It is extremely interesting when one sees a person forget everything around him, as it were, the moment he sets foot onstage, divesting himself of his own self and the audience and the consciousness that he is standing there as an actor and melding utterly with his role. When this Othello flies into a rage, one feels that his passion is madness; when he seizes his man, one trembles involuntarily for the victim and feels infected and carried away by the excitement of the actor, on whose body one sees the nerves playing and the muscles twitching. If one hears the mighty voice as well, which is equally accustomed to all tonalities from the softest meltingness to the thunder of passion, if one sees the bared snow-white teeth of the Negro stand out uncannily from the brownish face, one does indeed take away a lasting impression of a highly original phenomenon.

Aldridge performs Othello more with the overwhelming, passionate blood of his race than with the spirit of the artist; the nobility of his personality and the splendid wildness of his anger and pain capture our senses as if by magic, rather than capturing our hearts. And when the Moor drags Desdemona's corpse from her bed, kisses it insanely, and then lets it fall back like a senseless thing, the last emotion that remains with us is horror, not pity.

Mr. Aldridge's Shylock is a different matter.