{"id":53,"date":"2024-08-23T13:55:18","date_gmt":"2024-08-23T13:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/routledgelearning.com\/rhr-cultureliteratureandthearts\/?page_id=53"},"modified":"2024-09-27T13:24:05","modified_gmt":"2024-09-27T13:24:05","slug":"race-and-theatre-in-nineteenth-century-britain","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/routledgelearning.com\/rhr-cultureliteratureandthearts\/essays\/race-and-theatre-in-nineteenth-century-britain\/","title":{"rendered":"Race and Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sarah Meer<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faculty of English, University of Cambridge<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The early nineteenth century was a formative time for the construction and establishment of racial thinking. Theatre and performance played a crucial part in this, but also at points ironised and undermined it. This was partly because stage arts depend on performance, impersonation, and illusion, and partly because older plays survived in the repertoire, in which ideas of class and natural nobility, rather than colour, determined notions of identity. Nevertheless, throughout the nineteenth century, \u2018racial\u2019 performance took on forms and conventions which helped underpin imperial ideology. For performers of colour, these conventions both provided opportunities in the theatre, and limited the roles and representations available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Inventing race<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>\u2018Race\u2019 is a social construct. It was invented over a long period, but the idea was most critically and influentially articulated during the nineteenth century. This was the era in which elaborate assertions were made about the biological basis of human difference, including newly aggressive claims that physical characteristics, especially skin-colour, indicated moral, cultural, and intellectual worth (Fredrickson 2002).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Natural history in eighteenth-century Europe began to posit distinct human types, analogous to the division of the organic world into families and species. But throughout the century, rank remained the primary way of envisaging social difference between individuals, while the significant otherness of people outside Britain tended to be marked in cultural terms \u2013 in custom, clothing, housing, and religion (<\/a>Wheeler 2000).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>However, the scientists<\/a>\u2019 interest in human variety, and a growing sense of its significance, intensified over the first half of the nineteenth century. Earlier writers, like James Cowles Prichard, continued to believe in the essential unity of mankind, and that climate and circumstance played a role in diversity; but in 1850 the Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox proposed a classification in <\/a>The Races of Men<\/em> which treated human capabilities as inherently, and heritably, different. Around the same time, other theorists produced increasingly complex and hierarchical taxonomies. In the United States, Josiah Nott and George Gliddon published <\/a>Types of Mankind<\/em> (Nott and Gliddon 1854) and <\/a>Indigenous Races of the Earth<\/em> (Nott and Gliddon 1857\/2000). \u2018Race\u2019 books were themselves a kind of spectacular production, often filled with visual depictions of human \u2018types\u2019 or \u2018races\u2019, laid out in tables, schematic illustrations of face or body-types purporting to be the physical features associated with each \u2018race\u2019 (Nott and Gliddon 1857\/2000, 618).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>These writers argued over their classification, nomenclature, and conclusions: but they generally shared the conviction that white-skinned descendants of Europeans (often specifically English-speaking peoples) were fitted to rule the rest. Knox divided mankind into nine races, of which the \u2018Saxon\u2019 was \u2018about to be the dominant race on earth\u2019. Gliddon divided humanity into 54 \u2018<\/a>superior<\/em> and <\/a>inferior<\/em> races\u2019. These writers warned fiercely against marriage, or to be specific, procreation between \u2018races\u2019. Using observations from animal breeding, they cast doubt on both the possibility and the viability of \u2018interracial\u2019 progeny. Yet despite their contradictions, and some opposition from evangelicals, the new \u2018racial sciences\u2019 were naturalised and gained popular recognition from about the 1830s. They soon achieved institutional status: London\u2019s Ethnological Society was founded in 1843, with the Anthropological Society of London emerging from it in 1862. The results were lasting and pernicious: most fatefully, Englishness and Britishness became conflated with whiteness, and ideas of nation, culture, civilisation, and modernity were