{"id":495,"date":"2019-12-02T18:54:52","date_gmt":"2019-12-02T18:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/?p=495"},"modified":"2022-02-05T13:23:03","modified_gmt":"2022-02-05T13:23:03","slug":"the-theatrical-career-of-samuel-morgan-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/the-theatrical-career-of-samuel-morgan-smith\/","title":{"rendered":"The Theatrical Career of Samuel Morgan Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Bernth Lindfors<\/strong>
339 pp. Africa World Press<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviewed by Robin Breon<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On August 7, 1867, one of the world\u2019s greatest\nShakespeareans breathed his last. While on a tour to Poland, Ira Aldridge\nbecame ill after a rehearsal of Othello <\/em>with\na local company in Lodz. As was his custom when he toured throughout Europe and\nRussia, Aldridge would speak the lines for his character (Othello, Lear,\nMacbeth, Shylock, et alii<\/em>) in English\nwhile the local company of actors would answer in their own native tongue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The much honored Aldridge, who was at the height of\nhis fame at the time of his death, had recently announced that he would finally\nbe returning to America, the country of his birth (although he was often\nerroneously advertised as a native of Senegal descended from African royalty)\nto take his place on the same stages that had so peremptorily denied him\nopportunity in the years prior to the Civil War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The news of Aldridge\u2019s death was trumpeted throughout\nEurope and the United Kingdom. His son, Ira Daniel, read the news while living\nin Australia. The hearse that carried this great thespian to his final resting\nplace in the Evangelical Cemetery of Lodz was followed by the mayor and the\ncity council, a military band and various guilds of workers all with their\nbanners and flags. To this day, his gravesite is tended by the Society of Polish\nArtists of Film and Theatre. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A little less than a year before Aldridge\u2019s death,\nanother African American actor with aspirations for the stage arrived in\nLondon. He received little notice and was generally panned by the London\ncritics of his day. For Samuel Morgan Smith, the legacy of achievement and\nongoing acclaim for Ira Aldridge was both a blessing and a curse. The good news\nwas that Smith did not have to kick down the doors of the theatrical\nestablishment for bookings and engagements the way the 17-year old Aldridge had\nto do when he arrived in England in 1824. In fact, with the death of Aldridge\ncame an opening in a particular \u201cniche market,\u201d if you will, for a black actor\nto carry on the traditions and plays that were so popularly received when\nAldridge played them in repertory throughout the British Isles and abroad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bad news was that for all of his career, Smith\nwould be compared to a very high benchmark in theatre history. Newspaper\nreporters and theatre critics would often mention Aldridge when reviewing\nSmith, noting that the first was a much greater talent than the second. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bernth Lindfors is a distinguished scholar and\nprofessor emeritus of English and African Literatures at the University of\nTexas, Austin, who has previously provided us with a seminal four-volume\nbiography on Ira Aldridge (University of Rochester Press, 2011). Now, he has\nturned his attention to the life and times of Samuel Morgan Smith, whose\ncommitment to the theatre was no less than his predecessor and whose\nfascinating story is well worth chronicling in some detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born June 20, 1832, in the city of Philadelphia,\nSmith\u2019s early training was as a \u201chair dresser\u201d or barber. By 1854, he was\nregistered as a business and cutting hair at a shop close to the city\u2019s theatre\ndistrict. In that era, the trade of barber carried with it a sociological study\nall of its own, because an African American in the trade would have to\nconsciously decide from the get-go whether his shop was open to black or white\nclientele. Morgan chose to open a shop that catered to only a white clientele,\nbecause white patrons would not frequent a barber shop that also served black\npeople\u2014and they paid a higher price for a shave and a haircut. It was in the\n\u201ccity of brotherly love\u201d that he also became a habitu\u00e9 of the local theatre\nscene, with the Chestnut Theater being only one block from Smith\u2019s shop and the\nfamed Walnut Street Theater a few blocks down from there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smith would have had an opportunity to see many of the\nEnglish-speaking world\u2019s most well-known actors, who passed through the city\nduring this period, including James E. Murdock, Edwin Booth, Barry Sullivan,\nJames W. Wallack, Edwin Forrest, John Wilkes Booth and Charles Kean. Active in\nvarious civic organizations, he began to be known as a public speaker and also\nstudied \u201celocution, action and stage business\u201d with the Scottish actor, James\nB. Roberts. During this period, Smith would often inject sonnets and\nsoliloquies from Shakespeare into his lectures, when he was asked to speak at\npublic events. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often speaking on the salient political issues of the times,\non January 30, 1860, he convened a meeting of \u201ccolored citizens\u201d at the\nPhiladelphia Institute and urged them to sign a petition to the Governor of\nVirginia concerning the fate of two black prisoners, who had been condemned to\ndeath for participating in John Brown\u2019s raid on Harper\u2019s Ferry a month earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Ira Aldridge before him, Smith soon learned that\nhis possibilities of working on the legitimate stage (rather than the minstrel\nshows common during that time) were severely limited in America. In the city of\nBoston, he was even denied a pass to visit backstage in order to observe how\nstage machinery worked. So, by 1866, he summoned his courage and booked passage\nfor London after obtaining a travel passport in Boston. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He seems to have arrived on English soil fully\nprepared for the challenges that lay ahead. Smith had already committed to\nmemory all of the great Shakespearean roles that Aldridge had been known for,\nincluding Othello, Shylock, Lear, Macbeth and Richard III. But, unlike Aldridge,\nhe also added in Hamlet just for good measure! In addition, he gradually worked\nthe famous melodramas into his repertoire that Ira Aldridge played with such\npassion, including Oroonoko<\/em> (based on the novel by Aphra Behn),\nSheridan\u2019s Pizarro<\/em>, The Black Doctor<\/em>, The Slave<\/em>, The\nRevenge<\/em>, The Chevalier de St. George<\/em> and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The London critics were as tough on Morgan as they\nwere initially on Aldridge, so, like his predecessor, he lit out for the\nprovinces and, for sixteen years, was able to create his own work and perform\nthroughout the British Isles, including Ireland and Scotland, where he was\nespecially popular. Eventually, by adding in the melodramas and various popular\nfarces of the day, he was (incredibly) able to build a repertoire of over forty\nplays. