopians and other black

Africans, often peopling their works with deeds and descriptions of them. In Book 1 of

The Iliad, Homer writes that

Homer uses ἀμύμονας to describe Ethiopians,

which several translators of Homer’s text render as “pious,” “blameless” and “worthy.”

33. The Greeks named Ethiopia, which means “the Land of Burnt Faces.” See Richard Pankhurst, The
Ethiopians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 18.
34. Ibid.
 23

In his translation for the Loeb Classical Library, A.T. Murray renders the passage as

follows: “For Zeus went yesterday to the Oceanus, to the blameless Ethiopians for a

feast, and all the gods followed with him . . . .”35 Love motivates the gods to empty

Olympus yearly in order to have a twelve-day feast with these black people. Such honor

neither the gods nor the poets bestow on any other nation. Homer, however, does not

sing only of the Ethiopians’ interpersonal skills; he chants their mental and martial

prowess. In the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the Ethiopian Eurybates has

the distinction of being the only envoy whom Agammenon selects to collect Brisēis from

Achilles, to return her to him, and to entreat Achilles to rejoin the war.36 According to

The Odyssey, “Odysseus honoured [Eurybates] above his other comrades, because he was

like-minded with himself.”37 Like Eurybates, Memnon, king of Ethiopia, fought in the

Trojan war, showing nobility, valor, and mercy by slaying Antilochus yet sparing the

defenseless father until he himself falls by Achilles’s hand.38 Heliodorus draws upon

these and other ancient works to create the Aethiopica, which, in turn, influenced many

early modern playwrights’ admirable depictions of Africans on the Renaissance stage,

leaving a stage tradition that stretches back to this ancient text.

From the fifth century BCE and on, other writers from antiquity also ascribed

bravery, beauty, and nobility to Ethiopians, echoing Homer, who wrote during the eighth

35. References to The Iliad are to The Loeb Classical Library edition, trans. A. T. Murray (London:
William Heinemann Ltd., 1965), 35 (I. 409-34). Other translations such as W.H.D. Rouse’s (Edinburgh:
Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1960) and E.V. Riev (London: Clays, 1950) use “pious” and “worthy” to
describe the Ethiopians. See pages 19 & 34 of these texts.
36. The Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray, 27 (I. 305-31) & 395 (I. 160-86).
37. References to The Odyssey are to the Loeb Classical Library edition, trans. A. T. Murray (London:
William Heinemann, 1960), 247 (XIX. 237-64).
38. Frank Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1970), 151. McGrath, 5, and Snowden, 151-53, chronicle the color evolution of Memnon, noting that
at one point he is pictured as white, especially on vases. However, over time, Memnon reverted to being
black, as depicted by a statue in Ethiopia.
 24

century BCE. According to the fifth-century BCE historian Herodotus, the Ethiopians

inhabited “the ends of the earth” and “are said to be the tallest and fairest [handsomest] of

all men [in whole world]”39:

Herodotus uses the word κάλλιστοι to describe Ethiopians. It is masculine plural

superlative of καλός, which Liddell & Scott translates as “beautiful, fair.” In Prometheus

Bound, the dramatist Aeschylus, who also wrote during the fifth century BCE, has Io

travel to a faraway land “at the worlds end / where tribes of black people live / where the

foundation of the Sun gush / and the river Aethiops flows” (ll. 1214-1218).40 Io has to

take some of these people to the “three-cornered land”—i.e., Egypt—and found a colony.

The first-century historian Diodorus Siculus notes that Ethiopians “invented writing” and

gave it to the Egyptians—which they called hieroglyphics--along with religion and

culture. Diordorus also claims that Hercules and Bacchus were “awed by the piety of the

Ethiopians,” and testifies to the affection between the Ethiopians and the gods:

And they say that they [Ethiopians] were the first to be taught to honor the

gods and to hold sacrifices and festivals and processions and other rites by

which men honor their deity; and that in consequence their piety has been

published abroad among men, and it is generally held that the sacrifices

practiced among the Ethiopians are those which are the most pleasing to

39. Herodotus, The Histories, 430 BC, The Loeb Classical Library, trans. A. D. Godley (London: William
Heinemann, 1921), 27 (III.19-21); other translators use the word “handsomest.” See Herodotus, The
Histories, 430 BC, trans. George Rawlinson (New York: Dutton & Co., 1862), III. 19-21.
40. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. James Scully and C. J. Herington (London: Oxford UP, 1975),
68.
 25

heaven. As witness to this they call upon the poet who is perhaps the

oldest and certainly the most venerated among the Greeks[.] (Bk. 2)

Diodorus not only evokes Homer; he also makes his homage more forceful by venerating

the already venerated Homer: “. . . the oldest [i.e., established] and most venerated Greek

poet.” Diodorus connects the Ethiopians’ invincibility to their piety and reverence for the

gods, noting that Ethiopians enjoy the favor of the gods. This favor that the Gods bestow

on the Ethiopians has prevented other nations from conquering and dominating them,41

which also alludes to the historic attempts of the Persian Cambyses, the Babylonian

queen Semiramis, and the mythic Greek hero Heracles and god Dionysus to subdue the

Ethiopians.

The Homeric tradition of the pious and blameless Ethiopians also finds repetition

in other Greco-Roman voices that chant the praises of Ethiopians. In his “Periegetes,”

Dionysus (117-138) wrote that the Ethiopians were godlike and blameless; the fifth-

century compiler and author Stobaeus notes their stellar character, and Aelian, writing in

the third century, describes Ethiopia as a house of relaxation for the gods.42 Other works

of Greek origin feature Ethiopians’ skill and fortitude. In The Romance of Alexander the

Great (third century BCE), (Pseudo-)Callisthenes describes the Ethiopian queen,

Candace, “a woman . . . endowed with infinite beauty,” and the exchange between her

and the mighty conqueror. Alexander wrote admiringly to Candace, referencing the

oracle from Ammon and asking her to meet him in Meroe so they could “deliberate

together” (132). Suspecting an attack, the queen replies that by remaining at home “to

41. Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, The Loeb Classical Library, trans. C. H. Oldfather
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953), 91-93 (III. 2. 1-4, 4-3).
42. Dionysus, Orbis Terrae descriptio, ll. 559-61; Joannes Stobaeus, Anthologium, trans. Curtis
Wachsmuth and Otto Hense, Vol. IV (Berlin, 1909), 157; Claudius Aelian, De natura animalium, The Loeb
Classical Library, trans. A. F. Schofield (London: William Heinemann, 1958-1959), 2.21.
 26

wreak vengeance on those who attack [her] and to deal with them as . . . enemies,” she is

adhering to Ammon’s oracle that countered the initial instruction for her to march upon

Egypt. Then she admonishes Alexander:

Do not be mistaken about our color. For in our souls we are lighter than

the white men amongst you. And there are enough of us to hold out for

time without end. We have eighty squadrons ready for those who come to

do us harm (132).

Perhaps the queen thought Alexander had foolishly confused dark skin with a lack of

enlightenment and courage. However, Callisthenes notes that Alexander admired

Ethiopians, for Alexander’s letter to Candace signals his desire to worship Ammon and to

sacrifice to him. Whether Alexander wanted to conquer the Ethiopians or Candace

outmaneuvered him psychologically, Alexander ended up helping her son to retake his

wife from the king of Bebrycia (133-35).

The Aethiopica typifies the ancient literary tradition in its laudatory presentation

of black Africans, especially of King Hydaspes. Although Heliodorus provides no

physical description of Hydaspes beyond his black skin, he represents the king as a

mighty warrior who exercises power in the Ethiopian tradition. According to Snowden,

when Heliodorus created Hydaspes, he probably knew of the legendary and historic

Ethiopian kings, especially King Piankhi (751-716 B.C.) who conquered Egypt, for the

similarities between factual and fictional kings are striking: like the historic Piankhi,

Hydaspes dislikes putting men to death and instructs his men not to slaughter the enemy

but to take as many prisoners alive as possible. 43 Hydaspes does not seek to expand his

territory by coveting the land of another ruler and waging war over it. Instead, he is

43. Snowden, 148.

 27

content with the size of his territory as demarcated by natural boundaries, and once his

objective in the war with Persian Egypt is achieved, he retires to Ethiopia “because of his

reverence for justice.”44

The innumerable translations of the Aethiopica throughout Europe furthured the

literary tradition of piety and heroism associated with Ethiopians. Beginning with his

1534 edition, Obsopoeus recommended “the Aethiopian History of Heliodorus as the

most absolute Image of all humane Affections, a perfect Example of Conjugal Love,

Truth and Constancy being wonderfully drawn in the Character of Theagenes and

Charicleia” (19).45 Jacques Amyot is of a similar mind. Even the title of his translation

reflects the protagonists’ moral bent: L’Historie Aethiopique de Heliodorus: contenant

dix livres, tritant des loyales et pudiques amours de Theagene Thessalien, et Chariclea

une Aethiopiène. An abstract in and of itself, the title describes the virtues of Theagenes

and Chariclea: they are loyal (“loyales”) and chaste (“pudiques”). Amyot’s translation,

reprinted at least twenty times, might have contributed to the growth of Heliodoran-like

novels that followed, especially when one recalls that only one codex of the Aethiopica

existed in France then.

Warschewiczki’s translation of the Aethiopica applauds the Ethiopians’ noble

character, military prudence, and prowess that Obsopeous and Amyot had already noted

in the leading characters. In the dedication, Warschewiczki extols the pacific attitude and

moral virtue of the book: “Not only many changes of fortune but also many images of

virtue are here displayed. Among these is the description of Hydaspes, the king of

Ethiopia, who is to be praised not only for his fortitude but also for his justice, clemency,

44. Ibid.
45. Vincentio Obsopoeus, ed. Heliodorou Aithiopikes Biblia Deka. Heliodori Aethiopicae libri decem,
nunquam antea in lucem editi (Basel: ex officina Hervagiana, 1534).
 28

and kindness towards those whom he has subdued” (a3 ).46 An aristocrat and knight,

Warschewiczki was also a Renaissance man, with a humanist education and skill in many

areas. Given the Renaissance’s objective of using ancient texts for educational purposes,

it is not surprising that Warschewiczki appreciates and applauds Hydaspes for his royal

virtues: justice, clemency, and kindness. “Renaissance men,” according to Doody,

“believed in the moral good of contemplating examples of virtue” because “such

examples” are powerful. Warschewiczki is the only translator to privilege Hydaspes over

Charicleia and Theagenes, dedicating “the book . . . to the King of Poland”--for “the

Renaissance was interested in pictures for princes, mirrors for magistrates, good

examples with which to train rulers.”47 To Warschewiczki, Hydaspes is a king and a

mirror of virtues.

All of the English Renaissance translators--from Sanford to Underdowne,

Abraham Fraunce, and William Lisle--note the virtues of loyalty and sexual purity in the

Ethiopian Charicleia and her betrothed. Many English playwrights would draw on these

virtues as well as the martial activity of Charicleia to create a stage tradition of chaste and

intrepid heroines drawn from the Aethiopica. Other English writers saw the chance to

capitalize on the model of sexual conduct promulgated throughout the Aethiopica and to

offer the public alternative reading to the chivalric romances of the day. As if to

reinforce the themes of chasitity through comparison, both Sanford and Fraunce annexed

their renditions of the Aethiopica to another work. Adjoining Sanford’s The amorous and

46. Stanislaus Warschewiczki, trans. Aethiopicae Historia (Basilae: Johannes Oporinus, 1552).
47. Doody, 237-38.
 29

tragicall tales of Plutarch (1567)48 is his translation of Book 4 of the Aethiopica. The

overall themes of The amorous tales are sexual permissiveness and murder while that of

Book 4 of the Aethiopica is unsullied passion. By juxtaposing Plutarch and Heliodorus,

the latter appears even more pristine, especially when one realizes that Book 4 is where

Charicleia and Theagenes pledge fidelity and chastity to each other. In The third part of

the Countess of Pembroke Yuychurch (1592),49 Fraunce yokes Book 1 of his rendition of

the Aethiopica to his poem “Amytas Pastoral,” thus complementing and reinforcing the

ideal of chastity that is associated with Ethiopians and which Renaissance England so

prized. In Fraunce’s poem, Phillis and Amytas die for their love, and although

Theagenes and Charicleia do not, they come close. In Book 1 of Fraunce’s text,

Theagenes and Charicleia are shipwrecked, and when in danger of losing both her virtue

and Theagenes, Charicleia threatens suicide: “. . . poore mayd surprysed by the capten /

. . . / cleaved fast to the yongman, / And every way shee declared; Unless yongman went,

Shee never meant to be going, / Unles yongman went shee herself meant to be murdering,

/ And with a knife in her hand to her hart shee begins to be poynting” (47). Charicleia

understands the ramifications for herself and Theagenes if they are captured and

separated by outlaws: a seriously wounded Theagenes would be left to perish and she

would be subject to her captors’ lust.

Like Sanford and Fraunce, Lisle and Underdowne also call attention to the sexual

purity of the Ethiopian maiden and her Greek consort. Lisle’s The Faire Ethiopian

48. See The amorous and tragicall Tales of Plutarch: whervnto is annexted the Hystorie of Cariclea &
Theagenes, and the sayings of the Greeke philosophers, trans. James Sandford (London: H. Bynneman,
1567).
49. Abraham Fraunce, The third part of the Countess of Pembroke Yuychurch, entituled Amintas dale:
wherein are the most conceited tales of the pagan gods in English hexameters, together with their auncient
descriptions and philosophicall explications (Lundon [sic]: Thomas Orwin, 1592).
 30

(1631)50 advertises the “Testimonies of Learned Men concerning Heliodorus.” Among

these is the testimony of the scholar Thomas Dempster, who praises Heliodorus as “the

Phoenix of Phoenicia, an elegant writer of chast love. . . .” Lisle himself notes

Charicleia’s devotion to chastity when he writes that the men she slew “‘Twas in defence

of sacred chastity.” The coupling of “sacred” and “chastity” reinforces the importance of

sexual purity. Instead of offering the testimonies of others as validation for the sexual

purity of Heliodorus’s novel, Underdowne offers his own in “To the gentle Reader”

section of the 1577 reprint:

I am not ignorant that the stationers shops are to full fraughted with books

of small price, whither you consider the quantitie or contents of them, and

that the loosenesse of these dayes rather requireth grave exhortations to

vertue, then wanton alurements to leudness, that it were meeter to publish

notable example of godly christian life, then the most honest (as I take this

to be) historie of love (iii).

The parenthetical “this” refers to the Aethiopica, which Underdowne compares to Mort

Darthure, Arthur of little Britain, and Amadis of Gaule--all of which promote murder or

fornication. The comparison enables Underdowne, like the other translators, to

emphasize the Aethiopica’s focus on virtue through the “notable example of godly

christian life” and “honest historie of love” and to extricate himself from any charge of

peddling sexual impropriety, which Greek novels were often accused of doing. As the

OED explains, “honest” during the sixteenth century also meant “chaste, virtuous” and

usually referred to the sexual conduct of a woman. In this case, however, it refers to the

female and male protagonists: Charicleia and Theagenes.

50. William Lisle, The Faire Ethiopian (London: Iohn Haviland, 1631).
 31

By the sixteenth century, the literary tradition of the virtuous Africans underwent

significant changes in the hands of English Renaissance dramatists, who ignored the

testimonies from antiquity and the international influence of the Aethiopica; even as they

ironically culled material from the Aethiopica for the stage, English Renaissance

dramatists nonetheless often represented black Africans as degraded and profligate. Why

did this loss (or neglect) occur? Although it is difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons, the

outcome of the 1578 war in Morocco, also known as the Battle of Alcazar, the changing

taste in theatrical entertainment, and England’s initial entry into global affairs seem to

have contributed to the loss. In the summer of 1578, Muly Mahamet fought his uncle

Abdelmalek for the sovereignty of Marrakech and Fez. A usurper, Muly had seized the

throne by violent means in 1574 but was ousted in 1576 and tried to regain it in 1578.

Both sides sought the help of outside forces. Abdelmalek turned to the Turks 51 while

Muly Mohamet enlisted the help of the Portuguese, promising to surrender Morocco to

King Sebastian. In the aftermath, Muly drowned while trying to flee. Abdelmelek died

on the battlefield, as did Sebastian, other Portuguese noblemen, and Thomas Stukeley,

the Englishman who supported Sebastian. The news consumed England like a bonfire,

and tracts, pamphlets, plays, and histories fueled the market. As Emily C. Bartels points

out, “George Whetstone’s English Myrror (1586) and John Polemon’s Second part of the
52
booke of Battailes (1587) wrote Alcazar into history . . .” and provided material for

Peele’s play, The Battle of Alcazar (1588/9).

51. According to Polemon, Abdelmelek turned to the Turks because he had distinguished himself in
Suleiman’s army; when Suleiman’s son Amurrathes ascended the throne, he was eager to help his officer
reclaim his birthright: The Second Booke of Battailes, fought in our age: Taken Ovt of The best authors and
writers in sundrie languages (London: Gabriel Cawood, 1587), 67.
52. See “The Battle of Alcazar, the Mediterranean, and the Moor,” Remapping the Mediterranean World in
Early Modern English Writing, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York, Palgrave, 2007), 98.
 32

Peele’s Alcazar, created during the time when Roger Ascham and other

Renaissance figures sought changes in theatrical and other forms of public

entertainments53 and when England was engaged with initial excursions in the

Mediterranean, started the tradition of portraying Blacks as degraded and profligate

beings. As I have tried to show with ancient texts, black Africans were also represented

favorably throughout literature, as well as on the English Renaissance stage. In A Pretie

new Enterlude both pithie & pleasaunt of the Story of King Darius, Being taken out of the

third and fourth Chapter of the third booke of Esdras (1565), the character of Aethyopia

is portrayed positively. As guests of King Darius, Aethyopia along with “Percia, Medya,

and . . . Iuda” feast at the king’s table before returning “to theyr owne roofes.”54

Aethyopia is the earliest extant positive representation of a black character on the early

modern English stage and is another indication of a dramatic tradition that presents

Africans favorably. Significantly, this drama is an interlude.

Polemon’s account of the battle of Alcazar gave Peele the opportunity to represent

black Africans unfavorably and to embrace them as a new dramatic subject probably for

at least two reasons: the call for theatrical reformation had perhaps grown too loud for

practitioners of the stage to ignore and, as Anthony Gerard Barthelemy suggests, “the old

morality play with its world of allegory was being replaced by the new form of mimetic

53. Roger Ascham, Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, and others had decried the reading material and theatrical
entertainment presented to the public. In The Scholemaster, Ascham took aim at, among other things, “the
precepts of fond books” which he deemed “the enchantment of Circe” translated out of Italian into English
. . . to corrupt honest manners . . . [and] to beguile simple and innocent wits.” Ascham’s remark invokes
the sixteenth-century meaning of “honest.” See The Whole Works of Roger Ascham (London: J.R. Smith,
1864-65), 157. Erasmus condemned romances as well, instructing the avoidance of “Arthurs and
Lancelots”: Institutio Principis Christianis (Basel: J. Forebnis, 1516), sig. 11r. Vives decried books
“written in the vulgar tongue, Trystan, Launcelot, Ogier, Amasus, and Artur,” especially as reading
material for women. See The Office and Duetie of an Husband, trans. Thomas Paynel (London: John
Cawood, 1550), sigs.6r-7v. Perhaps this new dramatic subject helped to silence the critics of the theater.
54. The Story of King Darius (1565). rpt. in King Darius, Tudor Facsimile Texts (1907) (New York: AMS
Press, 1970). No pp. nos.
 33

drama,” necessitating that the figure of the Vice “yield the stage or adapt” (74). Because

writers of morality plays promulgated the notion that before Creation “the face of evil

was frequently black,” post-Alcazar plays associated color with vice and virtue: black is

evil; white is virtue—associations erroneously derived from the fall of Lucifer.55 An

agent of Satan, the Vice works in the allegorical world where he personifies a particular

evil or human flaw. Hence his deeds are “black.” The Vice evolved into the stage

villain: human, physically distinct from Satan, a natural man and so a more effective

dissembler and deceiver. Because the Vice wore blackface, according to Barthelemy,

and his deeds were black, it was easy for English Renaissance dramatists to fuse the

allegory, the symbolic, the metaphor with the mimetic and the actual by conflating black

deeds with black skin.56

When Muly Mahamet waged war against his uncle in 1578 and Europeans died

on the battlefield, this event cemented the theatrical conflation of black deeds with black

skin. Polemon’s account of the battle, on which Peele drew to reinforce the dramatic

presentation, makes the fusion of black skin and black deeds easy. Muly was

of stature meane, of bodie weake, of coulour so blacke, that he was

accompted of many for a Negro or black Moore. He was of a peruerse

nature, he would never speak the truth, he did all things subtelly and

deceitfully. He was not delighted in armes, but as he shewed in all

55. Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: the Representation of Blacks in English
Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987), 72. There is no biblical
evidence associating black with evil or sin. Throughout the Bible, sin is associated with scarlet or, in the
case of self-righteousness, with ultra-whiteness. When Miriam murmured against Moses for marrying an
Ethiopian and taking too much spiritual responsibility unto himself, she sinned and became “as white as
snow,” i.e., a leper. Similarly, when King Uzziah became puffed up with self-righteousness and tried to
perform the office of the priest, he became a leper. See Numbers 12: 1-12 and 2 Chronicles 26: 1-21
(NKJV).
56. Barthelemy, 75-79.
 34

battailes, of a nature cowardly and effeminate. But he so cruelly hated

Christians that he would kill either with famine or nakedness, those that he

caught.57

In Muly, all the traits of the Vice are present: deception, dissembling, blackness in deeds

and color--a destroyer of humankind’s soul. Polemon’s description of Muly facilitated an

easy fictionalization of a historic character as Vice for Peele and thus an easy evolution

of Vice into villain, especially when one realizes that of the major players at Alcazar,

only Muly is described as black. This fusion, Barthelemy writes, is what occurs in the

historic and dramatic accounts of The Battle of Alcazar. When the Negro Muly Mahamet

mounted the stage in 1588/9, the audience was “presented with the older allegorical form

and the new mimetic historical drama; the audience is asked to view the play not as the

older dramatic form but as the new form that calls to mind the older one” (79). Muly’s

black skin reinforced in the audience’s mind the allegorical representation of blackness,

making, in this case, the allegorical actual and the actual allegorical (79), according to

Barthelemy. A paradigmatic moment of allegorical and actual fusion occurs in Lusts

Dominion when Philip, responding to Eleazar’s taunt of bastardy, says, “Thou true

stamp’d son of hell / Thy pedigree is written in they face” (1V.ii. 40). Philip’s response

alludes to the older dramatic form in its labeling of Eleazar as a “true stamp’d son of

hell.” Eleazar has the imprimatur, the characteristics--a black face--of his father, Satan.

Here the audience/reader is asked to recall the allegorical representation upon seeing

Eleazar and hearing Philip’s words, especially “pedigree,” with its manifold meanings:

the literary, which goes back to the morality plays and their associations, and the

biological, which points to the offspring of a black individual. Likewise, when Philip

57. Polemon, 83.

 35

tells Eleazar that “seeing your face we thought of hell,” his remark encapsulates the

Renaissance’s associations of blackness with hell and villany.

Peele’s Alcazar sounded the death-knell for dramatic and literary respectability of

black Africans on the English Renaissance stage and “rejuvenated for the popular stage in

England a metaphor which, without exaggeration, profoundly and adversely affected the

ways blacks were to be represented on stage for years to come,”58 according to

Barthelemy. Bartels would concur with Barthelemy’s assessment, for she writes,

“Clearly influential, the play provided the dramatic precursors for Moors who would

follow in fairly regular succession: Aaron of Titus Andronicus (1594), Eleazar of Lusts

Dominion (1599), and Othello (1604).” The inclusion of Othello in this list would seem

to undercut the claim that Moors are portrayed negatively, but the connection among

these Moors seems to be murder. Each of them has killed someone. Although Bartel’s

list is all-male, black females were also subject to debased stage portrayal. Abdella from

Fletcher’s The Knight of Malta (1644) and Zanche from Marston’s Sophonisba, among

others, can be added to the list.

Given the Renaissance enchantment with ancient literature, the Aethiopica’s

influence on the Renaissance, including the stage, and England’s trade with the Levant, it

is difficult to see why Renaissance England presented Moors and other black Africans as

sub-human. Homer, Herodotus, Diodorus, Callisthenes, and others note the courage,

beauty, and sagacity of Ethiopians and other black Africans. Perhaps the clamor of

58. Barthelemy, 78. Bartels claims that “the very first representation of Moors on the English stage” came
when “George Peele produced The Battle of Alcazar featuring the conflict between Muly Mahamet, the
‘barbarous’ ‘negro’ Moor and Abdelemec, the ‘brave Barbarian lord’ (1 Pro. 6-7, 12).” We know that
Moors had been represented on the English stage prior to Alcazar, for the Annals of English History lists
plays performed by Lord Howard’s Men that featured Moors, and Barthelemy reminds us that Moors had
appeared on stage in Tamburlaine as defeated kings. Bartel’s point, however, is the negative portrayal of
black Africans on the English stage and its lasting influence. See “The Battle of Alcazar, the
Mediterranean, and the Moor,” 98.
 36

strident voices against the theatrical fare of Amadis, Mort d’ Arthur, and others lessens

the difficulty in seeing why “the events at Alcazar [would] prompt Renaissance

dramatists to embrace a new dramatic subject.”59 Besides Bartels, both Burke and

Stechow suggest that the Renaissance needed new subject matter for the stage that would

introduce new practices and values in the theater. And the Moor, placed in

contradistinction to the English, could and did provide the new practices and values for

the stage.

V.

Outline of Dissertation Chapters

Chapter 1 examines certain themes that the Aethiopica offered to playwrights for

the English Renaissance stage, including a positive representation of black Africans. The

chapter begins with a brief survey of past and recent scholarship on race, then moves into

exploring the extant European plays that use the Aethiopica as a direct source--Carichia

(1582), La comedie des chastes et loyales amours de Theagene et Chariclee (1601),

Aethiopicus Amor Castus (1605), Aithiopissa (1608). L’Ethiopique (1609), Chariclia

(1614), A strange discovery: a tragi-comedy (1640), and The White Ethiopian (1641)--

before reconstructing the plots of the three lost English plays—Charicleia (1572),

Theagenes and Charicleia (1573), and The Queen of Ethiopia (1578)—in order to

establish an English dramatic tradition stemming from the Aethiopica, especially one that

lauds Africans. Although Greene’s Orlando Furioso (1594) is a secondhand derivative

of Heliodorus, I use it to help elucidate this point because it retains the positive

representation of black Africans and the cross-cultural and transracial relationship found

59. Bartels, “The Battle of Alcazar, the Mediterranean, and the Moor,” 98.
 37

in the Aethiopica. In the penultimate section of the chapter, I turn my attention to

Heywood’s The Faire Maid of the West, Part I and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and

argue their connection to the Aethiopica. Finally, I look at the representations of black

Africans on stage and contend, based on evidence from other early modern plays and

texts, that the degraded African of the English Renaissance stage is a deviation from the

stage tradition of the Aethiopica.

Chapter 2 contends that Book 4 of the Aethiopica is pivotal to Jonson’s Masque of

Blackness and Masque of Beauty because Jonson derived the idea of racial

metamorphosis for his sixteen princesses from Queen Persinna’s description of birthing a

white baby, albeit for different purposes and through different agencies. In this chapter, I

also consider the relationship of metamorphosis to the issues of race and gender in

Jonson’s twin masques and Robert Brome’s The English Moore. Associating Ethiopia

with ugliness and England with beauty became an English Renaissance commonplace,

which Jonson exploits especially through the elaborate metaphor of “blanching,” and

which I argue he uses symbolically to participate in the dramatic tradition that derived

from the Aethiopica. In the penultimate section of the chapter I explore the

intertextuality of The English Moore, the Aethiopica, and Jonson’s twin masques plus his

Masque of the Metamorphosed Gypsies, and I conclude the chapter by offering an

analysis of Brome’s deviation from the Heliodoran stage tradition, since his comedy

utilizes material from the Aethiopica.

In chapter 3, I examine Othello as an adventure play that may be read as a drama

in the Heliodoran tradition. In Mediterranean adventure plays, white European men go to

the Mediterranean and become romantically involved with women of color. Othello
 38

reverses this motif: an African man goes to the other side of the Mediterranean and

becomes involved with a European woman. Both of them are undone because of their

union. Despite this and other inversion of motifs in this play, Othello is conversant with

other Mediterranean plays. That Cinthio is Shakespeare’s primary source for Othello is

well known. Yet there are moments in Shakespeare that do not exist in Cinthio. These

moments, Frank Kermode argues, germinate in Shakespeare’s mind--the spirituality of

Othello and Desdemona’s love, for example, as well as Desdemona’s elopement, and

Brabantio as a blocking father. I, however, suggest that these moments are rooted in

Heliodorus and tie them and other episodes to the Aethiopica, probing the parallels

between Charicleia and Desdemona. The Mediterranean exerted a magnetic pull on

English dramatists of this period, often provoking admiration and repulsion, especially in

matters of race and religion. In this chapter, I scrutinize these twin issues in

Mediterranean plays, and although I contend that in the Aethiopica the Mediterranean is a

site where boundaries between peoples frequently dissolve, I also suggest that in early

modern English plays the Mediterranean is a site of conflict because English Renaissance

playwrights make religion a tool of tension in the Mediterranean given the religious

difference between Christianity and Islam.

Recovering Heliodorus provides another way of looking into the Renaissance and

seeing its construct of race and gender through, for example, the masques of Blackness

and Beauty and the play Othello. In recovering the connections between Renaissance

dramatists and Heliodorus, we cast new light on historical and literary contexts of these

works and provide a deeply historicized and fresh angle of vision, thereby enhancing our

understanding of the Renaissance itself.

 39

Chapter 1

As demonstrated in the introduction, the Aethiopica was one of the most

influential ancient literary works in the Renaissance. It influenced the early modern

development of romance and romance epic, with its lost-and-found plot of exposure,

racial metamorphosis, love, elopement, shipwreck, captivity, deception, separation,

disguises, wandering, and reunion, and its intertwined multiple narratives told by

flashbacks, dialogues, and interpolated narrators in a disrupted chronology. It also

positively affected the early modern English stage representation of Africans by

emphasizing their chastity, wisdom, and bravery, and provided material for portraying the

interrelationship of race, religion, and gender in the Mediterranean adventure drama. In

this chapter, I examine the themes that I contend the Aethiopica gave to and popularized

on the English Renaissance stage, including, especially, a positive representation of black

Africans.

Scholarship on early modern English drama ignored race for much of the

twentieth century. For the past thirty years, however, there has been a dramatic increase

in scholarship on the representation of race on the Elizabethan stage; critics have

established that in Elizabethan and Jacobean England race had multiple meanings, from

religious, national, and geographical to color identities. In particular, scholars have

discovered that, from approximately the middle of the sixteenth century to the early part

of the seventeenth century, English Renaissance dramatists wrote plays which focused on

race relations between Islam and England in the Mediterranean, now called “adventure

dramas” or more appropriately “Mediterranean plays.” Samuel Claggett Chew was the

first scholar on record to investigate the relation between the Mediterranean and
 40

Renaissance England, effectively laying the foundation for scholarship on race. In 1937,

Chew published The Crescent and the Rose, a “combination of the historical and the

typographical” that surveys the period from“the downfall of the Byzantine Empire [1453]

to the downfall of the older English drama [1642].”1 Chew examines the commercial

interchange between England and Islam from this period, demonstrating the widespread

contact between the two nations.

Chew’s book and a few others documented England’s political involvement with

the empires of the Turks and Moors. In 1967, two years after the republication of Chew’s

book, G.K. Hunter published his British Academy lecture “Othello and Colour

Prejudice.” Countering his audience’s belief that Othello is either “tawny” or

incidentally black, Hunter contends that Othello is black for theatrical and typological

purposes, that Elizabethans had very little personal contact with real Moors, and that

blackness symbolizes death, wickedness, and the devil. Hence Shakespeare’s portrayal

of Othello is meant to challenge the audience’s assumptions about blackness while

playing out the triumph of Christianity over the black infidel. Hunter’s claim of limited

contact between Islam and Protestant England has been refuted by scholars during the

late 1990s and early 2000s. The claim, however, would be reiterated a year later by the

American historian Winthrop Jordan, whose book, in turn, influenced a great deal of

Renaissance scholarship on racism.

A study of White American attitudes toward Blacks, Jordan’s White Over Black:

American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968) looks at Renaissance England

1. The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (1937; Rpt. New York: Octagon
Books, 1965), vii.
 41

to argue that racial prejudice predates the Atlantic slave trade, not vice versa.2 Jordan

suggests that blackness produces an instinctive negative reaction in whites.

Consequently, whites represent blacks as ugly, immoral, heathen, cruel, lascivious, and

barbaric in their literatures, including travelogues. Positing that the “accepted standard of

ideal beauty was a fair complexion of rose and white,” Jordon suggests that this form of

“ideal beauty” can be seen in English Petrarchism, a claim Kim Hall would amplify

several years later.

While early scholarship on blackness such as Eldred Jones’s Elizabethan Image of

Africa (1971)3 reiterated the typological interpretation advanced by Hunter and Jordan,

by the late twentieth- to early twenty-first century, critics from various disciplines entered

the conversation, extending, amplifying, refining, and correcting Hunter’s and Jordan’s

arguments, as well as putting forth arguments independent of previous scholarship. Eliot

H. Tokson and Anthony Gerard Barthelemy engage Jordan in their individual studies of

how travel literatures impact the early modern English imagination. Tokson’s The

Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550-1668 (1982) centers on the

ways English Renaissance writers “treated the black Africans who had been introduced

into their cultures in the middle 1550s, especially how English playwrights dramatized

Africans from 1550-1668 based on the material they read and the stories they heard.”4

2. By looking at Renaissance England to show that racial prejudice predates slavery, Jordan seems to
engage in self-fulfilling prophecy. A look at antiquity would have shown Jordan that slavery predates
racism. The Egyptians enslaved the Jews, and the Romans enslaved those whom they defeated in war,
regardless of race. See White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 1968); Exodus 1:8-14. Except as noted, all references to the Bible are to the
New King James Version (NKJV); see, also, William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, The Riverside
Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1.1. Unless indicated otherwise,
all references are to The Riverside Shakespeare.
3. Eldred Jones, Elizabethan Image of Africa (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1971)
4. Eliot H. Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550-1668 (Boston, Mass:
G.K. Hall, 1982).
 42

Barthelemy’s Black Face, Maligned Race: Representation of Blacks in English Drama

from Shakespeare to Southerne (1987) examines black characters on the English stage

from 1589 to 1695, with Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1594) and Thomas Southerne’s

Oroonoko (1695) delimiting the period because both plays exemplify important changes

in the dramatic representation of Africans on the early modern stage: Alcazar marked the

start of the negative dramatization of blacks on the English Renaissance stage, while

Oroonoko with its noble African slave signaled a shift in the opposite direction.5 In this

study, I will suggest that the noble African has important precursors much earlier on the

English stage.

Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early

Modern England (1995) refines Jordan’s argument by establishing how literary

representations of dark and light, so well known in Anglo-American discourse, are also

“descriptions” that “are more than indicators of Elizabethan beauty standards[;] they are

conduits through which the English formulated themselves and others during the early

modern period.”6 Hall demonstrates that early modern references to blackness are

saturated with gender and racial identity—concerns that Ania Loomba articulated earlier

in Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (1989), the first comprehensive study to consider

the interconnection of gender and race. Loomba argues that the constructions of “women

and black people” are similar and facilitate the othering by “white patriarchal society, and

[that] they also reflect upon some sorts of exclusion such as that based on class.”7 In

5. Anthony G. Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: Representation of Blacks in English Drama from
Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisana State UP, 1987).
6. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness (Ithaca: Cornel UP, 1995), 2.
7. Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989), 2.
 43

Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1994)8 the discourse between

blackness and race moves beyond a simple one-to-one correspondence to include gender

as a construction of race and the construction of whiteness as a racial category.

This scholarship focuses on Protestant England and Islam, and, so, the

Mediterranean becomes a central locus. Jack D’Amico’s The Moor in English

Renaissance Drama (1991) examines the political implications of the encounter between

Europeans and Moors and Shakespeare’s treatment of them in his Roman and Venetian

plays. D’Amico also looks at the contracts and diplomatic ties between England and

Morocco circa 1550-1603, the great wealth of Morocco, and the ways the Portuguese and

other Europeans sought to exploit it. King Sebastian’s decision to fight on behalf of the

“Black King,” for example, was not motivated by Christian altruism but by the desire to

retain Portugal’s colonial hold on Morocco.9

Nabil Matar, Daniel Vitkus, and Jonathan Burton also examine the political

alliances and mercantile and economic exchanges between England and Islam, but cite

positive depictions as well as negative portrayals of the Other in early modern English

literature. Matar’s Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (1999) charts

“the change from a centripetal to a centrifugal” and adversarial relation between Islam

and Britain that came about from the Elizabethan to the Caroline era, including the

subordinate position of the English relative to the Moors and England’s attempt to

compensate for its weakness by demonizing the Moors through negative representations

in travel literatures, histories, sermons, and plays. In Turning Turk: English Theater and

8. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period
(London: Routledge, 1994).
9. Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press,
1991).
 44

the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630 (2003), Vitkus explores English

playwrights’ representation and appropriation of the multicultural Mediterranean from

Elizabeth’s rule to James’s, when England began its tentative entry into the “exotic and

mysterious lands” of a commercially, culturally, militarily, and religiously powerful East,

a place more important to English Renaissance interests than the “New World.” Burton’s

Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624 (2005) treats England’s failed

attempt to control the Turks because England then was a “compensatory, not a

controlling” power. Using new archival evidence, Burton examines “numerous images

of Islam and of Muslim peoples that English authors of the Renaissance produced,”

ranging “from the censorious to the laudatory, from others to brothers” to show the range

of contact between England and Islam.10

In this study, I want to add to this conversation by delineating a dramatic tradition

based on Heliodorus’s An Aethiopian History, a tradition that generally represents

Africans, especially black Africans, positively. Because my main concern is with

recovering a dramatic tradition stemming from the Aethiopica that portrays blacks

positively on the English Renaissance stage through three lost English plays based on the

Aethiopica, I divide the chapter into three sections, beginning with a thematic

examination of the six extant Continental plays whose titles are taken from the

Aethiopica and that use the Aethiopica as their direct source. Because each of these six

plays retells the Heliodoran story, I look at them thematically rather than individually to

avoid redundancy and to establish that works using Heliodorus as a source and having the

10. Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia UP, 1999);
Daniel J. Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630 (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-
1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 12.
 45

names of his title characters or of the Aethiopica itself in their titles follow the original

story closely. This, in turn, enables me to use these plays as paradigms to help

reconstruct the three lost English plays--Chariclea (1572), Theagenes and Chariclea

(1573), and The Queen of Ethiopia (1578)--because their title characters are also taken

directly from the Aethiopica, which is also their source. Examining these plays

thematically also allows me to explore the claim that the Aethiopica influenced the

English Renaissance stage through a collection of themes, including exposing newborns

with personal paraphernalia,11 male and female chastity, female martial intrepidity, male

wandering and displacement, racial metamorphosis, the Mediterranean story (with its

interrelationship of race, religion, and gender) and, as mentioned before, a positive

portrayal of black Africans. Although the theme of female chastity was not unfamiliar to

the Renaissance stage, the Aethiopica with its conception of virtuous love and

concordance with Christian values further popularized the theme of female chastity on

the Renaissance stage.

Because Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso (printed in 1594), a secondhand

derivative of the Aethiopica, is the earliest extant English Renaissance play that

dramatizes black Africans positively and that retains the positive representation of the

protagonists’ cross-cultural and transracial relationship found in Heliodorus’s text, I

examine it, along with the two little-known plays, John Gough’s The Strange Discovery:

a tragic-comedy (1640)12 and the anonymous The White Ethiopian (1641),13 both of

11. Although Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex has the theme of exposure, it differs from the Aethiopica’s. In a
modification of immense importance, Helidorus added the sexual anxiety and identifying features to his
theme of exposure, making Charicleia’s exposure unlike that of Oedipus, who is exposed without personal
paraphernalia to prevent any identification of him or his lineage.
12. John Gough, The Strange Discovery: a tragic-comedy (London: Printed by E.G. for William Leake,
1640).
 46

which derive directly from the Aethiopica. All of these plays allow us to posit the

existence of a dramatic tradition stemming from this ancient novel.

In the second section, in order to explore Heliodorus’s work as a source, I tease

out the connection between the Aethiopica and three popular early modern plays--The

Winter’s Tale, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Faire Maid of the West, Part 1. In the

final section, I examine the positive representation of black Africans on the early modern

English stage in relation to the tradition derived from Heliodorus.

I.

Plays Whose Titles Reflect Their Derivation and that Help

to Establish a Dramatic Tradition Stemming from the Aethiopica

In their titles, six Continental plays—Ettore Pignatelli’s La Carichia Tragedia

(1582), Alexandre Hardy’s La comedie de chastes amours de Théagène et Cariclée

(1601), Wolfgang Waldüng’s Aethiopicus Amor Castus (1605), Johannes Scholvin’s

Aithiopissa: Tragicocomedia Nova, Ex Historia Aethiopica Heliodori Espicopi Tricensis

(1608), Octave-César Genetay’s L’Ethiopique Tragicomedie des chastes amours de

Theagene et Chariclée (1609), and Caspar Brülow’s Chariclia (1614)—indicate that they

are based on the Aethiopica. Although each playwright introduces new material,

modifies, and rearranges the Helidoran narrative, each play shows its indebtedness to the

Aethiopica by remaining faithful to the original plot, story, and names of the major

protagonists. The titles of Hardy’s, Schlovin’s, and Brulow’s plays, for example, indicate

that they deal with the chaste love of Theagene and Cariclee, which ends in marriage;

13. Arthur Duncan Matthews, ed., “The White Ethiopian: A Critical Edition” (Diss. University of Florida,
1951).
 47

with Ethiopia/Ethiopians in some way; and with a woman named Chariklia, whose name

clearly recalls Heliodorus’s Charicleia and her story. The plays dramatize the story of an

abandoned Ethiopian baby princess who grows up in another country, falls in love with a

Greek prince, and returns home to marry him and to continue the succession and dynastic

line. In its dramatization of the story and themes associated with the Aethiopica, each

play helps to prove the existence of a tradition that originates from this novel.

The treatment by these plays of the themes of exposure, chastity, racial

metamorphosis, wandering and displacement, along with a positive portrayal of black

Africans establish their connection to the Aethiopica as well as a dramatic tradition

stemming from this ancient work. In each play, the queen exposes her newborn because

the baby is born “white.” While four of the plays imply the reason for the baby’s

exposure, two of them, Brülow’s Chariclia and Genetay’s L’Ethiopique Tragicomedie

des chastes amours de Theagene et Chariclée follow the Aethiopica and give an explicit

reason for the baby’s exposure: fearing the charge of adultery for giving birth to a

“white” child, the queen abandons her newborn. The focus on the accusation of sexual

impurity is evident in the queen’s decision to abandon her daughter: her fear is rooted in

would-be allegations of adultery and of the consequences.

Both Brülow and Genetay devote a significant amount of time to the theme of

exposure. 14 While Genetay conveys the exposure through a soliloquy that functions as

14. Child abandonment and exposure were prevalent during the Renaissance and were “linked to sexual
impurity,” although other factors were involved. The prevalence of exposure during this time could also
explain the significance Brülow and Genetay give to this theme. See John Boswell, The Kindness of
Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 166; David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment
in Russia (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988), 6, n. 36.
 48

background and exposition in his play, Brülow15 dramatizes the action in his. Chariclia

opens with a remorseful Persina, consumed by guilt and fear for deceiving “the king” and

exposing her daughter. In the Aethiopica, Persinna’s concern for her lost child is

conveyed through Calasiris, whom she commissions to search for her daughter. While

Brülow excises Calasiris from his play, he retains Persina’s concern for and eventual

reunion with her abandoned daughter.

