Comparative Drama

Following the Reconquest's end in 1492, Spain expelled the Jews and Muslims, forcing those remaining to convert to Christianity. At first, subjects suspected of religious recidivism were barred from honors and access to power, some becoming victims of the Inquisition. As the sixteenth century progressed, statutes targeted their descendants (known, respectively, as conversos and Moriscos): any hint of unclean heritage, or "bad blood," could imperil the greater good. Conversos, being white and relatively assimilated, were perceived as especially threatening to the religious establishment for their potential to pass as "Old" Christians. Although many Moriscos were also white, they were less integrated into the larger population and attracted less institutional and cultural animus, at least during much of the sixteenth century—before fear of rebellion eventually led to their 1609-14 expulsion from Spain.

The pure-blood statutes, which "inscribe religion as a racial characteristic" (18), have been seen as the source of emerging Western anti-Semitism and of racism more broadly. Emily Weissbourd, sensitized to these matters by reflection on her own Jewish heritage, helps complicate the originary narrative of modern racism in several respects. First, she is skeptical of received academic conventions: for example, her historically-inflected close readings of Spanish fiction and drama illustrate that the preoccupation in early modern Iberia with a "clean" Christian heritage was by no means uncontroversial. Her approach is also intersectional, factoring into the polemics around inherited alterity the contemporaneous rise of the Peninsula's sub-Saharan slave trade. The author's comparative work builds on these foundations to illuminate English consumption and processing of Iberian tropes of essential difference. Ultimately, the author demonstrates that those important Peninsular engines of white Christian claims on power—pure blood orthodoxy and the traffic in Black Africans—also affected and implicated then-contemporary England in incipient racist habits of mind.

Weissbourd explains that certain Spanish prose and theatrical texts actually skewered pure blood's purchase on entitlement. She shows that their ironies often failed to penetrate their English translations and adaptations, not to mention modern scholarship. "Far from a totalizing protoracist discourse that enshrines inconvertible difference, discourses of purity of blood in early modern Spanish culture were a site of contestation, negotiation, and even parody" (52).

The book considers the English fortunes of three Spanish prose fictions. There is James Mabbe's The Rogue (1622), a highly popular translation of Mateo Alemán's picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604). Mabbe's vocabulary is unequipped to comprehend and reflect many of the ethnic and [End Page 285] religious complexities and the satire in Alemán's Spanish. Fuchs has addressed the European impulse to orientalize Spain, and Weissbourd elaborates on Mabbe's Maurophilia as well as Alemán's. Then there is The Spanish Gypsy (1623), a dramatic adaptation by Middleton and Rowley, et al. of Cervantes' 1613 novellas La gitanilla (The Little Gypsy Girl) and La fuerza de la sangre (The Power of Blood). The noble white male rapist, unflatteringly unrepentant in Cervantes, is excused, reformed, and celebrated in the English play. Weissbourd summarizes, "The Spanish Gypsy is far more preoccupied with impure blood and ruined honor than either of the Spanish novellas it draws on, and Mabbe's English translation, with its persistent emphasis on the exotic Moorishness of Spaniards, offers a more essentializing portrayal of racialized difference" (75).

Attention turns to Black characters on the national stages (presumably performed by white actors in blackface). Both theatres frequently associated Black Africans with service and slavery. In Spain, unlike conversos and Moriscos, Blacks were regarded as less potentially troublesome for being visibly identifiable and hence unable to usurp white prerogatives. Sometimes exemplary protagonists (including of saint's plays), Black characters could signify untainted descent. Weissbourd examines several comedias in which highborn white women marry admirable Black slaves—although in her assessment fundamentally their roles promote "a fantasy of normative whiteness" (81). Claramonte's El valiente negro en Flandes (The Valiant Black...