There is a capital bill at the Chestnut theatre, to-night. Jim Crow Rice has written a travestie on Othello, which is said by all who have heard a rehearsal of it, to be one of the funniest pieces ever played. Rice made quite a hit on Saturday evening.
Daily Chronicle, Philadelphia, PA, 28 October 1844.INTRODUCTION
This is a deep dive into the production history of Otello Burlesque, the Shakespearean mock opera that Thomas D. Rice adapted from Maurice Dowling's Othello Travestie of 1834, and then performed ten years later at the Chestnut Theatre in Philadelphia.Footnote 1 Otello Burlesque is a milestone production, the first full-length script to recast Shakespeare's tragedy as blackface minstrelsy, and distinct from its many antecedents. As an adaptation of a Shakespearean burlesque, the play invokes a series of fashionable parodies, which were popular in England during the years Rice was touring, which drew from blackface routines as part of their own satire, but in which Rice himself never performed.Footnote 2 And as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, the play quite provocatively draws from the theatrical custom, dating back to the earliest performances, in which actors use makeup to artificially darken the complexion of the title character.Footnote 3 Otello Burlesque also marks a critical turning point in Rice's career, and accordingly I give some emphasis to his circumstances during the period when he composed the piece, roughly from April 1843 until mid-October 1844. While I offer a reading of the script, I also address performance and reception history, drawing from playbills, advertisements, and local chronicles, several of which have not been consulted in previous critical studies of the play. The sheer number of records is a telling reminder that for all the interest it has garnered as a disturbing convergence between Shakespeare and blackface minstrelsy, there remains a great deal of material still to be discovered.
My sense is that such discoveries are worth the effort, even in the instance of a play that was all but forgotten by the time Rice died in September 1860. (Obituaries make polite but passing reference to its one-time success, perhaps in recollection of a bygone era that had given way to entirely other matters.Footnote 4) To begin with, for all the interest it has generated among present-day critics as a disturbing combination of Shakespeare and blackface minstrelsy, the play also has a slipperiness that calls to mind the eels that W. T. Lhamon writes about in his study of the Atlantic blackface lore cycle.Footnote 5 Very much like an eel, the play remained hidden from view for nearly a century, a single manuscript copy in the New York Public Library saving the script from disappearing altogether. It is likely that as many readers today are familiar with Rice's script through Lhamon's collection of songs and sketches as ever saw it acted. Such circumstances help account for muted scholarly responses, which range from neglect to passing references in surveys of blackface performances of Shakespeare.Footnote 6 Many of these surveys fail to acknowledge significant differences between Rice's burlesque and better-known scripts of the post-Reconstruction period, including Dar's-de-Money and Othello: Ethiopian Drama.Footnote 7 With a similar interest in the recovery of performance, my approach relies on ephemeral materials, often made available through facsimile, and stored across several digital collections. Whether their neglect has been due to technological factors, such as the capacity for OCR, or to an understandable aversion to a performer who was regarded in his own day as the dregs of entertainment, on par with the circus and “the Lions,”Footnote 8 these traces offer an invaluable measure of what audiences thought they saw when they saw the “original Jim Crow” make his appearance in the guise of “the noble Moor.”
In another respect, though, the play's obscurity even among audiences directly familiar with Rice is as significant as Rice's efforts to travesty Shakespeare's play in the guise of his signature character. In reconstructing this episode of Shakespearean blackface, I treat Otello Burlesque as an encounter between a disreputable but still popular performer who composed his script as a response to concerns over marginalization, and an audience that took just enough interest to view the performance as an entertaining but passing curiosity. While there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the burlesque performer held long-standing interests in Shakespeare, Otello Burlesque reflects a belated attempt to reshape his well-known persona, following a lengthy and unwanted hiatus. While the performance caught local audiences by surprise, as much for its novelty as for the unexpected return of its feature performer, for Rice the play represents a long-held interest in burlesque as a mode, which could hold together his distinct and otherwise incompatible interests in Shakespeare and in the Jim Crow character that established him as a figure of notorious celebrity. More than a loose adaptation, Rice's script is a complex assemblage of sources and new stage business, which draws as much from Shakespeare's script as from Dowling's, and which puts as much emphasis on his character's anguish as on his absurdity. In its frenetic wavering between mockery and tragedy, Otello Burlesque challenges conventional expectations of Shakespeare and blackface minstrelsy alike, as much as it disturbs as an instance in the legacy of Jim Crow.
