Table Of ContentShakespeare and the
Cultivation of Difference
Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the r elationship
between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility
in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare’s plays alongside con-
temporaneous conduct literature—how-to books on self- improvement—
this book demonstrates the ways that the pursuit of personal improvement
was accomplished by the simultaneous stigmatization of particular kinds
of difference. The widespread belief that one could better, or cultivate,
oneself through proper conduct was coupled with an equally widespread
belief that certain markers (including but not limited to “blackness”),
indicated an inability to conduct oneself properly, laying the foundation
for what we now call “racism.” A careful reading of Shakespeare’s plays
reveals a recurring critique of the conduct system voiced, for example,
by malcontents and social climbers like Iago and Caliban, and embod-
ied in the struggles of earnest strivers like Othello, Bottom, Dromio of
Ephesus, and Dromio of Syracuse, whose bodies are bruised, pinched,
blackened, and otherwise indelibly marked as un-cultivatable. By ap-
proaching race through the discourse of conduct, this volume not only
exposes the epistemic violence toward stigmatized others that lies at the
heart of self-cultivation, but also contributes to the broader definition
of race that has emerged in recent studies of cross- cultural encounter,
colonialism, and the global early modern world.
Patricia Akhimie is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University—
Newark. She is co-editor of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women,
English Drama, and the Wider World (University of Nebraska Press),
with Bernadette Andrea. Her research has been supported by the Ford
Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, and the National Sporting
Library.
Routledge Studies in Shakespeare
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.
20 Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange
Early Modern to the Present
Edited by Enza De Francisci and Chris Stamatakis
21 Shakespeare and Complexity Theory
Claire Hansen
22 Women and Mobility on Shakespeare’s Stage
Migrant Mothers and Broken Homes
Elizabeth Mazzola
23 Renaissance Ecopolitics from Shakespeare to Bacon
Rethinking Cosmopolis
Elizabeth Gruber
24 Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse
Eleven Days at Newington Butts
Laurie Johnson
25 Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion
Edited by Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich
26 Shakespeare’s Suicides
Dead Bodies That Matter
Marlena Tronicke
27 The Fictional Lives of Shakespeare
Kevin Gilvary
28 Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy
Jonathan Goossen
29 Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference
Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World
Patricia Akhimie
Shakespeare and the
Cultivation of Difference
Race and Conduct in the
Early Modern World
Patricia Akhimie
First published 2018
by Routledge
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© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Patricia Akhimie to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
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Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
1 Othello, Blackness, and the Process of Marking 49
2 “Bruised with Adversity”: Race and the Slave/
Servant Body in The Comedy of Errors 83
3 “Hard-Handed Men”: Manual Labor and
Imaginative Capacity in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream 117
4 “Fill Our Skins with Pinches”: Cultivating
Calibans in The Tempest 151
5 Coda: Pedestrian Check 187
Bibliography 195
Index 215
List of Figures
I.1 Title page, The Arte of Riding the Great Horse, 1628 2
I.2 “Aethiopem lavare,” A Choice of Emblemes, 1586 4
I.3 Chart comparing skulls labeled “Caucasian,”
“Mongol,” and “Negro,” Types of Mankind, 1854 6
I.4 Chart comparing profiles and skulls labeled “Greek,”
“Creole Negro,” and “Young Chimpanzee,” Types of
Mankind, 1854 7
I.5 Title page, The Secrets of Angling, 1613 15
I.6 Title page, The Booke of Faulconrie or Hauking, 1575 29
3.1 Title page, The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting, 1575 121
3.2 Hand-colored woodcut depicting the water pageant
at Elvetham, The Honourable Entertainment Given
to the Queenes Majestie in Progresse at Eluetham in
Hampshire, 1591 123
3.3 Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar, “The Prospect of
Kenilworth Castle,” The Antiquities of Warwickshire,
1656 125
3.4 Woodcut illustration from the chapter “The Englishe
manner, in breaking vp of the Deare,” The Noble Art of
Venerie or Hunting, 1575 139
3.5 Woodcut illustration from the chapter “The place where
and howe an assembly should be made, in the presence
of a Prince,” The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting, 1575 140
4.1 Engraving by Étienne Delaune depicting workers
cutting and bearing logs from a series representing
the agricultural labor associated with each month,
“February,” The Labors of the Months, 1561–1572 162
4.2 Design for a pair of “Nyppers,” for pulling weeds
without damaging corn stalks, Markhams Farwell to
Husbandry, 1620 168
5.1 Plan for an orchard and gardens surrounded by walks
and woods, A New Orchard and Garden, 1618 188
