Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800.

Royster, Francesca T.

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800, by Virginia Mason Vaughan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 190. Cloth $75.00.

When I teach about blackface conventions in my undergraduate Shakespeare classes, I often ask students to cull from their own experiences of blackface performance. Most are from an American context: many of them have seen Spike Lee's Bamboozled, or caught a clip of Al Jolson (or Bugs Bunny imitating Al Jolson) singing "Mammy." A few have been lucky enough to have seen Marlon Rigg's groundbreaking documentary of blackface and its American roots, Ethnic Notions. In the United States, blackface performance has been forged in the ovens of slavery and postslavery race relations. In the sexual stereotypes of U.S. blackface images, we find lurking fantasies spawned from the systematic breeding and trade of black bodies; in the mixture of violence and humor of blackface, we might see a spectacular transmogrification of the post-Reconstruction Black Laws, ever-present threat of lynchings, and the rise of Jim Crow. And in the careers of blackface performers, white and black, we see reflected the tenuous act of becoming white and protecting whiteness borne from the history of U.S. immigration. The late twentieth and early twenty-first century brings a whole new trajectory of blackface appropriations shaped by U.S. experiences, including the critical use of blackface in the art and performances of Fred Wilson, Chris Rock, Whoopie Goldberg, and Michael Ray Charles, whose modern racial kitsch figures appear in Spike Lee's film, Bamboozled. But while our most familiar associations of blackface tradition might most likely be informed by the American historical context, Americans did not invent blackface. As Virginia Mason Vaughan discusses in her powerful study, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800, the early modern period in England has yielded several examples of white actors performing in blackface for the popular stage, and we can reach even further back to blackfaced devils in medieval mystery plays, or further still to black slave characters in classical Roman productions. Vaughan's Performing Blackness is valuable for its history and analysis of English blackface traditions in their specificity; at the same time, the work provides an important conceptual framework that might help bridge blackface traditions across time, nation, and audience.

Vaughan's study focuses on the relationship between text and performance in the flesh: "appearance, linguistic tropes, speech patterns, plot situations, the use of asides and soliloquies, and other forms of dramatic signification" (2-3), that shaped the ways that blackness was "performed," read, and understood by white audiences. Here, she applies Toni Morrison's concept of "Africanisms," first conceived to explain the production of fictionalized blackness to forge white American identity, to consider patterns of fantastical blackness as they are performed to forge white identity on the British stage. Blackface in the imaginative work of the stage is, after all, not about black people, but really about fantastic notions of blackness that tell us more about the (white) author and audiences. As Vaughan writes, "When all is said and done, the black characters that populated early modern theatres tell us little about actual black Africans; they are the projections of imaginations that capitalize on the assumptions, fantasies, fears, and anxieties of England's pale complexioned audiences" (4-5).

The challenge of any study of live performance is the difficulty of reconstructing audience response. This is particularly true for the early modern period, where few commentaries by audiences, actors, and playwrights about stagecraft and methods or the impact of those techniques survive. Vaughan nevertheless successfully brings this past to life by integrating historical context, illustrations, actor's handbooks, property books, reviews, and diary entries, as well as clues within the plays themselves, to reconstruct the material aspects of blackface as a stage tradition. Vaughan presents glimpses into the material practice of blackface as it shifts and adapts. For example, we learn that as blackface performances shifted from silent to speaking parts, there evolved new techniques and technologies that allow for greater visibility of the actor and of the performance of emotion. We see actors move from the use of coal or charcoal, and/or black lawn veils or other, more obscuring techniques of blackface, to experiments with different pigments. The increasing frequency of contact between the English and black and brown Moors, whether captured Africans who were brought to England as servants or visiting merchants and dignitaries like Abd-el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, a Moroccan ambassador to Elizabeth I, also influenced variations in blackface technique and style, including a range of skin colors, from black to tawny, as well as clothing and speech. Throughout the text, Vaughan effectively outlines the technologies and stagecraft of blackface performance, and the ways that blackface conventions grew to be a site for professional development--a way of showing one's performance chops and also one's viability for other forms of performance.

