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Shakespeare and the Minstrel Shows |
During the 1800s, performers in popular stage productions known as minstrel shows appeared on stage as stereotypical versions of black Americans, complete with heavy, stylized makeup called blackface. To a modern eye, the shows were grotesque and perhaps best forgotten—although many of the songs remain familiar today, including Camptown Races, My Old Kentucky Home, Dixie, and Carry Me Back to Old Virginny, the latter by the black composer-performer James Bland.
Scholars who study the scripts, playbills, and memoirs that record these racially loaded performances also see them as windows on American popular culture and society of that time. For example, as the late Lawrence Levine wrote in his book Highbrow / Lowbrow, minstrel shows often parodied Shakespeare’s plays, suggesting that working-class audiences knew the original works. Francesca Royster talks about these and other connections between Shakespeare and the vanished world of minstrelsy.
Associate professor of English, DePaul University
Minstrel performances and Shakespeare
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A 21st-century perspective
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Desdemonum: an Ethiopian Burlesque. New York, 1874 (?). Folger Shakespeare Library.