Phil Robinson
The Literary London Journal, Volume 9 Number 2 (September 2011)
<1> In 1613, a powerful white man, the Lord Mayor of London, and a powerful black man, the King of the Moors, looked each other up and down across the crowded urban landscape of St Paul’s. The setting for the occasion was the Lord Mayor’s show of that year, The Triumphs of Truth, authored by the dramatist Thomas Middleton. Early modern London’s mayoral show, an annual dramatic procession in honour of the inauguration of the new mayor, was a grand affair, paid for by civic guilds and playing to a range of city aldermen with divergent interests, sometimes with a royal or foreign presence, and always with a large and diverse London crowd. [1] Neither of the men at Middleton’s event were quite real: the black man played by an actor in a prewritten part, but the white man also playing a fairly strictly-defined role in the festivities of the occasion, a role well-established by many previous years of mayoral pageants. Both men, in short, had their parts more or less handed to them by the dramatist of the day.
<2> In the present article, I want to explore the dramatisation of this scripted meeting, the cultural and political meanings in play, and what Middleton’s work might have to say about impressions of London’s trading and racial politics in the period. Along the way, I glance at two other mayoral shows by Middleton: The Triumphs of Honour and Industry (1617) and The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue (1622), for the light they shed on these issues. As Ania Loomba has argued, seventeenth-century mayoral pageants were concerned with ‘not only the civic organization of London, and the livery companies that controlled it, but also the colonial possibilities of trade and commerce’ (1714). However, where Loomba sees the purpose behind this interest in terms of clear-cut celebration, I will suggest that these texts in fact offer a slightly more diffuse, wary commentary. The texts under discussion here were composed, after all, by ‘a writer whose economic view of humanity is unremitting’ (Jowett 219); Middleton was, among other things, a man very interested in the movements and morals of money. It would be odd indeed if, even in the encomiastic format of civic pageantry, such interests did not play a part. Though the figure of the Moor in the period is itself a complex, vexed subject, I argue that Middleton’s use of blackness in mayoral pageants can help to illuminate issues of wealth and political control, precisely because the Moor seems to fulfil a similar focusing function within these texts.
<3> In Middleton’s mayoral pageants, the figure of the Moor highlights fault-lines in civic economic models, and fault-lines also in the ways that London engages with her foreign others. In Triumphs of Truth, when the ‘King of the Moors’ first appears, he is made to emphasise immediately his own strangeness in his speech to the crowd:
I see amazement set upon the faces
Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes;
Is it at me? does my complexion draw
So many Christian eyes, that never saw
A king so black before? (411-415)
The Moor’s recognition of himself not just as black, but as so black, seems overwrought in its emphasis. Such an emphasis was in a sense traditional in the mayoral show. The Moor had appeared in the history of the show at least as early as 1585—as of my writing, the earliest pageant for which there remains an extant text. Authored by George Peele, the entertainment entitled simply The Device of the Pageant Borne before Wolstan Dixi, opens with a man ‘apparelled like a Moore’ (stage direction, 209) speaking to praise London. Like many Moors following Peele’s, this man is not only apparelled in a way designed to emphasise strangeness, but given a speech styled to confirm his status as foreigner:
Even from the parching Zone behold I come
A straunger straungely mounted as you see,
Seated upon a lusty Luzerns back’ (4-6).
