Performing Babies and the Properties of Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores how props that play babies perform not just individual characters but also racial and ethnic identities in two plays by Shakespeare and one by contemporary playwright David Ireland. Working across early modern and modern archives of text and performance to track ongoing, transhistorical processes of race-making, the article argues that the stage baby’s mingling of the symbolic and material puts racial formation on display. Each play locates their baby-prop’s performance of identity at the intersection of race and gender by featuring a paternal figure searching for evidence of a kinship with a newborn. The hypervisibility of Aaron’s son’s race in Titus Andronicus, and its connections to theatre history and material culture in performance and editing choices, contrasts with baby Perdita’s relatively unspecific whiteness in The Winter’s Tale that materialises Leontes’s fears of the baby’s indistinct, potential ‘strangeness’. Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue enacts Leontes’s infanticidal threats and paranoia in the twenty-first century, staging the violent consequences of a grandfather’s obsession with British purity. The repertorial relationships between baby-props across these three plays demonstrate how patriarchal questions of filial descent intertwine with constructions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how studying performance practices helps reveal social processes of identity formation.