The representation of race on the Georgian stage is something of a minefield in the midst of the quest to reconstruct contemporary stage practices and textual meaning. Only with the black American Ira Aldridge's appearance at the Royal Coburg Theatre in 1825 would a coloured actor publicly perform before a London audience. Of course, the regulatory system supporting litigation by the patentees excluded the Coburg from spoken drama, with the result that Aldridge could not perform Shakespeare's Othello or, indeed, any other spoken drama at that playhouse. However, the issue of black performers and their relationship to the blackface makeup used by white Georgian actors has a much more extensive context than simply recording the first coloured Othello. For the reasons set out below, many white actors probably avoided blackface as much as they could. James Fennell, who acted in England, Scotland and America from the 1780s onwards and who made a speciality of performing Othello, provides two fascinating anecdotes in his Apology memoir. When he was about to play the role for the first time, he asked advice from an older actor who replied ‘I have been forty years on the stage, and have never blacked my face, or passed through a trap-door’. On another occasion, he recalled a ‘delicate actor’ in an unnamed English country town who refused to play the role of Othello ‘with a black face, unless there should be seven pounds in the house’. Finding too few in the audience, he declined to perform blacked-up.