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Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic Of Plant Life In Titus Andronicus, Jean E. Feerick
Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic Of Plant Life In Titus Andronicus, Jean E. Feerick
Jean Feerick
The early modern epistemic overlap between plant and person, Feerick’s article demonstrates, can expand critical work on early modern race both in and beyond Shakespearean drama. It centers upon an analysis of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a play that brings plant bodies and human bodies into dizzying dramatic collision. In contrast to critics of the Enlightenment who have argued that the drive to classify plants into phyla and species helped to shape epistemologies of human difference, both gendered and racialized, this article works backward, examining how the premodern logic of botany helped to constitute a different racial idiom. During this …