The presence of Africans in Elizabethan England and the performance of Titus Andronicus at Burley-on-the-Hill, 1595/96.(Report)

In 1594 Shakespeare confronted the Elizabethans with the dramatic figure of Aaron, a literate African trained in the classics. Shakespeare's characterization of Aaron presented a striking departure from the established discourse of black inferiority. The novelty was calculated, in the first place, to unsettle the average Elizabethan theatergoer. It could not, however, have been a surprise to those playgoers who had a university education or to those courtiers and noblemen, like the Haringtons and Sidneys, who had been cultivating cultural relations with the Continent and had learned how to shape their beliefs and views in the light of the Spanish and Portuguese experience. There was, moreover, another category of spectators, the descendants of those English merchants who had pioneered slaveholding and dealing in early modern Andalusia from 1480 to 1532. The Mediterranean apprenticeship of slavery has been left unrecorded owing to the one-sided attention of Africanists and historians to the development of English slavery in the seventeenth century. I am going to make some use of the material I have uncovered from Spanish archives at the end of the present paper.

We must, moreover, bear in mind that the Elizabethans had witnessed the haphazard attempts made by the authorities to accommodate the presence of black Africans and Moors to the structure of Elizabethan society. The black presence, particularly in the last decade of the sixteenth century, had raised anxieties about interbreeding that asked to be addressed. This was the case particularly between 1592 and 1594, when the government was embroiled in the hitherto little noticed scandal caused by the legal and illegal importation of slaves from Guinea. I have, therefore, felt obliged to unfold the still poorly documented history of the black presence in Elizabethan England before turning my attention to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus as performed at Burley-on-the-Hill by the Chamberlain's Men on January 1, 1596. The per- formance had been designed by Sir John Harington to be the political and cultural climax of his lavish Christmas festivities.

The Presence of Africans in Elizabethan England

The presence of Africans in early modern England has remained a subject in its infant stage of studies. As late as the 1980s, historians clung to the view that there is no way of establishing how many colored persons had been taken to or had settled in early modern England. However, Rosalyn L. Knutson has opened up new research strategies. She is the first to have undertaken systematic investigation and has succeeded in gathering fresh material from the entries of baptisms and burials kept in the London parish records. (1)

The major difficulty in gathering reliable information has proved the absence of a regulated slave trade in early modern England. Whereas in Portugal and Spain the import of slaves was a government monopoly, England disposed of no legal code for operating a slave system under the Tudor monarchs. Hence there were no customs duties levied on imported slaves. There was, however, an annual per capita tax. This was, in effect, a poll tax of 8d levied by the municipal authorities. (2) The English authorities came close to conceding a royal monopoly on the import of slaves in the Guinea charter of 1588, a memorable event of its own that took place in the year of the Armada and that, surprisingly, Africanist historians have not taken any notice of (see below).

The majority of the Africans were black domestic slaves, a few were freedmen, and some of them were Moors, mostly Berbers from North Africa. The contemporary blanket term for them all was blackamoor. The seeming absence of records documenting their presence would argue the case for the existence of a negligible number of colored servants. (3) On second thoughts, however, the marginalized African population must have assumed a sizable volume, conspicuous and large enough to be of concern to the government, which thought it opportune to take countermeasures. The "discontented" queen, in view of the "great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which ... are crept into this realm," issued two expulsion edicts in July 1596 and a third in 1601. The royal orders, however, were of no consequence, for as long as the Africans were granted no legal status and the owners enjoyed the freedom of an unregulated market, the queen's policy of containment was simply ignored. The 1590s were a decade of poor harvests, food shortages, and poverty, but the queen's anxiety that, I dare say, approximately half a percent of London's population were taking jobs away from the English seems to be unwarranted. Similar concerns had been raised in Portugal in the 1560s when the African population of the Portuguese capital had risen to 10 percent. (4)

English Female Slaveholders