In the Aethiopica and the six derivative plays, the queen exposes the baby

princess with royal possessions and precious gems, including the ring Pantarbe, all of

which proclaim the child’s royal pedigree. While Heliodorus’s Charicleia is exposed

with a “ribbon” on which her genealogy is embroidered in hieroglyphics, Brülow’s

Chariclia, Pignatelli’s Carichia, and Genetay’s Chariclee are exposed in “swaddling

clothes.” Exposure and abandonment were widespread and often deadly social ills that

occurred from late antiquity to the Renaissance (and into the nineteenth century). To

minimize the deaths of their babies and allow for easy identification of the babies’

lineage, parents frequently abandoned their children near popular sites, such as

thoroughfares or temples, leaving identifiers like beads or amulets with the children. As

in the Aethiopica, each play presents a priest finding the exposed child, implicitly

connecting the child’s abandonment with religious structures to show that exposure was

not undertaken without regard to the child. In Brulow, the queen abandons her baby in a

grove16 where Sisimithres finds the child, allowing the conjecture that the temple of the

15. Caspar Brülow, Chariclia (Argentorati: excudebat A. Bertramus, 1641), translated by Scott Barker.
There is a probability that Brülow’s Cariclea, like Waldung’s Aethipicus Amor Castus, was performed.
See Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (London: C.J. Clay
& Son, 1886), 102-3. In treating the topic of exposure, Brülow provides several examples of exposed and
abandoned children in Act 1, including Oedipus and Hercules.
16. Groves, forests, marketplaces, and churches were places where parents “from antiquity until mid-
nineteenth century . . . exposed” their children. Oedipus, Romulus and Remus, among other mythic
 49

gymnosophists,17 Ethiopia’s religious savants who shun all intoxicants and animal flesh,

was near one or several groves and putting Sisimithres in a rich tradition of ascetics who

lead their lives with concern for others and in harmony with nature. Given that in each of

the plays the queen exposes the princess with royal possessions that identify the baby’s

lineage and later enquires discreetly about the welfare of her daughter, all six plays

present the act of exposure in a context of “parental concern” resulting from intense

“duress.”18

Throughout the Renaissance, the Aethiopica was best known for its treatment of

chastity. Indeed, the love of Theagenes and Charicleia became a paradigm for romantic

love. Despite traversing huge geographical spaces often without a chaperone, both

Theagenes and Charicliea remain chaste. Each derivative play dramatizes this theme of

male and female chastity. Pignatelli opens La Tragedia de Carichia19 in medias res and

focuses on the military conflict between Persian Egypt and Ethiopia, through which he

dramatizes the chaste romance between the protagonists, establishing a structural and

thematic continuation of the Heliodoran tradition. Although Pignatelli uses the military

conflict to stage the romance between Carichia and Teagene, he excludes Carichia from

characters were exposed in forests to thwart oracles. See Carol Sanger’s “Infant Safe Haven Laws:
Legislating in the Culture of Life,” The Columbia Law Review 6, no. 4 (2006): 23.
17. In actuality, the gymnosophists, located in India, are a sect of Hindu philosophers who lead ascetic
lives. Heliodorus places them in Ethiopia, as John Morgan points out, “on the precedent of Philostratos’s
Life of Apollonios, and their importance in Hydaspes’s administration reflects Greek beliefs on the power
of the Meriotic priesthood.” See “Helidorus,” The Novel in the Ancient World, ed. Gareth Schmeling
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 434.
18. Boswell, 151.
19. Ettore Pignatelli, La Tragedia de Charichia (Naples: Ottanio Beltrano, 1627), translated by Paolo
Sorbello, is the first recorded extant drama that owes its name, plot, and story to Heliodorus’s novel. The
play stretches the designation of “tragedy” because it ends in marriage. Pignatelli, 1572-1622, was the
fourth Duke of Monteleone and the fifth Count of Barrello through his marriage to Countess Caterina
Caracciolo. As capitano-generale of Catalogna in 1609, Pignatelli was instrumental in driving the Moors
out of Spain. A patron of the arts, Pignatelli received posthumous recognition for his work, which the
Italian and Greek Studies Academy honored in 1627, the year of his death. Pignatelli belonged to one of
the seven great families of Naples, with ancestry dating back to the kings of Lombards. In 1616, he
escorted the Infanta Donna Anna, daughter of Philip III, to France for her marriage to Louis XIII, the
Bourbon king of France. Perhaps the play was written and performed for this marriage celebration.
 50

any martial activity. Unlike Heliodorus, Pignatelli contracts Carichia’s role but expands

that of Teagnes, thereby transforming, as we shall see next, the Greek romance into its

new and constrained Renaissance form.

The contracting of Carichia’s role transforms her into a model Renaissance

woman by yoking chastity to domesticity and passivity.20 In the Aethiopica, Charicleia’s

and Theagenes’s chastity is a manifestation of their thoughts and deeds, both of which the

Renaissance incorporated in its definition of chastity. Chastity meant more than just an

abstention from sexual intercourse for an unmarried couple: it also included a concern

for honor and reputation. Having incorporated the Heliodoran model of chastity into

their definition, Renaissance writers then modified the model, adding prescriptions such

as domesticity and passivity to define female chasitity--which we see reflected in all but

Hardy’s La comedie de chastes amours. Except Hardy, the other five Continental

playwrights remove from their heroines the characteristics of resourcefulness,

independence, and action found in the Greek story. Pignatelli’s Carichia, for example,

does not participate in the battles, even though the military conflict is used as a stage for

her romance with Teagene. According to Ruth Kelso, the new early modern chaste

woman does not raise “evil hopes in . . . men” and must guard against unchaste thoughts

infiltrating her mind; “therefore she must avoid all occasions for evil thoughts . . .

keeping herself within doors . . . and shunning public affairs.”21 Whenever we encounter

Pignatelli’s Carichia, she is always indoors, a domesticated woman, and not the wanderer

or the active leader that her Heliodoran predecessor was. Like the emerging, male-

20. On the ideal Renaissance woman, see Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London: Methuen,
1985), 149-191; Peter Stallybrass “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” Rewriting the
Renaissance: the discourses of sexual difference in early modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson,
Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 123-42.
21. Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 97-
98.
 51

constrained ideal Renaissance woman, Carichia draws her reason for living, her very

existence from her man. She tells Teagene that her “life depends and recovers any lost

virtue” from his care and concern for her (3.2). Despite being importuned by Morebo

with declarations of love, Carichia ignores him. However, she informs Teagene of

Morebo’s behavior (2.3)—exemplifying the popular Renaissance construct of the silent

and chaste woman who must make herself an open book to her husband.

Brülow’s Chariclia is as chaste as Pignatelli’s Carichia and Schlovin’s Chariklia,

but less domesticated. When Theagenes encounters Pelorus in battle, Chariclia boosts his

confidence by cheering him on, reminding him that he is “born from the stock of

Achilles” (2.8). However, when things become personal and domestic as Thyamis

proposes marriage, she is silent, speaking only at the urging of the men, because she

understands that chastity requires women to defer to men. Both Brülow’s Chariclia and

Schlovin’s Chariklia frequently look to their Theagenes for leadership and solutions to

their problems.

Chastity also includes honor and reputation. In general, Renaissance men and

women prized honor and reputation, though such a prize had different meanings for each

gender. For women, honor meant a good name or good reputation, which they could

achieve through chastity. Men, however, achieved honor through excellent conduct in

their work and other activities.22 Each of the six plays illustrates the danger and sacrifice

that honor and reputation demand of women. Queen Persinna, confronted with the

dilemma of her safety or the life of her newborn child, decides to expose her baby, for in

doing so she may be able to prevent her death and that of her baby. Her action, designed

to protect the life of her child and her family from dishonor, also saves her honor and

22. Kelso, 97-98.

 52

reputation from being impugned, for a woman whose honor is questioned, justly or

unjustly, could be killed or, as Kelso notes, “had to hide her shame in perpetual

seclusion.” Such a woman also brought disgrace to her husband and child(ren).23 If

Persinna or her namesakes had not abandoned the baby princess(es), she would have

faced charges of adultery and in the worlds of the novel and the plays would (most likely)

have been sentenced to death. The princess would have been killed or ostracized, a

pariah to society, and the king would have borne the stain of an unfaithful wife and

therefore the disgrace of cuckoldry. In The Winter’s Tale and A Woman Killed With

Kindness, Hermione and Anne suffer the consequences that befall a woman whose honor

is impugned. Wrongly accused of adultery, Hermione escapes the murderous intent of

her husband Leontes but is secluded, monumentalized, for sixteen years. Anne, seduced

by her husband’s best friend, is locked away in a house, secluded from her husband,

children, and friends, where she dies in isolation.

Unlike Pignatelli’s “closet”24 drama, Alexandre Hardy’s La comedie de chastes

amours was performed publicly at the Hotel de Bourgogne in 1601, several years before

its publication.25 Of the six Continental plays that derive from the Aethiopica, only

Hardy’s play combines chastity with a resourceful and martial heroine. This combination

23. Ibid, .99.

24. Although there is no source that refers to La Tragedia de Carichia as a closet drama, I have chosen this
designation because I am operating on the assumption that the play was read, recited, or performed without
regard to stage props or directions at least once in a private setting; choosing a category is always a vexed
issue for plays which might have seen one performance in an aristocratic household.
25. Hardy, whose influence on the French stage and succeeding dramatists is significant, was a prolific
writer, authoring more than 700 plays, with only 34 surviving . Divided into eight plays of five acts, La
comedie de chastes amours is an anthology comprised of eight journeys. Born around 1569, Hardy was
connected to a troupe of actors headed by Valleram LeComote, for whom he wrote. The troupe played at
several venues throughout Paris but became established in 1628 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Considered the
father of the French tragi-comedy, Hardy wrote for popular taste, and with his vast stage experience
modified tragedy and tragicomedy by suppressing the chorus and limiting monologues. He died around
1632. See Henry Carrington Lancaster, The French Tragi-Comedy: Its Origin and Development from
1552-1628 (Baltimore: J. H. Furst Co., 1907), 36, 101-02, 133, & 143.
 53

of themes ties Hardy’s play both to Heliodorus’s novel and the dramatic tradition that

originated from it. Hardy combines virtue and valor equally in Cariclee and Theagene as

Heliodorus does with his protagonists, distinguishing them from the other Continental

heroes and heroines just as Heliodorus’s protagonists are set apart from the other Greek

male and female protagonists.

The combination of purity and courage in Cariclee becomes apparent during the

first and second journeys of Hardy’s play. Under siege from two groups of pirates, she

uses her bow and arrow to deter and kill would-be predators from the first set of pirates.

With the second group, she resorts to stratagem. Inflamed with passion for Cariclee, the

leader of the second band of pirates, Thiamis, proposes marriage, which she accepts, but

outsmarts him by requesting time to visit a temple to lay down her vestal garments before

becoming his bride. Anticipating that the marriage will not occur if Thiamis grants her

request because of the dangers involved in making the journey, Cariclee assures him that

allowing her to put aside her priestly robes will eliminate all obstacles to their marriage

because she will then be fully prepared for wifehood. While Pignatelli, Genetay,

Schlovin, and Waldung give little or no attention to this episode, Brülow, like Hardy,

does, but makes Chariclia defer to Theagenes, speaking only at the urging of the men

present. Both Hardy and Brülow, like Heliodorus, make their heroines realize the danger

to themselves and their beloved Theagene(s) should they refuse the proposal—a danger

Theagene(s) does not grasp immediately but eventually does. The quick-wittedness and

daring of Hardy’s heroine bring to mind David Konstan’s observation on the equality

between male and female protagonists in Greek novels: “Men are not valiant rescuers:

There are no scenes in which the valiant lover comes to rescue his lady. . . . Virtue is not
 54

conceived on the pattern of masculine virility.”26 For the other five Continental plays,

virtue is indeed conceived on the pattern of masculine virility.

Hardy’s Cariclee is unlike the heroines of the other five playwrights in bravery.

Although Genetay uses the prologue and soliloquies to establish background and review

the protagonists’ adventures, there is no sense of a martial or intrepid heroine in the

soliloquies or the prologue. The closest Genetay’s Chariclee comes to this

characterization is in her declaration to die with Theagene if Hydaspes sacrifices her

beloved. But that declaration is born of desperation prompted by the passions of

romantic frustration rather than by courage itself. A similar argument of romantic

frustration can be made for Brülow’s Chariclia when she confesses to murdering Cybele

and voluntarily ascends the pyre that Arsace prepares for her. Weary of being without

Theagene and ignorant of his fate, Chariclia decides to die rather than live in her present

state. Perhaps because, as Henry Carrington Lancastle writes, Hardy wrote for a popular

audience,27 he could portray a martial heroine, who would stir great excitement on the

stage. Or perhaps Hardy was insightful enough to realize that a daring female on the

Renaissance stage made for entertaining theater, or his innovative spirit led him to

emulate Heliodorus as closely as possible in creating such a role on the French stage, as it

had led him to dispense with the monologue and the chorus in his plays.

The last four of the themes prominent in the Aethiopica which influenced the

English Renaissance stage are racial metamorphosis, male chastity, a wandering hero,

and a positive representation of Africans. Each Continental playwright depicts his

heroine as racially transformed at conception, except Genetay. As in Heliodorus, the

26. Quoted by Margaret Doody in The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP), 36.
27. Lancaster, 133 & 143.
 55

metamorphosis occurs when the queen gazes at the painting of Andromeda. This kind of

transfiguration draws upon Aristotelian theories of reproduction, which credits the

mother’s imagination with shaping the fetus. According to Susan Magnanini, one form

of this belief held that “by staring fixedly at an image, usually a painting or statue, the

mother’s imagination came to imprint upon her child that which she beheld.”28 Queen

Persinna’s gaze at the painting of a white Andromeda imprints upon her fetus the

characteristics of that painting, as Persinna herself explains in the Aethiopica: “. . . I

looked upon the picture of Andromeda naked, while my husband had to do with me (for

then he first brought her down from the rock, had by misshape ingenderd presently a

thing like to her)” (Underdowne 108).

Along with a Mediterranean story and setting, the Aethiopica influenced English

drama through its themes of male innocence and wandering. Drawing upon Heliodorus,

all six Continental playwrights depict their Thessalian princes as innocent wanderers.

Theagenes and his namesakes traverse huge geographic areas, beginning in Thessaly and

ending in Ethiopia. Their wanderings also result in displacement and fracturing of the

self to some extent. While the other five Continental plays mute this fracturing, Hardy’s

La comedie de chastes amours articulates it. A Thessalian embassy arrives in Ethiopia

searching for its lost prince to take him back to his home to fulfill his duties (5.1).

Although Hardy does not delve into Theagene’s internal struggle that results from the

28. Magnanini relates the story which early modern physicians and surgeons tell about Hippocrates, “who
was said to have invoked [the] theory” of racial metamorphosis through visual stimulus “while defending a
white woman married to a white man who had been accused of adultery after having given birth to a black
child…. Hippocrates explained to the court that the woman had gazed upon the image of a Moor during
conception and impressed that image onto the skin of her child[;] the woman was acquitted.” See Fairy-tale
science: monstrous generation in the tales of Straparola and Basile (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2008), 73-74. The belief that women could alter the shape of a fetus had been around from antiquity but
gained popularity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which might help explain its presence in
the works of the five playwrights. Such a belief might have also helped to generate interest in the
Aethiopica itself among early modern readers.
 56

arrival of the Thessalian embassy to reclaim and return him to his home, the play invites

us to wonder how Theagene will cope with estrangement from his homeland, despite the

attempt of Hydaspes to lessen the ambivalence by marrying Cariclée to Theagene upon

learning that Theagene is a prince. Most probably, the embassy awakened some feeling

of nostalgia and patriotism in Theagene, which does not prove a strong antidote to his

love for Cariclée: he remains in Ethiopia.

All of the Continental playwrights emphasize the sexual purity that Heliodorus

assigns to Theagenes. When the Persian princess conspires to seduce Theagene(s), he

suffers beatings and imprisonment for refusing to surrender to her demands. All five

playwrights, except Pignatelli (who ignores the Arsace episode), dramatize an implacable

and punitive Arsace and an unshakeable Theagene(s) in the struggle for his virtue.

Rescued by the soldiers of the satrap, Theagene(s) is later ambushed by Ethiopian

soldiers and transported to Meroe, where the Ethiopian people are surprised to discover

that the prince is uninitiated in the art of Venus. Although Pignatelli ignores the Arsace

episode, his Teagene is also sexually pure, garnering the admiration of the high priest,

Acasto: despite the long sojourn from Athens to Ethiopia without a chaperone, Teagene

and Carichia remain chaste (3.4).

Each Continental playwright dramatizes Ethiopians positively, representing the

king and queen as virtuous, chaste, brave, sagacious, and magnanimous, reinforcing my

claim of a dramatic tradition of positive portrayal of blacks stemming from the

Aethiopica. Heliodorus’s King Hydaspes is an example of princely conduct, providing

the Renaissance a model of how power should be exercised, which is especially resonant

with Medieval and Renaissance writers, such as Boccaccio and Castiglione, who
 57

instructed rulers to embrace virtue and eschew vice.29 Each playwright makes his king

noble. Although Pignatelli’s Idaspe is old and no longer leads his army into battle,

Pignatelli shows that the old king was once a military man of great fortitude, defeating

the Persian satrap in their first encounter. Under his rule, Ethiopians enjoy peace and

prosperity. Victorious in war, the king treats his conquests with respect and dignity. In

Waldung, he frees the captured Oroondates, restoring him to his position, because as

Brülow’s Hydaspes explains, a “king does not bring his scepter upon the blood of the

subdued . . . and should not seek anything beyond what is just” (4.11). Similarly,

Hardy’s King Hydaspe, “content with the honor of victory,” makes peace with the

conquered satrap. However, the kings in Genetay and Schlovin seem to have boastful

and egomaniacal tendencies. Recounting the war with Persian Egypt to Meroebe,

Genetay’s Hydaspes tells his nephew that “although my power is not unknown . . . the

satrap Orondate /. . . pushed by overproud pomp / . . . / Dare[s] to present himself against

me” (3.1). Later in that same speech, the king compares Orondate to a “fly” and himself

to an “elephant”: “a fly must not combat with an elephant.” In Schlovin the king

displays misogynistic traits, claiming that “a talkative woman is grave trouble” and that

he “hates a woman who knows more than is appropriate” (5.1).

Genetay and Schlovin perhaps give their kings a fuller range of human traits than

the other four Continental playwrights do with theirs. Those kings seem less prone to

human weaknesses. In Brülow and Pignatelli, for example, the kings are circumspect and

measured in their speech and actions. When Idaspe promotes Teagene over the older and

longer-serving Cloanto, he, concerned with the emotional impact on Cloanto, takes

29. Prof. Maynard Mack, Jr., points out that Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513) can be read as the precise
opposite.
 58

counsel on how best to convey Teagene’s promotion to Cloanto. Despite the negative

traits of Genetay’s and Schlovin’s two kings, both playwrights endow them with a

majority of positive traits. The kings’ sense of justice and their magnanimity are as great

in these two plays as in the other four Continental ones, for they pardon and free the

Persian generals and the soldiers, each king contenting himself with repossessing only

territory that belongs to him.

Although each work represents the queen favorably, Pignatelli makes his queen

particularly formidable. In the Aethiopica, as in four of the Continental plays, Persinna’s

role is limited. In Books 4 and 10 of Heliodorus’s text, she narrates birthing Charicleia

and reunites with her. Otherwise, she is an absent presence, hovering in the marginal

spaces of the novel. However, in Pignatelli’s Carichia, she is active throughout the play

and, with the possible exception of Acasto, is the most sagacious person in the play. As

the king’s confidante, she is wise and shrewd, listening to and advising a careworn Idaspe

when necessary (1.1). She participates in public affairs, including the ritualistic robing of

Teagene as the Ethiopian general (3.6). A powerful intercessor for Carichia, she reasons

the improbability of Carichia’s poisoning Sabea and vanquishes all evidence of

Carichia’s supposed guilt, prompting a convinced Idaspe to release Carichia into her

custody (4.7).

Despite the modifications that these six playwrights make to Helidorus’s text, all

of them repeat the plot and story of the Aethiopica. Most important to this study are the

plays’ titles, which indicate their source, and their positive dramatization of Africans,

especially black Africans, based on the Heliodoran story. All six plays dramatize the

commitment of their Ethiopian heroines to sexual purity; the faithful adherence of the
 59

Ethiopians, especially of the priests, to their sovereign; the integrity and moral rectitude

of King Hydaspes, especially in adjudications; the sagacity of Persinna and Calasirs; the

piety of the Ethiopian priesthood and sovereignty; and mental acuity as innate

characteristics of Ethiopians and Egyptians.

Although these six plays postdate the three lost English plays, they strengthen the

argument for a dramatic tradition originating from the Aethopica that represented black

Africans positively on the Renaissance stage throughout England and Continental Europe

prior to the major shift in the English theater of demonizing Blacks, and they demonstrate

through repetition that plays whose titles reflect the name of the Aethiopica or the names

of its characters follow that text closely. Using these plays as models, I attempt to

reconstruct the three lost English plays in the rest of this section.

Given that all six Continental European plays whose titles include the names of

the protagonists or of the novel itself follow the storyline and plot of the Aethiopica and

present black Africans with dignity, it is reasonable to conclude that the three English

plays Charicleia (1572), Theagenes and Charicleia (1573), and The Queen of Ethiopia

(1578) did likewise and quite probably played a significant role in establishing a positive

dramatic tradition of black Africans on the English Renaissance stage originating from

the Aethiopica. Although these three English plays are lost, the Annals of English

Drama30 lists them as being performed in 1572, 1573, and 1578 at court by Lord

Howard’s Men. Some scholars believe the three plays are actually one play referred to

30. See Alfred Harbage and Samuel Schoenbaum, Annals of English drama 975-1700: an analytical record
of all plays, extant or lost, chronologically arranged and indexed by authors, titles, dramatic companies,
&c (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964).
 60

by different titles.31 However, there are sufficient reasons to believe that these are

separate plays with separate titles: Hill’s List of Early Plays in Manuscript cites Caricilia

as “performed at Court in 1572” and the Queen of Ethiopia as “acted by Howard’s Men

at Bristol in 1578”; Arthur D. Matthews observes that “. . . in the absence of other

evidence, different titles suggest different plays” (xxiv). Additionally, early modern

playhouses did not usually revive plays a year apart as the 1572 and 1573 dates of

Chariclea and Theagenes and Chariclea suggest.

Using the six Continental plays as paradigms to help reconstruct the three lost

British plays, it seems we can assume that the lost plays would have followed the stories

of the original title characters in the Aethiopica. The Queen of Ethiopia (1578) would

have centered on the story of the reigning queen, Persinna,32 as it is recorded in the

Aethiopica. Fearing charges of infidelity, Persinna abandons her baby because the

princess is born white. An Ethiopian priest rescues the child and places it in the care of a

shepherd; later he gives the child to a Greek priest, who raises her as his own daughter.

Persinna is eventually banished because the king suspects her of infidelity. With the

passage of time, the steadfast friendship of the high priest, and the princess’s return to

Ethiopia, the king, persuaded of his wife’s fidelity, restores her to her former position,

and both of them prepare for their daughter’s nuptials.

Chariclea would almost certainly have the trials of the heroine and the assaults

upon her virtue as the primary, if not the only, focus.33 The play would have told the

31. See Frederick Gard Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama 1559-1642 (New York: Ben
Franklin, 1969); and Carol Gesner, Shakespeare & the Greek Romance (Lexington: UP of Kentucky,
1970), 47.
32. Charicleia could also be represented by this title. However, it seems more likely to me that this title
refers to Persinna.
33. John Morgan tells me that the Aethiopica often went under the title of Charikleia; so, a play of the same
name may not be focused only on the heroine.
 61

story of her elopement, captivity by brigands and pirates, subsequent separation from her

beloved Theagenes, and her wanderings, culminating in her Ethiopian captivity, arrival at

Meroe, and the eventual revelation of her lineage along with her marriage or impending

marriage to Theagenes. Overlap--such as the elopement, captivity, and subsequent

adventures—probably would have occurred between this play and Theagenes and

Chariclea. However, given Theagenes’s Greek nationality and the prevailing

Renaissance conception of masculine virtue, a Renaissance playwright would most likely

have highlighted the hero’s valor and virtue in a play about the prince and lost princess

together, as Pignatelli does in his play. Chances are that Theagenes would have slain

many brigands, protected Charicleia from marauding and rapacious males, resisted the

allure of the Persian palace (including its voluptuous princess) as in Pignatelli and

Brülow, and eventually arrived in Meroe, where Charicleia’s identity would have been

revealed and preparations made for their (imminent) marriage, as seen in all of the six

Continental and two later extant English plays.

Unlike the titles of the three lost English plays and the six extant Continental

ones, the titles of another four extant plays that drew on the Aethiopica do not indicate

their source. While Greene’s Orlando Furioso (printed in1594) derives directly from

Ariosto’s epic of the same name, which in itself shows the influence of Heliodorus’s

novel, it, like the Thracian Wonder,34 borrows only one specific idea from Heliodorus’s

text: the transracial and cross-cultural romance between an African princess and her

European prince. The other two plays, The Strange Discovery and The White Ethiopian,

whose titles do not suggest that they are direct derivatives of the Aethiopica but are

indeed so, follow closely the plot and storyline of Heliodorus’s text. These four extant

34. I treat this play in chapter 2.

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texts demonstrate the popularity of the Aethiopica and also the development of a

theatrical tradition of plays drawn from this popular novel. Because Greene’s play is

derived directly from Ariosto’s poem and not from Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, I want to

look at Ariosto’s poem before examining Greene’s play.

Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso35 centers on the conflict between Charlemagne, the

Holy Roman Emperor, and the kings of North Africa and Spain, Agramante and Marsillo.

Agramante’s defeat and death end the conflict, and King Marsilio returns home.

Ariosto’s epic has three main stories, each interconnected and overlapping: the wars of

Charlemagne and the invading Moors; Orlando’s unrequited love for Angelica, which

drives him insane; and the love between the pagan warrior Ruggiero and the Christian

warrior Bradamante. My concern is with the Orlando-Angelica story. The tension

between Orlando and Rinaldo over Angelica prompts Charlemagne to place her in the

custody of the Duke of Bavarie, promising her as a prize to the lover who kills the most

Saracens. Angelica flees into the forest, where she eventually encounters Rinaldo,

Sacripant, Orlando, and other knights who battle one another for her favor. Ariosto, like

Heliodorus, weaves magic into his tale, for Angelica, like Charicleia, possesses a

talisman, a ring that protects and makes her invisible whenever she places it in her mouth.

Though loved by many, Angelica loves only Medor, a shattering moment for Orlando

when he stumbles into a cave and discovers the inscription “ . . . fair Angelica, born of

Galafron, and loved in vain by many, often lay naked in my arms” (C.23, p.279).

Orlando becomes insane, careens around the world destroying everything in his way until

35. References to the work of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso are to the text translated by Guido Waldman
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974).
 63

he recovers his wits, losing his passion for Angelica. Meanwhile with typical Ariostan

irony, she and Medor sail to India.

Several episodes of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso recall Heliodorus’s Aethiopica.

As Heliodorus does with Charicleia, Ariosto makes Angelica desireable to each man

whom she encounters. Although Charicleia’s ring Pantarbe lacks the power to confer

invisibility on her, it, like Angelica’s magic ring, protects her from harm, as evidenced at

her trial in Memphis where the flames flee from her. The cave scene, though thoroughly

reworked here, still evokes that of the Aethiopica because of its secret location and dual

associations--to Charicleia and Theagenes, the cave proves fortunate, as it does to

Angelica and Medor, but unfortunate to Thisbe and Orlando. The cross-cultural and

transracial romance between Angelica and Medor reflects another Heliodoran influence,

despite Ariosto’s reversal of the relationship between race and gender in his epic. As the

African Charicleia loves and prepares to marry Theagenes, so does the “golden-haired,

pink-cheeked” Angelica with the African Medor, who becomes king of the East because

of her.

Greene’s play reflects the full influence of Ariosto, with each scene having its
36
correlative in the epic, though modified and augmented with Heliodoran material.

Greene’s transracial romance has Heliodoran colorings. Greene’s Angelica is the

daughter of an African king who is betrothed to a European prince, not an Asian princess

who is the daughter of the emperor of the East marrying a simple African soldier, as in

Ariosto. A composite of Charicleia and her namesake in Ariosto, Greene’s Angelica is

36. See Tesumaro Hayashi’s A Textual Study of Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso, with an Elizabethan
Text (Muncie: Ball State University, 1973); Charles W. Lemmi’s “The Source of Greene’s Orlando
Furioso” MLN, 31 (1916), 440-41, for detailed and comprehensive comparisons between Greene and his
source.
 64

the daughter of Marsillus. Her beauty attracts suitors from around the world, including

the French Peer Orlando. With her father’s permission, she selects Orlando as her

prospective mate, which ignites jealousy among the other contenders because Orlando, in

comparison to the other suitors, is much lower on the socio-economic ladder: a banished

peer and the only suitor without a kingdom. As a result, war ensues between the

followers of Orlando and Marsillus and those of the rejected suitors. By hanging love

poems about Angelica under the trees of the grove, Sacripant suggests Angelica’s

unfaithfulness, thereby undermining Orlando and Angelica’s love, precipitating

Orlando’s madness, and causing Marsillus to banish his own daughter. The other French

peers arrive in Africa, seeking vengeance on Angelica, to which her father consents by

disowning her because he, too, believes she is inconstant and responsible for Orlando’s

insanity. Instead of a peer curing Orlando as in Ariosto’s epic, in Greene’s play a witch

cures him,37 and he learns the truth about Angelica and pursues his enemies, killing two

kings, freeing Angelica from the peers, and awaiting the wedding before returning to

France.

Greene follows the Heliodorian tradition of making his African king a model of

sagacity and justice. When Marsillus’s enemy, Mandrecard, disguises himself as a

common soldier and asks to be pardoned, Marsillus grants the request but enjoins the

soldier “never to tell Mandrecard / Nor any fellow soldier . . .” about the pardon.

Marsillus’s graciousness strikes Mandrecard to the core, and he resolves not to war

against such an honorable man (1.3. E). Mandrecard realizes that Marsillus’s nobility

37. This is another echo from the Aethiopica: the old witch raises her son from the dead, who predicts the
happy union of Charicleia and Theagenes in Ethiopia (Bk. 6, pp.156-58).
 65

extends to common soldiers as well, and though he prefers peace to war, yet he, like King

Hydaspes, is resolute and just in war.

Like the titles of the three lost English plays and their title characters, the

characters, plot, and storyline of The Strange Discovery and The White Ethiopian are

taken from the Aethiopica, providing additional evidence of English Renaissance

playwrights’ indebtedness to the Greek novel, the connection between the plays and the

novel, and a positive theatrical representation of Blacks on the early modern stage that

derived from the Aethiopica.38 While The White Ethiopian ends with the protagonists in

the palace dungeon at Memphis but with hopes of going to Meroe, The Strange

Discovery ends as the novel does: Charicleia’s identity is revealed. Theagenes is saved

from the sacrificial pyre, and preparations are made for his and Charicleia’s marriage.

In the scene that foretells Charicleia and Theagenes’s journey from Delphi to

Ethiopia, both plays show their affinity to Helidorus’s text. In Act II, scene iv of The

Strange Discovery, Caricles asks Apollo to accept the Thessalians’ sacrifice, and shortly

thereafter the oracle foretells Theagenes and Cariclea’s destiny:

Ye men of Delphos sing of her

and her rare beauties praise,

Who now in grace Ye begin to grow,

but fame shall end her daies,

Who leaving these my temples here

and sailing surging streames

38. The White Ethiopian uses Underdowne’s translation of the Aethiopica as its immediate source,
according to Moses Hadas and Duncan Matthews. Although Charicleia is born with white skin, she is a
Negro. The text makes this clear in a few ways, including Persinna’s description of birthing a white baby,
which focuses on the child’s complexion: “when I brought you to birth I found you white, a complexion
alien to the native Ethiopian tint” (Bk 4. p. 94). I discuss these in depth in chapter 2.
 66

Shall come at length to countrie scorch’d

with Phoebus burning beames,

Where they are recompenses due

that vertue rare doe gaine

In time to come ere it be long

White miters shall obtain.

Similarly, in Act II, scene 1 of The White Ethiopian, Charicles recalls the Oracle’s

pronouncement:

Glory shutts up that name for whome

The favour is begun at home

Offspringe of the Delphian race

Leaving my Temple and this place

Goe to the Zone where downright rayses

Make the earth smoake by parching dayes

Rewards of virtues shall be found

White garlands on the blacker ground (13-20)

In Book 2 of Underdowne’s version of Warschewiczki’s translation of the Aethiopica,

when “the young man beganne to do the Sacrifice, having leave firste of the priests,

Pythia saide thus”:

Ye men of Delphi sing of her,

and Goddes offspring praise:

Who now in grace beginnes to growe,

but fame shall ende her dayes.

 67

Who leaving these my temples here,

and passing surging streames

Shall come at length to countrie scortchte

with Phoebus blasing beames,

Where they as recompences due,

that vertues rare do gaine.

In time to come ere it be long

white Miters shall obtaine (76).

[And in Warschewiczki’s Latin translation: Cum itaque ingressus Deum venerarer, &

quiddam etiam apud me optarem, respondit hæc Pythia--

Fertilis a regione ferens vestigia Nili,

Fortia Parum stamina spontè fugis.

Durato, Aegypti quoniam nigricantia tradem

Arva tibi cito, nunc noster amicus eris (45).]

While the lines from The White Ethiopian are less specific in their reference to the

protagonists’ destiny, all three works contain the same message: someone from Delphi

will travel to a distant place where (s)he will be rewarded. The verbal parallels, sound,

and sense between The Strange Discovery and Underdowne’s translation of the

Aethiopica are striking, making clear the play’s indebtedness to the Greek novel: some

lines are verbatim and near-verbatim (e.g., ll. 3 & 5, 1& 3); both passages call upon the

Delphians to laud Charicleia, talk of leaving “my temples,” evoke the sound of ships

(“sailing surging streames”), and anticipate the heroine and hero’s accession in a distant
 68

land of the sun, where they will obtain a “white” crown. Perhaps Gogh also used

Underdowne as source for his play.

Central to my thesis of a Renaissance dramatic tradition based on Heliodorus’s

novel is the connection that The Strange Discovery and The White Ethiopian have with

the Aethiopica, especially the main passage explaining Charicleia’s birth and lineage. In

Warschewiczki’s translation of the Aethiopica, Persinna recounts her conception and the

birth of Charicleia:

Nobis maiores ex dijs quidẽ sunt, Sol & Bacchus, Porrò ex

numero Perseus & Andromeda, & Memnõ post hos. Hi igitur

qui regia domicilia successu temporis extruxerunt, picturis

ea, sumpis ab illorum rebus gestis, exornarunt. Acaliorum

quidem imagines & res gestas in habaticulis uirorum &

porticibus depinxerunt: thalamus autem Andromedæ

Perseicβ amoribus uariarunt. Ibi aliquado nos, decimo iam

elapse anno, postquam me Hydaspes uxorem cognouit, necdum

essent nobis li beri sub meridiem quiescere contigit, somno æstiuo

compellente. Tum quocβ mecum rem habuit lpater tuus, somnium

illi hoc præcipere iurans: & sensi me continuo grauidam esse.

Tempus igitur usсβ ad partũ, festum publicũ erat, & sacrificia

gratiarumactionis ergò dijs siebant, tanquam rege sperante

successorem generis. Post quam autem te albam peperi, inusitatum

Æthiopibus colorem referentē, ego quidē causam cognoscebã, quòd

cum aspectui, in consuetudine cũ uiro, picture Andromedam

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obtulisset, & undiquacβ ostendisset nudam, (tum primùm enim

eã Perseus ex rupibus deducebat) simile illi in pręsentia insœ-

liciter formasset (72).

And in Underdowne’s translations of Warschewiczki’s text, Persinna tells the same tale:

The greatest of all our Goddes, are the Sunne, and Bacchus: The noblest

nexte to these, are Persues, Andromeda, and Memnon after them. Those,

who have by succession edified, and finished the Kinges palace, have

portraited there many things that they did, as for the dwelling houses, and

Galleries, they have set diverse Images, and noble acts of theirs in them:

but all the bedde chambers are garnished with pictures, containinge the

love of Perseus, and Andromeda. After Hidaspes had bene married to mee

tenne years . . . we happened to rest after dinner in the summer . . . at

which time your father had to do with mee, swearing that by a dreame hee

was commaunded to do so, and I by and by perceived my self with childe.

. . . But thou werte born white, which couler is strange amonge the

ethiopians. I knew the reason, because I looked upon the picture of

Andromeda naked, while my husband had to do with me (for then he first

brought her down from the rock, had by misshape ingendered presently a

thing like to her) . . . (Bk. 4, pp.107-8).

The Strange Discovery explains the same events, in words that echo the source:

. . . we happened one time to rest us after dinner in a gallerie where hung

rare pictures and images, amongst which were those of Perseus and

Andromeda portrayed as when he first redeemed her from the rocke. At

 70

this time your father lay with me swearing that by a dream he was

commanded so to doe, and I by and by perceive my selfe to be with child:

but thou wert borne white which color is strange among the Aethiopians.

I knew the reasons, because I looked stedfastlie upon the picture of

Andromeda naked, and by that meanes conceived a thing like to her

(IV.i.H3).39

And The White Ethiopian tells her story, again in words echoing the source:

the Kinge was warned so that on a day

when in a summer roome I one time lay

I did obtain what I could ne’re before

that made my belly greate . . .

........................ ....

but when I was delivered finding thee white

which might me for the worst of crimes indite

although occasioned by looking on

Andromedas picture at my conception (II.i.595-604).

Although some of Gough’s alterations—“the sunne being author of our stocke,” for

example—reflect Renaissance cultural assumptions about climatic explanation for

blackness, the parallels between his and the translations of Heliodorus’s passage are

unmistakable: the conception occurs in a room decorated with pictures of Perseus and

Andromeda, whom Perseus rescues and marries; Persinna looks at the unclothed form of

Andromeda and immediately perceives that she herself is pregnant. Although The White

Ethiopian lacks such details, it maintains the thrust of the passage: some supernatural

34. .Passage is italicized in the text.

 71

force compels the king to consort with the queen, who gazes at Andromeda’s picture

during the sexual act, which results in her giving birth to a white-looking child.

Gough and the anonymous playwright make little or no use of the story of King

Hydaspes’s military exploits. While The White Ethiopian disregards that story, The

Strange Discovery ignores the details of the combat between the Ethiopian and Persian

armies but gives the outcome. Ignoring or passing over the military story detracts from

the full development of the Ethiopian characters and, consequently, from the bravery of

the Ethiopian soldiers and the overall sagacity and sophistication of King Hydaspes,

whose victory over the Persians testifies to his military genius, and his pardon and

restoration of their possessions evidence his nobility and wisdom. Hydaspes’s military

activities show his mathematical and strategic mind at work: his calculations of the

required number of trenches, their depth, and water capacity in order for the water to

function as a battering ram to destroy the walls of Syene; and his forcing Oroondates into

an envelopment maneuver with the sea at his back and the Ethiopian forces at his front.

However, by making Hydaspes and his soldiers victorious over the Persians, Gough

maintains the military prowess Heliodorus ascribes to black Africans.

Gough also uses the convocation between the Ethiopian, Egyptian, and Greek

priests in Athens as a way to portray black Africans positively. At their first and

subsequent meetings, the Ethiopian Sisymethres and the Greek Caricles are equals and

accord each other mutual respect. Like Heliodorus, Gough deepens this consanguinity

and mutuality through the Egyptian Calisiris at the congress at Delphi: dignitaries of the

priesthood of Delphi, including the Chief Priest Caricles, accept the Egyptian priest on

equal terms, deferring to his opinion. The Greeks believed in the piety and power of the
 72

Meriotic and Egyptian priesthood, reflected in ancient literatures and histories. Puzzled

by Cariclea’s behavior, Caricles seeks and follows Calisiris’s counsel, imploring him not

to “Suffer the maid to perish, nor her / Father frustrate of his purpose” (3.7.H). The love

between Theagenes and Cariclea is another instance of such equality and reciprocity, for

it is no coincidence that a direct descendant of Achilles and the offspring of an African

queen and king are enchanted with each other. Besides their beauty, both are of equally

noble stock. Their pairing is designed to show Ethiopians as the equals of the Greeks and

by extension of the European World, a realization of considerable weight when one

considers that Theagenes has never desired or wanted the love of any woman previously.

Although Gough and the author of The White Ethiopian make a few changes to

the story,40 only two of Gough’s changes are important to this study because of their

dramatic and cultural weight: Cariclea’s blondness and Sisymethres’s blackness. The

princess’s coloring serves two dramatic purposes: aligning her more closely to the Greek

and Renaissance ideal of female beauty and underscoring her virtue. Homer and the

Greeks pictured Aphrodite with streaming golden mane rising out of the waters off the

shores of Cyprus. The Romans also pictured Venus with long blond hair.41 As the ideal

beauty, Aphrodite/Venus was blond, and she eventually became associated with the

Virgin Mary, who was also, if improbably, pictured as blond. Blondness came to

40. Besides the slight variations in the names and the avoidance of the in-media-res beginning, Gough, as
Matthew Duncan also notes, chooses a chronological structure, starting the story almost at the very
beginning when Sisymethres meets Caricles in Egypt and recasting the story of Cnemon as another plot.
The story of Cnemon is not really a recasting, for in the Aethiopica it is an important minor plot, used as a
foil to the major one. The major change of The White Ethiopian is that it ends in Persia with the

The White Ethiopian uses the in-medias-res beginning, which robs the work of dramatic elements and
makes the play almost a dramatic monologue, interspersed with dialogue.
41. See The Hesiod and The Homeric Hymns,VI & X, The Loeb Classical Library, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-
White (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1938), ll. 185-200, ll.1-18 & ll.1-6. The Roman goddess Venus is an
appropriation of the Greek goddess Aphrodite and shares many of her characteristics.
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represent purity in antiquity, fostered especially by Roman armies who carried their

blond captives to Rome as slaves.42 Botticelli and Raphael painted Venus with blond

hair. In England, Queen Elizabeth, despite her scarlet-colored mane, appropriated the

blond icon to represent her virginity, and English poets and painters portrayed her that

way. Around 1600, Nicholas Hilliard painted Queen Elizabeth, forty-two years after her

accession, with long blond hair.43 The correlation of blondness to beauty and purity was

firmly established.

None of the six European playwrights makes Sisimithres’s complexion a concern.

However, such is not the case with Gough. His second important change to the

Heliodoran story, which opens The Strange Discovery, calls attention to Sisymethres’s

blackness. Caricles’s manservant, Nebulo, tells him that “A very sweet fac’d Gentleman

so sooty as the Divell himself, / I believe some Embassador sent from Pluto and the

fiend” is at the door (I.i). Nebulo’s statement reflects and departs from early modern

cultural assumptions of the demonic and blackness: Nebulo’s description of a black face

as “very sweet” is not typical, for the English Renaissance generally associates blackness

with ugliness and evil. Sisymethres’s “very sweet” face is reminiscent of “the Divell,

Pluto, and the fiend,” which is part of the cultural imperative to delineate and singularize

blackness negatively.

The negative valence that this playwright attributes to Sisymethres’s blackness is

absent from Greene, the six European playwrights, and the anonymous author of The

White Ethiopian. In Orlando Furioso, the African Marsillus is largely admirable and

42. In Titus Andronicus, the ultra blond queen of the Goths, Tamara, and her sons are taken to Rome as
captives. Saturninus, inflamed by his passion for her, renounces the dark-haired Lavina for the fair-haired
Tamara (1.i.260-337). Although Tamara is anything but pure, Saturninus and the public perceive her as
such because she is blond, reinforcing the discrepancy between actuality and representationality.
43. Alan Riding, “Blond Power: Its Siren Call,” The New York Times 8 March, 2003.
 74

resolute, despite Tetsumaro Hayashi’s comment that Marsillus “may represent justice, but

there is neither mercy nor the milk of human kindness in him.”44 Marsillus abides by and

defends his daughter’s choice of a husband and shows kindness and mercy to a

“common” soldier. Each derivative play follows the Heliodoran model, mentioning

blackness only when it is essential and only positively.

