Abstract
I owe the concept of the imaginary in art to Yoko Ono, whose works I have never seen and can only imagine.1 The depth of affection between John and Yoko, as well as their persecuted lives, qualifies them as the ideal imaginary English black couple, when that term is understood as responding to artistic intertextuality and as the expression of the cultural other among us.2 They represent the postmodern version of the Black Man and the Dark Lady, elusive figures of the English imagination from the Renaissance to our own time.
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Notes
If I read Anthony Gerard Barthelemy correctly, “several centuries of prejudice” have lumped together “at the simplest level … the other, the non-English, the non-Christian.” See Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 17. See, also, Joan Lord Hall, Othello: A Guide to the Play (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999), 18–19, n. 19. Ania Loomba argues, “imperialism was eventually to place natives of Asia, Africa, and the Americas in similar positions of inferiority vis-à-vis Europe.” See “‘Delicious Traffick’: Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern Stages,” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999): 201.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It is, with All the Kinds, Symptoms, Prognostickes & Severall Cures of It, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: Dutton. New York: J. M. Dent, 1932. Rpt. First Vintage Brooks, 1977). See “The Argument of the Frontispiece.” stanzas 7. 8.
The 1997 production of The Tempest at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., featured Chad Coleman, a black actor, in the role of Caliban. Stephen Orgel’s “Shakespeare and the Cannibals,” Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 40–66, has become the departure point for all modern conversations about Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Jyotsna G. Singh also considers The Tempest in a postcolonial context in “Caliban Versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest,” Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101–209. Singh comments that “the political message” of Aimé Césaire’s modern variation also attempts to “promote ‘black consciousness’ and rewrite the script of colonial history provided by Shakespeare’s ‘brave new world’” (205). See also, Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from the Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 108–109. Compare Tee Kim Tong’s “The South Seas Tempest in the Renaissance”
with Eugene P. Wright’s “Columbus, Shakespeare and the Brave New World,” The Mutual Encounter of East and West, 1492–1992, ed. Peter Milward (Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan: The Renaissance Institute, 1992), 89–91, 116–117.
See Robert Kinsman’s article “Folly, Melancholy, and Madness: A Study in Shifting Styles of Medical Analysis and Treatment, 1450–1675,” in The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 273–320. Kinsman affirms the link between black bile and the melancholic temperament in documents by authors ranging from Galen to Burton. Ben Johnson’s dramatic theory of the “comedy of humours” relies upon Renaissance commonplaces regarding the link between the conventional stage malcontent and his preponderance of black bile. Kinsman notes that associations of madness with the physical symptoms of frenzy were manifested according to contemporary accounts in “their casting about of eyes, their wagging of the head, … their ‘grinding and gnashing togethers [sic] of the teeth’” (201). These are as well symptoms modern directors and audiences associate with Othello’s epileptic fit of “ecstasy” (4.1. 34–81). See, e.g., Sir Laurence Olivier’s 1932 film performance in black face. Compare this with Laurence Fishburne’s portrayal of Othello in the 1996 film version produced by Kenneth Branagh.
Jack D’Amico contends in The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991), 187, that Olivier’s performance gives us a mentally unstable Othello, while Fishburne “plays Othello without any obvious character flaw.” However, I must argue that Othello’s illness, like Hamlet’s madness, is a symptom not of a flaw, but of the melancholia that afflicts an othered personality.
On the abolitionist conversation carried on by “The Little Black Boy” and “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” see David Bindman’s “Blake’s Vision of Slavery Revisited” and Anne K. Mellor’s “Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58, 3–4 (1996): 373–382 and 366–370, respectively. All subsequent literary quotations are selections from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., volumes 1 and 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
Henri Baudet’s Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man, trans. Elizabeth Wentholt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), 26–49, considers that the myth tended to privilege the “red Indian” over “the Negro,” although the “claims of the bon nègre were more venerable,” because they were “based on a tradition dating back to the manger of Bethlehem and on Europe’s respect and predilection for the legendary Christian kingdom of Ethiopia” (29).
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© 2004 R. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey
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Sumers, A.J. (2004). The Black Man and the Dark Lady: The Imaginary African in Early Modern and Modern British Writers. In: Black British Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981134_11
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