INTRODUCTION
This essay originates in the friction between two moments seemingly disconnected in space and time. The first is May 1677, in London, when the King's Company premiered, at the Theatre Royal, Edward Ravenscroft's farce Scaramouch a philosopher, which drew on several recent plays by Molière—chief among them, Les fourberies de Scapin (The cheats of Scapin, 1671). Ravenscroft translated into Restoration vernacular Molière's great race play, whose protagonist I read as a white-passing Rom: in the early modern parlance, a “Gypsy.”Footnote 1 In his version, Ravenscroft decided to split Scapin into two zannis (servant characters in commedia dell'arte typology): Plautino—who, as his name indicates, is “a man of intrigue”—and Harlequin, whose black mask, as Robert Hornback compellingly demonstrated, often indexes an African identity, especially in the second half of the seventeenth century. The first moment, then, is when, in the process of adaptation, Ravenscroft gave a sub-Saharan face to a white-passing Rom.Footnote 2 The second moment is March 2020, when, in the dematerialized digital space of a Zoom room, leading critical Romani scholar Ethel C. BrooksFootnote 3 told me:
My critical genealogy would include an engagement with Audre Lorde and a radical Black feminist tradition, but also certainly Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant. Those are formative theorists. Certainly, critical race studies too. I took inspiration from the taking back and reframing of the narratives that a lot of critical race theorists work to do. I am thinking of Derek Walcott's work and bell hooks's work. I embrace it and I engage it, always as a feminist. Going to university as a first-generation high-school graduate at an elite, small liberal arts college, my intellectual and social community—my people—was always, from the beginning, perhaps without even thinking about it, comprised of Black, Latinx, Asian-American, and queer, working-class kids on campus. I would not have survived Williams College without that. That formation where I learned from (so-called) Third World intellectuals and Black intellectuals and feminist intellectuals was thoroughly formative from the time I was eighteen. This is key and fundamental. . . . Those political solidarities and reciprocities were very important to me, they have always been the way in which I see a path to understanding, to knowledge production, and to liberation. . . . As Romani scholars, we are very aware of our indebtedness to Black studies, to postcolonial studies, and to decolonial studies, which help us with frameworks to think about liberation and solidarity.Footnote 4
In this essay, I search the archive of early modern European drama for the wider network of Afro-Romani connections toward which Ravenscroft's Harlequin points, and I offer that network as conceptual and ethical genealogy for the bonds, so eloquently described by Brooks, that exist today between Black studies and the fledgling field of critical Romani studies.
On the stages of Stuart England, Romani characters were often, but not always, performed in black-up, notoriously using cosmetic techniques akin to those used to perform characters of sub-Saharan descentFootnote 5 (as recently as 2007, Roma characters were performed by Czech and Slovak actors in brownface in the movie ROMing).Footnote 6 In this essay, however, I move beyond techniques of performance to get to the roots of this unsystematic yet recurrent alignment of Roma and Africans in early modern aesthetic regimes. The alignment I am concerned with is not the one that connects Roma and North Africans based on the legendary Egyptian origins of so-called “Gypsies,” but rather one that connects Roma to sub-Saharan Africans: it is my contention that this alignment operated under the aegis of bondage and human trafficking in the age of nascent capitalism. Indeed, while sub-Saharan Africans were subjected to the Mediterranean and then transatlantic slave trades throughout the Renaissance, and while the latter accelerated dramatically in the mid-seventeenth century, Roma were subjected to the early modern version of mass incarceration in the seventeenth century, as their heavy criminalization turned them into much-needed enslaved manpower for the galleys of several Western monarchs.
Of course, the history of Romani enslavement goes further back. Roma were enslaved from the fourteenth century onward in various parts of modern-day Romania (Wallachian and Moldavian principalities, as well as Transylvania): slavery was condoned there by the state and enacted through a robust legal apparatus.Footnote 7 Thus, in Romanian, the word Rom became synonymous with slave,Footnote 8 by the same logic according to which the word negro became synonymous with esclavo in sixteenth-century Spain.Footnote 9 As Felix Chang and Sunnie Rucker-Chang explain, “while slavery was localized within portions of CSEE [Central and South Eastern Europe], the institution has exercised an outsized influence over modern perceptions of Roma. In particular, some influential studies have correlated the legacy of slavery with contemporary marginalization.”Footnote 10 Yet an exclusive focus on the plight of Roma in CSEE has long had the exculpating effect of leaving Western Europe out of the historiography of Roma enslavement. By contrast, I wish to focus on the dynamics of Roma enslavement in early modern France and England, dynamics that may in turn have been influenced by a knowledge of old and ongoing enslavement practices in CSEE.
In early modern Western Europe, Roma were subjected to forced assimilation or expropriated from their own labor at the galleys—both of which forms of persecution forced their absorption into the nascent capitalist economy that their nomadic lifestyle apparently threatened. The condition of Roma in early modern Europe thus illustrates Dénètem Touam Bona's luminous observation, inspired by the work of Yann Moulier Boutang, that “one of the main engines of the history of capitalism is the immobilization of an ever-fugitive workforce.”Footnote 11 As Carol Mejia-LaPerle puts it, in early modern England, “Gypsies” are persecuted because “they resist the state's absorption of the surplus value of legitimate labour and reject the social obligations essential to reproducing the principles and priorities of the commonwealth.”Footnote 12 As Sydnee Wagner notes, the Romani disruption of the capitalist logic of production informs reactionary cultural representations of Roma as “beings that only mass consumed and reproduced monstrously.”Footnote 13 That logic obtained across the Channel: in France, as Henriette Asséo explains, “the seventeenth-century state is a transition state seeking to add to its regular repressive apparatus a coercive function more suited to the birth of capitalism: the use of vagrants and thus of Bohemians in the production process via ‘the Great Confinement’ is part of that evolution.”Footnote 14 Theatrical culture across the Channel reveals the similar positionings of enslaved Roma and sub-Saharan Africans within the logic of early modern white supremacy, which racialized both Roma and Afro-diasporic people in order to turn their bodies into fungible commodities in the age of nascent capitalism.Footnote 15
Seeing that alignment manifest in the aesthetic realm requires turning our attention to literary archives that have long been neglected. Most of the anglophone literary scholarship contributing to early modern Roma studies to date has focused on rogue literature and, within the dramatic archive, on hyper-canonical Elizabethan and Jacobean texts, such as Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1607) or Ben Jonson's masque The Gypsies Metamorphos'd (1621).Footnote 16 Without denying the importance of those plays, I would suggest that widening the theatrical archives we work with, far from lengthening critical pathways, can help reveal vital secret passages. It can help us get faster to the core of one of the key projects driving the field of early modern critical race studies: understanding the interlocked architecture of premodern racial formations within what I call the racial matrix. By reading virtually unknown Baroque plays such as Le fidelle esclave or The marriage broaker in conversation with the work of Edward Ravenscroft and of hyper-canonical playwright Molière—by placing them on equal evidentiary footing—I resist the centripetal force of the canon in order to find productive secret passages. Methodologically, then, this essay radically levels archival hierarchies, it expands capaciously in transnational directions, and it reckons with the abundant heuristic possibilities of literary translation and adaptation. Such critical moves, I contend, can meaningfully enrich and diversify our field as it enters a promising new phase.
