SOURCE: “Race Mattered: Othello in Late Eighteenth-Century England,” in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 51, 1998, pp. 57-66.

[In the following essay, Vaughan provides insight into the seemingly irreconcilable popularity of Othello among eighteenth-century audiences during a time of tense racial debates.]

‘When Paul Robeson stepped onto the stage for the very first time’, Margaret Webster recalled, ‘when he spoke his very first line, he immediately, by his very presence, brought an incalculable sense of reality to the entire play.’¹ That reality emanated from Robeson's status as the first actor of African descent to impersonate Shakespeare's Othello on Broadway. Because of his biological heritage, Robeson was perceived as being more ‘real’ as the Moor than a white actor in blackface. Robeson's performance in the longest-running Shakespeare production ever staged on Broadway thus revolutionized the way many people felt about its hero.

As public reaction to Webster's Othello demonstrated, a play in performance is both a maker and a transmitter of cultural codes; it is necessarily imbricated in the broader discourses that surround it. Shakespearians concerned with the history of performance must determine the nature of those discourses and how they shaped the text's reception and transmission. For the history of Othello, especially, the discourses inevitably include the messy matter of racial ideology.²

The received view of Othello in the late eighteenth century seems to deny this premise, however, and to isolate the play in performance from the broad context of English culture. At a time when the justice of British enslavement of black Africans in England and the West Indies was hotly debated,³ Othello's race and his relation to a white woman seem, in the eyes of most theatre historians, not to have mattered. Thus two contradictory discourses circulated simultaneously and, at first glance, seem to have had little or no impact on each other: (1) the pro- and anti-slavery polemics in pamphlets and magazines, and (2) criticism of Othello on stage in memoirs, acting treatises, and reviews.

Perhaps because Othello boasts a continuous acting history from the Restoration to the present, or perhaps because of its privileged place in the canon as one of the Big Four, there is abundant perceptive commentary about its early performance history. Marvin Rosenberg began his long and fruitful career with The Masks of Othello in 1961. His chapter on the eighteenth century argues that ‘a proper, neoclassic hero was aimed at’ and demonstrates how cuts in the acting text were designed to display Othello at his best and to protect the audience from overt sexual references.⁴ Rosenberg never mentions race per se. Carol Carlisle's thoughtful study of actor-critic responses to the Big Four, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, recognizes that colour had indeed created problems in the performance history of Othello but concludes that ‘there is no interpretation of Othello advanced by an actor-critic of that period [the eighteenth century] that might not bear the stamp of nobility upon it’.⁵ Julie Hankey's performance edition also offers a detailed survey of Othello's acting history; she characterizes the eighteenth-century Moor as ‘the hero-and-the-lover’ and suggests that theatre critics such as James Boaden saw little significance in Othello as an African; rather, in Hankey's words, ‘Othello was in their minds a hot and fiery southern gentleman in whom the qualities of an Englishman were not so much abandoned as exaggerated.’⁶ Gino Matteo is more emphatic, insisting that the issue of race ‘simply never materialised in the eighteenth-century theatre’.⁷ Even so astute a critic as James Siemon is reticent on the topic of race, asserting ‘the age's nearly universal insistence on Othello's nobility’.⁸

This reticence about the racial dynamics of eighteenth-century Othello performances, which is admittedly exhibited in my recent book,⁹ reflects the traditional sources. They are either silent about Othello's race or insist that it was not an issue. William Cooke, for example, anointed Spranger Barry as the best eighteenth-century Othello in his Memoirs of Charles Macklin because he was the perfect hero and lover. Cooke concludes: ‘those who before doubted of the poet's consistency in forming a mutual passion between such characters as the black Othello, and the fair Desdemona, were now convinced of his propriety. They saw, from Barry's predominant and fascinating manner, that mere colour could not be a barrier to affection’.¹⁰

