Othello and Blackface

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folger's Director. This podcast is called "Teach Him How to Tell My Story." It's a discussion that started out being about one thing and then turned into something larger. Originally, we wanted to look at attitudes around the practice of blackface as it is applied to the performance of off-fellow over the centuries. As you'll hear, though, we move from there to a much broader and richer conversation on many topics, illuminated by the ideas of two young scholars who are bringing an exciting and new perspective to the study of Shakespeare. Iana Thompson is Professor of English at George Washington University, and Ian Smith is Professor of English at Lafayette College in Eastern Pennsylvania. Their thoughts on race, history, and theatrical practice may leave you looking at off-fellow in an entirely new way. Iana and Ian are interviewed by Barbara Bogey. Ian, I'd like to start with a story that you tell about the time that you were on a panel at a Shakespeare conference, and it was about a fellow. One of your fellow panelists kept insisting that a fellow is not about race. Tell us about that and your reaction. It was actually a seminar, so they're a group of us participating in the conversation. And somebody asserted several times, actually, that a fellow is not about race. My sense is that he felt that this statement was supposed to be a corrective of some kind. And a corrective in that people talk about a fellow being about race, obviously, there are a lot of references to race or to color. Exactly. And he was going to correct this simplistic reading? Yes. I think on two grounds. One he thought that perhaps historically, people weren't interested in seeing the play in that way in Shakespeare's time, which, as you just suggested, is really sort of startling because of the very clear and numerous derogatory references to skin color in the play. And the second thing I thought that he was trying to do too was something perhaps a little bit more powerful and dangerous. That is, he was suggesting that race was not something that people thought about in Shakespeare's time. And the term race itself, he was suggesting, didn't have the kind of force that it has for us until the 18th century or so. That somehow we were misusing a term that was anachronistic. And so he was correcting us and saying that we should not be deploying a term in such a careless fashion. What is astounding to me is that that sort of very narrow thinking somehow did not and does not give due credence to the fact that there are patterns of behavior and sort of practices that Shakespeare was clearly calling attention to, to which we make of the term race. But the patterns of behavior are still very much recognizable. And so to quill over the term race itself in that very narrow way, I think is to try to use historical accuracy as a kind of moral high ground from which to really delegitimize race work and to silence others from being that kind of work. Right. And we're going to talk more about historic accuracy in a moment. But you are making a really interesting argument on that panel. And if I could paraphrase it, and I think what you were arguing was that the only world in which a fellow is not about race is in a white privileged world. And the way that you put it is a world where people think, imagine and speak as if whiteness described the world. Yes, that actually is a quote from Adrian Rich. And not just the person's view, I'm talking about Athelian this way, but also the experience of others in that room, for whom those that kind of approach to talking about race has a definite impact. That is to say, when somebody sits or stands in a room and makes that sort of declaration, there are intended consequences. Some of us in the room are quite unsettled by that sort of statement, right? A writer Tim Weiss talks about white privilege and power. And to quote him, he says, "That which keeps people of color off balance in a racist society is that which keeps whites in control." In a real sense, in that kind of discussion, when somebody makes that kind of declaration, there's an attempt to co-opt the conversation, there's an attempt to control the conversation, and there's an attempt to silence those who would want to produce a sort of progressive argument about race and similar topics. And so that is why I then refer to Adrian Rich, where it is about a sort of view then that would rather perpetuate the idea that we live in a world in which we think or we imagine or we speak as if whiteness is the totality of one's experience and knowledge. Iana, jump in here. Is this your experience as well of Shakespeare in academia or in circles where you're talking about a fellow? Absolutely. In fact, I have a similar narrative in another conference where older, white scholar turned to me after I gave a paper about the uses of blackface in the early modern period and questions about whether we should return to those practices in the 21st century. And he turned to me and he said, "And you, you, how dare you use the word blackface, you know you're doing history a disservice." And basically was trying to shame me and silence me and also police the borders of Shakespeare studies in a way that I think is very similar to what Ian described that there's a lot of fear that I sensed in his, you know, kind of raising his wizzened finger at me. Is that like, you know, he was afraid that his world, his scholarly world would be set adrift if I used the word blackface. And on the one hand, I felt threatened in a way, right, that I felt like I'm junior to this very senior person and perhaps I'm doing something wrong. And on the other hand, I felt very powerful because look at the reaction that I was getting from this guy after giving a paper, right? You know, I was like, this shows you the stakes. Right, that's something you dream of. But I'm wondering if part of this is a kind of accusation that you're trying to hard to make Shakespeare relevant to what's going on now in the world. Black Lives Matter and religious wars in the Middle East and immigration. This accepting that a fellow