ABSTRACT

This chapter explores controversial instance of blackface: a rewriting of Shakespeare's tragedy Othello by Thomas Dartmouth Rice. Titled Otello, A Burlesque Opera, it was first performed in Philadelphia in 1844, and frequently thereafter for about a decade. By the 1830s, Shakespearean burlesque was highly popular and commercially successful on both sides of the Atlantic. T. D. Rice modeled his burlesque of Othello on a previous one written by Maurice Dowling, first performed in Liverpool, and then at the Strand Theatre in London in 1836. Obviously, the success of Shakespearean burlesque as a genre has much to do with the well-charted bardolatry of the Victorian era. Considered as a literary and dramatic form, however, burlesque does more than simply up-end bardolatry. In short, like any burlesque of Shakespeare, Otello is a hybrid, a mixture that subversively overrides categorical distinctions between original and copy, authentic and spurious, elite and popular, tragic and comic.