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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2021
In an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, William Wells Brown stated: “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.” In these oft-cited lines, Wells Brown makes a strong claim for the absolute impossibility of representing slavery. But I wish to pause and stay with his earlier suggestion that it might just be possible to tell about slavery in a whisper. Breaking through the fastidiousness of the audience, a whisper can bring the condition of slavery close.
This article has benefited from the care of numerous individuals and institutions. I wish to thank Patricia Ybarra, Justine Murison, Seth Rockman, Rebecca Schneider, Robin Bernstein, and Kellen Hoxworth. I also am greatly indebted to and awed by the brilliant and generous librarians and scholars at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, the Harrison Institute at UVA, the New York Library for the Performing Arts, and the Newberry Library. I send thanks as well to the McNeil Center for Early American Studies for such thoughtful comments and queries during a Brown Bag session. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Brandi Catanese, Marlis Schweitzer, and Michael Gnat for so supportively guiding this essay through publication.
1 William Wells Brown, “A Lecture Delivered Before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem at Lyceum Hall, Nov. 14, 1847,” in The Works of William Wells Brown: Using His “Strong, Manly Voice,” ed. Paula Garrett and Hollis Robbins (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): 3–18, at 4.
2 Williams, Raymond, The Sociology of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 140–2Google Scholar; emphasis in the original.
3 Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133–4Google Scholar; emphasis in the original.
4 Lisa Freeman has claimed that the eighteenth-century drama was, unlike the novel, “a medium obsessed not with the tensions between interiority and exteriority but with the conflicting meaning of surfaces in themselves. On the stage there was no public/private split; there was only public space and public displays” (27). Freeman, Lisa A., Character's Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Hughes, Amy E., Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Voskuil, Lynn M., “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture and the Victorian Public Sphere,” Victorian Studies 44.2 (2002): 245–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Joanna Baillie, “Introductory Discourse,” in A Series of Plays, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1821), 1–71, at 58.
8 Ibid., 59–60.
9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 286–7; emphasis in the original.
10 Sarah E. Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 23.
11 Ian Smith, “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 32 (2003): 33–67, at 56. Smith discusses how Hamlet's dressing in black and his references to black complexion link to the material practices of staging Blackness and mark him as Black and white at once, and able to elicit the anxieties of a British audience over growing intimacies with racial and national otherness.
12 Simmel, Georg, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” American Journal of Sociology 11.4 (1906): 441–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 462.
13 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 157.
14 “Miscellanies. For the Centinel,” Massachusetts Centinel (Boston), 5.10 (22 April 1786); emphasis in the original.
15 Ibid.; emphasis in the original.
16 “To Censor,” Freeman's Journal; or, The North-American Intelligencer (Philadelphia), no. 44 (20 February 1782).
17 Young's Zanga may also have been influenced by Milton's Satan and works such as Thomas Dekker's The Spanish Moor's Tragedy. See Parker., Gerald D. “The Moor's Progress: A Study of Edward Young's Tragedy, The Revenge,” Theatre Research International 6.3 (1981): 172–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 “Falconer's Benefit,” American Citizen (New York), 9.2570 (7 July 1808).
19 Elizabeth Inchbald, “Remarks,” in Edward Young, The Revenge: A Tragedy in Five Acts, in The British Theatre; or, A Collection of Plays, ed. Elizabeth Inchbald, vol. 12 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, 1808), 3–6, at 3 (each play is paginated individually).
20 See Carla J. Mulford, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 267.
21 “From the Public Advertiser of February 10. To Alexander Wedderburne [sic], Esq.,” Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), no. 2365 (20 April 1774).
22 Beach, Adam R., “Global Slavery, Old World Bondage, and Aphra Behn's Abdelazer,” Eighteenth Century 53.4 (2012): 413–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 414.
23 “English Newspaporials,” Massachusetts Centinel (Boston), 10.41 (4 February 1789).
24 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995).
25 For one suggestion of the popular practice of darkening skin in the role of Zanga, see a statement that early antebellum Pittsburgh's use of coal darkened its white inhabitants to such a degree that it would be an optimal place to perform as Zanga. Richard Lee Mason, Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 (New York: Printed for C. F. Heartman, 1915), 20.
