The Black Presence in Shakespeare: Considering Sancho’s Legacy

Transcript 

Rebecca Cypess 

Cameron, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. I appreciate your time and would love to hear about your perspectives. I’m wondering if you could start by telling us a little about yourself, about your background as an actor or as a director engaging with the works of Shakespeare, including the sorts of roles that you’ve played and what your experiences have been like.

Cameron Knight 

Sure. Thank you so much for having me. I’ve worked as an actor and director for about 25 years, as a director predominantly in the past 12. But my work has been primarily in classical works in the intersection with diversity, specifically African American theater. As an actor, I’ve played the full canon of Shakespeare’s works, from Othello to Romeo, Mercutio to Benvolio to Don Pedro to… take your pick—a lot of the comedies, a lot of the tragedies, not as many of the histories, although I’ve coached and directed those more than I’ve worked on them as an actor. As a director, I’ve worked on the works of Shakespeare at places like Utah Shakespeare Festival. This fall, I’m going to direct Hamlet at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, and in my role here at Rutgers, I have a partnership with the Globe Theatre. So, a lot of collaborations there in London and working with the American Shakespeare Society and organizations that are committed to the works of Shakespeare. And a lot of the conversations that we’re having are about maintaining what we find to be universal and so exciting, and what got us all to fall into love with Shakespeare, with the world as it is evolving and changing, because his works did that. And I think sometimes we can put something in the mantle of “classic” and that somehow implies, “don’t touch it,” as opposed to, “these plays have to be applicable, and quite frankly entertaining. to the people that are consuming them.” Otherwise, we run the risk of it becoming a dated artform.

Rebecca Cypess

So you’re talking about kind of approaching the works of Shakespeare in a different way than has been done in previous generations. I’m wondering if you if you could share a little bit more about how you approach the task of performing and directing Shakespeare. Are you seeking to embed a critique in your work? Or is this more just sort of adaptation to keep up with the times? And maybe if you have a couple of examples that, you could share, that would be great.

Cameron Knight

Sure, I think it’s a little bit of everything. You know, I think each generation that works on this author sort of moves the needle forward a little bit. In the 70s and 80s, there was a big surge to diversify casting. There was a night on Broadway where they were doing, I guess they called “color-blind” Shakespeare at the time, where actors like James Earl Jones and some of the other amazing diverse actors were playing roles that they traditionally wouldn’t be cast in. You know, everyone knew James Earl Jones’s Othello, but no one knew his Lear. And Raúl Esparza, and so many other amazing artists that were remarkable, but sort of pigeonholed by cultural understandings of identity. So that moved the needle forward a little bit. And each year, each decade, everyone’s picked up a little bit more. For me, it’s more digesting the language of what the story is, and then seeing through what lens is best to tell that story. So the story of Romeo and Juliet—if we move away from, you know, teen suicide, which is important to address in that that play—it is really is a story similar to the Hatfields and McCoys, similar to our political agendas that we live right now, with people are so embedded in their beliefs, that they’re willing to sacrifice the people around them—even their loved ones. And you could lose generations, you could you lose family lineage, you could lose everything. And if we start to look at a story from that lens, then who in our society is best suited to tell it? Who’s most sacrificeable under the way our society currently works? We start looking at disenfranchised or underrepresented populations of people. That isn’t to eliminate one group of people, but to say while the adults in Romeo and Juliet are fighting, the children are suffering and dying, and having to grow up fast and make decisions for themselves. So it becomes less about a love story, and how do we see this play out? Now that all is going to go in concert with whatever the theater that I’m working with is willing to take on. You know, a production of Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare in the Park in New York will not play the same as it will at the Utah Shakespeare Festival for social reasons, just where they are. Now, I haven’t worked in Shakespeare in the Park yet—I would like to, so let’s like make that happen—but if you take the same play and move it across the country, it is going to be reflective of how far you can push that particular audience. And some can be pushed farther than others, and we want to be sensitive to that because I think sometimes we think, just, “I have an idea, and I’m just going to shove it down the audience’s throat,” and no one wants to be forced to a realization. No one wants to do that at all. So how do we guide them towards an understanding? And there are theaters all over the country, all over the world, that are taking some broad strokes and some that are taking subtle strokes that they can maintain an environment that an audience feels safe in, and challenge their way of thinking, so it becomes a bit of a balancing act.