was a racial play does seem to place it right in the midst of all of these current issues. Well, I mean, I think this is something that Shakespeareans have been celebrating since, you know, the 17th century that Shakespeare's plays managed to be timely, even though they were written in a very specific historical context, they kind of jump out of that context in many ways to seem as if they're about the current moment you're in. And certainly, black Shakespeare scholars are not the first to deploy Shakespeare in their current political climate or cultural climate. That's just something that happens. And that's, you know, kind of part of what makes Shakespeare enduring. The question for me, really, is whether Shakespeare, the cultural weight of Shakespeare's fame, gets in the way of talking about race in productive fashion. And I think this is something that's been hard to have a real conversation about with other Shakespeareans and with practitioners, with actors and directors, because they all want to make it very relevant and make it meaningful for their audiences, whether your audience is a student, a fellow scholar, or, you know, actual theater audiences. But I wonder if it really works or if the baggage that Shakespeare's name brings with it, which is almost always positive, right? I mean, it's hard to think of like any negative baggage that comes along with Shakespeare's name in our cultural climate. But I wonder if that kind of force of the positivity of his reputation gets in the way of having real productive conversations about race. Ian, I'm curious what you think about that. I think that's quite right. And also what that implies, therefore, is, as you just said, that Shakespeare's name comes at this sort of a positive sort of valence. But that also then underscores is that for some people to attach race to Shakespeare makes race something negative. That by definition, race is something that's going to somehow dirty or muddy the Shakespeare waters. When race per se is not something dirty or negative, race is about a study of relationships about how people interact with each other. That's what race is about fundamentally. And so to assume that it means something very negative, I think, is by definition, a sort of curious resistance to confronting and facing a history of relationships, which by virtue of what I am saying, Shakespeare gives us a wide audience. He gives us a sort of wide playing field in which multiple constituencies might come together. And instead, what we find is this real fear to not have that verbal play, that intellectual play. And I want to say that actually reminds me of a moment when I was teaching last year a large lecture class that is sort of a survey of early British literature. And I had this amazing lively class, even though it was a lecture, there was lots of participation. and the students were really engaged, whether it was Bay of Wolf or Marita France or whatever. And we got to a fellow. And I started lecturing and I posed to some provocative statements and asked some questions. And I was greeted by the chirp of crickets from this lively class. And I couldn't figure it out. And so at first I thought, you didn't read the play. And you know, like what happened? Shame on you if you didn't read it, but no, they had read it. And I said, oh, you're not comfortable talking about race in a mixed environment, are you? And I saw 60 heads nod in unison. And I said, OK, listen, you've been talking about rape. You've been talking about violence, you know, from killing people in Bay of Wolf. You've been talking about a lot of hot button issues. We can get through this together if you're willing to, you know, be willing to say something and be willing to make a mistake and we can learn from that together. But we're not going to learn anything if you're going to sit there silently. And finally, they started opening up. I think this is a racist play. And I love Shakespeare. But this seems racist. You know, they were all over the map with their, you know, kind of very emotive reactions to a fellow. And at the end of the semester, they ranked their favorite texts that we had read in the survey class. And a fellow came out on top. And I think it was because they were hungry to have a forum in which they could talk about race openly. But they didn't know how to do it without someone saying, it's OK. Well, how interesting in such a PC atmosphere that race is the last taboo. And probably the last taboo of taboos is blackface performances of a fellow in the 21st century, whether they're appropriate. Iana, given that there are all male Shakespeare productions who justify doing this because it's authentic. And basically, we're just doing it the way Shakespeare would have is the justification. How does that not wash when it comes to a white man playing a fellow in blackface? Well, I think there are actors who would like to do it in blackface. I mean, I would not underestimate the desire to do that kind of perform in that type of mode. And, you know, there's amazingly beautiful scholarship about the kind of pleasures and perils of blackface. Right? That there's something really pleasurable about performing as another race. And we shouldn't discount that. Why it hasn't happened is that the kind of cultural force of minstrelcy and the history of minstrelcy from the 19th century and the US primarily. But also, I mean, England has a long history well into the late 20th century of blackface performances on in popular media, including television. But that history is so hard and so divergent people think from what Shakespeare should be and what Shakespeare represents that there hasn't really been a return to it. Are we back to talking about the cultural weight of Shakespeare because the Worcester group did a blackface production of Eugenonials, the Emperor Jones back in the '80s, but also in 2006. And that was well received by critics. Yeah, really well received. So why the difference? No, I think that's precisely it. I think that blackface performances can be productive in terms of dialogues about race and the performativity of race when they're not tied to Shakespeare. O'Neill