Mounted on a lynx (Luzern) and heralding from an uncertain (and pejoratively described) equatorial locale, the Moor’s foreignness, his exotic quality, is underlined. The pleonastic fantasy of ‘a straunger straungely mounted’ seems to have been a running theme in the pageants: Barthelemy’s study of blackness on the early modern stage finds Peele’s Moor to be ‘prototypical’, with ‘some eleven other pageants’ (49) incorporating images of spectacular or otherwise fantastical Indian or Moorish figures. [2]
<4> But while in one sense Middleton’s Moor may appear to be typical, its play on that typicality is not. The opening statement of the Moor is startling in that it is, simply and obviously, wrong. By 1613, the crowd of London almost certainly would have seen a king so black before: in fact, they would probably have seen several. That is to say, a London audience would have had the opportunity to have seen a Moor at least as black as the blacked-up actor playing the role in Triumphs of Truth. They might have seen exactly so black a figure in Titus Andronicus, Othello, Lust’s Dominion, Selimus, the two parts of Tamburlaine or The Battle of Alcazar to name a few, all of which appeared on stage before 1613, and all of which, if not depicting kings, certainly included black figures of high status. [3] Although not perhaps as accessible to the average citizen, the court masque, too, had staged black characters, most famously in Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605). Black royalty had certainly appeared previously in the mayoral pageants. Moreover, black kings had featured as standard in the predecessor to the pageants, the Midsummer Watch, as Vaughan points out: ‘by 1536 the King of Moors had become a conventional figure and . . . audiences expected him to be brilliantly costumed with recognizable Moorish trappings’ (30). If by 1536—nearly eighty years before Middleton’s piece—the King of the Moors was already a familiar figure on the festival streets of London, then he must surely have been highly familiar to those viewing Triumphs of Truth.
<5> But if the blackness of the character is not as surprising as the Moor’s statement suggests, what might be the point in presenting him in this way? Traditionally, blackness in the civic pageant has been seen by critics as presenting a very clear didactic function, and one which is as distasteful as it is straightforward: ‘In many civic pageants, the emblematic role assigned to black characters is very simple. They more often than not seem to be exotic paraphernalia, used essentially to increase the air of extravagance surrounding a particular pageant car. Blacks also serve as visible reminders of British success in trade and exploration, as do Indians’ (Barthelemy 47).
<6> The Moor of Peele’s 1585 pageant for Wolstan Dixi, seated upon the back of a lusty animal (whose lustiness, presumably, stands in metaphorically for that of his rider), seems to fit this reading fairly neatly. Peele’s stranger from the parched land appears designed specifically to draw attention to himself as extravagantly exotic. By contrast, the speech of Middleton’s Moor seems almost like a pastiche. Drawing attention to not only his own problematic blackness, but drawing comparison with the audience’s equally questionable whiteness, the Moor sets up a dialectic which did not quite exist. The Moor of Triumphs of Truth draws attention to his blackness, I suggest, only to break down the discourses which construct that blackness, and in so doing, provides a valuable index for reading issues of trade, race, and nation.
<7> To begin with, the Moor appears to recognise his colour in order to chastise his audience, for not understanding that underneath blackness lies the whiter light of purity and religion:
I being a Moor, then, in opinion’s lightness,
As far from sanctity as my face from whiteness;
But I forgive the judgings of th’unwise,
Whose censures ever quicken in their eyes;
Only begot of outward form and show.
And I think meet to let such censurers know,
However darkness dwells upon my face,
Truth in my soul sets up the light of grace . . . (423-430)
In some ways, this is as formulaic a response to the Moor as the period produces: the king is a ‘good’ black because he has accepted Christianity. By many contemporary civic commentators, missionary work was seen as a natural extension of trade. As Tristan Marshall notes, citing an address to the Commissioners of the Virginia Company in 1615, more than one preacher ‘suggested that the reason why the gospel had been restored to the English nation by the Henrician Reformation was so that England might in her turn propagate it to ‘our posterity and brethren, the nations far and near’’ (19). Who the speech is being made to (a grouping of wealthy merchants) is, in this case, just as important as what is being said. In a broadsheet of the same year, two Indians are depicted pleading for conversion:
Once in a State, as of one Stem,
Mere strangers from Jerusalem,
As We, were Ye; till others Pity
Sought, and brought You to that City.
Dear Britons, now, be You as kind;
Bring Light and Sight to Us yet blind (qtd. in Marshall 19).
