Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800

by Virginia Mason Vaughan

• ISBN13: 9780521845847
• ISBN10: 052184584X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 examines early modern English actors' impersonations of black Africans. Those blackface performances established dynamic theatrical conventions that were repeated from play to play, plot to plot, congealing over time and contributing to English audiences' construction of racial difference. Vaughan discusses non-canonical plays, grouping of scenes, and characters that highlight the most important conventions - appearance, linguistic tropes, speech patterns, plot situations, the use of asides and soliloquies, and other dramatic techniques - that shaped the ways black characters were 'read' by white English audiences. In plays attended by thousands of English men and women from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, including Titus Andronicus, Othello and Oroonoko, blackface was a polyphonic signifier that disseminated distorted and contradictory, yet compelling, images of black Africans during the period in which England became increasingly involved in the African slave trade.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	viii
Preface	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
1 Preliminaries	1	(17)
2 Patterns of blackness	18	(16)
3 Talking devils	34	(23)
4 Kings and queens	57	(17)
5 Bedtricksters	74	(19)
6 Shakespeare's Moor of Venice	93	(14)
7 Europeans disguised as black Moors	107	(23)
8 Avenging villains	130	(19)
9 Royal slaves	149	(21)
10 Afterthoughts	170	(5)
Bibliography	175	(12)
Index	187