SOURCE: Gutierrez, Nancy A. “King Arthur, Scotland, Utopia and the Italianate Englishman: What Does Race Have to Do with It?” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 37-48.

In the following essay, Gutierrez looks at Baldwin's The Funerals of King Edward the Sixth, Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and a speech by Queen Elizabeth I to demonstrate that there was a developing awareness of racial hierarchies in mid-sixteenth-century England.

Exactly what does it mean that race is a category of analysis for early modern writings? In most cases, the word race suggests a “color”/whiteness binary, in which whiteness is privileged. However, in the first half of the sixteenth century, color was not yet the dominant “other” within the English culture. So the task of using race as a category of analysis in this early, early modern period means that configurations other than the color/whiteness binary should be explored, configurations, I would argue...