Aldridge's Glory Years in Europe

BERNTH LINDFORS: The best reviews come at the end of his career, when he actually moves to the Continent and starts performing there in 1852 and continues there really for the rest, the remaining fifteen years, of his life with occasional trips back to England. But there it's his glory years. He's winning medals, awards, decorations from heads of state, from kings, emperors, and makes a mint. I mean, theaters are sold out with prices doubled or tripled.

He's hailed as the greatest tragedian of all time. He gets a lot more respect in parts of Europe where blacks are hardly ever seen than he gets in England, where the black population is a significant visual presence in the society. So there may be a lot going on there.

But what tends to happen is that in some of the smaller towns, especially in Ireland in the 1830s, he's the biggest thing that's come since the circus. And they go on for columns, describing what he's done, and some of them even start dramatic societies because he's been there, and he's entertained them so much. And he also was quite generous—he would give a benefit performance for a local church or some needy organization or something like that, and he was known as a gentleman, someone who would give back to the community that he performed in.

The best reviews, however, appear in German and Russian theaters. The reviewers there knew their Shakespeare. They would evaluate his performances. When he went to continental Europe, he did almost exclusively Shakespeare. He occasionally would do a melodrama, but those were shows from his British years. And he did Othello, he did Macbeth, he would white up to do Shylock, Richard III, he did King Lear late in his life, and he also brought back Titus Andronicus so he could play Aaron the Moor as a hero rather than a villain.