Reclaiming Rome

Reclaiming Rome: Classical Revival and Race-making in the English Renaissance

Featuring performances of select scenes from Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, this talk will treat the projects of classical revival and race-making as they align and entangle in early modern English adaptations of Virgil’s Aeneid.

When England’s writers finally joined the Eurasian project of classical revival now known as the Renaissance, they were, to their frequently voiced embarrassment, some two hundred years behind the curve. How did this small island, isolated from the cultural and commercial centers of the Mediterranean world, establish a meaningful claim to antiquity’s inheritance?

Focusing on mid-sixteenth century translations of Virgil’s Aeneid as well as Christopher Marlowe’s dramatic adaptation of the epic, Dido, Queen of Carthage, this talk will suggest that the very tenuousness of Renaissance England’s connection to the classical world rendered all the more urgent its thinking about the ties that bind groups of people together across time and space. In England’s belated Renaissance, in other words, we can discern the contours of the fiction that we now understand as race.

Lauren Robertson is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she works on early modern literature and culture. She is the author of Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater: Stage Spectacle and Audience Response (Cambridge 2023), and her articles appear in Shakespeare Studies, Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, and Theatre Journal.

The Rendez-Vous de l’Institut Series is generously supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. You will find a full calendar of the Fellows’ Talks.