Throughout this essay, I consider Otello Burlesque as a measure of public distraction. In using this term, I have in mind both the sense of public division and that of conflict, such as one finds in treatises throughout the English Civil Wars, as well as the now more familiar sense of diversion.Footnote 9 Given its mixture of materials, at once provocative and over the top, Otello Burlesque resists straightforward conclusions about just which way the play means to distract. Much of the business that Rice introduces suggests a play that dwells on the conflicting status of servitude, at once vital to and rejected by the community that depends on it. Such concerns may have resonated in a city like Philadelphia, deeply divided in its public sentiments about slavery. They also resonate, if not always in obvious ways, with Douglas A. Jones's characterization of northern pro-slavery culture, which relied on conventions of blackface humor as an instrument for frustrating Black inclusion in public affairs.Footnote 10 It is fitting that Otello Burlesque occurs at a chronological midpoint between the 1833 National Anti-Slavery Convention, held in Philadelphia right when Rice was making his first performances at the Chestnut, and William Wells Brown's 1855 transatlantic travel narrative, which was published in the United States right when Rice's career was near its end, and which describes Philadelphia as the most colorphobic, pro-slavery city throughout the North.Footnote 11
Given these concerns, I contend that performance records give signals that are not clear from the script alone, namely a warm but very brief reception, followed by intermittent touring and “revival” shows. Several records suggest that the play was regarded as as much a curiosity as an outrageous spectacle; audiences enjoyed the performance for its novelty, without necessarily giving weight to the main conceit behind its display of Othello as a Jim Crow figure. The combination of enthusiasm and disregard invites comparison with other contemporary productions of Othello, where suggestions of race and racial difference meet with various forms of resistance, from privileged disavowal and deflection to outright hostility. Against such responses, Otello Burlesque stands apart as a complex solution among early productions of Othello. In its travesty of Shakespeare as blackface minstrelsy, it is almost as though the subjects of race, of racialized difference, and of racial discrimination that already went by the name of Jim Crow, could somehow be defused at precisely the moment when they were offered up as the most conspicuous features of the performance.
Many of these early American productions of Othello, including performances that Rice's audiences may have been familiar with, anticipate circumstances that Ian Smith addresses in his description of contemporary debates about racial difference and discrimination in Shakespeare's play.Footnote 12 Smith is one among a growing number of scholars who note a striking critical position, which denies association between Othello and race or racism on the ground that Shakespeare could not have known about these subjects, much less anticipated their significance for audiences located throughout a rapidly expanding United States, increasingly divided over questions of slavery. While often represented as a defense against anachronism, such refusals also suggest an underlying desire to regulate what can or cannot be said about the play, whether in scholarship, in performances, or even in classrooms.Footnote 13 The sense of pressure can be amplified if it occurs alongside what Sujata Iyengar characterizes as “strategic blackface” – productions that cast white actors in makeup in the pursuit of what is designated as an original staging practice.Footnote 14 As further described by Ayanna Thompson, it can be difficult to tell when such efforts speak to a legitimate scholarly endeavor to reproduce Shakespeare's original conditions – rather, to approximate them as best we can imagine – and when they suggest a desire to return to a mode of blackface performance that avoids the guilt of slavery, along with more persistent modes of racial discrimination.Footnote 15 Such desires for an accurate return to origins (if not an innocent one) can raise awkward questions over how to account for productions like Rice's blackface rendition, or related contemporary cases in which race is read into Othello, often with express misgivings even as they proceed. In revisiting such instances, I mean to reconsider the importance of anachronistic readings, including blatant anachronisms; and rather than dismiss them as errors, instead to acknowledge the contributions they have made to reshaping collective encounters with Shakespeare's “Moor of Venice.”Footnote 16
As Otello Burlesque suggests, the story of Othello on the early American stage does share an affinity with the conditions that led to the establishment of Jim Crow, though an affinity that surprises as much as it unsettles. In recasting his signature character as Othello, Rice directly addresses fundamental and intractable problems of community, from whom it recognizes and excludes, to whom it depends upon for its survival. Performing it as travesty, he frames that narrative as a problem that, in laughing it off as absurdity, audiences need neither acknowledge nor reckon with.
UPSTART JIM: HOW ONE CROW LEADS TO ANOTHER
As Lhamon observes in his biographical study of Rice and his signature persona, Jim Crow is marked by traces of Shakespeare throughout the course of the performer's professional career. Some connections are direct. Lhamon identifies several early performances, which Rice gives in Louisville in 1830 and 1831, which cast him in a full range of Shakespearean parts (Lhamon, 38). By as early as 1833, at the Tremont Theatre, Rice performs his signature character as an afterpiece to Richard III; more than once, he appears at the Bowery's American Theatre while productions of Othello take place at a venue like the National.Footnote 17 In performance, Rice's many references to individual plays, including quotations of familiar passages, offer the opportunity to make knowing allusions to these nearby productions. At some point, Rice must have become familiar with Charles Mathews, the prominent comic actor whose imitations of Black characters are widely recognized as an antecedent to his own, and whose late performance as Othello drew favorable attention among New York audiences.Footnote 18 Failure on Rice's part to follow suit earlier on might account for the tone of resentment, which underlies a crude joke about irrational violence in his 1837 Peacock and the Crow: “ha ha, I should like to play Otello – and smoder de white gal” (“Peacock and the Crow,” 293).
