The excerpt is from a speech by the fictional character Othello, whose blackness is a constant feature of academic, theatrical, and literary controversy. What did his blackness mean to early modern Englishmen? This is the kind of complex issue regarding chromatics (color) and ethnology that Mark Dawson examines in Bodies Complexioned. Historians have frequently deconstructed ethnicity in early modern England, for example, in Othello, by adulterating assertions such as “Turn thy complexion” and “Happly for I am Black,” and insults that include “sooty bosom” and “the thick-lips.” In such cases, the color “Black” is denatured as a description of “white” ethnicity. Alternatively and paradoxically, these sorts of phrases are asserted to have no relationship to skin color, and become reflections of something else: the theory of four humors or a character's disposition. But Dawson goes further and claims that references to color were fashioned by temperament. For example, with Othello, his sins of conspiracy, killing, and suicide could make him “Black,” as they were the kinds of homicide, uxoricide, and suicide that a “Black” man may commit.

Dawson questions twenty-first century notions of color and ethnicity. For example, in Othello, Shakespeare uses “pale” and “[rose] red” to describe the “white” complexioned Desdemona. Dawson suggests that these kinds of allusions reflect English reticence to adopt whiteness as an all-embracing ethnicity. The English only gradually accepted “white” as a moniker because of the kudos of being so. Ironically, a synonymous practice is followed by people of African descent who still use the colors white, black, brown, red, and yellow as popular sobriquets to describe their own complexions. This of course does not mean that people of African descent are unaware of other ethnic groups being an archetype. Using the logic of this trajectory in early modern England, Africans could still represent the archetypal “blacks,” no matter how many “whites” embellish themselves atramentously. This suggestion is worthy of investigation.

Nevertheless, irrespective of such color coding, the most important narrative about ethnicity in early modern England is that people of African and Asian descent lived there. It is problematic to write about ethnology and racism in England without acknowledging that fact. It is a narrative revealed by a diverse range of historians, including Ivan Van Sertima, Imtiaz Habib, Peter Fryer, Edward Scobie, Miranda Kaufmann, and many more. Moreover, all these authors have asserted, as Dawson does, that whiteness's popularity was linked to the pathology of colonialism at the end of the seventeenth century.

Certainly, Dawson is correct to distinguish early modern ethnology from modern ethnicity, because early modern people had different reference points. For example, early modern writers used the “Mark of Cain” to explain “Black” complexions and exoticized Cain's skin color, stigmatizing it as a punishment for being the first murderer. And, of course, other early moderns were willing to regurgitate confabulated stories about Canaan, the grandson of Noah. They postulated that Canaan was cursed “Black” for his father's sins. These issues, which Dawson does tentatively touch on, in fact, lay at the heart of discussing early modern ethnology.

Dawson faces tangible difficulties in excavating early modern notions of chromatics and ethnology, by not probing the matters referred to above. This is because modern perceptions of ethnicity have been warped by the science of race and reconfigured by institutional racism. We see ethnology through the bespoke systems of “race” manufactured in laboratories, churches, libraries, and museums by Carl Linnaeus, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Charles C. Nott, and Benjamin Rush. These misconceptions become systemic because of the very nature of early modern studies. After all, the early modern period starts in the fifteenth century and ends three hundred years later. Therefore, in theory, Blumenbach's intrinsically flawed but detailed concepts of “races” are as indicative of the period as Thomas More's musings on “barefoot pygmy Aethiopians” (Onyeka Nubia, England's Other Countrymen (2019), 104–7). Early moderns were often merely speculating on difference, and Thomas Browne, Robert Boyle, and Francis Bernier created a movable feast of chromatics, only some of which can be aligned to modern racism. Dawson could have given this greater clarity by dividing Bodies Complexioned into periodic sections. The early modern period does not have a coherent or consistent ethnology.

However, Dawson cautiously roots his discussions on ethnology within ordinary people's interactions and not Renaissance theater. But one wonders whether we could have heard more about how plays such as Othello can only give us an entrée to early modern chromatics and ethnology. This is because whether we like it or not, people are most likely to come across early modern ethnicity by reading or seeing Renaissance drama. These theatrical works were created to entertain, but they also sought to educate, inform, or in some cases politicize. In pursuing these intentions, these playwrights exaggerated human emotions and polemically promoted prejudices. But interestingly, these plays still also contain positive references to blackness. For example, Othello's blackness is constantly prefixed and clarified by his nobillis and “royal siege,” and he is honorifically styled “Noble Moor.” But blackness without a qualification could also ennoble in early modern Europe, and “Black” could be “perfect” and revered for its unchanging divinity, beauty, and constancy. This “perfect” blackness could be symbolically imagined through the skin complexions of Saint Maurice, Morien, Balthazar, Zipporah (Moses's wife), and Cleopatra. The persistency of this positive “Black” iconography should not be disregarded. And it would have been edifying to see Dawson's views on this.