16 - Re-engagements

Summary

Aldridge was re-engaged by Calcraft at Theatre Royal Dublin during December 1832, but this time, instead of performing only four nights spread over half a month, he acted eighteen nights over a period of seven weeks. The year before he had been eclipsed by Edmund Kean who had arrived just as Aldridge was about to depart. Kean had seen Aldridge perform in The Padlock and possibly The Slave, and had been impressed with his abilities as a comedian, but was unwilling to share the stage with him the following night by playing Iago to Aldridge's Othello. A year later Aldridge found himself alternating at Theatre Royal Dublin with another visiting star, John Vandenhoff, with whom he had acted in Liverpool five years earlier, once in The Castle Spectre, and once in Othello, with Vandenhoff playing Iago. Vandenhoff, seventeen years older than Aldridge and a more experienced actor, was willing to perform opposite him, and Calcraft soon found an opportunity to cast them together. But initially they worked separately, each in his favorite roles.

Aldridge opened in Othello on December 7, a few nights before Vandenhoff arrived in Dublin. Calcraft, instead of playing Iago as he had done the year before, earning considerable applause and a glowing review in the press, decided to entrust that role to a less competent actor in his company, H. Cooke. Worse yet, he allowed a Miss J. Cruise, a girl of fourteen, “her first appearance on any Stage,” to play Desdemona, and relegated Miss Huddart, a veteran leading lady who had performed successfully as Aldridge's Desdemona in 1831, to the role of Emilia.

The result was predictable. Saunders's News-Letter reported that

the African Roscius has returned to our city, after a twelvemonth's absence, and appeared last night in a Shaksperian character, that may be termed pre-eminently his own, Othello. His personation of the heroic Moor, was extremely just and pleasing in the majority of the impassioned scenes in this highly wrought Drama, and marked by numberless touches of natural good taste and refinement. A young lady made her appearance in Desdemona, evidently a novice on a Metropolitan Theatre, who paid such great attention to the manner of her performance, that she seemed to consider her share of the dialogue as immaterial in comparison to the appropriateness of her attitudes.