They Were Not What They Were

While studying drama at the University of Lethbridge, I took a range of theatre history courses. These classes included chronicles of live performance across millennia, explorations of international drama practices, cursory overviews of just about every popular theatrical style, and a thorough examination of Bertolt Brecht and his enduring influence. Despite the breadth and depth of my readings, the uncommonly competent and capable professors, and the many opportunities for further research, there was not a single lecture about blackface. So, in 2005, I received an undergraduate degree in theatre with no knowledge whatsoever of minstrel shows or the portrayal of racial stereotypes by white performers on stage.

In retrospect, this omission was a shame, given the subject’s long and multifarious history in Canada and its many connections to social and political developments ripe for scholarly study. An associate professor in performance at Toronto Metropolitan University, Cheryl Thompson investigates this gap in Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812–1897.

One of the first examples of a Black character intended to be portrayed by a white actor — and certainly the best known — is the protagonist of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, Moor of Venice. But while Othello is undoubtedly rendered in disparaging stereotypes, he remains a complex human figure, and it’s unlikely that the role was written as satire. According to Thompson, the earliest known comedic role performed in blackface was Mungo, a character in Charles Dibdin’s opera The Padlock, which premiered at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1768. The story is about an Englishman and his slapstick servant from the Caribbean, who sings and dances to meet his employer’s violent and determined demands. The drunken Mungo, portrayed by the white playwright himself, was met with overwhelming laughter and praise from audiences. The Padlock became the “second-most frequently produced drama” in eighteenth-century England. At the same time, it was performed in many American cities by touring troupes. Like several popular British plays during this era, Dibdin’s “closely extended the representation of slavery as well as blackfaced characters.” Thompson cites Mungo as “the most direct precursor to American blackface minstrelsy.”

From the earliest days of the colonization of North America, English settlers relayed many of their songs, dances, stories, and other cultural practices — including the portrayal of slaves from the Caribbean. However, during and after the Revolutionary War, which ended in 1783, many were eager to disconnect themselves artistically and intellectually from their British roots. Following the War of 1812, which further curtailed exchange between the two countries, “the quest for a distinctly American culture took over the arts, and blackface characters became increasingly caricatures of African Americans.”

Thompson explains that rivalry was a dominant trope in minstrelsy: between “a wheeling and pretentious free Black male” and “a comical and happily enslaved Black male.” These two caricatures were often pitted against each other onstage. The former portrayed northern dandies dressed in over-elaborate long-tailed coats, top hats, puffy shirts, and bell-bottoms, often posturing, pretentious, and sexually rapacious. Arguably the most famous version of this character first appeared in “Coal Black Rose,” an 1829 song by the circus performer George Washington Dixon. The minstrel character Zip Coon was beloved by audiences for the way he ridiculed and lampooned free Black men — a clear manifestation of the anxiety and annoyance that many white people felt about the prospect of unfettered freedom for African Americans. His name gave rise to the racial slur that was used for generations to come.

The caricature of a contented slave emerged onstage in 1830 in Louisville, Kentucky. “Jump, Jim Crow” was performed by T. D. Rice after he had seen an enslaved person with an appreciable limp. The white actor dramatized the man’s movements and put them to music. Thompson discusses this spectacle, which Rice toured around the United States, as the beginning of the widely popular Jim Crow character. As with most blackface portrayals, the effect of Jim Crow was to scorn slaves, presenting them as unintelligent, unskilled, and unworthy of freedom. It was one of many depictions of Black people as seemingly content without civil rights.

Throughout her book, Thompson challenges the notion that Canada was a refuge for African Americans, a final destination on the Underground Railroad. While it is true that Canada’s role in the Atlantic slave trade was meagre when compared to that of the U.S., slaves were bought and sold here. Many Loyalists fleeing north, for instance, brought enslaved people with them across the border. And throughout the nineteenth century, white Canadians limited the social and economic prospects of the free Black people who were arriving. Thompson quotes the American educator and abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe, who travelled north to interview former slaves. In The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West, from 1864, he described anti-Black discrimination: “This prejudice exists so generally in Canada, that travellers usually form an unpleasant and unjust opinion of the colored refugees, because it is usually strong and bitter in that class of persons with whom travellers come most in contact.”

During the 1840s, with the construction of the first large theatres in Toronto and Montreal, American drama companies found welcoming new audiences. At mid-century, “Canada West was firmly established as a theatrical centre for minstrel shows.” Then as now, much of the culture consumed in Canada was imported from or heavily influenced by our southern neighbour. But by the late 1850s, Canadian theatregoers would also have their choice of homegrown blackface troupes and ensembles that were setting up everywhere.

With Canada and the Blackface Atlantic, Thompson tracks the origins and progression of minstrelsy through to the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time, she details the growth of Black choral groups and concert singers, whose music espoused their right to civil liberties. In examining these contrasting performances — their style, popularity, origins, and social impact — Thompson illustrates how “White audiences were exposed to competing narratives about Black enslavement and emancipation.” Put another way, live entertainment both reinforced and challenged the dominant assumptions of the time about race.

I wish I’d had a book like this one assigned to me during university. It would have broadened my knowledge of Canadian theatre, while raising my awareness of other consequential misrepresentations in literature, film, and television. Comprehensive and timely, Thompson’s in‑depth contribution to theatre history provides us with a new lens for understanding how the stage both reflects and shapes our perceptions of others.