In somewhat the same vein, Francis Gentleman's 1777 edition of Othello emphasizes that the Moor should ‘be amiably elegant and above the middle stature; his expression full and sententious, for the declamatory part; flowing and harmonious, for the love-scenes; rapid and powerful for each violent climax of jealous rage’.¹¹ In The Dramatic Censor, Gentleman describes Othello as ‘open, generous, free, subject to violent feelings, not, as himself expresses it, easily jealous, yet rouzed by that pernicious passion above all violent restraint; weak in his confidence, partial in discernment, fatal in resolution’.¹² Despite his expansive concern with character, Gentleman never mentions colour or race. Nor is there any reference to Othello's make-up or colour in Kemble's promptbook.¹³

There are, to be sure, some hints in the standard sources that Othello's blackness was sometimes of passing interest. In a frequently cited anecdote, David Garrick is said to have answered the question, ‘why Shakespeare made his hero black?’ with this rejoinder:

Shakespeare had shown us white men jealous in other pieces, but … their jealousy had limits, and was not so terrible; … in … Othello, he had wished to paint that passion in all its violence, and that is why he chose an African in whose veins circulated fire instead of blood, and whose true or imaginary character could excuse all boldnesses of expression and all exaggerations of passion.¹⁴

Garrick drew here upon the common assumption that people living in Africa, Ethiopia, and Egypt were violent by nature, whereas people from more northern climes were steadier in temperament.¹⁵ But what had been a cultural bias during the late sixteenth century became a fixed ideology two hundred years later when London had acquired a substantial black population.

James Boaden's memoir of John Philip Kemble echoes this received wisdom when he describes the actor-manager's Moor as ‘grand and awful and pathetic. But he was a European: there seemed to be philosophy in his bearing; there was reason in his rage’.¹⁶ Because Kemble was too northern, or English, in his self-control, Boaden implies, the actor never fully realized the role's emotional dynamics. The 29 October 1787 Public Advertiser echoes Boaden's assessment in its evaluation of the first act: ‘in his first scenes [Kemble] was judicious, but too studiously so; and though most critically correct in his address to the Senate, evidenced he was more anxious to do justice to the text of his author than the feelings of Othello’. The reviewer praises the actor's performance in the later scenes, but, in a curious aside, comments: ‘We much approve his dressing Othello in the Moorish habit … [but] is it necessary the Moor should be as black as a native of Guiney?’¹⁷

That Kemble's Moor was too like an African from Guinea (most likely a slave to be exported to the West Indian sugar plantations) suggests that, to some viewers at least, the distinction between the white actor playing a black man and the real thing had to be maintained. This may be one explanation for David Garrick's failure in the role of Othello—not that he was too black, but that in his turban and feather, he looked too much like the black servants fashionable Londoners encountered every day. The historian Peter Fryer estimates that by the late eighteenth century approximately 10,000 black people resided in a nation whose total population was approaching nine million.¹⁸ Despite the popular impression that there was no slavery in England during the eighteenth century, slaves were regularly bought and sold in London and the port cities of Bristol and Liverpool.¹⁹ The majority of blacks in England had been imported by West Indian planters returning to the mother country. Slaves, many of them children, often decked in special livery, accompanied wealthy white women, their blackness highlighting by contrast the mistress's fair beauty. ‘Given classical names like Pompey and Caesar’, contends historian Gretchen Gerzina, ‘they were dressed in brightly coloured silks and satins, silver padlocked collars, and feathered turbans’.²⁰ William Hogarth's ‘The Harlot's Progress’, Plate 2, satirized this social practice with a be-turbaned black child bearing the tea kettle to his mistress's table.²¹ David Dabydeen observes in his study of Hogarth's blacks that the boy's

sartorial elegance, his silver collar and his polite domestic duties (English ladies employed black boys to wait at the tea-table, to carry their fans and smelling-salts, to comb their lap dogs, and so on) belies the sordid reality of the servitude of naked and manacled blacks in the colonies.²²

Hogarth's engraving thus illustrates the context for actor James Quin's famous quip about Garrick's representation of Shakespeare's Moor: ‘There was a little black boy, like Pompey attending with a tea-kettle, fretting and fumbling about the stage; but I saw no Othello.’²³ As the hero of a major tragedy crafted by the National Poet, Othello could not look like a little black slave. Garrick's diminutive stature and exotic turban thus doomed his Othello. Eighteenth-century audiences sought a Moor, as I concluded in 1994, who appeared ‘as a high ranking, noble, courageous general, an English gentleman, represented by a white actor in blackface’.²⁴

