Shakespeare and Mixed Race

This chapter considers how early modern English routines of exceptionalizing racial mixing distort more accurate understandings of how mixedness often factored in the period. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus offers key examples of such routines, representing procreative racial mixing as a novel and foreboding matter. But mixedness did not reliably factor in the period as anywhere near as ostensibly consequential as it does in Titus. Shakespeare’s early tragedy demonstrates instead the extent to which the topic could be instrumentalized. While mixedness was rendered urgent in some instances, it was frequently downplayed or rendered immaterial in others, depending, in part, on the exigencies of developing racist practice and ideology. As this chapter contends, such deemphasis is key to representations of racial Blackness on the early modern English stage.