Rebecca Cypess

Really interesting. We know very little about the presence of Black actors in Shakespeare’s own day, though some scholars think that that’s more because of the incomplete nature of the written historical archive than it is that there were no Black actors. What do you think that says about the written archive? And in the absence of solid written evidence, what role can the arts play to increase our understanding and expand our imagination?

Cameron Knight

Yeah, I think, in short, history is written by the people in power. I know some people see history is written by the winners, but whoever’s in power writes the narrative that maintains that power, and that can be racial, it can be socioeconomic, it can be lots of different—it can be religious. You know a lot of things are written just out of the Catholic lens, or Christian lens, as opposed to any other religious group, and that certainly has its impact on the arts. So, the erasure of a population of people is not surprising or new. What we’re finding now is that more and more artists are collaborating to look at paintings, look at archives, look at written data like you’re finding with your research was on Sancho, to say, all these people were here. And if they were here, then how are they interacting, you know? And there’s some excavating to be done. We know of the famous iconic ones, we know Nell Gwyn, first woman to step on the Shakespeare stage. We know Ira Aldridge, but there are so many people that are lost in the sort of the cracks of history. And that’s true across the board. We find that when we look at the scientists, you know the movie Hidden Figures illuminated a version of that story that we didn’t know. And that has happened time and time and time again, so I think, where the arts can really benefit, or help, is to start to shed a light on that and say “your understanding of how this world ‘should’ look—actually looked like this.” And the more we start to show people that it’s not only possible, but productive and useful and more accurate, people start to wrestle with their discomfort. I think sometimes we sort of jump on people for stereotypes. But the reality is that, in many ways, we’re born into them, so we don’t know it’s a stereotype until it’s shown to us. And when it’s shown to us, then we have to deal with this sort of crisis of faith, crisis of identity, and then who we are relative to it. And most people come out of that saying, “I wasn’t aware, but now that I am, I can make a new decision.” And some people dig their heels in and go, “Nope, the road has to be the way I knew it, and I don’t want to change.” And we’re always going to have that. But I think the arts really—what we talk about in acting, theater, performance specifically, is that it really gets to shine a mirror up against society and say, “This is who we say we are. This is who we actually are, and what do we want to do about it?” And I think Shakespeare’s plays— because they’re so universal and stretch the entire globe—have a real power in doing that, because it dismantles some of the preconceived notions that we might have, culturally or regionally.

Rebecca Cypess

So holding up a mirror, but also maybe asking us to imagine something beyond what we are now.

Cameron Knight

Yes. I have a dear friend who used to say to artists, “Who are you, but who are you also?” I really think that mirror metaphor goes into that—like this is who we are, but who are we also? As you were saying, who could we be? And some people don’t want to do that, and some people do, but the idea is to ask the question and then let the audiences sort out the answers.

Rebecca Cypess

The occasion for this conversation that we’re having is a set of discussions that we’ve been having over the past couple of years around this figure whom you mentioned of Ignatius Sancho. The correspondence that Sancho wrote was published posthumously in 1782, and it includes a very brief biographical sketch by the Welsh writer Joseph Jekyll. That biographical sketch provides very fragmentary information about Sancho and the theater. So the claim that Sancho knew the actor and theater manager David Garrick, who was a major driver of the Shakespeare revival in the eighteenth century, is confirmed in Sancho’s letters. He actually writes about knowing Garrick. More spurious, though, is Jekyll’s claim that Sancho had been “even induced to consider the stage as a resource in the hour of adversity.” Jekyll writes that Sancho considered, or maybe he even did actually play the roles of Othello and Oronooko, but he writes, “a defective and incorrigible articulation interfered,” as if he had some kind of speech impediment, and this is not confirmed in any other historical source. This is Jekyll, who didn’t really know Sancho, sort of reporting what he heard. But what do you make of this statement? What does it tell us about white perceptions of Sancho and the art of theater?