Blackface performances in the early modern period shift from medieval uses of blackness as a relatively simple analogy of moral and religious meanings, where blackness equals damnation, to "polyphonic" meanings and functions. These shifts in performance mark the development of a "racially defined discourse of human identity and personhood" essential to our notion of English modernity (2). In medieval visual art and mystery cycles, Lucifer bore the mark of blackness, signifying his shame-worthiness and exclusion from the Christian Kingdom of God. Medieval mystery plays also include more positive imagery, such as the blackfaced king in the image of the Three Magi. In this case, the king's black alterity ultimately demonstrates the universal reach of Christianity. As blackface characters move from silent displays to speaking parts--the "talking devils" and "avenging villains" of the Elizabethan public theater--characters become more dynamic and more memorable. Drawing from early modern travel literature and England's emerging participation in the transatlantic slave trade, these new configurations combine older associations of blackness with devils, with newer ideas of the blackface figure as warrior and sexual trickster. Trickster figures like Aaron in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Eleazor in Thomas Dekker's Lust's Dominion raise stereotypical fears of miscegenation and black rape (47-54). Yet the characters sometimes also embodied complex psychologies. For example, George Peele's Muly Hamet, from The Battle of Alcazar, the first public English play with a black speaking character, is both bloodthirsty warrior and loyal leader, sentimental lover and verbal threat to his enemies--and audience (42).

Vaughan continually asks us to think about the ways that blackface necessarily intertwines race with nation, gender, and class. These interconnections came most alive for me in her fifth chapter, "Bedtricksters." The bedtrick is a dramatic device of switching one bedmate for another, resulting in confusion, the questioning of identity, humiliation or crisis, leading to sometimes comic, sometimes more serious resolution. Vaughan argues that the figure of the Moor as a substitute bedmate in these early modern plays brings up anxiety about sexuality, the stability of gender markers, and changing ideas about marriage and property, all informed by race. These anxieties are also linked to deeper issues of "self" linked to the sexual act, what critic Wendy Doniger calls "'the tension between the urge to diverge and the urge to merge'" (74).

Why are these bedtricks so often linked to black bodies--or more accurately, to the performance of blackness? Blackface figures, usually servants, as they become involved in these sexual intrigues, often highlight (by contrast) the white women's chastity, at the same time allowing for the sometimes vicarious expression of sexual desire. Black female servants act as forbidden doubles, sites of fantasy and projection. Black male servants are also objects of desire or tools for revenge. Vaughan foregrounds these roles in the cultural context of growing populations of black servants and, later, slaves in England, and therefore increasingly more intimate interactions between blacks and whites in domestic spaces. These shifts accelerate the already circulating fantasies of sexual desire and pollution from travel literature and other earlier, more distanced images (76).

Bedtrick episodes sometimes highlight tensions in class identity, where sleeping (mistakenly) with a black servant becomes punishment for attempting to climb the social ladder. In John Fletcher's play Monsieur Thomas, written between 1614-17, Thomas, a fortune seeker, dresses up as a woman in order to win the financially well-placed Mary. Thomas is "punished" by finding himself in bed with a black female servant, Kate, rather than his desired love. These "tricks" often present sexually loaded and sometimes ambivalent expressions of desire for the other. When Thomas discovers his black bedmate, he cries,

 Holy saints defend me!
 The devil, devil, devil! O the devil!...
 I am abused most damnedly, most beastly;
 Yet if it be a she-devil--
 (5.2.30-35)

In Vaughan's reading, "At first, Thomas is horrified and reads Kate as the blackfaced devil of the homiletic tradition. His fourth line, 'Yet ...,' suggests that after the initial shock dissipates, Thomas has second thoughts; perhaps if the devil is female, she is beddable after all. But then he beats Kate, crying, 'Plague o' your Spanish-leather hide!' (5.2.39) and runs away" (81).

Black servants, particularly male servants, were also used in these bedtrick devices to complete acts of revenge and to perform implied or explicit sexual violence, as in John Marston's The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba, (1606). The villain Syphax threatens the white virgin Sophonisba that if she does not yield to his advances, he'll use his two black male servants to hold her down. The rape is averted by Sophonisba's substitution of Syphax's sleeping black male servant, Vangue, in her bed. When Syphax discovers that he has leaped into bed with a black man, he is so humiliated that he kills Vangue. As Arthur Little, Jr. has noted in his Shakespeare Jungle Fever, sacrificed black bodies help regulate the economy of desire in a society often fearful of its own "jungle" impulses. (1)

