Race Mattered: Othello in Late Eighteenth-Century England

Summary

'When Paul Robeson stepped onto the stage for the very first time', Margaret Webster recalled, 'when he spoke his very first line, he immediately, by his very presence, brought an incalculable sense of reality to the entire play.' That reality emanated from Robeson's status as the first actor of African descent to impersonate Shakespeare's Othello on Broadway. Because of his biological heritage, Robeson was perceived as being more 'real' as the Moor than a white actor in blackface. Robeson's performance in the longest-running Shakespeare production ever staged on Broadway thus revolutionized the way many people felt about its hero.

As public reaction to Webster's Othello demonstrated, a play in performance is both a maker and a transmitter of cultural codes; it is necessarily imbricated in the broader discourses that surround it. Shakespearians concerned with the history of performance must determine the nature of those discourses and how they shaped the text's reception and transmission. For the history of Othello, especially, the discourses inevitably include the messy matter of racial ideology.