Entertaining the nation: American drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

ENTERTAINING THE NATION American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Tice L. Miller A Series from Sou...

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ENTERTAINING

THE NATION

American Drama in the Eighteenth

and Nineteenth

Centuries Tice L. Miller

A Series from Southern Illinois University Press robert a. schanke Series Editor

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Other Books in the Theater in the Americas Series The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays Translated by Adam Versényi With an Essay by Jacqueline E. Bixler

Angels in the American Theater: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy Edited and with an introduction by Robert A. Schanke

Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937 Jonathan L. Chambers

“That Furious Lesbian”: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta Robert A. Schanke

Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience Dorothy Chansky Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta Edited and with an Introduction by Robert A. Schanke Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process Bruce Kirle Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater Sonja Kuftinec

Caffe Cino: The Birthplace of Off-OffBroadway Wendell C. Stone Teaching Performance Studies Edited by Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer With a Foreword by Richard Schechner Broadway’s Bravest Woman: Selected Writings of Sophie Treadwell Edited and with introductions by Jerry Dickey and Miriam López-Rodríguez Our Land Is Made of Courage and Glory: Nationalist Performance of Nicaragua and Guatemala E. J. Westlake

Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy Felicia Hardison Londré Stage, Page, Scandals, and Vandals: William E. Burton and NineteenthCentury American Theatre David L. Rinear


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Entertaining the Nation


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ENTERTAINING THE NATION American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Tice L. Miller

Southern Illinois University Press • Carbondale


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Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 07

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Tice L. Entertaining the nation : American drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / Tice L. Miller. p. cm.—(Theater in the Americas) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2778-2 (pbk : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8093-2778-3 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. American drama—18th century—History and criticism. 2. American drama—Revolutionary period, 1775– 1783—History and criticism. 3. American drama—19th century—History and criticism. 4. English drama—18th century—History and criticism. 5. National characteristics, American, in literature. 6. United States—Intellectual life—18th century. 7. United States—Intellectual life—19th century. 8. United States—In literature. I. Title. PS343.M55 2007 812'.309—dc22 2007003970 Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992. ∞


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In democracies dramatic pieces are listened to, but not read. Most of those who frequent the amusements of the stage do not go there to seek the pleasures of the mind, but the keen emotions of the heart. They do not expect to hear a fine literary work, but to see a play; and provided the author writes the language of his country correctly enough to be understood, and his characters excite curiosity and awaken sympathy, the audience are satisfied. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, volume 2, 1840 When Jonathan requires intellectual amusement he seeks it in the columns of his newspaper. Literature of any kind must be racy and exciting in order to appeal to his appetite. Bald reports of meetings and debates find little favor in his sight. Murders, elopements, divorce cases, and defalcations are to him the butter of his daily bread, oiling the wheels of life, as it were, and removing the crustiness from an arid existence. —Alan Dale [Alfred J. Cohen], Jonathan’s Home, 1885


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1 Contents Preface xi Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

xv

British Drama and the Colonial American Stage American Drama of the New Republic 29 Drama in the Age of Jackson 57 The Age of Melodrama 92 Realism and American Drama 136 Epilogue 185 Notes 191 Bibliography Index 219


1

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1 Preface I

began thinking about writing this book a number of years ago while teaching a seminar in American theatre and drama. It was clear that my students didn’t share my excitement in reading old plays, and I kept tinkering with the syllabus in an effort to fix it. After a certain amount of trial and error, I came to the conclusion that if we looked at these plays as historical documents rather than as dramatic literature, we could understand what was happening in the culture and how it influenced what ended up on stage. This seemed much more worthwhile than reading old plays just for the plot. It did require some knowledge of American history, since our early plays are tied closely to the events and moods of the people who inhabited this continent, and it required a curiosity about such matters. While not every student instantly fell in love with American history, the majority did find the new approach interesting enough to discover how plays are a “kind of” halfway house between historical events and the present and how the playwright has to understand the audience in order to utilize effectively the theatrical conventions of the age. The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction to a lot of unread and unloved plays with the hope that students will become excited by their possibilities and want to investigate them on their own. Anyone working in American drama stands on the shoulders of scholars who have developed this field; for me, these include the late Barnard Hewitt and Charles Shattuck. Hewitt introduced me to American theatre scholarship at the University of Illinois in the 1960s, and his Theatre U.S.A. remains a major book in this field. Shattuck, also at the University of Illinois, wrote the two-volume study Shakespeare on the American Stage, which is one of the most readable works published about the American theatre. He loved old prompt scripts and helped his students to appreciate them. These mentors interested me in old plays, and I have spent much of my career reading them. Over the years, I have worked at a number of libraries around the country. I want to thank the librarians at the New York Public Library, especially those at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection; the Harvard Theatre Collection and Houghton Library; Yale School of Drama Library and Beinecke Rare

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Preface

Book and Manuscript Library; Folger Shakespeare Library; Boston Public Library; the Library at the New York Historical Society; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; and Love Library at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. I am especially grateful for all the assistance given me by Kathy Johnson, humanities librarian at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Julia Curtis, Dan Watermeier, Gresdna Doty, and Peter A. Davis read portions of an early draft of the manuscript and offered advice. I am grateful to them for taking the time and effort to be of assistance to me. The errors and mistakes, however, are all my own. An earlier version of the Dunlap material appeared in the introduction to William Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005; reprinted with the permission of University of Illinois Press). Earlier versions of chapter 4, “The Age of Melodrama,” and chapter 5, “Realism and American Drama,” in this volume appeared in chapter 3, “Plays and Playwrights: Civil War to 1896,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1999; reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press). A Big XII Fellowship and a research leave from the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, supported my research at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. There are many people whom I want to thank for assisting me with this project. My wife, Carren, accompanied me on many trips and made all of them an adventure. Staff members at the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film have been attentive to my needs and include Todd Cuddy, Julia Hagemeier, Marilyn Duba, Pat Overton, Dorothy Benes, and two administrators, Jeff Scott Elwell and Paul S. Steger. I wish to thank Jack Oliva, dean of the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts, for his assistance in obtaining funding and a research leave. I am grateful to my nineteenthcentury study group at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for providing sage advice on earlier drafts of chapters. I am especially grateful to all my colleagues and friends who have shared papers and panels with me over the years. My collaborations with Don B. Wilmeth, Ron Engle, Felicia Londré, Weldon Durham, Julia Curtis, Dan Watermeier, and Robert A. Schanke have been personally rewarding to me. I especially wish to thank Martha Campbell of Austin, Texas, for running such a delightful bed and breakfast with wireless Internet and scrumptious meals. Returning to the University of Texas at Austin has been a joy, always. And I want to thank our sons, Dane and Graeme, for keeping my feet to the fire by always asking, “Is it finished yet?” xii


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Preface

And finally, I want to thank the staff at Southern Illinois University Press and Robert A. Schanke, editor of the Theater in the Americas series, for all their assistance and support.

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Introduction The number of books written today on American history and culture simply staggers the imagination. I visit my local bookstore weekly and usually find new titles on George Washington or Thomas Jefferson; about the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812; and on Abraham Lincoln and everyone he knew. And with a generation of feminist scholars pursuing the neglected history of women in this country, we can find new books on Abigail Adams, Martha Washington, and Dolly Madison as well as Mary Todd Lincoln. Keeping current in American history now taxes all the resources of the professional historian. Which brings us to my book on American drama. Historians seldom turn to the stage in assessing how people and events are perceived in the culture at large. Yet, before film and television, it was the playwright and actor who digested the news and made history come alive for a largely illiterate audience. Playwrights and actors created the character of Jonathan, who became the first symbol of this country in opposition to the Englishman John Bull. Audiences learned about the egalitarian nature of this democratic society from the stage, not only from new works but also from adaptations of older works whose rhetoric lent themselves to republican interpretations. The playwright together with actor and manager incorporated new technology into productions, acquainting audiences with steamships, trains, and the telegraph. Plays about the West, plays about the Civil War, plays about urban life when contrasted with rural life, plays about famous and not so famous battles, plays about Wall Street—all helped to educate and entertain new immigrants as well as the rest of nation. As the crucible where advanced ideas about marriage and divorce, ethics and morality, race and gender were put before the public, the theatre served as a civilizing force in the establishment of this nation. Americans were English before they were Americans, and that is why I begin this book with English plays that were favorites of the colonists. I take responsibility for the selections, although Odai Johnson and William J. Burling have made the task easier with their calendar documenting productions on the colonial American stage. The choices become somewhat easier for the xv


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Introduction

early years of this nation as scholars seem to have reached some consensus about the important American plays and playwrights. I hope to add to their insights. I am advocating a closer relationship than others have suggested between journalism and playwriting in the mid-nineteenth century, as the hot topics of the former became the melodramas of the latter. And finally, I am interested in exploring the decline of the romantic aesthetic and the rise of the realist movement—a rise that must have seemed barbaric and uncivilized to idealists. The New Drama of Henrik Ibsen crossed the Atlantic in the 1880s and 1890s, suggesting that plays could be more than popular entertainment. Yet, audiences and critics alike were slow to accept a vision of the world that required them to look at their lives truthfully rather than through the conventions of their age. It was not until the second decade of the twentieth century that a generation of American playwrights led by Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell depicted characters who resembled living, breathing humans and developed plots that dealt with real human issues. There was an American drama before O’Neill and Glaspell. In entertaining the nation, it both reflected and defined who Americans were as a people during the nation’s first two centuries. The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to this history.

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1 British Drama and the Colonial American Stage The Plays of Shakespeare, and Jonson, and Ford, and Marlowe, of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Wycherly, and all the old poets of the drama are ours, as much ours, being the descendants of Englishmen, as if our fathers had never left the country in which they were written. —William Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre, 1832

I

n 1763 at the end of the French and Indian War, the idea of the colonies revolting against British cultural tastes seemed as unlikely as their revolting against British rule. The cultural locus of the colonies was London. Literature and the arts—painting, music, architecture, and theatre—all bore the stamp of “made in London.” The search for an American identity would begin later when it became important to express cultural differences with the English and to define national identity. But in the colonial period, colonists strove to identify themselves with the mother country. And this is seen especially in the colonial theatre. Audiences wanted plays and actors from the London stage, or at least from one of the better-known provincial theatres in England, Ireland, or Scotland. The American colonies were dependent upon dramatic standards and values essentially English. Many colonists had arrived with a bias against the English stage, however, thanks in no small part to its “immoral” nature during the Restoration and its association at home with the Stuart court. The Puritans considered theatre immoral, a waste of money and time, and irreligious; and, as they settled the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, they banned theatrical performances.1 The Quakers and Presbyterians who settled Philadelphia also were hostile to theatre and passed laws outlawing it for both economic and moral issues. The frugal Dutch who settled New York thought theatre frivolous, and it languished in the early eighteenth century, caught between local political factions.2 But in Maryland and the southern colonies, liberalminded Catholics and Anglicans provided a more supportive environment, 1

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especially after the ban on public theatricals was lifted with the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660. There are many extant eighteenth-century political and religious dialogues that, while not intended for the stage, were used for instruction and entertainment. These include dramatic discourses by Cotton Mather, who, Peter Davis argues, knew how to develop characters and forward the action.3 There is a good deal of evidence for theatrical activity in Williamsburg in the early eighteenth century. For example, a merchant, William Levingston, built a theatre in the second decade and under terms of indenture engaged former London dancers Charles and Mary Stagg as performers. Likely, he imported other players from England. Existing records note that professional actors performed in Williamsburg during the court and assembly seasons in the 1720s and, at midcentury, the April sessions of the Virginia Burgesses.4 We also know the titles of plays produced in the 1730s; they included such London favorites as George Farquhar’s comedies The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Stratagem; Joseph Addison’s neoclassical tragedy Cato; George Lillo’s somber The London Merchant; and Susanna Centlivre’s most successful comedy, The Busy Body. These plays had widespread popularity in the colonies, north as well as south. The demand for amusements in South Carolina came with the leisure and wealth that slave labor and plantation life provided. In the 1730s during the racing season in Charleston, it was not uncommon for a wide variety of entertainments, including balls, concerts, and theatre, to be available for the large crowds. Hugh Rankin notes the production of Thomas Otway’s tragedy The Orphan in 1735.5 The John Hippisley ballad farce Flora; or, Hob in the Well, and John Dryden’s comedy The Spanish Fryer were also popular. The casts for these plays may have been local amateurs, but residents were interested, and if the religious fervor excited by the Great Awakening had not swept the south, perhaps professional theatre would have gained a toehold at this time. Preachers John Wesley and George Whitefield drew huge crowds. George C. D. Odell notes that in the course of three years in Charleston, besides pantomimes and comic operas, audiences viewed the standard plays of an eighteenth-century British theatre.6 Strolling players presented Shakespeare and other English plays in earlyeighteenth-century Philadelphia and New York. In 1749–50, the Murray–Kean troupe was the first theatrical company of importance to visit those cities and performed a repertory that included The Recruiting Officer, Cato, Colley Cibber’s adaptation of Richard III, John Dryden’s Love for Love, John Gay’s ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera, and afterpieces The Female Parson by Charles Coffey, The Lying Valet by David Garrick, and The Mock Doctor by Henry Fielding. The troupe’s repertory differed little from provincial English the2

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atres except that conservative colonial audiences required frequent revivals of plays promoting morality and patriotism. Some of the wealthy classes were motivated more by economic development and community pride than by aesthetic concerns. They wanted to import British cultural institutions to bring refinement to their communities. Anglican elites (as opposed to Quaker elites) in Philadelphia asked David Douglass to build a theatre and bring his troupe to the city because they wanted entertainment they had known back in London.7 For many in the educated and wealthy classes, theatre served as a symbol of culture and signified a progressive community, much like performing arts centers do today. But nothing is simple in understanding why certain groups supported theatre and others didn’t. Such issues became entangled with local politics in almost all of the colonies. In addition, an increasingly middle-class audience wanted their values reflected in their art and literature. As a result, didactic and sentimental eighteenth-century English plays such as The London Merchant became staples of the repertory well into the nineteenth century. In the colonial theatre, there was little or no interest in local plays. The publicspirited elite wanted British comedies and dramas with enlightenment values and an emphasis on virtue. Important to the development of English provincial theatre in the Western Hemisphere, the British West Indies were closely connected by trade to New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and other North American cities. The cash crop was sugarcane, which, through the efforts of slave labor, was turned into sugar, rum, and molasses and shipped to North American and European ports. Ron Chernow has noted that the West Indies brought more wealth to Britain than “all of the North American colonies combined.”8 Young English aristocrats came to Jamaica to make a quick fortune. There sprang up a plantation aristocracy in the islands with leisure time and money for entertainment. Even with scant evidence, we know that an English company performed Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in 1733 in Spanish Town.9 In 1745 an Irishman, John Moody, established a theatre in Kingston and recruited actors from England, including David Douglass and Mary and Owen Morris. Moody featured himself in a number of Shakespearean roles, including Hamlet, Romeo, and Lear.10 When George Washington visited Barbados in 1751, he attended a production of The London Merchant. The Hallam Company of Comedians, after arriving on the mainland in 1752, toured Jamaica from 1755 to 1758 and from 1775 to 1785 during the Revolutionary War, offering their standard repertory of Shakespeare, Restoration, and eighteenth-century plays. A few local plays were added from time to time, perhaps to satisfy local audiences, but the repertoire of theatres in eighteenth-century British West Indies derived almost exclusively from what English audiences were viewing back home. 3

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In practical terms, then, English drama came to America with the actors. As they arrived from England, they tended to bring with them the theatre they knew at home. When the Hallam Company of Comedians arrived in Williamsburg from London in 1752, David Garrick was in the fifth year of his co-directorship of the Drury Lane Theatre. Clearly, his success influenced the Hallam Company and their repertory. Garrick had offered the best and most popular English plays from the time of Elizabeth to that of his own. Through trial and error, he had learned the proper mix of comedies, tragedies, farces, and entre-acte entertainments to keep an increasing middle-class audience returning to Drury Lane. “Dances, pantomimes, spectacles, and other specialty numbers,” Kalman A. Burnim has noted, “often held more appeal and excitement for the spectators than the main piece they accompanied.”11 Spectators paid half-price admission after the third act in order to catch the entertainment following the play. Managers in the colonies followed this practice as well. Garrick had no qualms about altering plays to fit the temper of the times, and the times demanded sensibility, decency, and decorum. Jeremy Collier’s “Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage” in 1698 signaled an end to the licentious wit and behavior in Restoration plays, and in the early years of the eighteenth century, English drama began to reflect the moral tone of its increasingly middle-class audience as well as of the Hanover court. The drama that arrived before and with the Hallams in 1752 had no doubt been pruned of vulgarities that would offend sensitive tastes. Famed for restoring the original texts of Shakespearean tragedies, Garrick still retained alterations made in the Restoration that deleted violence and gross behavior. In reworking Restoration comedies to make them acceptable to contemporary tastes, Garrick cut references to “sex, cuckoldry or objectionable words.”12 Poetic justice was important to eighteenth-century sensibilities: evil must be punished and good rewarded. Augustan writers and audiences wanted tightly constructed dramas where the unities of time, place, and action were imposed on the plots of earlier plays. The shift from a court audience of the Restoration to a middle-class audience in Garrick’s day brought wholesale changes to the tone and substance of dramatic fare on the London stage and subsequently to the colonies. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s prologue, written for Garrick in 1747 at the beginning of his management of Drury Lane, stated the actor’s policy: The stage but echoes back the public’s voice. The Drama’s Laws, the Drama’s Patrons give, For we that live to please must please to live.13

This applied as well to the colonies. A slight alteration––“The Drama’s Laws, the Drama’s London Patrons give”––might be more apt. 4

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The Hallam Company selected and cast twenty-four plays before sailing from England in May 1752. They were favorite stock pieces, and Garrick had shone preeminently in many of them.14 There were four Shakespearean pieces, including Richard III in the Cibber version, Garrick having played the title role in his London debut in 1741 at Goodman’s Fields Theatre, and Hamlet, Garrick’s most popular tragic role at Drury Lane; The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Stratagem; Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent and Jane Shore; Nathaniel Lee’s Theodosius; Sir Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers; Lillo’s The London Merchant; and afterpieces by Garrick, including Miss in Her Teens and Lethe. By the time the Hallam Company arrived in New York a year later, it had added several other plays to the repertory. Garrick’s practice of offering something for everyone in his audience seems the method followed by the Hallam Company, which opened its Williamsburg engagement September 15, 1752, with The Merchant of Venice, followed by a farce, Edward Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist; or, The Sham Doctor. Odell reports that when the troupe opened its first New York engagement, September 17, 1753, Cibber’s (or Henry Carey’s)15 ballad opera Damon and Phillida followed the main bill of Steele’s The Conscious Lovers. The latter was regarded as “good as a sermon” because it preached against drunkenness and dueling.16 Garrick’s scheme of mixing lowbrow and highbrow entertainment is reflected in the addition of William Hulett’s dancing talents following the main bill two nights later. Hulett had arrived from England in 1752 and quickly became popular for his dancing and musical abilities (he played the harpsichord and violin). Providing a potpourri of entertainment to keep the groundlings happy was as necessary on this side of the Atlantic as in London. On September 24, “extra inducement was offered,” Odell reports, by the singing of Mrs. Love in act 2 and a scotch dance by Hulett at the end of act 3. A song by Mrs. Love in act 4 and a hornpipe by Hulett at the end of the play concluded the evening’s entertainment. Mrs. Love and her husband, like Hulett, were engaged as dancers and were used in various ways to entertain the audience.17 The prominent use of afterpieces and these entertainers suggests that more than the play was needed to attract this heterogeneous audience. On October 29 following The London Merchant, Garrick’s farce The Lying Valet and the dancing of William Hulett must have been appealing to an audience stuffed full of Lillo’s moral maxims. And on December 10, following a revival of The Beaux Stratagem, Hallam offered the company’s first pantomime in New York, Harlequin Collector; or, The Miller Deceived. Both the main bill and afterpieces for this first New York season were familiar to audiences at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Garrick’s practice of offering a balance of comedy and tragedy at Drury Lane was followed closely in the colonies. Odai Johnson and William J. 5

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Burling’s study reveals that eight of the thirteen most frequently performed main plays at Drury Lane were also popular in the colonies, including the favorite of both audiences, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.18 But colonial records indicate that there was a difference in taste between London and North America. By 1777, Cato and The London Merchant had all but disappeared from the London stage while they still were revived regularly in the colonies. “Provincial culture is always conservative,” Kenneth Silverman concludes in his Cultural History of the American Revolution. “It retains styles long after they have become unfashionable in the metropolis.”19 Shakespeare Colonists, even religious ones who opposed the theatre, recognized the genius of William Shakespeare. They turned to his plays as well as to the works of Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and others in an attempt to understand the age. Newspapers quoted him extensively; articles published in the Virginia Gazette in 1756 about the upcoming war with the French, for example, included references to his plays. 20 Colonists’ letters to one another were filled with quotes from Shakespeare. Abigail Adams writing to John in 1776 about independence quoted from Julius Caesar: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”21 At least three signers of the Declaration of Independence owned copies of Shakespearean plays; George Washington owned a copy of Bell’s 1773 edition.22 William Dunlap believed that Shakespeare acted as a bridge from literature to the theatre, noting that Philadelphians “who had only read the works of Shakespeare were anxious to experience the influence of the living personification of those thoughts and characters which had delighted them in the closet.”23 Yet for many, it was Shakespeare the philosopher, not Shakespeare the playwright, who interested them most. John Adams wrote in his diary: “Let me search for the clue which led great Shakespeare into the labyrinth of human nature. Let me examine how men think.”24 Evidence is scarce as to colonial productions of Shakespeare in the early eighteenth century. Rankin accepts that a New York amateur production of Romeo and Juliet in 1730 is the “first known performance of Shakespeare on the American stage.”25 In 1750, the Murray–Kean Company performed Richard III in New York at a theatre owned by the Honorable Rip Van Dam, Esquire. Hallam’s advance agent, Robert Upton, organized his own company in New York and performed Othello in 1751. The Hallam Company opened its first season in Williamsburg in 1752 with The Merchant of Venice. The actors had rehearsed and brought with them from London Richard III, Hamlet, and Othello. The following season in New York, they also performed King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry IV. Rankin estimates that fourteen Shakespear6

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ean plays were produced in the colonies between 1750 and 1776 for a total of at least 180 performances. He admits, however, that this number is only a guess and that the correct amount could be “at least 500.”26 Johnson and Burling have identified a total of thirteen plays for 181 known performances.27 Shakespeare was clearly the favorite playwright of the colonists, but as Charles Shattuck notes, “Much of what they saw was not true Shakespeare but ‘Shakespeare improved.’”28 “Improved” means of course that London patrons viewed Shakespeare reworked as Restoration drama: language purified, plots streamlined, comic characters deleted from tragedies, endings rewritten to adhere to the tyranny of poetic justice, and the age’s love of pageantry indulged with funeral possessions, masque balls, dancing witches, and the like. Romeo and Juliet came with Garrick’s more poignant ending and pageantry: after Romeo takes poison, Juliet awakens, and they have a final scene together before he dies and she kills herself with his dagger. Garrick also added a funeral procession for Juliet to bring the play to a close. Richard III came in Cibber’s shortened version with the title role expanded and made even more evil than the original play. The Tempest was rewritten as a Restoration comedy with music by John Dryden and Sir William Davenant. Garrick rewrote The Taming of the Shrew into a three-act afterpiece entitled Catherine and Petruchio. Macbeth contained music and dancing witches, although Garrick restored much of Shakespeare’s language. Garrick’s King Lear retained the “improvements” of Nahum Tate, which included a love affair between Cordelia and Edgar and a happy ending. Modern critics shouldn’t be too hard on Garrick. He understood that eighteenth-century audiences regarded the ending to Lear as a violation of poetic justice. The patrons in this age of sentiment came to the theatre for a good cry. There were good reasons that the Tate version of Lear held the stage for about 150 years. George Farquhar George Farquhar stood next to Shakespeare in importance for eighteenthcentury American audiences. New Yorkers apparently first viewed The Beaux Stratagem (1707) and The Recruiting Officer (1706) as early as 1732 in a “new theatre” owned by “the honourable Rip Van Dam Esq.”29 The Murray–Kean Company offered The Constant Couple (1699) as well as The Beaux Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer in their New York engagement in 1750–51. A year later, members of the Hallam Company brought these three comedies with them from London as part of their repertory. In 1767, David Douglass’s American Company (formerly Hallam’s Company of Comedians) chose to open the John Street Theatre in New York with The Beaux Stratagem. Between 1771 and 1773, the Yale Literary Society Linonian violated college regulations to produce the same comedy. During the British occupation of New York (1776–83), Sir 7

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William Howe’s Thespians reopened the John Street Theatre as the Theatre Royal in January 1777 with The Beaux Stratagem. Silverman notes that during the occupation, Farquhar’s play was presented there twelve times. 30 Why the popularity of this play in the colonies? While we cannot be certain today, it is well crafted with attractive lovers, a roguish set of crooks, clever situations, and the famous divorce scene between the Sullens—a dicey scene for comedy of the period, but clearly it must have resonated with the audience. The Beaux Stratagem begins as many other Restoration comedies: two dashing young gentlemen, Aimwell and Archer, have left London for a country adventure in the town of Litchfield to replenish their fortunes. Aimwell, a younger son of nobility, pretends to be his brother Viscount Aimwell, while Archer toadies up to him as his footman. Archer’s attitude about love and romance seems little different from the jaded characters in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife: “I love a fine House, but let another keep it; and just so I love a fine Woman.”31 As Aimwell’s pretended footman, he immediately pursues the innkeeper’s daughter, Cherry, who sees through his guise, recognizes him as a gentleman, and offers him two thousand pounds if he will marry her. Marriage to an innkeeper’s daughter, however, is not exactly what Archer has in mind. Meanwhile, Aimwell is doing everything possible to attract attention, including attending a country church service. All is part of a stratagem to catch a wife with a fortune to relieve their impoverished state. The possibility of Aimwell finding a fortune in Litchfield improves when Dorinda, the daughter of a local aristocrat, Lady Bountiful, is intrigued by his visit to church and sends the servant Scrub to make inquiries of Archer about his “master.” Scrub is a low comic type but individualized with a distinctive personality: “Of a Monday, I drive the Coach; of a Tuesday, I drive the Plough; on Wednesday, I follow the Hounds; a Thurdsay, I dun the Tenants; on Fryday, I go to Market; on Saturday, I draw Warrants; and a Sunday, I draw Beer.” After some spying on both sides, Aimwell and Dorinda meet outside her gate, where Aimwell pretends to be dying to gain admittance to the house. Helping in this effort is Lady Bountiful and her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Sullen, who is married to her worthless son. Farquhar has provided a very humorous subplot involving the innkeeper Bonniface, who, in addition to his hotel duties, is leader of a bumbling gang of highwaymen. Their attempt to rob Lady Bountiful resembles a Marx Brothers comedy. While his initial purpose was fortune hunting, Aimwell falls in love with Dorinda and confesses that he is not Viscount Aimwell but his poor younger brother. All ends well: Dorinda loves him anyway and his brother dies suddenly, leaving Aimwell with the title and fortune he has been claiming. The pièce de résistance is the divorce scene with the Sullens, who despise each other: 8

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Mrs. Sullen: Pray, Spouse, what did you marry for? Sullen: To get an Heir to my Estate. Sir Charles: And have you succeeded? Sullen: No. Archer: The Condition fails of his side—Pray, Madam, what did you marry for? Mrs. Sullen: To support the Weakness of my Sex by the Strength of his, and to enjoy the Pleasures of an agreeable Society. Sir Charles: Are your Expectations answer’d? Mrs. Sullen: No. Count Bellair: A clear Case, a clear Case. Sir Charles: What are the Bars to your mutual Contentment? Mrs. Sullen: In the first Place I can’t drink Ale with him. Sullen: Nor can I drink Tea with her. Mrs. Sullen: I can’t hunt with you. Sullen: Nor can I dance with you. Mrs. Sullen: I hate Cocking and Racing. Sullen: And I abhor Ombre and Piquet. Mrs. Sullen: Your Silence is intolerable. Sullen: Your Prating is worse. Mrs. Sullen: Have we not been a perpetual Offence to each other— a gnawing Vulture at the Heart? Sullen: A frightful Goblin to the sight. Mrs. Sullen: A Porcupine to the Feeling. Sullen: Perpetual Wormwood to the Taste. Mrs. Sullen: Is there on Earth a thing we could agree in? Sullen: Yes—To part. Mrs. Sullen: With all my Heart.

Sullen wants to rid himself of a wife and keep her fortune but is prevented from this by the robbers, who have stolen all of his legal papers and turned them over to Archer. Knowing where to find a fortune for himself, Archer ends the play by leading Mrs. Sullen to a country dance. Farquhar’s wit, skillful plotting, and well-defined characters made the play a favorite well into the nineteenth century. While Aimwell, Archer, Lady Bountiful, Scrub, and the rest were drawn from the comic tradition of Restoration drama, they seem more human, more compassionate, and more moral than the characters in the plays of Wycherley or William Congreve. As in most comedies, the play ends with a marriage, or perhaps two marriages, given the growing relationship between Mrs. Sullen and Archer. The Beaux Stratagem may have been the most popular comedy in colonial America. The Recruiting Officer, however, was not far behind. Set in the 9

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country (in Shrewsbury), it treated country life with more respect than usually found in Restoration plays. Oliver Goldsmith would handle country life with similar care in She Stoops to Conquer, which also became a favorite with American audiences. The characters in The Recruiting Officer are less caricatures of familiar Restoration types than they are fresh and individualized personages. The brittle wit of Congreve and Wycherley is absent, although there is an abundance of robust humor presented with identifiable contemporary issues and realistically depicted characters. Their experiences are closer to those of a mid-eighteenth-century American audience than those drawn by earlier writers. Since Farquhar had served a stint as recruiter for the English army, the play is filled with humorous details that undoubtedly came from his experiences. The language is risqué for Puritan tastes, but probably a few words were excised, depending on the audience. The following speech by the recruiting sergeant, Kite, in the third act provides a good sense of the fun of the play: I was born a Gypsie, and bred among that Crew till I was ten Year old, there I learn’d Canting and Lying; I was bought from my Mother Cleopatra by a certain Nobleman for three Pistoles, who liking my Beauty made me his Page, there I learn’d Impudence and Pimping; I was turn’d off for wearing my Lord’s Linen, and drinking my Lady’s Brandy, and then turn’d Bailiff’s Follower, there I learn’d Bullying and Swearing—I at last got into the Army, and there I learn’d Whoring and Drinking—So that if your Worship pleases to cast up the whole Sum, viz. Canting, Lying, Impudence, Pimping, Bullying, Swearing, Whoring, Drinking, and a Halbard, you will find the Sum Total will amount to a Recruiting Serjeant.32

The play remained popular in the colonies from the 1730s through the end of the century. Joseph Addison’s Cato It is easy to like Farquhar’s comedies, but why Joseph Addison’s Cato? Its language is turgid and bombastic; its political sentiments are so highly idealized that both Tories and Whigs thought it spoke to their principles; and its characters are wooden and lifeless. By the 1770s, the play was not considered fashionable for a London audience. Yet in pre–Revolutionary War America, Cato was favored for its eloquence and classical form. And its political sentiments were pure republicanism. In the colonies, the play had become more than a play but an expression of the idealism of the day with themes of patriotism, liberty, virtue, and Roman fortitude. Jason Shaffer argues: “Few plays could have better suited the worldview of American revolutionaries 10

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British Drama and the Colonial American Stage 33

than Cato.” Marcus Porcius Cato is a Roman senator who resists Caesar’s rise to supreme power in Rome. In act 2, when asked what Caesar must do to win Cato’s friendship, the worthy Roman replies: Bid him disband his legions, Restore the commonwealth to liberty, Submit his actions to the public censure, And stand the judgment of a Roman Senate. Bid him do this, and Cato is his friend.34

For colonists, George III could have been substituted for the name of Caesar. Odell notes that the play was given a college production in Williamsburg in 1736 and also that Murray and Kean included it in their repertory for the 1750–51 season in New York. During that season, only The Recruiting Officer had more performances. An edition of Cato that appeared in Boston in 1767 marked the first publication in America of an English play. Silverman calls it the most quoted Whig literary work during the Stamp Act protests: “The play applied in virtually every line to the colonial situation in 1765, and later.”35 In addition, “Its politics . . . gave a sanctity to performances that made foes of the theatre cautious.” In other words, to criticize the play might be taken as criticism of its sentiments, directly identified with the American cause. Cato was trotted out whenever the theatre came under fire from moralists. Addison’s words were pirated or adapted by everyone, including those attributed to the unfortunate Nathan Hale. His final speech––“I regret that I have only one life to lose for my country”––came from Cato’s words over the body of his dead son: “What pity is it / That we can die but once to serve our country!”36 In republican drama, characters who served the public good were heroes, and those pursuing individual ends were viewed as villains. Maybe that is why Cato’s fight for liberty against Caesar appealed to the Revolutionary War generation. Washington considered the play so important that he arranged for its performance by his soldiers at Valley Forge in April and May 1778. Like Cato, Washington was perceived as the perfect classical hero, one who laid down his sword and returned to private life after winning the war with no thought of retaining power. Perhaps his identification with the play helped ensure its popularity during and after the war. Susanna Centlivre’s The Busy Body Centlivre’s most popular comedy, The Busy Body, held the stage in England and America for about 150 years after its London premiere in 1709. The first recorded production in America was at the New Theatre, New York, in December 1732.37 Four years later, amateurs or a combination of amateurs and professionals performed it in Colonial Williamsburg. The Murray–Kean 11

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Company performed the comedy at the first Nassau Street Theatre in New York in April 1751 and at the New Theatre, Annapolis, during the following year. In 1760, the Douglass Company first performed it in Annapolis. Odell notes productions at the John Street Theatre in New York in 1768 and 1769.38 British officers performed The Busy Body during their occupation of Boston in 1776 and in New York at the John Street Theatre (renamed the Theatre Royal) in 1778–79.39 When the American Company returned after the war, its performers staged the comedy at the John Street Theatre (which had returned to its original name) in 1785 and revived it regularly into the nineteenth-century. The Busy Body concerns the intrigues of two pair of lovers to overcome the obstacles (fathers and guardians) that prevent them from being married. Sir George Airy is attempting to win the love of the clever and charming Miranda, while her guardian, Sir Francis Gripe, has designs on her and her fortune himself. His son, Charles Gripe, is in love with the shy Isabinda, whose father (Sir Jealous Traffick) wants her to marry a Spaniard. The usual contrivances move the play along: dropped letters, masked meetings, and disguises. The plot seems conventional in every sense. But Centlivre introduces a new character and a new kind of comedy. Marplot is the “busy body” of the title who sticks his nose in everyone’s business and complicates the intrigues of the lovers. Yet, because he means well, his mistakes are quickly forgiven. The characters learn that it is better to let Marplot in on any secret because if rebuffed, he becomes determined to find out for himself: “Lord, Lord, how little curiosity some people have! Now my chief pleasure lies in knowing everybody’s business.”40 In attempting to defend Charles to Sir Jealous, for instance, he reveals the secret that Charles is inside the house visiting Isabinda. When Miranda hides Sir George behind the chimney board and cooks up a story about keeping a monkey there, Marplot’s curiosity gets the best of him and he peeks in, revealing Sir George. At the same time, he recovers quickly enough to smash some china and claim the monkey broke it jumping out the window, which allows Sir George to escape. And finally, he informs Sir Jealous that Charles came to a ball at his house in the guise of a Spaniard. Sir Jealous had thought the Spaniard to be the merchant who was to marry Isabinda. When he calls for his servants to stop the marriage, Marplot is dismayed: “What have I done now?” But Charles has had time to wed Isabinda, and in the end, Sir Jealous gives his blessing. Marplot is forgiven, not only by Charles but also by the other characters who have been affected by his antics. His popularity encouraged Centlivre to write a sequel, Marplot in Lisbon. American actors found the role of Marplot attractive. As a relatively young man of twenty-eight, Lewis Hallam Jr. played Marplot in 1768 and still 12

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possessed the role in the 1803 production at the Park Theatre in New York. Edmund Shaw Simpson, a leading actor and manager of the Park Theatre in the early 1800s, took on Marplot after the death of Hallam. Francis Courtney Wemyss made Marplot one of his most successful parts in the 1820s. In reading the play today, one can understand why the role was so popular. Marplot is set up by Centlivre to be a walking disaster, and audiences must have begun laughing the moment he appeared in any scene. At the top of the play, Charles tells Sir George how Marplot delivered a letter arranging a rendezvous to the husband rather than to the wife and took horses to the wife that were to occupy the husband. Of course leading actors wanted this role rather than the more conventional ones of Sir George and Charles. In addition, Centlivre wrote two other plays that were revived regularly: The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) and A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718). Comic Opera and Farce Colonial audiences loved comic opera, especially ballad opera, that bastard art form that owed its existence to the London success of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in 1728. It was the English theatre’s way of fighting against the gorgeous Handel operas—albeit with rather arcane plots—at the Haymarket. The competition was intense. Could an Italian castrati compete with a robust Macheath? Or could baroque laments about romantic love and honor compete with a chorus of prostitutes or two women fighting to spring Macheath from jail? Gay discovered the magic formula. Instead of Italian lyrics and classical plots, his opera contains English lyrics set to popular tunes and political and social satire directly against the English ruling establishment, mainly the prime minister, Robert Walpole. This ridicule of Walpole led to the Licensing Act of 1737 that closed theatres, which forced actors out of employment at home and led them to seek work in the colonies. The first production of The Beggar’s Opera in the colonies was in 1750 when the Murray–Kean Company presented it in New York. The Hallam Company of Comedians would give The Beggar’s Opera its first Philadelphia performance nine years later.41 Prior to this, however, in Charleston in 1735, Flora; or, Hob in the Well (1729) was the first ballad opera performed in the colonies. The plot, in brief, of this John Hippisley concoction seems but an excuse for the songs. Flora, an orphan, lives with an uncle who keeps her locked up because he possesses her money until she marries or comes of age. She plans to elope with a Mr. Friendly, who, in sending her a letter as to time and place, gives it to Hob, a country bumpkin. Hob gets mixed up and gives it to her uncle, who throws him down a well. Some good-natured fun ensues as Hob’s parents hear him calling from down in the well and think it is a ghost. But all ends well: Friendly and Flora are allowed to marry, and the opera concludes with 13

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a country fair and the sentiments that rural life is much more honest than the servile flattery of the court. An early song of Flora’s suggests the work’s indebtedness to Gay: An oath’s seldom kept, as a virgin’s fair fame; A lover’s fond vows, or a prelate’s good name; A lawyer to truth; a statesman from blame; Or a patriot-heart in a courtier.42

Marriage and medical doctors are treated with no more respect in Henry Fielding’s The Mock Doctor (1732), also first seen in the colonies in 1750. Gregory and Dorcas sing about the “intolerable fatigue of matrimony” when Gregory, mistaken for a famous physician, is dragged off to cure Charlotte, the daughter of Sir Jasper, who has been stricken dumb. Her dumbness seems related to her father’s insistence that she marry someone other than her lover, Leander. Getting into the spirit of the occasion, Gregory speaks gibberish to explain her illness to Sir Jasper: Certain spirits passing from the left side, which is the seat of the liver, to the right, which is the seat of the heart, we find the lungs, which we call in Latin, Whiskerus, having communication with the brain, which we name in Greek, Jackbootus, by means of a hollow vein, which we call in Hebrew, Perriwiggus, meet in the road with the said spirits, which fill the ventricles of the Omotaplasmus, and because the said humours have—you comprehend me well, sir?43

Sir Jasper is snowed by this display of medical knowledge. When Gregory brings Leander to Sir Jasper’s house disguised as an apothecary, the young lover insists on knowing a few “medical terms” of his own. But Gregory thinks his medical education is moving at too fast a pace: “Would you know as much as the whole faculty in an instant, sir?” New Yorkers were introduced to Charles Coffey’s opera The Female Parson; or, Beau in the Sudds (1730) at the first Nassau Street Theatre in 1750. The plot moves along familiar terrain: Sir Quibble Quibus and his wife, Lady Quibus, have been married three months and despise each other already. “Oh matrimony, matrimony! What a poison art thou to their joys, whom thou bindst unequally together!” Lady Quibus exclaims.44 Sir Quibble feels no less passionate about the subject: “What the devil had I to do to marry, cou’d I not have liv’d singly upon my neighbors, but I must embarrass myself with a wife, in the Devil’s name? And such a wife never had man—why, a pox, she denies me the privilege of my marriage bed.” Both are pursuing new lovers. Forced into marriage by her father, Lady Quibus has an ace up her sleeve: she had disguised her maid, Pinner, as a parson who in turn married them. 14

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Now she convinces Sir Quibble that this parson can also part them; when he realizes that it was her maid, he is delighted: “O my lucky stars—why was I deceiv’d so long?—thou dear kind hypocrite, thus let me thank thee.” Since they were never legally man and wife, they are free to pursue their own pleasures and passions. After its premiere in 1751 at the first Nassau Street Theatre, the Carey/Cibber Damon and Phillida (1729) became one of the most popular ballad operas in America. Set in the Arcadian Fields, the plot involves Phillida, the daughter of Corydon, an old shepherd, who is in love with Damon, an “inconstant” who wants to “frolick” and not to marry. Corydon is afraid that Damon will “ruin” his daughter and wants her to marry either of two fops, Cimon or Mopsus. They love her, she loves Damon, Damon may love Phillida but is not ready to settle down. Phillida determines to break off the match unless he marries her. She sings: While you pursue me, Thus to undo me, Sure Ruin lies in all you say. To bring your toying, Up to enjoying, Call first the priest, and name the day.45

She refuses him a kiss, telling him he has deceived her too often: “Graze where thou wilt, I’ll feed no ranging lovers.” Damon loves Phillida but regards husbands as work animals: “A husband! Death! A mill-horse, what, to grind and grind in one poor hopeless round of life! Today, today, tomorrow, and tomorrow, still to plod the path, I trod the day before. O! me thinks I feel the collar on my shoulders!” Like Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, Damon agonizes over giving up bachelorhood but decides he loves Phillida enough to marry her. They sing a love duet as the opera ends. The piece is witty, bright, and fun. The Anatomist; or, The Sham Doctor by Edward Ravenscroft (1696) had the distinction of being on the first bill of the Hallam Company in Williamsburg, September 15, 1752. A London favorite for several generations, this clever little farce set to music has young lovers outwitting their elders. Old Gerald, who admits to being three score in years and is probably seventy, wants to take a young wife, Angelica, the doctor’s daughter. The doctor is obliging and boasts that his wife will agree: “If once my wife should contradict my will, she should soon find what metal I am made of.”46 Of course his wife flatly refuses: “Many young women have been ruin’d by such unequal matches. Youth and age cannot agree: An old man may be fond of a young woman, but a young woman of an old man never.” Old Gerald disagrees: “You don’t 15

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inquire about a man’s age in marriage if he is very rich.” But Angelica’s mother will have none of it: “I will not be the jest of the whole town. Who would not split their sides to hear a couple of old fools call one another father and son? Away for shame!” Old Gerald’s son arrives disguised as a musician to visit his true love, Angelica. A spendthrift at the university, Young Gerald also needs money. He soon discovers that he and his father are after the same girl and that his father has offered a large sum of money to wed her. Young Gerald protests that the “Laws of nature, tho’ not of Nations” forbid such unequal matches, but Angelica reminds him that money has a way of trumping these laws: Angelica: But money, Gerald! What will not money do? Gerald: ’Tis true; for money mothers sell their daughters. Angelica: Yes, for money, most daughters sell themselves. Gerald: A beau for money will marry an old wither’d witch, with rotten lungs, no teeth, one eye, and half a nose. Angelica: For money soldiers sell their lives. Gerald: And priests their consciences.

