"Look on this picture, and on this": framing Shakespeare in William Wells Brown's The Escape.

Botelho, Keith M.

"With me, socially, politically, morally, character is everything--color, nothing. The negro is no less a man, because he is black; the Anglo-American is no more a man, because he is white."

--Senator Francis Gillette of Connecticut, in a speech at the Senate, 23 February 1855

In his 1854 travel sketch The American Fugitive in Europe, William Wells Brown recounts his many excursions to the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition while in London. In his wonder at this "great international gathering," Brown states, "It is strange, indeed, to see so many nations assembled and represented on one spot of British ground. In short, it is one great theatre, with thousands of performers, each playing his own part." (1) This gathering undoubtedly occupied Brown's thoughts when he returned to the United States. In 1856, Brown began to read his first drama to New England audiences, entitled Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone, and in 1857, he began to read to various antislavery audiences what would become the first published drama by an African American, The Escape; or A Leap for Freedom. (2) Not coincidently, after returning from five years in Europe, where, according to William Edward Farrison, Brown had read and seen a considerable amount of drama, including many Shakespearean plays, (3) and with the vision of the theater and performers he witnessed at the Crystal Palace firmly in his mind, Brown came to write, perform, and publish a dramatic work. An engaging antislavery orator and lecturer, and writer of the first novel by an African American (Clotel, 1853), Brown returned to the United States knowing, as did Shakespeare's Hamlet, "The play's the thing."

In fact, William Wells Brown included a potent quotation from Hamlet--"Look on this picture, and on this"--as an epigraph on the title page of The Escape, published in June, 1858. (4) Brown filled a cultural niche in producing an original drama, and Shakespeare and the dramatic genre served as powerful vehicles through which Brown could contribute to the advancement of African-American literary activism. Brown's play emerged from within two Shakespearean traditions, one of white cultural appropriation and the other of black cultural appropriation. He engaged and contested the burlesque, parody, and minstrelsy of the white stage and used Shakespeare in ways similar to those of his black predecessors both onstage in its various forms and in print. Brown tapped into the notions of moral and social elevation and utility adopted by black writers before him who protested slavery through such forms as speeches, lectures, debates, newspaper pieces, travel accounts, autobiographies, and slave narratives. Brown performed against the institution of slavery by staging a drama of protest, displaying his oppositional politics through performance of both black and white in the great antislavery theater of the North. (5) And, with Brown's appropriation of drama as his form of resistance, Shakespeare's specter inevitably lurks. (6)

I. Antebellum Shakespearean Specters

The performance and publication of The Escape are situated within the growing cultural tumult of the 1850s. In May of 1854, three months before Brown returned from his five years in Europe, Congress approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which legalized white voting residents to determine whether to admit their territory as a slave or free state; racial violence escalated as a result. In 1857, while Brown was publicly performing both Experience and The Escape, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that African Americans could not become U.S. citizens and in turn had no constitutional rights. A year following the publication of The Escape, John Brown led a failed raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. The Escape, then, was written, performed, and published amid these national battles regarding the institution of slavery. For William Wells Brown, drama becomes a national genre of resistance and opposition that he hoped to offer as a supplement to the forms of protest that dominated the cultural landscape.

Furthermore, William Wells Brown's performance and publication of The Escape emerged from a moment when blackface minstrelsy had just reached the peak of its popularity, the years 1846 to 1854. (7) In Highbrow/Lowbrow, Lawrence Levine writes that Shakespeare and Shakespeare's plays were an integral part of American culture that dominated the theater as popular entertainment for the majority of the nineteenth century. (8) Oratory was a prominent feature in the national lifestyle, and it followed that Shakespeare's word play, dialogues, and soliloquies would attract Americans who already were drawn to the parallels between Shakespeare's characters and situations and their own society. (9) Burlesque and parody were highly popular on the American stage, and because of Shakespeare's cultural currency, his plays were a prime target. Shakespearean parody in the nineteenth century appeared in the form of "short skits, brief references, and satirical songs inserted into other modes of entertainment." (10) The burlesque, according to Richard Schoch, served to redirect Shakespeare's language toward non-Shakespearean concerns and exposed "the fragility of official Bardolatrous culture." (11) And, perhaps most importantly, burlesque was a central component to blackface minstrelsy, a form of commercialized popular culture that, as William Maher notes, appropriated elements of black culture with varying degrees of accuracy. (12) In his central study of blackface minstrelsy, Eric Lott argues that the minstrel show "brought to public form racialized elements of thought and feeling ... which Americans only dimly realized they felt, let alone understood." (13)

Within this complex terrain of burlesque, parody, and minstrelsy, William Wells Brown engages in his own performance both as orator and as stage performer, one who in fact performs both black and white characters. "The professional fugitive" writes Paul Gilmore, "was, in essence, required to embody simultaneously the social meanings of blackness and whiteness--to be both the illiterate plantation darkey of the minstrel stage and an eloquent defender of his race." (14) Gary Taylor has recently remarked that Brown, whom he calls "a professional orator, a black Lincoln" became a writer "after years of experience as an orator in an oratorical political culture," Taylor continues, quoting bell hooks, who says that for American blacks, "Coming to voice is an act of resistance. Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject." (15) Certainly, Brown's appropriation of and engagement with blackface minstrelsy's conventions in The Escape serve as a parody of and resistance to the heyday of minstrelsy's infamous popularity in America. Drama becomes a vehicle for Brown to redirect his audience's intellectual and moral progress. (16)

Shakespeare's specters inhabit the pages of many other printed antebellum works that precede The Escape. (17) The 1845 publication of Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life is one such significant work, yet we should remember that the use of Shakespeare in this work is one part of a wider cultural discourse that relied on the cultural currency of Shakespeare. Douglass's work contains three Shakespearean references, although only one comes from Douglass's text proper, while the other two appear in the front matter. William Lloyd Garrison's oftentimes condescending preface to the edition posits the first reference, interestingly to Shakespeare's Hamlet. (18) Speaking of Douglass's "stirring eloquence against the enslavers of men" Garrison continues that this eloquence brought Douglass "into the field of public usefulness, 'gave the world assurance of a MAN,' quickened the slumbering energies of his soul, and consecrated him to the great work of breaking the rod of the oppressor, and letting the oppressed go free." (19) This quotation from Hamlet is significant in that William Wells Brown returned to this same Shakespearean speech and drew from it for inclusion first as a chapter epigraph in The American Fugitive in Europe and then on his title page of The Escape. Both quotations come from Hamlet's speech where, after having killed Polonius, who was hiding behind an arras, Hamlet speaks at length to Gertrude about his murdered father, condemning the murder of a brother, a father, and a husband, while continually asserting his mother's blindness to what she has done (3.4.52-78). Garrison seems to use this quotation out of the context of the play's passage, but in capitalizing the word man, he draws attention to the humanity of the enslaved and the conditions of brotherhood as well as to Douglass's ability to protest against slavery in the public realm. (20)

Douglass draws from Shakespeare's third act of Hamlet, in Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" speech (3.1.83-84), yet he transforms the antislavery rhetorical appropriation of Shakespeare. (21) Before quoting from Hamlet, Douglass presents a long discussion of his resolution that 1835 would be the year that would decide his fate. He remarks at length about the fearful odds and certain obstacles of his proposed path to freedom. This appalling picture made Douglass and his fellow slaves (now adapting Hamlet) "rather bear those ills we had, / Than fly to others, that we knew not of." The text of Hamlet ends in a question; Douglass, however, puts Hamlet's words into a statement, one that promotes African-American perseverance and, above all, resolves to take action. Douglass seems to pick up on a passage in Hamlet that is striking in its close parallels of thought, and although Hamlet's lines "for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, / Th' oppressor's wrong," (72-73) are not used, they are even more resonant in their omission. Of course, Hamlet here contemplates suicide, considering whether or not to "take arms against a sea of troubles"; his conscience, as he says, makes a coward of him and he thus loses the name of action. We can see the parallels of the troubled psyche in both Hamlet and Douglass. To invoke Shakespeare at this moment, buried deep within Douglass's narrative, is a multilayered narrative strategy. Perhaps Douglass's continued delays of escaping are pitted against Hamlet's own continual inaction. Additionally, Douglass claims not only his own humanity in accord with the cultural icons his white readers would recognize, but he also claims that his moral dilemma is humanity's dilemma. Perhaps this calculated ambiguity allows for a certain desired uneasiness among some of his white readers. Furthermore, to a certain contingent of the reading public, Douglass's appropriation of Shakespeare after having the white endorsers of his narrative appropriate the bard in similar ways calls into question to whom Shakespeare "belongs." No less important, Douglass identifies himself as one who can quote Shakespeare, placing himself within the cultural theater that Hamlet occupies while effectively rescripting his own cultural role. (22)

