ABSTRACT
When discussing the use of colorblind casting in Shakespearean productions, one has to examine the complex semiotics of race. In the context of the United States and the United Kingdom, the presence of a black actor onstage may be interpreted through various disparate lenses that recall the histories of these countries, including the history of slavery, the ongoing battles for racial equality, and the history of the exploitation of black bodies (public lynchings, minstrel shows, etc.). These interpretive lenses, however, are not universal. An examination of the Continental reception of the nineteenth-century black Shakespearean Ira Aldridge will complicate our understanding of both the performance of blackness and the semiotics of blackness. Although Ira Aldridge is one of only thirty-three distinguished actors — and the only actor of African American descent — who is memorialized by a bronze plaque at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, and who has a theatre named after him (at Howard University), he is not given his due in scholarship. British and American historians tend to view Aldridge as a perfect example of the Strange, the Unknown, the Other. 1 But the archival materials about Aldridge’s reception on the Continent may challenge us to think about how our theories of theatre semiotics need to be developed in both historical and global contexts.
