In the early-modern dramaturgical device of the bed-trick, the "reveal" characteristically hinges on the discovery of a substituted bedmate by the (conventionally) male victim. In this topic, I will examine what happens to such a discovery when that surrogate sexual partner is a dark-skinned female servant. With primary reference to John Fletcher’s The Knight of Malta (1617), I will also highlight the significant and, as yet, overlooked connection in the period between the bed-trick motif and the myth of Ixion.1 The notion of "discovery" in Fletcher’s play, and in similar dramatic texts of the period, emphasizes the powerful display of black femininity to the male dupe, and to the audience. At the same time, these particular revelations are characterized not by sudden or automatic recognition, but by the male character’s complex and paradoxical ignoring of the black female body that can never quite be discovered. In his attempts to define black femininity during the process of discovery, the dupe is confounded not only by the black maid’s continually shifting persona as enacted on the early-modern stage, but also by a troubling sense of the loss of his own identity.
"What difference twixt this Moor, and her faire Dame?"
In The Knight of Malta, Mountferrat, a Knight who has taken a vow of chastity, lusts after the noblewoman Oriana. When she rejects his advances, he tells her dark-skinned Moorish servant, Zanthia, to forge a letter announcing that her mistress plans to marry a Turk—an act considered treasonous. Oriana is then brought to court and defended in a duel between Gomera, an aging Spaniard, and Miranda, a young man in training to become a Knight of Malta. She is found innocent, and Gomera is then given her hand in marriage, though Mountferrat vows to ruin the relationship. Later, when Oriana praises Miranda in the presence of her new husband, Gomera becomes jealous and accuses her of infidelity. Oriana falls unconscious following these allegations. Her husband, wracked with guilt, believes himself to have been the cause of her "death." What has actually happened, however, is that Zanthia (the Moorish servant) has drugged her mistress with a potion that makes the body simulate death. Zanthia reveals her poisoning of Oriana to Mountferrat, and he makes her a promise that once he has raped her mistress as she lies unconscious in her tomb, Zanthia may kill her. The two villains go to the burial-place, but are discovered by Gomera and the others. Finally, Mountferrat is punished by a ruling that banishes both him and Zanthia from Malta, and forces him to marry the Moorish servant. Oriana and Gomera are reunited.
As the above plot summary indicates, Fletcher’s play centers on the political stability of Malta. The Turks, described by one Knight as "head-bound Infidels" (I.ii.10), are its threatening outsiders; but the island is also represented as internally divided along racial lines. This schism is particularly evident in the male characters’ polarized attitudes to Zanthia and Oriana. As Bindu Malieckal argues: "Zanthia’s vicious treatment contrasts with the delicacy and respect with which her female opposite, a white woman named Oriana, is handled. While characters denigrate and attack Zanthia, they praise and rescue Oriana."2 Though white women’s sexual appetite is represented as a threatening and unknowable force requiring patriarchal sanction—after all, without any proof, Oriana is accused of cuckolding Gomera— black serving-women are believed to be doubly voracious, and therefore doubly threatening. In his Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), Thomas Wright draws such a distinction between women in terms of their color and their sexual temperance when he claims that "onely women that be of a hote complexion, and for the most part, those that be blacke or browne … have their affections most vehement." According to Wright, though all women are subject to "sundry passions," dark-skinned women are subject to even more inflamed passions than their fair English counterparts.3 When placed in opposition to Zanthia, Oriana is, therefore, persistently purified by her patriarchal culture.