The 20 January 1854 edition of the Provincial Freeman recounts William Wells Brown's series of lectures in Philadelphia, stating, "The very fact of one like William Wells Brown being able, after so many years spent in slavery, to lecture to his brethren on the above subjects, ought to give them renewed courage, and cause every colored person in the land to labour early and late for his own elevation." Increased activity and tapping into African Americans' reserve of useful skills and knowledge would, according to one African-American writer after another in antebellum America, allow their oppressed race to rise spiritually, culturally, economically, and emotionally. Such calls for the moral uplift of the race were strategically useful in themselves, as they promoted African-American activity and resourcefulness. (23) All races shared this common vocabulary of elevation, and "mind, morals, and the capacity to develop character merged in a vision of uplift that pervaded their thought." (24) According to Patrick Rael, African-American spokespersons "laced nearly all of their public statements with the language of uplift--of 'elevating' or 'rising,'" language that constituted a central conceptual paradigm through which northern black elites understood their world. (25)

How does Shakespeare fit into this schema of rising out of bondage to become a useful member of society? Various forms of nineteenth-century African-American literature invoke and borrow from Shakespeare to enhance a line of argument or analysis. (26) Shakespeare, I should note, remains mostly at the margins of these texts (with the exception of Brown's The Escape). Authors seem to recontextualize Shakespeare, placing blacks at center stage, shifting the importance of the high white cultural marker to serve their needs. At the same time, Shakespeare is placed on the same plain with these black writers, creating what might be for some an uneasy solidarity with one of white culture's most identifiable cultural markers. These writers bring the cultural currency of Shakespeare into their history only to expand his narratives in ways that promote black moral uplift. While acknowledging their debt to Shakespeare, black writers make him more useful to their own ends, and Shakespeare thus serves as a vehicle that allows African-American writers to further engage with the challenges of rising in nineteenth-century America.

Shakespeare and notions of rising and utility, all fixtures in the cultural terrain of both white and black communities in nineteenth-century America, are adopted by the black public protest tradition that sought to counter the American ideology of slavery. According to Patrick Rael, this construction of black protest and black identity occurred from "a conscious and public process of dialogue and contestation with a hostile white America." (27) In the mid 1850s, William Wells Brown's polyphonic performative protest, first on the stage and then on the page, refashioned the discourse of protest and resistance that was already a staple in antebellum America. Brown's appropriation of Hamlet's words on his title page served as a lens through which his readers could reassess the picture of race relations in antebellum America.

II. Picturing Race, Framing Shakespeare

A quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet appears as an epigraph at the bottom of the title page of The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom: "Look on this picture, and on this." (28) Acknowledging the greatest British playwright on the title page of the first published play by an African American would seem at first to be an appropriate gesture, yet Brown is doing dynamic cultural work by intentionally invoking Shakespeare. As John Ernest has argued, Brown's turn to drama was rooted in financial considerations as well as in attempts to counter blackface minstrelsy. (29) Yet, Brown's turn to Shakespeare and Hamlet was rooted in something more, a significant lens through which white and black viewers should read this original dramatic presentation. (30) Nineteenth-century African-American culture often read its struggle through biblical frameworks. (31) In many ways, Brown's insistence that his readers read his drama through the framework of Shakespeare's plays (particularly Hamlet) works on the same level, tapping into a cultural literacy that was available to all Americans no matter their color. In this way, reading with certain conventions of social meaning in mind, Brown's play of resistance through the lens of Shakespeare is read as humanity's drama. Yet Brown extends the common black appropriation of Shakespeare in the protest movement that preceded The Escape, turning to performance and a printed work of his performance. Before we can begin to engage Brown's play, however, we must first engage with the title page that greets the reading public. Brown's use of Shakespeare at this originary moment of publishing the first drama by an African American in fact looks back to a strain of Shakespearean specters in the African-American protest literature that preceded its publication. (32)

Brown was continually pressed to determine the best way to represent slavery to his northern audiences, many of whom had never seen (and certainly never felt) the terrors of this peculiar institution. Representation is central to Brown's project. Some ten years before the publication of The Escape, Brown delivered a lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, on 14 November 1847, where he remarked, I may try to represent to you Slavery as it is; another may follow me and try to represent the condition of the Slave; we may all represent it as we think it is; and yet we shall all fail to represent the real condition of the Slave. Your fastidiousness would not allow me to do it; and if it would, I, for one, should not he willing to do it;--at least to an audience. Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented. (33)

The quandary Brown faced was not how to represent slavery, but how to effectively represent slavery as it is. His turn to drama and performance protests minstrelsy, white benevolence, and perceived notions of racial superiority.

The act of looking upon pictures, as Hamlet asks his mother to do, commands a significant presence in The Escape, as the epigraph taken from Hamlet that precedes the play makes clear. (34) Still, the reader is positioned to read the play through Shakespeare, but more significantly, the reader must also look upon the pictures of racial identity that Brown frames for his reader. An incident Brown relates in The American Fugitive in Europe reveals his own dialogue with pictures some four years before he returned to them as the central and unifying image in The Escape. Brown recounts two days he spent in the British Museum, where he perused numerous galleries: In passing through the eastern zoological gallery, I was surrounded on every side by an army of portraits suspended upon the walls; and among these was the Protector. The people of one century kicks his bones through the streets of London, another puts his portrait in the British Museum, and a future generation may possibly give him a place in Westminster Abbey. Such is the uncertainty of human character. Yesterday, a common soldier; today, the ruler of an empire; tomorrow, suspended upon the gallows. In an adjoining room I saw a portrait of Baxter, which gives one a pretty good idea of the nonconformist. In the same room hung a splendid modern portrait, without any intimation in the guide-book of who it represented, or when it was painted. It was so much like one whom I had seen, and on whom my affections were placed in my younger days, that I obtained a seat from an adjoining room and rested myself before it. After sitting half an hour or more, I wandered to another part of the building, but only to return again to my "first love" where I remained till the throng had disappeared, one after another, and the officer reminded me that it was time to close. (35)

Brown ruminates about the portraits of the Protector (Oliver Cromwell) and Richard Baxter, both seventeenth-century historical figures, but he is consumed with the portrait of the unrepresented subject. In looking on this picture, one seemingly without origin, without the stain of historicity, Brown perhaps gains insight into the way to resist what he calls the uncertainty of human character.

