Roman Actor Research Articles

Ciceros Beweisführung aus der Wahrscheinlichkeit im Geldstreit zwischen dem Schauspieler Roscius und Fannius Chaerea

The paper explores the argumentation from probability in Cicero’s speech Pro Roscio comoedo, concerning the financial litigation between a famous Roman actor Quintus Roscius and an unknown businessman Fannius Chaerea. The Roman rhetorician had analysed the question of probability in his earlier dissertation De inventione, which influenced his art of persuasion. Because of lack of the strong proofs the arguments from probability played a great role in the defence of Roscius. Cicero used different types of likelihood arguments: syllogistic argument from probability, credibilia, incredibilia, verisimilia, as well as the arguments from ethos and kedros. He seems to be here aware of the Greek theory of argumentation present in the writings of Aristotle and Rhetorica ad Alexandrum. The Roman orator recalled often the truth and juxtaposed it with the probability. Cicero employed likelihood proofs in his speech, both in argumentation and in refutation.

‘Enter [. . .] a Boy Dressed for a Lady’: (Meta)theatricality, Tyranny, and Theatrum Mundi in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1629) and Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint Genest (1644)

Through comparative exploration of metadramatic elements, this article proposes a reading of Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (published 1629) in the light of Le Véritable Saint Genest, by Jean de Rotrou (1644). Rotrou’s hagiographic drama intertextually exposes Massinger’s revenge tragedy as a parallel study of an actor’s martyrdom under imperial Roman tyranny in the conspicuous absence of Christian grace. The pre-eminence of grace in Rotrou reflects his hagiographic sources, including a treatise by Jean Baudoin which itself recalls The Roman Actor’s evocation of theatrum mundi.

"Remembrance of things past": Classical and Renaissance echoes in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor

This essay discusses Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) as an example of the profoundly composite nature of early modern dramatic texts. Massinger placed borrowings and echoes from several classical and early modern texts in a new context, arguably counting on audiences’ pleasure of recognition. Focusing on sources which have not received enough critical attention, this essay investigates the influence of classical authors like Tacitus and Statius, and the impact of other Massingerian plays to shed light on the way the playwright appropriated and refashioned some sources to suit his tragedy’s political agenda.

The Influence of Philip Massinger’s The Maid of Honour on The Roman Actor

The Influence of Philip Massinger’s <i>The Maid of Honour</i> on <i>The Roman Actor</i>

Emotion, Deliberation and Political Authority in Philip Massinger’s the Roman Actor

Emotion, Deliberation and Political Authority in Philip Massinger’s the Roman Actor

“Mislike Me Not for My Complexion…”: Ira Aldridge in Whiteface

Ira Aldridge, the first important black American Shakespearean actor, had an odd but remarkable theatrical career. Born in New York City in 1807, educated for a few years in the second Free School in lower Manhattan, employed in his youth at various menial jobs in the city, including a brief stint as a costume carrier for a visiting British actor, and then involved in several small dramatic productions put on by ragtag black acting companies at a short-lived establishment called the Theatre, Aldridge fell in love with the stage and aspired to become a professional actor. Since he could fulfil this ambition in the United States, which had proven not yet ready to accept black actors in the legitimate drama (Hill 17), he emigrated to the British Isles, where he was fortunate enough to secure his first engagement with top billing at London's Royal Coburg Theatre (now the Old Vic) in October 1825, when he was only eighteen years old. In those days it was customary to hail a talented young performer as a a name alluding to the great Roman actor Quintus Roscius Gallus. Garrick had been the first English Next came Mr. Betty, the phenomenally successful juvenile thespian who was heralded as the Young and thereafter the name was linked to theatrical precocity. Master Grossmith, a seven-year-old, was introduced on the stage as the Celebrated Infant and Miss Lee Sugg, another child prodigy, as the Young Roscia. Inevitably, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and several American Roscii and Rosciae, including a Kentucky Roscius, soon appeared. Since Aldridge was both young and black, he was quickly dubbed the an honorific title given extra resonance when theater managers began to spread the word that he was the son of a Christian Fulani prince from Senegal. Aldridge, whose staple role was Shakespeare's Othello, could be said to have made a career out of playing a Moor playing a Moor. This may have been an adroit theatrical strategy, given the obstacles a black neophyte would have had to overcome to be accepted as a legitimate player on a foreign stage. But at the outset this was an easy way to make a living. Though he could depend on his novelty value to draw people to the theater, there were only a limited number of roles a black performer could take on, and in the first half of the nineteenth century the normal practice in British theaters was to perform at least two plays each night and to change the bill every day. Long runs of a single play were common until later in the century, and then only in London. For Aldridge to be employable, he had to be able to offer a reasonable number of well-known roles and to keep moving from place to place. He could find a permanent position in one of the London theaters, nor could he secure engagements outside London for more than a week or two at a time. So he turned into a perpetually touring player, an exotic star who made his rounds principally in the provinces week after week, month after month, year after year after year. But first he had to establish a reputation as a performer. Being an African was enough; he also had to prove his credentials as a Roscius. One way he did this was to draw upon anti-slavery sentiments by playing long-suffering slaves in abolitionist melodramas set in the New World. Gambia in Thomas Morton's The Slave, Oroonoko in stage adaptations of Aphra Behn's eponymous novel, and Christophe in J. H. Amherst's The Death of Christophe, King of Hayti were the principal tragic roles he assumed early in his career to supplement his performances of Othello. He also played dark strangers, some of whom were villains: Zanga the Moor in Edward Young's The Revenge, Rolla the heroic Peruvian army commander in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro, and Hassan the vengeful Moor in Monk Lewis's gothic thriller The Castle Spectre. These heavy roles helped to establish his competence as a tragedian. …