It is Angelica’s mother who will rescue the lovers, but first they must outsmart Old Gerald, who is still lusting after Angelica. The doctor is planning to dissect a corpse sent from the gallows. The fun begins when Old Gerald, who has been trying to see Angelica, is convinced to act as the corpse to evade detection. It is the wily servants who dupe him into believing that he is on the verge of being ripped apart. Crispin, a servant to Young Gerald, pretends to be a doctor and announces: “I will in one moment cut de breast-bone from de ribs, and lay all open, dat you shall see how de heart, de lungs, de liver, lie in dair place proper, and order natural.” When the knives and saws are brought out, the “corpse” comes to life in a hurry. At the end, the young lovers are reunited, and Old Gerald agrees to join the celebration. Isaac Bickerstaffe’s comic operas were well received in the colonies. Love in a Village began a vogue in 1762 for what Susan Porter calls pastiche opera, English comic opera with music borrowed from a wide variety of sources.47 The American Company first performed Love in a Village in Charleston in 1766. Colonial audiences had the pleasure also of viewing Bickerstaffe’s Maid of the Mill (1765) and The Padlock (1768) in 1769. The former is a Cinderella story borrowed in part from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Patty, the miller’s daughter, loves Lord Aimworth and he loves her, but she refuses him because he is a lord. At the end of a long and complicated plot, they are united. Aimworth defends his choice: “I know very well the ridicule that may be thrown on a Lord’s marrying a miller’s daughter; and I own with blushes, it has for some time had too great weight with me; but we should marry to 16

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please ourselves, not other people: and on mature consideration, I can see no reproach justly merited, by raising a deserving woman to a station she is capable of adorning. Let her birth be what it will.”48 While technically a comic opera, The Padlock is written as a classic farce. Don Diego, an old man of sixty, has taken Leonora, a young girl of sixteen, from her parents and kept her locked up for three months.49 Satisfied that she is pure, he now will marry her. Before he leaves to tell her parents of his decision, however, he puts a large padlock on his door so no one can get out or in. Leander, a wily student at the university, has been pursuing Leonora by disguising himself as a pilgrim to meet her at Mass. And he has won the trust of Don Diego’s Negro servant, Mungo, by pretending to be a blind and crippled musician. After learning the family secrets from Mungo, he breaches the wall and wins the maiden. When Don Diego returns home, he finds Mungo drunk and Leander in the house: “I rais’d up the walls of this house to a great height, I barr’d up my windows towards the street, I put double bolts on my doors; I banish’d all that had the shadow of man or male kind; and I stood continually sentinel over it myself, to guard my suspicion from surprise: thus secur’d, I let my watch for one little moment, and in that moment—”50 But Don Diego is no monster and agrees to the nuptials of the young lovers. He has learned also the limitations of locks, including the huge padlock. The Padlock was so popular in the colonies that at Valley Forge, “officers and their ladies, accompanied by a military band, sang The Padlock to an overflow house.”51 Short musicals proved to be the most popular afterpieces on the colonial stage. David Garrick’s Farces David Garrick’s farces brought a bright new edge to the genre and proved especially popular with colonial audiences, mainly as afterpieces. His first play, Lethe; or, Esop in the Shades (1740), a one-act satire on eighteenth-century London society, was first presented in New York in January 1751, probably by the Murray–Kean Company, and revived regularly for the rest of the century.52 The plot is derived from Greek mythology. On the anniversary of the rape of Proserpine, Aesop has been charged by Pluto to offer all dissatisfied mortals the opportunity of forgetting their cares by drinking of the waters of Lethe. The grumblers, ferried across the Styx by Charon, include a poet/ playwright who wants to forget his past failures. Aesop recommends that it would be better if he prevailed “upon the audience to drink the water” so they might forget as well. Other unhappy arrivers include a fine gentleman, an unhappy married couple, a tailor, a society matron, a Frenchman, and in later versions an obnoxious aristocrat, Lord Chalkstone, played by Garrick himself. Through his characters, Garrick satirized the foibles of the town 17

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with good-natured fun. The moral of the play, summed up by Aesop, is that the characters don’t need to forget their passions and affections but their vices: “’Tis vice alone disturbs the human breast; / Care dies with guilt; be virtuous and be blest.”53 There are echoes in the farce of Restoration comedy, sentimental comedy, and French classical comedy, particularly Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules. Garrick’s second farce, The Lying Valet, became a popular addition to his repertory at Goodman’s Fields in 1741. His play concerns the plight of Gayless, a young aristocrat who has spent his fortune, been disinherited by his father, and run up considerable debts. His valet, Sharp, sums up his situation: “All your money spent; your movables sold; your honor almost ruined, and your humble servant almost starved.”54 Financial problems will be solved the next day when Gayless weds the wealthy Melissa, who knows nothing of his plight. Disaster seems certain when Melissa’s maid, Kitty, arrives with the information that her mistress desires a ball and entertainment at Gayless’s that very evening. Gayless has no money for such extravagances, and the fun begins when Sharp concocts desperate excuses why Melissa shouldn’t be seen at his master’s lodgings. He suggests that the neighbors have been gossiping about Melissa’s visitations there. This seems to end the threat for the moment, although Kitty suspects that a lack of money lies at the heart of Gayless’s problems. In the second act, Gayless and Sharp are just beginning to relax when Kitty arrives to tell them that Melissa does not want to deprive her guests of the entertainment and that they will be arriving shortly. Here Garrick again satirizes the town with a motley group of guests including Mrs. Gadabout, Mr. Guttle, Mr. Trippit and his wife, and a Frenchman. Melissa, disguised as a boy, discovers Gayless’s penury and is touched. After several more “lies” by the valet to rescue Gayless, the evening ends successfully for all: Melissa reveals that in a letter, Gayless’s father has forgiven him. The wedding will take place the next day. And the play ends with a dance, or as Sharp states: “Oh, pray, Sir, have supper first, or, I’m sure, I shan’t live till the dance is finished.” The play was one of the most popular farces in the eighteenth century and Sharp one of Garrick’s favorite roles.55 Apparently the Murray–Kean Company in 1750 first performed it in the colonies at the first Nassau Street Theatre. Garrick’s third farce, Miss in Her Teens; or, The Medley of Lovers, premiered at Covent Garden in January 1747 and became one of his most successful afterpieces. Four years later, on January 15, 1751, it was first performed in New York at the first Nassau Street Theatre.56 The hero of the piece, Captain Loveit, with his valet, Puff, have come to town in search of a pretty young creature of sixteen, Miss Biddy, who with her looks and fortune of fifteen thousand pounds captured his heart prior to his regiment going abroad. Biddy lives with 18

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an aunt who has advised her to marry a wealthy old baronet of sixty-five. But Biddy, with a mind of her own, has encouraged two other admirers—Fribble, an effeminate fop, and Flash, a braggart warrior––and invited them to her home on the same day. When she learns that Captain Loveit is back, however, she desires to rid herself of her collection of admirers. This is accomplished in much the same manner as Bob Acres is gulled into dueling in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals: Fribble and Flash are pushed (literally) into a duel to settle their claims upon Biddy. Both are cowards, especially Flash, and become frozen in fighting postures, too scared to move.57 Evidently this was the funniest scene of the play. The old baronet turns out to be Captain Loveit’s father, Simon. Simon graciously gives Biddy up to his son and looks forward to celebrating their wedding. Besides being a love story, the play satirizes London society. The characters of Captain Flash and Fribble were drawn from London life. “The coffee-houses were infested by a set of young officers, who entered with a martial air, fierce Kavenhuller hats, and long swords. They paraded the room with ferocity, ready to draw without provocation. In direct contrast to this race of braggarts, stood the pretty gentlemen, who chose to unsex themselves, and make a display of delicacy that exceeded female softness. The purpose of Miss in Her Teens was to expose these two opposite characters to contempt and ridicule.”58 Garrick’s farces remained popular on the American stage well into the nineteenth century. They contain fast-paced dramatic action as well as physical and verbal humor. While he ridiculed the fools in eighteenth-century London society, his satire was universal enough to appeal to American audiences. As sea voyages between London and the colonies were reduced from months to weeks, crossing the Atlantic took less and less time in the eighteenth century. By the 1770s, a new play might open in New York within six months of its London premiere. Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, for example, opened in London on March 15, 1773, and in New York on August 2 of the same year.59 Reducing the travel time, however, did little to reduce growing differences between London and American audiences. Colonial audiences tended to be more conservative than their counterparts in London. Overt opposition to theatre forced managers to offer Shakespeare under the dodge of “moral lectures.” David Douglass, for instance, advertised Othello as a moral dialogue on jealousy to get around anti-theatre laws. Sometimes by providing benefit performances for charities, managers convinced city fathers to give them a license to perform and gained the sympathy of the public. English writer George Alexander Stevens’s Lecture on Heads became a favorite entertainment for actors to perform in communities that opposed the theatre. Written and first performed in April 1764 by Stevens at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in London, the piece was popular on both sides of 19

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the Atlantic. Gerald Kahan describes Stevens’s presentation: “Standing behind a long table covered with a green baize cloth and dozens of papier-mâché busts and wig blocks he began his two-hour long monologue satirizing one type after another: an Indian Chief, Alexander the Great, a London Blood, a Billingsgate Fishwife, a Horse Jockey, a Conjurer, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, a Dutchman, and finally a Methodist Parson.”60 Douglass performed the Lecture on Heads in Charleston in April 1766 to win over a reluctant public, and his fellow actors John Henry and Lewis Hallam Jr. included it in their repertories. The play could be adapted to reflect contemporary events. It could be given in any available hall. It remained popular in America well into the nineteenth century. Examples of the text from a 1785 script include: Connoisseur: Though born in this kingdom, he had traveled long enough to fall in love with everything foreign, and despise everything belonging to his own country, except himself. Society Ladies: This is a representative of those misled ladies whose families, having gained great fortunes by trade, begin to be ashamed of the industry of their ancestors, and turn up their nose at everything mechanical, and call it vulgar. Nobody, Everybody, Somebody, and Anybody: From these four heads people purchase lottery tickets, although calculation demonstrates the odds are so much against them; but hope flatters them, fancy makes them believe, and expectation observes, that the twenty thousand pounds prize must come to somebody . . . and as anybody may have them . . . and nobody knows who . . . everybody buys lottery tickets.61

When faced with harsh oppression, colonial theatre managers turned to lectures and plays that pointed to a moral, condemned vice, and could be interpreted to reflect classical republicanism. Bending art to the tenets of republicanism permeated all aspects of colonial culture in the eighteenth century, especially in the theatre. Differences in dramatic tastes became magnified during the Revolutionary War. The imposition of the Stamp Act in the 1760s led to attacks against everything British, including theatre, by the “Sons of Liberty.” The most serious incident happened in New York on May 5, 1766, when a mob tore down the Chapel Street Theatre and burned the lumber in the Commons. 62 For many colonial Americans, the theatre was a British institution and a symbol of the tyranny imposed by the English Parliament and King George III. For economic and patriotic reasons, theatre was banned during the Revolutionary War by an act of the Continental Congress in 1774, although there is evidence of amateur productions in Washington’s army. 20

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Audiences in occupied New York, Philadelphia, and Boston enjoyed English plays performed by British officers and their local friends. Because the British did not answer to local officials, they considered themselves under no obligation to perform the old chestnuts used before the war to placate religious and Whig tastes. In Boston, it seems they deliberately sought to offend locals. General John Burgoyne’s players in occupied Boston in 1775–76 performed at least four plays, including an original by Burgoyne himself, The Blockade of Boston, that ridiculed locals. In New York, after General Sir William Howe’s troops occupied the city in September 1776, his officers renamed the John Street playhouse the “Theatre Royal” and created a company of players. Under Howe and later Sir Henry Clinton, British officers offered theatrical performances during the seven years that the British occupied New York. After Howe captured Philadelphia in 1777, his officers organized a theatrical company and performed in the Southwark Theatre for four months. Several new plays saw their first production in America during the British occupation, including Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian and Sheridan’s The Rivals. Jared Brown has identified over 160 plays performed by the British during the Revolutionary War. It is not surprising, then, that actors returning after the war found their task of gaining acceptance so difficult. The theatre in America, for all practical purposes, was a British institution during the Revolutionary War. The Theatre Royal in New York offered a fashionable repertory not too dissimilar from the patent theatres in London. The British had a captive audience in New York, as most of the original 25,000 prewar inhabitants had left the city and in their place came Loyalists from all of the other colonies. The British military departed some seven years later, as did over 28,000 Loyalists who left with them for Canada or England. When the American Company returned to New York in July 1785, it encountered a city devastated by the occupation with much of its audience departed to Halifax or London. To win back a public, plays again were advertised as “moral lectures” and patriotic celebrations. Theatre managers again had to walk a tightrope to counteract anti-British sentiments as well as to support republican ones. Most tried to survive in the face of strong opposition to this British institution. The English drama arrived with the actors in eighteenth-century America. Colonists viewed what had been in vogue at Drury Lane and Covent Garden: neoclassical tragedies, domestic comedies, and clever ballad operas and farces. Gaining a hearing for the nascent American drama was much more difficult, and colonists’ first plays received no productions at all. Androboros, the first play printed in America, was written around 1714 by Robert Hunter, the royal governor of New York and New Jersey. Hunter did what politicians before and since have only dreamed of doing: he ridiculed his opponents in 21

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a satirical comedy. Witty and humorous, the play was set in an asylum with most of the characters having a counterpart in 1714 New York.63 Hunter put onstage his conflicts with his adversaries, mainly the church, legislature, and the Crown. Probably never acted, it seems to have been written for Governor Hunter’s circle of friends.64 The loosely connected plot makes little or no sense today with inside jokes, poems, and satirical thrusts at personages now long forgotten. Fifty years later, in 1764, The Paxton Boys was printed anonymously in Philadelphia. The play was inspired by a real-life situation in 1763: a mob of settlers from Donegal and Paxton, Pennsylvania, killed twenty peaceful Indians after a series of Indian raids, and the governor wanted the settlers arrested. Word spread that they were marching on Philadelphia to kill more Indians, and the militia was called out. The play concerns a group of citizens gathered at the courthouse to repulse the Paxton Boys, who have been sighted—1,500 strong—coming down the road.65 Rumors abound: they all may be six feet tall. Shaken and afraid, the locals mistake a Dutch company of butchers for the Paxton Boys and almost fire on them. The author presents the views of an Anglican, Presbyterian, and Quaker about whether the Paxtons were justified in killing the heathens or whether Quaker pacifism is tantamount to indifference. The play was about more than the massacre: the real issue seemed to be whether Pennsylvania should continue its proprietary government or come directly under the jurisdiction of the Crown.66 The play spoke to the incident and the politics dominating a local election in 1764. Like Androboros, it was not performed. Major Robert Rogers’s Ponteach; or, The Savages of America, published in London in 1766, dealt with border life and the Indian rebellion lead by Chief Pontiac in the summer of 1763. Although a native of Massachusetts, Rogers was a British soldier involved in this campaign. Historians today regard his depiction of the ill treatment of the Indians by British traders, hunters, officers, and governors as accurate. In the first act, McDole explains his principles in trading with the Indians: “Our fundamental Maxim then is this, That it’s no Crime to cheat and gull an Indian. . . . This is the very Quintessence of Trade, And ev’ry Hope of Gain depends upon it; None who neglect it ever did grow rich, Or ever will, or can by Indian commerce.”67 English hunters kill braves to steal their furs. English officers insult and belittle the chief. English governors keep for themselves most of the presents sent to the Indians by the Crown. When Ponteach finally goes on the warpath, the superior arms of the British kill him, his family, and his people. While much of the play seems conventional, especially the idealizing of Ponteach, Rogers depicts the plight of North American Indians with sympathy. Critics, however, were not kind: Allan Nevins points out that the Gentleman’s Magazine condemned 22

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the “flimsiness of its plot and the ‘disgusting familiarity’ of its language.”68 Perhaps the time was not ripe for a play with this much frankness about British behavior abroad. Ponteach was not performed either. David Douglass aimed to present a native comic opera at the new Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia in April 1767: he advertised that The Disappointment; or, The Force of Credulity, written locally by Andrew Barton (Thomas Forrest), would be played on April 20. The plot was based on a true incident involving the gulling of several locals into thinking that they had discovered Blackbeard’s pirate treasure buried on the banks of the Delaware River. Forrest uses this incident as the basis for a ballad opera that ridicules those involved, including several prominent personages. The Beggar’s Opera seems the major obvious influence on the work. The text is distinguished by social and political satire with a risqué and very funny scene where a prostitute, Moll Placket, has hidden her lover Topinlift under the bed while attempting to get rid of her paramour Raccoon. Names such as Rattletrap, Washball, McSnip, and Parchment suggest the farcical nature of the work. Popular tunes were incorporated, including “Yankee Doodle,” apparently the earliest use of this tune before the Revolution. Douglass withdrew the play because, “as it contains personal reflections, [it] is unfit for the stage.”69 Silverman explains that local businessmen “apparently saw themselves satirized in the play and became incensed.”70 David Mays suggests that a Masonic connection also might have led to the cancellation, as both Douglass and one of the men duped were Masons.71 While the play was revised extensively and published in 1796, there is no record of it receiving a production until the twentieth century. The Prince of Parthia holds the distinction of being the first play written by an American to receive a professional production. After his debacle with The Disappointment, Douglass quickly turned away from satire to the safety of a blank verse tragedy by another local writer, Thomas Godfrey, which apparently had been written in 1759 and published posthumously in 1765. The youthful author had had no qualms about borrowing freely from everyone in sight, including Shakespeare (possibly Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, and especially Julius Caesar), Tacitus’s Annals, Rowe’s Tamerlane, Ambrose Philips’s Distressed Mother (an adaptation of Racine’s Andromaque), and Sir Francis Beaumont’s The Maid’s Tragedy.72 Godfrey included enough plots for three plays about the struggle for power among the three sons of Artabanus, king of Parthia. Prince Arsaces is called a paragon of virtue: He’s gen’rous, brave, and wise, and good, Has skill to act, and noble fortitude To face bold danger, in the battle firm, 23

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And dauntless as a Lion fronts his foe. Yet is he sway’d by ev’ry tender passion, Forgiving mercy, gentleness and love; Which speak the Hero friend of human-kind.

His brother Vardanes, however, is the opposite—“arrogant” and “licentious”: That haughty Prince eyes with a stern contempt All other Mortals, and with lofty mien He tread the earth as tho’ he were a God.73

A third brother, Gotarzes, supports Arsaces. Vardanes schemes with Queen Thermusa, who wants to ruin Arsaces for killing her son, Vonones, who was a traitor to the state. The king turns Thermusa from his bed because he lusts after young Evanthe, beloved by Arsaces. There are duels, poison wines, long-lost fathers, and lengthy speeches from characters who pontificate about their grievances. As in Hamlet, there are a lot of dead bodies at the end with no one left to rule Parthia except Gotarzes, who doesn’t want the job. While the form resembles Shakespearean tragedy, the language—words such as “slaves,” “tyrants,” and “freedom”—reflects republican sentiments about freedom and liberty, common to eighteenth-century discourse.74 Scholars have disagreed on the play’s literary value, but whatever its merits, it received only one performance by Douglass’s American Company on April 24, 1767, and was not produced again until the twentieth century. Mercy Otis Warren Writers on both sides of the American Revolution wrote satirical, dramatic dialogues arguing for and against the wisdom of granting independence to the American colonies. These were not intended for production but were distributed usually as pamphlets or printed in newspapers.75 Mercy Otis Warren was one of the most important of these pamphleteers for the patriotic cause. She was well placed in Massachusetts society with a famous husband (James Warren), brother (James Otis), and friend (Abigail Adams). While there is no evidence that she ever attended a theatrical production, she was tutored in “the same college preparatory curriculum” as her brothers.76 She knew the plays of Shakespeare, the comedies of Molière, and the plays of Addison, particularly Cato. She read the works of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and her style of satire seems indebted to them. Katharine Anthony in her book on Warren suggests that she turned from writing verse to writing satirical plays when her brother James Otis was stricken ill.77 It was her way of helping the patriots’ cause. Although she wrote anonymously, scholars generally credit her with the authorship of three dramatic sketches, The Adulateur, The 24

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Defeat, and The Group; as the possible author of two others, The Blockheads; or, The Affrighted Officers and The Motley Assembly; and the confirmed author of two plays, The Ladies of Castile and The Sack of Rome. Warren’s first dramatic sketch was written in blank verse and published in two installments in the Massachusetts Spy in 1772 and as a pamphlet in the following year.78 She directed her satire against Thomas Hutchinson, governor of the Massachusetts Colony, who was duplicitous in his dealings with the colonists, on the one hand claiming to support their position about taxation and on the other corresponding directly with London taking the opposite position. This was an especially perfidious act to Warren since Hutchinson was a native-born American—one of the few who were governors—and was expected to show more understanding of the colonists’ grievances. She named many of her characters after those in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but they clearly were meant to depict patriots such as her brother James Otis as well as John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and John Adams. She named the duplicitous Hutchinson “Rapatio, Bashaw of Servia” and Chief Justice Peter Oliver “Hazelrod.” Her play challenged the colonists to rebel against “Rapatio’s” tyranny. As drama the sketch is negligible: she neglected such niceties as fully developed characters and conflict. But her dramatic satire was effective as political propaganda. In her next dramatic sketch, The Defeat, published in the Boston Gazette in 1773, she again satirized Hutchinson, turning him into an archvillain, which contributed the following year to his recall to London.79 But she was also stalking the fair-weather citizen who “shifted and trim’d and veer’d to either side”80 without commitment except for personal gains. And she had harsh words for “the wretched Scribbler, Bartering for Gold,” meaning, almost certainly, the Tory journalist Jonathan Sewall. Most scholars agree that her third political satire, The Group (1775), is her best drama of this series. It was published as a pamphlet in Boston on April 3, 1775, about two weeks before the Battle of Lexington. Here she attacked the Tory leaders who accepted appointments to the Council, the upper house of the Massachusetts Assembly, after the king had abrogated the colony’s charter, denying the Assembly’s right to elect the Council. Persons accepting these appointments directly from the king she collectively labeled “the group.” All were Loyalists; many were office-holders, including Peter Hutchinson, brother to the deposed governor. Well-educated, wealthy, and talented, they were native-born Americans who, in her opinion, should have cast their lot with the colonists instead of selling out their country for position and wealth. Her satire is not subtle. She called Timothy Ruggles “Brigadier Hate-All” because he hated his country and beat his wife. While written in dialogue form, her dramatic sketches were not intended for performance. They are witty and clever but not dramatic. 25

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Warren may be the author of two other satirical plays: The Blockheads; or, The Affrighted Officers (1776) and The Motley Assembly (1779). Although many contemporary scholars doubt her authorship of either, biographer Katharine Anthony is convinced that Warren wrote these “bold,” “rowdy” and “unfeminine pieces.”81 In style and subject they resemble The Group, although they are not as well crafted. The Blockheads was a response to General John Burgoyne’s satirical farce The Blockade of Boston, written in 1775 and performed in Boston in 1776, which ridiculed the patriot cause. Dunlap informs us that “while the officers were performing Burgoyne’s farce, an alarm was given that the rebels had assaulted the lines, and when a sergeant entered and announced the fact, the audience supposing his words, ‘The rebels have attacked the lines on the Neck,’ belonged to the farce, applauded the very natural acting of the man.”82 In reply to The Blockade of Boston, someone (perhaps Warren) wrote The Blockheads, ridiculing the British and the Loyalists. The Motley Assembly satirized the fashionable society in Boston that longed for the more elegant entertainments of the British officers.83 The satire here is directed more against class-consciousness than disloyal Americans. Warren also wrote more conventional dramas: The Ladies of Castile and The Sack of Rome, both published in her 1790 volume, Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous. The first is a historical drama about political rebellion in sixteenth-century Spain, written in the classical style; the second is a tragedy about the end of the Roman Empire. Apparently, Warren wished to show parallels between those times and her own.84 Her preface to The Sack of Rome suggests that she saw such plays as a means of instruction about history and morality: “In an age of taste and refinement, lessons of morality, and the consequences of deviation, may perhaps, be as successfully enforced from the stage, as by modes of instruction, less censured by the severe; while, at the same time, the exhibition of great historical events, opens a field of contemplation to the reflecting and philosophic mind.”85 Warren sent The Sack of Rome to John Adams in London asking him to help her get it produced, but he replied that there was no interest there in anything American.86 Other authors followed in a similar vein, using drama to advocate their political positions. In 1776, John Leacock wrote The Fall of British Tyranny; or, American Liberty Triumphant that was published in several editions. In the same year, Hugh Henry Brackenridge wrote two plays, The Death of General Montgomery and The Battle of Bunker’s Hill, as acting exercises for his students and to bolster patriotic morale during difficult times at the beginning of the war. The latter is not very stage-worthy, with characters doing little more than delivering long speeches to one another. While it was published in 1776, there is no evidence that The Battle of Bunker’s Hill was performed away from the recital hall.87 Finally, the best writer of this group of politically charged 26

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polemists, Robert Munford, satirized election practices in The Candidates; or, The Humors of a Virginia Election (1770–71) and in The Patriots (late 1770s). According to candidate Guzzle in the first piece, there are five qualifications for serving in the House of Burgesses: “Eating, drinking and sleeping, are three; fighting and lying are t’others.” Guzzle explains that “when you have been at Williamsburg, for six or seven weeks, under the pretense of serving your country . . . you must tell some damned lie, sooner than say you have been doing nothing.”88 In The Patriots, Munford concocts a more conventional love triangle and seems focused on exposing false patriotism. Here Trueman and Meanwell are accused of Toryism because they have expressed moderate views rather than be caught up in the war mania. Trueman loves Mira, whose father is a violent patriot who “understands little or nothing beyond a dice-box and race-field, but thinks he knows everything.”89 He accuses Trueman of being a Tory and forbids him his house and daughter. Trueman’s bitter enemy, Captain Flash, is all spit and polish: “I cou’d gizzard these English dogs if I had ’em here.” Fortunately for Flash, there are no British soldiers around to test his patriotism. But there are tribunals. Meanwell compares the tribunals on patriotism to the Inquisition forced on the Jews in Spain. When Trueman attempts to protect Scotchmen accused of being Tories, Colonel Strut sums up the evidence against them: Strut: The nature of their offense, gentlemen, is, that they are Scotchmen: every Scotchman being an enemy, and these men being Scotchmen, they come under the ordinance which directs an oath to be tendered to all those whom there is just cause to suspect they are enemies. Brazen: As these are Scotchmen, I think there is just cause to suspect that they are our enemies. Let it be put to the committee, Mr. president, whether all Scotchmen are not enemies. Strut: A good notion, Mr. Brazen. I second it with all my heart.

Munford comments on armchair soldiers through Tackabout, who thinks that by damning the British, abusing the king, vilifying Parliament, cursing the Scotch, raising suspicions against all moderate men, exclaiming against all taxes, advising people to pay no debts, and extolling Washington, he is making a heroic contribution to the war. Perhaps because Munford served as a soldier, the subjects of war and patriotism are handled more moderately in The Patriots than later in John Daly Burk’s Bunker Hill; or, The Death of General Warren (1797), which sinks beneath the weight of its rhetoric. The development of an American drama in the colonial period came to a quick end in October 1774 when the first Continental Congress passed a 27

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resolution to “discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horseracing, and all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”90 Early the following year, most of the American Company left for Jamaica, where they remained throughout the war. With the Franco-American victory at Yorktown in October 1781 and the British evacuation of New York in November 1783, the American Company returned to begin the task of reestablishing professional theatre, devoid of its most loyal audience, who had fled to London or Halifax with the British soldiers. It is important to note David Garrick’s influence on colonial dramatic activities in the mid-eighteenth century. The repertory and acting style of colonial companies were strongly influenced by his innovations in London at Drury Lane. If Shakespeare was the favorite playwright of the colonists, it was Shakespeare as reworked by Garrick. The brightest afterpieces were Garrick’s farces. His plays and adaptations were favorites with colonial audiences. Managers followed Garrick in putting together an evening’s entertainment, consisting of a tragedy, farce, dance, song, and pantomime to attract this new middle-class audience. For thirty years, Garrick provided the template for English-speaking theatre, not only at home but also in the American colonies, and his influence lingered long after the war. Yet, the faint beginnings of an American drama—glimpsed in the dialogues of Mercy Otis Warren and others—began to have a presence in the war’s aftermath. A new generation of writers and critics demanded that American drama reflect life on this side of the Atlantic, not life in London. In 1787, Royall Tyler wrote The Contrast.

28

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2 American Drama of the New Republic The root of all the evils of this country is familiarity—where everyone is equal, everyone is familiar. —Mrs. Wollope, The Lion of the West, by James Kirke Paulding, 1830

T

here was no guarantee in 1789 that equality would one day be regarded as a national commitment of the United States. The Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric had promised equality in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But while Jefferson and fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence had fought for liberty and equality, one of these “self-evident” truths had not made it into the Constitution. George Mason and other framers of the Constitution had argued for a Bill of Rights that might have included “all men are born equally free and independent,” but such words were not tolerated by slaveholders and represented a major obstacle to the ratification of the Constitution.1 So they were omitted. And in 1789, a Constitution that guaranteed liberty but not equality became the law of the land. The Founding Fathers finally ratified the Bill of Rights in 1791, which protected freedom of speech, the press, and the rights of people to assemble peaceably but made no mention of slavery or equality. Gary Wills makes a convincing case that it was not until some seventy-three years later, in the middle of the Civil War, that Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg returned to Jefferson’s words and made equality a cornerstone of American democracy.2 Lincoln understood that while politics had kept the guarantee of equality out of the Constitution in 1789, the concept had continued to resonate with the American people, as if they intuitively understood what the Founding Fathers had intended to do and what kind of commitment this nation should have made to its citizens. Evidence of this is found in contemporary literature, in politics, and in the theatre. The drama that began to emerge in the new republic reaffirmed both indirectly and directly that citizens of the United States believed that equality as well as freedom were basic tenets of 29

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American Drama of the New Republic

this new country. During his nine-month visit in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans cherished equality more than liberty itself. While they valued freedom, justice, and equality, the first two had appeared in the world under various forms and had not been confined to democracies. What made America unique was its dedication to equality.3 At first this pertained only to white men; later, as the abolition movement built up a head of steam, plays began to suggest that equality and freedom were meant for black as well as for white. And even before the Civil War, equality for women found its advocates both in political life and in the theatre. The Contrast The American theatre gave evidence of a shift in emphasis soon after the Revolutionary War had sputtered to an end in 1783 and the British had departed from New York on November 25, celebrated as Evacuation Day for the next century. Most Tories left with the departing British army. When the American Company under the management of Lewis Hallam Jr. and John Henry returned from Jamaica to Philadelphia in 1784, it had to change the perception that the theatre in America was a British institution. A new republic needed plays that reflected its own republican virtues—not aristocratic ones—and promoted egalitarian principles. Playwrights would come to ignore these precepts at their peril. Within three years, Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, the first play of any importance written by an American, appeared on the stage of the John Street Theatre in New York. A member of an established Boston family, Tyler pursued law as a vocation and letters as an avocation. He is the author of poetry, novels, essays, and several plays with The Contrast being his most successful literary work. In form it resembles Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal, an English comedy of manners that had been successful in London and that had played in New York at this same theatre during the British occupation. But similarities exist only on the surface, as the spirit of the piece reveals something quite different from its model. Class distinctions reflecting a snobbish and hidebound society that permeate the Sheridan play—if not all of English drama of the period—are largely absent in Tyler’s comedy. A prologue spoken by actor Thomas Wignell sets the tone for what is to follow: Exult, each patriot heart!—this night is shewn A piece, which we may fairly call our own; Where the proud titles of “My Lord! Your Grace!” To humble Mr. and plain Sir give place.4

Wignell played the role of Jonathan, the most distinctively American character yet to appear in a native play. 30

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Set in New York shortly after the Revolutionary War, The Contrast provides a lively view of contemporary society and subjects of interest to a local audience. The egalitarian nature of this new country is promoted front and center, as explained in this exchange between Jessamy, servant to the anglophile Billy Dimple, and Jonathan, “waiter” to the Yankee officer, Colonel Manly: Jessamy: Votre très-humble serviteur, Monsieur. I understand Colonel Manly, the Yankee officer, has the honour of your services. Jonathan: Sir!— Jessamy: I say, Sir, I understand that Colonel Manly has the honour of having you for a servant. Jonathan: Servant! Sir, do you take me for a neger,—I am Colonel Manly’s waiter. Jessamy: A true Yankee distinction, egad, without a difference. Why, Sir, do you not perform all the offices of a servant? Do you not even blacken his boots? Jonathan: Yes; I do grease them a bit sometimes; but I am a true blue son of liberty, for all that. Father said I should come as Colonel Manly’s waiter to see the world, and all that; but no man shall master me: my father has as good a farm as the colonel.

Jonathan explains that Americans “don’t make any great matter of distinction in our state, between quality and other folks,” which surprises Jessamy: “This is, indeed, a leveling principle.” Jonathan is proud of a government “which we had every mother’s son of us a hand in making.” While Tyler borrowed freely from English comedy, his Jonathan is not a stereotypical low comic servant. Even with his homespun speech and provincial ways, he is three-dimensional. He is fun, interesting, and filled with vitality, and while uncultured, he is willing to take social risks: he goes to the wicked theatre and attempts to kiss a young woman. He respects Colonel Manly as someone who has earned his position, yet he believes that as men they are equals, although Jonathan still has the barnyard on his boots. Audiences one generation or less removed from the farm could love Jonathan. They had been there and knew both the pain and pride of a country upbringing. He reminded playgoers how they might have behaved before they became gentrified. For a theatre audience consisting of the no-nonsense Knickerbockers, Tory sympathizers, and idealists who believed the Revolution had been worth the effort, Jonathan demonstrated that equality was a powerful ideal of this new country. Dimple’s servant, Jessamy, is also endowed with qualities beyond his station in life. Candor, writing in the Daily Advertiser, complained that Jessamy’s imitation of his master is closer “than is natural, and his language is generally 31

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too good for a servant.” He would have “produced a better effect if he had been more awkward in his imitation.”5 Jessamy has a great deal of social savvy, suggesting that he is capable of better things than shining his master’s boots. While he may be “trying on” the philosophy of his English master today, he seems intrigued by Jonathan’s ideas about equality and democracy. Not only are Jonathan and Jessamy depicted as superior to servants in the world outside the theatre, but they are also the most interesting and funniest characters in the play. It is ironic that the Continental Congress’s resolution in 1774 effectively shut down much of the theatrical activity in the colonies during the war. Had the theatres remained opened, perhaps an earlier play than The Contrast could have promoted the egalitarian ideology of this new republic. Tyler gave the play to Wignell, who published it in 1790. President George Washington headed the list of subscribers to reserve a copy.6 William Dunlap The success of The Contrast and Wignell’s performance of Jonathan encouraged young New York artist and writer William Dunlap to write a play with a Yankee role for the actor.7 A rather conventional piece, his The Modest Soldier; or, Love in New York was not produced in spite of being accepted for production. As Dunlap learned, to his dismay, he did not write a role for the manager of the American Company, John Henry, nor one for his wife. He would not make this mistake in his second play, The Father; or, American Shandyism (later renamed The Father of an Only Child). Borrowing part of the title and some of the characters from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760), Dunlap crafted stock comic characters to fit the talents of his company, including the Henrys. Wignell portrayed an especially funny quack doctor named Dr. Quiescent, later renamed Dr. Terebrate Tattle when Dunlap revised the play. First produced at the John Street Theatre in September 1789, The Father received four performances in New York, two in Philadelphia, and one in Baltimore, a successful premiere for the day.8 During the same year, Dunlap wrote an interlude, Darby’s Return, again for Wignell, who performed it at his own benefit in November with President Washington in the audience. Darby was a low comic character that Wignell had made famous in John O’Keeffe’s The Poor Soldier (1786), one of the most popular plays of the time. In this short interlude, Darby returns to Ireland after adventures in Europe and America to tell his countrymen about the chaos of the French Revolution and the orderly process in the United States of adopting a Constitution and inaugurating a president. Darby’s speeches are filled with egalitarian sentiments about blacksmiths, chimney sweepers, and tinkers walking in a processional with lawyers, parsons, and tavern-keepers and about Washington leaving his farm, like Darby, to “free the land from woe” and, like 32

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Darby, returning to “his own potato ground” when the war was over.9 For performances, Dunlap deleted references to Darby’s visit to France, perhaps because he feared they would incite a riot from Republicans in the audience who were pro-French.10 It is clear that at this time, the playwright held Federalist views of the French Revolution, and these are expressed in the play.11 Although Dunlap showed some talent as a playwright, his efforts were not financially rewarding, and he joined his father’s importing business as a partner, probably in 1790, and worked there until after his father died the following year. By 1793, Dunlap had turned over the business to a relative and returned to the theatre, this time to pursue it seriously as a profession. Several minor pieces ensued—a comedy, The Miser’s Wedding; a blank verse tragedy, Leicester; an opera, The Archers, based on the William Tell myth; and several gothic plays influenced by the novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis. A vogue for gothic drama had swept New York in the 1790s, and Dunlap’s Fontainville Abbey, for one, included the machinery typical of the genre: “travelers in gloomy landscapes, fostered in a ruinous abbey, and beset by villains of the deepest die.”12 Dunlap became a partner in managing the American Company (now called the “old” American Company) at the John Street Theatre at this time and so had a venue for his plays. He wrote such now-forgotten works as The Mysterious Monk, which drew on the popularity of gothic horror stories; an adaptation of a French farce, A. L. B. Robineau’s Jérôme Pointu, retitled as Tell Truth and Shame the Devil; and a comedy, The Man of Fortitude, written with one of his co-managers, the actor John Hodgkinson. Up to the mid-1790s, Dunlap’s plays had imitated what was in vogue in Europe. He gave evidence of something better with his blank verse tragedy André, which premiered on March 30, 1798, at the New Theatre in Park Row (later the Park Theatre) in New York. Arguably his best play, André is based on the 1780 capture, trial, and execution of Major John André, co-conspirator with American general Benedict Arnold to surrender West Point to the British. Dunlap’s sympathetic treatment of André drew criticism, as did actor Thomas A. Cooper’s performance of the character Bland. In the play, Bland is a young American officer who had been befriended by André when he was a prisoner of the British. When his petition for mercy before General Washington is denied, Bland (Cooper) tears the black cockade from his hat and throws it onto the stage. The audience thought this act unpatriotic and hissed the actor. Although Dunlap revised the play, adding a speech in the last act where Bland apologies for his hasty actions, the play received only three performances and was not revived.13 Clearly the public was not receptive to a tragedy about recent history, especially one in which a sympathetic British officer is hanged for being a spy, 33

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a sentence deplored by many but considered necessary by Washington. In the preface to the published edition of the play (1798), Dunlap alluded to the “diversity of opinion which agitated the minds of men at the time on the question of the propriety of putting André to death.” The problem encountered in dramatizing recent history, he noted, was that both friends of André and veterans of the American army were in the audience and viewed the events differently.14 Current political events also may have overwhelmed the play. In March 1798, war with France seemed likely over the XYZ affair, and the nation was badly divided with the Republicans defending the French and the Federalists urging war.15 Both sides used André to advance their agenda. Nationalistic sentiments were always present in the early American theatre and threatened any new play. André failed in 1798, although it is a well-crafted tragedy with a sympathetic hero and several strong patriotic speeches by the major characters. André’s fate in real life seemed to play itself out as a classical tragedy, which may have attracted Dunlap to it in the first place. The erudite and dashing British major was captured in civilian clothes behind American lines while transporting secret papers from Arnold to General Sir Henry Clinton. This violation of the laws of war and its consequences were understood well by both armies in the late eighteenth century. General Clinton had advised the overzealous André against such activities. The British had executed Nathan Hale at the beginning of the war for spying, a fact that did nothing to help André’s defense. In carefully crafted speeches, Dunlap pits the contestants against one another. André is a brave and virtuous officer serving his country. Loath to kill such a man, Washington nevertheless must act with the country’s future in mind. These are issues of classical proportion that might have interested an educated and cultured audience. André observed the classical precepts about nobility of character and adherence to duty. It was a play for the educated and wealthy classes, and it failed in a society where audiences expected their drama, like their politics, to depict the lives of persons like themselves. Tocqueville observed some thirtyfive years later that self-governing people want to see and hear something onstage that “concerns themselves.” In an aristocratic society, erudition is important, and drama is treated as literature determined by the taste of the well-educated and cultivated. Audiences in democracies, however, are more likely to want novelty, surprise, rapidity of invention.16 André invited reflection about the issues involved and was beyond the reach of a late-eighteenthcentury American audience. Dunlap quickly put to work the lessons he learned from this experience. He revised André in 1803 to fill the need for a patriotic spectacle and, he hoped, to make money. Entitled The Glory of Columbia: Her Yeomanry!, the play begins 34

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much earlier in the sequence of events, before the capture of André. Early on we meet David Williams, a farmer’s son and General Benedict Arnold’s waiter, who is tired of “brushing coats and blacking boots! dang it, pretty employment for a soldier!”17 David sings a song with his sister, Sally, about valor and patriotism. Shortly following this scene, we witness two common soldiers capture Major André in civilian clothes with drawings of West Point in his boots. In reality, these “heroes” were attempting to rob André, but there is no hint of this in Dunlap’s play. The elites of André now share the stage with farmers who are armed to defend the property and the rights they inherited from their fathers. By adding songs, spectacle, and common soldiers as major characters, a neoclassical tragedy for the cultured elite became an entertainment for the masses. The success of The Glory of Columbia signaled an important cultural shift in America that had been underway for over a decade. Thomas Jefferson had defeated John Adams and the Federalists in the election of 1800 on a platform of anti-privilege, anti-taxes, and anti–big government. The revision of André to The Glory of Columbia is a microcosm of this cultural shift as aristocratic privilege gave way to egalitarianism. The Founding Fathers—aristocrats in fact if not in name—were giving way to the common people in determining the culture of this country, and this would be evidenced more and more in the theatre.18 Clearly a product of the Enlightenment, Dunlap wanted to offer “proper exhibitions to set before a free and well-ordered people.”19 His dire financial straits as manager of the American Company, however, prompted him to compromise his ideals and search for plays to interest an indifferent public that craved novelties. Since his own plays had failed to draw, he turned to the sentimental melodramas of August von Kotzebue, which had been all the rage in London. In December 1798 during the Park’s first season, he brought out Kotzebue’s Menschenhass und Reue, which had been playing in London in various adaptations under the title of The Stranger. Kotzebue’s plays offered a mixture of sentimental and sensational plot devices that thrilled audiences—the cultured elites as well as the masses—tired of the same old round of Shakespearean, Restoration, and eighteenth-century English dramas. Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato might have been Washington’s favorite play and served the republican cause during the Revolution, but contemporary audiences were drawn more to Kotzebue’s romantic tales of incestuous marriages, self-immolations, murders, and violence of all kinds. Americans followed English audiences in abandoning the standard repertory for this new romantic drama. The Stranger follows Nicholas Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) in exploring the theme of whether adultery by a wife and mother can ever be 35

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forgiven. The plot is presented in a straightforward manner. A mysterious woman known as Mrs. Haller has worked for three years as a housekeeper on the country estate of Countess de Wintersen. Living in a cottage at the end of the estate is a stranger known only as a misanthrope. They have never encountered one another on the estate. As the play progresses, it is revealed that Mrs. Haller had abandoned her husband and children for a seducer but has since repented and taken refuge with the countess. She demonstrates her charity in giving to the poor. Also, it is discovered that the misanthrope is in reality a generous man. In a powerfully emotional scene at the end of the fourth act, Mrs. Haller and the stranger meet and recognize each other as man and wife. In the last tearful act, her husband forgives her, but she does not feel worthy of him, and they agree to separate forever. The arrival of their two children, whom neither has seen for three years, brings more tears, a happy reunion of the family, and a fast curtain. The New York Commercial Advertiser reviewer reported, “The effect of the pathetic scenes was beyond any former example within our remembrance; and the concluding comic scene exceeded anything for the effect produced on the spectators, which we have witnessed for many years.”20 Kotzebue seems to suggest that an arranged marriage, a too youthful bride, and a villainous seducer must share responsibility for Mrs. Haller’s actions. Jenny Broekman de Vries has praised Kotzebue for his “originality and even courage in presenting an adulterous wife as the heroine of a sentimental comedy.”21 It is love, not parental arrangements, that should govern marriages in Kotzebue’s world, a theme that would come to dominate nineteenth-century drama. Also, the use of children to rescue a faltering marriage would become a common plot device in the next century. American critics didn’t like the morality of Kotzebue’s plays because sin was sometimes rewarded rather than punished. His plays adapted for an American audience, however, did well at the box office and proved a lifesaver for the American Company. Dunlap’s version of The Stranger was performed at the Park Theatre twelve times during the 1798–99 season. George C. D. Odell writes, “There was something about the tone of The Stranger that exactly fitted into the mood of the last years of the Eighteenth-Century. The melancholy and misanthropy of the mysterious stranger . . . typified, no doubt, to many sentimental souls the very essence of what we have since learned to call the romantic revival.”22 Local audiences found favor in anything written by this “German Shakespeare.” Dunlap’s translation of Das Kind der Liebe (The Natural Son) as Lovers’ Vows was produced in March of the same first season and dealt with an unwed mother and her son. While unwed mothers in the theatre usually faced a slow and painful death in the last act, Kotzebue challenged that convention. The play ends much like The Stranger in that the 36

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son brings father and mother back together for a sentimental ending. Critics expressed displeasure that tradition and social conventions were being tossed out by this German playwright. Kotzebue brought more than sentimental and “immoral” endings to the late-eighteenth-century drama. Where the neoclassical drama aimed for universals in dramaturgy and staging, the new romantic drama localized the settings and focused on domestic life. “His characters knitted socks and set the table and swept the floor and trimmed the hedge,” David Grimsted notes, “and the commonplace character of such occupations apparently helped audiences sympathize with dramatic characters with a new closeness.”23 While his characters were everyday persons with whom the audience could identify, he placed them in situations of maximum emotional stress and sentimentalized their self-sacrifice and goodness. He was a product of his age and touted feeling and the dictates of the heart over reason and rational social choices. As one of his characters explains in Fraternal Discord, “Tears are the language of the heart.”24 Sentimental and melodramatic, Kotzebue’s plays created such a demand at the box office that it was easy in April 1799 for Dunlap to pass off his own The Italian Father as written by the German. He did not identify the author, and the final scene resembled Kotzebue’s style. In reality, Dunlap had borrowed the second act of Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Honest Whore (1604) and added parts of other English plays to piece together a comedy. He believed that if audiences knew that he was the author, the play would not be as successful. His version of Kotzebue’s Die Indianer in England as Indians in England closed the season. The romantic drama had arrived in New York, displacing the traditional English repertoire. Critics denounced Kotzebue and all German drama for challenging the social conventions of the age. But for a time, emotion was everything, and the Teutonic taste in literature was in vogue. Dunlap turned again to Kotzebue in the 1799–1800 season when his leading actor, Thomas A. Cooper, withdrew from the American Company and he had to find something to fit the talents of those who remained. Two of the Park Theatre’s most popular attractions of the season were Kotzebue’s The Virgin of the Sun and its sequel, Pizarro in Peru; or, The Death of Rolla, adapted by Dunlap from other adaptations, including one by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Both plays deal with the Spanish conquest of Peru and Inca resistance, subjects of special interest to western audiences in the late eighteenth century. Both provided exotic pageantry and self-sacrificing heroism plus the theme of the “noble savage”—that primitive people are superior morally to those who are civilized. To Kotzebue, truth and nature were more important than human institutions with their social positions, laws, and restraints on 37

