African Labour in Early Modern English Drama and England’s Anxiety over the Governance of Foreigners (1580–1620)

In late 16th and early 17th-century English drama, African characters frequently appear as servants, slaves, or generals, yet they do not remain confined to those roles. Instead, they enter the social and political networks of those they serve, affecting intimacy, marriage, lineage and household order, with consequences that extend beyond the domestic sphere. As plots unfold, these African labourers are often removed from the stage through silencing, retirement, banishment, or death. The plays thus present them as “important labour”: useful, employable and sometimes indispensable, yet repeatedly marked as a potential danger once they move beyond the limits assigned to service. By showing how such figures are admitted, put to work, watched, and ultimately removed, drama makes visible the maintenance of employment order and the management of foreign labour. In this sense, the theatre functions not merely as a site of entertainment but as a critical medium through which contemporary English concerns about labour, belonging, and exclusion are staged and judged. It lays before audiences a recurrent logic of handling foreign labour—needed, monitored, and finally expelled—and in doing so exposes the difficulties faced by the state in governing foreign labour and social difference. These dramatic representations also offer a historical lens through which later exclusionary and assimilationist tendencies may be more carefully understood.