We remember Ira Aldridge today as the first black Shakespearean to achieve international professional renown. Indeed, he’s the first American actor to do so. Throughout his life Aldridge was lauded with awards. Born to free blacks in New York at the turn of the nineteenth century, naturalized as a British citizen in 1863, and buried in Łódź, Poland in 1867, Aldridge’s cosmopolitan life was marked by triumphs as well as persistent racist responses to his performances. His cosmopolitan career spanned three continents and countless theatres. This essay surveys seven of Ira Aldridge’s strategies for succeeding on the nineteenth-century stage: educate; emulate; circulate; nominate; innovate; disseminate; elaborate. Such strategies can still inspire us, students, performers, scholars, artists, teachers, and innovators alike.

In this chapter I provide a sketch of rhetorical performance practice as it emerges from the rich, complex, and contradictory texts of the Greco-Roman world. A visual conception of ancient rhetoric: John Bulwer’s representation of rhetorical stage acting, which contrasts the stage actor with the dialectician. Greece and Rome: Greece developed the art of rhetoric, accepting the centrality of acting or ‘hypokrisis’, while Roman orators placed more emphasis on the constant persona of the orator. Cicero and Roscius: a case study of how Cicero used performance skills to defend the celebrity stage actor in court. Cicero’s ‘De Oratore’: Cicero’s masterpiece, couched as a dialogue to make it clear there is no single set of rules for being an orator. Quintilian: who codified Cicero, and made rhetoric the foundation of an educational programme. Tacitus: who dissented from Quintilian’s political conformism. Augustine: who tried to adapt his rhetorical training to serve the needs of Christian preaching, anticipating the dilemmas faced by rhetorical performers in the Renaissance.