I thank Eric Cheyfitz and Greg Wolmart for their help with this essay.

1. Scudder, Harold H., “Melville's ‘Benito Cereno’ and Captain Delano's Voyages,” PMLA 43 (06 1928): 502–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. See Delano, Amasa, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World, Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands (Boston: E. G. House, 1817)Google Scholar; reprinted in Richardson, William, Melville's “Benito Cereno”: An Interpretation with Annotated Text and Concordance (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic, 1987)Google Scholar.

3. In To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, Eric Sundquist points out that Thomas Wentworth Higginson, speaking to the American Anti-Slavery Society, noted the potential danger of a white man submitting his chin to the blade of the black barber (159).

4. I discuss the parallel to blackface performers later in this essay. I refer here also to the tradition of the black “signifying” trickster that has been documented so thoroughly by Gates, Henry Louis Jr (The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988])Google Scholar. Although Gates focuses on the trickster figure within a black vernacular (and not in white writers' representations of black tricksters), some of the parallels are remarkable. This trickster, rendered most famously in the tales of the Signifying Monkey, embodies an “ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike.” Further, the tales themselves are “fantasies of reversal of power relationships” (52, 59).

5. Melville, Herman, Benito Cereno, Putnam's Monthly (10 1855)Google Scholar; reprinted in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Hayford, Harrison, MacDougall, Alma A., and Tanselle, G. Thomas, in vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 115Google Scholar. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically and refer to this edition. Pierre Au-gustin Caron de Beaumarchais, “The Barber of Seville; or The Futile Precaution,” trans. John Wood (London, 1964); reprinted in Beaumarchais: “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro,” trans, and intro. Wood, John (New York: Penguin, 1964), 102 (act 4)Google Scholar. Subsequent references are to page and act in this edition and appear parenthetically.

6. Richetti, John, “Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais,” in European Writers, ed. Jackson, William T. H. (New York: Scribner, 1983), 3: 580Google Scholar.

7. Rossini's opera was only the most famous adaptation of Beaumarchais's play. The Oxford Dictionary of Opera (Warrack, John and West, Ewan, eds. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992])Google Scholar, lists 16 operatic works based on the text, 10 of which preceded Rossini's version (55).

8. Possible uprisings that may have inspired Melville's story include Nat Turner's rebellion and rebellions aboard the Amistad and Creole. For a discussion of the Amistad uprising as a source, see Karcher, Carolyn L., “The Riddle of the Sphinx: Melville's ‘Benito Cereno and the Amistad Case,” in Critical Essays on Herman Melville's ‘Benito Cereno’, ed. Burkholder, Robert (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992): 196–229Google Scholar.

9. Sundquist, , To Wake the Nations, 154Google Scholar.

10. Emelina, Jean, Les Valets et les servantes dans le theatre comique en France de 1610 a 1700 (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1975), 296Google Scholar, quoted in Dunkley, John, Beaumarchais: Le Barbier de Seville (London: Grant and Cutler, 1991), 27Google Scholar.

11. Greene, E. J. H., From Menander to Marivaux: The History of a Comic Structure (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1977), 156Google Scholar.

12. Howarth, William, Beaumarchais and the Theater (London: Routledge, 1995), 224Google Scholar.

13. Richetti, “Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais,” 573.

14. “The Drama in France: Classic and Romantic,” Putnam's Monthly 6 (10 1855): 406Google Scholar.

15. The “liminal” space is a threshold (“betwixt-and-between established states of politico-jural structure”) in which collective tribal ritual occurs. Such space affords the freedom to engage in playful, experimental behavior. “In liminality,” Victor Turner writes, “new ways of acting, new combinations of symbols, are tried out, to be discarded or accepted.” The leisurely rituals of industrialized societies are a variation of the “liminal”: designated “liminoid,” they are particularly secular, cater to specific segments of society, compete with other ritualistic phenomena, and are often subversive in their positing of alternative social structures (Turner, , “Variations on a Theme of Liminality,” in Secular Ritual, ed. Moore, Sally F. and Myeroff, Barbara G. [Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1977], 37, 40, 45Google Scholar).

16. Michael Rogin writes that Babo's spectacle exposes the conventions of power relations and, therefore, challenges the organicism underlying both the “natural rights” philosophy of abolitionists and the paternalistic justification of Southern slaveholding. Sundquist sees the spectacle as a mock benevolence that parodies both Southern and Northern assumptions about the docility of blacks (Rogin, , Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville [New York: Knopf, 1983]Google Scholar).

17. Kavanagh, James, “The Hive of Subtlety: ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Liberal Hero,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Bercovith, Sacvan and Jehlen, Myra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 352–83, quoation, 360Google Scholar.

18. Zagarell, Sandra A., “Reenvisioning America: Melville's ‘Benito Cereno,’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 30 (1984): 245–59Google Scholar; reprinted in Burkholder, , Critical Essays, 131Google Scholar.

19. The organic theories behind the notion of a natural aristocracy were also used to justify theories of racially determined, inherent inequality.

20. Melville, Herman, White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War (London, 1850)Google Scholar; reprinted with an introduction by Tony Tanner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 96–97.