Cameron Knight

I think we still see that happening today. You know there are measures by which art is considered “good” and there are some by which is considered “bad” and that can be—you could take the same piece of material and put it in the hands of one group of actors and another, and how it’s reported on, how it’s reviewed, how it’s critiqued makes it a blockbuster or makes it a failure, makes it a flop. And I don’t think this is any different? We often lose sight of the marketing aspect of this, or the societal pushback of this—these kinds of things. So a theater or a theater manager may say, “Let’s put this black artist on the stage.” Is society ready for that? And a reviewer that’s not willing to risk their own career may write something negative. That’s a possibility. There’s also—there could be a—as you said, there’s no evidence of there being a speech impediment or issue. It simply could be, “I’ve got to find a way to express my distaste or my dislike of this individual,” which we see in the States here more and more and more now, where we just find a reason to pick on the person, and there is an “otherness” to characters like Othello—there certainly is an otherness to being a Black artist at any time in our world history. So some of it I think is political, just in terms of like how do we navigate this person? How do we prevent them from doing this thing? You know, in the American south, this would have been met with much harsher language, and possibly lynchings. So it all depends on what is the status of—or the cultural thinking of—a society, and at any particular time. Are they ready for this artist to step on the stage? If they are, then you can take the review as an honest assessment, because it is possible he could be a bad actor. If the society’s willingness at the time is one of resistance, racism, classism, etc., then the reviews are going to reflect that, in which case there’s nothing Sancho could have done to give a “good performance.” So as we bear those two things in, mind we say, “ok, without archives, without much information, we don’t really get to know.” But there are people who aspire to be artists who were fine for a performance and some that weren’t. So, without all the information what I would say is, it’s not surprising that a person would watch something new or irregular or uncomfortable and tear it apart, because that lasts long.

Rebecca Cypess 

Yeah, it’s. It’s an interesting piece, this little biographical sketch, because it’s celebrates Sancho in many ways, but also is obviously still dealing in many of the cultural and literary tropes and assumptions and stereotypes that were kind of pervasive in British society, so definitely a document worth reading with a very critical eye. 

Cameron Knight 

Yeah, I mean, one thing that reminds me of is, early years in actor training in the United States, there was a standard of speech called Edith Skinner technique, which was a book called Speak with Distinction. And what it really did was neutralized everyone’s regionalism, so they all sounded the same. So you could have a stage of diverse bodies and races and genders, but they all sounded the same, and it neutralized what was unique about the individual. So if you had—I’m from the Midwest, I don’t sound like it anymore—but you put me me from the Midwest with that flat lateral “a,” and you put someone from the South, and you put someone from Barbados, and someone from Northern California in the same room. You have a very diverse sound. But if the goal is to make them all sound the same, you remove everything unique about them. So that could be a measure of standard. He’s not up to the standard of speaking that the stage requires. And that’s another way to say, “you’re other, you’re different.” And that transcends race, it transcends lots of things. That could simply be, “I’m from Alabama and I don’t sound like I should be speaking Shakespeare.” Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Rebecca Cypess 

Great. Thank you. Sancho lived at a time when Britain was asserting itself militarily around the world, and when it led the African slave trade to an all-time high. Shakespeare was caught up in this, even though it was long after his time, he became a symbol of British might and greatness. And I wonder if you have any thoughts or if you want to speculate about how do you imagine Sancho might have experienced that that phenomenon? The kind of glorification of Britain, with Shakespeare as one of the vehicles.

