5 - A Gentleman of Colour

Summary

It is generally accepted that Ira Aldridge made his debut in London at the Royal Coburg Theatre on October 10, 1825, by playing the role of Oroonoko in The Revolt of Surinam; or, A Slave's Revenge, an adaptation of Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko. Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock, in their infl uential biography Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian, had made this claim because they could fi nd no documentary evidence to support the statement in the anonymously authored stage biography Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius that

Mr. Aldridge commenced at the Royalty, at the East End, under the management of Mr. Dunn, where he first felt the British pulse, and found it favourable to his pretensions. This was in 1826, soon after his arrival from Glasgow. He made his debut as Othello, in which he was highly successful. Thus encouraged and strengthened he procured an engagement at the Cobourg [sic], where Messrs. Leclerc, Davidge, Hornblower, and Bengough, were the managers; here he played Oroonoko, Gambia, Zarambo, and [other] characters, and obtained great applause.

Marshall and Stock knew that the Royalty Theatre, renamed the East London Theatre in 1816, had burned down in April 1826 and, having solid proof that Aldridge had opened as Oroonoko at the Coburg half a year earlier, they suspected the account in the Memoir to be inaccurate. Moreover, they could fi nd no record of a Mr. Dunn as manager of the Royalty, and when they discovered that a Mr. Dunn and a Mr. Jones had teamed up to build the Coburg in 1816, they concluded that “possibly the writer of the Memoir confused the Royal Coburg with the Royalty, though the Coburg was defi nitely not in the East End of London.”

Subsequent scholarship has tended to follow the lead of Marshall and Stock, though some sources, especially those on the Internet that continue to rely on the Memoir or on old encyclopedia articles based on the Memoir, persist in reporting that Aldridge was first introduced to London theater audiences at the Royalty as Othello. One recent reference book, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, compounds the confusion by stating that Aldridge started out at the Coburg not as Oroonoko but as Othello.