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Elaine Brousseau
Othello, Shylock and the Face of White Anxiety
Othello enjoyed tremendous popularity in both the South and the North before the Civil War. In fact, Othello was performed so frequently in the United States that it was sometimes called “Shakespeare’s American Play” (Kaul 8). Charles Lower offers the striking historical evidence that Othello was only slightly less popular in the antebellum South than Richard III, Macbeth and Hamlet. Indeed, in Charleston, Othello was performed 63 times between 1809 and 1860, in Memphis 20 times between 1837 and 1853, and 41 times in Mobile between 1832 and 1860. Louisville saw 22 performances of Othello from 1846 through 1860, while in New Orleans the play “averaged more than one and a half performances annually through 1860” (201). In the North, Othello was performed with even greater frequency. In Philadelphia, for example, Othello was the seventh most popular play in the period 1831-51, with 118 performances (Grimsted 254). In addition to its popularity among other Shakespeare plays, Othello was also three times more popular in this period than any other legitimate blackface entertainment (that is any play or entr’acte that had a black character in it), and it vied with “Jim Crow” as the most performed of any blackface piece during the period (Cockrell 27). At the same time, The Merchant of Venice, which had been the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be performed in America , was being played in almost every town in the country by 1840, and nearly every major actor in America played Shylock. Even later in the century--after 1870--Merchant retained its popularity; only Hamlet was performed more frequently among New York productions of Shakespeare plays (Erdman 21). What did mid-nineteenth-century observers and theater reviewers see in Othello and The Merchant of Venice? What meanings did they extract from these plays? What part did racial and ethnic consciousness and what Barbara Hodgdon calls “the conflict between races, cultures, and histories which Othello dramatizes” play in audience--and critical--reaction (29)? How does my concept of Shakespearean formations, those patterns of shared expectations and fulfillment between performance and audience, illuminate the nineteenth-century reception of Othello and The Merchant of Venice? This chapter will explore these questions by looking at how American productions of Othello and The Merchant of Venice in the nineteenth century contributed to the construction of attitudes about race, ethnicity and anti-Semitism. What we will see, in the case of Othello, is that blackface minstrelsy, the form of nineteenth-century mass entertainment that Alexander Saxton says “epitomized and concentrated the thrust of white racism” (165), powerfully influenced productions of the play in the legitimate theater in the period before and after the Civil War. A connection between Othello and minstrelsy that suggests strongly that audiences were looking at the two in the same way is that a comical, at times even buffoon-like, or crazed Othello seems to mark both types of performances in the period. In addition, legitimate stage productions of Othello and the abbreviated minstrel burlesques of the play both reveal a fear of and fascination with blackness that historians of popular culture have come to associate with the minstrel audience, emotions that the audience could allow itself to feel “safely” because no actual black men were on stage. My discussion of the representation of Othello in both minstrelsy and legitimate-theater productions will make the connection between them clearer. With The Merchant of Venice, nineteenth-century productions become sites of exploration for audiences struggling with Jewish difference, revealing what seems to have been a collective uneasiness with and ambivalence toward American capitalism. Exploring Shylock’s connection with both racial blackness and capitalism will be the focus of the second part of this chapter.