But does this performance preference mean that, as I once thought, race was not an issue in the late eighteenth-century interpretation of Othello? How could it not be an issue when cultural anxiety about Britain's black population and the future of the slave trade was at its peak, when litigation such as the highly contested Somerset case of 1772 sparked a public debate about the merits of the slave system? In the 1770s, after the Somerset ruling set a precedent that escaped slaves could not be deported to the West Indies, allowing them to claim freedom on English soil, the pro-slavery lobby countered with loud assertions of Negro inferiority and bestiality, claims that blacks had a better life on the plantations than they would in London competing for scarce employment, and predictions of an English future polluted by miscegenation. By 1783, when a new influx of blacks who had served the Loyalist cause in America arrived to claim their promised freedom, public discussion of their status accelerated. A scheme to remove the black poor from London streets and resettle them in Sierra Leone won backing even from those in favour of abolition and was actually implemented in 1786, though to little success.

London's theatres may seem far removed from this political battlefield, but the same volumes that we comb for theatre reviews—journals like The Public Advertiser and The Gentleman's Magazine—published letters, reports, and reviews from both sides. The literate gentlemen who read such magazines probably knew Othello well, but perhaps it was to avoid making any connections between Shakespeare's moving tragedy and the reality of most black people's lives that they insisted on the Moor's nobility and exalted status.

Outside the magazines and other standard theatrical sources, there is admittedly slender but nonetheless suggestive evidence as to how Othello was constructed within the larger culture. His blackness, of course, was a given, so it is not surprising to find Othello as the name of a slave²⁵ or a member of an all-black military musical regiment.²⁶ That Othello married a white woman was also a given. Thus the white chambermaids who flirted with the Duchess of Queensberry's black servant, Julius Soubise (notorious for womanizing and other vices), called him ‘the young Othello’.²⁷ Othello was jealous. So, when Hester Piozzi reported the jealous quarrel between Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson's black servant, and his white wife, she called the wife ‘his Desdemona’.²⁸

More surprising is that literate Africans also used Othello as a self-construction when writing to a white audience. For example, when the West Indian pro-slavery lobby attacked the writings of the ex-slave Olaudah Equiano (who had gained a large and sympathetic white audience), claiming he was not African at all, he added this to the 1792 edition of his popular Interesting Narrative: ‘An invidious falsehood having appeared … with a view to hurt my character, and to discredit and prevent the sale of my Narrative … it is necessary [to]

Speak of me as I am,
Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught
In malice.’(29)

If Equiano, a passionate advocate for abolition, did not otherwise identify himself with Shakespeare's Moor, he probably assumed his white readers would make the connection and respond sympathetically, as they did in the theatre, to words from Othello's suicide speech.

Ignatius Sancho is another well-known exslave from the period. Hogarth's engraving ‘Taste in High Life’ (1746) depicts him as a child. Like Pompey with the tea kettle, Sancho is dressed in fancy livery with a feathered turban, serving—as does the monkey in the engraving's foreground—as a plaything to his fashionable white mistress.³⁰ But Sancho was lucky. Despite his first mistress's reservations, he learned to read and, in the service of the Duke of Montagu, he found greater opportunities to exercise his musical and literary talents.

In the 1770s, after Sancho became goutridden and incapable of further service, the Montagus helped to set him up in London as a grocer. From his shop, Sancho associated with many of London's artists and literati, including David Garrick. His letters, published after his death in 1782, quoted frequently from eighteenth-century writers such as Pope, Sterne, and Fielding, and less frequently from Shakespeare. In one letter, he adopts Othello's words and describes himself as ‘unused to the melting mood’.³¹ In another, more telling, letter, he jokingly speculates as to why gentlemen should ‘make elections of wide different beings than Blackamoors for their friends’. The reason is obvious, he concludes, ‘—from Othello to Sancho the big—we are either foolish—or mulish—all—all without a single exception’.³² Mocking the stereotyping of black people, Sancho chooses the black best known in the dominant white culture, Shakespeare's Othello.