Such portrayals of black female sexuality as especially voracious were, of course, commonplace on the early-modern stage. In John Webster’s The White Devil (1612), for example, Monticelso condemns Vittoria’s "black lust," thus underscoring the commonly perceived link between blackness and carnality (III. i.7).4 Kim Hall describes an "emerging tradition" in the drama of the early-modern period, in which black maids are seen to act as the evil and promiscuous antitheses of white female virtue.5 These stereotypical representations of black female sexuality seem to hold true in Fletcher’s play. In stark contrast to her mistress, Zanthia openly and bawdily articulates her sexual desires, and Oriana reprimands her servant several times for this sexual badinage (III.ii.63). Referring to such presumed connections between blackness, transgression and uncontrolled sex drive in the representation of dark-skinned women on the stage, Elliot Tokson notes that black servants often act as a threat to white female chastity by procuring their fair-skinned mistresses in order to facilitate the lust of white men.6 These conventionally-represented black maids (including Fletcher’s Zanthia)—slaves, as it were, to their libidos—often anticipate receiving sexual favors for such procurement. The convention of the lascivious black female servant was, in sum, well-established by the time Fletcher was writing The Knight of Malta, and it clearly influences his characterization of Zanthia.
In fact, Gomera excoriates the maid as a "bawd to mischiefe," suggesting his view of her both as a possible panderer and as a sexually transgressive figure. Zanthia fulfills this stereotypical function when she deviously attempts to acquire Oriana’s body for Mountferrat’s sexual pleasure (IV.ii.266). She boasts to the Frenchman that "it is in me with as much ease / To give her [Oriana] up to thy possession" (IV.i.109). Carolyn Prager says in relation to the generic name Zanthia/ Zanche that "four out of the five bondwomen so named follow the lustful immoral prototype established by Marston in Sophonisba."7 The Zanthia in John Marston’s play is Sophonisba’s maid, who betrays her mistress in order to facilitate Syphax’s lust. I detect a further connection between the two names in the 1647 Fletcher and Beaumont folio, where the stage directions for The Knight of Malta confuse the names and refer to Zanthia as "Zanchia" (I.iii.263).8 It is reasonable to suggest that the name, as well as the character’s dark skin color, would have been linked with duplicity and licentiousness for an early-modern audience aware of this theatrical tradition. In fact, while Anthony Gerard Barthelemy shows that black women in early-modern playtexts "seem never to be wholly free of the taint of the powerful and enduring stereotype of the black, malevolent meretrix," he also goes so far as to describe Fletcher’s Zanthia as "the most malevolent of all the Moorish waiting-women in seventeenth-century drama."9
Mountferrat specifically correlates Zanthia’s villainy with her dark skin, pointing out that, although his own deeds are nefarious, her blackness predisposes her to more extreme acts of wickedness. He thus locates her blackness in diabolism, while simultaneously naturalizing this association:
Bloody deeds
Are grateful offerings, pleasing to the devil, And thou, in thy black shape, and blacker actions, Being hell’s perfect character art delighted To do what I, tho’ infinitely wicked, Tremble to hear. (IV.i.74-9)
Eldred Jones and others have shown how these associations with hell and transgression pervade early-modern dramatic representations of dark skin color.10 As Tokson, Jones, and Malieckal have noted, the other characters in Fletcher’s play consistently associate Zanthia’s black skin with the devil, thereby reinforcing the perceived link between blackness, the demonic, and sin.11 Indeed, Mountferrat denigrates Zanthia as "hell it self confin’d in flesh," confirming the view that Zanthia’s black skin is a manifestation of the evil within her (IV.ii.185).
This common perception of black maids as morally reprehensible, and inherently less chaste than their class and racial counterparts, can also be discerned in Mountferrat’s polarized view of Zanthia and Oriana. This is based on skin color and social rank, as well as on perceptions of the women’s sexual temperance. In a pivotal early scene in the play, Mountferrat alludes to the myth of Ixion in order to reinforce such a disparity between the two women:
Oh my Zanthia,My Pearl, that scorns a staine! I much repent All my neglects: let me, Ixion like, Embrace my black cloud, since my Juno is So wrathfull, and averse; thou art more soft And full of dalliance than the fairest flesh, And farre more loving. (I.i.180-86)
In Greek mythology, Ixion attempted to seduce Hera, but was deceived by Zeus into copulating with a dark cloud disguised in the form of the goddess.12 Early-modern readers would have been aware of this myth: Sands Penuen fully describes the story of Ixion in Ambitions Scourge (1611), and Henry Hutton mentions the myth in his later comic poem Follie’sAnatomie (1619).13 Early-modern dramatists also alluded to the myth in their work. In Richard Brome’s The English Moore; or the Mock-Marriage, Nathaniel sleeps with a woman he thinks to be a negro, but who turns out actually to be a white woman in disguise.14 His delighted reaction—"I aym’d but at a Clowd and clasp’d a Juno"—clearly indicates that the playwright was drawing on the myth, and it intimates to the audience the character’s awareness that a white bed partner is more valuable to him than the black woman who functions as her sexual substitute (Viii.53).15 Earlier in the play, when the jealous Quicksands blacks up his young wife Millicent in order to prevent his own cuckoldry, he reassures her by saying "thou dost but case thy Splendour in a Clowd"—again indicating that Brome was invoking the Ixion myth (III.i.88). In this case, Millicent complexly embodies both the dark cloud and the fair woman when she adopts blackface masquerade.
