White Skin, White Mask: Constructing Whiteness in Thomas Kyd's The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda

Criticism in early modern English drama has become increasingly attentive to how the ideologies of racial Whiteness are formed on the English stage. However, this scholarship has not yet considered how White supremacy is dramatically constructed against the male, Muslim, Ottoman, a figure who, I argue, would have been performed as phenotypically white on the English stage. By examining the racialisation of the Ottoman Soliman in Thomas Kyd's late sixteenth‐century play The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda, this article illustrates how anxieties around the Muslim character's white sameness are negotiated by fashioning the Whiteness, or fairness, of the Greek, Christian Perseda as ‘natural’, while correspondingly framing Soliman's whiteness as ‘artificial’. Kyd renders Soliman's whiteness in this way by drawing on early modern English cosmetic language, customs, and debates. By turning to the male Muslim Ottoman figure, this study extends understandings of how racial Whiteness was shaped in early modern English culture, by illustrating how White supremacy is developed out of a Muslim‐Christian dichotomy and therefore in conjunction with Christian supremacy.

virtue.The interaction therefore represents a demonstration of the authority of Christian goodness over Muslim villainy, as well as of the inherent command a Christian person's White racial identity can affect over other racial groups. 5yd's attention to Perseda's Whiteness in this scene evidences the playwright's interest in using phenotypic attributes to construct social difference in the play, especially through racial Whiteness.The echoes of the above scene in later, racially concerned, plays such as Shakespeare's Othello, confirm that the play is likewise preoccupied with themes of racial Whiteness. 6However, despite the playwright's invitation to audiences to mark a racial distinction between Soliman and his White, Christian captive, critics have not yet considered the play's racial representation of the Ottoman Emperor and its role in early modern English formation of White supremacy.In exploring this as yet unexamined area of scholarship, this article argues that the Muslim figure Soliman would have been represented on stage as phenotypically white and that in response to the anxiety around this figure's racial similarities to English Christians, Kyd institutes a hierarchy of Whiteness in the play by marking Perseda's whiteness as superior to that of the Muslim Soliman.The playwright achieves his racial structuring of Whiteness by fashioning Perseda's Whiteness, or specifically her 'fairness', as natural, while simultaneously framing Soliman's phenotypical whiteness as false or artificial.To render the Ottoman's whiteness in this way Kyd animates the cosmetic meanings of the name 'Soliman' or Suleyman, which in the early modern period was a label given to a mercury sublimate product used widely in England as a skin-whitening cosmetic, and which was therefore associated in anti-cosmetic discourses with artificial whiteness.This article's analysis of the play's racial categorisation of Soliman advances critical understandings of how ideologies of White racial supremacy were being formed in the early modern English theatre, by demonstrating how a Christian European's phenotypical whiteness -that is, the outwardly observable, 'white' or light-coloured features of the body, such as skin colour -is constructed as superior to the equivalent phenotypical whiteness of a Muslim Ottoman.Examining English writers' treatments of Ottoman whiteness extends on-going conversations in premodern critical race studies that explore how this racial category is formed against versions of itself, by considering how White supremacy is framed in relation to a white-adjacent male Muslim figure. 7Although in the early modern world neither Christianity nor Islam were monolithic, with each harbouring their own divisions and imagined hierarchies, English dramatists frequently erased the boundaries of inter-Christian conflict in order to mark Muslims generally as the inferior faith group.Race becomes a useful organisational devise for augmenting such differences between Christian and Muslim in ways that transcend inter-religious conflict. 8This is the case in Solyman and Perseda, where notwithstanding English beliefs in Protestant authority, an implicitly Greek Orthodox Christian woman becomes a stand-in for the English and is delineated as superior to a Muslim Ottoman through her light skin colour.
The dynamic of religious difference in the play, whereby Islam is vilified and Christianity is venerated, has already been well-established. 9I reapproach this religious design in the play with a focussed attention to race, by considering how such difference is managed and heighted through the racial organisation of the titular characters.That is where race, as Karen E. Fields and Barbara J Fields define it, is an ideology which upholds 'that nature produced human-kind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits', especially biological ones, 'that its members share and that differentiate them from members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank'. 10As an 'inborn trait' that is used to contrive social hierarchies in the play, skin colour, I argue, becomes a site for negotiating the differences between the Muslim Soliman and the Christian Perseda, and enables the playwright to generate a form of White supremacy out of the complex binary of Christian European versus Muslim Ottoman.As Richard Dyer asserts, in order to bring attention to Whiteness as a racial category, in a manner that undercuts its claims to a normative status, 'whiteness needs to be made strange'. 11In Solyman and Perseda, English Christians are presented with such white 'strangeness', in the figure of the powerful, whiteadjacent Muslim Ottoman.This forces them to bring their own whiteness into visibility, which translates in the playwrights attempts to simultaneously mark and standardise Christian whiteness against Muslim power.Performed in what was an early colonial moment for the English, the play presents an important pre-history to the formation of colonial discourses of White, Christian greatness, that will become pertinent to English 'civilising' projects used to justify and enact colonialism and enslavement in the centuries that follow. 12

UNMARKED: STAGING OTTOMAN APPEARANCE
The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda was Thomas Kyd's expansion of a tale that he staged as a playlet in his popular revenge drama, The Spanish Tragedy. 13owever, as Daniel J. Vitkus has pointed out, this story of Ottoman, Muslim, male desire for a White, Christian, European woman is part of a much wider dramatic tradition of plays performed in early modern England that vilified power through images of Muslim or 'Turkish' lust and cruelty. 14yd's source text for Solyman and Perseda, Jaques Yver's Le Printemps d'Yverwhich was translated into English by Henry Wotton -was one version of this narrative. 15That this spin-off to The Spanish Tragedy was published twice, some years apart, in the late sixteenth century (1592, 1599), suggests that Solyman and Perseda, like its antecedent play, also enjoyed some success in the English theatre.
