Abstract
On 13 May 1888, Princess Isabel, Regent of the Empire of Brazil, signed into law the emancipation of all slaves in the country, and masses of her subjects took to the streets of Rio de Janeiro to celebrate. Two years later, Brazilians, now under a provisional republican government, witnessed another momentous event in the history of African slavery. On 14 December 1890, Rui Barbosa, Minister of Finance and Internal Affairs, ordered a thorough search of the archives that had been kept by the Portuguese colonial authorities and later by the Imperial government.1 All records pertaining to slavery were to be located and burned. Barbosa hoped to remove a blot from the national character. If, as Michel de Certeau suggests, ‘writing produces history,’ then Barbosa single-handedly succeeded in wiping out much of the history of millions of Brazilians of African descent.2
For mine owne part, when I heare the Africans evil spoken of, I wil affirme myselfe to be one of Granada; and when I perceive the nation of Granada to be discommended, then will I professe my selfe to be an African.
Leo Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600)
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Notes
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 3. Lévi-Strauss is distinguishing ethnography from history.
Gustav Cross, Introduction to Titus Andronicus, in The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Penguin, 1969), p. 823.
E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923; rpt Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 4: 246.
For a fuller discussion of the stage history of the play, please consult Jonathan Bate, ‘Introduction,’ Titus Andronicus, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 37-69
Alan Hughes, ‘Introduction,’ Titus Andronicus, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 31-47.
Stanley Wells, ‘Program Notes,’ Royal Shakespeare Production of Titus Andronicus, directed by Deborah Warner, at the Pit, 1 July 1988.
Eldred Jones. in The Dramatic Works of George Peek (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961), 2: 226-7.
Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 49.
For a full discussion of these stage figures, please consult Jones, Othello’s Countrymen; Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1991)
David Dabydeen, The Black Presence in English Literature (Dover, NH and Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985).
Hans Werner Debrunner, Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe: A History of Africans in Europe before 1918 (Basel: Basier Africa Bibliographien, 1979).
Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World: Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century, Tome 2 of Volume II, From the Early Christian Era to the Age of Discovery’, ed. Ladislas Bugner, trans. William Granger (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 7.
See Terisio Pignatti, Veronese (Venice: Alfieri Edizioni D’Arte, 1976), 1: 186.
Emily C. Bartels, ‘Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 443.
The illustration is readily available in a number of sources. See, for example, the Arden edition of Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 39.
Cleonice Berardinelli, ed., Antologia do Teatro de Gil Vicente (Rio de Janeiro: Grifo Edições, 1971), p. 347.
Bk I, 159-62 of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T Shawcross (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1971).
For a discussion of the wound motif in the Roman plays, see Coppélla Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, trans. John Pory, 3 vols (London, 1600); ed. Robert Brown (London: Hakluyt Society, 1894), 1: 190.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 237. Greenblatt argues that ‘Iago’s attitude toward Othello is nonetheless colonial’ (p. 233).
Louis O. Mink, ‘Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument,’ in Historical Understanding, eds Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 199.
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978; rpt Baltimore, Md. and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), esp. chapter 3, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.’
King James, ‘The Lepanto,’ The Poems of fames VI. of Scotland, ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1955), 1: 202 (11. 9-11).
George T. Matthews, ed., News and Rumor in Renaissance Europe (The Fugger Newsletters) (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959), pp. 39-42.
See Richard Barnfield’s sonnet, ‘Against the Dispraysers of Poetrie,’ in The Complete Poems, ed. George Klawitter (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990).
Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 7: 212. Bullough suggests that Shakespeare obtained materials about Italy from William Thomas’s History of Italy (1549) and from Sir Lewis Lewkenor’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (trans. in 1599).
Charles Hughes, ed., Shakespeare’s Europe: Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (London: Sherratt & Hughes, 1903), p. 139. Italics mine.
David McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1990), p. 73.
Debrunner, Presence and Prestige, p. 23. In The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks 1530-1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980)
I believe that although there is strong opposition to the interracial marriage, Karen Newman in ‘“And Wash an Ethiop White”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,’ in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York and London: Methuen, 1987)
William Cuningham, The Cosmographical Glasse (London, 1599), fol. 184.
Gomes Eanes de Azurara, Crônica de Guynee (Lisbon: 1506; rpt Lisbon: Empresa da Revista Diogo-Caäo, 1937), p. 36.
William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks 1530-1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 2.
Michael Neill, ‘Changing Places in “Othello”.’ Shakespeare Survey 38 (1984): 115-31.
See Carol Thomas Neely, ‘Circumscriptions and Unhousedness: Othello in the Borderlands,’ in Shakespeare and Gender: A History, edited by Deborah Barker and Ivo Kamps (London and New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 302-15.
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© 1999 Geraldo U. de Sousa
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de Sousa, G.U. (1999). Textual Intersections: Titus Andronicus and Othello. In: Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286658_5
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