Othello and Blackface (rebroadcast)

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Act 3, scene 4 of Othello, Othello tells Desdemona that the handkerchief he gave her was “dyed in mummy.” What does that mean? According to Lafayette College’s Ian Smith, it means the handkerchief was dyed black. In this episode, originally broadcast in June 2016, we talk to Smith and Ayanna Thompson about Elizabethan modes of blackface—which included covering a performer’s body with dyed cloth to simulate blackness—and how Smith’s insight changes how we understand Othello. Ian Smith is a professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. When we published this episode, Ayanna Thompson was a professor of English at George Washington University. She is now Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University. Smith and Thompson are interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Originally published June 14, 2016. Re-broadcast August 20, 2019. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Teach Him How To Tell My Story,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Ben Lauer is the web producer. With technical help from Tobey Shreiner at WAMU-FM in Washington, DC, Neil Hever at radio station WDIY in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Jeff Peters at the Marketplace Studios in Los Angeles.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sometimes your discussion about Othello and blackface starts out being one thing.
0:05.4	Then it shifts and turns into something much larger.
0:15.0	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:21.6	I'm Michael Whitmore, the Fulcher's director.
0:24.4	In June of 2016, we sat down with two professors to look at attitudes around the practice of blackface and the performance of Othello over the centuries.
0:34.7	But as you'll hear in this rebroadcast, the conversation moved from there to a much
0:40.1	broader and richer conversation of many topics, including a whole new way of looking at one
0:46.0	particularly important part of the play. The two scholars were Ianna Thompson, who at the time was a
0:52.8	professor of English at George Washington
0:54.7	University and is now director for the Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona
0:59.5	State University, and Ian Smith, who was a professor of English at Lafayette College in
1:05.4	Easton, Pennsylvania. We call this podcast, Teach Him How to Tell My Story.
1:14.6	Ianna and Ian are interviewed by Barbara Bogave.
1:21.4	Ian, I'd like to start with a story that you tell about the time you were on a panel at a Shakespeare conference, and it was about Othello.
1:27.1	And one of your fellow panelists kept insisting that Othello is not about race. So tell us about that and your reaction to that.
1:31.1	It was actually a seminar. So there are a group of us participating in the conversation.
1:36.9	And somebody asserted several times, actually, that Othello is not about race.
1:43.1	My sense is that he felt that this statement was supposed to be a corrective of some kind.
1:50.0	And a corrective in that people talk about Othello, being about race,
1:53.1	obviously there are a lot of references to race or to color,
1:56.0	and he was going to correct this simplistic reading?
2:01.6	Yes, I think on two grounds.
	...

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