The critical position on Othello as gleaned from reviews of the period varies widely by production, year, and star performer, although not so noticeably by area of the country. In a pamphlet entitled “Walter Hampden discusses the Great Othellos of the Past,” published in 1923, the actor singles out Edmund Kean, Tomasso Salvini, Edwin Forrest, John McCullough, E.L.Davenport and Edwin Booth as the six actors who “won lasting renown for their portrayal of the Moor of Venice,” although others have suggested that there was no actor on the nineteenth-century American stage of whom it could be said that the role of Othello was considered his greatest. Most great actors of the nineteenth century chose to play Iago instead of Othello. Cockrell attributes this preference to the “prevailing wisdom” that Othello “was at heart a simpleminded, hulking black man given primarily to despoiling white womanhood” (28). Indeed, cuts made to the play seem to have had the effect of reducing the play’s complexity and reducing some of its racial tensions. The introduction to the Asa Cushman promptbook (1852) points out that the language has been little altered but that the play has been “adapted to the modern stage by the simple process of abbreviation.” The more racially charged language, like references to black ram, white ewe, and the beast with two backs was removed, however, as were references to Desdemona as whore in Act IV.ii. Lower talks about how actors “protected their Othellos”: “Surviving nineteenth-century promptbooks usually cut most of the fourth act, including Othello’s ‘fit’ and his eavesdropping, but the cut text was performed everywhere. The promptbooks do not provide evidence of any additional cuts...to accommodate the play to southern audiences” (222). Overall, critical opinion held that Othello could not be played in its entirety. Said William Winter, “Many lines of ‘Othello,’ indeed, must be discarded in order that it may be made endurable, not to say decent, in a public representation” (270). Layered onto the body, ‘blackness’ (like femininity) may be constructed--and viewed--as a performance. Othello’s “Black” Body: The Changing Color of Othello. As Joyce Green Macdonald points out, “Othello’s black body in Shakespeare’s play proved an intense and disorientating problem for nineteenth-century actors, producers, and audiences” (233). Some of this problem is reflected in the confusion over Othello’s color. Before investigating the connection between productions of Othello and minstrelsy, a discussion of Othello’s color in the nineteenth century--what the character actually looked like to audiences--is necessary. Illustrations and descriptions in reviews and other notices give some idea of how Othello was represented, although one cannot be sure exactly what was meant by terms like “tawny,” “black,” and “red.” Clearly, though, the variety of “color” choices available for the representation of Othello reveals the extent to which this signifier of racial identity was unstable and in flux. What is apparent is that there was considerable variation in the representation of Othello in the period between 1835 and 1875, and what Othello was meant to look like when the play was first produced is almost entirely irrelevant. One suggestion that it was uncommon, at least in the earlier part of the century, to represent Othello as black, comes from the memoir of William Wood, a theater manager. Writing about the 1817-18 theatrical season, Wood points out that Henry Wallack “first appeared in America during this season as Othello, a part ill chosen, and more so from his persisting to make him a black, in a place [Baltimore] where the general practice prevailed of showing him a tawny Moor” (227). A very long early review of the play (from the Virginia Herald, 1819) calls Othello “perhaps as a whole...superior to any play of Shakspeare” and notes that the actor (Caldwell) chose to play the lead as a Moor, although the reviewer “believe[s] the Othello of Shakespeare to have been black.” The reviewer observes that playing Othello in the color of a Moor “had the advantage of not being so dark as to obscure the expression of his countenance.” A Savannah critic “commended Junius Brutus Booth, who would have been taking on the role in the 1830s, for playing the hero as black-skinned, rather than as a mulatto, as was more conventional” (Dormon 277). The late nineteenth-century critic William Winter, in looking at Othello’s color historically, notes that actors who played Othello before Edmund Kean (1787-1833) made him black, but that references to “black” in the play are not necessarily “literally descriptive of his color” because either persons hostile to Othello (i.e., Iago) are using the various expressions (e.g., “sooty bosom” or “old black ram”) or Othello is using the expression figuratively in a passage where he “depreciates himself” in comparison to Desdemona (e.g., “haply for I am black”). Winter insists, then, that “a Moor is not necesarily black; he is tawny. Othello is not a Negro and he should not be represented as one.” Indeed, Winter goes so far as to state that to “make Othello a Negro is, necessarily, to lower the tone of the interpretation” (Shakespeare on the Stage, First Series, 251-2). While there does seem to be increasing concern with Othello’s color as the century progresses, actually the near-obsession with Othello’s color seems to occur later in the century. (This observation, however, may be misleading, in that most of the extant reviews are from the 1880s and 90s.) William Winter’s remarks on Othello’s race are an example, as is a lengthy paper, “Othello’s Visage--a Plea for a Black Othello”, delivered to a Shakespeare club at the turn of the century. The following review of Robert Mantell as Othello (1888) both offers a kind of mini-“retrospective” of the variations in Othello’s color in the latter part of the century and indicates the extent to which the color discussion was occupying a prominent place in reviews. Robert Mantell has astonished Eastern cities by producing ‘Othello’
after an original fashion of his own. He makes Othello an Arab of tawny
hue and not an Ethiopian. This adds to the attractiveness and probability
of the story, but it is doubtful whether it is Shakespeare. Lawrence Barrett
looks like a Wild West Indian in the part, and Salvina [sic] made Othello
a dark-skinned Italian. Others have gone so far as to give the Moor the
complexion of a genuine African, and a coal-black negro Othello created
a sensation in the West a few years ago by essaying the role. Mr. Mantell
dresses Othello not in robes Oriental, but in the costume of a Venetian
soldier, an innovation that may be accepted without hesitation, even if
it lessens the picturesqueness of the character. Although he agrees with Lower that “Southern audiences do not seem
ordinarily to have been offended by the theme, at least not in the first
decades of the nineteenth century,” James Dormon sees audiences disturbed
by Othello’s color as the controversy over slavery heated up (276-77).