This essay first maps out the malleable geography organizing the traditional association of the Roma with Africa in early modern Western European culture during the Renaissance, and it signals the shift from Egypt and North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa that occurred in mid-seventeenth-century French theater. To explore the conceptual roots of that shift, I turn to Molière's farce, Les fourberies de Scapin (1671), a play that foregrounds the involvement of Roma in a perverse economy of bondage and human trafficking, and which locates that economy in Naples, the highly symbolical capital of Black slavery in early modern Italy. I then cross the Channel to read Ravenscroft's 1677 translation of the white-passing Rom Scapin into the sub-Saharan Harlequin as an embodied reckoning with the connecting work that the Neapolitan location effected in Molière's play. Surveying the late Caroline theatrical archive, I point out that the association of Romani characters with sub-Saharan characters was not new in English theatrical culture, yet I use the case study of the comedy The marriage broaker (1662) to show that this association took on new valences in Restoration theater, as it became distinctively suffused with concerns over notions of bondage, dispossession, and bodily commodification—in tune with the times. Finally, I return to the tendency within critical Romani studies to draw on Black studies for conceptual resources, and I construe the early modern archive of Afro-Romani slippages and its implicit acknowledgment of interracial connectedness within the economy of racial capitalism as an ethically binding genealogy for what is much more than a scholarly trend.
UNMOORED: ROMANI AFRICA IN EUROPEAN IMAGINATION
From their first appearance in Western Europe in the early fifteenth century onward, Roma—who originally hail from the Indian subcontinent—were erroneously construed as African. In 1596, Etienne Pasquier wrote that Romani companies—“whom some call Egyptians and other Bohemians”Footnote 17—claimed to hail from “basse Egypte” (“Lower Egypt”), presenting themselves as Christians who, having converted to Islam under duress, did penance by following the pope's injunction to pursue an itinerant pilgrimage among Christian nations for seven years.Footnote 18 This popular myth, which initially opened many doors to them, came under suspicion as time went by, yet Roma retained the Egyptian demonym—shortened as “Gypsy”—across the early modern period. Archives capture that association of early modern Roma with Egypt and adjacent nations. Pierre Davity, in his Description générale de l'Afrique (A general description of Africa, 1637), reports the opinion (which he does not share) that Romani people descend from “those Nubians who, fleeing the Sultans of Egypt, traveled through Palestine, Syria, and Anatolia in beggars’ rags, and, having crossed the Hellespont, spilled through Thracia and the lands around the Danube river.”Footnote 19 Some believed the Roma to hail from Nubia, south of Egypt, while others located them in a capacious Muslim geography stretching east and west of Egypt: in Adrien de Montluc's La comédie des proverbes (The comedy of proverbs, 1654), for instance, when white characters disguise themselves as Roma using costumes and blacking up their faces,Footnote 20 Lydias comments that Florinde “could pass for a bourgeoise from the Nile or from Algiers,” to which she retorts that he could pass for “a pilgrim on his way to Mecca.”Footnote 21
Pasquier insists on Roma's dark skin, as he reproduces the widely circulated 1427 account of a Parisian bourgeois: “the men were very black, with kinky hair, and the women were the ugliest and blackest women there are.”Footnote 22 Similarly, in 1520 Cologne, German historian Albert Krantz describes them as “hideous black people burnt by the sun.”Footnote 23 The Roma's Blackness was explicitly construed as an African trait in erotic French poetry. In his sonnet “La belle Egyptienne” (The beautiful Egyptian, 1631), Georges de Scudéry describes a Romni fortune-teller as a
For her, the poet unambiguously feels “an African love.”Footnote 24 Urbain Chevreau uses the same tropes in his 1656 “Madrigaux pour une belle Egyptienne” (Madrigals to a beautiful Egyptian), and he anchors them in a specific African geography, as the dark-skinned Romni's existence now “proves that the Graces / Do not dwell far from Abyssinia.”Footnote 25
Yet the African complexion of Romani people is anything but consistent in early modern aesthetic archives. In performance culture, the previously mentioned Comédie des proverbes (1654) includes cosmetic brownface (barbouillage) for its “Gypsy” disguise, and in La belle Egyptienne (1642)—to which I will shortly return—the Gadjo (non-Roma) Don Jean is told by Roma that they will “teach him the use of Egyptian paint” when he joins their crew;Footnote 26 but the drawings that ballet costume designer Daniel Rabel created in 1631 for an Egyptian entry do not suggest that the dancers who impersonated Romani characters used cosmetics to do so (fig. 1). Neither does early modern ballet historian Claude-François Ménestrier.Footnote 27 Similarly, visual culture articulates a wide chromatic spectrum for Romnia's complexion. That spectrum ranges from pale brunettes (as in Jacques Callot's famous Bohemian etching series from the 1620s and Frans Hals's well-known 1628 “The Gypsy Girl”), to exotic working-class women whose light brown skin and sleek black hair contrast with the pale skin and dark blonde hair of European burghers (as in Bartolomeo Manfredi's 1616–17 The Fortune Teller [fig. 2] and Simon Vouet's 1620 “The Fortune-teller”), to dark-skinned women whose hair texture is either hidden by a head scarf (as in several works by Nicolas Régnier from the 1620s) or coiled and braided like the hair of sub-Saharan women (as in Nicolas Cordier's marble and bronze sculpture La zingarella [The Gypsy girl, 1607–12]) (fig. 3).
Figure 1. Daniel Rabel. Entrée des Egiptiens et des Egiptiennes, 1631. Drawing. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Figure 2. Bartolomeo Manfredi. The Fortune Teller, 1616–17. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Acquisitions Fund, 79.30.
Figure 3. Nicolas Cordier. La zingarella, 1607–12. White and gray marble, bronze. With permission from the Galleria Borghese, Rome.