In the scene from Fletcher’s play quoted above, while Oriana—Mountferrat’s Juno/Hera—is averse to his sexual advances, Zanthia, his "dark cloud," is conversely constructed as more "full of dalliance."16 A direct link is thereby made between Zanthia’s darkness and her sexual impropriety, which in turn is contrasted with the self-restraint associated with Oriana’s "fairest flesh." As Kim Hall notes, "blackness" in early-modern discourses is frequently opposed to "fairness," rather than to "whiteness." Such polarized terms, she argues, are most frequently employed in relation to women’s physical appearance or to their moral state, and have a particular potency when applied to females.17 In The English Moore, Nathaniel supports this bipartite view of female sexuality when he views the (counterfeit) Moor, Millicent, as more easily open to his sexual advances precisely because she is black, thus frustrating Quicksands’s attempts to preserve his wife’s chastity. On his initial meeting with her, Nathaniel describes Millicent as a "black coneybury" (IV.iii.68), a derogatory term that Sara Jayne Steen identifies as a slang reference for a loose woman, and it clearly indicates that he already assumes, without any assent from Millicent, that she is sexually available to him.18
By referring to Zanthia as his "black cloud," Mountferrat is positioning her as Oriana’s sexual substitute and as a body that he may sexually enjoy at will. He emphatically makes this point again when he later declares:
It is not love, but strong Libidinous will That triumphs o’re me, and to satiat that, What difference twixt this Moor, and her faire Dame? Night makes their hews alike, their use is so: Whose hand so subtile, he can colours name, If he do winck, and touch ‘em: lust being blind, Never in women did distinction find. (I.i.241-7)
In insinuating the interchangeability of women’s bodies under the cover of night, Mountferrat’s speech can be read as constituting a metatheatrical reference to the popular early-modern dramaturgical convention of the bed-trick. William Bowden defines the trick as follows: "X, expecting to lie with A, is caused to lie with B instead through the conspiracy of A and B."19 In other words, the dupe has sexual relations with someone other than s/he intended. While there were many variations on the hoax, I will focus here on one particular instance of the bed-trick that involves a noblewoman’s attempting to protect her chastity from male lust by putting a black servant in her bed as her replacement.20
If we follow the format of the bed-trick device as outlined, Ixion, who is tricked into having sex with a proxy "dark" partner, can be described as a victim of this type of deception. Fletcher’s Mountferrat, as a self-styled Ixion figure, could plausibly be interpreted as making this connection with the trick when he muses that Oriana "might with colour dis-allow my suit," which demonstrates his awareness that Oriana may place Zanthia (a woman of color) in her bed to avoid his lust (I.i.18). Though Patricia Phillippy says that "the bed trick relies too much on the willing participation of women, making them partners in crime," we can see that it in fact emphasizes a distinct lack of community between women, especially in terms of rank and ethnicity, as the ruse, often engineered by white noblewomen,is specifically designed to protect culturally-prized white female chastity.21 Dark-skinned women are therefore doubly othered in this case, by their race and their gender. Black women’s sexuality (which, because of their skin color and their inferior rank, is seen to be of inferior value) is clearly sacrificed and exploited in this trick by white men and women.
