Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 - Hardcover

Vaughan, Virginia Mason

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052184584X ISBN 13: 9780521845847

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Synopsis

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 examines early modern English actors' impersonations of black Africans. Those blackface performances established dynamic theatrical conventions that were repeated from play to play, plot to plot, congealing over time and contributing to English audiences' construction of racial difference. Vaughan discusses non-canonical plays, grouping of scenes, and characters that highlight the most important conventions - appearance, linguistic tropes, speech patterns, plot situations, the use of asides and soliloquies, and other dramatic techniques - that shaped the ways black characters were 'read' by white English audiences. In plays attended by thousands of English men and women from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, including Titus Andronicus, Othello and Oroonoko, blackface was a polyphonic signifier that disseminated distorted and contradictory, yet compelling, images of black Africans during the period in which England became increasingly involved in the African slave trade.

About this title

Book Description

Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 examines the dynamics of blackface performance by English actors from the cycle plays of the early sixteenth century, through Shakespeare's Aaron and Othello, to the depiction of enslaved African princes in the eighteenth-century theatre.

About the Author

Virginia Mason Vaughan is Professor of English at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 052184584X
• ISBN 13: 9780521845847
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 206