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human freedom. Arthur Hobson Quinn suggests that The Virgin of the Sun offered a comparison between the “love, fidelity, self-sacrifice, and general forgiveness” on the part of Inca rulers and the “barbarous penal laws and customs” of European governments.25 In 1799, Kotzebue’s plays kept Dunlap in business in that thirty of the hundred playing nights were dedicated to this “German Shakespeare.”26 In his last seasons as manager of the Park Theatre, Dunlap turned with regularity to Kotzebue. After a yellow fever epidemic disrupted the 1800–1801 season, he produced Lovers’ Vows and Fraternal Discord, the latter adapted from Kotzebue’s Versöhnung oder der Bruderzwist (Bruder’s Twist) and considered by Odell to be one of his best adaptations.27 But even with this success, the Monthly Magazine wondered if Kotzebue’s popularity had run its course.28 Finding the right combination of plays and actors to keep the Park open continued as Dunlap’s main occupation. He returned to English drama with a revival of Thomas Morton’s Speed the Plow (1800) and its favorite character, Mrs. Grundy, the paragon of English virtue and manners who never makes an appearance onstage. He offered Matthew Gregory Lewis’s new comedy, The East Indian. On Evacuation Day, November 25, he staged John Burk’s Bunker Hill, a play he considered worthless, but patriotism would draw and Dunlap needed a paying audience. In July 1801, he brought in Mrs. Anne Brunton Merry from Philadelphia as guest actress to boost the box office. Kotzebue and gothic drama headed his 1801–02 season, delayed again by a yellow fever epidemic. He revived Lovers’ Vows again and staged Blue Beard by English playwright George Colman the younger, which ran twelve performances. Odell credits the play with satisfying “a craving for Gothic thrills, and for a spectacle of oriental magnificence.”29 In April 1802, Mrs. Merry was back for a return engagement, helping both Dunlap’s box office woes and her own growing reputation as a star. Dunlap’s 1802–03 season was about survival. He brought out a revival of The Mysterious Monk, now renamed Ribbemond; or, The Feudal Baron. Thomas A. Cooper, who had rejoined the company that season, announced that he was returning to London to perform at Drury Lane Theatre and gave several farewell performances in his favorite roles: Hamlet, Richard II, Shylock, and Macbeth. In February, Dunlap’s The Voice of Nature introduced many of the elements of melodrame to the New York stage. Created five years earlier by Guilbert de Pixérécourt in Paris, melodrame differed little from the gothic drama except for the use of music to heighten the dramatic effect. Its popularity received a boost in this country when Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery opened at the Park Theatre in March. An adaptation of Pixérécourt’s Coelina, ou l’enfant du mystèrie, A Tale of Mystery is widely regarded as the first English melodrama. On July 4, Dunlap brought out The 38

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Glory of Columbia, adapted from his own failed André, and it was revived on patriotic occasions for years. Dunlap’s last two seasons were not successful, and he closed the theatre after the February 18, 1805, performance. He lost almost everything he owned in bankruptcy, and the loss affected him deeply. He had professed an interest in uplifting the American stage by offering the classics and the best in contemporary drama, and in this he had failed. But in his final years, he found time to write a few more plays, including A Trip to Niagara; or, Travelers in America, with an eye to skewering English travelers such as Mrs. Trollope. In addition to Irish, French, and Yankee character types, he added to A Trip to Niagara a new romantic character, Leatherstocking, borrowed from his friend James Fenimore Cooper. 30 He published the first History of the American Theatre in 1832 and a History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States two years later. In addition to his original dramas, Dunlap gave plays by native authors a more prominent place in his repertory and offered in translation the best of French and German plays to a New York audience.31 An important reason for Dunlap’s difficulties was the shift of the capital from New York to Philadelphia in 1790 for a ten-year period that gave the City of Brotherly Love an opportunity to demonstrate its cultural superiority. It had not suffered from seven years of occupation during the war like New York had. As Gresdna Doty notes, it had a library, a university, a literary society, a museum, and thirty-three churches.32 It was the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the nation. The American Company had been performing in both New York and Philadelphia, but an internal conflict involving their star comedian, Thomas Wignell, had ended with the actor leaving the company in 1792 and, with the assistance of a Philadelphia musician, Alexander Reinagle, building a theatre and establishing a company there. Recruiting most of their actors from London, they opened the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia in February 1794, modeled on the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden.33 Heading the new company, in addition to Wignell, were the Morrises from the American Company, Mrs. Oldmixon (née Georgina George), Eliza Kemble Whitlock, and James Fennell from London. Mrs. Whitlock was the sister of John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, the reigning royalty of the London stage. William Rowson, a musician, and his wife, actress and writer Susanna Haswell Rowson, also were part of the London contingent. In 1796, Wignell again visited London on a recruiting trip and returned to Philadelphia with Thomas A. Cooper, William Warren, and Mrs. Anne Brunton Merry, actors who were persuaded that better opportunities existed for their talents on this side of the Atlantic. With these additions, the Chestnut Street Theatre developed into the finest company in the country and remained so until the mid-1820s. 39

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Susanna Haswell Rowson As the center of culture in this new republic, Philadelphia attracted young artists, writers, and playwrights who found a receptive management at the Chestnut Street Theatre. Susanna Haswell Rowson’s acting talents were modest, but as a writer she had attained a measure of success in London in 1791 with her sentimental novel, Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth.34 After Susanna and her husband joined the Chestnut Street Company in 1793, she wrote Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom, A Play interspersed with Songs, in Three acts (1794). The drama dealt with America’s war with pirates and the imprisonment of Americans for ransom in the Mediterranean after the loss of protection from the British navy. Some of the plot came from Cervantes’ “Story of the Captive” in Don Quixote.35 The playwright borrowed the methods of comic opera—disguises, escapes, and recaptures—such as the attempt by Ben Hassan to escape by putting on a dress and pretending to be an American woman.36 Rowson’s views on freedom, slavery, and women’s independence seem enlightened for the day. A major character, Fetnah, the chosen favorite of the dey (governor) of Algiers, yearns for liberty: “Is the poor bird that is confined in a cage (because a favourite with its enslaver) consoled for the loss of freedom. No! tho’ its prison is of golden wire, its food delicious, and it is overwhelm’d with caresses, its little heart still pants for liberty.”37 An American captive has taught Fetnah “the love of liberty” and that “woman was never formed to be the abject slave of man. Nature made us equal with them, and gave us the power to render ourselves superior.” Fetnah is proud that she is a woman: “A woman!—Why, so I am; but in the cause of love or friendship, a woman can face danger with as much spirit, and as little fear, as the bravest man amongst you.” Rowson speaks out in the play against slavery and for women’s independence. An epilogue, spoken by the playwright herself, seems designed to be provocative: Well, Ladies tell me—how d’ye like my play? “The Creature has some sense,” methinks you say; “She says that we should have supreme dominion, And in good truth, we’re all of her opinion. Women were born for universal sway, Men to adore, be silent, and obey.”

Rowson seemed willing to speak her mind about contemporary issues. Her other plays, including The Volunteers (1795), a comic opera about the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, and Americans in England (1797), retitled The Columbian Daughter; or, Americans in England, are not extant.38

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James Nelson Barker A native Philadelphian, James Nelson Barker also believed in writing about issues that mattered to Americans. The son of a Revolutionary War veteran, Barker became an advocate for a native drama. He served in the War of 1812 and involved himself in Philadelphia politics. He saw himself as an American playwright with a commitment to exploring native subjects and themes. Influenced by Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, Barker wrote a bright new comedy, Tears and Smiles, in 1806 that also drew upon the actions of the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and the dey of Algiers to capture American ships and sailors, holding them for ransom. But in this play, the war is just a background for social comedy. Tears and Smiles ridicules upper-class society and shows the moral superiority of Nathan Yank, a lower-class rustic, suggesting that Barker understood the egalitarian spirit of his audience. With Joseph Jefferson I portraying Yank, Tears and Smiles successfully premiered at the Chestnut Street Theatre on March 4, 1807. While an immature work, it does have vitality. The plot turns on the wooing of Louisa Campdon by the penniless but brave young naval hero Sydney, who has returned from fighting pirates in the Mediterranean. Louisa’s guardian, General Campdon, has demanded that she wed the wealthy but foppish Fluttermore, who after college went abroad and returned with “a hearty contempt for every thing this side the water”: For my part, I can’t conceive what you possibly do in this corner of the globe. No opera; no masquerade, nor fete, nor conversazione; a diabolical theatre; and not even a promenade, where one might— (Examining his figure.) Then your women; such dowdies! No air; no manner. And your men: O Ciel! such beings!—Gad, Jack, you must go to Europe! You see what it can do.39

Fluttermore seems but another version of Tyler’s Billy Dimple in The Contrast. He believes that the English can’t dress, talk, or cook “as well as the French” and that Italian opera “is a dev’lish deal finer than anything in the world.” Campdon insists that Louisa marry Fluttermore immediately because he is worried that she and Sydney will elope. As things begin to look hopeless for the lovers, Sydney’s unmarried sister Clara reveals that Fluttermore is the father of her unborn child. A priest quickly remedies this situation, leaving Sydney and Louisa free to wed. Tears and Smiles is overloaded with plot, including an additional love interest and the discovery of Sydney and Clara’s long-lost parents. But Fluttermore’s élan, if not his pretentiousness, gives the play its vitality. He seems almost modern when he paints a picture of the joys of domestic life:

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Once a week or so, you’ll emerge from the elegant cares of your counting-room, to take the benefit of the dust with spousy, to your rural cot on the high road; and once a year catch an ague, for the benefit of your health, at some one of your brilliant watering places. Amiably domestic, you’ll play cards for kisses with lovey; or make one of a tea-drinking circle in the American taste; staring at each other like a room full of wax-figures; and gloomy as a Presbyterian synod.

Like The Contrast, Tears and Smiles satirizes contemporary manners, especially the aping of French etiquette in America after the French Revolution. Nathan Yank with his rustic wisdom continues the development of the Yankee character from Jonathan in The Contrast into a full-blown national type. Actor and dancer Charles Durang praised the play in his history of the Philadelphia stage.40 Barker wrote a number of plays prior to the War of 1812. His most popular success was an adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s long poem Marmion, performed at the Park Theatre in New York in April 1812 and at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia the following January. While the poem (and play) is set in sixteenth-century England and Scotland, Barker used it to address contemporary America and its relationship with England during a time of intense debate in Congress over the imprisonment of American seamen. Clearly patriotism and the conflict with England gave the play its relevancy. Marmion fairly bristles with anti-British sentiments, as seen in this speech by James IV, the Scottish king: Murder and pillage, England’s constant agents, Roamed through our land, and harboured in our bays! Our peaceful border sacked, our vessels plundered, Our abused liegemen robbed, enslaved and slaughtered. My lord, my lord, under such injuries, How shall a free and gallant nation act? Still lay its sovereignty at England’s feet— Still basely ask a boon from England’s bounty Still vainly hope redress from England’s justice? No! by our martyred fathers’ memories, The land may sink—but, like a glorious wreck, ’Twill keep its colors flying to the last.41

Long and sustained applause greeted this speech, especially after war with England was declared on June 9, 1812.42 The play received its first production in New York, probably because another by the same name was playing at the Olympic Theatre in Philadelphia. To counter this, the managers advertised 42

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Thomas Morton, a popular English playwright, as the author in the hopes that this would attract a larger audience. But after six or seven performances, Barker’s authorship was acknowledged. Barker wrote dramatic criticism as well as plays, prose, and poems. In a preface to the first edition of Marmion, he advocated for a strong American literature and criticized the lack of encouragement for a native drama. He believed that the nation should be independent of European standards of taste and condemned Americans’ provincial feelings of inferiority: “We meanly condescend to learn from British reviews, British newspapers and what is still more contemptible, from romances of British travelers through our country, how to estimate the benefits we enjoy, and indeed, what to think of ourselves.”43 Aristocratic assumptions permeated the whole of English literature, including the drama, he believed, and his goal in Marmion was to tease some of these out. The National Registar would later praise Barker for writing “some pieces of considerable merit, and much superior to many of the European dramas that have been received in this country with great éclat.”44 Barker remains best known for two plays—The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage (1808) and Superstition; or, The Fanatic Father (1824). Both premiered in Philadelphia at the Chestnut Street Theatre. The Indian Princess was based on the legend of Pocahontas and was drawn from Virginia history. It has the distinction of being the first Indian play written by an American to be performed. The characters are conventional and the dialogue stilted, and the presence of five pairs of lovers somewhat dilutes the main action, the rescue of Captain Smith. Yet the suspense is skillfully built, and the freeing of Smith by Pocahontas is dramatically effective. The London performance at Drury Lane on December 15, 1820, appears to be the first well-authenticated instance of “an original American play to receive a hearing in England after a premier production in America.”45 The Pocahontas story is found in four other plays around that time, including John Brougham’s satire Po-ca-hontas; or, The Gentle Savage in 1855. Superstition; or, The Fanatic Father is a more mature work that deals with Puritan religious intolerance.46 First performed at the Chestnut Street Theatre on March 12, 1824, Superstition made concrete for Barker’s audience political concepts that people were struggling to understand: that tyranny could happen in a democracy when the rights of minorities are not protected. The main events in the play are based on historical events. Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts may have been the playwright’s main source. Set in New England during the late seventeenth century, Superstition demonstrates the evil that can come from Puritan religious intolerance. Charles and his mother, Isabella, have come from England to search for her father, a character based on the regicide William Goffe, one of the fifty-nine 43

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judges who had signed the death warrant for King Charles I in 1649. The local minister, Ravensworth, stirs up the mob against them because he feels they do not properly recognize his authority or that of the church’s and also because Charles has fallen in love with his daughter. By accusing them of being witches, he rouses the townspeople against them. The trial of Charles and Isabella for sorcery and Charles’s execution are heinous crimes. And although Ravensworth is the villain, residents of the village share his guilt, suggesting that the tyranny of the majority may be as great an evil as the tyranny of a despot. Arthur Miller pursues a similar theme in The Crucible (1953). Barker seems to be suggesting that citizens need to be informed in a democracy, or freedom may be lost in the name of equality. While Barker’s political activities took him from the theatre, he continued to advocate for an American drama, one that reflected the history and myths of this new republic. With Barker, we begin to see an increasing number of writers who looked to America—to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—rather than to London as the locus of their work. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, two wars against the British and other conflicts involving American interests provided a wealth of material for playwrights. Philadelphian Mordecai Manuel Noah wrote She Would be a Soldier; or, The Plains of Chippewa (1819) about a famous battle against the British in July 1814. Like most war plays then and now, the battle served mainly as a background for romance. A young woman disguises herself as a soldier to visit her lover in camp. Captured and accused of being a spy, she faces execution before a last-minute rescue by her lover promises a happy ending and future marriage. Noah’s The Siege of Tripoli (1820) dealt with Mediterranean pirates, kidnappings, and building a navy. He followed this with Marion; or, The Hero of Lake George (1821), which shifts back to the Revolution with the Battle of Saratoga providing the background for the heroic antics of a patriot named Marion whose wife also disguises herself to get into the camp. He adapted The Grecian Captive; or, The Fall of Athens from a French play, Mahomet II, in 1822, and although it was about Greece’s struggle for independence, it spoke to American values of freedom and equality. Noah turned once more in 1824 to the Revolution with The Siege of Yorktown, performed during the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to New York. Other writers also discovered that American history could provide attractive subjects for their plays. C. E. Grice’s Battle of New Orleans at the Park Theatre on July 4, 1816, continued the practice begun by Burk’s Bunker Hill and Dunlap’s The Glory of Columbia of offering self-congratulatory entertainments about republicanism on the nation’s birthday. Samuel Woodworth’s The Widow’s Son; or, Which Is the Traitor? (1825) dramatized the events surrounding Margaret Darby’s spying for Washington after her son, William, commits 44

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treason and goes over to the British. His La Fayette; or, The Castle of Olmutz (1824) was written to celebrate Lafayette’s return visit in 1824. Both premiered at the Park Theatre. These plays dramatized the defining events of this new republic. Most were crude efforts made for entertaining a mass audience. But their existence meant that writers recognized the importance of theatre as a forum for celebrating and exploring the recent history of the nation. Yankee Theatre As the idea of America became a reality, questions arose both at home and abroad as to what defined an American. How did an American differ from his cousin in England? In other words, how did Jonathan differ from John Bull? Tyler’s The Contrast and his character of Jonathan helped define the tradition of the stage Yankee—the most successful type of American character to date and one imitated throughout the nineteenth century. Yankee characters were beloved by audiences as they depicted some basic attributes of the American character: they were rural, shrewd, honest, and hard-dealing but fair, seen by audiences both here and in England as images of the democratic experiment. Jonathan, the country boy from New England, became by the mid1820s the image of the common man in American. Two plays stand out in this process. The first, David Humphreys’ The Yankey in England (ca.1815), handed on the “Yankee tradition of The Contrast.”47 In an introduction to the play, the author explained the basis for his character, and in a glossary, he provided a list of Yankee terms that was used by other performers, including the English actor Charles Mathews. Humphreys’ obsession with the speech dialect and specific location of the Yankee probably helped set the character in New England. Although he wrote poetry, prose, and adapted other plays, The Yankey in England was his only original dramatic work. The second play, Samuel Woodworth’s The Forest Rose (1825), introduced Jonathan Ploughboy, the most completely drawn Yankee character to date and one totally involved in the plot rather than an appendage.48 Its themes are typical of the Yankee plays: pro-country and anti-city, pro-American and anti-British. The play became popular not only in America but in England as well. Richard Moody describes it as the “first hit show of the American theatre.”49 Woodworth’s sense of fun gives The Forest Rose a giddy air and makes it delightful reading. In act 1 when Jonathan visits Harriet to profess his love, the following scene and a song ensues: Harriet: Well, Jonathan, what is it you wish to tell me? Jonathan: Why, Miss Harriet, Granny Gossip and I had a long talk about it last night; and she said how— Harriet: She said how! Then what did you say? 45

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Jonathan: (confused) I said how— Harriet: Well? You both said how! What next? Go on. Jonathan: Why, darn it! You won’t let me tell. Harriet: You are so long about it. Don’t you know that a smart girl, like me, wants every thing done quick? Jonathan: That’s just what Granny Gossip said, by the hokey! She told me, says she— Harriet: Indeed! Then what did you tell her? Jonathan: I said, says I—No; Granny Gossip said, says she—Harriet Miller is the smartest girl in all the county, be the other who she may. Harriet: I am very much obliged to the old lady. Then, what did you say? Jonathan: I said, says I, so she is; for, says I, she can milk a cow, make a cheese, and boil a pudding, with any girl in the world, says I. Harriet: That was certainly very kind of you. Jonathan: Wan’t it now? Then says she to me, says she, why don’t you strike there, instead of running after the deacon’s Sal, who don’t care three skips of a flea for you, only for your money. Why don’t you strike there? says Granny Gossip to me, says she. Harriet: Strike! Where? Jonathan: Here—you! Harriet: Strike me! Jonathan: No—no. She meant, why didn’t I court you? He, he, he! Harriet: O, that alters the case. What reason did you give for not courting me! Jonathan: I told her I was afeard. But after talking a good while longer about it I thought, thinks I to myself, there can be no great harm in axing the question; and if I get the sack, says I, to myself, I shan’t be the first that’s got it by hundreds.50

A prolific playwright, Woodworth wrote sentimental plays about the American Revolution and American life in the 1820s and 1830s. His best work, The Forest Rose, was revived regularly until the Civil War. He served as editor and publisher of several newspapers, most notably the New York Mirror, which he established with George P. Morris. However, time has treated his work with little respect. He is remembered today only as the author of the poem “The Old Oaken Bucket.” At this point, the Yankee character had grown organically, developed by native writers with an eye to local characteristics. English comedian Charles Mathews took these characteristics and developed the Yankee dialect character by imitating the speech of the common people in New York and 46

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elsewhere. In his vehicles Trip to America and Jonathan in England, Mathews established the model for the next half-century of Yankee theatre. He was famous for performing At Home with Charles Mathews in a vaudeville-like format, offering satirical portraits of various national types. Extending this to include the American national type—the Yankee—seemed a logical step, especially after his American tour of 1822–23. Mathews gave form to the genre, combining craft with his observations and those of other English travelers in the 1820s and 1830s. American comedians followed in his footsteps. Francis Hodge credits James Henry Hackett with making the Yankee an important American stage character in the decade 1826–36, performing not only at the Park and Bowery in New York but also on tour.51 At the beginning of his career, Hackett borrowed his ideas and methods, especially from Mathews, and adapted English plays to his talents. He was adept at storytelling and mimicry, and he experimented in finding the right vehicles for himself. He was the first American to play a Yankee on the London stage. Although his homespun characters were incomprehensible to an English audience, he gained status in the States by his efforts. In 1828, he adapted George Colman’s Who Wants a Guinea? as John Bull at Home; or, Jonathan in England and transformed the low-comedy role of Solomon Gundy into the Yankee Solomon Swap. A year later, he added the role of Industrious Doolittle to his repertory in a new comedy, The Times; or, Life in New York. Doolittle is described on the Park Theatre playbill as “a busy, talkative, native of one of the eastern states—speculator in everything—auctioneer, bank and insurance director, and stump candidate for assembly, with a sneaking notion for Caroline or more ‘specially’ her large inheritance in rice and cotton plantations.”52 Other Yankee plays followed with roles tailored for Hackett: Major Joe Bunker in Down East; or, The Militia Muster and Melodious Migrate in The Moderns; or, A Trip to the Springs. Later, after his second London tour, he would add several more Yankee pieces, including Major Jack Downing; or, The Retired Politician (1834), based on the writings of humorist Seba Smith, and his last Yankee play, Job Fox, the Yankee Valet (1836). Hackett played other such native characters as the backwoodsman Nimrod Wildfire (based on Davy Crockett) and Rip Van Winkle. Many regarded him as the best of American comedians during his nearly fifty-year career. The stage Yankee had not only become the symbol of the common man but also reflected the egalitarian spirit of the nation. Consequently, it was good business for actors, particularly low comedians, to pursue this line and for writers to create vehicles to take advantage of these actors’ unique styles. In the 1830s, George Handel Hill developed his country boy into the most popular Yankee character in the business. A low comedian by trade, he borrowed from Charles Mathews and James Hackett before creating the role of 47

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Jonathan Doolittle in Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia during the fall season of 1831. This was his first Yankee in a fully developed play. He turned to established writers such as Joseph S. Jones to find authentic material. Jones’s The Green Mountain Boy provided Hill with an original New England character, Jedediah Homebred, who told stories and sang songs about the farm and rural life in a natural and humorous manner. Audiences were delighted with his observations of everyday New England life. During the winter of 1832, he portrayed Jonathan Ploughboy in Woodworth’s musical play The Forest Rose. For his London debut in 1836, Hill performed the Yankee peddler Hiram Dodge in Old Times in Virginia; or, The Yankee Pedlar from the pen of American-born writer William Bayle Bernard, who then lived in England. Set on a southern plantation, the play revolves around a horse race, a love affair, and the arrival of Dodge to outsmart the owner, Colonel Bantum, and set all matters right. The London Globe of November 2, 1836, described his character: “Not finding a market for his razors, which he assured his customers, if oiled, and put under the pillow at night, would astonish the buyer, who would find himself clean shaved when he awoke in the morning, he becomes successively a servant, a confidant, a carpenter, and jockey, with a view to gain unappropriated dollars.” The critic found Hill’s “quaint, dry humor” attractive as well as his “many odd phrases and similes interspersed throughout the dialogue.” His Hiram Dodge was judged a major success in London. His success signaled a shift in taste away from artificial comedies to more realistic ones, as audiences found his Yankee characters true to nature: “Hiram Dodge was a thoroughbred Yankee, sly, fraudulent, cunning under a mask of simplicity, a smooth, slick peddler, and an accurate, truthful image.”53 Finding new situations and characters in the Yankee line were constant challenges for actors as audiences continuously demanded novelty. Joseph S. Jones in his play The People’s Lawyer provided Hill with the role of Solon Shingle that would be among his finest accomplishments. Quinn calls it “the most famous of his Yankee characters.”54 Much of the humor derives from farmer Solon visiting Boston and contrasting city ways with those of the country in a simple but clever manner. After Hill played Solon at the Park Theatre in 1842, it became a popular role for other Yankee specialists, especially John E. Owens in the 1860s. While conventional in plot, The People’s Lawyer is more than a vehicle: there is less buffoonery and more wise comedy. Also, Solon is a well-developed character who outwits everyone else. Yet, the play follows tradition in preaching about the virtues of the common man. When Robert Howard, “the People’s Lawyer,” visits the Otis home, he comes dressed as a mechanic. When Mrs. Otis makes light of his appearance, Robert replies: “I lose not, I trust, my right to the title of a gentleman, because my 48

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hands are hardened by labour.”55 A sympathetic lawyer defied tradition in the theatre, as lawyers had served as “the heavies” in most plays, English as well as American. The People’s Lawyer remained popular into the 1860s. The stage Yankee continued to evolve in the 1840s and 1850s, catering on one hand to recent Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famines back home and on the other to the western states—Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana—and cities up and down the Mississippi. Irish-Yankee plays were created as vehicles for Irish specialists such as John Brougham and Barney Williams. Brougham’s The Irish Yankee; or, The Birthday of Freedom introduces Ebenezer O’Donahoo as a low comic type who joins the army, fights at the battle of Bunker Hill, and becomes a confidant of George Washington. After the war, O’Donahoo comes back home to marry his girl, Lyddy, and to sing a love duet with her. The tone is derived from a combination of low comedy and high patriotism. In the final scene, Washington reads from the Declaration of Independence and afterward takes his place on a low pedestal. O’Donahoo leads the cast in three cheers: “Liberty all over the world, and where it is not given with a good will may it be taken by a strong hand.”56 As the country moved westward, the Yankee took on the shadings and color of western life. Dan Marble, the most accomplished of these western Yankees, is best remembered for his role of Sam Patch, a real-life character whose claim to fame included jumping over Niagara Falls. Sam Patch the Jumper became a favorite with audiences, and stage business included the jump. Other Yankee specialists, including Joshua Silsbee and John E. Owens, continued borrowing and refining as they made the Yankee character into vehicles for their own talents. Silsbee worked into the 1850s, and Owens continued the Yankee traditions into the 1860s. But by this time, Yankee characters were so well integrated into melodramas and comedies that they no longer seemed unique, as they had a half-century earlier. However, they had introduced native types and given American audiences something quite distinct from what was seen in British drama, an image of the common man in this new republic. Changing what was essentially an English institution into an American one was a slow process, even with the contributions of Dunlap, Rowson, Barker, Noah, and the Yankee specialists. The standard repertory at the Park as well as Chestnut Street Theatre continued to follow that of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Shakespeare continued to be the most popular dramatist on both sides of the Atlantic, even as his plays faced attacks for their vulgarities, indelicacies, and immoral actions. Several plays, modified in the Restoration and eighteenth century, continued in service. Individual managers made changes to give star actors more lines or to provide more acceptable endings. Certain roles such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and Richard III were crucibles by 49

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which actors measured their talents against their peers, and audiences flocked to theatres to compare performances. Restricted by theatre laws at home and with an eye on “the main chance” here, English actors came by the hundreds. Thomas A. Cooper arrived from England in 1796 and was to spend much of his career in America. A classical actor in the style of John Philip Kemble, he excelled as Hamlet. Arriving later were romantic actors George Frederick Cooke, Edmund Kean, and Junius Brutus Booth. Of the twenty roles that Cooke played in two seasons in America (1810–12), ten were Shakespearean.57 His Richard III, Iago, and Shylock were considered his best. Kean was a star of the first magnitude when he first came to American in 1820 and played in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. He excelled as Richard III, Othello, Shylock, and King Lear. Booth came to America with his mistress in 1821 to escape a family and unfavorable comparisons with Kean at home. He resembled Kean in physique and style and, like Kean, excelled in the same kind of roles—Richard III, Shylock, and Iago. No American actors compared in talent to these British visitors until the rise of Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman in the late 1820s. John Howard Payne Besides Shakespeare and modified Restoration dramas, the standard repertory included works from the eighteenth century, plays such as The Rivals, The School for Scandal, She Stoops to Conquer, The Beggar’s Opera, The London Merchant, The Conscious Lovers, and others. For a time, English playwright James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius; or, The Liberation of Rome (1820) and The Hunchback (1832) provided important roles for English and American actors, as did his countryman Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons (1838) and Richelieu (1839). William Macready, the leading English actor of his age, helped establish these writers by performing their plays. Of native playwrights in the early nineteenth century, John Howard Payne was the most successful in writing and adapting plays that became part of the standard repertory in London and New York. He was not interested in creating new American characters for the stage. In fact, he lived abroad for much of his career. Born in New York City in 1791, he began acting at an early age and made his professional debut at the Park Theatre in 1809 as Young Norval in the Reverend John Home’s Douglas, a favorite part for male prodigies in England and America.58 To catch the spirit of the romantic age, he adapted Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe into Lovers’ Vows, the same play that Dunlap and others had translated. Then he sailed for England. As Young Norval, he made his London debut in 1813 and for a time traveled in Europe. For several years he shuttled between London and Paris, attempting to work as an actor while translating French plays, first for Drury Lane and later for Covent 50

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Garden. During this time, he learned the workings of the French melodrames, and his own adaptations began to reflect their skillful tying and untying of the dramatic knot and their extreme sentimentality. Payne gained an astute understanding of what the public would pay to see and put this knowledge to work in what is generally regarded as his best tragedy, The Tragedy of Brutus; or, The Fall of Tarquin. Written for Edmund Kean and performed at Drury Lane in December 1818, The Tragedy of Brutus became a huge success, running for twenty-three consecutive nights before closing for the Christmas holidays and returning for fifty-three consecutive nights afterward. 59 Three months later it opened at the Park Theatre in New York and was revived regularly for the next seventy years. Payne acknowledged that he had borrowed from seven earlier versions of the play; previous studies have identified five, including Lucius Junius Brutus, Father of His Country (1681) by Nathaniel Lee and Brutus, A Tragedy (1730) by Voltaire.60 Like Joseph Addison’s Cato, Payne’s Brutus was grounded in Roman history but spoke to a contemporary audience about the twin subjects of tyranny and democracy.61 The play invites comparison with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Coriolanus and contains echoes of a host of other plays, including Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear. The leading role of Lucius Junius (later called Brutus) was tailor-made for Kean and contains the best speeches in the play. The rhetoric is bombastic but, in the hands of an actor of Kean’s skill, must have been theatrically effective. The subject comes from the early years of Rome when Lucius Junius Brutus led a revolt against the Tarquin kings and established a republic. At the play’s opening, it is revealed that Lucius’s father and brother have been murdered while Lucius was away on travels; upon his return, he has pretended to be mad to protect his life while awaiting an opportunity for revenge: When will the tedious gods permit thy soul To walk abroad in her own majesty, And throw this vizor of thy madness from thee? To avenge my father’s and my brother’s murder! 62

Tullia, the murderous queen of the Tarquins, has horrible visions and consults the Sibyl, who prophesies: “The race of Tarquin shall be kings, / Till a fool drive them hence and set Rome free!” Worried, she calls for the mad Lucius and questions him. When she finds his faculties brutish, she renames him Brutus, thus the title. While Brutus schemes to revenge the death of his father and brother, his son Titus falls in love with Tarquinia, the Tarquin princess. This is a union that Brutus cannot abide: “If thou art mine, thou can’st not be Tarquinia’s. / Renounce thy father,—or renounce thy love.” Forced to choose, Titus thinks 51

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his father mad and refuses to yield. One disaster follows another when the king’s son, Prince Sextus, rapes Lucretia, kinsman to Brutus and the wife of Collatinus, a noble solder. Lucretia then takes her own life, and Brutus uses her death to create an uprising against the Tarquins. His speech at the Roman forum over Lucretia’s body echoes Antony’s over the body of Caesar: Say, would you seek instruction? would ye ask What ye should do? Ask ye yon conscious walls Which saw his poison’d brother, saw the incest Committed there, and they will cry, Revenge! Ask yon deserted street, where Tullia drove O’er her dead father’s corse, ’twill cry, Revenge! Ask yonder senate house, whose stones are purple With human blood, and it will cry, Revenge! Go to the tomb where lies his murder’d wife, And the poor queen, who lov’d him as her son, Their unappeased ghosts will shriek, Revenge! The temples of the gods, the all viewing heavens, The gods themselves, shall justify the cry And swell the general sound, Revenge! Revenge!

Edmund Kean carried the audience with him in this rhetorical sweep of emotion. By the fifth act, Brutus and his rebels have triumphed. Rome is a republic, and he has been elected a consul. Sextus has been stoned to death in a neighboring village, thus avenging the death of Lucretia. But Titus has joined the Tarquins and thus has betrayed his country. When he is captured, Brutus is given the decision on his fate, and he agonizes before condemning his own son to death. In the last scene, Titus is marched offstage to the place of execution, and Brutus must signal when it is to occur: Poor youth! Thy pilgrimage is at an end! A few sad steps have brought thee to the brink Of that tremendous precipice, whose depth No thought of man can fathom. Justice now Demands her victim! A little moment And I am childless.—One effort and ’tis past!—

The stage directions explain the ending: “He [Brutus] rises and waves his hand, convuls’d with agitation, then drops on his seat and shrouds his face with his toga. Three sounds of the trumpet are heard instantly.—All the characters assume attitudes of deep misery.—Brutus starts up wildly, descends to the front in extreme agitation, looks out on the side which Titus 52

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departed, for an instant, then with an hysterical burst exclaims, ‘Justice is satisfy’d and Rome is free!’” The end was regarded as highly effective. The role of Brutus found many interpreters on this side of the Atlantic, including Thomas A. Cooper, Edwin Forrest, Edwin Booth, John McCullough, and Junius Brutus Booth. Payne wrote or adapted over sixty plays. He had a knack for taking the plots of others and building stage-worthy dramas with roles that attracted star performers. He took historical information, added human interest, mixed in strong characters, and, with a keen eye for the dramatic, provided the leading actors of his day with some of their best material. During the most productive period of his career, he drew upon his childhood friendship with Washington Irving to collaborate on six plays, including Charles The Second; or, The Merry Monarch, a social comedy that premiered at Covent Garden in May 1824 and played at the Park Theatre in New York five months later. It is Payne’s most accomplished comedy, with the story borrowed from the French comedy La Jeunesse de Henri V by Alexander Duval, which also borrowed from earlier plays. The plot turns upon the nocturnal adventures of King Charles and the Earl of Rochester when they go in disguise as sailors to see if Mary, the niece of a local tavern owner, is worthy of being the love interest of the earl’s protégé and page, Edward.63 The king is infamous for his nightly adventures in disguise, but unknown to him the queen has devised a plot to reform him, using her friend Lady Clara and Clara’s lover, the Earl of Rochester. We meet Mary at her uncle Captain Copp’s tavern. Copp is an old retired sailor who has given up the sea to raise his niece. Part of the fun of the play is that Copp keeps singing a “salty” song from his seafaring days: In the time of the Rump, As old Admiral Trump, With his broom swept the chops of the Channel: And his crew of Tenbreeches, Those Dutch sons of ———

Mary always stops him before he can complete it. Washington Irving is credited with adding Copp and his song. Charles The Second is a comedy about disguises and mistaken identities. Edward, in disguise as an Italian music teacher, calls on Mary just at the time that Rochester and the king arrive incognito. After a round of drinks, Rochester manages to relieve the king of his purse and slips out with Edward. When King Charles can’t pay his bill, Copp thinks he has a deadbeat on his hands and won’t let him leave. The king produces an expensive watch and ring as a guarantee for the bill, but Copp assumes he has stolen them 53

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and calls authorities. Charles faces utter humiliation at court and ridicule throughout the country until he escapes out the window with the aid of Mary. Later, when the watch and ring are identified as the king’s, Copp, thinking they have been stolen from the king, returns them in person to the palace. In one of the funniest scenes in the play, Copp describes the rascals who have stolen the king’s jewelry, not knowing he is talking about one of the “rascals” to his face. Rochester’s exit with the purse, we learn, was part of the queen’s plot to embarrass her husband and stop his nightly ramblings. All works out well. The lovers are united, and the king promises to give up his nightly adventures. There is nothing about Payne’s plays that is uniquely American. Today his style might be called “international.” He wrote for a London audience and, like his contemporaries, borrowed plots and characters from the ragbag of French and British drama. He was an astute craftsman, able to cobble together an exciting plot with characters designed for some of the finest actors of his day. To criticize Payne for not being more original is to criticize the theatrical practices of his age. Playwrights were at the mercy of star actors who commissioned pieces and had them tailor-made for their eccentricities. His plays—especially Brutus and Charles The Second—were well received in the United States. In the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, his plays were highly regarded. However, today he is remembered only for that enduring American song “Home Sweet Home.” Farces and Afterpieces Many of the English farces and comic operas discussed in chapter 1 continued to serve republican audiences in the early nineteenth century. David Garrick’s farces Lethe, The Lying Valet, and Miss in Her Teens remained popular, as did Isaac Bickerstaffe’s comic operas Love in a Village, The Maid of the Mill, and The Padlock. But tastes were changing, and plays involving the antics of aristocratic characters were giving way to ones involving the middle classes. London comic operas continued to dominate the American stage. George Colman the younger’s opera Love Laughs at Locksmith first played in New York in 1804 after its opening in London at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, in 1803.64 His Blue Beard played in Philadelphia in 1799 after opening at Drury Lane the season prior. And his The Forty Thieves had its first performance in Charleston, a year after its Drury Lane opening in 1806. Thomas Knight’s comic opera The Turnpike Gate played in Boston in 1801 after a Covent Garden opening in 1799. Thomas Morton’s comic opera The Blind Girl played in Philadelphia in 1802, a year after its Covent Garden opening. Musical entertainments by Isaac Pocock and John O’Keeffe were as popular on this side of the Atlantic as in London. 54

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The large number of extant English farces can give us some idea of what an early nineteenth-century audience found attractive. John Till Allingham’s Mrs. Wiggins (1803) remained a favorite for years. In the play, young Wiggins is supposed to be studying law but instead has been drinking and whoring. While involved with one young widow who has taken his name, he marries another, thinking she is wealthy. She isn’t. His father arrives at his lodgings one step ahead of young Wiggins’s mother after a family spat. Upon her arrival, mistaken identity among the three Mrs. Wigginses—mistress, wife, mother—makes the fun of the play. John Poole’s Paul Pry was successful in New York in the 1820s due to the nature of the title role.65 A busybody like Marplot with a penchant for sticking his nose in everyone’s business, Paul Pry becomes a hero when he recovers letters thrown down a well and uncovers a crime being committed by two servants, Grasp and Mrs. Subtle. The plot was conventional, but the antics of Pry delighted audiences. In Joseph Lunn’s farce Family Jars (1822), Mr. Porcelain and his servant are planning to retire but not before they see their wayward sons married. However, the young men have minds (and girls) of their own. When they bring their fiancées to meet their fathers, there is confusion about which girl belongs to which young man. The servant is delighted when he thinks his son has found a well-educated and cultured bride, and the master is appalled with whom he thinks is his son’s choice. But this is farce, and all is put right at the end. Compared to eighteenth-century English farce, servants and masters seemed on a more equal footing here. Otherwise, plots continued to focus on domestic issues. The treatment was conventional, differing little from that of the previous century. In the early years of the new republic, drama on the American stage changed, like the country itself, from an English institution to something not quite English but not yet independent. Cultured elites of the pre– and post–Revolutionary War days demanded a kind of Roman–Whig seriousness to their drama that later audiences rejected. As the tastes of the middle classes began to influence the box office, physical actions trumped rhetorical flourishes, and gothic scenes set in medieval Italy or Spain with lots of violence trumped speeches in the Roman forum. The egalitarian spirit that had manifested itself in The Contrast and The Glory of Columbia continued through the Yankee plays. Still, traditions established a century before in Drury Lane and Covent Garden continued to exert their pull. Cultivated audiences still looked to London for the best of drama. Actors still chose Shakespearean roles to measure their talent against their peers. When Edwin Forrest made his New York debut at the Bowery Theatre in 1826, he chose Othello. But romanticism freed playwrights from the neoclassical straitjacket and let them write about local history, even if that history served merely as 55

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a background for a love story. Now there abounded a number of plays about the adventures of Americans rather than the British. Criticism that American drama of this period is unworthy of serious scholarship misses the point. The large number of unloved plays provides historians with snapshots of a political creation in the process of becoming a nation. These plays, like the players in Hamlet, “are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.”66 They are both fascinating to read and challenging to understand.

56

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3 Drama in the Age of Jackson It is not necessary to be always writing on national subjects, or illustrating our own history and manners. But we do think, that the literature of a new century, new in its existence, its institutions, and situations, ought to have a special reference to these circumstances. It is this reference which alone can give it originality, and maintain its claims to a national character. —“Dramatic Literature,” The Register of Pennsylvania, September 18, 1830

T

he election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 marked a significant revolution in American politics. Jackson was an outsider, not part of the circle of well-bred men who had led the country from its beginning. He was a military hero, the victorious general at the Battle of New Orleans, with a reputation for being intemperate and excessively ambitious.1 He had just missed garnering the presidency in 1824 when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Now he had come to power because of widespread discontent: western farmers, eastern working men, and southern planters had rebelled against an economic system that they deemed hostile to their interests. With the center of gravity of this nation shifting away from the eastern seaboard, the future belonged to the entrepreneurs who were carving out the wilderness, building the canals and railroads, and establishing new towns and cities. Jackson looked to common people, not to the wealthy and cultured classes, for his political support. The working classes believed that eastern financial interests were strangling their livelihoods, and they celebrated Jackson’s defeat of John Quincy Adams as a victory of the masses over the classes. When he arrived in Washington, D.C., on February 11, 1829, to form a cabinet and prepare to assume office on March 4, he faced a task that was enormous: the country was in the middle of a depression, and the elites who had ruled the country since its beginning were out of power and fleeing the capital. He had to put together a government of yet-undistinguished men from wherever he could find them.