Dormon points out that reviews in the 1850s and early 1860s increasingly
object to a black Othello and that, by the end of the antebellum period,
Othello “had to be played as near-white, or not at all” (277).
One actor in 1852 was told in Macon, Georgia, “that the play was
‘very displeasing to many citizens’ and that they would ‘not
permit his being played dark’ under any circumstances.” In an
1860 production of the play in Mobile, James Wallack, Jr. “refused
to perform the lead” because he was “‘afraid of the negro
part’” (Dormon 277). The demand for a whitewashed Othello is
not surprising given attitudes like that of Mary Preston, author of the
1869 Studies in Shakespeare, who said in speaking of Othello, “I
have always imagined its hero a white man. It is true that the dramatist
paints him black, but ....it is a stage decoration which my taste discards”
(qtd. in Kaul 11). John Quincy Adams was certainly one who thought that Shakespeare was often less satisfying in performance. In an article in New England Magazine (1835), the then former U.S. president names Othello as one of several of Shakespeare’s admired plays that “give much more pleasure to read than to see performed upon the stage” (“Misconceptions” 223). He identifies Desdemona as “little less than a wanton” and is repelled by any sign of Desdemona’s sexuality, expressing his opinion with a revulsion that is racially charged: “Upon the stage her fondling with Othello is disgusting. Who, in real life, would have her for a sister, daughter or wife?” (Adams, “Misconceptions,” 224-5). In the American Monthly Magazine (1836), Adams discoursed at length on the “unnatural” passion of Desdemona for Othello, “solely and exclusively because of his color,” insisting that “the intermarriage of black and white blood is a violation of the law of nature. That is the lesson to be learned from the play” (214-16). The tone of the article suggests, however, that Adams’s opinion of Desdemona was not one generally accepted by others, as he takes pains to point out that “there are critics who cannot bear to see the virtue and delicacy of Shakspeare’s Desdemona called in question” (209). But he maintains that a daughter who would elope with a “thick-lipped wool-headed Moor” is “deficient in delicacy,” filial duty and female modesty and not intended by the playwright as “an example of the perfection of female virtue” (211-4). Adams goes so far as to suggest that Desdemona gets her just “deserts” in the end and that the audience has limited sympathy for her (“Misconceptions” 226). In an article in Southern Literary Messenger, Judge Harper’s language is less inflammatory, although, like Adams, he sees the attraction of Desdemona for Othello unlikely: “I will venture to say that not in one instance in a hundred is the man of sound and unsophisticated tastes and propensities so likely to be attracted by the female of a foreign stock, as by one of his own....Shakespeare spoke the language of nature, when he made the Venetian senator attribute to the effect of witchcraft, Desdemona’s passion for Othello” (634). Just how was Desdemona represented in performance? In the reviews I have looked at, not much is given about Desdemona, except to point out whether she was well-acted or not. One actress appearing as Desdemona in Philadelphia in 1848 is chided for her “want of grace” and her “chilling indifference.” Words like “sweet,” “lovely,” “pleasant,” “graceful,” “ladylike” and “innocent” occur repeatedly to describe both the performance and the character. Often, she is simply mentioned along with the other supporting players, which suggests that the role was regarded as of much less significance than that of Othello. Actually, her character was made less complex in nineteenth-century productions with much of her independence and intelligence left out, and, as the earlier discussion of the cuts made to the play makes clear, her sexuality as well. For example, the thirty-six lines of banter she engages in with Iago when she lands in Cyprus had pretty much disappeared from nineteenth-century promptbooks, cuts that date back to Thomas Rymer’s disapprobation (in 1693) of Desdemona’s behavior in this scene (Dash 109). Desdemona’s role was considered so minor in the nineteenth century that William Macready was surprised when Fanny Kemble volunteered to play Desdemona opposite his Othello. Said Macready to Kemble