Two instances concerning pictures serve as bookends to Brown's play. While Hamlet details the physical differences inherent in his father and Claudius after telling his mother to look upon their pictures, Brown repositions and recontextualizes this quotation perhaps to call to mind the distorted white picture of racial difference. In act 1, scene 1, Mrs. Gaines is looking at some drawings while in her sitting room, while Sampey, a "white slave" stands behind her chair. Sampey, in fact, is mistaken for Dr. Gaines's son in act 2, scene 3, by Major Moore. His observation that Sampey "looks so much like his papa" is actually a cogent comment, for Gaines all but says that he has fathered Sampey (29-30). These unspecified drawings that Mrs. Gaines looks upon call attention to her inability to actually see the distorted racial picture that, in fact, stands behind her. Mrs. Gaines chooses not to see. (36) And in act 5, scene 4, the final scene of the play, the northerner Mr. White, waiting for the ferry to Canada, takes out his sketchbook, pencils, and sketches. When a peddler interrupts him by asking for money, Mr. White states, "You've spoiled a beautiful scene for me" (46). And when another peddler implores Mr. White to buy something, he tells him, "You've spoiled some of the finest pictures in the world" (46). Mr. White's gazing on these beautiful pictures obscures the reality of the socioeconomic injustice surrounding him. Like Mrs. Gaines, Mr. White chooses not to see, and it is clear that both are caught within a cultural model of seeing only what one chooses to see, a distorted model that is not restricted by race or region. In calling our attention to looking on pictures, Brown is commenting that both the white northerner and southerner, both the white male and the female, are not seeing the reality beyond the picture. (37) Brown sees that through performance of both black and white, his audience might begin to look upon the picture of race with new eyes.

The Escape, as I've earlier mentioned, is the first published African-American play, not the first African-American performance of a play. Bernard L. Peterson, Jr., tells us that although Brown was technically the third African-American playwright of record, "he was the first to be born in slavery, the first to write a full-length drama on the problems of American slavery, and the first to have a play published in the United States." (38) Moreover, he was the first to mobilize Shakespeare in dramatic form as a means of protest. Furthermore, Brown's performance of these plays sets him in line with the black actors, particularly James Hewlett, the first African-American Shakespearean actor, as well as Ira Aldridge, S. Morgan Smith, and Paul Molyneaux, who were regularly performing Shakespeare in Britain and America in the first half of the nineteenth century. (39) In fact, the Seneca Falls Courier notes that, after Brown read The Escape in Seneca Falls on 29 April 1857, he exhibited "a dramatic talent possessed by few who have, under the best instruction, made themselves famous on the stage." (40) The first drama by a black playwright in America was by a man named William Alexander Brown (no relation to Wells Brown), the founder of the first black theater company in North America, who wrote a play entitled The Drama of King Shotaway, which featured Hewlett in the leading role. After 1824, when William Alexander Brown's African Theatre closed, he performed one-man imitations of Shakespearean roles with his wife accompanying him on piano, billing himself as "Shakespeare's proud representative." (41)

While William Alexander Brown may have stood in for Shakespeare in his performances, William Wells Brown's initial one-man dramatic readings of The Escape recast Shakespeare's role in black performance, as Shakespeare's specter signifies and acts in accord with a program of resistance to the ideological structure of slavery. Brown's performance conforms to what Joseph Roach identifies as orature, a range of forms, including gesture and song (similar to the pastiche found in Clotel), that has ties to theatricality. (42) Jay Fliegelman makes this point in regard to the Declaration of Independence, which was, he asserts, a script to be spoken aloud as oratory, a document to be "published and declared." (43) The printed document, in fact, was to be read aloud on various colonial "stages" to declare that the colonies were free. Viewed in this way, Brown's performance of his originary play by an African American is closely associated with the originary document of the United States that claimed all men are created equal. Significantly, Thomas Jefferson was often silent as an orator and, according to Fliegelman, often passed the burden of public performance to someone else, an interesting fact considering the "elocutionary revolution" in the eighteenth century. (44) This revolution had strong ties to the burgeoning American theater and actors like David Garrick. In fact, Fliegelman notes, oratorical manuals of the period were often indistinguishable from acting manuals. He states that the "oratorical revolution and the culture of performance were used to define the distinctiveness of Americans, a distinctiveness that excluded African-Americans from that definition." (45) Brown's remarkable and often reported ability to perform and speak in public, as opposed to Jefferson's anxiety about public oration, defines him as a man as "distinctively American" as a founding father of the country. Brown invokes the "natural theatricality" of the Declaration of Independence together with the orature inherent in the slave auction, both theaters of social order, to expose the fragility of a culture's foundational beliefs and ideological systems that were tainted from the beginning. Brown's antebellum dramatic protest--to first declare and then publish--tinged with the specter of Shakespeare, provided a script to picture independence for African Americans.

Brown's antebellum performance practices for The Escape reverse the scene of the slave auction while they also invoke it, a shifting strategy Brown employs throughout the play. American theaters maintained, until the mid-nineteenth century, a three-part seating arrangement: the pit (the only place blacks could sit), box seats, and the gallery. (46) In his dramatic readings, Brown undoes theater convention by effectively moving out of the pit and onto the stage, changing from spectator to performer. He brings "blackness" inside into enclosed spaces of the hall or lyceum to deliver his readings, countering the often open spaces of the slave auctions. Brown, in what John Ernest has called a "shifting performance of selfhood," occupying both black and white roles, nevertheless shifts control by implicating his white audience in the performance. (47) Even though Brown was still subject to the white gaze during these performances, he redirects this gaze back onto his audience, holding up a mirror of the distorted picture of racial indifference that permeated America at that cultural moment. As Harry J. Elam, Jr., states, the black performer can "purposefully acknowledge and utilize her ambiguous status--as real person, as theatrical representation, as sociocultural construction--to explore, expose, and even explode definitions of blackness." (48) Brown's dramatic protest interrogates minstrelsy and implicates dominant white ideology.

Shakespeare's presence on the title page of the first published play by an African American is a lens through which Brown asked his audience to understand the play. (49) It is necessary to examine what drama could do, allow, or open up that other written and oral forms could not. The theater, according to Lawrence Levine, "not only mirrored the sweep of events in the larger society but presented an arena in which those events could unfold." (50) Furthermore, according to Alan L. Ackerman, Jr., "In the exceptionally theatrical culture of nineteenth-century America, theater raises questions about the parameters of selfhood, origins and authenticity of character, and the concern of many to designate space for moral action, especially in regard to the responsibilities of audience." (51) The dramatic form allowed Brown to respond to "a larger cultural drama in which he found himself playing a limited, pre-assigned role"; his performance of both black and white roles showed Brown as "containing within himself a collective drama of national identity." (52) For Brown, performing a play within the structure of the ex-slave oratorical performance represented "an empowering act, an act through which he asserted control over the representational apparatus." (53) Further, performing all the roles in a play allowed him to oppose the institution of slavery and the white ignorance and blindness that he was critiquing. Appropriating Shakespeare in speeches, pamphlets, narratives, and novels provided one way to see Shakespeare's currency and impact on nineteenth-century American culture. Yet when Shakespeare is made a spectral presence in the first published play by an African American, then he does similar but more pressing cultural work. Quoting Alan Sin field, Thomas Cartelli remarks that for many nineteenth-century Americans "Shakespeare was more 'a site of cultural contest' than of cultural consensus or accord, and functioned as a privileged medium through which a self-consciously postcolonial society could both address and construct its differences from the society that had produced it." (54) Brown's performance of The Escape merges with the specters of the Declaration of Independence and the slave auction. The play, then, should be read as a drama of cultural order that protests society's own performance of antiblack sentiment. (55)