21. According to Jay Leyda's Melville Log, Melville saw Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at Palmo's Theater, starring the famous tenor Ferdinando Beneventano, on January 29, 1847. He saw another production of this opera, again starring Beneventano, at Astor Place on December 24, 1847, as well as another of Donizetti, 's works, Lucrezia Borgia, at Astor Place on 02 4, 1848Google Scholar. Beneventano was the basis for the character Signor Beneventano of Melville, 's story “Cock-a-Doodle-Do” (The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891, ed. Leyda, Jay [New York: Gordian, 1969], 234, 267, 271)Google Scholar. In his 1849 journal, Melville recalls meeting a Mrs. Gould, an established opera singer and the wife of Napoleon Gould (a guitarist and regular member of the famous Christy's Minstrels) while crossing the Atlantic. He also recalls socializing with Albert Smith and Tom Taylor, two of the best known comic writers for the English stage, during his stay in London.

22. Melville, Herman, “Journal 1849–50,” in The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 15: 14, 31, 14Google Scholar.

23. Berthoff, Warner, preface to “The Two Temples,” in Great Short Works of Herman Melville, ed. Berthoff, (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 151Google Scholar; and Fischer, Marvin, Going Under: Melville's Short Fiction and the American 1850s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977), 51–53Google Scholar.

24. Edwin Forrest had won the favor of less privileged audiences with his out-spoken beliefs in self-improvement and social mobility; thus, the actors' rivalry, according to Robert C. Allen, symbolized a “contest between the democratic and popular native son and the aristocratic Englishman (Allen, , Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991], 59Google Scholar).

25. Levine, Lawrence, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of a Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 64–65Google Scholar.

26. Rossini's Il Barbiere debuted in Rome in 1816. An English-language adaptation of the opera, by the British composer Henry Rowley Bishop, was performed by the stock company of New York's Park Theater in 1819. On November 29, 1825, Manuel Garcia's Italian Opera Company staged the first American performance of this opera in its original Italian language; this performance was the first Italian-language opera ever in the United States (Preston, Katherine K., Opera on the Road: Travelling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–1860 [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993], 2, 102Google Scholar).

27. Although by the time Walt Whitman reviewed a production of Il Barbiere in 1847, it was already stylistically “old-fashioned” — having given way in popularity to the new vocal styles of Giuseppe Verdi and Vincenzo Bellini — the “familiar” Il Barbiere was nevertheless “always heard with pleasure” and its shaving scene in particular brought “infinite gratification.” One anonymous writer for Yankee Doodle, the humor magazine to which Melville regularly contributed, grudgingly acknowledged its lasting popularity when he complained of the “sing-songery” of the Barber, “which one has heard, one knows not how many times” (Whitman, Walt, “The Barber of Seville,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 03 23, 1847Google Scholar; reprinted in The Gathering of the Forces, 1846–1847, ed. Rodgers, Cleveland and Black, John [New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1920], 2: 350Google Scholar); and “Opera Bulletin,” Yankee Doodle 2 [1846]: 38Google Scholar).

28. Whitman, Walt, “The Miserable State of the Stage,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 02 8, 1847Google Scholar; reprinted in Rodgers, and Black, , Gathering of the Forces, 2: 310Google Scholar.

29. According to Katherine K. Preston (Opera on the Road), opera, from its European origins to its transplantation in America, had been an “ordinary component of the popular theater repertory” until, beginning in about 1847, those fighting to establish Italian-language opera in America had brought about a “slow but almost insidious expropriation of this musical theatrical form by the wealthy and elite of American society,” at the exclusion of “other social classes that traditionally had been a normal part of the American theater audience” (99–100). In her history of opera in America, June C. Ottenberg uses a telling anecdote to illustrate the dramatic transformation of opera in the United States. She writes that when Lorenzo Da Ponte (best known as Mozart's librettist) first tried to erect an Italian-style opera house in New York City in the early 1830s, the project failed because the lavish opera house, imported foreign performers, and Italian-language libretti were considered too exclusive for Jacksonian America; yet, a decade later, “these were the very elements that eventually gained support for opera from those socially elite … seeking class symbols” (Ottenberg, , Opera Odyssey: Toward a History of Opera in Nineteenth-Century America [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994], 61Google Scholar).

30. Odell, George C., Annals of the New York Stage, 15 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–1949), vol. 5Google Scholar.

31. Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. In his study of blackface performance, W. T. Lhamon argues that Melville's shaving scene might have been loosely based on Dan Emmett's blackface “Ethiopian Burletta” titled “German Farmer, or, The Barber Shop in an Uproar.” He writes that, though “German Farmer” included a scene in which a black barber cut a white client, the show actually elicited the sympathy of white, working-class theater patrons because it attacked the snobbery of the white middle class (Lhamon, , Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998], 82, 85Google Scholar).

32. Lott has observed that many Americans sympathetic to the notion of a legitimate African-American artistic culture, insisted that “Ethiopian opera” (as blackface minstrelsy was often called) was as American, if not more so, than European-based art. Though often apologetic for its lacking virtuosity, many antebellum music critics advocated respect for the minstrel show and an end to the European elitism that had dominated the American theater. Often these critics too easily confused African-American culture with its imitation by whites; nevertheless, their appreciation for the minstrel song, which was often based on actual plantation melodies, posited an alternative folk culture to the elite European-based music epitomized by Italian opera.

33. The French Revolution brought important changes for the theater when a 1789 decree abolished the royal theater monopoly and granted any playhouse the right to open its doors (Kennedy, Emmet, A Cultural History of the French Revolutionr [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], 168–69Google Scholar).

34. Reynolds, Larry, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 101Google Scholar; and Melville, Herman, Billy Budd, Foretopman, in Four Short Novels (New York: Bantam, 1959), 197Google Scholar.

35. Appropriately, Karl Marx used theatrical terms when he described the 1851 coup of Louis Bonaparte as an event that made “farce” of the preceding revolution.