“Away you Ethiope!” and “Out tawny, tartar, Out!” When Hermia still refuses to leave, the trio have the following exchange:
HELENA
O, when she’s angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school;
And though she be but little, she is fierce.
HERMIA
“Little” again! nothing but “low” and “little”!
Why will you suffer her to flout me thus?
Let me come to her.
LYSANDER
Get you gone, you dwarf;
You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;
You bead, you acorn.55
In a neat jumble, Shakespeare makes Hermia at once a “vixen,” capable since a young age of luring men with her sexual charms, as well as a grotesque and “low” dwarf. For her sexual and physical transgressions, she is discarded. Helena, Lysander’s newly chosen lover, is by contrast depicted as tall, white, and slim, like a “painted maypole.”
English ladies weren’t only painting themselves white to enhance their beauty. They were also painting themselves black to reveal, through contrast, the alleged hideousness of black women. In 1605, shortly after the death of Elizabeth, an infamous court masque known as The Masque of Blackness was presented by Jacob I’s queen, Anne of Denmark, and her court. The Masque of Blackness, by Ben Jonson, presented the tale of King Niger and his twelve daughters. While the king tries to convince his daughters that they are beautiful, they despise their black skin. An oracle (Aethiope) tells the girls that if they wish to remove their blackness, they should go to the land with the name ending in -TANIA (that is, Britannia), also known as “Albion the Fair.”
The twelve daughters were played by Queen Anne and her ladies in blackface. Their faces and their arms up to the elbows were painted black, leading the English art collector Sir Carleton, who once sat for a portrait by Rubens, to cringe, claiming the “lean-cheeked Moors” they invented to be a “loathsome sight” indeed.56 Neither Sir Carleton nor the twelve painted black ladies were to find any relief until Ben Jonson finished the sequel, which was performed in 1608. At that time, they arrive at the Throne of Beauty in Britannia, where they bask in the sun’s (less scorching) glow while chanting, “Yield night, then to the light, as blackness hath to beauty.”57
Such was the double signification of fairness in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. After the Restoration, black women were seldom represented in painting, and when they did appear, they were not miraculously re-christened in England as the beauties they had been in other places at other times. Being commonly retained as pages and sexual conveniences for men from the rising world powers, they remained in the popular imagination as little, base, and licentious.
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The rise of the slave trade also had a direct impact on changing ideas about the good qualities associated with being fat among the English people. Perishable goods reaped from slave labor began arriving from the colonies that would forever change the English way of life, one of which would go on to have a curious impact on the English diet and body size: sugar. Sugar production had been developing at breakneck speed in late sixteenth-century Brazil, then a colony of Portugal. In the 1620s the Dutch Republic attempted a hostile takeover of the northernmost Brazilian territories. The war that ensued was fought in a series of skirmishes in which the Dutch captured a key port in 1630, only to lose it again in 1654.58 In the meantime, sugar production in Brazil dropped precipitously, a shift that allowed the British and their colony of Barbados to step into the void.59
The mind-boggling profits the English reaped from sugar plantations were one obvious benefit of this trade. Another was the widespread availability of a commodity once deemed so rare and enticing that it was dubbed “white gold.” In 1660 England imported 1,200 barrels of sugar from Barbados and other key West Indian holdings. By 1700, that amount had jumped to 50,000 barrels. When it came to the sheer volume of sugar sent to the mother country, the British were rivaled only by the Dutch.60 As sugar imports soared, prices plummeted, making what was formerly a luxury item readily available to the average citizen of England and Holland.61 Teahouses and coffeehouses sprang up on fashionable London thoroughfares. Sugar was creating whole new industries in centers of European social life and culture, along with delicious new opportunities for daily delight.
But with the improved standard of living came the dissipations of the high life. While malnutrition remained the prevailing concern for most of the population, a mounting number of the moderately well-off were growing fat. Doctors in England eyed the swelling number of fat people with consternation. In 1620, for example, the Oxford-trained English physician Tobias Venner lamented the rising rates of corpulence among the English.62 Using for the first time the word “obesus” to describe excess fat, Venner argued that “obesity” had adverse health consequences. He offered a treatment “to make slender such bodies as are too grosse.”63
The changes in the English diet enabled by sugar plantations in the colonies also led to rising rates of a purportedly related illness: gout. With the introduction of sugar and sugar-sweetened alcoholic beverages such as sack (a sugar-sweetened wine), gout was becoming an epidemic in England, particularly among men, who are more susceptible to the illness. Known previously as the disease of kings and the king of diseases, by 1683 the sweeping problem of gout prompted Dr. Thomas Sydenham to write A Treatise of the Gout and Dropsy in an effort to detail the etiology of the disease and offer practical advice to its sufferers.64
In Sydenham’s estimation, gout overwhelmingly struck those “who happen to be of a robust habit, who lead an indolent life, and are used to live very full.”65 The “robust habit” referred to a rich diet paired frequently with wine and beer. This behavior, he claimed, was particularly common among the male sex, since women rarely exhibited such a “voracious appetite” and “immoderate” drinking behavior.66 And, believing that overindulgence was the cause, Sydenham added that gout typically beset the “gross and corpulent,” although it occasionally befell lean and slender folk as well.67 Sydenham was himself a gout sufferer. He believed himself to be speaking both as a medical authority and as a fellow, fat, gout-afflicted man. Interestingly, while Sydenham and Venner pointed to diet as causes of corpulence and illness, neither recognized sugar as a potential cause. Sydenham, in the denial typical of a sugar addict, actually suggested that a concoction using brown sugar and the syrup of marshmallows be used as a cure.68
Sugar was rarely if ever recognized by seventeenth-century English physicians as the culprit driving both gout and what was described as “gross” corpulence. But this was largely because many doctors didn’t quite understand how along with the quantity, the quality of the food consumed, affected a person’s weight. This situation was to change in the coming century. Still, in Holland, the other country where sugar consumption, corpulence, and gout were on the rise, at least one seventeenth-century physician was making the connection among the three. In the same year that Sydenham published his Treatise, the Dutch doctor Stephen Blankaart wrote that the ubiquity of sugar in Amsterdam was associated with the marked increase of cavities, corpulence, and gout.69
Fatness was becoming more common, but it remained a condition common among the relatively well-off. Regardless, Western doctors were making nascent arguments about the link between fatness and ill health.70 Still, concerns about the physical health of the fat man as he partook of white gold and port wine was not the foremost concern of the high-minded Englishman. For the English intellectual, fat bodies had a different, pernicious association.
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In
