In her study of blackface performance on Renaissance and Restoration English stages, Vaughan surveys the theatrical conventions of early modern English drama to reveal the layered meanings that have attached to “blacking up” (2) from its earliest use in medieval pageants to mark the fall of Lucifer to its subsequent incarnations in nineteenth-century minstrel shows up through its use in a modern musical like Holiday Inn, where Bing Crosby wears blackface. In her reading of a wide range of both canonical and noncanonical plays, her emphasis is “on patterns—character types, plot situations, tropes, and other performative tactics … repeated from play to play” (5), which cumulatively made blackface into a “polyphonic signifier” (2) powerfully shaping images of black people.

To this end she scours early modern drama for depictions of Moors, specifically the “blackamoors” referred to in early modern English discourse, observing how the stage yields a series of Moorish types, from the evil devil, to the exotic royal, to the servile bedtrickster. In providing readings that are brief and suggestive rather than expansive, she produces a survey similar to those that Eldred D. Jones and Elliot H. Tokson offered on dramatic representations of blacks, except that she decisively shifts the focus to the material practices of staging blackface. Where these earlier studies “collapsed chronology, grouping early and late plays together” (3 n. 7), Vaughan tries to be more attuned to their movement over time, analyzing how revivals and adaptations of plays with black characters build on and sediment earlier associations of blackness. Just as Renaissance drama inherits from the medieval mystery plays an association of blackness with sinfulness and damnation that it shapes to new ends, so the Restoration theater obsessively returns to Shakespeare's Moor, in a process Vaughan describes as “Othellofication,” rewriting the older play but with a difference. As she contends, “With each repetition, new resonances are added” such that “the black Moor imagined by English audiences from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries accrued layers of signification that contributed … to the racial attitudes of the twentieth century” (170).

But taking the long view with regard to racial attitudes has its limitations. By emphasizing similarities over time, she attributes to Renaissance dramatists the sort of racist ideologies that emerge in the specific, and in many cases later, context of North America and chattel slavery. Looking for such similarities might at times make it difficult to read the more important differences. For instance, an early chapter observes the presence of Moorish kings in court revels of the sixteenth century. Although such enactments of the Moorish king emphasize his royal grandeur by dressing him “with cloth of gold and blue velvet” and “sleeves of silver sarcenet” (28), Vaughan reads these representations as functioning to construct “King Henry VIII's court … as a beacon of light to far away nations who needed his civilizing influence” and as being therefore “strangely prescient of what would become England's colonial aspirations in the next century” (28). Might, however, such productions have done the converse? One could read such spectacles as attributing to Henry VIII's court the luxury, the wealth, and the learning associated with Moorish culture. Indeed, we might want to ask who is civilizing whom in this masquerade?

In one of her most interesting chapters, where she treats representations of Moors as “Avenging Villains,” Vaughan poses a fascinating question: why, just as chattel slavery takes hold in the colonies, does Restoration theater increasingly depict more humanized Moorish characters in adaptations like Ravenscroft's 1678 production of Titus Andronicus and Behn's 1676 production of Abdelazer: The Moor's Revenge? Vaughan argues that people in England had lost their fear of blacks through frequent exposure to them, since former slaves had traveled back to London from the colonies in large numbers during this period. But she also suggests that depictions of Moors function in the period's drama in connection with issues of “legitimacy and succession” (142), since the plays she surveys consistently position characters in blackface as defenders or avengers of besieged bloodlines. Considered on these terms, such characters may function less as representations of a colonial “reality” than as tropes used in quite suggestive and unexpected ways to resolve the deep social rifts of Restoration England.

Elsewhere Vaughan is agile in teasing out the implications of blackface's metadramatic potential on early modern English stages. In fact, in my view her analysis of the intricacies of blackface performance—specifically its powers to unhinge or confound essentialized notions of identity—is where this book makes its most significant contribution, building on the rich body of criticism on the transvestite theater. She shows how many plays toyed self-referentially with theater practices for turning fair skin dark—Othello's “sooty bosom” reminding the audience that they are observing a white actor applied with black soot or burned cork, and other plays going further in actually staging the removal of color as part of the performance. By so doing, early modern theater cultivated a sort of “double vision” (109) among its auditors, “[fetishizing] black pigmentation as a marker of racial difference, [and] constructing categories of blackness and whiteness even as they conflate them” (109).

Yet even as these insights suggest a degree of indeterminacy to English conceptions of blackness, Vaughan may prematurely stabilize them in arguing that blackness signified “all manner of human vices,” including “moral corruption, murder, rebellion and treason, sexual perversion” (24). Critics like Mary Floyd-Wilson (in English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]), for instance, have identified other valences, observing in medieval and early modern physiological discourse a range of positive meanings associated with a black complexion, including considerable powers of contemplation and even divinity. In observing that “racial attitudes were still in the early stages of formation” (15), Vaughan seems to agree that early modern conceptions of race were distinct from their modern incarnations. Her book invites us to consider its earlier forms and manifestations and suggests that we still have much to learn about the history of the category of race.