Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800
206
Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800
206Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521845847 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/12/2005 |
| Pages: | 206 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.63(d) |
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Cambridge University Press
052184584X - Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 - by Virginia Mason Vaughan
Excerpt
CHAPTER I
Preliminaries
I
Pierre Delacroix, the central character of Spike Lee's satirical film Bamboozled, wants to create a television show so offensive that he and his arrogant white boss will be fired. He develops a pilot for Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, expecting that audiences will riot when they see two African-American males blacked up as "coon" figures tap-dancing in a watermelon patch. To his surprise, audiences black and white love Mantan. Wearing blackface make-up suddenly becomes hip: the camera pans over a packed house of noisy blackfaced fans, gladly proclaiming themselves to be "niggers." As Pierre's father, the comedian Junebug, opines, "Everybody white want to be black. Everybody want to be black; they all act, sound black."1
Lee's racial satire shows white fantasies scripted onto black bodies. Delacroix's collection of "Negrobilia"2 - old money boxes and other artifacts employing images from the minstrel-show tradition - points to a long history of the material appropriation of blackface images. Shakespearean scholars are certainly aware that the role of Othello was originally performed by a white actor in black make-up, even though the general public is now used to actors of African heritage in the title role. When Holiday Inn is shown on television, new generations are exposed to outdated conventions as they watch Bing Crosby don blackface for the Lincoln's birthday musical number. Reruns of The Al Jolson Story are also reminders that blackface was once a staple of American entertainment. When blackface is mentioned, however, the form that readily comes to most people's minds is the nineteenth-century minstrel show, and several recent studies of this genre explain how this obsolete form of entertainment reflected the complicated social and political conditions of the period.3
Nineteenth-century minstrel shows did not invent blackface impersonation. Nor did Shakespeare. The performance practice of "blacking up" thrived in religious pageants of the middle ages as a simple way of discriminating evil from good. Cycle and morality plays set up oppositions between black and white, damnation and salvation, evil and good. Until the latter half of the sixteenth century when the cycle plays were repressed, generations of Englishmen and women enjoyed the yearly ritual of watching good angels pitted against bad angels at the feast of Corpus Christi and other festivals. The sixteenth century's shift to modernity was marked by a transition, however, from the religious identifications of the middle ages to a "racially defined discourse of human identity and personhood,"4 and that shift was reflected in blackface performances on the English stage. Take Shakespeare's Aaron. When the blackfaced Moor of Titus Andronicus gleefully proclaims, "Aaron will have his soul black like his face,"5 he taps into a premodern religious sign system that identified the bearer as a damned soul, capable of all manner of deviltry. But Aaron's statement also evokes geographical and physical resonances that were beginning to racialize the older religious signification of blackness; as a black Moor among the whitefaced Goths who attack Rome, Aaron suggests a range of what Keir Elam terms "secondary meanings" that relate blackness "to the social, moral and ideological values operative in the community of which performers and spectators are part."6 Blackface had become more than a simple analogy - blackface equals damnation - and taken on multiple meanings, participating in several readily recognized codes at once. By the time Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus, blackface functioned as a polyphonic signifier that reflected changing social contexts and helped to create expectations and attitudes about black people.
In the chapters that follow, I present some snapshots of plays, groupings of scenes and characters from early modern English dramas, that highlight the most important theatrical conventions - appearance, linguistic tropes, speech patterns, plot situations, the use of asides and soliloquies, and other types of dramatic signification - which shaped the ways black characters were "read" by white audiences.7 Many of these conventions were repeated from play to play, often with modifications that stretched or inverted audience expectations. Thus blackface - and the theatrical patterns associated with it - accrued a readily recognizable set of meanings that repeated, expanded, and modified over time. While theatrical performance cannot be equated with the everyday performativity that, as Judith Butler argues, helps to construct our conceptions of race and gender, it shares performativity's "repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being."8 The bodies of others, as David Theo Goldberg notes, are "unproblematically observable, confronted and engaged." And the body is "central to ordinary experience and offers a unique paradigm: It is a symbol of a 'bounded system,' a system the boundaries of which are formed by skin at once porous but perceived as inviolable and impenetrable."9 If Goldberg's analysis is correct, the actor's blackened skin is a particularly powerful signifier of otherness to English audiences, even though its temporary and performative qualities undermine its seeming inviolable nature. Its recurrence on stage was, as Butler contends, "at once a reenactment and a reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established."10
In the theatre, the repetition of a trope or a gesture or a conventional plot comforts the audience by presenting what is familiar. Moors were expected, for example, to be cruel and lascivious, and in plays of the 1590s new blackfaced figures might push those stereotypes a bit further than their homiletic forebears but they might also contradict or complicate audience expectations in new ways. Theatrical performance is by definition a masquerade, which by its very nature negates essentialist notions of reality. The white actor in blackface may speak and act in ways that reinforce stereotypes about black people, but because he is not the thing he pretends to be and the audience knows it, his gestures and attitudes suggest that his identity is adopted, not inherited.11
The performer's facial expressions, hand movements, gait, and other forms of body language are particularly expressive. "The moving actor's body," notes Curdella Forbes, can "negotiate relations among multiple levels of consciousness and experience." The actor feeds upon the audience's responses, creating "kinetic energy" in the playing space.12 Such dynamics are difficult, if not impossible, to recapture for early modern performances for which we have only a script as a record of performance. In the performances under discussion here, however, it is clear that blackface coated the performer's most expressive non-verbal signifier, his face. By reading the scripts that have come down to us with the dynamics of performance in mind, we can tease out some insights as to what the audience might have seen when they looked at a black Moor and how they might have interpreted that experience.