Shakespeare also helps to shape Rice's public reception, though rather more for the purpose of discrediting the performer's sudden fame and questionable talents. Contemporary reviewers link Rice/Jim Crow with Shakespeare/Othello through tropes of antithesis, as though the mere pairing of names were enough to demonstrate the gulf that separates them. Scorn also betrays a hint of anxiety over an underlying parasitical relationship, particularly in an environment where, as Lawrence Levine describes, Shakespeare holds distinction as a figure of shared culture, universally appreciated by people of otherwise sharp differences in class.Footnote 19 In this respect, it is remarkable not only that the comparisons appear as early as 1833, when Rice was still a relatively new sensation, but also that they can be found in a periodical like George P. Morris's New York Mirror, which proclaims itself a weekly journal “devoted to literature and the fine arts.” In a seeming effort to assuage concerns among readers who might sense, in Gumbo Cuff, traces of Othello or Troilus, Morris assures,
Let no one, however, suppose that Mr. Rice has taken a hint from Shakespeare; far be it from his original genius to borrow an idea from any body; and, in order to silence at once all envious hypercriticism on this point, we deem it no more than justice to inform the reader, that “Gumbo Cuff” is not founded upon Shakespeare's Othello.Footnote 20
Morris's scathing review has rightly enjoyed critical attention, not least because Rice was angered enough to write a reply in his own defense, a rare public instance of the actor in his own words.Footnote 21 But in his neat trick of doing away with the emerging celebrity, Morris establishes a framework for subsequent reviewers. By as late as 1844, when E. R. Harper begins to take Rice's place in Jim Crow sketches, a notice from London's Era remarks, “We have only, in expressing a wish for the success of his enterprise, to hope his … peculiarities will not put an extinguisher on poor old Shakspere.”Footnote 22 Whether they come from widespread and unremitting concern over contamination, or a more practical journalistic reach for familiar phrases, ironic expressions of concern over Jim Crow's spreading influence take on a formulaic character by the end of the period when new sketches for Rice are being staged.
One important but overlooked measure of Jim Crow's ambivalent public reception can be found among burlesque adaptations of Shakespeare, which were at the height of their popularity when Rice made his first tour of England in 1836. Several scripts include songs set to the music of “Jump Jim Crow,” while performers routinely comment, in character, about its interminable length and its distinctly unpleasant melody.Footnote 23 In their allusions, such performances continuously waver between exploiting Rice's notoriety and acknowledging it as the basis for an underlying affinity. But even when they take notice of him, there is no evidence to suggest that Rice himself participates in any of their performances. Notably, Rice does not make an appearance in Othello, Moor of Fleet Street, a play which in many ways would have been suited to him. The burlesque had been performed in 1833 at the Adelphi Theatre, where Rice would later hold extended engagements. Whether or not the play had been written by Charles Mathews, the cast featured several actors who later share billing with Rice.Footnote 24 While the play was not nearly as successful as Dowling's Othello Travestie, which made a hit at the nearby Strand, it easily could have been revived, either with or without revisions. The fact that it was not suggests a combination of factors, from general satisfaction with the sketches Rice did perform to a general lack of interest in the material. The circumstances also suggest that neither the house nor audiences expected Rice to appear as Othello in any manner, not in Shakespearean burlesque, and certainly not as part of his Jim Crow repertoire. While we can only imagine the conversations that took place among the performers, passing allusions turn up in later advertisements, which change Otello's origins from Fleet Street to Orange Street, “or somewhere thereabouts,” as one 1846 performance puts it (see Figure 1). By as late as 1858, Otello Burlesque appears under a new title, Moor of Orange Street, a renaming that directly recalls the Adelphi production of some twenty-five years earlier (see Figure 2). Since there is little chance that Rice's audiences would have recalled that earlier play, which had long disappeared from the stages and which never held a recorded performance anywhere in the United States, the indirect allusion suggests that Moor of Fleet Street lingered as a personal memory for Rice, an antecedent he would recall to himself for the duration of his career, regardless of whether his audiences caught the reference or not.
