The Novella - Race and Sex

Race and Sex

The Novella, like Brome's later play The English Moor, exploits a version of the standard Elizabethan bed trick so common in English Renaissance drama, but with a racial twist: in each play a man goes to a sexual assignation expecting to encounter a white woman, only to find that his partner or potential partner is apparently an African woman. In both cases, the appearance is deceptive: in The English Moor the apparent black woman is a white woman in blackface makeup, while in The Novella the apparent black woman is an African boy eunuch. This plot twist in The Novella has attracted the attention of modern critics interested in race and gender issues.

In both cases, a white English boy player would have played across race and gender lines in the original productions: a white boy playing a white woman playing a black woman, and a white boy playing a (castrated) black youth playing a black woman.