about the role, “There is absolutely nothing to be done with it, nothing: nobody can produce any effect in it...Emilia’s last scene can be made a great deal more of. I could understand your playing that, but not Desdemona (qtd. in Rosenberg 135). Indeed, in a review of a production in which Edwin Booth played Othello, some fifteen lines are devoted to a discussion of Emilia with only three to Desdemona. Annie Clarke is praised for being “remarkably bold and brilliant” as Emilia, who, characterized as “young, handsome, impetuous [and] a little crafty,” is obviously staged with more personality than Desdemona. Dey say dat in de dark all cullers am de same. Othello in Minstrelsy. Although individual minstrel-type blackface acts had existed earlier in the century, minstrelsy became formally organized in “show” format with the creation of the Virginia Minstrels in 1843. Minstrelsy took the already popular Shakespeare burlesque and put its unique stamp on that form: the minstrel burlesques of Othello, unlike English burlesques of the play like Maurice Dowling’s 1834 Othello Travestie, for example, all are marked by a foreshortened plot (or the near absence of a plot altogether), the use of dialect and punning, and, of course, the use of the minstrel clown. The minstrel burlesque Desdemonum features extreme plot foreshortening, even by burlesque standards: The first two of its three very short scenes are occupied with Brabantium’s discovery that his daughter is missing and the subsequent appearance of all parties before the Judge. The twenty-nine lines of scene three are all that is needed to get Oteller going about the “han’kerchum” and to dispatch Desdemonum. Except for a reference by Desdemonum to “my soldier” and one by Oteller to “my sword,” there is no sense of Othello’s generalship and clearly no nobility in this short piece. The emphasis in the sketch is on the possibility of Desdemonum’s duplicity (“She humbugged her old daddy, and may thee” (66)) is consistent with the fear of women’s duplicity, a theme that runs throughout minstrelsy; the extreme telescoping of the action means that any indication that Desdemonum is being wrongly accused is entirely glossed over. Although this highly abbreviated burlesque works because audiences could be assumed to know the play (or at least the story) , the effect of the foreshortening nonetheless is to foreground the white man’s fear of the attraction black men held for white women. In minstrel burlesques of Othello like Desdemonum, it is significant that even Desdemona would have been played in blackface. This practice might have demonstrated the white fear that white women would start to “look” black if they married black men. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a prominent physician, relates the following “fact”: A white woman in North Carolina not only acquired a dark color, but several of the features of a negro by marrying and living with a black husband. A similar instance of a change in the color and features of a woman in Buck’s [sic] county in Pennsylvania has been observed and from a similar cause. In both cases, the women bore children by their black husbands (qtd. in Takaki 31). But the playing of Desdemona in blackface may have had a different, more subtle effect on the audience. It is at least possible that the fact that having both Othello and Desdemona in blackface may have erased somewhat the racial differences between the two. The line that they say together, “Dey say dat in de dark all cullers am de same,” most likely prompted ironic laughter (in blackface, Othello and Desdemona are both the same color), but may also have had the unintended effect of suggesting that a love relationship could erase, or at least mask, differences in color, a suggestion that could simultaneously confirm one of the main fears of the white male audience (the fear of miscegenation) and allay it (by positing that the two were equal). The very short minstrel piece “Bones Plays O’Feller,”
which was probably part of the opening section of a minstrel show, emphasizes
the violence and misogyny in the Othello story. In his conversation with
the Interlocutor , Bones relates how he and his first wife “both
belonged to the same freeater” where they played “O’feller”
and “Desdamony,” then describes how he “pull[ed] and haul[ed]
her” and “catched her by de windpipe and shookt her” (137).