racialised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Racism, the ideology of \u2018racial\u2019 superiority derived from \u2018race\u2019 theory, has had practical consequences. Some of these \u2018race\u2019 arguments were formed in the wake of European expansionism and slavery: Robert Knox had been an army surgeon in the Cape Colony; George Gliddon\u2019s family were traders in Egypt; others sourced human remains from enslavers. But these \u2018racial\u2019 ideas also <\/a>drove<\/em> European expansionism, underpinned empire, and served to vindicate slavery, as well as the slaughter and dispossession of indigenous peoples around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Theatre engaged with \u2018racial\u2019 ideas in various and complex ways: at times the stage reflected and fed such thinking, realising racial theory in dramatic form, even promoting the ideology of empire. At other points, performance could ironise, undermine, or even challenge nineteenth-century claims about \u2018race\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Tolerance and sympathy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>For late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century playwrights, the intercultural contacts produced by travel and diplomacy made good subjects, but writers<\/a>\u2019 interest was primarily piqued by religious and cultural differences. The dramatist Aaron Hill argued that theatre had an educative role in presenting the \u2018manners of other nations\u2019; like travel, it could \u2018humanize\u2019 or endow observers with \u2018a fine polish\u2019. As this implies, different societies were not automatically presumed to be lesser: in these plays, curiosity was often accompanied by a sense of what Bridget Orr calls \u2018cultural equivalence\u2019 (<\/a>Orr 2001, 16; <\/a>2020, 6, 5). These responses to difference were governed by a concern to promote religious tolerance, in the interests of national harmony; in some plays, especially tragedies, this virtue was inculcated by investing figures of \u2018otherness\u2019 with nobility. African, Asian, or Amerindian heroes embodied dignity and articulacy; some were based on historical figures, and even drew on their testimony (<\/a>Orr 2020, 251). In the best-known example of this line, Edward Young\u2019s <\/a>The Revenge<\/em> (1721), a Moor, Zanga, takes revenge on Spaniards for the conquest, imprisonment, and humiliation he has suffered in his youth. The play became a much-revived favourite: Elizabeth Inchbald judged, in reprinting it in her 1806 volume of <\/a>British Theatre<\/em>, that Zanga\u2019s \u2018high-sounding vengeance \u2026 charms every heart\u2019 (Waters 2007, 21). Later in the eighteenth century, sympathy had become a prime social good, leading to depictions of foreign and domestic \u2018others\u2019 as figures of pathos. Now Arabs, Jews, and enslaved Africans were more likely to figure as victims than as heroes. Thomas Southerne\u2019s 1695 play <\/a>Oroonoko<\/em> was a forerunner of this genre, a dramatisation of Aphra Behn\u2019s novella in which an African prince, enslaved and taken to Suriname, leads a rebellion to protect his wife, Imoinda. George Colman\u2019s comic opera <\/a>Inkle and Yarico<\/em> (1787) equates European colonial ventures with callousness: Inkle is an Englishman shipwrecked in the Caribbean; he is saved by Yarico, an indigenous Carib; they profess their love, but then the faithless Inkle tries to sell Yarico into slavery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a><\/a>Oroonoko<\/em> remained a beloved staple: throughout the eighteenth century, Bridget Orr argues, the three most popular dramatisations of Africans consisted of <\/a>Oroonoko<\/em>, The Revenge<\/em>, and Shakespeare\u2019s <\/a>Othello. Inkle and Yarico<\/em>, too, played regularly for decades. The longevity of such dramas, which persisted into the mid nineteenth-century, illustrates the way that older attitudes and assumptions live on in the theatre, where certain plays and kinds of representation achieve traditional status in the repertoire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Many early nineteenth-century plays reflected these inherited traditions. The hero of William Dimond\u2019s 1813 drama, <\/a>The Aethiop<\/em>, is the Arab leader Haroun Al-Raschid, of Baghdad. Based on a historical figure, and drawing on the Arabic folktale collection, <\/a>The Thousand and One Nights<\/em>, the play makes Haroun a wise and clever king, who foils a plot, and resolves family conflict, by disguising himself as an African magician (Dimond 1813\/1994). <\/a>The Aethiop<\/em> doesn\u2019t feature any British or European characters. In this part of the century, even when British characters appeared in plays set in distant locations, they were not necessarily central figures, often merely participating in conflicts between indigenous camps (Holder 1991). In W. T. Moncrieff\u2019s melodrama, <\/a>The