Despite its seeming popularity on stage, and its resonances with many other renowned English dramas that explore dynamics of race in the period, studies on race in Kyd's play have been limited, with almost no discussions available to date on the playwright's racial characterisation of Soliman.Jane Hwang Degenhardt has importantly begun to highlight this aspect of the play's difference-making methods, by suggesting that for the early modern English audiences, the discomfort of Soliman and Perseda's 'threatened sexual union' would have been 'enhanced by the visual contrasts between Soliman's Turkish appearance, likely distinguished by a turban, Turkish robes, and facial makeup' and the white, beautiful Perseda. 16y considering Solyman and Perseda alongside The Spanish Tragedy, Degenhardt suggests that the later Soliman might have been wearing 'dark makeup' on stage. 17I agree with Degenhardt that the character's racialised appearance, and his skin colour, would have induced anxiety in early modern English audiences.However, I argue that such uneasiness arises not from the Ottoman character's somatic differences but his sameness since Soliman would not have been performed in blackface or brownface but instead would have appeared, like many other Christian European characters, as phenotypically white.
Kyd's Soliman, like other Ottoman characters on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, is not assigned any specific skin colour.In fact, by contrast to Soliman's religious identity, which is clearly flagged for example in the play's descriptions of the emperor's allegiances to the Prophet 'Mahomet', descriptions of the Ottoman's physical appearance are almost completely absent from the play. 18Turning to the playlet in The Spanish Tragedy, as Degenhardt does, offers some insight into how the character's identity may have been marked on the body of the actor performing him.When Kyd's Hieronimo casts the Portuguese Prince Balthazar as the Ottoman Emperor, the director instructs his royal actor to 'prouide a turkish cappe,/A black mustacio and a fauchion'. 19Soliman in Kyd's expanded play certainly resembles his earlier counterpart in his use of a curved knife, a 'Semitor' (scimitar), which is akin to the 'fauchion' wielded by Baltazar. 20Given this use of a common weapon across the two plays, it seems reasonable to infer that the later Soliman would also have been dressed in other items from the earlier play, including a turban or 'cappe' and dark facial hair.
The 'black' colour of Soliman's 'moustacio', if we assume the actor in Solyman and Perseda was indeed wearing one, is the most explicit colourbased, biological marker of identity used in the play to distinguish the Ottoman character from those around him.Although the cover pages of The Spanish Tragedy from the 1618 publication onwards include a figure shaded-in black, which implies the use of blackface in the production, the line spoken by the blackened character on the cover corresponds with the dialogue of the play's Spanish Prince Lorenzo. 21This use of physical blackness in the play is therefore a manifestation of early modern England's anti-Spanish sentiment which is prevalent throughout the play. 22In The Spanish Tragedy where blackness is mobilised as a marker of racial difference, Kyd's blackening of Soliman's hair may have been an attempt to disparage the Muslim Ottoman in the same colour-coded terms as the playwright does the Spaniards.Given that Muslim identity, by way of 'Moorishness', is linked to the frameworks of anti-blackness used in shaping anti-Spanish views in the period, the Muslim Ottoman would have neatly fallen into these structures of difference.However, The Spanish Tragedy does not imply anywhere that the colouring of the moustache extends to other parts of the Ottoman character's body.
The absence of any allusion to Soliman's appearance or skin colour in the later play can be explained by sixteenth and early seventeenth century English understandings of the Ottoman imperials' racial ambiguity, which was the result of their long-standing dynastic practices.Ottoman rulers had historically engaged in a system of procreation in which 'the mothers of the royal children were kul [or enslaved captive] recruits', and from the fifteenth century onwards these women were primarily 'Christian born' captives from the 'European fringes of the empire'. 23The purpose of this system was to avoid challenges to Ottoman political authority and later to protect the empire. 24By having children with 'consorts' whose national and ethnic identities they could erase, as opposed to royal wives who would be entitled to a share in their imperial power, Ottoman men were able to continually secure their positions of rule and the longevity of the dynasty. 25As a result of this domestic protocol, senior male figures in the Ottoman family and court were often the children of Christian Europeans, including White women.