Because all of the extant plays that derive or borrow material from the Aethiopica

share similar characteristics about the Mediterranean, the major protagonists, and

Africans, a convention associated with these works emerges. The hero and heroine travel

across the multicultural Mediterranean. At least one of them is of royal blood, and they

are of different racial and cultural background: the female is African, and the male is

western European, who forsakes his country for that of his beloved. The Ethiopians and

Egyptians are admired. While there were many plays on the English stage that drew on

various prejudices in their depictions of Africans, in this Heliodoran line of continental

and English plays, playwrights represented black Africans without prejudice and with

dignity.

II.

The Aethiopica as Source for Popular English Renaissance Plays

The widespread influence of the Aethiopica on the Elizabethan stage prompted

Stephen Gosson to declare “that the Palace of Pleasure, the Golden Ass, the Aethiopian

History . . . have been throughly ransackt, to furnish the Playe houses in London” with

material.45 Besides showing Gosson’s own attitude, the violence of “throughly ransackt”

44. See A Textual Study of Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso, 9.

45. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in five actions (New York: Garland Pub., 1972), 28.
 75

suggests the thorough manner with which Elizabethan dramatists examined each idea,

scrutinized each page, probed each Greek text from cover to cover to cull materials for

the stage. Because the Aethiopica and other Greek novels were commonplace among the

literati, Renaissance playwrights could have borrowed stories about disguises,

shipwrecks, wanderings, chastity, female abandonment and courage from other sources

and not necessarily from the Aethiopica itself, especially since Latin and vernacular

translations of those other texts were available, as Matthew Duncan and others also point

out. However, as I have tried to show earlier, those themes became integral to

Renaissance literature because of the Aethiopica. Building upon the previously discussed

themes of exposure, chastity, female wit and courage, and male wandering, I argue in this

section for the Aethiopica as a source of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610/11),

Antony and Cleopatra (1606/7), and Heywood’s The Fair Maide of the West, Part 1

(1591).

Heliodorus’s Aethiopica and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe are the only Greek

novels that use the motif of abandoning newborn babies to the elements of nature (i.e.,

exposure).46 Since Heliodorus predates Longus and only the Aethiopica concludes with a

focus not simply on the theme of return and reunion but more deeply on return and

recognition47 and provides written evidence of the abandoned baby princess’s lineage, the

conclusion that the Aethiopica is one of the direct sources of the The Winter’s Tale is

almost inescapable. While Duncan notes the “plot parallel between The Winter’s Tale

and the Aethiopica,” he concludes that this “is certainly interesting and suggestive, but

46. Gesner believes that the exposure “was suggested in Apollonius of Tyre when the infant Tharisa was
left with unloving foster parents to be reared” (9). However, she was not exposed, i.e., swaddled and
abandoned to the elements without anyone to care for her as a result of a parent’s anxiety about infidelity.
47. Morgan, “Helidorus,” 440.
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the fact that Heliodorus had become commonplace makes it impossible to argue strongly

for them” (xxv). Many Renaissance scholars, including Bullough, believe that Pandosto

is the main source of The Winter’s Tale;48 they do not see the Aethiopica’s influence in

the play and on Greene, who, according to Samuel L.Wolff, “is full of matter from” the

Aethiopica. Wolff notes that “amid Greene’s variety of sources, it would be rather

strange if he had not drawn upon Greek Romances,” and points out that Pandosto

exhibits “the greatest fullness of influence of the Greek Romance upon Greene” and

“[that] it was the destiny of one of Greene’s Heliodorean plots . . . to be caught up by

Shakespeare, and translated.”49 Gerald Sandy cites Wolff’s catalogue of major

Elizabethan writers on whom the Heliodoran influence is evident, which also shows the

“urgent ransacking” of the Aethiopica.50 Gesner’s observation regarding the Aethiopica

and The Winter’s Tale is especially important: “On first reading, the exposure of Perdita

and the pastoral fourth act suggest Longus as the major Hellenistic influence. Reflection,

however, leads inevitably to recognition of Heliodorus as the central romance inspiration

. . .” (117). The inevitability of this conclusion stems from the baby’s royal status, her

exposure and the reason for it, the identifying script, and the theme of return and

recognition.

Duncan is equally cautious in positing Heliodorus as a source for Thomas

Heywood. Citing Heywood’s Four Prentices of London and Shakespeare’s Two

Gentlemen of Verona as plays with the Heliodoran theme of the noble thief, Duncan

notes that from the point when Heywood’s noble thief falls in love with a beautiful

48. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. V (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1966), 215-449.
49. Wolff, 375-76, 408.
50. Sandy, 765.
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“damsel who comes within his power,” the play’s indebtedness “to Heliodorus is more

than in Shakespeare.” Yet he concludes that it is tempting “to posit Heliodorus as the

common source and so escape the pitfalls of Shakesperian scholarship, but, unfortunately,

these are elements common to Heywood’s and Shakespeare’s treatment of this which

cannot be explained by reference to the Aethiopica” (xxvii). Although brigands and

pirates are staples of the Greek novel, Heliodorus’s Thyamis is the original pirate in

literature to claim that he has “never outraged” women and “those of good birth [he]

released for ransom or simply because [he] pitied their lot” (Bk.1. p. 21); this

magnanimity both Heywood and Shakespeare appropriate for their noble thieves.

Thyamis can claim never to have violated women or the military code of conduct

associated with captives of noble birth because he is a former high priest turned pirate

captain, and though he has changed occupations, his sense of justice and morality has not

deserted him. Thematic correlations, allusions, Gosson’s comments that Heliodorus and

other Greek writers have been ransacked to furnish material for the stage, and the

arguments of scholars like Wolff, Gesner, and Sandy, suggest the probability that

Shakespeare, Heywood, and other early modern English dramatists borrowed directly

(and indirectly) from Heliodorus. Even if one were to concur with Bullough and Duncan

that Shakespeare borrowed mainly from Greene, the argument would still stand that the

Aethiopica is ultimately one of the main sources of The Winter’s Tale: it is the source of

the source.

The abandoning to the elements of newborn babies with personal paraphernalia

because of some sexually deep-rooted fear on the part of a parent is one of the themes

that the Aethiopica gave to the English Renaissance stage. The Winter’s Tale depicts
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female abandonment in the direct stage tradition of the Aethiopica: the exposure of a

baby princess because of a parent’s anxiety over infidelity. Leontes’s jealousy threatens

his kingdom, marriage, and boyhood friendship with Polixenes, and his fear of raising

another’s issue prompts him to order the child’s death. Instead, the courtier Antigonus

exposes the baby in the forest of Bohemia, where a shepherd finds and raises it as his

own. Perdita matures, falls in love with a prince, and elopes to Sicilia, unwittingly

returning to her homeland to continue the succession and dynastic line.

The exposure motif, the theme of parents acknowledging their offspring and

reuniting with her, and the security and continuation of the dynasty through a female

successor to the throne link The Winter’s Tale to the Aethiopica. Both baby princesses

are exposed with written evidence and personal possessions that reveal their royal

heritage, including precious gems. With fewer and less costly personal effects than

Charicleia’s, Perdita’s possessions include a scroll and a bundle containing gold and

other possessions. Both children, whose destiny the Oracles foretold, are raised by

shepherds, but Charicleia is later removed from her shepherd’s care and given to a priest.

Although the lack of an heir is not as salient a concern in Ethiopia as in Sicilia, the return

of the princesses, precipitated by their elopement, fulfills the Oracle and ensures their

nations’ stability and security by establishing the line of succession. Their elopement, a

consequence of blocking fathers--Polixenes objects to his son’s choice and Charicles, for

all intents and purpose, to his adopted daughter’s--ironically returns them home, where

both sets of parents acknowledge their daughters for the first time. Overjoyed, Persinna

remembers and reclaims her daughter, and a stunned Hydaspes realizes for the first time

that he is a father, that Charicleia is his daughter, whom he accepts as his own flesh and
 79

blood. Like Heliodorus, Shakespeare combines the theme of return and recognition with

that of separation and reunion. In a transfiguring moment, Hermione, Leontes, and

Perdita behold one another again for the first time in sixteen years. Past wrongs are

forgiven and future joys embraced. Perdita pays homage to her mother, who forgives

Leontes and honors the gods for protecting her daughter. Leontes reconciles with

Polixenes, who accepts Perdita—following the model of Charicles and Charicleia

whereby the former accepts the latter’s fiancé. The return of both princesses saves a

dynasty and in Perdita’s case unifies a fragmented family.

As perhaps the most frequent borrower of Heliodorus’s material, Shakespeare

alludes to the Aethiopica in Twelfth Night.51 His indebtedness can also be traced to

Othello (treated fully in chapter 3) and Antony and Cleopatra. Based largely on

Plutarch’s historical account of “The Life of Marcus Antonius,”52 Antony and Cleopatra

concerns the politics of empire building and the historical and legendary namesakes

whose love undermines that goal and leads to their destruction. Despite its historicity,

Antony and Cleopatra also features themes associated with the Aethiopica: a wandering

and displaced male plus the Mediterranean story with its romance between a quick-witted

and resourceful black53 African woman of noble blood and a white Western man also

nobly descended. In describing Antony’s military exploits, Plutarch tells of his

wanderings and love for Cleopatra: “the last and extreamest mischief of all other (to wit,

the love of Cleopatra) lighted on him, who did waken and stirre up many vices yet hidden

in him

51. See TN (V.i.121-124).

52. See Plutarch’s Lives, The Life of Marcus Antonius, Vol. IX, The Loeb Classical Library, trans.
Bernadotte Perrin (London: William Heinemann, 1968), 139-341(II. I-5-LXXXVIII. 3-4); Bullough,
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare,Vol. V, 254-318, esp., 273; Shakespeare’s Plutarch, The
Life of Marcus Antonius, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (London: Penguin Books, 1964), 174-295.
53. I deal with the dispute surrounding this claim later.
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. . . and if any sparkle of goodnesse or hope of rising were left in him, Cleopatra

quenched it straight, and made it worse then before” (273). The words “τελευταΐον

κακόν” appear in Plutarch’s own text. According to Liddle & Scott, the authoritative

Greek dictionary, τελευταΐον--neuter form of an adjective, modifying κακόν—means (1)

“at the end, last”; (2) “the last, worst, extreme.” κακόν - substantive (a word or word

group functioning syntactically as a noun) formed from the adjective kakός,--means "bad,

ill, evil." Liddle & Scott defines the substantive as follows: (1) “evil, ill, mischief”; also

“woe, distress, loss”; bodily ill, injury; (2) in the moral sense, “evil, vice, wickedness.”

The overall sense of the passage is hostility to and blame of Cleopatra for Antony’s fall,

conveyed through sentiments such as “waken and stirre up many vices” and “extreamest

mischief.”54 Throughout his descriptions of her, Plutarch makes no mention of

Cleopatra’s race or color. Shakespeare, however, does (as we shall see below),

combining the historic with the histrionic. This composite Cleopatra is partly rooted in

historical fact (i.e., Plutarch) and, I want to suggest, partly rooted in fiction (i.e.,

Heliodoran fiction, given the Mediterranean story with its transracial romance).

As a Mediterranean adventure play with an intrepid heroine and a wandering

hero, Antony and Cleopatra participates in the stage tradition derived from the

Aethiopica. In both the Aethiopica and Antony and Cleopatra, the male protagonists are

western, white men who consort with African women of royal blood and face political

repercussions. Despite the many similarities in the themes and motifs of both works, the

relationship between the Aethiopica and Antony and Cleopatra is not a one-to-one

54. Some translators render the Greek text as “mischief,” “crowning mischief,” “crowning evil,” or
“bewitched.” See, for example, Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. V, 273;
Plutarch’s Lives, The Life of Marcus Antonius, Vol. IX, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, 191(XXIV. 6- XXV. 2);
Plutarch--Eight Great Lives, Antony, trans. John Dryden, revised by Arthur Hugh Clough (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1960), 320, l. 25.
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correspondence given the play’s various sources and its historical determinations.

Nonetheless, there are moments and details unaccounted for in the other sources (for

example, Cleopatra’s ethnicity and race, as we shall see later) that can be traced to or

found in the Aethiopica. Like all major male characters in the Heliodoran adventure

tradition, Marc Antony crosses great geographical spaces. Both he and Theagenes move

intentionally and reactively from place to place. Theagenes’s move from Thessaly to

Athens is, like Antony’s first move from Rome to Egypt, purposeful: fulfilling political

and social obligations. In Athens, Theagenes is a part of the Thessalian delegation that

arrives in Athens to participate in the Pythian games and to consecrate as well as

celebrate the festival of Neoptolemus in the temple of Apollo (Bks 2 & 3, pp. 64-72). His

subsequent move from Athens to Meroe, delayed frequently by war and the vicissitudes

of fortune, is less political and more social, satisfying his romantic desires while obeying

the dictates of the gods. Antony’s travel through the Alps, Ephesus, Macedonia, and

Cilicia is politically intentional as well as historically determined. However, his first

excursion into Cleopatra’s Egypt was, according to Plutarch, romantically motivated:

. . . Antonius was so ravished with the love of Cleopatra, that though his wife

Fulvia had great warres, and much a doe with Caesar for his affaires, and that the

armie of the Pathians . . . was now assembled in Mesopotamia readie to invade

Syria: yet, as though all this had nothing touched him, he yielded him selfe to goe

with Cleopatra into Alexandria, where he spent and lost in childish sports . . . and

idle pastimes, the most pretious thing a man can spende . . . time.55

55. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. V, 275. See, also, Perrin’s translation
for The Loeb Classical Library of “The Life of Marcus Antonius,” XXVII. 2- XXVIII. 2 (p. 197).
 82

Mesmerized by Cleopatra, Antony whiled away his time in Egypt. In using this episode,

Shakespeare allows Antony to lose himself “in dotage,” but eventually to break his

“strong Egyptian fetters” (I.i.116), and return to Rome, where he accepts, if only

temporarily, a life of domesticity and politics. Shortly thereafter, he rushes back to

Egypt, driven by amorous desires.

Constantly moving between Egypt and Rome, Antony realizes that straddling

both countries is untenable, for he finds himself splintering: “I am Antony, / Yet cannot

hold this visible shape” (IV.xiv.13-14). Antony cannot hold his shape, i.e. be himself,

because, as Linda Charnes points out, “he is at once re-placed and dis-placed. He cannot

properly be Egyptian, nor can he continue to meet the requirements of being properly

‘Roman’ in all its implications. . . . Belonging fully in neither [world] yet being pulled by

both, he becomes incapable of rooting himself in a position that would enable him to

launch an effective strategy of his own.”56 Antony’s dis-placement from Rome and re-

placement in Egypt help to explain his decision to fight at sea: left with no place of his

own, he claims one, which is as shifting and insubstantial as the no-man’s land where he

finds himself, as Charnes also remarks. Antony’s inability to return “fully to his one

self,” i.e., to become exclusively Roman once again in order to re-occupy “the unified,

integral identity that Rome provided for him” results from his love for and loyalty to

Cleopatra: a loyalty that splits his responsibilities and duties to Rome, thus giving him

what Charnes calls “two sets of coordinates, two places which now claim different

Antonys.”57 Implicit in Charnes’s analysis is the recognition that Octavius is able to

56.See Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 113
&115.
57. Ibid, 114.
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represent his conflict with Antony as war with Egypt because of Antony’s love for

Cleopatra and frequent absence from Rome.

The fracturing of Antony’s unified self and his divided loyalties are also part of

the Heliodoran tradition. Despite its historical record, if Antony and Cleopatra, with its

geographical spread, multiculturalism, and Mediterranean story with its transracial and

cross-cultural romance is viewed in the Heliodoran adventure tradition, then except for

chastity, Antony’s wandering, displacement, and lack of belonging to one place or

another is characteristic of the male protagonists of this tradition. Both Charicleia and

Theagenes journey across the Mediterranean world, from Greece, to Egypt, and finally to

Ethiopia, as do their namesakes in the six Continental plays, illustrating the geographic

instability that characterizes protagonists in this kind of drama.

As the male protagonist in the Aethiopica and dramas of similar derivation,

Theagenes and his namesakes experience displacement that Charicleia and her namesakes

do not, for the women eventually return to their homeland, but the men do not.

Theagenes’s habitation in Ethiopia and initiation into the gymnosophist priesthood signal

a complete re-placing and dis-placing of himself. Theagenes the Thessalian no longer

exists. The Ethiopian rites, rituals, and domicile that now define him have re-placed and

dis-placed him. When the Tyrian merchant who desires to be Charicleia’s husband tells

Calisiris to “Say no more of that, father. . . . As for race and country, I shall accept

yours,” one hears not only the merchant but Theagenes as well, for all his actions are

circumscribed in this man’s words (Bk.5. p.125). Antony’s proclamation that Egypt is

his space (1.i.34) resonates with this pronouncement. As Theagenes is not fully Greek or

Ethiopian, neither is Antony fully Roman nor Egyptian, as indicated by Theagenes’s

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imminent accession to the Ethiopian throne and Antony’s war with Octavius. Both

Theagenes and Antony have relinquished all for love;58 however, the intensity which

accompanies Antony’s self-splintering has deeper political complications and more far-

reaching consequences than Theagenes’s because Ethiopia and Thessaly do not have

competing political strategies as do Egypt and Rome, with each nation exerting opposing

claims on Antony. Ethiopia, unlike Rome, is not historically predetermined as nation

embarked upon world domination, and Thessaly, unlike Egypt, is not engaged in a

struggle to preserve its sovereignty or to resist becoming another territory of the empire-

building nation of Rome. Unlike Theagenes, Antony’s divided loyalties ultimately

results in his and Cleopatra’s death, making Octavius the undisputed ruler of the world,

and Egypt a Roman territory. In seeing Antony in the Heliodoran tradition, we can read

him as less capricious, less self-destructive in his desires and more as a character whose

struggles with love and loyalty ultimately lead him to his destiny. All of Antony’s self-

splintering can be seen as a part of his journey to “self-discovery”; his burial in Egypt

may indicate this discovery, reminding us that Egypt is indeed his space and where his

loyalty finally lies.

Of the popular English Renaissance plays under discussion, The Fair Maid of the

West, Part 159 demonstrates most effectively the Heliodoran tradition of a female who

values her honor and uses martial means to protect it. The play depicts a woman who

searches for her beloved, encounters numerous adventures, and finds and marries him,

before returning home. This is a large part of Charicleia’s story, though there are

58. The sentiment recalls the title of Dryden’s play, All for Love, based on Shakespeare’s Antony and
Cleopatra.
59. References to this play are to The Fair Maid of the West, Part 1: A Critical Edition, ed. Brownell
Saloman (Salzburg: Universitat Salzburg, 1975).
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variations in the details. But Bess also has similarities to Queen Elizabeth,60 despite

being more closely aligned to Charicleia. Although Bess’s exhortation to the crew

against the attack of the Spaniards has historical resonance to Queen Elizabeth’s in 1588

to the soldiers at Tilbury against the attacking Spanish Armada, the exhortation also has

its parallel in the Aethiopica: Charicleia cheers Theagenes in his fight against brigands,

who, like the attacking Spaniards, are ultimately defeated. Like her literary prototype’s,

Bess’s virtue is constantly under siege because of her beauty. Although chastity is a

standard theme in Greek novels, the Aethiopica and plays that derive from it give chastity

a new spiritual imperative. In the hieroglyphics, Persinna admonishes her daughter to be

chaste because chastity is a woman’s only virtue, which is the reason she herself

abandons her newborn.

The heroines of the six Continental plays value their chastity more than their

lives, voicing a preference for death rather than losing their purity. Heliodorus makes his

protagonists’ chastity a spiritual quest, which their wanderings help to refine and to

prepare them for the priesthood.61 Their wanderings also unfold another characteristic of

this stage tradition: women are as courageous as men and capable of defending their

honor. While other Greek heroines exhibit fearlessness, none of them, like Charicleia,

takes a martial role in protecting her virtue. Instead, these heroines talk or “shame” their

60. Besides the obvious similarities such as name and nationality to Queen Elizabeth, Bess also commands
and leads men. If we accept that a ship is a microcosm of a country or society, then just as Queen Elizabeth
rules England so Bess commands the Negro. As Jean E. Howard points out, Bess’s portrayal “owes much
to the representation of Queen Elizabeth . . . however, Bess is not simply a screen for Elizabeth. Her
depiction is much more complicated than a simple identification of a female subject with her monarch
would suggest.” For example, Bess has sailed the Mediterranean and is a martial maiden. There is no
record of the queen ever sailing the Mediterranean or engaging in martial combat. See “An English Lass
Amid the Moors: Gender, race, sexuality, and national identity in Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West,”
Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker
(London: Routledge, 1994), 107.
61. Despite their innocence, Daphnis and Chloe tried unsuccessfully to have sex, and, as Wolff points out,
Leucippe was quite prepared to surrender to Clitophon (129). For Heliodorus’s protagonists, virtue is a
spiritual drive.
 86

would-be attackers into repenting their lustful inclination, as Leucippe does with

Thersander. In Fair Maid, rather than “shame” her would-be ravishers into repentance

and trust their conscience to prick them to reform, Bess becomes a militant protectress of

her honor. In the duel between her and the braggart Roughman, Bess triumphs by

outsmarting him: dressed as a man, she meets him alone in a field; calls him “a villaine,

a Coward,” a liar, and strikes him; forces him to throw his sword down; to tie her shoe; to

untruss her point; and to lie on the ground so she can straddle him. Sparing Roughman’s

life, she warns him about the consequences of reverting to bullyism (II.iii.50-89).

The concern with female courage and Bess’s ability to protect and defend her

honor, her wit, along with male chastity and wandering indicates the indebtedness of The

Fair Maid of the West, Part 1, to the dramatic tradition derived from the Aethiopica. So

closely are Heliodorus’s novel and Heywood’s play related in themes that the Aethiopica

could have indeed been entitled The Fair Maide of the East. Surprisingly, Robert K.

Turner argues that “Heywood does not seem to have based any of the components of the

play on a specific source.” According to Turner, Heywood could have used an

“Elizabethan pamphlet, The Life and Pranks of Long Meg of Westminster (1590) . . . [or]

‘a play on Long Meg now lost but acted by the Admirals Men, Henslowe’s company,

from 1595.’”62 Besides the established fact that Heywood knew the Aethiopica and most

likely borrowed from it, Turner makes two critical observations that can allow for the

Aethiopica as one of Heywood’s sources: first, Heywood’s use of several sources and,

second, Long Meg’s “submissive devotion to the man of her choice” (xiii). Heywood’s

use of several sources would include rather than exclude the Aethiopica, given Bess’s

62. Heywood worked for Henslowe as a playwright from the late 1590s when his “name appears frequently
in Henslowe’s records until his death in 1641.” See The Fair Maid of the West, ed. Robert K. Turner
(Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), xiv & xv.
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purity and Heywood’s familiarity with Heliodorus’s novel. In noting the difference

between Bess and Long Meg, Turner himself remarks that Bess’s virtue “may be

superhuman” in comparison to the lack of Long Meg’s. Though devoted, Bess, unlike

Long Meg, is not submissive to the man of her choice, as several scenes suggest,

especially the scene in which Spencer tells her to remain aboard the ship, but she returns

to the palace to seek him. Additionally, neither the pamphlet nor the play about Long

Meg concerns itself with male virtue or, for that matter, female virtue. These differences,

I submit, have their origins in Heliodorus.

The Fair Maid stages female and male chastity along with female bravery through

the exploits of its protagonists, Bess and Spencer. Bess, a tanner’s daughter and the love

interest of Spencer, is renowned for her beauty and virtue. Spencer’s accidental killing of

a patron forces him to flee England and his rumored “death” prompts Bess to sail the

Mediterranean to recover his body. She reunites with him in Fesse, but King Mullisheg’s

sexual designs on her goad the queen into a similar desire for Spencer. However, the

sleights of the English crewmember, Goodlack and Roughman, aid both Bess and

Spencer to maintain their honor.

The Fair Maide delineates numerous attacks upon Bess’s virtue, but those

involving King Mullisheg are most conspicuous. Mullisheg is willing to release his

Christian prisoners and risk one-half of his kingdom if Bess will gratify his sexual

desires. On the night of her honeymoon, Mullisheg plans to deflower her but is

outmaneuvered by Goodlack and Roughman, who trick Tota instead into Mullisheg’s

bed. Both dramatic incidents recall the designs by Trachinus and the Tyrian merchant on

Charicleia. Each man is willing to undertake anything to have her, and both end up
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empty-handed because they are outmaneuvered. Both women keep their admirers at bay

by making them believe their own romantic projections: Charicleia allows Trachinus to

think she will marry him despite finding him repugnant, and Bess plays along with

Mullisheg despite a complete lack of romantic interest in him. Both women understand

that to escape their admirers’ tyranny they must improvise or playact.

The Fair Maid is not only concerned with the virtue of a woman but, in accord

with the Heliodoran model, with that of a man. Although Heywood does not equate male

and female chastity as Heliodorus does, he nonetheless makes Spencer constant. When

Tota decides to avenge herself because of Mullisheg’s infidelity, she settles on a sexual

encounter with Spencer, who is uninterested in the queen and ignorant of her design.

Although she solicits Goodlack and Roughman’s help, both men dupe her into thinking

that Spencer knows her intent. Spencer endures no torture to force him into a sexual

surrender because Roughman and Goodlack have outmaneuvered both the queen and the

king. Besides, Tota is not a nyphomaniac like Arsace, and Spencer is not being refined

for the priesthood. While there are mitigating circumstances, like his ignorance and the

bed-trick, that help Spencer maintain his virtue, such is not the case with Theagenes; his

unsullied virtue is an internal, moral commitment to purity. When Charicleia demands

that he vow not to violate her chastity, he resists pledging because he sees complying as

impugning his own virtue and consents only at Calasiris’s urging. Additionally, when

she urges him to enjoy Arsace’s bounty, he refuses even a taste despite severe

punishments.

In English Renaissance adventure plays, the main protagonist is almost always a

man. The Fair Maid is unusual because its main protagonist is a female who drives the
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dramatic action. With the exception of the play about Long Meg and some of those that

derive directly from Heliodorus’s novel, there is no precedent for a female protagonist

who drives the action in an early modern English adventure drama.63 Bess’s role as the

leading protagonist in an adventure drama is yet another indication of The Fair Maid’s

participation in the dramatic tradition derived from the Aethiopica. Like the female

protagonist in the Aethiopica, Le comedie de chastes amvors, and perhaps the three lost

English plays, Bess is as active as her male counterpart, defending herself from predators,

frequently finding solutions to her employees’ problems, and making decisions by which

they and her patrons abide.

Despite The Fair Maid’s departure in granting equal social status to its hero and

heroine, Heywood retains the Heliodoran tradition of making the heroine and hero equal

in other ways. Bess’s successful management of the tavern in Foy, her decision to buy

and outfit a ship to comb the Mediterranean in search of Spencer’s body, her resolve to

become a privateer, and her courage to challenge the braggart Roughman to a duel and to

outwit him illustrate David Konstan’s argument that “women are as intellectual,
64
resourceful, self-conscious, and intelligent as their sweethearts” in this tradition.

Disguised as a man aboard her ship, Bess participates in the battles by cheering her crew

to victory against the Spaniards and the Turks. Her action is that of a cockswain in a

boat-race spurring her teammates on to victory, which recalls the actions of Charicleia

63. Although there are several early modern plays with leading female protagonists--Sophonisba and
Soliman and Perseda, for example--none of these female protagonists drives the action of the plays, even
though that action frequently occurs because of them. Both Sophonisba and Perseda are acted upon more
than acting on. They suffer a concatenation of cruel circumstances: having experienced coitus interruptus
on her wedding night, Sophonisba is the Senate’s bait to prevent Syphax from attacking Tunis and the
object of his unbridled lust, just as Perseda is the target of Soliman’s lascivious yearnings and the catalyst
for his murdering her husband and besieging Rhodes. See John Marston, The Wonder of Women, or The
Tragedy of Sophonisba (New York: Garland, 1977), esp Acts 1 & 2; Thomas Kyd, Solimon and Perseda
(New York: AMS Press, 1970) Acts IV & V.
64. Quoted by Doody, 36.
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and her namesakes cheering their Theagenes in battle against pirates, and her disguise

brings to mind Charicleia’s as an old peasant woman roaming the Egyptian countryside

in search of Theagenes. Although Bess eventually finds Spencer alive in Fesse, her

encounter with Mullisheg plunges her into another adventure that reveals her mental

resourcefulness, just as Charicleia’s and her namesakes’ encounters with Arsace land

them in intrigue in the Persian palace. Charicleia’s advice to Theagenes to modify his

behavior toward Arsace proves insightful, for Arsace had decided to marry Charicleia to

the peasant Achaemenes but reverses herself as a result of the change in Theagenes.65

Similarly, when Mullisheg interrogates Bess regarding her age and other personal

information to determine if she is sexually suitable, Bess, understanding that a rash or

“wrong” answer can jeopardize her entire crew, gives Mullisheg the answer he seeks.

After much intrigue, several posturings, and numerous wranglings, Bess and her crew sail

for home. Quite probably, the English Renaissance stage had never seen such a female

role before, except perhaps with the lost plays of Long Meg and Chariclea.

III.

Black Africans on the English Renaissance Stage

Around the mid-seventeenth century, the Aethiopica came into vogue once more

as a result of England’s commercial dealings with the Levant and upper-class

gentlemen’s renewed interest in the novel. According to Jonathan Burton, plays dealing

with the Mediterranean increased “more than four times,” especially when compared to

65. Theagenes does not succumb to Arsace. He becomes less supercilious toward her and her cupbearer,
which Arsace accepts temporarily.
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plays “about the New World.”66 English theatergoers were inundated with

representations of Africans as crafty, degraded, and licentious. Yet this was not always

the case, as ancient histories, literatures, and the popularity of the Aethiopica suggest.

Sacred histories and literatures tell of the advancement of Africans. Ethiopia and Egypt

were lands of wealth and power, dating back to antiquity. Biblical history and literature

show interconnections among Ethiopia, Egypt, and Israel. Moses and Joseph married

Ethiopian and Egyptian women, and their sons were among the twelve tribes of Israel.

Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manassas, belonged to the tribes of Israel which bore

their names. And the Ethiopian Ebed Meleck saved the Prophet Jeremiah from dying in a

dungeon.67

The Renaissance knew of the accomplishments of Ethiopians and Egyptians from

other literary and historical sources. The Iliad and The Odyssey accord Ethiopians the

distinction of feasting with the gods and the qualities of wisdom, loyalty, and piety.68

Antiquarians such as Diodorus believed in the primacy of Ethiopian and Egyptian

learning. According to Diodorus, the Ethiopians invented the first form of writing, called

by the Egyptians hieroglyphics.69 Following Diodorus and other antiquarians, Louis Le

Roy elaborates on the primacy of Ethiopian learning in Of the Interchangeable Course of

Things (1594):

Antiquitie hath given the first praise of Letters to the Ethiopians,

attributing the invention to them, which they communicated with the

Egiptians their neighbors; where they have been augmented: from thence

66. Burton, 13.

67. See Jeremiah 38:10-13.
68. The Iliad, trans. A.T. Murray, 34 (I. 409-34); The Odyssey, trans. A.T. Murray, 5 (I. 20-43).
69. The Library of History, Books 11.35-IV. 58, The Loeb Classical Library, trans. C.H. Oldfather, xxxiv.
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they came to the Libians, Babylonians, and Chaldeans; consequently to the

Greeks; then to the Romans; the Arabians, Italians, Frenchmen, Almains,

Englishmen, Spaniards, and Polonians (Bk. 2, E 1).

Additionally, the Ethiopians invented sculpting, which the Greeks copied from the

Egyptians and perfected. The Egyptian influence of presenting the human figure with

one foot in front of the other is still evident in early Greek sculptures. 70 Historians,

archaeologists, and other recorders of the past, are familiar with the primacy of Ethiopian

and Egyptian knowledge. According to Georges Perrott and Charles Chipiez, ancient

Greece “entered late into history, when civilization had already a long past behind it, a

past of many centuries. . . . In comparison to the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Phoenicians, the

Greeks are but children.”71 Heliodorus points to the infancy of Greek and by extension

Western learning and the primacy of Ethiopian and Egyptian knowledge in his text.

While Charicles, Charicleia, and the other Greeks are unable to read or speak the

Ethiopian or Egyptian language, a liability that allows Charicleia’s lineage to remain a

secret, the Ethiopian and Egyptian aristocracy and priesthood are literate in each other’s

language and Greek. Hydaspes and Persinna speak to Theagenes, Charicleia, and the

other Greek captives in Greek. The High Priest Sisimethres explains Charicleia’s

genealogy to Charicles in Greek. Additionally, the Egyptians Calasiris and Thyamis

speak Greek to the priests at Delphi and to Cnemon. The wisest sage in Greece,

Calasiris, travels to Ethiopia “to [augment his] Egyptian attainments with . . . Ethiopian

wisdom” (Bk. 4, p. 98). Heliodorus, however, is not negating the intelligence of the

Greeks or claiming that all Ethiopians are superior in intelligence to the Greeks. In Book

70. Snowden, 109, 114-15.

71. Georges Perrott and Charles Chipiez, A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol.1, trans. Walter Armstrong
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1883), xxxiii.
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10, Theagenes wrestles and defeats an Ethiopian giant, a victory Heliodorus represents as

the triumph of Greek intelligence over brute strength.

Renaissance England also knew of the accomplishments of Africans through

commercial interchanges and contemporary travel narratives such as that of Purchas, who

praises the military skills of Ethiopians and describes the people as “sincere and of very

great fidelitie.”72 Burton and Matar detail the intimate association between Queen

Elizabeth and Ahmad al-Mansur and between the queen and Sultan Murad III.

According to Matar, “Queen Elizabeth repeatedly sought military and diplomatic help

from” al-Mansur, much to the consternation of Europe. Both Matar and Burton note that

Elizabeth’s and al-Mansur’s letters to each other evince a position not of superiority but

one of equality and cooperation on Elizabeth’s part.73 Elizabeth’s letters to these two

rulers show a great deal of cordiality to these two heads of state, perhaps because of

England’s controversial trade with these two nations and the proposition that “Morocco

join with England in an attempt to put the Portuguese Pretender, Don Antonio, on the . . .

throne,” to cripple their nemesis, Spain.74 In one of their correspondences, al-Mansur

proposed to Elizabeth that “Moroccan and English troops, using English ships, . . . attack

the Spanish colonies in the West Indies, expel the Spaniards, and then ‘possesse’ the land

and keep it ‘under our dominion for ever, and . . . joyne it to our estate and yours.”75 In

al-Mansur’s plan, England, following Morocco’s lead, would help Morocco dispossess

Spain and colonize America. Burton describes the correspondence between Elizabeth

72. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, Or Purchas His Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World
in Sea Voyages And Land Travells by Englishmen and Others (Glasgow: J. MacLehose and sons, 1905-
1907), 579-83.
73. Nabil Matar, Turks and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 9;
Burton, 57.
74. Howard, “An English Lass Amid the Moors,” 112.
75. Matar, 9.
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and Murad and their trade agreement as “a watershed moment.” Because the English

were neutral in the Ottoman-Venetian War (1499-1503), which disrupted the English

import of silk and spices, the “Ottomans were anxious to establish direct relations [with

England] to obtain vital materials such as English tin, steel and lead, as well as to give a

fatal blow to the Venetian economy.” 76 By 1572, English imports and exports suffered

because of Spain’s conquest of Antwerp. A few years later, in March 1579, England and

the Ottoman Empire established formal trade relations. And in 1600, a Moorish embassy

arrived in England to talk of matters of diplomacy and trade. The Turks and Moors were

not only a commercial and maritime power but a military one, as well. Lisa Jardine notes

that Europeans, including the Elizabethans, admired the military puissance of the Turks

and Moors and the sultan’s ability to maintain a standing army, and feared their

“awesome might.”77

England’s commercial and social affiliations with Africans and the influences of

the Aethiopica throughout the nation tempered some of the early modern dramatists’

representations of Africans on the English Renaissance stage. The three lost plays, along

with Greene’s Orlando Furioso, The Merchant of Venice, The Strange Discovery, The

White Ethiopian, and several Lord Mayor’s Day pageants all depict black Africans

positively, as do Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello, even though the majority of early

modern drama represents Blacks negatively. In the tradition of the Aethiopica, Antony

and Cleopatra and Othello counter the stereotypical notion of black Africans as

subservient creatures, sexual deviants, and debased savages that most Elizabethan and

Jacobean dramatists portray them to be.

76. Burton, 57-58.

77. Lisa Jardine, Wordly Goods: a new history of the Renaissance (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996), 407.
 95

Shakespeare is among the few English Renaissance playwrights and the best

known whose representation of black Africans on stage also participates in the

Heliodoran tradition. Although at times Shakespeare challenges contemporary racial and

gender assumptions, he frequently contributes to them. Certain works embody this

tension. Despite the Prince of Morocco’s caprice and presumed sexual threat in The

Merchant of Venice, he is a majestic figure. His clothes speak to his status, and he

departs with dignity after choosing the wrong casket. Even in Titus Andronicus the

tension of undermining yet reinforcing cultural constraints strengthens the dramatic

power of the play. Tamora, the ultra-white, ultra-blond wife of the Roman emperor

Saturninus, is a nymphomaniac, who favors Aaron the Moor over her husband (II.iii.9-

41, 66-84). That a blond woman prefers a black manservant to a powerful white male

ruler shatters stereotypes and social constraints, which are also reinforced--for Aaron is a

villain but with intellectual depth and sexual control. Resisting Tamora’s charms, he

conceives and helps to execute the plot that enables Chiron and Demetrius to cut off

Lavinia’s tongue and hands, to “pillage her chastity,” and to “wash their hands in

Bassanius’ blood” (II.iii.10-50).

In Antony and Cleopatra, as well as Othello, the tensions are more pronounced:

the marginalized and demonized become the center even if they are ultimately defeated.

Cleopatra and Othello are Africans whose favorable presentation upon the early modern

stage taps into the stage tradition that existed for such representation. Although a

majority of scholars agrees that the historic Cleopatra, descended from the Ptolemies, was

white, many critics and scholars conflate the factual and the fictive Cleopatra, thereby
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constructing Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as white, as well as Othello,78 despite

Shakespeare’s description of her as non-white. However, there is sufficient textual

evidence indicating that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is racially the Other. In one of her

musings Cleopatra says, “Think on me, / That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black,

/ And wrinkled deep in time” (I.v. 27-29). While it is likely that Cleopatra is speaking

about maturity or superannuation, it is also quite possible that she is making a clear

assertion that her blackness is hereditary, generational: hence,“deep in time.” The line,

“That am with Phoebus’s amorous pinches black” (I.v.29), alludes to the Renaissance

climatic explanation for black complexion, a recurring theme in early modern literature

which Jonson’s Masque of Blackness interrogates: Phaeton’s loss of control of Apollo’s

chariot supposedly created catastrophic effects in the African temperature, causing its

sun’s “intemperate fires” to blacken Africans (Blackness, ll. 130-150). Cleopatra’s

reference to “Phoebus’ amorous pinches” draws upon this early modern climatic theory

to explain her black complexion. Also, as Imtiaz Habib contends, it is not what

“Cleopatra was ethnically or racially, but what she was in the early modern English

popular imagination that has more to say about her ethnicity [and race] in Shakespeare.”79

78. David Bevington describes Cleopatra as “tanned,” not black. Mary Preston declares that Othello is
white (qtd. in Furness 395) and others see him as tawny, despite the fact that “tawny” never appears in the
text or as a descriptive of Othello. See Bevington, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, London:
Cambridge UP, 1990), 107, n. 29; A New Variorium Edition of Shakespeare: Othello, 8th ed., ed. Horace
Howard Furness (Philidelphia: Lippincourt, 1886).
79. Historically, Cleopatra’s ethnicity and racial origins are not uncontested issues. The British classicist
Sir Paul Harvey believed that Ptolemy IV Philopator’s recruitment of native Ethiopian soliders in his
victorious battle against Antiochus III in 217 B.C. facilitated “Egyptian influence in and penetration of
Ptolemaic political and civic life to the point that [a] mixed Graeco-Egyptian race was gradually formed”
(qtd. in Habib, 164). Elizabeth Cary describes Cleopatra as “a brown Egyptian” in The Tragedie of
Mariam. Recently several scholars, including Linda Charnes, concur that Cleopatra is black. Charnes, 111,
goes a step farther by enumerating the levels of Cleopatra’s Otherness to Rome: racial, national, gender. Of
course, some early modern English writers, including Samuel Daniel and the Countess of Pembroke
dramatize Cleopatra as white in their versions of Antony and Cleopatra. In The Virtuous Octavia Samuel
Brandon wonders how Cleopatra’s “sun-burnt beauty” was pleasing to Antony. For a comprehensive and
in-depth discussion of Cleopatra’s mixed heritage, see Imtiaz Habib, Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial
 97

Robert Greene, for example, sees Cleopatra as a “black Egyptian” in his Ciceronis amor

(1589), and Aemilia Lanyer describes Cleopatra as “a blacke Egyptian” in Salve Deus

Rex Judaeorun (1611).80

As a black African on stage, Cleopatra, like Othello, is the major protagonist in a

major play. A goddess on the river Cydnus, she enthralls the people who surround the

river in adoration. She purses up the heart of Marc Antony and scorns Octavius’s

request, offering two heads instead of one: hers along with Antony’s. In Cleopatra, and

Othello, Shakespeare makes people of color, especially women, transcend the mundane,

rising majestically above the degradation that often characterizes them on the English

Renaissance stage, despite, as I iterated earlier, her fall. Descended from an ancient line

of nobility, Cleopatra, like Othello, undermines the notions that Africans are subservient

and that only debased whites consort with or become spouses to blacks. Heliodorus’s

influence is especially evident here, particularly in Cleopatra and Antony’s union: an

African woman and a Roman man (Antony claims Greek ancestry as well; see I.iii.84,

III.ii.59). In Act V, Cleopatra resists and disrupts Octavius’s plans to stage her and her

maids in Rome, preferring instead to lie dead and naked “on Nilus’ mud / . . . and let the

water-flies / Blow [her] into abhorring!” (ii.49-62, 207-26). Cleopatra’s concern about

Rome’s representation of her (V.ii.200-221) transcends the personal. Her concern is not

simply how Rome will represent Egypt but also how the West will stage the East, and by

extension how England will stage Africa. Cleopatra’s requests for her “best attires” and

Praxis in the Early Modern Period (Lanham: UP of America, Inc., 2000), 163-66. See, also, “Ptolemy XII
Auletes” and “Cleopatra VII” in Encyclopedia Britannica for a discussion of Ptolemy’s illegitimacy and
Cleopatra’s possible “Egyptian blood.”
80. Robert Greene, Ciceronis amor (London: Robert Robinson, 1589); Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex
Judeorun, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), ll. 1425-32, esp. l. 1431.
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to be shown “like a queen” are a call for authentic portrayal and a remembering of who

she and Egypt—and by extension Africa, its people, and their accomplishments—are.

All of the plays discussed in this chapter show indebtedness to the Aethiopica.