Cataract of the Ganges; or, the Rajah\u2019s Daughter<\/em> (1823), the roles with a high social status belong to Indian characters \u2013 the Rajah and the Emperor \u2013 and as the hero and the villain, these also have the highest status in dramatic terms. There are only two important \u2018English\u2019 parts in <\/a>Cataract<\/em>: Mordaunt, a subordinate officer attached to the Rajah, and a servant, Jack Robinson (a comic figure). Like many plays in these early decades, <\/a>Cataract<\/em> shows relatively little anxiety about marriages across national and cultural boundaries: Robinson is in love with an Indian woman called Ubra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>At the same time, comic drama frequently based characterisation on forms of identity \u2013 particularly nation and social status \u2013 a practice which would in time lend itself to the theatrical construction of race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Types and blackface<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>One of the early terms for \u2018race\u2019 \u2013 \u2018types of mankind\u2019 \u2013 recalled one which was already significant in drama. Historically, \u2018type\u2019 has spanned a complex range of meanings \u2013 its earliest uses were connected to ideas of representation or symbolism; later it was used to suggest characteristic, or essential qualities. At different points, the same word has described theatrical representation (that is performance and surrogation), and something like its opposite \u2013 inalienable essence. Both senses played into the theatre\u2019s fascination with \u2018types\u2019 in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>In many dramas, characters were differentiated, and sometimes plots were structured, around the supposedly characteristic qualities of specific national, regional, and religious types. Certain identities became favourite types, marked by specificities of language, dress, and behaviour. \u2018Irish\u2019 typing was a particularly long-lived tradition, but other stage types included \u2018Yankee\u2019, French, Dutch, Jewish, Cockney, Yorkshire or Lancashire, and West Country characters. There were also professional types: the stage sailor, or \u2018Jack Tar\u2019, combined a set of class virtues (straightforward, honourable, steadfast) which were often also taken to be nationally representative. These type-associations settled into standard forms and recurred \u2013 or were transferred \u2013 between plays. In other words, stage types helped to create formulaic preconceptions \u2013 what were later called, by analogy with printed reproduction, \u2018stereotypes\u2019 \u2013 and they served to define who was \u2018us\u2019 and who was not. Always, however, this kind of representation was conditioned by the specific conditions of the theatre, in which pretence and portrayal is a given: actors are playing parts. \u2018Type\u2019 roles would be the specialities of particular actors, and often, in fact, actors became known for types which were supposed to reflect their own backgrounds. But this might be a complex identification, especially where the \u2018type\u2019 was assigned a comic status, and marked as different from the presumed identity of the audience. Irish actors like John Johnstone, for example had ambivalent relationships with the \u2018stage Irishmen\u2019 they created, and contradictions could be sublimated in more unexpected ways, for example when Irish playwrights depicted Arabs or Africans (<\/a>Davis 2019; <\/a>Orr 2020, 249).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>One theatrical type would become important, both in terms of dramatic history, and in relation to popular understandings of race. Comic black servants (whether free or enslaved) became a significant line of characterisation. A crucial source for this type was Isaac Bickerstaffe\u2019s comic opera <\/a>The Padlock<\/em>, which was first performed at Drury Lane theatre in 1768. Slavery on a plantation in the West-Indies forms the background to the play, which may have been suggested by an actor who had lived in Barbados (Waters 2007, 28). The black character Mungo foils the cruel schemes of his master Diego, forwards the cause of young lovers, and protests about the violent and miserable conditions of his enslavement. He is witty and funny, but the typing is also partly demeaning, especially as Mungo\u2019s speech (as written to be performed), is a representation of a black Caribbean creole \u2013 a far cry from the elevated style and diction usually assigned to heroic figures in theatre: \u2018Dere\u2019s one in de house you little tink. Gad he do you business\u2019 (Waters 2007, 29).