Repositioning Shakespeare by Cartelli Thomas

Author:Cartelli, Thomas.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134647323
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

2.

Some eighty years stretch between Shakespeare's composition of Othello and Behn's Oroonoko, a span of time bridged most prominently by the English Civil War and its aftermath, events that play no small role in Behn's construction of her oxymoronic “royal” slave. An even more crucial determinant of Behn's composition, however, is England's burgeoning participation in the slave trade and development of its overseas empire during this same period. It is this story or history—abetted by England's decision to cede its colony of Surinam to the Dutch—that informs and sponsors Behn's transformation of Shakespeare's self-styled man “of royal siege” into a “royal slave.”10

Historically speaking, the figure of the exotic/exceptional royal slave occupies the space of romantic or sentimental fantasy at the end of the century filled by the exotic/exceptional mercenary general at its beginning. Although John Gillies has recently proclaimed the precipitous “demise of the Elizabethan moor” on the seventeenth-century stage, grounding his conclusion on the “contempt” Thomas Rymer expressed in 1693 “for the heroine who allows herself to be talked into marrying a ‘Blackamoor’ and for the playwright who expects his audience to sympathise” (Gillies 1994: 33), the Moor continued to figure prominently on the Restoration stage, most notably in Abdelezar, or the Moor's Revenge, Behn's 1677 adaptation of Dekker's Lust's Dominion (1600), as well as in the many contemporary productions of Othello.11 Gillies correctly observes that:

The gap between [Rymer's and] Coleridge's [conception of Othello as a] “veritable Negro” and Shakespeare's moor is partly explained by the institutionalisation of plantation slavery in the New World in the course of the seventeenth century, a phenomenon which (as Winthrop Jordan has argued) required a sharp distinction between “Negroes” and other types of “savage” (such as the Amerindian), and a hierarchisation of difference defining the “Negro” as the lowest of the low.

(Gillies 1994: 33)

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