The depiction of the Indians here seems fairly straightforward, as does the naturalised relationship between the savage and the civiliser. In Triumphs of Truth, too, the savage thanks the civilised English for their good work, although in Middleton’s piece it is specifically as a result of the kindly actions of the trade guilds that religious conversion has been possible. The king speaks of how he, his queen and people were:
At one time won
By the religious conversation
Of English merchants, factors, travellers,
Whose truth did with our spirits hold commerce,
As their affairs with us; following their path
We all were brought to the true Christian faith (435-440).
The Moor’s speech makes explicit, then, not just a connection of commerce with religion, but a direct correlation. It is not from missionaries, but from moneymen—merchants and factors—that the king’s people have learned their faith.
<8> Such rhetoric was, in its basic form, familiar: ‘The fantasy is . . . heathen natives will be so swept away by Christianity that they will enrich Europeans for no other reward than that of being converted’ (Tumbleson 63). Fitzmaurice quotes the churchman William Crashaw, whose arguments on trade balance privileged the value of religion: ‘we will geive them more, namely such things as they want and neede, and infinitely more excellent than all we take from them: and that is {1. Civilitie for their bodies,} {2. Christianity for their soules}’ (qtd. 146). As Fitzmaurice argues, ‘appeal to trade was enthusiastically adopted as a justification for colonising. The concept of trade in these justifications was extended metonymically to include the trade of spiritual goods’ (144). At one level, then, and no doubt with an eye on its guild sponsors, the Grocers’ Company, Middleton’s pageant valorises mercantilism. It connects trade explicitly with religious conversion, simultaneously presenting it as a fair and balanced—even charitable—process. James Knowles describes the effect straightforwardly in his discussion of Middleton’s pageant: ‘Such markedly Protestant features . . . justify the wealth and power of the mercantile elite by suggesting that all eventually share in the prosperity, and by transforming commerce into religion’ (169). Similarly, and reading the same passage in Middleton’s piece, Barthelemy defines a clear meaning for the Moor’s speech:
Recognizing the traditional association of blackness with sinfulness, the king reveals that he had the light of Truth in his soul, a light planted by distant-travelling Christian merchants. For their gift of Christianity, the king praises their virtue and example. The unspoken yet clear implication of his words, though, is an endorsement of continued trade. According to this king, the Moors (and that includes all Africans and Indians), are the greatest beneficiaries of such trade, through which they have been rescued from damnation. (65)
The choice of language given to the Moor by Middleton appears to complete the effect. Still, one might wonder whether the speech renders such transactions a little too clearly, in its bold assertion of the mechanics and mathematics of trade, of the link between trade and religion. Especially when one bears in mind the author of the piece, the clarity of the speech might seem less like a ringing endorsement for trading values than a means of rendering visible the greed involved in those values. Religious truth, we are told, held ‘commerce’ with the people’s spirits. In the early seventeenth century, commerce was a word in a state of flux between moral and more modern meanings, being both the specific actions of trade and the more general act of communication between relationships. [4] Middleton here puts those meanings side by side, in neat parallel. While appearing to triumph trade, the pageant may thus also offer a coded appeal against trade: the paralipsis hovering over the line break suggests one consider not just the similarities but also the differences between the commerce of the English merchants’ affairs and the commerce of truth between spirits. This seems like more than quibbling word-play, and may be a case of appealing to multiple audiences simultaneously. For some in Middleton’s audience, the rhetoric here may make religion out of economics; conversely, for others it might make clear the economics of religion.