Tom Rice, 1808–60. Othello playbill (1846). MS Thr 1848, Box 17, Rice, Tom, 1808–1860, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Tom Rice. Othello playbill (1858). MS Thr 1848, Box 17, Rice, Tom, 1808–1860, Playbills, 1833–1845, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
For all his interest, Rice did not resolve to play Othello until his career had come to a standstill. While he had begun to suffer from a partial paralysis by as early as 1840 (Lhamon, 71), he continued both to perform and to travel overseas, including a successful engagement at the Adelphi for the 1842–43 season. From December 1842 until April 1843, he appeared nearly every night, in feature performances that ran for as many as two dozen consecutive evenings.Footnote 25 This remarkable stretch stands in sharp contrast with his return to the United States, when only a handful of bookings, including a New York appearance which announces “a New Opera [unnamed] written expressly for him,” give any signs of activity.Footnote 26 Ironically, Rice's popularity may have directly contributed to his displacement from the London stage, as new performers began to take roles previously written for him. In one intriguing instance, the Adelphi records a performance by E. R. Harper, promoted as an up-and-coming talent and cast in the familiar role of Ginger Blue.Footnote 27 As it happens, the evening's performance of The Virginia Mummy was staged as an afterpiece at the end of an evening, which features Othello as the headline event. Professional companies like the Virginia Minstrels also play a direct role, the more as their performances are packaged in the language of cultural distinction. As little as two months after Rice had wrapped up his grueling season, the Virginia Minstrels were welcomed to the Adelphi with praise that championed them as a “vast improvement” over their predecessors.Footnote 28 Such promotion resembles similar notices for Christy's Original Band, in which descriptions of market share are characterized, in a crassly commercial brand of elitism, as “a large and highly respectable audience” (see Figure 3). Even as these new acts were drawing interest, the Philadelphia Enquirer would report on the construction of a luxurious new home on Long Island, and then speculate (with seeming relief) that Rice had finally retired for good.Footnote 29
Playbill, Christy's Minstrels, 18 April 1844, MS Thr 1848, Box 9, Christy Minstrels on Tour, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
A Shakespearean mock opera holds clear appeal for an aging burlesque performer in need of a new direction, particularly in the United States, where such performances were still a novelty.Footnote 30 Othello was an obvious selection for a blackface rendition, meanwhile, given the common convention, in which actors used makeup to artificially darken their complexions. In explicitly recasting Othello as a figure of blackface, however, Rice also exploits widespread inconsistencies, among audiences and critics alike, over how – or even whether – to acknowledge Othello as Black. In making this statement, I mean to address a complex and deeply troubling practice of silence and evasion, coupled with flagrant exaggerations of racialized difference, which recurs throughout early American productions of Othello, in performance as well as in writing. Specifically, I wish to consider to what extent these productions, which vary on questions of Othello's race and its visibility in recognizable signs, in turn lead audiences either to confront what Ayanna Thompson identifies as the “unstable semiotics of race,” or to recast it in other terms, or to avoid the subject altogether.Footnote 31
To consider specific instances, Maurice Dowling's Othello Travestie is well recognized as a calculated response to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British colonies, and perhaps also to a recent production at Covent Garden, which featured Ira Aldridge – the prominent American actor, often promoted as “the African Roscius.”Footnote 32 As a telling sign of its dependence on local conditions, Dowling's play was far more successful in Liverpool, which was a major port in the slave trade, than throughout the United States, where only a small number of performances can be found. Dowling also is concurrent with the contemporary convention, which features actors in distinctly lighter shades of makeup – regarded today as the “Bronze Age of Othello” – and which allows audiences to either to associate “the Moor” with terms like “swarthy” or “Arab,” or to evaluate performances by other criteria.Footnote 33 The American celebrity Edwin Forrest had been touring various cities for years. His rendition of Othello was promoted as part of a broad repertoire of characters, which included Cardinal Richelieu and Metamora, “Last of the Wampanoags.” Reviewers were just as likely to consider the size of his audience as the quality of an evening's performance.Footnote 34 Other performances invite speculation about intriguing new prospects, such as one James Robert Anderson, whose rendition at New York's Park Theater in September 1844 draws favorable attention as the sign of future talent.Footnote 35 Closer to Rice's engagement in Philadelphia, at a public lecture held in May 1845, the actor James Edward Murdock uses Othello to demonstrate “the art of correct reading, and the matchless power of true personation,” before spectators who evidently are not embarrassed to be described as “a fashionable and intellectual audience.”Footnote 36 Given some six months after Otello Burlesque, which Murdock's audience must have heard of, the lecture focusses on the subject of “contrasts” among the characters; among the several passages noted as key illustrations, the report makes no mention of race, or of interracial marriage, as a part of the evening's discussion.
None of these instances prevent Othello and Desdemona from serving as shorthand names in scandal stories – runaway couples newly discovered, nighttime assaults narrowly averted – where such references needle public anxieties over “amalgamation.”Footnote 37 Still, events like the public lecture in Philadelphia help clarify the strain that other individuals express when they address Othello in terms of racialized difference and the consequences of mixed-race marriage. Critics rightly give prominence to “The Character of Desdemona,” the provocative essay written by John Quincy Adams, not least because its forceful aversion to the marriage between “a daughter of a Venetian nobleman of the highest rank” and “a thick-lipped wool-headed Moor” raises questions about the character of the former President, his ongoing interest in anti-slavery causes, and the deep-seated fears of miscegenation that underlie his public activities.Footnote 38 It also raises questions about the motives of the aspiring critic, who goes out of his way to censure the marriage only to concede doubts over how effectively it supports his central premise that a correct reading of Shakespeare's text requires a didactic interpretation.Footnote 39 With a complicated defense against an all too obvious objection, namely that his moral lessons offer “no practical utility in England, where there are no valiant Moors to steal the affections of high-born dames,” Adams is left to contend that a frankly anachronistic moral is preferable to a play that offers no moral instruction at all.Footnote 40
In playing Othello as Jim Crow, Rice takes advantage of underlying contradictions among audiences, where questions of Othello's race are simultaneously denied and taken for granted. Such conditions allow the performer not only to recast his outmoded stage persona in a new guise, but also to pass it off as though the pairing of Jim Crow and “the Noble Moor” represented an unexpected novelty. In some ways, this sense of novelty gives Rice occasion to respond to the newly professionalized minstrel troupes, and their own appeals to propriety. Faced with his own diminishing prospects, the nearly forgotten “Original” minstrel draws a neat, if clever, parallel to the General – cast off as an outsider from the very community that formerly depended on his service. Meanwhile, in returning to Dowling's script, Otello Burlesque gives Rice occasion to respond to the broader tradition of Shakespearean burlesque, which he had observed at a close distance, during his years on tour. The full nature of that response requires a separate and direct review of the script, as much of the ways in which he depends on his source material as of the ways in which he departs from it.
