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Intersections of Race and Class in 1830S Othello Burlesques Laura Michelle Keigan Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

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Intersections of Race and Class in 1830S Othello Burlesques Laura Michelle Keigan Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2014 Intersections of Race and Class in 1830s Othello Burlesques Laura Michelle Keigan Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Keigan, Laura Michelle, "Intersections of Race and Class in 1830s Othello Burlesques" (2014). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 899. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/899 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. INTERSECTIONS OF RACE AND CLASS IN 1830s OTHELLO BURLESQUES A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Laura M. Keigan B.A., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2004 M.S., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005 M. A., Mississippi College, 2008 August 2014 Acknowledgements I am incredibly grateful to all the people who helped make possible this dissertation and my graduate studies in general. Thank you to everyone who looked over drafts of my chapters and provided insight along the way. These include Sharon Weltman, Robert Hamm, Dan Novak, and Elsie Michie. A special thank you goes to Helana Brigman, who helped untangle my thoughts at every stage of this project and opened her home to me when I commuted between Baton Rouge and Jackson. Many others—professors, mentors, coaches, and friends—have over the years encouraged me and taught me invaluable lessons in perseverance and courage. These include David Miller, Jim Everett, Kerri Jordan, John Zomchick, Joellen Weis Maples, Becky Reno, Jake and Kara Evans, and Katie Rogers. My graduate studies wouldn’t have been possible without the love and support of my family, who have kept me going with advice, encouragement, financial support, hot meals, and free babysitting. Finally, thank you to my husband Austin, who thinks I’m great, and to our daughter Nora, whose boundless curiosity and sense of humor provided a much-needed dose of perspective throughout the writing process. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………ii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..iv Introduction. A Black Footman Plays Othello…………………………………………………..1 Chapter One. 1830s Othello Burlesques In Context…………………………………………….22 Chapter Two. Robert Waithman, the City of London, and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Justice……………………………………………………………………………………………68 Chapter Three. Othello, the Moor of Fleet Street and the City of London’s “Culture of Justice” …………………………………………………………………………………………………..100 Chapter Four. Rise of the Gretna Green Marriage Plot: Historical and Literary Context.……162 Chapter Five. The Gretna Green Topos in Dowling’s Othello Travestie: ‘According to Act of Parliament’……………………………………………………………………………………..211 Conclusion. Reconsidering the Role of West-End Burlesques in the Evolution of Nineteenth- Century Conceptions of Blackness……………………………………………………………..256 References...…………………………………………………………………………………….262 Vita…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 277 iii Abstract In recent years, we have come to better understand how nineteenth-century burlesques critiqued and lampooned the respectable humbuggery of patent theater productions and middle- class culture. Their carnivalesque spectacle and low humor turned topsy-turvy what was falsely revered or pretentious in English society. This study, however, explores the extent to which some burlesques responded conservatively to social and legislative change, which supposedly weakened established hierarchies constituting English culture and society. My chapters examine how two burlesques of Shakespeare’s Othello—Charles M. Westmacott’s Othello, the Moor of Fleet Street (1833) and Maurice M. M. G. Dowling’s Othello Travestie (1834)—contributed to discourse surrounding debate concerning the 1832 Reform Act and the 1833 Slave Emancipation Act. These burlesques ultimately reject the transformative potential bound up in such legislation, and their mechanism of critique is a punitive compounding of low social standing with blackness, with the implied inferiority of each descriptor inflecting and intensifying the other. Finally, I suggest this link helps explain why many burlesques, and specifically ones depicting black characters, originated in and remained popular at London’s West-End minor theaters but not others, in that their demeaning coupling of blackness with low social standing limited their appeal to more socially varied audiences at other metropolitan theaters. iv Introduction A Black Footman Plays Othello On April 10th of 1832, actor Ira Aldridge trod the boards of London’s Covent Garden for the first time, in the titular role of Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice. His performance marks the initial instance a black man played a leading dramatic role in one of England’s patent theaters, and it sparked a maelstrom of outage and indignation by some English theatergoers and critics.1 Their anger stemmed not only from the locale of Aldridge’s performance but also the subject matter: he was appearing as the hero of a Shakespearean tragedy. By this point, Shakespeare was largely heralded as England’s national poet, and his plays and characters increasingly occupied a canonized and anointed place in the English cultural imagination. Seeing one of his central tragic heroes performed by a black man, then, proved untenable to some viewers, revealing the country’s complex relationship with issues of race. Most conservative reviews and even some moderate ones roundly pan Aldridge’s performance, and their mode of attack rests almost entirely on Aldridge’s racial otherness rather than his acting prowess. Several, however, also display a curious conflation of Aldridge’s race with low social standing. For instance, an article appearing in the April 6th issue of the satirical paper Figaro in London, by owner Gilbert á Beckett, provides a starting point for examining this epistemological overlap. In a previous review, á Beckett had derided Aldridge as a “stupid looking, thick lipped, ill formed African” for appearing on a Lancaster stage (qtd. in Lindfors, “Ira” 146). Here, á Beckett compounds racial discrimination with that of class. He is disgusted by the introduction to the boards of Covent Garden theater, of that miserable nigger whom we found in the provinces imposing on the public by the name of the African Roscius. This wretched upstart is about to defile the stage, by a foul butchery of Shakespeare, and Othello is actually the part chosen for the sacrilege. Is it because nature has supplied the man with a skin that renders soot and butter superfluous, is it on the strength of his 1 blackness that he considers himself competent to enact the part of the Moor of Venice? We have before jammed this man into atoms by the relentless power of our critical battering ram, but unless this notice causes the immediate withdrawal of his name from the bills, we must again inflict on him such chastisement as must drive him from the stage he has dishonored, and force him to find in the capacity of footman or street sweeper, that level for which his color appears to have rendered him particularly qualified. (qtd. in Lindfors 150) This passage accuses Aldridge of using color (a hereditary trait, provided by “nature”) rather than talent to earn the part, a line of critique usually wielded by liberal reformers. Yet, á Beckett precludes any possibility of a black man playing Shakespeare, pointing to the supposed natural racial inferiority of blackness as cause. Aldridge’s very presence is defiling and dishonorable, and á Beckett slips into an odd sort of elitist defense of social hierarchy in support of this exclusion.2 I am struck by the severity of á Beckett’s critique, and its conflation of race and class. This attack comes before Aldridge even took the stage. Aldridge’s social status—or the social status á Beckett allocates for him—works in tandem with his blackness to disqualify him from the stage. As Hazel Waters explains of the situation, here was a black man “attempting to engage, on equal terms, with two national shibboleths at once—Shakespeare and the home of legitimate drama, a center of national prestige” (71). Ultimately, Aldridge’s “color,” according to á Beckett, makes him eligible specifically for the “level” of “footman or street sweeper,” these occupying the same lateral position along related hierarchies of race and class. Á Beckett was not alone in this pairing of blackness with low social class, and other reviewers made much, for instance, of Aldridge’s former occupation as a footman, this an apocryphal story.3 Furthermore, á Beckett’s critique alludes to the figure of the black crossing- sweeper—supposedly based on an actual man—which had become a popular piece of London lore and was commonly featured in comedic portrayals of working-class life. Blackness, then, 2 had already entered into the London cultural imagination as socially aligned with the working class, and á Beckett merely calls on existing tropes to negate what he perceives to be Aldridge’s anomalous foray into
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