Final Sample: I conclude by sharing a little of my current scholarship. Below are three poems. The first is a verse letter from George Herbert to Francis Bacon, a prominent figure in the court of James I. It was not uncommon for aspiring courtiers to write poems seeking the favor of a senior figure, and to do so in the erotic mode of love poetry.

Here, Herbert is a young man flattering the elder statesman, Bacon. In the first poem, written in English, he presents to Bacon a gift, what he calls “a Blackamore.” That gift is the second poem, which, in several manuscript copies, accompanies the first poem. Why “Blackamore”? Because this second poem, in Latin, is the complaint of an Ethiopian woman against Cestus, a “man of a different colour,” for refusing to return her love. The two poems are a racialized courtship, in which the dejected black woman of the Latin poem is a stand-in for Herbert, the young courtier seeking the “love” (i.e. social or perhaps political support) of an admired senior member of the Jacobean court.

The third poem, also in Latin, is Cestus’ reply. Below are all three poems, with translations and an image of the manuscript containing the two Latin “Aethiopissa” poems: 1. “To My Lord Chancellour Sir Francis Bacon” [audio] My Lord a Diamond to mee you sent, And I to you a Blackamore present. Gifts speake the giver. For as those Refractions Shining, and sharp, point out your rare Perfections; So by the Other you may read in mee (Whom Schollers Habitt & Obscurity Have soil’d with Blacks) the colour of my state, Till your bright gift my darknes did abate. Onely (most noble Lord) shutt not the dore Against this meane & humble Blackamore. Perhaps some other subject I had tryed But that my Inke was factious for this side. 2. “Æthiopissa ambit Cestum Diuersi Coloris Virum” Quid mihi si facies nigra est? Hoc, Ceste, colore   Sunt etiam tenebræ, quas tamen optat Amor. Cernis vt exustâ semper sit fronte viator;   Ah longum, quæ te deperit, errat iter. Si nigro sit terra solo, quis despicit aruum?   Claude oculos, & erunt omnia nigra tibi: Aut aperi, & cernes corpus quas proijcit vmbras;   Hoc saltem officio fungar amore tui. Cùm mihi sit facies fumus, quas pectore flammas   Iamdudum tacitè delituisse putes? Dure, negas? O fata mihi præsaga doloris,   Quæ mihi lugubres contribuêre genas! “An Ethiopian Woman Woos Cestus, a Man of a Different Colour” [audio] What though my face be black? This is the colour, Cestus,   That shadows have; yet love does these prefer. You perceive that the traveler always has a sunburnt brow;   Ah! long is the road she wanders who perishes for you. Though the land’s soil be black, does anyone despise the field?   Close your eyes, and all will be black to you; Or open them, and see the shadows that a body casts:   That office at least would I do for love of you. Since my face is smoke, what flames do you suppose   Have long within my breast hid silently? Harsh one, you reject me? O fates, you were portents  Of my sorrow, who gave me mournful cheeks. 3. “Cesti ad Æthiopissam responsio” Vota precésque tuas nigro signabo lapillo,   Conuenit Æthiopum vultibus iste color. Optat an odit Amor tenebras? cui matris habetur   Candidulae mater candida spuma maris: Aut si non odit, nullo discrimine agentur   (Sat scio) cœcigeno lux tenebrǽque deo. Si quod amoris iter carpsisti æstate, nigrescas,   Amissam formam reddit amoris hyems. Si nigro seu terra solo vis ipsa placere   Calce tero terram; vis tibi fiat idem? Lumina clausa velis? age, portus amoris ocellus,   Hoc clauso nullus cor penetrabit amor. Lumina aperta velis, quo spectem corporis vmbram?   Nigra sed illustris corporis vmbra placet. Vmbram hanc esse cupis? nimias o pix mera Cesto   Offendes tenebras, albus an ater ero. Vmbram hanc sume tamen, modo possis demere; nolo   Invidiosa comes sis, velut vmbra mei. Vende alijs multos flammarum e pectore fumos,   Sæpe quidem fumi plus minor ignis habet. Nigra rogas? pudeat; fatum et fortuna reclamant,   Alba solent albis iungere, nigra nigris. “Cestus’ Reply to the Ethiopian Woman” [audio] I will mark your vows and prayers with this, a dark pebble;  That color befits the faces of Ethiopians. Does Love desire the darkness, or despise it—the mother  Whose gleaming mother was the glittering foam of the sea? Or, if the blind-born god (I know too well) hates not  The darkness, he will not distinguish light from dark. If you grow dark in summer traveling the road of love,  Love’s winter will restore your lost appearance. Like earth with its black soil you would be deemed fair?  I tread the earth with my heel. You crave the same? Should my eyes be closed? Come now, the eye is love’s harbour;  When this is closed, no love will penetrate the heart. Open them? That I may espy the body’s shadow? Indeed,  A radiant body’s sable shadow pleases. You’d be that shadow? O, total pitch, you’d Cestus strike  With too much darkness—be I white or black. Yet, inhabit that shadow, provided you can withdraw: I’d not  Have you be an envious companion, as if really my shadow. Proclaim, cry up to others, the flaming smoke from your breast:  For often indeed small fires have greater smoke. Black, you court me? For shame! fate and fortune protest—  Are wont to join white with white, and black with black.