Brown continues his bricolage begun in Clotel by writing a play that is a Shakespearean pastiche, drawing from selected plays that become a necessary part of his drama of protest. Reading The Escape through the framework of Shakespeare's plays, particularly Hamlet, serves as a bridge to examine related cultural concerns, including the performance practices of white benevolence in nineteenth-century antebellum America. In act 1, scene 2, we see the slave Cato in Dr. Gaines's shop making pills. Ernest notes that Cato is a character straight from the blackface minstrel tradition. (56) Brown seems to mock his concern with appearances, calling into question such views of achieving respectability through the donning of proper clothing. Cato says, "I muss change my coat. Ef any niggers comes in, I want to look suspectable. Dis jacket don't suit a doctor; I'll change it. Ah! now I looks like a doctor. Now I can bleed, pull teef, or cut off a leg" (7). Cato mistakenly envisions a clothing change as a way to rise and look respectable. Cato "performs" medicine in this scene, but only after he has re-envisioned himself as a doctor. (57) When two slaves from a neighboring plantation knock on the door for medical assistance, Cato goes to a looking glass and views himself, saying, "I'll see ef I looks right. I em some punkins, ain't I?" (8). Here the specter of Hamlet looms. Brown as Cato is playing a minstrel figure, known for overdone and exaggerated actions. Hamlet's advice to one of the players, we should recall, sheds light on such a performance: "For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature" (3.2.18-20). What Cato (and the white audience) sees in this mirror is a distorted image, a false understanding of rising. Of course, Brown's own performance should be noted, for the mulatto Brown, in performing Cato, needs to "black up" like the minstrel performer. (58) Brown's ability to "put on" blackface with such ease, as well as his ability to "black down" when playing white characters, aligns with Cato's own ease in playing a false part. Yet Brown seems to be resisting the ways in which identity is perceived and promulgated by both blacks and whites. Through dramatic protest, Brown highlights, as John Ernest has remarked, "the many ways in which the underlying ideological fictions that script these various performances are exposed when placed on a common stage." (59)

In act 1, scene 3, the "plantation darky" vernacular of Cato is replaced by the refined rhetorical eloquence of the slave couple Glen and Melinda. (60) Farrison notes that in act 1, scene 3, and act 3, scene 4, Brown "seems to have tried, although vainly, to model Glen's soliloquizing after Hamlet's first two soliloquies." (61) Glen is unable to convince Dr. Gaines to allow him to marry Melinda. Glen tells Melinda, I used all the persuasive powers that I was master of, but to no purpose; he was inflexible. He even offered me a new suit of clothes, if I would give you up; and when I told him that I could not, he said he would flog me to death if I ever spoke to you again. (11)

Glen, "master" of his own rhetorical powers, protests to little avail the fact that he and Melinda must answer to a different kind of master. Furthermore, Glen resists Dr. Gaines's replacement offer, interestingly a new suit of clothes, which Dr. Gaines assumes to be how a black man judges respectability. Brown asserts the need for resistance to white demands and offers of advancement. When Glen leaves the room, Melinda soliloquizes on human suffering: After the soul has reached the lowest depths of despair, and can no deeper plunge amid its rolling, foetid shades, then the reactionary forces of man's nature begin to operate, resolution takes the place of despondency, energy succeeds instead of apathy, and an upward tendency is felt and exhibited. (11)

In other words, Melinda, cognizant of the necessity of rising, is laying out a necessary program of resistance within her speech; the "reactionary forces" within all men become the impetus for change.

In act 2, scene 3, Dr. Gaines comes upon Cato and the mulatto slave Tapioca and hides to overhear their conversation, echoing the cruel Iago's continual surveillance of the Moor Othello. (62) Yet in act 3, scene 5, Brown gives his audience his clearest parallel to Shakespeare, as both Othello and Hamlet emerge. Dr. Gaines, who has lied to his wife and told her he has sold Melinda, visits Melinda at the small cottage on the poplar farm where he keeps her hidden. What occurs in this scene is a racial inversion of the bedroom scene in Othello (5.2). The white man Dr. Gaines comes upon the black female Melinda in the room of the cottage, firm in his desire to have Melinda sexually. He even tells her that he will "dress [her] up like a lady" if she gives in to his desires and forgets Glen, yet another promise of sartorial refashioning. Whereas Desdemona accepts her fate at the hands of Othello, stating, "Then Lord have mercy upon me" (5.2.62), Melinda resists Dr. Gaines's advances: "Sir, I am your slave; you can do as you please with the avails of my labor, but you shall never tempt me to swerve from the path of virtue" (29). Earlier in the scene, a despondent Melinda thinks of suicide, "that sweet sleep" and later she tells Dr. Gaines, "Command me to bury myself in yonder stream, and I will obey you" (29). Neither Brown nor his audience missed the parallel here with Ophelia in Hamlet, who drowns herself in a brook in act 4, scene 7. Of course, Melinda's oppression continues later in the scene at the hands of the nominal Christian Mrs. Gaines, thereby implicating white women in their role of oppressing the potential elevation of black women. Melinda resists Mrs. Gaines, who attempts to force Melinda to drink the contents of a vial of poison, imploring, "Drink it, or I will thrust this knife to your heart! The poison or the dagger, this instant" (31). Her alignment with Ophelia's own plight allows Melinda to enter into a realm of oppressed women and makes her not a female slave but a part of a larger female community of suffering. As Brown passionately declared in an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, "A million of women are in Slavery, and as long as a single woman is in Slavery, every woman in the community should raise her voice against that sin, that crying evil that is degrading her sex. I look to the rising generation." (63) Brown redefines Shakespeare to work in protesting against the national institution of slavery in the wider cultural theater of white hegemony.

With the presence of Hamlet on the title page of his play, Brown positions his reader in aligning Hamlet's psychological "escapes" with Glen, Melinda, and Cato's own leap to freedom. As John Ernest suggests, this leap for freedom becomes "the outward performance of an inner resistance." (64) The performative element retained on the page functions in ways similar to how Saidiya Hartman suggests blackness is performed as a "strategy of power and tactic of resistance." (65) The Shakespearean specters that make their appearance in this first published drama by an African American are used to oppose claims of the lack of humanity and character of the black race and voice protest against the institution of slavery. By "performing escape" Brown protests proslavery rhetoric and implicates both whites and blacks in their collective failures to see the true picture of race in America. As Leonard Cassuto argues, "Escape was an important form of direct resistance ... the decision to escape itself becomes the rebellion. Escape was a specific instance of a more general liberation: the entry of the objectified slave into personhood." (66) Brown asks his reader to look on the picture of white blindness and oppose the hypocrisy that he exposes in his play. Brown's antebellum protest play, which placed Shakespeare at the forefront of African-American drama, ultimately served as a way to catch the conscience of his white audience.

I wish to thank John Ernest, who encouraged this project from its inception and provided generous suggestions and constructive critiques of my arguments, as well as Harry Elam, Jr., and the anonymous reader at Comparative Drama, both of whom provided invaluable feedback on early drafts of this article.

Kennesaw State University

NOTES

(1) William Wells Brown, The American Fugitive in Europe, in The Travels of William Wells Brown, ed. Paul Jeffers on (New York: Markus Wiener, 1991), 171. Brown's words here echo Jaques's famous speech in act 2, scene 7, in As You Like It: "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players." The 30 June 1855 edition of the African-American newspaper the Provincial Freeman reprints a piece from The London Punch, entitled "The Seven Ages of a Public Man;' which the editor terms "a clever parody on Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man": Public Life's a stage, All men in office merely players: They have their characters and salaries, And one man in his course plays many parts, And acts through seven ages. First, the infant, High-born, inheriting a coat of arms. And then the Public School boy, with his satchel, And shining lot of fag, going by rail Uncaringly to school. Then the Collagian Boating and driving, with a comic ballad, And supercilious eyebrow. Then the Patriot Full of strong oaths and moustached like the pard, Anxious for honor, and not disposed to quarrel With any decent situation Suffice that can one's mouth; and then the Member Quoting old saws and modern instances, In fair round paunch, with public dinners lined; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered Minister, With spectacles, and prose, and voles on side, His youthful views renounced, a world too wide For his shrunk wits, and his once manly voice, Trying in vain to hoax the people, pipes A miserable sound. Last scene of all, That ends this sad disgraceful history, Is childish Red-tapeism, sans pluck, sans everything.

See my discussion of parody and burlesque in the section entitled Antebellum Shakespearean Specters that follows. All articles from the Provincial Freeman, Frederick Douglass Paper, the North Star, the Colored American, and the National Era that appear in this essay were obtained from the Accessible Archives Database, available at www.accessible.com.