The extensive number of plays performed on the early modern English stage that relayed narratives like the story of Ottoman-Christian desire in Solyman and Perseda, ensured that the English were familiar with a version (albeit a prejudiced one) of contemporary Ottoman practices of taking Christian European captives for their 'consorts'.That the English were conscious too of the political and 'racial' motivations behind some of these relationships is indicated, for example, by texts like Hugh Goughe's The Ofspring of the House of Ottomanno. 26The writer notes, of the Ottomans, that 'to auoyde equalitie in the Empire, they neuer marye anye honest and lawfull wiues, but in their places, to satiffye their pleasures, and libidinous lustes […] they haue rauished virgines frome all partes of the worlde. 27Goughe's description of this Ottoman imperial strategy points to both the reproductive role of the 'rauished virgins' in the Ottoman family dynamic, as well as the royal 'Ofspring' that are born from them. 28Given the significance of bloodlines and lineage to early modern English beliefs about racial and social organisation, such writings render the Ottomans as decidedly multi-racial to early modern English audiences. 29nglish views on the Ottomans' mixed or 'impure' racial identity would have been entrenched by their understandings of a corresponding historical practice related to the Ottoman treatment of male captives who were absorbed into the Ottoman court.This involved 'the promotion of men who were taken as children [from amongst the Christian population of Ottoman domains] and converted to become Turkish eunuchs or janissaries at court'. 30This policy is alluded to in Solyman and Perseda, in the Christian, Rhodian youth Erastus, the play's male Christian hero and Pereda's love-interest, who joins Soliman's services.Although Erastus voluntarily enters Soliman's court after committing a crime against his kinsman in Rhodes, as a young Christian European captive from an Ottoman-conquered domain who rises to senior ranks in the Ottoman empire, his story mirrors the Ottoman practice of incorporating Christian, European male captives into their imperial court.The intermarriage and mixing that resulted from the inclusion of these Christian men into the empire heightened the multi-ethnic diversity of the Ottoman dynasty.
Such systems of social organisation meant that the 'Ottoman elites' had a 'multi-ethnic character' that could not be neatly, somatically marked in European writing. 31For Paul Kaplan, this accounts for why, in practice, European and English writers often did not 'concentrate on an 'essential' exterior physical nature' in their descriptions of Ottomans. 32This European trend is certainly reflected in Kyd's Solyman and Perseda, which like many dramatizations of Ottoman figures in the period, is void of literal textual descriptions of Soliman's appearance.Although Kyd makes some attempts to racially demarcate Ottomans in The Spanish Tragedy, this is not achieved through the performers' adoption of what Kaplan refers to as 'essential' bodily features.Rather, the play relies on clothing and accessories that can be easily changed, and a form of facial hair which, although colour-coded, can be altered, stylised or altogether removed, in a way that other essential physical features, such as skin colour, cannot.By contrast to the permanence of physical differences such as black skin colour, which cannot be 'washed away' as the English maintained in the proverbial notion of 'washing an ethiop white', the use of props in The Spanish Tragedy demonstrates how seamlessly anyone can become an Ottoman or indeed 'turn Turk'.
Despite and because of the absence of many clear indicators of specific 'essential', physical features of Ottoman men in early modern English drama, I would contend that these figures, including Kyd's Soliman, would have been performed as racially White.The few descriptions of Ottoman appearance that begin to circulate in England by the end of the sixteenth century identify Ottomans as 'pale' -a colour, or a lack of a colour, close to whiteness.33Richard Knolles, for instance, categorises several of the Ottoman Kings and Emperors, including Suleyman the Magnificent, as similarly light-skinned.The writer describes, amongst others 'Selymus' I as having a 'Tartar-like pale colour' with 'long mustachoes on his vpper lip'; 'Solyman' as being 'of feature slender, long necked, his colour pale'; and 'Amurath' III as likewise 'pale'. 34Lightness, specifically a white-like and unpleasant 'pale' skin colour, emerges in these texts as a consistent feature of Ottoman appearance across time.
Furthermore, when considered in conjunction with dramatists' textual representations of racial Whiteness in other contemporary plays, the absence of any explicit description of Soliman's skin colour itself serves as a sign of the theatre's treatment of this Ottoman character as phenotypically white.The construction of racial Whiteness and White supremacy on the Shakespearean stage necessarily involves the rendering of White characters as 'unraced' or 'race-free'. 35As Arthur L. Little cogently illustrates, this stage practice can best be understood in terms of the wider sociohistorical construction of racial Whiteness as the normative human identity. 36In early modern texts, White characters are 'unmarked' in a way that supports and continues to develop a standard that holds Whiteness as an original and natural version of humanity. 37This representation of White, 'unmarked' identity is especially prevalent in the characterisation of White masculinity on the early modern English stage.Premodern race critics have shown that White womanhood is often visible through the gendered language of 'fairness', which I examine in the next section. 38By contrast, however, the Whiteness of men typically goes unstated in early modern plays and is managed instead through racial mechanisms such as blood and kinship.Soliman's unmarked-ness therefore suggests that the actor playing Soliman would have presented the character with white physical features, and with few if any phenotypical qualities to indicate the Muslim character's distinction from his male European counterparts.
