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“Put money in thy purse. Follow thou the wars”: Othello, the Mexican–American War, and Manifest Destiny
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2024
Extract
In the winter of 1845–6 the United States Army languished on the border waiting for an opportunity to provoke what would be the Mexican–American War, or, as the Mexicans would come to call it, La Intervención Americana. To break the dull monotony, the army turned to theatre. In January, Second Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in a production staged for the troops and the local community. Grant would later be the victorious general in the Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. He was not yet that person. In 1846 he was a twenty-four-year-old, newly commissioned officer, only three years out of the US Military Academy. His peers, a cohort of junior officers who would become the senior military leadership on both sides of the Civil War, were also actors in the production, as well as its producers. The anecdote is humorous in large part because the Grant of national record and memory is the least Desdemona-like figure anyone can conceive. It has been repeated multiple times across the nineteenth century and still holds in the imagination almost two hundred years later.
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- Copyright © The Authors, 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.
Footnotes
I would like to thank the members of the Equitable Arts Infrastructure Research Group—Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Colleen Hooper, Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud, Derek Miller, Michael Sy Uy, and Sarah Wilbur—as well as Andrew Carlson, Amy E. Hughes, and Domino Renee Perez for their generous help and support with this article.
References
Endnotes
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