It’s not enough that she’s “smodered...wid a pillow”
but the coroner also sits on her and “squelched de last ob de breff
out of her” (138). The recurring sexual imagery--“the phallic
nose and the engulfing, vaginal throat” (26)--that Eric Lott sees
in minstrel discourse in his analysis of a song also comes into play in
“Bones Plays O’Feller.” Desdamony, who is decribed by Bones
as “fasten[ing] wid all her teeth on de end of my nose,” meets
with death, punished perhaps for her sexual rapaciousness. In the metatheatrical Dar’s de money , which is about two “actors” preparing to take on the roles of Othello and Desdemona, the actual play Othello nearly disappears altogether. Jake explains the plot of Othello to the down-on-his luck Pete: “Now, do you know this piece? You can easy learn it. The plot is: Othello, a jealous Moor--tells tales of love--runs off wid Darsemoney--expects her--excited! ‘Whar’s de hankerchum?’ (catches Pete by the throat) seizes her! Strangles her; ha!” The only actual “scene” that the two practice from Othello is the murder of Desdemona, with Pete as Desdemona and Jake as Othello. Jake enters, “a lighted candle in left hand, a pillow on left arm,” and announces, with the characteristic punning of the minstrel piece, “‘It is the caws, the caws, my crow! It is the caws! Yet I’ll not shed her blood! Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, and smooth as monumental alabastrum.” To Jake’s line, “And now put out de light (extinguishes candle.) And then put out thy light!,” Pete replies, “Not if I know it!” and the two engage in a struggle. Pete lies still, and Jake worries that he is dead but then Jake realizes that Pete is “playing ‘possum.” The piece ends with Pete running off stage and returning with something with which to hit Jake. The ability, presumably, to generate humor from even the very small amount of actual “Othello material” used in Dar’s de money again attests to the audience’s familiarity with the play, but raises the question of what the burlesque is really about. Clearly the piece, if nothing else, ridicules the pretensions of blacks attempting to act Shakespeare. But Othello’s violence is different here than in the other minstrel burlesques in that he doesn’t actually succeed in killing Desdemona. Although Desdemona in the other burlesdques is also played by a white man in blackface, the metatheatrical nature of Dar’s de money means that it is the “maleness” of Pete as Desdemona that is underlined. Remember that, unlike some of the other minstrel burleques I am looking at here, the audience gets only a snippet of Othello, so there is no indication, as there is in Desdemonum, of Othello as a black man running off with a white woman; the first scene is never shown. This could have had the effect of neutralizing the Othello-Desdemona union (i.e., they both seem to the audience to be “black” men) instead of highlighting and/or ridiculing it. Perhaps Othello is merely incidental to this piece in that there is so little of it here, making it hard to imagine an audience having any reaction to it, any judgment about black-white unions. Performances of the minstrel burlesques of Othello reverberated along class lines as well. For example, Griffin and Christy’s rendering of Othello (1866) reveals a working-class uneasiness with Irish immigration. Iago is represented as an Irishman jealous of Othello’s success with Desdemona, a rivalry that mirrors the bitter feelings between Irish immigrants and free blacks, which periodically erupted into race riots throughout the middle of the century (Engle 69). Haywood points out that Othello “may even talk with an Irish brogue, if he is billed as ‘O’Thello,’ or ‘O’Feller’” (91). Minstrel songs , too, made oblique reference to Othello in their treatment of black-white attraction. For example, the song “Stop that Knocking” refers to a “yaler gal” who “never would go walking, Wid any coloured man but me.” In the song “The Heart Broken Darkey,” the Othello echo is unmistakable: The singer laments the loss of a dead love who was “pale as de night dats lit by de moon” and admits, in a clear reference to Othello, that “I lubb’d her not wisely, but lubb’d her too good.”Othello, therefore, was used up somewhat unkindly. But that poor gentleman has been frequently demolished. The “Minstrelized” Othello. Some have looked upon the two representations of Othello--one in minstrelsy and one on the legitimate stage--as two different ways of looking at the nineteenth-century fear of miscegenation : that the minstrel material reveals the sexuality and racial blackness that were edited out of the legitimate theater productions both through extensive cuts to the play to make Desdemona as sexless as possible and through whitewashing Othello’s color to remove from the