Parkman invited only a dozen or so guests to the dinner party. Some of the men were accompanied by their wives—but not Adams, though his British-born wife, Louisa, who had a strong interest in Shakespeare, had just joined him in Quincy, arriving from Washington the day before. She may not have been invited along because she was exhausted from the long trip; or it may be that this was one more instance of Adams’s conviction that women should not be involved in political or literary life (as Louisa Adams herself put it, her husband “had always accustomed me to believe, that women had nothing to do with politics; and as he was the glass from which my opinions were reflected, I was convinced of its truth”). In any case, he came alone and was seated next to Fanny Kemble. Adams was underwhelmed. He made an early night of it, arriving back home before eleven. The following morning he dutifully recorded in his journal that he had “had much conversation with Miss Kemble, chiefly upon dramatic literature; but it differed not from what it might have been with any well educated and intelligent young woman of her age.” It’s hard to tell whether his dismissiveness was due to overly high expectations or, as seems more likely, a failure to take a young woman seriously.
Kemble also recorded her impressions. She was shocked by what Adams had to say about Shakespeare’s plays, including Othello, so taken aback that she gulped down her water (and almost her glass too) and thought it best not to respond:
Last Saturday I dined at———’s, where, for my greater happiness, I sat between———and———. . . . Presently Mr.———began a sentence by assuring me that he was a worshipper of Shakespeare, and ended it by saying that Othello was disgusting, King Lear ludicrous, and Romeo and Juliet childish nonsense; whereat I swallowed half a pint of water, and nearly my tumbler too, and remained silent,—for what could I say?
Kemble doesn’t elaborate on what disgusted Adams about Othello or what in particular had reduced her to silence. There the matter might have rested, destined to be forgotten, like countless uncomfortable exchanges between ill-matched dinner guests. Except that two years later—in part because of long-standing commitments, in part because she saw herself as a writer—Fanny Kemble decided to publish a two-volume journal of her American tour, including her recollections of that evening. Its publication led to a storm of protest and excellent sales.
By then Fanny Kemble had married an American, Pierce Butler, who had likely insisted on her inserting dashes in place of real names, to spare those exposed or embarrassed by what she had written. But we know that it was Adams whom she speaks of here, because years later, at the request of a close friend, she filled in those blanks herself in a copy of the printed edition now in Columbia University’s rare book collection. And those dashes didn’t stop those who bought her book from filling in the blanks; even before it was published, as copies of her manuscript circulated, that guessing game was being played up and down the East Coast. If anything, the omissions generated even more gossip and finger-pointing. And everyone seemed to know that she was speaking of John Quincy Adams.
When in the autumn of 1835 word reached Adams of the publication of their exchange, he was mortified. Seeking either to help or to fan the flames, George Parkman invited Adams to write an extended response on blank pages of Parkman’s recently purchased copy of Fanny Kemble’s book. In his long entry, Adams blames “Miss Kemble, [who] appears to have misapprehended the purport of my remarks upon the plays of Shakespeare.” If she disagreed with him, she should have said so: “I hoped to elicit from her, either her assent to them, or some observations which might have served me to rectify my opinions.” Parkman, with Adams’s permission, took Adams’s essay to the publisher of the New England Magazine, where it was immediately printed, stripped of its opening and closing remarks about Fanny Kemble.
Though the essay was only signed “A,” it was clear to many that its author was the former president, and his views were harshly condemned in the press. Adams was stung. What had begun as “a merely casual and very desultory conversation with Miss Fanny Kemble” had now gone national. The critic for the Philadelphia National Gazette refused to accept his claim that Othello was black, arguing that Adams had racialized the play in a way that Shakespeare hadn’t intended: “Othello should not be so conceived, either as a Negro or Ethiop, but as Shakespeare took him from the Spanish poetry of the day, . . . a Moorish Chieftain.” And while warmly agreeing with Adams that “it would seem, then, that Shakespeare was, even in his day, a firm Anti-Amalgamationist,” the chivalric Virginian reviewer for the Alexandria Gazette felt that Adams had nonetheless unfairly defamed “one of the best and purest of Shakespeare’s female characters.” Adams now felt attacked from both sides, a not unfamiliar position for the cautious former president. He was sufficiently self-aware to know that his subsequent long essay on Desdemona and her love for Othello was a tedious and “self-defensive dissertation,” but he couldn’t hold back, and agreed to have it published under his initials.
While his attack was directed against amalgamation, it focused less on Othello than on the headstrong white woman who desires him. Adams parts company with those who saw the greater threat of interracial mingling stemming from the fantasy of hypersexualized black men, from whom white daughters had to be protected. In this respect, the essay does double duty for Adams: Shakespeare’s play confirmed both his deep anxiety about the dangers of mixing the races as well as the threat posed by disobedient women. His own long marriage to a wife who had proved indispensable to his political success had done little to soften Adams’s views. Ironically, and almost surely unknown to him at the time, the very month that Adams would write on Othello, his wife, Louisa, would comment on the play herself in her own private diary, reflecting on “the petty spite” and “degrading littleness” of “political life” that produces “the Iago-like attack of smooth’d faced hypocrites” who “wear the mask of friendship, to stab more securely the victims whom they assail.” We don’t know enough about what was by all accounts a strained relationship to speculate about how his essay on Desdemona’s character indirectly touches upon Adams’s own marriage.