Hyper-Parodic Machineries from Narrative to Cinema: Dürrenmatt's A Dangerous Game between Ettore Scola and Alberto Sordi

A Dangerous Game of Friedrich Durrenmatt centres on the mockery of justice. The issue was brought to the big screen for the first time by Ettore Scola’s The Most Wonderful Evening of My Life (1972). There is a willingness to overcome the narrative and environmental mockery with parodic elements that are closely related to Sordi’s mask.Indeed, despite the Roman actor’s efforts, a scrupulous direction and Sergio Amidei’s accurate screenplay, Sordi’s topical characteristics comes out during his performance. Sordi’s personal comedy cliches overlap the Swiss playwright’s sarcasm with some hyper-parodic aspects. Scola’s movie sets up itself as the focal point of an artistic and semantic perspective that begins with Thrilling third episode directed by Carlo Lizzani in 1965 up until Comencini’s Traffic Jam, inspired by Cortazar and having, of course, Alberto Sordi in the leading role.Durrenmatt’s A Dangerous Game finds in Lizzani’s episode a precursor of some distortions of judgment and condemns , which will culminate in Comencini's film where a whole path of the highway will be shut off.

Staging Authority in Caroline England: Prerogative, Law and Order in Drama, 1625–1642 by Jessica Dyson (review)

Jessica Dyson. Staging Authority Caroline England: Law and Order Drama, 1625-1642. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. x + 224. $109.95. With its focus on often overlooked riches of Caroline stage and its attention to period's central political and legal debates, Jessica Dyson's Staging Authority Caroline England: Law and Order Drama, 1625-1642 makes a worthy contribution to recent scholarship on early modern theater. Dyson's work especially useful for its clear, efficient discussions of historical contexts as well as theoretical lineaments of Caroline disputes about monarchical and for its close readings of language and stakes of these debates period's drama. Dyson's introductory chapter effectively establishes her interest Caroline theater as a forum for period's competing articulations of royal and common law as they took shape against King Charles Is increasingly personal rule (2). She identifies her approach to drama as more oppositional than those of influential critics such as Martin Butler, but she careful to insist that playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, Philip Massinger, John Ford, or James Shirley offered challenges not to Charles's position as but rather to ability to act above, beyond or outside established laws of country (9). In these challenges, she adds eloquently, their drama diagnosed a dynamic by which Charles I, in over-asserting kingly and central authority, ... raise[d] possibilities of destabilization, fragmentation and disintegration of legitimate legal authority (13). Chapter 1, Rights, Prerogatives and Law: The Petition of Right, investigates acute constitutional issues driving 1628 Petition of Right and their enactment on stage. She reads petition, which crystallized competing interests of Parliament and King matters of taxation and martial law, as a symbol of widespread fear of royal absolutism and of a concomitant loss of traditional liberties. She then examines plays that juggle these concerns, arguing that Ben Jonson's The New Inn advocates balance of subjects' rights against a moderated, if not curtailed, royal prerogative (20) and that Richard Bromes The Love-Sick Court offers not only predictable critique of self-interested courtiers and their bad counsel--readings offered by Butler and Matthew Steggle--but also a more pointed political statement about the usefulness of parliaments and necessity of calling them (44). Chapter 2, Shaking Foundations of Royal Authority: From Divine Right to King's Will, surveys contemporary accounts of royal authority--theories of divine right, of designation, and of contract--and then charts Philip Massinger's representations, over course of three plays, of this and its relation to law. She traces an arc of declining divinity: from king as undeniably a god with extra-legal power The Roman Actor to king as undeniably mortal, willful, and fallible The Emperor of East and The Guardian. Although theoretical background here cogent, some of specific readings are overly literal ways that undermine idea of a declining divinity; it maybe true that Domitian The Roman Actor presented as a divine ruler and that his extra-legal is not denied (66), but play neither condones nor reinforces this position--it seems to put it into question order to insist on Domitians very human status and passions. Dysons treatment of The Guardian, which sees outlaw Severino as a critique of, rather than a substitute for, absolute power, more assured and convincing. The third chapter, Debating Legal Authorities: Common Law and Prerogative, sets common law center stage, as a legitimate alternative to will of monarch as foundation of realm. …