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linfors has filled this remarkable biography with\npress clips and critics\u2019 comments that lend much local color to the actual\nperformances given by John Morgan Smith. In Lloyd\u2019s Weekly Newspaper<\/em>,\none London critic gave a generally thumb\u2019s up approval to one of Smith\u2019s early\nportrayals of Othello in September of 1866, but cautioned theatre goers to be\nwary of the premise upon which it was based:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surely a black or a dark Othello is running realism mad. It reaches a point when acting ceases to be. . . . The end and aim of an actor is to appear to be somebody he is not. . . . And so we think natural duskiness no kind of advantage to a theatrical Othello; and if, moreover, he should happen to be a great general in a foreign service there would be all the less acting in the case. The stage is built for assumptions\u2014not for realities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Today, Shakespeare\u2019s relationship with black actors\nremains an interesting area of study and a barometer of sorts as to how our\ntheatre has evolved with regard to providing opportunities for racialized\nminorities in general when it comes to casting classical roles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Canada\u2019s own Stratford Festival (formerly called the\nStratford Shakespeare Festival) was slow to reflect the country\u2019s multi-racial\nreality by remaining a virtually all-white repertory company well into the\n1980s. John Neville was the first artistic director to cast a black actor\n(Howard Rollins) in the role of Othello in 1987. In 2019, the Public Theatre in\nNew York upped the ante a bit by mounting director Kenny Leon\u2019s all black\nproduction (read 23 actors) of Much Ado About Nothing<\/em> at the Delacorte\nTheater in Central Park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bernth Lindfors ends his book by quoting the late\nauthor and academic Errol Hill, who wrote Shakespeare in Sable<\/em>\n(University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), the now classic work on black\nShakespearean actors. Says Hill: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an interpreter of Shakespeare, Morgan Smith cannot be ranked with Ira Aldridge. . . . He lacked that spark of greatness that is reserved for the privileged few whom the gods love. . . . He received no awards from crowned heads. Yet he was a superior performer, a talented and painstaking actor of intelligence, a careful elocutionist devoid of rant and exaggeration whose personal and artistic life was governed by a sense of taste, good judgement, and proper deportment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For the record, Morgan Smith died of pneumonia at his\nhome in Sheffield, England, on March 22, 1882, at the age of forty-nine. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n\"\"
 \n\n\n\n

*<\/a>Robin Breon<\/strong> is an arts journalist based in Toronto and author of the blog Aisle Say.ca<\/a><\/em>. He has written widely on topics related to theatre and multi-culturalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2019 Robin Breon
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n\n\n\n



<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":497,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/21\/2019\/12\/Smith.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":487,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/queer-shakespeare-desire-and-sexuality\/","url_meta":{"origin":495,"position":0},"title":"Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality","author":"Robin Breon","date":"November 27, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Edited by Goran Stanivukovic424 pp. The Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury) Reviewed by Sky Gilbert* In his excellent study, Homoerotic Space, Stephen-Guy Bray suggests that consumers of texts\u2014even of the famous classical texts central to Renaissance notions of culture, history and identity\u2014interpret texts as they move through them, according to their own\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Book Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Book Reviews","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/category\/book-reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/21\/2019\/11\/Sky-Gilbert-150x150.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":517,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/creating-dance-with-elders-and-how-to-see-it-company-of-elders-in-the-festival-of-world\/","url_meta":{"origin":495,"position":1},"title":"Creating Dance with Elders, and How to See It: Company of Elders in the World Gold Theatre Festival","author":"Robin Breon","date":"December 3, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Katsuhiko Sakaguchi* Abstract The Company of Elders, produced by Sadler\u2019s Wells Theatre (U.K.), was invited by Saitama Arts Theatre (Japan) in 2018 as a model for dance companies which feature elderly performers. 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This paper will seek to explain Scotland\u2019s relative lack of a historical theatre tradition and to explore the key elements in what the author proposes has been a \u201cEuropean modernist renaissance\u201d on the national stage\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "National Reports"","block_context":{"text":"National Reports","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/category\/national-reports\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/21\/2019\/12\/image8-4.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/21\/2019\/12\/image8-4.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/21\/2019\/12\/image8-4.jpeg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/21\/2019\/12\/image8-4.jpeg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":574,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/all-puppets-large-and-small-in-quebec-and-the-czech-republic\/","url_meta":{"origin":495,"position":3},"title":"All Puppets, Large and Small\u2014in Qu\u00e9bec and the Czech Republic","author":"Robin Breon","date":"December 8, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Mark Brown* FIAMS, Saguenay, Qu\u00e9bec, Canada, 23\u201328 July, 2019.One Flew Over the Puppeteer\u2019s Nest Festival, Prague, Czech Republic, 31 October to 3 November 2019. 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This is what most people think, and if the reference is classical ballet, it might be the case. Yet, the examples of Ohno, Manning, Ek, Fonteyn, Bausch show quite the opposite:\u00a0that there is still life for a dancer who is no longer young. 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