British Theatre Pre-1807
Professor Colin Chambers

While 1807 is a significant date in the fight against British slavery, it is not a significant date in theatrical terms. Slavery, which predates history books, appears on the British stage before the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. A major reference point is the fictionalised ‘orient’, with the harem as a central metaphor that stands in the British and western imagination for sexualised male power – and in some circumstances eroticised female community – as well as the tyranny implicit in a different and alien culture. This link between dark skins, irreligion, cruelty and lust can be found from the beginning of the early modern theatre in the sixteenth century when the colour Black carried several meanings but increasingly became identified with one: evil. As British piracy and human trafficking gathered pace to create the colonial and imperial project, drama reflected the debates concerning its practice and propriety, without ever attempting to capture its horror.

London’s civic pageants featured Africans and lauded the wealth created by slavery while many plays featured slaves or slave locations. The key play was an adaptation of the Aphra Behn novella, Oroonoko, by Thomas Southerne (1695), which showed sympathy for the ‘noble savage’ having turned the main black character, Imoinda, white. Several later versions are more concerned with the morality of slavery itself, particularly once the abolitionist movement had gathered momentum, and in one, The Prince of Angola (1788) by John Ferriar, the trade is attacked on humanitarian grounds. Slavery and ‘Black’ topics even became good box office, as the success of George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico (1787) shows. The appeal of romance in a slave trade setting rather than anti-slavery motivation is likely to have lain behind its writing, yet it became for abolitionists a very important vehicle, outperforming the many other contemporary pieces that dealt with slavery. A rival in popularity was Isaac Bickerstaff’s The Padlock (1768), which introduced Mungo, one of the main stage characters of the time, who, like Figaro, is the dynamo of his play. Mungo was written at the behest of an actor who had spent time in Barbados and became the first Black role of any note to speak in what the (white) audience believed to be a genuine voice:

 

‘Dear heart, what a terrible life am I led! A dog has a better, that's shelter'd and fed; Night and day, 'tis de same, My pain is dere game.’

While not directly dealing with slavery, the story of a rich old man who imprisons his young wife resonated in the slavery debate. The comic opera was popular in the slave-holding Caribbean, but it could also be played as a critique of slavery, as Ira Aldridge may have done. Mungo was celebrated in prints, tea caddies and masquerades, spawning several stage reincarnations, such as Harlequin Mungo, or, A Peep into the Tower (1787) and influencing a line of comic Black servants as well as the development of minstrelsy. Harlequin Mungo and its direct descendant, Furibond, or Harlequin Negro (1807) highlight a time in British theatre when the figure of Harlequin was associated with notions of class, resistance (as an outsider) and blackness. These allude to, while marginalising, the actions of slaves in the abolition struggle, which, along with the contribution of ex-slaves, were mostly overlooked. John Fawcett’s pantomime Obi, or Three-Finger'd Jack (1800), which was based on the story of Jack Mansong, an escaped Jamaican slave who organised a community of escaped slaves (maroons), offers justification for his revolt because of slavery but emancipation is made conditional on his murder by his peers: freedom means joining the master’s side.

Obi is a reminder that, despite the existence of some Black artists, the theatre that has been recorded was overwhelmingly white and the slavery story it told was seen through the eyes of white writers and white actors who sometimes were blacked up. There is reference to a Black actress playing John Gay’s Polly and Shakespeare’s Juliet in Lancashire in the second half of the eighteenth century but no further details are known. Black performers probably appeared as musicians or walk-ons in the ‘legitimate’ theatre and may also have acted in illegitimate theatres. Julius Soubise, whose father was a Jamaican slave, was said to be a favourite of leading actor David Garrick, and performed extracts from Shakespeare in ‘spouting’ clubs; he was also a friend to Ignatius Sancho, who was invited to appear by Garrick at Drury Lane but was apparently prevented by his speech impediment. A major breakthrough came in 1825 with the arrival on the British stage of the African American Ira Aldridge, who changed the history of the theatre.

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