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a><\/a>The Padlock<\/em> was a great hit in London, and also in the United States, where it became a major influence on a whole style of performance (Pickering 2008). This came to be called \u2018blackface\u2019, the term used to describe white-skinned actors using black make-up to represent people of colour. For over a century, across the Anglophone Atlantic, this became the dominant mode of signifying non-white identities, and particularly of representing African Americans. Mungo\u2019s \u2018stage black\u2019 speech influenced the voicing of this whole blackface style: it became an intrinsic element of the development of blackface performance into a virulent and degrading representation of black people, a major contributor to ideas of \u2018race\u2019. \u2018Stage black\u2019 speech also became a generic sign of otherness, commonly assigned to characters from all sorts of regions \u2013 Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. It became, in other words, a mark of racialisation, and synonymous with colour-based ideas of difference. By the late twentieth century, in Britain as in the United States, blackface performance had become inextricable from white supremacy, and race-based violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, blackface was most commonly deployed in the United States in comic songs and sketches, sometimes called \u2018Ethiopian Delineation\u2019. These were stand-alone acts, often played between longer theatrical pieces, and certain performers began to specialise in this form. Some, like Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who had a hit with a character called \u2018Jim Crow\u2019, toured successfully in Britain, and there were British versions of such acts, such as Charles Mathews<\/a>\u2019 <\/a>Trip to America<\/em> (<\/a>Davis 2011). By the 1840s, blackface performers were banding together into groups, called \u2018negro minstrels\u2019, and this became associated with a whole variety show format, involving sentimental and comic songs, burlesques of popular opera, puns, slapstick, and lectures in \u2018stage black\u2019 language. Blackface burlesques (the songs and the lectures), both mocked high cultural forms and contrasted them with black speakers (that is, the joke was predicated on the presumption of black characters<\/a>\u2019 lowly status and uneducated condition). Minstrelsy too caught on widely in Britain, becoming standard fare for many decades, not only in theatres, but in street-, seaside- and side-show performance. A Jim Crow puppet even appeared at some <\/a>Punch and Judy<\/em> shows (Meer 2018, 149\u201350; Pickering 2008).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Mid-century racial drama<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Another possible factor in the gradual racialisation of drama in the early nineteenth century may have been the development of scenic realism. Antiquarian concerns for about precision in depicting distant settings fed into considerations of costume and appearance. The tragedian Edmund Kean (1787\u20131833) gave careful consideration to his depiction of Shakespeare\u2019s Othello, choosing a face paint described as \u2018tawny\u2019 in colour. In 1869 Kean\u2019s biographer F. W. Hawkins interpreted Kean\u2019s thinking in terms derived from the new racial sciences: \u2018[he] regarded it a gross error to make Othello either a Negro or a black, and accordingly altered the conventional black to the light brown which distinguishes the Moors by virtue of their descent from the Caucasian race\u2019 (quoted in Ziter 2003, 55).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>By the time Hawkins was glossing Kean\u2019s make-up on these lines, the stage was becoming a prime site of racialised assumptions. One indication of this was a new sense of discomfort about romance that crossed boundaries of nation and culture (Holder 1991, 132). In Dion Boucicault\u2019s melodrama, <\/a>The Octoroon<\/em>, that discomfort became central to the drama. First staged in New York in 1859, <\/a>The Octoroon<\/em> opened in London in 1861. The very title reflects ideas of \u2018race\u2019, which had become particularly critical in the context of racialised slavery (the play is set on a Louisiana plantation). In the United States, where African heritage, or \u2018black\u2019 ancestry, was now the defining justification for slavery, a complex terminology had developed to define \u2018racial\u2019 heritage in terms of fractions of \u2018blackness\u2019 \u2013 \u2018mulatto\u2019, \u2018quadroon\u2019, \u2018octoroon\u2019. The latter was supposed to describe someone descended from a \u2018black\u2019 great-grandparent, whose other ancestors were all \u2018white\u2019: that is, the \u2018octoroon\u2019 was categorised as \u2018one-eighth black\u2019. The fascination lay in the fact that such a person was legally \u2018black\u2019, but very pale-skinned: they would appear \u2018white\u2019. In Boucicault\u2019s play, the \u2018octoroon\u2019 was Zoe, the daughter of an enslaved mother, and therefore in law a slave herself. Her enslaver, who is also her father, has forgotten to free her before dying, and she