The Masque | Yumna Siddiqi (essay date 1992)
Yumna Siddiqi (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: “Dark Incontinents: The Discourses of Race and Gender in Three Renaissance Masques,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. 23, 1992, pp. 139-63.
[In the essay below, Siddiqi considers the treatment of gender and race in two court masques by Ben Jonson and a masque written for London merchants by Thomas Middleton.]
Colonial discourse is characterized by its capacity to harness a rhetoric of difference—construed in terms of race, culture, and morality—for a project of domination. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, Britain had but begun to colonize other territories. The rhetoric that underpinned its early colonizing ventures was not yet a fully developed discourse. However, even in its early moments, what one might call the protocolonial discourse of the period imaginatively constituted non-Europeans so as to legitimate British intervention and rule. This discursive expression of a will...
[The entire page is 9169 words long]
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