That staging of Ottoman Muslims who were not especially distinguishable from Englishmen would have amplified fears of Ottoman power and expansion, that were coupled with Islamophobic anxieties in early modern English thought. 39A White English actor playing Soliman, dressed in Turkish attire, would be an uncomfortable and uncanny sight for early modern English audiences who were concerned about the realities of English conversion to Islam, or 'turning Turk'.Englishmen frequently turned Muslim in the period, sometimes under the duress of captivity at the hands of Ottoman subjects in the Mediterranean, but often also voluntarily as they sought to enter Ottoman service to make an entry into the lucrative Mediterranean marketplace.For the English at home, the prospect of religious conversion was accompanied by worries about the inability to discern religious changes outwardly on a convert.Although conversion to Islam required the convert to undergo circumcision, this change is not visible to every beholder, nor does it necessarily reflect the inward sensibilities of the converted.This tension between outward and inward identity is dramatized in Solyman and Perseda, through the braggart Knight Basilisco's conversion to Islam.Basilisco 'undergoes' conversion, including circumcision, to escape the cruelty he anticipates in Ottoman captivity.He subsequently attempts to reclaim his Christian identity, but his efforts are fruitless as he remains 'permanently suspect' amongst his Christian companions because of his circumcision. 40Given English preoccupations with the ambiguity of Muslim difference, the whiteness of the Muslim Ottomans performed on the English stage would ultimately have been disconcerting to the English, and playwrights in turn negotiated these anxieties as Kyd does in Solyman and Perseda.

WHITE SKIN: NATURAL EUROPEAN CHRISTIAN WHITENESS
To counteract the similarities between the Muslim Ottomans and White English Christians, or the European Christians who act as a proxy for the English self on stage, Kyd engineers differences in the somatic whiteness of the play's central Muslim character, Soliman, and his Christian captive Perseda.Drawing on discourses of beauty and cosmetics in early modern English culture, the playwright invites the early modern audience to recognise Perseda's superior white skin as natural while correspondingly identifying the Ottoman Soliman with artificial whiteness.That is where the natural can be understood as the quality of being inherent and divinely created, in 39 Mary Floyd-Wilson asserts that paleness and its corresponding implications of temperament were Northern features that were closely associated with English identity (13) direct opposition to the artificial that is human-made and imitative of the natural.This binary was central to the anti-cosmetic discourses in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, wherein 'nature becomes the privileged category, and art and artifice are correspondingly reviled'. 41Kyd's framing of Perseda's whiteness as natural and Soliman's whiteness as artificial engenders different racialised forms of Whiteness that operate on a hierarchy.At the same time, because Christian goodness is emblematised in notions of whiteness and lightness in the religious discourses of the period, the characterisation of Perseda's fairness as authentic also yokes Christianity to ideas of a true, natural, and normative faith. 42n the first part of the play, before Soliman and Perseda encounter one another, the playwright focuses particularly on forging Perseda's White Christian supremacy by representing her whiteness, and specifically her 'fairness', as natural.The word 'fair' in early modern England was a synonym for beauty that was typically used to refer to people with white physical features such as a light skin colour or blonde hair. 43In its denotation of colour, Farah Karim-Cooper has shown that fairness indicates a bright or shining whiteness that by contrast to paleness or other light-skinned shades, 'conveys a lustre that is comparable to silver'. 44To call skin 'fair' therefore expresses that it holds a white hue which is aesthetically superior to other light phenotypical colours.Fairness also relied on and perpetuated precepts of Christian inimitability in early modern England. 45s Richard Dyer observes, Christianity's preoccupation with 'embodiment' has historically been conducive to racial formation in the Christian world. 46This is made apparent in early modern England where the Christian discourses that saw lightness/whiteness as emblematic of goodness contributed to the emergence of an aesthetic vocabulary of fairness.
Correspondingly, when used to describe women, fairness assumed gendered connotations of morality and religious, goodness, and Christian ethics represented the moral standard against which a phenotypically white woman's good character and chastity were measured in order to determine her fairness. 47This is nowhere more evident than on the English stage: from Marlowe's Abigail in The Jew of Malta to Massinger's Donusa in The Renegado and beyond, women from non-Christian faiths who are deemed 'fair' in English dramas are always predisposed to Christian virtue, and their fairness is eventually fully realised once they abandon their supposedly sacrilegious 41  religions to become Christian.As an 'emergent ideology of white supremacy' in early modern England, as Kim F. Hall identifies it, that is bound to long-standing English beliefs of Christianity's pre-eminence, the language of fairness therefore serves as a useful apparatus for professing Perseda's racial and religious superiority in Solyman and Perseda. 48The interrelatedness of these 'fair' features in Perseda is evidenced during Soliman's suspended execution, where the captive's prayer to Christ works together with her White body to overpower Soliman and prevent her death.
