Blackface Othellos and Irish Melodies: James Joyce’s Minstrelsies

Abstract:In the latter part of the nineteenth century, transatlantic consumer culture celebrated two kinds of minstrelsy. One mode, associated in Ireland especially with Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, involved the reproduction of “national” melodies with the substitutions of Standard English lyrics and European musical style. The other, associated especially with “Christy Minstrels,” was that of blackface performance. Contemporary criticism almost always treats these minstrelsies separately, but James Joyce’s writings intertwines them, especially in “The Dead” and in Ulysses, where Joyce animates the punning play of Moore and the Moor: Thomas Moore and Othello. Joyce’s treatment of blackface minstrelsy--especially minstrel productions of Othello--as an inseparable counterpart of Irish minstrelsy produces an Othello-inflected reading of Ulysses as an alternative to the critical tradition of reading Joyce’s Shakespearean intertexts primarily through Hamlet.