The language of blackness, too, was multivalent. Many blackfaced characters are referred to as "Moors," a slippery term at best.13 Although in some texts early modern writers distinguished between "tawny" Moors of northern Africa and "blackamoors" from the sub-Saharan region, the two were often conflated in the popular mind. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, well into the seventeenth century, "the Moors were commonly supposed to be mostly black or very swarthy." My focus is the dynamics of performance, and consequently my criterion for discussing characters and plots is not geographical, but rather the cues in the text that indicate that the actor blackened his face in order to perform a particular role.14 For the most part, the Moors discussed here would have been considered "blackamoors" in the early modern period, as opposed to the tawny Moors of northern Africa. And unlike previous surveys of the black characters in early modern English drama, this book will not discuss every blackfaced character. My emphasis is on patterns - character types, plot situations, tropes, and other performative tactics - that are repeated from play to play.15
This examination of early blackface performances is intrinsically interesting to theatre historians, but it may also make a contribution to what is now termed "whiteness studies," the examination of the ways in which English men and women in the early modern period came to think of themselves as constituting a "white" norm in opposition to people of darker pigmentation. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison asked critics of American literature to reexamine how the black "Africanist" figures in canonical texts such as Huckleberry Finn were imagined. "What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans do to and for the work?" Morrison asked us to recognize that "The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious."16
The figures discussed in this book are indeed Africanist personae,17 whose presence shadows and shapes the audience's responses to characters white and black as well as their own sense of identification. When all is said and done, the black characters that populated early modern theatres tell us little about actual black Africans; they are the projections of imaginations that capitalize on the assumptions, fantasies, fears, and anxieties of England's pale-complexioned audiences. An English proverb dating from the early fifteenth century teaches that "Black best sets forth white,"18 a sentiment reiterated by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene:
But neuer let th'ensample of the bad
Offend the good: for good by paragone
Of euill, may more notably be rad,
As white seemes fayrer, macht with blacke attone.
(III.ix.2)19
Blackfaced characters in early modern dramas are often used in just this way, to make whiteness visible so that it can be "read" and in the process to make it seem fairer by contrast.20
1 This image from Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblems (Leiden, 1580) illustrates the proverb, "It is impossible to wash the Aethiop white."