To construct White Christian supremacy, it is pivotal for Kyd to characterise Perseda's fairness as authentic, since his shaping of Soliman's difference relies on the cosmetic practices prevalent in early modern England.This strategy of difference-making acknowledges a social reality in England that destabilises English Christian claims to White greatness -namely, that physical whiteness was an unstable distinguishing signifier of identity that needed to be maintained and could be artificially produced.The reality that people, and women especially, managed the appearance of their skin colour undermines the foundational logic of racial ideology, which maintains that social hierarchies can be created based on essential biological differences between groups of people.Cosmetic practices additionally impeded associations between whiteness and Christian virtue.Anti-cosmetic polemics circulating in Europe and England frequently chastised men and women, though women more so, for 'painting' their faces with cosmetics, which were deemed as mediums of 'moral impurity'. 49The women who applied cosmetics, as Francis Dolan notes, were accused of disrupting natural and divine order by 'Taking the Pencil out of God's hand' and were therefore seen to contravene God's command in the Christian doctrine. 50Cosmetic practices were most often denounced because they 'sinned against truth' in transforming the body into a site of deception. 51The inability to read a cosmetic-covered body generated a 'general epistemological disarray', that was brought about by the quandaries of the body's '[un]trustworthiness' and illegibility. 52In this vein, cosmetics also posed a crisis for the fashioning of White Christian goodness.The artificial construction of whiteness meant that a woman's white features could not always be presumed to be true, or to be taken as a viable sign of Christian values.
Kyd, therefore, actively fashions Perseda's fairness as natural, beginning in the opening scenes of the play, where Erastus professes his long-standing love 48 Hall, 'Literary Whiteness', 67. 49Tanya Pollard, 'Beauties Poisonous Properties', Shakespeare Studies, 27 (1999), 192.Sujata Iyengar notes that while men also used cosmetics, especially in the royal court, women were predominantly the focus of anticosmetic concerns.See  for Perseda.The scene foregrounds her Christian piety, as Erastus begins by describing how as a child, he 'waited on' Perseda when she would 'goe to Church on hollidaies', before proceeding to describe present the character in environmental terms that ascribe her white beauty and religion with a natural quality. 53When Erastus and Perseda present one another with tokens to confirm their love, Erastus declares that the '[ex]change' is 'far more welcome' to him than 'sunny daies to naked Sauages'. 54He continues to draw on this light imagery as he reflects on the courage her attention will provide him in the tournament that is to follow, where he will be as a 'glasse' that 'takes the Sunbeames burning with his force' and 'thou [Perseda] that heauenly Sun, From whence Ile borrow what I do at chieue'. 55In both analogies, Erastus invites the audience to imagine Perseda as the sun, which is an icon of natural lightness that signifies Perseda's Christian virtue and white beauty.This trope of shining brightness was used widely in the poetical rhetoric of the period by male lovers to describe the white beauty of their ideal fair woman.Erastus' categorisation of Perseda in these terms, as part of his romantic declarations, thus gestures towards her naturally oriented phenotypical whiteness and Christianity.Perseda's natural fairness is addedly depicted through her body's ability to convey sincere emotion, when Perseda blushes on seeing another woman, Lucina, wearing the necklace she earlier gifted to Erastus.Her blush appears after a discussion that draws attention to the character's fairness -Basilisco declares that Lucina has the 'fairest shine that shall this day be seene/Except Persedas beautious excellence'. 56Amused by the knight's comment, Lucina reprimands Basilisco for labelling her 'fairest, and yet Perseda fayrer', but Perseda reassures her companion that Basilisco is blinded by his affections, and 'blind can judge no colours'. 57In highlighting the women's supreme fairness, the conversation guides the audience to recognise a process that is pivotal for the demonstration of Perseda's natural Whiteness, which is to follow -the beholder's discernment of an individual's colour and bodily signs.
On seeing Lucina with the necklace, Perseda's face 'flushes' to reveal her anger and shame, as she believes herself to be 'betraid' by 'false Erastus'. 58Her emotions are made manifest to all through Lucina's observation that Perseda's 'coulor changes'. 59Blushes in early modern England, were considered a physiological proof of virtue insofar as they were thought to demonstrate an individual's true capacity for feeling shame. 60At the same time, this body phenomenon was distinctly affiliated with the construction of White identity.The pink/red tint, as Sujata Iyengar has argued, makes Whiteness 'visible' and confirms a woman's fairness, her white-coded greatness, by emphasising her skin colour as well as her good moral character. 61Equally, persons associated with phenotypic darkness, such as 'Moors and Ethiopians', were thought to be unable 'to blush and experience shame', and thus blushing also served as a ground for asserting a White Christian person's moral and religious greatness over their physically black or dark and Muslim counterparts. 62rue blushes were perceived as antithetical to artificial beauty, and anticosmetic advocates like Richard Barnfield and Thomas Tuke censured women for 'masking or falsifying the blush' with cosmetics 'thereby rendering pink cheeks unreadable as signs of innocence or guilt, prurience or purity, Englishness or strangeness'. 63The dramatization of Perseda's outwardly visible colour 'change', then, evinces her organic whiteness, and by extension affirms her Christian integrity.Such a distinction is key for the playwright to make since Perseda's 'true' fairness is what distinguishes her from Soliman when the pair appear on stage together.