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IT TURNS OUT that John Quincy Adams had brooded about Othello, race, and Desdemona’s unnatural desires back in his undergraduate days at Harvard—which may explain why he so strenuously rejected the charge that what he thought about Desdemona’s marriage was “criticism of 1835.” In 1786 Massachusetts reenacted its law against racial intermarriage (which dated to 1705) while eliminating prohibitions against interracial fornication (to protect white men who had sex with black women outside the bounds of wedlock). That same year a nineteen-year-old John Quincy Adams chose to speak about Othello to fellow members of his Harvard club. In that address he tried out some of the arguments to which he would later return. Even as an undergraduate he refused to accept the popular view that Othello was “the most perfect of all” of Shakespeare’s plays; it couldn’t be, because the “very foundation upon which the whole fabric is erected appears injudicious, disgusting, and contrary to all probability.” He doesn’t elaborate on what he means by “disgusting,” though it’s not hard to guess. The young Adams also found it unbelievable that the senators of Venice would trust the state in the hands of Othello and didn’t think it “natural that a young lady so virtuous and chaste as Desdemona is represented would, as Brabantio expresses it, ‘Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom of such a thing as him, to fear, not to delight.’” Even then, the greater share of blame is shouldered by Desdemona.
In September 1785, the year before young Adams delivered this speech, his parents, Abigail and John Adams, saw Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble, Fanny Kemble’s aunt and uncle, star as Desdemona and Othello on the London stage. A letter that Abigail Adams wrote to her son about it gives some sense of how thrilling she found the production: “I did not go into fits, nor swoon, but I never was so much pleased with any person I ever saw upon any theatre.” Other than saying that she would have preferred
seeing Siddons play a role other than Desdemona, Abigail Adams never mentions race in her letter and there’s no record of any other conversation between mother and son about Othello.
Yet when Abigail Adams wrote to everyone else about this performance of Othello, her letters were all about her deep discomfort with watching a black man fondling a white woman (even though she knew that it was a white actor playing Othello in blackface). She wrote to her sister Elizabeth Smith Shaw that “I lost much of the pleasure of the play, from the sooty appearance of the Moor. Perhaps it may be early prejudice; but I could not separate the African color from the man, nor prevent that disgust and horror which filled my mind every time I saw him touch the gentle Desdemona.” She was even more explicit about her ambivalence when she wrote to her son-in-law, William Stephens Smith. I’ve included in this original-spelling transcription the cross-outs and second thoughts that convey her agitation:
I was last Evening however at Drury Lane and Saw for the first time Mrs. Siddons. Grace was in all her steps heaven in her Eye And every Gesture dignity and Love. She appeard in the tradegy of Othello, and acted the part of Desdemona. Othello was represented blacker than any affrican. Whether it arises from the prejudices of Education or from a real natural antipathy I cannot determine, but my whole soul shuderd when ever I saw the sooty
Abigail Adams here gets at the heart of the problem: was her unease in watching a black man “touch the fair Desdemona” a “natural antipathy” or something learned or taught, “the prejudices of Education”? Though she doesn’t answer that question, it’s an extraordinarily honest response; as someone who strenuously opposed slavery, Abigail Adams’s revulsion, whatever its source, clearly made her feel uncomfortable. Her self-doubt stands in sharp contrast with the reaction to the play of her eldest son, who never questioned his own disgust at reading about or watching an interracial couple touching each other: he knew it was a violation of natural law.
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WHEN IN 1834 Fanny Kemble left the stage and married Pierce Butler (who had pursued her during her American tour), she had not understood that much of the Butler family fortune derived from a slave plantation in Georgia, the second largest in the state, which her husband inherited two years after their wedding. Fanny Kemble was now mistress to more than six hundred slaves. At the end of December 1838, she traveled with her husband and their two young daughters from their home in Philadelphia to the plantation on Butler Island, Georgia, where they resided until May. What she saw there of slavery and the sexual exploitation of black women she found horrific, and it would help destroy an already crumbling marriage.
Kemble kept a journal on this trip too, in the form of long letters to a friend in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Dwight Sedgwick. In the entry for January 1839 she describes the visit of a slave named Morris, who wished to be baptized. Her account turned from his features to generalizations about “a certain African tribe from which the West Indian slave market is chiefly recruited, who have these same characteristic features. . . . They are a tall, powerful people, with remarkably fine figures, regular features, and a singularly warlike and fierce disposition.” It was a description that led her in turn to the imagined racial characteristics of Shakespeare’s tragic hero: “I do not think Morris, however, could have belonged to this tribe, though perhaps Othello did, which would at once settle the difficulties of those commentators who, abiding by Iago’s very disagreeable suggestions as to his purely African appearance, are painfully compelled to forego the mitigation of supposing him a Moor and not a negro.”
