The work of Ira Aldridge rediscovered 190 years on is evidence of his battle with prejudice
Tomorrow evening at a special event, Shakespeare’s Globe celebrates Ira Aldridge (1807–1867).
The first black theatre manager in the UK and the first black actor to triumph in Shakespeare, he is considered to have been previously written out of history. Thanks to the Multicultural Shakespeare project and Professor Tony Howard, his work is now being celebrated and written back into theatre history.
Coincidentally, this year, one of his key works has been rediscovered, almost 190 years after it was written.
The monologue The Negro Boy was an attack on slavery, and researchers have established that Aldridge performed it as a song on at least 104 occasions between 1829 and 1855. This week, it will be performed live by actor Ray Fearon at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.
The Negro Boy was a piece written ‘expressly’ for Ira, by the prolific local writer James Bisset. By an extraordinary stroke of luck, it was discovered, untitled, in one of James Bisset’s notebooks and featured in an online display of the manuscript curiosities of Birmingham’s libraries. But the link with Ira Aldridge was not made until Tony Howard, exploring Aldridge’s West Midlands career, came across it and made the connection.
In this below account, Tony discusses the background of this newly-discovered piece, ahead of the special event on Tuesday 19 September…
It has been magical timing — just as we are commemorating the 150th anniversary of the great actor’s death. Bisset’s ‘The Negro Boy’ demonstrates the impact Aldridge had on people’s attitude to slavery, and exposes the complex, tortuous and self-contradictory role that Aldridge had to play as a black performer.
James Bisset devised a peculiar language for Aldridge to speak as the Boy, with some weird words and invented diminutives. The writer tried to convey the wide-eyed innocence of a child, overlaid with the patois of an African wrenched from his home in Guinea into slavery. In fact Bisset sometimes seems to go for linguistic weirdness just for the sake of a rhyme. The effect can be uncomfortably patronising, and it was certainly meant to be flattering to England, which the Boy calls ‘the land of freedom’.
Like many of the melodramas Ira Aldridge appeared in at the time, it celebrates the abolition of slavery in the British Isles. In the process it sidesteps the fact that Britain’s West Indian colonies — and thousands of British investors at home — still depended on slavery for their wealth and fought hard to maintain it.
Nonetheless, by performing this piece as part of an evening’s entertainment from Birmingham to Belfast, Aldridge drew attention to the horrific realities this child has undergone.
He has been ‘chained and lashed and whipped’. Aldridge himself came to England two years after he was savagely beaten in the street by a hired white assailant at the age of 14 — for daring to become an actor.
‘Me the Negro Boy
Once my parents’ joy
From dere bosom torn
O’er de Ocean borne…’
The Negro Boy’s odyssey puts him in the hands of a god-fearing ‘good’ Master who brings him to 1820s England. In fact he comes to Birmingham. This gave Aldridge a gentle opportunity to satirise his audience’s world, their 1820s fashions and their oddities, from buckled shoes to monocles. It’s a light-hearted comic sequence, but with an unexpected twist: Birmingham is also described as a startling centre for early industry — as a city of whirling lathes.
The Boy discovers that alongside the tin toys that it churns out for England’s children, Birmingham (‘fine place’) makes and exports the machinery of slavery — the ‘pistols’, ‘daggers’ and ‘swords’ that oppress ‘poor Negroes’. Meanwhile the Boy himself, played by Ira Aldridge, is dancing on an English stage — ‘cheerful’, ‘singing’.
It must have crystallised Aldridge’s relationship with his early audiences. We know from playbills and from press reviews that they often came to mock or wonder at the ‘extraordinary novelty’ of ‘a man of colour’; it was Ira Aldridge’s strategy to show them the picture they expected but then reverse it, turning the fairy-tale world of distant Empire into a painful, lived reality — confrontation with a smile.
Bisset’s Negro Boy may never have been printed, and it’s unwieldy. Aldridge must have trimmed its 22 stanzas in performance. So on September 19th 2017, in the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Ray Fearon will deliver an edited version and it will be spoken not sung.
But I can promise that you’ll find it as moving and unsettling as it must have been when Ira Aldridge travelled round this country for decades performing it. Whenever we celebrate Aldridge as an historical pioneer — and would we call him a ‘refugee’ today, or an ‘economic migrant’? — we sense him looking us in the eyes, quizzical and challenging.
‘The Negro Boy’ is available online, and was submitted for the online gallery by Mike Hunkin, Birmingham Archives and Heritage.
