Othello and the Performance of Blackness

Actors and Blackface in the Early Modern Period

Para1In William Shakespeare’s Othello, actors must perform race. In early modern performances, white actors played Othello, with Richard Burbage being presumably the first actor to play the role in 1604. Burbage, like other white actors who played Black characters on the early modern stage, wore dark makeup and wigs made of black lamb’s wool. White actors also sometimes used dark colored cloth or animal skins to cover their hands, necks, and even their faces. Burbage and other white actors thus employed blackface and masking when performing Black characters.
Para2As Ian Smith has argued, these techniques portrayed blackness as a kind of object or thing that is presented for the speculation of the audience (Smith in Bogaev 1). The key object of the play, Othello’s handkerchief, is also black in color. The black handkerchief, as Smith suggests, could also represent the black body and the idea of race contingent on the thingness of black textile (4). The black man’s literal embodiment is reduced to textiles on the early modern stage. Using these early modern performance practices, race became something to be put on and taken off in order to impersonate someone else.
Para3Other White actors who portrayed Othello in blackface or other makeup styles up to the early 19th century include:
Nicholas Burt
James Quin
David Garrick
Spranger Barry
John Philip Kemble

Blackface and Racism

Para4Blackface contributed to early modern race-making through comic traditions of blackface widespread in Europe. Terms like blackamoor demonstrate race-making and racism as, in the words of the Tide Project, England put colour at the heart of identity. For instance, a well-known emblem book (a sort of illustrated moral guidebook) from the 16th century featured the popular saying, To wash an Ethiope is a labour in vain, which arises from Jeremiah 13:23, which asks Can the Ethiopian change his skinne? Or the leopard his spots?. Robert Hornback states that the Ethiope was then understood to be proverbially associated with the ‘unteachableʼ due to stereotypical black foolishness (193). With this known racist history, the oppressive nature of this theatrical tradition becomes apparent.
Para5By the 19th century, blackface had become inseparably tied to enslavement and portrayed the systematic inferiority embodied by that status. Smith suggests that it is this type of objectification that is coincident with the economy of chattel slavery and denied personhood (172). When engaging with blackface, racism is undoubtedly intertwined, which has now made the practice unacceptable in modern theatrical spheres. As Ayanna Thompson notes, these performance traditions have deep implications for acting today. All applications of blackface, whether on opera stages or television screens, objectify blackness, denigrate black identities—and render the making of black-created stories that much more difficult.

Racism and Speech

Para6As much as race and racism are enacted through hair, makeup and embodied performance, they are also enacted through speech and language. Iago’s speech in Othello is frequently hateful and filled with racial judgements, but characters with good qualities also exhibit racism, for instance when Emilia calls Othello, the blacker devil (5.2.129), matching his skin and identity to the darkness of the devil. Emilia’s image can also be found in 16th century religious drama, where, as Kim F. Hall reports, regional mystery plays showed black-painted demons springing from hell to torment (white) humans (182).
Para7Shakespeare counters some of this racial discrimination through Othello’s speech and actions. Othello uses sophisticated language and is a great warrior who has been elevated by the Venetian state to a position of great authority, whereas Shakespeare portrays Iago as jealous and petty man, willing to act on immoral or evil impulses. Shakespeare counters racial assumptions of Blackness by giving Othello eloquent speech and high status. Othello suggests that assumptions of race are changeable, especially if one recognizes that Iago in his immorality serves as a dramatic mirror and counter to the tragic figure of Othello. These characters invert the racial stereotypes of this time, despite how the actors portraying them on stage might have appeared.

Key Print Sources

Hornback, Robert. Racism and Early Blackface Comic Traditions: From the Old World to the New. Palgrave MacMillan, 2019.
Shakespeare, William. Othello: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Kim F. Hall, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Smith, Ian. Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England. Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 2, July 1998, pp. 168–186.
Smith, Ian. Othello’s Black Handkerchief. Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 1, 1 Apr. 2013, pp. 1–25.
Thompson, Ayanna. Blackface. Bloomsbury, 2021.
Traub, Valerie. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Key Online Sources

Blackamoor. Tide Project, 8 May 2018, https://www.tideproject.uk/keywords-home/?keyword_id=40.
Bogaev, Barbara. Othello and Blackface. Shakespeare Unlimited. Folger Shakespeare Library, 14 Jun. 2016. https://www.folger.edu/podcasts/shakespeare-unlimited/othello-blackface/.
Slights, Jessica. Othello: A History of Performance. Internet Shakespeare Editions, 11 Jan. 2019, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Oth_PerfHistory/index.html.
Thompson, Ayanna. Blackface is Older Than You Might Think. Smithsonian Magazine. 29 Apr. 2021. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/blackface-older-you-think-180977618/.

Key Image Sources

Act 1, Scene III from Othello. https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/img139058. Accessed 9 Mar. 2021.
Othello: the Role That Entices and Enrages Actors of All Skin Colours. The British Library, 16 Nov. 2015. Archived by the Internet Archive, 20 Jun. 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210620223652/http://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/othello-the-role-that-entices-and-enrages-actors-of-all-skin-colours.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Shalom Reimer

Shalom Reimer was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Othello and the Performance of Blackness
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Shalom Reimer, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
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Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
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