PROSPECTUS

Perhaps for good reason, relations between the sexes as portrayed by Shakespeare are not often discussed in terms of tolerance or intolerance. From the perspective of this book, in which tolerance is understood to require a possibility of making a choice against intolerance, the problem might be that in Elizabethan gender relations choice was not always a possibility. At the start of The Merchant of Venice, Portia, dominated by her late father's will, laments: ‘O me, the word “choose”’ (1.2.21–2). Some see early modern gender relations as the product of hierarchal or patriarchal ideologies determined by (or rationalising) oppressive and unjust social, economic, and legal arrangements beyond any individual's control. Much remains to be learned about such matters in connection with Shakespeare's time and culture.

From among such large questions a restricted but perhaps illuminating focus will be chosen for this chapter. This will be on Shakespeare's varied dramatic representations of men or women who react in ways specific to their dramatically posited situations to questions regarding gender and sexual relations. In some cases they manifest abnormal intolerance, and in others develop remarkable tolerance, relative to the possibilities available to them in Elizabethan culture.

Shakespeare, of course, had to frame his representations of gender interactions and attitudes within boundaries defined by his own society, although sometimes they were quite close to the edge of these boundaries, occasionally perhaps over the edge. Moreover, Shakespeare's transgressors of bounds are not always ‘contained’.

TYPES OF SLAVERY KNOWN TO ELIZABETHANS

In a particularly careful study of the tragedy of Atlantic plantation slavery, Jonathan Schorsch dates the European emergence of notions corresponding with Racialism, finding that although most historians claim a later origin, some have dated this emergence to the second half of the seventeenth century (which is, of course, still well after Shakespeare's lifetime). Starting from that point, Schorsch detects a process that he finds still continuing:

If, as he says, such a process is still in progress, we are in the early twenty-first century living out the waning legacy of the massive, mainly eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade (a fine example of a ‘political or economic interest’), and so inhabit a highly racially sensitised culture. Was Shakespeare's culture similarly sensitised? To help answer that question we need to ask what views were taken in his England of slavery, and in particular what significances the word ‘slave’ had in Shakespeare's culture and in his plays.

Elizabethans were aware of three kinds of slavery: the enslavement of Africans or Native Americans employed by Spanish and Portuguese colonists in the New World; the enslavement of captives in war – in galleys or otherwise – who were not able to provide ransom payments; and the enslavement of those taken by corsair raiders on land or sea.

PROSPECTUS

In Shakespeare's age political and cultural perceptions of what constituted nationality tended to diverge: this circumstance will underlie the twofold structure of this chapter.

On both sides of this divide, nationality in the Renaissance was often a shifting or emerging concept, and certainly this was the case in Elizabethan England. In terms of cultural mythologies, scholars and artists forged and/or questioned British origin myths. In the realm of political constructions, English lawmakers refashioned the limits of citizenship and alien status.

Moreover, mythic–historical and mythic–jurisprudential thinking joined in novel, highly influential theories that an essential ancient Englishness was the basis of the immutable English common law: scholars have argued that these theories had a great deal of fictional content. So in several ways English nationality was both a prominent and yet an evidently constructed entity.

Because of the dual nature of the constructions of nationality in accord with either legal specification or else with perceptions of cultural difference, this chapter will be divided into two portions, one of which could be labelled ‘Alien Statutes’ and the other ‘Exotic Foreigners’.

A REPRISE

I have just claimed that in Henry V 3.3 Captains Jamy and Gower intervene humorously in an attempt to ‘extricate from angry dissension the tolerant impetuses in a dialogue seeking mutual understanding’. I will next argue that their action and its humorous mode find an exact analogue in a very remarkable, but not wholly unprecedented, work by Shakespeare's contemporary Jean Bodin. Only there the parallel action is intended to stop dissension over religious rather than national differences.

JEAN BODIN'S DIALOGUE BETWEEN SEVEN RELIGIOUS OUTLOOKS

Although unsigned, the Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime was almost certainly written by Bodin (and no other), late in his life, probably between 1588 and 1593. Originally circulated in Latin and French manuscripts, it became a famous and eagerly sought ‘underground’ text, but remained unprinted until long after Shakespeare's lifetime. Bodin's Colloquium is important for our purposes because it shows that western European culture in Shakespeare's age was capable of imagining wholly open-minded intra-religious dialogue; in addition, as just mentioned, it dramatises the protection of that dialogue in a manner eerily similar to that witnessed in Henry V.

The Colloquium of the Seven consists of a series of dramatised conversations between a Roman Catholic, a Muslim, a Calvinist, a Lutheran, a Natural Philosopher, a Sceptic, and a Jew. In consequence of this wide diversity of participants, Bodin's work cannot be understood in terms of merely politique concessions to religious pluralism.

A great deal has been written of late about early modern patriarchy, racism, bigotry, exploitation, hegemonic relations, oppression of ‘outsiders’, and ‘containment’ of human difference; it has often been claimed that these intolerant traits and practices are reflected from Shakespeare's culture into his work. A counterpoise seems in order in the form of an attempt to explore Shakespeare and tolerance.

Although there has been much research and debate about early modern tolerance, especially religious tolerance, little of this has been applied to Shakespeare studies, or literary studies generally. Indeed, I feel that a subject area of ‘literature and tolerance studies’ is needed, and hope my efforts may contribute somewhat towards that.

This Introduction discusses what ‘tolerance’ might mean in relation to a study of Shakespeare. It is a tricky question, although only a subdivision of the much-discussed issue of what tolerance means in general.

Some of the problems can be identified by posing a simple riddle: why is it that, in popular parlance, ‘to be tolerant’ and ‘to tolerate some particular X’ may seem in some sense diametrically opposed? For instance, to say that ‘I tolerate gays’ may be seen as offensive, because acceptance on such terms may seem derogatory and, in its condescension, not in accordance with ‘being tolerant’. Allied with this paradox is the political/ethical question: should a programme to advance the social good of ‘toleration’ promote ‘tolerant persons’, or alternatively merely induce a public to ‘tolerate X, Y or Z’?

PROSPECTUS

The following discussion of Shakespeare, tolerance, and what we now call ‘race’ will be divided between this chapter and the next. This one will concentrate on love and desire (including ‘miscegenation’), while the next will be concerned with international topics like slavery and New World encounters. The present chapter will consider Othello, for example, as a play in which bigotry begets bigotry, that is, antipathy to a ‘black’ Moorish man leads to the evil stereotyping of a ‘white’ Venetian woman. The following chapter will analyse images of slavery in Othello and elsewhere, and will focus particularly on Prospero's two exotic servants in The Tempest.

‘RACE’ IN SHAKESPEARE'S TIME

Throughout its (sadly continuing) life the spurious notion of there being a small handful of colour-coded, distinct human ‘races’ has always been both equivocal and historically unstable. This complicates current perplexities, and perhaps some confusion, over whether questions of ‘race’ are anachronistic in, or properly relevant to, discussions of Shakespeare's writing. I am sorry to enter a dermatological prior to a dramaturgical nexus, yet some questioning of ‘race’ itself must preface a questioning of race in relation to Shakespeare.