Racial impersonation on the Elizabethan stage: the case of Shakespeare playing Aaron.(Forum: Race, Racism, and Performance on the Early Modern Stage)

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-07

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I

IF racial construction is a clairvoyant performance, the creation of a virtual human reality from another psychic realm, its greatest provenance will be in the theater. Acting, as the production of virtual persons, is predicated on another that will be fabricated, so that different sexual or ethnic lives are the staple of the industry of the stage. This symbiotic relationship between drama and the other, that is to say between mimesis and alterity, is what drives the postcolonial philosopher Michael Taussig, following Walter Benjamin, to assert that "the ability to mime, and mime well," which is to say act and act well, "is the capacity to Other." (1) Insofar as early modern racial discourse is a heavily colonial product, (2) from a postcolonial standpoint it follows, then, and is a neglected truism for post-structularist cultural studies in general, that the rise of racial discourse in early modern England is intimately connected to the rise of popular drama in the early colonial reign of Elizabeth I. (3) The multiplicity of racialized representations in the popular English drama between 1587 and 1640 testify to the onset of this otherwise unnoticed and only recently studied discourse that traditional historical acknowledgments have been wont to see as operating clearly only from the middle of the seventeenth century onward, most notoriously in the transatlantic slave trade. But while over the last decade and a half important analyses of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English racial constructions have focused on the figurative representations of race in elements of material texts and in discrete cultural formations, including language, (4) there has been little opportunity to examine the political dynamics of the literal impersonation of race onstage. (5) If, however, that has been due in part to the paucity of documentary details of racial acting in Elizabethan drama, a significant breakthrough for race studies as a whole in the period is afforded diachronically by the plausible albeit speculative data of Donald Foster's stylometric SHAXICON tests regarding specific roles Shakespeare may have played, specifically that he may have played Aaron in Titus Andronicus, as well as Morocco and Antonio in The Merchant of Venice and Brabantio in Othello. Unraveling the complex psychosocial transactions involved in such possibilities provide valuable new insights into the compulsions and difficulties of racial discourse in Shakespeare and his world.

The usefulness of the data produced by SHAXICON stems from its reasonably cautious methodology, and from its generally corroborative compatibility with the existing information of traditional scholarship on Elizabethan playhouse documents and theater history, and on the beginnings of Shakespeare's professional career. "Electronically map[ping] Shakespeare's language so that we can now tell usually which texts influence which other texts, and when," SHAXICON'S "lexical database indexes all words that appear in the canonical plays 12 times or less. (These are called 'rare words')." What this demonstrates, in Foster's own words, is that:

The rare words in Shakespearean texts are not randomly distributed either diachronically or synchronically, but are mnemonically "structured." Shakespeare's active lexicon as a writer was systematically influenced by his reading, and by his apparent activities as a stage player. When writing, Shakespeare was measurably influenced by plays then in production, and by particular stage-roles most of all. Most significant is that, while writing, he disproportionately "remembers" the rare-word lexicon of plays concurrently "in repertoire"; and from these plays he always registers disproportionate lexical recall (as a writer) of just one role (or two or three smaller roles); and these remembered roles, it can now be shown, are most probably those roles that Shakespeare himself drilled in stage performance. (SHAXICON '95, 1)

Applying this test Foster finds that in Titus Andronicus Shakespeare played "probably Aaron or old Lucius, or possibly alternating between these roles" (SHAXICON '95, 4). Additionally, SHAXICON indicates that in The Merchant Venice "Shakespeare seems to have played Antonio in all productions; but Morocco is a second 'remembered' role," and that in Othello he played "Brabantio" (SHAXICON '95, 3).

The cautiousness of SHAXICON's methodology is indicated, first by the fact that it has no knowledge of traditionally ascribed play dates and of Shakespearean authorship, and second, despite the test's confirmation of three roles traditionally attributed to Shakespeare, that of Adam in As You Like It, the Ghost in Hamlet, and Old Kno'well in Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, by Foster's emphatic (and subsequently repeated) warning that "this catalogue cannot be proven to represent historical reality" (emphasis added). (6) Although in the intervening decade since its release SHAXICON has been successfully challenged, that has focused mainly on its claim of Shakespearean authorship for the nondramatic text Funeral Elegy, which Foster himself has subsequently withdrawn. (7) But despite its controversial reputation, and despite being now regarded by some as a "moribund" study, and akin to "counterfeiting Shakespeare" (fueled, one suspects, by an understandable but unnecessary traditional humanities apprehension about the mechanization of things literary by the emergence of statistical and electronic studies), its method of statistically derived internal stylistic analyses of Shakespeare texts, particularly of "rare words," for deriving a variety of insights about Shakespeare's writing and performing life, has proven useful and drawn cautious adherents. (8) Overall, and without implying a position for or against the validity of SHAXICON's methodology and findings as such, it is possible to suggest that the list of probable acting roles for Shakespeare that it indicates is not incredible, because it is congruent with traditional scholarly knowledge of Shakespeare's early career.