falls into the hands of a villain. Meanwhile, George, a white relative who has grown up in Europe, and is therefore unfamiliar with both Zoe\u2019s status and American laws against inter-racial marriage, falls in love with her. Zoe\u2019s speeches are a prime illustration of racialisation and its contradictions. Her inheritance is a \u2018curse\u2019, expressed in apparently biological (but physically impossible) terms: \u2018Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black \u2013 bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the blood\u2019. Zoe\u2019s speeches insist on her biological difference, but the interest of the play depends on the difficulty of detecting this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a><\/a>ZOE: \u2026 George, do you see that hand you hold: look at these fingers, do you see the nails are of a bluish tinge?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>GEORGE. Yes, near the quick there is a faint blue mark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a><\/a>ZOE: Look in my eyes; is not the same color in the white?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a><\/a>GEORGE: It is their beauty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Boucicault 1859\/2014, 42)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The exchange makes \u2018race\u2019 a physical fact, though vanishingly difficult to perceive. Not only this, George declares that he is attracted to Zoe precisely because of her \u2018racial\u2019 qualities. In a sense, there was a theatrical parallel: Boucicault hoped that the \u2018racial\u2019 dilemma at the heart of this play would prove similarly engaging for audiences. Performance also made the \u2018racial\u2019 paradox expressed in this exchange between George and Zoe especially piquant. Zoe is made to convey the conviction that \u2018race\u2019 is an inescapable physical inheritance, even when it is undetectable, but the character was played by Boucicault\u2019s wife, Agnes Robertson, who was herself understood as \u2018white\u2019. In this scene, the construction of \u2018race\u2019 depended on the illusory magic of theatre: it was a function of the actress\u2019s skill, the persuasion of the production, and the audience\u2019s suspension of disbelief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Despite its up-to-the-minute fascination with defining \u2018race\u2019, <\/a>The Octoroon<\/em> still carries the remnants of older stage conventions. Zoe\u2019s extravagant, romantic expression is a version of the grand rhetoric of earlier heroic figures: \u2018Those seven bright drops give me love like yours, hope like yours \u2013 ambition like yours \u2013 life hung with passions like dew-drops on the morning flowers\u2019 (Boucicault 1859\/2014, 43). And she is partly, of course, descended from characters like Imoinda and Yarico, whose enslavement made them vectors for audience sympathy. But Boucicault\u2019s drama also flirts with the blackface style: it has a cast of secondary characters, also enslaved, who were played in blackface, and whose speeches are given in the \u2018stage black\u2019 creole of blackface tradition. They show none of Zoe\u2019s tragic selflessness: they are, rather, comic, frivolous, and lazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Blackface minstrelsy was incorporated even more enthusiastically into dramatisations of the American antislavery novel, <\/a>Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>. Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s book caused a huge sensation in Britain, and it was translated into every kind of popular medium (puzzles, paintings, ceramics, songs, wallpaper). The theatre was no exception. <\/a>Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> formed the basis of more than 20 plays in London between 1852 and 1855 (<\/a>Meer 2005, 1\u20132, 152). The fiction itself was influenced by blackface in some of its minor characters, who share the \u2018stage black\u2019 speech, silly preoccupations, and performativity of minstrels (they sing, dance, and do acrobatic tricks). <\/a>Uncle Tom<\/em> plays capitalised on these moments: in two plays, characters even performed a reprise of Thomas Rice\u2019s \u2018Jim Crow\u2019 act. In Stowe\u2019s novel, Uncle Tom himself is a figure of great dignity and pathos, a figure of Christian resignation. In some London Tom plays, however, he is more like a minstrel figure: he dances, and makes music and lame jokes (<\/a>Meer 2005, 153). Yet the minstrelsy of the Tom plays is noticeably British minstrelsy \u2013 it reflects the distinctive style (in costumes, music, and kinds of joke), which the form was beginning to take in Britain. In this it bears out George Fredrickson\u2019s argument that \u2018[r]acism is always nationally specific\u2019 (Fredrickson 2002, 75).