Image not available in HTML version
It is striking how many black characters in these plays call attention to their own complexions, introducing metadramatic elements into their performance. Often they reiterate the proverbial expression that "it is impossible to wash an Ethiop (or blackamoor) white," a saying roughly adopted from Jeremiah 13:23, which in the Geneva Bible reads, "Can the black More change his skin? Or the leopard his spottes?"21 Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblems depicts two washerwomen scrubbing down a naked black man, accompanied by this motto:
Leave of with paine, the blackamore to skowre,
With washinge ofte, and wipinge more then due:
For thou shalt finde, that Nature is of powre,
Do what thou canste, to keepe his former hue.22
In popular parlance "washing the Ethiop white" could refer to any impossibility or "labor in vain." When stage blackamoors recall this expression, they reference a well-established stereotype about the indelibility of black pigmentation. Ironically, even as they cite the proverb, they undercut it because they are white actors known to the audience. Thus, even though the audience may be caught up in the play's theatrical illusion, the repetition of this proverb creates a fissure in the mimesis. Like Cleopatra's inside joke about the actor "boying" her greatness, repeated references to the washing trope constitute a metatheatrical "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" to the audience.23
Another frequently repeated trope resonated with the religious and moral signification of blackness. When black villains boast that they cannot blush, they echo a popular expression describing one who has no shame as "blushing like a black dog."24 In his response to a Gothic soldier's question, "What, canst thou say all this and never blush?" Aaron explicitly echoes this phrase: "Ay, like a black dog, as the saying is" (5.1.121-22). Another proverb from the period claims, "blushing is virtue's color," a sentiment explained more fully in Thomas Wright's Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604):
[T]hose that have committed a fault, & are therein deprehended [sic], or at least imagine they are thought to have committed it; presently if they be . . . that is, of an honest behaviour, and yet not much grounded in vertue, they blush, because nature beeing afrayd, lest in the face the fault should be discovered, sendeth the purest blood, to be a defence and succour, the which effect, commonly, is iudged to proceede from a good and vertuous nature, because no man can but allowe, that it is good to bee ashamed of a fault.25
A black, unblushing face indicated, in contrast, that the bearer had no virtue and, hence, no shame. Such sentiments circulated freely and reiterated the medieval correlation between evil and blackness; their repeated utterance on the public stage no doubt contributed over time to their discursive power.26
Black pigmentation thus served as a marker in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture that could more easily be signified on stage than other "racial" characteristics.27 Used prominently in the medieval period as a marker of religious difference, blackened faces became increasingly complicated by inchoate conceptions of race. Fear of the devil overlapped with fear of the black African other; on the stage, the fascinating and sometimes frightening characteristics dark pigmentation came to signify were acted out.28 Over time, the actor's blackened face hardened into a marker of racial difference;29 by the Restoration, it denoted slave status, and in the eighteenth century, it could also evoke the audience's pity.
II
The theoretical and practical implications of blackface impersonation depend, of course, upon the material conditions that create it. There is a world of difference, for example, between the exaggerated lips and eyes featured in the make-up used in nineteenth-century minstrel shows and the impersonation of Otello by a world-class opera singer. The performers intend different effects. The former uses grotesque images of black people for comic farce; the latter seeks a convincing representation. Both must use some sort of black make-up, however. Pierre Delacroix's assistant in Bamboozled offers the traditional recipe for blackface make-up: "Pour some alcohol on corks and light it, let them burn to a crisp. Make into a powder and then add water. Voila! But please put cocoa butter on your face to protect your skin."
Early modern performers may indeed have used burnt cork, but there were other ways of signifying blackness. In earlier sixteenth-century court performances, vizards, similar to the masks employed in Italy's commedia dell'arte, were used. According to Randle Holme's Academy of Armory (1688), a compendium of information related to heraldry, the vizard "is made convex to cover the Face in all parts, with an out-let for the nose, and 2 holes for the eyes, with a slit for the mouth to let the air & breath come in and out. It is generally made of Leather, and covered with black Velvet. The Devil was the inventer of it, and about Courts none but Whores and Bauds, and the Devil Imps do use them, because they are shamed to show their Faces." Holme also insists that "this kind of Mask is taken off and put on in a moment of time, being only held in the Teeth by means of a round bead fastned on the in-side over against the mouth."30 Speaking with a bead between the teeth must have been problematic, though not impossible. Court records show that for some performances vizards were combined with velvet or fine linen covering for the arms. Philip Henslowe listed "The Mores lymes," along with "Hercolles lymes, and Will. Sommers sewtte," in an inventory of 1598. Presumably the "Mores lymes" were a black covering for the actors' arms and legs.31
Like the commedia dell'arte masks, vizards limited the actor's scope. He had to "work within the limitations of persona and [could not] escape into the complexities of personality." The actor became the "prisoner of the mask" and had to play out his part "in terms of the statement it makes, rather than in terms of some complex of emotions that go beyond that statement."32 Once the actor donned the mask of a black Moor or a black devil, the face's emotional range was static. The actor could adopt a variety of poses in hopes that body language would convey different attitudes, but the scope of emotion was more limited than what could be conveyed through facial expressions. In his survey of the development of the vice figure, L. W. Cushman notes the secundus demon in the Townley cycle did not wear a mask because the text calls for him to make faces: he "gryned and ghast."33 It seems likely that actors who wished to grimace preferred some other mode of blackening than a heavy leather vizard.
Although vizards probably served well for court masques, in which dance and music were more important than the spoken word, the use of vizards in the public theatre may have been restricted to non-speaking roles, such as the Moors who drew in Bajazeth's chariot in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine. The shift from what Dympna Callaghan describes as "exhibition" - the display of black people "as objects, passive and inert before the active scrutiny of the spectator" - to "mimesis" - the simulation of negritude - required a different mode of representation, one which allowed the actor to convey a full range of expressions, not a series of static poses.34 When actors in the public theatres began to impersonate black characters in speaking roles, the "technology" consequently underwent a profound shift.
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