Conventionally, this sort of exchange took place under the cover of darkness, which presumably functioned in this case to conceal the substituted bed-mate’s racial identity from the dupe. In addition, night was sometimes specifically figured in early-modern drama as a dark-skinned woman, indicating that discourses of both race and gender are inextricably linked with black women’s involvement in the bed-trick. In Thomas Kyd’s The First Part of Jeronimo (1605), Lazzarato the corrupt courtier anthropomorphically describes night as a black female— "night, / That yawning beldam with her jetty skin"—once more drawing together lasciviousness, blackness, night and femininity (I.i.109-10).22 In Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion (1600), the licentious Spanish Queen Mother also personifies night as a black woman who will both permit and disguise her tryst with the Moor Eleazar. Again, this highlights the perception of black females as the loci, and, as mentioned earlier with reference to black maids, the enablers of sexual transgression:
… thou spotlesse night,
Empresse of silence, and the Queen of sleep;
Who with thy black cheeks pure complexion
Mak’st lovers eyes enamour’d of thy beauty:
Thou art like my Moor, therefore will I adore thee,
For lending me this opportunity,
Oh with the soft-skinned Negro! (III.i.1-7)23
Indeed, Mountferrat describes Zanthia as a "night hag, gotten when the bright Moone suffer’d," which both makes a connection between her dark skin and the darkness of night, and violently asserts that the fact of her birth, which he claims was under the cover of darkness, was itself an aberration (IVii.184).
"Women … memorie … would one of ye leave me"
Though stoutly asserting Zanthia’s and Oriana’s interchangeability, Mountferrat in a sense also recognizes that substituting Zanthia for her mistress necessitates a kind of willful ignorance on his part. If he only "winks," he claims, Zanthia’s racial difference will become subsumed by darkness. The OED defines "wink" (3) as follows: "to have the eyes closed in sleep, to sleep; sometimes, to doze, to slumber." Garrett Sullivan has examined the relationship between sleep and inattention in the period as well as its association with sensual excess. Mountferrat’s bracketing of Zanthia’s racial difference necessitates, to use Sullivan’s term, a kind of "erotic self-forgetting," when he disregards the racial and social differences between Oriana and Zanthia in order to satisfy his own sexual appetite.24 Clarindore, in Philip Massinger’s The Parliament of Love, similarly imagines the disguised and blacked-up Calista as a suitable bed-mate, though, again, only under the cover of darkness:
The curtains drawn, and envious light shut out, The soft touch heightens appetite and takes more Than colour, Venus’ dressing, in the day-time, But never thought on in her midnight revels. (Il.iii)25
This notion that all women are alike when it comes to sex not only confirms the men’s carnality, but also reveals how they essentialize all women’s genitalia. As Wendy Doniger argues, "it was precisely women’s sexuality that was taken as their essence and that was regarded as essentially the same in all women in the dark, just as their beauty was essentialised and universalized in the light."26 At the same time, however, the claim that all women are alike is shown to be a tenuous one. Echoing the sentiments of Mountferrat, Clarindore asserts his belief that at night all differences between women, regardless of skin color, may be overlooked; but in so doing he also highlights what Sullivan terms the "foundationality of forgetting" to his sexual relationship with a dark-skinned woman.27
William Bowden explains how the conventional bed-trick, dependent as it is on surprise, "is most effective dramatically as a peak, not as a plane … for the more frequently such a meeting was repeated, the more chance there would be for discovery".28 However, the presence of black maids in these plays complicates the premise of the bed-trick in a way that the presence of a white female would not. Mountferrat, Nathaniel and Clarindore are, in a sense, willingly subjecting themselves to deception by deliberately disregarding the social and racial differences between black maids and their mistresses. Yet Zanthia’s social status and her skin color mean that, unlike their attitude to Oriana’s sexual economy, the preservation of Zanthia’s chastity is not considered an issue for the men who bed her. When Mountferrat says that Zanthia may be a suitable surrogate to satisfy his lust, he assumes her assent and devalues her chastity in the face of her mistress’s, because of both her skin color and her lower rank. As Marliss Desens argues with reference to a bed-trick in The Decameron, the replacement of a maid for her mistress "suggests some awareness by the writers of the way in which their society divides women into two groups: the idealized women who are above sex and the despised women who are associated only with sex."29
Though willing to have sex with Mountferrat, Zanthia is nonetheless hyper-aware of her disposability and her status as a sexual object: she tells Mountferrat that "like a property, when I have serv’d / Your turnes, You’ll cast me off’ (I.i.188-9). Mountferrat’s desire for sexual pleasure thus marks, not his seduction by Zanthia, but rather his power over black women’s sexual economy. In Black Looks, bell hooks maintains that desire for a racialized other indicates authority over the other whose body is represented as a locale of temporary sensual pleasure.30 In just this way, Mountferrat is seen to be content to satiate his lust with black female bodies, which he views as interchangeable with white women’s, yet easily discarded. Sexual encounters with Zanthia thus constitute for Mountferrat a temporary deviance from the social order where, under the cover of nightfall, she becomes as desirable a sexual partner as Oriana.
