English ethnicity and race in early modern drama

"The importance of English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama lies in its recognition that the English were afflicted in the sixteenth century by a profoundly unstable sense of identity derived from the British Isle's northern, marginalized status in a set of classical texts that were revered and considered authoritative. Simply put, humoralism, for the early modern English, was ethnology. Floyd-Wilson demonstrates that the English not only were driven to rearrange, discursively, this inherited knowledge in an effort to revalue those traits conventionally identified as 'northern', but they also aimed to alter or remedy their northern natures through the manipulation of their environment, whether that meant the air, temperature, diet and terrain, or the effects of travel, education, rhetoric, impersonation or fashion. To follow Floyd-Wilson's application of contemporary geohumoral theory to a succession of major canonical texts is exhilarating, surprising and unsettling, as Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and others emerge as unwittingly complicit in ways of thinking about English selfhood that enabled the growth of the Atlantic slave trade and British imperialism."--Jacket.