The White Devil (1612) has attracted considerable critical attention, focusing on, among others, its intervention in the early modern debate on 'the nature of women' and depiction of female sexuality (Luckyj, 'Boy Prince'), its reflection on court life in Jacobean England (Brennan xix), its depiction of the after-effects of the Reformation (Williamson), its engagement with the tradition of revenge tragedy (Purcell 89), its intertextuality with contemporary plays (Weil), and, no less important, its engagement with contemporary debates about race. 1 While these studies have gone a long way to enrich our understanding of
Scholarly discussions of race in Othello have almost exclusively focused on the eponymous character. 1 Often forgotten is another Moorish character the play evokes, even if she does not make an appearance on the stage: Barbary, the maidservant Desdemona remembers in the Folio version and with whose tragic story she identifies to process her own experience of rejection and grief. 2 Barbary is an example of those women about whom Kim F. Hall wondered: why, '[w]hile feminists are increasingly uncovering the voices and presence of white Englishwomen,' do 'women of color [...] [even though] clearly a presence in [...] sixteenthand seventeenth-century England, [...] remain "invisible women" existing at the margins of
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.