Underlying much recent historicist criticism lurks the conviction that early modern England was in many ways—like postmodern America—a transitional culture caught between outmoded but still powerful ideologies and newer economic, political, and social realities. Fractious early modern debates regarding religion, marriage, nationhood, and governmental authority sometimes seem strangely akin to what we read now in our daily newspapers. Yet in race studies, scholars have generally eschewed identification with the past, arguing that race was not in Shakespeare's lifetime the stable category it is today. Shaped by Europe's history of colonialism and enslavement of African peoples, as well as by the Enlightenment's pseudoscientific classification of world populations, race today means something quite different than it did four hundred years ago.

Lara Bovilsky challenges us to rethink this assumption, arguing that early modern writers’ racialist discourse is similar in many ways to our own. Scholars in our field, she charges, assume that contemporary views of race reside in fixed biological categories, particularly that of skin color, when in fact they are constructed by national heritage, class, religion, language, and culture. If race was a fluid, shifting category in early modern England, it is (as the election of 2008 bears out) equally protean today.

Bovilsky, in other words, broadens our concept of race to include the contingencies that help to shape it. First among these is gender. As Kim F. Hall has shown in her pioneering study Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, 1995), race and gender were mutually constitutive categories. Bovilsky builds on this in her discussion of Desdemona, arguing that her decision to marry a man so unlike herself underscores “the exogamous potential of all heterosexual marriage” (49). Desdemona is, in a sense, darkened by succumbing to her desire to marry outside her own culture. So, too, with Jessica. As long as she “relies on her father to be continually distinguished from him, in manners if not in blood, she is immersed in Jewish signification rather than liberated from it” (86).

Shylock is racialized by repeated tropes that suggest common ancestors, blood ties, and morality among the members of his community. Culture morphs into race, moving in the circular logic that Jews are not only villainous because they are alien but also alien because they are villainous. Riches become a sign of Jewishness, and Shylock's reference to Barabas during the trial scene (alluding, Bovilsky maintains, to the villainous hero of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta) sets up a Jewish genealogy.

Bovilsky extends her discussion of race to nationality in a chapter on the English Italian. Noting the predominance of Italian settings in English plays written for English audiences, she describes a multifaceted English construction of Italy: it is a site of radical, even racialized moral otherness, a center of international trade and wealth, and a seat of learning and high culture. Thus in their representations of a highly sophisticated culture fraught with corruption, Italian plays provided the English audience with a hybrid imaginary. To exemplify this imaginary, she discusses John Milton's Italian sonnets. Written in Italian and addressed to Emilia, a region of Italy, the sonnets offer a double consciousness of English and Italian traditions and a speaker who is palpably estranged from both.

Bovilsky then turns to John Webster's The White Devil, which demonstrates, in her view, the ways in which Jacobean drama's use of Italian settings allows “the English to depict disturbing tendencies toward immorality, religious errancy, and sexual license as the native province of national others” (118). The Italian darkness of these plays, in other words, leads the English audience to read the Italian character as racially different.

Barbarous Play's final chapter turns to Renaissance theories of epistemology and science, particularly the humoral theories outlined in Mary Floyd-Wilson's English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2003). Early modern theories regarding bodily humors anticipated, Bovilsky argues, later uses of “science” in racial discourse. There is incipient racism, for example, in Shylock's claim to a visceral hatred of Antonio in the trial scene and in Beatrice-Joanna's natural repulsion at DeFlores in the first half of Thomas Middleton's The Changeling.

Bovilsky believes that today's widespread belief in the stability of racial classifications perpetuates racist stereotypes, that we need to understand the contingencies that contribute to racialist discourse in all periods—our own as well as the past. She concludes her study by reiterating her initial premise, that just as early modern drama conveyed constructions of race that were always becoming, always being reshaped by a variety of contingencies, so too do twenty-first century racial narratives. Her slim but thought-provoking study challenges us to reexamine our own assumptions about race even as we explore those of early modern England. Even if Bovilsky's readings sometimes lead her away from well-trodden paths, Barbarous Play is a valuable contribution to our understanding of racialist discourse, in the present as well as the past.