New Lows in Eighteenth-Century Theater: The Rise of Mungo
Titel:
New Lows in Eighteenth-Century Theater: The Rise of Mungo
Auteur:
Carlson, Julie A.
Verschenen in:
European romantic review
Paginering:
Jaargang 18 (2007) nr. 2 pagina's 139-147
Jaar:
2007-04
Inhoud:
This essay focuses on Mungo, the cheeky black servant in Isaac Bickerstaff's hugely popular comic opera The Padlock (1768), and what the rise of Mungo tells us about the cultural politics of ostensibly pro-abolition theater in the later eighteenth century. The first blackface comic figure on the London stage, Mungo foregrounds the popularity of “low” forms on stage (pantomime, farce, comic opera, rage for spectacle) and their association with “low” characters—marginalized figures with low cultural capital. It situates this rise within Cedric Robinson's exposition of the “invention of the Negro” or “inferiorized black,” an invention that begins with Othello and remains ongoing, to consider how eighteenth-century theater participates in this invention. Proposing that Mungo comes to rival Othello as the new comic image of black masculinity, it considers the bleak implications of Mungo's popularity on black character “development,” whereby subsequent black comic characters are invariably servile and denied erotic pursuits of their own and for their own. At the same time, the essay stresses the linkage in the characterization of Mungo that is at the heart of his popularity—spirited critique of enslavement and comic relief—to propose that, within the theater of this period, liberation of marginalized characters is voiced through the non-speaking, and thus avowedly illegitimate, components of theater.
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