21 - Moving On

Summary

Up to this point Aldridge's career onstage in the United Kingdom had resembled both a melodrama and a farce—a mixture of success, failure, and absurdity. He had managed to make a respectable debut at the Royalty Theatre in East London in 1825 as a teenager, had parlayed that unlikely start into a longer, well-publicized run at the Royal Coburg, and had set out on his first provincial tour with plentiful press notices in his pocket. Nonetheless, his controversial notoriety as a black performer—a “genuine nigger” and “right earnest African tragedian” in the words of Charles Mathews and several London papers—did not carry him very far. Within nine months he was destitute, and friends in Exeter were trying to raise enough money to enable him and his wife to ship out to America.

That effort failed, and he was soon on the road again, playing at theaters large and small throughout the British Isles and trying to build up a diverse repertoire that would help to keep him employed at each stop for a week or longer. It was a hard way to make a living, but he persisted, hoping he would eventually be invited to perform at one of London's patent theaters—Covent Garden, Drury Lane, or the Haymarket. That did not happen right away, but at the end of 1829 and beginning of 1830 he did secure short engagements at less fashionable metropolitan houses— Sadler's Wells, the Royal Pavilion, and the Royal Olympic. It took another three years of trouping through England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland before Covent Garden called on him to return to London to replace the ailing Edmund Kean as Othello. He took the stage there in the worst of circumstances and paid dearly for it, both then and in the years that immediately followed.

This volume ends with Aldridge's departure from London in June 1833, but his story continued until 1867, and from 1833 until 1848 he persisted in touring relentlessly throughout the British Isles, especially in Ireland where he took refuge for five consecutive years. He supported himself by giving lectures in defense of the drama, which were illustrated with scenes and speeches from famous plays. It was in Ireland that he began to experiment more often with playing a wider range of Shakespearean characters, particularly Shylock but also, to a lesser extent, Macbeth and Richard III.