Contrary to conventional opinion, Hamlet is a major race play in which a white prince dressed in black has a self-serving, improvisational relationship to blackness as a violent, criminal identity. Called upon to avenge his father’s murder, Hamlet designates the fratricidal Claudius a “Moore,” a racial slur for a type that had only recently gained popularity on the stage. Simultaneously, the imperative of the revenge genre requires retributive action, leading the revenger to replicate the original perpetrator’s murderous violence: Hamlet must become a “Moore” like Claudius. Cowardice, Hamlet explains, is the product of contemplation and manifests in bodily paleness, and his affiliation with a black Pyrrhus, drawn from the repertory of the traveling players, compensates for his self-ascribed white cowardice so that blackness in action becomes the revenger’s motivating passion. The theater-aficionado prince is knowledgeable about the traveling company’s repertory of black drama and uses a black Lucianus in the staging of The Murder of Gonzago to truly capture the conscience of the Moor-like king Claudius.

Chapter 4 considers the intersection of appetite and desire in plays such as Middleton’s The Bloody Banquet and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. It argues that the elision of these two drives lends a gustatory logic to the theatre’s depiction of excessive desire. The chapter explores the extent to which this serves to associate desire with the excessive appetites unleashed by material excess and tyranny. But it also emphasises the vulnerability which the culinary logic instils in representations of desire, emphasising the period’s profound ambiguity regarding who, precisely, is being consumed in the context of a sexual relationship. Finally, the chapter emphasises the extent to which the imagery of appetite foregrounds the potentially debilitating consequences of sexual desire, at a time in which humoral theory asserted a model of the body as porous, and potentially vulnerable.