Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 (review)

To consign the study of early blackface performance to the category of theater history or the conventions of stage disguise, Claire Sponsler has shown, is to neutralize the inherent political import of racial performativity or deny the deconstructive significance of racial drag.¹ Consistent with this view, Virginia Mason Vaughan's study moves beyond the nominal concerns of theater history to assert that "performance is by definition a masquerade, which by its very nature negates essentialist notions of reality" (4). Reconstructing the "dynamics of performance"—corporal histrionics, facial expression, and their audience interface—is at best a speculative venture, but the actor's blackened face is posited as both recoverable textual evidence and a legible theatrical sign. Interrogating the fabricated black stage personae as figments of racial fantasy, Vaughan concludes that they reveal more about the English, the source of these early modern racial projections, than about the ostensible subjects—Africans whose regional or ethnic distinctions are eroded by the stark uniformity of stage blackness. Blackface characters, despite their superficial contrast, mediated an emerging early modern white identity that stabilized over time according to ideologies of white supremacy and privilege.

As such, Vaughan sees her project as contributing "to what is now termed 'whiteness studies,' the examination of the ways in which English men and women in the early modern period came to think of themselves as constituting a 'white' norm in opposition to people of darker pigmentation" (5). "Europeans Disguised as Black Moors" (chapter 7) extends these observations in keeping with the book's titular project, the mechanics and significance of racial camouflage. Vaughan argues, perceptively, that the donning of blackface is not always as important as its removal, displaying not just a white body but a "persona" beneath (108). African skin, fetishized in the black cloth, vizards or masks, oils, and burnt cork used for racial mimicry ("Preliminaries" [chapter 1]), is assimilated into a play's denouement as a chromatic deus ex machina: its theatrical discovery or removal diffuses racial anxiety. That is, in representing "whiteness" as the signifier of racial normativity, white actors in blackface were paradoxically reassuring for an audience, deployed as a strategy of racial containment in an age of exploration, trade, commerce, slavery, and the resulting insurgent intercultural mixing. Where stage transvestism has become a proven site of critical investigation concerning gender, desire, and sexuality (a related factor to which the author, surprisingly, pays scant attention), Vaughan demonstrates here that racial cross-dressing promises equally rich research rewards.

Her approach is chronological, beginning with the homiletic constructions of medieval folk drama—where blackness is associated with evil and the devil—in order to postulate an absorption of religious codes into early modernity's secular discourse of human difference, social status, and racial subjectivity. A sweeping narrative of England's increasing colonial ventures and an evolving global slave economy frames this religious "transcodification" (23). Critiquing some of the pioneering scholarship on blackness on the early modern stage (Elliot H. Tokson and, to a lesser extent, Anthony Gerard Barthelemy) for collapsing historical periods at the expense of contextual specificity, Vaughan covers the title's three centuries, with thematic chapter headings organizing the mostly noncanonical material. At the same time, she is vigilant in distinguishing among the divergent performance spaces of public, private, and court presentations.

The chapters after "Preliminaries" unfold according to a repeated, schematic plan: a review of related plays and performances followed by speculation about how a chapter's chosen dramatic or stage conventions might be read as social and political metaphors. "Patterns of Blackness" (chapter 2) surveys the extravagant urban processions and royal entertainments in the first half of the sixteenth century that subsumed African figures within their spectacles of mercantile and royal commodification. The sudden removal of blackface disguise by white actors facilitated "the colonizing myth that king and merchants could control and transform the darkened aliens beyond England's shores" (33). English contacts with North Africa in the 1580s and 1590s having...