"We think of others possessing you with the throes of Othello": Dickinson Playing Othello, Race and Tommaso Salvini

Othello is one of Emily Dickinson's favorite plays. It is the play alluded to most often in her extant letters and the one most often marked with pencil in her copy of Shakespeare's works at the Houghton Library, Harvard (Capps 182-5). ¹ It is also the only play Dickinson is likely to have seen performed. In 1851, while in Boston, Lavinia Dickinson recorded in her diary on the 8^th of September that they 'heard Othello read' at the Museum (Leyda I, 211). ² Dickinson's epistolary allusions to this play begin in 1876 as if the play and its characters had a special significance for Dickinson in the last decade of her life. Moreover, in three of these references, Dickinson actually identifies with Othello. This paper examines Dickinson's identification with this character by focusing upon his theatrical and critical reception in nineteenth century America. Dickinson references to the play are best understood within this context, particularly the performances of Othello by the Italian actor Tommaso Salvini.

Othello was one of the most popular plays on the American stage during Dickinson's lifetime and was performed by many of the most famous actors of the day, including Edmund Kean, Edwin Booth and Edwin Forrest (Shattuck 74-5, Marder 301-5). Its popularity derived in part from the resonance that a play centering upon an interracial relationship had in an American culture where race was such a controversial and contentious subject. According to one critic, Ray B. Brown, common racism at the time meant that the play's central character was often viewed with contempt, yet when he was manipulated and treated unjustly by Iago he inspired sympathy (Brown 375). Although from Shakespeare's time onwards Othello was played by white men with blackened faces, in 1814 the actor Edmund Kean introduced a "tawny" Othello to the stage (Cowling 133-46). Kean 'regarded it as a gross error to make Othello either negro or black, and accordingly altered the conventional black to the light brown' which according to him, distinguished "the Moors by virtue of their descent from the Caucasian race" (Hawkins I, 221). Kean's "tawny" innovation became popular and slowly the 'blackened' Othello was eclipsed on both the American and the English stage.

Like many of Shakespeare's other plays, Othello inspired popular burlesques, travesties and parodies, as well as vaudeville and minstrel productions (Levine 25-30). ³ These production often accompanied proper stage performances of the play. In these Othello's "blackness" was constantly mentioned and exaggerated as a source of humor and amusement (MacDonald 233). ⁴ For instance, Othello: a Burlesque (1870), performed by Christy's minstrels, white men in black-face, begins with Iago lamenting that his Desdemona has left him and is "now with a nasty, dirty fellar, / As black as mud — a white-washer — a nager called Othello" (Wells 129). When Lavinia records in her diary that they "heard Othello read" the suggestion is that like most nineteenth-century theatergoers they would have seen a bronzed actor play the central part. Yet, they may also have witnessed the burlesques or travesties that typically accompanied these performances. Might then the sisters have encountered Othello's blackness hyperbolically performed?

Thus the American theatre accepted a "tawny" Othello when the play was 'properly' produced and an exaggerated "black" Othello in popular burlesques. However, critical confusion abounded about the specificity of his race. This confusion was generated and fuelled by America's own problem with slavery and its need to prove the inferiority of certain races. ⁵ Thus Shakespeare's indicators of Othello's race [for instance, Roderigo's reference to Othello's 'Thick-lips' (I.i.66)] became part of a debate to determine whether Shakespeare's Othello was black and what the consequences of this might be.

The former...