26 “Original Articles: Theatrical Criticisms,” Philadelphia Magazine, and Weekly Repertory 1.8 (4 April 1818), 59.
27 Heather S. Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 17–18.
28 “Address,” The Ariel: A Literary and Critical Gazette 2.20 (24 January 1829), 157.
29 Ibid.
30 “Theatrical,” Boston Gazette 42.7, 12 January 1815.
31 “The Tragedy,” The Mirrour 1.25 (Concord, NH), 15 April 1793.
32 Promptbook copies from the nineteenth century often highlight the way the play opens with thunder. See, for example, John B. Wright's copy from an 1838 Boston production of The Revenge, which has a cue written at the top of the first page of the play: “Thunder, Lightning and Rain as Curtain rises.” This promptbook is based on Thomas Palmer's 1822 edition of The Revenge. Edward Young, The Revenge: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (Philadelphia: Thomas H. Palmer, 1822). The promptbook is located in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; NCOF (Young, E. Revenge. Philadelphia, 1822).
33 Edward Young, The Revenge: A Tragedy. In Five Acts. As Performed at the Theatre in Boston (Boston: West & West, [1794]), 5. All quotations from the play hereafter are from this edition.
34 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 14.
35 “Questions Arising from the Drama—No. II,” Irish Shield and Monthly Milesian 1.4 (April 1829): 144–5, at 144.
36 David Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam Black, William Tait, Charles Tait, 1826), 3: 236.
37 Eze, Emmanuel C., “Hume, Race, and Human Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61.4 (2000): 691–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 695.
38 The Boston Daily Advertiser, remarking on theatrical productions such as The Revenge and The Slave, explicitly intervened in contemporary discourses surrounding Black feeling, engaging with questions regarding “the incongruity of poetry and sublimity with the African's character.” “Theatrical Journal, No. 8,” Boston Daily Advertiser 20.32 (6 February 1818).
39 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: John Stockdale, 1787), 231–2.
40 Ibid., 230.
41 See Bruce, La Marr Jurelle, “Mad Is a Place; or, The Slave Ship Tows the Ship of Fools,” American Quarterly 69.2 (2017): 303–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bruce contends that studies of madness and modernity must confront the “deranging” experience of the Middle Passage.
42 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 2d ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 22.
43 Deleuze and Guattari, 286–7.
44 “Theatre,” Leicestershire Mercury, and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties 22.1089 (28 March 1857), 3.
45 Ashon Crawley, “Blackpentecostal Breath,” The New Inquiry (blog), 19 July 2017, https://thenewinquiry.com/blackpentecostal-breath/, accessed 20 December 2017.
46 Sunday Times, 26 March 1848, quoted in Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge (London: Onwhyn, 1849), 24.
47 Eze, 695.
48 See In the Wake for attention to how the atoms of those Africans thrown from the slave ships cycled continually in residence time. Sharpe, 41.
49 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Penguin, 1999), 3.2.1–3. Gerald D. Parker also notes this connection between Zanga and Lear, suggesting that both scenes draw attention to the characters’ state of mind and their passions. Parker, 187.
50 As Michael Goldman points out, Lear's speech also requires energetic effort in its delivery due to “dead stopping explosions of . . . unwieldy, massively active words” (37). The effort involved in the speech's delivery mirrors Lear's grappling with his own emotional upheavals. Michael Goldman, “King Lear: Acting and Feeling,” in On King Lear, ed. Lawrence Danson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981): 25–46, at 36–7.
51 Young, 20.
52 Ibid. The soliloquy turns into a prayer in which Zanga states: “Look down, Oh, holy prophet! See me torture / This Christian dog, this infidel, which dares / To smite thy votaries . . .” (20). An earlier scene also ended with his prayer to Mahomet: “Be propitious, / Oh! Mahomet . . . / And give at length my famish'd soul revenge! What is revenge, but courage to call in / Our honour's debts” (6–7). These prayers reorient questions about the propriety and morality of violence while highlighting a sense of Mahomet's overseeing the scene, refusing the absolute surveillance of the conquering Spanish Christians.