(2) Experience was never published and is not extant. For more on this play and its other potential titles, see William Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 277-80. See also James Haskins, Black Theater in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1982), who remarks, "Although William Wells Brown's plays were never performed on an actual stage, it must have given him comfort in his later years to know that he had played a part, however small, in bringing about the abolition of slavery" (17). Errol Hill notes, in Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), that Brown considered The Escape to be superior to his first play, and states, "Most critics found the playscript to be inadequate, an unruly hodgepodge of different scenes, with language that is artificial, but they are prepared to excuse the author since he did not expect his play to be staged" (50). William Edward Farrison, in "Phylon Profile, XVI: William Wells Brown" Phylon 9 (1948), remarks that Brown seems not to have enjoyed reading the play; he quotes from a letter Brown wrote to Marius R. Robinson on 29 November 1857, which reads, "I had rather give two lectures than to give one Reading" (22). Frederick W. Bond, discussing the reception of Brown's first play Experience in The Negro and the Drama: The Direct and Indirect Contribution Which the American Negro Has Made to Drama and the Legitimate Stage, with the Underlying Conditions Responsible (Washington, D.C.: McGrath Publishing Company, 1969), quotes a review from the Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle: "His lectures are among the best ever delivered on that subject, as all who heard him testify, and his drama interested and amused his audience, bringing the subject before them more vividly than any amount of argument could have done" (26). Finally, according to Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Brown firmly believed that drama had its role to play in the struggle" ("The Bondwoman's Escape: Hannah Crafts Rewrites the First Play Published by an African American," in In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on the Bondwoman's Narrative, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Hollis Robbins [New York: Basic Books, 2004], 118).

(3) Farrison, William Wells Brown, 279.

(4) This Shakespearean quotation was particularly resonant in the writings of abolitionists and others alike as evidenced in its presence in many of the African American newspapers published before The Escape. For instance, the 10 September 1852 edition of the Frederick Douglass Paper contains an article discussing the platforms of pro- and antislavery parties. The article concludes, "Compare these platforms, consider them well, reader, look on this picture, and then on that, and say which of them you will select for your families, your country, and the world. If you will have slavery, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the compromise of 1850, if you would engage in the absurd and impious attempt to stop the progress of the world and put an end to freedom of speech and declare slavery eternal, then you will vote for Gen. Scott or Gen. Pearce. On the other hand if you would have your country and the world progress to the enjoyment of absolute freedom and universal justice, then you will join the Free Democracy and vote for John P. Hale and George W. Julian." See also the 27 August 1852 edition of the Frederick Douglass Paper for a similar use of this quotation in discussing political platforms. Finally, a letter to the editor of the Colored American in its 11 September 1841 edition recounts the unequal justice given to black and white men under the law. After recounting an incident in St. Louis, Missouri, in April 1841, in which four black men were tried, found guilty, and hanged after a reward of ten thousand dollars had been offered for the capture of the murderers of two young clerks at the store of Munns and Co., the writer states, Now Look on that picture, and then on this! From the New York Herald, Aug. 8--'It is reported that a WHITE MAN CUT OFF THE HEADS OF FOUR NEGROES near St. Louis. The bodies only have been found!' Where is the press, the boasted guardian of our liberties, now, sir? Why does it not speak out in thunder-tones against this 'horrid murder?' Where are the authorities of St. Louis? Why has not a reward been offered for the apprehension of this murderer? and why is it that the people have not risen in their might, and demanded the life of this man, as an atonement for the deed committed? Is it because he is white? Yes, sir! and he stalks forth mid the light of a noonday's sun, none daring to molest him or make him afraid.

(5) Elmo Terry-Morgan, "Noise/Funk: Fo' Real Black Theatre on 'Da Great White Way;' African American Review 31 (1997), argues that the 1990s play Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk follows a black dramatic tradition begun with William Wells Brown's The Escape, and remarks that Brown's purpose was fourfold: "(1) to tell his story through his own experience, (2) to engage the audience through entertaining means, (3) to validate the common experience of Black folks, and (4) to appeal to the goodwill of White folks and, through logic and pathos, petition them to join the righteous battle against racism and oppression" (677-78). I concur with Terry-Morgan that Brown appealed to his audiences to support the abolitionist movement, a movement for which Brown was an agent. We should remember that the publication of the play was itself another part of this Northern abolitionist enterprise.

(6) J. Noel Heermance, discussing Clotel in William Wells Brown and Clotelle: A Portrait of the Artist in the First Negro Novel (Hamden: Archon Books, 1969), notes Brown's ability to "transcend the oration and slave narrative and work within a literary medium which he, himself, had chosen" (23). The same can be said for Brown's choice of drama.

(7) Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9. For a related discussion of blackface minstrelsy and its connections to abolitionism and Brown's novel Clotel, see Paul Gilmore, "'De Genewine Artekil': William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Abolitionism," American Literature 69 (1997): 743-80. Gilmore examines the black male character in Clotel "who resists slavery through acts of subterfuge and masquerade," (749). He continues, noting that Brown's novel "undermines the idea of one authentic representation of black manhood by insisting on the instability of both white and black manhood" (750). Finally, see Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

(8) Lawrence W Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 17.

(9) Ibid., 36. As Levine notes, Shakespeare was also a striking part of life, not just the stage, in the nineteenth century. See his many examples, 36-38.

(10) Ibid., 15.

(11) Richard W. Schoch, Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7. Schoch states, "The nineteenth-century burlesque thus maintained an unwavering critical perspective: far from being an insult to Shakespeare's poetic genius, the burlesque expressed such undoubted loyalty to the playwright that he himself could not have withheld his mirthful assent" (37). For more on Shakespearean burlesque and parody, see Jonathan Bate, "Parodies of Shakespeare," Journal of Popular Culture 19 (summer 1985): 75-89; Joyce Green MacDonald, "Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness," Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 133-46; and Stanley Wells, "Shakespearean Burlesques," Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1965): 49-61. For a nineteenth-century British parody of Shakespeare, see note 1, above.

(12) William J. Maher, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 353.

(13) Lott, 6. Lott comments on Thomas D. Rice's burlesque of Shakespeare called Otello, performed in September 1852 at New York's Purdy's National Theatre (213). For more on Rice and his enormous popularity in performing Jim Crow (1830-1850), see Laurence Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891), 115-20, and, more recently, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Jump lira Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). Lhamon comments, Two and a half centuries into Shakespeare's cultural fate, the Bard had become a model of transcendent ideals that seemed to naturalize elite status in the States. Shakespeare's sensitive registry of rude mechanicals and rustic manners was not what drove people to produce his art in the early nineteenth century. Rather, the one important reason Shakespeare was then culturally useful was the way producers could show his plays subsuming low persons and manners-- could bend the plays to serve an ideal of courtly hierarchy. This top-down push on theater in general of course stimulated an opposing shove upward. This counter tendency was what Jim Crow, his dance and his popular following, originally ventilated. (5)

Lott also recounts British actor Charles Mathews's lampoon of the black Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge in the 1830s, whose skit included Hamlet's lines, "To be or not to be, dat is him question, whether him nobler in de mind to suffer or lift up him arms against a sea of hubble bubble and by opossum (oppose 'em) end 'em," (45). Aldridge would later acknowledge that he never attempted Hamlet in his life. See George A. Thompson, Jr., A Documentary History of the African Theatre (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 210-11. For more on Shakespeare's appropriation in blackface minstrel shows, see W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998) and Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 37-38, 95, 165-67, and 185-86.

(14) Gilmore, 744.

(15) Gary Taylor, Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip Hop (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 98.

(16) Leonard Cassuto, in The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), remarks, "In Clotel, Brown presented ringing rebuttals to stock portrayals common to Southern proslavery novels, books that made up a large propaganda movement which had been thriving for some two decades. Plantation fiction was a genre dedicated to papering over the human aspect of slavery; Clotel was the first black voice to enter the literary debate in a field that the South had dominated for decades" (128). Similarly, with the publication of The Escape, Brown's abolitionist message of exposing the picture of slavery as it really was served to protest against various proslavery arguments.

