Ira Aldridge in the North of England: Provincial Theatre and the Politics of Abolition

Abstract

African American actor Ira Aldridge, who toured widely across Britain, Scotland, Ireland, and Europe and is the first known black performer to play Othello in England, is the focus of this chapter by Theresa Saxon. She focuses on the critical reception of his work in London and in provincial theatres in the North West and how newspaper reviews of his performances reflected regional attitudes toward racial identities and debates about enslavement. Saxon describes how theatres, in addition to the Church and the press, were one of the central loci of the dramatization of arguments over the slave trade and abolition of slavery. Aldridge’s reviews in London papers, where his characters were almost always enslaved, were largely racist and even his defenders’ reviews were through the lens of race. In contrast, his reception in the regional patent theatres of Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster, centers of abolitionist activity, were typically positive and lauded. Although there does not seem to have been direct association between Aldridge and abolitionist figures, much of the critical praise he received smacked with the rhetoric of abolitionism as it focused on his skill and intellect to illustrate the wrongs of pro-slavery arguments of racial hierarchies.