Equiano and Sancho were powerful spokesmen for the abolitionist cause. After gaining their freedom, both constructed identities for themselves in the white world of eighteenth-century London, yet in their writings both display the double consciousness described by W. E. B. DuBois, ‘the simultaneous and sometimes conflicting awareness of being both a part of the political and social organism as a citizen, and of being a descendant of Africa’.³³ When they presented themselves to the mainstream culture, whether seriously or playfully, they chose Othello, a black hero constructed by whites, to speak for them.

Eighteenth-century publishing was, of course, controlled by white men, and it was through the efforts of white abolitionists that Equiano and Sancho's writings circulated. Would the ex-slaves have been as successful at being heard in other venues? Sancho's earliest biographer, Joseph Jekyll, reports that the grocer had a passion for the theatre and that as a young man, ‘He had been even induced to consider the stage as a resource … and his complexion suggested an offer to the manager [David Garrick] of attempting Othello and Oroonoko; but a defective and incorrigible articulation rendered it abortive.’³⁴ Perhaps Garrick would have arranged for Sancho's debut as the noble Moor had the plump grocer been endowed with Paul Robeson's voice and heroic figure, but it seems more likely that the performance would never have materialized.

I draw here on the distinction Dympna Callaghan makes in her recent essay, ‘“Othello was a white man”’, between ‘the display of black people themselves’ (an exhibition) and ‘the simulation of negritude’ (an imitation or mimesis).³⁵ As she convincingly concludes, the actor who imitates can control the image and its signification; the person on display, in contrast, is passive, leaving the spectators in charge of determining her or his signification. White actors impersonating Othello could—and if we believe contemporary accounts, did—reinforce the stereotype of African passion. If Sancho had been able to portray Othello in the London theatres, his occupation of a speaking, subject position would have been too threatening. This may be a reason, among others, why London theatres would not accept Ira Aldridge as Othello fifty years later. Joyce Green MacDonald contends in a recent essay that by being black instead of acting black, in a ‘self-authorization of blackness’, Aldridge ‘disrupted and complicated the economy of race in unforeseen ways’.³⁶ In any case, the distinction between exhibit—the thing itself—and imitation may explain why, as one historian puts it, Londoners in the eighteenth century could read about slave auctions at home and ‘sensational stories of revolts on West Indian plantations quite coolly in the morning newspaper, and then shed tears that evening over similar situations presented on stage’.³⁷

Although Francis Gentleman never mentions race in his comments on Othello, he repeatedly frets about indecorous sexual suggestions, something Rosenberg pointed out long ago. Decorum was certainly an eighteenth-century preoccupation, and most plays were emended or cut to satisfy current tastes. For example, Gentleman describe Mercutio's reference to the ‘demesnes’ that lie adjacent to Rosaline's (in Garrick's version, Juliet's) thigh as ‘a very indecent line of ludicrous conjuration’.³⁸ Though Juliet's contemplation of the loss of her maidenhead is removed from her ‘Gallop apace’ soliloquy in Gentleman's edition, the cuts in Romeo and Juliet are nevertheless minor compared to those in Gentleman's Othello. Moreover, Gentleman's commentary on Othello has a touch of hysteria about it that clearly contrasts with his sentimental acceptance of Romeo and Juliet's passion. There are, to be sure, many differences between these two tragedies, but I suggest that the impulse to clean up and cut loomed larger when it came to Othello because black sexuality and the prospect of miscegenation caused far more anxiety than sexual relations between two white lovers.