CHAOS COMED AGAIN: SHAKESPEARE IN THE BLACKFACE SHAKESPEAREAN BURLESQUE
Among all the scripts that Lhamon assembles in his collection of songs and sketches, Otello Burlesque stands out as an unusual departure. As a mock performance of Shakespeare, the play marks a new direction in subject matter. As an adaptation of another script, it is unusually dependent on written sources, a telling sign of Rice's professional circumstances, far from the rehearsal spaces and stages where he traditionally developed his material. Since Rice had occasion to observe a rich variety of Shakespearean burlesques, including no fewer than three distinct versions of Othello, it is not clear how much his direct dependence on Dowling is a matter of convenience, a turn to the one script that happened to be in print, and how much a deliberate engagement with a rival who in many ways upstaged him.Footnote 41 Along similar lines, since Othello Travestie had been staged in Philadelphia some years earlier, though only for a limited number of performances, it is not always clear from Rice's adaptation (which reproduces Dowling's script down to Othello's signature sneeze) which revisions are meant as minor updates to suit local tastes, and which are meant as a direct response to a recognizable antecedent.
These uncertainties shape virtually every aspect of Rice's script, from its alterations to the story line, to its jokes and other stage business, to specific bits of dialogue. Along these lines, the play follows Dowling's basic dramatic narrative, itself a highly reduced outline of select passages from Shakespeare's play, from the council scene to the arrival in Cyprus, followed by several scenes of Othello in dialogue, with Iago and with Desdemona. While the songs throughout generally are meant as parody of familiar melodies, on occasion lyrics make clever nods to passages left out from Shakespeare's play. For his own part, Rice introduces a child, half made up in blackface, who represents the offspring of the marriage. He removes the confrontation over the missing handkerchief, a troubling yet critical development in Othello's jealous rage.Footnote 42 While the bedchamber scene stages a grisly combination of eroticism and violence, Rice takes the moment to call out in the name of his notorious signature persona, “it is the cause, caws, caws.” And in a notable divergence from Dowling, he rewrites Othello's final speech under the conventions of blackface dialect, to reemphasize his history of “some sarbice” done the state, all of which gives way to Desdemona's sudden rise from her deathbed, leading the cast in a dance and song, set to the melody of “Fifth July.”
In one clear sign of deliberate revision, Rice restores several passages from Shakespeare's script, some rewritten into his own idiom but many nearly verbatim, which are not found in Dowling's. Rice is surprisingly generous in his selections, restoring lines to nearly every character, occasionally inserting single lines (for example Iago: “scan this thing no further. Leave it all to time,” 376) into passages he lifts from Dowling (“Otello Burlesque”). While he never misses an opportunity to depict Othello in the throes of his passions, more incidental phrases, such as “how comes it Michael” (“Otello,” 369), also suggest a more extensive drawing from his material. These passages are noteworthy, as much for their dependence on Shakespeare as a direct source as for their fixation on language as a significant feature of Shakespeare's play. They are distinct from the well-known blackface routine of quoting from well-known speeches, typically to highlight the difference between the “universally shared” language of the bard and the “broken English” dialect that held the blackface performer apart.Footnote 43 They also are distinct from the conventions of Shakespearean burlesques, which tended either to mock scholarly fixations on text and language, or else to highly discount it as a feature of the performance. (John Poole's early examples, parodies of Hamlet and Othello, are as much a mockery of Edmond Malone and his circle as they are of the plays themselves, whereas others make light of easily recognizable phrases; several burlesque scripts make no reference at all to Shakespeare's language.Footnote 44) In their gradual accumulation throughout the performance, the lines recall Rice's lifelong interest in performing Shakespeare, even as they acknowledge his limited opportunity to realize it. Whatever his dreams of playing Othello, this highly altered version was as close as he would come.
In fact, the combination of sources suggests a grotesque of a distinctly new kind. Passages from Shakespeare are just as liable to disrupt the conventions of burlesque as those burlesques mock the cultural conventions that assign central importance to Shakespeare. The hybrid design well mirrors the themes of union and offspring, which Lhamon identifies as a prevailing concern in the provocative depiction of the marriage (Lhamon, 83–84). Meanwhile, the recurring stylistic incongruities allow the performance to waver between confrontational and extravagant. The black and white child who shows up in Cyprus compels audiences to acknowledge the marriage as a case of “miscegenation,” even as its spontaneous appearance in a carriage makes nonsense of their coupling. To the extent that the marriage can be regarded as a stand-in for sectional rivalries in national politics, the unnamed offspring hints at the closely related subject of territorial expansion. In one subtle but tantalizing allusion to this concern, Desdemona warns her husband, should he refuse her appeals, “Cassio's off and making tracks for Texas” (“Otello,” 374). Although only a passing remark, the reference illustrates good fortune in timing. Appearing onstage the same month as Emerson publishes his second series of essays, the performance offers an unexpected response to “The Poet,” with its calls for songs about “Oregon and Texas,” along with “our Negroes,” as material for a new national aesthetic. And while there were several months to go before various interests in the region would lead to annexation and border war – when one Robert E. Lee and a young Ulysses Grant would meet and fight nearly side by side – it is fitting that Desdemona happens to express her worry right when the marriage shows its first real signs of strain.