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Drama in the Age of Jackson

The Age of Jackson begins with the common man taking center stage in American social, political, and cultural life. Enlightenment values and classical precepts that had defined Western culture in the eighteenth century were shoved aside by this bumptious age. Jean Jacques Rousseau in France, the Sturm and Drang movement in Germany, the American and French revolutions, gothic literature in France and England, and August von Kotzebue’s dramas all played their part in destroying a rationalistic and collective vision of civilization and replacing it with a highly individualistic one that found truth in nature, not society, and in emotion, not reason. The social and cultural turmoil associated with this shift in perception defined romanticism. Despots were out and democracies in as revolutions swept Europe and South America. Shakespeare’s plays became the template for a new generation of writers who found in his “irregular” dramas the emotional wallop, dynamic action, and individual vision they sought. Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas père in Paris established romanticism in the 1830s as the dominant aesthetic. Writers and artists turned to medieval and renaissance history for unique subjects to excite and move an audience. Plays were set in dark and dank castles in Spain, Italy, and France with torture chambers, poisoned wine, and adulterous love affairs. The rationalism of the Enlightenment gave way to the irrational as artists depicted wild, unkempt nature, not nature ordered by man. Romanticism meant individual freedom in dramatic and artistic expression, but this freedom was a fragile thing at the mercy of the middle classes, the new patrons of the arts. While the old classical rules were abandoned, new conventions soon replaced them, linking the romantic drama to the nineteenth-century audience—an audience in America that grew in size but not in sophistication, the flotsam and jetsam of the Industrial Revolution and increased immigration. Economic forces were changing not only the country but also the nature of theatre itself. The British system that had been imported to the colonies by the Hallams depended on resident stock companies performing a season of plays from the standard repertory with a few new pieces added each year. As visiting stars came with their own plays and roles tailored to their talents, the stock company actors were left performing the secondary roles in support, often at pitiful salaries. The romantic age rewarded geniuses, individuals who were highly gifted. Audiences demanded innovation and novelties. The traditional system based on a company of performers began to crumble. New York, as the principle port of entry, confronted this sooner than theatres in Philadelphia and Boston, but all managers began to demand bright new stars when competing to attract audiences tired of the same old round of plays and actors. The success in America of English stars George Frederick Cooke, Edmund Kean, and others in the early decades of the nineteenth century demonstrated 58

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to actors back home that economic opportunity awaited those brave enough to cross the Atlantic. Ellen Tree toured the United States for two and a half years between 1836 and 1839 before she married Charles Kean, who also toured the nation in 1830–33, 1840, and 1845–47. William Charles Macready visited in 1826 and again in 1843 and 1849. Charles Kemble and his daughter Fanny toured in America in 1832, drawing compliments for his elegance of performance and her sympathetic and charming Juliet. By this time, visiting stars had become an economic necessity in attracting an audience. And star power meant that the stars chose the repertory. This was not just an American phenomenon; it reflected the economics of producing theatre on both sides of the Atlantic. The romantic revolution together with the star system altered the way that plays were written. In the mid-eighteenth century, David Garrick had set the standard for production by tending to the whole of a play, not just to the starring role(s). The classical school in 1800 led by John Philip Kemble and his sister Sarah Siddons in England and by Anne Brunton Merry and Thomas A. Cooper in America had valued grace and dignity with beauty of speech and gesture as well as feeling. These traditions gave way before the emotional and highly personal style of the romantics. Edmund Kean changed the way audiences in London thought about acting, as he seemed to be obsessed by a role. His triumph at Drury Lane as Shylock in January 1814 established him as a major star and his style of romantic acting the dominant school. He excelled in villainous roles that possessed a tinge of malignancy and much physical action like Richard III, Macbeth, and Iago. For Kean as for other romantic actors, chewing up the scenery—seeming to be out of control—was a necessary part of the performance. As noted in the last chapter, playwrights James Sheridan Knowles and John Howard Payne crafted plays to fit his oversized talents, and this practice became common on both sides of the Atlantic. America’s first international star, Edwin Forrest, sponsored nine contests to acquire new plays with appropriate roles for himself. Other star actors James Hackett, James William Wallack, and Josephine Clifton followed suit. In providing larger-than-life roles for star actors, the romantic drama defined itself as a creature of the theatre, not of literature. The importance of Forrest to the development of American romantic drama should not be underestimated. Forrest had made his theatrical debut in 1820 at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia and afterward had served an arduous apprenticeship on the western circuit, acting in Pittsburgh, Louisville, Lexington, and Cincinnati before accepting an offer in 1824 to join James H. Caldwell’s new American Theatre in New Orleans.2 The following year, he joined Charles Gilfert’s theatre in Albany, where he supported visiting stars, including Edmund Kean. In 1826, he made his New York debut at the 59

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Bowery Theatre in the role of Othello. Forrest brought to the stage little of the elegance and aristocratic bearing of his English colleagues. He was a talented actor in the romantic tradition but different. He worked out regularly in the gym and took pride in a muscular physique. His physical attributes made him most successful in roles that stressed physical force over the mental or spiritual. He seems an integral part of the Andrew Jackson revolution of 1828 with a kind of raw energy and rabid nationalism. In 1848, the Albion would credit him with creating a school of acting that was “strictly American” and that embodied not only the national character but also “its democratic idiosyncrasy,” meaning an intense energy and physical display of force.3 Forrest used his new star status to promote playwriting contests. In the fall of 1828, he sent a letter to the editor of the New York Critic offering to pay five hundred dollars and “half of the proceeds of the third representation” for “the best tragedy in five acts, of which the hero, or principal character, shall be an aboriginal of this country.” The offer was printed in the November 22, 1828, edition and attracted fourteen plays. Why an aboriginal? It seems likely that Forrest, in searching for a role to make his mark, decided that an Indian chief would allow him to demonstrate his strength and muscular attributes, something his English rivals for all their elegance and charm could not offer. Richard Moody suggests that Forrest was not “unaware . . . that the colorful, yet scanty, tribal regalia would permit a provocative display of his calves and biceps.”4 Today we would say he played to his strengths. There may have been other personal reasons: he had lived with an Indian tribe during his New Orleans days and had great sympathy for their plight. Also, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales had familiarized the reading public with the Indian as a character in fiction, and his Last of the Mohicans in 1826 had proved popular.5 With this beginning, Forrest held nine contests, raising the prize money to a thousand dollars and opening entries to all subjects. Four of the winning plays became staples in his repertory, and he performed them across the United States and in England. These prize-winning authors included John Augustus Stone, Richard Penn Smith, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Robert Conrad. All from Philadelphia, they, together with George Henry Boker and other locals, became known as the “Philadelphia School.” From about 1820 until the late 1850s, the Philadelphia School, together with writers from Boston and New York, developed a romantic drama in America at the same time Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were creating a romantic literature. While nothing the members of the Philadelphia School wrote had the staying power of The Scarlet Letter (1850) or Moby Dick (1851), their plays were popular for a time, and several were revived regularly until the end of the century. But tied closely to the theatre of their age, they failed to survive beyond it. 60

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John Augustus Stone Forrest’s offer of a prize for the best tragedy “of which the hero, or principal character, shall be an aboriginal of this country” enticed John Augustus Stone in 1829 to write an Indian play, Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags. A Massachusetts native, Stone had begun his career as an actor in Boston and later acted in New York and Philadelphia. The author of at least seven other plays, including Tancred; or, The Siege of Antioch (1827) and The Ancient Briton (1833), Stone had performed previously with Forrest and understood how to shape the title role of Metamora to the actor’s talents. He may have learned also from the actor’s appearance as the Indian chief in Mordecai Noah’s She Would Be a Soldier in November 1828. According to Joseph N. Ireland: “It [Metamora] was created for, and entirely fitted, all his [Forrest’s] peculiarities.”6 A distinguished panel of judges that included William Cullen Bryant picked Metamora over thirteen other plays, and it became Stone’s most popular dramatic work and Forrest’s most successful role. The play was based loosely on King Philip’s war, the bloodiest conflict in the history of the colonies, between the Wampanoag tribe and white settlers during 1675 and 1676. Jeffrey Mason notes how a dozen towns were totally destroyed, others partially, and how the “fighting decimated New England.”7 Skillfully drawn for maximum dramatic effect, Metamora premiered at the Park Theatre in New York on December 15, 1829, and five weeks later at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia to great success. It would remain in the actor’s repertory for the rest of his career. His Wampanoag sachem became the template for stage representations of the noble redskin: brave, strong, self-sacrificing, and a child of nature. The villain in the play is an English aristocrat, Lord Fitzarnold, who is characterized by Sir Arthur Vaughn as “a profligate and spendthrift.”8 The plot turns on the attempt by Mordaunt, a regicide involved in the execution of Charles I, to force his daughter, Oceana, to marry Lord Fitzarnold so that he can regain his place in English society. The orphan Walter, however, is in love with Oceana and, true to democratic values, will not accept that he is inferior to any English lord. Metamora also “owns no master.” He wants to live the way his people have lived for hundreds of years, but the advancement of the white man makes this impossible. Fierce and bloodthirsty, he faces treachery by one of his own people (Annawandah) as well as by the white man. But he saves Oceana’s life, protects his wife and son, and is true to his word. Walter’s attempts to rescue Oceana from the clutches of Lord Fitzarnold and Metamora’s attempts to save his family and his people from the white races work together to create an exciting climax. Walter turns out to be the long-lost son of nobility and marries Oceana; the Indian chief kills Lord Fitzarnold and others in a full-scale war that shows him both heroic 61

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and a savage. And in the final scene, with his braves and son dead and faced with certain capture himself, Metamora kills his own wife to keep her from the soldiers, then is shot and dies cursing the white man. The play became one of the most successful characterizations on the nineteenth-century American stage. It is difficult today, based on the text alone, to understand its popularity. Metamora’s speeches are turgid, and as the role was a vehicle for Forrest, there are a lot of them. We must accept the view of contemporaries, however, that Forrest could make such stilted speeches dramatically exciting: “The palefaces are all around us, and they tread in blood. The blaze of our burning wigwams flashes awfully in the darkness of their path. We are destroyed—not vanquished; we are no more, yet we are forever—Nahmeokee.” English actor George Vandenhoff viewed Forrest’s Metamora at the Bowery Theatre in the early 1840s, and in his Leaves from an Actor’s Note-book attempted to describe the effect that the actor created, using metaphors of the age: He . . . acted with his accustomed vigor; and I freely acknowledge that, for power of destructive energy, I never heard anything on the stage so tremendous in its sustained crescendo swell, and crashing force of utterance, as his defiance of the Council, in that play. His voice surged and roared like the angry sea, lashed into fury by a storm; till, as it reached its boiling, seething climax, in which the serpent hiss of hate was heard, at intervals, amidst its louder, deeper, hoarser tones, it was like the falls of Niagara, in its tremendous down-sweeping cadence: it was a whirlwind, a tornado, a cataract of illimitable rage! 9

John Brougham burlesqued the language, the play, and Forrest’s performance in his 1847 version, Metamora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs. Forrest played the role to the end of his career, and it continued to be his big moneymaker. In his first engagement at the Park Theatre, after his return from Europe in 1837, Metamora drew houses ranging from $1,400 to $900 per performance, more than other favorites The Gladiator and Othello.10 But because Forrest owned the play, Stone did not benefit financially from its success. His The Ancient Briton won another of Forrest’s contests and was produced at the Arch Street Theatre in March 1833. At least one critic, James Rees, thought it “the best” of Stone’s plays.11 What else Stone might have contributed to the American theatre ended the following year when he committed suicide by jumping into the Schuykill River at Philadelphia. Richard Penn Smith Born in Philadelphia in 1799 into a patrician family, Richard Penn Smith established himself in the 1820s as a successful playwright alongside his voca62

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tion as a lawyer. For about a decade, from the mid-1820s, he mined American history—usually famous battles—for subjects to celebrate patriotic occasions, and he adapted popular French comedies and melodramas to suit American tastes. Fifteen of his twenty plays were performed, no insignificant feat at that time.12 In 1829 alone, five of Smith’s plays were performed in Philadelphia. The Eighth of January (1829), adapted from the French, premiered at the Chestnut Street Theatre on January 8, 1829, and celebrated Andrew Jackson’s 1815 victory over the British at New Orleans and, not incidentally, his election as president in 1828. It is a much more interesting play than C. E. Grice’s The Battle of New Orleans (1815) because there is more variety in the characters, more comic scenes, and less political rhetoric. The Eighth of January begins with a family in crisis as John Bull supports the British and his son Charles the Americans. The Battle of New Orleans, however, takes a back seat to the comic antics of Bull’s nephew from London, Billy Bowbell, played at the Chestnut Street Theatre by Joseph Jefferson I. In his attitude toward the battle, Bowbell is more like Falstaff than Prince Hal, as seen here in act 2. Stage directions note that he enters running: Rat my buttons, but this is a pretty scene of confusion. Drums beating; soldiers bawling; cannon firing: bum, bum, bum, from all quarters. O! that I was only safe in Lunnun [London] again! I thought I knowed a thing or two when I left there, but I am in a fair way of learning a thing or two more before I get back again. Uncle’s mill has been burnt to the ground, and we and the rats have been obliged to fly elsewhere for shelter. (cannon) Ha! Bless me! My nerves are as fidgety as though I had been touched by St. Vitus. They’re a coming! Which way shall I fly from these dirty shirts.13

The English captain M’fuse also is played for comedy, as noted in his instructions to a soldier in act 2: Soldier, I station you here; guard that door with the eyes of Argus, and mind you be as surly as old Cereberus, who, we are told, growls as much on letting a jontleman [sic] go to the devil, as if he were conferring a favour on him.

The comic antics of Bowbell and M’fuse contrast nicely with the seriousness of General Jackson, whose speech to John Bull in act 2 is pure Old Hickory rhetoric: General Jackson: Wherein lies the distinction between man and man? They are all born equal, and though fortune may favour one more than another, as long as they are equally upright, the distance between them is much less than the self-important would have you imagine. 63

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John Bull: That’s a new doctrine. General Jackson: No; an old doctrine that was revived in seventysix, and one that must eventually prevail throughout the world to the end of time.

In the most famous scene of the play, General Jackson is on the verge of being captured by the British general Sir Edward Packenham when he signs an armistice prepared earlier by the general and thus escapes. This play doesn’t take itself as seriously as other patriotic pieces. There is a nice balance between serious and humorous elements. The Eighth of January was successful in its day and revived afterward. The variety of Smith’s subjects makes him a fascinating playwright to study. His William Penn at the Walnut Street Theatre, debuting on December 25, 1829, deals with Penn and conflicts among Indian tribes; it seems part of the renaissance of Indian literature at this time. The Triumph at Plattsburg (1830) takes as its subject a famous naval victory of the War of 1812 against the British, although the battle serves only as a background for comedy and romance.14 In the best scene, Major McCrea of the American army disguises himself as Scottish miller Andre Macklegraith to escape the British soldiers. With no knowledge of this ruse, the real Andre reappears to denounce the imposter but is dismissed as a half-wit by his own mother to protect the major. The British commander, Captain Stanley, is no ogre but an honorable military officer secretly married to the major’s daughter, Elinor. The Americans win the battle, Stanley becomes a prisoner of his father-in-law, and the couple is united. Again Smith shows his theatrical acumen by mixing comedic and serious scenes. Smith’s plays include a number of adaptations. He took advantage of the popularity of James Fenimore Cooper to adapt two of his novels for the stage: Water Witch (1830) and The Bravo (n.d.). He adapted from the French The Sentinels; or, The Two Sergeants for production in 1829 at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Not unlike the Damon and Pythias story, the play concerns two sergeants condemned to death for disobeying an order and allowing a woman from a quarantined district to enter the city. By lottery, the single one is chosen to be freed and the married one to be executed. The freed sergeant is allowed to replace his married friend for a night so that he can say good-bye to his wife. It is understood that if the married man doesn’t return in time, his friend will be executed. Because of difficulties, he barely makes it back. Upon seeing the friendship of the two men, the general pardons both.15 Smith wrote a very dark melodrama about a love triangle and attempted murder, The Disowned; or, The Prodigals, based on a French play. First performed in Baltimore in 1829 before opening in Philadelphia at the Chestnut 64

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Street Theatre the following year, the play focuses on Malfort’s plot to destroy Gustavus to win the beautiful and rich Pauline. There are no likable characters except for Amelia, who loves Gustavus and sacrifices herself for him in the end. Our sympathy for Gustavus is compromised by his addiction to gambling, noted here in a speech worthy of George Lillo’s The London Merchant: Cursed be the hour that I looked upon a card! A gambler! Oh! that I had never been born! A gambler! A curse upon society; a disgrace to the human race. . . . Heaven’s choicest blessings were showered upon me and yet I was mad enough to listen to the seductive fiend, and, in wantonness to stake reputation, happiness, honor—all upon the color of a card, or the turn of a die.16

Amelia is killed, leaving a reformed Gustavus free to unite with Pauline. More hackwork followed. In 1830, Smith cobbled together The Deformed; or, Woman’s Trial from an earlier melodrama, The Divorce; or, The Mock Cavalier, and parts of William Dunlap’s Italian Father and Thomas Dekker’s Honest Whore to create a story about the cripple Adorni asking his friend Claudio to tempt his wife, Eugenia, to ascertain if she is faithful. The play had some success, opening at the Chestnut Street Theatre in February 1830. While these were slight works, Smith was learning his craft, much like his contemporaries, by borrowing whatever he needed from older plays. Historians consider that Smith’s two best plays are Caius Marius and The Actress of Padua. The winner of Forrest’s second play contest, Caius Marius was first performed by the actor at the Arch Street Theatre in January 1831. The only blank verse tragedy written by Smith, it is filled with idealistic speeches about liberty, equality, and democratic rights spoken by Forrest as Marius: The people’s voice is here omnipotent; And as from them all power originates, Into their hands all power must be return’d.17

Since the play was tailored for Forrest, he had the best speeches, and many expressed the political mood of the times. When Marius accuses the Roman Senate of using public funds for private luxuries in the waning days of the Republic, his accusations reflect Andrew Jackson’s rhetoric in the campaign of 1828. After opening in Philadelphia, it played two more performances there before its New York premiere on May 9 and its Boston opening on November 21.18 Caius Marius failed to find an audience and was soon abandoned by Forrest. The only other known production came after the death of Smith in 1858 at the Walnut Street Theatre with F. B. Conway as Marius and Forrest in the audience. 65

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Smith’s The Actress of Padua (1836), based on Angelo, Tyran de Padoue by Victor Hugo, was performed by the leading actresses of the day, including Charlotte Cushman. Set in Padua during the mid-sixteenth century, it is filled with jealous husbands, ardent lovers, poisons, stabbings, and the usual machinery of a Hugo romantic drama. Angelo, deputy of Venice, jealously guards his wife, Catharina, although he loves an actress, Thisbe. Both of the women love Rodolpho, a former lover of Catharina’s before she was forced to marry Angelo for political reasons. Strong passions play a major role in determining the outcome. Angelo learns of Catharina’s unfaithfulness and condemns her to death. A sleeping opiate, like that taken by Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, is introduced to save her life.19 The Actress of Padua had the best stage record of any of Smith’s plays.20 American audiences viewed the play only six years after a riot at the Comédie-Française over the production of Hugo’s Hernani signaled the triumph of romanticism over classicism. Smith brought knowledge of contemporary British and European drama to his challenge of writing for the American theatre. His adaptations and original plays give evidence that he was widely read in history and literature. He wrote about American subjects, mainly famous battles, although he followed contemporary practices of using such events as background for a love story. He did not stray too far from the accepted conventions of his age. He borrowed and stole what he needed from a variety of sources. Not a great writer, he nevertheless introduced American audiences to the French romantic drama, gave the infant native stage some plays about America, and provided Forrest with two major roles. Robert Montgomery Bird Robert Montgomery Bird may have been the best American dramatist of his day.21 Arthur Hobson Quinn praises his plays for making a ‘‘decided advance in the progress of our drama.”22 Bird began his professional life as a doctor, but dissatisfaction with this profession led him from medicine to writing. He published short poems in popular magazines and wrote comedies in the style of William Congreve, Plautus, Terence, and Ben Jonson. He looked to Elizabethan drama for proper models, as did his contemporaries. In 1829, he learned that Edwin Forrest was sponsoring a playwriting contest to encourage native writers and submitted his tragedy, Pelopidas; or, The Fall of the Polemarchs, which won first place in 1830, although it was never performed because it lacked a significant role for Forrest. The play, based on Plutarch, dealt with the Thebans’ revolt against the tyranny of Sparta. Bird mined novels, histories, and classical references to find stories that would appeal to audiences. He wrote in a style now termed neo-Elizabethan, which provided an effective mechanism for distancing events and idealizing characters and 66

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subjects. The trick of dramatists was to capture the spirit of the age without depicting recent events or people. He succeeded in the theatre mainly because he shaped his materials around the talents of Forrest, and this proved a devil’s bargain that he was later to bitterly regret. Because Forrest, not Bird, held the copyright to his plays, Bird never benefited financially from their success. Bird’s The Gladiator won Forrest’s next prize play contest in 1831; this time he had tailored the role of Spartacus for the actor. It was Bird’s most successful play, one that Forrest revived regularly until his retirement, performing Spartacus over a thousand times. The play had several things going for it in September 1831: the leading role was played by America’s leading actor; the subject material was drawn from Roman history, an understandable choice for a young playwright trying to impress; and the play had recently won Forrest’s prize of a thousand dollars. Set in imperial Rome during a gladiator insurrection, the play offered the kind of action to excite mass tastes, much like modern gladiator films. Bird crafted patriotic speeches about freedom, liberty, and tyranny—the building blocks of popular drama of the day—that seemed to speak not only to America’s struggle against England in gaining independence but also to revolutions occurring in France, Poland, and Greece. Bird’s character of Spartacus allowed Forrest to demonstrate his physical prowess, which critics later characterized as “the vital, burly, aggressive Americanism of his age.”23 Modern critics, however, have found a feminine side to Spartacus and argue that the popular image of the actor today does not correspond with the evidence. Ginger Strand makes a strong case that in addition to having a wife and mistresses, Forrest was emotionally and probably sexual intimate with his close friend of almost half a century, James Oakes. Their relationship was well known to contemporaries, and since the character of Spartacus was crafted to fit Forrest like a glove, it included this side of his nature.24 With a keen sense of the theatre, Bird opens his play on the streets of a violent, bustling Rome. Phasarius, the best gladiator in the empire, is inciting his fellow warriors to revolt. The Roman generals are conquering the world, leaving no one at home to protect the city, and Phasarius sees this as an opportunity: Since that day I tasted Roman blood, I have had no desire To kill poor slaves—I’ve longed for naught but Romans! 25

Bracchius, the master of the gladiators, announces the arrival of a new slave who will not take the gladiator’s oath nor fight “for the diversion of Rome.” This sets up Spartacus’s first entrance; he arrives onstage chained and bound. 67

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No ordinary slave, Spartacus is strong, proud, and articulate, accusing the Romans of building their successes upon the miseries of subjugated people. He cannot be forced to fight until he learns that his wife and son are being held captive, and at that point he is trapped. To free them and himself, he agrees to serve the Romans. This leads to his meeting Phasarius in the arena, where they discover that they are brothers and refuse to fight. Instead, they strike at their captives and encourage other gladiators to mutiny with the rallying cry: Death to the Roman fiends, that make their mirth Out of the groans of bleeding misery! Ho, slaves, arise! it is your hour to kill! Kill, and spare not—For wrath and liberty!— Freedom for bondmen—freedom and revenge!

The second act ends with a full rebellion. Stage directions read, “Shouts and trumpets—The guards and gladiators rush and engage in combat, as the curtain falls.” Critics agreed that this was the most exciting scene in the play. Maintaining interest for another three acts, however, was a more serious problem. When the third act opens, the gladiators, led by Spartacus, have won the battle. Their victory, however, is threatened by dissension. The German gladiators, led by Crixus, disobey Spartacus, attack the Roman consul, and are slaughtered. To ransom his wife, Spartacus captures Julia, the niece to the Roman praetor. When Phasarius demands her, Spartacus refuses, which brings a major rift between the brothers. Phasarius wants to attack Rome, while Spartacus believes they need to build up their forces by going to Sicily and recruiting more slaves. Phasarius defies his brother and takes fifty thousand men to march on Rome, where his forces are defeated and crucified, although he manages to escape. When Spartacus entrusts his family to his brother’s care, they are slaughtered. And in the end, surrounded by Romans with his wife and son dead, Spartacus dies fighting. Much of acts 3, 4, and 5 is descriptive rather than dramatic. Major actions take place offstage. Even Spartacus is stabbed offstage before he enters to give his dying speech: Well,—never heed the tempest — There are green valleys in our mountains yet.— Set forth the sails.—We’ll be in Thrace anon.—(dies)

The success of the play depended in a large measure upon Forrest’s acting skills in keeping the last three acts theatrically exciting. Both the strengths and weaknesses of the play were apparent on opening night at the Park Theatre on September 26, 1831. The weather had been wretched that evening, and the playwright noted in his journal, “There fell 68

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such torrents of rain as had not visited New York for 15 or 20 years.” He thought the play poorly produced: “Old dresses, old scenes . . . the performers with but one or two exceptions, were horribly imperfect.” And he found the managers indifferent: “It was a horrible piece of bungling from beginning to end.”26 No one, least of all Bird, would have thought on that occasion that Spartacus would be one of Forrest’s major successes. The following day, the critics were divided in their opinions: the New York Evening Post reviewer thought the classical material well adapted to the stage, although the performance showed all the faults of a first presentation; also, Forrest “lacked spirit—a quality he not often lacks.”27 The New York Morning Courier and Enquirer “damned” the play mainly due to “five long acts of uninteresting declamation” that lacked sufficient action; in addition, Forrest should have “made more of it than he did.”28 According to other accounts, the The Gladiator became boring after that highly theatrical second act; in reading the play today, it seems a fair criticism. Yet, as Bird noted in his journal, the production improved with each performance, and reviews became more favorable. The Evening Post critic reported on October 3 that receipts for the productions were averaging more than $1,100 a night, which the paper considered “the best proof of the estimation in which the actor, and the new tragedy . . . are held by the public.”29 And when the play opened in Philadelphia and Boston, similar receptions were accorded it. Forrest thought so well of The Gladiator that he opened his London engagement with it in 1836. London critics seemed more focused on the actor than on the play, and when they did comment on it, they found little to praise. The Examiner critic, John Forster, turned up his nose at the vulgarity of introducing scenes with gladiators in an English theatre.30 While most London critics were favorable toward Forrest, several found too much of the “democratic” manner in his acting. Clearly the play was not for an English audience; yet, Bird was unanimously elected an Honorary Member of the English Dramatic Authors Society the same year. The Gladiator remained in Forrest’s repertoire for the rest of his career. On tour, it frequently outdrew his Shakespearean roles and sometimes his Metamora. The account ledger of the Park Theatre from 1832 to 1841 shows how financially successful the play continued to be in New York over the decade. After returning from his European tour, Forrest played Spartacus at the Park on September 28, 1837, to receipts of $1339.25, topped only in that engagement by his October 4 performance in Metamora. He drew more in this role than as Lear, Othello, Richard III, or Macbeth.31 Forrest as Spartacus was the ideal hero of Jacksonian democracy: physically strong and muscular, courageous, dedicated to freedom, and a protector of women and children. He was seen as the common man pitted against the corruption and decadence 69

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of city life. Country versus city, commoner versus aristocrat, slavery versus liberty—these themes were present in all public forums: newspapers, legislatures, the pulpit, and the stage. They characterized the speeches of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Andrew Jackson. Bird was astute in his selection of this subject. In 1831, Jackson was in the third year of his term as president and gearing up for the campaign of 1832. Audiences who braved the rain that September evening at the Park Theatre would have known the election of 1828 had swept from power the founding generation. But there is evidence that the play may also have been speaking to the slavery issue and, by happenstance, to an unfolding tragedy that was shaking the country to its core. Although completed in the spring of 1831, the play premiered in late September, about a month after the twoday slave insurrection led by Nat Turner had taken some sixty-two lives in Southampton, Virginia.32 Aware of the uprising, Bird wrote in his journal on August 27, 1831: Armed negroes marching through Southampton County, Virginia, murdering, ravishing, and burning those whom the Grace of God has made their owners—70 killed, principally women and children. If they had but a Spartacus among them—to organize the half million of Virginia, the hundred of thousands of the states, and lead them on in the Crusade of Massacre, what a blessed example might they not give to the world of the excellence of slavery! 33

The audience that filled the seats of the Park Theatre that September evening would have known about the horrors of the slave rebellion. Newspapers reported that the insurgents had murdered whole families, severing heads from bodies. Fear had swept the entire region, and editorials blamed outside agitators. The retribution of the soldiers who had captured many of the insurgents was creating controversy, especially in the North. It was rumored that soldiers had cut off the heads of several dozen slaves and planted them along the highway on poles as a warning to other slaves who might pass by, a practice established in earlier slave rebellions and one utilized by the Romans in destroying the rebellion of Spartacus. Controversy ensued in the nation’s press as Nat Turner was depicted as either a liberator or a blood-stained monster. At The Gladiator’s premiere at the Park, much of the audience would have known that the resurrection was over but Nat Turner was still at large. He was not captured until October 30, tried and convicted on November 5, and executed on November 11. By that time, The Gladiator had completed its successful run at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia, beginning October 24, and had opened November 14 in Boston to enthusiastic crowds. Before the end of the Boston engagement, Nat Turner’s court-appointed lawyer, 70

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Thomas R. Gray, had turned his interviews with Turner into The Confessions of Nat Turner, a pamphlet that sold tens of thousands of copies. Interest in the slave insurrection was widespread, which should have made the events of The Gladiator seem highly relevant. Turner’s insurrection would not have been the only slave rebellion in the memory of Bird and contemporary audiences. The previous decade had been filled with racial strife as the abolitionist movement began to build. One of the most famous conspiracies involved a free black carpenter named Denmark Vesey, who in 1822 planned to rally slaves from the plantations around Charleston and attack the city. An informant revealed the plot to authorities, and Vesey and his men were captured and hanged. 34 In 1829, another free black, David Walker, indicted the white population for the inhuman condition of slavery in his pamphlet “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.” He published three editions within six months and circulated copies in the South. This terrified white citizens, especially in the South, and laws were passed to make inciting slaves to rebellion a serious crime. In the same year, abolitionist and editor William Lloyd Garrison spoke at the Park Street Church in Boston on July 4, crying that the time to act was now, that slavery was “a national sin” and threatened the existence of the republic.35 In his first issue of the Liberator on January 1, 1831, Garrison demanded the abolition of slavery in words now famous: “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.” David Walker’s words were also included in the first issue of the Liberator: “Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour.” Bird’s rhetoric is not dissimilar. Spartacus at the end of act 2 exclaims: “Ho, slaves, arise! it is your hour to kill!” But neither the press nor the audiences at the time seemed willing to make a connection between the horrors depicted in The Gladiator and the slave rebellion occurring in Southampton. We know from Bird’s “Secret Records” that he was concerned that audiences might identify the play with the massacre. The prologue spoken on opening night made a different connection. The Evening Post critic of September 27, 1831, noted how the prologue (apparently no longer extant) alluded to the revolutionary struggle in 1831 of the Polish people against Russian tyranny and “elicited a peal of warm applause.” Newspapers praised the Polish patriots for their devotion to liberty and democracy while slave revolts in the South were reported as unlawful and criminal. The color barrier in 1831 made it unlikely that audiences would regard The Gladiator as an abolitionist play. Spartacus’s struggle was viewed as noble, unlike the African Americans involved in the Southampton revolt. In his writings, Bird reveals that he had more than a casual interest in the subject of slavery. In an introduction to “A Young Dramatist’s Diary,” Richard 71

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Harris has noted how Bird’s manuscripts contain “occasional references” to slavery as does his novel Sheppard Lee (1836).36 He wrote in his journal that he realized that the play contained antislavery rhetoric and, if produced in a slave state, “the managers, players, and perhaps myself into the bargain, would be rewarded with the Penitentiary!” He may have had in mind speeches such as “Ho, Slaves, arise! it is your hour to kill!” from the end of act 2 or “Villains, do you put them up for sale, like beasts? / Look at them: they are human” from act 1, referring to Spartacus’s captured wife and son. Richard Moody reminds us, however, that The Gladiator was performed in Mobile, Alabama, in 1839 to standing-room-only crowds. 37 The citizens of Alabama apparently found no contradiction in their own efforts to own slaves and the play’s sentiments about slavery. Walt Whitman’s review of The Gladiator in December 1846 makes a connection between the play and abolitionism: “This play is as full of Abolitionism as an egg is of meat.”38 Exactly what Whitman meant by this, however, is not clear, as he does not mention it again in his review. While he opposed slavery, he considered the abolitionists a threat to the Constitution and the Union.39 From our perspective today, it seems that the play’s rhetoric closely resembles that of the abolitionists’. At the time, however, the public failed to find a relationship. Consequently, there is no record of New York audiences rioting after hearing lines such as “Ho, Slaves, arise! it is your hour to kill!” and audiences at the time were known for expressing their opinions in a violent manner. Bruce A. McConachie has noted that a performance of Metamora in Augusta, Georgia, in 1831 created a near riot because the audience identified the Indians in the play with the Cherokees of their own area.40 The response of the Philadelphia audience to The Gladiator in 1831 gives no hint of any such reaction. Charles Durang wrote that at the end of the second act, the “entire male portion of the audience—rose to their feet and gave at least nine cheers.”41 It is not clear if they were cheering for the play, for the acting, or for the fact that both Bird and Forrest were from Philadelphia. Whatever Bird’s intentions, it appears that few if any contemporary critics made the connection between the play and the unfolding national tragedy of black slavery. Spartacus seemed a classical hero, struggling against Roman tyranny as Americans had struggled against British tyranny. And since they pursued commercial success, neither Bird nor Forrest could have wanted The Gladiator labeled an abolitionist play. As it turned out, perhaps as they had hoped, audiences viewed the play within the dramatic conventions of the day, finding in The Gladiator the timeless qualities of its classical subject. Bird next turned to Latin American history, drawn, perhaps, by the political turmoil in Mexico and South America as countries broke with Spain and fought revolutions to secure their independence. There was enormous 72

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sympathy in the United States for these wars of independence, and Bird mined Peruvian history for his next play, Oralloossa, Son of the Incas, which dealt with the Spanish conquest of the Incas. Quinn faults the play for a lack of humanity and romantic excitement, but it garnered some success in its day, opening in Philadelphia at the Arch Street Theatre in October 1832 with Forrest in the title role.42 Bird then wrote his third play for Forrest, The Broker of Bogota, first played by the actor at the Bowery Theatre in New York in February 1834. The plot turns on the accusations against moneylender Baptista Febro of robbing his own vaults of the vicerory’s gold. While Febro has a reputation for honesty, Bird gives him clear motivations for committing the crime as he is attempting to help his wayward eldest son, Ramon. In the end, Febro is cleared when it comes out that Ramon stole the gold to win his betrothed, Juana. Ramon commits suicide, and the play ends with Febro’s death. A revision of Stone’s Metamora for Forrest (not performed) ended both partnership and friendship. A disagreement over the terms of compensation and lack of legal recourse led Bird to abandon playwriting for the novel. At least three of his novels were adapted for the stage, including Nick of the Woods by Louisa Medina in 1838. Robert T. Conrad Clearly Edwin Forrest’s play contests were responsible for the plethora of new scripts coming out of Philadelphia. On January 17, 1832, at the age of twenty-two, Robert T. Conrad saw his first play, Conrad, King of Naples, presented at the Arch Street Theatre, written for the popular actor James E. Murdock.43 Like other writers of the Philadelphia School, Conrad had been trained for a different career. Born in 1810, he studied law and worked as a journalist before being appointed Judge of the Court of Criminal Sessions; afterward, he pursued politics. But during his early life, he wrote for the stage. His success with Conrad, King of Naples led to an invitation for him to write a play for the actor A.A. Addams, and the result was Jack Cade, also called Aylmere. The title character is a fifteenth-century English rebel who appears in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II. Shakespeare paints him as a demagogue, but Conrad turns him into a patriot who believes that commoners can live on equal terms with the nobility. His Jack Cade rebels against the lack of freedom in feudal England, represented by Lord Say. While based loosely on English history, Conrad wrote his play to suit the times. The production of Jack Cade was scheduled originally for late October 1835, but difficulties delayed it until early December, and then it was performed at the Walnut Street Theatre without Addams, who was “indisposed.”44 Although Addams played the role briefly in February 1836, 73

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he soon dropped the play from his repertory. Francis Wemyss, the theatre’s manager, then interested Forrest in the play, and Conrad retailored it for this actor’s peculiarities. Forrest as Cade was given several powerful speeches in defense of equality and liberty: When we are free, Jack Cade Will back unto his hills, and proudly smile Down on the spangled meanness of the court, Claiming a title higher than their highest,— An honest man—a freeman!45

Cade reflects on the advantages of freedom: Liberty gives nor light nor heat itself; It but permits us to be good and happy. It is to man, what space is to the orbs, The medium where he may revolve and shine, Or, darkened by his vices, fall for ever!

By the end of the play, Cade has learned that equality is a fragile thing: victory over the nobles has encouraged his men to struggle for rank even among themselves: Life’s story still! all would o’ertop their fellows; And every rank—the lowest—hath its height To which hearts flutter, with as large a hope As princes feel for empire! But in each, Ambition struggles with a sea of hate. He who toils up the ridgy grades of life, Finds, in each station, icy scorn above, Below him hooting envy.

Even when victorious, Cade refuses to treat his men as inferiors: England’s sun Sees not a slave; and her glad breeze floats by, And bears no groans save those of her oppressors.

The play ends with Cade killing Lord Say, but in the fight, Cade is struck by a poison dagger. The charter freeing the bondmen arrives onstage, and the dying Cade speaks the last line: “Free! Free! / The bondman is avenged, my country free!” Forrest’s Jack Cade was first presented at the Park Theatre in New York in May 1841 and remained in his repertory for years. He performed it during his second trip to England and Ireland in 1846, receiving excellent notices in 74

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Dublin for identifying “himself with the struggles of an enslaved people.”46 Others, including John McCullough and Edmund K. Collier, performed the role after Forrest’s death. George Henry Boker George Henry Boker was a poet, not a man of the theatre. For almost a quarter of the nineteenth century, he pursued literature as a profession. Born in Philadelphia in 1823 and educated at Princeton, Boker published his first play and his first book of poetry in 1848.47 He went on to write eight more plays and numerous poems and sonnets before being appointed minister to Turkey in 1871. A further appointment to Russia kept him abroad until 1878, after which he wrote an additional two plays before his death in 1890. Well-educated and well-traveled due to family money and influence, he developed his talents as a poet and chose poetic drama as the medium to make his reputation. While his plays enjoyed some success, he failed to gain recognition as a preeminent man of letters; this failure haunted him all of his life. He wrote Bayard Taylor in 1854: “My theatrical success I never valued. I had not, nor have I, any ambition to become a mere playwright. I look on my triumphs in that way as if they were another’s, with something of pity. . . . If I could not be acknowledged as a poet, I had no further desire, and no further active concern in literature.”48 Boker, like other romantic poets, turned to Shakespeare for inspiration. He wrote to friend and fellow poet Richard Stoddard: “Read Chaucer for strength, read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read Milton for sublimity and thought, read Shakespeare for all these things, and for something else which is his alone. Get out of your age, as far as you can.”49 His plays and sonnets are derivative of Elizabethan literature: he wrote in blank verse, chose subjects from the past, and dealt with universal themes. His disdain for fame as a “mere playwright” suggests that, like the English romantic poets, he lacked an understanding of stagecraft, of how to shape his materials to attract and hold the attention of his audience. Unlike Bird, who wrote his plays with Forrest in mind, it seems Boker had no one in mind and lacked understanding of how to build tension and shape a scene that pushes the action forward. He set his first play, Calaynos (1848), in Spain and focused upon the betrayal of the title character by his friend Don Luis. 50 To seduce Calaynos’s wife, Dona Alda, Don Luis tells her the “deep dark” secret that her husband has Moorish blood, the knowledge of which dishonors Calaynos in her eyes and destroys the marriage. The plot then concerns itself with Dona Alda’s abduction and later death, Calaynos’s loss of honor, and a fight between Don Luis and Calaynos that leads to the death of both. The characters are complex and the theme universal: the virtuous Calaynos destroyed by a corrupt society, 75

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represented by Luis. These were attractive roles for romantic actors, and in spite of the play’s shortcomings, it was produced on several occasions. Samuel Phelps at Sadler’s Wells in London presented it in 1849 in a pirated edition and without Boker’s knowledge, pointing up the need of an international copyright law. Phelps cut and rearranged the script to move the action and make it more interesting to his audience. While he showed little regard for the poetry, Phelps did provide Boker with an actable version of his play. It is interesting that the playwright in his revisions generally followed Phelps’s alterations, resulting in a “much shorter, more active play, with less description and few long speeches.”51 Calaynos received its American premiere in January 1851 at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia with James E. Murdock in the title role. Using many of Phelps’s revisions, the actor performed the role frequently over the next thirteen years in Philadelphia and also in Albany, Chicago, and Baltimore. Quinn has claimed an importance to the play that is difficult to understand today.52 Writing in 1984, Oliver H. Evans seems correct in calling the plot awkward, the themes confused, and the language “labouring.”53 Calaynos is a first play with all its inherent strengths and weaknesses, but it served to gain recognition for Boker as a promising new writer. His next tragedy, Anne Boleyn, dramatizes the last days of Queen Anne, wife of Henry VIII, during her arrest, trial, and execution in the Tower. Published in 1850, the play was never produced, perhaps because Boker failed to interest a major actress to play the role of Anne (at one time he thought that Charlotte Cushman was committed to the production). The play builds in intensity better than Calaynos because the Anne Boleyn story offers more possibilities for drama. We observe the machinations of Henry in ridding himself of Anne, and we witness her heroic defense. Yet, Boker still depends upon lengthy speeches that slow down the action, and his language at times feels turgid and shopworn. However, when he finds the right words, his images are haunting: For memories are the shadows of our hopes, That ever lengthen as our day declines, Till death’s oblivion wraps them both in night. 54

But more often than not, his use of poetic language is not up to the task: Is life a dream? Is time a mere illusion of the mind? And shall we awaken from our restless sleep, To see the glory-beaming face of God Smile in our eyes a summons to that life Where all is real? 76

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Critics have found Anne a less sympathetic character because of her earlier role in condemning Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, whom he divorced. Audiences might have found this complexity intriguing if it had been better handled. Yet, without a major actress willing to undertake the role of Anne, there was no opportunity to test the play’s merits. Hoping for a popular success, in 1850 Boker turned to romantic comedy for his third play, The Betrothal.55 Set in Tuscany, the plot turns on the attempt by the Marchioness Di Tiburzzi to wed her daughter Costanza to a wealthy but deformed merchant, Marsio. The Tiburzzi estate is impoverished, and Costanza’s marriage to the detestable Marsio will improve the family fortune. While she loathes Marsio, Costanza thinks her father wants her to marry, and so she agrees to the match. In reality, this is her mother’s scheme, and her father actually disapproves of it. Except for a happy ending, this play has few of the qualities typically associated with comedy. There is little wit or sparkling language, and Boker uses an old device, poison wines, to bring about the denouement. But Costanza’s meeting with Count Juranio in her father’s park after he has been hiding out and observing her is a charming scene; and the relationship between Juranio and his best friend, Salvatore, is handled with a certain jauntiness. The happy ending is brought about by Salvatore’s cunning and deception in substituting his “simple opiate” for Marsio’s poisoned wine. The Betrothal is interesting in that it sets up Marsio for our sympathy at the beginning—he is deformed, ugly, shunned, and, except for his money, a nobody, ridiculed by the city. But when in his jealousy he plots to kill his rival, Count Juranio, he proves himself a villain and is unmasked at the end. This is a better-written play than Boker’s first two tragedies: he moves the action quicker with fewer lengthy speeches, and his dialogue has more give and take. The Betrothal is a romantic comedy but a very serious one with little more than a happy ending separating it from his earlier work. It premiered at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia on September 25, 1850, and stayed for ten performances, then opened in New York at the Broadway Theatre in November (E. A. Marshall managed both theatres). The Betrothal later played unsuccessfully in London. The Walnut Street Theatre’s continued support of Boker’s work must have been encouraging for the young playwright, producing his next play, The World a Mask, in April 1851. A very different kind of comedy, it satirized social types and explored the differences between virtue and respectability in the London of 1851. 56 The play is more melodramatic than humorous, somewhat like an eighteenth-century comedy without the wit. Again turning to comedy, Boker wrote The Widow’s Marriage in 1852, but due to casting problems, the Walnut Street Theatre did not produce it, nor did anyone else. 77

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At about the same time, Boker was finishing Leonor De Guzman, a tragedy set in the Spain of 1350.57 Here the author demonstrates that he had learned something about dramatic structure with fewer lengthy speeches and more dialogue to move the action forward. Also, his characters are developed more consistently with glimpses of real humanity beneath outwardly wooden historical figures. The plot concerns the death of the Spanish king Alfonso and the controversy over the succession to the throne between his mistress, Dona Leonor, and his wife, Dona Maria De Portugal. Our sympathies are with Leonor, who must protect her sons from the court and the legitimate wife, Maria. Along the way we meet familiar types, including the scheming prime minister and fellow courtiers. Again, Boker is exploring the relationship between the virtuous individual and a corrupt society. The play opened at the Walnut Street Theatre on October 3, 1853, for six performances and in April at the Broadway Theatre in New York for three more, clearly not a successful engagement. In spite of Boker’s skill in putting this together, there remains the whiff of the museum about it all. Boker turned next to one of the oldest and best known of the world’s love stories, told by Dante in canto 5 of the Inferno and by Boccaccio in Commentary on the Divine Comedy: the love of Francesca Da Rimini for Paolo, brother of her crippled husband, Lanciotto. Francesca Da Rimini became Boker’s most successful play.58 The lovers have always been attractive characters, but he worked to give weight and sympathy to the hunchback husband, Lanciotto. E. L. Davenport first portrayed the role at the Broadway Theatre in New York for the opening eight-night engagement in September 1855, followed by a short four-performance run in Philadelphia. While reviews of the play were generally favorable, it was not revived until twenty-seven years later when Lawrence Barrett recognized its possibilities as a star vehicle for himself. After some trimming and cutting, he produced the play at Haverly’s Theatre in Philadelphia, September 14, 1882, and played Lanciotto, making it one of his greatest successes. Clearly, the complexity of Lanciotto intrigued Barrett: his ability to make him sympathetic, even as he killed his wife and brother, was a supreme challenge. It was this role that continued to attract actors. Otis Skinner created a memorable Lanciotto in his 1901 revival in Chicago and later for fifty-six performances in New York. 59 Words such as “old-fashioned,” however, were beginning to show up in reviews. The days of this style of romantic drama had long passed by 1901 and with it the audience that had cheered such largesized heroics. Scholars have continued to be intrigued by this play, calling it the finest romantic drama written in America, if not in the English-speaking world. Boker’s biographer Oliver H. Evans argues, however, that the play is flawed because Lanciotto’s character is inconsistent. How are we to regard 78

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a man who loves his wife and brother but for honor’s sake kills them and then grieves for them? Clearly, in the heat of a great performance, these inconsistencies are covered over in emotion. But in the light of day, it is more difficult for us to understand and feel sympathy for this character than for Metamora, who kills his wife to save her from the white man. Francesca Da Rimini marked the zenith of Boker’s writing career. He never again wrote anything that attained the success of or measured up to this play for emotional power. In 1853, he experimented with realism in The Bankrupt, a melodrama. Written in prose and well constructed, the play deals with American business practices but fails to rise above the ordinary. Edward Sculley Bradley calls it Boker’s worst play; 60 yet it received a production at the Broadway Theatre in late November 1855, running for four nights. A year later, Boker published his collected works, entitled Plays and Poems; the two volumes included Calaynos, Anne Boleyn, Leonor De Guzman, Francesca Da Rimini, The Betrothal, and The Widow’s Marriage. His last three plays were never produced. Königsmark (1857), a tragedy set in the Hanoverian court of 1699, is based on historical events concerning George I before he came to England. The play lacks sufficient action and depends upon the clichés of the genre: forged letters, midnight trysts, and foul murders—familiar materials of romantic drama. His last two plays came thirty years later. Encouraged by Lawrence Barrett’s success with Francesca Da Rimini in 1882, Boker wrote Nydia and Glaucus in 1885 and 1886, based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii. They are different versions of the same story, giving emphasis to Nydia in the first, Glaucus in the second. Bradley suggests that the latter was written to give Barrett a central role in the hopes that he would produce it, and there is some evidence that the actor considered doing so, but the plays were never performed. 61 For all his literary output, Boker remains known only for his blank verse tragedy Francesca Da Rimini. Quinn weighs in with his opinion that “of all American plays written before the Civil War Francesca Da Rimini shows the most vitality.”62 Moody in his America Takes the Stage calls it “the best romantic tragedy written in America up to 1900.”63 Clearly, because of the Barrett production in 1882, it was highly regarded and consequently held the stage for over two decades. Such achievement is not to be regarded lightly. Yet, a neo-Shakespearean blank verse tragedy set in medieval Italy seems an anachronism in 1882, the year that Henrik Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People and three years after he had written A Doll’s House. There was something a bit too refined about this Philadelphia poet who had no interest in writing about his age or the issues that were important in nineteenth-century America. Regarding his country as provincial, he turned to the past for universal themes that he expressed through the medium of dramatic poetry. Poets and writers, 79

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including Richard Stoddard and Bayard Taylor, who shared his beliefs were collectively grouped together as the “genteel tradition” in the waning years of the nineteenth century. The playwrights discussed up to now in this chapter were all from Philadelphia, as that city continued to encourage native writers: local theatre companies seemed willing to produce new works by native playwrights. By the mid-1820s, however, New York had established itself as the premier theatre center in America, mainly due to its position as the most important port. Stars ruled the theatrical firmament, and major stars arriving from London played first in New York before traveling to Philadelphia, Boston, or Charleston. New York was not devoid of writers, claiming Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville, considered today the finest of America’s romantic novelists. But New Yorkers also applauded journalist and playwright Nathaniel Parker Willis, at the time considered more popular than the triumvirate noted above. In New England, Bostonians could boast of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Henry David Thoreau, but they also recognized and applauded Epes Sargent and Julia Ward Howe. Famous in their day, Willis, Sargent, and Howe differed little in their methods from the Philadelphia playwrights in that they tailored their plays for popular stars. Their reputations were tied to the ephemeral stuff of theatre and journalism. Like their compeers in Philadelphia, their reputations disappeared with the stars and the theatre of their age. Nathaniel Parker Willis Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote two of the most memorable plays of the late 1830s and 1840s.64 Making his reputation as a poet, editor, playwright, short story writer, and travel author, Willis, in Quinn’s estimation, “became probably the most popular American writer of the forties.”65 In 1837, his blank verse tragedy Bianca Visconti; or, The Heart Overtasked won a dramatic contest sponsored by actress Josephine Clifton.66 The play, set in Milan, is based on real personages. Clifton played the title role of Bianca, daughter to the Duke of Milan, who is in love with and marries Francesco Sforza. His new position in Milan threatens Bianca’s brother, Giulio, which results in attempts on Francesco’s life. Meanwhile, the duke dies, Bianca comes to the throne, and, when an attempt is made to assassinate her husband, she unwittingly causes her brother’s death. Heartbroken, she dies at the end, and the crown goes to Sforza. Bianca Visconti opened at the Park Theatre on August 25, 1837, and received a favorable review in the Knickerbocker, a monthly New York magazine.67 The critic found “enduring beauties of poetry,” a “well told” story, and characters 80

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“naturally drawn” that possessed “in themselves an individuality—a form of their own, defined and marked out; and not . . . made with the sole quality of filling up the space not occupied by the principal character.” While not perfect, the play suggested that Willis was capable of “future efforts more decidedly faultless.” Bianca Visconti was revived for years by Clifton. Willis wrote another play for the actress, a comedy entitled The Betrothal that was unsuccessful. Willis also wrote a romantic comedy, Tortesa the Usurer, for actor James William Wallack, and it was first played at the National Theatre in New York on April 8, 1839, with Wallack in the title role.68 The plot, based freely on the story of Genevra d’Amori of Florence, borrows from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, A Winter’s Tale, and Romeo and Juliet, especially the latter’s sleeping potion scene. It concerns an attempt by the aging usurer Tortesa to wed Isabella, the young daughter of Count Falcone. In love with the artist Angelo, Isabella takes a sleeping potion in order to feign death, is assumed to be dead, and later is mistaken for a ghost. When the deception is discovered, Tortesa gives way to the young lovers and takes a more suitable bride. Wallack considered it one of his most successful roles and produced the play in London at the Surrey Theatre in August 1839. Edgar Allan Poe thought it was “by far the best play from the pen of an American author.”69 Epes Sargent Epes Sargent made his reputation in Boston in the 1830s as a journalist, poet, and playwright, editing for a time the Boston Daily Advertiser and Boston Daily Atlas. In the 1840s, he edited the Boston Transcript and seven volumes of The Modern Standard Drama. A prolific author, Sargent wrote several novels and published several volumes of poetry, original speeches, and essays in addition to four full-length plays. His first play, The Bride of Genoa, opened in Boston at the Tremont Theatre on February 13, 1837. Set in 1593 in Genoa, the play is based on a real person, Antonio Montaldo, a role tailored for the talented Josephine Clifton. The commoner Montaldo falls in love with Laura Castelli, daughter of a nobleman, who is beloved by the doge. A number of complications keeps the outcome in doubt up to the end. When the play, by then retitled The Genoese, opened at the Park Theatre in New York on November 18, 1837, Charlotte Cushman supported Clifton as Laura. Sargent followed The Bride of Genoa with what is regarded as his best play, Velasco; a Tragedy, in Five Acts, which premiered at the Tremont Theatre on November 20, 1837.70 Based on the story of Le Cid, the play is set in eleventh-century Spain and concerns the age-old conflict between love and honor. As the play opens, Velasco has returned to Castille after a year’s banishment, during which time, unbeknownst to King Ferdinand, he has been fighting the Moors incognito as the unknown cavalier or “vizor’d knight.” 81

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In his guise he has become a national hero, and during his presentation at court, he opens his visor and reveals his true identity. Difficulties begin immediately, as the beautiful Izidora has fallen for the mysterious knight and he for her. They were friends in childhood before a feud between their fathers kept them separate. Izidora’s father, Gonzalez, has betrothed her to Hernando, and Velasco appeals to the king for her hand in marriage. Because of Velasco’s great victories in the wars with the Moors, the king convinces Gonzalez to release her from her commitment to Hernando. Velasco appears to have won Izidora when the jealous Hernando manipulates Gonzalez into a quarrel with his bitter enemy, Velasco’s father, DeLerma. The resulting fracas results in Gonzalez striking DeLerma, who calls for his son to defend the family honor. The Spanish code of honor gives Velasco no choice but to fight the father of his beloved. And yet, my father wrong’d, Insulted by a blow—the proud old man, Who fourscsore years has kept his fame unblurr’d, Now to be so disgraced, and no redress! My honour calls! It drowns all other cries! Love’s shrieking wo, and Mercy’s pleading voice! Thus, thus! I cast them off—poor suppliants! And now, Gonzalez! for revenge on thee!