audience all thought of miscegenation. My research into nineteenth-century reviews of the play, however, reveals that there was more interplay between these two theatrical forms than has previously been noted. I would like to argue that legitimate-theater productions of Othello were subtlely “minstrelized.” Reviews of the play in the main support both the then-prevailing belief that Othello was an easily gulled black man and my contention that a comical or crazed Othello is the preferred characterization for Shakespeare’s hero in this period. Even at first glance, Othello is clearly kin to minstrelsy in one important way--the title role is performed in this period by a white man in blackface. In both, the representation of a black man by a made-up white man “ensures that both blackness and whiteness remain separate” (Hodgdon 27). As Ruth Cowhig observes in discussing white men in blackface as Othello, “The knowledge that the actor is not really a Negro provides the audience with an escape from the racial situation which is denied them when the [actor] is black” (146). The line between the two--between legitimate productions of Othello and minstrelsy of any sort--was fine, indeed. Thomas “Daddy” Rice, one of the founders of “Ethiopian Opera,” once “jumped Jim Crow” after a legitimate performance of the play at New York’s Bowery Theatre in November 1832 “to the clamorous delight of the audience” (Browne 380-81). Although, as we have seen, Othello’s color in the legitimate theater was lightened as the century progressed, I would argue that his association with blackness was not diminished. In fact, except for Edwin Booth’s representation and that of John McCullough , the greatest Othellos of the century chose to represent him as in possession of and subject to those traits most allied at the time in the popular and scientific mind with blackness: savagery, ignorance, superstition. Reviews of several of these productions reveal that the nobility of Othello was undermined by stage business, costume and characterization. This discussion of the “minstrelized” Othello focuses on three of the most prominent Othellos on the American nineteenth-century stage: William Macready, Tomasso Salvini and Edwin Forrest. The English actor William Charles Macready had three tours of the United States--in 1826, 1843 and 1848 (Vaughan 154). Macready took pains with his representation of Othello: “Even through the swamps of Georgia, from Savannah to Mobile, Macready carted mammoth trunks of resplendent costumes so that he could represent his characters as he envisioned them” (Vaughan 145). Those who have written about Macready stress his emphasis on Othello’s domesticity, on his position as a husband who thinks himself wronged. Illustrations of Macready in the role attest to the oddness of his appearance as Othello, a feature that Vaughan doesn’t comment on. A notice from British newspaper refers to an 1839 print of Macready in the role, noting that it was a part that “some of the best writers of his day” thought “he would have done well to avoid.” The writer notes that the illustration “proves the truth” of what an actor who disliked Macready said about his Othello: “The reply has become historic: ‘I have nothing to say about the man’s acting, but he looked like an elderly negress of evil repute going to a fancy ball.’” A second illustration that, though not identified, is clearly of Macready makes Othello appear even more
hysterical and womanish as he emerges from behind the curtains of Desdemona’s
bedchamber. Although he was not American (and, indeed, spoke Othello’s lines only in Italian), Tomasso Salvini, who first performed the role in New York in 1873, was regarded as one of the “best” Othellos in nineteenth-century America. Illustrations of the Italian actor in the role show him turbaned, with black beard and mustache and with eyes bulging. The actress Charlotte Cushman, who presumably saw his performance, said that “he makes Othello a civilized barbarian,” and he is characterized by another as “faithful to this animal conception of the character” A review from the New York World refers to Salvini’s “barbaric grandeur” and to the play in Salvini’s hands as “a grand setting of the natural man,brave, cruel, impetuous, large-hearted, but slow in adjusting motives.” Although he detested Salvini’s representation of Othello, the critic William Winter acknowledged that Salvini had been “extolled with prodigious enthusiasm” in America. Winter called Salvini’s Othello “an incarnation of animal fury, huge, wild, dangerous, and horrible” and remarked how, in the last scene, he “prowled to and fro like an enraged tiger about to spring upon his prey” (Shakespeare on the Stage, First Series 290). A later review, while acknowledging the popularity of Salvini’s “spectacle ...of ferocious lust” observes that “Signor Salvini comes nearer to Shakespeare, and gets farther from what we desire Shakespeare to be on our stage than any man who has ever played the part.” Another reviewer observed that “Othello with him [Salvini] is a barbarian, whose instincts, savage and passionate, are concealed behind a veneer of civilisation....The picture is exact of a noble animal turning piteously in the toils in which it has been enmeshed, and finding its efforts at escape serve only to render its position more desperate” (113). The Othello of Edwin Forrest (1806-1872), which was (as best as I can
