Their Names in Lights

Cecilia Morgan, the author of the 2017 monograph Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada, has now produced a book where her spadework digs up interesting facts and sidelights about Canadian actresses who made it big abroad. In their era — from the 1870s to the 1940s — Shakespeare was not considered a damnable foreign playwright, and cultural appropriation was accepted virtually by decree. Margaret Anglin and Viola Allen wrote articles about their interpretations of Lady Macbeth, Portia, and other lead roles; Julia Arthur expressed disapproval of acting schools and claimed that there was no such thing as a “national” style of acting. Nobody winced in embarrassment when Annie Russell took on a Japanese character or when Allen played a Chinese dowager empress.

The stereotypical tropes of the period were most explicitly demonstrated by such popular plays as Claude Askew and Edward Knoblock’s The Shulamite, an English drama set in...