They saw Othello's visage with their minds: Interpreting 'Othello' in the antebellum North (William Shakespeare)

The purpose of this work is to examine the antebellum Northern response to Othello with an emphasis on its interaction with major social concerns, including the maintenance of racial hierarchies, struggles with miscegenation, and definitions of womanhood. This study stresses the cultural, historical, and literary contexts through which antebellum Shakespeareans and popular audiences and readers viewed the play, with a particular focus on those issues which affected the interpretation of the characters of Othello and Desdemona. It also explores the popularity and politics of two major theatrical representations: Edwin Forrest's Othello and minstrelsy's Othello burlesques.; The era's interpretations reveal the strategies employed by white antebellum Northern audiences and readers in reaction to what was, for them, Othello's troubling content: the nobility of the title character, Desdemona's acceptance of Othello, Desdemona and Othello's elopement and their subsequent deaths. Shakespearean scholars such as Henry Norman Hudson, Richard Grant White, and Henry Reed utilized the innovation of the “tawny” Moor to distance the play from racial controversy, whereas John Quincy Adams rationalized the deaths of Othello and Desdemona as the natural result of their supposed immoral behavior. Furthermore, the reasons for the great popularity of Edwin Forrest's Othello and minstrelsy's adaptations of Othello show that white working-class audiences applauded representations which affirmed racial and gender hierarchies, whether through the presence of their Jacksonian hero, Forrest, or minstrelsy's racialized and politicized lampooning. This study serves not to uncover true meaning in Shakespeare's play, but to explore the interactions between Othello and antebellum Northern society.