Warning: strong language

Miles Grier on inkface, blackface, Othello and fraternities of white men

3 February, 2021

In: Conversations, Culture, History, Literature, Performance, Theatre

Tagged: book history, dramaturgy, early modern, literature, Othello, Performance, Race, Shakespeare, theatre history

Miles Grier is a book and theatre historian, and tells us about the place of Shakespeare’s Othello in a ‘long moment of shared vernacular literacy as a colonising tool’. Grier insists that this is a play that ‘implicitly summons an audience of white experts’, and connects this both to the use of blackface paint for most of the play’s long history onstage, and to the history of black actors taking on the central role. Why does this ‘indestructible play’ live on, Grier asks, as a ‘vector of authority’?

People

Miles Grier
Early modernist

Andy Kesson
A Bit Lit host

For more on these ideas, see:

Miles P. Grier “Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination” (ed. Vincent L. Wimbush) Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political 2015
Miles P. Grier “Staging the Cherokee Othello: An Imperial Economy of Indian Watching” The William and Mary Quarterly 73.1 2016
pp. 73-106
Miles P. Grier "Black/White" (ed. Claire M. L. Bourne) Shakespeare/Text forthcoming
Anthony Gerard Barthelemy Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne 1987
Morwenna Carr “Material / Blackness: Race and Its Material Reconstructions on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage.” Early Theatre 20.1 2017
Brigitte Fielder “Blackface Desdemona: Theorizing Race on the Nineteenth-Century American Stage.” Theatre Annual 70 2017
pp. 39-59
Kim Hall Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England 1996
Mitchell M. Harris “The Expense of Ink and Wastes of Shame: Poetic Generation, Black Ink, and Material Waste in Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (ed. Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin) The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400-1800 2017
Benjamin Minor and Ayanns Thompson “‘Edgar I Nothing Am’: Blackface in King Lear” (ed. Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple) Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England,
Francesca T. Royster “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.4 2000
pp. 423-55
Ian Smith Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors 2009
Andrea Stevens Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama 2013