In the ensuing fight (which happens offstage), Gonzales is killed, and Velasco begins to realize the terrible cost: Honour! What frigid bigotry it is! Comfort! no more, oh! nevermore, shall I know the soft comfort of a mind at ease!

Izidora, without knowing the identity of her father’s killer, has promised to avenge his death. Velasco reveals the truth and offers to let her kill him to preserve her family’s honor. She refuses. The king patches thing up and arranges a banquet to celebrate their marriage. At the banquet, she, like Hamlet, sees the ghost of her dead father: There he stands, As I beheld him last, pale, pale and dying! Oh! thou august and dreadful monitor! Wouldst thou remind me of my broken vow?

Izidora’s brother Julio arrives and discovers his father dead and his sister set to marry his killer. This violates their family’s honor, and he attempts without success to dissuade her. But the vengeful Hernando persuades him to poison 82

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Velasco’s wine “to avenge thy father.” When Izidora recognizes what is happening and attempts to stop Velasco from drinking, Julio stabs Velasco. She then drinks the poisoned wine, ending the play much like Hamlet. While Velasco contains echoes of several Shakespearean plays, including Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, it was well crafted: Sargent handled language well, built scenes carefully, and maintained suspense throughout. The play compares favorably with other dramas of the period for cutting back on soliloquies and letting the dialogue move the action forward. British actress Ellen Tree played Izidora and James Murdock Velasco in the original production, which was well received both in Boston and in New York the following year (1838).71 It opened the Marylebone Theatre in London the fall of 1849, with E. L. Davenport and Fanny Vining as the lovers. Sargent’s other plays were not as well received. Change Makes Change (1845) included a Yankee character. The Priestess, based on Bellini’s Norma, was performed at the Boston Theatre in 1855 to poor notices. Like Willis, Sargent acquired a reputation in his lifetime as a popular journalist, a reputation that proved as ephemeral as the publications for which he wrote. Julia Ward Howe The daughter of New York banker Samuel Ward, Julia Ward Howe grew up in the New York of the 1820s and 1830s.72 She married Samuel Gridley Howe in 1843 and they made their home in Boston, where he was director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind while she developed her career as a writer. She wrote four books of poetry: Passion Flowers in 1853, Words for the Hour in 1857, Later Lyrics in 1865, and From Sunset Ridge in 1898. She remains best known for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written in 1862 in the midst of the Civil War. She also wrote two plays: Leonora; or, The World’s Own, first presented in New York on March 16, 1857, at Wallack’s Theatre with Matilda Heron and E. A. Southern, and Hippolytus, written for Edwin Booth but not performed until 1911 with Margaret Anglin and Walter Hampden. She was a strong advocate for women’s rights and an ardent suffragette. Leonora is a challenging drama, especially for the actress playing the title character. She begins as a beautiful and charming young woman—“the hamlet’s village queen”—who has fallen hopelessly in love with Count Lothair, who in disguise is slumming in the provinces. His tastes and manners are superior to those of her local admirers, who are both jealous and fearful that she is being foolish. As the play opens, Jacques is telling his old friend Edward about the love affair: In the shelter of her cottage They pass snug days, of which the world knows naught Save the perpetual hum of lover’s voices. 83

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And now and then two heads that come to view, Touching almost, within the vine-clad window. He has taught her foreign music, foreign ways, Unknown among our mountains: daintier work Has put to shame the wholesome spinning-wheel. Books, too, they have,—plays, novels and such trash. Her table feeds him.73

The gossipmongers are busy at work calling the aristocratic stranger “Signor Prettyman” and predicting that he will leave Leonora once he has satisfied his desires. But Count Lothair has given her a ring as a pledge of his undying love, and she worships him: You are still the guide, Leading, each day, to joys undreamed before. Into the sunset’s fiery heart we fly, As in the rose the bee for ravishment. I know not places, when I walk with you; I only know they are no earthly ways We tread together.

Edward, who has loved Leonora since they were children, challenges Lothair to a duel, accusing him of seducing “inexperienced girls.” Leonora jumps between them, thereby saving Lothair’s life and offering up her own to Edward. This postpones the conflict until the next day, but Lothair, realizing that, in spite of his passion for Leonora, it is time to flee, writes her a letter and rides out of town. The next morning, Leonora’s friends gleefully tell her that Lothair left at daybreak. Disbelieving, she accuses Edward of killing him and hiding the body. Lothair’s letter finally convinces her otherwise. The village youths, her former friends, ridicule her and plot to “hunt her from our village.” Lothair, in the meantime, meets his friends, brags about his conquest, and shows them Leonora’s portrait. A stranger named Lorenzo condemns Lothair’s seduction and challenges him; in the ensuing fracas, Lorenzo obtains the portrait, which he later gives to Edward. Meanwhile, Leonora searches from village to village for Lothair until one day she spies him walking in the street with his wife, Helen: Do you remember me? These eyes, these lips, This bosom,—was it you who ravished all The poor girl’s dower? This very lock of hair Has lost its fellow,—do you know its fate? 84

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Upon your heart you swore that it should lie Till death,—upon the heart that swelled with pleasures To ecstasy, you said, when I drew nigh. Sweet words,—sweet breath,—a madness of delight In which my soul passed from me! Could I die, And think him not a villain, I would bless The hand that stabbed me! Say it is not true; Say that you love me still!

Trapped by Leonora while walking with his wife, Lothair must confess that he is married and has a son and that he does not love her. Rejected and humiliated, Leonora changes from the sweet and beautiful young “queen” of the village to an avenging Lucretia Borgia. She schemes her way to becoming the prince’s mistress so that, Medea-like, she can bring about Lothair’s total destruction: getting him falsely arrested for treason and condemned to death and arranging to have his wife arrested and his son kidnapped. In the end, Edward, her old love from the village, finds and confronts her with her youthful portrait, showing her what she was and what a monster she has become. He brings a dagger with the intent of killing her, but Leonora takes fate into her own hands by snatching the dagger and stabbing herself. As she lies dying, she begs Edward to tell Lothair that she forgives him. Like Boker’s Francesca Da Rimini, Howe’s play has some fine poetry and enough dramatic moments to have held an audience in New York and Boston. But it is weak in action; we learn more about what characters are thinking and feeling rather than see what they are doing. Howe relies on lengthy soliloquies instead of on the give and take of dialogue, which would do a better job of moving the plot forward. Much of her poetry is splendid, as her talent is more lyrical than dramatic. Her title character remains almost as fascinating as Medea. Novelties The ready supply of farces and comedies from the London stage continued to serve American audiences in the mid-nineteenth century. Thomas G. Rodwell’s The Young Widow (1824), a comic piece in one act, was performed in Boston and Philadelphia into the 1850s. The widow Aurelia has gone to a masquerade disguised as a military officer to spy on her lover. This sets off a series of misunderstandings because the lover spots this “military officer” entering the house of his beloved and is jealous. Cheeky servants Splash and Lucy become involved, and the women thoroughly outfox the men. Splash’s line sums up the play’s ending: “You may deceive a maid, perhaps a wife; but, in the future, take care how you tackle with a widow.”74 The Mummy, a one-act farce by William Bayle Bernard, arrived here after its premiere in 85

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London at the Lyceum Theatre in 1833. In the play, Captain Canter wants his old friend Toby Tramp to pretend to be a mummy to please the father of his current love interest, who is obsessed with mummies, a popular fad of the 1830s. In this way, he can gain entrance into the household. John Maddison Morton’s Poor Pillicoddy, first seen in London in 1848 at the Lyceum and later in New York, finds old Pillicoddy with a young wife, Anastasia, whose first husband was lost at sea. Anastasia’s sister Julia arrives fleeing her husband, a sea captain. When he turns up, Pillicoddy thinks he is his wife’s drowned first husband. The mix-up makes for farce and fun. Morton wrote (or adapted from the French) over 125 pieces for the London stage, including the very popular Box and Cox in 1847. Almost any success in London found its way to American shores. Charles Dance’s Who Speaks First? was a “clever trifle” first produced at the Lyceum in 1849 (now managed by Madame Vestris) before opening in New York later that year. The plot runs in familiar grooves: Mr. and Mrs. Militant have been married four months and after an argument have agreed that the next one to speak to the other will be considered at fault. A naval captain arrives, telling each he is friend to the other, and in several amusing scenes brings them back together before revealing that he is the wife’s long-lost brother. These short dramatic pieces arrived regularly from London but, while clever, showed little advancement over those of the earlier period. Native farces and melodramas, however, were becoming serious competitors to the latest London successes. As noted in chapter 2, Yankee characters had become essential to the farces and comic pieces as playwrights exploited their popularity with the public. They also appeared as secondary characters in important new works of the 1840s—including Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion—and in Irish and Jim Crow plays. With increased Irish immigration, plays with characters named Shandy McGuire, Paddy the Piper, Kitty O’Shea, and Darby O’Gaff also became important to theatres catering to this new audience. Walter J. Meserve suggests that the Irish actor Tyrone Power in his frequent visits to the United States from 1833 until his death at sea in 1841 stimulated interest in “Irish vehicle acting.”75 Power specialized in playing such Irish characters as Sir Lucius O’Trigger in The Rivals and Dennis Brulgruddery in the younger Colman’s John Bull; or, The Englishman’s Fireside, in addition to roles in his own plays, St Patrick’s Eve (1832), Paddy Cary; or, The Boy of Clogheen (1833), and O’Flannigan and the Fairies (1836).76 George C. D. Odell calls Power “the best representative of Irish characters seen in America up to his own time.”77 Barney Williams and John Brougham continued and extended the popularity of the Irish drama. Williams made his first appearance on the New York stage in 1836 performing Irish impersonations and Power’s vehicles even 86

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before Power’s death. He married Maria Pray Mestayer in 1850, and together they toured in such romantic Irish comedies as Power’s Born to Good Luck, Samuel Lover’s Rory O’More, and James Pilgrim’s Paddy, the Piper. Brougham came to America in 1842 after working with Madame Vestris and managing the Lyceum Theatre in London. He was a prolific author (Moody credits him with 126 “wide-ranging pieces”)78 and comedian who specialized in creating Irish characters. David S. Hawes notes that many of his comic Irishmen were of the “roguish, hard-drinking, uneducated comic” type, including Micky Magra in Love and Murder (1854), Mike Fogarty in Take Care of Little Charley (1858), and O’Flannigan in A Recollection of O’Flannigan and the Fairies (1855).79 While Brougham claimed authorship of these plays, the latter clearly is a reworking of Power’s 1836 vehicle. Besides depicting the stereotypical comic Irishman, Brougham wrote about the Irish immigrant experience in The Irish Yankee; or, The Birthday of Freedom (1843), Temptation; or, The Irish Emigrant (1849), and The Game of Love (1855).80 Like Power before him, he drew plaudits as Sir Lucius O’Trigger and Dennis Brulgruddery, besides playing Dazzle in Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance. He wrote Irish vehicle plays for Barney Williams and other stars. Since his “wide-ranging” talents created burlesques of Indian plays, adaptations of Charles Dickens and other novelists, and some of the most popular comedies and melodramas of the mid-nineteenth century, we will revisit Brougham in the next chapter. One of the most prolific authors of Irish plays, James Pilgrim wrote mainly for a working-class audience. T. Allston Brown claims he made his first appearance in America onstage as Paddy Miles in his own play Limmerick Boy at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia in 1849.81 He wrote Irish vehicles not only for Barney Williams and his wife but also for Maggie Mitchell, Mary Devlin (Mrs. Edwin Booth), and other star performers. Gary Richardson notes that upon his arrival in America, his Irish characters were the “hard-drinking, blarney-spouting, shillelagh-wielding” conventional types developed for an English audience. 82 Later, his view of Ireland and Irish characters became more romanticized, reflecting, perhaps, the change in audience makeup and his own wish to appeal to a middle-class public. His Mabel, the Child of the Battlefield became a hit in 1851. Two years later, his Eveleen Wilson; or, The Flower of Erin, adapted from a popular serial story, gave him one of his best roles, O’Slashem. Estelle Grant; or, The Lost Wife came from a story in the Sunday Dispatch in 1855. He borrowed his plot for Stella Delorme; or, The Comanche Chief (1859) from a Ned Buntline story in the New York Mercury.83 A more significant play, Pilgrim’s Robert Emmet, the Martyr of Irish Liberty (1853) was based on the life of the great Irish patriot who was executed by the British in 1803. The play contains both Irish jigs and lengthy political speeches 87

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about freedom, suggesting that Pilgrim had found a formula for pleasing a popular audience. In making a case for a rebellion against the English, Emmet looks across the Atlantic for inspiration: Fellow-countrymen, look at our present condition; our soil uncultivated, our manufactures crushed, and we are all subservient to the caprice of a foreign power. . . . I saw the pampered lords of another soil gormandizing upon the hard-earned labors of the poor peasant. I heard the merry song from the thatched cottage. But the tax gatherers came, and all was gloom; O that we had another Cincinnatus, or some godlike Washington, to rise up, shake off our servitude, and hail the natal day of Irish liberty.84

Emmet is leading a rebellion that, in the end, will result in his capture and execution. Prior to this, his wife, Maria, pleads with him to escape: There is a clime yet new in song, a land where all are free. Be that our adopted home. Let us cross the seas, and bid adieu to the sweet isle of our childhood, and find beneath the eagle’s wings a refuge unstained by oppression’s foot where bright, glorious equality is every true man’s boon.

Emmet is betrayed. In the final scene before he is executed, Maria notices the gallows: “Mark how the rope waves to and fro in the clear wind—See the hangman, the coffin, and the throng of gaping multitudes, another laughing at his fellow, just as though it were a holiday! Horror! Horror!” Clearly, Pilgrim had learned to frame his story within the conventions of domestic melodrama, which made him more attractive to mainstream audiences. White performers in blackface began to offer their interpretations of African American experience to a white audience in the 1830s. T. D. Rice became the most popular performer in America in Jim Crow plays. A member of Samuel Drake’s company in Louisville in 1828, he was performing the part of a cornfield Negro in a local play when he developed his specialty: singing and dancing Jim Crow between the acts. First on de heel tap, den on de toe, Eber time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow. Wheel about and turn about and do jis so, And every time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.85

Rice achieved tremendous popularity, not only in the States but also in London in 1836. He wrote and performed his own material, creating the extravaganzas Virginia Mummy, Bone Squash Diavolo, and Otello (based on Shakespeare’s play). He commissioned a number of plays, including Flight to America (1836), 88

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The Peacock and the Crow (1837), and The Foreign Prince (1839). Later creations included Jim Crow in Foreign Service and Jim Crow in London. W. T. Lhamon Jr.’s impressive study Jump Jim Crow argues that before white actors scandalized “blackness in minstrel shows,” Jim Crow was a regional folklore character, a trickster, part of black culture in the South. Even at the end of the Civil War, “Jim Crow” meant “free and runaway African Americans moiling together with volatile European Americans.” Before Jim Crow came to represent “justly despised segregation laws, it first referred to a very real cross-racial energy and recalcitrant alliance between blacks and lower-class whites.”86 Lhamon argues that where the Shakespearean cultural model represented class and elite status, Rice’s Jim Crow offered the view from below, giving voice to the underclass and the exploited, the outcast and low caste. At its beginnings, the blackface performances were “sufficiently novel—and so outrageous to official culture” that they attracted other elements that opposed the dominant culture. For a time, the Jim Crow rage stuck a finger in the eye of elite culture. Rice’s Virginia Mummy, written in 1835, borrowed its main idea from William Bayle Bernard’s Mummy.87 Captain Rife is in town to see his true love, Lucy, whose guardian, Galen, wants her to marry a taxidermist. Galen is very interested in stuffed animals and mummies. He has invented a new “live forever” extract and wants to use it to bring a mummy to life. Rife hatches up a scheme to see his true love by getting someone to pretend to be a mummy, and this falls to one of the servants, Ginger, played by Rice. Everything is going well until O’Leary, the doctor, tries to cut off a toe and receives a kick from the “mummy.” When an artist assigned to paint the mummy tries to clip off a finger as a curiosity, he receives a butt on the head. When a servant puts her finger in the “mummy’s” mouth, the mummy bites back. Galen brings the “mummy” to life with his extract and Captain Rife’s liquor and is so pleased that he promises the hand of his ward to the captain. But Ginger is recognized and Galen embarrassed before a happy ending. Rice’s success spawned many imitators and led to the development of minstrel shows in the 1840s that continued to attract large audiences for the rest of the century. Dan Emmett and E. P. Christy expanded the Jim Crow routines into group performances where minstrel songs, dances, jokes, and instrumental music by white men in blackface attempted to present the black experience to a white audience. By the end of the century, these activities had become thoroughly integrated into the culture and were performed by amateurs as well as professionals. Written as a how-to-do-it book for amateurs, The Minstrel Show; or, Burnt Cork Comicalities (1893) provides “a Collection of Comic Songs, Jokes, Stump Speeches, Monologues, Interludes, and Afterpieces for Minstrel Entertainments.” The compiler and author, Ed 89

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Marble, drew upon his own experience as “a wandering minstrel” as well as that of headliners such as George Thatcher, Lew Dockstader, “Billy” Rice, and others. In addition to providing instructions about costuming and makeup (“use only the best prepared burnt cork”), the book includes comic sketches such as “Chickens”: Interlocutor: Bones, how are you on mathematics? Bones: I don’t know Matthew Matticks. I know his brother, Ben. Interlocutor: No. No. How are you on figures? Bones: I beg your puddin’. I didn’t understand you. I’m pretty good on figures. Why? Interlocutor: I want to ask you a question. Suppose there were sixteen chickens in a coop, and a man should come along and take out five. How many would there be left? Bones: What time of day is this supposed to be? Interlocutor: What time of day? Now, what has that got to do with it? Bones: A good deal. Interlocutor: Why? Bones: ’Cause if it was twelve o’clock at night, and nobody was about, and you should happen to be in the immediate vicinity, dere wouldn’t be any left.88

The Minstrel Show; or, Burnt Cork Comicalities also includes comic sketches about New York Streets, dramatized novels, and the Baltimore Baseball Club, suggesting that many of the old jokes were becoming tired and contemporary references were needed to attract an audience. In Jacksonian America, the romantic drama suited the demands of a large popular audience that was looking for action, not erudition. Shakespeare provided the template for this new drama, and countless blank verse, five-act tragedies and comedies set in Italy, Spain, or France appeared. To get their work before an audience, playwrights had to interest a star and then tailor the leading role for his or her peculiar talents. This usually meant giving the stars the best speeches and keeping them onstage for the major scenes. George Henry Boker ignored these demands. As a poet, he aimed for the sublime and professed little interest in theatrical matters. He became successful only when Lawrence Barrett took his play Francesca Da Rimini in 1882, adapted it for his own talents, and made a popular success of it. That nineteenth-century American audiences would tolerate the oversized romantic drama, written in blank verse and dealing mainly with grand love affairs of the middle ages in Europe, seems strange. Americans were a practical people, and romantic drama usually avoided dealing with the practical 90

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at all. But audiences came to the theatre for actors, not for plays, and the romantic drama provided the romantic actor with the chance to create new and exciting characters in the grand style. By the 1850s, however, the romantic drama had become a cliché with its feudal settings, poisoned wines, dark castles, duels, conflicts between love and honor, grand love affairs, and neoElizabethan language. Yankee, Irish, and Jim Crow plays were finding a huge popular audience and eroding support for the standard repertory supported by the dominant culture.

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4 The Age of Melodrama Anything which depends so absolutely upon the moods and tastes of the hour cannot have any ideal of its own. Managers are not in the habit of producing plays for their intrinsic merit or for posterity. To be of any earthly value it must keep pace with the people, as the newspaper does. —Nym Crinkle (A. C. Wheeler), New York World, October 31, 1869

The appeal of the romantic drama had been exotic settings, foreign (usually Spanish, Italian, or French) characters, adventuresome plots, and embellished language—everything designed to transport audiences as far away from their domestic situation as possible. But the audience was changing in the 1840s with the arrival of new immigrants that included Irish fleeing the potato famine at home and Germans fleeing a failed revolution in Europe. Conventions held sacred by previous generations of playgoers meant nothing to this new bumptious audience. Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that in democracies, the spectators want to see “on the stage that medley of conditions, feelings, and opinions that occurs before their eyes”1 seems an apt way to describe what was happening in the American theatre of the 1840s. Managers and playwrights scrambled to stay ahead of the public in identifying what would attract a paying audience. What was happening on the stage seems closely related to the rise of the penny press, which made newspapers accessible and affordable for a semi-illiterate audience and changed the idea of what kind of news should be reported. Beginning in 1833, the New York Sun featured police court reports and human-interest stories rather than political news, the mainstay of newspapers of the past generation. Two years later, James Gordon Bennett began the New York Herald, which became famous for sensational crime, sex, and society stories. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune followed in 1841 and Henry J. Raymond’s New York Daily Times in 1851. Circulation soared between 1840 and 1860 as the newspaper became the literature of the country and influenced all aspects of American culture.2 Citizens began to demand

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The Age of Melodrama

in their drama what they were reading in their newspapers: lively and saucy stories that made some connection to their lives and their age. In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a perceptive critique of Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt’s play Fashion that helped explain this cultural shift. Poe, then a young journalist, spelled out how the drama had failed to keep abreast of the cultural revolution that was changing the face of Western society. Poe railed against the tyranny of convention that had kept the drama stationary “for a hundred years,” imitating itself while the other arts moved on: “The drama has not declined as many suppose: it has only been left out of sight by everything else.”3 Dramatic characters were not based on life but on other characters. Mrs. Tiffany, one of the principal characters in Fashion, reminded him of Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals. He found the “whole conduct and language” of the comedy something from the “greenroom.” Lines echoed other lines from other plays and should be “ranked with ‘stage properties’; [they] are inexpressibly wearisome and distasteful to everyone that hears them.” Poe especially ridiculed “preposterous soliloquizing” and “even more preposterous ‘asides’” and asked for “common sense” in recognizing that audiences “under no circumstances” will “be brought to conceive” that what they can hear fifty feet from the stage cannot be heard by actors standing next to the speaker. All models should be discarded, he reasoned, and “principles of dramatic action” should be drawn from nature, not from “old dramatists.” If playwrights abandoned the conventions of the greenroom, Poe thought, they might create a drama that would be “neither tragedy, comedy, farce, opera, pantomime, melodrama, or spectacle, as we now comprehend these terms, but which may retain some portion of the idiosyncratic excellences of each.”4 In the same year, Walt Whitman argued for reform of the American stage. “We have a real love of drama,” he wrote, and “good principles and good manners can be taught through its means.” But, in order to be an effective agent of social change, it “must be made fresher, more natural, more fitted to modern tastes—and, and above all, it must be Americanised.” He especially resented its lack or originality: “It has worn the tinseled threadbare robes of foreign fashion long enough.” Even the Park Theatre, he noted, which claimed a higher rank than its peers, is but a “respectably stupid imitator of old—a bringer out of English plays imbued with anti-republican incident and feeling.”5 Poe and Whitman were ahead of their time in demanding that the drama abandon tradition and reflect life outside the stage door. But a decade later, many of these ideas were being repeated by a new generation of critics.6 And

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as the endless rounds of plays with the same characters, same plots, and same speeches bored younger and newer audiences, dramatists turned to the world around them for their ideas and inspiration. The democratization of culture created an appetite for popular literature, and the rapid expansion of newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century introduced society news, gossipy interviews, and aggressive reporters who wrote about the latest fire or theatre opening in a lively and sensational manner. Dramatists found in contemporary journalism the key to understanding what interested the new theatregoing public. Fashion Fashion opened at the Park Theatre on March 24, 1845, and ran for twenty performances, a hit at the time. Poe initially had criticized its derivative nature but upon repeated viewings came to admit that he was seeing at least one thing new, the “satirizing of fashion as fashion” instead of the ridiculing of “fashionable follies.”7 The plot centers on Mrs. Tiffany’s efforts to gain entrance for her and her daughter into society.8 From a humble background as a milliner, she married Mr. Tiffany, a New York merchant, and took steps to leave her past far behind and become a member of the “upper ten thousand,” a term borrowed from the British to indicate the ruling class. Since Mrs. Mowatt was accustomed to wealth and the amenities of wealth as the daughter of Samuel Ogden, a member of New York’s elite, she understood the society that she satirized. In spite of his criticism, Poe considered the play “a very good one” if compared with “most American dramas.”9 Fashion gave the American stage its best native social comedy in several decades, one that focused attention on the increasing number of nouveaux riches who were disdainful of Jacksonian America and instead imported European culture—especially French culture—to advertise their newly acquired wealth. After a week of studying “French without a Master,” Mrs. Tiffany thinks she is “quite at home in the court language of Europe.” She insists on using French terms such as “fauteuil” instead of armchair; she entertains beyond her means; she tries to ape Parisian customs (for example, receiving visitors on one day of the week); and she wants to marry off her daughter to the man she thinks is a French count. Where Billy Dimple in Royall Tyler’s The Contrast aped everything English to satirize Americans who still identified with London culture, Mrs. Tiffany satirizes a whole class of Americans who were perched on Gotham’s social ladder in the 1840s but without much confidence that they belonged. Besides adopting French customs, the nouveaux riches made an art of ostentatious living: elaborate Fifth Avenue mansions, an endless round of parties and balls, daily shopping trips to A. T. Stewart’s department store, vacations at summer watering 94

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holes such as Saratoga Springs, a pew at Grace Church, and the patronage of liberal ministers, poets, and Italian tenors.10 Isaac Hull Brown, sexton of Grace Church, held sway as social arbiter over Fifth Avenue society for two generations. He approved guest lists for fashionable parties and presided over $50,000 weddings. Fashion opens in Mrs. Tiffany’s splendid drawing room. Stage directions list the mirrors, couches, ottomans, tables, armchairs, and a conservatory that signify her status. Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance four years earlier had set the vogue for such opulence with its realistic interior that included a three-dimensional ceiling. Onstage, Millinette, a French maid, and Zeke, an African American servant, provide the necessary exposition. Zeke, beginning his job and very proud of his new livery, wants to know about the people who live here, information that Millinette is only too willing to provide: Monsieur is a businessman and Madame a “lady of fashion.” This translates to mean that he makes the money and she spends it: “De money is all dat is necessaire in dis country to make one lady of fashion. Oh! it is quite anoder ting in la belle France!” And daughter Seraphina Tiffany is a “coquette.” Ma’mselle Prudence is Madame Tiffany’s “bizarre” sister. And Ma’mselle Gertrude, the governess, is “not anybody at all.” Millinette teaches Madame “les modes de Paris” and Madame teaches all of New York, which makes Millinette the leader of fashion “for all de American beau monde!” With exposition out of the way, the characters turn to the business at hand: Madame’s “day of reception” for all her friends. Mrs. Tiffany arrives to make certain that everything is ready for her guests. She is extravagantly dressed, but her scant knowledge of French makes Millinette invaluable. This French maid is not unlike the saucy maids in French classical comedy (for example, Dorine in Tartuffe). Zeke is too common a name for a servant of Mrs. Tiffany’s status, so he is renamed Adolph, a “French” aristocratic name, at Millinette’s suggestion. When Prudence stops by and reminds Madame of their old life together in the millinery shop, Millinette is sent from the room and Prudence told to never mention this again: “Forget what we have been, it is enough to remember that we are of the upper ten thousand.” And finally, daughter Seraphina arrives for final instructions and is told to play up to Count Jolimaitre, “the most fashionable foreigner in town.” The first of Mrs. Tiffany’s guests to arrive is Mr. T. Tennyson Twinkle, the poet, a character straight out of Sheridan’s School for Scandal, who believes the true test of a poet is “the velocity with which he composes.” While poets are fine as “ornamental appendages,” Mrs. Tiffany cautions Seraphina that they are always poor and “don’t make eligible husbands.” Augustus Fogg arrives next, and while he is a member of one of the oldest families, he is a bore. Count Jolimaitre’s arrival rattles the group; no one seems to have any 95

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idea what to say in front of a count. His attitude is little different from Billy Dimple’s: “’Pon my honour, a foreigner of refinement finds great difficulty in existing in this provincial atmosphere.” But the count is not what he seems. When asked if he is familiar with the courts of Europe, he quips as an aside: “with police courts.” Into this hothouse of fashion and deceit comes Adam Trueman, an old friend of Mr. Tiffany’s from the country. He is vintage stage Yankee who must call a spade a spade, even if it offends everyone present. As the first act ends, he contemplates how his friend Tiffany got himself into this unholy mess of keeping up with fashion. Social comedy gives way to domestic melodrama in the second act. A confidential clerk, Snobson, has witnessed Tiffany’s forging of notes and is blackmailing him. Unless Snobson is allowed to marry Seraphina, he will report Tiffany to the authorities. Mrs. Tiffany wants Seraphina to marry Count Jolimaitre, who in reality is not titled except as it relates to the culinary or service vocations. It takes Adam Trueman to straighten everything out: “You must sell your house and all these gew gaws, and bundle your wife and daughter off to the country. There let them learn economy, true independence, and home virtues, instead of foreign follies.” Trueman has little use for fashion, telling Mrs. Tiffany: “Fashion! And pray what is fashion, Madam? An agreement between certain persons to live without using their souls! to substitute etiquette for virtue—decorum for purity—manners for morals! to affect a shame for the works of their Creator! and expend all their rapture upon the works of their tailors and dressmakers!” He does approve of nobility if it be of “nature’s stamp,” not of fashion’s. The best native comedy since The Contrast, Fashion was an immediate success and proved influential for a generation. Reasons for this success lay not only with the merits of the play but also with the age. Newspaper coverage of New York’s elite had begun in the late 1830s with Bennett’s New York Herald offering satirical and at times tasteless treatment of the “Upper Ten.” After professing shock, society came to relish having its affairs reported in the press, and by midcentury, satirizing New York’s better families had become a favorite pastime of journalists. George W. Curtis’s “The Potiphar Papers” in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (1853) introduced such fascinating creatures as Gauche Boosey, Minerva Tattle, and the Reverend Cream Cheese. FitzJames O’Brien lampooned the social strivings of the new rich in the Lantern, Putnam’s, and Young America. Edward G. P. Wilkins in Harper’s Weekly and Saturday Press satirized the same crowd for their pretentiousness. The success of Fashion led to a large number of similar comedies between 1845 and 1870. They are more farcical than comic but provide a vivid and colorful if not entirely accurate image of fashionable life in New York. Extant social comedies from the 1850s include Henry Pardey’s Nature’s Nobleman (1851), 96

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Cornelius Mathew’s False Pretences (1856), Edward Wilkins’s Young New York (1856), Mrs. Sidney Bateman’s Self (1857), William Henry Hurburt’s American in Paris (1858), and D. W. Wainwright’s Wheat and Chaff (1858). After the Civil War, Irving Browne’s Our Best Society (1868), adapted from “The Potiphar Papers,” and Bronson Howard’s Saratoga (1870) carried on the tradition. The theme running through all of these plays is the craving for status. Fashion, books, paintings, plays, and even words themselves become weapons in the struggle to claim a superior status to one’s neighbors. In Our Best Society, Mrs. Potiphar points with pride to the family library: “Books are enormously high now-a-days, and so I had these blocks made, and painted, and lettered in imitation. They’ll answer every purpose. Of course nobody ever takes books down, and for that matter we can hide the key if necessary.”11 Humble origins are set aside as social climbing nouveaux riches wish to be accepted as titled aristocrats. Zachary Westwood in Nature’s Nobleman expresses shock and dismay: “Aristocrats! It riles me to hear the word—it hadn’t ought to pass American lips; we are borrowing the notions as well as the fashions of foreigners.”12 These plays also promote the themes of rural innocence and urban corruption—themes that run through the entirety of American literature. A Glance at New York A grittier piece, Benjamin Baker’s A Glance at New York opened at Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre in New York in February 1848 and played to a broader urban audience, including both a rowdy working-class element in the pit and the fashionably wealthy in the boxes. Baker made New York City the center of his play with “scenes from the slums, the rough districts, and the criminal precincts of New York.”13 There was the appeal of Mose the fireman and Bowery B’hoy, modeled on the “real life” Mose Humpreys, a colorful local character. As played by actor Francis S. Chanfrau, Mose wore the costume typical of a New York fireman: a red shirt, long sideburns (soap locks), a stovepipe-shaped plug hat, and boots into which his trousers were tucked. Audiences recognized the settings, identified with the situations, and laughed at the quaint expressions of the characters. The plot was conventional, but its realistic treatment narrowed the gap between the world of the audience and that of the play. With A Glance at New York, the urban underworld of clerks, milliners, carpenters, seamstresses, Bowery B’hoys, and firemen—characters out of the pages of the Sun and Herald as well as those of the National Police Gazette—would become an apt subject for the melodramas that would come to dominate the American stage.14 For all its appeal to local culture, A Glance at New York owed a huge debt to its English predecessor, Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London, a burletta pre97

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sented in New York twenty-five years earlier (1823). First written as a book by Pierce Egan before being adapted for the stage by W. T. Moncrieff, Tom and Jerry had played to packed houses at London’s Adelphi Theatre in 1821 before its opening in the United States two years later. Egan had filled his work with “flash and slang” terms of the sporting young men of the town, resulting in glossaries being printed to make the language comprehensible to the uninitiated. Tales of young men having a jolly night out in London drew large crowds to the theatre. There was a freshness about the material as the two bons vivants, Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., with their Oxonian friend Bob Logic tour London, creating mischief amid recognizable places such as Tattersall’s (racing club), Hyde Park Corner, Almacks (hall for society balls), Temple Bar (gateway to the city of London), Bond Street, and a London gin shop. Popular songs with new lyrics added spice to the fun, as did slang and contemporary expressions, such as “chaffing crib” for a drinking room, “flesh and blood” for a mix of port wine and brandy, and “Rhino” for money.15 The Evening Post called it “one of the most amusing entertainments ever presented on our stage.”16 The play proved popular in America with the most memorable production in Philadelphia, where Francis Wemyss played Tom, James Wallack Jerry, and Joseph Jefferson I Bob Logic. Additional Tom and Jerry plays created a cultural phenomenon, as if audiences couldn’t get enough of these characters. John Brougham wrote a “Tom and Jerry” series in the 1840s, including Life in New York (1844), revised two years later as Life in New York; or, Tom and Jerry on a Visit, and Tom and Jerry; or, Life in Boston (1847), but none had the success of the original Tom and Jerry. Baker’s A Glance at New York in 1848 made famous not only Baker but also Chanfrau, the actor who portrayed living legend Mose the fireboy. In the same way that actual London locales were featured in Tom and Jerry, New York locales were an integral part of A Glance at New York. The various scenes transported audiences to all parts of the city and introduced them to various local types. Beginning with the opening song about the fast steamer from Albany, the production kept congratulating New Yorkers on how up-to-date they were. George C. D. Odell calls A Glance at New York “one of the greatest successes ever known in the history of the New York stage.”17 The plot resembles that of its model, Tom and Jerry. Harry Gordan has invited his provincial friend George Parsells to town to impress him on the merits of Gotham: Well, here we are in the great metropolis of the Western World, where you can realize all I have told you of it; here you can purchase amusements of all kinds, from the Astor Place Opera, to the farfamed “Hall of Novelty”; five minutes’ walk will take you from the extreme of wealth to the extreme of poverty. Here you can see all

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sorts of life. How much better it is to live here, than in your stupid village in the backwoods, with no society but that of bumpkins and old women; to be sure, you have some pretty girls there—your cousin Jane, for instance; but what are your country girls, compared to our dashing New York belles?18

What indeed! When Harry is off tending errands, con artists fleece George of his watch and money. Clearly, slow-witted country boys are no match for wily, street-smart New Yorkers. The smartest of the locals is Mose, one of the B’hoys, a member of a fire brigade and a working-class hero who bests all the con artists. His opening speech—in the urban patios of the Lower East Side—always drew applause and cheers: I’ve made up my mind not to run wid der machine any more. There’s that Corneel Anderson don’t give de boys a chance. Jest ’cause he’s chief Ingineer he thinks he ken do as he likes. Now last night when de fire was down in Front Street, we was a takin’ 40’s water, I had hold ov de butt, and seed she was gittin’ too much for us; and I said I to Bill Sykes: “Sykesy, take de butt.” Seys he, “what fur?” Seys I, “Never you mind, but take de butt.” And he took de butt; so I goes down de street a little, and stood on 40’s hose. Corneel Anderson cum along and seed me. Seys he, “Get off der hose!” Seys I, “I won’t get off der hose!” Seys he, “If you don’t get off de hose I’ll hit you over de gourd wid my trumpet!” Seys I, “What!—I won’t get off de hose!” And he did hit me over the gourd.

The adventures of Harry, George, and Mose in New York played for twentyfour performances at Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre before being rewritten with additional scenes and characters, after which it ran for another twenty-four to twenty-six performances. The popularity of Mose spawned a cottage industry of similar plays. New York as It Is (1848) was rushed into production across town at the Chatham Theatre to take advantage of Mose’s popularity. Chanfrau played Mose in both productions, in different theatres, the same evening. The Mysteries and Miseries of New York, adapted from a story by Ned Buntline, also included Mose. Mose in California, Mose in China—Mose was everywhere as the character embodied by Chanfrau became famous. The plays depended on a formula that included songs; dialogue that captured authentic New York accents, idioms, and slang; local color and settings; and action or plots that revolved around the adventures of Mose. This was a working-class hero for a working-class audience. The success of A Glance at New York suggested that tastes were changing. Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the early 1850s accelerated this process.

