E3W Literature | University of Texas

Bernth Lindfors, Ed.
Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius
University of Rochester Press, 2007
288 pages
$55

Reviewed by Rebecca Hewitt

In his introduction to this collection of scholarly essays on Ira Aldridge, editor Bernth Lindfors details the difficulties of compiling information about the famous 19th century African American actor. Born in New York in the early 1800s, Aldridge discovered a passion for acting in the early 1820s and set out for England, where he hoped to find performance opportunities outside of the increasingly popular blackface minstrelsy genre. London’s stages were only slightly more welcoming, however, and its culture too was enmeshed in debates over slavery. As a result, Aldridge spent the bulk of his career traveling smaller English cities, and eventually ventured further into Europe and Russia. He died while on tour in Łódź Poland, in 1867; a statue of Aldridge stands there still. Over the course of his career Aldridge gained recognition as one of the most accomplished actors of his or any generation; his name is listed as one of the most famous Shakespearean performers on an engraving at the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon. As Lindfors points out in the introduction, however, because the nature of Aldridge’s career was migratory by necessity, researching his performances and their reception among critics and audiences takes a collaborative effort. This is reflected in his book’s historiography and methdology. Footnotes reference collections from archives and museums across the United States, in addition to London, Zagreb, Amsterdam, Vienna, Cologne, and Meiningen, and the authors selected represent a variety of disciplines, including English, history, and performance studies.

Ira Aldridge is divided into two parts: “The Life” and “The Career.” Part One consists of biographical material that contributes recently discovered information about Aldridge’s biography while separating, as much as possible, the facts of Aldridge’s life from the myriad fictions about it. It reprints extant reviews and other archival materials that contain much false information about Aldridge’s life before becoming an actor in England. The first chapter, titled, “Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius,” is an anonymously written publicity pamphlet ca.1848, which is perhaps responsible for some of the confusion over Aldridge’s origins. The author claims Aldridge was the descendant of Senegalese princes, and that his father was brought to the United States under the patronage of missionaries. Research since has proven these assertions untrue, but the confusion over their veracity stretches through Aldridge scholarship, as Part Two demonstrates. Several of Aldridge’s contemporaries worked to correct these inaccuracies; chapters two and three are reprinted articles from 1860 and 1867, respectively, both written by Aldridge’s former schoolmates from New York. They each attest to Aldridge’s upbringing in the United States and his choice to emigrate to England in the 1820s to seek work on the stage.

Chapters four through seven then complete the first part of the book by offering contemporary perspectives on and revelations about the life of the actor. In chapter four, Lindfors shows the initially tepid response Aldridge received from London theater critics, and argues persuasively that it was perhaps the audience’s own fear of miscegenation that motivated such harsh reception. Aldridge married a white English woman soon after arriving in that country; in addition, Lindfors provides evidence of Aldridge’s high-profile affair with another Irish woman. Reviews of Aldridge in the role of Othello from about this time derided his “pawing” of Desdemona. The overall effect of Aldridge’s public relationships, Lindfors suggests, perhaps led to a backlash of racist assumptions about the performer’s sexuality.

In addition to creating false histories for himself, Ira Aldridge also fabricated biographies for his wives. He claimed his first wife was the daughter of a member of Parliament, and that his second was the daughter of a Swedish Baron. In the essay “Ira Aldridge’s Swedish Wife,” Gunner Sjögren reveals new archival information proving that the second wife’s family were not aristocrats, and speculates that Aldridge lied about his wives’ backgrounds either to protect them from censure for their relationship with an African American or to increase the public’s interest in Aldridge as a public personality. This information about his wives is complicated by chapters six and seven, which both use previously unpublished correspondence to convincingly demonstrate the ardent devotion of Aldridge’s fans—particularly female fans—throughout Europe.

The essays in “The Career” detail Aldridge’s performance history across Europe. The pieces in this section focus on the roles Aldridge played, and the places he performed, ranging from his early performances in Manchester, England, to his final days in Poland. These essays rely heavily on archival materials, including photographs, reviews, and correspondence, as well as on Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian, the 1958 biography by Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock, acknowledged as the foundational text for Aldridge scholarship. Of most interest throughout this second section are the claims made about intersections between the roles Aldridge played and the race politics in the communities he visited. Aldridge’s career coincided with arguments on both sides of the Atlantic about the legality of slavery; the actor’s career as an extremely visible black man engendered arguments, then and now, about the ways race was performed on stage.

The essays in Part Two document Aldridge’s creation of a repertoire of roles that included the tragic leading men of Shakespeare, lighter comedic parts, and minstrel characters. Although he left the United States as blackface minstrel performance was becoming popular in the cities along the eastern seaboard, its popularity followed him across the Atlantic. Minstrelsy was introduced on English stages not long after Aldridge first began performing there; it became so popular among audiences he eventually incorporated blackface songs and sketches into some of his performances. Most writers in this section consider how Aldridge may have used his performance abilities as an agent of change, and whether his comedic roles, while adopting various minstrel qualities, worked to inadvertently support the status quo at a time when black actors had little recourse to careers as performers. Hazel Waters argues in chapter eight, “Ira Aldridge’s Fight For Equality,” that he used his stage presence to subvert stereotypes of African Americans through a tongue in cheek performance of a black villain. Other authors complicate those conclusions. In “Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness,” Joyce Green MacDonald compares three different performances, two by Aldridge, and one parody of Othello, to compare individual performances of race. She uses Eric Lott’s work on minstrelsy to argue that “in exchange for the uncomfortable spectacle of blacks acting white, the audiences of minstrel shows or Othello ‘burlettas’ would be offered the more reassuring spectacle of whites acting black, of reasserting a relation between observer and object that affirmed white authority over, and authorship of, narratives of racial difference.” This argument acknowledges the complicated power dynamic Aldridge performed as a black actor in whiteface, and asks important questions about the ways in which the nature of minstrel performance existed to reassure white audience members of their authority over and ownership of black bodies. “Ira Aldridge: Shakespeare and Minstrelsy,” by Nicholas M. Evans, continues this argument through a comparison of Aldridge’s performances of both Shakespeare and minstrelsy as a “dual identity” and suggests that, ultimately, no one narrative can be assigned to Aldridge’s career. His work may have contributed to both racist and anti-racist endgames.

In the introduction, Lindfors argues that because Aldridge is generally omitted from much of theater history, returning him to that history is a necessary project. Because so much of western historical narrative is organized through lenses of particular places and times, a career like Aldridge’s that spanned a vast geography can fail to come into focus. Nor does Aldrige’s career fit simply into the commonly argued trajectory of theatre history during his lifetime. While many African American performers in the United States during the mid 19th century resorted to stage careers performing in blackface minstrel shows, he was performing Shakespeare’s leading men abroad, at times in whiteface. Ira Aldridge fills in these gaps, and makes clear why studying Aldridge’s life and career needs to be an interdisciplinary, collaborative effort: his work and the issues it raises spread across many histories, disciplines, and geographies. Aldridge’s life and the scholarship around it both serve as important examples of how western histories can seem always already set up to exclude those who are not fixed to one place, and how they might strive to overcome such exclusions.