Melancholy Nature

Abstract

Abstract The construction of race in early modern England relied upon the creation of non-Christian subjects. English colonial activity was largely directed against fellow Christians: Irish Catholics, Spanish Catholics, converted Africans or people of African descent. But the extermination or enslavement of a people becomes impossible to justify against acknowledged Christians. The means by which England becomes both ‘white’ and ‘Christian’ was a racial fiction that purged English Protestantism of Catholics and other Christians who were not regarded as properly part of the nation-state. This fiction simultaneously marked these people as available for English exploitation. The English strategy of racialization made conversion to Christianity impossible for certain groups of colonial subjects: black melancholy rendered them pagan by nature. This melancholy marking moves to the surface of the skin with the legal codification of chattel slavery. But Shakespeare shows the ground of the thinking and early stagings of the idea.