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin The subject of slavery dominated public discourse in the 1850s as the country unraveled, trying to find yet another compromise to placate both abolitionists and Southern radicals. Democratic newspapers tended to be proslavery, while Whig publications leaned toward abolitionism. In spite of the Compromise of 1850 and other attempts to find a middle ground, the country moved toward civil war. To understand how Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the most popular play on the nineteenth-century American stage, it is necessary to consider its success prior to dramatization. Influenced by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a serial for the abolitionist National Era, beginning on June 5, 1851, and ending on April 1, 1852. By that time, a Boston publisher had issued it as a novel in two volumes; it sold 10,000 copies within a week and 300,000 by the end of the year.19 Without adequate protection of Stowe’s copyright, there was a race by theatre managers to get a dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the stage. An adaptation by C. W. Taylor opened at the National Theatre in New York on August 23, 1852. Taylor’s version, however, omitted the characters of Eva, Topsy, and St. Clare and, contrary to the original, contained a happy ending where Tom is set free. But it did include a spectacle scene of Eliza fleeing across a partially frozen Ohio River, leaping from ice floe to ice floe. This scene became the standard in all subsequent versions and productions. Considered better than Taylor’s version and advertised as “embracing the whole work,”20 George L. Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin established a track record of one hundred performances at the Troy Museum in New York State before coming to the National Theatre in New York City in July 1853. Its success there became legendary: over three hundred performances without an opening farce or afterpiece. It also made stars of the Howard family of actors. As a child actor, Cordelia Howard moved audiences to tears as little Eva, sometimes dying twice a day; her mother, Caroline, played Topsy in blackface; her father, G. C. Howard, portrayed St. Clare; and her uncle G. W. L. Fox played Phineas Fletcher. The Howards made a fortune from the play, but Aiken apparently received only a small commission. The Herald critic complained on September 12, 1853: “A gentleman (who is a clever actor and author) dramatizes a novel—he makes an effective play with a strong underplot in eight acts, occupying three hours in its representation and receives twenty-five dollars for his labor, why, we would not do the manual labor of writing the manuscript for that sum.” Two weeks later, the Herald noted that Aiken had corrected this account, reporting that he had received forty dollars in the first instance and later a gold watch. The truth of the matter may be impossible to verify. 100

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Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin proved to be a cultural phenomenon, both as a novel and as a play. When it became clear that the National Theatre’s production was drawing huge crowds, other theatre managers jumped aboard the “Tom” bandwagon. To counter the competition, on January 9 the National brought out a “fresh” version on the 186th performance with new characters and scenery.21 The competition included H. J. Conway’s adaptation at Barnum’s American Museum in New York, beginning in October, and Thomas Hamblin’s Bowery production, also in New York, that ran from January 16 till March 11 with T. D. Rice as Uncle Tom. Countless other versions would follow, although most scholars regard Aiken’s well-crafted adaptation as the best. It brought to the conflict the theatre’s power of making the slavery issue personal and emotional. Audiences identified, perhaps for the first time in their lives, with the misery of black slaves. Aiken wasted no time in getting to the crux of the slavery issue, opening act 1 with the slave George Harris informing his wife, Eliza, that his master won’t let him see her and their son, Harry, anymore, and he is running away to Canada where he will buy her and the boy.22 Immediately in the second scene, we learn how callous Southerners’ attitudes are toward trading slaves. Shelby doesn’t want to sell Uncle Tom because he has been “a good, steady, sensible, pious fellow,” but he is in debt to Haley and has no choice. To sweeten the deal, Haley wants little Harry thrown in with Tom: this is simply a matter of business, getting the best deal for your property. Eliza overhears the conversation, takes Harry, and runs away. She must cross the Ohio River, which is filled with ice floes. While she waits for a way over, Haley arrives in pursuit of Harry. Eliza again overhears a plot by Haley and others that includes not only the capture of Harry but also, because she is “white and handsome—well brought up,” the plan to take her down to New Orleans “to speculate on.” She flees with Harry across the river, ice and all. In a theatrically exciting end of act 1, we find Eliza with Harry on a cake of ice floating across the Ohio River with her pursuers standing on the bank waiting for a boat to follow. Later versions would tighten the tension with men and dogs pursuing Eliza over the ice. Aiken’s skill in assembling this melodrama from Stowe’s novel can be seen in how he varies emotionally wrenching scenes with lighter ones. With the audience hooked by the events of the opening act, he provides another face to slavery with the introduction of Eva and Topsy in the second act. Uncle Tom has saved little Eva from drowning, and subsequently her father, St. Clare, has purchased him. St. Clare has also purchased Topsy in order to educate and civilize her. When his overly pious housekeeper, Ophelia, complains that Topsy is an ignorant slave girl, St. Clare admonishes her: “That’s you Christians, all over. You’ll get up a society, and get some poor missionary to spend 101

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all his days among just such heathen; but let me see one of you that would take one into your house with you, and take the labor of their conversion upon yourselves.” Topsy sings, dances, and tells lies; in fact, she seems not to know the difference between lying and the truth. In the play, she functions as comic relief, as does Gumption Cute in acts 4 and 5. Aiken moves between the comic and the serious, with considerable pathos thrown in. Events are heartbreaking in the third act. Eva is gravely ill, and Tom serves as a nursemaid and spiritual advisor. Aiken sets up her death scene well. Tom tells everyone: “It’s jest no use tryin’ to keep Miss Eva here; I’ve allays said so. She’s got the Lord’s mark in her forehead. She wasn’t never like a child that’s to live—there was always something deep in her eyes.” Eva gets her father to promise that he will free Tom, and she dies with the words “Love! Joy! Peace!” on her lips. “Oh! Bless the Lord!” Tom says, almost as a prayer, “It’s over, dear mas’r, it’s over.” Heartbroken, St. Clare sinks to his knees: “Farewell, beloved child! the bright eternal doors have closed after thee. We shall see thy sweet face no more.” With solemn music, the curtain closes slowly. As hokey as this may sound to a modern audience, contemporary audiences found it deeply moving. And audiences, at least Northern ones, were emotionally caught up in the fate of Uncle Tom. Freedom has a deeper meaning to Tom than to St. Clare: “Why, Tom, you couldn’t possibly have earned, by your work, such clothes and such living as I have given you.” “I know all that, Mas’r St. Clare—mas’r’s been too good,” Tom replies, “but I’d rather have poor clothes, poor house, poor everything, and have ’em mine, than have the best, if they belong to somebody else.” St. Clare plans to free Tom, but before he gets around to signing Tom’s freedom papers, he is killed. Tom will not be freed but will be sold at auction to settle the estate. At the beginning of act 5, Tom is sold to the vile trader Simon Legree, who inspects Tom’s teeth and muscles before buying him. “Ain’t I your master?” Legree asks Tom when he refuses to flog a young woman slave. “Didn’t I pay twelve hundred dollars, cash, for all there is inside your cussed old black shell? Ain’t you mine, body and soul?” “No, no! My soul ain’t yours, mas’r; you haven’t bought it—ye can’t buy it,” Tom responds; “it’s been bought and paid for by one that is able to keep it, and you can’t harm it.” Tom is beaten to within an inch of his life. At the end of the play, his old master George Shelby arrives to buy him back and reunite him with his family, but it is too late. Tom dies, and the final scene of the play is a tableau: “Gorgeous clouds, tinted with sunlight. Eva, robed in white, is discovered on the back of a milk-white dove, with expanded wings, as if just soaring upward. Her hands are extended in benediction over St. Clare and Uncle Tom, who are kneeling and gazing up to her. Expressive music.—Slow curtain.” Audiences across the nation left the theatre in 102

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tears—and returned for repeat performances. Aiken’s dramatization suggested to managers that a fortune could be made from plays that dealt with contemporary events and skillfully dramatized subjects of concern to most people, especially if they included sensational scenes such as Eliza’s crossing the Ohio River on blocks of ice and the selling of slaves at auction. The enormous success on the stage of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not the first time American audiences had been exposed to black culture. As noted in chapter 3, T. D. Rice had discovered the “Jump Jim Crow” dance in 1828, and his success in turning it into a blackface act for himself encouraged others to appropriate black culture for entertainment purposes. In February 1843, four men in blackface billed themselves as the Virginia Minstrels and took to the stage in New York with violin, banjo, bones, and tambourine. As Robert Toll notes, up to this time the minstrel show was a variety show consisting of songs, jokes, and dances, drawing on both white and black material.23 The Virginia Minstrels gave this new form of popular entertainment a structure by arranging the performers in a semicircle with percussion instruments (tambourine and bones) at the ends. Their act consisted of songs and dances with comic repartee tying everything together. A master of ceremonies, called the interlocutor, was part of the show and kept it related to the audience. The minstrel show offered a diversity of entertainment consisting of political stump speeches, acrobatic acts, clowns, and jokes in abundance. Novelty was crucial to its continued success, and no material was more novel for a white Northern audience in the 1840s than material appropriated from Southern plantation culture. “Dixie” and even Stephen Foster songs were added to the program—songs such as “Camptown Races” and “Old Folks at Home.” Richard Moody calls the script “little more than a kind of commedia dell’arte scenario.”24 The success of the Virginia Minstrels encouraged the creation of numerous companies that toured the country—companies with names like Ethiopian Serenaders, Buckley Serenaders, and Christy Minstrels. As the subject of slavery came to dominate public discourse in the 1840s and 1850s, Northern audiences especially looked to the minstrel shows for hints about the nature of black men and women, especially to what they regarded as the eroticism of black culture. While the purpose of minstrel shows was entertainment, the side effects included the perpetration of racial stereotypes: black characters depicted as lazy, superstitious, immoral, crooked, or just plain dumb. Even when they were treated sympathetically, black characters usually came off as weak. In the meanwhile, Jim Crow and Zip Coon became household words. Toll asserts that before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “Minstrelsy . . . had the greatest impact on the Northern public’s image of blacks.”25 Eric Lott may be right also that “without the minstrel show there would have been no Uncle Tom’s 103

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The Age of Melodrama 26

Cabin.” For much of the nineteenth century, the minstrel show was the most popular form of entertainment on the American stage. La Dame aux Camélias Fashion began a vogue for social comedies. A Glance at New York brought the urban experience to a wide audience and created a vogue for plays about city life. Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought the forbidden subject of slavery into the theatre and across the country, attracting an enormous audience and creating a political firestorm. La Dame aux Camélias, a romantic melodrama about the life and death of a courtesan by Alexandre Dumas fils, also had a significant influence on native drama in the 1850s. Originally published as a novel in 1848 and adapted for the theatre in 1852, the play concerns the love of Marguerite Gautier for Armand Duval, a son of nobility. One of the most beautiful women in Paris, Marguerite (based on the mistress of the author, Marie Duplessis) has served as a courtesan to the rich and famous. Her love for Armand is real and it seems he also loves her, but because the scandal of their affair will destroy the marriage of Armand’s sister, his father pleads with Marguerite to sacrifice her love for the family. In a heartrending scene, she agrees to the old gentleman’s request, returns to her old life, and allows Armand to think she has been unfaithful. Their passion had allowed Marguerite (and audiences) to believe for a moment in the all-redeeming power of love, and her sacrifice is truly heroic. Bitter and vengeful, Armand taunts her at a ball, throwing money at her as if she were a common whore. Marguerite falls ill with consumption, and Armand, hearing the truth from his father, rushes to her bedside where they have a final love scene together before she dies. While American audiences were unable to relate to the role of the courtesan in French society, they did relate well to a good love story, even if pious critics found the novel and play immoral. Actress Jean M. Davenport introduced the play to New Yorkers in December 1853, a year after its premiere in Paris, but in a sanitized adaptation titled Camille the Coquette. The critic of the New York Herald thought the play full of inconsistencies but called it “a most exciting drama” that kept “a New York audience in their seats during three hours and a half.”27 Laura Keene and Matilda Heron brought out their own versions: Keene’s Camille; or, The Moral of a Life played to crowded houses in 1856, while during the following year, Heron’s Camille delighted audiences at Wallack’s Theatre in New York, where she played Marguerite to forty-six sold-out performances in seven weeks, a major success at the time. Heron’s version and performance touched off a controversy over issues related to sexual morality. The bohemian writer and early feminist Ada Clare found the play deeply moving: “The plain, unvarnished tale of a woman who knew how to love and to grieve . . . had struck one of the keynotes of the world’s heart.”28 104

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Was the play immoral or moral? Critics weighed in on both sides of the issue. Even French critics called the subject “indelicate,” and American critics expressed outrage. William Winter in the Albion of November 8, 1862, called Camille “sympathetic swindling,” existing for no other purpose than to make money. Henry Clapp Jr., writing in the Leader, however, expressed amusement at the uproar: “I notice that some of my brother critics . . . are so shocked by the appearance of any such character on the stage that they seriously think of resigning their positions and never going hence forth to any worse place than a barroom or a concert saloon.”29 He hoped Camille had weeded out of the theatre the “Pharisees and fanatics.” Later, the Spirit of the Times defended the play, calling it “one of the most sternly truthful that has been penned in modern times.”30 In 1888, critic A. C. Wheeler reasoned that a play showing a courtesan’s immoral life coming to a bad end is “one of the most moral of plays.”31 And with the same logic, he regarded Rip Van Winkle as immoral because it shows a drunken and lazy man coming to a good end. Winter and J. Ranken Towse opposed the new French drama because they believed that sexual immorality was not a proper subject for discussion in a public theatre. While Winter and Towse may have disdained French drama, Gallic culture—French fashion, food, architecture, art, music, and drama—during the Second Empire (1852–70) was embraced by the American urban middle-class. Camille was popular in part because it was French; it appealed to both men and women—perhaps titillating the former to a certain degree while encouraging women to empathize with the “fallen woman.” Also, it was romantic and sentimental and offered a bravura female role. In addition, the role of women in American society was being hotly discussed in newspapers and magazines of the 1850s—especially in women’s magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book—and this brouhaha over Camille seems another facet of this issue. Camille’s success encouraged offshoots of sorts with adaptations of Tosca, Fedora, and Cleopatra. The story has remained popular ever since, mainly due to Verdi’s opera La Traviata (1853) based on the story by Dumas fils, and Greta Garbo’s film Camille (1937). Star actresses Lillian Gish and Eva Le Gallienne revived the play in the 1930s, and Charles Ludlam reinterpreted it in the 1960s. Other events also served to demonstrate the fascination of elites with French culture. Lloyd Morris argues that the visit of Mademoiselle Rachel to America in September 1855 helped sophisticated audiences accept the new Parisian drama. 32 Rachel performed Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouvé’s Adrienne Lecouvreur and Victor Hugo’s Angelo in addition to her classical repertory, which included Pierre Corneille’s Horace and Jean Racine’s Phèdre. While audiences never warmed up to her classical roles, they applauded her 105

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modern pieces, especially Adrienne Lecouvreur, in spite of its tale of illicit love. The fact that she was an international star helped the cultured classes to overlook their prejudices concerning the immoral nature of French drama. For everyone else, the public controversy over the more liberal attitude of the French toward sexual matters served to advertise plays such as Camille and fill the theatres with curious spectators. Even the most conservative managers could not miss this change in public taste. Much of the emotional drama that seemed to flood the stage with tears came from Gallic playwrights, albeit through English and American adaptations: for example, The Two Orphans (Le Deux Orphelines) and Article 47 (L’Article 47). Dion Boucicault and Sensational Melodrama The times were changing, and an Irishman named Dion Boucicault was ahead of the pack in identifying what this new audience wanted to see. Boucicault had won early fame in London at Covent Garden in March 1841 with his comedy London Assurance, creating such stage-worthy characters as Lady Gay Spanker and Sir Harcourt Courtly. Due to its “unprecedented display of upholstery furniture,” London Assurance became known as “the shabby-genteel school of comedy.”33 Its American premiere occurred at the Park Theatre on October 11, 1841. Odell called it the “best new comedy for many decades.”34 Three years later, the playwright’s Old Heads and Young Hearts at the Haymarket proved almost as enduring. Both plays were to become favorites in America. By the time Boucicault came to New York, he had become proficient at adapting French plays, English novels, and short stories into popular dramatic fare. He had mastered the French method of compressing incidents so that they seemed to spill over one another and move the action at a torrid pace. He was prolific and ambitious with an ear and eye for what was topical and theatrically exciting. During the seven-year period Boucicault spent in New York, 1853 to 1860, he adapted from the French The Poor of New York in 1857 and wrote (with obvious borrowings) The Octoroon in 1859, both major successes. He also worked to establish a copyright law that protected his interests, since no law existed at the time that gave the dramatist the sole right to license his plays for production. The law as finally passed by Congress on August 18, 1856, gave authors, “along with the sole right to print and publish the said composition, the sole right to act, perform, or represent the same.”35 While the law brought a measure of respectability to the profession, it did little to prevent play piracy, since only the title page was registered. And it did nothing to stop American producers from performing British and French plays without paying royalties. It was not until an international copyright law was passed in 1891 that the property rights of foreign writers were protected. 106

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This leveled the playing field economically for American writers, making it no more expensive to produce a local play than one from abroad. The international copyright law made it possible for playwrights to earn a living from their literary labors. For The Poor of New York, Boucicault crafted a thrilling melodrama with the economic downturn of 1837 and the financial panic of 1857 providing the settings for the action. Audiences attending opening night on December 8, 1857, would have known about the circumstances of the panic: the embezzlement of railroad bonds had caused a major business to fail. Bank depositors demanded payment in gold. This became impossible due to the sinking in a hurricane of the SS Central America, which had been returning with fifteen tons of federal gold from the U.S. West Coast. Banks failed and unemployment rose. Half of the brokerage houses in New York went out of business. The depression that followed lasted eighteen months.36 The financial panic was the news of the day, and Boucicault found Edouard Brisebarre and Eugène Nus’s Les Pauvres de Paris the right vehicle to capture public attention. The main plot in his adaptation concerns the fraudulent handling of a large sum of money by the “honest” banker Bloodgood; its effects upon the lives of the Fairweather family; and the blackmailing of Bloodgood by his clerk, Badger. A secondary plot focuses on persons of means who had lost their fortune in the panic of 1857. A speech by Livingston, a member of one of the oldest New York families, epitomizes the plight of the “newly poor”: The poor!—whom do you call the poor? Do you know them? do you see them? they are more frequently found under a black coat than under a red shirt. The poor man is the clerk with a family, forced to maintain a decent suit of clothes, paid for out of the hunger of his children. The poor man is the artist who is obliged to pledge the tools of his trade to buy medicines for his sick wife. The lawyer who, craving for employment, buttons up his thin paletot [overcoat], to hide his shirtless breast. These needy wretches are poorer than the poor, for they are obligated to conceal their poverty with the false mask of content—smoking a cigar to disguise their hunger—they drag from their pockets their last quarter, to cast it with studied carelessness, to the beggar, whose mattress at home is lined with gold. These are the most miserable of the Poor of New York.37

The most thrilling scene in the play takes place in the fifth act with the burning of the tenement house that contains the infamous receipt, the only proof of Bloodgood’s crime. With almost no dialogue, Boucicault builds suspense brilliantly. His stage directions call for a dark stage with the exterior of 107

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the tenement house in view. The shutters of the windows are closed. A light is seen in the upper windows, then “a flame rises—it is extinguished—then revives. The light seems to descend as the bearer of it passes down the stair case, the door opens cautiously—Bloodgood, disguised, appears—he looks around—closes the door again—locks it.” The villain then declares: “In a few hours, this accursed house will be ruins. The receipt is concealed there—and it will be consumed in the flames. (the glow of fire is seen to spread from room to room) Now Badger—do your worst—I am safe!” Stage directions explain how the scene is to unfold: the house is “gradually enveloped in fire.” A cry outside of “Fi-er” is taken up. More voices are heard, as are tocsin sounds and bells of engines. Churches take up the alarm. Enter a crowd of people. Enter Badger—“he tries the door—finds it fast; seizes a bar of iron and dashes in the ground floor window, the interior is seen in flames.” For several minutes, Badger is seen in the burning building as he works his way up the stairs. Shutters fall away, and the inside of the house, gutted by fire, is revealed. A cry of horror is sent up by the mob. Badger drags himself out with his clothes afire, and rescuers recoil before the heat and try to put out the blaze. They rescue him and he lies center stage. While this may not be great dramatic literature, it is thrilling melodrama. Joseph Francis Daly called Boucicault “the master of stage sensation.”38 The Octoroon opened on December 6, 1859, seven weeks after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, a month after his trial ended on November 2, and four days after his execution on December 2. With newspapers filled with these events, it seems strange, even daring, for Boucicault to have opened a play that deals with miscegenation. As usual, Boucicault borrowed his plot from several sources, chiefly from a novel published in 1856 by Mayne Reid entitled The Quadroon, which had been adapted for the stage and produced in London.39 Boucicault’s play concerns a young Southern plantation heir, George Peyton, who falls in love with Zoë, who appears white but is oneeighth African American and, as it turns out, the property of the plantation. With his usual attention to local color, Boucicault’s stage directions call for views of the plantation Terrabonne in Louisiana and of the Mississippi River. Always the careful craftsman, he sets up his plot well. Before the audience meets Zoë, Scudder reveals that she is beautiful and wonderful: “When she goes along, she just leaves streaks of love behind her. It’s a good drink to see her come into the cotton fields—the niggers get fresh on the sight of her. If she ain’t worth her weight in sunshine you may take one of my fingers off, and choose which you like.”40 Zoë is the tragic character in The Octoroon. The natural daughter of George’s uncle, she has been well educated and raised like a lady. Before he died, the uncle had signed papers giving her freedom. But there was a lien on 108

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the property that included the slaves; therefore, these papers turn out to be worthless. A free-spirited George Peyton has returned from Europe just as the plantation is being foreclosed. He and Zoë have been friends in the past, and he has no inkling of her status as an octoroon. They fall in love before he learns that she is legally a Negro, and in the South it is both impossible and unthinkable for them to consider marriage. He is willing to disregard the law and custom to marry Zoë, but she looks after his welfare by refusing him, even though she loves him. Boucicault threaded his way carefully through the minefield of national politics on the eve of the Civil War. There is no evidence that he was interested in making a political statement about the slavery issue, like Harriet Beecher Stowe or George Aiken. In fact, the play was popular in both North and South. His villain, M’Closky, is a New Englander who has been successful in bankrupting the plantation and building a fortune. It is M’Closky who buys Zoë because he has lusted after her and “loved” her for some time. It is M’Closky who kills a young slave boy to prevent a check from Liverpool from reaching Terrebonne and saving the plantation. A New Englander, then, not a Southern man, is responsible for Zoë’s tragedy. And in spite of Zoë’s wonderful qualities, Boucicault has no intention of offending Southern sensibilities by allowing George to marry her. Boucicault maintains maximum tension throughout the play: Will the check from England arrive in time to save the plantation? Will someone outbid M’Closky for Zoë at the estate auction? Will the Indian Wahnotee catch M’Closky? Boucicault had learned the French methods well. Everything is carefully set up, including M’Closky’s pointing to turpentine on a boat that he will ignite later to make his escape. Boucicault’s genius for novelty and spectacle included using photography—a novelty itself in 1859—to solve a murder and in showing a burning boat onstage. He ends the play much as David Garrick ended Romeo and Juliet: Zoë drinks poison just before news arrives that the missing check has been found and the plantation saved. George and Zoë have a moment together before her death. The play ends with her final lines: “O’ George, you may, without a blush, confess your love for the octoroon.” This is as far as Boucicault was willing in 1859 to take the issue of interracial marriage. New York Saturday Press critic Personne (Edward G. P. Wilkins) was disturbed “a great deal” by the play, unable to decide whether the author had written an antislavery play or not. On the eve of the Civil War, he objected to seeing Zoë sold at auction to such a wicked overseer and expressed doubt that even Southern gentlemen would have allowed such a thing. He did not believe it fair to judge “the peculiar institution” of slavery by a case that was purely fictional. While he found much to praise about the construction of the 109

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play and several of its characters, in the final analysis he could not approve of The Octoroon because it raised issues that made him uncomfortable: “We are all a little tender upon the subject of our great National Sin, and would rather have it kept out of sight.”41 In fact, it was not kept out of sight as the play was performed repeatedly across the country. Until after the Civil War, no one equaled Boucicault’s skill in creating dynamic and exciting drama for the American stage. He found ways of making compelling dramas out of the stuff of headline news, like the economic panic of 1857 and the slavery issue dividing the nation. Originality, however, was not one of his stronger virtues. The Poor of New York he adapted from a French melodrama that had appeared at the Theatre de l’Ambigu-Comique in 1856.42 For The Octoroon, he drew upon Reid’s novel and its English adaptation. If not original, however, he had a sense of what audiences wanted to see. A. C. Wheeler thought that he tailored his plays to the “restless and superficial needs and moods of the public.”43 Public interest following the defense of the British garrison at Lucknow (India) in 1857 helped make his Jessie Brown; or, The Relief of Lucknow a success at Wallack’s Theatre the following year. He capitalized on the popularity of Charles Dickens and his visits to this country by dramatizing a number of Dickens’s novels and stories, including the Cricket on the Hearth and Nicholas Nickleby, both in 1859. In addition to his theatricality, exciting topical subjects, and astute timing, he built suspense with great skill, and it was his methods as practiced and perfected by Augustin Daly that dominated the American drama in the post–Civil War era. Augustin Daly and Urban Melodrama Daly was an astute judge of public taste, writing and adapting plays with broad emotional appeal. Born at Plymouth, North Carolina, in 1838, he moved to Norfolk, Virginia, in 1841 after his father died and finally to New York City in 1849.44 There he developed a taste for theatre, first managing one in 1856. Boucicault’s success at tailoring plays for popular actors served as his model. In the 1850s he attempted the same for Laura Keene, W. E. Burton, and Joseph Jefferson III but was unsuccessful. He then turned to journalism. Aided by his brother Joseph, he contributed to five New York newspapers over a tenyear period (1860–69), including the Sunday Courier, Evening Express, Sun, Citizen, and New York Times. He wrote about theatre and reviewed opening nights. His observations and criticism of the theatre while working as a journalist were important later in developing his own dramatic principles and practices. That Daly, like his prominent contemporaries Bronson Howard and Bartley Campbell, also began his career writing for newspapers suggests that the ability to describe the passing moment in the daily and weekly papers served 110

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as a valuable apprenticeship for ambitious young dramatists. In addition to teaching them how to capture the essence of a story quickly and in few words, journalism exposed them to the most newsworthy events of the day, including murders, train wrecks, robberies, politics, and society functions. Wheeler regarded the drama as something like the newspaper. “Anything which depends so absolutely upon the moods and tastes of the hour cannot have any ideal of its own. Managers are not in the habit of producing plays for their intrinsic merit or for posterity. To be of any earthly value it must keep pace with the people, as the newspaper does.”45 “What we want is more nowness in the serious drama,” he reasoned. The drama, like the newspaper, should provide the public with “the freshest of everything.” In covering the theatre, Daly learned about standard theatrical practices of his day: What kind of play was in demand by the stock companies? What kind of roles did star actors demand? What kind of effects thrilled audiences, and with what kind of situations could they identify? In 1869, he took all that he had learned and pursued a career in the theatre as a playwright and manager. Boucicault had had a clear view of what New York audiences wanted to see in the 1850s. Daly understood the aspirations and desires of post–Civil War audiences. In his spectacular melodrama Under the Gaslight (1867), he begins at the elegant home of the Courtlands on New Year’s Day.46 A party is breaking up, and Ray Trafford, “one of the New York ‘bloods,’” has arrived to meet his fiancée, the “belle of society,” Laura Courtland. Their conversation concerns social calls on New Year’s Day. A servant interrupts with news that a messenger is at the door with a bouquet of flowers for Laura and wants to deliver it himself. “Show him up here,” Laura agrees, and the action accelerates when Snorkey, a one-armed solder messenger, arrives with flowers for Miss Laura. From whom? A stranger on Fifth Avenue. There is a confidential note: “I respectfully beg you to grant me the favor of an interview to-night. . . . You will remember me as the strange man whom you saw once talking with your mother in the parlor, and who frightened you so much.” A servant then informs the family that a strange man has forced himself in and will see Laura. Byke—with a name straight out of a Dickens novel—appears and tells them with veiled threats that he was Laura’s music teacher and received contributions from her mother. Obviously shaken by this visit, Laura asks him to come back tomorrow. He agrees and leaves. Laura tells her cousin Pearl that Ray must know everything. There is a family secret here that the other characters (and the audience) are dying to learn. From Pearl we learn that Laura has been living a lie: when she was six years old, she was stealing purses and begging under the guidance of an old woman, Old Judas. Pearl’s mother and father rescued and raised her, introducing her into society as a niece. But now the past has intruded. 111

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Laura Courtland is not the twenty-year-old belle of the ball but a former thief and beggar who is now at the mercy of a “drunken wretch” and “beggar woman.” This is too much for Ray: “What would my mother think? My friends? Society?” He writes a letter to Laura explaining why he can’t marry her but changes his mind and puts the letter in his pocket. If no one knows, he reasons, they could be married and go to Europe. The first scene ends with this mystery, and many questions hang over the play. Can Laura retain her place in society, both economically and socially? Will the wedding ever take place? Who are these dreadful people, Byke and Old Judas? In the second scene at Delmonico’s Restaurant, Ray’s unsent letter falls into the hands of his mother, Mrs. Van Dam, and the cat is out of the bag. “The best blood of New York is insulted by the girl’s presence,” she snorts as she walks out of Delmonico’s. Will Ray stay with Laura or go with his mother? Daly then takes the audience to the underbelly of the city. Having secretly left her home, Laura, now plainly dressed, is living in a shabby basement apartment and earning money by coloring photographs. Everyone shows up, including Old Judas and Byke, who claims to be her father. At the Tombs Police Court, a judge hears the case and rules that Laura is Byke’s daughter. Can this be true? With Ray trying to rescue Laura and Old Judas and Byke trying to hide her for ransom, the action moves from a pier to a railway station. The most famous scene in Under the Gaslight—if not in American melodrama—is Laura’s rescue of the trussed-up, one-armed Snorkey from the railroad tracks at the end of act 4. Stage directions indicate that this was accompanied by spectacular effects with sounds of a steam whistle, the rumble of a train approaching, “locomotive lights” glaring, and then, as Snorkey is pulled from the tracks, the rush past of the train of cars with a “roar and whistle.” Daly patented the effect.47 After being rescued, Snorkey comments: “And these are the women who ain’t to have a vote!” All ends well. In the last act, Laura learns that she is the rightful daughter of the Courtlands, having been stolen from her crib as a baby by Old Judas, who put Pearl in her place. It is cousin Pearl who is the beggar child. Ray and Laura are united, Snorkey is rewarded, and Daly concludes one of the most successful plays of the nineteenth-century American stage. He introduced a locomotive, the technology that was changing the face of America; he included a one-armed Civil War veteran, reminding the audience of the recent war and those who had sacrificed much for it; he referenced the drive by women’s groups for equal rights; and he kept the audience in suspense until the final curtain. Daly had learned that melodrama, like popular journalism, not only must be sensational but also must find novel ways of being sensational. In A Flash of Lightning; or, City Hearthsides and City Heartaches (1868), he put onstage a 112

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burning Hudson River steamer, Daniel Doo, with his heroine, Bessie Fallon, trapped inside. She is saved, of course, as Daly had learned from Boucicault the value of a last-minute rescue. A necklace disappears in the first act with suspicion thrown upon Bessie Fallon, who believes the thief is Jack Ryver, the man she loves, and so she refuses to implicate him. In reality, a bolt of lighting has entered the room and destroyed the necklace, a ridiculous plot device that is revealed in the last act. Here the credible gives way to the novel, a not unusual situation for melodrama. For part of his plot, Daly borrowed from Victorien Sardou’s La Perle noire.48 He manipulated similar sensational materials in The Red Scarf; or, Scenes in Aroostock (1868) with a last-minute rescue by May Hamilton of Gail Barston, who has been tied to a log, about to be sawed in two, by his rival; this antagonist has also set fire to the mill to burn up the evidence. This scene maintains maximum suspense while bringing the play to the desired outcome. Daly sustained novelty with local color by placing onstage recognizable scenes from various neighborhoods in New York. In Lightning, the audience views a Greenwich Street house, a scene on Fifth Avenue, an all-night’s lodging cellar called Jacob’s Ladder, and a Hudson River steamer. While becoming clichés of the Daly drama, these were familiar landmarks, which placed the action of the play within the experiences of his audiences. Daly helped define public taste after the Civil War by writing sensational melodramas and social comedies about the most newsworthy topics of the day. He found the western theme compelling enough in 1871 to write Horizon, “An original drama of contemporaneous society and of American frontier perils.” Daly never went west himself but, influenced by Bret Harte, drew in caricature, creating colorful characters that resemble the western types of Harte. In act 1, Congressman Sundown Rowse, Esq., prepares to travel west to inspect some new lands obtained in a congressional land grant while accompanying Alleyn Van Dorp to his new army post. Alleyn is the adopted son of Mrs. Van Dorp of Waverly Place, New York, who has requested that they be on the lookout for her worthless husband, Wolf Van Dorp, and their daughter, Med, whom he kidnapped and took west fourteen years earlier. While Mrs. Van Dorp is regarded as a kind and generous woman, she is the type of person who never should have married: “She had no patience to bear the failings of a husband.”49 Mrs. Van Dorp’s elegant salon in Waverly Place looks out upon Washington Park, a fashionable address of the day. She is pleased that her adopted son has made friends with influential people in Washington. While not as impressed with Congressman Rowse’s background of railroads and business, she is very impressed that Alleyn has made friends with an English nobleman, the Honorable Arthur Wellesby Vere de Vere Smith. Later at dinner, 113

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it is clear that no one knows anything about the West except what has been read in newspapers. The Honorable Smith thinks the British flag will protect him if Indians attack him: “Aw—yes—the noble savage. I’ll speak to him as his paleface brother. I’ve read the Leatherstocking stories, and I think I can manage them.” Rowse plans to “take a case of dollar store jewelry . . . and trade it for furs with the simple-minded red man. There’s nothing like carrying civilization into the Far West.” The reality of the West is far different from the newspaper accounts in the East. At Rogue’s Rest (sixty miles from Fort Jackson), Rowse finds that acts of Congress and congressmen get no respect. A vigilance committee is getting set to either run undesirables out of town or string them up. Daly notes that the gambler John Loder is “one of the reasons for the establishment of Vigilance Committees in the peaceful hamlets of the plains.” The action of the play moves between farce and melodrama. Wolf and his daughter, Med, “the white flower of the plains,” show up. The men fall in love with her, including Wannemucka, the “civilized Indian and ‘Untutored Savage,’” who leads his Indians in an attack on the fort. The sensational scene—a trademark of a Daly play—is the storming of the stockade by the Indians. Ideas about the noble savage have disappeared by the fourth act: “They’re all a dirty pack, and [James Fenimore] Cooper’s is no better nor any of ’em.” Trinculo (A. C. Wheeler), tired of the myth of the noble redskin, praised Daly for putting onstage “the American Indian . . . as he exists and not as Cooper painted him.”50 Horizon includes many of the stereotypes made popular by Harte: the crooked politician, the gambler, the “Heathen Chinee,” the innocent ingenue, and the drunken Indian. Wheeler found especially true the sketches of the gamblers, Indians, and western desperadoes. He thought the play brilliantly animated in “constant action, multiplicity of details and characters, and a perfect mise en scene.” Odell notes that a novelty of the performance was the actress Agnes Ethel’s ability to shoot a gun as the character Med.51 During the same year, Daly gauged correctly that the public was more than casually interested in the subject of divorce. The growing suffrage movement had made it an issue, and although there were only 155 divorces per 100,000 couples in 1870, 52 a backlash against easy divorce resulted. Frank Luther Mott notes how the Princeton Review, the New Englander, and the Century “deplored the increases in the divorce rate,” while Elizabeth Cady Stanton advocated more liberal divorce laws in the North American Review.53 Taking his plot from Anthony Trollope’s novel He Knew He Was Right, Daly created the hit of the 1871–72 season with Divorce, which opened September 5, creating “extraordinary interest” and running a record two hundred consecutive performances. During one week, it was performed simultaneously in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and St. Louis. To provide some context 114

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for this success, one should note that a leader in the suffrage movement, Victoria Woodhull, spoke at Steinway Hall in New York on November 20 on the subject “The Principles of Social Freedom, Involving the Questions of Free Love, Marriage, Divorce, and Prostitution.”54 This was the topic of the moment. Divorce begins on the wedding day of the aging De Wolf De Witt to young Louise Eyck, a May–December match. On the same day, Alfred Adrianse returns after a two-year absence to ask for the hand of Louise’s sister, Fanny Eyck, who had rejected his proposal previously. She accepts. In act 2, set three years later, things have not gone well for either marriage. Louise and old De Witt quarrel every day with the former contacting a lawyer about a divorce “without publicity.” Her mother is scandalized. Fanny has continued her friendship with an old admirer, Captain Lynde, making Alfred jealous. When he demands that she “not see him again,” she refuses: “If I am fit to be told that I must not see any man living, I am not fit to be any man’s wife.” She is determined to maintain her independence: “Just so far as it is right I will obey his [her husband’s] wishes. If I am in doubt, I will give him the benefit of that doubt and still comply, but if he outrages my feelings, insults my friends and suspects my honor, I will resent it with all my power to the day of my death.”55 Alfred is highly offended, and in the ensuing argument, Fanny leaves. The characters discover that divorce is an unpleasant business. Daly introduces a divorce lawyer, Templeton Jitt, Esq., of the New York Bar, and a private detective, Burritt, to inform the characters (and the audience) about the legalities of divorce and the shoddy practices of modern divorce lawyers. Both are depicted as opportunists, willing to do anything to win their case. Jitt’s interrogation of Louise in act 3 is both humorous and informative: Jitt: Now to the point. Your husband made up for his former brutality by paying all your bills, asking your pardon, and taking you on an overland excursion to California and Utah? Louise: Yes, it was splendid while it lasted, but when we came back he got to be just as bad as ever—in fact, worse. Jitt: Any violence? Louise: Only to my feelings. Jitt: Suspicious? Jealous? Louise: Just the reverse. He says I may do what I like. I may buy all New York up, and beggar him—says all he can do is to submit to my whims. Did you ever hear such outrageous language? Jitt: Yes, he’s as bad as he was before, no doubt about it. In fact, my dear madam, you can never be happy with him, and you must get a divorce somehow. 115

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Louise: I must have it. I have suffered in silence, but I can bear it no longer. Jitt: Have you tried whether your husband would consent to a separation? Louise: No, I want him to propose it, so I can go into hysterics, and touch his heart. Jitt: And he won’t? Louise: No, he won’t, and yet he goes on torturing me with his pretended resignation. Jitt: Well, I see nothing left for you to do but to put in operation the little stratagem I suggested; you must lead him into some ebullition of anger, in which he will forget himself. Louise: But suppose he forgets me, too? Jitt: If he does, his case is settled. If he’ll only give you a pinch on the arm, or a shove with the hand, or a box on the ear—but that is too great a legal luxury to expect. Louise: What if he should? Jitt: I undertake to get you a cast-iron divorce for the faintest tap on the cheek.

By the time Louise and De Witt decide they don’t want a divorce, Jitt has obtained one for them anyway and demands a consultation fee to get it set aside. Planning to remarry immediately, Louise sums up the situation: “Once divorced, twice married, and the last one a great deal better and nicer and funnier than the first.” While Daly makes clear through their union that May–December marriages come steeped with difficulties, he also suggests that the laws governing divorce may need modernizing. Louise asks, “Can’t they put all the divorce lawyers somewhere, and keep ’em where they won’t do any damage?” As to Alfred and Fanny’s marriage, Captain Lynde turns out to be a cad, someone always interested in pretty wives. Alfred and Fanny are getting ready to separate forever when Alfred asks, “What power can bring forgetfulness, and unite us in a new life?” Fanny bows her head, “Heaven, have pity on us!” But no one should confuse Daly’s melodramas with real life anymore than August von Kotzebue’s seven decades earlier. Little Alfred runs into the room: “Papa will never go away again, will he mama?” “Pray to him, darling,” Fanny tells him. This leads to reconciliation and a fast tableau, not to a door slamming and the beginning of the end of such trite and dishonest conclusions. Convention is a stern taskmaster in any age, and Daly recognized its hold on audiences in shaping the ending to Divorce. He raised serious questions, however, about the subservient role of the wife in a nineteenth-century marriage. He drew a husband who admits he is wrong and offers his wife a 116

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separation. He presented marriage as something requiring an equal partnership. Joseph Daly wrote of the first performance: “The play exactly suited the temper of the public. It did not preach, it acted, its moral. The causes of trouble lay on the surface of everyday life. The whole play was an appeal to reason, to fairness, to justice.”56 Trinculo, reporting in the Leader, found the play to be a “lively, witty, pathetic, humorous, melodramatic, comedy of contemporaneous interest full of strong situations, smart dialogue, bold sketchy characters and stupendous dresses.” In the critic’s view, the play “dealt with a subject that interests society always, and never so much as now. Divorce means in a dramatic, no less than in a legal sense, love, folly, anger, remorse, repentance, and—sometimes reconciliation. These are the things that make a good play. At least they are the things that interest the world, whether in poem, picture or play.”57 The New York Telegram expressed skepticism about any value in the play beyond “satin covered furniture of the scenes and the handsome dresses of the actresses.”58 Divorce, like most of Daly’s plays, was risqué enough to be fashionable and not notorious enough to be scandalous. Turning from the subject of divorce, Daly borrowed in part the plot of the British religious novel Her Lord and Master by Florence Marryatt for another major hit, Pique, which opened on December 14, 1875, at the New Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York. Catherine Sturtevant has noted that the last two acts also drew upon a contemporary kidnapping and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.59 The play begins at the Conservatory at Grassmere on the Hudson where several young college men pursue the beautiful but haughty Mabel Renfrew, who has lived half her life in Paris and seems the epitome of the new self-assured woman of good taste and breeding. In a pique of anger when she learns that Raymond Lessing, whom she loves, has proposed marriage to her wealthy widowed stepmother, she marries Captain Arthur Standish, whom she does not love. Captain Standish’s father had been a factory overseer, and while he made a great deal of money, Mabel believes she has lowered herself socially by this marriage. Her old family physician, Dr. Gossitt, reminds her: “There is no such thing as rank in this country. . . . These are false notions you gained abroad in your childhood.”60 It is clear that Mabel does not agree. Captain Arthur, like George Tesman in Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, has married a spoiled, aristocratic woman. At the beginning of act 2, his family at their New England home, Old Deerfield, is nervous about receiving her. They had hoped that he would marry his cousin Mary, and his father, Matthew, blames himself for letting his son go into the navy and “enter fashionable houses.” Matthew is offended that Arthur’s letters talk about Mabel’s beauty, her aristocratic background, and her manners: “Believe me . . . a son would not display such a mass of tawdry stuff before his father’s eyes, 117

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if he had anything more solid to show.” The puritan Matthew is suspicious of Mabel’s self-assertiveness: “The women rule the world in which she was bred, and the men stand in awe of them. Once upon a time the man was head of his house. Now he’s a fetcher and carrier for the dainty, selfish tyrant he calls wife.” Mabel and Standish have spent their honeymoon abroad for six months—two at Baden and four in Italy—and their homecoming is not a happy occasion for the bride. It is clear that Mabel does not love Standish. She is expected to conform to the traditions of his family, and she refuses. His family’s homespun ways, including evening devotions, seem intolerable to her, and in an ensuing argument she tells Arthur that she never loved him but the libertine Raymond Lessing. Livid with anger, Arthur tells Mabel that she is free to leave, and he departs. By act 3 they have separated; their marriage, though brief, has produced a child, young Arthur; and Captain Standish has gone back to sea. Always the puritan, Matthew does not forgive her: “To deceive an honest man into the belief that she loved him. To marry him—from pique! And then drive him from her when his society becomes distasteful. A capital jest . . . in the cultivated circles from which my son chose to take a wife.” He will not allow Mabel to take the child away: “My son lives—he is the guardian of his boy—he may dispose of him as he pleases—until he does so, I will keep him.” This keeps Mabel at Old Deerfield. The adventurer Raymond Lessing reenters the picture and attempts to convince Mabel that he is devoted to her. Strangely, she finds herself defending her husband. Unfortunately, Matthew sees her with Raymond and learns that she is attempting to take her son and leave without his permission. Mabel has arranged for little Arthur to be kidnapped to get him away from Matthew; but while she has a change of heart about this business, the kidnappers do not. Consequently, all of act 4 deals with the search for the boy in Trinity Churchyard and “Beggar’s Paradise,” concluding with an exciting rescue led by Captain Standish. Borrowing freely from Victor Hugo, the setting of “Beggar’s Paradise” provides a glimpse of the underbelly of the city. The play no doubt reminded audiences of the real-life kidnapping of Charley Ross from in front of his Philadelphia home on July 1, 1874, which Odell regarded as “one of the greatest mysteries of our country.”61 Matthew confesses that his “fancied integrity and sense of right” is responsible for this misfortune: “Gentle words, kindness from me—might have averted it.” The last act brings the family back together for a tearful finale. Fanny Davenport made a great success of the role of Mabel, demonstrating a wide range of emotions from haughty and overbearing to desperate and dying. The play had all the appearances of being modern. Mabel was an assertive and wealthy modern New York woman up against old puritanical New 118

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England traditions. Daly incorporated a liberal use of slang and colloquial expressions and specific references to New York City. Critical reaction over the next ten years varied from highly laudatory puff pieces to accusations of excessive sentiment and irritating sensationalism. What is one to make of William Winter’s comments in the Tribune? “Pique,” he wrote, “blended comedy, sentiment, and sensation in a way that will not fail to please the average tastes.”62 A friend of Daly’s, Winter usually touted his productions. The play ran 238 performances in New York, toured extensively, and in at least two versions was produced in London. The influence of the French well-made play brought a new level of sophistication to American drama in the 1850s and 1860s. Boucicault and Daly adapted the methods of Sardou and Dumas fils to the American theatre and became the foremost dramatists of their day. Another foreign invasion occurred in 1866 when T. W. Robertson’s “cup and saucer” comedies from the Prince of Wales Theatre in London received their American premiere at Wallack’s Theatre under the management of James Wallack and his actor son, Lester. Robertson provided a quieter, more naturalistic style of comedy, suggesting rather than spelling out the actions in explicit terms. Society failed at Wallack’s Theatre in March 1866, but Ours, nine months later, was a hit. The title refers to a military regiment and the families supporting it. Instead of focusing on the heroics of the soldiers, Ours focuses on the comings and goings, on the things people say when they don’t want to talk about battles and killings. To hide his feelings, one character says: “You don’t know how mutton is usually roasted, do you?—I mean, which side up?”63 Robertson was not rebelling against the subject matter of nineteenth-century drama, however, only against the way it was written. Underneath the small talk and natural conversations, his plays deal with marriage, war, and romance—the same topics as the rest of the drama of his day. What he attempted to do, though—and what Anton Chekhov would later succeed in doing—was to put the focus on what happens between the big noisy moments. The Wallacks produced each new Robertson play shortly after it appeared in London. Audiences (but not all critics) found them simple, natural, and charming. The Spirit of the Times reported that the playwright “illustrates the humors, the graces, the refinements, and the eccentricities of the day with a fidelity that shows him to be a most acute observer.”64 The irascible Nym Crinkle (Wheeler) argued, however, that Robertson and his followers merely adapted their comedies to fit current tastes and lacked “conviction, belief, or purpose.” Accustomed to the noise and largeness of romantic drama, the critic did not find the simplicity and quietness of the Robertson drama appealing. It was too genteel for his taste—too respectable—and he accused the new school of aiming for politeness rather than passion.65 But 119

