Imagining African Public Spaces: Justice, Identity and National Anxieties in Late-Sixteenth- and Early-Seventeenth-Century English Drama

In the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, the plays of Thomas Heywood, Robert Daborne and Philip Massinger portrayed Africa as a ‘land of deficient justice’ by staging unequal rights, private vengeance and judicial irregularities in public spaces of the Barbary states. Informed by widely circulated travel narratives and historical records, this imaginative framework reflects English anxieties over conversions to Islam and increasing migration to North Africa. By dramatizing the fragility of African public order, these plays caution against departure from national identity and Christian faith. These dramatized narratives construct imagined African public spaces marked by disorder, while simultaneously reflecting and interrogating the fragility of legal order that haunted early modern England, prompting broader reflection on governance and law. These works have shaped early modern English judicial discourse, exposing the fluid and contested character of justice, through implicit textual and theatrical inquiries into the nature of legal and social order. Present-day performance, pedagogy and scholarship invite reflection on issues of justice, identity and cultural encounters across time.