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"With me, socially, politically, morally, character is everything--color, nothing. The negro is no less a man, because he is black; the Anglo-American is no more a man, because he is white."
--Senator Francis Gillette of Connecticut, in a speech at the Senate, 23 February 1855
In his 1854 travel sketch The American Fugitive in Europe, William Wells Brown recounts his many excursions to the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition while in London. In his wonder at this "great international gathering," Brown states, "It is strange, indeed, to see so many nations assembled and represented on one spot of British ground. In short, it is one great theatre, with thousands of performers, each playing his own part." (1) This gathering undoubtedly occupied Brown's thoughts when he returned to the United States. In 1856, Brown began to read his first drama to New England audiences, entitled Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone, and in 1857, he began to read to various antislavery audiences what would become the first published drama by an African American, The Escape; or A Leap for Freedom. (2) Not coincidently, after returning from five years in Europe, where, according to William Edward Farrison, Brown had read and seen a considerable amount of drama, including many Shakespearean plays, (3) and with the vision of the theater and performers he witnessed at the Crystal Palace firmly in his mind, Brown came to write, perform, and publish a dramatic work. An engaging antislavery orator and lecturer, and writer of the first novel by an African American (Clotel, 1853), Brown returned to the United States knowing, as did Shakespeare's Hamlet, "The play's the thing."
In fact, William Wells Brown included a potent quotation from Hamlet--"Look on this picture, and on this"--as an epigraph on the title page of The Escape, published in June, 1858. (4) Brown filled a cultural niche in producing an original drama, and Shakespeare and the dramatic genre served as powerful vehicles through which Brown could contribute to the advancement of African-American literary activism. Brown's play emerged from within two Shakespearean traditions, one of white cultural appropriation and the other of black cultural appropriation. He engaged and contested the burlesque, parody, and minstrelsy of the white stage and used Shakespeare in ways similar to those of his black predecessors both onstage in its various forms and in print. Brown tapped into the notions of moral and social elevation and utility adopted by black writers before him who protested slavery through such forms as speeches, lectures, debates, newspaper pieces, travel accounts, autobiographies, and slave narratives. Brown performed against the institution of slavery by staging a drama of protest, displaying his oppositional politics through performance of both black and white in the great antislavery theater of the North. (5) And, with Brown's appropriation of drama as his form of resistance, Shakespeare's specter inevitably lurks. (6)
I. Antebellum Shakespearean Specters
The performance and publication of The Escape are situated within the growing cultural tumult of the 1850s. In May of 1854, three months before Brown returned from his five years in Europe, Congress approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which legalized white voting residents to determine whether to admit their territory as a slave or free state; racial violence escalated as a result. In 1857, while Brown was publicly performing both Experience and The Escape, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that African Americans could not become U.S. citizens and in turn had no constitutional rights. A year following the publication of The Escape, John Brown led a failed raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. The Escape, then, was written, performed, and published amid these national battles regarding the institution of slavery. For William Wells Brown, drama becomes a national genre of resistance and opposition that he hoped to offer as a supplement to the forms of protest that dominated the cultural landscape.
Furthermore, William Wells Brown's performance and publication of The Escape emerged from a moment when blackface minstrelsy had just reached the peak of its popularity, the years 1846 to 1854. (7) In Highbrow/Lowbrow, Lawrence Levine writes that Shakespeare and Shakespeare's plays were an integral part of American culture that dominated the theater as popular entertainment for the majority of the nineteenth century. (8) Oratory was a prominent feature in the national lifestyle, and it followed that Shakespeare's word play, dialogues, and soliloquies would attract Americans who already were drawn to the parallels between Shakespeare's characters and situations and their own society. (9) Burlesque and parody were highly popular on the American stage, and because of Shakespeare's cultural currency, his plays were a prime target. Shakespearean parody in the nineteenth century appeared in the form of "short skits, brief references, and satirical songs inserted into other modes of entertainment." (10) The burlesque, according to Richard Schoch, served to redirect Shakespeare's language toward non-Shakespearean concerns and exposed "the fragility of official Bardolatrous culture." (11) And, perhaps most importantly, burlesque was a central component to blackface minstrelsy, a form of commercialized popular culture that, as William Maher notes, appropriated elements of black culture with varying degrees of accuracy. (12) In his central study of blackface minstrelsy, Eric Lott argues that the minstrel show "brought to public form racialized elements of thought and feeling ... which Americans only dimly realized they felt, let alone understood." (13)
