Acting Bronze, Acting Black: _Othello_ and the Performance of Race on the Romantic Stage

This essay considers a segment of Othello’s performance and reception history, focusing on the Romantic-era stage and the related print culture. A number of documents, including a nineteenth-century biography of Edmund Kean, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s «Lecture V» on Othello (1819), and a theatre review of Ira Aldridge’s first performance in the role on the legitimate stage of Covent Garden (10 April 1833), are discussed as offering significant specimens of the politics of race in British theatrical culture at the time of the abolition of the slave trade and then of the institution of slavery itself.