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This article examines the success of Tommaso Salvini's Othello in late nineteenth-century America within the cultural context of that era, when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were perceived as nonwhite. It argues that, as an Italian performing in his native language with otherwise Anglophone companies, Salvini offered American audiences an Othello who was an ethnic (and indeed "racial") other in a performance that accentuated the anxieties attendant upon increased Italian immigration.
Traditional narratives of American theatrical history divide representations of Othello into two periods. Before Paul Robeson's ground-breaking 1943 performance, which at its opening received "an ovation that ha[d] not been equaled along Broadway in many years" (Nichols), this role was inevitably played by white actors. 1 In the decades following Robeson, Othello was increasingly interpreted by black performers until such casting became the norm. By 1997, director Jude Kelly had to employ the elaborate conceit of casting all the other roles with African Americans to justify Patrick Stewart's appearance as the Moor at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC. Peter Marks contrasted Kelly's approach with "traditional productions" in which a black Othello is "surrounded by a roomful of white faces" (E5), illustrating our contemporary preference for African Americans in this role. However, this perceived racial dichotomy, consisting of white Othellos before Robeson and black Othellos afterwards, does not fully acknowledge the ethnic complexity of late nineteenth-century America, in which immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were considered nonwhite. The nuanced racial definitions of this era help explain the cultural phenomenon of Tommaso Salvini. From 1873 to 1890, Salvini's was the most popular American incarnation of Shakespeare's Moor. Edwin Booth, the Italian actor's nearest rival in the part, effectively ceded dominance when he agreed to play Iago to Salvini's Othello during a series of performances in 1886 (Ruggles 321-24).
Salvini's experience may seem irrelevant to the racial history of actors in this role. Indeed, the very notion of a "racial history" may appear misguided in an era when most educated Americans agree with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that "'races,' put simply, do not exist, and [to] claim that they do, for whatever misguided reason, is to stand on dangerous ground" (403). Yet however misguided the racialist attitudes of Salvini's era, it is...