Such chromatic instability is in keeping with a body of legal texts that increasingly reflected widespread cultural perceptions of the Roma as white—as Gadje counterfeits deliberately espousing a marginal lifestyle.Footnote 28 The suspected whiteness of Romani people was coming under close scrutiny across the early modern period, and that scrutiny manifested in a renewed enthusiasm for the old idea that Roma's dark complexion was artificial. Indeed, as early as 1578, Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens had asserted that water horehound was called “the Egyptian herbe, bycause of the rogues and runnagates which call themselves Egyptians do colour themselves blacke with this herbe,” and the idea seems to have gotten particular traction in seventeenth-century popular culture.Footnote 29 In 1617, John Minsheu defined “Gypsies” as
a counterfeit kinde of roagues, that being English or Welsh people, accompanie themselves together, disguising themselves in strange roabes, blacking their faces and bodies, and framing to themselves an unknowen language, wander up and downe, and under pretense of telling of fortunes, curing diseases, and such like, abuse the ignorant common people, by stealing all that is not too hot, or too heavie for their carriage.Footnote 30
In Jean-Pierre Camus's short story L'innocente Egyptienne (The innocent Egyptian, 1640), a dying Romni confesses to a Gadji lady whose protection she seeks for her daughter Olive, whose face is olive colored: “Do not let her tawny face awe you: that color is not natural but artificial, and although the sun, to which we are regularly exposed, does help mar our hue, it is nothing compared to the juice of a certain herb which darkens our skin—we have a secret recipe to lift this blackness.”Footnote 31 In the 1679 abridgement of Richard Head's popular picaresque novel, The English Rogue, when Meriton Latroon escapes boarding school to join a crew of “Gypsies,” he has his “face so bedaub'd with green walnut that I looked so much like a Gypsie as the best of them.”Footnote 32 The same idea found its way into scientific discourse, for instance, into Thomas Browne's widely read Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Vulgar errors), where Browne states that he believes Roma to originate “not far from Germany,” rather than from Egypt, making them Western Europeans who “acquire their complexion by anointing their bodies with bacon and fat substances and so exposing them to the sun.”Footnote 33 He dubs them “artificial Negroes.”Footnote 34
The growing suspicion that many Roma were Gadje in disguise, which permeated iconographic, legal, lexicographic, fictional, and scientific discourses, set the Romani relation to Africa in flux across seventeenth-century Western Europe. It is against this background, this flux, that the theatrical development that is of interest to me—namely, the growing association of Romani characters with sub-Saharan characters within the logic of white supremacy—deploys itself. The use of cosmetic brownface on stage could sometimes facilitate that new association, but it was not required, because the new connection between Roma and Africa did not depend on a common origin manifesting on bodily surfaces any longer, but, rather, on a common destination on the map of white supremacy, a destination of dispossession and enslavement.
BONDS IN BONDAGE
The transformation of the link between Roma and the African continent is palpable in Sallebray's La belle Egyptienne (1642), a play that closely imitates Alexandre Hardy's famous 1620s adaptation for the French stage of Cervantes's widely influential sensation novella La gitanilla (The little Gypsy girl). While Sallebray's play stays fairly close to Hardy's version, it departs from it in one important instance.Footnote 35 When, at the beginning of the play, the elderly Romni who raised Preciosa reminds her of the day when she first met Don Jean, her future husband, she refers to “the ball's day (that most fortunate of days), when you were leading dancing Blackamoors in shackles.”Footnote 36 This short line could easily go unnoticed, as the two women immediately switch topics and start discussing the various graces of Don Jean. And yet, that evocation, as striking as it is brief, demands unpacking. In early modern Spanish culture, such choreographic associations between Roma and sub-Saharan Africans were not rare. In Seville, for instance, Corpus Christi processions included popular danzas de cascabales (jingling-leg dances), often featuring primarily gitanos (Roma) and negros (Black people),Footnote 37 and it has been suggested that early modern flamenco may have been informed by a rich cross-pollination between the Black and the Romani communities in early modern Andalusia.Footnote 38
In England, as I show elsewhere, the animalizing discourse of choreographic antics that was first deployed around Roma characters in the mid-1610s as a powerful racializing tool was redirected toward Blackamoors in late Jacobean and Caroline theater.Footnote 39 Sallebray's vignette thus draws on a network of kinetic associations, both real and imaginary, between those two racialized communities. This historical background leads me to read the visual juxtaposition of the Romni dancer and her Black crew as connective rather than contrastive. The detail of the Black dancers’ shackles draws attention to their status as enslaved and thus places the kinetic Afro-Romani connection under the sign of enslavement and of the shared craving for mobility—real and symbolic—that comes with enslavement.
The motif of Romani enslavement is strikingly rehearsed in Le Sieur Vallée's little-known tragicomedy Le fidelle esclave (1662). In that play, Hécate, the white-skinned prince of Numidia (an ancient kingdom stretching across today's Algeria, Tunisia, and Lybia), being nearly shipwrecked off the Island of Crete, sees his ship taken over by enemies who enslave him: he falls into the possession of Boristhène, the prince of Cyprus. In order to preserve the glory of the Numidian crown, Hécate does everything in his power to hide his own royal identity. He uses black-up, pretends to be Egyptian, and under the fake name of Atramante, he spreads the rumor of his own death and lets the world believe that the prince of Numidia preferred perishing at sea to the shame of enslavement. While the geography invoked in the play is that of the ancient Mediterranean world, the Egyptian disguise that Hécate puts on is clearly that of an early modern Rom. Indeed, the cosmetics he uses to “blacken his face and his hands” (but not his arms, a detail that ultimately gives him away) converge with the meaning of his chosen name in Greek: Atra-mante, literally, the Black Fortune-Teller.Footnote 40 As Georges Forestier notes, the temporary yet powerful reluctance that Hécate manifests when his former lover, the infanta, recognizes him and urges him to reclaim his true identity is not solely rooted in shame but in alienation: Vallée “created an original psychological situation, that of a hero who has really convinced himself that he died as a prince and has become a slave.”Footnote 41 Eerily, Hécate literalizes Orlando Patterson's famous theorization of the condition of slavery as a “social death.”Footnote 42 Even after the infanta obtains Atramante's freedom from Boristhène, and after his royal identity is revealed, Hécate, appearing in stage “un-blackened” (“dénoircy”) and dressed as a prince, remains oddly attached—as the play's title suggests—to the idea of his own enslavement. He will “always hold as a glorious title / that [Boristhène] should be my Lord and master,” for “who suffers slavery must go through its laws.”Footnote 43 Hécate's inner struggles with his own enslavement fuels the play's acute grappling with the psychological disintegration that enslavement can inflict on the enslaved—unambiguously figured, here, as a dark-skinned Rom.
Ultimately, the linkage of Roma and sub-Saharan Africans within a joint economy of enslavement and willful resistance to enslavement that Sallebray inaugurated in 1642 found a clear if discrete expression in the canon of neoclassical French drama in Molière's oeuvre. In the interlude between act 1 and act 2 of Le malade imaginaire (The hypochondriac, 1673), “the imaginary invalid's brother seeks to entertain him by bringing on stage several Egyptian men and women, dressed as Blackamoors, who intersperse dances with songs. . . . All the Blackamoors dance together; they brought apes with them: now they make the apes jump.”Footnote 44 For this interlude, Romani performers were cast in the role of the “Mores”—who, I have argued elsewhere, were dark-skinned sub-Saharan characters in early modern French ballet culture.Footnote 45 Here again, the association between the two racialized groups happens through dance. That dance is not innocuous: involving a kinetic interaction between humans and apes, it participates in a transnational choreographic tradition particularly popular in French Baroque court ballets since the 1620s, a tradition that destabilized the divide between animals and sub-Saharan Africans, implicitly excluding said Africans from ownership and self-ownership as it downgraded them from human in the Great Chain of Being and included them in the animal realm.Footnote 46 The trope of animalization brings together Roma performers and sub-Saharan characters under the sign of enslavement. That slippage in Le malade imaginaire makes it possible for us to see what has remained unseen to this day: Molière's exploration of the Romani condition within the economy of early modern bondage in Les fourberies de Scapin.