Each of the six Continental plays along with The Strange Discovery and The White

Ethiopian modify and retell the Aethiopica in varying degrees, which, along with the

three lost English plays, help to establish a dramatic tradition originating from this

ancient text. The themes of parental exposure of newborns as a way of preserving a

mother’s honor and protecting the life of her child, of woman’s autonomy and capacity to

defend herself from rapacious males, of man’s pride in his chastity, and of protagonists’

travel around the world and surrender to love are common in this tradition. Most

important, however, is the positive representation of Africans on the early modern

English stage. Majestic and unbowed, Cleopatra electrifies the audience with her

memorable performance: in preparing to meet her great love Antony, death is not grim,

not a sleep, not a forgetting, but the fulfillment of immortal longing. Scripting her own

final performance in unmistakable Egyptian fashion (V.i.87), she upstages Octavius,

commanding the admiration of this stoic and outmaneuvered man. Cleopatra’s

dramatization helps us recall what African characters once were on the Renaissance

stage: noble, intrepid, deeply human, and deeply flawed. To Elizabethan and Jacobean

England with its admiration and repulsion of Moors and other Africans, its belief in the

supernatural, and worship of antiquity, Charicleia’s birth, nationality, and betrothal to

Theagenes were a mine from which many of its dramatists prospected. Some extracted

dross by portraying Blacks as lechers and other kinds of profligates. A few extracted

gold by presenting them as complex human beings with weaknesses and strengths. As
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the Aethiopica extols the virtues of dark-skinned people, it leaves a legacy of their

nobility, sagacity, and cultural sophistication, which is rarely emulated but frequently

exploited, distorted, and obscured by the dramatic representations of early modern

English playwrights. In the next chapter, I investigate how Ben Jonson and Richard

Brome, two playwrights whose works reveal Heliodoran influence, utilize this tradition.
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Chapter 2

From King James’s accession to the English throne in 1603 to about 1636 more

than a dozen dramatic works dealing with blackness and the Mediterranean were written,1

including Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1603), his Masque of Beauty (1608),2 and

Richard Brome’s The English Moore; or The Mock-Marriage (1635).3 Blackness was the

first major court masque to be produced and performed during King James’s reign. “It is

no accident,” Kim Hall writes, “that the first court masque is an elucidation of

blackness.”4 Hall’s observation highlights the Stuart court’s fascination with blackness

and the exotic, dating back to the reigns of James IV and Mary Stuart. 5 Hall, Habib, and

Clare McManus record that many Blacks were present at the Scottish court and that

James VI kept blacks as captives, pets on a par with his exotic lions and tigers at his

Scottish court. At James and Anne’s wedding, four black boys might have danced naked

in the subzero temperature and died of pneumonia a few days later, 6 and at Anne’s

1. Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen, 4; Burton, Traffic and Turning, 13.
2. References to Jonson’s masques are to Stephen Orgel’s edition, Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1969).
3. References to Brome’s play are to Sara Jayne Steen’s edition, The English Moore; or The Mock-
Marriage (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri, 1983).
4. Hall, Things of Darkness, 133. It is unclear if the first masque was Samuel Daniel’s Vision of Twelve
Goddesses performed at court or the anonymous masque about Indians and Chinese knights, whose text is
lost. David Norbrook and Clare McManus list Daniel’s masque as performed in 1603 and 1604. However,
both Martin Butler and E. K. Chambers list Daniel’s masque as performed on 8 January 1604 and the
anonymous masque on 1 January 1604. See Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance,
revised edition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 157; McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002),100; Martin Butler, “The early Stuart masque,” The Stuart Court and
Europe, ed., R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 69.& 70. See, also, E. K. Chambers,
The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. III. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1923), 279.
5. According to Clare McManus, black performers entertained the court of James IV as early as 1505. In
1507/8, James IV participated in a court tournament in which a black woman was the prize. As the Black
or Wild Knight, James fought for the Black Lady. The winner would kiss the woman’s lips and the loser
would approach from behind and kiss her hips. Black performers also participated in the entertainments of
“Mary Stuart’s 1558 marriage . . . and again in her 1561 royal entry” into Scotland. See MacManus, 76 &
83.
6. See Hall, 128; Imtiaz Habib, Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period
(Lanham: UP of America, 2002),163; and McManus, 76. There seems to be discrepancies about this
incident. Tokson and Hall claim that four boys died and the incident occurred in Norway. Habib claims
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coronation and entry into Scotland, Blacks participated in the ceremony, dancing and

acting as a means of crowd control.7 Given her extensive encounter with black Africans,

Queen Anne’s request to have her and her ladies appear as “blackamores” in a court

masque is not surprising. However, both Anne and Jonson would have been aware of the

controversy that would result from such a performance, because, as Orgel and McManus

tell us, blackness was antithetical to the court, the source of beauty and light.8 To

minimize contention, Jonson couches blackness in paradoxical, metaphorical, and

ambivalent terms in the twin masques because he would also use the masques to glorify

King James and as a platform for James’s agenda for Great Britain.

To other seventeenth-century writers, such as Brome, blackness lacks the

multivalency with which Jonson invests it; instead, Brome sees it as a monolithic,

negative quality. Despite a difference in perspective regarding blackness, Jonson and

Brome found common ground in the associations they make with blackness, connecting it

to gender and race through metamorphosis. While Jonson’s Blackness and Beauty decry

and laud blackness simultaneously, Brome’s The English Moore vilifies it. In Jonson’s

twin masques, sixteen Ethiopian princesses are metamorphosed from black to white

women, and in Brome’s comedy an Englishwoman is transformed from white to black.

While Jonson uses Heliodorus as a model for transmutation, Brome inverts the model by

transformating a white woman into a black woman. In this chapter, I establish the

similarities between Heliodorus’s novel and Jonson’s twin masques by looking at Book 4

of the Aethiopica and contending that Jonson used it as a template for the transformation

that only one boy died and that the incident occurred in Scotland. McManus believes the incident to be
more anecdotal than factual because of its lack of authoritative documentation.
7. McManus, 75.
8. Orgel, Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, 120; McManus, 83.
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of his Ethiopian princesses in Blackness and Beauty. I also argue for a Heliodoran stage

tradition that is implicit in Blackness through the conceit of blanching. Then I turn my

attention to The English Moore, looking at the ways it is conversant with the Aethiopica

and Jonson’s masques. Usually, plays that use a portion or all of the Aethiopica

participate in the dramatic tradition under investigation. Despite its intertexual discourse

with the Aethiopica and use of Heliodorus’s material, The English Moore does not

participate in this stage tradition. Given that The English Moore is the first of two plays

that use material from the Aethiopica but fails to participate in the dramatic tradition

originating from this text, I explore Brome’s use of the Heliodoran and Jonsonian

materials to create a negative one-dimensional quality of blackness that taps into the

dramatic tradition of the degraded African on the English Renaissance stage.

I.

The Aethiopica as Template for Blackness and Beauty?

Among the most striking examples of transformation in secular literature is that of

the Ethiopian princess, Charicleia, in Book 4 of the Aethiopica. The transformation of

Charicleia from black to white occurred in utero when her mother, Queen Persinna,

gazed at a painting during sexual intercourse. As we have already seen, the queen

explains that she and her husband, King Hydaspes, produce a white-looking child

“because I looked upon the picture of Andromeda naked, while my husband had to do

with me (as then he [Perseus] had brought her from the rocke, had by mishappe

ingendered presently a thing like to her)” (108). Persinna further explains Charicleia’s

aberrant complexion: under divine motivation, Hydaspes consorts with Persinna in her
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“apartment” which boasts “colorful representations of the love of . . . Perseus and

Andromeda.”9 And the queen knew immediately that she was pregnant. When she gave

birth, the baby was “white,” a color she describes, as “strange amonge the Aethiopians”

(107-8). In keeping with ancient ideas about the mother’s influence on the fetus,

Heliodorus makes Charicleia’s whiteness the exclusive result of Persinna’s gaze at the

painting of Andromeda’s image during sexual intercourse. Images and paintings, Doody

points out, have “a special place in marking the order of creativity [, which] remind us of

the visible world, and thus of the sensible universe, but [which] also speak of stasis, and

artifice—of things out of nature.”10 As the white offspring of pure-blooded black

Africans, Charicleia is a being “out of nature” because her complexion is inexplicable

from a natural, biological standpoint. If she were an albino—the result of genetic

mutation--or either or both of her parents had Caucasian ancestry, then nature, not

ekphrasis, would explain Charicleia’s color. Ekphrasis, the power of images, paintings,

pictures, or icons to transform the gazer into another entity, is generative as well:

Hydaspes fathers a white-complexioned child because Persinna gazed at the painting of

Andromeda during the procreative act.

Interestingly, Heliodorus allows Persinna and the High Priest Sisimithres to focus

only on Charicleia’s complexion to denote her difference from the other Ethiopians.

While the text makes it fully plausible to see Charicleia as white, as the preponderance of

9. There is an alternative tradition stretching back to classical time, discussed by Elizabeth McGrath, that
represents Andromeda as black. In “The Black Andromeda,” 1-18, McGrath questions the representation
of Andromeda in the Aethiopica, asserting that Heliodorus mistakently makes Andromeda white. Although
she mentions several sources from classical literature that accord with Heliodorus’s view, she cites three
notable literary figures who affirm Andromeda’s blackness or, at least, her dark skin: “the greatest of all
mythographers, Ovid”; “Pacheco . . . who first encountered the idea in Petrarch . . .”; and “Petrarch” in his
poem Trionfi (ii.142-44). However, she neglects to mention the myth of Cassiopeia as additional
confirmation of Andromeda’s blackness. As we have seen, Pignatelli also makes Andromeda black, citing
her as the progenitor of heroic Ethiopians.
10. Margaret Ann Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 387.
 104

scholars and translators have done, including Gesner, Morgan, Sandys, McGraw, Amyot,

and Underdowne,11 Heliodorus makes it equally plausible, I believe, to see Charicleia as

phenotypically White (i.e., she looks white) but genotypically Black: although she

manifests the characteristics of a Caucasian as a result of the transformative agency of

ekphrasis, the seed she derives from is Black because of her ancestors.12 Heliodorus

reminds us of this in a few powerful yet subtle ways: Charicleia has a “black circle

etched on her left arm” (Bk.10, 256); Persinna describes her daughter’s “complexion [as]

alien to the native Ethiopian tint”; and Sisimithres speaks of the “difficulty concerning

the girl’s complexion” (Bk.10, 255). Neither Persinna nor Sisimithres regards Charicleia

as different racially. To both of them, Charicleia’s difference is her complexion. As

Persinna explains, it is Charicleia’s “complexion [that] is strange.” Neither Persinna nor

Sisimithres refers to Charicleia’s features, implying that her features are not unlike those

of other Ethiopians. According to some ancient writers, Ethiopians have various features,

including those that Iago ascribes to Othello. Both Siculus and Herodotus claim that

Indians immigrated to Ethiopia.13 The inference, then, is that Ethiopian features and

11. See, for example, Gesner, 70; Sandy, 430; McGrath, 12.
12. Writers during this time spoke of “seed”—not gene. See Genesis 3:15 (NKJV); Aristotle, “Theory of
Knowledge C. Priority of Act. Early modern writers also spoke of “inherent,” according to Orgel:
“Marginal Jonson,” The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque edited by David Bevington and Peter
Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 158. The science of genetics, not designated as such then,
was around at least during the Renaissance. The French playwright Octave-
Chariclee’s color scientifically, and the embryologist Anton van Leeuwenhock had described the
spermatozoa in 1668. See Walter Libby, The History of Medicine In its Salient Features (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1922), 238; Leeuwenhock’s publication indicates that scientific investigation into
this area had been going on long before 1668. See, also, Silvia Campesi, Paola Manuli, and Giulia Sissa,
Madre materia: sociologia e biologia della donna greca (Torino: Boringhein,1983)--for the relationship
between the Aristotelian theory of reproduction and gynecology, see especially Manuli’s and Sissa’s
essays.
13. Diodorus Siculus contends that Indians emigrated to Ethiopia, which would help to explain why
Charicleia’s features provoke no comments from her mother, father, or other Ethiopians. Additionally,
McGrath cites several sources that claim the existence of two Ethiopias. In note 14, she cites, among
others, Herodotus who “distinguishes between the eastern and the African Ethiopians, the latter having very
curly hair rather than straight hair. McGrath also cites L.A. Thompson’s Life of Apollonius where
Pholotratus allows for a compromise by making the African Ethiopians immigrants from India, p. 10, n. 54.
 105

Caucasian features can also be similar or not strikingly dissimilar. In L’Ethiopique

(1609), Genetay attributes Chariclee’s whiteness to ancestral heritage.14 In Act 4, the

chorus traces Chariclee’s Caucasian ancestry to her forebear “Persee”: “. . . if someone is

born / Of a complexion that is different, / He bears it from some ancestor / In whom it

was apparent.” Here Genetay gives a scientific explanation regarding phenotype and

genotype: an individual can look different from her or his parents but that difference can

be traced to ancestry, as is the case with Chariclee--

It is then quite a simple matter

That Chariclee is white,

The same as Persee,

First of her royal blood.

And let us not think that it follows

From the sight of a painting,

For black was Andromeda

Even though she had a very beautiful body (4.1).

Offering a scientific explanation--Chariclee’s Caucasian features are inherited from her

ancestor “Persee”--over a magical one, Genetay dismisses the claim of ekphrasis as a

transfiguring agent. His seventeenth-century explanation aligns with my contention that

despite Charicleia’s appearance, she can be seen as genotypically Black. Genetay also

makes Andromeda Black, thereby restoring her to the tradition that McGrath discusses.

I myself have seen innumerable evidence of these claims and recall two incidents in particular. One
Sunday in 2009, I hailed a cab and became immersed in conversation with the driver. When I assumed that
he was an East Indian, he proudly informed me that he is Ethiopian. In a much earlier encounter, I thought
an acquaintance was from India. She told me she was from Ethiopia, but people were often as mistaken as
I was. On the website www.angelfire.com/ny/ethiocrown/Haile.com there are several pictures of the
emperor and other members of the royal family. These pictures reveal an array of different features in the
royal family, ranging from straight nose and wavy hair to flat nose and tightly curled hair.
14. See note 12 of this chapter.
 106

Before discussing the twin masques’ participation in the Heliodoran tradition, it is

necessary to show their connection to the Aethiopica to establish Jonson’s use of

Heliodorus’s novel as a template for Blackness and Beauty. In The Jonsonian Masque,

Stephen Orgel traces the tradition of the masque form in which Jonson worked15 and

Jonson himself claimed that it was “her Majesties will to have . . . Black-mores” and that

“the invention was derived by” him16 (Blackness, n.19). Jonson does not, however,

elaborate on how he derived the invention, which, I want to suggest, is from the

Aethiopica. Although there is no concrete proof that Jonson read Heliodorus, there are

some reasons to believe he did: as we have seen, Stephen Gosson’s 1582 complaint--

“that the Palace of Pleasure, the Golden Ass, the Aethiopian History . . . have been

throughly ransackt, to furnish the Playe houses in London” with material 17— though not

specific to Jonson, shows the widespread appeal of the Aethiopica as source material for

English dramatists. It is difficult to see how the erudite classicist Jonson, who boasted of

having more Greek and Latin in his little finger than his contemporaries had in their

heads, could not have read the Aethiopica, especially since it was in the general literary

domain. Third, Jonson’s former servant Richard Brome references the Aethiopica,

Blackness, and Beauty in the same passage (IIII.v.11-37) and elsewhere in The English

Moore (III.i. 80-82, III.iii.14-15). While this shows that Brome most probably read the

15. See The Jonsonian Masque (New York: Columbia UP, 1981, c1965), 61-128.
16. Enid Welsford and David Norbrook note that Jonson and Jones were influenced by the Florentine
tournament that commemorated the marriage of Francesco de’ Medici and Bianca Cappello and the Medici
court in Florence. See Welsford, The Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1927), 170;
Norbrook,160. It is also possible that because Queen Anne and her ladies were to appear in the masque,
Jonson had to find the appropriate social milieu for these aristocratic women; hence the “Black-mores” are
Ethiopian princesses. Plus the expression “wash an Ethiop white” was a commonplace that seemed ready-
made for Jonson’s purpose and perhaps Queen Anne’s, who might have helped with the plot.
17. Gosson, 28. As noted previously, the Aethiopica existed in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish,
German—languages accessible to Jonson. As noted in the introduction, Amyot’s translation appeared in
print as early as 1547 and was reissued at least 25 times, and translations in other languages followed,
including in English. Thomas Underdowne also issued several editions of his translations in English,
beginning in 1569.
 107

Aethiopica or knew the story well (III.iii.14-30), it can also suggest that Jonson most

likely knew the novel because Brome, Jonson’s erstwhile secretary, was familiar with

Jonson’s sources or library. Finally, the popularity of the Aethiopica during the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries plus similar interests in racial, gender, and national effects of

metamorphosis in the twin masques suggest that Jonson read the Aethiopica closely or

knew the story thoroughly.

Racially, nationally, economically, and socially Jonson’s protagonists from these

two works are identical to Heliodorus’s female protagonist: they are Ethiopian princesses

who become transformed from black to white through the agency of ekphrasis, although

the means of and reason for their metamorphosis are different from Charicleia’s. In the

fashion of imitatio, Jonson reworks the concept of ekphrasis: instead of using the usual

painting, image, or another inanimate object as Helidorus does, Jonson uses the animate

icon of the sun. Mary Floyd-Wilson contends “that The Masque of Blackness is

somewhat equivocal about whether it is the English sun or James I whose ‘beams’ are

able to lighten the Ethiopian nymphs.”18 However, Jonson puns “sun” with “son,”

conflating them in James I. The notion of kings as sun and vice versa goes back to

Egyptian antiquity and its kings, the Pharaohs, who were believed to be Horus, the god of

the sky reincarnated.19 Horus was also the son of Ra: Pha-Ra-oh. By conflating sun and

king, Jonson is also legitimizing James’s divine power mythologically. Britain’s sun/son

or king, like the paintings in the Aethiopica, has the power to transform its gazers.

Despite Orgel’s quibble about the “literalistic” meaning of King James’s transformative

18. Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2003), 116.
19. See The Concise Oxford Companion of Classical Literature, 2003; The American Heritage Dictionary
of the English Language, 4th ed., 2004.
 108

power in the masque (124), many people in early modern England believed in the

transformative and regenerative power of the king. Scrofula sufferers could gaze on the

king and be transformed, or the king could touch and heal them as well. James himself

believed that he had the power to touch and heal people: in November 1618 when the

son of the visiting Turkish official (“Chiaus”) was ill, King James visited the home with

the express purpose of touching and healing the boy. As Matar surmises, the king’s

willingness “to apply his miracle on a Muslim may have stemmed from his desire to

demonstrate . . . the international efficacy of his royal touch to his subjects.”20 To many

English subjects, the king was a representation of a sacred personage, an icon, which,

Doody reminds us, is a numinous object and, as such, is transformative21: as beings who

are considered outside the norm of society, Britain’s scrofula sufferers, like Jonson’s

sixteen Ethiopian princesses, will behold Britain’s sun-king and be changed.

II.

The Ambi-valence of Blanching in Jonson’s Twin Masques

and the Heliodoran Stage Tradition

Having established the likelihood of the Aethiopica as a template for Jonson’s

Blackness and Beauty, in this section I argue that his twin masques are part of the

Heliodoran dramatic tradition. However, this participation is subtle and complex,

concealed with puns, paradoxes, contradictions, ambivalences, equivocations, and the

conceit of blanching. In this part, I scrutinize the multidimensionality of blackness in the

twin masques, acknowledging the apparently negative associations Jonson ascribes to

20. A “chiaus” is an official messenger or representative from Turkey, frequently with a retinue. See
Matar, 35.
21. Doody, 389.
 109

blackness but going against conventional readings to show the physical and spiritual

beauty Jonson also posits in blackness as well. Like Shakepeare and Gogh, Jonson

reviles blackness by drawing upon cultural stereotypes to represent Ethiopians:

ostensibly, the princesses are physically ugly because they are black, but innately

beautiful because they are princesses. The first lines of Blackness establish the Ethiopian

princesses’ seeming lack of pulchritude. According to the opening song, the dark skin of

the princesses makes them physically ugly: “To prove that beauty best / Which not the

color but the feature / Assures unto the creature” (ll. 85-87). Were it not for their color,

the princesses would have been beautiful. As physical beauty is the prerogative of white

women, black women can only be beautiful if they are morphed into white women

because blackness is anathema to beauty. Wanting to embody this ideal of beauty, the

princesses travel to James’s court to find a cure for their ugliness: transmutation.

Blanching and ekphrasis are the two agents of metamorphosis in Blackness and

Beauty. These dual agents are a part of the complexity and ambivalence associated with

the twin masques and the reason scholars and critics like Floyd-Wilson and Andrea

Stevens find it difficult to distinguish which agent transforms the Ethiopian women.

Identifying the agent of transformation is actually unimportant. What is significant,

however, is that blanching, like ekphrasis, is effected through the sun and that both agents

serve the same purpose: “to [whiten] an Ethiop.” Whether as a culinary or laundry

activity, blanching accomplishes the same result: removing what is undesirable. Both

activities require water and heat. In cooking, water is heated and the object to be

blanched is immersed in it, thereby removing or whitening the unwanted skin. In

laundering, clothes are spread flat on a surface and continuously hydrated as the sun’s
 110

heat penetrates and whitens them. “To blanche an Ethiop, and revive a corse” (Blackness,

l. 225), Jonson combines both forms but privileges washing, for, among other reasons, it

indicates eradicating dirt or impurity to achieve cleansing.

The correlation between impurity and black skin was common during the English

Renaissance. In 1587, George Best remarked that he had

seen an Ethiopian as black as coal brought into England, who took a fair

English woman to wife, begat a son in all respects as black as the father

was, although England were his native country and an English woman his

mother; whereby it seemeth that blackness proceedeth rather of some

natural infection of that man, that neither the nature of the the clime,

neither the good complexion of the mother concurring could any thing

alter . . . 22

Despite the whiteness and therefore beauty of this Englishwoman, no alteration or

transformation occurred with the “infected” black son. To blanch or “wash an Ethiop

white,” then, is a long and arduous process, especially because this kind of blackness, like

the princesses’, necessitates individuals’ steeping their “bodies in that purer brine / And

wholesome dew called rosmarine” thirty-nine times on thirteen nights and thereafter

washing themselves “with that soft and gentler foam” (Blackness, l. 316). Implicit in the

“purer brine” and “wholesome rosmarine” treatment is the association of blackness with

infection, which the prescribed treatment will cure. Called the dew of the sea,

“rosmarine,” like brine, is used for healing and remembrance,23 in burial preparations,

22. Quoted by Orgel in “Marginal Jonson,” 160.

23. See Alice M. Coats, Flowers and Their Histories (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971), 299-301.
Shakespeare associates rosemary with remembrance. In Hamlet, Ophelia gives each person flowers that
symbolize some characteristics about her or him. To Laertes, she gives rosemary with the injunction
 111

and other forms of preservation. The brine and the rosmarine are “purer” and

“wholesome” in order to extract all impurities from the princesses’ bodies, whose

prolonged ritualistic washing in “brine” and “wholesome dew” three times each night for

thirteen nights suggests an embedded racial impurity/uncleanness—similar to Best’s

1587 pronouncements. It is no accident that the princesses practice this ritualistic

cleansing “when all things else do sleep” (l. 312). Such precautions ensure containment

of any contamination to man or beast and provide a cover for the “shame” of the

princesses. After the prescribed time, the princesses can slough off their infected and

unwanted skin and become Venus-like: white and perfect (Blackness, ll. 308-321). The

brine and the rosmarine will preserve their newly found state and dispel all malodor.

“Their beauties will be scorched no more,” and Britannia can rejoice “to see [each]

Ethiop washed white” (Beauty, ll. 66-67).

Embedded in Jonson’s uneasy, contradictory, and paradoxical treatment of

blackness is a positive theatrical portrayal of Ethiopians that is in keeping with the

Heliodoran tradition of Africans. Following classical representations, Jonson also

describes Ethiopians as beautiful, virtuous, pious, learned, and sagacious, invoking the

Heliodoran tradition in three ways: the ambivalence of the opening song, Niger’s

paradoxical speech, and the conceit of blanching. Jack D’Amico reminds us that

Jonson’s equivocation about blackness exists from the outset of the masque in the

opening song and that Jonson prepares the audience/reader to accept the argument that

black is beautiful by couching the princesses’ description in oxymoron.24 However,

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember” (IV.v.175-76). See, also, M R Al-
Sereitia, K M Abu-Amerb, & P Sene, “Pharmacology of rosemary (Rosmarinus Officianlis Linn.) and its
therapeutic potentials,” Indian Journal of Experimental Biology 37 (1999): 124.
24. D’Amico, 54.
 112

Jonson is also unequivocal in acknowledging the princesses’ physical beauty in the

opening song: the sixth line of the song explicitly refers to Niger’s “beauteous race” then

hurries on to equivocation and paradox: “To prove that beauty best / Which not the color

but the feature / Assures unto the creature” (ll.85-87). The distinction between “color”

and “feature” allows for the physical beauty of blackness, which is about features, and

color may or may not be a component. Although the lines do not iterate what those

features are, we may ascertain what they are by looking at another early modern text that

deals with dark-skinned females: Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1599).25

Although Ralegh and Jonson were of different class, they moved within similar

socio-economic milieu.26 Given this, Ralegh’s text can be useful in elucidating other

features that an English Renaissance man like Jonson might have considered physically

beautiful. In one of his many encounters with Guianese women, Ralegh is struck by the

beauty of the wife of a certain Cassique: “[I]n all my life I have seldom seen a better

favoured woman: She was of good stature with black eyes, fatt of body, of an excellent

countenance, her hair almost as long as her selfe . . . she was very pleasant, knowing her

comelyness and taking great pride therein.”27 “[G]ood stature, fatt body, excellent

countenance, long hair,” pleasantness, and self-assurance, as the passage makes clear, are

other designators of beauty. Ralegh finds this dark-skinned Guianese beauty and a fair-

skinned English beauty equally comely: “I have seen a Lady in England so like hir, as

but for the difference of cullour I would have sworn might have been the same.”28 The

beauty of these two women, regardless of complexion, suggests that color was an

25. Walter Ralegh, Discoverie of Guiana, ed. Joyce Lorimer (London: Ashgate, 2006).
26. Besides being courtiers and writers during the reigns of Elizabeth and James, Jonson and Ralegh
frequented the same pubs and taverns, according to Imtiaz Habib, 31.
27. Ralegh, 126.
28. Ibid.
 113

inconsequential factor to Ralegh, and might not have been of consequence to Jonson,

either. According to Orgel, “Renaissance aesthetician[s]” believed that “color was not

essential but merely accidental,”29 an assertion Jonson also makes by casting his tritons in

the Spenserian mold, as Orgel also notes. In Hymn in Honour of Beautie, Spenser makes

form or feature the essence of beauty: “For of the soul the body form doth take: / For

soule is form, and doth the body make” (l.132-33). Yet in A View of the Present State of

Ireland, Spenser lambastes the Irish and Scotts for having “black” blood, making both

groups inferior and ugly. In the mold of Hymn, Jonson’s “tritons . . . treat the nymphs’

blackness as trivial,” to cite Orgel once more.30 Regarding the other attributes of beauty,

both Jonson and Ralegh subscribe to “excellent countenance.” Because long hair is

generally associated with beauty from time immemorial, we can also assume that it

would have been another marker of beauty for Jonson, as it was for many Renaissance

men. In Paradise Lost, for example, John Milton makes Eve’s tresses cascade down her

back (Bk. IV. 495-97).31 Additionally, Mary, Queen of Scotland, and Queen Elizabeth I,

reputed beauties, had long flowing hair. Since Ralegh and Milton, two of Jonson’s

contemporaries, associated long hair with beauty, it is reasonable to surmise that Jonson

would also make that association. All these attributes suggest strongly that Jonson saw

and appreciated the beauty of Ethiopian women. Jonson might have also wanted his

audience to see the beauty of Ethiopian women through the sumptuous costumes of the

twelve princesses and, as we shall see shortly, Niger’s spirited disputation of his

daughters’ divine hue and “perfect’st beauty.”

29. See the Jonsonian Masque, 121.

30. Ibid.
31. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York:
Random House, 2007).
 114

Jonson’s designation of Niger’s daughters as Ethiopian princesses and nymphs is

a politic and allusive way of praising blackness. The association of princesses, Ethiopia,

water, and nymphs helps us to remember the myth of Cassiopeia and Andromeda,

Ethiopians renowned for their beauty. Angered by Cassiopeia for denigrating the beauty

of his nymphs, Neptune threatened to inundate her kingdom and demanded her daughter

Andromeda, whom Perseus rescued, as a sacrifice. Jonson’s choice of mythological story

is telling: it reveals his awareness of a long tradition associating blackness with beauty. 32

Abraham Melamed recalls for us that “in ancient Greece the black was described . . .

favourably.”33 Jonson’s invocation of African queens also reveals his knowledge of yet

another association with African females: powerful connotations of autonomy.

According to David Riggs, “African females, and particularly an African Queen, carried

powerful connotations of female autonomy and ethnic diversity[;] 34 Anne’s instructions

[therefore] tacitly challenged the Jacobean myth of male supremacy and imperial rule.”35

As the writer for the court, Jonson would have been sensitive to his monarchs’ own views

and been “knowledgeable of their interests and character.”36 Jonson’s choice of

32. Although some painters and writers, such as Reubens and Heliodorus, represent Andromeda as white,
Jonson follows the other tradition that pictures her as black. Ever the intellectual writer, Jonson knew from
Roman mythology, Ovid, and Petrarch that Andromeda, like her mother, was dark-skinned. In “The Black
Andromeda,” McGrath cites Ovid and quotes Petrarch’s “I Trionfi” to help establish Andromeda’s
blackness:
Perseo era l’uno; et volli saper come
Andromeda gli piaque in Etiopia,
Vergine bruna, I begli occhi etle chiome. (ii. 142-44)
(Perseus was one and I wanted to know
how it was that in Ethiopia the dark-skinned
maiden Andromeda
attracted him with her fine eyes and hair.)
33. Abraham Melamed, The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture, trans. Betty Sigler Rozen (London:
RoutlegeCurzon, 2003), 63.
34. African queens such as Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Semiranus, Sheba, Cleopatra, Dido, and Candace come to
mind.
35. See Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989), 118.
36. Orgel, Helgerson, and Norbrook argue that Jonson's sensitivity to James's taste allowed him to be the
court poet, ahead of Samuel Daniel, Thomas Campion, and others. See Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 65;
 115

Ethiopian princesses reflects Queen Anne’s interest in blackness and allows him to focus

on African women of royal pedigree and their beauty. His praise of blackness allows him

to fulfill “Her Majesty’s will” by using the masque as a metaphor for Anne’s disaffection

with James and his court.

Niger’s insistence on his daughters’ beauty (l.119) is yet another way in which

Jonson praises blackness and challenges certain common cultural assumptions to

participate in the Heliodoran stage tradition. At first glance, Niger’s position borders on

the ludicrous, especially in consideration of his English audience and the great distance

that he has traveled to secure the color transformation of his daughters. One is tempted to

think that Jonson had anticipated negative reactions like Dudley Carletons’,37 which

Niger’s position, on one level, is designed to elicit. On another level, as Andrea Stevens

observes, Jonson wants “Niger’s defense of black beauty to be taken seriously,”38

evidenced by the staunch defense and sneer at the panegyricks of certain poets who

dismiss the beauty of Ethiopians but hymn that of Europeans. In his defense, Niger

claims perfection for his daughters’ beauty, citing the immutability of their color and its

divine association: “ . . . in their black the perfect’st beauty grows, / . . ./ . . . / No cares,

no age can change, or there display, / The fearful tincture of abhorred grey, / Since Death

herself . . . / Can never alter their most faithful hue; / All which are arguments to prove

how far / Their beauties conquer in great beauty’s war, / And more, how near divinity

they be” (ll. 119-28). Death itself dares not disfigure blackness given the celestial

Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 32-40; Norbrook,
158-59, 187.
37. Carleton found the performance ridiculous, bordering on disgust. He calls the performance of the queen
and her ladies as blackamores a “loathsome sight.” See McManus, 1.
38. Andrea Stevens, “Mastering Masques of Blackness: Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, the Windsor text of
The Gypsies Metamorphosed, and Brome’s The English Moore,” English Literary Renaissance 39, no. 2
(2009): 12.
 116

associations with this color. Niger follows up his defense with an attack on poets who

dismiss the beauty of blackness, labeling them “Poor brainsick men” (l. 131). The

dysfunction of these men’s brains prevents their appreciation of natural beauty. Niger’s

association of blackness with beauty has correlation to other writers’ works, for Jonson is

not the only popular English Renaissance playwright to see black women as beautiful. In

The Knight of Malta, Fletcher et al. describe Abdella as a “black beauty” (IV.iv. 39),

despite denigrating her throughout the play.

Niger’s disputation prompts Floyd-Wilson to posit that “Jonson portrays the

Ethiopians’ complexion . . . in terms of western aesthetics of ‘great beauty’s war.’”39

Niger’s challenge to the western concept of beauty and hence to its cultural designations

and perspectives is not, as Orgel maintains, “a limited view of nature.”40 Rather, it is

profound and comprehensive. Niger recognizes that Europeans’ designation of beauty is

not necessarily correct or the only acceptable one:

. . . since the fabulous voices of some few

Poor brainsick men, styled poets here with you,

Have with such envy of their graces sung

The painted beauties other empires sprung,

Letting their loose and winged fictions fly

To infect all climates, yea, our purity;

As of one Phaeton, that fired the world,

And that before his heedless flames were hurled

About the globe, the Ethiopians were as fair

39. Floyd-Wilson, 125.

40. Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 122.
 117

As other dames, now black with black despair (ll. 130-38).

Besides dismissing these “poets” and their claims, Niger helps to foreground the place of

cultural assumption in interpretation and the pamphlet controversy over cosmetics by

sneering at “painted beauties.” D’Amico points to the limits of cultural assumptions and

Europeans’ inability or unwillingness to take into account the contribution of cultural

perspective in their interpretations. Theirs is an automatic belief that what is culturally

fair is so in nature.41 Niger argues otherwise. Each culture has its own parameters of

beauty, negating the claim that European women are more beautiful than African women

since there is no universal standard of beauty. “The beauties” of which certain poets sing

are comely because their pulchritude is cosmetically enhanced, which, in Niger’s

estimation, does not constitute beauty because it is made up, i.e., a cosmetic and poetic

illusion. Niger realizes that lauding “painted” women as the paradigm of beauty is a

fable and the invention of a “few” men, whom he describes as “brainsick . . . poets.”

Niger’s anticosmetic stance reverses Best’s 1587 pronouncement (see page 109

above) by associating infection with Europeans and purity with Ethiopians. This

infection, operating on a literal and figurative level, has a three-fold effect on Ethiopians:

environmental, physical, and mental. The melding of region and atmosphere in “climate”

with the juxtaposition of “infect” and “purity” point to an Ethiopian and worldwide

contamination as well as to bodily corruption. Once pure, Ethiopia’s environment or

atmosphere is polluted by the noxious fables emitted from the pens of poets. As

precursor to literal corruption, literary corruption prefigures the pernicious effects of the

actual use of cosmetics. As one writer points out, “Cosmetics were seen as a health

threat”; frequent use facilitated an accumulation of harmful substances in the body, such

41. D’Amico, 52-54.

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as lead oxide, which corroded the face and resulted in numerous other physical problems,

including muscle paralysis and even death.42 In The Devil’s Charter (1606), Lucretia

Borgia is a victim of the “rancke poyson” of cosmetics. In Act 4, scene 3, a “richly

attired” Lucretia enters “with a Phyal in her hand.” In the midst of reminiscing about her

sexual conquests and having her face made up, Lucretia exclaims that her “cheeks . . .

burn and sting” and that her “face is scalded” from “rancke poyson” (ll. 2075-84).43 She

dies shortly after. Tanya Pollard interprets Lucretia’s death from “the corrosion of

poisoned face-paints” as a fitting end to a corrupt and adulterous woman.44 Niger’s

concern with infecting “our purity” resonates with the sexual laxity that underlies the use

of cosmetics (I return to this later), exemplified in the conflation of Lucretia’s use of

cosmetics, her sexual exploits, and her death.

Besides environmental disorder and physical disease, the infection also has a

psychological impact on the Ethiopians: “black despair.” Hopelessness overwhelms the

princesses as they learn that once they were fair-skinned and hence beautiful. Now they

are black and brooding. “Black with black despair” reflects the harmony, the

synchronicity between the princesses’ internal and external state. Jonson’s varied and

complex representation of blackness along with Niger’s assertion and disputation help us

realize the social, political, and cultural levels in which blackness operates in Jonson’s

text and on his stage.

42. The ingredients of make up included carbonate, hydroxide, and lead oxide. Women’s use of cosmetics
was popular throughout the Renaissance and was controversial. White women used cosmetics to achieve a
porcelain look on their faces, popularized in England by Queen Elizabeth after a bout of smallpox which
left her face scarred (Beauty Secrets from Ages Past: A Brief History of Makeup,
http://www.erasofelegance.com/fashion/makeup.html).
43. Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter, critical edition, ed. Jim C. Pogue (New York: Garland Pub.,
1980).
44. Tanya Pollard, “Beauty’s Poisonous Properties,” Shakespeare Studies 27(1999):187.
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Jonson’s implicit arguments can be fleshed out by looking at Thomas Middleton’s

pageant The Triumphs of Honor and Virtue (1622).45 Honor and Virtue disambiguates

Jonson’s argument about blackness and whiteness. Middleton draws upon “a black

personage” to embody and stage the qualities of external and internal beauty. In doing

so, he also suggests that the association of physical beauty with blackness was not

unheard of in early modern England. The pageant features India as a spice capital,46

represented by a “Black Queen,” who addresses the crowd:

You that have eyes of judgment and discern

Things that best of man and life concern

Draw near: this black is but my native dye,

But view me with an intellectual eye,

As wise men shoot their beams forth, then you’ll

find

A change in the complexion of the mind:

I am beauteous in my blackness (358).

Through the “Black Queen,” Middleton makes several moves, referencing the Hebrew

Bible and the Septuagint,47 inviting and challenging the audience in its cultural and

intellectual complacency to a new perspective, and praising the physical beauty of the

45. References to Thomas Middleton’s pageants are to The Works of Thomas Middleton Vol.7, ed. A.H.
Bullen (New York: AMS Press, 1964). Pageants do not have lines numbers. For convenience, I include
page numbers with each act and scene in parentheses. This pageant celebrates the installation of Peter
Proby as Lord Mayor and Chancellor of London.
46. The East India Company, which began on December 31, 1600, supplied cotton, spices, silk, and indigo
dye to England. D’Amico speculates that this is one of the reasons for India’s representation. According to
Dyce, “the newly-established East India Company . . . had contributed so much to enlarge the sphere of the
grocer’s trade (qtd. in Bullen), 239.
47. References to the Septuagint and Hebrew Bible are to He palaia diatheke kata tous o’:
Septuagint/epistemonike epimeleia Alfred Rahifs, Verkleinerte Ausgabe in einem Band edition (Athenai:
Biblike Hetairia, 1979); (Torah Nebi’im Kethubim) The Holy Scriptures according to the Masoretic Text
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1955).
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Black Queen, all of which supplement the complex subtleties that I contend Jonson

interrogates in the twin masques.

In both Bibles, the female speaker of the Song of Songs asserts her beauty and

blackness: in the Septuagint 1:5, “μελαινα ειμι και καλη θυγατερες ιερουσαλημ ως

σκηνωματα κηδαρ ως δερρεις σαλωμων / 1:6 μη βλεψητε με οτι εγω ειμι μεμελανωμενη

οτι παρεβλεψεν με ο ηλιος”; and again in the Hebrew, “‫ה‬

. ‫ו‬ - ” [“I am black and48

comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. . .

.”] Abraham Melamed notes that “black” and “comely” are synonymously positive

images reinforcing the speaker’s beauty . . .” and that she, as I believe like Jonson, takes

“a stand against” the normalization of fair skin as ideal beauty.49 Noticeably missing

from these lines is the famous disjunction “but” of the Vulgate and the 1611 King James

Bible. Both Jerome50 and the translators of the King James Bible (who had a precedent

in Jerome) changed the conjunction “and” to “but” so that the line reads “I am black but

comely,” a distortion of the original line, which, according to Ania Loomba, posits “a

contradiction between blackness and beauty so that the black exterior of the woman does

not explain but clashes with her beauty.”51 Middleton’s black queen’s assertion, “I am

48. My emphasis.
49. Malamed, 43.
50. Jerome’s antipathy toward women is legendary. In Adversus Jovinianum, he labels woman a human
“atrocity,” the scourge of mankind, and the principal cause of sin in the world. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Online Academic Edition. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2011. Web. 30 Sept. 2011
<http.//www.britannica.com/ EBchecked/topic 6785/Adversus-Jovinianum>. Numerous Renaissance
paintings depict Jerome struggling against the enticements and siren call of women. Francisco de
Zurbaran’s Temptation of St. Jerome (1638-40) depicts “maidens as pretty musicians, playing come-hither
music as the virtuous [Jerome] fends them off.” David D. Gilmore, Misogyny: the male malady
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 87.
51. Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 61. Loomba’s
observation that “the frank sexuality and passion of the Song seems oddly placed in a religious book . . .” is
itself odd because the Bible is replete with human sexuality and passion: Potiphar’s wife’s consuming
desire for Joseph (Gen. 39); King David’s murderous carnal yearning for Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife (2 Sam.
 121

beauteous in my blackness,” hearkens back to this female speaker’s declaration. It is

worth remembering that King James I was depicted as the English Soloman and that the

relationship of the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba became legendary.52

Hearing of Solomon’s great wisdom, Sheba journeyed from Ethiopia53 to Jerusalem to

test the king’s wisdom, indicating that she herself was wise. The queen, according to

legend, was also beautiful, as is Middleton’s “Black Queen,” who proclaims her beauty

from the stage--another reminder that positive dramatization of black individuals

occurred on the early modern English stage.

In Middleton’s pageant of Honor and Virtue, the Black Queen invites the

multitude to discern beauty. Like Jonson’s, the invitation also challenges the audience to

move beyond cultural prescriptions to exercise mature judgment through the intellectual

rather than the physical eye. The queen’s declaration, “I am beauteous in my blackness,”

echoes the first few lines of Blackness, which also commend the spiritual beauty of the

Ethiopian princesses, who “. . . though black in face, / . . . are bright, /And full of light.”

Several scholars, including Hall and Orgel, see these three lines as alluding to the Song of

Songs. However, these lines more accurately recall Queen Candace’s reply to Alexander

the Great. Thinking that perhaps Alexander could mistakenly correlate black faces with

darkened minds, Candace tells him that though Ethiopians have black faces, their “souls

11-12, 1 Kings 1-2, 1 Chr.3-5), Mary Magdalene’s transgressions (Luke 7:36-50), and a woman’s
adulterous act (John 8:3-11), among other episodes. Loomba also comments on Medieval and Renaissance
allegorical interpretation of blackness, citing one of Abelard’s letters to Heloise as a case in point: “The
Ethiopian woman . . . is black without but lovely within, for she is blackened outside in the flesh because in
this life she suffers bodily affliction.” Abelard further categorizes blackness as a “disfigurement . . .” (61-
62).
52. For a detailed account of the various legends of Solomon and Sheba, see
www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13515-sheba-queen-of.
53. Scholars such as Richard Pankhurst locate Sheba in Ethiopia. See The Ethiopians (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1998), 19.
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are ‘lighter’ than the white men among you.”54 “Light,” according to the entries of 7a

and 8a in the OED, is “often associated with spiritual reference; illumination of soul by

divine reference; full of virtue, intellect or other excellence.” Jonson’s description of

Niger’s daughters as “bright” and “light” picks up the sentiments of the Ethiopian queen

and, like her, establishes the contrarities associated with blackness, “defining it as both a

superficial and an essential property . . . [and] imbuing it with . . . moral and

psychological significance” as well as with mental acuity. Given these associations that

Jonson makes with blackness, people will react more positively to blackness, like the

Spanish ambassador, previously quoted, and Raleigh, who often compares the beauty of

Guianese and European women.55 Queen Anne’s and the Black Queen’s stage

performances help audiences and readers to see some of the subtleties that Jonson

associates with blackness.