You’ll notice, perhaps, that the second Latin poem in the manuscript, Cesti responsio or “Cestus’ Reply,” is subscribed “Finis. Georg: Herbert” (fol. 168). The hand, however, is definitely not Herbert’s, and for reasons too complex to explore here, it is impossible to determine with any certainty that Herbert wrote it. It is unlikely that Bacon wrote the response. It’s not in his hand, he died in 1626, and the manuscript (the only one known to include it) is dated 1639. Herbert died in 1633, which only adds to reasons for doubting the authenticity of the scribal attribution to “Georg: Herbert.” Still, because scribes routinely copied poems from already extant manuscripts, it is at least possible that Herbert is the author. The scribe seemed to think so.

It is also important to bear in mind, finally, that racial (and racist) ideologies as we understand them today were only beginning to emerge in the seventeenth century, so we need to be cautious when assessing the racial dimension of works produced during that time. The second of the two Latin poems, for example, seems clearly to be a cruel rejection of Aethiopissa based on her skin colour, and concludes with a kind of erotic apartheid—despite Cestus’ fleeting admission at line 14 that “indeed, / A radiant body’s sable shadow pleases” (Nigra sed illustris corporis vmbra placet). The absolutist sentiment with which the poem concludes—fate proclaiming that white belongs with white, and black with black—is racialized in a literal sense. But the black/white dichotomy it enacts is rooted in an ancient and value-laden metaphor according to which white (and light) are associated with purity and goodness, black (and darkness) with contamination and evil. Recall, for example, the passage from Milton’s Areopagitica cited above, where true purity is whiteness itself, as though a substance one might possess. The language of “shadow” (vmbrae) introduced by Aethiopissa in the first of the two Latin poems complicates this simplistic binary—a complication that Cestus in response momentarily acknowledges, but completely shuts down in the end.

The first of the two Latin poems, on the other hand, has been read variously as a love elegy satirizing its speaker—a black woman who would presume to love Cestus, this “man of a different colour”—and as a humanizing portrayal of the same. Either way, it is difficult to avoid the fact that Herbert, in giving voice to an Ethiopian woman, put on a kind of literary blackface. (Though blackface is a distinctly modern phenomenon, derived from late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century American minstrelsy, the practice of entertaining white Europeans with displays of blackness has been around since at least the fifteenth century. English actors on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, moreover, routinely played black characters—though whether they caricatured supposedly black attributes or altered their appearance in performance is difficult to say.)

Scholars of the British Renaissance are only beginning to grapple with the racial dimension of English culture and letters. I, for one, am certainly baffled by it—just as much of the Renaissance world continues to puzzle me many years after I first encountered it as an undergraduate.

Thanks for taking some time to explore that world with me, and feel free to email me with any questions.