Though Mountferrat is, however temporarily, allowed to disregard the social order through his appropriation of bed-trick tropes, those black-skinned servants coerced into the trick are allowed no such space for forgetfulness. In Sophonisba, the eponymous fair-skinned noblewoman attempts to protect herself from the sexual desires of Syphax by placing the drugged and naked black male servant Vangue in her bed. Syphax, "offering to leap into bed, discovers Vangue." Vangue’s response to the situation once he comes to consciousness focuses on what he sees as his reversal of fortune:
Vangue: Where am I? Think. Or is my state advanced?
O Jove, how pleasant is it but to sleep
In a king’s bed!
Syphax: Sleep there thy lasting sleep,
Improvident, base, o’er-thirsty slave.
Syphax kills Vangue
Die pleased, a king’s couch is thy too-proud grave. (III.i.189-95)31
As Virginia Mason Vaughan maintains in her reading of this scene, it is Vangue’s fantasy of a higher status (he is "o’er thirsty"), as much as his black skin, that results in his murder.32 Moreover, Vangue’s "forgetting" of his lower social status must be punished by those men who guard their own privileged positions. As both a black man and a servant, Vangue is not allowed any transgression of societal boundaries. The discovery of a black woman in the bed-trick, however, produces a far more ambivalent reaction, a point to which I will now turn.
In his discussion of All’s Well That Ends Well, John Wain argues that "love feeds on recognition and knowledge of the loved person; lust, by contrast, is blind; its patterns are laid down in advance and it feeds on whatever approximates to those patterns."33 Indeed, Mountferrat himself at one point claims that "I am … almost blind, and deafe. / Lust neither sees nor hears ought but it selfe" (I.i.169-70). The lascivious Frenchman categorically states that he does not love Zanthia; for him she functions as a sexual plaything that can be cast off at his whim. In a similar turn to Mountferrat, Nathaniel in The English Moor admits that by having sex with a black woman he will prove that he has "as good stomach[s]" as her partner Quicksands, denoting not only his sexual appetite for her, but also his culture’s assumption that not every white man can "stomach" having sex with a black woman (IV.iii.106). Dark-skinned females are paradoxically viewed as both sexually desirable and repugnant. Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas (c.1610-16) addresses this contradictory reaction more fully. Here, Thomas is tricked into getting into bed with Kate, a black maid. However, candlelight reveals the woman’s true identity, and he cries out:
Holy Saints defend me!