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage by Barbara Wooding (review)

Barbara Wooding. John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603-1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. xiii + 209. 60.00 [pounds sterling]. If one evaluates a life purely in terms of the cultural and artistic experiences it contains, then John Lowin enjoyed arguably one of the most enviable lives in history. In a theatrical career spanning almost fifty years, he was present (one may assume) at the first performances of almost all Shakespeare's Jacobean plays: indeed, he was on stage for those first performances, as one of Shakespeare's leading men. But he was also the first Mammon in Alchemist; the first Bosola in Duchess of Malfi; and the creator of identifiable roles in plays by Fletcher, Massinger, and others. In fact, he was a member of the original cast of a large proportion of the masterpieces of Jacobean and Caroline drama. First recorded in Henslowe's Diary working for Worcester's Men, he worked his way up to become a senior figure in the King's Men, the leading theater company of their day, and was for a long time their effective leader. For all these reasons, then, he is a pivotal figure in early modern English theater, and Barbara Wooding's new biography of him is to be celebrated. Born (probably) in 1576, John Lowin is first documented for certain in 1594, as an apprentice goldsmith. Chapter 1 of Wooding's study documents this part of his career, uncovering, for instance, new archival evidence about the shady practices of his master, who was in repeated trouble with the authorities for using substandard metal. After completing his apprenticeship, he starts to appear in Henslowe's Diary as a member of the relatively obscure Worcester's Men in connection with such intriguing lost plays as The Italian The Unfortunate General, and The Second Part of the Black Dog [of Newgate]. In 1603, Lowin transferred his services to the company soon to be known as the King's Men. Wooding observes, It was the best career choice he ever made (10). chapter, Pamphlets, Plays, Pageants, and 'Prentices, traces career up to around 1613. Wooding has intriguing material to go at, including the fascinatingly uninformative print pamphlet Conclusions upon Dances, written by Lowin around 1605; and Maid's Tragedy, in which Lowin is known to have played the part of Melantius. Wooding mixes this together with what is known of life story, and with the history of the period and the cultural history of the stage. She uses parish records, literary texts, and theater-history documents to weave the story together. There is a wealth of documentation, although Lowin himself remains an elusive figure. Wooding observes in a later chapter--and it is a recurring note through the book--that Lowin's opinion, as always, is not on record (90). From 1627 onwards Lowin was one of two Housekeepers--effectively, co-leaders--of the King's Men. As his role as theater manager becomes more important, the book turns into an almost annalistic history of the company. There are long sections on, for instance, Massinger's Roman Actor and the challenges it might offer in performance; on the second war of the theaters, so called; and on the evolving history of the King's Men up to the 1642 closure. one exception to this basic chronological plan is provided by chapter 8, an in-depth discussion of the incomplete manuscript of the Caroline comedy Soddered Citizen. manuscript contains numerous signs of revision, in various hands, which, Wooding argues convincingly, demonstrates the input of the players themselves (and by implication of their leader Lowin). A final chapter reviews what is known about activities after the 1642 closure, finding him active in projects such as the attempts to revive playing during the Commonwealth, and the Beaumont and Fletcher publications. beauty of a chronological, biographical journey through the theatrical history of this period is not that it offers a complete revision of what is currently known about that history, but that it gives it all a human timescale. …

