abstract: This article explores the intersection of race and reproduction in The Enchanted Island by William Davenant and John Dryden. An adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the Restoration play enlarges the cast of characters in its source and replaces its focus on revenge with multiple plots involving love and marriage. Drawing on premodern critical race studies and disability studies, this article argues that the marriage plots generate an ablenatalist script that naturalizes elite white reproduction while labeling non-elite and non-white procreation as expendable or deviant. The play’s aristocrats secure their place atop this ablenatalist system because of their ability to subordinate their sexual desires through dynastic marriage; its non-elite white commoners inhabit the lower rungs of this hierarchy because they are either childless or associated with interracial progeny; and its Indigenous islanders occupy the bottom of this hierarchy because their access to natality is curtailed through medical intervention or an aborted wedding. Attending to the play’s ablenatalist logic can thus reveal the formation of racial hierarchies long before the advent of scientific racism.
abstract: This article focuses on Thomas Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy , identifying it as a race play deeply invested in the contours of “strangeness,” especially as it relates to neurocognitive and physical differences. Drawing attention to the play’s construction of revenge, this essay moves through the multiple economies of commercial and moral value assigned to certain human beings. It considers the signposts of difference made legible through processes of continued debasement in order to expose which bodyminds have culturally legible “value.” In marking out characters who are of “such a blood [. . .] as for evil only good,” “base-coined,” “strange-digested,” or otherwise “infectious [. . .] pestilence,” The Revenger’s Tragedy refracts contemporary discourses from literature, theological treatises, medical works, and legal frameworks. Utilizing beliefs about race and disability alongside properties of revenge, it negotiates human value through notions of capacity. In other words, this essay deploys the twin frameworks of racecraft and disability-craft to reveal the logics that underpin alienation and exclusion on the early modern stage.
abstract: This article argues that Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 illustrates the way queer-crip sexuality can interrupt the engine of English nation-building, which in turn lays bare the (il)logic that connects able bodies, ethnic nationhood, racial identity, and procreative sexuality. Building on Allison Hobgood and Simone Chess’s literary-historical analysis of queer-crip sexuality, I argue that Henry Hotspur’s military and political rebellion against his king extends into and is reflected by his sexuality. Hotspur’s pointed refusal to have sex with his wife, probably the result of the trauma of battle, at once constitutes a form of impotence and a break from early modern normative sexuality as he works within his disability to explore non-procreative sexual acts. Positioning himself against King Henry IV’s desire to establish a homogenous ethnic state and a Lancastrian empire built on the pillars of military conquest and normative sexuality, Hotspur’s political and sexual rebellion leaves open the possibility of a culturally and ethnically heterogeneous state.