WHITE MASK: ARTIFICIAL OTTOMAN MUSLIM WHITENESS
To sustain the illusion of Perseda's White superiority and correspondingly fashion Soliman's racial inferiority, the playwright uses tropes of colour change and artificial beauty to animate the cosmetic meanings of Soliman's name for the early modern English audience.Tanya Pollard has demonstrated how Kyd's Solyman and Perseda engages with early modern cosmetic culture and anticosmetic debates in ways that navigate gender dynamics on the early modern English stage. 64The playwright, I argue, also mobilises these cosmetic discourses in order to construct racial hierarchies by means of soliman, or mercury sublimate.Kyd's allegorising of Soliman's name is not surprising or unfounded given that he uses the same rhetorical strategy to represent characters in The Spanish Tragedy. 65Like the meanings of the 'name Bel-Imperia', which Eric Griffin insists must be unveiled 'to render Kyd's [ethnic and imperial] thematics visible' in The Spanish Tragedy, the denotations of Soliman's name should be similarly teased out to assess Kyd's frameworks of racial Whiteness in his later play. 6661 Iyengar, Shades, 103-69. 62Ibid., 129. 63 Ibid., 123. 64Pollard, 'Beauty's', 197-8. 65On names as metaphors in The Spanish Tragedy, see for instance Eric J. Griffin, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 70-6. 66Griffin, English Renaissance, 70.Soliman is also not the only character whose name's double meaning is evoked in Solyman and Perseda.The play frequently references sight and blindness in relation to the braggart Knight "Basilisco" (Basilisk).
Solimán/Soliman/Suleymani was a term used in early modern Spain and the Muslim world as a label for a derivative of mercury known otherwise as mercury sublimate. 67This was a pharmaceutical product employed as a treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and was also widely employed amongst European women in the period as a skin-whitening cosmetic.Although the origin of the name remains unclear across various historical disciplines, critical scholarship on this mercury sublimate reveals that its name was certainly well-known and in wide use during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 68The label 'soliman' began circulating in England in its Spanish form by the end of the sixteenth century. 69Kyd, whose knowledge of and interest in continental languages has been well documented, would have encountered the term in Spanish. 70Moreover, since mercury was an Arabic export that, like many other cosmetic and medicinal products, came to Europe from the East, it is possible that the English may have picked up the Arabic version of the term through trade. 71'Soliman' was a renowned cosmetic 'hack' in the Elizabethan court for 'when all else failed, it really did get rid of all blemishes, freckles, spots, warts, and blobs by the simple expedient of removing the outer layer of skin'. 72However, this product was also notorious for having adverse effects on the body -it corroded and burned skin and gave way to other illnesses and ailments.
Soliman's dual quality as a damaging cosmetic is captured in the writings of Thomas Tuke who quotes at length from the Spanish physician Andreas de Laguna to discuss the contemporary uses and sinister effects of women's cosmetic uses of 'Soliman'. 73According to de Laguna, the 'Laidies of Spaine are so faire of themselues, that they haue no neede of any thing to cleere their complexions, but onely a little Orpin, and Soliman, or Mercury sublimate'. 74omparing the effects of Orpin to Soliman, de Laguna writes: Soliman is the more corosiue and byting; insomuch that being applied to the face, it is true, that it eateth out the spots and staines of the face, but so, that with all, it drieth vp, and consumeth the flesh that is vnderneath, so that of force the poore skin shrinketh […] This harme and inconuenience (although it be great, yet it might well be dissembled, if others greater then this did not accompany it; such as are, a stinking breath, the blacknesse & corruption of the teeth which this Soliman ingendreth (Andreas de Laguna qtd in Tukes, A Discourse, fol.B4r-B4v) The mercury derivative was thus characterised as a 'medium that not only fails, but actively undermines, all of its own goals -it mortifies where it should enliven, blackens where it should whiten and disfigures where it should beautify'. 75s a product that is decidedly deceptive in its fabrication of an unnatural whiteness and its promise of beauty, the cosmetic 'soliman' becomes a fitting allegory for Kyd's Muslim Ottoman.The moral deception of the sublimate soliman is embodied by the emperor who first presents himself as an ally to Erastus, but later gives in to stereotypical Muslim vices of uncontrollable tyranny and sexual desire that result in injuries against the Christians.Kyd's audience would not have had trouble making connections between the vices of soliman and the Ottoman Emperor Soliman, given that the features of moral corruption associated with 'painting' practices in the period were much like those assigned to Islam in religious polemics published in the period.While anti-cosmetic publications warned against the 'moral impurity', 'sexual impropriety' and 'idolatry' of women's beautifying practices, clergyman including John Foxe, Meredith Hanmer, and later Henry Byam and Edward Kellet, similarly disparaged Muslims as idolatrous, unjust and prone to deviant and irreligious sexual practices. 76Such alignments in depravity would only have been entrenched by the fact that mercury sublimate itself were sourced from the Muslim world, as well as English knowledge on the habits of using colour-altering cosmetics in these geographies. 77Thus, the Muslim Soliman would have easily been construed as a material manifestation of the moral and religious evils associated with deceptive cosmetics. 74Ibid., fol.B4r. 75Pollard, 'Beauty's', 191. 76Pollard, 'Beauty's', 192-4; Dimmock, New, 104-6; Vitkus, Turning, 87-91. 77Leo Africanus, for example, asserts that the Arabs introduced cosmetic practices to the Africans.See Iyengar, Shades, 134.