Nearly all this stage business falls in line with techniques found throughout Rice's more standard repertoire, where jokes about “bobalition” and fascination with Black male bodies ridicule the very things they seem to celebrate.Footnote 45 But in the hybrid form of Otello Burlesque, which infuses the Jim Crow persona into a strange combination of Shakespearean tragedy and burlesque, Rice leaves uncertain just how much he means to continue a similar spirit of mockery, how much he seeks to redirect it to surprising purposes. The combination gives Rice's script an especially complex relation to chaos, both the fear of chaos that underlies Othello's anguish and the chaos that prevails throughout the world of travesty. Rice takes care to emphasize Othello's marriage as a tenuous defense against chaos. Rewriting the general's line in the conventions of blackface dialect, he anticipates a condition later described by Ralph Ellison, who recalls the marriage in his study of “American Myth,” and its dependence on the myth of the “Negro stereotype.” As Ellison suggests in his subtle analysis, the blackface trickster bears an affinity rather more with Desdemona than with Othello, in that both stand as a figure both of the imagination and of what lies beyond the capacity to imagine.Footnote 46 In playing Jim Crow as a cross between Otello and Othello, Rice's character manages both to fulfill something like the stereotype and to mimic the obsessions that create such persistent demand for it. Along related lines, Rice both amplifies his character's outbursts and diffuses them throughout the carnival atmosphere that envelopes him. Even at the height of his rage, as his threat to “tear her to pieces” clearly exploits racialized fears of brute violence, the reference to dismemberment is tempered by a scenario where physical bodies are intrinsically permeable, engaged in a continuous process of consumption and expulsion, and even death is only a temporary condition that leads to a rousing chorus based on a well-known song about emancipation. Chaos certainly does come again and again. Given the palliating effect it has on the tragedy, it could not come quickly enough. Meanwhile, in its celebration of chaos, the performance allows audiences to disregard the fantasies of racialized difference that the script puts on display. As I address in the section that follows, the records we have suggest that reactions to Rice's novelty are unsettling enough to warrant direct attention of their own.
NOW THERE'S NOTHING IN IT: OTELLO ONSTAGE AND (QUICKLY) OFF AGAIN
In teasing out readings of the script, I do not wish to overstate the role that Otello Burlesque plays in confronting public attitudes, whether about sectional rivalries or about the complicated attitudes toward race and racial difference that lie behind them. Performance records strongly suggest that Rice's hit was unexpected, and more for its novelty than for its subversiveness. In his chronicles of the Philadelphia stage, for instance, Charles Durang includes a brief description of the first night. The passage warrants full citation, since it represents the most direct account of what audiences observed:
In this Ethiopian opera Rice looked the part of the noble Moor to admiration. It was extremely well (musically) constructed. It had its songs, arias, cavatinas, concerted music, choruses, &c. – the dialogue mostly rendered in recitative, and all Othello's soliloquies in airs or songs. Without a joke, it was really a clever thing, and was well executed. It made a palpable hit, and had a fine playing run. Such was its success that the managers re-engaged Rice. Up to this period the actors received their regular playing salaries.Footnote 47
Durang's remarks are helpful as much for what he does not note as for what he does. He does not identify any contemporary performers or their acting styles, neither celebrities who had recently performed in Philadelphia, such as Forrest, nor more remote figures such as James Hewlett, whom earlier critical studies have speculated as a target for Rice's antics.Footnote 48 While parody of specific individuals is recognized as a standard feature of burlesque performances, Durang's disregard for it here suggests that the play spoke to entirely different concerns, for the house as much as for the performers.
For the Chestnut these concerns are financial, more candidly so as the run of performances continues. The course of advertisements suggests that Otello Burlesque held the stage slightly longer than audiences might have preferred. Initial promotions announce a new play by “the original Jim Crow.” Such straightforwardness was sufficient early on, when the play was so successful that the nearby Arch Theater would attempt a burlesque Othello of its own. By 12 December, “Jim Crow Rice again held forth in his ‘Otello,’ and other negro oddities, but not to very good houses.”Footnote 49 Within two days, in a newfound effort to draw in whatever remaining customers it could find, notices make recourse to a striking phrase: “If you wish to see fun, go to the Chestnut tonight.”Footnote 50 The nebulous appeal to momentary diversion deflects public attention from several additional concerns that the performance might otherwise make inescapable, whether fixations on Shakespeare and blackface minstrelsy alike as signs of cultural merit, their overlap with ideologies of racial supremacy and segregationist practices, even the culture of the professional theaters, which hold all these elements together under a sign of manufactured leisure. But the promise to “see fun” is intriguing as much for its elusiveness as for its appeal to a culture of novelty. The very use of the phrase suggests something of an innovation, in promotions for professional theaters. While hardly brand new in its terminology – indeed, a notice in the Enquirer had already described it as “one of the funniest pieces ever played” – American theaters make surprisingly uncommon reference to fun as a distinct quality which describes the experience of attending a performance.Footnote 51 In this regard, the shift in terms reflects a calculated response in the face of rapidly declining interest, even if whatever rewards offered by the house are as fleeting as the performance itself.
