Katherine Gillen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474417716
- eISBN:
- 9781474434539
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474417716.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter examines the commodity potential of white Europeans in multiracial trading environments. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Massinger’s The Renegado register anxieties about ...
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This chapter examines the commodity potential of white Europeans in multiracial trading environments. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Massinger’s The Renegado register anxieties about Eastern trade, invoking the specter of captivity to explore the racial, religious, and sexual effects of commoditizing Christian bodies. Both plays resolve crises of personal commoditisation by discursively removing chastity from the commercial realm, a development that mitigates the potentially miscegenational circulation of Christian women and works to reclaim the intrinsic personal value of Christian men. The tragicomic trajectory of each play depends upon transforming chastity from a potential commodity to an inherently Christian—and increasingly white—virtue. As such, the plays’ redefinition of chastity informs their articulation of racial whiteness, which emerges as a repository of intrinsic personal value that exempts certain subjects from the most objectifying aspects of the market, leaving others even more vulnerable to its commoditising energies.Less
This chapter examines the commodity potential of white Europeans in multiracial trading environments. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Massinger’s The Renegado register anxieties about Eastern trade, invoking the specter of captivity to explore the racial, religious, and sexual effects of commoditizing Christian bodies. Both plays resolve crises of personal commoditisation by discursively removing chastity from the commercial realm, a development that mitigates the potentially miscegenational circulation of Christian women and works to reclaim the intrinsic personal value of Christian men. The tragicomic trajectory of each play depends upon transforming chastity from a potential commodity to an inherently Christian—and increasingly white—virtue. As such, the plays’ redefinition of chastity informs their articulation of racial whiteness, which emerges as a repository of intrinsic personal value that exempts certain subjects from the most objectifying aspects of the market, leaving others even more vulnerable to its commoditising energies.
Dennis Austin Britton
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823257140
- eISBN:
- 9780823261482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823257140.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Whereas numerous infidel women convert to Christianity on the early modern English stage, relatively few infidel men convert. Chapter 5 explores the interplay of race, gender, and salvation in ...
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Whereas numerous infidel women convert to Christianity on the early modern English stage, relatively few infidel men convert. Chapter 5 explores the interplay of race, gender, and salvation in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado. The frequency with which Jewish, Turkish, and Moorish women convert to Christianity in English drama more generally responds to the convergence of theological and medical discourses that highlighted the role of male seed in creating a child’s identity, and reflects as well Reformation theology’s linkage of spiritual and sexual reproduction. Nonetheless, anxieties about what an infidel mother might pass on to her children, even when she is married to a Christian man, prompt Fletcher’s and Massinger’s plays to employ the discourse of martyrdom in order to verify the women’s acquisitions of true Christian faith.Less
Whereas numerous infidel women convert to Christianity on the early modern English stage, relatively few infidel men convert. Chapter 5 explores the interplay of race, gender, and salvation in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado. The frequency with which Jewish, Turkish, and Moorish women convert to Christianity in English drama more generally responds to the convergence of theological and medical discourses that highlighted the role of male seed in creating a child’s identity, and reflects as well Reformation theology’s linkage of spiritual and sexual reproduction. Nonetheless, anxieties about what an infidel mother might pass on to her children, even when she is married to a Christian man, prompt Fletcher’s and Massinger’s plays to employ the discourse of martyrdom in order to verify the women’s acquisitions of true Christian faith.