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>It was during these middle decades of the nineteenth century that British forms of racism began to reflect and to promote the nation\u2019s imperial ambitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Empire, exhibition, and performance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Throughout the reign of Queen Victoria, imperial wars were re-enacted on the London stage. Conflicts in India, Afghanistan, South Africa, Ethiopia, Ghana, New Zealand, Egypt, and the Sudan were reflected in dramas, which justified and glorified British actions, and sometimes entirely rewrote them (Schultz 2015, 118\u201322; Ziter 2003, 168\u201382). The 1857 rebellion in India was an especially potent crisis, both a military catastrophe, and an ideological challenge to British rule. The trauma was partly processed in popular culture, including drama. Here too, Dion Boucicault created an emblematic text, <\/a>Jessie Brown<\/em> (1857; staged in London in 1862 as <\/a>The Relief of Lucknow<\/em>). The play, vaguely based on newspaper reports of recent events, depicts a brave British garrison, and their civilian families, besieged by rebels. Its assumptions differ notably from those in early plays like <\/a>The Cataract of the Ganges<\/em>. The Indians are represented as almost uniformly barbaric: treacherous and cruel. Their leader\u2019s attraction to a British woman is perceived as abhorrent and frightening. India offers spectacular and exotic architecture and scenery, as it did in <\/a>Cataract<\/em>, but there is none of the earlier antiquarian interest in accuracy: Boucicault is cavalier about details of Indian society, confusing Muslim and Hindu beliefs, Turkish and Hindi words. At the same time, \u2018white\u2019 identities are very carefully distinguished. There are Cockney and Irish characters among the soldiers, and the besieged regiment is Scottish. The play romanticises Scottish identity as a kind of special Britishness: characters reminisce about their Highland childhoods, use Gaelic to outwit the Indian villain, and are triumphantly relieved to the sound of bagpipes (Holder 1991, 137).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>\u2018Race\u2019-based ideas vindicated imperial projects of other types, too. The third act of Charles Reade\u2019s 1865 drama, <\/a>It Is Never Too Late to Mend<\/em>, is set in Australia. Here the hero meets an indigenous Australian, whom the English call Jacky, though his given name is Kalingaloonga. This character is made to represent the superiority of European thought, reasoning, and technology. He has little concept of the future, he makes a fire \u2018<\/a>by friction, after the manner of savages<\/em>\u2019, he is frightened of his reflection in a mirror, and amazed by lucifer matches. His speech also seems to be a variant of minstrelsy\u2019s stage-black creole: \u2018When Jacky a good deal hot here (<\/a>feeling himself<\/em>) he can\u2019t feel a berry little cold a berry long way off there (<\/a>he points with his heel backward<\/em>). Jacky not a white-fellow\u2019. It is he who shows the good white characters where to find a giant gold nugget, and as it holds no value for him, they carry it back to England, leaving him their few belongings in exchange. The interaction thus encapsulates the extractive logic of imperial economics, and the racial basis of its rationale: because \u2018Jacky not a white-fellow\u2019, he doesn\u2019t need or deserve these riches (Henderson 2004). Reade\u2019s drama even makes the indigenous character argue the case himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The ultimate in theatrical glorifications of empire were the spectacular shows staged by Augustus Harris at the Drury Lane Theatre in the 1880s. These crowd-pullers were an essential part of Harris\u2019s business strategy: along with the Christmas pantomime, his autumn melodramas kept the theatre afloat the rest of the year, allowing him to stage opera in the spring, and more experimental European dramas. Shows like <\/a>Youth<\/em> (1881), <\/a>Freedom<\/em> (1883<\/a>), and <\/a>Human Nature<\/em> (1885), were noisy, exciting, and visually spectacular, filling the stage with flags, gun smoke, and armies of \u2018supers\u2019, non-speaking extras, in plots which exalted Englishness and the Union Jack. Africans and Arabs were now background figures: the significant drama mainly concerned Europeans (British heroes, French villains). Harris\u2019s extravagant use of \u2018supers\u2019 had the effect of de-individuating the non-Europeans, giving an impression of indistinguishable masses. They were characterised in the dialogue \u2013 and in the reviews \u2013 as \u2018swarming hordes\u2019, \u2018mosquitoes\u2019, \u2018fiends\u2019, a \u2018gigantic wave of humanity\u2019 (Booth 1996, 9; Ziter 2003, 179; Holder 1991, 141).