With the conceit of blanching, Jonson offers perhaps his most complex and subtle

laudatory dramatization of blackness. Jonson’s praise of blackness also glorifies King

James as a living embodiment of divine qualities: a being with power to transform and

recreate people and things. We have already seen Niger’s association of blackness with

divinity (Blackness, l. 128) and James’s transformative powers with the Ethiopian

princesses. In this laudatory dramatization, Jonson combines James’s transformative and

54. Candace drew on the traditional association of Ethiopians with piety. Alexander’s action disproved
Candace’s assumption. See The Romance of Alexander the Great, trans. Albert Mugrdich Wolohojian
(New York: Columbia UP, 1969), 132; my introduction, p. 20. Also, the female speaker in the “Song of
Songs” asserts her physical beauty, ranking it with that of the daughters of Jerusalem, which is a different
argument from that of innate beauty and from the arguments of those scholars.
55. Because of the Spaniards’ brutal treatment of the South American peoples post-1591, description of the
native Indians “turned towards emphasizing [their] good nature and hospitality.” English merchants and
adventurers such as Ralegh were aware of the benefits of doing so, given that they needed “a new source of
raw material and a market for English goods.” Despite Ralegh’s vested interest in praising Guiana and its
people--he wanted the country to be as attractive as possible to the English so they would colonize it—his
observationsshould not be dismissed as having no merit. Ralegh, 17, 84.
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recreative powers. “[T]o blanch an Ethiop, and revive a corse,” rings with legal and

political connotations, implicit reminders of King James’s project to unite England,

Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as Great Britain and the twin masques’ participation in the

stage tradition originating from the Aethiopica. In Scottish law, “Blanching . . . is a legal

term that denotes the king’s ability to transform a subject’s debt to the crown into a

ceremonial display of allegiance.”56 James was well aware of this legal maneuver, for in

Trve Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598) he cites his ability to blanch his subjects: “the

whole subjects being but vassals, and from holding all their lands as their over-lord, who

according to good service done unto him, chaungeth their holdings from tacke to few,

from ward to blanch, erecteth new Baronies, and uniteth the old.”57 A tacke (or tack) is

“a customary payment levied by a ruler, feudal superior, or corporation,” while a few (or

feu) is a “feudal tenure of land in which the vassal, in place of military service, makes a

return of grain or money (opposed to WARD or military holding and BLANCH or

holding at a nominal rent),” according to the OED. When subjects do “good service . . .

unto him,” the king can reward them however he chooses: with “ward,” “few,” “tacke,”

or “blanch.” If the king decides to reward his subjects by blanching, first, he blackens or

black-wards his subjects into military service, then “transfers an obligation of military

tenure to a nominal fee or payment of honor”58 onto them. Rather than make regular

monetary payments, the subjects make a ceremonial gesture in the form of a penny, rose,

glove, or a similar token. Thus the king has transformed his subjects as he sees fit.

56. For the connection between blanching and the legal ramifications, especially in Scotland, I am indebted
to Mary Floyd-Wilson’s reading of Blackness in English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, 111-
131, especially pp. 116-17.
57. The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard Mcllwain (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1894), 62.
58. Floyd-Wilson, 116-17.
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Jonson’s use of “blanch” in Blackness reverberates with King James’s usage in

Trve Lawe, where James notes that all laws originate and spring from him. As overlord

of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, King James can blanch his subjects by

changing their status from English, Scotts, Welsh, and Irish to Britons as long as there is

provision for doing so within the legal corpus. To “revive a corse,” is, as Floyd-Wilson

suggests, to bring “a body of laws to life again,”59 which James sought to do with the

name “Great Britain.” James sought to recreate Britain because he saw it as “the true and

ancient Name which God and Time have imposed upon this isle, extant and received in

Histories in all Mappes and Cartes, wherein this Isle is described, and in ordinary Letters

to our selfe from divers Forraine Princes . . . and other records of great Antiquitie.”60 In

referencing England’s ancient name in histories, James probably had William Camden’s

Britannia (1586) in mind, for the king, like Camden, whom Jonson references in

Blackness, wanted “to restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britaine to antiquity.” Camden’s

county-by-county description of the land, including Ireland, produced a picture of Roman

Britain. Both James and Jonson, however, would find that James’s decision to take “the

name . . . King of Great Britain” so as “to discontinue the divided names of England and

Scotland”61 would also rankle many, especially Samuel Daniel and Sir Edward Coke.

James and Jonson would also find that certain English subjects, including Daniel and

Coke, would challenge the king’s assumption to resurrect old and/or create new laws to

restore ancient geographical name and monarchal dignities. 62

59. Ibid., 117.

60. King James, “Proclamation of the Union of England and Scotland (1604).”
61. “Proclamation of the Union of England and Scotland” (1604), Select Statutes and Other Constitutional
Documents Illustrative of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I, ed. G.W. Prothero (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1894), 393.
62. Daniel’s Defense of Rime (1603), an apologetic for English rime over quantitative meter, is, according
to Richard Helgerson, also a direct response “to the concerns aroused by the accession of a king who
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Jonson’s pun on “blanch” and “corse” and their use in the same expression may

indicate that Blackness and Beauty are analogues for King James’s Great Britain project.

Through these analogues, Jonson’s depiction of James’s recreative and transformative

powers ties the masques to the Heliodoran tradition, as it depicts blackness positively.

The ultimate goal of both masques and the unification project is the attainment and

reclamation of Britannia: the name of the place where the princesses will be transformed

and the name James wants for himself and his realms. When the parliament of 1604

failed to ratify James’s wishes, the king issued a proclamation, thereby allowing himself

to assume the titles he wanted for himself and his realms. The proclamation, issued in

October, preceded the performance of Blackness by fewer “than three months.”63 The

proximity between James’s proclamation and the performance of Blackness suggests a

political interconnection and Blackness as a platform for the unification of James’s

realms. Commenting on the interconnection between this masque and King James’s

agenda, Butler notes that

In . . . Blackness, the Ethiopian ladies who visited the court came on a

quest which was clearly an analogue to the dilemmas of national and

individual identity which Union posed. A . . . dream had made the

claimed ancestral conquest as the ultimate sanction of his authority, a king who thought his will should be
law.” Given that Trve Lawe adumbrates James’s absolutist theory of monarchy, which claims a royal
prerogative to impose new laws or resurrect old ones, Daniel might have indeed been responding to the
king’s claim, as Coke did in his Reports; both Daniel and Coke saw James’s claim as presumptuous. James
and Coke clashed repeatedly over the law, and by 1607, all legal challenges to James’s authority became
embodied in Coke. The king and his supporters were eager for him to speak the law: “Rex est loquens.”
And “Coke was as eager not to make the king speak the law . . . ‘Judex est lex loquens,’” he countered in
his Reports. Their battle came to a head in 1616 when James “sent order by Francis Bacon, then his
attorney general, to the twelve common law judges that they should halt proceedings[,]” should delay
“taking any further action, [and] . . . were to consult with the king himself.” Under Coke’s leadership the
judges refused. They were then summoned before the king and coerced into submission. Eleven
acquiesced. Only Coke resisted,” and his defiance “brought swift retribution” from the king: James
removed him permanently from the position of chief justice. See Helgerson, 38, 84, 88 & 89.
63. Martin Butler, “The invention of Britain and the early Stuart masque,” The Stuart Court and Europe:
Essays in politics and political culture, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 69.
 126

negresses feel discontented with their black skins, and they were seeking a

magical name which would solve . . . anxieties about alienation. Though

they were received as aliens at Whitehall, the king’s magic proved them to

have pale skins of aristocratic ladies . . . and it was James [who] washed

the Ethiop white, thereby demonstrating his sovereign power to

incorporate alien nations and do the proverbially impossible.64

James’s power to transform and incorporate aliens into his realm also extends to

incorporating the alien nation of Scotland into the English nation, thereby indicating that

the “‘real point’ of the masque[s] may be more than” the king using his powers to effect

“the external metamorphosis of the Ethiopians from black to white.”65 Given the

correspondence of national, racial, and gender issues between the Ethiopians’

transfiguration and Jacobean England, the real point of the masques might indeed be the

transformation of James I’s alien Scottish and rebellious English subjects into

enlightened Britons.

Like Trew Lawe, Blackness and Beauty outline the divine origin of James’s

authority (ll. 165, 181, 223; 20, 142) and prerogatives, making resistance to his rule

rebellion and ignorance. Tristan Marshall divides King James I’s alien subjects into two

distinct categories: the Scottish Lowlanders who “possessed a civic capacity” and the

Scottish Highlanders who did not.66 Marshall also relates a story about King James and

Thomas Knox that highlights the incivility of the Highlanders: Knox requested help from

the king to counter the Jesuits’ proselytizing in Argyll. James refused, “on the basis that

64. Ibid., 74.

65. Floyd-Wilson, 117.
66. Tristan Marshall, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London stage under James VI and I
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 2.
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anyone who could civilise the Highlanders, even if Catholic, could go ahead without his

blessing.”67 Transformation, then, is a process aimed especially at unifying and civilizing

the two groups of prospective British subjects--the Scots and those English who oppose

royal absolutism and unification--so that their extreme natures, emblematized by their

pale skin, can be brought under the blanching power and therefore refining and tempering

influence of the king. In Beauty, Jonson depicts pale skin as the embodiment of incivility

through the character of Boreas. As a Northerner, Boreas is expected to be enlightened.

However, he is “rude,” “rough” and “unkind” to the “reign” of the “prince,” who “shut[s]

up wars, proclaim[s] peace and feasts, / Freedom and triumphs, making kings his guest”

(ll.31-39). Januarius’s relation to Boreas recalls that of James with his subjects: James

stopped English involvment in the Dutch conflict and, calling himself Rex pacificus and

the British Solomon, promoted peace throughout his reign--hosting and feasting

sovereigns, including King Christian IV of Denmark.68 Boreas’s hyperwhiteness—“Thy

hair, thy beard, thy wings o’er-hilled with snow” (l. 33)—emblematizes the rebellious

and ignorant natures of certain English and Scottish subjects. Francesca T. Royster has

argued the affinity of hyperwhiteness to rebellion and barbarity. In Titus Andronicus,

both Saturninus and Aaron call attention to Tamora and her sons’ ultra-whiteness (II.

261-62, 312-14; IV. 2.116). As Royster points out, the play shows how barbaric, how

lawless such a “treacherous hue” can be: pretending to be what they are not, Tamora and

67. Marshall, Theatre and Empire, 2.

68. Although Sir John Harrington’s account of King Christian IV’s visit to England in 1606 is perhaps the
best known one, Jonson himself also wrote an account of the event. See J. B. Nichols, The progresses,
processions, and magnificent festivities, of King James the First: his royal consort, family, and court;
collected from original manuscripts, scarce pamphlets, corporation records, parochial registers,
Comprising Forty Masques and Entertainments; Ten Civic Pageanst; Numerous Original Letters; and
Annotated Lists of the Peers, Baronets, and Knights, Who Received Those Honours During the Reign of
King James. Illustrated with notes, historical, topographical, biographical and bibliographical, Vol. II
(London: J.B. Nichols, 1828), 70-74.
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her sons wreak havoc in Rome. These “hyperwhite” Goths are barbarians--within

Rome’s gate.69 Like Shakespeare, Jonson problematizes and, again, inverts the received

perception of whiteness by connecting it to lawlessness, thereby facilitating positive

associations of blackness.

The inversion is yet another subtle way Jonson engages the Helidoran tradition.

Britannia, like ancient Rome, has its own hyperwhite barbarians within its gate:

prospective British subjects--specifically the rebellious English subjects and the

intractable Scots, particularly the Highlanders--who resist King James’s authority. In

Beauty, Januarius’s chastisement of Boreas for failing to recognize “Neptune’s son”

(ll.21-29) functions as a corrective to those who challenge or resist James’s authority,

including Coke, Daniel,70 and the ungovernable Scots. Jonson uses the twin masques to

promulgate the king’s unification platform and to represent the king as having sole

authority to execute laws, thereby transforming his realms and subjects. Butler argues

that in the masques Jonson “took . . . [a] radical line,” presenting “Britain and Union as

revolutionary rather than evolutionary concepts [whose] legitimation came about through

the king’s magical powers . . . a power which was rooted solely in the person of the

monarch himself and with which there could be little or no prospect of contest.”71 Both

Blackness and Beauty make clear that James, whose authority is divinely conferred,

69. “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.”
Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2000): 432-55.
70. Jonson was fully aware of Daniel’s opposition to King James, for, according to Helgerson, he told
“Drummond that he had written a discourse of poesy both against Campion and Daniel, especially the last.”
Helgeron adds that in A Defence of Rime, Daniel asserts a “community whose authority can both enable
other poets . . . and repel the encroachment of royal invaders who might try to do to English law what
Campion wanted to do to English verse. Norbrook also notes that in A Defence Daniel praises “vnlearned
Rome” for laying “the foundations of the Roman state” but blames “eloquent Rome” for allowing the state
to fall “into disorder and allowed a collapse ‘from the glory of a common-wealth’ to an absolutist empire,”
adding that in “his Panegyrike Daniel praised the frugal Henry VII and urged James to avoid luxury” (157-
58).
71. Butler, “The invention of Britain and the early Stuart masque,” 73&74.
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embodies both transformative and (re)creative power, as well as wisdom (ll.226-27, 26-

28). In delineating James’s power and authority, Jonson’s glorification of the king also

shows the lawlessness of James’s opponents. Jonson reinforces James’s power and

superiority through Olympian and cosmological comparisons: James is “Neptune’s son,”

and, therefore, like the planet and the god, far-removed from the ordinary; “Mars,” the

conqueror; “Hesperus,” the evening star; and “Sol,” the brightest planet in our solar

system (Beauty, ll.21-25). He is Prometheus, the symbol of human aspiration and

potential (Beauty, l. 26), with knowledge and wisdom to understand and cure all maladies

(Blackness, ll. 226-27), including intransigence and barbarity, and to inspire love and

obedience in his subjects (Beauty, l. 29).

As a tool that reconciles disjunction between individuals’ interior and external

states, blanching signals movement from dark to light. In the world of the masques,

James’s blanching the would-be Britons is correlative to his blanching the Ethiopians, for

both are transformative and recreative processes. Through these processes, Jonson’s

praise of blackness and participation in the Heliodoran tradition emerge. Boreas’s “rude

voice” establishes a correspondence with James’s unenlightened and rebellious subjects,

for they, like him, are mentally and spiritually dark (Beauty, l. 20). Since early modern

England associated dark skin with barbarity and pale skin with civility, the northern

complexion or pale skin of the Highlanders and James’s English detractors would suggest

that they have qualities such as temperance, piety, and wisdom. Jonson’s association of

pale skin with barbarity and dark skin with civility inverts the English Renaissance

cultural norm. The inversion is yet another subtle way Jonson participates in the tradition

under discussion. To tease out the arguments Jonson makes about blackness and
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whiteness through inversion, I want to look once more at another of Middleton’s

pageants, The Triumph of Truth (1614), which celebrates the installation of Sir Thomas

Middleton as Lord Mayor of London.72 Although the pageant postdates the twin

masques, its inversion of the black-white binary remains relevant.

Truth helps make explicit the implicit arguments about blackness in Jonson’s twin

masques, Blackness and Beauty. Truth relies upon images and symbols to help make its

point: fog and mist are symbols of error, while “a robe of white silk” and a “white dove”

are those of truth. The pageant features a ship with the words “Veritate gubernor” in

golden letters and only four occupants: “a king of the Moors, his queen, and two

attendants of their own color.” Initially, the king believes that the multitude gapes at him

because he is “A king [who is] black.” But he sees that the object of the multitude’s

“amazement” is the “city-governor” and that he and his queen attract only passing

glances from the hurried crowd (247-48). According to D’Amico, a “striking theatrical

moment occurs that ties the appearance of Error” to the English, who are enveloped in

mist and fog and, I will add, ties enlightenment to the black king, who sees past the mist

and fog. He also realizes that “Where true religion and her temple stand; / [and] being a

Moor” himself the English are likely to hold him “in opinion’s lightness” because they

perceive him to be “As far from sanctity as [his] face [is] from whiteness[.]” The pun

“then in opinion’s lightness” reveals the simultaneity of the black king’s enlightened

mind and the slight regard in which the English crowd holds him because he is black.

Nonetheless, the king “forgives the judgings of th’ unwise / Whose censures ever

quickens in their eyes, / Only begot of outward form and show[.]” The king “think[s it]

meet to let such censurers know / However darkness dwells upon my face / Truth in my

72. No relation to the playwright.

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soul sets up the light of grace” (248). Although early modern convention associated

darkness with black individuals and light with white persons, Middleton, like Jonson,

overturns the convention by associating the Moor with “light” and the English with

darkness. Middleton’s use of the dark-light symbolism further inverts the convention, for

the Moor seeks to correct the common opinion that “dark-complexioned person[s] cannot

be enlightened in mind or spirit” (60) and that fair-skinned individuals cannot have

darkened minds. Here, Middleton makes explicit the argument of black enlightenment

and white ignorance, and his reversal resonates with Jonson’s conceit of blanching: the

fair-skinned “Britons” are dark on the inside, while the dark-skinned Ethiopians are light

on the inside. Like Middleton’s English who are enveloped in darkness and need

enlightenment, so are some of James’s would-be Britons, who need blanching to be

brought under the enlightening and civilizing effect of the king.

Through the reconciliation of fair-skinned but mentally and spiritually dark

Britons and the dark-skinned yet enlightened Ethiopians by means of blanching, Jonson’s

twin masques can be viewed as a part of the Heliodoran stage tradition. Both Blackness

and Beauty posit a positive portrayal of blacks by dramatizing admirable traits associated

with Africans. The symbolic meaning of the names of the masquers in Blackness also

testifies to Jonson’s awareness of the association of knowledge and purity with

Ethiopians. Indeed, Jonson explains that he chose the symbolic names “for strangeness

as relishing antiquity, and more applying to that original doctrine of sculpture which the

Egyptians are said first to have brought from the Ethiopians” (Blackness, n. 240), thereby

revealing his knowledge of their accomplishments. By reviving “a corse” to blanch his

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subjects, James moves toward enlightening his rebellious subjects and Jonson reveals a

complex participation in the Heliodoran tradition.

III.

The Intertexuality of the Aethiopica, Blackness, and The English Moore

When Jonson wrote Blackness, Richard Brome was his apprentice. Brome started

in Jonson’s employ in 1614, around the age of 24, and wrote The English Moore73 around

1635, twenty years later.74 A few of Brome’s plays were more successful than his former

master’s, according to Sara Jayne Steen.75 Both Steen and Stevens believe that The

English Moore was among the first to be acted at the Salisbury Court theater, following

the re-opening of the theaters in 1637, after the plague of 1636.76 The main plot of the

play centers on the forced marriage between Millicent, a young Englishwoman, and

Quicksands, an old usurer who has bankrupted the young English gallants. The gallants

plan to avenge their disgrace by cuckolding Quicksands, who employs preventive and

counter measures by disguising Millicent as a Moor and staging a lavish counter-masque,

the “shew of blackamores,” which he hopes will outdo the masque of the gallants,

thereby nullifying the effects of their masque and guaranteeing his triumph over them,

securing his authority over Millicent, and simultaneously ensuring her inaccessibility to

the gallants. During the “shew,” Millicent escapes and reunites with her true love.

73. All references to Brome’s text are to The English Moore; or The Mock Marriage, ed. Sara Jayne Steen
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983).
74. The Stage-keeper’s line from the Induction of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) references Brome: “I
am looking, lest the Poet heare me, or his man, Master Brome, behind the Arras.” Little is known of
Richard Brome. He had at least a grammar school education. As “one of the most popular Caroline
playwrights,” Brome wrote for the Blackfriars theater and the Red Bull and was the dramatist for the
reorganized Queen Henrietta’s Men from 1635-1639. See the Introducton to The English Moore, 1.
75. Brome’s Lovesick Maid, for example, achieved “extraordinary applause” shortly after Jonson’s New Inn
failed at the same theater, much to Jonson’s surprise and chagrin. See Steen, 2.
76. Steen, 3 & 5; Stevens, “Mastering Masques of Blackness,” 420.
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Quicksands is exposed and humiliated. Quicksands as an old usurer with Venetian

connections recalls The Merchant of Venice, while Millicent’s transformation and the

“shew of blackamores” alludes to the Aethiopica, and Jonson’s Blackness, Beauty, and

Gypsies. In this section, I look at Brome’s use of specific sections of Heliodorus’s and

Jonson’s texts to engage the gendered issues of race and metamorphosis and his parody

the Heliodoran material in particular, which he uses to tap into the stage tradition that

depicts black Africans negatively.

The first instance of Brome’s rich and complex use of the materials he borrows

from Heliodorus and Jonson occurs in Act III, scene i of The English Moore, in which

Quicksands suggests that Millicent undergo a racial transformation from white to black.

Not wanting to be a cuckold or break his promise not to consummate his marriage until

the end of the month, Quicksands resorts to transforming his wife racially. He explains

that blackening Millicent will “Kill vain attempts in me, and guard you safe / From all

that seeke subuersion of yor honor,” adding, it will “coole theyr Kidneys, & lay downe

their heats” (ll. 63-68). As a “blackamore,” Millicent will be sexually unattractive to

Quicksands and the gallants. Brome, like Heliodorus and Jonson, makes metamorphosis

an issue of gender and race. In the Aethiopica, Blackness, Beauty, and The English

Moore, only women undergo racial transformation, despite the preponderance of male

characters in these works.77 None of the men in Jonson’s or Brome’s texts feels that he

himself needs to be transformed, perhaps because women’s sense of self and notion of

beauty are tied to masculine approval, and Renaissance men frequently saw themselves

77. In Heliodorus, there are approximately eight women and nineteen men, excluding pirates, soldiers,
sailors, and contestants in the games at Delphi; approximately seventeen women and ten men in Jonson;
and five women and ten men in Brome. Although there are more women than men in Jonson, ther ratio is
not two to one (2:1), or greater, as in Helidorus and Brome. Such combined numeric disproportionality
supports Hall’s assertion that “[d]iscussions of blackness are inevitably yoked to problems of gender
difference” (134).
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as proprietors of women as well as authors of women’s existence (see, for example, A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, I.i. 46-51). The act of transformation shows men’s “power

to display [women] as white and beautiful”78 or black and ugly. Millicent recoils at

Quicksands’s suggestion to “make /A Negro of” her (ll. 56-57) because she associates the

blackening of her face with blackening of her reputation and loss of her beauty, which

Quicksands understands and exploits: Millicent’s lack of beauty will deflate

Quicksands’s libido as well as the young gallants’. Quicksands will be able to keep his

promise and will lose his fear of cuckoldry.

Brome also uses Quicksands’s sexual insecurity to engage Jonson intertextually

and to dramatize a one-dimensional view of blackness. Quicksands’s fear of cuckoldry

prompts his desire to transform Millicent into a Blackamore, which allows Brome to

reference Blackness. Quicksands’s assurance that “Illustrious Persons, nay even Queenes

themselves / Have, for the glory of a Nights presentment / To grace the work, suffered as

much as this” (ll. 80-82) alludes to Queen Anne’s participation as a “blackamore” in

Blackness. Quicksands invokes the legitimizing precedent of Queen Anne in blackface

“to assuage [Millicent’s] anxiety about . . . racial change . . . .”79 As Stevens points out,

by allowing Quicksands to recall Queen Anne in blackface to blacken Millicent during

the actual performance in the audience’s sight, and Millicent to re-emerge on stage re-

transformed to white shortly thereafter, Brome provides a useful lesson to Jonson on how

to stage metamorphosis successfully and succinctly in a single performance. It took

took three years and two performances in Jonson’s Blackness and Beauty to stage the

Ethiopian princesses’ transformation as white women. The invocation, especially “the

78. Hall, 134 & 166.

79. Stevens, 421.
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mention of Queen Anne, encourages the audience to view Quicksands’ own theatrical

activities as grandiosely Jonsonian” because Quicksands’s own attempts at staging a

masque of “blackamores” fails, giving “Brome an opportunity both for comedy and for

theatrical one-upmanship.”80

Quicksands’s statement that “Queenes themselves” have “suffered” being in

blackface is curious and provides an opportunity for Brome to associate blackness with

unattractiveness through an oblique reference. In this context of negative association, the

choice of word, “suffered,” suggests that the queen endured some sort of indignity

performing in the masque, bringing to mind Carleton’s quip about the ugliness of “lean-

cheek’d Moors” regarding the queen’s performance in Blackness. The word “suffer”

along with Carleton’s quip might indicate how the English court audience largely

perceived Blackness, a perception in contrast to the foreign audience’s, suggested by the

reactions of the Spanish and Venetian ambassadors, who kissed the queen’s hand, danced

with her, and found the masque richly decorated and entertaining. Perhaps because both

Spain and Venice had known the conquering power of the Turks and Moors and were

less rigid and judgmental about race than seventeenth-century England, the two

ambassadors were more embracing of blackness than the English appreciating the beauty

which Jonson strove to achieve during the performance of Blackness.

In Act IIII of his play, Brome revises, conflates, and parodies Book 4 of the

Aethiopica and three of Jonson’s masques, Blackness, Beauty, and The Gypsies

Metamorphosed (IIII.iii.14-60) through Quicksands’s masque, “the shew of

blackamores.” As discussed earlier in this chapter, Book 4 of the Aethiopica deals with

the conception, birth, and breeding of Charicleia. Persinna gazes at the painting of

80. Ibid, 421-22.

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Andromeda during intercourse and births a white-complexioned baby, whom she

exposes. The child grows up in Athens and eventually returns home with her beloved

Greek prince. In Brome’s revision, however, Persinna is told in a dream that she will

give birth to a white child, which terrifies all concerned: “The queene of Ethiope

dreampt vpon a night / Her black wombe should bring forth a virgine white / . . . / She

told her King, he told thereof his Peeres / Till this white dreame fill their black heads w th

feares” (ll. 14-18). To escape the terror, the Ethiopian aristocracy decides to banish the

child to England if the child is born white, presumably because this kind of “prodigee” in

Ethiopia is the norm in England. When, however, the queen “was deliuered / Of child

black,” she, in keeping with the prognostication of “wizards,” sends the princess “to

merry England . . . / The fairest Nation Man yet ever saw / To take a husband,” who will

make her “as white as hee” through marriage (ll. 29-38). Instead of marrying a prince as

in Heliodorus, the princess will marry an untitled Englishman in Quicksands’s masque.

In rewriting the Aethiopica and Jonson’s twin masque through Quicksands’s

“shew of blackamores,” Brome heaps ridicule and disdain on both works. Brome’s

Ethiopian princess is born black, unlike Heliodorus’s. But like Heliodorus’s princess,

Brome’s princess will marry a western white man, who will morph her into a white

woman, as Jonson’s sun/king does with the sixteen Ethiopian princesses in Blackness and

Beauty. Brome seems to make royalty and blackness incongruous. In rewriting

Heliodorus and Jonson, Brome redirects racial metamorphosis from an exalted position to

a debased one. In the Aethiopica, the metamorphosis of Charicleia has associations with

Persinna’s gaze at the painting of Andromeda. In Jonson’s twin masques, the

transformation of the Ethiopian princesses occurs through the powers of the king.
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However, in Brome play, the transformation of the princess will result from a sexual

union with a commoner. The disdain and carnivalesque atmosphere surrounding

Brome’s revisions of Heliodorus’s and Jonson’s texts reaches its climax when Brome’s

Patrico outperforms himself with his sexual quibble: “This is the worthy man

[Quicksands] whose wealth & wit / To make a white must the black marke hit” (ll. 59-

60). Brome displays virtuosity as a dramatist by conflating these three texts—the

Aethiopica, Blackness, and Beauty—that deal with the gendered issue of color

transmutation into his play. Brome’s familiarity with Jonson’s texts and his use of them

as sources become apparent in Quicksands’s masque.81

The title itself of Quicksands’s masque, “shew of blackamores,” and the elaborate

preparations with which Quicksands adorns it recalls that of Jonson’s, The Masque of

Blackness. A “shew” is a masque and vice versa. Each work is “a spectacle elaborately

prepared or arranged in order to entertain a number of spectators,” according to the OED.

In fact, Brome sometimes refers to Quicksands’s “shew” as a masque. Both Jonson’s

masque and Quicksands’s “shew” engage blackness through Ethiopian princesses.

Indeed, the titles of both works are interchangeable, without each work losing its titular

meaning: Jonson’s Masque of Blackness could easily be called The Shew of Blackness

and Quicksands’s “shew of blackamores,” could also be “masque of blackamores.” In

both instances, each work retains the original meanings of its title. Additionally, Brome’s

description of England as “the fairest Nation Man yet ever saw” alludes to the twin

masques’ description of “Albion the fair “and “Albion,” 82 which means “white land” and

is traditionally the name poets use for England, which is also the destination of Jonson’s

81. See The English Moore, 105, n. 37.

82. Blackness describes England as “Albion the fair” (l. 180) and Beauty as “Albion” (l. 20), which literally
means “white land.” See the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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and Brome’s princesses. By referencing Heliodorus and making England the destination

of the Ethiopian princesses, Brome collapses Blackness and Beauty into the Aethiopica,

thus engaging three texts concurrently, all of which deal with the racial transmutation of

Ethiopian princesses.

Brome expands the intertextual dialogue with Heliodorus and Jonson to include

yet another Jonsonian masque, Gypsies, which he parodies as well (IIII.iii.39). The

“Egiptian Prophet” of The English Moore recalls Calasiris of the Aethiopica and the

Patrico of Gypsies,83 who are Egyptian diviners or fortune-tellers. In his role as prophet

(or priest), Calasiris helps Charicleia and Theagenes to find their destiny and pretends to

be a clairvoyant, divining their maladies. The Patrico of Gypsies, an Egyptian

clairvoyant as well, tells the fortune of the audience by reading each person’s palm

favorably. Brome’s fortuner-teller, however, gives his audience an unfavorable reading,

except for Quicksands. The young gallant Edmond learns that he cannot have the woman

of his dreams because he has “forfeited the Mortgage of [his] land” (ll. 43-44). A similar

dire prediction awaits Vincent, who apparently has designs on the same woman but must

relinquish her because he has “sold & spent [his] Liues Annuity” (ll. 47-48). The

Patrico’s enumerations of the young gallants’ failings have correspondences to the

financial misdealings of and abuse of trust by the duke of Buckingham, Master of the

Horse and King James’s favorite courtier, as reflected in Quicksands’s queries to the

gallants: “. . . have you offices to sell? or would you / Deale for some Courtier, that

83. Gypsies deals with metamorphosis as well. Interestingly, Jonson felt compelled to explain in Gypsies
why the removal of theatrical paint was successful in a single performance of this masque but not in
Blackness: “It was fetched off with water and a ball, /And to our transformation this is all” (1391-92).
Earlier at line 1122, Jonson reveals the components of the paint: “walnuts and hog’s grease.” Since this
“confection” was easily removed with water and soap, presumably the paint in Blackness was much denser
and not easily removed, at least not with water and soap. Rather than issue textual explanation on the ease
or difficulty in removing theatrical paint, Brome demonstrates the ease in effecting several transformations
with and without paint, thereby instructing and correcting Jonson.
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has?” (III.i. 64-65). Buckingham came under fire for financial mismanagement of his

office and for encouraging the king to sell social titles, including those of the peerage.84

Brome also rehabilitates the “stained” gallants by allowing them to recover their

properties and hence their reputation, just as Jonson rehabilitates Buckingham and family

in Gypsies by showing “the stain of ‘gypsy’ as only temporary, that Buckingham is

always essentially a gentleman.”85 Brome’s rewriting of Heliodorus and Jonson through

parody and disdain facilitates his departure from the Heliodoran tradition and his

participation in the tradition that stereotypes Africans negatively.

Although The English Moore borrows material from the Aethiopica but does not

participate in the Heliodoran stage tradition, it acknowledges the dualism embedded in

blackness. Quicksands admits “Heauven[‘s]” workmanship in African women:

Why, thinckst thou, feareful Beauty,

Has Heauen no part in Egipt? Pray thee tell me

Is not an Ethiops face his workmanship

As well as the fairst Ladyes? Nay more too

Then hers, that dawbes & makes adulterate beauty. 86

(III.i.69-73)

Although Quicksands’s admission serves primarily to gain Millicent’s confidence to put

her in blackface, it nonetheless echoes the ambivalence that Jonson expresses about black

pulchritude. A significant difference between Jonson’s and Brome’s acknowledgements

of African beauty is the willingness of the former but the reluctance of the latter to praise

84. Norbrook, 206-7.

85. Stevens, 399.
86. Quicksands’s pontification on cosmetics recalls Abdella’s anti-cosmetic critique (I.1.173-185) in The
Knight of Malta, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966), 366-67.
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African women as comely. We have seen the many ways that Jonson admits to the

beauty inherent in blackness (Beauty, l.71; Blackness, ll.85-87). Brome, however, seems

constrained to do so. Quicksands praises Ethiopian and Egyptian women as beautiful

because their undaubed, unadulterated faces look beautiful in comparison to the

“dawbe[d and] adulterate” faces of European women. In reality, Ethiopian and Egyptian

women are not beautiful but appear so because European women mar their beauty by

painting themselves. Hamlet voices a similar condemnation of women’s use of

cosmetics, raging against women’s use of cosmetics because it blurs the line between the

natural and the artificial and makes ascertaining or appraising their natural beauty

impossible: “I have heard of your paintings. . . . God hath given you one face and you

make yourselves another” (III.i. 148-150). Against this adulteration, this “dawbing,”

Quicksands lauds the “Ethiops face,” making her beautiful by default.

A distinct pattern of one-dimensional association with blackness emerges from

Brome’s rewriting of the Aethiopica and the twin masques. As a quality, blackness is

negative, which Brome demonstrates in the stereotypical ways. His Moor is both a comic

and inconstant figure. Despite her exoticism, the Moor’s speech and costume are

designed to elicit ridicule, which her encounters with Nathaniel demonstrate. In their

first conversation, Nathaniel suggests that they meet for a sexual interlude. After a brief

moment of self-deprecation, the Moor consents, telling him, “Then I sall speak-a more-a”

(IIII.iii.115). Although the Moor’s native tongue is not English, the audience is not

meant to sympathize with her and the difficulties involved in speaking a new language.

Rather, her speech is meant to provoke ridicule, as Nathaniel’s witty mocking response
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shows: “And I’ll not loose thee for more-a then I’ll speak-a” (IIII.iii.116). Her encounter

with Nathaniel also establishes her promiscuous nature.

Brome’s eroticization of the Moor reiterates the promiscuity that early modern

English playwrights frequently ascribed to black women. In that tradition, black women

are unappealing and devoid of honor. Zanche from The White Devil (1611)87 and

Abdella from The Knight of Malta are examples. Both women publish their availability

and eagerness for sexual dalliances. After Flamineo rejects Zanche because she is black

(5.1.188-205), she promptly seeks out the disguised Francisoco de Medici, publicly

confessing her burning desire for him: “Verily I did dream / You were somewhat bold

with me, but to come to‘t . . .” (5.3.240-42). The thought of a sexual encounter with him

overpowers her, and, in the presence of others, she moves forward to embrace the

disguised duke, prompting an attendant to exclaim, “How, how! I hope you will not go to

it here,” adding, “. . . she simpers like the suddes / A collier hath been washt in” (5.3.243,

247-48). Insatiable like Zanche, Abdella makes Mountferrat know of her sexual

availability and eagerness to pleasure him: “I can blithely work in my loves bed, / And

deck thy faire neck, with these Jetty chains, / Sing thee asleep, being wearied, and

refresh’d / With the same organ, steale sleep off againe” (I.i.178-181). The metonymy of

“jetty chains” links Abdella’s promiscuity directly to her blackness. Like “jetty chains,”

the double-entendre of “the same organ” stealing “sleep off againe” refers to a woman’s

two mouths and the paradox of sexual intercourse: it refreshes as it wearies. The

suggestion is that Abbella is a sexual automaton that enslaves men by refreshing and

wearying them simultaneously.

87. References are to John Webster, The White Devil, ed. Martin W. Sampson (Boston: D.C. Heath & Co.,
Publisher, 1904).
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Because black women were reputed to be sexually loose, the cultural constraints

of the English Renaissance prohibit respectable white men from consorting with them.88

Hence, in The Merchant of Venice, the clown Launcelot can consort with and get up the

Negress’s belly (III.v.38-39), but Duke Francisco de Medici, who masquerades as a Moor

in Webster’s The White Devil, must reject the sexual advances of the Moor Zanche--in

and out of disguise. Mountferrat’s marriage to Abdella reinforces the proscription of an

upstanding white man avoiding sexual congress with a black woman: as a disgraced and

debased knight, his relationship with her reflects his fallen status. Brome’s dramatization

of the Moor confirms that he is fully aware of these associations with black women.

When Nathaniel, the play’s equal-opportunity fornicator, first sees the Moor, he refers to

her as “a black Coneybury” and later desires “a snatch / In an od Corner, or the dark to

night” (III.iii.68, 103-04). “Coneybury” is slang for a loose woman, and “snatch,”

according to the OED, is “an unexpected and quick robbery” and “the female pudenda.”

Nathaniel desires a “quickie” because he imagines the Moor an easy conquest, which her

surrender confirms (III.i.108-116). By making the Moor yield to Nathaniel, Brome

follows in the tradition of portraying black females as promiscuous on the English

Renaissance stage.

Millicent’s and the Moor’s actions belong to the same tradition of the virtuous

white woman and the vile black woman. In this tradition, white women have fathers,

brothers, husbands, or uncles, but black women do not. Such male protection ensures the

safety of white women’s honor as well as that of their families. Nathaniel’s declaration

that fathers are obstacles and his seduction of Phylis, the play’s fallen and symbolic black

woman, as a result of her absent father attest to the security women derive from male

88. Tokson, 90-91.

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protection. Although Quicksands fails to live up to the Renaissance code of conduct to

protect his wife’s honor, Brome provides other forms of masculine protection for

Millicent. In the male-dominated Renaissance society the protection of women’s honor

devolves upon men because women were commodities to be traded to form political and

dynastic alliances, were responsible for the purity of the family bloodline, and were

perceived as weak. In 1613, King James I married his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to the

Protestant Federick V, Elector of the Palatinate and future king of Bohemia to secure

political, dynastic, and religious bonds with members of the Palatinate; approximately

seven years later, the king also sought political and dynastic links with Spain by

negotiating the marriage of Charles to a Catholic Spanish princess (a marriage which was

not realized). In The Tempest, both Alonzo and Prospero seek dynastic and political ties

with Tunis and Naples through the marriage of their daughters. By allowing his daughter

Claribel to marry the king of Tunis, Alonzo forms political and dynastic connections with

Tunis to prevent it from attacking Naples. To reclaim his dukedom and establish

dynastic and political relations with Naples, Prospero orchestrates the marriage of his

daughter Miranda to the heir apparent Ferdinand. Prospero’s vigilance in protecting

Miranda’s, and hence his own, honor extends to ensuring that Ferdinand does not break

Miranda’s “virgin-knot” prior to marriage (I.ii.345-351, IV.i.1-23). When the gallants

decide to make Millicent a common commodity among them, despite Quicksands’s

inaction, Brome allows Millicent’s honor to be protected through her imposition of a

sexual moratorium on Quicksands, the aid of a gentleman in orchestrating her escape, and

the intervention, though late, of her uncle (II.ii.41-49, IIII.iii.231-48).

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Millicent is able to escape her “denne of Miserie” because the structure of male

protection is in place for white women, a structure that is unavailable to black women on

the English Renaissance stage. Without father, family, or any sort of male protection, the

self-authoring and castaway black woman in the non-Helidoran tradition is a sexual

profligate on the English Renaissance stage. Brome’s Moor’s “deed of darknes”

(III.iiii.189) with Nathaniel is a foregone conclusion. The preservation of white women’s

chastity and the loss of black women’s purity are dramatized repeatedly in plays like The

Devil’s Law Case (1623), Monsieur Thomas (1610/16), and others.

One of the strategies of the writers in the non-Heliodoran tradition is to degrade

Africans (and other non-native English individuals) by emphasizing their foreignness.

Hall observes that Elizabeth’s virginity came to symbolize the enclosed space and

insularity of the English,89 an insularity played out over decades on the English

Renaissance stage and in several texts that made the English suspicious of others,

especially of dark-skinned individuals. English writers capitalized on this cultural

phenomenon, this xenophobia, in their depictions especially of Africans. In The

Thracian Wonder,90 another play that borrows material from the Aethiopica but, like The

English Moore, does not participate in the dramatic tradition stemming from this novel

that portrays black Africans positively, we see an example of degradation through

xenophobia. Having selected Prince Sophono as the husband for his daughter, Alcade,

the black African king and father of the “white” heroine, Lilia Guida, assures the prince

89. Hall, 126-27.

90. All references are to The Dramatic Works of John Webster, ed. William Hazlitt (London: John Russell
Smith, 1857). Lines are unnumbered in this edition. For ease and convenience, I give page numbers after
the act and scene. The playwrights, John Webster and William Rowley, invert how the lovers meet. Instead
of the African princess being abandoned and taken to Greece, as in the Aethiopica, it is the Greek prince
who, as a baby, is lost and taken to Africa. Lillia Guida and Eusanius, like Charicliea and Theagenes, face
obstacles to their love because of a blocking father, King Alcade, who has already chosen the man he wants
his daughter to marry
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that before the close of the fortnight “my child shall call thee husband.” Yet the king

betroths his daughter to another man. Later, King Alcade brags that “men [who] have

livers [as] . . . pale as their faces / . . . will . . . run” (3.3. 172) because of fright from him

and his fellow Africans. As the seat of bravery, the liver and its color indicate men’s

temperament: courage or cowardice. The inference is that white men are cowards and

black men are brave. By making Alcade a promise-breaker and captive, the playwrights

ridicule Alcade, showing the king to be vaunting and untrustworthy and his rhetoric to be

bombast. Alcade’s claim that his and his fellow Africans’ visages are so black that they

will inflict terror on the pale faces and cause them to flee, though comic and ironic—the

supposed terrifying men are captives of the putatively terrified ones—masks a deeply

xenophobic reaction to black Africans.

Brome implements the strategy of the alien by emphasizing the Moor’s

foreignness: her speech, habit, and dress. But Moors and other Africans were not as

foreign in England as Brome’s text may indicate, which Chew, D’Amico, Burton, Vitkus,

and Matar demonstrate: Moors interacted with the English extensively from the1580s to

the 1630s, through commerce and habitation. According to Matar, “. . . thousands of

Turks and Moors visited and traded in English and Welsh ports; hundreds were captured

on the high seas and brought to stand trial in English courts; scores of ambassadors

dazzled the London populace with their charm, cuisine, ‘Araby’ horses.” Sometimes,

both groups “even ate at the same table,” and some English who made their fortunes in

the Levant returned home91 and no doubt told stories of this fascinating land. The

question then arises, why do Brome and other early modern English playwrights treat

Africans with contempt on the stage, despite the widespread influence of the Aethiopica,

91. Matar, 5-6.

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the claims of antiquity, and actual encounters among the English, Moors, and other

Africans?

Besides the other reasons that I have been exploring for such degradation, Matar

suggests that the English encountered a people, a culture to which they could not feel

superior, unlike their encounter with the American Indian:

In the Muslim world, Englishmen possessed no invisible bullets because

the Muslims were religiously and militarily powerful, were widely

influencing English culture, and were dictating their own terms of

commercial and industrial exchange. . . . the English found themselves

humbled in North Africa and the Levant . . . [and] slaves in Algiers. As a

result, and in order to maintain their sense of national superiority and

confirm the image of Englishmen as God’s own, they imposed moral

constructions they had devised to legitimate . . . the destruction of the

Indians on the Muslims: as the American Indians were “sodomites”. . . so

too [were] the Muslims . . . . 92

Superimposing sexual degeneracy on the Moors was a compensatory measure and a face-

saving device that English writers practiced because, as Jardine has also shown, England

was militarily and economicallly puny on the world stage during this period. Goran V.

