Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare’s plays alongside contemporaneous 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 embodied 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 uncultivatable. By approaching 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.