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Page 79 We went reluctantly and came back sad.… Whether our Native friend juggled wisely or well in selecting so difficult a task we will not venture to discuss, but that he failed, in every sense of the word, both in conception and execution, we think everyone must admit. It is not our intention to expatiate with hair drawn minuteness on the demerits of this gentleman as an actor; let it suffice for us to observe that the performance was tame, languid, affected, tedious, and imperfect…undeservedly imposed upon a kind-hearted and indulgent public. (Mitra 1967:211–12) The anxious ambivalence that characterized reviews of the first performance has disappeared. The project is now “imperfect,” an infliction upon an “indulgent” public. As a subject interpellated within a colonialist ideology, Addy was always already doomed to failure. The Native could not speak, even through the garb of theatrical verisimilitude that “made” him the Moor. Writing about the Hindu Theatre, a theatrical outfit established by a Bengali bābu in 1831, a writer for the Asiatic Journal notes that Natives ought to “perceive the propriety of confining themselves to the representation of dramas to which their complexion would be appropriate” (Sānyāl 1997:45). Thus, the Native is cautioned not to speak for the white Shakespeare. Despite James Barry’s courageous casting, Addy’s Othello could not bridge the racial divide. Addy might well have mouthed the lines of the Bard’s Moor to speak his own burdened Native mind:
Shakespeare’s reference to the “base Indian’’ turns ironic in the face of Addy’s “failure.” The Native actor had indeed thrown a “pearl…/Richer than all his tribe” —his identity—into question, “as fast as the Arabian trees” drop “[t]heir medicinable gum.” |
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