Ignatius Sancho and Theater
The biographical sketch by Joseph Jekyll that appeared at the opening of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782) stated that Sancho “loved the theatre to such a point of enthusiasm, that his last shilling went to Drury-Lane, on Mr. Garrick’s representation of Richard.—He had been even induced to consider the stage as a resource in the hour of adversity, and his complexion suggested an offer to the manager of attempting Othello and Oroonoko; but a defective and incorrigible articulation rendered it abortive.”
Jekyll’s narrative is spurious on many points, and there is no record, in fact, of Sancho ever having “attempted” to portray either Shakespeare’s Othello or Aphra Behn’s famed African prince Oronooko on the stage. Moreover, there is no evidence outside Jekyll’s biographical sketch that Sancho had a speech impediment (a so-called “incorrigible articulation”) of any kind.
Yet Sancho clearly loved the theater. He was friends with David Garrick, the actor and theater manager perhaps most directly responsible for the revival of the works of Shakespeare during the eighteenth century, and he wrote to others about Garrick’s character. When Sancho published his Collection of New Songs, he included one text from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (“The Complaint”) and two from Garrick’s Ode Upon Dedicating a Building and Erecting a Statue to Shakespeare, an event staged at Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1769 and revived in London. His letters also record his impressions of the London theater.
Consideration of Sancho’s relationship with the theater opens the way to a broader discussion of the Black presence on the London stage of the eighteenth century, as well as questions of diversity and representation in works of “classical” theater today. These two pages address these questions: