Mini: Shakespeare's World: Immigrants, Others, and Foreign Commodities

In recognition of the National Day of Mourning/Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, we are examining how British colonialism impacted the depiction of people of color in Shakespeare's work. 

We also suggest listening to our episode on Shakespeare and the Colonial Imagination (Website | Apple Podcasts | Spotify) and the All My Relations podcast’s episode “ThanksTaking or ThanksGiving” (Website | Apple Podcasts | Spotify)

Kourtney Smith (KS): Welcome to another Shakespeare Anyone mini-episode! In these mini-episodes, we’ll be exploring topics that are related to Shakespeare but aren’t necessarily connected to whatever play we’ve been discussing. 

Elyse Sharp (ES): And they’re mini, because well, they’re shorter than our other episodes. They’re like quartos if the regular episodes are folio editions.  

KS: In today’s Thanksgiving mini-episode, we’ll be discussing postcolonial theory in Shakespeare. And there is a lot to discuss here. Since we haven’t covered any of Shakespeare’s plays that include postcolonial themes, this episode is a continuation of our Intro to Postcolonial Theory in Shakespeare, this time focusing on immigrants, “others” and foreign commodities in early modern England.

ES: And, as Korey continues writing these episodes, she acknowledges that the study of postcolonial theory in Shakespeare is so vast that we still need to cover this topic as a mini-series. Subsequent episodes will discuss the colonization of Ireland, anti-semitism in The Merchant of Venice, racism in Othello, the aftermath of colonialism, and, of course, postcolonial performance, past and present.

KS: In addition to our mini-series, we will dive deeper into this topic during our The Tempest, Othello and Merchant of Venice series, respectively.

ES: The reason we are releasing this episode on Thanksgiving is because we believe in deconstructing and decolonizing our readings of, as we said in our trailer, this old white dude, William Shakespeare. Art is not created in a vacuum. People create the art we consume for a reason. So let’s re-examine the Renaissance man through colonialism.

KS: We also want to acknowledge Jyotsna G. Singh’s 2019 book Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (published by Arden Shakespeare) as our primary source today. And as we will be discussing colonialism, we will cover topics that may be triggering for some people. Please listen with care.

ES: Quick re-cap: Postcolonial theory is the academic critical cultural study of European colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized peoples and their lands. And, boy, did England do a lot of colonizing during the last 400 years! The British Empire was composed of colonies and territories that were ruled under the United Kingdom, often through invasion and force. Some of those territories include the continental United States; Ireland and Scotland; Canada; Australia and New Zealand; India; and portions of Africa, amongst others.

KS: The British Empire’s goal was to extend England’s authority around the world, often for economic and religious purposes. The empire was at its strongest during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but it didn’t completely fall until the late twentieth century, after a series of uprisings for independence by the colonized.

ES: The British Empire also included the original thirteen colonies of the United States. Which leads us to Thanksgiving. Without historical context in mind and restorative justice in place, Thanksgiving celebrates the horrifying legacy of English and European colonization that led to the slaughter of the Indigenous peoples and their culture. It’s misleading to teach a tale of unity when, less than a generation after the supposed meal between the English Pilgrim colonizers and the Wampanoags, the two groups were at war; and the American government systematically destroyed Native sovereignty. In addition, Native peoples and their allies call Thanksgiving the National Day of Mourning. 

KS: If you’re listening to this episode and are unsure of what to do about the Thanksgiving holiday because the history is so bleak, stick around for the end of the episode. We have suggestions about how to begin ethically celebrating this moral dilemma. So now, let’s tie colonialism to our main man, William Shakespeare. But how?

KS: Last Thanksgiving we discussed the colonial imagination. To sum up that mini-episode, early modern England’s colonial imagination was a result of trade and sea exploration made possible by an emerging British Empire. While Shakespeare didn’t participate in proto colonial activities directly, he and his plays might have been influenced by the travel writers who were documenting their travels, as well as the people they encountered abroad. Go back and listen if you haven’t already.

KS: So, now that we’ve covered our bases… let’s dive in!

ES: London – the city, its theatres, and its society – was the ground zero of England’s initial colonial ambitions that resulted in an influx of foreign commodities and peoples into the city. While most studies of Elizabethan class division, vagrancy and immigrants do not typically recognize or acknowledge any racial and ethnic mix of the population, thanks to Singh, we’re going to do just that. So let’s reassess the racial, ethnic and cultural perspectives of a global early modern London.

KS: England had contact with many non-European groups around the globe during the early modern era, including: with the Ottomans and Moors, based on military and religious competition; with the Safavids in Persia and the Mughals in India, based on commercial and political relations; with Indigenous Americans, based on colonization; and with Sub-Saharan Africans, based on the slave trade. Commerce validated these expansions, which materialized into merchant companies, including: the East India Company in 1600, Levant Company in 1581 and Muscovy Company in 1555.

