ABSTRACT
Middleton’s play divides the world into blacks and whites. Not an inevitable color-coding of chess. Of course, that binary depends upon (and reinforces) a seemingly self-evident Christian symbolism: white good, black bad. And England has been associated with whiteness since Roman times, at least, because from the Continent it features visibly “white” chalk cliffs. Modern critics have therefore seen no need to interpret the play’s color line racially. After all, nobody in the Black House is African.
