Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
On leaving Berlin, Aldridge and his troupe spent a month en route to Vienna making a series of brief stops at smaller towns—Stettin, Posen (now Poznań), Frankfurt (Oder), Breslau (now Wroclaw)—at each of which they played their usual repertoire before large audiences who had read the Berlin reviews and were eager to see Aldridge perform. In Stettin “crowds from all corners of the intellectual world [came]. Their desire to see ‘the Moor’ performed by a real Moor was immense.” Othello had to be repeated the following evening in order to satisfy those who were unable to get a seat the first time. In Posen crowds gathered to welcome him at the train station and in front of his hotel, forming lines to receive him. When he appeared as Othello to a packed theater, “enthusiasm exceeded all bounds.” In Frankfurt (Oder) he proved that “a higher, indeed the highest degree of education is even within the grasp of Negroes, of which there could hardly be a more striking example.” And in Breslau,
long before midday the theater directors could only reply negatively to requests for tickets, and all copies of Othello had vanished from the bookstores. The little book The Art of Learning English in Twelve Hours was a rare commodity, and teachers of the English language will date a new epoch in their lives from this day. Business had come to a standstill; Breslau read. Thus prepared, and in greatest anticipation of the passionate outbursts of the “green-eyed monster” of jealousy in a true son of the hot south, the audience waited in solemn silence for the curtain to go up on Thursday evening.
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