Representing Othello in 1890s New Orleans: The Myth of Chivalry in the South

Critics have long been aware that Shakespeare's play Othello was very popular in the South both before and after the Civil War.² The reasons for this popularity, however, remain hard to explain, as its plot is essentially that of a black man marrying and then murdering a white woman. The possibility of racial intermarriage is known to have been a highly charged political issue that could be used to stoke racial tensions among white southern Democrats in the postbellum period,³ yet surviving responses to Othello from Mobile and New Orleans in the 1890s indicate that many upper-class white readers were able to sympathize with Othello and perhaps even to admire him. The strange paradox of white racist men and women celebrating a character who actually in the play refers to himself as "black"—then kills an innocent white woman—demands examination. The current political climate sadly makes it all the more necessary that we try to understand how readers in a time characterized by racial hatred were able to accept as a hero a character who did not look like them. I aim to shed a little more light on the subject by exploring two little-known representations of Othello in the postbellum period: the notebooks of a Shakespeare discussion club in Mobile, Alabama, and float illustrations and surviving documentation from a Mardi Gras parade in 1898 New Orleans.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans has a complex history and culture that can seem baffling to outsiders, so having some background is helpful. To start at the beginning, Mardi Gras is the day before Lent and in many places is celebrated as a festival or carnival. In New Orleans, the idea of celebrating Mardi Gras by means of a parade of themed floats through the streets was conceived by a group of young, wealthy, Anglo-American merchants and businessmen, who in 1857 created a secret society for the express purpose of putting on a lavish Mardi Gras parade, far more organized and on a grander scale than any New Orleans had so far seen, followed by an even more lavish ball. This group called itself the Mistick Krewe of Comus.⁴ The name Comus was chosen from Milton's masque, and the theme of the parade in 1857 was "The Demon Actors in Milton's Paradise Lost." In one way, both Comus and Paradise Lost were natural choices for Mardi Gras: Milton's Comus is the leader of a debauched and drunken group of followers that the krewe is supposed to represent; and devil costumes are a very conventional choice for carnival. In another way, as Richard Rambuss has demonstrated, the Mistick Krewe of Comus's choice to align itself with an English literary giant was a social and political statement, visually declaring to New Orleans that the formerly Catholic and Creole celebration of Mardi Gras would henceforth be dominated by the Anglo-Americans. Comus's literary and political agendas were never mutually exclusive. Comus's first parade and ball in 1857 were a success, so the krewe made this an annual Mardi Gras custom and other Anglo-American parading clubs were soon established (all of whom also adopted the title of "krewe," which became the accepted term for a Mardi Gras parading club in New Orleans). Comus frequently returned to English literary themes in its parades, and in 1898 it chose the theme of "Scenes from Shakespeare." Shakespeare plays had been represented in Mardi Gras floats before, but this was the first Mardi Gras parade wholly devoted to his works. Comus's parade adopted the format of presenting a tableau of one scene from one play on each float, and the plays chosen for the parade corresponds with what Joseph Patrick Roppolo has identified as the most frequently performed, or most spectacular productions, of Shakespeare's plays in New Orleans before 1865 (118-19). The Othello float was the fourth one in the procession.⁵

What the parade looked like can be reconstructed fairly well from the Carnival Bulletin, a large...