Introduction: “There Were No Black People in England…”

These seven words are the impetus behind this entire project. It was 2007, and I was attending my rst academic conference. I was surrounded by promising graduate students and established scholars who shared my interest in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, and I was both excited and nervous to engage in intelligent conversations about our work. What I soon found, however, was that my interests in black people in Early Modern England were often dismissed, even by notable scholars whose work I greatly admired, with the above quote. While people offered other responses, such as “all black people were slaves at the time,” which greatly downplayed the role of blacks in constructions of cultural identity, “There were no black people in England during Elizabeth’s reign” became the most common refrain with which I was confronted. I was perplexed by how such an assertion could be made in the face of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I found myself both rationalizing and condemning the assertion, criticizing both myself and those who gave these responses. Perhaps I was not presenting my ideas clearly enough? Perhaps the people to whom I spoke were simply misunderstanding what I meant, assuming that I was conating contemporary notions of blacks in America with notions of blacks in England? Perhaps they were willfully ignorant of the presence and impact of blacks in Early Modern England, ignoring the works of scholars such as Virginia Mason Vaughan, Kim Hall, and Imtiaz Habib? Were they unaware of Queen Elizabeth’s edicts concerning the black population and the origins of the slave trade? Did they never question how characters such as Aaron and Othello made their way into English drama? The continual denial of a black presence in England from this community prompted many questions: Did I just run into numerous individuals who felt this way, or was this denial part of a larger blindness? Why were they so quick to dismiss the possibility? Who stands to gain from perpetuating this dismissive attitude? Perhaps they simply misinterpreted my intentions (or perhaps I misrepresented them), choosing to focus on the presence of black bodies in England rather than on the perception of black bodies and blackness in England. Essentially, I wanted to know why this group of obviously enlightened and intelligent individuals seemed unwilling to engage this topic.