White‐Washing the Black‐a‐Moor: Othello, Negro Minstrelsy and Parodies of Blackness1

Abstract

To speak freely of this tragedy, as it is written, we should recommend parents put none but a castrated edition of it into the hands of youth; and as it is at present altered for the stage, we contend that it can never be played without committing such a violence on the modesty and decency of the house as it is altogether intolerable.... Othello is indeed a most replenished of the goats and monkeys of Shakespeare's brain. Monthly Mirror (1807) Theatrical production of Othello in nineteenth-century America was governed by many of the same institutional conditions that bore on the production of all Shakespearean dramas at the time: the rapid growth of Shakespearean idolatry, the reorganization and social segregation of playhouses, and the emergence of textual piety in American editorial practices.2 Yet the anxieties articulated by the anonymous early nineteenth-century critic quoted above indicate that in both textual and theatrical reproduction Othello was a particularly problematic text. Part of that instability is revealed in the critic's use of metaphor: Othello is simultaneously in need of castration (a sign of its threatening phallic potency) and is a brothel (a place of illicit and socially problematic female sexuality). While all Shakespearean plays were subject to the censor's pen, excising offensive material from Othello was a special project for nineteenthcentury editors3--one that only barely disguised white America's fascination with black male sexuality, the repression of white female sexual prerogative, and a pronounced anxiety concerning miscegenation. Its vilest 'goats and monkeys' (set) aside, Othello was extremely in nineteenth-century American. It ranked as the third most frequently performed Shakespearean play, just behind Richard III and Hamlet (Edelstein 179). But the reproduction of Othello in nineteenth-century America extended well beyond the sanitized bourgeois mainstage--it was parodied extensively on the popular blackface minstrel stage as well. The mainstage and blackface productions of Othello provided the alter-egos of both Othello and Desdemona-- civilized, whitened, and innocent in the former; bawdy, blackened, and buffoonish in the latter. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize how the two genres complemented and foiled one another, offering very similar (and similarly derived) interpretations of both natural and social racebased and gendered taxonomies. Both mainstage and minstrelsy productions of Othello were, I am arguing, part of a larger set of discourses through which white America attempted to control racial signification during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Productions of Othello of both genres had mutually affirming relations with contemporary work in the natural sciences--specifically that of biological determinists. The natural sciences provided justification for critics, actors, and directors regarding specific changes to Othello's and Desdemona's characterizations, and the mainstage and minstrelsy productions of Othello provided scientists with further proof of their scientific formulations. On one level, this paper questions the accuracy and significance of discreet and recalcitrant class binarisms such as high/low, elite/popular, conservative/radical in the analysis of culture. Such dualities are reproduced by many cultural materialist critics despite persistent criticism from post-structuralists, some feminist critics, and (more recently) race critics. At the very least, I hope to challenge the false essentializing of class-based categories, including their transhistorical alignment with political or ideological motivation (Stallybrass and White, 14). However, dethroning class as the organizing principle in cultural studies, only to install race as the new czar, will re-essentialize and re-totalize the way we think about blackface minstrelsy and (more generally) nineteenthcentury American culture. …