Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representations of Slavery and the Black Character (review)

{ 208 } BOOK REV IEWS introduction to part 5 (1960–80) but is not represented by a chapter. The length and tone of the chapter introductions vary quirkily; several living authors are described in the past tense, for example, while several deceased authors are referred to in the present. In a rare substantive error, a birth year but no death year is listed for Michael Kirby (1931–97). Overall, however, Theatre in Theory represents a much-needed contribution to the field of dramatic theory and is likely to prove a valuable resource to theatre scholars in and out of the classroom for many years to come. —HENRY BIAL Associate Professor, University of Kansas \ Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representations of Slavery and the Black Character . By Hazel Waters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. viii + 243 pp. $96.00 cloth. In Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representations of Slavery and the Black Character , Hazel Waters charts the development of black characters on the British stage during the early Victorian period and through the 1850s. She provides ample historical contextualization of Victorian plays, reaching back to the late seventeenth century to root the beginnings of such representations in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, based on the novel by Aphra Behn and originally performed in 1695. Her aim in mapping the emergence of the black character in theVictorian theatre is“to trace how racial assumptions in Britain evolved from a certain flexibility at the end of the eighteenth century to a greater rigidity, elaboration and entrenchment by the second half of the nineteenth” (2). The result is a narrative historical timeline of plays and performers representing a particular brand of blackness that both reflected and influenced British audiences ’ attitudes toward slavery. Waters’s thesis that “it was slavery, both its imposition and the decades-long struggle against it, that shaped the image of the black as presented for popular consumption” (5) does not break new ground. Yet her examination of how theatre, a cultural commodity consumed by members of every social class, was used as a tool for developing social attitudes regarding race in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century begins to shed light on a less illuminated area of theatre history. Each of the book’s seven chapters provides a painstaking review of play { 209 } BOOK REV IEWS scripts from the period, which Waters mines as an archive of popular culture. Detailed script analysis of these plays—some largely forgotten or unknown to today’s audiences, such as Obi and The Africans; or War, Love and Duty, and more familiar titles such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the classic Othello—along with readings of extant documentation on their productions, are called upon to demonstrate Waters’s argument that social attitudes toward blacks evolved throughout the Victorian period and are reflected in the material of the stage. Broadly speaking, Waters charts the shift in depictions from that of the revengeful Moor or noble savage African, to the comical servant or grotesque “darky” (as influenced by the influx of blackface minstrel performers from the United States), to a highly sentimental humanization of black characters in melodrama. These categories read as indicators of British sentiment not only toward blacks but also toward the institution of slavery, abolition, and what Waters proudly claims as the expression of “the Englishness of liberty, the peculiarly English nature of freedom” (190). The treatment of blacks and slavery in performance is additionally framed through an examination of the international careers of T. D. Rice, the father of Jim Crow mania, and the acclaimed African-American actor Ira Aldridge. These two contemporary yet antithetical American performers established dueling representations of “black” characters on the British stage, the former establishing and the latter challenging “the more degraded images of the black that were gaining currency” (59). By comparing the performances of these two men, Waters throws into high relief the racism inherent in not only the dramatic texts but also the embodied practices of the Victorian stage. Ultimately, Waters credits the shift in attitudes toward race, from demonization to comical representations of blackness, to “the influence from America . . . that altered the tendency of English racial attitudes and beliefs, channeling them...