53 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 235; emphasis in the original.
54 In Morton's The Slave, Gambia, the African enslaved character, loves Zelinda, an enslaved quadroon (who is also loved by Clifton, a captain in the English army). Although initially spurred on by vengeance, Gambia ultimately saves Clifton from a slave rebellion and imprisonment (by selling himself back into slavery). In the end, Gambia gains his freedom, all the while praising England as a land of liberty.
55 “Theatrical Journal, No. 8.”
56 “The Ordeal . . . No. 17,” The Emerald; or, Miscellany of Literature 2.43 (21 February 1807): 89–91, at 91.
57 Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor; or, Critical Companion, vol. 2 (London: J. Bell, 1770), 333.
58 The Thespian Preceptor; or, A Full Display of the Scenic Art (Boston: Joshua Belcher, 1810), 9.
59 See Virginia Mason Vaughan's Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 152.
60 “The Drama,” National Advocate (New York), 7.1862 (26 January 1819).
61 Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 14.
62 Shane White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 24.
63 Due to abolitionist efforts, in 1840, New York allowed fugitive enslaved people the right to a trial by jury. In 1841, it ended the nine-month travel allowance for visiting enslavers. Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 386.
64 “Questions Arising from the Drama,” Irish Shield and Monthly Milesian 1.1 (January 1829), 27–8, at 28.
65 Young, 17.
66 Northerners implemented cultural practices maintaining Black unfreedom in a nominally free society. See Douglas A. Jones Jr., The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 2.
67 Zanga's soliloquy exemplifies what José Muñoz has described as a productive and militant melancholia, which works to “(re)construct identity and take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names.” José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 74.
68 As other American newspapers point out, however, Aldridge was born in the United States (in New York). “From the illustrated london news (with an engraving of the African Roscius as Zanga, in ‘The Revenge,’” quoted in Memoir and Theatrical Career, 26. National Era (Washington), 2.75 (8 June 1848), 89.
69 North American and United States Gazette (Philadelphia), 65.16,294 (24 April 1848); italics per the original.
70 Joseph Roach defines “surrogation” as “the enactment of cultural memory by substitution” (80) and further notes that “performances so often carry within them the memory of otherwise forgotten substitutions” (5). Thus the actor's embodied performance calls up other performances and their racial contexts. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
71 See the following articles in American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany (hereafter APJM): “Article V. Examination of a Colored Servant Girl,” APJM 4.1 (1 January 1842): 21–3; A. E. B., “Article XLII. The Phrenology of the Hindoos,” APJM 9.8 (1 August 1847): 247–53; L. N. F., “Article I. Application of Phrenology to Criticism, and the Analysis of Character, in a Letter to the Editor,” APJM 1.3 (1 December 1838): 65–71; and A. Wren, “Article III. Application of Phrenology to the Analysis of the Character of Shakespeare's Iago,” APJM 1.7 (1 April 1839): 212–28.
72 “Foreign Correspondence,” Holden's Dollar Magazine 1.5 (May 1848), 305–6, at 306.
73 See Shane White's Stories of Freedom in Black New York and Marvin McAllister's White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) for descriptions of hostilities faced by Black performers in antebellum New York.
74 Dillon, 42.
75 Note late eighteenth-century performances of The Revenge at Harmony Hall in Charleston as well as performances in Charleston in the early nineteenth century featuring the touring actor Thomas Cooper as Zanga. “Theatre,” City Gazette (Charleston), 6 February 1809.
76 “American Intelligence,” Columbian Herald (Charleston), no. 49 (19 May 1785).
77 Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 6–7.
78 Colbert, Soyica Diggs, “Black Rage: On Cultivating Black National Belonging,” Theatre Survey 57.3 (2016): 336–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 337.
79 The Revenge's main difference from Behn's Abdelazer lies in its refusal to entangle its figure of the vengeful moor in a romantic plot. Here, the review's emphasis on the Black women's admiring spectatorship repositions the vengeful moor in a larger romantic framework.
80 Jones Jr., 40.
81 “American Intelligence.”
82 Johnson, Odai, “Unspeakable Histories: Terror, Spectacle, and Genocidal Memory,” Modern Language Quarterly 70.1 (2009): 97–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 104–5.
