Black Tudor and Stuart Lives in England

Watch Dr. Miranda Kaufmann in discussion with course contributor Wendy Lennon, a Fellow of the English Association and founder of Shakespeare, Race & Pedagogy.

In the second part of the interview, Wendy Lennon outlines the insights, challenges and some of the issues of using fiction and literary interpretation to better understand the lives of Africans in Tudor and Stuart England.

Stark Archives of Black Tudor and Stuart Lives

Where records are fragmentary, how do we interpret the experience of Black historical characters? Can we use historical fiction and art informed by historical research to fill the silences in the archives?

And where records do exist, how do we interpret these to appreciate and understand 16th and early 17th century Black lives?

There is a growing body of novels, poetry and drama by writers from a range of backgrounds, exploring the lives of Africans in Tudor England. In this step we provide selected creative interpretations and examine how contemporary writers have responded to the stories of Black men and women from history.

Black Tudors in Literature

Testament’s Black Men Walking is an odyssey through 2,000 years of Black British History, seen through the eyes of three Black men walking through the Peak District, which references John Blanke the trumpeter amongst other key figures

Patrice Lawrence has written a children’s book The Diver’s Daughter about an imagined daughter of Jacques Francis a Salvage Diver. The Diver’s Daughter tells the story of Eve, a young West African girl from Southwark who travels to Southhampton with her mother on a mission to find Jacques Francis.

Novelist Nikki Marmery re-imagines the story of Maria, the African woman who sailed on the Golden Hinde in her novel On Wilder Seas. The novel is inspired by Maria, who Francis Drake abandoned heavily pregnant in Indonesia in 1579.

Kate Morrison’s novel A Book of Secrets, tells the story of Susan Charlewood, taken from Ghana as a baby and now as a young girl, hunting for her brother through an Elizabethan underworld.

Ayanna Gillian Lloyd, novelist and poet from Trinidad and Tobago, has written a short story evoking the experience of Diego recently commissioned by the Colonial Countryside Project. You can hear Ayanna reading an extract from her story The Shadow Man in this audio podcast.

Reflection

We’d like you to investigate one of the examples of literary interpretations of historical Black characters from the 16th and early 17th centuries.

You don’t need to read or listen to all of the work now, but you may be interested to follow up some of the writing that interests you later on. You can read short extract quotes from some of the writers in the Creative Responses PDF which you can download below.

After investigating some of the examples, which literary styles and approaches did you find most interesting?

• What kind of historical research did the authors carry out? What do you think the writer’s reason was for adopting a historical approach?
• Which approaches do you think are most valid or meaningful in relation to the evidence and what historical insights might they provide?