As Michael Neill shows in his analysis of the early illustrations of the murder scene, the figures of the white Desdemona, prone and helpless in her bed, and the black Othello who hovers over her ‘foreground not merely the perverse eroticism of the scene but its aspect of forbidden disclosure’.³⁹ Neill shows how fear and fascination at the idea of miscegenation lurked behind audience responses to the play's final scene. William Leney's engraving of J. Graham's painting of the same scene, commissioned for the Boydell Gallery, shows a diminutive, be-turbaned figure who recalls descriptions of Garrick's performance. The engraving also suggests quasi-pornographic eroticism encoded in black and white. Like the black page whose dark skin highlights by contrast his mistress's whiteness, the black Othello hovers in the shadows of the bed curtains while Desdemona's exposed neck and breast form the picture's erotic centre. As Othello holds the light in one hand and the dagger in the other, the viewer is implicitly invited to contemplate what will happen when the black man ‘tops’ the helpless white female figure and kills her in an erotic embrace. Leney's engraving encodes the spectre of racial intermarriage and ‘contamination’ incessantly invoked by the West Indian slavery lobby, a spectre that according to Fryer, haunted England from the 1770s well into the next century.⁴⁰ Though this fear was not articulated in contemporary theatrical discourse, Cooke's denial of its existence in his description of Spranger Barry suggests its power. Moreover, the spectre's widespread circulation in larger social discourses may well explain the repeated insistence that Othello had to bear himself like an English gentleman and wear makeup that everyone recognized as artificial. Reality would be too terrifying.

However contradictory this may seem on the surface, it is less a contradiction than it is a paradox of the times and of the history of Othello in performance. Returning to Francis Gentleman's description of Othello—

he is open, generous, free, subject to violent feelings, not, as himself expresses it, easily jealous, yet rouzed by that pernicious passion above all violent restraint; weak in his confidence, partial in discernment, fatal in resolution. [my italics]⁴¹

we find striking similarities with Hector McNeill's Observations on the Treatment of the Negroes in the Island of Jamaica, a pro-slavery treatise published in 1788:

The Negro is possessed of passions not only strong but ungovernable; a mind dauntless, warlike, and unmerciful; a temper extremely irascible; a disposition indolent, selfish, and deceitful … He has certain portions of kindness for his friends, generosity and friendship for his favourites, and affection for his connections … Furious in his love as in his hate.⁴²

Perhaps Gentleman's seeming silence about race is not silence at all; perhaps it is simply the product of shared cultural assumptions—that Othello's blackness and his jealous passion are integrally connected. This linking of race with character, temperament, and values is an incipient form of the racialism that flowered in England and America during the next century.

When theatre historians look outside the standard theatrical resources for the late eighteenth century and examine the personal and political discourses that circulated simultaneously, the evidence is impressive that Shakespeare's Othello was deeply imbricated in England's growing racialism. Race mattered to performances of Othello but in ways that were discussed only when an inviolable line was crossed; when stage representations moved uncomfortably close to verisimilitude—when Kemble was too black, like a native of Guinea, or Garrick too like Hogarth's depiction of the slave boy Pompey with his tea kettle—only then did Othello's biological heritage merit serious comment.

As theatre historians, we should be especially careful when dealing with texts that foreground volatile issues of race, class, gender, religion, or sexual identity. Eighteenth-century reviews and memoirs were written by educated white men whose prosperous standard of living often rested on traffic in human flesh; what they did not discuss may be as important as what they did. We need to ponder their silences and, as best we can, burrow in alternative discourses to understand fully Shakespeare's role within the cultural tradition.

Notes

1. Margaret Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears (New York: Capricorn Books, 1975; orig. pub. 1995), p. 179.

2. James C. Bulman proposes in his introduction to Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance that in contrast to the essentialistic approach to performance pioneered in the 1970s by John Styan, contemporary theatre historians and performance critics should examine how ‘acts of representation are implicated in the dynamics of contemporary culture and in themselves acquire meaning’ (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 1.

3. For historical accounts of blacks in England during this period, see Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society (London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1973), esp. chaps. 4-8; and Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), esp. chaps. 3-8.

4. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Othello (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), pp. 29-53; quote from p. 34.

5. Carol Jones Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 172-263; quote from p. 200.

6. Julie Hankey, ed. Othello (Plays in Performance) (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), pp. 36-61; quotes from pp. 36 and 49.

7. Gino M. Matteo, Shakespeare's Othello: The Study and the Stage, 1604-1904 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974), pp. 85-200; quote from p. 123.