<9> To expand on this point, I want to turn for a moment to two later shows by Middleton dramatising similar issues. Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honour and Industry, his second pageant, discusses trading processes more overtly. This is also a pageant which returns to figures of blackness for its presentation. Beginning with an image of ordered labour, Honour and Industry stresses the international reach of London’s trading arm:
A company of Indians . . . are set at work in an island of growing spices: some planting nutmeg trees, some other spice trees of all kinds; some gathering the fruits, some making up bags of pepper; every one severally employed. (43-48)
The labour of the Indians here is parcelled, discreet. Some plant, some gather, some produce: segregated into these various occupations, they make up a perfected (if simplistic) image of an industrious exchange economy, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Being ‘severally employed’, for Middleton, seems to be a strict use of the early modern definitions of these words: to take part in one specific area of the economy. The flaw in the economy presented is that it doesn’t seem to go anywhere: although we can assume that the Indians’ produce will be shipped as part of the trading enterprises of Honour and Industry’s sponsors (again, the Company of Grocers) the purpose behind the labour is not altogether clear. The tenor of that labour, however, is slightly clearer: commenting on this pageant, Tumbleson notes that ‘While no image so openly coercive as an overseer is shown, the Indians do not merely work but are ‘set to work’ . . . The Indians labor, dance to display their contentedness, and remain mute, while voice is reserved for those who have set them to work’ (60). Although the link drawn here between labourers and those directing the labour is not necessarily so exploitative as to pass into the realms of slavery, the succeeding pageant device seems to point more directly to just such a relationship.
<10> The passivity of the image of Indians on their island gives way to a much more aggressive set of images: discreet and peaceful activity is succeeded by a quasi-mythological image of international trading. Following the presentation of the pageant of the Indian Island, we are treated to a personified version of India. Coming straight after one version, this new India offers a rather different image: ‘This India sits on the top of an illustrious chariot; on the one side of her sits Traffic or Merchandise, on the other side, Industry, both fitted and adorned according to the property of their natures’ (53-57). Again, the presentation of the pageant here is ambiguous. Traffic, another word fluctuating between meanings, is coupled by Middleton to an apparently explanatory synonym, but one which is in fact in an equal state of flux, merchandise. [5] Middleton is, I suggest, quite self-aware of the movement in these terms. There is in fact a good deal of punning interplay in Honour and Industry between moral and economic meanings, with the ideas of nature, property, adornment and merchandise circulating just in the small piece of description quoted above. Middleton’s pageant here manages, like Triumphs of Truth, to offer almost opposing readings at the same time: on one level providing an encomiastic celebration of trading practices, while on another level, or to different sections of its audience, suggesting darker interpretations of its presentation.
<11> A still clearer indication of these processes is provided by the figure of India in Middleton’s later mayoral show, The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue. The opening device of the pageant, the ‘Continent of India’, is described as ‘a triumph replenished with all manner of spice-plants and trees bearing odour’ (39-41). The central character here is ‘a black personage representing India, called, for her odours and riches, the Queen of Merchandise’ (42-43). The connection of an exotic India with the opportunity for trading riches is charted in sexualised form. This queen of merchandise ‘advanceth herself upon a bed of spices, attended by Indians in antique habits: Commerce, Adventure and Traffic, three habited like merchants, presenting to her view a bright figure, bearing the inscription of Knowledge’ (44-48). As Tumbleson argues, the eroticised image links, through a figure of blackness, the commodification of women and the commodification of foreign spaces and peoples: ‘she submissively presents herself as sexual object and colonial subject, and hence doubly other’ (63). The spectacle of a female black figure, lying on a bed of spices and encircled by male merchants, has much to say about early modern thought on trading practices and the structures of international relations, although precisely what it is saying is open to debate. There is clearly, at the least, an element of exotic voyeurism involved, but it is also hard to think about the proxemics of this dramatic spectacle without construing the possibility of more violent sexual practices. Similarly ambiguous, and similarly sexualised, scenes present themselves throughout Middleton’s work. Spectators of Triumphs of Honour and Virtue might well have been familiar with, for example, the lines of power and sex drawn in Middleton’s and Rowley’s The Changeling, in all probability performed in the summer of the same year. [6] Such an audience might at least be prepared to consider Middleton’s rich and odoriferously spiced Merchandise with obvious homonyms in mind: in this case, quean for queen.