Not to Be Altered”: Performance’s Efficacy and Audience Reaction in The Roman Actor

Not to Be Altered”: Performance’s Efficacy and Audience Reaction in The Roman Actor

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Representing the Duke of Buckingham: Libel, Counter-Libel and the Example of The Emperor’s Favourite’

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Representing the Duke of Buckingham: Libel, Counter-Libel and the Example of The Emperor’s Favourite’

Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger (review)

Reviewed by: Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger Julie Sanders (bio) Joanne Rochester. Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. x + 172. $99.95. Joanne Rochester's study Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger is a very welcome addition to what she herself describes as the "growing literature on Caroline drama" (3). While acknowledging that her study of the inherent metatheatricality of Renaissance drama follows in a long tradition of exploring plays-within-plays in drama from this period, Rochester makes the case for the innovative nature of her approach, not only in terms of its focus on the woefully understudied figure of Massinger, but in her consideration of plays-within-plays and inset masques as conscious "enactments of spectatorship" (1). Three particular plays from Massinger's oeuvre form the backbone of her analyses: The Roman Actor (1626), The City Madam (1632), and The Picture (1629) (though there is also a very useful analysis of The Guardian (1633) in chapter 2). The two former plays on the list have perhaps enjoyed the most sustained critical focus of late, but The Picture, which recently enjoyed a successful restaging in the UK, is now coming firmly into view. Rochester's study is, then, well-judged in speaking to such timely interests. While the three-play focus may seem tight to the point of narrowness in a monograph-length study, this focus does allow her to offer sustained close readings, and she stresses that her discussion of particular plays has far wider implications and applications. [End Page 142] Massinger is, as she rightly observes, a key "transitional figure" whose career bridges the Jacobean and Caroline moments and involves extensive collaborations with other playwrights. He is also the producer of work within the compass of several distinct types of playing venue: Philip Henslowe's open-air amphitheater, the Rose, Christopher Beeston's indoor theater at the Cockpit, and in the context of the King's Men's extensive and flexible repertory at both the indoor, roofed Blackfriars and the open-air Globe. Describing The Roman Actor as Massinger's "most metatheatrical play" (15), Rochester uses it as a springboard for the volume as a whole. Though in date terms this play falls squarely within the confines of Caroline drama, the author argues that it has its roots firmly within a Jacobean aesthetic and ethos, and she compares it to other Jacobean Roman plays such as Ben Jonson's Sejanus. Exploring how the opening of the play superimposes a deserted Roman playhouse onto the crowded Caroline one of the actual performance venues, Rochester demonstrates in lively fashion how The Roman Actor dramatizes the King's Men's working practices and the vexed relationship that existed in the 1620s between commercial playhouses and the court. Though this is an entirely proficient and worthwhile chapter, Rochester is not exactly breaking new ground in interpreting The Roman Actor from this standpoint, and she rightly acknowledges the influence of the pioneering editorial work of Martin White in this regard. Nevertheless, this is a helpful case study in terms of providing a means of navigation through some of the less familiar material to follow. In chapter 2, she moves onto the category of "masques-within-plays." Noting that Massinger (like Shakespeare) wrote no official court masques, she indicates that he was nevertheless fascinated by the form. Providing useful background material on the masque genre and making enroute the significant observation that in the Caroline period the masque developed into a huge "diversity of venues and forms," (59) Rochester argues that the very dominance of the masque by this time allowed for its diversification. I admired the way in which, throughout, Rochester was constantly alert to the interactions of space, site, and form, and it is a very located and embedded picture of Massinger as a playwright that she offers us as a result. She also makes important distinctions between country-house masques, those performed for corporate and commercial contexts (such as Jonson's recently rediscovered 1609 Entertainment at Britain's Burse), and the court variety of the form that she identifies as Massinger's...