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>In the second half of the nineteenth century, the empire projected in the theatre began to intersect with translations of \u2018race\u2019 theory into the realms of education and learning. Show culture worked in tandem with the rise of academic disciplines like anthropology. Impresarios transported indigenous peoples across the globe, singly and in groups, organising exhibitions which purported to illustrate customs, clothing, and behaviour, as well as the supposedly characteristic physiognomies of these exhibited people. In shows like Charles Caldecott\u2019s \u2018Zulu Kaffirs\u2019 (1853), or Imre Kiralfy\u2019s \u2018Savage South Africa\u2019 (1859), exhibited peoples were expected to perform their own identities, and often explicitly to put on performances, for example of traditional dances (Qureshi 2011; Schultz 2015, 114\u20136; Shephard 1986, 97). This proto-anthropological show culture intersected directly with the theatre, as for example when M\u0101ori show participants took part in melodramas, like <\/a>Wahena, The M\u0101ori Queen<\/em> (1863).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Exhibition culture even informed performance. In the 1879 pantomime <\/a>Jack the Giant Killer: or Good King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table<\/em>, one stage picture \u2013 a tableau \u2013 consisted of \u2018groups of figures emblematic of the various races under our dominion in the East\u2019. Here, in a single moment of staging, we see a reflection of the race theorists<\/a>\u2019 tabular depictions of \u2018racial types\u2019; and the theatrical \u2018race\u2019 table is conscripted to serve both imperial ideology and the identity-formation of British audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Racialised performers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The production of \u2018race\u2019 in the theatre had implications for the profession, particularly for performers. Playing \u2018others\u2019 became a specialism, one which particularly suited actors who were already positioned as marginal in relation to the construction of Englishness. Irish performers became prominent in blackface minstrelsy; the Dublin-born actor-playwright Dion Boucicault took on roles like \u2018Wah-no-tee, the Lipan Indian\u2019 in <\/a>The Octoroon<\/em>, and the Indian leader Nana Sahib in <\/a>Jessie Brown<\/em>. The French actress C\u00e9line C\u00e9leste made a specialism of \u2018outsider\u2019 characters, and became particularly known for her Miami, a Native American part in J. B. Buckstone\u2019s <\/a>Green Bushes<\/em>. Many such parts called for a lot of mime, a way of getting round inconvenient accents (here Irish and French, respectively).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Occasionally, theatre\u2019s interest in \u2018otherness\u2019 offered opportunities for performers whose \u2018racial\u2019 identity it was helping to construct. The most famous was Ira Aldridge, the African American tragedian, who made a career in Britain and Europe between 1825 and 1867. Aldridge faced hostility when he appeared at London\u2019s prestigious Covent Garden theatre, though he made a successful living with provincial touring. He did, however, have to negotiate expectations which pushed him towards racialised roles (most obviously <\/a>Othello<\/em> and <\/a>Oroonoko<\/em>) (Lindfors 2011\u20132015). Other names which have come down to us include William Henry Lane, the African American dancer known as \u2018Master Juba\u2019, who toured Britain in 1848; the African-born Londoner, Joseph Jenkins, who played Othello at the Eagle Saloon in East London; and the Southern African Peter Lobengula (Pickering 2008; <\/a>Meer 2018, 196\u20137; Shephard 1986). Still others only appear as glimpses in the records \u2013 Indian jugglers and dancers in the early part of the century, or the \u2018Beni Zoug Zoug\u2019 acrobats who appeared in <\/a>The Relief of Lucknow<\/em> (Ziter 2003, 97\u20139). Here too, the theatre provided double-edged opportunities for what would now be called performers of colour: their stage roles would contribute to the racial typing which would determine and constrain their own life-chances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The racialised limits of performance are manifest in the London tour of an indigenous theatre troupe from Bombay, the Parsi-run Victoria Theatre Company, which attended the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886. Although highly successful at home, and in an earlier tour of South-East Asia, the Victoria Theatre Company\u2019s offering was met in London with derision and dismay. The Victoria Company\u2019s performances were lauded at home for their modernity, for the facility with which they reconciled European and Indian performance traditions (including performances of European characters in whiteface). London audiences, however, preferred the anthropological emphasis of the rest of the Exhibition, such as \u2018primitive\u2019 Indian tools (Nicholson 2017, 83\u201391). Indigenous theatre was only welcome when it confirmed the dominant preconceptions of \u2018race\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>References<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Booth, Michael (1996) \u2018Soldiers of the Queen: Drury Lane Imperialism\u2019, in Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, Melodrama: the Cultural Emergence of a Genre<\/em>, Houndmills: Macmillan, pp. 3\u201320. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boucicault, Dion (1859\/2014) The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana<\/em>, edited by Sarika Bose, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Davis, Jim (2019) \u2018John Johnstone and the Possibilities of Irishness, 1783\u20131820\u2019, in David O\u2019 Shaughnessy, Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740\u20131820<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57\u201378. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Davis, Tracy (2011) \u2018Acting Black, 1824, Charles Mathews\u2019 Trip to America<\/em>\u2019\u2019, Theatre Journal<\/em>, 63<\/em>(2<\/em>): 163\u201389. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dimond, William (1813\/1994) \u2018The Aethiop\u2019, in Deane L. Root, Early Melodrama in America<\/em>, vol. 2<\/em>, New York: Garland. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fredrickson, B. L. (2002) \u2018Positive emotions\u2019, in C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (eds) Handbook of positive psychology<\/em>, Oxford University Press, pp. 120\u2013134. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henderson, Ian (2004) \u2018Jacky-Kalingaloonga: Aboriginality, Audience Reception and Charles Reade\u2019s It is Never Too Late to Mend <\/em>(1865)\u2019, Theatre Research International<\/em>, 29<\/em>(2<\/em>): 95\u2013110. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holder, Heidi J. (1991) \u2018Melodrama, realism and empire on the British stage\u2019, in J. S. Bratton et al., Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790\u20131930<\/em>, Manchester: Manchester University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lindfors, Bernth (2011\u20132015) Ira Aldridge<\/em>, 4 volumes, Rochester, New York: Rochester University Press. Information Classification: General <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meer, Sarah (2005) Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s<\/em>, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meer, Sarah (2018) \u2018Melodrama and Race\u2019, in Carolyn Williams, English Melodrama<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 192\u2013205. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morosetti, Tiziana (2016) \u2018Constructing the Zulus: The African Body and its Narratives\u2019, in Staging the Other in Nineteenth-Century British Drama<\/em>, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 79\u2013101. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicholson, Rashna Darius (2017) \u2018Troubling Englishness: The Eastward Success and Westward Failure of the Parsi Theatre\u2019, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film<\/em>, 44<\/em>(1<\/em>): 75\u201391. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nott, Josiah Clark and George Robins Gliddon (1857\/ 2000) Indigenous Races of the Earth<\/em>, Bristol: Thoemmes Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orr, Bridget (2001) Empire on the English Stage 1660\u20131714<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orr, Bridget (2020) British Enlightenment Theatre: Dramatizing Difference<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pickering, Michael (2008) Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain<\/em>, Aldershot: Ashgate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Qureshi, Sadiah (2011) Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain<\/em>, Chicago: Chicago University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schultz, Marianne (2015) \u2018\u201cAn interest must be strong now-a-days to raise much enthusiasm in an audience, but it may be, at the same time, of an unpleasant nature\u201d: M\u0101ori, New Zealand and Empire on Stage, 1862\u20131864\u2019, in Tiziana Morosetti (ed.) Staging the Other in Nineteenth-Century British Drama<\/em>, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 103\u201324. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shephard, Ben (1986) \u2018Showbiz Imperialism: The Case of Peter Lobengula\u2019, in John M. Mackenzie, Imperialism and Popular Culture<\/em>, Manchester: Manchester University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waters, Hazel (2007) Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wheeler, Roxann (2000) The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture<\/em>, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ziter, Edward (2003) The Orient on the Victorian Stage<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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