Race and Miscegenation on Stage

Abstract

During the British Romantic period the widespread fascination with foreign cultures and races led to the proliferation of theatrical productions featuring black, Moorish, American Indian, or Asian characters. Written by white authors for predominantly white audiences, these plays offered diverse representations of the racial Other, ranging from tragic heroes to comic retainers, from victims to avengers. In 1825, the expatriate American Ira Aldridge appeared at the Royal Coburg as Oroonoko in The Revolt of Surinam, or A Slave's Revenge , an adaptation of Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (1696), and became the first black actor to receive top billing on a British stage. As the African Roscius’, Aldridge played numerous black parts in provincial theatres and whitened his skin to perform the roles of Macbeth, King Lear, and Shylock (Nussbaum 2003). Before Aldridge's English debut, characters such as the black servant Mungo in Isaac Bickerstaff's The Padlock (1768) and the enslaved African Prince Oroonoko were invariably played by white actors wearing blackface. Shakespeare's Othello and Edward Young's Zanga, the Iago‐like villain of The Revenge (1721), inspired a series of charismatic, noble, passionate, and violent African characters who reflected English anxieties about slavery and empire, and the popularity of Mungo prompted many other blackface roles involving servants or slaves speaking in dialect. By the early nineteenth‐century the intensification of public concern over foreign, particularly West Indian, immigration to England and racial intermixing made dramatic portrayals of miscegenation increasingly controversial.