Minstrel Show Macbeth

Abstract

At first glance, Macbeth does not seem to be a very likely subject for minstrel show parody. After all, it does not even have any black characters in it, unlike Othello, which has elicited a wide range of blackface performances—both parodic and straight—into the twenty-first century. In February 2008, white British tenor Ian Storey, for example, commented in the Los Angeles Times on the various kinds of costume and makeup issues that have accompanied his performances of the title role in Verdi’s Otello: “It’s a really sensitive subject…. How dark should you go?” (Ng).¹ But as Patricia Parker persuasively argued about Hamlet, a play does not have to include black characters in order to be deeply informed by Renaissance moral vocabularies of fair and dark (Parker). More to the point of my discussion here, Shakespeare’s proneness to racial appropriation operates regardless of the presence or absence of black characters. What matters more to this appropriation than a storyline involving black characters is the pre-existence of a broadly racialized explanatory narrative of social relations, which is then mapped over the cultural currency of the Shakespearean text. Given Macbeth’s popularity on the antebellum stage, it was perhaps a logical site for blackface reaction. The examples I discuss here are not so much about putting Macbeth fully into blackface—I was able to discover the existence of only one such work, irresistibly titled Bad Breath, or the Crane of Chowder—as they are about Macbeth’s (and more broadly, Shakespeare’s) utility to the racial unconscious of the antebellum stage. Going dark, I argue, was often about other things than race, and helped bring other things to light.