(17) Shakespeare's omnipresence in nineteenth-century culture can also be located in the period's newspapers. As many nineteenth-century African-American newspaper borrowings from Shakespeare reveal, quoting or invoking Shakespeare is often, but I should stress not always, a haphazard process. While in Europe from 1849 to 1854, Brown frequently renewed his subscription to the Frederick Douglass Paper, where he would have often encountered Shakespeares presence. Within these African-American newspapers, Shakespeare is often aligned with public speaking and elocution. Two instances are noteworthy. On 1 June 1855, the Frederick Douglass Paper reprinted an article from the Boston Telegraph entitled "The Anti-Slavery Enterprise: Its Necessity, Practicability, and Dignity" which was an address delivered at New York's Metropolitan Theatre by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on 9 May 1855. Thinking of the many divines who "sought to throw the seamless garment of Christ" over slavery, Sumner states, "and thinking of these things, I am ready to say with Shakespeare, 'In religion, / What damned error, but some sober brow / Will bless it and approve it with a text?'" This borrowing is from act 3, scene 2, of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. It should not be lost that Sumner's original performance and quoting of Shakespeare was an oration that now resides in printed form, similar to the track William Wells Brown would take over the following three years. In the 19 May 1848 edition of The North Star, in a piece entitled "Practical Elocution" the writer discusses the elocutionary performances of D. V. Gates, and then reprints a tribute to the advantage of such exercises from Channing: Were this art cultivated and encouraged, great numbers, now insensible to the most beautiful compositions, might be waked up to their excellence and power. It is not easy to conceive of a more effectual way of spreading a refined taste through a community. The drama, undoubtedly, appeals more strongly to the passions than recitations; but the latter brings out the meaning of the author more. Shakespeare, worthily recited, would be better understood than on the stage. Recitation, sufficiently varied ... is well adapted to our present intellectual progress.

Like Gates, Brown had practiced such elocution through his lectures and engagements in America and Europe, but Brown turns to drama in the late 1850s not to spread refined taste, but to challenge and ultimately resist the racist tendencies that were invested in his audience. In this sense, Brown broke with the cultural association of Shakespeare and elocution and focused on using Shakespeare to undermine white sentimentalism and white ideologies of racial identity.

For an interesting account of a female elocutionary performance that incorporated selections from Shakespeare, see the 18 May 1855 edition of the Frederick Douglass Paper, which recounts the Massachusetts performances of Mrs. Webb, the "Black Siddons?' In his The American Fugitive in Europe (1854), Brown recounts a visit to Hereford, the birthplace of Mrs. Siddons, "the unequalled tragic actress" (192).

(18) In his letter situated between Garrison's preface and Douglass's text proper, Wendell Phillips's letter provides the second Shakespearean reference. Phillips states in the letter, "indeed, those who stare at the half-peck of corn a week, and love to count the lashes on the slave's back, are seldom the 'stuff' out of which reformers and abolitionists are to be made" ("Letter from Wendell Phillips, Esq.," Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in Shadowing Slavery: Five African American Autobiographical Narratives, ed. John Ernest [Acton, Mass.: Copley, 2002], 16). Here, Phillips posits a reference to The Tempest, when Prospero, by way of his magic, has just presented a betrothal masque to Ferdinand and Miranda, and in a distempered state, he says, "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on" (The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. [New York: Norton, 1997], 4.1.156-57; subsequent citations of Shakespeare's plays refer to this edition and are noted parenthetically in the text). Recent critical discourse places Prospero as a tyrannous white dictator and enslaver, while Caliban becomes recast as the hero by being enslaved by force. It should be noted that Caliban first becomes a significant character in The Tempest's political reception in the nineteenth century, when, as Richard Schoch notes, "debates on colonialism, the dissemination of Western 'civilization" and evolution highlight the importance of this hitherto secondary character" (181). Phillips seems to be using the enslaver Prospero's rhetoric to critique his own nation's slaveholding populace, drawing attention to the cultural construction of pro- and antislavery alliances. Caliban, in fact, in the antebellum antislavery newspapers, is not "re-envisioned," but rather is referred to as a monster. E T. Mott's 13 October 1848 piece, "America Gone Mad," in the North Star, however, aligns this monster with America. Mott speaks of the "terrible monster" slavery, stating that it is a "mass of loathsome ugliness, to which a mountain of Calibans would be like roses." Mott aligns this mountain of Calibans with the "most notable and free Americans," asking, "is she not a slave who is bound, body and soul, to the vilest, the filthiest, and most abominable of masters?" See the 3 November 1838 edition of the Colored American and the 15 April 1849 edition of the National Era for two additional negative uses of Caliban.

(19) William Lloyd Garrison, preface to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in Shadowing Slavery, 5-6.

(20) William Wells Brown points to the cruel ironies a black man faces in America in his 14 November 1847 lecture delivered before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, where he states, "If I wish to stand up and say, 'I am a man,' I must leave the land that gave me birth. If I wish to ask protection as a man, I must leave the American stars and stripes," in The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, ed. Larry Gara (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1969), 92.

(21) For more on the role of Hamlet in Douglass's 1845 Narrative, see Donald Gibson, "Reconciling Public and Private in Frederick Douglass' Narrative" American Literature 57 (1985): 549-69. Gibson states that Douglass "found in [Hamlet] correlatives mirroring his own sense of himself and his situation" (560).

(22) Protesting slavery via Shakespearean appropriation is not unique to Douglass's text. Shakespearean references abound in other African-American texts appearing before The Escape. These texts, like Douglass's, are a part of a wider, more complex social theater, and it is important to consider some of the more suggestive examples. David Walker, in his 1830 Appeal, turns to Hamlet in his first Article. Walker speaks of the talents among his people that have not had a chance to develop because of their oppression, but he asserts that their sufferings will come to an end, as "[e]very dog must have its day" (David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000], 17). Of course, this passage recalls Hamlet's words, "The cat will mew, and dog will have his day" (5.1.277). Once again, Hamlet's play between inaction and action is adopted to the cause of black moral uplift--the black in America will have his day of freedom, while the advocates of slavery will have their day of reckoning. James Forten's 1813 pamphlet utilizes the rhetoric of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, who delivers his famous "[h]ath not a Jew eyes" speech in act 3, scene 1. Forten asks, "Are we not sustained by the same power, supported by the same food, hurt by the same wounds, pleased with the same delights, and propagated by the same means" ("Series of Letters by a Man of Colour," in Pamphlets of Protest, ed. Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky [New York: Routledge, 2001], 68). Forten notably uses the same plea for humanity and equality that Shylock uses. However, certain audiences could view this parallel negatively, linking this distrustful outcast of society and his persuasive rhetoric with Forten's own devices, thus exemplifying Shakespeare's fluidity within many strains of American thought in the nineteenth century. Finally, Frank J. Webb's 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends (Robert Reid-Pharr, ed. [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997]), the second novel to be published by an African American (the first was William Wells Brown's own Clotel, or, The President's Daughter, in 1853), presents another reference to Shakespeare's Shylock. After the deaths of the Garies, Mr. Waiters, a wealthy and respected African-American real estate agent in Philadelphia, relates to his companion Mr. Balch that [t]ime after time, when scraping, toiling, saving, I have asked myself. To what purpose is it all--perhaps that in the future white men may point at and call me, sneeringly, 'a nigger millionaire; or condescend to borrow money of me. Ah! often, when some negro-hating white man has been forced to ask a loan at my hands, I've thought of Shylock and his pound of flesh, and ceased to wonder at him. (275-76)

Webb has Mr. Waiters consider his own cultural position as outcast and sometimes moneylender in terms of Shakespeare's Shylock. Of note, of course, is that Waiters seems "to know" Shakespeare and aligns himself with Shylock accordingly, thereby reinforcing the view that Shakespeare belongs to both white and black culture. Walters can understand Shylock's insistence on demanding the pound of flesh from Antonio because of his own position in the cultural liminal space reserved in the nineteenth century for free blacks. Both Forten's and Webb's use of Shylock seems to assert that the demand for recompense for the wrongs their race has suffered is understandable and altogether justified.