Within this complex terrain of burlesque, parody, and minstrelsy, William Wells Brown engages in his own performance both as orator and as stage performer, one who in fact performs both black and white characters. "The professional fugitive" writes Paul Gilmore, "was, in essence, required to embody simultaneously the social meanings of blackness and whiteness--to be both the illiterate plantation darkey of the minstrel stage and an eloquent defender of his race." (14) Gary Taylor has recently remarked that Brown, whom he calls "a professional orator, a black Lincoln" became a writer "after years of experience as an orator in an oratorical political culture," Taylor continues, quoting bell hooks, who says that for American blacks, "Coming to voice is an act of resistance. Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject." (15) Certainly, Brown's appropriation of and engagement with blackface minstrelsy's conventions in The Escape serve as a parody of and resistance to the heyday of minstrelsy's infamous popularity in America. Drama becomes a vehicle for Brown to redirect his audience's intellectual and moral progress. (16)
Shakespeare's specters inhabit the pages of many other printed antebellum works that precede The Escape. (17) The 1845 publication of Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life is one such significant work, yet we should remember that the use of Shakespeare in this work is one part of a wider cultural discourse that relied on the cultural currency of Shakespeare. Douglass's work contains three Shakespearean references, although only one comes from Douglass's text proper, while the other two appear in the front matter. William Lloyd Garrison's oftentimes condescending preface to the edition posits the first reference, interestingly to Shakespeare's Hamlet. (18) Speaking of Douglass's "stirring eloquence against the enslavers of men" Garrison continues that this eloquence brought Douglass "into the field of public usefulness, 'gave the world assurance of a MAN,' quickened the slumbering energies of his soul, and consecrated him to the great work of breaking the rod of the oppressor, and letting the oppressed go free." (19) This quotation from Hamlet is significant in that William Wells Brown returned to this same Shakespearean speech and drew from it for inclusion first as a chapter epigraph in The American Fugitive in Europe and then on his title page of The Escape. Both quotations come from Hamlet's speech where, after having killed Polonius, who was hiding behind an arras, Hamlet speaks at length to Gertrude about his murdered father, condemning the murder of a brother, a father, and a husband, while continually asserting his mother's blindness to what she has done (3.4.52-78). Garrison seems to use this quotation out of the context of the play's passage, but in capitalizing the word man, he draws attention to the humanity of the enslaved and the conditions of brotherhood as well as to Douglass's ability to protest against slavery in the public realm. (20)
Douglass draws from Shakespeare's third act of Hamlet, in Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" speech (3.1.83-84), yet he transforms the antislavery rhetorical appropriation of Shakespeare. (21) Before quoting from Hamlet, Douglass presents a long discussion of his resolution that 1835 would be the year that would decide his fate. He remarks at length about the fearful odds and certain obstacles of his proposed path to freedom. This appalling picture made Douglass and his fellow slaves (now adapting Hamlet) "rather bear those ills we had, / Than fly to others, that we knew not of." The text of Hamlet ends in a question; Douglass, however, puts Hamlet's words into a statement, one that promotes African-American perseverance and, above all, resolves to take action. Douglass seems to pick up on a passage in Hamlet that is striking in its close parallels of thought, and although Hamlet's lines "for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, / Th' oppressor's wrong," (72-73) are not used, they are even more resonant in their omission. Of course, Hamlet here contemplates suicide, considering whether or not to "take arms against a sea of troubles"; his conscience, as he says, makes a coward of him and he thus loses the name of action. We can see the parallels of the troubled psyche in both Hamlet and Douglass. To invoke Shakespeare at this moment, buried deep within Douglass's narrative, is a multilayered narrative strategy. Perhaps Douglass's continued delays of escaping are pitted against Hamlet's own continual inaction. Additionally, Douglass claims not only his own humanity in accord with the cultural icons his white readers would recognize, but he also claims that his moral dilemma is humanity's dilemma. Perhaps this calculated ambiguity allows for a certain desired uneasiness among some of his white readers. Furthermore, to a certain contingent of the reading public, Douglass's appropriation of Shakespeare after having the white endorsers of his narrative appropriate the bard in similar ways calls into question to whom Shakespeare "belongs." No less important, Douglass identifies himself as one who can quote Shakespeare, placing himself within the cultural theater that Hamlet occupies while effectively rescripting his own cultural role. (22)
The 20 January 1854 edition of the Provincial Freeman recounts William Wells Brown's series of lectures in Philadelphia, stating, "The very fact of one like William Wells Brown being able, after so many years spent in slavery, to lecture to his brethren on the above subjects, ought to give them renewed courage, and cause every colored person in the land to labour early and late for his own elevation." Increased activity and tapping into African Americans' reserve of useful skills and knowledge would, according to one African-American writer after another in antebellum America, allow their oppressed race to rise spiritually, culturally, economically, and emotionally. Such calls for the moral uplift of the race were strategically useful in themselves, as they promoted African-American activity and resourcefulness. (23) All races shared this common vocabulary of elevation, and "mind, morals, and the capacity to develop character merged in a vision of uplift that pervaded their thought." (24) According to Patrick Rael, African-American spokespersons "laced nearly all of their public statements with the language of uplift--of 'elevating' or 'rising,'" language that constituted a central conceptual paradigm through which northern black elites understood their world. (25)
How does Shakespeare fit into this schema of rising out of bondage to become a useful member of society? Various forms of nineteenth-century...
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