<12> Honour and Virtue, then, represents an extension of Middleton’s continuing preoccupation with the relationship between power and sexuality. The fact that the merchants bring the Indian queen ‘Knowledge’ does not so much vindicate these relationships as render them yet more visible, given that to have knowledge of someone was also a very well-known synonym for coitus. In some ways, Middleton’s civic pageant goes further than his plays: Honour and Virtue makes use of the physical structure of the pageant device to draw power relations in visual, emblematic form, as part of a procession moving through the chief financial and trading districts of London. There is, moreover, one final point to bear in mind about the pageant of the Indian queen: the characters involved are not just personifications of trade, but are particularised. At the close of the pageant device, Middleton helpfully notes: ‘to add a little more help to the fainter apprehensions, the three merchants placed in the Continent have reference to the lord mayor and sheriffs’ (98-101). The pageant involves London’s mayor directly in the performance of the practices it describes: in this case, the practices of trading and colonialism, figured as what is close to becoming a polyamorous assault. Whether the point is to encourage subjection, to offer a critique, or something hovering in-between, it seems clear that it is being made quite explicitly in the direction of the new mayor.
<13> As with Honour and Virtue’s pageant of India, The King of the Moors’ declaration of conversion in The Triumphs of Truth is packed with meaning: in both texts, the more visible interlocution of a black figure into the pageant helps to draw attention to other less visible exchanges being made. While Barthelemy argues that ‘pageant writers always portray blacks as inferiors, either cultural or spiritual’ (70-71), there are more complicated representations occurring in the performance of blackness. By insisting on the fact that he has already been converted to Christianity, Middleton’s Moor neatly removes the only moral reason for continued trading. By his very presence, the Moor monumentalises those exchanges and discourses he attempts to deny. Standing opposite the mayor, the Moor presents bluntly the practices in which that mayor was himself intimately involved: the lord mayor elect in 1613 was Sir Thomas Middleton (no relation), a veteran of the sugar trade with hands in customs and privateering. He was also a founding member of the East India Company, and, by 1609, sharer in the Virginia Company. If there are potential problems in the colonial rhetoric espoused by the Moor, these are problems made to reflect directly on the mayor’s own activities. As with Middleton’s later pageants, Triumphs of Truth appears at this point to utilise its structure to play off white versus black: if the Moor is not as black as he appears, might the mayor not be as white as he appears? In this way, the pageant makes similarly politicised use of figures of blackness as other texts of the period: such texts are part of ‘a broad discursive network in which the polarity of dark and light articulates ongoing cultural concerns’ (Hall 2). Though clear answers are not given, the ambiguity of Middleton’s king appears to point precisely to just such concerns.
<14> From one point of view, the Moor outlines a system of exchange which is both highly moral, and (not entirely coincidentally) highly profitable. But the efficacy of this kind of exchange also appears to be undercut. Middleton’s Moor is not just an apologist for trade but a prosecutor, roundly chastising the credulity of his audience. Such viewers, ‘whose censures ever quicken in their eyes’, form their opinions based only on ‘outward form and show’ (426-427). The distinction between outward appearance and interior truth is of course a familiar one in the period; as elsewhere, though, the distinction being made seems pointed. The whole civic pageant, after all, involves outward form and ‘show’, because it is, simply, a show. The argument of the speech, then, might be seen not only in terms of traditional ideas about selfhood or blackness, but as a coded warning about the veracity of the material being presented. More complicatedly, while the Moor might warn against simplistic readings, his speech also emphasises them. He begins his speech by pointing out how very black he is, and ends the same speech by remonstrating with those who read him for his blackness; the character thus ends up in the difficult position of claiming it unwise to only consider his outward form, when, it seems, his outward form is all he can talk about. I would propose, however, that the contradictions built up here actually work to emphasise the point. The theatricality of the Moor’s speech, coupled with the over-determination of the Moor himself, strongly suggests that his appearance should be read as something more complicated than just a grand evocation of ‘spiritual’ trading.
