"What Good Newes from Barbary?" Nascent Capitalism, North-Africans and the Construction of English Identity in Thomas Heywood's Drama

Resumen

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries England experienced an epistemological transition that entailed the construction of a still precarious identity. This process involved the adoption of a new economy (nascent capitalism) and the shaping of a proto- racialist project of exclusion, which was mainly addressed towards the Muslim Other. In this paper I will show how a corpus of four plays by the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Heywood problematizes this project by simultaneously reinforcing and interrogating it: I will suggest that whereas the new economy is apparently privileged and celebrated and Islam still appears to be approached without racialist assumptions, the plays develop some strategies that nostalgically question nascent capitalism and its consequences, as much as they start to display a process of racial stereotyping towards North-African Muslims. The four plays studied are Parts 1 and 2 of The Fair Maid of the West (ca. 1599-1603 and 1625-1630) and If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (Parts 1 and 2) (ca. 1604 and ca. 1605). In order to explore these texts, and to define how the plays engage with these processes, I will employ Juri Lotman's cultural semiotic notion of the semiosphere.