‘The Birth of Blackness in Titus Andronicus’

Dr Hanh Bui, Shakespeare’s Globe

This talk will examine a neglected context for understanding the ontology and epistemology of race in Shakespeare’s drama: the role of the midwife. Early modern midwives performed an important cultural function by not only assisting women in labour, but also pronouncing the sex and paternity of a newly born infant. As scholars have shown, this was a time when a midwife had significant influence over how a body was literally shaped and interpreted, thereby influencing its reception in the wider community. Nowhere in Shakespeare’s canon is the midwife’s authority more manifest—and threatening—than in Titus Andronicus, where the midwife’s role includes bearing witness to an infant’s race. My specific claim is that statements made by Tamora’s nurse concerning Aaron’s ‘black’ son can be read as a performative utterance, one that confers, constitutes, and attempts to naturalise the newborn’s raced identity. Merging critical interest in early modern childbirth with Shakespeare scholarship on race and performance, I show how newly born bodies are midwived into racialized subjects, illuminating how midwifery discourses can broaden our understanding of early modern racecraft.

‘Othello‘s Ottoman Roots: Shakespeare and Hiren’s Tale’

Dr Hassana Moosa, University of Cape Town

This paper considers Othello as a starting point for examining early modern English literary engagements with discourses of racialised slavery through the Mahomet and Hiren narrative tradition. This was a literary tradition that developed from the European circulation and reproductions of the tale of ‘Mahomet and Hiren’, in which an Ottoman Emperor called Mahomet, based on the historical figure of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, becomes infatuated with, but later violently kills, his white, Greek, enslaved concubine, Hiren. This story emerged from Europe in the aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, and became an ur-narrative, throughout the continent, for stories of interracial desire, especially between Muslim men and white women. English engagements with the narrative reveal the prevalence of ideologies of racially organised slavery in England at what was, for the English, a very early colonial moment. This paper will examine Shakespeare’s engagement with this narrative tradition in Othello, and consider how critical understandings of this play and its cultural implications might be expanded by considering it in the context of a wider early modern literary tradition of exogamous desire.