Upon leaving Brussels, Aldridge, instead of heading south to Paris, took his troupe east to Aachen, a small Prussian spa and industrial center in North Rhine–Westphalia that shared a border with both France and the Netherlands. They had been invited to play there by Theodor Eberhard L'Arronge, a popular actor-manager, who in the course of running a successful German-language theater must have kept an alert eye on what was happening in the wider theater world nearby. He certainly must have read the enthusiastic reviews of Aldridge's performances in Brussels in the Deutsche Theater-Zeitung and Allgemeine Theater-Chronik before offering him a contract. And he probably figured that Aldridge and his company would attract larger audiences in Aachen than they had in Brussels, even though they would continue to speak their parts in English. Employing them was a risk worth taking simply because they would be enacting plays by Shakespeare.

German theatergoers loved Shakespeare. Indeed, he may have been more popular there than in England. In the nineteenth century there was a growing “Shakespeare cult” among German scholars and critics that led to widespread public acceptance of his plays as integral components of their national literature. In a study of the reception of English literature in Germany, Lawrence Marsden Price reports that