E3W Literature | University of Texas

Martin Hoyles
Ira Aldridge: Celebrated 19th Century Actor
Hansib Publishing, 2008
104 pages
£8.99

Reviewed by Aména Moïnfar

In nineteenth-century Europe, the most famous Shakespearean actor happened to be a free American Black named Ira Aldridge. His realistic approach to the Shakespearean repertoire and in particular his interpretation of characters such as Othello, Shylock, and King Lear captivated the European audience that rushed to each of his performances. Rapidly nicknamed the “African Roscius,” Aldridge toured continental and even Eastern Europe. His first performance in Belgrade corresponded to the first time Shakespeare was performed in Serbia. In Russia, his performance as Othello galvanized audiences and French author and critic Théophile Gauthier, who visited St. Petersburg at the time of Aldridge’s apogée and wrote a dithyrambic review of the actor’s performance.

Memory sites that attest to Aldridge’s presence and recognition punctuate European theatres. Examples include a seat commemorating him in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and a plaque in the National Theatre in Belgrade dedicated to the “African Roscius.” Polish and Russian audiences identified with his realistic performances that inspired new schools of acting, especially in Russia. However, after his death, Aldridge would be “forgotten” from most anthologies dedicated to nineteenth century theatre in Europe. His memory though continued to survive among actors of African and African American descent despite such official amnesia.

As Bernth Lindfors did with Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius (2007), Martin Hoyles, also dedicates his book Ira Aldridge: Celebrated 19th Century Actor to this “forgotten” icon of theatre. Hoyles who specializes in African/Black performance, among other topics, previously published a biography, The Axe Laid to the Root: The Story of Robert Wedderburn (2004), on the eighteenth-century antislavery activist of Scottish-Jamaican descent, Robert Wedderburn. In this earlier book, Hoyles declared that “London, and particularly the East End, is one of the most multicultural places in the world, and Black history here goes back over 200 years. The impact of Black and mixed-race people on our social history is still not widely appreciated and Robert Wedderburn’s is one of the many fascinating untold stories that are part of all our heritage.” With his subsequent book, Hoyles endeavors to provide Aldridge, like Wedderburn, with the place he deserves in the pantheon of Black London.

Hoyles offers a synthesis of the life of the brilliant actor through straightforwardly written chapters that are accompanied by archival documents such as pictures of Aldridge or newspapers clippings of his performances. Hoyles addresses a wide audience, beyond academics alone, by using a clear and concise style of writing with no intimidating jargon. Moreover, Hoyles does not hesitate to remind his readers of contemporary events and figures in Aldridge’s life. Indeed, in order to approach the question of slavery still prevalent in the United States at the time of the actor’s life, Hoyles points out events that led to Aldridge’s success on the European theatre scene. Hoyles also mentions the fact that after his performances Aldridge would take the time to converse with his audience and discuss the injustice of slavery. Furthermore, Hoyles also captures the importance of the “slave” question in the European psyche and more importantly how America was perceived and condemned on the issue of its slaves.

The book is divided into thirteen chapters that chronologically correspond to Aldridge’s growth as an accomplished, recognized and then forgotten actor. The African Roscius’s call to theatre at an early age is emphasized through testimonies from his teachers, his relatives and his peers. However, as Hoyles acknowledges himself, it is difficult to actually reconstruct the actor’s childhood. Reviews of Aldridge’s incredible performances actually serve as the most useful testimonies and evidence of the way Aldridge was perceived by his contemporaries. From opposition to having a Black actor perform “Black” parts such as Othello, to the transformation of marginalized characters, Hoyles draws from famous theatre critics like Gauthier. Hoyles à propos presents explanations of the cultural contexts surrounding Aldridge’s life and shows how his performance as Othello resonated strongly with audiences who could identify with the noble Moor’s frustrations. Nevertheless, it could have been judicious to dwell more on particular contexts. For instance, when Aldrige was enjoying his greatest success playing Othello, Europe was still struggling between opposing nationalisms and monarchies that contributed to instable, brutal, although short-term, and successive occupations of Poland and other territories in Russia and the Baltic regions. Likewise, the presence of certain reviews in Russian and Polish newspapers and the impact of these reviews certainly could have had crucial nationalistic pretensions and vindications. Who would or could have read these reviews? When? Moreover, who was the audience of Aldridge within the European tour? Who had access to theatre? Could it have been only elites who desired independence from local oppression? Or could the commoners have related to Aldridge’s interpretations of slave characters? These could have been questions that readers might have wanted to see developed more throughout Hoyles’s fascinating reconstitution of Aldridge’s life.

Still, Hoyles includes an impressive number of representations of Aldridge—from official paintings to caricatures that appeared in newspapers. Even though the African Roscius possessed a wide repertoire of roles stretching from Oroonoko and King Lear to Shylock, Hoyles insists that it was Aldridge’s performance of Othello that was the most groundbreaking and celebrated: “It is not surprising that the play [Othello] appealed so much to Aldridge. It revealed the prevalent racism but in acting out the tragedy of the noble Moor, Aldridge turned it into a victory on the stage.”

Acting in Great Britain provided a fertile ground for Aldridge to explore his own creativity as a playwright as well. He adapted plays that often involved interracial unions. These plays, according to Hoyles, were hugely successful. It would have been interesting to dwell more on how success for these plays was possible in England yet unimaginable in the United States during the same time.

Overall, Hoyles examines the figure of Aldridge with a passionate enthusiasm, but it is not always clear whom he has in mind as his audience. He fluctuates between simplistic explanations that assume a limited and limiting knowledge on the part of readers in some chapters, while expecting from the same readers an awareness of certain events in other chapters. However, to be fair to Hoyles, he himself concludes his book by reaching out to a future group of scholars who should carry on the relay after him. His book certainly deserves to be a passage obligé in order to trigger curiosity and promote interest for further explorations of the remarkable man that Aldridge was.