FICTIONS OF PASSING IN LES FOURBERIES DE SCAPIN
Molière included “Gypsy” scenes in many of his earlier plays. In Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669), a masque displays an Egyptian man and woman wooing each other; in La pastorale comique (The comic pastoral, 1666), an Egyptian woman sings and dances to the sound of guitar, castanets, and nakers (kettledrums of Middle Eastern origins), while in Le mariage forcé (The forced marriage, 1664), two Egyptian women called “Bohemian women” in the dramatis personae dance and sing to the sound of Basque drum, and torment Sganarelle by foretelling that he shall be a cuckold.Footnote 47 Those scenes have a purely ornamental function and follow the aesthetics of Baroque court ballets in terms of dramaturgy and performance techniques (those Romani characters were likely performed sans brownface). They nonetheless form the experimental grounds whence Les fourberies de Scapin would rise a few years later.
It is here, again, in the changes the early modern playwright made to his own source texts that the play's reflection of and on the connectedness of formations within the racial matrix becomes visible. Those source texts are Terence's Phormio (161 BCE) and Cervantes's previously mentioned La gitanilla, which Molière had already adapted some twenty years earlier in one of his earliest plays, L’étourdi (The fool, 1655).Footnote 48 The plot of Molière's Scapin runs thus: Léandre is in love with Zerbinette. “Les Egyptiens”—the Romani clan she is part of—are threatening to take off with her, and Léandre's father, the senex Géronte, will not give him the money he needs to reclaim her. In order to help Léandre gather the money he needs, his servant, the witty Scapin, tricks Géronte into believing that his son is held hostage in a Turkish galley: the Turks will take him to Algiers and sell him as a slave there if Géronte does not pay up the ransom—which he begrudgingly does. Zerbinette, we learn by the end of the play, actually is the Gadji daughter of another senex, Argante: she was kidnapped at age four by “a crew of those people we call Egyptians, who roam provinces and busy themselves with fortune-telling, and, sometime, many other deeds.”Footnote 49 Fate, it seems, brought her back to her native city, where she can be recognized: just like Preciosa's supposed grandmother in Cervantes's novella, Molière's old Romni reveals Zerbinette's birth, and gives her the bracelet she wore when she was kidnapped, a token that allows her biological father to recognize and restore her.
In this plot's various departures from its source texts lay suggestions that Scapin himself may have been designed as a Romani character. As we shall see, Scapin reads as a character familiar with transnational Romani lore, willing to associate with Roma, structurally connected to them by subterranean onomastic roots, and thus as someone whom the French justice system would (mis)use as a Rom and send to the galleys—which, as a matter of fact, it already has. Indeed, Scapin, unlike Terence's original, has a fraught relation to the justice system. He has spent three years in the royal galleys, as punishment for crimes that the play never discloses despite Sylvestre's repeated allusions to Scapin's legal imbroglios. All we know is that he had in the past “a certain disagreement with the justice system,” which “badly misused” him,Footnote 50 yet as he puts it, “three years more in the galleys are not to discourage a brave heart.”Footnote 51 Scapin's scathing condemnation of the Neapolitan (understand, French) justice system's corruption—famously highlighting the biases, venality, and inefficiency of all its cogs and agents—is articulated from experience and from below.Footnote 52 Scapin's aversion to the justice system dramatically flips the script that Molière inherited from his main source text, Terence's Phormio. Indeed, while he otherwise remains close to the plot of Terence's play, Molière turned an archetypal parasite who serves his patrons by suing their enemies (the title of the Greek play by Apollodorus that Terence himself reworked is The Claimant—in other words, an expert manipulator of the law) into a self-proclaimed victim and enemy of the law.Footnote 53
This flip is in line with Scapin's willingness to work in cahoots with the Romani crew to raise the ransom, a deed that was sufficient for its perpetrator to be legally treated as a Rom at the time. While the play does not mention any material reward for Scapin's labor, one cannot help but wonder what might incentivize a character modeled after an ancient parasite and a commedia dell'arte zanni—a character who has proved his greed and limited loyalty to his master Léandre on more than once occasion—to take any part in Géronte's family business.Footnote 54 Might it be the case that Scapin, in cahoots with the Romani crew, devised a fable around Zerbinette—or, rather, borrowed that fable from Cervantes—to extract money from a gullible family? After all, Léandre met Zerbinette just after his father put him under Scapin's supervision, and he first heard of the Romani crew's blackmail from Carle, a cheater (fourbe), who always follows Scapin's lead, according to the dramatis personae.
Moreover, the history of Zerbinette's own name in the commedia dell'arte tradition—which we know had such a profound influence over Molière's dramaturgy—suggests that she is structurally connected to Scapin. Her name is indeed coined after that of capitaine Zerbino, whom Jacques Callot represented in conversation with Scapin in an etching within his 1622 Balli di Sfessania (Sfessania dances) series, a crucial primary source for commedia dell'arte scholars. Moreover, Zerbinette is a Colombina type, and Colombina, being a servant and Harlequin's lover, is traditionally paired in performance with zanni, such as Scapin, not masters, such as Léandre. That was even more the case with zingana types, Romni stock characters, who, as M. A. Katritzky has shown, were often associated with zanni both on stage and in Italian Gadje's cultural imagination at large because of the deceitfulness that they allegedly shared.Footnote 55 This widespread fantasized association sets Scapin and Zerbinette as accomplices, and thus helps us understand why the case of Zerbinette's potential birth as a Gadji is settled with evidence that would strike as tenuous at best any spectator familiar with Cervantes's original novella. The burden of proof is met almost too easily in Molière's version.Footnote 56 My point here is that, intentionally or not (and the distinction matters little when the focus is on effect and reception), Molière's translation of La gitanilla turned fantasies of Gadje infiltrating Romani society into the opposite: fantasies of Roma infiltrating Gadje society. To readers versed in the fictionalization and dramatization of early modern racial formations, Molière's translation of Cervantes's novella for the French stage reads as a story of white passing.
Cynthia Damon has shown that Roman comedy, including Terence's Phormio, repurposed the stock character of the parasite from Greek drama as a figure crystallizing concerns about the excesses, dysfunctions, and internal contradictions of the Romans’ own patronage system. By the same token, one ought to consider the fraught political implications of Molière's decision to recast the figure of the Roman parasite as an early modern Rom, as well as the dangerous dissemination of racial stereotypes that comes with casting Scapin, a likeable thief but thief nonetheless, as Rom.Footnote 57 Simply put, Molière's play is not progressive in its treatment of Romani characters; rather, it is a realistic reflection of early modern race relations. Indeed, anti-Roma legislation accelerated brutally in 1660s France. After a couple of edicts in 1504 and in the 1530s expelling the Roma from the kingdom, an ordinance, decree, or edict had been promulgated on average every forty years (in 1560, 1606, 1647), always with the stated goal of dismantling large Romani clans with military capabilities.
