"Gary Taylor's meditation on whiteness is learned, articulate, and deeply felt. Much of the material will be unfamiliar to most readers, and the argument, original and provocative, genuinely transforms an essential part of the social and cultural landscape. This is an important and exciting book." —STEPHEN ORGEL, J. E. Reynolds Professor in Humanities, Stanford University "In this wide-ranging, deftly coordinated, incisively focused book, Gary Taylor addresses two Renaissances. Making a major contribution to the new subfield of whiteness studies in the English Renaissance, Taylor locates the origin of an explicit appeal to white racial identity in the second decade of the seventeenth century—a turning point he illuminates through strong comparative analysis of the transition from Shakespeare to Thomas Middleton. Moreover, since the book's reach extends to the nineteenth-century American literary Renaissance, revised to include African American voices, Taylor also brilliantly reconfigures the overall framework of whiteness studies as a whole. Gary Taylor speaks with contemporary urgency about the persistent problem of white blindness to white skin privilege: presenting a comprehensive, detailed history of white identity formation, Taylor opens our eyes. Future scholarship starts here." —PETER ERICKSON, author of Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama and Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves