Abstract
In this thesis, I attend to the ways in which Gypsy identity was performed in English drama of the early seventeenth century. Scholars have yet to pay sufficient attention to Gypsy identity in work which examines race, race-making, and racisms in early modern England. I argue that the racialisation of Gypsy figures on the early modern stage is both founded on and complicated by the Tudor statutory concept of the ‘counterfeit Egyptian’, which configured Gypsy identity within and without the theatre as a form of mendacious pretending. Romani people were widely (mis)understood as white, English subjects who had donned strange clothes, affected an unknown language, and artificially darkened their skin. Attempts to perform this racial identity on the early modern stage were, therefore, constantly in negotiation with ‘authentic’ alterity. The question of authenticity served both to conceptualise and place limits upon the Gypsy figure.I begin by examining the production of the myth of the ‘counterfeit Egyptian’ in Tudor statutory law and outlining the theories of pretence which will allow us to gain some purchase upon the slipperiness of this mode of racialisation. Chapter One examines the relationship between Gypsy identity and theatrical disguise in Thomas Middleton’s More Dissemblers Besides Women (c. 1614). I argue that the status of Gypsy identity as a pretence renders it, paradoxically, difficult to straightforwardly pretend. I elaborate upon this tension between pretence and authenticity — this potential for pretence to fold itself into the authentic — both by examining the play’s deployment of cosmetic technologies and situating it within Middleton’s Calvinism. In Chapter Two, I examine the rhetoric of Gypsy pretence in William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607). I argue that the racial term ‘Gypsy’ is used twice in this play in order to circumscribe Cleopatra’s capacity to felicitously and authentically perform as queen of Egypt. If, in Chapter Two, Gypsy identity is used to limit political power, we see the opposite effect in Chapter Three. The penultimate chapter of this thesis examines the ways in which George Villiers, favourite of James VI and I, deployed Gypsy identity in order to renegotiate his political status in the summer of 1621. I argue that Ben Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed allowed Villiers to articulate himself as the maker of his own political identity following his first major brush with controversy. Chapter Four examines the operations of, and tensions between, different forms of recognition in Middleton, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford’s The Spanish Gypsy (1623). In the first section, I argue that the dramatists’ representation of the central troupe of Gypsies draws upon the structures and constructive recognitions which constituted the early modern playing company in order to articulate and legitimise themselves. In the second section, I argue that this emphasis upon constructive recognition is withdrawn at the end of the play and the emphasis shifts to a denotive, constative form of recognition which works to essentialise white nobility. I conclude by tracing the resistance of Preciosa, born a noblewoman but raised as a Gypsy, to this recognition and argue that she presents a route out of the idiom of pretence which has hitherto characterised the operation of Gypsy identity on early modern stages.
| Date of Award | 1 Jul 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Lucy Munro (Supervisor) & Sarah Lewis (Supervisor) |