Moors, Social Anxiety and Horror in Thomas Rawlins's The Rebellion

Abstract

In her article, Anna Fåhraeus contextualizes race within multiple images of social horror in Thomas Rawlins’s little-discussed tragedy The Rebellion (1640). While racial representation of the Moors in the play adheres to stereotype, Fåhraeus contends that the multiple racial doubling works to interrogate the certainty of nature versus culture in relation to race, even as the image of the tailors that runs through the play does the same in relation to class. Both issues—race and class—become sexualized through the juxtaposition of male and female characters and gender itself thus becomes a third site of epistemological uncertainty: are women materially changed through sexual experience or exposure? Fåhraeus suggests that The Rebellion merits serious consideration because it links the depiction of race to upward social mobility and constructions of female purity, and all three to the loss of white male privilege.