By contrast, between 1660 and 1673—the peak of Molière's career—five texts were promulgated promising harsher and harsher punishments. This series culminated with the king's declaration of July 1682, which initiated a new phase in the history of the French Roma: a phase of cultural genocide. Sanctioning status rather than deeds, it sentenced men to the galleys for life simply for being Roma, without having committed any crime; it condemned women to being shaved, castigated, and banished should they refuse to relinquish their Romani lifestyle; and it separated children from their parents, placing them at the hôpital with beggars, vagabonds, the mentally ill, and sex workers, to be reeducated, so to speak, into Gadje.Footnote 58 As a reminder, Article 2 of the United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide lists “forcibly transferring children of [a national, ethnical, racial, or religious] group to another group” with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part” as a genocidal act.Footnote 59 Becky Taylor and David Cressy have observed that the survival of Roma in early modern Europe is largely explained by the discrepancy between ever harsher laws and the failure or refusal of European populations to implement those laws at the local level.Footnote 60 The genocidal 1682 status, however, effectively undermined local resistance by threatening countryside aristocrats with seizure of their property if they continued to host and protect Romani performers as they had done for so long.
Historians have established causation between the tightening of anti-Roma laws starting in the 1660s and the need to man the royal galleys in order to fight numerous wars—this is what Lucassen and Willems call “the military recruitment hypothesis.”Footnote 61 As early as 1662, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (who would play a crucial role in the establishment of the infamous Code Noir [The black code] defining the conditions of slavery in French colonies some twenty years later) was urging regional parliaments to send prisoners to the galleys as often as possible and to commute capital punishment to that effect.Footnote 62 The galley sentence, invented in the late fifteenth century, was a sword of Damocles hanging above any Rom's head in the second half of the seventeenth century. Not all galley men were sentenced for life, but across the board, records reveal a 50 percent mortality rate with roughly one-third of the fatalities occurring within their first three years of being convicted.Footnote 63 A galley man was “the King's acquisition, a slave devoid of civil rights for the duration of his sentence in the royal galleys, which often lasted a life time.”Footnote 64 The archives often record statements by French officials referring to galley men as “slaves” (“esclaves”) in the second half of the century.Footnote 65 France created in 1687 the first centralized police force in Europe, the maréchaussée, whose primary function was to round up Roma and vagrants in order to send them to the galleys.Footnote 66 In those circumstances, it might very well have been in Zerbinette's interest to find a quick way out of her Egyptian condition, whether by lying about her birth or, more simply, by marrying a gullible Gadjo.Footnote 67 As for Scapin, his act as a Frenchified Latin parasite and an Italian zanni proved an efficient protective disguise—so efficient, in fact, that he has evaded the detection of race scholars to this day.
Scapin's experience as a white-passing Rom moving within a Gadje society might be what makes him so good at evoking the specter of cultural, ethnic, and racial difference to get what he wants from Gadje. For instance, when, to avenge his wrongs, he plays his famous bag trick on Géronte and hides the senex in a bag to beat him up while pretending to be someone else, he fakes foreign accents, brandishing by oral means the specter of the violent étrangers. The two foreign accents Scapin uses in that scene are meaningful, for they come from liminal regions: not Spain or Germany, but Gascony and Switzerland—regions that are not French, but not not French either, neither kin nor stranger—like Roma for Gadje. In this scene, Scapin voices liminality, hybrid cultural identities that pressure the divide between insiders and outsiders and, maybe for that reason, terrify Géronte.Footnote 68 Under the sign of Scapin, the play at large pressures the divide between outsiders and insiders that its protagonists hold so dear. Indeed, Argante finds out that Hiacinthe is the very daughter he thought lost at sea: the stranger can be kin, and invertedly, when plotting with Léandre against his father, Scapin suggests that those we think are kin might be strangers.Footnote 69 His other trick, which he uses to dupe Géronte out of his money, hinges on the fear of Muslims: the Islamophobic logic of the lies he serves to Géronte is that, if Léandre had not accepted the hospitality of the friendly Turkish man who invited him to eat and drink with him aboard his ship, he would not now be facing the prospect of slavery in Algiers. Scapin's bag of tricks is full of racial stereotypes—a body of knowledge.
In his Muslim trick, Scapin weaves strands of xenophobia and religious racism together with an acute concern with enslavement. As the anti-Roma laws mentioned above made clear, the infamous yet enduring myth according to which the Roma abducted Gadje children—which Zerbinette's own story instantiates—was a perverse inversion of the historical realities of early modern human trafficking. In seventeenth-century France, as per the 1682 genocidal status, it is Romani children who were snatched from their families to be reeducated, and Roma who were disappeared into the king's galleys as slaves. Those dynamics of inversion haunt Scapin's Muslim trick: Scapin makes the father believe that his money will free an enslaved white man from Brown Muslims, and he makes the son believe that the money stolen from his father will save an enslaved woman believed to be white from Brown Roma. But statistically, an enslaved person in Naples, where the play is set, was unlikely to be a white Gadjo. Indeed, the Spanish outpost that was Naples hosted one of the biggest enslaved populations in Italy, including people of sub-Saharan descent, visible and audible enough to leave their imprint on early modern Neapolitan visual and musical cultures.Footnote 70 In his Muslim trick plot, Scapin inverts the racial dynamics of Neapolitan early modern enslavement practices because he knows that this is how white supremacy works and this is what his interlocutors need to hear in order to give him what he wants. In Scapin, the unbearable idea of a French man being enslaved by nonwhite people is the tip of a whole iceberg of racialized practices of human trafficking. That tip is visible because of its whiteness, which simultaneously signals and occludes the rest of the iceberg.
RAVENSCROFT'S HARLEQUIN
When he translated Les fourberies de Scapin into the vernacular of Restoration drama with Scaramouch a philosopher (1677), Edward Ravenscroft reckoned with the iceberg and exposed Scapin's nonwhiteness.Footnote 71 First, Ravenscroft exacerbated the “Gypsy” component of Molière's farce by inserting an ornamental scene lifted from another early play by Molière, Le mariage forcé (1664). In that scene, Zerbinette and the “white-skinned” Aurelia (the love interest of Octavio, the other cash-strapped romantic lead in the play) “enter like Gypsies, singing and dancing,” and, performing palmistry, convince the capitan Spitzfaterro to renounce seeking Aurelia for his wife, as she will surely cuckold him.Footnote 72 Reduplicating the Romni character and thickening her racial performance with a palmistry act, Ravenscroft picked up on the Romani plotline of Molière's play, and he emphasized it.
