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  • Ira Aldridge: Performing Shakespeare in Europe, 1852–1855 by Bernth Lindfors
  • Matthew Yde
Ira Aldridge: Performing Shakespeare in Europe, 1852–1855 BY BERNTH LINDFORS Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2013. x + 311 pp. isbn 9781580464727 cloth.

Berth Lindfors has followed his marvelous two-volume biography of the great nineteenth-century African American actor Ira Aldridge with a further volume, Ira Aldridge: Performing Shakespeare in Europe, 1852–1855. As the title suggests, this time Lindfors has narrowed his focus to a three year Continental tour. Whereas Aldridge was compelled to play a great many popular farces and melodramas in his years touring the British Isles, in Europe he concentrated almost exclusively on Shakespeare, specifically Othello, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard III.

Lindfors structures his book chronologically, but concludes by analyzing Aldridge’s remarkable artistic success in each of these four plays. Even so, our understanding of this actor’s enormous talent and remarkable success is confirmed long before we arrive to this chapter. By reproducing copious local reviews of Aldridge’s performances throughout Brussels, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Holland, and elsewhere we quickly come to realize that Ira Aldridge was, without doubt, one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of the nineteenth century.

Aldridge’s performance of Othello was thought to be “indelibly African” (229) and this was reinforced by Aldridge’s fabricated biography as the son of a Christian Fulani prince from Senegal who was raised in America. This was actually part of a strategy whereby Aldridge “could draw more spectators to his performances and then surprise them with his intelligence, sophistication, and skills, thereby proving that blacks were not inferior to whites but were part of the same family of mankind” (85). Aldridge also continually drew attention to the ignominious plight of his people back home in America and we learn that he was generous materially as well, buying one family out of slavery to prevent their forced separation (173–74).

It is hard for us today to imagine the extent of Aldridge’s achievement, not just as a black actor in white-dominated nineteenth-century Europe, but more specifically as a black actor playing “white” characters from the Shakespearean canon. Lindfors ably illustrates how—through talent, training, and make-up—Aldridge was able to win over even those predisposed against accepting a black actor playing “white characters.” Not surprisingly, stereotypes about race were often found in those who appreciated his talents, just as in those who did not. For instance, some enthusiasts believed that the actor’s “vigor, sensuality, and ardent passion [were] authentic markers of his race” and that such innate qualities raised him above the “anemic inadequacies of German actors,” while more conservative critics thought his passionate rendition of Othello’s murder of Desdemona an offense against aesthetic decorum and standards of artistic beauty (71).

Ira Aldridge was not only a great artist, but clearly a great man as well. The master thespian cultivated a career that not only delivered outstanding artistic performances to the public, he also intended to shape his audiences’ perceptions about race. Lindfors shows how the great actor meticulously fashioned his creation of the Jewish villain Shylock in The Merchant of Venice to disclose his degraded [End Page 153] humanity. Aldridge just might have been the first actor to show how this demonized character was warped not by some innate perversity of the Jewish character, but by the inhuman treatment of European Christians endured over many years.

Matthew Yde
The Ohio State University
MYDE@UNM.EDU
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