Ira Aldridge

Photo: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

He was born in Manhattan, NY in 1807. His family belonged to the world of the “quasi-free,” to take a phrase from the historian John Hope Franklin. Slavery was gradually being abolished in New York, but the black population was hemmed in by Jim Crow-like restrictions—notably, drastic limits on voting rights. Aldridge’s father, Daniel, worked as a street vender and served as a lay preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; his mother, of whom almost nothing is known, was named Luranah. Aldridge’s early education took place at the African Free School, a network of schools set up by antislavery advocates to educate “the descendants of an injured race.” Daniel Aldridge wanted his son to be a minister, but Ira fell in love with the theatre. "The New Yorker" by Alex Ross

LONDON — The story is gripping. It is the mid-1820s, and a young black American actor improbably moves to London while still a teenager, tours the provinces and gets his big break a few years later, when he is asked at the last minute to replace Edmund Kean as Othello at Covent Garden in 1833. Can he overcome the innate prejudice of his fellow actors, the public and the critics? Will he succeed?

His name was Ira Aldridge, and when the British actor Adrian Lester was asked, way back in 1998, to do an informal reading of some writings about Aldridge, he was astonished by the story.

Aldridge was an anomaly in theater history: a Black actor — and an American — who achieved mainstream success in grand Shakespearean roles at a time when no black actor had ever been seen on the stage of a major London theater, and who went on to win considerable renown in Europe, honored with titles and medals by crowned heads of state.

Aldridge’s Covent Garden debut in 1833 coincided with the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, and the heightened debate over the decision. His performances in “Othello,” well received by the audiences, were vilified by critics; after two shows, the management closed the theater, and Aldridge never appeared again on a mainstream London stage. Until he died at 60, in the Polish town of Lodz in 1867, he toured Europe relentlessly, becoming something of a celebrity in Eastern Europe and Russia. Memorials in this country are few, but in Stratford, a plaque for him is on the back of one of the seats in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

When Aldridge died, he was on the cusp of a lengthy United States tour, beginning in Brooklyn at the new Academy of Music. [NY Times, Roslyn Sulcasmarch]