Race, Women, and the Sentimental in Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko

(4.) John Hawkesworth, Oroonoko, A Tragedy, As it is now Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane ... By Thomas Southern. With Alterations (Dublin, 1760), A2.

(5.) Francis Gentleman, Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave. A Tragedy. Altered from Southerne, by Francis Gentleman (Glasgow, 1760), "Advertisement" (n.p.)

(6.) John Ferriar, The Prince of Angola, A Tragedy, Altered from the Play of Oroonoko, and Adapted to the Circumstances of the Present Times (Manchester, 1788), ii.

(7.) Besides Ferriar, Hawkesworth, and Gentleman, the adaptations also include the anonymous The Royal Captive (1767). For discussions of Oroonoko's stage history, see Maximilian Novak and David Rodes, eds., Oroonoko (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), xvi-xx; and Robert Jordan and Harold Love, eds., The Works of Thomas Southerne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 2:89-92.

(8.) E.g., Margaret Ferguson, "Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," in Women, `Race,' and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. 218-24; Stephanie Athey and Daniel Cooper Alarcon, "Oroonoko's Gendered Economies of Honor / Horror: Reframing Colonial Discourse Studies in the Americas," American Literature 65 (1993): 415-43; and Ros Ballaster, "New Hystericism: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: The Body, the Text, and the Feminist Critic," in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. 288-90.

(9.) Novak and Rodes, xxiii.

(10.) A more recent discussion by Jacqueline Pearson, "Blacker Than Hell Creates: Mary Pix Rewrites Othello," in Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama, ed. Katherine Quinsey (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 13-30, seems to me to repeat Novak and Rodes's assumption that the social experience of white women offers a direct index to others experiences of oppression. Pearson contends that Behn and other early modern women writers identified with black people because of the oppressed social status they presumably shared, and that these "writers, in producing more sensitive representations of black characters, were also subtextually presenting more positive representations of themselves" (19). Two rebuttals of this assumption of universality that focus an early modern drama are Ania Loomba, "The Color of Patriarchy: Critical Difference, Cultural Difference, and Renaissance Drama," in Women, `Race,' and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 17-34; and Jyotsna Singh, "Othello's Identity, Postcolonial Theory, and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello," in Women, `Race' and Writing, esp. 287-92.

(11.) See Peter Erickson, "Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance," Criticism 35 (1993): 499-527. Two discussions of this issue based on film spectatorship are Tania Modleski, "Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film," in Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a `Postfeminist' Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 115-34; and James Snead, "Angel, Venus, Jezebel: Race and the Female Star in Three Thirties Films," in White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, ed. Colin MacCabe and Cornel West (New York: Routledge, 1994), 67-80.