The name Soliman accordingly serves as an instrument for Kyd to devalue the whiteness of the Muslim Ottoman based on its associations with false and contrived whiteness.The function of cosmetic soliman as a substance that strives to create whiteness where such colouring is not naturally present inextricably attaches the Ottoman Emperor's name and character to ideas of false or artificial whiteness.This false colouring is positioned against Perseda's fairness, which is 'naturall and without artifice'. 78Characterising Soliman in these terms allows Kyd to devalue the Ottoman's white skin colour by marking it as inferior to Perseda's true White beauty.Correspondingly, it distances this Muslim figure from notions of Christian virtue that are ordinarily emblematised by whiteness in the religious colour symbolisms of the period, and firmly positions the character in an unholy fashion culture.The English already identified Islam as a 'false' faith, and an illegitimate, imitative 'double' of Christianity, whereby the Prophet Muhammed 'was painted as a kind of [false] Christ'. 79Kyd complements and advances these conceptions of Islam by similarly classifying Soliman's whiteness as a false imitation of true Christian Whiteness, thus marking the Muslim Ottoman's whiteness as supposedly counterfeit as his Muslim faith.
The playwright enlivens the meanings of Soliman's name in moments of the play where the emperor and Perseda appear together on stage, especially in their first encounter when the 'two Christian Virgins' Perseda and Lucina are brought to Soliman as a captive of conquest. 80On first seeing the beautiful captives Soliman describes a transformation that is characteristic of the desired cosmetic effects of mercury sublimate: SOLIMAN: This present pleaseth more then all the rest, And were their garments turnd from black to white, I should haue deemd them Junoes goodly Swannes, Or Venus milke white Doues, so milde they are, And so adornd with beauties miracle.(Kyd, Solyman, fol.F3r.) Soliman's assertion that the white women would be more beautiful if their black outward features were 'turned' to white considers the possibilities that a cosmetic, whitening transformation might have had on the two phenotypically white characters.This is a change that resonates with the cosmetic effects of soliman, which is supposed to remove dark 'spots and stains' and whiten or clear skin. 81lthough Soliman refers to clothing here rather than painting, on the early modern English stage costumes and makeup were closely linked as 'cosmetic actions' used in conjunction with another to create the picture of a 78 De Laguna qtd in Tuke, A Discourse, fol.B4r. 79 character. 82This is especially true in performances of racialised identities, whereby clothing items together with paint in order to represent phenotypic differences. 83Thus, when the Ottoman muses on this colour change on stage, I suggest that he imagines a cosmetic transformation that draws the audience's attention onto the cosmetic implications of his own name.This effect is augmented by his use of the personal pronoun 'I' as he proposes the role he might have had in 'deem[ing]' their whiteness.As Soliman assigns himself an active role in the process of turning the women from black to white, he animates his resonances with the sublimate by indirectly identifying himself as soliman personified.
In fashioning Soliman's racial Whiteness as false, Kyd also keeps the audience conscious of Lucina and Perseda's comparatively greater whiteness by emphasising its natural quality.As Soliman himself suggests, a removal of their outer garments would render the women as pinnacles of white beauty, like the 'swans' and 'doves' of the natural world.This change is not as profound as Soliman insinuates it might be, since 'the transformative effects of external trappings, such as clothing, suggest that changes can be undone by removing the threat'. 84In contrast, however, cosmetic products could produce irreversible change, leaving scars or marks on the skin. 85To this effect, black 'garments' do not fundamentally impair Perseda and Lucina's Whiteness -their 'blackness' can be easily restored to their true, non-artificial whiteness.The cosmetic comparison therefore works to brand Soliman with the quality of an enduring unnatural whiteness, which the audience views against the default, natural fairness of the two women.
A similar effect in racial organisation emerges once Soliman isolates Perseda as his chosen object of desire.As he dwells on her features, the emperor draws on popular early modern poetic tropes of fairness to depict Perseda's natural beauty: Soliman here maps a 'pornographic trajectory' of Perseda's body through a series of 'hackneyed Petrarchisms'. 86The environmental tropes of flowers, climate and terrain that Kyd draws from early modern poetics of beauty characterises Perseda as inherently 'nature […] made' beauty.Since her white, bright skin is clearly delineated as a key component of her beauty, this language also implies that Perseda harbours a naturally great whiteness.By relaying the shape of Perseda's 'eye brows' in the passive voice, and without a corresponding acting object, Kyd allows Soliman's description here to be interpreted as a reference to God's metaphoric 'pencil'. 87This designation of Perseda's beautiful whiteness as God-given entrenches the natural categorisation of her comparatively superior White racial identity, while also hinting at the Christian values attached to her natural, illustrious whiteness.
