‘Better to the Commonwealth’: Merchant,Mixedness, and Demographic Revision
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Dr. Kyle Grady
UCI English Department
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Friday, February 3, 2023
12:00-1:00pm
HG 1030
Lunch will be provided
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Please click here to RSVP
by or before Monday, January 30th.
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In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo asserts that he can “answer…better to the commonwealth” for marrying Jessica than Lancelot can for conceiving a child with a Moor. In making such a claim, Lorenzo demonstrates that early modern assessments of racial mixing included perceived ideas about the impact of exogamy on a broader society. As this talk explores, notions of racial mixing as either beneficial or detrimental to a given population have oscillated since at least the early modern period. Such appeals have not only been employed to hierarchize different formations of mixedness. They have also tended to rely upon and forward distorted representations of past, present, and future demographics. This talk reads Merchant’s appeal to a broader populace alongside other early modern English formulations treating mixedness as a point of extrapolation. It situates such early modern approaches into a longer history of discourse on mixedness and its perceived demographic impact, and it considers how such theories have routinely worked to undergird broader projects of racial construction.
Bio
Kyle Grady is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. His current book project explores representations of racial mixing in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His research has appeared in the journals Shakespeare Quarterly, New Literary History, and Pedagogy, among others.