Before considering contemporary interest in Negro drama it
will be well to discover its historical background. William
Shakespeare was the first dramatist to appreciate the “intriguing
opportunities” in the life of the darker races and in his master-
tragedy Othello, he has given us the stellar rôle of the Moor
in a study of the effect of jealousy upon a nature of simple
and overpowering emotion. So great an embarrassment has
this “Black-a-moor” been to the Anglo-Saxon stage that the
"supreme tragedy of English drama” has suffered a distinct
unpopularity, and its chief interpreters have been compelled to
give a bleached and an adulterated presentation of the black
commander of the Venetian army. Thus O'Neill had an excellent precedent for his Emperor Jones.
The example of Shakespeare was not followed by his immediate successors. In fact, a character of sable hue does not appear in the pages of English literature until a century later when Aphra Behn wrote that sentimental romance, Oronooko, portraying the unhappy lot of a noble Negro prince in captivity. This tearful tragedy had numerous imitators in both fiction and drama, an example of the latter being the Black Doctor, written by Thomas Archer and published in London in 1847. It was not long after this publication that London and the continent were treated to an extraordinary phenomenon,—the appearance of a Maryland Negro in Othello and other Shakespearean rôles in the royal theaters. Ira Aldridge is thus the first Negro to surmount the bars of race prejudice and to receive recognition on the legitimate English-speaking stage.
Up until the Civil War, then, there was but meager interest in the drama of the African or Negro in England, and practically none in the United States. That great sectional conflict aroused a tremendous sentimental interest in the black population of the South and gave us Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which also enjoyed a wide popularity as a drama. The Octoroon, written on the same pattern, soon followed on the American stage. These works mark the first instance where an attempt is made to present to the American public in a realistic manner the authentic life of the Negro.
