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

Hazel Waters’s Racism on the Victorian Stage belongs in every college library and on the bookshelves of theatre historians with an interest in the early Victorian era and/or black drama. Tracing the development of the “black character,” broadly construed to include Moors, Africans, and diasporic Africans, the book introduces the reader to dozens of plays, provides an authoritative reading of the presentation of black character(s) from 1700 to 1860 in England, and, in so doing, restores the historical presence of the black body on the English stage. Whereas the average theatre scholar likely would blank after naming Shakespeare’s Othello and Aaron, Waters identifies over fifty prominent black characters that appeared in the English theatre before 1860. The lasting value of this book anchors itself not only in Waters’s rediscovery of early plays (and characters), but also in her emphasis on the influence of American racism on nineteenth-century English theatre.

In the opening chapters, Waters offers a chronology of plays that feature black characters, beginning with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1589). Describing her approach as “primarily empirical, based on extensive readings of largely forgotten plays to discover how black-skinned characters . . . were represented” (5), the author develops a narrative structure in which she identifies a play with a prominent black character and provides an extensive plot summary before moving on to another play and another summary. In this manner, she introduces the reader to Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1695), Edward Young’s The Revenge (1721), Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Padlock (1768), George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico (1787), and Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797), among others. Although the “forgotten” aspect of these plays demands reminders by Waters, the successive summaries create a reading experience more analogous to an encounter with an encyclopedia than a sustained critical study. As a result, the first section functions best as a handy reference source containing useful and important information that can be accessed with ease.

The middle chapters, where Waters shifts her attention from plays to performers, are the most engaging and rewarding. Here, Ira Aldridge, T. D. Rice, and Charles Mathews take center stage. The author builds her analysis of the evolving role of the black character on the English stage on the back of Aldridge, an African American actor who staged the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoire in England and Europe throughout the Victorian era. Waters skillfully introduces Aldridge’s mixed success in London by highlighting his concerted efforts to present “noble” black characters to British audiences and by drawing attention to critical reviews that dismissed the actor as being a novelty (because of his skin complexion). Concerning the former, the author notes the tragedian’s commitment to playing complex characters, as in his adaptation of Titus Andronicus in which Aaron is the protagonist who evokes the spectator’s sympathy.

The challenges and resistance that Aldridge faced in England do not become evident until Waters’s subsequent chapters on Rice and Mathews. As Aldridge sought to create a space for the black performer and to render a more realistic depiction of black individuals onstage, Mathews’s tremendously popular comedic impersonation of a black American actor who unsuccessfully attempts to recite Shakespearean lines in stereotypical dialect dogged Aldridge throughout his career. Waters, noting the influence of Mathews on the critical reception of Aldridge’s performances in London, cites reviewers who suggest that the actor’s “thick lips” prevented him from mastering the Bard’s dialogue. Rice’s blackface minstrelsy proved as successful in England as it was in the United States, launched a widespread desire to see comic and “grotesque” representations of blacks, and, ultimately, undermined the efforts of Aldridge. In short, racial parody and blackface minstrelsy in the mid-nineteenth century proved so successful that they established a new model for black characters in English theatre. Waters notes, minstrel stereotypes “[proved] grist to the jobbing dramatist’s mill...