Ower Felaws Blake: Blackface, Race, and Muslim Conversion in the DigbyMary Magdalene

Abstract

The Digby Mary Magdalene—a fifteenth-century East Anglian play about the life of Mary Magdalene—racializes many “enemies” of Christianity: devils who tempt Mary into sin and anachronistically Muslim rulers of Marseilles whom Mary converts. This article examines their shared racialization and argues that the play depicts the devils applying black to each other onstage in order to destabilize ideas of natural, bodily race. This destabilization forces the audience to seek other connections between the black-skinned devils and the Muslims, who are not depicted as visually different from the Christians. The play links Muslims and Devils through shared racial performances that repeat visual, auditory, olfactory, and psychological elements. These shared performances ultimately show that race in the play functions as a spectrum based on the soul–body binary. This spectrum marks a character’s place on a hierarchy from the damned to the saved, with the unrepentant associated with the body and the physical world, while the converted are associated with the spirit and the spiritual world. This fluid identity allows the characters in the play to perform their race and to change their performances as they convert and become closer to the Christian ideal.

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