{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03507373455559984, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0219210840972499, 'mean_word_length': 5.212871287128713, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Ira Aldridge: Performing Shakespeare in Europe, 1852–1855. By Bernth Lindfors. Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013; pp. xii + 352, 21 illustrations. cloth, $55, e-book $49.99.

As Bernth Lindfors notes in Ira Aldridge: Performing Shakespeare in Europe, 1852–1855, by the end of Aldridge’s first tour of continental Europe, the “African Roscius” (as Aldridge called himself) was famous enough that plays were being created about him, burlesquing his particular style of performing Shakespeare. These plays gave European actors “an opportunity to mimic, and thereby to recall in an amusing fashion, the impact that the real Aldridge had made on Continental audiences” (179). Throughout his meticulously researched study of this important African American actor and his European tour, Lindfors demonstrates the tour’s impact on continental critics and audiences and on the trajectory of Aldridge’s own career. This book is the third in a series of biographies of Aldridge by Lindfors. The first two volumes (both published in 2011, also by Rochester University Press as part of its Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora) chronicle far longer periods in Aldridge’s life and career. The history presented in these volumes, Ira Aldridge: The Early Years, 1807–1833 and Ira Aldridge: The Vagabond Years, 1833–1852, is summarized in the author’s brief introduction. Lindfors acknowledges that the third book differs significantly from the earlier two in that it focuses on a shorter span of time and because during his European tour Aldridge performed in only a handful of roles, including Othello, Mungo (from Isaac Bickerstaff’s The Padlock), Shylock, Macbeth, and, very occasionally, Richard III. Although he had played in a variety of melodramas and farces on the British Isles, as Lindfors notes, “it was primarily as a Shakespearean actor that Aldridge was known and evaluated when he toured the Continent” (6). On his tour, Aldridge either performed entirely in English with his company or—usually as Shylock—joined a European company performing in their native language while he portrayed his role in English. In the first chapter, Lindfors describes how Aldridge prepared for the tour, hiring a company of British actors. The second chapter examines Aldridge’s disappointing first engagements in Brussels, which led to the dismissal of much of the company he had just hired. Aldridge received a much more positive response