determine) universally criticized as a failure in England , was acclaimed
by many critics in America and was considered by Forrest himself, as his
best character. A reviewer who saw Forrest in a February 1863 performance
of Othello at The New Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia had this
to say in the Sunday Dispatch: The actor James Hackett also praised Forrest’s Othello: “I rank it as a whole, and excepting the late Edmund Kean’s, the best I have ever seen in either hemisphere....[in orig.] Mr. Forrest inspires more terror than pity; though I remember on one occasion particularly...noticing to a friend that ‘Mr. Forrest had infused into his last act of Othello a degree of manly tenderness, refined sensibility, and touching melancholy...’” (qtd. in Moses 343). Other reviews make mention of his playing to packed houses and of it being “unnecessary to speak of his abilities, for the whole world has heard of his fame as an actor.” Some hailed him as “an original” who works diligently at perfecting his representation of Othello. Not every American reviewer, however, shared this opinion. Although William Winter granted that “upon the part of Othello he [Forrest] bestowed exceptional attention, and his performance of it was the most symmetrical, rounded, and finished of his achievements,” he did note that Forrest’s performance was “not ...free from that animal coarseness which was more or less apparent in all his acting” (263-5). Although there are illustrations of Forrest looking martial as Othello, Winter also singled out what he called Forrest’s “ridiculous attire” in the role: “a tunic, cut low in the neck, dark-colored tights, low shoes fastened with straps and adorned with buckles, an ample silk mantle spotted with large gilt leaves, a turbanlike hat, resembling an inverted saucepan, and a dress sword. His face was clean-shave [sic], except for his usual mustache and tuft of hair under the lower lip, and his color was dark brown” (265). Forrest’s particular acting style reinforced his foolish appearance as Othello. The critic John Forster accused Forrest of literalism, or, as Shattuck puts it, missing Shakespeare’s larger meaning by “trimming from ironic lines everything except their plain dictionary meaning” (74). For example, Forrest would deliver Othello’s line “Your napkin is too little” not as indicative of Othello’s distraction, but instead as a literal stage direction: He would point at the handkerchief as he said, “Your napkin,” and then run his finger across his forehead as he said “is too little” (Shattuck 74). Forrest also liked to “make quick switches between violently contrasting emotions.” In the line, “If thou dost slander her and torture me,” he would move swiftly and preposterously from fierceness to self-pity (Shattuck 75). In speculating on the effects of Forrest’s performance on an audience, it seems reasonable to suggest that Forrest’s bombastic style, which was already old-fashioned then, may have appeared comic and ridiculous not only to a few discerning reviewers but to audience members as well. Although the similarities in spirit between the legitimate Othellos and the minstrel-versions of Othello that produce, on the legitimate stage, what I call the “minstrelized Othello” are only hinted at in the reviews, illustrations and audience reactions I have noted, at least one review makes the connection quite explicitly. In a performance that featured Edwin Booth as Iago, W. E. Sheridan’s Othello is described as having “an unpleasant resemblance to various professors of negro minstrelsy,” although, the reviewer contends, “it is not impossible to make Othello tolerably handsome and imposing.” Sheridan is taken to task for his “pronounced Africanism,” and his “sky-blue and highly decorated” costume “might have frightened even a love-sick girl like Desdemona.” That there were competing tensions in the staging of legitimate-theater productions of Othello is underlined by this critic’s remark; his words clearly acknowledge that Othello was minstrelized while, at the same time, convey that he wishes it weren’t so--that, instead, Sheridan would treat the character more nobly.