83 David Bain, Actors and Audience: A Study of Asides and Related Conventions in Greek Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 17. The aside might trace its roots to the parabasis in ancient Greek comedy, in which a pause in the action of the play allowed the chorus to channel the playwright's reflections on political issues. The parabasis also carries a sense of transgression and moral ambiguity. On this, see Zachary P. Biles, Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 46–9.
84 Quoted (and translated from the French) in McGrath, Michael J., “The (Ir)relevance of the Aside in Golden Age Drama,” Romance Quarterly 61.4 (2014): 227–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 228.
85 See Freeman, chap. 3, “Tragedy's Tragic Flaw,” 87–144.
86 Ahmed, 90.
87 Young, 11.
88 Ibid.
89 Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 68; emphasis in the original.
90 Ibid., 78.
91 Young, 39.
92 “Falconer's Benefit.”
93 Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 8.
94 This frontispiece was also included in the 1808 Inchbald edition cited in note 19.
95 Young, Prologue.
96 Ibid. In addition to its reproduction in the [1794] printed Boston production copy cited herein, the prologue also was reproduced in the 1806 and 1814 New York printed editions of the play (as it had been acted at theatres in Covent Garden and New York).
97 Young, 51.
98 “Theatrical,” Boston Gazette.
99 Ibid.
100 “Boston Theatre: [January] 23,” The Polyanthos, n.s. 1 (February 1812), 59–60; emphasis in the original.
101 Early American newspapers often referred to The Revenge or Othello as works of questionable morality, drawing comparisons between the two, as well as to Cato, which was celebrated for virtue and propriety. “Theatrical,” The Kaleidoscope, 26 December 1818.
102 Muñoz, José Esteban, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs),” Theatre Journal 52.1 (2000): 67–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 68.
103 Lyman, Peter, “The Domestication of Anger: The Use and Abuse of Anger in Politics.” European Journal of Social Theory 7.2 (2004): 133–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 139.
104 Adam Smith, “Art. XIV. The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” North-American Review 8.23 (March 1819), 371–96, at 381.
105 Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents,” InTensions 5 (Fall/Winter 2011), 3, ¶3.
106 Adding to Hortense Spillers's conception of the Middle Passage as a project that dehumanized and ungendered captive Africans, La Marr Jurelle Bruce notes that the Middle Passage “deranged millions of Africans across continents, oceans, centuries and lifeworlds” (304).
107 Young, Prologue.
108 “Theatrical,” Boston Gazette.
109 Similar cuts were made to nineteenth-century productions of Othello. Printed acting editions show an excision of references to sexuality in Desdemona's, Iago's, and Othello's lines. See Kahn, Edward, “Desdemona and the Role of Women in the Antebellum North,” Theatre Journal 60.2 (2008): 235–55Google Scholar.
110 “The Revenge,” in Edward Young, The Revenge (London: John Bell, 1792).
111 “The Revenge,” in Edward Young, The Revenge (New York: D. Longworth, 1806).
112 Ibid., 20.
113 Ibid., 52.
114 Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 100.
115 Eighteenth-century Britain treated private theatricals and recitations with differing degrees of social approval. While private theatricals raised questions of propriety, reading plays aloud at home could be morally improving. See Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 170.
116 Dillon, 10–11.
117 See advertisements for The Revenge and the afterpiece, The Romp: “New Theatre,” Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), 3 January 1798; “Theatre,” City Gazette (Charleston), 6 February 1809.
118 [Isaac] Bickerstaff[e], The Romp (New York: Longworth, 1806), 9.
119 An article in the Gazette of the United States, notes of another pairing of an afterpiece to The Revenge that “The mock doctor is considered as an excellent after-piece, abounding with genuine wit and humour, well calculated to excite the risible faculties of the audience and dispel the melancholy sensations inspired by the sanguinary vengeance of Zanga.” “New-Theatre . . . From the [Philadelphia] Aurora of Saturday,” Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), 9.1180 (20 June 1796).
120 Helton, Laura et al. , “The Question of Recovery: An Introduction,” Social Text 33.4 (2015): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 1.