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the New York Evening Post critic (probably Towse) spoke approvingly on May 1, 1874, of a revival of Robertson’s School at Wallack’s: “The play is without any sensational element in plot or dialogue, presenting merely a pretty little love story, quite commonplace in its incidents, with such simple accessories as school girls, an old beau and a hated tutor. Yet so skillfully and delicately is the work treated by the author that . . . it cannot fail of popularity.” Odell credited Robertson with revolutionizing the “method of writing, acting, and setting comedy,” ridding it of its stiffness.66 Bronson Howard and Social Comedy While the Wallacks imported the best plays from the London stage, they did little to encourage native playwrights. Augustin Daly, on the other hand, promoted original American plays. The success of Saratoga at Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre in December 1870 launched Bronson Howard’s playwriting career in New York. Born and educated in Detroit, Howard, like Daly, had learned his craft in journalism, first for the Detroit Free Press as drama critic in the early 1860s before moving to New York in 1865, where he wrote for the Tribune and Evening Post. He had attempted writing plays in Detroit: in 1864, the Detroit Theatre produced his first play, Fantine, a dramatization of an episode in Les Misérables. Howard learned the methods of the French well-made play, including the clever tying and untying of an intrigue. The first American playwright to make a profession out of playwriting, he was a cofounder of the American Dramatists Club in 1891. Howard sent Saratoga to Laura Keene, who recommended it to Daly. Opening on December 21, 1870, it ran for 101 performances and was produced in London under the title of Brighton. A very funny farcical comedy, Saratoga possesses some of the same high-spirited fun as A Glance at New York, set within the world of society. Act 1 opens at the Academy of Design during an art exhibition. Sir Mortimer Muttonlegg attempts to make sense of a painting: “Do you know if the catalogue didn’t say this was a picture of—a-h—‘Nemesis’—I should have taken it for a—cat—watching a-ah—mouse—and a—chair—and—a-h—a big piece of cheese on the table.”67 There is an intellectual pretentiousness about the event, especially the “gallery talk” of the artist explaining his work. Lack of knowledge doesn’t hinder anyone from spouting off about art. Effie Remington notes: “I left father discussing the question of Pre-Raphaelite art, whatever that may be, with another old gentleman that knows as little about the subject as papa does.” Howard clearly understood the prejudices of the public about such exhibitions at this time, and his play reflects these prejudices. The exhibition is only a device to bring all these characters together, especially Robert Sackett, who, in answering a newspaper ad, has arranged to meet with a mysterious woman. With the 120

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proclivity to fall in love with every girl he meets, Robert is engaged already to three beauties: Virginia Vanderpool, young widow Olivia Alston, and Effie Remington. But he can’t resist meeting this mysterious new woman and will wear a white rosebud and she a blue rosette for identification. The mysterious woman turns out to be Effie, and after accusing each other of being unfaithful, both then claim to have known it was the other all along. Two months later at the Congress Springs in Saratoga, the fashionable set is arriving for the water. A local character, Muffins, can’t understand why “all the payple kape drinking this Saratogy water as if there was a Chicago conflagration inside of ’em, and yit they kape making faces all the time, as if they’d rather be swallowing kerosene oil.” On learning that his multiple loves were all coming to Saratoga, Robert had scampered away to Vermont. A runaway horse there threw a young woman in his arms. She departed before he could get her name, but in this brief encounter, he gave her a dozen warm kisses and fell in love for the fourth time. Now, in Saratoga with his friend Jack Benedict, Robert is there to look for her. She is Lucy Carter, married to a man old enough to be her father, and she does, of course, show up in Saratoga with husband in tow. While social commentary takes a back seat to exploiting the situation for laughs, Howard has a few wise things to say about fashion, conventional morality, and bad parents. Robert is “found out.” The women are furious and set their male friends to challenge him, thinking that he is a coward and won’t fight. “I haven’t the least objection to what they call the ‘smell of powder,’” Robert quips. “It isn’t the smell of powder I object to; it’s the bullets.” Having received seven challenges, he borrows his friend Jack’s suite and sends out for coffee and four pistols. Rumors convince his female adversaries that they might have misjudged both his courage and expertise in dueling, so they show up individually to talk him out of fighting. As each arrives, the previous one must hide—in the closet, under the bed, in the next room—to prevent being caught in a man’s private quarters, the death for reputations at the time. They are all discovered; when Robert swears they came in together to protect their men, however, reputations remain intact and the pairing up of the lovers ends the play. Robert decides that he loves the girl of the blue rosette, Effie Remington. Saratoga is much closer to the world of Georges Feydeau than to Mrs. Mowatt’s 1845 Fashion. Clearly Howard understood the French method of construction with less emphasis on social commentary and more on setting up and untying the farcical situations. Odell notes how his central character, Robert Sackett, resembles Cheviot Hill in W. S. Gilbert’s Engaged in that both can’t resist a pretty woman.68 Saratoga may be the funniest play written at this point in the nation’s history. It is well constructed with interesting characters and a refreshing lack of sentimentality. The Spirit of the Times reported that 121

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the situations were “often very comical” and the dialogue “contains much” that is laughable. It excited “a good deal of merriment” on its opening in December 1870 and a month later continued to “fill the house.”69 After the play was revised and revived in January 1874, the New York Evening Post reported that the audience was “in a condition of chronic laughter and applause.”70 Following Daly’s lead, Howard set his plays in the business world with American businessmen as major characters. To Howard, each country had its own subject, and in America that subject was business. After a modest success with Diamond in 1872 and a failure with Moorcraft in 1874, Howard revised an older play, Lillian’s Last Love, as The Banker’s Daughter; A. M. Palmer produced it at the Union Square Theatre in 1878. Eight years later in a lecture at Harvard, Howard explained how the play was rewritten to satisfy what he called the “laws of dramatic construction.” Dramatics should deal “with subjects of universal interest,” he believed, and the strongest of these is “the love of the sexes.” Next in importance, the play must be “satisfactory” to its audience. To Howard, that meant that “in England and America, the death of a pure woman on the stage is not ‘satisfactory,’ except when the play rises to the dignity of tragedy.”71 In the earlier version of this play, the wife, Lillian, dies; in his new version, she lives because her life is pure. “The wife who has once taken the step from purity to impurity,” Howard argued, “can never reinstate herself in the world of art this side of the grave.” Few playwrights of the period challenged this maxim. Howard wrote well-crafted melodramas that were attractive to his audiences. His Young Mrs. Winthrop followed at the Madison Square Theatre on October 9, 1882. Arthur Hobson Quinn considered it a major achievement because the author did not stoop to satire.72 Odell called it “one of the finest things yet written for the American stage.”73 Here Howard is writing in the milieu of Henry James and Edith Wharton about the successful business class in American culture and the social class to which it belongs. In the play a frivolous young wife, Constance Winthrop, occupies herself with the social scene while her husband, Douglas, spends all his time involved in work. His mother, Ruth Winthrop, expresses concern: “Douglas and Constance see less and less of each other every day. I am very anxious for them. ‘Business’ and ‘the club,’ and the ‘duties of society,’ are changing them into mere acquaintances.”74 Their marriage falls apart when their daughter, Rosie, dies on her birthday while Constance is attending a ball and Douglas is away from home visiting a mysterious Mrs. Dunbar. They separate and Douglas goes abroad. Later, in the midst of a property settlement, Constance learns that her brother was guilty of embezzling in his business affairs, and to prevent his arrest, Douglas had replaced the money and appealed to one of his creditors,

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a Mrs. Hepworth Dunbar, not to file charges. While she refused his appeal, the death of Rosie that evening changed her mind. When Constance and Douglas review the division of property for a legal separation, they reminiscence over the good times in their marriage. The family lawyer informs them that he has not mentioned one piece of property, Rosie’s burial lot in Greenwood Cemetery: “Even a lawyer cannot divide that property.” At this point, they rush into “each other’s arms, weeping.” Undoubtedly the audience joined them. Howard showed that the old plot device of a child reuniting a separating couple could still work, even if the child in question was dead. He does provide comic relief in the character of Mrs. Dick Chetwyn, a friend of the family, who has been married and divorced so many times that she can’t keep husbands straight. While Howard makes the point that a preoccupation with business and society destroys family life and that divorces may be too easily obtained, he provides the audience with the expected conventional ending. It would take a playwright with a different aesthetic and more courage than Howard to push human actions to their logical conclusions. The drama ran for 190 performances and was successfully presented in London. The Henrietta, one of Howard’s best social dramas, offered a satirical treatment of business, finance, and Wall Street. The play opened at the Union Square Theatre on September 26, 1887, and ran for 155 performances before a fire destroyed the theatre. The play is set in the richly appointed private residence of Nicholas Vanalstyne Sr., the “Master of Wall Street” who bought a mine called Henrietta “on a three-hundred-dollar bluff, in a friendly game of poker.”75 After incorporating the mine for $20 million, the elder Vanalstyne “bought the whole town, including two newspapers and an opera house, and all the railways, not to mention the branch lines and a steamship company, to say nothing of six million acres of public land grants.” For the super-rich, the business of Wall Street is akin to a high stakes poker game. Vanalstyne takes great delight in bankrupting an old friend and then extending to him a full line of credit. And he still has time for romance, competing with his minister for the affections of a widow, Mrs. Cornelia Opdyke. A self-made millionaire, he must have reminded audiences of John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the other “Robber Barons” of the age. Vanalstyne is a tough, no-nonsense business tycoon. His “city-bred” children, however, lack his character. His daughter plans to marry an effete English lord. His son Nicholas Jr. intentionally tries to bankrupt him while involved in an affair that has produced an illegitimate child. Another son, Bertie, has yet to find himself. Dr. Wainwright, the family physician, draws the distinction between generations: Vanalstyne Sr. is in perfect health because he “was

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bred in the country. His nerves were as firm and as cold as steel before he ever came to the city.” In contrast, “the furnace-bred young men of New York are pigmies . . . mere bundles of nerves, that burn themselves like the overcharged wires of a battery.” The fast living of Wall Street, he explains, is like “wearing your life out in the greatest gambling hell on earth. There is death on the street. Monaco is nothing.” He suggests that “bulls and bears are much fiercer animals than tigers.” He describes the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a dangerous place: “No outsider has ever been on the floor . . . and come out alive.” Dr. Wainwright blames the “telephone and the stock indicator” for bringing death to the homes of fashionable society as well as to the offices of Wall Street. Even while Howard suggests that an obsession with business has corrupted ethics, friendships, family life, and personal morals, he romanticizes the businessman and Wall Street as a place with high risks, excitement, and adventure. Such sentiments helped create the myth of big business in America. Howard borrowed his methods from the French. The substance of his comedy, however, is rooted in the deep-seated belief that personal initiative and accomplishment in America outranks any title. He understood clearly that his urban audiences still believed that country life was more authentic than urban life. Attempts at affectation, especially in characters speaking French or with an upper-class British dialect, are soundly ridiculed. Comic types include the liberal minister, the Reverend Dr. Murray Hilton, who is interested more in stock tips and widows than in saving souls, much like the Reverend Cream Cheese introduced by George W. Curtis in “The Potiphar Papers.” The foppish English lord has been a familiar character in American comedy. Vanalstyne’s son-in-law, Lord Arthur Trelawney, is typical with his eyeglass and quaint English expressions. The younger son, Bertie, apes the manners of the English lord at first but in the end gains independence and, with a satirical touch, shows how to make money on Wall Street by tossing a coin. The main comic device, the name of Henrietta, refers to a mine, not to a ballet girl whom some of the women suspect is the object of the men’s desires. Howard was a superb craftsman. At the end of act 3, he builds suspense and excitement by the ticking of the stock indicator as the market is first driven down and then up when Nicholas Jr. attempts to win control of Wall Street from his father. The play grossed half a million dollars in its initial production, a success that would indicate business values were taken for granted. Critic John Corbin in the New York Times, October 2, 1887, identified The Henrietta as the earliest of a new kind of play, the business play. Shenandoah, a romantic melodrama set against the background of the Civil War, became Howard’s most successful play. After an inauspicious premiere at the Boston Museum on November 19, 1888, Shenandoah received an 124

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overhaul from Charles Frohman before it opened in New York the following September for a 250-performance run. The main plot does not concern the war itself but with lovers divided by the conflict. Colonel Kerchival West of the North is in love with Gertrude Ellingham, sister of his best friend, Colonel Robert Ellingham of the South. Three other love affairs include Kerchival’s sister Madeline with Robert; General Haverill with his young wife, Constance; and Jenny Buckthorn with Captain Heartsease. Howard handled the war and the lovers on both sides with impartiality. When Madeline confesses to her brother that she loves the Confederate colonel Robert Ellingham, Kerchival tells her: “Every woman’s heart, the world over, belongs not to any country or flag, but to her husband—and her lover.”76 Critics reported that audiences wept as memories of the war overwhelmed them emotionally. By 1889 and the theatrical success of Shenandoah, the national discussion had moved from partisanship to reconciliation, from division to unification, from two countries to union. Assessing truthfully the chaos and carnage would await a later time and later writers. Howard returned to social comedy for his last plays, although they never attained the success of The Henrietta nor of Shenandoah. His Aristocracy (1892) was only “moderately popular”; his Peter Stuyvesant (written with Brander Matthews) had limited success in 1899; Kate was never performed. Aristocracy drew a parallel between a rich western capitalist from an old New York family and a prince from Vienna. Comparing America’s self-made aristocrats with the titled nobility of Europe had occupied native comedy since The Contrast. Howard’s comedies show how the natural aristocrats of farmers and soldiers in pre–Civil War America evolved into the businessmen of the post–Civil War era. Nicholas Vanalstyne Sr. was the new American aristocrat. Even while Howard moralized about the adverse effect of business upon domestic life, he romanticized the American business class. Western Drama The frontier had remained a romantic ideal in American culture throughout the nineteenth century, as settlers pushed west from cities along the eastern seaboard to the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys and finally crossed the Great Plains to California and the West. The first appearance of a frontier character, Nimrod Wildfire in J. Kirke Paulding’s Lion of the West (1831), was based loosely on the historical Davy Crockett. Louisa Medina’s adaptation of Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1837 novel Nick of the Woods was successful in 1839 at the Bowery Theatre with the larger-than-life character Jibbenainosay and spectacular events set in Kentucky. “You who live in peace and plenty know not the fearful deeds done on the western border,” suggests the spirit of the piece.77 125

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The shift of the frontier to the far west was brought about by the gold rush to California in 1849 and then to other western states between 1859 and 1876. Going west became the means to start a new life and become rich. Bret Harte migrated to California in 1854 and, after some experience mining in the Mother Lode, moved to San Francisco and turned his attention to journalism. He became editor of Overland Monthly in 1868, where he published “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” These were local color stories about life in the mining camps and were received with acclaim across the country. Subsequent Indian wars across the Great Plains built greater interest in the West, prompting western authors with established reputations to dabble in playwriting—mainly in turning their stories into drama. While Harte influenced other writers, he never understood the demands of the stage. His first play, The Two Men of Sandy Bar, offered “original and powerful” stories that were full of life, abounding in “grim humor and simple pathos,” but with too many incidents.78 Mark Twain also failed to follow up on his literary successes by learning dramatic construction. The Gilded Age; or, Colonel Sellers, which he wrote in collaboration with G. S. Densmore, possessed merit for its character study of Colonel Sellers and had some success onstage, playing for over a hundred performances after its opening at the Park Theatre in September 1874. Ah Sin, written in collaboration with Harte, however, failed to live up to expectations, although it did receive a production in New York at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1877. Dramas set in the West would become a major genre, attracting a number of important writers. Augustin Daly, as noted, tried his hand at creating western characters without leaving the East. Frank Murdock’s Davy Crockett; or, Be Sure You’re Right, Then Go Ahead helped turn the historical Davy Crockett into myth in the 1870s. Written for actor Frank Mayo, the play was first performed at the Opera House in Rochester in 1872, then opened at Wood’s Museum in New York City on June 2, 1873, with Mayo as Davy. The plot is conventional and turns on the sensational actions of the hero, the blackmail of the villain, and the pure love of the heroine—in other words, standard melodrama of the era. In the first act, Davy Crockett is presented as an ignorant but honest frontiersman who meets a childhood friend, the “young, ardent, imaginative,” and somewhat romantic Eleanor Vaughn, who has returned from abroad.79 While she is engaged to Neil Crampton, Davy’s feelings for her are reawakened. At the end of act 2, when she and her betrothed seek refuge from a raging snowstorm in Davy’s hunting lodge, Davy nurses her back to health and protects her from howling wolves by using his arm as a bar to prevent the door from being pushed open. Later he prevents her from marrying the weak Crampton, whose uncle Oscar is forcing the match by blackmailing her guardian, Major Hector Royston, with some promissory 126

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notes. Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Lochinvar” inspires Davy at the beginning of act 4 to abduct Eleanor, take her home, and then marry her in act 5. Davy Crockett received favorable notices. The old romantic Nym Crinkle sat through the play twice at Niblo’s Garden and was delighted that Eleanor was able to overlook the rough edges of Crockett’s character and see instead his “sincerity and manly beauty.”80 He found the threat of the baying wolves made “plausible and effective by every device of stage management.” And he applauded the play’s naturalness as well as its truthfulness and even its poetic quality. He admitted that the play was not great “in any psychological or even theatric sense,” but it was interesting and wholesome romantic fare. The influence of Harte can be seen in a better frontier play, The Danites; or, the Heart of the Sierras, written by Joaquin Miller and produced in 1877 at the Broadway Theatre. Stridently anti-Mormon, the plot involves a young woman hiding in a mining camp disguised as a boy to protect her from a secret society of Mormons, the Danites. Her father was involved in the murder of the prophet Joseph Smith, and the Mormon church has ordered her execution. The Danites presented familiar types, including the evil Mormon and stereotypical stage Chinese, “Washee Washee,” characters whose harsh treatment the playwright later regretted.81 Like the Harte short stories, it provided easterners with a sense of rawness of frontier life, including the justice system where hanging first and a trial later remained the law of the land. The play also pointed up the miners’ (or Miller’s) religious feelings about the Sierras and all of nature. J. Ranken Towse in the Evening Post found the play deficient as drama, more the work of a poet than a playwright: “Its chief excellences are distinctly literary rather than dramatic, although it is by no means deficient in incident.”82 The critic found the humor in the play “grossly stupid and abominably vulgar. Mining camp wit is scarcely relished in civilized society.” The Danites remained popular as long as the general population viewed Mormonism with suspicion or contempt. Miller wrote about the frontier from firsthand experience. His other plays with western subjects include Forty-nine, Tally Ho!, and An Oregon Idyll, but none were successful. Bartley Campbell also followed the lead of Harte and wrote plays with western themes. His plays were more successful in the theatre because he was a better craftsman and understood that it was important to make the West attractive for a New York audience. Like Daly and Howard before him, Campbell began his career as a journalist. Born in Pittsburgh in 1840, he began writing for the Pittsburgh Post sometime in the late 1850s. From this time until about 1872, he served as dramatic critic, editor, reporter, and writer of stories and verses and also penned at least two novels while working for various papers in Pittsburgh, Louisville, Cincinnati, and New Orleans. After writing his first play in 1871, he gave up journalism and focused on playwriting. He worked for 127

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Richard M. Hooley’s Theatre in Chicago, going with Hooley to San Francisco in 1874 where he met Mark Twain and formed his own company in 1876 to tour his plays. He had little success until his melodrama of mining camp life, My Partner, opened at the Union Square Theatre on September 16, 1879, for a short run and established his career. Set in a mining camp in the West, My Partner dramatizes the deep friendship of two miners, Ned and Joe, and their love for Mary Brandon, the hotel owner’s daughter. It is interesting how positive attributes in the East become negative traits in the West for frontier drama. The college-educated and well-dressed Ned has gotten Mary pregnant before Josiah Scraggs murders him. Joe, rougher in manners and dress, marries her even as he faces hanging, falsely accused of Ned’s murder. In the end, through the efforts of Wing Lee (treated comically but sympathetically), Scraggs is revealed as the killer, Joe goes free, and Mary and Joe are united. Since Mary had surrendered her virginity before marriage, dramatic convention dictated that she face a tragic end. Campbell’s failure to arrange such an end and instead reward her with a happy marriage violated the Victorian sense of propriety and shocked some critics. While melodramatic and sentimental, My Partner offers a strong situation and colorful dialogue that frequently rises to the level of poetry. Audiences preferred Campbell’s more conventional melodramas The Gallery Slave, which opened in New York on December 1, 1879, at Haverly’s Lyceum, and The White Slave, which followed on April 3, 1882, at the 14th Street Theatre. Although Stephen Fiske in the Spirit of the Times encouraged Campbell after his success with My Partner, he found The White Slave “unworthy of serious consideration.” He accused Campbell of rewriting Uncle Tom’s Cabin, adding scraps of Boucicault’s The Octoroon, and labeling it a new and original drama. “He makes no secret that his ambition in carpentering up this stupid plagiarism is catch-penny, not artistic.”83 A. C. Wheeler lauded the play’s thoroughly native flavor, however, noting “touches” that “might have been written by Walt Whitman or [Henry Ward] Beecher.”84 Towse, like Fiske, thought the play contributed nothing new or important, although it offered local color (or what the audience would accept as local color). What Wheeler praised as original, Towse dismissed as conventional, complaining that frontier plays might offer new plots but with secondhand characters and situations. In a short period of time, the machinery of melodrama had drained the life out of frontier drama. In his review of One Hundred Wives at Booth’s Theatre in New York in February 1881, Towse lists the clichés of the genre: “An abundance of miners in flannel shirts . . . the inevitable chinaman, the sanctimonious Mormon elder . . . the heroine . . . who has been lured from her home and her husband in England by the elder aforesaid . . . the efforts 128

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of the wronged husband to recover his wife and child and the arrival of U.S. troops to right all wrongs.”85 The popularity of frontier drama pointed to the significance of the West in American life and the myths that defined it. Theatre, like journalism, would continue to exploit the subject until it no longer held any interest for the public. But the film industry in the twentieth century turned myth into nostalgia, and a West that never existed became the defining image of the frontier for the nation. Novelties From the late 1840s until the early 1870s, John Brougham supplied the professional theatre with some of its most popular attractions. A native of Dublin, Brougham began his career as a comedian and playwright in London before coming to New York in 1842. As discussed in chapter 3, he created a number of Irish vehicles for popular actors. Many of his other plays were adaptations of popular novels, and he enjoyed some success with his dramatic versions of Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), David Copperfield (1851), Bleak House (1853), and The Old Curiosity Shop, retitled Little Nell and the Marchioness (1867). He wrote for Burton’s Theatre, later for the elder Wallack’s, and then for his own theatres, creating new or adapting works on short notice with mixed results. He dramatized Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred as Dred; or, The Dismal Swamp (1856), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1849), and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1849), plus lesser works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and T. W. Robertson. He wrote the melodramas The Red Mask; or, The Wolf of Lithuania (1856), The Pirates of the Mississippi (1856), and The Gun-Maker of Moscow (1857). He assembled the farces Love and Murder (1854) and Take Care of Little Charley (1858). Brougham’s reputation today, however, seems more dependent upon his burlesques than his other plays. His Metamora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs (1847) ridiculed not only the vogue for Indian plays but also Edwin Forrest’s acting of the title role in John Augustus Stone’s play. Po-ca-hon-tas; or, The Gentle Savage (1855) demolished the Pocahontas love story that had been romanticized earlier by James N. Barker and others. Brougham’s satire took aim at Italian opera, Shakespearean drama, minstrel shows, women’s finishing schools, politicians, the New York Herald, fashion, the “Upper Ten,” and the visit of French actress Rachel.86 All kinds of music—solos, duets, and choruses—helped fuel his evening of foolishness, especially when he substituted his own lyrics to those in popular songs such as “Pop Goes the Weazle.” Po-ca-hon-tas ends when the “Anti-marry-folks-against-their-will” Society rescues John Smith from losing his head. King Powhatan (played by Brougham) considers this an “outrage” against propriety, but Pooteepet, a member of the Society, tells him that they are determined to protect women’s 129

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rights: “Your daughter dear, must marry whom she may, / Daughters you know, should always have their way.” The issue is settled with a game of cards, and the show ends with a lively chorus. David S. Hawes argues that Brougham’s burlesques “practically succeeded in chasing the Noble Savage and gentle Pocahontas from the American stage.”87 Brougham wrote other extravaganzas, including Columbus El Filibustero!! (1857), The Great Tragic Revival (1858), and Much Ado About A Merchant of Venice (1869). In Columbus El Filibustero!!, Brougham takes aim at politics, get-rich-quick schemes, Wall Street, and American society in general where everyone hopes to become rich by investing in Columbus’s voyage.88 When Columbus arrives in New York, he is greeted by a band playing “Yankee Doodle” and banners proclaiming “Columbus for Mayor,” “The People’s Choice,” and “Columbus for Governor.” In act 2, when he arrives back in Spain, he brings with him a “trans-Atlantic” procession of “beautiful young ladies” representing the states. He is upset when Miss Kansas attempts to join the procession: What, with her bleeding nose? I told her she would have to wait a cure, And when her Constitution could endure Fatigue, she might come in.

Columbus can’t kneel before the Spanish king because “my Constitution wouldn’t stand it.” The king tells one of his ministers, “I’m sick of local plays and French translations.” And when told that new paintings have arrived, the king asks if the artist is dead. “Not yet, my liege, I think,” is the reply. “Ah, that’s a pity,” the king sighs. “They won’t sell ’till he is, in this great city.” Brougham’s satire is gentle but pointed. Characters in The Great Tragic Revival include Marcus Brutus Richelieu Samith, Cassius Marc Antony Shylock Barown, Romeo Stubbs, and Iago Iachimo Jones. In Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice, Brougham satirizes his usual subjects of politics and Wall Street as well as popular actors and plays. Note Lorenzo’s speech to Jessica in act 1: “I’d be beside thee, love, thy heart to soothe, / If I could only climb like Edwin Booth.” And Tubal tells Shylock in act 2 that Jessica “spends the money faster / Than A. T. Stewart or John Jacob Astor.” After Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech in act 3, Shylock quips: “Well, I’ll be hanged if he don’t talk like Beecher [the Congregational preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher].” Finally, when Shylock discovers he is trapped, he proclaims: “I’m sick, I’m sick: I pray you, sirs, be silent. / Take all I have; I’ll go to Blackwell’s Island.”89 Brougham’s sense of fun infused his productions. Richard Moody reports that in his Row at the

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Lyceum; or, Green Room Secrets (1851), Brougham, posing as a Quaker, was planted in the audience and, during the opening scene, stood up and exclaimed: “My wife! Come off that stage, thou miserable woman!” A shocked audience watched as he ran up onstage, apparently to drag his wife out of the theatre. Of course, this was part of the show.90 One of the most successful stage adaptations of the nineteenth century, Rip Van Winkle, began as a story published by Washington Irving in 1819 that spoke to Dutch folklore in the Hudson Valley. Irving tells the tale—supposedly from the posthumous writings of Diedrich Knickerbocker—of how Rip Van Winkle goes into the Kaatskill (Catskill) Mountains with his dog, Wolf, in order to escape his wife. Here he encounters some odd-looking personages playing at ninepins. They give him some strange liquor from a keg, and he falls asleep. The next morning, as he awakes and the day proceeds, he discovers that twenty years have passed. His wife is dead, his children are grown, and instead of being a subject of King George, he is now a citizen of the United States. It was a charming story, but as Joseph Jefferson III noted in his introduction to the play, “The tale was purely a narrative.” What could be done to turn it into “an effective play”?91 Jefferson knew that three or four earlier attempts had resulted in vehicles for other actors, including Jefferson’s father; J. H. Hackett; and Jefferson’s half-brother, Charles Burke. In 1859, after analyzing the other versions, Jefferson prepared his own but found that while he was fond of his character, Rip, the play overall was weak. In 1865, he commissioned Dion Boucicault to rewrite it, and this was basically the play he performed over the next forty years, adding and reshaping the play to make it as much his as Boucicault’s. In Jefferson’s acting version (published in 1895), the play is set in the Hudson River Valley with the Catskill Mountains in the distance. Beginning much as a temperance melodrama with Rip sacrificing his family to “riot and drink,” the play manifests other subjects that were part of the popular culture of the day. Rip’s wife, Gretchen, has refused the attentions of the vile Derrick Von Beekman because, as she explains, “woman is not a domestic animal, glad to serve and fawn upon a man for the food and shelter she can get.” Where Washington Irving drew Derrick as the schoolteacher who becomes a famous general during the Revolutionary War before he is elected to Congress, Jefferson’s version depicts him as the traditional villain of domestic melodrama with no redeeming virtues. He needs to get Rip’s signature on a deed that will give him possession of Rip’s property, and he attempts to do so by loaning Rip money and then asking that he put his X (Rip cannot read) on the note. Sensing that something is fishy, Rip refuses and asks young Hendrick, son of Nicholas Veder the innkeeper and friend to his daughter

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Meenie, to read it to him, and he learns that Derrick is attempting a swindle. Before Rip can confront Derrick with his treachery, however, he gets drunk, returns home, and is kicked out by Gretchen. The play follows the original story in act 3 with Rip hiking up into the Catskills in the midst of a storm where he meets the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his men. Jefferson learned from the other versions of the play that the ghost scene became unbelievable once Hudson’s men began to speak. In his version, they did not speak at all, leaving all the lines to Rip (thus to Jefferson). They offer him liquor, and Rip gets drunk, passes out, and awakens in act 4 to discover his beard and hair are long and white, his gun has fallen apart, and he has grown old. He returns to his village to discover that his home is gone and that everyone thinks he died twenty years ago. In Irving’s version, Gretchen has died, while in Jefferson’s, she is still alive and married to Derrick, who has become even viler than in act 1. Rip’s daughter, Meenie, has been promised to her old friend Hendrick, but he may be lost at sea, and Derrick wants his nephew Cockles to marry her to make certain they secure all of Rip’s property. Rip’s return upsets all of these plans. Hendrick is not lost at sea but arrives to assist Rip in reclaiming his family and property. Boucicault (and Jefferson) framed the story as domestic melodrama with good and evil characters and a clear dramatic conflict. They reshaped Irving’s story for the audiences of their day. While most critics regarded the play as little more than ordinary, they agreed that Jefferson’s portrayal of Rip was one of the most charming and natural characterizations on the late-nineteenthcentury American stage. Towse wrote in the Evening Post: “It was the trueness of tone and delicate nicety of emphasis that, in his Rip Van Winkle, supplied most of the humor and pathos to dialogue which in itself—let anybody read it—was but ordinary stuff.”92 No novelty of the age had the impact of The Black Crook, the musical extravaganza with spectacular scenery, transformation scenes, fairies and demons, and a seemingly nude corps de ballet that drew the wrath of pious critics and preachers and the repeated attendance of nearly everyone else, running 474 performances. The production occurred almost by accident when the partnership of theatrical entrepreneur Henry C. Jarrett and Wall Street broker Harry Palmer imported a ballet troupe to appear in the opera La Biche au Bois at the Academy of Music. The theatre burned down and they were without a proper venue until they reached an agreement with William Wheatley, manager of Niblo’s Garden, to utilize their company in a melodrama, The Black Crook, by Charles Barras. Inspired by Maria Von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, Barras had cobbled together The Black Crook several years earlier, borrowing freely from Weber as well as other extravaganzas.

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Cecil Smith has identified Undine, The Naiad Queen, and The Swiss Cottage as probable sources in addition to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust.93 A quick perusal of the play will reveal that the plot is the least important element. Like Faust, Barras’s Hertzog (the Black Crook) has made a pact with the devil. For each person he wins over to the devil’s cause, Hertzog will gain an additional year of life. This involves a pair of lovers—Rudolph and Anima—who have been separated by an evil baron who lusts after Anima and imprisons Rudolph. Hertzog identifies Rudolph as his new victim, frees him, and sends him on a suicidal mission to find treasure. On the way, Rudolph rescues a dove about to be eaten by a serpent, and the dove, in reality, turns out to be Stalacta, queen of the fairies. With her help, he easily defeats both Hertzog and the baron and is united with Anima. Having failed in his mission, Hertzog faces being cast into hell in a final scene that must have seemed to audiences like a glimpse into Dante’s Inferno: Fiends discovered in a chorus of demoniacal yells and fiendish laughter, dancing around a flaming chasm. After the action is continued a brief time, Zamiel [the arch fiend] waves his scepter. Zamiel. ’Tis well. Let silence reign awhile. How stands the record of the dying year? Has every seed brought sinful fruit? Is all the harvest gathered in—is every bond fulfilled? Redglare. All—all save one. Zamiel. Who plays the laggard. Redglare. One who sought to rival thy great power—Hertzog, the Black Crook. All the Fiends. Ho, ho, ho. (Echoed without and above, followed by a single wild blast of infernal music) Zamiel. If when the brazen tongue of clamorous Time, now trembling on the midnight’s verge, proclaims the appointed hour, the wail of no fresh soul by him betrayed breaks on the air of Hell, let him be summoned.94

After the gong strikes twelve, Hertzog is dragged on by fiends and is thrown into the flaming chasm with demons howling and dancing around it. Since the production took over five hours, much more occurred than is spelled out in this plot summary, mostly more luscious scenery, more beautiful girls in flesh-colored tights, and more transformation scenes that left audiences weak from applauding. When The Black Crook opened on September 12, 1866, the New York Tribune described it as a beautiful pageant: “The scenery is magnificent; the ballet is beautiful; the drama is—rubbish.”95 Notwithstanding such criticism, Robert C. Allen argues that Barras’s script,

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which is “part melodrama, part extravaganza, part spectacle” was written for songs and dances to be included, and this suggests why it was so successful.96 Dancers Marie Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, and Betty Rigl dazzled audiences and received star treatment. During the sixteen-month run, the show evolved with additional numbers and dancers. Next to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was the most successful show on the nineteenth-century American stage. Cecil Smith notes that it was revived eight times in New York alone in the nineteenth century.97 Edward E. Rice’s Evangeline followed in 1874, another extravaganza that depended upon girls in tights and spectacular scenery, and remained popular for thirty years. The phenomenal success of H.M.S. Pinafore in 1878–79 created a huge demand for the William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan comic operas from London’s Savoy Theatre. To conservative critics such as William Winter, the theatre of the marketplace and street had breached the ramparts and entered the temple. In the 1860s, Henry Clapp Jr. had attempted to convince him that drama was more than an intellectual exercise. Aesthetic pleasures that appeal to the senses such as ballet, pantomime, and dance must not be neglected because they are not intellectual. He reasoned that if good people want to purify the drama by excluding all vulgar accessories such as dancing and pantomime, they should put a pulpit on the stage “and be done with it.” But he warned that such attempts would fail because it is human nature to find pleasure through the senses.98 In the public’s overwhelming support of The Black Crook and its successors, Clapp’s prophetic words would resonate in the American theatre of the future, a theatre dedicated less and less to Shakespeare and the classics and more and more to theatre with music, spectacle, and dance. The middle years of the nineteenth century brought a mass audience into the American theatre, which worked to the advantage of melodrama and farce and to the disadvantage of the romantic drama and comedy. Playwrights told their stories in broad strokes, leaving little room for subtlety. Realistic scenery made its appearance long before realistic plays, although there was a growing tendency of playwrights to dramatize events within the experience of their audiences. Significant change came slowly for American drama. It would be over half a century before Poe’s demand for a more natural drama could be evidenced in the realistic plays of Eugene O’Neill. Although showing its age at midcentury, the standard repertory of Shakespearean, neoclassical, and romantic drama in the hands of star actors continued to draw audiences. Edwin Forrest’s sixty-nine-performance engagement at the Bowery in 1852, beginning on February 2 and ending on April 30, drew his friends and supporters even after his contentious divorce suit with Catherine Sinclair and the lethal Astor Place riot had branded him 134

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an adulterer and ruffian. Audiences viewed the repertory that had defined his career during the first half of the century: Damon and Pythias, Richelieu, Macbeth, Jack Cade, The Gladiator, Othello, King Lear, The Lady of Lyons, Richard III, Metamora, The Broker of Bogota, Virginius, Hamlet, Venice Preserved, and others. Charlotte Cushman returned to New York in 1857 after an absence of five years to open at Burton’s New Theatre in her repertory of Bianca, Lady Teazle, Romeo, Mrs. Haller, Rosalind, Meg Merrilies, Lady Macbeth, Lady Gay Spanker, and Katharine of Henry VIII. Odell writes that “thus ended one of the most brilliant engagements of those years.”99 Edwin Booth’s Hamlet ran for 100 performances, beginning in November 1864, also attesting to the continued power of star actors in classical roles. For the drama to cast off the millstone of tradition, the Victorians needed to make way for younger artists who viewed the world differently. More important, the audience had to change. Nineteenth-century theatre audiences were conservative by nature, preferring novelties to real innovation. Conventional morality always hung in the air, preventing playwrights and critics alike from dealing with the essential issues of men and women. Because the French were so much more liberal about such matters and had mastered the technique of storytelling for a contemporary theatre audience, they exerted enormous influence over Western drama in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Figaro (Henry Clapp Jr.) wrote in the New York Review of Books on April 1, 1865: “Whenever you hear of the success of a new play in any part of the world you may be pretty sure it is of French origin.” Practically all native playwrights stole from the French, although few acknowledged their sources. Clapp and Edward Wilkins were proficient in French and in the late 1850s made a practice of printing in the Saturday Press and other papers the titles of French plays that had been passed off as originals. There was little shame, however, in being caught plagiarizing a French play. Didn’t Shakespeare steal his best lines from older plays and histories? The neat and tidy structure of the French well-made play gave a clarity and simplicity to storytelling that had been absent in the romantic drama. The subjects explored by American dramatists now reflected what the public could read in their morning newspapers. It would take a playwright of the first rank and a more sophisticated audience to move beyond sentimental plots with happy endings, but at least the public was beginning to accept that it was proper for drama to reflect contemporary life.

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5 Realism and American Drama Is the play true, does it express American life? Does the plan unfold from the characters, and is the author looking at life, special definite facts of life, as the subject of his American drama? . . . We demand no set form for a drama, but insist simply on truth and a certain gravity of intent. —Hamlin Garland, Literary World, September 14, 1889

T

he American theatre has had a long love affair with romanticism. When bright new plays about hot-button subjects fail, when Shakespeare and the classics become boring, when literary plays cease to impress for their erudition, romanticism with its gut-wrenching suspense and last-minute heroics comes along to rescue desperate managers. There is something awe-inspiring about romantic drama’s power to captivate audiences and provide a respite from an adult world where actions usually have consequences. The romantic drama and its bastard offspring, melodrama, held the stage in the post–Civil War American theatre right up to World War I. Significant changes occurring in European countries, however, were working to undermine romanticism as the dominant aesthetic by the end of the nineteenth century. Cultured audiences began to view romantic notions of the world as provincial when confronted with scientific inquiry. The advent of modernism brought a new generation of critics as well as writers and artists who made truth to nature the foundation of their aesthetic. The realist movement began in Europe and found its way slowly to the North American continent. The uncompromising plays of Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Hermann Sudermann, and Gerhart Hauptmann together with George Bernard Shaw’s comedy of ideas found a small but receptive audience in America and encouraged a new generation of playwrights to rigorously confront the social problems of their age. Slowly an audience was developing for dramatic fare different from that typically viewed on Broadway. But it didn’t happen overnight. This was a difficult journey for the American theatre. Post–Civil War writers might have wanted to be honest, but audiences and critics demanded sentimental plots and happy endings. The template of romanticism required 136

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Realism and American Drama

an idealized drama. It was easier and safer to realistically depict scenery than people, and with the advent of sophisticated machinery and electric lighting (around 1880), the theatre was able to create the illusion of a real train or steamboat before it put onstage characters that truthfully depicted real men and women. In fact, traditional critics applauded the illusionism of the new realistic scenery because they saw this as serving the romantic ideal of the play. Bringing the uncompromising new European drama to American was one thing; getting audiences to attend and critics to approve was another. Any attempt to move away from the romantic ideal brought severe criticism from the old guard. Nym Crinkle (A. C. Wheeler) left little doubt where he stood in 1874: “Romanticism now and forever for the stage, is my motto. Wholesomeness, too, whenever we can get it. Don’t prate of intellectuality. By no possible human effort or conceivable superhuman miracle can you make the intellectuality of the stage keep pace with the intellectuality around it.”1 New York Evening Post critic J. Ranken Towse objected to Bret Harte’s first play, The Two Men of Sandy Bar, in 1876 because a drunkard and gambler received heroic treatment.2 A year later, he objected to the coarseness of language in Joaquin Miller’s The Danites; or, the Heart of the Sierras.3 His arguments were never about whether real people spoke such words but whether it was the purpose of art to depict real life or to idealize it. At about the same time, William Winter in the New York Tribune began attacking the sexually explicit plots of French drama and the coarseness of language and situations in the New Drama. He preached that “the sole refuge of this age is art; and that should be kept white, pure, peaceful, and beautiful.” He believed that the theatre is a temple of art, not a “workshop for shrewd and vulgar speculation in popular credulity.” The artist, he believed, had a higher calling: to interpret and champion the ideal. His belief in this idealized art put him in opposition to the new realistic literature of the age.4 The criticism of these Victorians grew shriller as the century came to a close. William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland Even while romantic drama was at its peak of popularity, two American writers—William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland—were arguing that literature and the stage must reflect life in the United States realistically, not through the prism of romanticism. Born in Ohio in 1837, Howells grew up on the frontier of America in his father’s print shop. 5 As he outgrew his backwoods beginnings, he wrote plays, poems, essays, and fiction, publishing many of these in his father’s newspaper. He read the best of contemporary European writers, including Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Heinrich Heine, as well as native authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 137

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Edgar Allan Poe, and James Russell Lowell. Because the newspaper business thrust him into covering Ohio politics, he developed a practical understanding of how government worked. His pro-Republican and antislavery political views led him to support Lincoln for president. As time allowed, he wrote literary reviews. The practical world around him began to appear in his prose and poetry. He began to despise the sentimental and romantic tales published in the newspaper and searched for stories that had the ring of truth about them. His trips to Boston, Cambridge, and Concord in 1860 allowed him to meet the preeminent authors of the age, including Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He met Walt Whitman in New York when he visited the so-called bohemians at the Saturday Press. With the outbreak of war in 1861, he applied for and was given a consulate in Venice. This took him away from America and gave him a new perspective on literature and drama. His Venice years exposed him to the plays of Carlo Goldoni, and he was later to credit Goldoni for leading him away from the romantic ideal.6 Howells’s writings for the North American Review and his time in Venice led to his job at the Nation when he returned to America after the war in 1865. Living and working in New York, he became friends with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Henry Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor—the arbiters of literary taste in America during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was clear during his work on the Nation that he was beginning to take aim at the excessive sentimentality then permeating American literature and drama. Writers wrote sentimental tales to please the public, not to tell the truth about any aspect of life. In 1866, Howells became the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, the most influential cultural journal in the country. It was here that he began to understand the provincial nature of the nation’s culture, as he was faced with accepting or declining literature with advanced ideas about religion and morality. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “The True Story of Lady Bryon’s Life” cost the publication fifteen thousand subscribers when it included Lady Bryon’s charge that Bryon had slept with his half sister, Aurora Leigh.7 Stowe had introduced a matter considered private and immoral by Victorian standards, and Howells had published it in a journal for the public. Darwinism prompted a war between science and theology. Howells faced the task of shepherding America’s leading literary journal through a battlefield in which little middle ground existed between those who believed in the authority of the Bible and those who found Darwinism compelling. As the foundations of romantic idealism were being stripped away by science, Howells in his novels sought to describe characters and events as truthfully as possible. In 1871, he succeeded to the editorship of the Atlantic 138

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Monthly and from this position of literary power was able to encourage an entire generation of writers, including Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and defend them from moralists who found their writings coarse. The depression of 1873 that brought unemployment to millions was deeply disturbing to Howells and left him aware of the discrepancy between the ideals of American business and its dark underbelly. He left the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly in 1881 to pursue a career as an independent man of letters, writing the novels Indian Summer and The Rise of Silas Lapham in the mid-1880s, the latter a realistic portrayal of the American businessman in the Gilded Age. Howells had a lifelong interest in the theatre. The author of thirty-six plays, he perfected the one-act play but failed to gain fame in this field. He promoted the realistic plays of Edward Harrigan and James A. Herne, claiming that British authors could not have written Harrigan’s ethnic urban types—Irish, German, Italian, and Negro characters. He stirred up a hornet’s nest when he asserted that Denman Thompson’s “rusticities” and Charles H. Hoyt’s farces possessed more artistic merit than the “genteel comedies imported from abroad” because they were more “true to life.”8 Hamlin Garland followed Howells in the late 1880s and early 1890s, demanding that American literature reflect contemporary American life as truthfully as possible. Born in Wisconsin in 1860, he moved with his parents to Iowa and South Dakota farms as the family attempted to scratch out a living during hard economic times. To educate himself, pursue a writing career, and escape this life of boredom and drudgery, Garland fled to Boston in 1884.9 The public library became his school, and he spent most days reading books on literature and science. Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, John Fiske, and others confirmed his thinking about progress and democracy and the replacement of divine law by natural law. Eugene Véron, Hippolyte Taine, and Walt Whitman taught him about art and literature. He read the novels of Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy and the plays of Ibsen, Sudermann, and Emile Zola. To make a living, he lectured at Moses True Brown’s Boston School of Oratory and began to write. The Boston Evening Transcript published his reviews, essays, and short stories, and Benjamin Orange Flower’s left-wing Arena carried his essays about social reform. He wrote also for Harpers’s Weekly, and his contributions were collected later and published as Main-Travelled Roads (1891). He joined the local-color literary movement that included Joel Chandler Harris, Edward Eggleston, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins—authors who wrote about their region of the country, reflecting, according to Garland, “conditions peculiar to our own land and climate.”10 With the success of his writings, Garland began to meet the important literary figures of Boston, including Howells in 1887 and the actor/play139