does not have the kind of cultural weight that Shakespeare's name imparts. And again, it gets back to that universal goodness that is ascribed to Shakespeare. So the Worcester group very successfully mounted two different productions of the Emperor Jones in which they employed blackface. And everyone came away thinking, oh my God, here we are. We can finally think about what it is that blackface taps into. And there was nothing about O'Neill's name or the text of Emperor Jones that got in the way of thinking through the complexities of blackface. And I think if one were to try and do on a fellow, I think there would be some sort of psychic dissonance that would go on for audience members, that they would be saying, like my students said, I thought I was supposed to love everything by Shakespeare. How is it now that I'm feeling that this is racist? And then less of theater company has an infrastructure and resources, financial resources, to host and facilitate dialogues about blackface as a performance mode and a performance tradition and a performance history. Unless they have that, it would be kind of dangerous, I think, to have a white actor in blackface doing a fellow night after night after night and then sending the audiences on their way to make of it what they will. - No kidding. So American audience come with complex baggage to blackface to race and to Shakespeare. But what baggage did Elizabethan audiences bring to a cello? It was written at a time when English people were just beginning to experience Africa and Africans. And Ian, you've written about the books that English travelers who went to Africa wrote about the continent that shaped the public's views. So what do those books tell us about Shakespeare's audiences' ideas of blackness? - Well, what we learn interestingly is that, as you said, it's a new experience largely for the audience in Shakespeare's time. Suddenly, all sorts of foreigners, and by that other European nations, people from other European nations are in England, are in London at the time. But then there is this other, other black people, whom writers document in their histories and their travel logs. And what we find in some cases, one interesting one is one by Eden, who writes about seeing black people in Guinea. And he describes them as being as black, as the environment they're in. So the environment has a certain sort of naming system, which everything is called as described as black, and the people that describe this black as well. And so it's a peculiar sort of continuity. What I think we're seeing is an notion expressed that black people are not just present in the environment, but they're identified with this sort of natural environment, the rivers, the trees, the geography in general. And that kind of identification then has a larger, longer history, where there's a sort of well-known story told by several classical writers about the origins of civilization fundamentally. So the idea is that people wondered about in woods and a wild state of nature. And then it wasn't until people started building cities that people became civilized. And so what we have then in these sort of travel narratives that Elizabethan writers would use is this idea that renewed from an early modern audience that black people are still in the sort of state of nature. There's still some whole trapped back there. And perhaps that is some of what we see in the sort of audience expectation that we're dealing with people who are perhaps not as civilized as we are. And this I think points to the very important idea that if this is an idea that's been created, then it's a creation of a notion that we now today would call a sort of racially piston model, a way of thinking about other people and constructing other people that has nothing to necessarily do with truth, but has everything to do with our notion of how we want to construct certain kinds of relationships. So a fellow plays into so many of these layers and also just on a simple level blackness. The devil was black, whereas we think the devil is red, but that's what Elizabethan audience were familiar with, the blackness of evil. Iana, what are your thoughts on this? Well, I think Ian lays it out perfectly, right? That what I think our fantasy is that when someone writes a first person travel log that what we're getting is an actual representation of truth. But in fact, no, what you get is a kind of recycling of older narratives that you already have in your head and you're kind of placing them onto the new environment that you're experiencing. And I think that that plays out in the plays in really fascinating ways, especially in the ways that Shakespeare, I think, tries to shake up certain audience expectations regarding race and then kind of fulfills them over and over again in many ways. And how does the text reference that? There are lots of moments in the text that refer to, and scholars will refer to them as sort of metadramatic moments. That is moments that sort of reveal the performance. So, suddhy bosom or the kind of blackened skin, the fact that Desdemona might be blackened by a fellow. These are moments, of course, in the play that contextually are actually about their relationship. But also in the moment of performance can be moments where you're highlighting the fact that this is a white actor in black makeup. Ian, you've written about all of the range of stage techniques that were used by male actors and Shakespeare's time to portray blackness. What were they? Yes. By the time we get to Othello, we do have these sort of references, not just to one kind of skin blackening technique, but perhaps to several, right? So, the suddhy bosom reference really goes back to the sort of medieval practice of using coal to darken the skin. But if we look earlier in the previous century, in the 16th century, we find other practices, primarily the ones that I find striking, was that, particularly in court masks, actors would use cloth or the skin of animals to literally cover their necks, their hands, even their faces to simulate blackness. And so that's where I use the term prosthetic, because it is a kind of prosthesis. Race