In a previous post Hassana Moosa has discussed the costuming of Muslim characters in plays such as A Christian Turn’d Turk, drawing our attention to the uses of blackface and brownface as theatrical strategies for performing both race and religious identity on the early modern English stage. While here at MEMOs we are interested in encounters between England and Islamic worlds, I’d like to draw on my previous work on the Early Modern German Shakespeare project and focus on a form of cross-cultural exchange somewhat closer to home: the export of dramatic material and staging practices from London to northern Europe by travelling players. This type of exchange meant that English dramatic material – including character types and the presentation of their racial identities – passed into new cultural contexts and performance environments.

Plays from the London stage were taken by travelling English actors to the Netherlands and German-speaking lands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Unlike England, Germany did not have a tradition of professional theatre, so the skills of the English players – which included tumbling, acrobatics, dancing, music, as well as acting – proved to be very popular. The players initially performed their plays in English, usually in a much shortened and simplified form, but over time the plays were adapted and translated into German. Some of these adaptations survive in manuscript and in print, supplemented with records and traces of performance, forming a rich body of material that offers valuable glimpses into processes of cultural transformation, staging practices, and dramatic afterlives.

In this blog I’d like to focus on the use of blackface in two such plays, both of which were published in a collection of English plays entitled Engelische Comedien vnd Tragedien (Leipzig, 1620; see header image).

Eine sehr klägliche Tragaedia von Tito Andronico vnd der hoffertigen Käyserin

This play is an adapted version of the story that we find in William Shakespeare and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus (London, 1594), and contains a character named Morian, who is the equivalent of Aaron the Moor in the English play.^[1] The word ‘Morian’ stems from the German word for ‘Moor’, so it is not a proper name but rather a racial designation which comes to stand in as a name. An interesting feature of Tito Andronico is that Rome’s enemies (Morian, Aetiopissa, and her two sons) are not Goths, as is the case with the equivalent characters in the English play – they are instead from Ethiopia. In the German play, Morian offers the audience a lengthy description of his apparent fame as a fierce warrior and his secret affair with Aetiopissa, in addition to recounting how the Romans invaded Ethiopia and took them prisoner. However, despite hailing from Ethiopia, the descriptive opening stage direction suggests that among the other Ethiopian captives only Morian is black:

Also enter aetiopissa, the Queen of Ethiopia, who is lovely and white, [...] and morian, who is black and has a humble cloak pulled over his magnificent clothes (1.[1].0 SD.4-.8)^[2]

Morian’s part must have been performed in blackface, since his skin colour is described as black several times in the play, in contrast with the other characters, who are implicitly coded as white. This type of visual contrast is captured the ‘Peacham Drawing’, which may well be a sketch of a now lost play which might have served as the source for both the German and the extant English play.^[3] Later in the first act, when he is alone on stage and recounts his past exploits, Morian discards his ‘humble cloak’ to reveal the finery that he wears underneath. The revelation of Morian’s splendid attire would have represented visually for the audience his erstwhile high status in Ethiopia, but it remains unclear whether the costume was in any way intended to look ‘Ethiopian’ or recognizably ‘African’.

Figure 1: Detail from the ‘Peacham Drawing’, which has a complicated history in relation to both the English and the German Titus plays. Image credit: Wikipedia.

The actor playing Morian would most likely have used cosmetics to darken his face, quite possibly in conjunction with black stockings and gloves for his limbs. It is also possible that he might have used a vizard (mask) made of black cloth instead of applying cosmetics to the face. However, in Tito Andronico, Morian has a substantial speaking part – he delivers nearly a quarter of the play’s lines, an even higher proportion than the other principal characters, which might have made cosmetic blackface a preferable option, as it was common practice for such parts, and it would keep the actor’s facial expressions more visible than would a mask.^[4]

Comoedia von eines Königes Sohne auß Engellandt und des Königes Tochter auß Schottlandt

This play, which is likely a version of a now lost English play on the same subject, also stages a ‘Morian’ part, but does so in a very different way from Tito Andronico.^[5] Here, the Morian character is not a Moor at all, but rather a white character who adopts a temporary disguise.  Serule, the English prince, disguises himself as a Moor to gain access to his love-interest, Astrea, the King of Scotland’s daughter, by introducing himself as a true-born Ethiopian (ein geborner Aetiops, sig. V8^v). To achieve this, he puts on a black smock or robe (ein schwartzen Rock) and uses fabric to disguise his face (bindet einen Flor vors Angesichte):

Fig. 2. Stage direction detail from sig. V7^v. Image credit: Folger Shakespeare Library.

As suggested in the Lost Plays Database entry on this play, it is possible that the German word ‘flor’ can be taken to mean ‘gauze’ or a similar type of thin, sheer fabric that could be tied around the face (the LPD translates this part of the stage direction as ‘ties a gauze onto his face’). However, it might also be possible that instead binding the fabric against the whole face – like a rudimentary mask, as it were – ‘flor’ might be a more general reference to a veil, which could be draped around the face in such a way as to hide the majority of the wearers’ facial features.^[6]

In any case, this instance of blackface clearly relied on sartorial and textile elements rather than cosmetics.^[7] The play requires for Serule’s disguise to be taken off onstage; he simply pulls back the textile covering (Zeihet den Flor vom Gesicht, sig. X2^r) to reveal his true identity to his lover. This action needs to be performed quickly, so cosmetic blackface would not have been an expedient means of disguising the white actor’s body, because it would be too difficult to remove swiftly onstage. A textile construction of the ‘Morian’ / Ethiopian works more effectively to temporarily transform the actor’s racial presentation, thus offering us a glimpse into an alternative to blackface cosmetics.^[8]

***

While there remains much work to be done by way of making these types of German adaptations available in reliable English editions, the examples of blackface performances discussed above demonstrate that this corpus contributes usefully to considerations of performances of blackness in early modern drama, particularly in transnational contexts.^[9]

Title image: Facsimile title page of the Folger Shakespeare Library copy of the Engelische Comedien second edition (Leipzig, 1624), accessed here.

[1] On the origins and sources of Tito Andronico play see: Early Modern German Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew, ed. by Lukas Erne, Florence Hazrat, and Maria Shmygol (Bloomsbury: Arden, 2022), pp. 28-45, accessible here.

[2] All references are from Lukas Erne and Maria Shmygol’s Arden translation of the play, accessible here.

[3] On the ‘Peacham Drawing’ see Early Modern German Shakespeare, pp. 29-36.

[4] On blackface and costuming, see Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘The Materials of Race: Staging the Black and White Binary in the Early Modern Theatre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. by Ayanna Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 17-29.

[5] For a discussion of the play see David McInnis, “Magic Mirrors, Moors, and Marriage: A Lost English Play Surviving in German”, in Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis, and Matthew Steggle (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 215-31. See also the relevant entry in the Lost Plays Database: https://lostplays.folger.edu/King_of_England's_Son_and_the_King_of_Scotland's_Daughter Digital images of the play-text are available via the Folger Shakespeare Library.

[6] See https://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/#3, ²FLOR m.

[7] For a discussion of textiles and performance of race, see Ian Smith, ‘The Textile Black Body: Race and “Shadowed Livery” in The Merchant of Venice’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. by Valerie Traub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 170–85.

[8] When Serule is thus disguised, the speech headings for his character are given as ‘Morian’, reminding the reader that he now has a different identity and physical appearance.

[9] For a ground-breaking study of English, French, and Spanish transnational theatre and the performance of race see Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). The book is available for pre-order here: https://www.pennpress.org/9781512822632/scripts-of-blackness/