“Come Aloft, Jack-little-ape!”: Race and Dance in The Spanish Gypsie

Abstract

This essay posits that, on the early modern stage, dance was a powerful communicative modality which performed racializing work. Focusing on The Spanish Gypsie (1623), this essay argues that Middleton, Rowley, Ford, and Dekker’s play innovatively deployed around Gypsy characters an animalizing choreographic discourse called “antics.” That discourse, given the early modern understanding and uses of dance, had the ability to downgrade its dancers in the Great Chain of being by kinetic means long before the development in the Enlightenment of the racist taxonomic systems with which we usually associate such downgradings. Ultimately, the essay brings to light the relational logic of early modern theatrical racecraft by tracing the popular extension of that new animalizing choreographic device to another ethnic group in the repertory of The Queen of Bohemia’s Men from 1623 to 1642: Blackamoors—who were similarly entangled in the processes of exclusion from ownership and self-ownership at play in the rhetoric of animalization, both on stage and off stage. [N.N.]