ES: Due to England’s mercantile relations abroad, London became a dynamic cosmopolitan full of material culture from places beyond the West. One snapshot of the convergence of worldwide goods comes from a Swiss traveler, Thomas Platter, who, during his trip to England in 1599, observed tobacco in English ale-houses “first learnt of … from the Indians”. Platter then describes a cabinet of curiosities owned by a Mr. Cope, a citizen of London. Mr. Cope’s curios “with queer foreign objects in every corner” includES: an African charm made of teeth, an embalmed child, and porcelain from China “Heathen Idols” among other Eastern costumes, clothes, plumes, and other exotic items.

KS: And it wasn’t just foreign goods that can be found in early modern London. Foreign people also spent time in the city. A documented account of a portrait of a Moorish ambassador, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun (known as Hamet Xerife in England), provides an image of a “Mahometan” (now referred to as “Mohammedan”, or follower of Muhammad) in the streets of England. He spent six months in England in 1600, and his Moroccan group attended Queen Elizabeth’s accession day celebrations that November. This embassy took place just before Shakespeare wrote Othello, so it’s possible Shakespeare may have witnessed English responses to these elite Muslims.

ES: It’s important to note that English images of Islamic cultures (their customs, attires and worship) were also increasingly changing due to actual contacts with Muslim empires around the Mediterranean. With the advent of print culture, information about the Ottomans and Moors spread, complicating the traditional association of Muslims with acts of violence, treachery, cruelty and wrath. “It was difficult for more learned Europeans, or those who lived in closer proximity … to demonize Islam [and so] there were Europeans who rejected … the popular and learned demonizations of Islam.”

KS: But please don’t let this make you too optimistic about a growing tolerance of non-white people in early modern London. Historical and cultural references inform us of the presence of black Africans who lived, visited and worked in London. But in 1596, Queen Elizabeth issued a proclamation calling for the expulsion of an early modern word for Black people that I am not going to use on this podcast and “blackamoors” from England. She licensed for them to be transported to Spain in exchange for English prisoners to appease “troubles between her and the King of Spain.” Big yikes, Elizabeth.

ES: Luckily for these actual-human-beings-and-not-just-goods-for-Elizabeth-to-trade, the first edict did not work because citizens refused to give up Africans to those traders.

KS: But, Elizabeth didn’t stop there. In 1601, another warrant appeared in Elizabeth’s name requiring the transportation of, again this early modern word that I am not going to use and “blackamoors” out of her realm to Iberia. She planned to send “eighty-nine blackamoors [for] very good exchange” in exchange for English prisoners. But black immigrants didn’t ever pose a threat to English livelihoods and, in spite of Elizabeth’s efforts, continued to live in England throughout the Renaissance, comprising somewhere between one and three percent of the London populace.

ES: While most early modern documentary materials only offer passing references to a few blacks in London, we do want to mention the illuminating work of Imtiaz Habib in Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677. According to Habib, “the book’s aim [is to] establish [a black population’s] presence [as a] known even if denied ethnic group.” His all-encompassing use of the term to include Ethiopian, Egyptian, Moor, and Indian, among others, adds a range to non-British “others” in and around London.

KS: And England’s far-reaching enterprises, like the East India Company, also brought the beginnings of an East Indian presence to London. Samuel Purchas wrote in his 1625 Purchas, His Pilgrims: “And now we see London an Indian Mart.” Thomas Middleton’s pageants for the Grocers Company staged both spice and Indian figures, “altering the complexion of London”. In addition, the English were said to be “wearing Moorish or Turkish fashion, buying ‘strange’ trinkets, displaying carpets and porcelain and consuming foodstuff from elsewhere.” We can read these references as a change in England, and, as Singh argues, allow ourselves to register the presence of East Indians in London.

ES: If London was an Indian Mart, a place for the consumption of Indian commodities, that might as well have included a very palpable imagined figuration of India and Indians. As we discussed in our colonial imagination mini-episode, Shakespeare’s audiences were also acquainted with travel narratives, so India may have been “the stuff of a sailor’s tavern tale, a map made in the human imagination.”

KS: So, this is all happening in London. But how does it show up on early modern stages?

ES: The relationship between London and the stage was symbiotic and interdependent. Jean E. Howard’s study defines this process: “Rather than simply describing London, the stage participated in interpreting it and giving it social meaning … In these stories, specific locations are transformed into venues defined by particular kinds of interactions, whether between citizen and alien, debtor and creditor, prostitute and client, or dancing master and country gentleman. Collectively, they suggest how city space could be used and by whom, and they make ‘place’ the arena for addressing pressing urban problems: demographic change and the influx of foreigners and strangers into the city.”