8. James R. Siemon, ‘“Nay, that’s not next”: Othello, v.ii. in Performance, 1700-1900’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), 38-51; quote from p. 41.

9. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 113-34.

10. William Cooke, Memoirs of Charles Macklin (London: James Asperne, 1804), p. 155.

11. Francis Gentleman, ed. Othello (London: John Bell, 1777), p. 10.

12. Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor, vol. 1 (London: John Bell, 1770), p. 150.

13. See the reproduction of Kemble's promptbook in John Philip Kemble Promptbooks, vol. 7, ed. Charles H. Shattuck (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1974).

14. From Frank A. Hedgcock, David Garrick and his French Friends (London: Stanley Paul, 1912), p. 341n.

15. J. B. Bamborough discusses this English Renaissance conception in The Little World of Man (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), pp. 72-3.

16. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, vol. 1 (London: Longman et al., 1825), p. 256. Earlier in his career, Kemble produced an adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, called OH! ’tis Impossible; Boaden attributes the staging of the twin Dromios as black slaves (so that the faces of Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus could not be distinguished by the audience) as the reason for the production's failure (p. 33).

17. Quoted from The London Stage, 1660-1800, Part 5, vol. 2, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), p. 1016.

18. Fryer, Staying Power, p. 68.

19. Ibid., pp. 58-61.

20. Gerzina, Black London, p. 16.

21. See also Hogarth: The Complete Engravings, ed. Joseph Burke and Colin Caldwell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1960), plate 135.

22. David Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 114.

23. Cooke, Memoirs, p. 113.

24. Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History, p. 121.

25. Gerzina, Black London, p. 31.

26. Fryer, Staying Power, p. 87.

27. Gerzina, Black London, p. 55.

28. Hesther Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, ed. S. C. Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), pp. 136-7.

29. The preface is reprinted as Appendix A in The Life of Olaudah Equiano, vol. I, ed. Paul Edwards (London: Dawsons, 1969).

30. The description of plate 200 in Hogarth: The Complete Engravings identifies the black boy as Ignatius Sancho. Dabydeen suggests that the lady's seductive gesture implies the sexual role sometimes played by the black male slave with aristocratic white ladies; see Hogarth's Blacks, p. 79.

31. Ignatius Sancho, The Letters of Ignatius Sancho, ed. Paul Edwards and Polly Rewt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), p. 40.

32. Sancho, Letters, p. 191.

33. Gerzina, Black London, p. 63.

34. Sancho, Letters, p. 23.

35. Dympna Callaghan, ‘“Othello was a white man”’, in Alternative Shakespeares 2 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 192-215; quotes from pp. 194-5.

36. Joyce Green MacDonald, ‘Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness’, Theatre Journal, 46 (1994), 231-49; quotes from p. 234.

37. Gerzina, Black London, p. 7.

38. Romeo and Juliet (London: John Bell, 1774), p. 100. Gentleman used Garrick's acting edition which, among other changes, cut Rosaline from the play's beginning and added an extended dialogue between Romeo and Juliet before they expire at the end.

39. Michael Neill, ‘Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), 383-412; quote from p. 385. Paul H. D. Kaplan concludes in his overview of early illustrations that the ‘repeated selection of the murder scene at the end of the play reveals a taste for the melodramatic, and implies a reading of the tragedy in which Othello's violence assumes the most important position’. See ‘The Earliest Images of Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 171-85; quote from p. 185.

40. Fryer, Staying Power, p. 161.

41. Gentleman, Dramatic Censor, vol. 1, p. 150.

42. Gentleman's Magazine, 1788, part 2, pp. 1093-4.

My title is an allusion to Cornel West's recent analysis of race relations in the United States, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994). Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Shakespeare Association of America, the Higgins School of Humanities Lecture Series at Clark University, and the Shakespearian Studies Seminar at the Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies; the essay has benefitted greatly from the ensuing discussions and I thank all who generously shared their ideas with me. I am also grateful to Alden T. Vaughan and R. A. Foakes for suggestions about sources and revisions.