5 - Meanwhile, in London

Summary

Meanwhile, during the period that Aldridge had been away, there had been more “black fun” staged at several theaters in London. Charles Mathews and Frederick Yates, who remained coproprietors of the Adelphi Theatre until Mathews's death in June 1835, continued their comic entertainments there, sometimes reviving old sketches they had popularized years earlier. From April to June 1834, Mathews gave another “At Home, Comic Annual” comprising “a succession of selections from his old entertainments. These,—his Youthful Days, his Trip to Paris, Trip to America, &c. are all to appear in turn, and cannot fail to fill the house; for who is there among the play-going public that do not talk of them?—who is there that will not like to see them again?” Those who came would have another opportunity to laugh at Mathews's droll depiction of the blundering “African Tragedian.”

Not long after Mathews died, the English Opera House staged William Dimond's Stage Struck, which had as one of its principal characters Massa Jeronymo Othello Thespis, a black footman whose love for stage plays is such that he spouts lines from Shakespeare as he carries out his household duties. Jeronymo's master, a tradesman named Stubborn, is also excessively fond of the theater and wants his daughter Juliet to train as an actress so she might have a chance to marry an Earl or Duke instead of Charles Forrester, the respectable young man with whom she has fallen in love. Juliet and her mother are opposed to this plan, and Charles fi nds a way to subvert it by disguising himself as a teacher of dramatic elocution who appears to succeed in swiftly winning Juliet's heart when rehearsing a scene with her. Stubborn, alarmed at the rapidity of this romance and cured of his infatuation with theatrical matters, demands that his daughter marry Charles instead.

Much of the humor in the play comes from Jeronymo's frequent interventions with misquotations from Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, King Richard III, Macbeth, Othello, and other plays from the Shakespeare canon.