becomes a kind of prosthesis that one can use to impersonate somebody else. Blackness is a kind of object or thing that is presented for the speculation of the audience. And so to think of blackness or the black body as a thing, we see that that only proved to be a sort of early instance of a kind of disturbing practice in the years, centuries to follow. So slavery and absolutely. And it's dehumanizing by definition. And you make this fascinating connection between this practice of that you're talking about of draping black cloth rather than dying the skin in performance and the handkerchief that Dostomona keeps with her to remind her of a fellow when he's away. What was about that theory? Well, sometime ago, I mean, I was, you know, I've been always taught about the white handkerchief in a fellow, you know, that sort of, and I will tell you that's sort of standard thinking on the play. But it never really sort of sat with me completely. And so a couple years ago, I was thinking more about this and it occurred to me as I was reading the text that what we found there actually was a reference in the play where Shakespeare sort of makes it clear at least to me that he speaks about the handkerchief died in mummy. And mummy has everything to do with the substance that one would extract from mummified bodies and also of other kind of substance called bitumen that one would use for the same purposes as one would use as a substance extracted from the mummified bodies. And what they had in common very often was that they were also black. And so you have this idea that the Shakespeare is telling us that the handkerchief was died in this black substance. So it became clear to me that Shakespeare wanted to think of not a white handkerchief, but something that was other than white and in fact something that might well in fact be black. On the one hand, the died in black thing goes back to the practice of what I call this sort of racial prosthesis to impersonate blackness on the stage, the early modern version of blackface. When we use cloth to imitate black skin, what we also recognize is that that cloth must be dyed black. And so there is this notion that it's a sort of continuity of this sort of dying practice whether it be the textile body or the body that is cosmetically darkened. The idea that blackness is also a form of dying process. And so here we have the handkerchief, a dyed handkerchief, one could imagine it as a sort of a portable symbol of a fellow that decimates sort of carries around with her all the time. And so if we think of how one uses blackface on the early modern stage, we come once again to the point about the body as object, the body as something that is perhaps even in later on, we could think of it as sort of commodity. And produces, I think, for the audience this idea too, that these bodies are not just objects, but the objects that are bought sold purchased and to be consumed in a particular way. So which is the figure? Which is the figure. Which is the figure. With meanings, what do you think of the black handkerchief theory and how has it been received in the academy? I'm so glad you asked that because I was going to interrupt and say Barbara, you probably don't know how revolutionary this idea is that Ian put forth. It's as if we realize we've been misreading this play for 400 years. And I mean, that's not to overstate it. This is exactly how scholars are coming to Ian's argument, like, oh my gosh, how have we missed this all this time? And there have been a few who've pushed back slightly to say, no, no, I think you're overreaching a bit. But for the most part, everyone is in awe and saying, yes, now I'm understanding the play in an entirely new way. Well, that Ian, you just rule. No, right. Are you fending off? Are you fending off? No, I'm not being very kind at all. I think of handkerchief lecture invites. All of this does make me wonder, though, getting back to this, the cross-dressing aspect of Elizabethan performance, both in regard to whites dressing as blacks and men dressing as women. What Shakespearean audiences saw when they went to the theater? Did they see the female character or the boy beneath the dress? Well, I'm not, I'm not if I can answer what audiences actually saw or thought, but I think Shakespeare gives us some idea. So let's take Yago then as a way to sort of come at this. In the play, Yago is arguably someone who is a sort of racial cross-dresser too. In the early modern period, blacks were typically described or rendered as having certain characteristics, right? They were seen as treacherous, they were violent, they were prone to jealousy, were told, deceitful, and so on, right? And I think what happens in Othello is that Shakespeare reverses the stereotypes. It is to Yago to whom Shakespeare gives these sort of stereotypes, the traditional black stereotypes. And by contrast, Shakespeare promotes Othello as very different in Act 1, scene 2 in particular, he casts that entire first meeting, the audience's first meeting of Othello, in a classic scene that that audience would have recognized because they were a sort of religiously educated audience, that is, Othello is cast in that moment where the officials come to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Nazareth at night to take him off. So what do we have then? Othello is on the one hand, Yago is the sort of quote-unquote "black figure" and surprise, surprise, Othello is cast in the role of classic Christian English representation. And these two contrasting views get to the heart of what you're talking about. Yago says very clearly that he will not wear his inside on the outside, but he'll always fashion himself in such a way that his outside will always be a clear mask for his inside. Well we now know what the inside is all about. His inside has been characterized by blackness falling the stereotypes of the day. And so it's his white outside that becomes the mask. So Yago then wears a mask of whiteness one could argue. And this white skin is represented to the audience as having a sort of un-earned benefit or credit. And when we cast in those terms, we have what today we