The Tyranny of Tragedy: Catharsis in England and "The Roman Actor"

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Tyranny of Tragedy: Catharsis in England and "The Roman Actor"MARISSA GREENBERGMARISSA GREENBERG Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 392011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.39.41917486 Views: 475Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2011 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Harriet Archer Gorboduc on Fire: The Pyropoetics of Tyranny in Early Modern England, Exemplaria 34, no.22 (Jul 2022): 168–195.https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2022.2070369

The Tyranny of Tragedy: Catharsis in England and &lt;i&gt;The Roman Actor&lt;/i&gt;

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Tyranny of Tragedy: Catharsis in England and "The Roman Actor"MARISSA GREENBERGMARISSA GREENBERG Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 392011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.39.41917486 Views: 489Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2011 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Harriet Archer Gorboduc on Fire: The Pyropoetics of Tyranny in Early Modern England, Exemplaria 34, no.22 (Jul 2022): 168–195.https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2022.2070369

The Roman Actor , Metadrama, Authority, and the Audience

Early modern debate about the legitimacy of theater concerns the question of the author's authority in relation to that of the licensing authorities and their informers. Here the fear of misinterpretation generates a self-conscious metadrama, which expresses the ambiguity of authority in dramatic structures that aim to manipulate audiences' responses. Moreover, this metadrama acknowledges theater's own potential for complicity in social control and is often concerned with the interchangeability of authority figures, informers, and author-actors. These tensions and interconnections are embodied in the metadramatic representations of the tyrannous court of Caesar in Philip Massinger's The Roman Actor .

Fletcher, Massinger, and Roman Imperial Character

Fletcher, Massinger, and Roman Imperial Character John E. Curran Jr. (bio) In 1678, Thomas Rymer, the infamous debunker of Shakespeare, attacked Rollo, Duke of Normandy, a collaborative tyrant tragedy by John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, and probably some others,1 on what ought to occur to us as a puzzling basis: Rymer located the root of the play's alleged ugliness in its ties to history. Rollo, in recasting the history taken from Herodian of Caracalla's slaughter of his brother Geta, and in merely renaming the personages,2 offers a prime example of how "particular yesterday truths were imperfect and unproper to illustrate the universal and eternal truths" of tragedy. To Rymer, it was for "History to describe the truth, but Tragedy was to invent things better then the truth." Caracalla's tyrannical fratricide was a "horrid and bloody story," "all which" had been injudiciously "cram'd" into Rollo, "crude and undigested, as in the Original"; Rollo was "indeed a History, and it may well be a History; for never man of common sense could set himself to invent any thing so gross."3 For Rymer, despite the changes in setting and naming, the Normans of Rollo are essentially reconstructions of the Romans of Herodian. Rymer assumes that such a historical reconstruction is ill-advised, but that he assumes it at all should astonish us from our vantage point today, for it flies in the face of our own assumptions about the dramaturgy of Fletcher and Massinger, and of their contemporaries. What if Rymer is right, and a significant part of the intention behind Rollo is to get at the heart of the "horrid and bloody story," and to do so by analyzing the particular "yesterday truth" of who this murderous Roman emperor really was? My implicit purpose here is to suggest that what Rymer senses about Rollo was much more a common feature of English Renaissance drama than we often think: it was often driven by characterization, and, in historical [End Page 317] dramas, by a characterization based on historically informed conceptions of the minds of particular persons. To build up to this suggestion, I will focus on six Roman plays Fletcher and Massinger wrote, as a team and separately: their coauthored plays The False One and The Prophetess; the multiauthored Rollo; Fletcher's Valentinian; and Massinger's Roman Actor and Emperor of the East.4 My immediate purpose is to study this group of plays closely as they have not been studied before, as a group, one which, like Shakespeare's Roman plays, may be fruitfully examined for the interconnections between its members. But such an examination also has far wider significance, as it yields evidence contrary to our now longstanding critical attitudes about characterization—that is, that there really are no particularized historical analyses, only topical/political valences,5 and no characters, only representatives of stock types.6 The flatness of characterization in Fletcher and Massinger being an old commonplace,7 if we can find something in these plays indicative of an effort toward the historical reconstruction of character, then we must begin to imagine this effort as much more pervasive in the drama than critics have generally held. In each play, we will observe engagement with what I will term the historical tradition, a cluster of ideas about a given personage that the playwrights would encounter not only in their sources, but also in the biographical conceits imbuing the gamut of historical commentary, both ancient and contemporary. By working with and sifting through the historical tradition, each play, as it produces an understanding of the nature of its emperor's personality, amounts to a conjecture in the sense used by Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh defended the historian's use of conjecture because it was necessary "to discover the passions" that had instigated "notorious actions" and "to search into the particular humours of princes";8 historical inquiry meant inquiry into causation, and that in turn meant inquiry into a particular prince's character, his or her configuration of memories, conditioning, drives, and ingrained moral parameters. Our two authors conduct just such an inquiry in each play; they derive from the diverse and at times disparate ideas of...

Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius (review)

Reviewed by: Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius David Krasner Bernth Lindfors, ed. Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius. Rochester, NY: Rochester UP, 2007. 288 pp., 19 illustrations. $55.00. Ira Aldridge (1807-1867) was one of the greatest actors of the nineteenth century. In today's parlance, his superstar status would be unimpeachable. Yet he has received less recognition for his achievements than his contemporary white luminaries. The objective of Bernth Lindfors's collection of primary sources and critical essays is to set the record straight by giving Aldridge his overdue credit. Acknowledging the book Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian (1958) by Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock as groundbreaking, Lindfors, the editor of this collection, sets out nonetheless "to fill some of the lacunae" left out of previous studies of Aldridge "by bringing together a number of essays that shed light on aspects of his existence that were not treated in sufficient depth" (2). In doing so, the book succeeds at portraying Aldridge admirably. The text is divided into two sections. The first reproduces nineteenth-century documents regarding Aldridge, most significantly "Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius" (ca. 1848), an exaggerated but still informative account of the actor's life. The section offers newly translated news reports and letters that verify or reveal important data about Aldridge's professional and personal life. After a brief stay in New York, Aldridge realized that racism in the United States provided limited opportunities. He ventured to Europe, achieving recognition as one of the great leading actors of his generation. Aldridge's early career succeeded primarily in the provinces outside London rather than in the theatrical capital. In his middle-to-late career he gained success throughout Europe, including London. Known as the "African Roscius" (after the Roman actor Quintus Roscius Gallus), Aldridge played Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Shylock, and Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Mungo in The Padlock, and other roles with humanity, pathos, and eloquence heretofore unseen on the European stage. The second section consists of critical essays. Researchers Ruth Cowhig, Nichola Betŭsić, Joost Groenebour, Ann Marie Koller, and Krzysztof Sawala examine Aldridge's performances in England, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, and Poland. Hazel Waters attempts to show how Aldridge fought racism by pushing "the boundaries of the roles available to him" (101). Joyce Green MacDonald argues that Aldridge challenged "the relevance of previous centuries' efforts by white actors to 'act black'" (137) by undermining the perceptions of blackness in new and innovative ways. Unsettling the fixed identity of Africans, Aldridge disrupted a theatrical trend by inserting interpretations that cut against the grain of stereotypes. Nicholas M. Evans asserts that Aldridge went to England and performed in roles antithetical to traditional popular minstrelsy, applying instead a "Du Boisian double consciousness" to his characterizations (163). Along similar lines, editor Lindfors adds that Aldridge established himself as a serious tragic actor by experimenting with "white roles," which resulted in challenging racist assumptions through a demonstration of his range and capacity. Aldridge's performances as Macbeth and Lear, writes Herbert Marshall, were intensely human, dispelling stereotypical caricatures. Keith Byerman observes that the actor's performance in comic roles, such as in The Black Doctor, also undermined prevailing perceptions. Aldridge was a superb actor, both comic and tragic, as this book evinces. In Shakespeare in Sable, the late theatre scholar Errol Hill noted that Aldridge was instrumental in bringing a naturalistic acting style to the European stage. His renditions of Othello and Shylock jettisoned the bombastic villainy that had been the bailiwick of other actors. Instead, he brought multi-dimension and nuance to his characterizations, fleshing out a three-dimensional portrayal. One of the most interesting essays in this collection is by Ann Marie Koller, who (following Hill's argument) [End Page 202] suggests that the great stage director the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen attended Aldridge's performance and was so impressed by the actor's authenticity that he was inspired to initiate his famed quest for stage naturalism. That Aldridge helped shape the future of the Western stage practice of realism and naturalism is a highly original and profoundly important idea. A further testament to Aldridge's acting skills is the fact that...

Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor and the Caroline Crisis of Theatre

Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor and the Caroline Crisis of Theatre

Philip Massinger's The Roman Actor and the Semiotics of Censored Theater

Philip Massinger's The Roman Actor and the Semiotics of Censored Theater

The Roman Actor, Censorship, and Dramatic Autonomy

The Roman Actor, Censorship, and Dramatic Autonomy