Stanivukovic reaches a conclusion similar to Matar’s and Jardine’s: “[a]t a time when

England was engaged in difficult diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire over commercial

92. A Muslim is also a Moor. See the OED for various categories of Moors. Athough Matar quibbles
about Renaissance scholars not differentiating among Moors, Turks, and sub-Saharan Africans (6, 15, 16),
early modern English playwrights did not make these distinctions, as Jack D’Amico (59) and Elliot H.
Tokson have also shown; according to Tokson, the term “black” included “Moors, Black-a-Moors,
Negroes, and Aethiopians” (2). Despite “being aware of the differences among these peoples,”
Renaissance playwrights made no distinction. Shakespeare, for example, describes Aaron’s son and
Cleopatra as “black.”
 147

routes and political domination of the eastern Mediterranean, making the Ottoman

Mediterranean a home of sexual vices and transgressions became one of the most

common ways in which the early modern English writers defamed the Ottomans.”93

Moors, including Ethiopians and other Africans, during this time were known for their

religious scruples; yet English Renaissance playwrights staged them as irreligious with a

natural tendency to sexual deviance, a tradition Brome taps into when he eroticizes the

Moor. To emphasize the erotic nature of the Moor, Brome transfers the disguise from

Millicent to the fallen Phyllis because such a disguise is incompatible with the maidenly

Millicent but suitable to the unchaste Phyllis, the symbolic black woman of the play.

Both Jonson and Brome indicate indebteness to Heliodorus in covert and overt

ways. In positing Ethiopians and blackness as physically and mentally attractive, Jonson

treads where few English Renaissance writers dared to tread. His association of white

skin with ignorance and incivility and dark skin with enlightenment challenges the

prevailing cultural norm of white skin with civility and dark skin with barbarity. Thus,

the Ethiopians’ journey from East to West is symbolic: they enlighten James’s court with

their civility, wisdom, and piety, and he transmutes them into the Western ideal of

physical beauty so that their internal light reflects their external appearance. Perhaps

Jonson’s equivocations, paradoxes, and conceits create a multidimensional blackness that

denies the negative, monolithic quality that English playwrights such as Brome stage

blackness to be. In utilizing material from the Aethiopica but inscribing blackness as

overwhelmingly negative, Brome flattens the complexity, richness, and sophistication

that Heliodorus and Jonson associate with black Africans and joins the band of early

93. Goran V. Stanivukovic, “Crusing the Mediterranean,” Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early
Modern English Writings, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2007), 65.
 148

modern English dramatists for whom blackness was antithetical to beauty and virtue,

which often plays out especially in English Mediterranean drama. In the next chapter, I

examine the affinity between the Aethiopica and the genre of English adventure drama in

a play and argue that Othello reflects a complex relationship within a framework of race,

religion, and gender in the Heliodoran tradition.

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Chapter 3

England’s fascination with Africa as the exotic Other, as seen in Jonson’s work

and James’s reign, facilitated the production of a plethora of texts dealing with the

Mediterannean, a territory which became increasingly important during the seventeenth

century. Among the major Mediterranean city-states that interested England was Venice,

known for its wealth and political thought. In February 1603, the Venetian “Secretary”

Giovanni Sacramelli met with Queen Elizabeth, and his successors Piero Duodo and

Nicola Molin “continued . . . negotiations” with the new king, who “with a crowd of

nobles [praised] the splendour of Venice.”1 Given England’s and Venice’s mutual

interests, commercially and politically, these negotiations focused on “trade conditions

concerning the Levant . . . as well as Cyprus and Aleppo . . . .” By 1604, England and

Venice had established diplomatic ties, with Sir Henry Wotton as the British ambassador

to Venice. Dignitaries such as “Lord Southampton, Lord Bruckhurst, Robert Cecil, and

others met frequently with the Venetian envoys.”2 Fernand Baldensperger has argued

that Shakespeare, though not an official dignitary, had “direct intercourse with the

Venetian envoys,” perhaps at “the Elephant and Castle” near “the Globe Theatre.”3 And

on November 1, 1604, Bladensperger notes, Othello, the Moor of Venice was performed

1. Ferdand Baldensperger, “Was Othello Ethiopian?” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and
Literature XX (1958): 3-4.
2. Baldensperger, 3.
3. Scholars like Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba maintain that Shakespeare also consulted Richard
Knolles’s General Historie of the Turks (1603) while writing Othello. See Burton, 22; Loomba, 94. Emily
C. Bartels and Rosalind Johnson have suggested Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation of Pliny’s Natural
History and John Pory’s translation of Leo Africanus’s A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600) as other
sources that Shakespeare consulted. See “Making more of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance
Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 435; “African Presence in
Shakespearean Drama: Paralells between Othello and the Historical Leo Africanus,” Journal of African
Civilization 7 (1985): 276-87. Shakespeare also drew on the historical wars between Turkey and Venice,
especially the Battle of Lepanto (1571) as source material.
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in the Banqueting House at Whitehall with “Molin the principal ambassador, who also

saw Masque of Blackness on January 12, 1606, in attendance.” 4

Othello, set in Venice and Cyprus, was performed several times during James’s

reign and is one of the most staged, discussed, and debated plays within the

Shakespearean canon. Ever since Thomas Rymer’s infamous attack on the play as a

“bloody farce” and a cautionary tale to “all Maidens of Quality,” “all good Wives” and

“Husbands,”5 critics have had disparate reactions to the play, especially to the hero and

heroine, ranging from the ignoble to the noble hero and the submissive to the courageous

heroine. In joining the scholarly conversation about Othello, I find the evidence pushing

me toward a reading closer to the idea of a noble Othello and a fearless Desdemona.

Placing the play as a drama in the Heliodoran tradition with its dramatization of a

Mediterranean setting, positive representation of a black African, and a brave and chaste

heroine and hero highlight aspects of the play that sometimes get overlooked. Critics

such as Charles Gildon,6 Samuel T. Coleridge, and F.R. Leavis have inveighed against a

black hero as inappropriate,7 and others such as William Hazlitt and Frank Kermode

4. Baldensperger, 5. Some scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote Othello earlier, in late 1603, or even as
early as 1601/2.
5. See A Short View of Tragedy, 1693 (Yorkshire: The Scholar Press, 1970), 92.
6. In 1694, Charles Gildon chastised Rymer for indicting the play and the hero. Gildon maintained that
despite Rymer’s censure Shakespeare did not violate the Aristotelian unities, that the playwright actually
fulfilled these functions by depicting a meritocracy where a virtuous man, regardless of color, can achieve
distinction. Gildon noted that there is no social disparity between Othello and Desdemona because
Shakespeare creates Othello with “extraordinary Merit and Virtue” that Desdemona would love. He
praised Shakespeare for representing “things as they should be, not as they are” and for exposing the
“barbarity of confining nations, without regard to their virtue and merits, to slavery and contempt for the
mere accident of their complexion.” Almost two decades later (1710), Gildon reversed himself by
subscribing to what he had previously decried in Rymer: “making a Negro of the Hero or Chief Character
of the Play, wou’d shock anyone” and Desdemona’s love for Othello is “monstrous.” Gildon offered no
explanation for his reversal; perhaps the spirit of the times—the prevalence of slavery during the eighteenth
century—possessed him. See “Commentary on Rymer’s Othello,” A Norton Critical Edition on Othello
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 231; “Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare,” The Works of Mr. William
Shakespeare, Vol. 7. 1710, ed. Nicolas Rowe (Rpt. NY: AMS Press, 1967), 411-12.
7. Whereas Rymer insinuates racism through sarcasm--“With us a Black-amoor might rise to a Trumpeter;
but Shakespeare would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General--”Coleridge is blunt: “Can we imagine
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praise Othello as heroic and noble.8 While many critics argue against Othello’s

blackness, a heroic Othello, or a black hero,9 I, like Hazlitt, Kermode, and others, contend

that Othello achieves heroic and noble status. But I also argue that Shakespeare

combines material from Heliodorus with his major source in Cinthio, and fashions it into

an Othello that follows the mold of Hydaspes to certain degree, but retains distinct parts

of Cinthio’s story. I differ from Kermode and others by positing a stage tradition of

which Othello is a part that makes him a positive black character.

[Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth—at a time, too, when
negroes were not known except as slaves.” But Coleridge is disingenuous. During the eighteenth century,
England had several accomplished and well known blacks, negating Coleridge’s claim that during this time
“Negroes were not known except as slaves.” Ignatious Sancho was a composer, writer, and the first black
British playwright and critic. His friends included the duchesses of Queensbury and Northumberland, the
actor David Garrick (who also played Othello), and the writer Laurence Sterne. Coleridge, who was
twenty-seven when Olaudah Equiano (1745-1787) died, would have known of this famous man. Equiano,
a journalist and writer, published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah
Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, in 1778, and collaborated with fellow anti-slavery campaigner
Granville Sharp on numerous issues, touring England and Ireland with public support and admiration. In
1792, Gentleman’s Magazine listed Equiano’s marriage among its “Marriages and Deaths of Considerable
Persons,” among several others. Coleridge’s remarks are similar to Immanuel Kant’s sentiments. In 1798-
99, Coleridge visited Germany, became interested in Kant’s work, and studied philosophy at Göttingen
University. In “Observation on Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime,” Kant notes that the “Negroes of
Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling” (53). See Race and the Enlightenment A
Reader (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 38-70 for Kant’s manifesto on race. As Allison Blakely
remarks, “Kant was not basing his evaluation on the historical experience of blacks in Europe,” or on
history itself, for if he had the civilization would have reminded him of his foolish remark just as the lives
of eighteenth-century Blacks such as Joseph Boulogne, Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges in France, whose
music influenced Mozart; the philosopher Antony William Amo in Germany; the poet and polyglot Jacobus
Capitein, who was also a preacher in Holland; and Abram Hannibal, the maternal great-grandfather of
Alexander Pushkin, in Russia, would have. See “Problems in studying the role of Blacks in Europe,”
Perspectives (May/June 1997):11-12. Coleridge also knew of Toussaint L’Oveture, the Haitian general
who defeated the French army and led Haiti, the first country in North America, to freedom through
revolution in 1804. Coleridge’s friend, colleague, and collaborator William Wordsworth wrote an ode to
Toussaint. See, also, Leavis, “Diabolical Intellect or the Sentimentalist’s Othello,” The Common Pursuit
(New York: NY UP, 1954), 136-59.
8. William Hazlitt, “Othello,” Characters of Shakespeare’s Play and Lectures on the English Stage
(London, 1817); The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1974), 1198-1202.
9. William Kendrick was the first critic to object to Othello as a black hero, asserting that Shakespeare
intended Othello to be tawny; otherwise Desdemona’s love for a black Moor would be intolerable.
Kendrick’s assertion dominated Victorian stage representation of Othello and spawned scholarship about
Othello’s color and racial origin, including Coleridge’s, Lamb’s, and those of many twentieth- and twenty-
first century critics. See Shakespeare, the Critical Heritage: 1774-1801, Vol. 6, ed. Brian Vickers
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 116-17.
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Critics frequently underestimate Desdemona’s courage and intelligence, labeling

her passive and charging her with complicity in her own death and the ensuing tragedy of

the play. John Quincy Adams, for example, lambastes Desdemona as a “little less than a

wanton.” Adams, who must have ignored Shakespeare’s text while reading Iago’s,

derides Desdemona for betraying her gender and social status by marrying a black man.10

Anna Brownell Jameson depicts Desdemona as passive, offering no resistance to

Othello.11 Both G. R. Elliott and Gayle Greene12 see Desdemona as mentally weak,

although Elliott concedes that during the play’s denouement Desdemona achieves

understanding. Greene concludes that Desdemona is compliant and accepting of the

position society assigns her. In my analysis of Desdemona, I aim to show that such

characterizations of her are fundamentally flawed. In creating his heroine, Shakespeare

also draws upon the Heliodoran tradition to offer us a medley of personal traits. Instead

of the simple romance in Cinthio, Shakespeare, as might be expected, deepens and

complicates it by adding the elements of bravery, maidenhood, and elopement found in

Heliodorus to his drama, making Desdemona, like other heroines in the Heliodoran

tradition, a neophyte in love but one whose courage is comparable to her male

counterpart.

Scholars in the twenty-first century initiate a new field of critical inquiry by

looking to the Mediterranean to offer fresh insights into Othello on race, religion, and

national origin. Emily Bartels, Ania Loomba, Daniel Vitkus, and Michael Neill argue for

10. John Quincy Adams, “Misconceptions of Shakespeare upon the stage,” Notes and Comments upon
Certain Plays and Actors of Shakespeare, 3rd ed., edited by James Henry Hackett (Carleton Publisher,
1864), 217-18.
11. Anna Brownell Jameson, “Characters of the Affection: Desdemona,” Shakespeare Heroines:
Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (George Newness, Limited, 1897), 172-81.
12. G. R. Elliott, “Othello as a Love-Tragedy,” The American Review 8, no. 3 (1937): 257-88; Gayle
Greene, “This That You Call Love’: Sexual and Social Tragedy in Othello,” Journal of Women’s Studies in
Literature 1, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 16-32.
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“Moor” and “race” as unstable and indeterminate terms with multiple meanings because

early modern playwrights used these terms loosely and indiscriminately to categorize

people of various hue, religion, and cultural make-up as the same.13 Loomba contends

that Othello’s race and nationality cannot be known and that, indeed, it is unnecessary to

know. Vitkus asserts that “Othello as a noble Moor [is] a walking paradox, a

contradiction in terms.”14 In seeing Othello himself as noble and his race, nationality,

and color as knowable and necessary, I take a different path from these critics. Nobility,

race, color, religion, and nationality are integral to the literary and stage tradition of

which Othello is a part. In this chapter, I look at Othello as a drama that can be seen in

the Heliodoran tradition by emphasizing its derivation from the Aethiopica through

certain motifs: a wandering hero, the romantic union of an African prince and a Venetian

noblewoman, a daring heroine who challenges social structures, and a hero and heroine

who value sexual purity. Because I contend that Shakespeare also models Othello on

Heliodorus’s King Hydaspes to some degree, I begin the chapter by arguing for Othello

as an Ethiopian, and I close it by exploring how Othello and Desdemona’s relationship is

similar to yet different from others in the Heliodoran tradition.

I.

Othello, An Ethiopian?

Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi provides the essential story and is the main source of

Othello. Against her parents’ wishes Disdemona marries a Moorish general, whom she

13. See, for example, Emily Bartels, “Making more of the Moor,” 434; Loomba, 91-92; Vitkus, 90;
Michael Neill, “‘Mulattos,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian Moors’: Othello and Early Modern Construction of
Human Difference,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 361-64, esp. 364.
14. Loomba, 92; Vitkus, 92.
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accompanies to Cyprus. There, she becomes friends with the ensign’s wife. The ensign,

however, desires Disdemona. Incensed by her rejection, he plots her destruction, steals

her handkerchief, plants it in the captain’s bedroom, and tells the Moor that she is

unfaithful. The captain, recently demoted, tries unsuccessfully to return the

handkerchief. When the Moor asks Disdemona about the handkerchief, she becomes

flustered, unwittingly confirming his suspicion. The Moor hires the ensign to kill the

captain, and later both of them murder Disdemona. The ensign and the Moor eventually

quarrel, and their secrets are revealed. The ensign is imprisoned and Disdemona’s

relatives murder the Moor. Although Cinthio’s general is a Moor, there is no clue to his

race or nationality: he could be a black or a white Moor from anywhere in Africa.

Neither is there any designation of nobility or magnanimity to him, though he is valiant.

In Othello, these traits are demarcated. In this section, I aim to demonstrate that

Shakespeare dramatizes his character Othello as a black African and most probably an

Ethiopian.15

Were Iago to be believed, Othello could be from Mauritania. In Act IV, scene iii,

Iago informs Roderigo of Othello’s imminent departure from Cyprus. Roderigo

immediately assumes that Othello will return to Venice. But Iago tells him, “O no; he

goes into Mauritania and taketh away with him the fair Desdemona, unless his abode be

ling’red here by some accident” (l. 225). However, in an earlier scene of the same act,

Othello’s erratic behavior prompts Lodovico to offer an explanation to Desdemona for

Othello’s uncharacteristic actions. Having just arrived from Venice with a letter from the

Senate recalling the general, Lodovico suggests that Othello may be upset because the

15. In 1958, Fernand Baldensperger proposed that Othello is an Ethiopian. Although my contention is
similar, my proposal differs from Baldensperger’s in claiming that Othello is in the Heliodoran tradition
and is modeled to some extent on the Ethiopian king, Hydaspes.
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commission requires his return to Venice: “May be th’ letter mov’d him / For as I think,

they do command him home . . .” (IV.i.236-37). A few lines later, Othello clarifies

“home”: “Sir, I obey the mandate, / And will return to Venice” (ll. 259-60). Both

Lodovico and Othello corroborate each other’s statement that Venice is Othello’s home

and destination, which contradicts Iago’s.

“Home” could mean the current abode of Othello or his country of origin.

However, the context indicates that “home” is Venice, Othello’s current abode.

Additionally, neither Othello nor Lodovico discusses the general’s departure for

Mauritania. There is no other conversation between Lodovico and Othello that could

support Iago’s claim that Othello is going to Mauritania or that Mauritania is Othello’s

country of origin. Iago imparts the information about Mauritania to Roderigo because

Roderigo confronts and threatens to expose him for misleading and swindling him: “I

will make myself known to Desdemona” (IV. iii.173-217). Needing to prevent this

exposure, Iago discloses the general’s imminent departure to Roderigo but misrepresents

the destination. Knowing Roderigo’s desire and weakness, Iago torments him

emotionally so as to prepare him to do anything to stop Othello from taking “the fair

Desdemona” to a strange and far-off land. After delivering the first part of his message,

Iago then pauses to gauge Roderigo’s reaction before launching the final attack: “unless

his abode be ling’red here by some accident” (IV.iii.225-27). Iago’s claim that

Mauritania is Othello’s destination is troublesome, especially since Othello and

Desdemona are Christians, and Mauritania during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

was a cradle of the Almoravid movement, which spread Islam throughout the region and

for a short time controlled Islamic Spain. The notion that a Christian Othello would take
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his Christian wife to a land that is geographically, culturally, and, most important,

religiously distant is indeed puzzling, unless, of course, this piece of information is a lie

serving Iago’s interest. A significant concern arises out of Iago’s disclosure to Roderigo.

There is no independent corroboration of Iago’s assertion or any other hint that Othello is

going to or in any way associated with Mauritania. Iago probably invents this story

because he understands that by filling Roderigo’s head with visions of Desdemona in

some untamed and distant land he can execute his plan to prevent Roderigo from ever

exposing him (V.i.60-65). Othello has taught us that Iago is untrustworthy, and, unless

his pronouncements are corroborated independently, they are as far removed from truth

as he is from honesty. In the absence of corroborating evidence, Iago’s claim is best

recognized as one of his many fabrications.

There is also a slight possibility that Othello could be from Egypt. Othello

associates his parents with Egypt in Acts III and V. Both associations originate with the

handkerchief he gives to Desdemona, which an Egyptian Sybil or his father gave to his

mother (III.iv.55-74, V.ii.214-17). In the first instance, Othello says that an Egyptian

Sybil gave the handkerchief to his mother, and in the second, that his father gave his wife

the handkerchief.16 The possibilities of the origins of Othello’s parents are many. Either

one or both parents could have been Egyptian--though it is unlikely that both parents

were Egyptians, given Othello’s religious belief and military position in Venice. If,

however, one parent were Egyptian, then the other could have been Ethiopian, for

historically Egypt and Ethiopia, besides bordering each other, have always had close

16. See Lynda Boose, “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,’” English Literary
Renaissance 5.3(1979), 360-74; Michael C. Andrews, “Honest Othello: The Handkerchief Once More,”
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama 13, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 273-84
for other resolutions to this seeming discrepancy.
 157

ties.17 Egyptians and Ethiopians traveled to one another’s country frequently. In the

Aethiopica, the Egyptian Calasiris goes to Ethiopia to increase his knowledge and his

wisdom. If Othello’s father were Egyptian, he could have lived in Ethiopia, or his mother

could have emigrated to Egypt. In either case, Othello’s Egyptian heritage would most

likely have also given him an Ethiopian one as well. Except for the two vague

suggestions dealing with a farfetched and unlikely Egyptian heritage, Othello provides no

other hint or clue on this subject. Without additional and convincing evidence, Othello’s

Egyptian lineage remains a vague speculation at best. As places from where Othello

could have originated, neither Mauritania nor Egypt is credible. However, both countries

are important to the progress of the play. Mauritania is that wild Other land that holds the

potential of lost love for Roderigo and supplies the pretext for his murder, which helps to

unravel Iago’s scheme. Egypt, a land of sybils, spells, incantations, and magic,

historically noted as the birthplace of all sorts of arcane knowledge, is intricately woven

in the handkerchief that becomes the “proof” Iago uses in slandering Desdemona to

Othello and the catalyst in their downfall.

Having established the improbability that Othello is from Mauritania or Egypt, I

want to explore the probability that he is depicted as a black African from Ethiopia.

Besides being familiar with Ethiopia’s Christian history through biblical and other

literatures, Shakespeare would have known that no other African nation during his time

or before, except Ethiopia, had Christian affiliation. Before reading the character of

Othello as Ethiopian, I want to look at critical views of a divided Othello. In his 1998

essay on early modern constructions of human difference, Michael Neill catalogues an

17. Ethiopia had conquered and ruled Egypt during antiquity. For its part, Egypt supplied Ethiopia with its
high priest. See Snowden, 144-48; Pankurst, 69-73, esp. pp. 71 & 72.
 158

array of meanings for Moors, including “Africans generally (whether white, black, or

tawny).” To Neill, the term “Moor” was “notoriously indeterminate: . . . insofar as it was

a term of racial description it could refer quite specifically to the Berber-Arab people

vaguely denoted as ‘Morocco,’ ‘Mauritania,’ or ‘Barbary’; or it could be used to embrace

the inhabitants of the whole North African littoral[.]”18 In his introduction to the 2006

edition of the Oxford Othello, Neill acknowledges that the consensus of sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century critical appraisals of Othello is that he is Black: “the earliest

reference to Othello’s color (Rymer’s critique and the 1709 engraving in Nicholas

Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare) assumes him to be Sub-Saharan while the earliest known

North African interpretation was not until Edmund Keane’s 1814 production of the

play.”19 Neill’s quiet placement of “assumes” registers his own doubt. Curiously, the

lone interpretation of Othello as a North African or tawny Moor was in 1774, earlier than

the 1814 date Neill gives, and it was a supposition. William Kendrick was the first

person to suggest that Othello was not a Negro but could be a tawny Moor to explain that

“. . . Desdemona’s delicacy of sentiment could never have fallen in love with a Negro . . .

whereas, supposing him tawny20 there is nothing very unnatural in it.” Kendrick then

delineates the reasons Othello is a tawny Moor: Christianity, heritage, and relation

between Moorish Spain and Venice.21 But Kendrick’s supposition lacks textual support.

18. See Neill, “Mulattos,” “Blacks,” and “Indian Moors,” 364.

19. William Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
20. My emphasis.
21. Shakespeare, the Critical Heritage: 1774-1801, Vol. 1, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1981), 116-17. Kendrick is definitive that Othello is not a “Negro” but only speculative that he could
be “tawny.” Kendrick, a lecturer, translator, literary critic, and playwright, wrote for the Monthly Review,
Gentleman’s Journal, and later for his own periodical The London Review of English and Foreign
Literature. He was notorious for his abuse of other literary figures, especially Samuel Johnson, Oliver
Goldsmith, and David Garrick, among others. The Monthly Review terminated Kendrick in 1765 after his
publication of “A Review of Doctor Johnson’s New Edition of Shakespeare: in which the Ignorance, or
Inattention, of that Editor is exposed, and the Poet defended from the Persecution of his Commentators.”
Kendrick does some presterdigitation with the tawny Moor’s Christianity, conflating pre-fifteenth-century
 159

Like Neill, Loomba, Vitkus, and E. A. J. Honigmann believe Othello’s nationality

and ethnicity to be indeterminate, unknowable, or unimportant. Loomba’s categorization

of Othello as “the representation of the idea of the Moor” and Vitkus’s surmise that

“Othello is not identified with a specific, historically accurate racial category,” whose

identity is derived from a “complex tradition of classical barbarian, Saracen, paynim

knight of medieval romance, blackamoor, and Turk”22 may be probable in relation to

other Moorish figures, but these assertions do not line up with Shakespeare’s text or how

Renaissance and Victorian England as well as Continental Europe viewed Othello.

Honigmann’s contention that Othello’s race is ambiguous23 has shortcomings similar to

those of Loomba and Vitkus. To Roderigo’s designation of Othello as “thick-lips”

(I.i.66), Honigmann responds that such an insult should not be taken literally. But it

should not be dismissed as untrue, for insults seem to be more efficacious when they are

true. Additionally, Honigmann ignores Othello’s description of himself as black as well

as Brabantio’s characterization of Othello as “sooty” which, according to the OED, is

24
also a descriptive for the devil: “Old Sooty.” Brabantio’s immediate contrast of

Othello’s “sooty bosom” with “curled [darlings] of our nation” is a comparision of Negro

and Caucasian. The combination of Brabantio’s and Roderigo’s epithets along with the

Spain with post-fifteenth-century Spain, when the Moors, after more than six decades, lost Spain and
converted to Catholicism for fear of losing their lives and their properties because of limpieza de sangre
and the Inquisition. Also, the notion that the Venetians would entrust the safety of their lives and their city
to a converted Turk or Moor is ludicrous.
22. Loomba, 92; Vitkus, 90.
23. William Shakespeare, Othello, 3rd ed., edited by E.A.J. Honigmann (Walton-on Thames: Thomas
Nelson, 1997).
24. Renaissance England associated black people with the devil. In George Chapman’s The Blind Beggar
of Alexandria (1596) Brebitius calls Porus, the Ethiopian king, “a devil.” See The Works of George
Chapman, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd (London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1889), 21. There are no
lines, scenes, or acts in this edition. For ease and convenience, I give the page number instead. Both Iago
and Emilia label Othello a devil (I.i.91, V.ii.130-34). Notwithstanding Iago’s racial hatred of Othello and
Emilia’s bereavement because of Desdemona’s death, their description of Othello should not be
disregarded, because other characters refer to Othello as black.
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other textual descriptions of Othello as black, and the characterizations of early moderns

of him as a Negro suggest the overwhelming probability that as a character Othello is

indeed black. Honigmann also arrives at the conclusion that Othello’s race is ambiguous

primarily by dating the play 1601/2 and arguing that “the Moorish ambassador to Queen

Elizabeth [from 1601/2] seems right . . . for Othello.” This date, however, presents a

major obstacle: the first performance of the play was November 1604. If, indeed,

Shakespeare wrote Othello during 1601/2, why did he wait until 1604, two to three years

later, to stage the play for the first time?

Other critics see Othello as a dark-skinned convert of Islam. Patricia Parker,

Karen Newman, and Jonathan Burton all categorize Othello as a dark-skinned convert of

Muhammad. Newman sees Othello as an insecure black man who, under Iago’s tutelage,

reverts to paganism.25 Parker argues for a splintering of Othello’s Moslem and Christian

self, and Burton notes that Othello’s dark skin inscribes him as a Mohammed, describing

him as a religious Other, who “in a simultaneous affirmation of his Otherness . . . inhabits

the dual role of a ‘malignant and turban’d Turk’ and the redeeming crusader who ‘smote

him’” (254).

If, however, we recognize that Othello is meant to be Ethiopian and therefore a

Christian prior to his European sojourn, a deeper and more historicized understanding of

the character emerges. Ethiopia has been a Christian nation from biblical times. From

the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, “white Christian Europe took an emphatic interest in

the black Christian state of Ethiopia and its emperor, usually called . . . Prester John” by

25. Karen Newman, “And wash the Ethiop White: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,” Critical
Essays on Shakespeare’s Othello, ed. A. G. Barthelemy (New York: G.K. Hall, 1987), 133-34; Patricia
Parker, “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Africa, Othello and bringing to light,” Women, “Race,” and
Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994),
98.
 161

Europeans, whom they imagined “as a rich and resplendent monarch, exotic but also

potentially an engaged ally against intervening powers.”26 In 1400, King Henry IV sent a

letter to the “King of Abyssinia” (1380-1411) informing the emperor of his recent trip to

Jerusalem where he learned of the emperor’s desire to capture the “Holy Sepulchre from

the Saracens.”27 Ethiopians, Italians, Portuguese, and Spaniards traveled to one another’s

country. This collaboration had the destruction of the common enemy, the Turks, as one

of its objectives, and in 1305, a huge Ethiopian embassy visited Spain with a dispatch

from the emperor offering “to help fight the ‘infidels.’”28 To Europeans, Ethiopians were

Moors because they were black, not because of religious affiliations.29 Like other

Europeans, the English knew of the relationship between Continental Europe and

Ethiopia. While the crusading spirit had declined drastically in early modern England, as

late as 1511 and perhaps 1536 Englishmen were anxious to join the Crusade.30 In 1694,

Gildon (see note 6 above) surmised from one of Othello’s remarks (I.i.21-22) that the

Moor might have been “the Son or Nephew of the Emperor of . . . Aethiopia . . . forc’d to

leave his Country” and traveled to Europe in a Portuguese ship.31 Gildon’s association of

Ethiopia and Portugal has historical significance and textual relevance and indicates that

26. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Local Color: The Black Presence in Venetian Art and History,” Speak of Me as I
Am (Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2003), 12.
27. Pankhurst, 71-78.
28. Ibid., 77.
29. In 1441, two Ethiopians monks attended the Ecclesiastical Council of Florence. Between 1519 and
1524 the Venetian scholar Alessandro Zorzi interviewed at least five Ethiopians. Pankhurst, 76-98. See,
also, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. Cyril Edwards (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 1-46, esp.pp. 1-
14, that depict Moors and Mooresses as black people.
30. Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095-1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 345.
31. It is more feasible that the son or nephew of an Ethiopian emperor would have been captured rather
than forced to leave because historically Ethiopia never experienced internal strife but frequently warred
with its Muslim neighbors. Also, Europeans, especially the Portuguese, Venetians, and Genoese, were
beginning to infiltrate the country. See “Comments on Rymer’s Othello,” A Norton Critical Edition on
Othello (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 231. See, also, “Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare,” The
Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, Vol. 7, 1710, ed. Nicolas Rowe (Rpt. NY: AMS Press, 1967), 411-12;
Kaplan, 12; Pankhurst, 61-94.
 162

some Englishmen knew of the relationship between Ethiopia and Europe, as England was

not cut off from or deaf to news on the Continent. Shakespeare could have known of this

religious intercourse between Europe and Ethiopia and of the historical tradition of

Ethiopians as soldiers—even in European armies.32 If this is so, Shakespeare’s decision

to make an Ethiopian Othello general of the Venetian army is logical.

In making an Ethiopian the general of a foreign army, Shakespeare had precedent

from history and literature. Historically, Ethiopians had a long tradition as soldiers

(Snowden 119), some of whom fought in European armies, including Roman and

Venetian armies. In 1495, John the Ethiopian served as a Venetian military commander

in the war against the French and died in the battle of Farnevo in early July. The

Venetian chronicler Marion Sanuto called John a “saracino valentissimo” (“a most

valiant black African”).33 Shakespeare could have known of this story and used it in his

play, giving him the precedent for an Ethiopian general in the Venetian army.

As Ethiopian and Christian, Othello’s antipathy toward the Turks is natural, thus

validating the Senate’s choice of him as a general. If Othello were indeed a converted

Muslim, the Senate would be reckless to entrust the safety of the State to a former enemy

to lead its army into battle against this same enemy. To Baldensperger and Gesner

Othello is Ethiopian because of his race and religion. According to Baldensperger, “. . .

this negro’s Christian faith is attested, not only by his devotional attitude whenever

Roman Catholic practice appears in fact . . . or allusion . . . but by a negative argument:

32. Snowden, 119. Besides being familiar with Ethiopia’s Christian history through biblical and other
literatures, Shakespeare would have known that no other African nation during his time or before, except
Ethiopia, had Christian affiliation.
33. I am indebted to Paul Kaplan’s unpublished paper on Venice for this great find. The Venetian Senate
was so filled with gratitude that it “presented to the wife of Giovanni the Moor, now a widow, 72 ducats
each year from the treasury and a home forever.” See the final page of this unpublished paper; Marino
Sanuto, La spedizione di Carlo VIII in Italia, ed. Rinaldo Fulin (Venice, 1873), 527. See, also, Diaria de
bello carolino, ed. and trans. Dorothy M. Schullian (New York, 1967), 142-43.
 163

not for a single moment does Iago hint that Desdemona’s ravisher is, or was, a

miscreant—not a bad point.”34 Not a bad point indeed. Gesner reminds us that Ethiopia

“had long been thought of as a stronghold of the [Christian] faith.” 35 Baldensperger also

connects the name “Othello” to Ethiopia: it is a possible derivative of the “geographical

name OSCELO,” which is contracted to “Oxello”—a word found in Jesuit reports of

Ethiopia, which, along with the name “Iago,” carries an Ethiopian coloring. 36 Othello,

the Moor of Venice, then, was probably a Christian prior to being in Europe. As a

Christian nation, Ethiopians always regarded the Turks as dangerous, as Baldensperger

also notes. To critics who claim a Muslim past for Othello, Baldensperger’s observation

on Othello’s “Moslem” heritage is incisive and timeless: “Some of Othello’s most

‘moresque’ commentators were forced to suppose that he was made a Catholic convert in

Venice. This in the face of Mohammedan impenetrability to what seemed to Moslems,

polytheistic Christian ‘paganism.’”37 In such contexts, Othello’s query “Are we turned

Turk and do to ourselves / What heaven forbids the Ottomites?” is not, as Loomba,

Burton, and other critics posit, a self-canceling act, a distancing of himself from his

former self or kin,38 but a recall to Christian ideals that have always been familiar to him,

for historically Christian Ethiopia considered Islam paganism and frequently had hostile

34. Baldensperger, 7.
35. Gesner, 70. Although Gesner associates Ethiopia’s Christianity with Jesuit missionaries, Ethiopia’s
Christianity predates European missionaries’ proselytizing, going back to antiquity.
36. Loomba, however, claims that “Iago’s name recalls the patron saint of Spain, Sant Iago or Saint James,
who was known as Santiago Matamoros, St. James the Moor Killer.” Although Loomba’s explanation does
not connect Iago to the geography of the play, it captures Iago’s intent toward Othello. Using geographical
names to denote a character’s nationality, ethnicity, and/or race is not infrequent in Shakespeare. In
Othello itself and The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare uses the geographical names of Barbary and
Morocco to denote the nationality, ethnicity, and race of two characters: the maid of Desdemona’s mother
and the prince of Morocco. Compare Vitkus’s belief that “Othello’s name . . . pronounced in Shakespeare’s
day with a hard ‘t’ sound for ‘th’ is a compression of ‘O to hell O!’”, 102. See, also, Baldensperger, 9;
Loomba, 104.
37. Baldensperger, 7.
38. Burton, 253.
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relations with its Muslim neighbors Ifat and Adal and occasional animosities with

Muslim Egypt, then under Ottoman control.39

For Shakespeare to make Othello a “Moslem” convert “would prove a certain lack

of religious psychology on Shakespeare’s part; it would . . . make somewhat base and

disgusting Othello’s fixed antipathy for the ‘common enemy’ and the ‘circumcised

dog.’”40 To Ethiopians, Turks were religious infidels. Othello’s query about turning

Turk, then, is a reassertion of Christian ideals, and his suicide is not a self-canceling act, a

division of his Muslim half from his Christian half as Patricia Parker41 and other critics

posit, because there is no religious division, no Muslim half within him.

Othello’s Ethiopian origin and Christianity enlarge and solidify his heroic stature.

Among the ancients, Ethiopians were reputed to be noble, pious, and brave. Perhaps

Shakespeare makes Othello Ethiopian because he was aware of the literary tradition

associated with Ethiopians, of their military history, and of their Christian identity.

Perhaps, too, he wanted to identify him more closely with the King Hydaspes of the

Aethiopica. Hydaspes’s defeat of and subsequent treatment of a conquered people,

especially the Persian general, and his relationship to his queen and subjects demonstrate

kingly virtues. Like the Polish humanist Stanislaus Warschewiczki, Gesner sees

Hydaspes as the classical ideal of nobility and makes correspondences between Hydaspes

and Othello: both embody “nobility, greatness in soldiership and leadership, [are]

descendant[s] of an ancient line . . . with . . . deep religious consciousness, and a capacity

for dignified love.”42 The Senate, confident that Othello’s leadership and soldiership will

39. Pankhurst, 71-74.

40. Baldensperger, 7.
41. Parker, “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender,’” 98.
42. Gesner, 74.
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save Venice from the Turks, entrusts the defense of the nation to him. His rebuff of

Iago’s initial slander of Desdemona, noting that her conviviality is nothing but a generous

heart, testifies to a capacity for dignified love (III.iii.183-186), and his deep religious

beliefs attest to his religious consciousness. The generous, great-hearted, and noble-

minded Othello of Iago’s, Cassio’s, and Desdemona’s descriptions is more credible if he

is an Ethiopian rather than any other black African in Renaissance Venice because of the

historical record of Ethiopians in the Venetian army and the shared religious faith of both

nations. These ascriptions strengthen the heroic nature of Othello and establish a

correspondence between him and Hydaspes while negating or mooting critical opinions

such as the nineteenth-century Romantic critic August Wilhelm Schegel’s charge that

Othello’s tempered “inherent inclination to fierceness and sensuality reverts to his savage

nature” when Iago arouses the Moor’s jealousy and the twentieth-century scholar Karen

Newman’s claim of Othello’s recidivism to pagan savagery.43

II.

Othello: A Play in the Heliodoran Tradition

Criticism of Othello has focused on the play as a drama depicting the struggle

between good and evil, dealing with love, racism, or language as correlative to

character.44 Rarely has scholarship treated it as an adventure drama: a play whose

43. August Schegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, ed. A. J. W.
Morrison (London: H.G. Bohn, 1846), 401-04; Newman; 133-34.
44. E.K. Chambers, Robert G. Hunter, and Bernard Spivak trace the struggle between good and evil for the
protagonist’s soul. Derek Traversi claims that the play deals with the degradation of physical love into
sensuality. Susan Synder argues for the paradox of love: the co-dependence of two different people who
may never know each other. Eldred Jones examines the ways Moors are frequently portrayed in
performative literature, either as black-skinned villains or tawny rulers capable of noble and ignoble deeds.
Jane Donawerth focuses on the play’s language. G. Wilson Knight and Wolfgang Clemens concentrate on
Othello’s language and the correspondences between characters and speech.
 166

protagonists are involved in novel, risky, unexpected, and often dangerous and exciting

events in the Mediterranean. Recently, however, scholars like Jean E. Howard, Vitkus,

Burton, Bartels, Loomba, and others have become interested in a set of plays they term

“Mediterranean adventure drama.” Burton also terms these plays “Turkish plays.” Both

he and Vitkus argue for Othello as a reinscribed barbarian. Vitkus makes Othello’s

Muslim past responsible for his reinscription. Burton, however, contends that Othello’s

dark skin inscribes him as a “Mahumetan,” regardless of past religious affiliation.45 I

have argued in chapters 1 and 2 that dark skin can also signify civility and enlightenment

and white skin incivility and ignorance. A similar argument can be made for Othello. As

I have shown, Othello’s dark skin is not a signifier of paganism, barbarity, or a marker of

religious difference because “Moor” can easily denote skin color, enlightenment, and

national identity, which is the probablity in Othello’s case. My argument in this chapter

subsumes those racial, national, and religious issues: it engages the crosscultural and

transracial romance between the Moor Othello, an African man, and the Venetian

Desdemona, a European woman, both of whom are intelligent and courageous. However,

my main aim in this section is to examine how Othello may be read as a drama in the

Heliodoran tradition.

Shipwrecks, land and/or sea battles, chastity, wanderings, religion, nationalism,

and racially and culturally mixed romances and marriages are characteristic of the

adventure genre as well as the stage tradition of Mediterranean plays. As we have seen,

most of these characteristics can be traced to the Greek novel, in particular to

Heliodorus’s Aethiopica. Othello, as Howard also notes, belongs to this Mediterranean

45. Vitkus, 103-06; Burton, 252-54.

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tradition.46 If we see Othello with its Mediterranean setting, maritime drama, chaste

protagonists, elopement, and the romantic union of its protagonists as an adventure drama

in the Heliodoran tradition, then some of the ambiguities that beset critical interpretations

of the play will disappear, such as the near-ubiquitous charges of Othello’s recividism to

paganism and savagery, Desdemona’s subservience, Othello’s sensuality, and Peter

Stallybrass’s intimation that Desdemona’s elopement could taint her chasitity.47 By

emphasizing the hero’s journey from Africa to Europe, his experience with Venetian

society through his generalship and marriage to a noblewoman, a heroine who risks

parental and societal disapproval for love, and the hero’s value of chastity, I analyze how

Othello may be seen as an adventure drama in the Heliodoran tradition in this section.

Othello is the only play in the English Mediterranean adventure tradition to invert

the encounter between its male and female protagonists and to feature a black aristocratic

hero.48 In English Mediterranean adventure plays, the hero is almost always a white

commoner and occasionally a gentleman—but never royalty. A derivative of the

Heliodoran tradition, English Mediterranean adventure dramas frequently modify the

social status of the Heliodoran male protagonist by making a non-aristocratic European

male travel to the Mediterranean and fall in love with a native, aristocratic woman of

color or by allowing the hero to engage in notable actions in the Mediterranean that

enable him to rise above his station. In Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (1623/4), for

46. Jean Howard, “Gender on the Periphery,” Shakespeare and the Mediterranean, ed. Tom Clayton, Susan
Brock, Vincente Fores (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 359.
47. Burton, 253-55; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 247-48; Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body
Enclosed,” Rewriting the Renaissance: the discourse of sexual difference in early modern Europe, ed.
Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 141.
48. Although The Blind Beggar of Alexandria has traces of the Heliodoran tradition, Porus is not the hero
or a wanderer.
 168

example, the Italian gentleman Vitelli travels to Turkey and falls in love with the Turkish

princess, Donusa. The Battle of Alcazar and The Famous History of Captain Stukeley

feature a commoner, Stukeley, engaged in notable actions in distant lands49 in an effort to

improve his social status. Although the historical Stukeley was an impoverished

gentleman, the plays do not describe him as such. In Othello, Shakespeare reverses the

English tradition of aristocrat/commoner and European male/African female binaries by

making Othello, an African prince, go to the Mediterranean where he meets a native

aristocratic Venetian girl, Desdemona, and they fall in love.

In “Gender on the Periphery,” Howard notes that “Othello is in the tradition of the

adventure plays, which informed Shakespeare’s creation of Antony and Cleopatra and

Pericles as well.” Although Othello “reverses the dynamics of most adventure drama,

[it] is thoroughly conversant with them”:

In most such plays an English hero goes to the Mediterranean, interacts

with the alien peoples he encounters there, and is threatened by that

encounter, often through contact with a foreign woman. In Othello, a . . .

Moorish hero comes to the other side of the Mediterranean, to Venice, and

is eventually undone by this experience, in part through his encounter with

the white daughter of a Venetian senator.50

Othello’s conversance with other English adventure drama lies in the hero’s

Mediterranean experiences: his adventures and romantic contact with a native woman of

different cultural and racial background. Although Howard points out that adventure

49. Howard, “Gender on the Periphery,” 346.

50. Ibid., 359.
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plays were part of a stage inheritance for Shakespeare, 51 she makes no connection to

Greek romances, including Heliodorus’s Aethiopica. While Mediterranean setting and

adventures are standard practices in Greek novels, the transcultural and crossracial

romance between the hero and the heroine is strictly Heliodorus’s. Shakespeare also

inherited his hero and heroine’s mixed cultural and perhaps racial romance from Cinthio,

but the pair’s elopement, sexual innocence, grief of the heroine’s father on losing his

daughter, the wanderings of the hero, and the pair’s aristocratic status are Heliodorus’s,

not Cinthio’s. In Cinthio, the social status of the Moor and Disdemona is not a focal

point; neither is the heroine as a desiring subject, as they are in Shakespeare and his

Greek source. In the Aethiopica, both Charicleia and Theagenes desire each other the

moment they meet—so, too, in Othello: the protagonists simultaneously desire each

other.

