“When one is considering the crimes of slavery, the popular theater is as central as the courthouse.”
—Saidiya Hartman
Welcome to The Octoroon archive. For several years, the owners of this site, Professor Lisa Merrill (Hofstra, New York) and Dr Theresa Saxon (University of Central Lancashire, Preston) have been collecting and examining a range of playbills, newspaper and journal reviews, photographs and other images, relating to the production history of one of nineteenth-century theatre's most inflammatory melodramatic plays, The Octoroon, by Irish playwright, Dion Boucicault.