<15> There are, then, a number of paradoxes created in the Moor’s appearance. By becoming like the predominantly white audience in turning to Christianity, the King trades places with those who have converted him, and instead attempts to convert the London audience to the idea of trade. But by making clear that both he and all his people have already been converted, the Moor removes one half of the trading exchange he espouses. The circular exchange is also paradoxical in that it has no starting point: the Moor convinces London to trade based on a system of trade that must already be in effect for the Moor to be there. Exhorting the city both to trade and to missionary work, while possibly celebrating London’s abilities in these areas, might also suggest by its very nature a lack of success. In this case, the religious argument used by the Moor as evidence of the worth of international trade is, in fact, worthless. This sort of calculation hardly represents a ringing endorsement of the activities of the trade guilds.
<16> By using the Moor to warn that form and show are uncertain and untrustworthy media, the pageant effectively highlights and undercuts the moment of its own performance. In so doing, it also raises questions about the trades and processes it depicts. The presence of the Moor in Triumphs of Truth is bound up with the tensions evoked by such a figure in the period: the Moor allows for the projection of an array of anxieties concerning international transactions and trade. Entangled discourses of religion, commerce, sexuality, and power are all invoked in Middleton’s use of the Moor, and if his pageants do not come to a direct conclusion on the nature, form, or morality of these discourses, yet they are suggestive of a wider range of thought than the glorification of civic trading. When the mayor and the Moor are made to stand opposite one another as part of Middleton’s pageant, an audience is clearly invited to compare and contrast. Who is subject and who is object? Who is ‘black’ and who is ‘white’? While the plot of Middleton’s show as a whole may dramatise the triumph of truth, it is not altogether clear, certainly in this moment raised by the Moor, exactly what—or whose—truth is triumphant.
Endnotes
[1] Standard works on the mayoral show include David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642 (London: Edward Arnold, 1971); Theodore B. Leinwand, ‘London Triumphing: The Jacobean Lord Mayor’s Show’, Clio, 11:2 (1982), 136–53; James Knowles, ‘The Spectacle of the Realm: Civic Consciousness, Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Modern London’, in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring eds., Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 157–89; Tracey Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585-1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).
[2] Barthelemy misses from his list both Anthony Munday’s Camp-bell or the Ironmongers Faire Feild (1610), and Chruso-thriambos (1611), making the total slightly higher.
[3] For fuller surveys of black figures on the early modern stage, see, in addition to Barthelemy, Eldred D. Jones, Othello’s Countrymen (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); and Elliot H. Tokson’s The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).
[4] ‘commerce, n’. (20 May 2009. ). Especially, compare 1.a. ‘Exchange between men of the products of nature or art’ and 2.a. ‘Intercourse in the affairs of life’. Hamlet provides us with a neat example of a (tainted) moral form, in Ophelia’s famous contention: ‘Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?’ (III.i.111-12).
[5] Under traffic, the OED gives both ‘1. To carry on trade, to trade, to buy and sell; to have commercial dealings with any one; to bargain or deal for a commodity’, and ‘2. fig. To have dealings or intercourse (with a person); to carry on negotiations; to be concerned, to busy or exercise oneself (in some matter)’, with the meanings being contiguous in the period under discussion (‘traffic, v’. 20 May 2009. ). Under merchandise, the OED offers a variety of meanings, but we might pause over the difference between ‘To trade, to engage in the business of a merchant’ and ‘to use as a bargaining tool, esp. inappropriately’ (‘merchandise, v’. 20 May 2009. ).
[6] See Taylor and Lavagnino vol. 2: 422, for questions of date and authorship. On a similar note, one might make comparison with the duke of Women Beware Women, when describing the supposed exchange for Bianca’s rape: ‘But I give better in exchange: wealth, honour’ (II.ii.368).
Works Cited
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To Cite This Article:
Phil Robinson, ‘Trading Places: Middleton’s Mayor and Middleton’s Moor’, The Literary London Journal, Volume 9 Number 2 (September 2011). Online at http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2011/robinson.html. Accessed on [date of access].