The devil, devil, devil! O the devil! …
I am abused most damnedly, most beastly;
Yet if it be a she-devil … (V.iv.50-51, 53-4)34
The stage direction for the Monsieur Thomas bed-trick reads "a bed discovered with a Black More in it." When Thomas "discovers" a black maid in place of the woman he intended to seduce, the dupe immediately names her "devil," thus attempting to intercede between her and the audience: to define and control who, or what, she is (or is not). However, his discovery ends not necessarily in his complete appropriation of the servant’s otherness, but rather in Thomas’s bracketing, perhaps even his deliberate forgetting, of his initial interpellation of her. His discovery of Kate produces a tension between his desire to sexually possess her and his acute fear of her racial difference. This culminates in the fragmentation of Thomas’s own identity, wavering as it does between desire and anxiety. Such ambivalent reactions to dark-skinned females can be seen to pervade wider discourses of "discovery" in Renaissance travelogues, and, as historian Jenifer L. Morgan has shown, European male travel writers routinely enact this very "ideological maneuver" when they juxtapose the beauty and the monstrosity of the foreign black female body.35
The ambivalence at the heart of Thomas’s discovery is further amplified by early-modern theatrical modes of representation, which make Kate—a male actor in drag and blackface—an exceedingly contrived and evasive persona. Though aware of the presence of Kate prior to Thomas’s own discovery of her, the audience is also implicated in "forgetting" the black maid’s "real" identity. The image of the doubly-othered black woman, mentioned earlier, can be seen as particularly pertinent here to considerations of early-modern theatrical representations of black femininity, which constitute a double absence and highlight what Lynda Boose terms the "unrepresentable"—and, perhaps, for Thomas and the audience, "undiscoverable"— nature of black women.36
"Go leap her, and engender young devillings"
In a period when black women, to use Jennifer Morgan’s terms, "mark metaphorically the symbiotic boundaries of European national identities and white supremacy," the presence of the black female body in the bedroom would have represented the ultimate taboo.37 As Virginia Mason Vaughan astutely notes, there are no consummated bed-tricks featuring black women in the period: "while the spectre of miscegenation is raised, it is never literalised on the stage."38 The risk to social hierarchies thought to be posed by sex with a dark double in the bed-trick is also a concern in early-modern texts that reference the Ixion myth. In Eldred Revett’s poem "One Enamour’d on a Black-Moof’ (1657), for example, the black woman desired by the male speaker is imagined as "the goddesse’s deputed cloud" and any contact between them, he predicts, will result in "a dapple race."39 In Penuen’s version of the myth in Ambitions Scourge, Ixion is said to have displayed presumption in attempting to seduce Hera. The false Hera with whom he actually lay, moreover, bore Ixion the outcast child Centaurus. The latter, grown to manhood, is said to have produced a hybrid race when he sired horse-centaurs on Magnesian mares:
But yet Ixyon on this seeming Faire,
(Which was indeed nought but delusive aire)
Begot the Centaures, that rebeld gainst Jove:
The mixture monstrous, so th’effect did prove:
But of Ixyon’s issue, write who will,
Monsters in minde (not Nature) move my quill. (D2v)
Penuen’s allusion to the commixing of the black cloud and Ixion as "monstrous" imagines their offspring as a hybrid race that he views as distinct from, and inferior to, creatures of the natural world. Kathryn M. Brammall has outlined how, though monsters continued to be associated with physical deformity throughout the early-modern period, the rhetoric of monstrosity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became increasingly focused on deviant behavior.40 As Judith J. Kollermann notes, the figure of the centaur is explicitly associated with rapacity, "the result of presumptuous and unlawful appetite, [and] is himself the inheritor of perverted sexual appetite, and the final result is a race of beings that manifest impulsive violent behaviour and unlawful desires."41 The act of interracial sex between Zanthia and Mountferrat is also believed to be as monstrous as the hybrid creatures it is anticipated to produce. Norrandine tells Mountferrat: "Away French Stallion, now you have a Barbary Mare / of your own, go leap her, and engender young devillings" (V.ii.314-15).42 His image of Zanthia as "a Barbary Mare" clearly recalls Iago’s warning to Brabantio when his daughter clandestinely marries the Moorish general Othello: "you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your nephews neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans" (I.i.109-12).43