Beyond its brief sensation in Philadelphia, Rice's touring schedule tells of a performer willing to go to great lengths to generate new interest in a play whose appeal had turned out to be decidedly short-lived. One engagement at Niblo's Theatre in New York, in August 1845, announces the show with such over-the-top enthusiasm that irony cannot be ruled out.Footnote 52 Periods of several months separate his next appearances in various cities, from a feature engagement at the National Theater in Cincinnati to a bottom-of-the-bill performance at the Chatham Theatre in New York, in late September 1847. While performance records tend to be incomplete as a rule, those that are available suggest ongoing concerns, on the part of the theaters who book him, over how to promote his play. In one instance that has become prominent, thanks in part to Eric Lott's passing attention to it in his remarkable study of blackface and working-class disaffections, Rice appears in consecutive roles, first as Otello, and then as Uncle Tom, in an early adaptation of Stowe's novel.Footnote 53 The pairing makes a surprisingly vivid illustration of the complex ideological forces which structure blackface discourse. As Sarah Meer and Brian Roberts note in their respective studies, the conventions of blackface minstrelsy are malleable enough to sustain multiple, and often incompatible, social attitudes among its audiences.Footnote 54 But more often, Otello Burlesque is staged as a revival, whether as a museum piece at P. T. Barnum's establishment in February 1850, or as an evening at the National later that July gives occasion to show, as “Daddy Rice” remaining “just as good as new, just the same as ever, the only representative of the Ethiopian race, who ever really deserved to be called the artist.”Footnote 55 By 1858, the latest date for which there is an available advertisement, the Broadway Theatre stages it as part of a retrospective revue, which represents Rice in bluntly nostalgic terms – “The original representative of Negro Characters in America, England, Ireland and Scotland.”Footnote 56 Taking care to note that Otello would be played with “all the original music,” the managers at the Broadway Theatre could only hope that a play conspicuously out of fashion would hold enough curiosity to generate at least some turnout. Fittingly, it is this same performance that advertises the play under its new name, Othello, the Moor of Orange Street; the alteration of the title hearkening back to an origin that pre-dates Rice himself.Footnote 57
Age and health partially account for the sharp decline in performance schedules. Following another stroke of paralysis, suffered in 1846, it is remarkable that Rice continued to make public appearances of any kind.Footnote 58 These same years also show a sharp decline of interest in burlesque performances of Othello, and at least some records suggest that in the main the primary conceit had worn thin. A passing recollection of Otello Burlesque turns up in an 1851 review of an art exhibition, where one painting of Othello and Desdemona as a mixed-race couple stands out for especially sharp criticism. In a rare combination of Jim Crow and the former President turned Shakespearean critic, the reviewer surmises that “the painter may be supposed to have had the inimitable burlesque of Rice in his mind's eye, while painting” Desdemona in embrace with a “thick-lipped, wooly headed Moor.”Footnote 59 Contemporary professional companies like Christy's Minstrels and the Ethiopian Serenaders made no attempt to imitate Otello Burlesque, even as they drew from other parts of Rice's repertoire – Virginia Mummy, Oh Hush!, and Fra Diavolo, among others. Among the nearly three hundred “Ethiopian Melodies” compiled in their famous songbook, none make mention of Othello; only one joke mentions Shakespeare's name in passing.Footnote 60 A single undated notice stands out as the only confirmation that the ensemble attempted an Othello of their own – at least in excerpt, since only Christy (Desdemona) and J. H. Surridge (Othello) are identified as cast (see Figure 4). Perhaps this performance was restricted to the bedchamber scene, which in turn becomes the kernel for blackface performances during the 1870s and 1880s, when Othello serves to aggressively highlight themes of sexual violence against innocent victims; though in the end, exactly what passages were selected remains unclear. Whatever its contents, the performance shows no trace of influence from Rice's burlesque. If anything, its obscurity helps illustrate a stark contrast in periods, between the final years of Rice's career when blackface performances of Othello remain comparatively infrequent and increasingly peripheral, and the productions that turn up during “the turbulent period” following the Reconstruction, when, as Michael Neill notes, Othello fuels hostilities over patterns of immigration and widespread anxieties over mixing among races.Footnote 61
