The Shakespeare Centre London at King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe is pleased to invite you to the first gathering of London Shakespeare Seminar in this academic year.

This seminar is free and open to anyone who has an interest in early modern literature and culture. In this first meeting of the seminar, we will be hearing papers from two wonderful colleagues:

Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami (University of Manchester): ‘"A lovely boy stolen from an Indian king": Early Modern English Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean

Dr Andrea Stevens (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Racial Masquerade and the Early English Actress

You can read their abstracts and bios below. Refreshments to follow. Any enquiries should be directed to the Shakespeare Centre London: shakespeare@kcl.ac.uk.

"A lovely boy stolen from an Indian king": Early Modern English Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean

Much of the action of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is propelled by the conflict between Oberon and Titania over an Indian boy. The child, a changeling described to have been taken from an Indian king, is in the care of Titania while Oberon angrily seeks to acquire him as a personal ‘henchman’. Little is heard from the child himself, who is not necessarily present on stage and has no lines. There is much that can be said of this plotline in the play, but few have considered it in relation to the very active European trade in enslaved peoples in the Indian Ocean during this period. This paper will examine this violent, burgeoning, and underexplored human commerce, considering England’s role and engagement in the trade. It will also consider how the trade came to intersect with the more (in)famous Atlantic slave trade, and the consequences of this commerce that continue to this day.

Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami is a cultural historian specialising in the Global Renaissance. She is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at the University of Manchester and a research fellow at the University of Liverpool. She is founding editor of Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs, memorients.com), a digital platform on premodern encounters between England and the Islamic Worlds. She is also founding convener of Network of Sister in Academia (NeSA), the first international professional network for Muslim women academics. Lubaaba’s first book, Travellers in the Golden Realm: How Mughal India Connected England to the World (John Murray, 2024) examines English travel to India through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is currently working on two projects: an edition of Titus Andronicus with Pascale Aebischer for Cambridge University Press and a second monograph, working title English Travellers and Indian Queens in Early Modern Literature, 1526-1675.

Racial Masquerade and the Early English Actress

Drawn from my monograph in progress, my talk will explore the centrality of feminine racial masquerade to the personal mythology of Queen Henrietta Maria, partner to King Charles I. I define the device of the ‘Maid-as-Moor’, or the white woman who temporarily disguises herself as an African only to be revealed as white in the course of the masque or play; by the 1630s, it was more common to see ‘blackness’ performed as a disguise rather than as a static identity (as for example in earlier plays such as Othello). This fact of theatre history has not been sufficiently explored or indeed tied to the conservative ‘feminist’ politics of Queen Henrietta Maria. One key example: the first play written for and performed by English actresses is Walter Montagu’s 1633 pastoral romance The Shepherd’s Paradise, commissioned by the queen herself and centrally featuring a black-face disguise plot. For this talk I’ll survey a range of ‘race-making’ performance events deploying this trope of the ‘Maid-as-Moor’ – sometimes satirically or critically – in a variety of venues. My talk thus reveals the intersection of the history of the early English actress with the history of black-face performance on English stages.

Specializing in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Andrea Stevens is Associate Professor of English, Theatre, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and affiliated faculty at the European Union Center; for the fall semester 2024, she is a Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama (2013) and her edition of William Heminge’s 1639 tragedy The Fatal Contract – the first modernized edition of this play-text – can be found in the new Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020). With the UIUC department of Theatre, she has adapted for performance and/or served as dramaturg for several Shakespeare productions, most recently Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet; she has also directed her own adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi at the Armory Free Theatre. At the present time, she’s working on two separate book projects: Racial Masquerade and the Early English Actress and Shakespeare, Gender, and the Performance of the Commonplace. Her talk for King’s will be drawn from the former.