Audiences in the period 1835-1875 were steeped in a culture that was not inclined to view the black man--and by, extension, Othello’s tragedy--sympathetically. One of the most influential men in the theatrical circles of Jacksonian America was William T. Porter, editor of New York’s Spirit of the Times during much of the 1830s and 1840s, who wrote “Shakespeare was a good anatomist, and therefore made the African the easy dupe of the designing, crafty Iago, and gave him a corporeal and physical development suited to his nature, not the finesse and subtlety of a highly wrought intellect, which would have been utterly misplaced” (qtd. in Cockrell 28). This is in line with much of the thinking about race in the period. There was in America at this time “growing acceptance” of a
theory that “blacks were closer in origin to animals than to men,”
a theory that made blacks appear “inherently unequal to whites”
and justified “different treatment.” In the South, until about
1850, “only the mulatto, thanks to some white blood, would be viewed
as a black not limited by animal traits” (Edelstein 183). This “different
treatment” found itself reflected in discourse as well, where the
elevating language of whiteness bestowed greater value on blacks. Because
the color white was associated with superiority and goodness while black
was associated with inferiority, “good” blacks in the nineteenth
century are described in the language of whiteness. Notice the discourse
of whiteness in the praise of Benjamin Brown French , a Northerner, for
one of his employees, Hannibal Graham, after his death: “Colored
though his skin was, he had as white and pure a heart and as keen an intellect
as many and many a man who boasts his Caucasian descent” (581). Belief in the animal nature of the black man tied in with fear of him as a sexual predator. In Iron Cages, Ronald Takaki underlines how anxious Northern whites were about blacks as a sexual threat to white women and racial purity. In fact, this fear translated into political anxiety as well, an anxiety that manifested itself in 1860 during an anti-Republican parade in New York. There “floats showed a thick-lipped black embracing a white woman and a black man leading a white woman into the White House” (114). White fears of racial intermingling prevailing just before the Civil War had not changed much since the colonial and early Republican period. While he documents the clear existence of miscegenation practices in colonial America, historian Winthrop Jordan points out that the intermingling of the races was not part of the overall “‘white’ game plan”: “The colonists’ conviction that they must sustain their civilized condition wherever they went rendered miscegenation...a negation of the underlying plan of settlement in America....[R]acial amalgamation was stamped as irredeemably illicit; it was irretrievably associated with loss of control over the baser passions, with weakening of traditional family ties, and with breakdown of proper social ordering” (144). William Loughton Smith, in a 1790 congressional debate, insisted that “mixture of the races would degenerate the whites” and that black-white intermarriage would result in the extinction of the white race (qtd. in Jordan 470). In the North, too, intermarriage was forbidden by law in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in the early 1800s (Jordan 139), although there was not the aversion toward black-white intermingling that becomes widespread in the nineteenth century. In 1761, David Douglass brought his company of actors to Newport, Rhode Island to present Othello under the guise of “Moral Dialogues.” The tone and language of the playbill’s description of Brabantio suggests that Othello’s blackness was not a problem, at least for the English actors trying, at least ostensibly, to suggest the play’s “moral”: “Mr. Morris will represent an old gentleman, the father of Desdemona, who is not cruel or covetous, but is foolish enough to dislike the noble Moor, his son-in-law, because his face is not white, forgetting that we all sprung from one root. Such prejudices are very numerous and very wrong” (qtd. in Shattuck 12). Drawing on statutes and judicial decisions, historian Peter Bardaglio concludes that “white sexual anxiety about blacks was a persistent force” under slavery and even more so after emancipation (113). He points out that the goal of miscegenation laws “was to keep black men and women in their place and to protect the purity of white womanhood....only white men could cross the color line in the South without incurring severe social and legal penalties” (113). Scientists like Philadelphia’s Samuel G. Morton expressed concern over the “hybridity” that would be the result of miscegenation. Morton claimed that “hybrids, as a general law, are contrary to nature,” and he held that a natural and moral repugnance should dictate separating “individuals of different kinds” (qtd. in Collins 89). It is impossible to think about the representation of Othello in roughly the mid-nineteenth-century, then, without considering the number and character of images of blackness that were before the theater-going public. Consider that audiences were exposed to, first of all, minstrel shows caricaturing blacks, and, secondly, to legitimate stage productions where blacks were represented as devious and evil at the worst end of the spectrum and as stupid, lazy or comical at best. Then consider that, on top of those representations, audiences were barraged with minstrel burlesques of Othello depicting him as a low and stupid “darkey.” How likely is it, then, that audiences would be receptive to sitting through Shakespeare’s Othello and seeing a black man portrayed as noble? If in all these blackface performances blacks were being ridiculed, is it possible to think that it could be any different with Shakespeare’s Othello, that audiences could actually respond sympathetically to the play? My contention is that that possibility is highly unlikely, and that the messengers from the front--the reviews of the American Othellos of the period--reveal that Othello was being caricatured even on the legitimate stage, that he was being staged as excesively violent or as something of a joke. Stereotypes of blacks as gullible, comic, and violent found themselves played out, then, on the legitimate stage in the character of the “minstrelized” Othello. Powerful and unsettling issues in the play--a white woman’s attraction to a black man, interracial marriage, the violence of jealousy--were so close to the surface of nineteenth-century fears and consciousness that Othello had to be “minstrelized” before audiences could look upon the uncomfortable themes that the play sounded. Copyright Elaine Brousseau 2002 |