Cameron Knight

Yeah, I think we still battle with this today, like the gold standard is Shakespeare. If you can do that, you know, people say you can do anything. I mean, people use it as a headline for their programs: if you can master the classics, you can do anything. And if that’s the measure that you’re being held against without what we would consider adequate training, it seems like you’re never quite going to be good enough. So you can either carve your own path parallel to it, you can fight up against it and take it on, you can seek out people to teach you and train you. But like I would imagine it could be quite a lot of pressure to live under if your goal is to be considered equal to someone, and the measures in which they determine your equality seem to keep changing. Shakespeare’s work is amazing, you know, and people talk about it in that regard, in that reverence, all the time. Even now I work with artists from all over the world, and the one thing we have in common is Shakespeare. What’s different is, you see everyone’s interpretation of Shakespeare, which isn’t the way even 15 years ago, at least in the mainstream. 15 years ago, it was, “let’s see this country do Shakespeare our way.” And, to be what I would imagine as a black artist at the time to get a bit of a singularity by yourself pushing against this, there’s not much room for interpretation or change, or even your own identity. How do you assimilate? How do you blend in? And you can really blend in so far because you’re always going to stand out. That can be a lot of pressure. It’s similar to my own experience as a young artist wanting to do Shakespeare, and no one in the room looked like me, so I there were certain roles I knew I was going to play, there were certain roles that I knew I would have to fight to get. And if I got the chance to play them, how well I did determined if the people after me ever got a chance to them. And that’s a tremendous amount of pressure if you don’t want to live up to it, if you just want to be in a Shakespeare play. And I think that has its parallels in all walks of life, across race, across gender, lots of things. But I can imagine the pressure of such a thing and that sort of scrutinizing eye that comes at a person when everyone’s measuring who you are versus this person who’s been deified in a certain kind of way.

Rebecca Cypess

Thank you. Starting in the 19th century with the actor Ira Aldridge, there’s a much better documented history of Black actors appearing in Shakespearean works. Do you see yourself and other contemporary actors as part of that lineage? Where do you fit in?

Cameron Knight

Yeah, we’re all standing on their shoulders. You know, I think someone said a long time ago, “I’m standing on so many shoulders, I can’t see the ground.” I’m forever grateful for the people who were willing to be the first one to do something, because it’s hard to be the first one. We talk so much about representation now, but when I was younger it—because there was Earl Hindman, because there was Roscoe Lee Brown, because there was James Avery and Avery Brooks (a Rutgers alum). There were all these different people—because there was a Paul Robeson—I never thought it was impossible for me to do it. I knew it would be difficult, but I think it was impossible, because so many people have done it before me. And it just goes back and back and back. So I do see all of us, as part of that lineage and—I’m quoting people without remembering who said it, so I apologize—someone said, “our job as artist is to take the big book that is the story of art in the world, and just contribute one line.” And I think we’re all part of this one sentence about what this this author means to us. So I do, I think we’re standing on their shoulders.

Rebecca Cypess

Lovely. Last question and really just an open invitation for you to add anything that you’d like. I would ask, what do you think audiences need to understand about Shakespeare and race that they’re currently missing, but really that’s just an open invitation for you to use.

Cameron Knight

Yeah, I think the big thing is that it doesn’t have to be a binary—that an author can be revered and write about horrible things. An author can be revered and write truthfully about the world. And an author can make things up, because Shakespeare did all those things. And when we think about race, I think sometimes we think of race in terms of ownership. And there was a time when Shakespeare belonged to a population of people, but now it belongs to the world. And the best thing you can do with it, the true celebration of it, is to let it continue to be something that everybody can play in and play with. I saw an amazing production. What was it? Hamlet. A few years ago. Where it the first time I saw artists that were otherly abled not relegated to the sidelines, but playing Hamlet, playing Claudius, playing Gertrude, playing the ghost, like telling the story. And it wasn’t about the tokenization of someone’s identity, it was, these are great actors, and they want to play these parts. I had the privilege of directing an actress who has become a dear friend of mine as Richard III, and I wanted to commit to using actors that are otherly abled in the show, not just as Richard, but in the ensemble. And when we sat down to talk about the roles, like, “what do want to do?” He was like, “I just want to play Richard III. I just want to play Richard III.” And I was like, “let’s just do Richard III,” you know, and not make it about, “look at what we’re doing.” You know, I think the more we can step away from “it has to mean something,” the better we’ll be, and knowing that it means something—when you put a body on stage, it means something, whatever that body is, the absence or the presence of something means something, and we are capable of the hard work and the difficult conversations. And if we can move away from not doing things because people will be uncomfortable, we actually will have a better artistic society, and possibly society as a whole. But I think this world of being just in our safe quarters is a version of segregation that we don’t need—not that there’s a version of segregation that we do.

Rebecca Cypess

Cameron, thank you so much. This is a really important conversation and I’m looking forward to sharing it.

Cameron Knight

My pleasure. Thank you so much.