Abstract
Richard Brome’s seventeenth-century play A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars imagines complex intersections between class, race, and sexuality in its depiction of landowners and their engagements with beggars. In doing do, this comedy crafts a vision of racialized Whiteness as an inherited trait of the gentry, and this notion of class-based Whiteness reinforces a socio-economic segregation that will preserve and protect the wealth and freedom of this class as it pursues colonial projects.
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Notes
- 1.
Richard Brome, A Jovial Crew, ed. Tiffany Stern (Bloomsbury, 2014), 2.1.5; cited parenthetically in the text hereafter by act, line, and scene numbers.
- 2.
Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (U of Illinois P, 2001), 241–8.
- 3.
Garrett A. Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape (Stanford UP, 1998), 189.
- 4.
On the emergence of improvement, see Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement (Oxford UP, 2015), 91–128; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities (Yale UP, 2000), 183–212; Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland (Yale UP, 2014), 43–83; and Francis E. Dolan, Digging the Past (U of Pennsylvania P, 2020), 3–7.
- 5.
The phrase “invention and experimentation” is Joan Thirsk’s. See Economic Policy and Projects (Clarendon Press, 1978), 11. Slack discusses how those promoting innovations to secure profits sidestepped accusations of greed by reframing their work as producing happiness, 112–13. See also Eric H. Ash, Draining the Fens (John Hopkins UP, 2017), 281–3.
- 6.
Robert Brenner contends that, for instance, “one of the most spectacular, yet largely unnoticed, political developments of the late 1620s and the 1630s was the creation of a close working relationship between the noble and gentry political groups that operated the Puritan colonizing companies and the new-merchant leadership of the colonial trades.” See his Merchants and Revolution (Verso, 2003), 242. For his definition of the “aristocratic colonizing opposition” within government, see 243–69. See also Ash, 288–90.
- 7.
On this point, see Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives (Routledge, 2008), 125 and 170. Habib observes that this work only continues a pattern of involvement in the trade in the enslaved that started in the late sixteenth century, yet by the middle of the seventeenth century, England witnessed both substantial growth in this trade and an uncompromising pursuit of colonial projects, with many aristocrats involved in these enterprises.
- 8.
See Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages (Cambridge UP, 2005), 109–10; Karim-Cooper, “The Materials of Race: Staging the Black and White Binary in the Early Modern Theatre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. Ayanna Thompson (Cambridge UP, 2021), 18–23. Geraldine Heng asserts that the European racial sensorium began constructing a notion of racialized Whiteness via European contacts with geographically and culturally distant others in the thirteenth century. See The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge UP, 2018), 181–4.
- 9.
See Smith, Black Africans in the British Imagination (Louisiana State UP, 2016), 9.
- 10.
See Hall, Things of Darkness (Cornell UP, 1995), 211 and passim.
- 11.
There is a long prehistory of linking dark skin color to peasants and the underclass in European culture, as Paul Freedman reveals Images of the Medieval Peasant (Yale UP, 1999), 139–41 and 143–4. Sometimes, dark skin color was a sign of someone who worked outdoors, while at other times, it could signify the stain of Noah’s curse. Hall (99–101) notes that the link between tanned skin and agricultural labor remains operative in early modern English culture.
- 12.
On the commonness of this adage and the ways that early modern English culture perceived Black skin, see Anu Korhonen, “Washing the Ethiopian White: Conceptualizing Black Skin in Renaissance England,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge UP, 2005), 94–5 and passim. For other examples of the use of this adage in non-dramatic English texts, see Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba, Race in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 54–5, 119–21, 217.
- 13.
“Moor” can also signify someone who practices Islam, and if it does in this instance, Islam is not a source of difference that the rest of the play utilizes; however, the play, as I will show, frequently returns to race and racism. On English racism and somatic perception, see Hendricks, Race & Racism (ACMRS Press, 2022), xvii.
- 14.