In both works, the simultaneous desires of the protagonists play out in a

protracted manner. Despite the moment of enchantment when Theagenes and Charicleia

know they are destined for each other, neither one speaks to the other. Instead, both

convey their desire for the other through an intermediary. To Calasiris, Theagenes

confesses his love for Charicleia, who, sick from love, resorts to her bed. Concerned for

her daughter’s well being, Charicles seeks the help of Calasiris, who, privy to the secret

longing of both young lovers, assures each of the other’s love. Shakespeare retains the

protracted moment in his text, but modifies the meeting place and the manner in which

his protagonists confess their love to each other. Othello’s spellbinding narratives of

captivity, enslavement, and near death “scapes” that he experiences also become the

vicarious sufferings of Desdemona. Overcome with pity and passion, she lets drop a hint

51. Ibid.
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of her emotional feelings: “. . . she wished / That heaven had made her such a man”

(I.iii.162-63). And Othello, hoping for such a hint, speaks. Remarking on the equality,

social and other, between Greek lovers, David Konstan notes that Greek romances

revolutionized the novel by making the lovers social, intellectual, and emotional equals,

especially in their devotion to each other.52 Doody adds that usually the protagonists’

noble status is unknown to at least one of them until a later time.53 In Othello, we see the

intellectual and emotional equality of Desdemona and Othello. Each has the capacity to

stand up for her or his belief, to find solutions to their romantic and other problems, and

to love as deeply as the other. Both of them are of noble birth. Shakespeare, however,

keeps elements of the noble status unknown by making Othello’s royal pedigree a secret

to the Venetian populace (I.i.21-22) and, one can surmise, to Desdemona until perhaps

some time shortly before the marriage.

Othello is a wanderer in the Heliodoran tradition and an outsider in the country of

his beloved, as several critics have noted. In Charles Marowitz’s view, Othello “is an

outsider who pretends he isn’t . . . .”54 And Greenblatt concludes that Othello must

embrace the norms of another culture because he has lost his own origin and identity.55

Lost origin and identity, and outsider status, however, are integral to the hero in the

Heliodoran tradition. Theagenes, the prototypical Mediterranean adventurer, loses his

origin and identity by crossing geographical, religious, racial, and cultural boundaries.

His investiture in the gymnosophist religion signals his transformation from Greek prince

to Ethiopian king through his imminent marriage to the Ethiopian princess, Charicleia.

52. Quoted by Doody, 36.

53. Ibid, 35-36.
54. Charles Marowitz, “Shakespeare’s Outsiders,” Shakespeare and the Mediterranean. ed. Tom Clayton,
Susan Brock, Vicente Fores (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 207-214.
55. Greenblatt, 245.
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Similarly, Othello is no longer a mysterious African national and not fully a Venetian,

either. However, he, like the other heroes in the Heliodoran tradition, must embrace the

cultural norms of the country of his beloved. As wanderers and outsiders, protagonists in

the Mediterranean adventure tradition are individuals, Howard reminds us, who cross not

only “natural boundaries but religious and racial ones, as well.”56 In Robert Daborne’s A

Christian Turned Turk (1612), the Englishman John Ward crosses these boundaries by

going to Tunis, falling in love with Vaoda, converting to Islam,57 and marrying her.

Daborne’s play, like Massinger’s Renegado, also functions as a recuperative locus for

European, especially English, masculinity (Burton 30-32) and as an exposé for the

Mediterranean as a site of religious contestation in English adventure dramas. In these

plays, English playwrights deploy religion as a tool of conflict by assigning the hero and

heroine different religious beliefs. Shakespeare, however, follows Heliodorus in making

the Mediterranean a place where boundaries frequently disappear for lovers, instead of a

site for religious conflicts. While Shakespeare maintains the hero’s wanderings and

outsider status through geographical, cultural, and racial crossings, he, however, makes

his protagonists share the same religious persuasion, as Heliodorus does in the

Aethiopica, thereby negating the tension that usually accompanies religious crossings in

English Mediterranean adventure drama.

Roderigo’s description of Othello as “an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of

here and every where” (I.ii.135-36) is the first textual identification that Othello is a

wanderer and an outsider in Venice. Iago seconds Roderigo’s observation of Othello by

labeling the general “an erring barbarian” (II.i.355-56). Etymologically, “extravagant”

56. Howard, 351.

57. Ward does not actually convert to Islam. As Jonathan Burton explains, no sincere conversion to Islam
exists in the canon. Instead, Ward only acts the apostate to preserve his Christianity (30-32).
 172

and “erring” are related. “Extravagant,” from the Latin verb “extrāvagārī” (extrā=outside

+vagārī=to wander) means “wandering out of bound.” “Erring,” from the Latin verb

“errare,” means “to wander.” The Riverside Shakespeare glosses Roderigo’s description

of Othello as “. . . literally, wandering beyond his due limits.” It also glosses “wheeling”

as “roving” (1205, n.136). Roderigo’s grouping of “wheeling” and “stranger” with

“extravagant,” along with Iago’s “erring barbarian” stress Othello’s wandering and

outsider status and make Roderigo’s statement especially pointed, given Brabantio’s

denial of his suit to Desdemona, causing the lovesick Roderigo to see Othello’s marriage

as nationally and racially transgressive--a “wandering beyond . . . due limit.” To

Roderigo and Iago, Othello has no community or homeland of his own. Brabantio’s

adamant opposition to Othello as a son-in-law along with his charges of witchcraft, “foul

charms,” and enumeration of Othello’s “defects” also register Othello’s outsider status.

According to Brabantio’s logic, Desdemona could not have married the sooty-bosomed

Othello voluntarily because she has spurned the “wealthy curled [darlings] of our nation”

(I.ii.65-70). Iago’s discourse on the “pranks” of Venetian women also points to Othello’s

outsider status (III.iii.201-204): the inference is that culturally Othello the outsider does

not understand the ways of Venetian women, including Desdemona’s, for Venetian

women cuckold their husbands and zealously conceal their “pranks,” as Desdemona

conceals her marriage from her father and, so, must be concealing her “affair” with

Cassio from Othello.

In the Aethiopica and plays that draw on it, Mediterranean marriages are between

European men and African women: generally a white male goes to the Mediterranean,

encounters an African woman, forms a romantic union with her, and relinquishes
 173

everything for her love. The relationship between Theagenes and Charicleia, Eustanius

and Lillia Guida, and Antony and Cleopatra, as I have argued, exemplifies the traditional

racial and national make-up of couples in the Heliodoran or Mediterranean adventure

drama. While English dramatists hold on to the mixed race tradition, they, nonetheless,

modify it so that Mediterranean romance becomes a “convention . . . related to the

expansion of property through the subjugation of a non-Christian female body to that of a

58
[white] Christian male,” as Hall explains. In other words, European males of lower

social order can improve their rank by marrying upperclass native females and inheriting

their property or becoming executor of their patrimony. Besides reversing the dynamics

of English Mediterranean plays, Othello also complicates and vexes the issues by making

the female relinquish all and by subjugating a white European female body to a black

African male body. While the subjugation of a black female body to that of a white male

is acceptable, the reverse is censured in English Renaissance drama. The majority of

Mediterranean plays--The Fair Maide of the West and The Merchant of Venice, for

example--scrupulously avoids subjugating a white female body to that of a black male.

Plays like The Tempest and The Blind Beggar of Alexandria explicitly criticize such

subjugation. In The Tempest, Sebastian berates Alonzo for enforcing the marriage of

Claribel to the Tunisian king (II.i.125-135), although the marriage is politically

pragmatic: preventing war between Tunis and Naples by forming political and dynastic

alliances. Similarly, in The Blind Beggar of Alexandria King Brebritius chastises

Elimine for choosing the Ethiopian king as a husband: “Out on thee, foolish woman,

58. Hall, 153.

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thou hast chose a devil!” (21).59 In Othello, the subjection of Desdemona’s white body to

Othello’s black body sparks condemnation throughout all levels of Venetian society.

Brabantio’s disinheritance of Desdemona registers his complete disapproval of the

marriage and ensures that no patrilineal property passes to Othello.

Othello deals with a crosscultural and transracial romance of its protagonists,

which also characterizes the Heliodoran tradition. Although Cinthio’s story also deals

with the diverse cultural background of his protagonists, we are not sure if the story is

racially diverse as well, for Cinthio’s Moor could be coded by religion, color, or both.

Additionally, his heroine experiences no animosity to marriage. In fact, she is a widow.

In the Aethiopica, Charicleia and Theagenes are of different racial and cultural

backgrounds.60 Charicleia, however, is a maiden. Like Heliodorus, Shakespeare makes

his heroine a maiden. Both heroines, known for their antipathy to marriage according to

their fathers’ accounts,61 recognize the transcendence of their love and are receptive to

wedlock only upon meeting Theagenes and Othello. Previously, Charicleia finds a

romantic union with Alcamenes odious, and Desdemona ignores Roderigo, rejecting even

the “wealthy curled (darlings) of [the] nation.” Now they elope rather than heed the

objections of their fathers and live without their beloved or marry others. In the case of

Desdemona and Othello’s secret marriage, G. G. Gervinus, and J. A. Heraud fault both

59. The Works of George Chapman, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd (London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly,
1889).There are no lines, scenes, or acts in this edition. For ease and convenience, I give the page number
instead.
60. Although Charicleia spends a good deal of time growing up in Athens and is phenotypically white, the
text consistently reinforces her Ethiopian heritage and returns her to her country.
61. Charicles remarks that Charicleia “rejects matrimony and insists on a virgin life. . . . Neither entreaties
nor promises . . . can move her” (63). In a similar manner, Brabantio observes that Desdemona is “So
opposite to marriage that she shunn’d / The wealthy curled [darlings] of our nations . . .” (I.ii.56-58).
Although Brabantio speaks in anger, his statement should not be dismissed as untrue or exaggerated.
Despite unanimous agreement on Desdemona’s beauty and her breeding, we see no prospective lovers, no
romantic attention from any man--except the rejected and lovesick Roderigo--lending support to
Brabantio’s assertion.
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protagonists for filial disrespect and impiety.62 However, it is difficult to imagine

Brabantio consenting to Othello and Desdemona’s union. Brabantio’s own comments

certainly imply that if he had known of Desdemona’s feeling for Othello, he would have

tried to marry her to another man (I.ii.176), a move Desdemona would certainly have

opposed.

One of the characteristics of the heroine in the Helidoran tradition is the right to

choose her own mate, a prerogative Desdemona exercises by choosing Othello--not

however, without consequences. Remarking on the equality of the lovers’ spirits and

minds, Bradley writes that “[w]hen Desdemona’s soul came in sight of the noblest soul

on earth, she made nothing of the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her

senses took with it . . . .”63 “[T]he shrinking of senses” and similar sentiments are

Bradley’s, Brabantio’s, Iago’s, and several critics’ assertions, not Desdemona’s or

Shakespeare’s, for, as Elaine L. Robinson reminds us, “Shakespeare does not want us to

find it monstrous that Desdemona loves a black man, and does not think we should find it

so. It would defeat his purpose in writing the play if we found it monstrous that

Desdemona loved coal-black Othello.”64 Because the Mediterranean is a site where

cultural and racial boundaries frequently dissolve and Othello is in the tradition of the

Aethiopica, in which heroes and heroine of diverse cultural and racial backgrounds

encounter one another in the Mediterranean and fall in love, it becomes less improbable

for the heroine to find the hero unsuitable.

62. G. G. Gervinus, “The Third Period of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Poetry: ‘Othello,’” in Shakespeare’s
Commentaries, trans. F. E. Bunnett, revised edition, 1877 (Rpt. New York: AMS Press Inc., 1971), 505-47.
J. A. Heraud, “Excerpt,” A New Variorium Edition of Shakespeare: Othello, Vol.VI, ed. Horace Howard
Furnace, 1886 (Rprt. American Scholar Pub., 1965), 422-24.
63. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1955), 164.
64. Elaine L. Robinson, Shakespeare Attacks Bigotry: A Close Reading of Six Plays (Jefferson: McFarland
& Company, 2009), 97.
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Desdemona’s wit, bravery, resourcefulness, and chastity put her in the tradition of

a Heliodoran heroine. Although many critics underestimate her wit, will, and bravery,

Othello is replete with examples of them. In the Senate, she divines the conflict between

her father and husband and settles it with tact and aplomb:

My noble father,

I do perceive here a divided duty:

To you I am bound for life and education;

My life and education both do learn me

How to respect you: you are the lord of duty;

I am hitherto your daughter. (I.iii.180-85)

Her answer also recognizes her husband’s role, but to remind her father of the duties of a

wife, including hers, she draws on his own experience:

. . . here’s my husband;

And so much duty as my mother show’d

To you, preferring you before her father,

So much I challenge that I may profess

Due to the Moor, my lord. (I.iii.185-89)

Such a response moots any argument Brabantio could have had. Desdemona’s

acknowledgment of the importance of both men in her life but with preference to her

husband indicates courage and intelligence. For a daughter to oppose a father, especially

in public, requires courage. It also takes great intelligence to nullify his argument and to

do so with respect while allowing him to maintain his dignity and preserving that of her

husband. When Charicleia opposes both her adoptive and biological fathers’ choice of
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husbands for her, she does so more in the form of passive resistance than active defiance:

she refuses to see the man Charicles wants her to marry and pleads with Persinna to stop

Hydaspes from sacrificing Theagenes. Desdemona is active and vocal in her resistance.

It bears pointing out that it is Desdemona’s speech, not Othello’s, that settles the dispute.

Despite Desdemona’s dexterity in handling the situation and standing up to her

father in public, Allardyce Nicoll dismisses her as unintelligent, mentally deficient,

passive, and unable to face the consequence of telling the truth.65 To see Desdemona in

this light is a fundamental misunderstanding of her character and the tradition of which

she is a part. Heroines in the Heliodoran tradition are not passive, weak-willed, or

unintelligent. A passive or weak-minded female could not have opposed her father, or

foreseen and accepted the estrangement that results from her disagreement with him. In a

way that neither Brabantio nor Othello does, Desdemona articulates why she will not

return to her father’s home and how her constant presence in his home would result in his

distemper by re-opening the emotional wounds of losing her to a husband whom he

vehemently disapproves. Her counter-proposal to accompany her husband to Cyprus

solves several problems: finding a home suitable to her status within such a short time,

not separating the newly-weds, and not interfering with or suspending consummation of

the marriage.66 Desdemona is not the aggressive or ruthless individual like Queen

65. Allardyce Nicoll, “The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice,” Studies in Shakespeare (London:
Leonard & Virginia Woolf, 1927), 80-109.
66. T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines claim that Othello and Desdemona’s marriage is unconsummated.
See “Othello’s Unconsummated Marriage,” Essays in Criticism 33 (1987): 1-18. Although the possibility
of unconsummation could occur in Venice, in Cyprus that possibililty does not exist, for the text shows
otherwise. Othello talks about not finding Cassio’s kisses on Desdemona’s lips and dying rather than keep a
corner in the thing he loves for another’s use (III.iii.331 & 270-73). Like “kisses,” “things” is a double-
entendre. For additional evidence regarding the consummation of the marriage, see Lynda Boose’s brilliant
and compelling argument on the symbolism of the handkerchief.
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Margaret, Goneril, or Regan, but she is, in all the possible meanings of Othello’s

encomium, a “fair warrior.”

Among the most notable example of Desdemona’s courage as a heroine in the

Heliodoran manner is her public declaration of her love for Othello. Brabantio charges

that Desdemona could not love Othello because such a love would pervert nature:

To fall in love with what she fear’d to look on!

Is a judgment maim’d, and most imperfect,

That will confess perfection so could err

Against all rules of nature . . . (I.iii.98-101)

Although Desdemona is absent when Brabantio makes these charges, her declaration of

love for Othello is a direct negation of her father’s charges:

That I love the Moor to live with him,

My downright violence and storms of fortunes

May trumpet to the world. My heart’s subdu’d

Even to the very quality of my lord . . . (I.iii.248-51).

Undaunted by the sea of men, Desdemona firmly yet modestly tells her father that she

loves Othello. Although Shakespeare prepares us for the courage of his heroine from the

start of the play, we are awed by her fearlessness and intelligence when we finally meet

her. Her refutation of her father’s charges fills us with admiration for her and an

appreciation of her love for Othello: noble, pure, and unspotted with the color of racial

prejudice. Frank Kermode notes that the marriage, “founded upon [Desdemona’s] just

understanding of [Othello’s] virtues, is a triumph over appearances; it is grounded in

reality and independent of such accidents as color or the easy lusts of the flesh. It is more
 179

like the love of Adam and Eve before than after the Fall” (1200), or, more pertinently,

like the love of Theagenes and Charicleia.

Desdemona’s admission that she “saw Othello’s visage in his mind” (I.iii.250-51)

validates Kermode’s observation and is, in fact, a gentle rebuke and corrective to her

father’s foreshortened vision. Although the admission can be twisted to support

Brabantio’s charge that “she fear’d to look on” Othello, which makes Martin Orkin and

other critics associate Desdemona with racism,67 the speech is a complete repudiation of

this charge. Aware of her father’s and others’ view of her marriage to Othello,

Desdemona puts forth the ancient concept of the mind as the measure of the man to

challenge the notion of race or skin color as determinative and to invite the all-white male

senate to move beyond the complacency of prejudicial limitations and see Othello. Curtis

Brown Watson’s observation on the Renaissance hierarchy of value helps give us a

context for Desdemona’s statement: “If a choice had to be made between the exterior

beauty of the body and the inner beauty of the mind and soul, it was immediately

made.”68 Desdemona has made the choice and articulates the concept, which the duke

seems to grasp, for he tells Brabantio, “[Y]our son-in-law is far more fair than black”

(I.iii.291)--even if his response is self-serving and is still mired in the vocabulary, though

not necessarily the spirit, of racial bigotry. Shakespeare uses Desdemona’s Senate speech

to validate publicly the relationship between his protagonists, to show the remarkable

courage of his heroine, and to remind us that Desdemona is a heroine in the Heliodoran

tradition.

67. Martin Orkin writes that Desdemona “refers to or draws upon racist discourse” and that “Desdemona
herself [possibly] incorporates in her ‘revolt’ an element of racism.” But this is a misunderstanding of her
discourse. See “Othello and ‘The Plain Face’ of Racism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 2 (Summer 1987):
170, 175.
68. Curtis Brown Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1960), 30.
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Desdemona’s speeches in the Senate serve as notice of her intelligence,

independence, and being “half the wooer” (I.i.176) of a partnership that can be

characterized as in the Heliodoran tradition. Generally, female characters in early

modern dramas wait to be desired, keeping their romantic feelings sealed until then.

However, heroines in the Heliodoran tradition operate at higher levels of intellect and

independence than do traditional Renaissance heroines, giving these heroines the freedom

of desiring subjects and of expressing those feelings as they see fit. Desdemona does not

rely on Othello to explain to the Senate how his separation from her will affect her.

Instead, she forthrightly tells the all-male Senate how she will be affected:

. . . if I be left behind

A moth of peace . . .

The rites for why I love him are bereft of me,

And I a heavy interim shall support

By his dear absence. Let me go with him.

(I.iii.255-259)

Desdemona’s claim to marital rites is self-explanatory, and her language--“heavy

interim”--is layered. Besides the meaning of a difficult period or “a temporary or

provisional arrangement” that is challenging (3.b.), “heavy interim” has ecclesiastical

undertones through “marital rites,” giving women the sacred right to claim sexual

intercourse from their husbands. Desdemona’s assertion that any provisional

arrangement made for her to adjust to the denial of the fruits of marriage will be heavy
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for her to bear is a claim for her marital right and an explanation of the difficulty denial

will cause.69

Desdemona’s candor about and refusal to accept separation from Othello

contradicts critics such as Gayle Greene, who argue that Desdemona is submissive,

passive, and compliant, which make her complicit in her own destruction. Such

passivity, Greene charges, renders Desdemona incapable or unable to understand the evil

Othello attributes to her and to challenge it.70 However, Evelyn Gajowski shows

otherwise: comparing Desdemona to Mariana in Measure for Measure, whose lack of

self makes her vulnerable to exploitation, Gajowski notes that Shakespeare does not

depict Desdemona in this way. When “Othello strikes her, she stoutly responds, ‘I have

not deserved this,’” and “resolutely defends herself from the moment she comprehends

[Othello’s] accusations of [strumpetry] until she dies”71 (IV.i.240, IV.ii81-85, V.ii.48-

61). Like Brabantio, Greene confuses Desdemona’s quietness with passivity and

stillness. Desdemona’s response to Othello’s striking her is a defense. Using the only

weapon--speech--at her disposal, she makes Othello aware of the double wrong he has

inflicted upon her. Neither is she a blind adherent to patriarchy, as Greene and others

imagine. When necessary and appropriate, Desdemona also challenges masculine

notions of women’s role in regard to men’s, as Valerie Wayne demonstrates. Regarding

Iago’s slander of women, Desdemona advises Emilia not to “learn” from Iago, although

69. It is possible that Desdemona furthers the burden of being denied her marital rights by using the words
“heavy” and “support” to image herself as a caryatid, the “female figure used as a column to support an
entablature” (OED); caryatids were also captives and slaves of the Greeks. Desdemona’s imagery projects
the onerous burden of captivity and servitude that Othello’s absence will impose on her.
70. Gayle Greene, “‘This That You Call Love’: Sexual and Social Tragedy in Othello,” Journal of
Women’s Studies in Literature 1, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 16-32.
71. Evelyn Gajowski, “The Female Perspective in Othello,” Othello: A New Perspective. ed. Kent
Cartwright and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Cranbury: Associated UP, Inc., 1991), 101.
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he is her husband.72 “As a woman,” Robinson writes, Desdemona “is unique in taking

[these] position[s]. She has a mind of her own . . . and is not limited by the prescribed

boundaries of her sex or paternity.”73

Although Robinson does not categorize Desdemona as a heroine in the Greek

mold, the characteristics and actions she attributes to her are also those associated with

the archetypical Greek heroine, Charicleia. When we recall the courage of both

women,74 then the Desdemona whom Brabantio describes as “a maiden, never bold, / Of

spirit so still and quiet that her motion / Blush’d at herself” is an illusion, a projection, for

like her prototype Charicleia, Desdemona defies the “never bold” and “still” spirit by

choosing and marrying her mate despite societal disapprobation. While Shakespeare

does not provide details of his protagonists’ elopement as Heliodorus does with his, he,

like Heliodorus, gives us detailed and dramatic glimpses of how the courtship began and

progressed and the effects of the elopement on the household and city: both elopements

throw the households and cities into chaos and uproar, with both fathers raising arms and

kinsmen to apprehend their offending sons-in-law. In Othello, Shakespeare deepens the

chaos and uproar by making Brabantio’s search for Othello coincide with the State’s

because of the terror the Turks pose in their threat to Venice. With torches ablaze and a

multitude of kinsmen and servants who brandish glittering swords, Brabantio orders the

arrest of Othello while pelting him with epithets, including “thief” and seducer.

However, we learn from Othello that he is neither a thief nor a seducer, for Desdemona

made the first overture (I.iii.159-161). Only then did Othello reciprocate: “Upon this hint

72. Valerie Wayne, “Historic Differences: Misogyny and Othello,” The Matter of Difference: Materialist
Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 163.
73. Robinson, 107.
74. I am not suggesting that all brave heroines in early modern plays draw on Charicleia. Rather, I am
arguing that those who are desiring subjects and in the Heliodoran tradition do.
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I spake” (I.iii.166). As Robinson puts it, “. . . it was Desdemona who came, saw, and

conquered.”75

To the Renaissance, chastity was woman’s primary, if not her only, virtue.

Because of its connection to male governance, women’s sexuality became the concern of

society. Accordingly, women were bombarded with various forms of literature that stress

the need for them to shun sexual defilement. In the drama of the period, we see this

imbalance between male and female sexual requirement and behavior. Almost all

Renaissance dramatic literatures stage female infidelity as heinous but male adultery as

venial. In A Woman Killed With Kindness, Frankford banishes his adulterous wife Anne,

who eventually dies. However, her seducer, Wendoll, only loses Frankford’s friendship.

Shakespeare, in keeping with the Heliodoran tradition, departs from this theatrical and

cultural norm by investing his hero and heroine with an equal sense of chastity, thus

holding them equally accountable sexually. In these concluding pages, I examine the

importance of chastity to Othello and Desdemona and the difference and similarity in

their relationship to the Heliodoran tradition.

The love between Theagenes and Charicleia helped to popularize the importance

of chastity on the early modern stage. Renaissance writers emulated the constancy of

Charicleia in their female protagonists’ sexual conduct. In the six Continental plays that

derive directly from the Aethiopica, the heroes and heroines are equally chaste. While

Heliodorus invests Charicleia with other positive traits beside chastity, English

Renaissance writers invariably associate her with chastity to the exclusion of the others.

They also ignore Theagenes’s chastity. However, in Othello, Shakespeare continues the

Heliodoran tradition by making chastity equally important to Othello and Desdemona.

75. Robinson, 105.

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All the characters, except Iago, acknowledge Desdemona’s chastity. When Iago tries to

smirch her by suggesting that she is of easy virtue, both Roderigo and Cassio reject

Iago’s malicious suggestions—the latter even when thoroughly drunk. Roderigo states

incredulously, “I cannot believe that of her, she’s full of the most blessed condition”

(II.i.250). Similarly, Cassio dismisses Iago’s equally rank notion that Desdemona is a

tease (II.iii.15-28). To Othello’s false accusations, Desdemona reminds him of her

Christian virtue and faithfulness to him: “. . . I am a Christian / If to preserve this vessel

for my lord / From any other foul unlawful touch” (IV.ii.82-85). Desdemona’s demand

that Othello send for Cassio to speak truth attests to her purity, a fact Othello remembers

too late.

Othello, like Theagenes, is a chaste man. However, Othello’s chastity is not as

obvious to a twentieth- or twenty-first century audience, as it was to an early modern

audience. The designation of Othello as honest and “honorable” (V.ii.293-95)76 is an

indicator of his sexual innocence, as well as his rectitude. In Act V, Othello describes

himself as “honorable” and tells us that what he did was for the sake of “honor.”

Although Othello invokes the popular Renaissance meanings associated with masculinity,

he underpins them with the sexual meaning as well. We have seen that the definitions of

“honor” and “honest” in the OED include “chastity.” According to Watson Brown,

“Honor for the Renaissance was the same as honesty,” and both words were sometimes

used as synonymous with integrity; “honesty had both its present meaning and the more

inclusive one of honor and moral rectitude[,]”77 including sexual purity--meanings

Shakespeare invokes in other plays as well as in Othello.

76. Although there are several designations of Iago as honest, these are dramatic ironies to expose Iago.
77. Brown Watson, 254.
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In The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, Falstaff is bent on cuckolding the

husbands, but the wives are equally bent on making a laughingstock of Sir John, who, in

one of his visits to Mrs. Ford, learns that Mr. Ford is “hard by” ( IV.ii.40) and all means

of escape seem impossible. As the women devise Falstaff’s escape, Mrs. Ford

expostulates, “Hang him, dishonest varlet! we cannot misuse [him] enough. / . . . / Wives

may be merry, and yet honest too” (IV.ii.102-5). The antonyms, “dishonest” and

“honest,” capture the sexual interplay between Falstaff and the wives. Despite the

absurdities and weaknesses of Falstaff, which are stressed throughout the play, his desire

to have sexual intercourse with other men’s wives, however, still make him dishonest.

Because the wives have no intention of indulging Sir John’s sexual desire but to

compound his absurdities and make him a public laughingstock, they are honest. In The

Tempest, Prospero claims to enslave Caliban after the latter sought to “violate the honor

of” Miranda (I.ii.350). Prospero’s treatment of Caliban has generated fiery

disagreements, with some critics charging him with the familiar yarn of the natives’ lust

for white women as a cover for imperialist and colonialist aggression. Others see

Caliban’s enslavement as just punishment for the attempted rape. Caliban, however,

freely admits to the misdeed: “ . . . would’t had been done! / Thou didst prevent me; I had

peopled else / This isle with Calibans” (I.ii.349-51). Notwithstanding the controversy

among scholars, both Caliban and Prospero agree on the sexual definition of “honor,” for

Caliban’s response shows that he understands and accepts Propero’s meaning.

In Othello, Shakespeare captures and conflates the sexual meanings of “honest”

and “honor” in Desdemona. Othello’s ambivalent assertion--“I think my wife be honest,

and I think she is not” (III.iii.384)--and his testy interrogative--“She is protectress of her
 186

honor. May she give that?” (IVi.14-15)--capture the sexual meanings of both words.

Generally, “honor” and “honest” as signifying chastity apply to women; however, they

can also apply to men. Mrs. Ford describes Falstaff as dishonest to denote his lack of

chastity. Othello’s description of himself as honorable invokes his chastity. It is because

he himself is honest that he finds Desdemona’s “infidelity” so odious, which prompts his

expostulation of the intermingling of the pure and the impure: “. . . there where I have

garnered up my heart / . . . to be discarded then / Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads / To

knot and gender in” (IV.ii.56-61). The disgust that Othello expresses in this passage

serves as notification to the sexual purity he demands of himself and his beloved.

Othello’s reaction to Desdemona’s alleged adultery also signals his innocence and

the importance of chastity to him. If Othello were indeed sexually experienced, then

Desdemona’s supposed infidelity would quite probably have been less traumatic to him,

for his experience would have lessoned him about the “pranks” of men and women, thus

softening the blow. As Iago declares, a “cuckold lives in bliss / Who, certain of his fate,

loves not his wronger” (3.3.171-72). In other words, experienced men keep their peace

of mind because they do not expect fidelity from women and tailor their affections

accordingly. That Othello lacks this experience becomes apparent in his lamentation

(III.iii.270-73), obsession with Desdemona’s sexuality, and erratic behavior--changes so

profound that they prompt Desdemona to exclaim that her “lord is not himself”

(III.iv.124-25). Othello’s transformation has at its core the issue of chastity. Believing

that Desdemona has betrayed him and the values they share, Othello murders her.

Although there is critical consensus that Othello kills Desdemona because of jealousy, it
 187

is imperative to realize that he murders her because of his belief in her sexual betrayal

(V.i.6)—the nullification of chastity.

Some critics see Othello as sexually repressed; others see him as sexually

experienced,78 citing as proof his cry, “O curse of marriage! / That we can call these

delicate creatures ours, / And not their appetites!” (III.iii.268-270). Despite Neill’s and

Denton J. Snider’s hypotheses of illicit sexual contact between Othello and Emilia,79

there is no credible textual support or suggestion of any sexual union between Othello

and any woman except Desdemona. Such hypotheses arise from Iago’s own admittedly

dubious statement that Othello has cuckolded him and the possible intermingling of

Othello’s and Emilia’s blood on the bed, resulting from Emilia’s request that her body be

placed on the bed beside Desdemona’s. But Iago also suspects Cassio of wearing “my

night cap” and the text is clear that Iago’s unsubstantiated pronouncements lack

credibility. Also, Emilia’s request to be placed beside Desdemona is not necessarily a

stage direction and might have been ignored, as Neill himself observes.80 Besides,

reading an adulterous relation into the comingling of Othello’s and Emilia’s blood on the

bed seems an overreach, since Desdemona is also on the bed and since the most efficient

and readymade way to remove dead bodies from the stage is to pile them on a bed that

will then be “hid” with curtains. Othello’s talk about women’s sexual insatiety does not

necessarily mean that he himself is sexually experienced, as Allardyce Nicoll contends.81

78. See, for example, Heilman, Magic in the Web: Action and Language in Othello 1(Lexington: University
of Kentucky Press, 1979), 75; Leo Kirschbaum, “The Modern Othello,” English Literary History 11, No. 4
(December 1944): 290-91.
79. Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly
40, no .4 (Winter 1989): 406-12; Denton Snider, “Othello,” Shakespearian Drama, a Commentary: The
Tragedies (St. Louis: Sigma Pub. Co., 1887), 97-107.
80. Neill, “Unproper Beds,” 407.
81. See “The Tragedie of Othello, the Moor of Venice,” in Studies in Shakespeare (London: Leonard &
Virginia Woolf, 1927), 80-109.
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The wording of his cry, I want to suggest, is drawn from the common language of

betrayed husbands.

The notion of women and their bodies as the property of men was a Renaissance

commonplace. “The wife’s body,” according to Katherine Henderson and Barbara

McManus, “was her husband’s; it was not legally hers to give to another.”82 As we saw

in Act IV, scene i, Othello impatiently demands if Desdemona has the right to give her

body to another. Henderson and McManus along with Valerie Wayne also show that

Renaissance men’s complaint and slander of women drew on pre-existing language,

language already in the public sphere, which described women “as lustful, deceitful,

shrewish, domineering, extravagant, proud, vain, and selfish.”83 In Act II, scene i, Iago

describes women as “. . . pictures out [a’doors], / Bells in your parlors, wildcats in your

kitchens, / Saints in your injuries, devils being offended, / Players in your huswifery, and

huswives in your beds” (109-15). The descriptions Henderson and McManus enumerate

permeate Iago’s charges against women. Wayne points out that Iago’s slander of women

relies on “stock phrases of standard misogynist fare.”84 According to Henderson and

McManus, perhaps the most heavily stressed slander or complaint “is that of the

seductress: the image of woman as . . . sexually insatiable and deceitful in the service of

her lust.”85

In Venice, as in London, certain expressions were also common in men’s

complaints against and slander of women. In several case studies, men’s complaints

almost exclusively centered on women’s sexuality, and expressions such as “insatiable

82. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the
Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 57. See,
also, Stallybrass, 123-42.
83. Henderson and McManus, Half Humankind, 47.
84. Wayne, 161. See, also, Henderson and McManus, 57.
85. Henderson and McManus, 47.
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desires,” “dishonor,” and “shame” occurred repeatedly in husbands’ suits against wives.86

In one particular case, the defendant decided to break his promise of marriage by

claiming that the plaintiff had an uncontrollable sexual appetite.87 Shakespeare knew of

the ways Englishmen slandered women and would have known, heard, or read of the

ways Venetian men published sexual complaints against women, complaints which he

places in Othello’s mouth. Othello’s lamentation, “O curse of marriage! / That we can

call these delicate creatures ours, / And not their appetites!” (III.iii.268-270), especially

his use of the first person plural, draws on the common language that sexually aggrieved

men used to slander women and publish sexual complaints against them. The clichéd

expressions--“delicate creatures” and “their appetites”--identify Othello emotionally and

linguistically with betrayed husbands while suggesting a language common to these men,

as does his declaration that Desdemona will betray more men if she is not stopped from

her (alleged) activity.

The hankerchief is the tangible expression of both the hero and the heroine’s

chastity. As Charicleia’s ring and talisman, Pantarbe, is a visible sign of her chastity, so,

too, is Desdemona’s handkerchief. As Othello’s first gift to Desdemona, the white

handkerchief “spotted with strawberries” symbolizes the purity and passion of their

love,88 which Othello, Michael C. Andrews argues, gives Desdemona to ensure “the

continuance of his love for [her], not hers for him. . . . [and] . . . to render it perpetual.”89

86. Daniela Hacke, Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice (Croft Road: Ashgate, 2004), 206.
87. Ibid, 205-207.
88. See Laurence J. Ross, “The Meaning of Strawberries in Shakespeare,” Studies in the Renaissance VII
(1960): 225-40. See, also, David Kaula, “Othello Possessed: Notes on Shakespeare’s Use of Magic and
Superstition,” Shakespeare Studies II (1966): 123. Kaula argues that Shakespeare probes the two
iconographic meanings of strawberry, righteousness and hypocrisy: “The former meaning is appropriate to
Desdemona as she really is, the latter to Desdemona as Iago is making her appear.”
89. Michael C. Andrews, “Honest Othello: The Handkerchief Once More,” Studies in English Literature,
1500-1900, Vol. 13, no. 2. (Spring 1973): 281-82.
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It is also, as Lynda Boose shows, “a visually recognizable reduction of Othello and

Desdemona’s wedding sheets, the visual proof of their consummated marriage”90 and, so,

of Desdemona’s chastity. The handkerchief, then, is a powerful sign in the play because

it manifests the importance of chastity to both protagonists. Consequently, its loss fills

Desdemona with perturbation because she understands its meanings; hence her

observations that losing the handkerchief “were enough / To put” the noble-natured and

pure-minded Othello “to ill thinking” (III.iv.25-29) and that “. . . I had rather have lost

my purse / Full of crusadoes” than the “sacred” token (to use P.G. Mudford’s

descriptive).91 Othello’s belligerent insistence on “the handkerchief!” is the need for

reassurance that their vow of chastity is unbroken, as Winifred T. Nowottny also points

out,92 and that their love for each other continues. Desdemona’s response, “It is not lost,”

is that reassurance, despite her inability to produce the actual handkerchief.

“Desdemona’s stammering insistence that ‘it is not lost’ may seem a troublesome

deception in terms of literal fact,” Boose observes, “but it is perfectly true in terms of the

handkerchief’s mythic identity”: the sexual gift that a wife and husband share is unique

and can never be lost,93which Wayne’s observation that the “handkerchief . . . remains a

single and original piece of work” that “cannot be copied by Emilia [or] Bianca”

reinforces.94 Desdemona’s response is also true literally: her chastity is unsullied.

To Othello, the symbolic and the actual meanings of the handkerchief must be in

tandem: one does not exist without the other. Had Desdemona produced the

handkerchief, that, in Othello’s mind, would have proven her purity and countered Iago’s

90. Boose, 363.

91. P.G. Mudford, “Othello and the ‘Tragedy of Situation,’” English XX, no. 106 (1971), 1-6.
92 . Winnifred T. Nowottny, “Justice and Love in Othello,” University of Toronto Quarterly XXI, no. 4
(July 1952), 330-44.
93. Boose, 169
94. Wayne, 169-70.
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slander. Because she does not, Othello feels compelled to purge sexual impurity from his

world—a justification he draws from the symbolism of the lost handkerchief. According

to Deuteronomy 22: 20-22, if a woman cannot disprove the charge of adultery by

presenting her wedding sheets to the elders of the city/village, “they shall stone her . . .

because she hath wrought follie in Israel.”95 As governor of Cyprus, Othello has judicial

mandate to eradicate folly.96 Displaying the wedding sheets as a means to safeguard a

woman’s life is an ancient Mediterranean, Asian, and African custom, still extant in some

of these societies.97 Desdemona’s failure to produce her miniaturized wedding sheets

(i.e., the handkerchief) results in her death, for Othello incorrectly believes she has

transgressed the code of sexual ethics, which his explanation, heavy with the language of

Deuteronomy, shows: “She turned to folly.”98 In countering Othello’s

mischaracterization of her, Desdemona demands that he “send for [Cassio] hither [to] /

Let him confess a truth” (V.i.39-70). Othello, who has mistakenly correlated the loss of

the handkerchief to the loss of Desdemona’s chastity, does not comply, and tragedy

ensues. Ironically, the wedding-sheets now splattered with Othello’s blood repeat his

recognizance and pledge of love to Desdemona.

95. The Geneva Bible.

96. My reading of the handkerchief is greatly influenced by Lynda Boose’s essay.
97. The film Wedding in Galilee (1988), directed by Michel Khlefi, reveals the importance of the wedding
sheets to a newly married couple, especially the bride. The elder of a small Palestinian village obtains
permission from the Israeli military for his son’s wedding on condition that the military governor and his
staff are guests at the wedding. As villagers gather outside the honeymoon suite to await proof of the
bride’s virginity and consummation of the marriage, both sets of parents are anxious. The bridegroom’s
psychological impotence prompts the bride to penetrate herself. The presentation of the blood-stained
wedding sheets to the villagers as proof of consummation of the marriage and evidence of the bride’s
chastity averts catastrophe
98. My italics.
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III.

Similarity Yet Difference in Desdemona and Othello’s Relationship

to the Heliodoran Tradition.

Because their deaths are predetermined in Shakespeare’s primary source, Cinthio,

the disintegration of Othello and Desdemona’s relationship and their subsequent deaths

signal the major differences between Othello and Desdemona’s relationship and the

others in the Heliodoran tradition. The success of Charicleia and Theagenes’s

relationship and the failure of Othello and Desdemona’s as well as the latter’s ultimate

undoing are also rooted in the brides’ fathers’ and each society’s reaction to the marriage

or impending marriage. As heroines in the Heliodoran mold, both Charicleia and

Desdemona demonstrate their ability to choose their own mates. Despite Charicleia’s

setting aside her father’s choice of a husband, Hydaspes and the Ethiopian people accept

Theagenes as her prospective husband. Neither king nor country disparages Theagenes.

To them, Theagenes’s different racial make-up is inconsequential. Instead, the king, as a

sign of full acceptance of his son-in-law and of Theagenes’s imminent coronation as king

of Ethiopia, removes “his own miter and Persinna’s, the symbol of the priesthood, and

puts his on Theagenes and Persinna’s on Charicleia” (Bk. 10, 277). By contrast,

Brabantio repudiates his daughter’s choice of a husband, labeling him a necromancer and

taking measures to annul the marriage.

Desdemona’s choice of a husband brings serious consequences that also

contribute to her death. Besides the inescapable fact that Desdemona’s death is already

determined by Shakespeare’s primary source, Shakespeare complicates the matter by

making Desdemona’s marriage without her father’s consent rob her of a support system

that could have helped protect her from the scurrilous and deadly charges of Iago and
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Othello. Notwithstanding, Desdemona makes her choice and marries without the consent

of her father, thereby exercising autonomy. Brabantio’s “problem,” Martin Orkin argues,

“is as much to come to an understanding of the fact of his daughter’s disobedience as it is

to cope with his misgivings about his son-in-law’s color.”99 It is undeniable that parental

right is at issue here and that the pain that consumes Brabantio owing to the loss of his

only child increases our sympathy for him. Knowing that her father would disapprove of

her marrying a man of a different color and origin, Desdemona had no choice but to elope

to marry Othello. In addition, Shakespeare uses Brabantio’s loss to expose the

magnifico’s color and other prejudices related to black Africans. Brabantio’s

chastisement is not only directed at Desdemona,100 which would argue disobedience, but

more so at Othello’s racial difference, which argues bigotry. Gratiano reminds us of

Brabantio’s color prejudice against Othello: “Poor Desdemona! I am glad thy father’s

dead. / Thy match was mortal to him, and pure grief / Shore his old thread in twain”

(V.ii.204-6). To ensure that audiences and readers do not miss the connection between

Brabantio’s death and Desdemona’s choice of husband, Shakespeare allows Gratiano to

reiterate the connection for us. Risking overstatement, I would argue that it is

Desdemona’s match, not her disobedience per se, that Brabantio finds unbearable and

which precipitates his death.

Brabantio’s public disapproval of his daughter’s union helps give momentum to

Iago’s systematic destruction of Othello and Desdemona themselves as well as to their

relationship. Perhaps if Brabantio had been circumspect and controlled in the presence of

Roderigo and Iago, then neither man would have been emboldened to attack

99. Orkin, 167.

100. Except for saying, “She has deceived her father” (I.iii.293), Brabantio aims his objections at Othello.
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Desdemona’s character. Roderigo’s “unlawful suit” might not have been sought or

prolonged if Brabantio had not mentioned that he wished Roderigo, instead of Othello,

had married Desdemona. Iago might not have conceived the notion of Desdemona’s

“infidelity” if Brabantio had not, in the presence of Iago and others, flung in Othello’s

ears the suggestion that Desdemona might deceive him. Brabantio’s loose tongue might

have also signaled to Iago that attacking the Venetian general on racial grounds could be

done with impunity. Interestingly, Iago also repeats the language Brabantio uses to

deprecate Othello, echoing Brabantio’s claim of perverted love, reminding Othello of

Brabantio’s charge of witchcraft against Othello himself, and of Brabantio’s sentiment

about Desdemona’s deception (III.iii.206-11). Had Brabantio exercised more self-

control, then he could not have been deemed complicit in the disintegration of Othello

and Desdemona’s relationship.

The society in which both couples live also helps to determine their fate.

Theagenes and Charicleia inhabit a nurturing environment which enables their love to

thrive. Unlike Othello, who is plagued with whispers, innuendoes, insinuations, and

consequent doubts about Desdemona’s faithfulness to him, Theagenes has no such poison

poured into his ears. This is not to say that Theagenes does not endure his share of sexual

intrigue. Frequently, he finds himself and Charicleia besieged sexually, with plots for

their destruction. In Thessaly, women desire him; in Memphis, Arsace pursues him,

plotting his and Charicleia’s death. However, none of these political or sexual intrigues

takes place in his new country. Instead, they occur mainly in Persian Egypt, a place

similar in its political and sexual intrigue to Venice.