Her reflections on Othello as a black man (rather than a lighter-skinned Moor) led her back to her conversation on that topic with John Quincy Adams. “Did I ever tell you of my dining in Boston . . . and sitting by Mr. John Quincy Adams, who, talking to me about Desdemona, assured me, with a most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he considered all her misfortunes as a very just judgment upon her for having married a ‘nigger?’” That last word, which she indicates is quoted verbatim, comes as a shock. It may well explain why a stunned Fanny Kemble kept gulping her water and was reduced to silence. Still, it’s hard to believe that a leading abolitionist and one of the best educated men of his day really spoke of Othello in this way. Did people in Boston at the time even use that word? Apparently, they did. To cite but a pair of examples: a British author, William Faux, visiting Boston in February 1819, writes that the “contempt of poor blacks, or niggers, as they are called, seems the national sin of America,” and in the early 1830s the Massachusetts abolitionist Lydia Maria Child described how “the very boys of this republic would dog [the] footsteps” even of “a colored man with the dress and deportment of a gentleman” with “the vulgar outcry of ‘Nigger! Nigger!’”
Kemble’s recollection of Adams’s remarks led to additional and sardonic thoughts about the play and slave culture in America. Why don’t American productions just come out and, with a slight edit, say what their audiences privately think about Othello? In proposing this, she shows an actor’s ear for the sneering ways in which the word was uttered in the slaveholding South:
I think, if some ingenious American actor of the present day, bent upon realizing Shakespeare’s finest conceptions, with all the advantages of modern enlightenment, could contrive to slip in that opprobrious title, with a true South Carolinian anti-abolitionist expression, it might really be made quite a point for Iago, as, for instance, in his first soliloquy—“I hate the nigger,” given in proper Charleston or Savannah fashion, I am sure would tell far better than “I hate the Moor.”
For Adams, marriage between blacks and whites was largely theoretical; he may never have met an interracial couple, or, if he did, never acknowledged it. But for Kemble, the fruits of amalgamation were visible everywhere she turned in Georgia.
Kemble wryly notes that while her husband railed against sexual relations between whites and blacks, anyone could see that masters and overseers engaged in sex with enslaved women: “I cannot help being astonished at the furious and ungoverned execration which all reference to the possibility of a fusion of the races draws down upon those who suggest it; because nobody pretends to deny that, throughout the South, a large proportion of the population is the offspring of white men and coloured women.” She then demolishes the claim men like her husband and Adams made that amalgamation was against natural law. If it were truly unnatural, why are laws needed to prohibit it? If so monstrous, why are all these white men busily impregnating black women?
After her four-month stay in Georgia, Fanny Kemble never returned to the plantation. She separated from her husband, finally divorced him in 1849, and returned to the London stage (where, for the first time, she played Desdemona, and deliberately broke from tradition, resolving, as she put it, to make “a desperate fight of it” in the “smothering scene” rather than “acquiesce with wonderful equanimity,” as her predecessors in the role had done). Butler retained custody of their daughters and used that leverage to delay the publication of her journal about life on the plantation.
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LONG BEFORE MOST AMERICANS, Adams had a keen sense of where slavery, tolerated and indeed practiced by many of the nation’s founders, would inexorably lead. Because of this, Othello meant something quite different for him than it had for his father, John Adams, America’s second president, who though not
a slave owner himself, and against slavery on principle, tolerated it, as others did, because it was politically expedient to do so. Back in the 1760s, a 33-year-old John Adams, still making his way in the world, could even liken his own unsettled life to Othello’s—“a life of here and everywhere, to use the expression, that is applied to Othello, by Desdemona’s father. Here and there and everywhere, a rambling, roving, vagrant, vagabond life.” For John Adams, in these pre–Revolutionary War days, Othello’s blackness doesn’t even register; for his son, whose generation inherited the problem of slavery, it was all that mattered.
In 1820 John Quincy Adams reconstructed in his journal a cordial conversation he had had with John C. Calhoun, secretary of war and a staunch defender of slavery, over what emancipation would mean for America. The two played out the moves. Abolish slavery, Calhoun said, and the South would immediately break with the North and ally itself with Great Britain. When Adams pointed out that this meant “returning to the colonial state,” to his surprise Calhoun agreed, saying that this departure would have been forced on the South. A naval blockade of the North would follow, then undoubtedly an invasion of the South and a bloody civil war. Neither man could see further than that—though both recognized that the abolition of slavery would mean the end of the compromise that had resulted in the United States of America. While he “pressed the conversation no further,” Adams reflected in his journal what might follow a “universal emancipation of the slaves”: “the extirpation of the African race on this continent, by the gradually bleaching process of intermixture, where the white portion is already so predominant.” How Adams felt about the possibility of this “bleaching” and a fully interracial nation is not recorded, but the context suggests that it was undesirable. It would be the only time in his voluminous journal entries that he broached the issue of amalgamation.
Shakespeare in a Divided America Page 4