Lara Bovilsky contends that Othello perceives Desdemona as morally darkened by the accusation of adultery, a moral darkening linked directly to his and the play’s conceptions of race and racism. I am making a similar claim that what Oldrents does is morally darken Springlove via this adage. See Barbarous Play (U of Minnesota P, 2008), 49–65.
- 15.
David Cressy demonstrates that English legislation against the Romani often admitted that they traveled with English people; when the authorities punished “gypsies,” they sometimes removed the English from the group, protecting them from harsher punishments. For instance, in 1628, the Suffolk authorities arrested a company of “gypsies,” but they pulled John Agglinton, a runaway apprentice, out of the group and sent him back to his master before they executed the thirteen remaining gypsies. Presumably, the authorities decided who was English (Agglinton) and who was not before meting out punishment. Cressy contends that this case was an exception in the seventeenth century when the government made fewer and fewer legal efforts to target Romani people. See “Trouble with Gypsies in Early Modern England,” Historical Journal 59.1 (2016), 58–9.
- 16.
Stern cites this passage in her edition of Brome’s A Jovial Crew (92n6) when commenting on Oldrents’ friend Hearty’s incredulousness about Oldrents trusting “gypsies,” a remark that Hearty makes in reference to Patrico and the beggar crew generally (1.1.6). Stern, however, does not develop the link between the racist practice of blackface linked to “Egyptians” and Oldrents’ racist depiction of Springlove as like a Moor. See also Burton and Loomba for their translation of Cowell’s dictionary, 282.
- 17.
Rogue literature often portrays its subjects engaging in different types of deception, usually impersonating others, which links rogues with theatricality, an association Brome’s comedy also mobilizes. On the links between roguery and counterfeiting, see Dionne and Mentz, “Introduction,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (U of Michigan P, 2006), 11; Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled (U of Chicago P, 2006), 44–58; William Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar (Cornell UP, 1996), 208–15; Ari Friedlander, Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford UP, 2022), 23–5.
- 18.
Stern, 167n127–8.
- 19.
On the use of cosmetics, see Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh UP, 2019), 54–60. See also Ben Jonson’s masque The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621) since its actors use cosmetics to stage racial difference, and the play ultimately crafts a notion of Whiteness linked to the landowning class, a play probably familiar to Brome because he was Jonson’s servant during its production. On this masque, its representation of race, and its links to Brome, see Andrea Stevens, “Mastering Masques of Blackness: Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, The Windsor Text of The Gypsies Metamorphosed and Brome’s The English Moor,” English Literary Renaissance 39.2 (Spring 2009), 414–20.
- 20.
Brome, 160n320.
- 21.
Thomas Harman, Caveat for Commen Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones (1592, F3r−v), reprinted in Brome, 274–5.
- 22.
Early modern scholars who analyze race have demonstrated the ways that “fair” can signify racial Whiteness. See Hall, 1–11; David Sterling Brown, “White Hands: Gesturing Toward Shakespeare’s Other ‘Race Plays,’” Plenary Lecture, Shakespeare Association of America Conference, Washington, DC, 2019; and recently, Dennis Austin Britton, “Flesh and Blood,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. Ayanna Thompson (Cambridge UP, 2021), 112–6.
- 23.
On “the physiognomy of subjection, see Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” small axe 55 (March 2018), 16.
- 24.
See Davidson, Breeding (Columbia UP, 2009), 27, 32.
- 25.
On the ways that romance as a genre can be “a conduit for white supremacist illogic about the inherent stability of race,” see Hendricks, xviii and passim; italics in the original.
- 26.
Sullivan, 189.
- 27.
Morgan, 10.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Stephen Spiess for his vital feedback on this essay and Ari Friedlander for generously sharing a portion of his book before publication.
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Higginbotham, D. (2023). Filiation and White Freedom: Class, Race, and Sexuality in Brome’s A Jovial Crew. In: Arab, R., Ellinghausen, L. (eds) Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_5
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