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Unlike Hydaspes and his fellow Ethiopians who accept Theagenes as Charicleia’s

equal, Brabantio and the Venetian society reject Othello,101 viewing him as an inferior

and different species from Desdemona. Iago and others’ polygenist view of Othello

becomes apparent in their incessant belittling of him. This viewpoint is most obvious

when Iago tells Brabantio that “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping

your white ewe” (I.i. 88-89). At first glance, the difference that Iago posits is basically

color: “black ram” and “white ewe.” However, a closer look reveals Iago’s extreme

polygenesis position. As ventriloquist of his society, Iago articulates Othello’s difference

from the Venetians by emphasizing that difference in racial terms as frequently as

possible. His designation of Othello and Desdemona as ram and ewe is one instance of

emphasizing that they are different species. From a biblical perspective, sheep and goats

are different kinds of animals. For example, in Matthew 25:32-33, Jesus talks about the

Final Judgment when “All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate

them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set

the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.” The positions that these animals

occupy, symbolically and literally, indicate their different natures. Sheep are gentle,

docile, and easily led. Goats, however, are aggressive, frisky, roving, and wayward. The

male goat or ram is especially wanton and sexually aggressive, mounting many animals

that it encounters—from its own parents to siblings and others. Figuratively,

Shakespeare prepares us for Roderigo’s and Iago’s designation of Othello as a goat in

many ways: through the naked association of sexuality with “goats and monkeys,” as

101. It is difficult to say categorically if the duke rejects Othello or not. My sense is that he tolerates
Othello because of political necessity. In Act I, scene iii, the duke assures a heartbroken Brabantio that he
shall receive justice, “though our proper son / Stood in your action.” Upon learning that Othello is the
culprit, the duke and the other senators proclaim their sorrow and shift their position because they need
Othello’s military skills (ll. 66-113).
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well as “lascivious Moor,” “wheeling stranger,” “erring barbarian,” and “black ram.”

Although the usage of “ram” as a male goat is largely relegated to the Caribbean,

African, and certain parts of the United States, such as Oregon, it was a common usage

during the sixteen and seventeenth centuries (and even nineteenth and twentieth)

centuries in England and Scotland102--a usage Shakespeare would have known. Because

the male sheep and goat are both rams, Iago’s polygenist categorization is almost

imperceptible. “Polygenists,” according to John Stenhouse, “denied that all humans had

descended from Adam and Eve, and emphasized racial differences rather than common

humanity. The more extreme argued that racial differences ran so deep that the races

constituted different species.”103 Iago’s categorization of Othello and Desdemona as ram

and ewe betrays his view of Othello and Desdemona as different kinds of human beings

because Iago and Roderigo associate all the characteristics that define a goat with

Othello.

The deaths of Othello and Desdemona mark a radical departure from the

relationships in the Heliodoran tradition. Othello is the only hero in this tradition to

commit homicide and suicide. Despite Shakespeare’s retention of the deaths of his

protagonists from his main source, Othello’s and Desdemona’s deaths are more vexed by

Othello’s inculcation of and subscription to misogyny. Like all couples in the Heliodoran

102. In 1566 William Adlington translated “Apuleius .XI. Bks. Golden Asse xxvi. f. 70v, A great number
beastes, amongst whiche there was bigge Ram goate, fatte, olde, and hearie.” In 1634 T. Herbert Relation
Trav. 8 noted that “In Angola . .[.] some adore the Deuill in forme of a bloudie Dragon . . [.] Others a Ram-
goat.” To access these meanings in the OED, type “ram and goat” in the search box and click on “browse.”
See Appendix B; see, also, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Recently, I spoke with a
longtime resident of Oregon, Mr. Dan Clarke, Jr., who assured me that people in Oregon and surrounding
areas call the male goat a ram. Then he explained the reasons male goats are called rams, confirming what I
know. The association of sexuality with the male goat helps to explain the OED’s citation of ram for sex,
especially as that citation comes from Othello (1.c.). Goats, not sheep, are known as wanton creatures. No
one refers to a lecherous man as an “old sheep”—but, rather, as an “old goat.”
103. John Stenhouse, “Catholicism, Science, and Modernity: The Case of William Miles Maskel,” The
Journal of Religious History 23, no. 1 (February 1998): 78.
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tradition, Othello and Desdemona love each other. However, like the other men in the

play, Othello has latent fears about women’s sexuality, making him susceptible to Iago’s

manipulations, not because there is something already corrupt in Othello himself, as Leo

Kirschbaum and Robert Heilman claim,104 or because of Othello’s own feelings of racial

inferiority, as Karen Newman believes. Newman’s assertion that “Iago’s manipulation of

Othello depends on the Moor’s own prejudice against his own blackness and belief that

the fair Desdemona would prefer the white Cassio”105 is myopic, lacking nuance and

complexity. Othello’s belief that Desdemona is unchaste turns more on misogyny than

on other prejudices.

Textually and culturally, misogyny runs deeper than racial prejudice. Each man

in the play subscribes to sexual bias but not to racial bigotry. Cassio, for example,

subscribes to gender bias but not to color prejudice. In Act IV, scene i, Cassio, seeking to

regain his position, tells Bianca, “I do attend here on the general / And think it no

addition . . . / To have him see me woman’d” (193-94). “Woman’d” recalls Iago’s

catalogue of female vices: idleness, wantonness, and duplicity, among others (II.ii.109-

15). Brabantio himself feels compelled to warn that damned, sooty-bossomed “thief,”

Othello, against the treachery of woman, even if that woman is the magnifico’s own flesh

and blood (I.ii.202-3). Iago is able to abuse Othello’s ear and manipulate him into

destroying Desdemona and ultimately himself because both men share a common

ideology—not, as Stephen Greenblatt argues, because of Othello’s adultery with his own

wife Desdemona.106

104. Kirschbaum, 283-96; Robert Heilman, 149.

105. Newman, 125.
106. Greenblatt, 247-48. Valerie Wayne has dealt effectively with Greenblatt’s charge of Othello’s adultery
with Desdemona. See “Historic Differences: Misogyny and Othello,” 153-60.
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Othello’s surrender to his masculine fears about female sexuality makes him

complicit in the destruction of his relationship with Desdemona and directly responsible

for her murder. By making Othello’s destruction of Desdemona and their relationship

depend on the hero’s inculcation and internalization of societal biases and by

Christianizing Othello and making him the equal of Desdemona in birth and virtue,

Shakespeare points to a confluence of environmental, parental, and personal factors as

significant elements in the disintegration of his protagonists’ relationship and their

deaths. Conversely, these three factors enable Theagenes and Charicleia’s love and

relationship to flourish. Othello and Desdemona’s crosscultural and transracial

relationship along with Desdemona’s independent choice of a mate--all evince affinity to

the Heliodoran tradition. But the decline of their relationship and their subsequent deaths

mark a profound departure from this tradition. Although the deaths of Othello and

Desdemona obtain from the play’s primary source, their undoing in the Helidoran

tradition can mean the need for parental blessing of a union. Among the reasons

Theagenes and Charicleia elope from Athens to Ethiopia is that their union will receive

parental blessing in Ethiopia, but will not in Athens. Paradoxically, Othello appears to

vacillate between endorsement and disapproval of its protagonists’ defiance of parental

consent in marriage.

There are gaps and moments in Cinthio that Shakespeare fills in and enriches,

allowing us to see that Othello can be read as a part of the Heliodoran tradition and

making us see the literary tradition associated with black Africans. Desdemona is

intelligent, resourceful, honest, and as brave as her mighty general. Her opposition to

society is no less courageous than Othello’s courage in facing an army on the battlefield.
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While battlefield warfare is not waged on a daily basis for the duration of a soldier’s life,

parental and societal battles frequently are. Though formidable on the battlefield, Othello

is a political innocent who frequently accepts things as others present them to him. His

honesty along with Desdemona’s innocence stand in deep contrast to the machinations of

the Venetians. Consequently, his fall is not too difficult to comprehend. Although there

are critics who condemn Othello’s ignomy, there are others who praise his nobility. As a

black African on stage, Othello soars linguistically and representationally above the

demeaning rhetoric and portrayal that often stigmatize black Africans on the English

Renaissance stage, thus representing Blacks as more than subservient characters, sexual

deviants, or procurers, which many early modern English dramatists portray them to be.

Such portrayal by Shakespeare and other dramatists remind us of the dramatic heritage of

Africans by letting us recall the Aethiopica and its influence on the English Renaissance

stage.
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Conclusion

From antiquity to the latter part of the sixteenth century, Africans have had

favorable depiction in various literatures. In the first book of Wolfram von Eschenback’s

medieval epic Parzival, for example, the black queen of Zazamarc, Belacane, and the

white knight and prince of Anjou, Gahmuret, fall in love. Belacane and Gahmuret’s

emotional reaction to each other recalls that of Charicleia and Theagenes, especially their

love at first sight:

The black Mooress, that country’s queen, caused him to swoon again and

again. He twisted and turned, time and again; like a bundle of willow

twigs, his joints cracking. . . . His heart resounded with blows for it

swelled with chivalry, stretching both the warrior’s breasts, as the

crossbow does the cord (14).

Like Gahmuret, Belacane feels the fire of love and desire: the lady “sighed time and

again . . . she cast many bashful glances . . . at Gahmuret; then her eyes informed her

heart that he was handsome” (14). Von Eschenback’s portrayal of Blacks, especially

through the love and marriage of Belacane and Gahmuret, is reminiscent of Heliodorus’s.

Their union, like that of Charicleia and Theagenes, reminds us of a tradition that depicts

Blacks positively, but their separation because of difference in religious belief draws

attention to the role of religion during the medieval and early modern period.

The story of Belacane and Gahmuret stresses the importance of religion as a tool

that separated people during the late medieval and early modern period and that two

important issues in this study warrant further investigation: first, that race as a designator
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of color1 was not the dividing factor during Medieval and early to mid-sixteenth-century

Renaissance Europe but became so from late sixteenth century onward and, second, that a

literary tradition existed then which represented Africans positively.

With the reconquest of Spain, race gradually emerged as a tool of separation as

Spaniards and Portuguese sought to establish the purity of their religious faith by

distancing themselves from Moorish or Jewish ancestry and claiming that the purity of

their faith could be seen in their blue blood beneath their pale skin.

The seminal event that contributed dramatically to the changing view of race as a

tool of division, instead of religion, on the English stage was the Battle of Alcazar (1578)

when hundreds of Europeans, including royalty, lost their lives on the battlefield in

Morocco and Peele transcribed that historic moment into a dramatic one in his play The

Battle of Alcazar (1588/9), fusing the Vice figure from Medieval dramas with the black

character of Muly Mahamet. Although black devils existed in Medieval plays, these

devils were not actual Blacks but were allegorical figures or figurative representations of

darkness and evil. The conflation of the actual and the representational, the Spanish

blood laws, England’s contact with Mediterranean peoples, and its desire to reposition

itself from a peripheral to a central power in global affairs, all converged to make race a

tool of separation toward the close of the sixteenth century and contributed to the shift

from a dramatic tradition that represented Blacks positively on the English Renaissance

stage to one that depicted them negatively.

More than the contact itself, the English feared losing their identity and becoming

the Other: Jews, Catholics, or Muslims. Besides England’s own attempts at inscribing

1. Sometimes nationality, religion, and gender were also categorized as race. The English thought of the
Irish as a different race, and Jews were also seen as a separate race.
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Spain as a sultanate, during the 1580s and 1590s certain pamphlets circulated throughout

Europe, primarily in England, the Netherlands, and France, that conflated Spain with

Moors, despite Spain’s own attempts to distance itself from its Moorish and Jewish past. 2

Fearing the stigmatization of the racial European Other that Spain suffered because of its

contact with Semitic people (Moors and Jews), the English invented ways to preserve and

protect their identity by writing their religious experiences into Mediterranean plays

while simultaneously dehumanizing Africans. While the Muslim world enjoyed religious

tolerance and, to a great degree, peace, Renaissance England experienced religious

turmoil and daily persecution. By superimposing their religious experiences onto the

Muslim world, early modern English playwrights made the Mediterranean a site of

religious contestation and persecution. Protestant England believed its religion to be true

but Islam false, fostering the notion among many early modern English playwrights that

any contact between England and any Islamic nation would inevitably result in conflict.

England’s conviction that dark skin signified false religion and its nascent foray into the

slave trade further resulted in the degradation of Africans on the English Renaissance

stage.

The combination of dark skin and the wrong religion had distinct associations in

the early modern English imagination: sexual depravity as well as dispossession and

alienation from God, a technique English writers deployed to control Africans by

dehumanizing them and to compensate for their own nation’s political marginality on the

world stage. For example, George Best’s explanation of blackness and its consequent

2. See Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Bk 5, viii, ed. Gareth Roberts (Buckingham, Philadelphia:
Open UP, 1992). See, also, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and The Song of Roland, trans.Gerard J. Brault
(University Park: Penn. State UP, 1978). In both works, the Spaniards and the Saracens fight on the same
side. See, also, Barbara Fuchs, “The Spanish Race,” Rereading the Black Legend: the discourses of
religious and racial difference in the Renaissnce empires, ed. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and
Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2007), 55.
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inferiority, a justification for the slave trade and exploitation of Africans, provides ample

illustration of this technique. According to Best, Noah’s “wicked sonne Cham

disobeyed” his father--“being perswaded that the first childe borne after the flood . . .

should inherite and possesse all the dominions of the earth, hee” consorted with his wife.

As an

example for contempt of Almightie God, and dis-obedience of parents,

God would a sonne should be borne that it might remaine a spectacle of

disobedience to all the worlde. And of this blacke and cursed Chus came

all these blacke Moores which are in Africa.

Best’s mythmaking distorts and collapses the biblical account of Noah and Ham into that

of Esau and Jacob as an explanation of dark skin,3 with specific aim to justify the slave

trade and the exploitation of black Africans: in 1552 John Lok sold the first slaves whom

he captured in Guinea, and ten years later, 1562, John Hawkins sold three hundred slaves

whom he stole from Portuguese ships en route to the West Indies. 4 Blackness as the

spectacle of disobedience, the visible sign of sin, ignorance, and affinity with evil are part

of Best’s mythology, which along with other negative narratives of black Africans, such

as Peele’s Battle of Alcazar, became the dominant depiction of Africans during the late

sixteenth-century and thereafter on the early modern English stage.

But the early modern English stage also associated blackness with positive images

through the Heliodoran and other traditions. In the anonymous drama A Pretie new

Enterlude . . . of the Story of Kyng Daryus (1565), the character Aethyopia is presented

favorably on stage. There are two strikingly noteworthy observations about this text:

3. See Genesis 7-9 & 25: 20-34.

4. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995), 20.
 204

first, it is a morality play predating Peele’s Battle of Alcazar. Although Aethyopia’s part

is small, it represents one of the earliest positive representations of Blacks on the early

modern stage. Second, it is a play outside the Heliodoran tradition, indicating the

possibility of a range of favorable portrayals of black Africans on the early modern

English stage. A Pretie new Enterlude strengthens the two major concerns of this study:

that race was not a tool of discrimination in early modern England until the close of the

sixteenth century and, principally, that there were plays (and other performative

literatures), especially those in the Helidoran tradition, that portrayed Africans positively.

The existence of this positive representation of Africans on the Renaissance stage

from the 1560s to 1660s reveal the stretch of the tradition, especially of the tradition

originating from the Aethiopica, and the major and minor early modern dramatists who

participated in it: Heywood, Jonson, Shakespeare, and, as we have seen, Gogh, among

others. The participation especially of three prominent early modern playwrights makes

us realize the importance of Helidorous to the English Renaissance and its playwrights by

bringing into sharper focus the patriarchal Renaissance norm and providing an alternate

perspective to this prevailing norm. Heywood’s Bess Bridges and Shakespeare’s

Desdemona, for example, are active, independent, brave, and yet chaste women whose

behavior is a counterpoint to that of the ideally passive, dependent, and chaste

Renaissance women. A successful entrepreneur, a courageous defender of her honor, a

builder of community, and a leader, Bess Bridges, like Desdemona, reminds us of a

frequently neglected or overlooked aspect of the English Renaissance, but which the

Heliodoran tradition helps us to note: that females were more independent during the

English Renaissance than is generally thought. Bess’s and Desdemona’s challenges to

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the accepted standard of women’s behavior and role in the early modern period make us

also see the difficulties involved in and the paradox of such challenges: liberation yet

constraint. Ultimately Bess is recuperated into the role of domesticity through marriage,

but a marriage that suggests equality.

Both Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s use of the Heliodoran lens also provides novel

ways of seeing blackness and Othello. In satisfying “Her Majesty’s will” Jonson stages

blackness because it would also satisfy his majesty’s will. Jonson’s dramatization of

Queen Anne and her ladies as Ethiopian princesses offers insight afresh or, at least, one

not frequently acknowledged: the role of blackness becomes associated with challenges

and autonomy. The queen’s request to be a “blackamore” offers a tacit challenge to the

Jacobean myth of male supremacy and imperial rule since African females, particularly

African queens, Charicleia, Cleopatra, Sheba, and Candace, for example, “carried

powerful connotations of female autonomy and ethnic diversity.”5 Finding herself

increasingly alienated from the king and his court, Anne used blackness to assert her

individuality and to challenge her husband’s power. The ladies themselves who

participated in the masque were known to “resist patriarchal standards of female

decorum”: Penelope Rich, was the mistress of Edward Blount and the mother of four

illegitimate children; Lady Arbella Stuart was imprisoned for marrying the man of her

choice, Lord Seymour, against the king’s wishes; Frances Howard, Lady Walsingham,

murdered her husband in the “Overbury affair”; and Lady Mary Wroth had two

illegitimate children with her first cousin, Lord Pembroke. One aristocratic female

connected the behavior of the ladies of the court to “the performance of the masque,”

noting that masque seem more like the “site of female misrule” than a peaceful

5. David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989), 118.
 206

celebration of the king’s power.6 In a move that signals autonomy, the queen even

established an alternate court to the king’s.

Jonson would also use blackness to assert King James’s authority over unruly

subjects. As the king did with the sixteen Ethiopian princesses, he would do with his

intransigent subjects: transform them from darkened Englishmen and Scotts to

enlightened Britons. Viewed from this angle, Jonson is not just another early modern

English playwright who apes the prevailing notions of blackness as anathema to beauty

and light, but one who goes against the dominant idea of the time to celebrate the

qualities associated with this color through his Ethiopian princesses.

Desdemona’s decision to make Othello her husband reverberates negatively

throughout the society and speaks to a bravery that is as militant as any courage on the

battlefield. Such courage gives us fresh perspective into her character, prompting us to

revise traditional interpretations of her actions as compromising her virtue, for those very

actions affirm her chastity because elopement and sexual purity are essential and integral

aspects of heroines in the Heliodoran mode. Desdemona’s actions, measured against the

Venetian society, against the intrinsic value of the play itself, and against the tradition of

which she is a part, present a more layered Desdemona and allow a better understanding

of her character.

Likewise, a greater depth attaches to Othello when the character is seen in the

Heliodoran tradition. The difficulties that many scholars have in reconciling Othello’s

blackness to his stature as a tragic hero easily disappear when the character is seen in this

tradition, because of the tradition’s representation of black Africans as heroic and noble.

Chaste and pious, Othello transcends the label of pagan convert or sensuous Moor, as

6. Hall, 137.
 207

well as that of “erring barbarian.” Paradoxically, his displacement and lost identity are

his identity because male dislocation is intrinsic to and characteristic of heroes in this

tradition. It is no accident that Jonson and Shakespeare allow Niger, Othello, and

Cleopatra to call for accurate portrayals of Africans and Africa, which challenge and

disrupt Europe’s misrepresentations of Africa and its people. In recovering Helidorous,

then, our understanding of the cultural practices of early modern English drama becomes

more complex, more textured, and more nuanced.

Throughout this study, I have focused on the positive representation of Blacks in

the Heliodoran tradition. In this pursuit, I have perused several dramatic works, arriving

at the conclusion that though the number of positive dramatic representations of Africans

is small, it can be increased significantly. When I began this study, I had not heard of the

six continental plays that I uncovered and that became integral to this discussion. Other

plays also in this tradition, such as The White Ethiopian, though less obscure, were

considered lost. We know that the influence of the Aethiopica was widespread

throughout Europe, influencing European humanists, including the Spanish dramatists

Juan Pérez de Montalbán and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who based their play Los hijos

de fortuna, Teágenes y Cariclea (1664) on the Aethiopica.7 Places such as Holland,

Hungary, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, and Asia Minor where the Aethiopica was

popular might yield more plays based on Heliodorus’s novel, which may be waiting to be

discovered and, like Los hijos de fortuna, to be translated into English. The possibility

also exists that plays independent of the Heliodoran tradition, as a Pretie new Enterlude

7. See Eric Mayer, “Notes on the Aethiopica, the Lives of Homer, and the Name ‘Don Quixote de la
Mancha,’” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 28. no. 1 (Spring 2008): 167-80, esp.
pp. 167-69, n. 5.
 208

suggests, are also waiting to be excavated, all of which could expand our knowledge of

the many positive roles that Africans played on the English Renaissance stage.

I am hopeful that more plays inside and outside the Helidoran tradition will be

discovered, thereby increasing the number of dramatic works in the tradition of positive

representation of Africans on the Renaissance stage, especially the early modern English

stage, and showing us that the overall tradition of representing Africans positively on the

early modern English stage is not as sparse as the current canon reflects.

By definition, the Mediterranean includes territories of Morocco, the Levant, and

other places bounded by the Mediterranean sea and under the control of Moors and

Turks. Yet as scholars we study the literature of this place through the viewpoint of

England, a country with its own vested interests and far removed geographically and

culturally from the Mediterranean. The current focus on race in Renaissance scholarship

affords us an opportune time to research, recover, and discover dramatic literature

perhaps written by people of the Mediterranean or by writers with Mediterranean

sympathies about the contact between the peoples of England and the Mediterranean

during the Renaissance. Such texts would provide invaluable perspectives on the

interplay of the English and the Africans in the Mediterranean, thus giving scholars wider

lens with which to view the Mediterranean relationship of these two nations. Perhaps,

these kinds of texts could alter our perception by providing us with a more layered view

of the relationship between the English, including other Europeans, and Africans. Such

texts could also present a counterpoint to English portrayal of Africans by inverting the

relationship in Mediterranean adventure plays between these two peoples to which we are

accustomed.
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Appendix A

Detailed Summary of the Aethiopica

Book 1

A group of pirates surveys the landscape from the mouth of the Nile and spies a

heavily loaded merchant ship “moored by its hawsers.” Venturing aboard, the pirates see

telltale signs of death and carnage and discover that everyone is dead, except two people

of striking beauty: Charicleia and Theagenes. Awed by Charicleia's beauty and thinking

she is a goddess, the pirates keep their distance until her solicitations and affections for

the seriously wounded Theagenes make them realize that she is mortal. Before they are

able to capture the two young people and collect the booty, another set of pirates appears,

prompting the first set to flee. This last group secures the booty, taking Charicleia and

Theagenes captive and traveling until sunset before reaching their hideout, where the two

captives are placed in the care of Cnemon, a fellow Greek and longtime captive of these

pirates.

During the night, Cnemon recounts the reason for his exile and captivity: his

stepmother, Demainete, importuned him with sexual advances, which he rebuffed.1

Piqued, she enlisted the help of her maid, Thisbe, to entrap him. Thisbe told Cnemon that

Demainete had dishonored his father’s bed and asked if he would like to catch the

adulterers in bed. Instead of finding an illicit lover in his stepmother’s embrace, Cnemon

found his father, who pleaded for his life. Stunned, Cnemon let the sword fall from his

hand. Recovering himself, Aristippus beat, bound, and charged Cnemon with attempted

1. The Cnemon story is based on the Phaedra myth. John Morgan suggests that Heliodorus might have
been “using the first version of the Euripidean play” and that the “role of Phaidra is shared between
Demainete and Arsake,” and the former “calls Cnemon a new Hippolytos.” See “Heliodorus,” 438.
 210

patricide. Although divided in the type of punishment to mete out, the Areiopagos

decided to banish Cnemon. Prior to his captivity, he learned of Demainete’s death, the

confiscation of his father’s property (Demainete’s family charged Aristippus with her

death), and Thisbe’s flight from Athens.

The next morning the leader of the brigands, Thyamis, assembles everyone and,

recounting his vision that he interprets to mean Charicleia should be his wife, proposes to

her; she pretends to accept his proposal by requesting appropriate time to put aside her

priestly robes in accordance with her ancestral practices and by claiming that Theagenes

is her brother. Thyamis agrees and prepares to march on Memphis.

Meanwhile, the first group of pirates finds Thyamis and his cohorts’ hideout,

destroying and burning their possessions. Realizing the futility of victory and

reinterpreting the dream to mean he must kill Charicleia, Thyamis steals away from the

war and enters the cave where Cnemon had stowed Charicleia; following the voice of a

woman who responds in Greek, “he seize[s] her . . . and plunge[s] his sword through her

breast” and hurries back to the war.

Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, Thyamis’s remaining cohorts flee, leaving him

to battle their enemies, who are the agents of his usurping brother, Petosiris. They

capture, chain, and send Thyamis to the mainland. The attackers then turn their attention

to recovering the spoils. Failing this, they set the island ablaze.

Book 2

Cnemon and Theagenes make their way back to the cave where Charicleia is

hidden. Both men come across the body of a woman, which they eventually realize is
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Thisbe’s. Along with Charicleia, they search the body and find a tablet around the neck.

They discover that Thyamis’s squire, Thermouthis, has kidnapped her from an Egyptian

merchant, with whom she had eloped, and has hidden her in the cave. They also learn of

Cnemon’s father’s efforts to repeal his exile.

Finding a dead Thisbe, Thermouthis suspects Cnemon and Theagenes, both of

whom come to believe that the cave is no longer safe because Thermouthis may seek to

avenge Thisbe’s death. With Charicleia, both men decide that everyone should leave the

cave but should travel in pairs: Charicleia and Theagenes, Thermouthis and Cnemon.

Cnemon agrees to meet Charicleia and Theagenes at Chemmis as soon as he can give

Thermouthis the slip.

On the way to Chemmis, Cnemon encounters an old man dressed as a Greek, who

laments the loss of “his children.” As they travel together, Cnemon presses him to tell his

story and learns that he is Calasiris, an Egyptian high priest and Thyamis’s father; that he

is searching for Charicleia and Theagenes; that he is the guest of the merchant from

whom Thermouthis steals Thisbe and where they are bound. Calasiris further confides

that his exile is self-imposed because he fled from sexual temptation and the prediction of

blood-strife between his two sons;2 that during his sojourn at Delphi he and the Greek

high priest Charicles became friends; that Charicles told Calasiris how he lost his wife

and daughter and how he met an Ethiopian ambassador who offered him wealth to care

for a beautiful girl. The ambassador explained that the girl’s mother had exposed her

along with a ribbon and other pertinent paraphernalia that gave an account of the

circumstances and the girl’s pedigree. Before Charicles could learn more about the girl,

2. Calasiris’s flight recalls Oedipus’s, both of whom, John Morgan observes, act out a “story of a man’s
inability to avoid or change the destiny written for him.” See “Helidorus,” 438.
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the ambassador was ordered out of the country because his mission related to the disputed

emerald mines. Cnemon also learns that Charicles sought Calasiris’s counsel about his

daughter Charicleia and that as Theagenes sacrificed in the temple, the oracle foretold his

and Charicleia’s adventure and marriage.

Book 3

(Calasiris’s story continues)

Each year, Thessalians offer praise and consecration to Neoptolemus in Athens.

In the temple, Charicleia and Theagenes met for the first time and fell instantly in love.

After the ceremony, both young people became ill, but only Calasiris realized the cause

of their illness, and he managed to endear himself to Charicles and to gain his confidence

by agreeing with him and praising Charicleia’s beauty independently. He led Charicles

to believe that Charicleia’s illness resulted from some “Evil Eye.”

Later that day, Apollo and Artemis visited Calasiris and instructed him to care for

Theagenes and Charicleia and to help them leave Delphi. Theagenes also visited Calasiris,

confessed his love for Charicleia, and avowed his innocence. Playing the part of the

magician that Theagenes assigned him, Calasiris promised to help him and also assured

Charicles that he would cure Charicleia and make her amenable to love and marriage.
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Book 4

(Calasiris’s story continues)

On the second day of the festival, Theagenes won the footrace, defeating the

champion3 and, while accepting the prize from Charicleia, feigned exhaustion by falling

into her embrace. Overcome with love, Charicleia took to her bed, and a worried

Charicles sought Calasiris’s help once more. Pretending to “divine” and to “cure”

Charicleia’s malady, Calasiris managed to obtain from Charicles the ribbon that inscribes

Charicleia’s pedigree when her mother abandoned her as a baby and the other

paraphernalia that attest to her ancestry. Calasiris told Charicleia of her lineage and

encouraged her love for Theagenes, assuring her that it was reciprocated and promising to

do all he could to help them. He also told Charicleia that her mother, Persinna, sought his

help in finding her.

Charicles dreamed that an eagle swooped down and carried Charicleia away,

which he interpreted to mean that Charicleia would be taken from him to a distant land.

Although Calasiris knew that Charicles’s interpretation is accurate, he reassured his

friend by reinterpreting the dream positively, telling Charicles that the eagle represented a

husband, that the dream foreshadowed Charicleia’s marriage,4 and that he should be

diligent in breaking down Charicleia’s resistance to marriage by showering her with

presents from the prospective bridegroom, Alchemenes—Charicles’s nephew.

3. Besides being a descendant of Achilles, Theagenes also has other traits that identify him with Achilles:
swift-footedness; throughout The Iliad, Achilles is called “swift of foot” as, for example, in Bk. 1 when
fever plagues the Greeks for nine days because Agamemmnon dishonored Chryseis’s father, Apollo’s
priest. On the tenth day, Achilles, “swift of foot,” called a meeting and explained the reason for the
pestitlence. See The Iliad, Vol. I, trans. A. T. Murray, 7 (I. 41-67).
4. Technically, both interpretations are correct: Charicleia will be married, but in a distant land where she
will be away from Charicles.
 214

To implement the command of the gods, Calasiris, along with Theagenes, devised

a plan to “kidnap” Charicleia using the young men from Theagenes’s entourage.

Calasiris also secured passage for Theagenes, Charicleia, and himself aboard a

Phoenician merchant ship. At the appointed hour, the Thessalian young men broke into

Charicles’s house and with Charicleia’s assistance, “kidnapped” her, who, along with

Theagenes, took refuge at Calasiris’s home, where she insisted that Theagenes vow not to

violate her chastity, and Theagenes, protesting that such a vow impugned his own virtue,

consented only at Calasiris’s urging. Calasiris then hurried to Charicles’s home, where

he found the household in uproar, advised a swift pursuit of the kidnappers, and returned

to his lodging.

Book 5

(Calasiris’s story continues)

Under the cover of darkness, Charicleia, Calasiris, and Theagenes boarded the

ship and wintered in a Phoenician suburb at the home of a fisherman, who told him of the

pirate Trachinus’s plot to attack the ship and make Charicleia his bride. Calasiris then

prevailed upon the lovesick Tyrian merchant to sail immediately, promising him

Charicleia in marriage.

At sea, pirates attacked the ship and forced the crew to surrender. Trachinus

informed Calasiris that he had “betrothed” Charicleia “to be his wife and intended to

celebrate the marriage today.” Calasiris alerted Theagenes and Charicleia to Trachinus’s

design; playing along, Calasiris suggested that Trachinus forbade the other pirates to go

onto the ship so that Charicleia could use it as a bridal chamber to prepare for the
 215

wedding. Trachinus agreed and issued the order. Then Calasiris inveighled Trachinus’s

deputy, Pelorus, to rebel against Trachinus by telling him that Charicleia loved him, not

Trachinus. When Pelorus accused Trachinus of violating the pirates’ law of first choice

and demanded Charicleia as his prize for being the first pirate to board the ship,

Trachinus denied the demand and countered by asserting the law of a subordinate

yielding to a superior--insisting that Pelorus could have his choice of any other prize.

War erupted. Pelorus killed Trachinus, and Theagenes killed Pelorus. Amid the

complete annihilation of crewmembers and pirates, Theagenes was seriously injured and

taken to the ship, where another set of pirates appeared, taking the couple captive. From

his perch on a hill, Calasiris tried to follow them but could not.

When Charicleia and Theagenes separate from Cnemon, they agree upon code

words to help them locate each other should they, too, be separated. Theagenes chooses

“Pythios” and “palm” and Charicleia selects “Pythias” and “lamp.” He shows her a scar

on his knee,5 and she shows him an ancestral ring. As they are about to sail away, a troop

of armed men captures them and takes them to Mitranes, the satrap’s lieutenant whom

Nausicles (Calasiris’s host) pays to search the island for Thisbe. When Nausicles sees

Charicleia in Mitranes’s custody, he is smitten and, pretending that she is Thisbe, tells her

in Greek to play along, which she does. Although Mitranes releases Charicleia

reluctantly, he sends Theagenes to Oroondates, exhorting the satrap to send the handsome

Greek as a gift to the Persian king.

5. This is another identifier of Theagenes with the Greeks, in this case, Odysseus, and of Heliodorus’s
intertextuality that helps situate the Aethiopica within the literature of ancient Greek tradition.
 216

Nausciles returns home, claiming to have found a better Thisbe. During the night,

Cnemon overhears a woman, who refers to herself as Thisbe, weeping. Terror seizes

him. The woman turns out to be Charicleia, who reunites with Calasiris the next morning.

Book 6

Buoyed by finding Charicleia, Calasiris asks Nausicles to help him locate

Theagenes. The next day they go in search of Theagenes. However, they learn that

Theagenes never went to Memphis because Thyamis and his Bessean band have

slaughtered Mitranes’s army and have captured Theagenes. At this news, the men return

home, where Nausicles reveals his upcoming trip to Athens and offers his daughter to

Cnemon. After much expostulation and felicitation about the betrothal, Charicleia and

Calasiris decide to continue searching for Theagenes. Disguised as beggars, they

encounter an old sorceress lamenting her dead son.6 Calasiris asks her for help, and she

agrees but tells him to wait. Both he and Charicleia unwittingly witness her necromancy.

The son predicts that Charicleia and Theagenes will live a brilliant and royal life in a

remote country. He also predicts the peaceful resolution to the dispute of Calasiris’s

sons’ and the death of the old woman, his mother.

Book 7

Because of Oroondate’s involvement with the disputed emerald mines, his wife,

Arsace, is the interim ruler of Memphis. The sister of the Great King, Arsace is a

6. This episode recalls that in The Odyssey, in which the rites are similar. Odysseus digs a pit and pours a
libation of milk, honey, sweet wine, water, sprinkled with white barley meal. He sacrifices sheep and
conjures the dead, promising to do more sacrifices to the shades, especially to Teiresas’s, on his return to
Ithacas if Teiresas unfolds the future to him. The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, Bk.X, ll. 518-45 (p. 383),
and Bk.XI, ll. 25-54 (p. 389). See, also, The Novel in the Ancient World, 436.
 217

nymphomaniac. Because of her sexual overtures, Thyamis flees his homeland, for

Oroondates, incensed by Petosiris’s lies about a dalliance between Thyamis and Arsace,

hounds Thyamis out of Memphis and gives the priesthood to Petosiris. Now with his

brigands, Thyamis wants to besiege the city, but Arsace checks his action by proposing

that the brothers engage in single combat as a way of deciding the priesthood.7

Petosiris refuses to fight, throwing away his weapon, running, and seeking to re-enter the

city but is prevented. With Theagenes following at a distance, Thyamis chases Petosiris

around the city wall.8 Into this spectacle Calasiris enters, seeing his two sons feuding.9

When they do not respond to his call, Calasiris realizes that his beggarly attire makes him

incognito. Shedding his rags and letting his hair down in a priestly fashion, he gains his

sons’ attention and ends their feud. Shortly after, Charicleia runs into the arena, spies

Theagenes, and embraces him. Not until she mentions the code words does he recognize

her.10 Calasiris dies shortly thereafter, but he passes the priesthood on to Thyamis,

enjoining him to protect Theagenes and Charicleia.

7. The allusion is to Hector’s challenge to the Greeks for a single combat to determine the outcome of the
Trojan War and to Oedipus’s sons’ fight for the crown. See A. T. Murrary’s translation of The Iliad, Bk.
VII, ll.77-103 (p.309); Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, The Loeb Classical Library, ed. & trans. Alan H.
Sommerstein (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008).
8. This entire book recalls the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two major sources of Heliodorus. Petosiris’s flight
recalls Hector’s when Achilles chases a fearful Hector around the city walls of Troy. The beggarly
habiliments of Calasiris and Charicleia and the consequent failure by loved ones to them recall Odysseus’
homecoming. See The Iliad, trans. A.T. Murray, 465-73( XXII. 129-260); The Odyssey, trans. A.T. Murray,
177-187(XVII. 334-494).
9. The feud between Thyamis and his brother Petosiris for the priesthood recalls the feud between
Oedipus’s two sons for the crown. Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, The Loeb Classical Library, ed. &
trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, (Cambridge: Harvard UP), 152-275.
10. Incognito as beggars, Calasiris and Chariclea are cast in the role of Odysseus, especially Calasiris who
returns home to find his house in chaos. Throughout the novel, Calasiris and Charicleia have been
repeatedly cast in this role. For example, Calasiris is the secondary narrator of the novel, and when in
Book 2, Theagenes and Charicleia disguise themselves as beggars, Cnemon “(mis)quotes the Odysseus to
make sure that no one misses the point.” See “Heliodours,” 436.
 218

From the moment Arsace sees Theagenes, her desire for him consumes her.11

Finally, her procurer, Cybele, intervenes, and under the guise of hospitality lures

Theagenes and Charicleia into the palace, where she gradually reveals Arsace’s design to

Theagenes. Despite threats, beatings, and other punishments, Theagenes remains

virtuous. However, when Arsace decides to marry Charicleia to Cybele’s son,

Archaemenes, Theagenes pretends to be amenable to Arsace’s wishes and asks her not to

marry Charicleia to another man. Arsace agrees. Embittered, Archaemenes steals away

to alert Oroondates to Arsace’s voluptuousness; Oroondates dispatches soldiers to Arsace

commanding her to send him the prisoners.

Book 8

The war between Persian Egypt and Ethiopia begins fortuitously for King

Hydaspes, who outmaneuvers and outsmarts the Persians by pretending that Philae is not

his objective. He takes the city and sends an ambassador to Oroondates, who is at Thebes

mustering his army. Although preoccupied with war, the satrap is enchanted with

Charicleia because of Archaemenes’s description of her beauty, demanding that his wife

release her and Theagenes. Meanwhile, Arsace tosses Charicleia in the palace dungeon

with Theagenes after attempting but failing to poison or burn her alive. As they

commiserate with and encourage each other, Charicleia and Theagenes recall their

dreams of Calasiris. Theagenes misinterprets his dream, believing that the dream’s

reference to a maiden and a dark land signifies an imminent death. Charicleia explains

that it portends his going to Ethiopia with her, thus fulfilling the oracle. She also comes

11. Morgan makes the point that Arsace also plays the role of Phaedra (436). It seems to me, however, that
she is also cast in the mold of Calypso, keeping Theagenes against his will in order for him to become her
lover. See The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, 171-81 (V. 7-162).
 219

to realize that her dream had foretold that her ancestral ring, Pantarbe, would save her

from the funeral pyre.

When the armed messengers of Oroondates arrive at the palace, they encounter no

resistance and, freeing the couple, escort them to the satrap’s camp. They are, however,

ambushed and captured en route by Ethiopian scouts who take the couple to King

Hydaspes.

Book 9

Hydaspes reserves Charicleia and Theagenes as a sacrifice for victory in the war

and turns his attention to capturing Syene by besieging it. From Syene to the Nile, he

digs trenches that increase in width and incline; when all is done, Hydaspes opens the

Nile into each trench, causing the water to rush downstream and flood Syene. 12 In spite

of themselves, the people of Syene surrender, and Oroondates, promising to return Philae

and the emerald mines, lists his terms for surrender, which an amused Hydaspes grants.

During the night, Oroondates steals away to Elephantine, where he musters his

army and leads an attack on Hydaspes. Despite routing the Persians and their allies,

Hydaspes is careful not to engage in unnecessary slaughter and directs his men

accordingly. To Oroondates, he is merciful, bestowing the best medical care on him,

releasing him, and restoring all, except what belonged to Ethiopia by geographical right:

the emerald mines and Philae. Likewise, he is magnanimous to his soldiers, rewarding

12. Morgan argues that the siege of Syene, which he uses to date the Aethiopica, occurred during 350 A.D.
See “Heliodorus,” 417-20. The siege and overthrow of Syene by damming the Nile has Biblical resonance
and a touch of irony. To overthrow Babylon, the Persian general, Cyrus, dammed the Euphrates, which ran
underneath the city. The men entered the city by walking through the riverbed and finding the inner gates
(of the city) open. See Isaiah 45: 1-6 and Jeremiah 50:36-38 (NKJV). Herodotus also recounts Cyrus’s
overthrow of Babylon in his History. It is ironic that this strategy would be used against the Persians. See
The Histories in Four Volumes, The Loeb Classical Library, trans. A. D. Godley, (London: William
Heinemann. 1960), I, 229-41.
 220

them according to their heroics and requests. In reviewing the prisoners, Hydaspes is

struck by Charicleia’s resemblance to the daughter in his dream, but disregards his

feelings. Speaking to them in Greek, he also inquires of her parentage and assigns a

eunuch to guard her.

Book 10

Hydapes returns to Meroe among a jubilant and admiring public. When the

preparations for immolations are made, the king orders the brazier to be brought forth to

test the purity of the prospective sacrifices.13 Theagenes and Charicleia walk the brazier

without being harmed, astounding the people with their beauty and chastity and, in

Charicleia’s case, prompting the High Priest Sisimethres to caution Hydaspes about the

gods’ displeasure with human sacrifice. As Sisimethres and the other priests are about to

leave the celebration, Charicleia, to Hydaspes’s displeasure, asks the high priest to judge

if she should be sacrificed. Claiming Ethiopian birth and lineage, Charicleia presents

tokens to validate her claim. Both Persinna and Sisimethres confirm that Charicleia is the

king’s daughter, whom the queen abandoned at birth. Perplexed and incredulous,

Hydaspes inquires into the possibility of two full-blooded Ethiopians producing a “white”

child. Persinna explains the role of the Andromeda painting; when messengers produce

it, the similitude between it and Charicleia sweeps away the king’s reservations.

Despite this, the king wants the sacrificial rites to continue, but when the people

demand that Charicleia and Theagenes not be sacrificed and the sacrificial system be

abolished, all the others are saved. Theagenes performs two heroic feats: recapturing a

13. This book, according to Morgan, “plays on the two Iphigeneia plays of Euripides, with the threat of
human sacrifice in a barbarian land and a father confronting the possibility of slaying his only daughter for
the sake of the community he leads” (438).
 221

runaway bull and using his wits to defeat a massive Ethiopian wrestler. As a part of the

embassy from Oroondates, Charicles arrives in Meroe in search of his daughter

Charicleia. He seizes and denounces Theagenes as a kidnapper, thief, and other things—

all of which Theagenes admits to Hydaspes. Upon seeing Charicles, Charicleia prostrates

herself at his feet and acknowledges his paternal benevolence. To the perplexed

multitude, Sisimethres explains what has transpired. Hydaspes learns that Theagenes is

Charicleia’s betrothed and makes their betrothal official. Both Theagenes and Charicleia

are invested into the gymnosophist religion as priest and priestess of the sun and moon,

prompting Charicles’s recollection of the Delphic oracle. The people rejoice at the king

and queen’s fortune and prepare for the nuptials of Charicleia and Theagenes.
 222

Appendix B

Definition Page from the Oxford English Dictionary

 223

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