But as Vaughan shows, there is also pleasure to be had in becoming that dangerous black body, and this was exploited theatrically by having European characters black up onstage. In her seventh chapter, "Europeans Disguised as Black Moors," Vaughan argues that blackening up gives another kind of social mobility, providing the opportunity to trick, humiliate, avenge, rape, or otherwise punish by becoming the other. In late Jacobean and early Caroline plays like John Webster's The White Devil and Samuel Harding's unperformed Sicily and Naples, black disguise adds a new life to the increasingly conventional aspects of revenge drama. Thus, Harding's play Sicily and Naples takes the image of the Machiavellian villain and "supersizes" him, by having him blacken up onstage. This play so pushed the envelope of propriety via the graphic acts of its blacked-up villain, including incest, murder, and rape, that it was never able to be produced. This play continues the association between blackness and devils that has now become a "naturalized" association onstage. Perhaps we might think about the ways that white characters continue to appropriate black style, music, and identity in films, music, and other forms of performance, as a means of expressing socially dangerous ideas and freshening up putrid writing and stock characters or forms. Take, for example, Mike Judge's recent film Office Space, and its sometimes self-mocking use of a gangsta rap sound track to express primarily white, middle-class corporate workers' frustration and anger at (white) corporate norms.

Useful chapters focusing on Shakespeare's Othello and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko shed new light on these more familiar plays and show their influence on theatrical conventions and genres. Shakespeare's Othello becomes an important and special case throughout Vaughan's analysis, in part because of its influence on other blackface plays in the period--a phenomenon that Celia Daileader has described as "Othellophilia" (2)--and because of the play history's influence on current attitudes toward blackface in contemporary theatrical productions.

In her chapter on Othello, as well as in her "Afterthoughts," Vaughan asks us to think harder about the social uses of blackface now. Going against the grain of much contemporary theatrical practice, Vaughan argues for the continued usefulness of blackface productions of early modern theater, if presented sensitively and within their own social context. This, she argues, is not only because "Othello was a white man"--performed by and to some extent always remembered to be white and male by his original audience, as Dympna Callaghan points out in her book Shakespeare Without Women (3)--but also because the artiface of blackface can tell us much about the fears and anxieties of white audiences in the past (and, I'd argue, now). Vaughan uses the illustration of the reconstructed Globe Theatre on Bankside, which she says, through its recent all-male productions of Antony and Cleopatra and Twelfth Night, has shown the erotic charge of cross-gender casting as it might have been experienced by earlier audiences. She asks, "Could we not have an experimental Lust's Dominion or Oroonoko that demonstrates black performance at work? Would the resulting impersonations be seen simply as derogatory racial slurs? Or would some other qualities--dignity and courage, perhaps--capture the audience's attention?" (174). I agree with Vaughan that this might be a risk worth taking in contemporary theater, one that we saw in slightly different form taken in Spike Lee's film Bamboozled, but which might have even more immediate impact in live production. Perhaps, though, Vaughan sets up an unnecessary dichotomy by imagining such experimental blackface productions as only being cast with white male actors, and only telling us about white fantasies of blackness. Blackface can also be performed by black bodies, and can tell us something about the ways that we have all been shaped by white supremacy. In many ways, we might think of performances of Othello by Paul Robeson, Ira Aldridge, and more recently, Laurence Fishburne, as forms of blackface. These actors, while of African descent, were still performing within a history of fantasized "patterns of blackness" expressed by character, speech, and gesture. The "fact" of their black bodies does not erase the artificiality of the conception of black identity as it is manifest in Shakespeare's play. At the same time, such performances enabled these actors to gain a limited form of social power that might arguably be conceived as "white." Perhaps, then, a more expansive conception of a historically informed experimental production highlighting blackface dynamics might be one that acknowledges the ongoing ways that blackface performances have been constitutive of our identities, white and nonwhite. As we continue to think about the formative impact of performance on the identity of audiences, we have to revise our histories and our view of the present to include audiences that are not only white and male, and whose politics of looking might not only be to replicate a white and male social position. Vaughan's study will be an important tool for readers to think about the formations of fantasized blackness that we have all inherited.

Notes

1. Arthur Little, Jr., Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape and Sacrifice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 14-15.

2. Celia Daileader, "Casting Black Actors: Beyond Othellophilia," in Shakespeare and Race, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells, 177-203 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

3. Dympna Callaghan, "'Othello Was a White Man': Properties of Race on Shakespeare's Stage," in Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 2000), 75-96.

Reviewer: Francesca T. Royster