Description: Demonstrates how the career of Britain's first major Black actor, Ira Aldridge, transformed a range of dramatic genres, including tragedy, melodrama and minstrel plays.
Brief description: Gregory Vargo is an Associate Professor at New York University. He is the editor of the collection of plays Chartist Drama (2020) and the author of An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (2018), which won the North American Victorian Studies Association's best book of the year award in 2019.
Review Quotes: This brilliantly conceived and meticulously edited collection enables us to understand a major actor through his repertoire. It is a window onto the theatrical construction of Blackness in the early nineteenth-century, and the ways in which gifted performers transcend the constraints of problematic material. A fabulous resource.--Sarah Meer, University of Cambridge