To take as a case in point SHAXICON's indications about Titus, the uncertain history of the play's origins, between 1592 and 1594, associated as references to the play are with Pembroke's-Strange's-Sussex's-Chamberlain's Men singly and in combination (ignoring here the "early start" argument of E. A. J. Honigmann ascribing a late 1580s date, and the even more dubious but ingeniously constructed Oxfordian argument ascribing a 1570s date), does not affect the possibility and the significance of Shakespeare playing Aaron. (9) The conflicts and issues within that history all point to Shakespeare beginning his theater career as an actor and writer (as the Robert Greene, Henry Chettle references to him suggest), (10) for whom it is perfectly consistent to write crowd-winning lines/roles/texts that he could himself help to make successful in performance while seeking employment in times that were uncertain for both, the industry as a whole (plague years, playing companies' breakups and reformations) and the playwright in terms of his struggling beginnings in the London/Southwark performance scene. Traditional scholarship has already noted that Titus is one of the two early tragedies that seems to have been written to impress, in terms of the unusual demands it makes on its producers. (11) In the racial discourse of an early colonial environment, a key crowd winner is the impersonation of a racialized life on the stage, as is witnessed by the fact that according to the payment records in Henslowe's Diary Titus Andronicus was performed five times between 1593 and 1594, with the fattest takings on his lists for each of those occasions, including sometimes three times per week. (12) In what follows, this paper will not try to analyze how Shakespeare played Aaron and the other related racial roles or to prove that he did in fact play them. Rather, it will explore the psychosocial dynamics of what it meant for him to have probably done so. SHAXICON's findings provide not the proof but the cue for such a speculative exploration.

II

The impersonation of a racialized life is a preference on the part of the actor-playwright, and in that racial impersonation is primarily projective, striving to cast a perceived similitude of difference for the enjoyment of a kind of virtual solidarity. Irrespective of whether Titus Andronicus is a revision of the older Titus and Vespasian held by Strange's Men and given for reworking to a young Shakespeare seeking to show his mettle or is a fresh script composed by him with the same compulsions, and irrespective of whether the scripting of a black role in the play is the first instance of the representation of color on the popular Elizabethan stage or whether that scripting merely follows the seminal lead of George Peele's Battle of Alcazar racially played with such success by Edward Alleyn in 1587, (13) the writing and playing of race in Titus is a Shakespearean choice. The developed independent role of the doubly demonized Moor with the Jewish name, identifiable in no source but directly evocative of the additional racialization potential of anti-Semitic dramatization popularized by the endless success of Marlowe's Jew of Malta, is "peculiarly Shakespearian." (14) It is a choice with a particular psychic signature. It is indicative not so much of a knowledge of the black life or of a desire to know it as of a need to project it exploitatively to make it known, to render it usably into a larger social imaginary. At this fundamental level, racial playing is unavoidably implicated in an identificatory impetus, the gesture of oneness with the object of representation that is the quintessence of the mimetic act.

The cosmetic details of race's physical depiction on the Shakespearean stage, first catalogued by Eldred Jones, and cited recently by Dympna Callaghan, (15) aim at external phenotypical conflation, facing white with black, which is consistent with the "externalized" quality of late Elizabethan acting as opposed to the "subtler" effect of the later acting of Burbage as differentiated by Andrew Gurr. (16) The physical staging of the black life in Aaron, inscribing and reinforcing conventional traits of that life gathered from the morphology of popular Elizabethan cultural constructions such as the travel writings of Richard Hakluyt, Richard Eden, and others, (17) as well as from novel experiential encounters with the small but growing numbers of captured African populations in London, constitutes for playwright-actor and his protocolonial audience an enjoyment of the black other who with his "cloudy melancholy ... [and] ... fleece of woolly hair" fights to save his species against the imperial order that has enslaved him and in revenge busily plots its destruction. Carried by a logic of representative inclusion, the demonizing performance of Aaron functions obscurely as a kind of virtual solidarity with the marked-down black subject who is by that very representation added to the protocolonial English socius's circuit of visibility. For the denigratory impersonator and his audience, the "wretch-ing" of the marginal black wretch is acceptably enjoyable, in other words, because it offers to culturally showcase him in return.

At the same time, the obscurity and the virtual (rather than real) nature of the instinct of solidarity within the projective performance of racial impersonation makes the latter also racial critique. Critique is implicit in the act of impersonation itself, in that the act substitutes the real with its mimesis, which can become a denial and cancellation of the real and hence a critique of it. To ask, as Dympna Callaghan does in her seminal essay, why if there were blacks were they not used on the Elizabethan stage, (18) is to confront the expurgatory regime of Shakespearean racial acting in which the black subject can be re-presented but not allowed to present itself. A homologous instance of this is the performance, six years after the first staging of Aaron in Titus Andronicus, of the historical Mary Frith or Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl at the Fortune theater, in which she can watch the performance but not participate in it. (19) This is the similitude of difference that serves as a reminder of separation from the enacted product (beyond the instinct of solidarity and empathy with it), and thereby works as a critique of it. The contrarious mimetic reflex between critiquing re-presentation and projective presentation has been described by Alexander Leggatt as the distance between the early modern English actor standing "as it were, beside the character, commenting on it," and "showing it off," (20) which is to say, performing it. This is the self-pointing gesture of the Aaron actor's onstage likening of his "fleec[y]"...

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