KS: Essentially, there’s a dialogue about foreigners happening in the streets that playwrights are putting on the stage. And while we don’t have time to unpack many of those plays (don’t worry, we’ll address them further when we get to each play), we’d like to focus on some pretty troubling depictions and allusions to these non-white “others.”

ES: By the time Shakespeare wrote Othello, the English stage had seen more than twenty plays with bombastic “tawny Moors” and “blackamoors”. During the early modern period as a whole, the English stage saw around thirty-one plays that mentioned “Turks” and “Turkish characteristics”. According to Nabil Matar, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, the “Turk” (according to Europeans) was cruel, tyrannical and deceiving; the “Moor” was sexually driven and uncontrollable. And in Othello’s text, the word “moor” is used sixty times in one form or another; the word “Turk” is used sixteen times; and neither are used kindly. Shakespeare’s Turk is a “malignant and turbaned” man or “a circumcised dog” while his good white Christians “turn Turk” if they behave immorally. 

KS: In addition to Othello, these other plays wrote of rampaging Ottoman armies led by “Grand Turks”. The “Turk plays”, as they are called, drew on fears and fantasies of Islamic Turks threatening English Christedom. In Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Part I, Tamberlaine, after defeating the Turkish emperor Bajazeth, burns the Quran and insults the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 2 also alludes to fears of Islam, reassuring his court, “This is the English, not the Turkish court.” This sentiment (English values good, Turkish values bad) is not unusual. In fact, after the Protestant Reformation, a pamphlet from the Catholic Cardinal of Canterbury upset by Henry VIII referred to new Protestants as “the new turkeys”, or new threats, popping up in their society.  

ES: And while early modern plays reinforced London’s fear of Muslims – whether they be Ottoman, Mediterranean or North African – they had less to say about India. Indian characters are not portrayed in and India is hardly referenced to in Shakespeare’s plays. However, the “Indian Mart” of London can be examined through the integral plot device of the changeling Indian boy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In her essay, “‘Obscured by Dreams:’ Race, Empire and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Margo Hendricks lays out a question regarding the alluded-to changeling Indian boy: “What implications about race and early modern England’s mercantilist and/or colonialist-imperialist ideology might we draw from Shakespeare’s use of India?”

KS: Hendricks, along with many others, view India as the play’s engagement with mercantilism, as well as a metaphor for the demand for Eastern commodities, evoking an exchange between goods and bodies. Shankar Raman views the Indian boy in relation to practices of colonialism: “If the Indian Boy represents his absent mother and her relationship to Titania, colonial discourse concretely represents his value through the foreign merchandise destined to be consumed in the home country … Despite their differences, Oberon and Titania’s economies both rest upon commodifying the East.”

ES: So while Shakespeare depicted few non-white (or assumed to be non-white) characters on the early modern stage, what these characters said about the foreign and immigrant “others” comes from somewhere and was meant to communicate a strong opinion about these peoples and places to its audiences now, ripe for postcolonial discourse.

KS: That’s all the time we have today. So, to sum up this episode, mercantilism complicated early modern identity by labeling foreigners and immigrants “others” while also consuming their material culture. In addition to the material, a postcolonial lens allows us to imagine Shakespearean audiences as cosmopolitan and worldly, enjoying imaginings, good or bad, about Africans, Middle Easterners and Indians.

ES: And while it can be uncomfortable to read Shakespeare through a postcolonial lens, ignoring the possibilities of such a reading only further ignores the public discourse surrounding early modern England’s ambition to colonize.

KS: And before we let you go, if you choose to celebrate Thanksgiving, we have some suggestions for celebrating the holiday that we hope make you feel less icky. First, unlearn revisionist history and learn real history. It may be uncomfortable, but remember: Native lives over white feelings. Then discuss this history with family and friends.

ES: Second, donate to your local tribe, either money, resources, or your time. Third, support Native activists and become an ally. Get involved in restorative justice and diversify your feed by following Native activists, organizations, and artists. Fourth, and finally, support Native businesses, art, and academia. Today, we recommend listening to the All My Relations podcast’s episode “ThanksTaking or ThanksGiving”.

KS: And that’s postcolonial theory! Keep an eye out for future postcolonial mini-episodes. 

ES: Thank you for listening to this episode.

Quote of the Episode:

ES: From Coriolanus, act three, scene three, said by Coriolanus, “Thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere.”

Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.

Note: When this episode was recorded, Kourtney Smith was "Korey Leigh Smith".

Episode written and researched by Kourtney Smith.

Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.

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You can support the podcast at patreon.com/shakespeareanyone

Works referenced:

Barin, Filiz. “Othello: Turks as ‘the Other’ in the Early Modern Period.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 43, no. 2, 2010, pp. 37–45. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41960526. Accessed 7 Sep. 2022.

Singh, Jyotsna G. “Chapter Two: Historical Contexts 2: Shakespeare's World and Productions of Difference” Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory, The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2020, pp. 57-78