While Roma's condition was different on both sides of the Channel in the late seventeenth century, the dramatic archive that this essay explores reveals lines of continuity. Cressy writes that, by contrast with the Tudors, the Stuarts “still found Gypsies offensive, though no longer to be hounded or eliminated,” and in that respect, “Stuart England differed from continental Europe where prejudice hardened and Gypsies became subjects to ever sharper attacks.”Footnote 73 Following the Thirty Years’ War, such attacks were particularly harsh in Germanic regions (Austria, Bavaria, and various Southwest German towns issued decrees of expulsion in the second half of the century), in the Holy Roman Empire, and in Bohemia (where Roma were outlawed and suffered mass killings in the early eighteenth century).Footnote 74 David Mayall mentions a “reduced concern with the problem [of vagrancy] after circa 1660” in England, connected to changes in the system of poor relief ushered by the Settlement Act of 1662.Footnote 75
While it is true that “there was no new legislation on Gypsies in the seventeenth century,”Footnote 76 as social historian David Hitchcock points out, all English rulers in the second half of the century made proclamations aimed at eliminating vagrancy from the kingdom, so that “by 1700, vagrants and petty criminals were routinely sent onto the seas, either as indentured servants or as impressed soldiers and sailors. Penal transportation would become the iconic method by which the English state disposed of the undesirable and undeserving, first with its Atlantic colonies, then its floating naval hulks on the river Thames, and finally the colony of Australia serving as penal institutions during the eighteenth century alone.”Footnote 77 That English Roma, falling under the larger umbrella of “vagrants,” became administratively invisible does not mean that they disappeared or stopped being criminalized: rather, their penal transportation helped fulfill the need for a cheap, often-indentured colonial workforce. Vagrancy in the period after 1662, Hitchcock argues,
remained without a doubt one of the pre-eminent concerns of projectors, legislators, parish officials, magistrates, and even monarchs, not to mention a spectre haunting the lives of the poor themselves. It did not vanish as either a cultural construct or as a social and economic consequence in the century after 1650, and we should be wary of arguing that a relative paucity of traditional records indicates a clear “easing” of an economic problem (vagrancy) known to be structural in nature, particularly when the number of landless labourers of both sexes in search of work continued to consistently rise.Footnote 78
Moreover, historians who argue that “mentions of Gypsies in political and cultural sources [between the middle of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth century] remain ‘remarkably slight’” might be surprised by the archives of Restoration drama.Footnote 79 Indeed, a simple word search for “Gypsy” and its orthographic variants under the USTC subject “Drama” in the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database yields 126 plays, roughly two-thirds of which were published after 1661. True, most of those plays allude to Roma without staging them, and many of those plays are reprints of pre-Restoration plays; nonetheless, the nearly continuous increase of allusions to “Gypsies” in the English dramatic corpus throughout the century speaks to the staying power of the Romani figure in English cultural imagination and to the role of theatrical culture in perpetuating it.
It is in the light of such enduring literary representations and persistent societal efforts at forcing Roma into the capitalist machine of dispossession that I read Edward Ravenscroft's decision to split Molière's white-passing Rom into two complementary zannis: Plautino the plotter and the black-masqued Harlequin, who is “better at execution than invention” and whose Africanness has been brought to the fore most notably by Hornback.Footnote 80 Just like the Romani dimension of Molière's Scapin becomes more visible when we read it in conversation with Molière's whole oeuvre (including Le malade imaginaire), the Africanist dimension of Ravenscroft's Harlequin becomes more visible when we read Scaramouch a philosopher in the context of Ravenscroft's whole oeuvre, which is characterized by an unambiguous and long-lasting fascination with the question of Black slavery.
In his very first play, The citizen turn'd gentleman (1672), Ravenscroft translated Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The would-be gentleman) into English and added “three Blacks” to the mock-Turkish train used in the original play to trick Mr. Jorden.Footnote 81 That detail speaks to the traditional ascription of racial diversity to the Ottoman world and to the convenient association of slavery (literal and political) with the East that was so dear to the Enlightenment from its earliest days. Yet because the entire conceit of the play is that this train is faking Turkishness in the heart of London, spectators know that those performers are, in all likelihood, British within the world of the play itself. The “three Blacks” in question are, in all likelihood, Black Britons. The same year Scaramouch a philosopher was staged, Ravenscroft wrote The English lawyer, a translation of George Ruggle's Latin comedy Ignoramus (1615), which features Bannacar, an honest Black Christian servant (the “little Black boy Banacar”) whose legal status is kept unclear, and whose hands are “colour'd with the blacknesse of Night.”Footnote 82 The happy resolution of the play hinges upon Bannacar's moral fiber. Ravenscroft cut down the number of scenes featuring Bannacar,Footnote 83 and he made one big change: while in Ruggle's play Bannacar's master was Theodorus, a merchant based in the French slave-trading port of Bordeaux, in Ravenscroft's play, Bannacar's master is Theodorus's wife, Dorothea, who lives in London and who joins her husband in Bordeaux with her Blackamoor at the end of the play. In other words, Ravenscroft anglicized Bannacar, evoking on stage what visual culture attests to: the craze for enslaved Black pages among well-off women across the Channel in the later seventeenth century. Finally, Ravenscroft is best known for his rewriting of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus about a year after Scaramouch a philosopher. Rewriting the play that first gave a voice to an enslaved Black man in English drama apparently proved irresistible for Ravenscroft. Simply put, Scaramouch a philosopher was written by a playwright acutely interested in the question of Black slavery on English soil.
It does not come as a surprise, then, that his black-masked Harlequin should be threatened with enslavement for the cheats he performs. The seneses call him “villain” and “knave” (two terms that, Susan Phillips reminds us, refer to forms of bondage),Footnote 84 as well as “rogue” (a term often associated with Roma).Footnote 85 Harlequin is the object of the seneses’ wrath, one of whom wants him “hang'd out right,” while the other wants him “strapado'd”Footnote 86 and, later on, “broken alive upon the wheel,” or “sent to the galleys,” initially “for seven years” and then “for his whole life,” for his insolence.Footnote 87 The galleys, of course, are reminiscent of the Roma's plight in the late seventeenth century, and it may not be a coincidence that Harlequin should make the most direct anti-Roma jokes in the play.Footnote 88 Ravenscroft's aesthetics of racial spectacle, which was all the rage on the Restoration stage, links Romaness and Blackness in a visual grammar that makes explicit the implicit of Molière's play.Footnote 89 In Ravenscroft's translation, Harlequin's body becomes the crucible where Romaness and Blackness merge in a shared economy of potential enslavement.
Of course, the association between Romani and sub-Saharan African characters was not entirely new on the English stage in the Restoration. In addition to the choreographic tradition of racializing antics whose transfer from Romani to sub-Saharan characters in late Jacobean theater I already mentioned, Caroline drama had made strong forays. For instance, in Richard Brome's The English Moor (1637), when Quicksands hires Moors “to dance and to speak speeches” for a private masque at his house, those Moors (performed in black-up by white actors) simultaneously perform Blackness and Romaness.Footnote 90 The Inductor enters “like a Moor,” leading a white woman in black-up framed as an Ethiopian princess, and yet he calls himself “an Aegyptian prophet,” and his entire act consists in performing palmistry.Footnote 91 The same year, in Lodowick Carlell's little-known tragicomedy The fool would be a favorit (published 1657), a character called “A Moor” in the dramatis personae is referred to as a “Gipsie” in the play's stage directions and performs palmistry acts at court,Footnote 92 and yet is later referred to as “the skillful Moor late come to court” by one of the play's protagonists.Footnote 93 In the world of the play, this character's identity is stable enough to endure various scenes of disguise (as a magician and later as one of the romantic leads of the play): in him, Romaness and sub-Saharan Blackness merge and reach a certain state of osmosis. Thus, Ravenscroft did not invent the Afro-Romani connection: this motif already existed in English performance culture and its emergence had followed a timeline resembling the French one. What was new, however, in Ravenscroft's treatment of this motif, and, more generally, in the Restoration version of this motif, was the emphasis on the ever-present threat of enslavement. That new dramaturgy inscribed the Afro-Romani connection explicitly within a shared economy of bondage and human trafficking that, it bears repeating, befell both Roma and sub-Saharan Africans in early modern white supremacy.
