<title level="m">Othello and the Performance of Blackness <title level="m">Othello and the Performance of Blackness Author Shalom Reimer Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Shalom Reimer, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Race Blackness Racial Identity Othello (play) Racism Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best 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.

 Leah Hamby 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.

 Navarra Houldin 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.

 Kate McPherson 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.

 Shalom Reimer Shalom Reimer

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

 Melissa Walter 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.

 LEMDO Team 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 https://www.uvic.ca/
Actors and Blackface in the Early Modern Period

In 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.

As 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.

Other 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

Blackface 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 unteachable due to stereotypical black foolishness (193). With this known racist history, the oppressive nature of this theatrical tradition becomes apparent.

By 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

As 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).

Shakespeare 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. <title level="m">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. <title level="m">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.