Yet, Soliman's praises also conjure ideas of artificial beauty that turn attention onto the cosmetic connotations of his name and, resultantly his congruence with artificial whiteness.The cosmetic lens through which the emperor's perceives of Perseda's white beauty guides the audience to identify the Muslim figure with this immoral beautifying culture and thus enlivens the mercury meaning of his name.For instance, in the vernacular of the period a pencil was an alternative name for a cosmetic paintbrush, and thus Soliman's lack of clarity on the owner of the hand drawing Perseda's brows enables this instrument to be regarded as human-made and cosmetic rather than Godly.Since, as we have seen, Perseda's white face is makeup free, the artificial beauty intimated by the pencil casts meaning back onto Soliman who mimetically wields the cosmetic utensil.A parallel effect is created by Soliman's references to other 'very popular ingredients in the cosmetic recipes of the period' such as roses and lilies. 88These flowers produce Perseda's natural white beauty just as they bring attention to the practice of artificially casting whiteness.For Degenhardt, Soliman's 'mimicry of the Petrarchan lover', who would have been imagined as a European man, emphasises the 'unnaturalness' of the proposed union. 89I argue, by extension, that Soliman's conceptual 'mimicry' of the also inferably white, Petrarchan lover further affixes him to the fabric of imitative whiteness and false faith, thereby affirming his embodiment of the qualities of whitepretending soliman.Kyd fittingly incorporates cosmetics into the actions that lead to the ultimate Christian triumph over the Muslims at the end of the play, which is enacted through Perseda's military resistance against the Ottoman and a trick she performs to eventually kill the Turk.When Soliman returns to Rhodes to reattain his territory and Perseda, the Ottoman fatally injures Perseda as he believes her to be a male soldier (she appears on stage during the conflict dressed in 'mans apparell'), but on realising her identity he kisses the deceased woman in a final attempt to satisfy his lusts. 90The kiss leads to his own demise, as it transpires that Perseda has placed poison on her lips.Perseda is one character in a long line of dying or deceased women on the early modern English stage who use poisonous cosmetics to kill the men 'who pursue them to their deaths and beyond'. 91Perseda and her poisoning counterparts act only as 'vessels' for the poisonous cosmetics they use, as they 'become the site of a literalization of preexisting spiritual poisons, the poisons of lust and tyranny in the men' who desire them. 92Thus, while Perseda makes a cosmetic her choice of weapon, this painting does not irreparably impair her natural fairness since, much like the other references to cosmetics in the play, its use here projects the meanings and consequences of such cosmetics onto the Muslim Soliman.
Death by makeup is a felicitous act of revenge against Soliman, and the cosmetic murder correspondingly marks a final attempt to construct the Muslim character's racial and religious differences.As Soliman kisses Perseda, he laments her death by reminding the audience once again of her natural, bright whiteness as a 'Faire springing rose, ill pluckt before thy time'. 93He makes this statement while his own links with soliman, and thus artificial whiteness and religious falsehood, are being impressed on the audience's mind, as the cosmetics earlier aligned to the emperor materialise on his face, with the transfer of the cosmetic from Perseda's lips onto his own.This process of cosmetic application -the tyrannical Soliman's kiss with a dying, chaste Christian woman -is an immoral sexualised act that accentuates the evil qualities of cosmetics like soliman, as well as the emperor's stereotypically deviant Muslim behaviour.Soliman's false whiteness and his Muslim faith are brought together by Perseda's note, where she reveals that she applied 'deadly poyson' to her 'lips' to 'plague' the Turk's 'hart that is so full of poison'. 94Perseda here connects the poison of her cosmetic products to Soliman's toxic inward religious and moral state.Thus, as the play draws to a close, the audience are left 90 Kyd, Soliman, fol.H4r. 91Pollard, 'Beauty's', 198. 92Ibid. 93Kyd, Solyman, fol.I1r. 94Kyd, Solyman, fol.I1v. with a view that Soliman's faith and character readily matches the same sinister, unnatural qualities that Kyd has sought to secure to in the Muslim Ottoman's white appearance.

CONCLUSION
In his narrative study on interracial relationships between the 'Man of Colour' and the 'White Woman' in colonial society in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon considers the psychological anxiety of a Black man's dependence on White love for human validation. 95A White woman's love, he considers, offers access to what is perversely desirable to him: 'white culture, white beauty, white whiteness'. 96Both here and in other parts of his study, Fanon laments and negotiates not only the want of whiteness itself but also the 'Man of Colour's' psychological conditioning to desire Whiteness at all, and to rely on whiteness for self-determination.
As this article has sought to make clear, the process of conditioning Fanon describes was already taking shape in sixteenth century Europe, where a 'true' form of Whiteness was being crafted as a covetable and natural property.However, a turn to the early modern English stage, and to Solyman and Perseda in particular, demonstrates how such fashioning of this White racial supremacy itself emerges out of a confrontation with an authoritative 'Man of Colour' or a figure we might contemporarily read in this way, since they have been historically ascribed with false 'colour' in endeavours to invent White European and Christian greatness.In addition to providing insights into the development of difference in later history, examining Kyd's play, illuminates for us just how inseparable religion and race were in the context of forming ideologies of White Supremacy in early modern England itself.It is specifically, the English theatre's dramatic encounter with an Ottoman, Muslim, whiteadjacent 'Turk' that gives way to English self-fashioning -a self-fashioning that generates White Christian supremacy that will be inherited by colonialists and put to devastating effects.Bringing Ottoman males into critical discussions on early modern English racial formation, thus, reframes our understanding of how Whiteness was being formed before the English began to gain colonial momentum, as well as unveils the intersecting forms of difference that were pivotal to establishing this fiction of greatness.
. See English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13.
40 Jonathan Burton, 'English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five Perspectives on "Turning Turk" in Early Modern Texts', Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2 (2002), 50.