A CASE STUDY: THE MARRIAGE BROAKER
The marriage broaker: or, The pander, was published in 1662 by “M. W., M. A.” in Gratiae Theatriales with two other plays. It might be “a redaction of an older play” written we know not when.Footnote 94 We don't know whether it was ever acted,Footnote 95 nor who the author of the play was.Footnote 96 This is the kind of play that theater history does not usually reckon with, though it is one that matters greatly for my purposes: I will now turn to it as a final case study illustrating the overarching argument of this essay. This comedy follows two London gallants who ultimately get what they want: marrying two lovely young women. Their plotlines run parallel to each other for most of the play, yet they converge toward the notion of bondage. The first gallant, Friendly, is in love with Elisa, Old Goodwit's niece, and he must find a way to overcome Old Goodwit's initial opposition to their match. When wary Old Goodwit dispatches his daughter to spy upon her cousin, Elisa advises Friendly to “serve [her] in a Blackamoor disguise,”Footnote 97 and their cunning servant, Dove, working in cahoots with the lovers, advises Friendly's rival, Shift, to offer that enslaved Blackamoor as a gift to Elisa—a most romantic gesture.Footnote 98 The play underlines the materiality of Friendly's cosmetic transformation—to turn Friendly “of the mourning colour,”Footnote 99 Dove becomes a painter:
The use of the word “negro” in conjunction with “Blackamore” leaves no doubt that Friendly seeks to perform the identity of an enslaved and commodified sub-Saharan African: “your servant acts the Blackamore.”Footnote 101 Assuming the identity of a “smooty Blackamore” leads Friendly to alter his body language: “he becomes his vizor; When I had fully finisht all my work, / He then begins to practise servile gestures.”Footnote 102 He is then offered as a “black postilion”Footnote 103 to Elisa by a Shift who openly states that it “is good husbandrie / To give what's dear to keep, and cheap to buy.”Footnote 104 And yet, the depiction of this enslaved sub-Saharan African regularly evokes a Romani identity too: Dove tells Shift that said slave is a
We know from his “vaticinating” that the man is a fortune-teller. Dove reassures Elisa that “the inside of the Gipsie is your Friendly.”Footnote 106 Shift, as a man who regularly consults Romani fortune-tellers, excitedly believes Dove, and later on, when the other young gallant of the play, Young Goodwit, meets the disguised Friendly, he too calls Friendly a “Gipsie.”Footnote 107 Friendly's disguise reaches a perfect state of osmosis: both of his identities, sub-Saharan and Romani, are articulated in the idiom of stage performance in very high resolution, distinct yet blended. In him, the Afro-Romani merger is complete.
Meanwhile, the play's obsession with bondage and human trafficking is explicitly articulated in the parallel plotline of the other white gallant, Young Goodwit. In act 5, when he is put in debtors' prison for a cloak he got that very day, we learn that Young Goodwit's entire life has been placed under the sign of bondage. He returned to London only five moons ago from Spain, where he had spent years in the royal galleys, only to find himself now in a different kind of prison on his own native English soil:
While we never learn what exactly led him to Spanish galleys in the first place, or how he managed to escape and return to England, Young Goodwit reveals that he was accompanied on his journey by a loving old man (his uncle), who, upon his death, advised him to seek his father in England. Young Goodwit followed his advice and contracted some debts while searching for his father, which led him straight to debtors' prison in London. The irony of his fate makes him muse upon embodied existence in general as a form of captivity:
While he presents his stay in prison as a matter of captivity, the fact that repaying his debt can buy his freedom reframes this issue as a matter of human trafficking. He finds a savior in his well-named fellow prisoner Freeman, who, as it turns out, is himself in prison for a debt he owed Young Goodwit's uncle. His debt having been transferred to Old Goodwit upon his brother's death, and Old Goodwit proving to be more tractable than his late brother and thus “willing / To grant my freedome at an easier rate,” Freeman offers to “command the price of both our freedoms” if Young Goodwit agrees to marry his daughter.Footnote 110 Thus, “you shall enjoy / A greater happiness then liberty, / By a new bondage but a sweeter.”Footnote 111
Young Goodwit's experience of human trafficking is particularly illustrative of white supremacy's ability to rhetorically redirect toward itself the forms of oppression it systemically inflicts upon nonwhite people (something we already saw at work in the iceberg structure of Les fourberies de Scapin). Young Goodwit's experience of bondage (like Léandre's) is framed as unacceptable: as a young white man of promise on a worthy quest for patriarchal authority, Young Goodwit does not belong in the galleys of Spanish enemies or in English debtors’ prison. The play makes this clear, and it remedies that morally unacceptable situation. Moreover, his temporary experience of bondage inspires facile philosophical musings, which, by vacuously reading every human life as a form of captivity, obfuscate the fact that some human lives (those Friendly is impersonating for his own benefit while Young Goodwit philosophizes) are much more likely to be subjected to enslavement and human trafficking than others. Some humans (those who do not resemble Goodwit Jr. or Friendly) are “thraldom's perfect emblem” more than others. The play's treatment of Young Goodwit's pseudo-bondage thus suggests that if, in the words of Cathy Park Hong, “white people fear that all the sins they committed against black and brown people will come back to them tenfold,” that silent fear goes back at least four centuries.Footnote 112
Young Goodwit's and Friendly's distinct yet similarly recuperative engagements with enslavement, bondage, and human trafficking intersect in the metaphor of marriage as a “sweet bondage” used by Freeman, which affects both gallants. Indeed, marriage as bondage will put Young Goodwit in the same position as Friendly, who acts the part of the enslaved racialized person out of love for his future wife. That metaphor draws on the Petrarchan trope of the slave to love often deployed in early modern performance culture around men in black-up: that Petrarchan trope construes Blackness as the result of one's burning true love.Footnote 113
The play, however, seems to critique that trope by repeatedly placing it in the mouth of unworthy characters. For instance, when Shift—whose name says it all—first starts courting Elisa, he rhetorically positions himself as a “slave” who “will sadly bear your yoak / Though I dare say he may deserve your favour.”Footnote 114 Similarly, when the eponymous pander of the play, the well-named Hog, reads some of the poetry he uses to conquer women, he spouts such lines as “call me as I am, ‘tis all I crave, / Sweet widow, thy intangled gally-slave.”Footnote 115 The crass use that those grotesque characters make of the Petrarchan trope when they court women is all the more hypocritical when read in the light of the comments those men make in those women's absence. Indeed, when they discuss matchmaking, those men use a logic of conquest and colonization in which it is not them but their potential female matches who are enslaved. Derrick, the eponymous marriage broker of the play, first introduces himself and his peers as “Merchants of the Maidenhead,”Footnote 116 and as he surveys a list of potential matches for Shift, he presents that list as a map representing a “land of Amazons.”Footnote 117 That land includes regions such as the Maids’ region “call'd Virginis: / And this is thought to be a fertile land, / Now onely wanting the good husband's tillage”—a region reminiscent of Virginia, of which Shift wishes he “were its Governour”Footnote 118—and the region of widows, “Called by some the Island of Japan, / A rich and open countrey; though some think / ‘Tis not the sweetest air.”Footnote 119 Moving between American and Orientalist fantasies of abundance, the broker's map frames marriageable women as colonial subjects.Footnote 120 Logically, Shift, a cash-strapped “English younger brother, whose Estate / Consists in his annuity and wit,” frequently uses the term “invading” to describe his attempts at seducing Elisa.Footnote 121 Spectators are privy to their conversations, which exposes the vacuousness of the rhetoric of the male slave to love and marriage as sweet bondage they so glibly wield. In other words, the recuperative trope of enslavement to love that operates successfully in the plotlines of the worthy gallants Friendly and Young Goodwit gets savaged in the play's burlesque subplot.
