Victorian London’s Black playwrights

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Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Brittany Sanders for her research assistance on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are no doubt more Black writers of theatrical entertainments performed in London who should be recovered, including perhaps most prominently Black musical theatre creators whose original performances in touring in Black minstrel troupes constituted authorship.

2 For just a few examples of extensive periodical treatment of Dumas’s work, see three sample reviews of Henry III and his Court in The Foreign Quarterly Review (1831), The Athenaeum (1829), and The Examiner (1832), and of Antony in The Quarterly Review (1836).

3 This story is newly topical – and still highly controversial – due to the May 2023 premiere at the Cannes Film Festival of a film titled Kidnapped, directed by the acclaimed Marco Bellocchio, that retells the story of this scandal (Keslassy 2023).

4 David Belasco played the role of Spada with Fanny Cathcart (Winter 1918, 477).

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Notes on contributors

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is the Chair of the English Department at TCU, a Margaret Belcher Visiting Fellow in Victorian Studies at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and co-editor of Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film. She is the author of Ruskin’s Mythic Queen (1999) and Performing the Victorian (2007). Her Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical (2020) won the 2021 SCMLA Book Prize and was named a “MUST READ” theatre book by Playbill. Her article “Melodrama, Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation” on Elizabeth Polack, the first Anglo-Jewish woman playwright, won the 2020 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Best Article Prize.