(23) For an extended commentary on respectability and notions of rising and elevation as evidenced in the writings of both black and white writers and speakers, see Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 124-35,160-83, and 189-200.

(24) Ibid., 127. In fact, I would argue, African-American writers, with their concern with respectability and rising, were the forerunners of later nineteenth-century "rags to riches" stories by white writers like Horatio Alger, who conflated rising with putting on a new set of clothes. Frank Webb's novel anticipates the rhetoric of the late-nineteenth-century New York "rising" boys such as Ragged Dick. In his The Garies and Their Friends (1857), Kinch is said to have "metamorphosed" "with faultless linen, elegant vest, and fashionably-cut coat" (340). Charlie, exposed to refinery at Warmouth, tells Kinch to wear his good clothes so that he could "try to look more like a gentleman" (295). Charlie even notes the "unaccountable prejudice existing in the city against the rising generation" (287, italics mine). Clothing, of course, could help in the process of rising for these black boys, but certainly not to the extent that it helped white boys like Ragged Dick. William Wells Brown makes a case for this view in The Escape.

(25) Ibid., 124. As the 1847 Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored People attest, rising is tied to the elevation of the black mind and to moral uplift. I offer a few notable examples of how notions of utility and rising converge in antebellum African-American protest literature. In his preface to Douglass's Narrative of the Life, Garrison asserts his happiness that the powers of Douglass have been brought into "the field of public usefulness" (5). Absalom Jones and Richard Allen's 1794 "Narrative," for instance, uses the rhetoric of usefulness and utility throughout, asserting that during the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, African Americans were concerned with being "as useful as possible," looking to increase their utility to their fellow man. In fact, the authors exalt black utility in this time of crisis, stating that "the general part of the poor white people were so dismayed, that instead of attempting to be useful, they in a manner hid themselves" ("A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia" in Pamphlets of Protest, 33-37). The second strain of related rhetoric--rising--also can be found in Douglass's narrative, where, early in the paragraph where he quotes from Hamlet, he states in a strikingly terse sentence, "My tendency was upward" (87). Henry Highland Garnet, in his 1848 "Address to the Slaves of the United States" demands his brethren to "arise, arise" and calls on them to "arise from the dust" (Pamphlets of Protest, 164). Female writers, in fact, utilize this rhetoric of rising to an even greater extent, bringing to mind the phoenix rising from the ashes. In her 1835 "Productions," Maria Stewart notes that rising is frowned upon by whites, who hinder "the rise and progress of the people of color"; she wants the "rising youth" to become educated, and asserts that all they have to do is "raise ourselves" (Pamphlets of Protest, 124-30). Her call is to rise above the condition of servants and drudges and rise instead to respectability.

(26) Brown, in The American Fugitive in Europe, recounts his visit to Shakespeare's House in Stratford during the day and his attendance at a lecture at the Mechanics' Institution later that evening, where the Scottish essayist George Gilfillan says of the Americans, "Long may they draw inspiration from Shakespeare and Milton, and come again and again to the old well." Brown would follow his advice (185).

(27) Rael, 279.

(28) William Wells Brown, The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom, ed. John Ernest (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 1. Ernest's edition follows the first edition by R. F. Wallcut (Boston, 1858), which does not contain line numbers. Subsequent citations note act and scene as well as the page number from Ernest's edition.

(29) John Ernest, introduction to The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom, x. In Buying Whiteness, Gary Taylor writes, "William Wells Brown wrote Clotel to prove that a man with dark skin and frizzy hair could write novels. He also proved that such a man could write plays, histories, and travel books" (352).

(30) According to Lawrence Levine in Highbrow/Lowbrow, ten Hamlets were produced in a single (1857-58) New York theater season (34). Laurence Hutton, in Curiosities of the American Stage, remarks, "Probably at no period in the history of Hamlet, since the early days when Shakspere himself, according to tradition, played havoc with the Ghost, has any town witnessed such an epidemic of Hamlet as passed over the city of New York in the years 1857 and 1858" (293). Notably, this is the same time that Brown began performing and publishing The Escape.

(31) In performing the nominal Christianity of his white characters, Brown seems to draw from The Merchant of Venice, where Bassanio states that in religion, "What damned error but some sober brow / Will bless it and approve it with a text, / Hiding the grossness with fair ornament" (3.2.78-80). The slave speculator Walker states, "I always like to hear about religion" a sentiment that corresponds to those of Mrs. Gaines, who enjoys hearing about religion but fails to practice Christian benevolence (17). Later, of course, at the sale of Sam and Big Sally, Walker tells Dr. Gaines, "I likes to go according to Scripter" (20). As Rev. Mr. Pinchen visits Mrs. Gaines, she at one moment states, "It always does my soul good to hear religious experience. It draws me nearer and nearer to the Lord's side" while in the same scene she threatens to whip her slave Hannah (12, 14). Just as Shakespeare asks his readers to see the humanity in Shylock's plea, subject to the tainted Christianity of Venice and Belmont, so too does Brown ask us to see through the tainted Christianity and inhumanity of the white characters he performs while at the same time to uphold the humanity of the black characters he performs. In The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Brown recounts the nominal Christianity of his captors after his failed attempt at escape with his mother. Brown is attuned to the irony that he and his fellow slaves live in "the land of whips, chains, and Bibles" (32). For a concise discussion of the failure of benevolence in Brown's play, see Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 165-67, 176-78.

(32) I do see in Daniel Coker's 1810 "A Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister" an earlier dramatic (non-Shakespearean) strain, one that precedes Henry Box Brown's own "performances" or "restagings" of his escape, complete with shipping crate, in the early 1850s.

(33) Brown, "A Lecture Delivered Before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem" in The Narrative of William W. Brown, 81-82.

(34) In the chapter from The American Fugitive in Europe (1854) where Brown encounters Joseph Jenkins, the same epigraph appears as found on the title page of The Escape, although in slightly modified form: "Look here, upon this picture, and on this" (203).

(35) Brown, The American Fugitive, 131-32.

(36) Note that Hamlet, in the speech that begins by demanding his mother look upon pictures, twice asks his mother, "have you eyes?" (3.4.64, 66).

(37) See Brown's lecture delivered before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1847. Near the end of the lecture, Brown relates an incident of an American passing through Germany: Only a short time since, an American gentleman, in travelling through Germany, passed the window of a bookstore where he saw a number of pictures. One of them was a cut representing an American Slave on his knees, with chains upon his limbs. Over him stood a white man, with a long whip; and underneath was written, "the latest specimen of American democracy." (The Narrative of William Brown, 93-94)

(38) Bernard L. Peterson, Jr., Early Black American Playwrights and Dramatic Writers: A Biographical Directory and Catalog of Plays, Films, and Broadcasting Scripts (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 41.

(39) For a detailed account of Aldridge, Smith, and Molyneaux, see Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), particularly his second chapter, "Involuntary Exiles."

(40) Quoted in Farrison, William Wells Brown, 285.

