Patricia Akhimie's Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference is an important advancement in the study of race in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare's Othello, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest (among others) through the paradigms of self-cultivation promised by early modern conduct literature, Akhimie's timely and cogent argument reorients our understanding of race in Shakespeare's plays toward the systems of conduct that identified and produced social difference.
Early modern conduct literature promoted leisure activities like angling, hunting, entertaining, and travel—occupations that simultaneously filled the time of the idle rich and displayed the wealth that enabled such idleness. Such activities also cultivated persons of worth: travel, for example, exposed men to different qualities of people, which allowed the returned traveler to refine his own behaviors. The traits of mutability, malleability, and transformation inherent to conduct literature were presented as cultural values, as readers were instructed to improve themselves for the enrichment of their own lives and the betterment of society. Yet the prerequisites for self-improvement—a body and mind capable of change—were marks of high social status, while persons of lower social status were characterized by permanent somatic signs that announced a natural inability to improve by any means. These somatic signs are racialized, Akhimie argues, through the association of working bodies—hands hardened with labor, skin browned by the sun or blackened with bruises, limbs misshapen with “pinches” of correction—with minds incapable of edification. As “stigmatized somatic markers come to be associated with whole groups,” Akhimie shows, “bodily difference comes to serve as justification for social oppression” (29).
Since travel refined the faculties of judgment toward others, it is the process of marking—looking, noticing—that produces the mark of difference. Othello, a traveler whose esteem in Venice is linked to his ability to recount stories of diverse persons and groups, is undone by his compulsion to direct this cultivated regard toward Desdemona. He is also consistently the subject of such marking, a dynamic Akhimie explores in chapter 1. For Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus, it is not black skin but blue-black bruises—badges of their lifetimes in service/slavery—that mark their inferiority. While the beating of these men is depicted in the play and prescribed in treatises of domestic organization, their bruises are nevertheless imagined as inherent to their status, an illogic that sanctions the violence against them by imagining the effects of their abuse (ever-present bruises) as the cause for correction (indelible somatic marks that indicate their inferiority and ignorance). This circular system of “prejudicial treatment,” Akhimie argues, “is best described as racism, evidenced by this perpetual bruise” (89).
The third chapter is dedicated to A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play that positions laborers as entertainment to the aristocracy and reveals the extent to which the latter group's judgment of the former is its own performance of refinement and cultivation. The “hard-handed” performers present another recognizable mark—their tough, laboring hands—“that naturalizes, and thus racializes, the exclusion of a working-class group” (118). In the final chapter, Akhimie reads Caliban's “pinches” in The Tempest along the same lines, demonstrating how Prospero's deployment of husbandry comes to shape Caliban's body and justify his abjection as natural and embodied. By focusing on these racialized marks, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference exposes the mirage of cultivation, which argues that anybody may better themselves, except those bodies bearing certain signs (some imposed upon them through toil and abuse), which come to emblematize an inability to change.
Conduct, Akhimie stresses throughout, “is about the relative value of people, and it is used to justify unequal treatment; the evaluation process is injurious” (191). Conduct literature promises to instruct individuals to cultivate better selves, when in fact it serves to cultivate the faculties of judgment and condemnation in a privileged readership that reinforce fluid and often-contradictory boundaries of social difference. As this volume demonstrates brilliantly, “learning how to wrestle with this slipperiness is itself the emancipatory task” (10). Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference will be of great use to those with interests in the operations and consequences of racist thinking in Shakespeare, early modern England, and beyond.