call white privilege. Yago says, "Well, I have that, and I can wear this, and I can hide what's inside behind this white privilege that I have." And it also reminds us that Shakespeare does want us to think about the use of blackface and whiteface if you'd like in his plays. And that's the beginning of the play. And so we're almost out of time. That's wonderful that you went there because I'd like to ask you about the end of the play when Athello famously pleads with people to tell his story and to do it truthfully. How did Shakespeare's audience read the significance of that speech? Visa V. Rays. We read that sort of dying long last speech as a sort of divided personality. Is he Christian or more? Is he good or bad? This sort of divided self-idea. And I think that we have missed emphasizing something else that is there, that is. He now recognizes everything has gone wrong. And he says, essentially, "I want someone to tell my story." But he makes it very clear that he wants that story to be told in a just fair way. And so we ask ourselves, "Why does he pause to make that kind of distinction?" And then for me, it became clear. Especially if you put this play side by side with Hamlet. Hamlet's dying, he has a friend, right? Horatio and he says, "Tell my story when I die because you and Horatio and that play is the just man." And he knows that he'll have someone to tell his story. Athello doesn't, and why is that? Because he also understands that that moment, his immediate audience is all white. And that for them to tell his story is a much more treacherous adventure on their part than it might otherwise be if he were able to tell it himself or if he had a reliable friend who could tell the story too. It seems to bring us right back to what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation about black Shakespeare scholars not being hurt. Whereas I see the play as making a point for a modern audience about raising the question about how can we tell stories? Shakespeare himself puts it in a racialized context. What is he says? How can we now as modern-day audiences? How can we tell Othello's story when Othello himself is very anxious about how the story is going to be told? When I talk about Othello essentially saying, "Well, who's going to tell my story?" I think the meta dimension of that is about us as audience and critics. How do we tell that story? Yes, I think it does, although I want to intercede with a slightly different reading of the ending. Because I think Othello tells us to be extreme -- the play, not the character. The play tells us to be extremely wary of storytellers. I mean, Iago's not the only strange storyteller in Othello. The play, Othello is as well. We get various different genealogies for the handkerchief, the way he narrates his boyhood, seems to come out of classical narratives that the audience would have been familiar with, therefore not being true to his own life, but sort of like he's subsuming these other narratives. So I think that in many ways at the end of the play, we are supposed to be very wary of storytellers. Because while we want to always validate the power of the storyteller, the power of the listener is really important. And I think, on his point about skepticism, then ties neatly into that point. That is, we need to be far more skeptical about the way we think we can very sort of ease the storyteller's story. We learn from behavioral psychologists who have done these sort of studies recently, that as a country in the United States, we're still -- 75% of us -- are more likely to be biased towards whiteness. So if that's true, then Shakespeare's argument, where he says, well, can we tell stories across sort of racial divides, that the data I just cited, would suggest to us that that is a kind of very problematic, but also at the same time exciting on the taking. That if we are aware that we as a culture, and a culture of critics, and a culture of audiences, et cetera, and readers and students, if we have this sort of bias, that still dominates what we do, how we think, how we read race in American culture, then that -- the end of a thriller really makes a real demand on us to then be much more conscious and humble at the same time. When we say we want to talk about a thriller or make declarations like a thriller is not about race, that it makes us think about, well, how reliable are we, and what is the basis of our saying that? I think that's important. And so while I agree and think that we've got to diversify the Shakespearean world to have more voices included, we also need people in the who already exist in the field who are willing to say, I'm skeptical of the narrative you're telling me, actually this is about race. Actually this is about power. Actually they're related. I wish that more of our colleagues would be willing to be those kinds of listeners and readers instead of the ones who react violently or aggressively to information that seems to go against what they already know. Well a call to be open about and to challenge our assumptions, that is such a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful talking with both of you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you Ayanna. Ayanna Thompson is a professor of English at George Washington University and a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. Ian Smith is a professor of English at Lafayette College in Eastern Pennsylvania. His article of fellow's black handkerchief ran in the spring 2013 edition of Shakespeare Quarterly. They were interviewed by Barbara Boe gave. This podcast teach him how to tell my story was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kernpaster and Esther Farrington. We had help from Toby Schreiner at WAMU FM in Washington DC, Neil Heaver at Radio Station WDIY in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and Jeff Peters at Marketplace in Los Angeles. Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world's largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts. You can find more about the Folger at our website Folger.edu. For the Folger Shakespeare Library, I'm Folger Director Michael Whitmore. [Music]