Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800, by Virginia Mason Vaughan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 190. Cloth $75.00. Reviewer: Francesca T. Royster I teach about blackface conventions in my undergraduate Shakespeare classes, I often ask students to cull from their own experiences of blackface performance. Most are from an American context: many of them have seen Spike Lee's Bamboozled, or caught a clip of Al Jolson (or Bugs Bunny imitating Al Jolson) singing Mammy. A few have been lucky enough to have seen Marlon Rigg's groundbreaking documentary of blackface and its American roots, Ethnic Notions. In the United States, blackface performance has been forged in the ovens of slavery and postslavery race relations. In the sexual stereotypes of U.S. blackface images, we find lurking fantasies spawned from the systematic breeding and trade of black bodies; in the mixture of violence and humor of blackface, we might see a spectacular transmogrification of the post-Reconstruction Black Laws, ever-present threat of lynchings, and the rise of Jim Crow. And in the careers of blackface performers, white and black, we see reflected the tenuous act of becoming white and protecting whiteness borne from the history of U.S. immigration. The late twentieth and early twenty-first century brings a whole new trajectory of blackface appropriations shaped by U.S. experiences, including the critical use of blackface in the art and performances of Fred Wilson, Chris Rock, Whoopie Goldberg, and Michael Ray Charles, whose modern racial kitsch figures appear in Spike Lee's film, Bamboozled. But while our most familiar associations of blackface tradition might most likely be informed by the American historical context, Americans did not invent blackface. As Virginia Mason Vaughan discusses in her powerful study, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800, the early modern period in England has yielded several examples of white actors performing in blackface for the popular stage, and we can reach even further back to blackfaced devils in medieval mystery plays, or further still to black slave characters in classical Roman productions. Vaughan's Performing Blackness is valuable for its history and analysis of English blackface traditions in their specificity; at the same time, the work provides an important conceptual framework that might help bridge blackface traditions across time, nation, and audience. Vaughan's study focuses on the relationship between text and performance in the flesh: appearance, linguistic tropes, speech patterns, plot situations, the use of asides and soliloquies, and other forms of dramatic signification (2-3), that shaped the ways that blackness was performed, read, and understood by white audiences. Here, she applies Toni Morrison's concept of Africanisms, first conceived to explain the production of fictionalized blackness to forge white American identity, to consider patterns of fantastical blackness as they are performed to forge white identity on the British stage. Blackface in the imaginative work of the stage is, after all, not about black people, but really about fantastic notions of blackness that tell us more about the (white) author and audiences. As Vaughan writes, 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 (4-5). The challenge of any study of live performance is the difficulty of reconstructing audience response. This is particularly true for the early modern period, where few commentaries by audiences, actors, and playwrights about stagecraft and methods or the impact of those techniques survive. Vaughan nevertheless successfully brings this past to life by integrating historical context, illustrations, actor's handbooks, property books, reviews, and diary entries, as well as clues within the plays themselves, to reconstruct the material aspects of blackface as a stage tradition. …