The particular reference to horses in the case of Norrandine’s invective, mentioned above, points not only to what he sees as the bestial nature of the relationship between Mountferrat and Zanthia, but also to the threat to patriarchal social order that is specific to the involvement of black maids in the bed-trick. As Wendy Doniger argues, stallions are said to "service," but also to "serve," mares.44 Norrandine’s reference to Mountferrat as a "stallion" and Zanthia as a "mare" may thus also anxiously point to the challenge that Zanthia’s color is believed to pose to patriarchal notions of inheritance. Lynda Boose shows how, in a society that depends on a principle of inheritance in which the father’s identity—whether that be his name, his authority, or his property—is passed on to his son, the idea that a black woman may possess the authority to influence the color of her child provokes extreme anxiety.45 Indeed, Boose notes a curious silence in travelogues where miscegenous relationships featuring black women are concerned. In the period, the ability of the black matrix to attenuate a fair child’s skin color, she argues, emphasizes not only the power of blackness but also a threatening reversal of gender hierarchies, such that the child resembles the mother, and not the father.46 Interracial sex between a black woman and a white man was thus viewed as something that destabilized both gender and racial hierarchies. When the woman involved in interracial sex is both dark-skinned and of a lower rank than her lover, as is evident in the case of the black maid’s involvement in the bed-trick, her believed ability to determine the color of her offspring from the encounter is viewed as triply threatening: it may destabilize hierarchies of gender, race and rank.
When confronted with the body of a black woman in the place of her mistress, male bed-trick dupes experience a complex and conflicted mix of sexual desire and loathing. Though he views Zanthia as a sexual object that he may easily dispose of, Mountferrat nonetheless sees himself as essentially altered by his relationship with this black servant: "thou hast made me more devil than thy self," he claims (II.iii.20—21). Here, Mountferrat articulates a fear of his and Zanthia’s sameness as much as his anxiety over the threat of Zanthia’s racial alterity. Like Thomas, Mountferrat experiences the fragmenting of his identity through his contact with a Moorish servant. However, it is in the denouement of the play that Zanthia’s threat to the social order is most profound. Valetta (a Knight of Malta) tells the Frenchman: "your doom is then / To marry this coagent of your mischiefes" (V.ii.309-10). The Parliament of Love has a similar ending: Clarindore is ordered to marry Calista, a Moorish servant, as punishment for his sexual misconduct, a penalty that he views as "cruelty / beyond expression." While he is willing to have sex with her, the legitimization of the relationship through marriage is abhorrent to him (V.i.513). To Clarindore’s relief, however, "Calista" turns out to be his spurned wife Beaupre, masquerading as a Moor. At the end of The English Moor, Nathaniel also discovers that the black woman he has slept with is actually his spurned lover in blackface disguise. In a sense then, while the villainous male characters may temporarily "forget" the difference between white women and their black counterparts, they, and indeed the audience, ultimately recall that these types of relationships are anathema to social norms. What makes The Knight of Malta so remarkable, then, is that the forgetting of difference is violently enforced, as a social punishment, at the end of the play. In an ironic reversal of fortune, Mountferrat finds himself to have become interchangeable with Zanthia (his "black cloud"), and the victim of his own ruse. Norrandine curses both of them in similarly demonic terms: "We’ll call him Cacodemon, with his black gib, / There, his succuba, his devils seed" (V.ii.209-10).
Conclusion
Producing an object of sexual desire that is also viewed as a repugnant devil, the discovery of a dark-skinned maid in the bed-trick necessitates a complex and paradoxical mental act on the part of the male dupe and the audience. The ambivalence that lies at the centre of the male dupe’s discovery is one that is specific to the black woman’s involvement in this dramaturgical device, and it is exemplified by theatrical modes of representing black women on the early-modern stage. At the same time as the dupe discovers her, or attempts to name, or define, what she is, the doubly-absent black female figure continually disappears and constantly evades full representation. Yet the threat she poses to patriarchal notions of signification and inheritance, indeed to male identity itself, remains. Though Zanthia is physically absent at the end of the play, as the two villains are banished from Malta, the power of her blackness remains a vestigial threat that is always ideologically present; always both discovered, and undiscoverable.