America Christy Minstrels on tour. Playbills, 1844–65 and undated. MS Thr 1848, Box 9, Christy Minstrels on Tour, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Still, these late and intermittent performances of Rice's Otello offer intriguing hints about the presence of Othello during the no less turbulent decade of the 1850s, when disputes over slavery become increasingly visible as signs of sectional conflict, and when questions about the status of free Black men are addressed by a Supreme Court which would deny to Black persons any rights which “the white man” was bound to respect. In very briefly turning to these turbulent years, I mean to revisit questions raised by Ian Smith, both how to answer Othello's demand to “speak of me as I am,” and how to do so in a manner that lives up to the challenges of a racially divided American society. To the extent that Smith's questions call for examination of the play in production (onstage as well as in written records), it follows that responses will necessarily include further examinations of the numerous productions that take place during a period that finally came to be recognized as a house divided. I suggest here that accounts of this period remain indefinite, not least because they require the study of materials no less slippery than Rice's burlesque. They are all the more so the further they move away from landmark surveys of Shakespeare in early American performance, which characterize these years by distinguished actors and new “stars,” and which themselves make distinctions between the virtuoso performances of Edwin Booth and the underappreciated, yet respectable, accomplishments of James W. Wallack.Footnote 62 Within such frameworks, the contemporary blackface ensembles stand apart as a separate world, all the more so as their performances offer up artificially halcyon portraits of plantation life as a foil to the harsh conditions of wage labor throughout the industrialized northern cities. Even as performances of Otello Burlesque become infrequent during these years, the occasional revival should serve to remind us that contemporary audiences for Shakespeare and blackface minstrelsy were not necessarily as bifurcated as the records of more distinguished performances might otherwise suggest.
Meanwhile, in light of more familiar cases – of celebrities and songbooks alike – it remains crucial not to lose sight of the occasional performer who does, on occasion, make use of Shakespeare's play for more tendentious purposes – all the more so the harder they are to observe. Taking recognition of one neglected but significant instance, I conclude this production history by turning to a select moment in the career of George W. Jamieson. To a limited degree, Jamieson can be regarded as a companion of Rice's. He produces his first plays at the Bowery Theater in New York, just as Rice was “quite literally figuring Jim out” through song and dance (Lhamon, 30). They continue to play in proximity for several years, including a series of separate evenings in December 1844, when each appears at the Chestnut to perform in distinct versions of Othello – one as tragedy, the other as farce.Footnote 63 Jamieson makes regular appearances in Shakespeare's tragedy, and a cast which features him as the subtle Iago can safely be described as “good.”Footnote 64 For all his professional accomplishments in playing Iago, however, Jamieson reappears at the Bowery Theatre in March 1860 for a double bill, where a performance of Othello is paired up to “coincide with the Southern play of the OLD PLANTATION, in which the author … enacts the part of a plantation negro unsurpassably.”Footnote 65 As a pairing of Shakespearean tragedy with anti-Tom propaganda, Jamieson's performance makes a neat counterpart with the one Rice had given some years prior, when he brought his blackface Shakespearean burlesque together with the melodramatic adaptation of Stowe. As these occasional performances suggest, the respective scenarios and modes they draw from could in fact be combined and recombined to suit any number of occasions. And in turn, strategies for evasion and blatant display were not limited to the ones that Rice had adopted in his script.
As a performance record, The Old Plantation remains well suited to the kind of dredging-up work that scholars have undertaken with Rice's songs and scripts. About the script, all that currently remains is the title, some of the music, and a record of its performance in New Orleans some six years earlier, when it played under the name Uncle Tom As He Is.Footnote 66 To New York audiences it is essentially a new piece. Details of the performance are as unsettling as they are faint. From a contemporary account printed in the New York Dispatch, it was welcomed as much for its pleasant construction and design as for clear display of the author's “ultra pro-slavery” outlook. Even the double billing with Othello gives occasion to remind reviewers “that Othello was not a white man, and that luxuriant side whiskers, and moustache, a la George Jordan, were not worn years ago in Venice.”Footnote 67 One additional hint can be inferred by the layout of the advertisement, right at the top of the front page of the New York Herald. Notice of the performance appears directly to the left of a multicolumn article, which editorializes at great length on William Seward's prominent speech on “The Irrepressible Conflict,” including discussions of slavery and the plantations, the upcoming presidential election, and the secession question. It also appears directly above an advertisement for Barnum's American Museum, in which the notorious showman trumpets forth a grotesque of his own, “Face of man” – “Limbs of monkey” – “WHAT IS IT?” – replete with the bold type, capitalizations, and countless exclamation points that had become customary in the museum's advertisements.Footnote 68 Wedged as it is at the intersection between these two entries, incommensurate in their interests, the notice for the Bowery performance appears to invite readers to pursue remarkably divergent directions in their scanning. Along related lines, it remains unclear to what extent Jamieson's performance was meant to address the prospects of sectional conflict, or in fact to deflect attention from those concerns toward an increasingly sprawling network of curiosities and sideshow marvels that go about their business with indifference to public affairs. Cast as passing entertainment, on the brink of civil war, this pro-slavery rendition of Othello bears direct witness, though disturbing in its osbscurity, to an altogether new age of distractions.
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