The play's structure opens a space to critique the recuperative engagements of white supremacy with forms of enslavement and human trafficking that impacted Roma and sub-Saharan Africans so harshly in 1662 England. Compared to Les fourberies de Scapin, this play without a known date, author, or performance history stands at the opposite end of the spectrum in archival hierarchies. And yet, it does similar conceptual work: it forges a space where white supremacy's talent for simultaneously representing and disowning its own deeds by redirecting them toward its own falsely victimized self becomes visible and potentially criticizable. Reading together these two plays, which have been kept apart to this day by archival hierarchies and by linguistic and disciplinary siloes, helps us see in Molière's hyper-canonical play what would likely have remained invisible otherwise. The difficulty to see race is by no means unique to Molière studies, or even French neoclassical studies, for it results from a tendency within the transhistorical forces that have shaped the canon of early modern drama at large to favor plays whose treatment of race is ambiguous, subtle, or self-obfuscating. Thus, I am less interested in pushing against the canon qua canon than in doing right by race plays (i.e., most plays) that happen to be canonical—which requires reading them as directly connected to the myriad of lesser-known textual chambers in the dynamic race maze of early modern European theatrical culture. Archival hierarchies are strictly two-dimensional; linguistic and disciplinary siloes merely partition. Once we let go of those, as early modern critical race studies certainly will, we can find multidimensional secret passages in the archives and use them to explore the mobile architecture of early modern racial formations.
CONCLUSION: THE VIEW FROM THE SHOALS
One of the greatest pitfalls in writing about “Gypsies” is to write about Romani figuration as a romantic symbol for something else or a disguise for someone else. Such scholarly practices unwittingly replicate the epistemological violence to which real-life early modern Roma were subjected. Thus, my ambition was not to uncover “the African” under the “Gypsy” disguise, but rather to underline how early modern theatrical culture, through inconsistencies, bonds, and performative slippages, reveals the commonalities between the white supremacist treatment of European Roma and sub-Saharan Africans. Romani characters have often been represented as connected to other racialized groups to the effect of further othering them—for instance, in commedia dell'arte, where, as Erith Jaffe-Berg points out, the idiom of “Gypsy” characters often contains Hebrew and Arabic words.Footnote 122 The particular connection that I brought to the fore between Roma and sub-Saharan Africans stands out, however, for its critical affordances, as it offers a genealogy for the Afro-Romani alliance characterizing much of the scholarship produced in the field of Romani studies since it initiated its critical turn starting in the mid-2010s.Footnote 123
That alliance manifests when sociologist Ethel C. Brooks, whose eloquent statement opened this essay, invokes W. E. B. DuBois's notion of “double consciousness” to describe the experience of being a feminist Romni today.Footnote 124 When early modern literary scholar Sydnee Wagner draws on Jennifer Morgan's Laboring Women (2004) and compares the eugenic sterilization efforts targeting Romni in several European countries to those targeting “women of color in the US, particularly Black and Indigenous women.”Footnote 125 When Hungarian scholar of Romani studies Angéla Kóczé draws on the work of legal scholar Bridgette Baldwin around the figure of African-American so-called “welfare queens” to understand the mechanisms of racialization affecting Central Eastern European Romnia.Footnote 126 Or when Roma rights activist and scholar Margareta Matache and Cornel West demand, in one breath, “reparations for the comparable histories of enslaved people” in the US, the Caribbean, and Romania.Footnote 127 As Chang and Rucker-Chang succinctly put it, “scholars have made fleeting comparisons between Roma and African-Americans for years, and in the last decade, the Roma rights–Civil Rights comparison has recurred with increasing frequency.”Footnote 128 Such comparisons are not limited to the scholarly realm: they exist for Romani people in the domain of everyday life, when, for instance, in the Czech Republic, Roma refer to Czechs as white and to themselves as Black to critique the precariousness of their own situation because they know, as sociologist Mathieu Plésiat reports, that “in other countries westwards, those with the darkest skin are also the poorest.”Footnote 129
In Black studies, whether scholars have closed their analysis to non-Afro-diasporic racial formations (as is the case in certain streams of Afro-pessimism) or, on the contrary, have embraced the idea that part of the significance of Black diaspora projects is “their capacity to chart more than Black identities and political movements” (as Lisa Lowe puts it while paraphrasing Robin G. Kelley),Footnote 130 inclusion and exclusion have overwhelmingly operated within the framework of coloniality, for obvious historical reasons. And because the early modern Romani racial formation, taking place in a squarely European space, does not, at first sight, seem to deploy itself within the framework of coloniality, it has not been included in the braided accounts of racial formations produced in Black studies so far. Even accounts that seek to connect Europe's medieval racial formations to Black racial formations, such as Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, do not reckon with Romani people.Footnote 131 Given the importance of the theoretical frameworks of Black studies for critical Romani scholars, it is time to fill this gap.
Thus, at the close of this essay, I wish to extend to Afro-Romani connections the theoretical model that Tiffany Lethabo King powerfully calls the “Black shoals.” Indeed, in order to bring Black and Native American studies together, King uses the metaphor of the shoals as spaces “of liminality, indeterminacy, and locations of suture between two hermeneutical frames that have conventionally been understood as sealed off from each other.”Footnote 132 For her,
The Black shoal is certainly a moment of friction and the production of a new topography. The Black Shoals, as an analytical and methodological location, constitutes a moment of convergence, gathering, reassembling, and coming together (or apart). The shoal, like Black thought, is a place where momentum and velocity as normal vectors are impeded. It is the place where an adjustment needs to be made. As an in-between, ecotonal, unexpected, and shifting space, the shoal requires new footing, different chords of embodied rhythms, and new conceptual tools to navigate its terrain.
To read the archive of Afro-Romani slippages in early modern Western European drama from the perspective of the Black shoals—as I tried to do in this essay—means to slow down, to pay extraordinary attention even to the smallest of signs, slips, texts, or shifts in the archive, and to make adjustments to the maps of the racial matrix we thought we knew. For if, as King puts it, any “shoal can erode over time, drift, and eventually accumulate in another location,” the Afro-Romani shoal is currently reconstituting itself under our eyes.Footnote 133
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