(41) Hill, Shakespeare in Sable, 14. William Alexander Brown's drama was produced by the short-lived African Company, or African Theatre. For more on this and on Shakespeare and the black actor in the nineteenth century, see Thompson, A Documentary History; Hill and Hatch, A History of African American Theatre; Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown's African and American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); William Over, "New York's African Theatre: Shakespeare Reinterpreted," in Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, ed. Donald Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds (London: Palgrave, 2000), 65-84; and Edith J. R. Isaacs, The Negro in the American Theatre (New York: Theatre Arts, 1947), 18-27. In A History of African American Theatre, Hill praises William Alexander Brown: "To have pioneered as a black theatre artist in either writing, building, owning, recruiting, founding or managing, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century would suffice to make one memorable. To have done them all under the most trying circumstances requires that we humbly recognize William Alexander Brown as the true father of African American theatre" (40). Hill earlier notes that William Alexander Brown began his theater "by offering the well-known plays of Shakespeare but he quickly moved beyond such fare" (27). Shakespeare thus serves as a vehicle for Brown's theater to be taken seriously before other dramas (including his own) are performed; as is so today, "doing Shakespeare" legitimizes. George A. Thompson, Jr., writes that Shakespeare's plays "represented all that was noblest and most glorious in anglophone culture, and, in deference to that, the African Theatre performed his plays from memory" (27). Furthermore, Michael D. Bristol, in Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1990), notes, "Shakespeare is the one absolutely unassailable icon for a cultural tradition" (31). However, as Hill relates, Shakespeare was viewed by some as the token possession of white theater. He recounts how Stephen Price, manager of the nearby Park Theatre, opposed this black company doing Richard 111 just two weeks after the Park Theatre had staged the same play. Hill writes, "Price promptly hired a group of white hecklers to disrupt performances at the African Theatre and when the troupe persisted in playing, Price arranged for the night watch to crash the theatre during a performance and arrest the actors. They were taken to the watch-house, warned to cease playing Shakespeare, and released at a late hour" (29).

(42) Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 11 12.

(43) Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 25.

(44) Ibid., 2, 5.

(45) Ibid., 3-4, 81,189-96.

(46) Levine, 24. Errol Hill, in A History of African American Theatre, remarks that the nineteenth-century theater "played a role in fashioning public attitudes toward race. On the one hand, the popular minstrel stage presented degrading images of Blacks over many decades; on the other, the issue of slavery formed a serious undercurrent in productions by the African Theatre and in the plays of Wells Brown" (52).

(47) John Ernest, "The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Brown's The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom," PMLA 113 (1998), 1108-21. Samuel A. Hay recounts the force of Brown's performance and its potential resistant powers; see African American Theatre: A Historical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). He describes William Wells Brown's "brush with oblique bigotry when an agent of the Abolition Movement told Brown to stop reading his antislavery melodrama" The Escape: Some listeners allegedly had complained that Brown's powerful readings were scaring them. Indeed, Brown probably had, what with his booming voice and the romantic style he had learned by watching Ira Aldridge in London. The abolitionist critics had often bragged that Brown could rivet 'the attention of a large audience for a/most three hours.' This is not surprising: The poor audience was probably too frightened to move. (138)

(48) Harry J. Elam, Jr., "The Black Performer and the Performance of Blacknes," in African American Performance and Theater History, ed. Harry J. Elam, Jr., and David Krasner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 289. For more on the body as performative text, see Elam, 291-92.

(49) Like Shakespeare, William Wells Brown was already a performer before becoming a dramatist. Loren K. Ruff, in "William Wells Brown: Dramatic Apostle for Abolition," New England Theatre Journal 2, no. 1 (1991), notes that "Although Brown wanted his plays staged in a full-scale production, as a Black person, his social status in American theatre at mid-century ruled out any such possibility" (77). Shakespeare was not a draw for Brown's dramatic readings, although Shakespeare's specter was present within the play. However, the printed form of the drama announces its association with Shakespeare on the title page with the epigraph from Hamlet.

(50) Levine, 68.

(51) Alan L. Ackerman, Jr., The Portable Theater: American Literature & the Nineteenth-Century Stage (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), xiii.

(52) Ernest, "Introduction," xli-xlii.

(53)Elam, 291.

(54) Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999), 30.

(55) In the author's preface that precedes the play, Brown states, his play was written for my own amusement, and not with the remotest thought that it would ever be seen by the public eye. I read it privately, however, to a circle of my friends, and through them was invited to read it before a Literary Society. Since then, the Drama has been given in various parts of the country. By the earnest solicitation of some in whose judgment I have the greatest confidence, I now present it in a printed form to the public. (3)

Brown presents a progression of his formulation of the play, from written to oral to print form. It is the printing of this performance that distances him from other black "performers" before him. Yet there is another progression that Brown posits, one that begins in the private sphere (writing the play), moves to the public sphere (his various performances), and comes back to the private sphere (the published form in the hands of the reader). Brown's antislavery message is not transitory, lost in a fleeting set of performances in the public realm. Through the printing of the drama, he brings his work back to the private sphere, into the hands and before the eyes of the reader where it becomes a script that enables the reader to protest the racist tendencies alive in American culture.

(56) Ernest, "Introduction," xxxv.

(57) Cato's performance continues in act 5, scene 1, where he performs as the barkeeper at the barroom at the American Hotel, stating, "de fuss gemman I waits on will be dis gemman of color" (36). In act 5, scene 3, Cato again refashions himself by taking a "suspectable name" upon escaping, "Alexander Washington Napoleon Pompey Caesar" (40). For more on the "topos of unnaming," see Kimberly W. Benston, "I yam what I am: The Topos of Un(Naming) in Afro-American Literatur," in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1984), 151-74. Finally, when Cato encounters Glen and Melinda in act 5, scene 4, Cato is still in disguise, for Cato states, "Dey don't know me in dese fine clothes," (45). James V. Hatch notes in "A White Folks Guide to 200 Years of Black & White Drama," The Drama Review 16, no. 4 (December 1972), that Cato has ripped off "the stupid darky disguise" (9).

(58) Two other instances of white or mulatto characters who "black up" are noteworthy. In the chapter entitled "The Escape" in Brown's Clotel, we encounter Horatio Green's slave George, who is described "as white as most white persons. No one would suppose that any African blood coursed through his veins" (210). He was spared death because of his heroic action of saving a valuable box that was almost destroyed in a fire at the courthouse. He escaped injury, but "[h]is hair was burnt, eyebrows closely singed, and his clothes smelt strongly of smoke" (211). In Frank J. Webb's novel The Garies and Their Friends, the morally abhorrent Mr. Stevens, dressed in a suit of clothes resembling those worn by the city's most notorious fire company, is the victim of mistaken identity when he encounters the enemies of a most hated faction. The men drag Stevens into a wheelwrights shop, "where they obtained some tar, with which they coated his face completely" (188). People react to his new darkened appearance by stating, "Oh! don't he look like a nigger!" and "Hallo! here's a darkey!" (188-89). See W. T. Lhamon's Raising Cain for more on blackface performance, as well as the collection of essays on nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Hanover, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996).

(59) Ernest, "The Reconstruction of Whiteness," 1112.

(60) Werner Sollors, in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), has remarked that in The Escape, "the operative literary code defines the standard English-speaking Mulattoes Glen and Melinda as serious and heroic, and casts blacks as buffo types who provide comic relief in dialect" (486, n. 50).

(61) Farrison, William Wells Brown, 303. Furthermore, Farrison states that "in act 3, scene 5, he tried to make Melinda soliloquize about sleep somewhat as Macbeth talked about it" (303-4). In an earlier article, Farrison remarks that "The Escape is no Hamlet" and that Brown tried to have imitated some parts of Shakespeare's tragedy unsuccessfully ("Phylon Profile, XVI," 22). These are the only specific acknowledgements of Shakespeare's presence in The Escape that I have encountered.

(62) In The American Fugitive in Europe, Brown recounted seeing the drawing power of Othello when he watched Joseph Jenkins in the title role: "I saw that the house was crammed with an orderly company." Furthermore, he notes that when the curtain fell, Jenkins was "called upon the stage, where he was received with deafening shouts of approbation" (204).

(63) Brown, The Narrative of William W. Brown, 97.

(64) Ernest, "The Reconstruction of Whiteness," 1112.

(65) Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 57.

(66) Cassuto, 101.