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wright James Herne and his wife, Katherine, in 1889. He reviewed Herne’s temperance play Drifting Apart favorably in the Literary World and brought the production to the attention of his literary friends in Boston, including Howells. “Here is a play which, with all its faults, deals with the essentials of American domestic life,” he wrote. “The relations of husband and wife” are presented with “sincerity and gravity as well as humor.”11 He protested against the “wearisome conventionality of the English melodrama and the never-ending statement of intrigue.” He railed against the “business of last wills, lost heirs, seductions, intrigue, and sensational clap-trap” that had robbed American drama of its vitality. “All protests,” he advocated, “should be leveled against conventionalism of plot and unreality of characterization.” He concluded his review by asking those who “are clamouring for sincerity and originality in the drama to give Mr. and Mrs. Herne the support they need and deserve.” During the same year, he viewed Beatrice Cameron’s Nora in a production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in Boston and proposed establishing an Ibsen Club to convince managers that an audience existed for realistic dramatic fare.12 In 1890, Garland with Howells fought to gain recognition for Herne’s realistic Margaret Fleming, the most shocking and controversial play of its age. In his Boston Evening Transcript review, Garland praised Herne for writing a play “somewhat in the manner of Ibsen.”13 Recognizing the lack of commercial interest in the new realistic drama, Garland advocated for an independent theatre in Boston in 1891 and a year later in Chicago; in spite of initial planning and enthusiasm, however, nothing came of either effort. An early advocate of realism, Garland is remembered today mainly for Main-Travelled Roads and his autobiographical A Son of the Middle Border (1917). A sequel, A Daughter of the Middle Border (1921), won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1922. Edward Harrigan Howells and Garland found in Edward Harrigan’s comic sketches a courageous attempt to depict the New York urban underclass, and they became avid supporters of his work. Born in 1844 on New York’s Lower East Side, Harrigan grew up with Irish and German immigrants who were packed together like sardines in the Sixth Ward. He left school at an early age and worked as a laborer in the shipyards. His experiences during these years would become material later for his sketches and plays. In 1866, he traveled to San Francisco and performed in the theatres and mining camps as an Irish comic; later he performed in minstrel shows. He met Anthony J. Cannon (Tony Hart) while playing in Chicago in 1871, and they teamed up to create vaudevillelike sketches about the new immigrant class. With Harrigan portraying the male characters and Hart the female ones, they added songs to their sketches, 140

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fleshing them out to full-length musical comedy entertainments. By 1872, their antics were attracting a large audience at the Theatre Comique in New York. From this beginning, Harrigan developed recognizable characters from the streets of Lower Manhattan. Writing in Harper’s Weekly, February 2, 1889, he explained his methods: “At the outset of my career, I found that whenever I tried to portray a type, I was warmly applauded by the audience, and praised by the press the next day. . . . It began with the New York ‘boy,’ the Irish American, and our African brother. As these grew in popularity, I added the other prominent types which go to make up life in the metropolis.” Harrigan also placed his characters in settings drawn from recognizable locales on New York’s Lower East Side: bars, opium dens, and dives. He would be called both the American Charles Dickens and the American Carlo Goldoni for his ability to depict these characters.14 Harrigan became famous for drawing Irish characters from the generation that had immigrated to New York after the famine of 1848.15 His best characters, Dan and Cordelia Mulligan, appeared in a series of plays beginning with The Mulligan Guard in 1873 that satirized the organizations formed by young men “anxious to identify themselves with politics.”16 In many ways, it continued the Mose plays of the 1840s and 1850s by offering working-class heroes for a working-class audience. The hero of the series, Dan Mulligan, was brave, honest, loyal, courageous, impulsive, and likely to become drunk and disorderly at the slightest provocation, yet forgiving and generous to his enemies. He was modeled on a real tailor from the Seventh Ward.17 His faithful wife, Cordelia, yearned for social status and suffered as a consequence. The German butcher Gustave Lochmuller, his wife, Bridget, and their daughter, Katrina, joined the Mulligans as part of the fun. Also included were the African American types: Mulligan’s cook, Rebecca Allup (played by Hart), the Skidmores, the barber Simpson Primrose, and the Reverend Palestine Puter. All were drawn from their real-life counterparts in Lower Manhattan. The Mulligans and Skidmores belonged to feuding militia companies, which created endless comic possibilities involving military marching and drilling. The Mulligans and Skidmores create havoc in The Mulligan Guard Ball when Mr. Garlic (the Italian) rents the Harp and Shamrock Ballroom to both groups for the same evening. The Mulligans enjoy several songs and dances before the Skidmores arrive and chaos threatens the evening. Garlic saves the moment by moving the Skidmores upstairs with ten dollars deducted from their rent. During the ensuing dance, according to stage directions, a “crash is heard and the ceiling falls with Skidmores on it.”18 The play ends with more songs and a cotillion while the tailors Sneider and Rosenfelt attempt to collect for clothes ordered for the ball. The final stage directions call for Lochmuller and six butchers to enter with cleavers. New York Evening 141

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World critic Alan Dale viewed the play in 1892, finding it “alive with quaint saying and picturesque truth touches.”19 Like vaudeville, Harrigan’s plays depended upon the skills of the performers to enhance an underdeveloped script. The Mulligan Guard Ball ran more than one hundred performances and prompted six other Guard plays that followed over the next two years: The Mulligan Guard Chowder (1879), The Mulligan Guard’s Christmas (1879), The Mulligan Guard’s Surprise (1880), The Mulligan Guard Picnic (1880), The Mulligan Guard Nominee (1880), and The Mulligans’ Silver Wedding (1880). The plays followed each other in sequence, with each new play beginning where the preceding one left off. 20 Harrigan wrote other plays. The Major (1881) abandoned the Mulligan characters and presented Harrigan as Major Gilfeather, a Yankee character who lives on his wits and cleverness in deceiving people. The play was a hit, running for over 150 performances. Squatter Sovereignty in 1882 dramatized the conflict between landowners and squatters near the East River. Cordelia’s Aspirations in 1883 and Dan’s Tribulations in 1884 brought back the Mulligan characters. After more plays and more tours, Harrigan revived Dan Mulligan for the last time in Reilly and the Four Hundred in 1890. The Illustrated American covered the opening: “Dan Mulligan has returned to New York. He is the type of its streets. He is as truly the embodiment of its popular life as Pulcinella in Naples or Figaro in Madrid[, and] . . . he has really had more influence in directing the course of the contemporary stage than any fictitious personage of his time. . . . Sooner or later our managers will understand the lesson which Dan Mulligan teaches. They will see that American spectators care only for the portrayal of American life.”21 Dale credited Harrigan with having “a keen insight into peculiar types that make up metropolitan low life.”22 Stephen Fiske thought that he had taken much of his material for his “vaudevilles” from variety and minstrel shows.23 Probably both were right. In a theatre dominated by English imports and French adaptations, Harrigan found an audience for his plays about American working-class urban life. Harrigan created American immigrant characters and placed them in his stories drawn from the streets of Lower Manhattan. Howells saw in him a kindred spirit: “part of the great tendency toward the faithful representation of life which is now animating fiction.” Writing in Harper’s Magazine in July 1886, Howells praised Harrigan for accurately presenting “the actual life of this city”: “the street-cleaners and contractors, the grocery men, the shysters, the politicians, the washer-women, the servant-girls, the truck men, the policemen, the risen Irishman and Irish woman of contemporary New York.” Writing in the Spirit of the Times for December 13, 1890, Fiske called him the most “original of American dramatists”: “His pictures of New York life have never been equaled.” While Harrigan excelled in creating realistic characters 142

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in local settings, he was a romantic at heart, and his treatment of the urban immigrant experience was largely escapist. His plots were little more than excuses for his characters to sing and dance. His plays were not well-made in the French manner but resembled loosely knit vaudeville or variety acts. The American drama did not follow his lead, although he influenced Charles H. Hoyt, and playwright-performers such as George M. Cohan carried many of his practices into the twentieth century. Charles H. Hoyt Hoyt has been compared with Harrigan for drawing broad character types and putting them into farcical and witty situations that depended more on vaudeville routines than on the formulaic plotting of the well-made play. Born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1860, Hoyt grew up in New England and pursued an early career in journalism, writing for the Boston Post as dramatic, sporting, and music critic.24 He attempted playwriting in the 1880s, demonstrating a forte for comedy and farce. He had a keen wit and satirized American characters from all walks of life in seventeen comic farces. In his first important play, A Bunch of Keys; or, The Hotel (1883), he built his plot around the conceit that one of the Keys sisters—May, Rose or Teddy—will inherit the Grand View Hotel from their uncle if she is picked by a “drummer” (a door-to-door salesman) as the homeliest of the three. The sisters are appalled. As May says, “I’d rather never have a cent than be called the homely one of the family.”25 But the girls have fiancés who lust after the hotel and attempt to persuade their brides-to-be that they indeed are the homeliest in the family. Schemes to grab the hotel crackle with humor. Writing with clipped dialogue and fast-paced action, Hoyt fills the play with physical humor worthy of the Three Stooges or the Marx Brothers (for example, Gilly cracking a walnut with a hammer on Snagg’s head). Lawyer jokes, congressmen jokes, and train jokes permeate the play, creating laughter that continually stopped the show. Songs and dances added to the fun. Much of Hoyt’s success depended upon finding actors who could play this broad style of farce. Hoyt wrote nearly a play a year from 1883 until 1899, the year before his death. His A Texas Steer (1890) remains one of the wittiest political satires written for the American stage, although racial stereotypes and ethnic humor make its revival impossible today. The plot is straightforward. According to the author, it is “a collection of saws and instances supposed to bear more or less directly upon the extraordinary possibility of American politics, and the development of statesmanship of the average type.”26 Against his wishes and while he is in Mexico, Texas cattle king Maverick Brander is elected to Congress. It seems that his daughter, Bossy, and his wife want to make a splash in Washington society and without his knowledge have contributed 143

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fifty thousand dollars to getting him elected and willing to serve. Major Yell, who has organized the campaign, has spent five dollars on each vote and probably “cleared ten thousand dollars on the job” for himself. Bossy explains that while her father may not like what has happened, “he’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that he came by his election honestly. He paid all it was worth for it.” Since everyone was paid in advance, “he’s under no obligation to anybody.” Fishback, the local African American politician, has delivered his constituents for the promise of an appointment as minister to the nonexistent country of Dahomey. Understandably, when Brander returns home, he is furious: “I’m an honest man! What do I want in Congress?” Since the deal included getting Brander to serve, Major Yell and other politicians pull out their revolvers Texas-style and end the rebellion. “Gentlemen, I’ll serve” are Brander’s final words before the first act curtain. In act 2, the Brander family is in Washington adjusting to their new status. Before he can begin his duties, the new congressman must hire a private secretary, according to Innitt, who wants the job: “The secretary knows the ropes and can show his employer the town, give him all the fun he wants, and bring him home in the morning.” Brander protests that he isn’t in Washington for fun but for business reasons: Innitt: Oh, if it’s money you’re after, I can be just as useful. I know all the lobbyists and can arrange all your business with them. Why, I’ve no doubt I could get you five thousand dollars for advocating the land-grant for the Northern Texas Transportation Co. They’re here with lots of money to get the bill through. Brander: And do you think I’d support that bill? Why, it’s an infernal robbery of the settlers! Innitt: Oh, well! What of that? You get your five thousand dollars, don’t you? You are too sensitive, Mr. Brander. You won’t give a thought to such trifles as that after you’ve been in Congress a session. Brander: But, sir! That bill would rob me of eighty thousand acres of cattle range. Innitt: O! Then, of course your conscientious scruples against the bill are justified. As you say, the scheme is an infernal outrage and must be squelched.27

The family has difficulty in negotiating the big city. The women dress so badly that they are kept in their hotel suite for dinner. Captain Bright has a new suit made for Brander so he won’t look like a hayseed. Hoyt includes a romance between Bossy and Captain Bright, but this takes a backseat to the farce and fun. The new congressman stumbles into the hotel elevator and, when it begins to move, pulls out his revolver. A young woman dupes him 144

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into kissing her and then blackmails him. And he learns quickly that the main currency of Washington is money. When three politicians from Texas arrive to check up on his attention to the railroad bill, he gives each a certificate for a hundred shares: “As stockholders, you’ll be able to understand the matter better.” Later, they get drunk and shoot up the hotel, injuring Colonel Pepper, who lives above them. When the police arrive, Brander hides them in U.S. Mail bags and refuses to let the law examine them: “Stop! Seize United States Mail at your peril!” The play ends with Colonel Yell sticking his head out of a bag and praising Brander as “the ablest and best man in Congress” and promising to support his reelection. Hoyt’s most successful play, A Trip to Chinatown, was a musical that became a huge hit in 1891, running 657 performances at Hoyt’s Madison Square Theatre in New York. Set in San Francisco, the play is a farcical romp where the title and plot are not as important as the antics of the performers. The play opens with a servant slyly deciding that the R on an envelope looks enough like a B to warrant giving the letter to bachelor uncle and man-about-town Ben Gay instead of the nephew Rashleigh. The letter is from Mrs. Guyer, a widow from Chicago: “My dear old boy! . . . You must take me to the grand masquerade ball tonight! Even if I am in mourning . . . I’m dying for a good time.”28 Uncle Ben, after some reflection, decides that while he thought she has been coming to the house to see his niece, Tony, in reality she has been coming to see him: “Damn bright woman, that widow! I’ll not disappoint her.” But how can he stay out all night at the ball without everyone knowing it? He had earlier forbidden Rashleigh and Tony an evening in Chinatown, but now he readily agrees to their request to go. This plays into their hands as they had been scheming with Mrs. Guyer to pretend to go to Chinatown but instead plan to meet at a restaurant and go to the ball. When widow Guyer arrives, Ben thinks they have a date while his nephew and niece think she is helping them elude Ben and go to the ball. Ben’s boyhood friend Welland Strong arrives to add to the evening’s complications. Welland is not well and not strong, clearly a hypochondriac, believing himself at death’s door: Rashleigh: Do you cough much? Strong: Not at all! That’s a very serious feature. My malady is so deep-seated that I can’t bring the cough to the surface. But instead I feel a sensation which, in a well man, would be called a thirst for liquor. Tony: And what do the doctors say? Strong: No two agree. Ben: And who shall decide when doctors disagree? 145

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Strong: Usually the coroner. Why, I had seven of them. One fool said that nothing aided me. Do you know, the only man who really understood my case was a horse doctor! He said if I stayed in Boston I’d die in sixty days. Out here I’d live two years if I obeyed certain rules. Here’s the book of rules and it tells just how much I shorten my life each time I break one. That glass of wine shortened it nineteen hours.

Since Ben is planning a night out with the widow (who has no inkling of these arrangements), he pawns off Strong on his niece and nephew for a night in Chinatown. They decide to take him with them to the ball and face the consequences tomorrow. It takes acts 2 and 3 to work though these complications and bring everyone safely home. The play is filled with singing and dancing—important to this play and to Hoyt’s farces in general. In A Trip to Chinatown he introduced the songs “Reuben, Reuben” and “The Bowery.” Charles K. Harris’s tune “After the Ball” also was added to the show. The most defined characters are Welland Strong, who is always dying, and Mrs. Guyer, who has the most vitality. Fiske considered Hoyt “our best writer of farcical comedies” and A Trip to Chinatown “very amusing and . . . sure to be profitable.”29 With A Temperance Town (1893), Hoyt’s antics turn darker as he makes a more serious statement about the hypocrisy of the prohibition movement and also, it seems, temperance dramas. Setting his play in Vermont, Hoyt suggests that all the respectable citizens, including the minister, are corrupt and the drunkards noble and heroic. While the law is closing down the saloon of Fred Oakhurst, who needs it to support his family, the doctor is writing prescriptions for liquor to be purchased at the drugstore. There is still plenty of wit and humor. The trial of Oakhurst is vintage Hoyt. Since no one can be sure that liquor is in the container that Mr. Kneeland Pray allegedly has purchased, the jury must find this out for themselves. Later they send out for “more evidence.” Apparently missing the satire, Fiske was not amused, calling the play “one of Mr. Hoyt’s mistakes.” “It is not true in Vermont, or anywhere else, that all the respectable people are cranks, perjurers, conspirators, and spies; that all the drunkards are noble, generous, and heroic, and that all the illicit rumsellers are Union veterans, with one arm and two motherless children.”30 Fiske reminded Hoyt that the theatre is “a place of amusement, not of argument for or against prohibition nor scenes which shock and wound the feelings of respectable people.” Like the farces of Harrigan’s, Hoyt’s plays were grounded in the events of their time, capturing the color and spirit of the age. His A Contented Woman (1897) satirized the women’s movement, A Brass Monkey (1888) business

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types, and A Milk White Flag (1894) home-guard companies.31 They drew tremendous crowds and made him a fortune. But his plays were written for actors to flesh out, and it is difficult today to appreciate and understand them away from their theatre. Historians argue that Harrigan and Hoyt were influential in the development of American drama. Montrose J. Moses suggests that realism on the American stage had its roots in the Harrigan and Hoyt plays. Barnard Hewitt finds Harrigan an important link between Benjamin Baker’s A Glance at New York in 1848 and Edward Sheldon’s Salvation Nell, Elmer Rice’s Street Scene, and Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End in the early 1900s.32 But for all of their popularity—especially with working-class audiences—Harrigan’s and Hoyt’s comedies seem more akin to George M. Cohan’s plays and vaudeville skits than to most American comedies in the early twentieth century, although some of their cheeky exuberance can be found in the early work of George S. Kaufman. They depicted their milieu with a great deal of local color and realistic detail, but the spirit of their plays was romantic and theatrical. Ibsen in America For most of the American drama of the 1880s, the penchant for romanticism continued—albeit with realist touches of character and situation—because the audience demanded it. While some of the cultured classes were aware of the Ibsen drama and had viewed his plays in Europe, their arrival in America created a major cultural war. He was introduced to American audiences in amateur productions as early as 1882, but it was not until Richard Mansfield produced A Doll’s House at a matinee in 1889 with his wife, Beatrice Cameron, as Nora that mainstream audiences had the opportunity of assessing this Norwegian playwright for themselves. 33 Critics were brutal in their responses. Amy Leslie in the Chicago Times called the play “morbid, forced, repulsive. The world abounds with festers of many kinds . . . but the way to remedy them is not to smear their horrible oozings over everything else.”34 Winter called Ibsenism a “rank, deadly pessimism . . . a disease, injurious alike to the Stage and to the Public” because the playwright represented “human nature as radically and universally vile and human society as hopelessly corrupt.”35 Fiske thoroughly disliked Hedda Gabler and said so in the Spirit of the Times: The despicable heroine has no redeeming quality. For the sake of a comfortable home, she marries a man whom she despises, and she begins to betray him before the honeymoon is over. One of her lovers, a drunken bohemian named Lovborg, also seduces Mrs. Elvsted. When Hedda discovers this, she ruins Lovborg by burning his manuscripts, and then

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hands him a pistol and advises him to kill himself gracefully. For herself she reserves another pistol and commits suicide when she finds herself in the power of another lover whom she loathes. This vicious gabble is preferred by the Ibsenidiots to Shakespeare and Sheridan, and Hedda is described by them as the grandest creation of the drama.36

Such attacks by mainline critics did nothing to help promote Ibsen’s plays in this country. To get his work before an audience, Catherine Mary Reignolds-Winslow, an actress at the Boston Museum, gave readings of his plays in halls and ballrooms. Hamlin Garland published a collection of essays in 1894 with a defense of Ibsen, prophesying that “his dramas lead to the future.”37 Few other critics were as astute or broadminded. Even the usually liberal New York Dramatic Mirror found “no ray of light, no touch of loveliness beyond a mother’s devotion” in the first production of Ghosts in the City in 1891.38 New York Times critic Edward Dithmar warned the actress Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske away from Ibsen in 1894 because, as he explained, the plays do not “impel hearty laughter or sympathetic tears. . . . There is nothing for Americans in Ibsen.”39 Alan Dale characterized John Gabriel Borkman in 1897 as “the usual curious palaver about redemption, and atonement and self-sacrifice. It is the conventional series of characters delving into their musty pasts amid the squalid details of the squalid life that this remarkable Ibsen adores.”40 Such critical resistance to Ibsen seems incomprehensible today and suggests how difficult it was to change habits of the mind. And uncomprehending theatre audiences remained sentimental and nostalgic, filled with notions of equality, progress, and “uplift,” believing that, facts to the contrary, everything would turn out well in the end. Steele MacKaye Change came slow in American drama as playwrights feared losing their audience if they strayed too far from the tried and true. But melodrama became more sophisticated as distinct lines between hero and villain were blurred and bombastic dialogue was dropped in favor of more natural speech. The public turned out in record numbers to attend Steele MacKaye’s domestic melodrama Hazel Kirke that opened at the Madison Square Theatre in February 1880. A contributor to the new realistic movement, MacKaye studied the Delsartian system of acting and set up a school in New York. He was an actor, manager, and playwright who eliminated the traditional villain and toned down the melodramatic excesses of character and plot in favor of understated actions and natural dialogue.41 But that is as far as he moved from the mainstream. Set in England, the plot of Hazel Kirke is conventional and turns on the legality of the marriage of the title character, daughter of mill 148

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owner Dunstan Kirke, to Arthur Carringford, who, in reality, is Lord Travers, an English nobleman. They have fallen in love while Hazel was nursing him back to health after he almost drowned in the milldam before being rescued by Dunstan. The major complication, however, is that she is promised to an elderly squire, Aaron Rodney, who saved the Kirke family from financial ruin seven years earlier and sent her away to be educated as the future “Lady of Rodney Hall.” Dunstan is a difficult man who believes a promise is a promise, even though Rodney is more than twice as old as the lovers and is willing to relinquish his claim to Arthur. When Hazel leaves with Arthur, Dunstan curses her and casts her “adrift forever from thy feyther’s love.”42 Hazel’s marriage to Arthur becomes an issue: are they legally married or not? Because his mother, Lady Travers, has been determined to marry him to Lady Maud and would be against his wedding the daughter of a mill owner, Arthur arranges a secret marriage in Scotland. His mother’s illness has prevented Arthur from telling her the truth. Hazel finds the situation depressing: “Your mother deceived! My father broken-hearted! Oh! it is horrible!” But bad news follows when Arthur’s valet, Barney O’Flynn, admits to Arthur that he misunderstood instructions and took the couple to the Scottish border but not across. A Scottish marriage on the English side is invalid. Worse news is just offstage. Squire Rodney, hearing that the marriage is a sham, has contacted Lady Travers and brought her with him to confront her son. Their motives are different. Rodney wants Lady Travers to demand that her son marry Hazel legally; Lady Travers wants to persuade Hazel to give Arthur up to marry Lady Maud because of the honor of their family. It seems that Lady Maud was a ward of Lord Travers, who spent all of Maud’s fortune and upon his dying bed made Lady Travers promise to marry their only son to her. Maud will come of age within the month and will demand a settlement of her estate. Only this marriage will save the family from disgrace. Hazel is sympathetic but claims him as her lawful husband, not knowing about the Scottish border problem. When Barney confirms that they were on the wrong side of the border, Hazel is adamant: “He shall right my wrong. He shall make me an honorable wife, or—I will—” Lady Travers protests that this will kill her, and Hazel sees that her father’s curse is responsible. She takes off her wedding ring before deciding against leaving it: “No, not this. My marriage ring! (Kisses it) This I have bought with a wife’s love, a woman’s perdition! This I will keep! (Going.) The rest I leave forever,—I go to cover up his infamy with my shame—and heaven forgive you all!” Hazel returns home and finds her father blind but still unforgiving. He tells Rodney: “If she were now before my very face, kneeling at my feet, prayin’ for my consent to marry ye, I’d tell her nay, never! I’d tell her she had wronged ye bad enough wi’out seeking to make ye the hoosband of a 149

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dishonored creetur like herself.” When Hazel asks Rodney if he loves her, he replies: “More than life—or all the world—but as a father, Hazel, dear, a father, and no other way.” Hazel decides to take her own life: “All is over; I know the worst now, and I know what I must do. I’ll go, and there in the water that has brought so much misery to this home, I’ll drown my sorrows and my sins.” The third act ends with shouts offstage that Hazel is drowning. Dunstan realizes that his blindness prevents him from rescuing her and that this is his punishment for his curse. Perhaps if Ibsen had written this play, it would have ended at this point. But MacKaye knew his audience. A lot happens between the third and fourth acts: Arthur rescues Hazel and nurses her back to health; Lady Travers dies; and Arthur gives up all of his estate to settle the claims of Lady Maud against his father. When asked by Pittacus Green if nothing remains, Arthur replies: “Nothing but my own hands; my own brains, and the endless wealth of my love for her.” Green replies: “Travers, I congratulate you. You’re above a lord now—you’re every inch a man.” And finally, a letter arrives confirming that the inn where they were married was on the Scottish side, not the English side, making their marriage legal. Barney simply didn’t know the difference. Before the play can end, the plot demands one more moment—the forgiveness of Hazel by her father in a tearful scene: “Hazel, Hazel, coom to my heart! My child, my child!” Towse in the Evening Post was not impressed: “The emotional drama has no doubt its place among other kinds of art, but that place in an inferior one, and it should be kept in its proper subordination. What the public wants in a place of amusement is not harrowing scenes and distressing tales of suffering and sorrow, but pictures of manners, nice delineations of character, diverting adventures, and genuine comic wit. Four acts of almost continuous agony are a little too much for any healthful sensibilities.”43 Yet Hazel Kirke was a huge success, running for 486 performances on Broadway and touring the country in 1882–83 with as many as fourteen duplicate companies. In 1887, MacKaye fashioned another hit, Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy, a romantic melodrama set during the French Revolution. Opening on Christmas Eve at the Standard Theatre in New York, it dramatized the chaos caused by the Reign of Terror. There is enough plot for several plays, dealing with Paul Kauvar, a hero of the Revolution; his secret marriage to Diane, daughter of the Duke de Beaumont; his rescue of the duke from the guillotine; his rescue of Diane and her father from the republicans; accusations of his enemies that he betrayed the Revolution; and, with the death of Robespierre, the announcement of amnesty for all Frenchmen, which unites him with Diane. The play offered the usual contrivances and last-minute heroics familiar to nineteenth-century playgoers but also spoke to the social unrest of the 1880s. 150

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A. C. Wheeler, who knew MacKaye, believed that he intended to comment upon the chaos that follows a revolutionary period, to contrast the difference between “liberty under obedience and liberty under license . . . [to] portray patriots and madmen side by side, each using the same torch.”44 Percy MacKaye would later suggest that the play was his father’s response to the trial and execution of the four anarchists involved in the Chicago Haymarket Riot of 1886. The riot had occurred while police were attempting to disperse a crowd in Haymarket Square; someone threw a bomb, killing and wounding policemen and civilians alike. The trial and subsequent hangings were highly controversial, reflecting the anti-union and anti-German feelings in the city. After one performance and before the executions, MacKaye changed the original title from Anarchy to Paul Kauvar, perhaps to diffuse the publicity associated with the executions.45 Wheeler praised the play’s heroic characters, thrilling climaxes, great suspense, and “action, action, action.”46 He also argued that the playwright’s social message had taken second place to the love interest between Paul and Diane. For an audience that wanted romance and “action, action, action,” MacKaye successfully created larger than life characters and situations. On the other hand, his melodrama is more restrained—less bombastic—than plays of twenty years earlier. And while Paul Kauvar seems a relic from the past, it is about more than love and action. MacKaye remains a transitional figure in the American drama, remembered less for his plays than for introducing the Delsarte system of restrained expression to American acting and for building two stages that could be shifted by an elevator in two minutes at the Madison Square Theatre. James A. Herne It was inevitable that sooner or later an American playwright would move beyond the effort to write a popular success and tell the truth about men and women. MacKaye did not take this risk, because there was no commercial reward for doing so. A better writer, Herne is regarded today as the best American realist playwright of the period. In the 1880s and early 1890s, he contributed several plays to the American stage that remain important milestones of realistic drama. Born in 1838 in Cohoes, New York, Herne learned his trade first as an actor in the 1860s, playing in theatres on the East Coast and in Montreal before managing the Grand Opera House in New York.47 He toured in the West and managed theatres for the pioneering San Francisco theatre owner Tom Maguire. While in California, he met David Belasco, and they collaborated on several plays, none important until 1879 when they wrote Hearts of Oak, the plot borrowed by Belasco from an old English melodrama, The Mariner’s Compass. After failing to attract an audience with the play in California, they took it to Hamlin’s Theatre in Chicago and 151

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opened it on November 17, 1879, later taking it to Philadelphia and New York and then touring it. While Hearts of Oak was not successful, it suggested that Herne was aware of the realistic movement or at least aware that public taste was changing. The play lacked a villain and a conventional hero and offered simple and colloquial dialogue. Herne biographer John Perry has suggested that the playwright was caught between two forces: “the old popular school of Boucicault and his growing conviction that drama should truthfully mirror the lifestyle of common people.”48 After the unsuccessful The Minute Men of 1774–75, an American history play indebted to James Fenimore Cooper, Herne in 1888 wrote a temperance melodrama, Drifting Apart, that showed the effects of drinking on family life. Thanks to the crusades of the American Temperance Society, temperance plays remained popular throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the 1840s and 1850s, when the best melodramas were written. The plot of Drifting Apart is simple: Jack Hepburne, skipper of the Dolphin, gives up sailing and drinking to marry his sweetheart, Mary. Fifteen months later, after daughter Margaret is born, Jack suffers a relapse on Christmas Eve and falls into a drunken stupor. Unknown to the audience until the fifth act, the events that follow in acts 3 and 4 are in reality a nightmare where Mary and Margaret die and Jack goes mad. But on Christmas morning, Jack wakes up to discover that it was only a dream and his family is alive and well. Drifting Apart had a run of 250 performances but was not considered successful. Katharine Herne suggested that audiences resented being misled.49 Hamlin Garland liked the play’s local color and scenes of quiet realism. It was his promotion of Drifting Apart and of the playwright that encouraged Herne to write Margaret Fleming, the play that was to make his reputation as a serious dramatist. With Katharine Herne in the title role, Margaret Fleming opened at Chickering Hall in Boston on October 5, 1891, supported by leaders of the realistic movement and attended by the city’s most distinguished citizens. The play quickly drew fire from conservative critics and audiences for its shocking subject matter and treatment on the stage. William Dean Howells and others of the realist school came to its defense. The plot moved forward in a quiet and thoughtful manner with simplicity of effect. The characters appeared true to life. Asides and soliloquies were abandoned. The dialogue appeared to be natural and understated. It was the play’s frankness about the double sexual standard that was most offensive. The first-night Boston audience suffered through the following: Philip Fleming’s infidelity with one of his mill girls; his child born out of wedlock and the mother’s death; his wife Margaret’s blindness when she discovers the truth; and, what was most offensive, Margaret unbuttoning her own dress to nurse the baby. 152

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The original version of the play did not have a conventional happy ending: Margaret did not forgive Philip, and Stephen Fiske in the Spirit of the Times of May 9, 1891, was appalled, dismissing the play as “commonplace, abortive, immoral, . . . a play of seduction, adultery, and delirium tremens.” Howells, however, rode to the rescue: “It [Margaret Fleming] clutched the heart. It was common: it was pitilessly plain; it was ugly; but it was true, and it was irresistible.”50 Palmer’s Theatre in New York gave a matinee performance of Margaret Fleming on December 9, 1891. While strongly supported by Howells and Garland, the play drew the wrath of major New York critics because of its unpleasant subjects: “The life it portrays is sordid and mean, and its effect upon a sensitive mind is depressing,” the Herald critic wrote.51 Margaret Fleming received twelve performances the following summer in Chicago with a revised script that made it less objectionable. Margaret Fleming established Herne’s reputation, but it did not make him any money. His next play, Shore Acres (1893), was a huge hit that owed its success as much to his own portrayal of the gentle and wise Uncle Nat Berry as to the idyllic portrait of rural life in New England. Uncle Nat, drawn in the tradition of the stage Yankee, had fought in the Civil War to protect the Union and now lives with his brother Martin and family on Shore Acres, near Bar Harbor, Maine. He is fond of his niece Helen, who is “high-spirited and proud, yet simple and direct.”52 She is in love with Sam Warren, a young physician attracted to the advanced ideas of Charles Darwin. Sam’s books provoke a violent reaction from Helen’s father, Martin: “I won’t hev yeh abringin’ them books here! A-learnin’ my daughter a pack o’ lies, about me an’ my parents a-coming from Monkeys—.” Martin will tolerate no argument on the subject of religion and orders Helen and Sam off the farm. They marry, move west, and have a child. Uncle Nat remains the gentle protector of Shore Acres, buying presents for his kinsfolk, bringing the family back together, and in the last act using a war pension to rescue the farm from foreclosure. The final scene of Nat shutting up the house, putting out the light, and going upstairs to bed was played without dialogue. The play ran five years. Clearly it touched audiences at some level and reminded them of home and family, holidays and tradition. Herne closed out his career with two commercial failures. A Civil War play, The Reverend Griffith Davenport, adapted from Helen H. Gardener’s best-selling novel An Unofficial Patriot, ran only twenty performances at the Herald Square Theatre in early 1899. Howells liked it: “It is an attempt, a successful attempt, to put upon the stage a carefully studied passage of life once real, in which only such incidents as express character are employed, and no mere effects are sought for the sake of effects.”53 Sag Harbor, a reworking of the Hearts of Oak material, also failed to find an audience the following year. Herne died in 153

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1901. Although his methods were old-fashioned and sentimental, he brought realism a step closer to being accepted on the American stage. Plays of rural life continued their hold on the American public into the twentieth century. One of the most popular was Denman Thompson’s The Old Homestead that started out as a variety sketch titled Joshua Whitcomb in 1876 and was expanded into a four-act play retitled The Old Homestead in 1888. From the beginning, Joshua Whitcomb was a vehicle for Thompson, who embodied the character of the old New Hampshire farmer with realistic detail. Edward A. Dithmar of the New York Times found poetry in the sentimental tale of the farmer’s goodness in giving money to a tramp who had reformed and in his forgiveness of and love for his wayward son, who had gone to the city and fallen in with a bad crowd.54 Clearly, Thompson created a memorable Joshua who rang true to the audiences of his day. And the production offered “real oxen, hay, [and] well water.”55 There were no villains and little overt action. Thompson underplayed the role and was praised for his naturalism. Climaxes seemed to rise from “the revelation of human character.”56 Fiske in the Spirit of the Times called The Old Homestead one of the finest plays yet written on American life because it transports a city audience back to their rural roots like “an old cradle song, heard again in late life.” “If the dialogue had been taken down in shorthand from the talk of country gossips it could not be more true to nature.”57 Like so much of late-nineteenth-century drama, its appeal was emotional; even the title reeks of sentimentality. The play ends with a festival to celebrate the return of the prodigal son to the old homestead. Augustus Thomas Realism to Augustus Thomas meant authenticity of locale. In the 1890s, Thomas contributed to a growing body of plays about American regional life with Alabama (1891), In Mizzoura (1893), and Arizona (1899). While his plots were conventional, he recreated regional scenes, characters, and dialogue with verisimilitude. Thomas was born in St. Louis in 1857 and grew up in Missouri, working at a variety of jobs including touring with a theatre company and newspaper reporting before he turned to playwriting. 58 In 1890, he was hired by A. M. Palmer, manager of the Madison Square Theatre, to serve as play adapter. The following year, other failures prompted Palmer to produce Alabama, which became a hit and established Thomas’s reputation. Opening on April 1, 1891, the play is set in Alabama after the Civil War and concerns the building of the railroad by a Northern company through a bayou. Alabama makes the point that with the war over and the country reunited, old resentments should be put aside and the building of one country go forward. Northern capital and Southern natural resources are the means 154

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by which this can happen. But hatred of the North runs deep for Colonel Preston because his son, Harry, left to fight for the Union and came through with General Sherman: “Your North came to my peaceful little corner here, and ruined it. They took my only boy. They impoverished me in possession, and in affection, too. My heart was big enough, sir, but it couldn’t keep your cavalry off of my graveyard. My colored servants loved me, but they have been driven away into vagabondage and theft and ignorance. My boy loved me, too,—they estranged his love.”59 Unrecognized by his father, Harry has returned as Captain Davenport, chief engineer and president of the railroad: The North and South were two sections when they were a fortnight’s journey apart by stages and canals. But now we may see the sun rise in Pennsylvania, and can take supper the same day in Talladega. It is one country. Alabama sends its cotton to Massachusetts—some of it grown very near your graveyards. The garment you have on was woven twenty miles from Boston. Every summer Georgia puts her watermelons on the New York docks. Pennsylvania builds her furnaces at Birmingham. The North took some of your slaves away—yes—but one freight car is worth a hundred of them at transportation. Our resentment, Colonel Preston, is eighteen years behind the sentiment of the day.

The theme of one country united again is symbolically underscored in North–South marriages, including Captain Davenport with Mrs. Page as well as Armstrong with Davenport’s daughter, Carey. Thomas keeps the focus of the play on the spirit of reconciliation and romance, not upon any problems besetting the new South. Scenes of local color, not big themes, characterize Thomas’s dramas In Mizzoura and Arizona. The former, written for the actor Nat Goodwin and produced in 1893, concerns the efforts of frontier sheriff Jim Radburn (Goodwin) to win the affections of Kate Vernon, a young woman he has paid to educate, unbeknownst to her. His rival is the polished and charming Robert Travers, a bank robber, although that fact is unknown to everyone. While the situation is a cliché of melodrama, Thomas has drawn his characters with realistic detail and depicted local scenes with an eye for regionalisms. In the preface to the published play, Thomas discusses its genesis. First, he decided to make the hero a sheriff. Also, there had to be a love interest: “A sheriff would presumably be a bit of the rough diamond; contrast wherein ‘lieth love’s delight’ prompted a girl apparently of a finer strain than himself; and conflict necessitated a rival. The girl should be delicate and educated, the rival should be attractive but unworthy; and to make him doubly opposed to 155

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Goodwin I decided to make him an outlaw—someone whom it would be the sheriff’s duty and business—business used in the stage sense—to arrest.”60 The bank robber was based on a real train robber yet seems as conventional as the rest of the characters. Thomas determined that he needed to make his sheriff sympathetic and decided to have him carry onstage a yellow dog with a broken leg: “It was a counter-pointing touch to a sheriff with two guns: it gave him an effective entrance; . . . and best of all, it gave me a ‘curtain’ for a second act: when perturbed and adrift after being temporary rejected by the girl, Goodwin should turn in an undefined but natural sympathy to the crippled dog in his box under the helper’s bench.” Thomas explained, “It is a visual thing that binds together your stuff of speech like a dowel in a mission table.” George C. D. Odell found the play “a priceless transcript from American village life.”61 Today it seems more like a windup toy with characters that do little more than provide color and help tell the story. They were clichés already in their day. Arizona (1899) is regarded as Thomas’s best play before 1900. His characters are nicely drawn, the dialogue is crisp, and he builds suspense well. His depiction of army post and ranch life in Arizona seems authentic, perhaps as a result of his visit to Arizona in 1897 to prepare for writing the play. Some touches seem new to the genre: San Francisco is depicted as the place of civilization when compared to the Arizona desert. The military post is characterized as a boring place for the women, who spend all their days waiting for their men to return. They yearn for somewhere to wear silk dresses and jewelry. The plot involves the attempted elopement to New Orleans of a cavalry officer, Captain Hodgman, with his colonel’s much younger wife, Estrella, and the issues of honor and self-sacrifice made by a junior officer who accepts blame to keep the colonel from knowing the truth. Later, when the affair is discovered, Estrella’s sister, Bonita, chastises the unforgiving husband: “You never danced with her. You never took her to the towns. You were always at headquarters. Don’t put all the blame on her.”62 Estrella begs her husband for forgiveness: “It was a madness. A recoil from the dreariness of the desert—a woman too much alone.” Thomas uses a prop to underscore the final moment. Instead of a big scene of forgiveness, the colonel picks up the rose that Estrella wore and puts it in his blouse before he exits. Such understated moments rather than big teary scenes suggests that Thomas understood what audiences were beginning to expect—the shift in aesthetics toward quieter and less bombastic displays of emotion. A master of the well-made play, Thomas continued crafting hits into the 1900s, taking his subjects from topics of contemporary interest. The Witching Hour excited public interest in November 1907 because it made spiritualism and hypnotism integral to the unraveling of the plot.63 Theatre audiences 156

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traditionally have loved a good drama about the supernatural, and in The Witching Hour Thomas combined a murder trial with hypnotism and telepathy. The play’s big scene comes at the end of act 3, when Frank Hardmuth arrives with a gun to kill Jack Brookfield but the latter hypnotizes him into dropping it: “You can’t shoot—that—gun. You can’t pull the trigger. (Pause.) You can’t—even—hold—the—gun.” The play ran for 212 performances as Thomas’s pseudoscience apparently appealed to audiences of his day. While most of his characters are stock, his gambler, Jack Brookfield, evokes a wide range of emotions, including humility. He always thought himself a gifted poker player until he realized that all his good luck was due to his psychic gift of reading minds. He helps Frank Hardmuth escape because he feels responsible for the murder of the governor-elect; he once thought about it and now realizes that his thoughts through telepathy may have implanted the idea in Hardmuth’s mind. Thomas may have had another theme in mind: Clay has been raised by his mother and lacks the masculine virtues of strength, courage, and self-control. He kills Denning because his fear of the voodoo power of the cat’s-paw causes him to strike back when it was thrust into his face. Learning courage and self-control would have prevented this. Jack blames Clay’s mother: “Say once for all to your soul and thereby to the world—‘Yes, my boy killed a man—because I’d brought him up a ‘half-effeminate, hysterical weakling,’ but he’s been through fire, and we’re both the better for it.” Years earlier, Helen had rejected Jack because she did not approve of his gambling. Now her pampering of her son has left him unfit to function in the world of men. Instead of designing buildings, he designs domestic interiors and reads poetry, feminine, not masculine, virtues. It is Jack who forces him to confront his weaknesses and learn what is expected of him as a man. Perhaps Thomas wished to comment here upon the feminization of American culture, especially noted in the plays of Clyde Fitch. It is ironic that Thomas’s best play, The Copperhead, was written in 1918, when the country was in the middle of World War I. Adapted from Frederic Landis’s novel The Glory of His Country, the play garnered some of his best reviews and ran for 120 performances. Towse in the Evening Post praised Thomas for capturing the spirit of the times and appealing to patriotic sentiments.64 Heywood Broun in the New York Tribune noted that although its success depended upon Lionel Barrymore’s acting and the times, it was “an excellent play” that “has at its best a distinctly exalted quality.”65 Thomas personalized the issue of patriotism with his character Milt Shanks, a farmer called to Washington by President Lincoln and asked to join the Copperheads and spy for the Union. His family turned against him, including his son, who was later killed at Vicksburg. He finally tells his story to neighbors 157

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and family because his granddaughter is threatened with the loss of her job because of his past. The Copperhead’s favorable reception in February 1918 seems related to patriotic feelings generated by World War I as well as to a brilliant performance by Barrymore as Milt Shanks. Thomas’s strengths as a playwright lay not only in depicting local settings that seemed authentic but also in drawing American characters that resonated with audiences of the day. His penchant for melodrama and excessive sentimentality, however, left his plays unable to transcend the theatre of his time. David Belasco Credited with writing more than seventy plays, David Belasco was also attuned to the tastes of late-nineteenth-century audiences. Born in 1853 in San Francisco, he grew up in the West and served a grueling apprenticeship in the theatres of San Francisco before moving to New York in 1882.66 As secretary to Dion Boucicault and collaborator with James A. Herne, he learned how to create realistic details, local color, American characters, and theatrically effective situations from romantic plots. Most of his early plays were collaborations or adaptations from the French. His first important plays, written with Henry C. De Mille, father of the Hollywood De Milles, included four melodramas: The Wife, a flimsy piece that nevertheless ran for 239 performances in 1887; Lord Chumley (1888), a vehicle for the popular actor E. H. Sothern; The Charity Ball (1888), a lightweight plot about sin and religion; and Men and Women (1890), a melodrama about a banking scandal that achieved a long run and then toured. These plays were conventional, tailored to fit specific actors, and of little consequence. But they served Belasco in refining his working methods and in understanding his audience. Discussing Belasco’s contribution to American drama is difficult because so much of his work was derivative rather than original. But he was a skilled craftsman who understood how to turn plots into suspenseful dramatic action. He did not rise above the theatre of his day but studied carefully what his audience wanted to see and the mechanics of delivering it. In 1893, Belasco, with the assistance of dramatic critic Franklin Fyles, wrote a highly effective “cavalry versus Indians” play, The Girl I Left Behind Me. Romantic melodramas about the West were popular in the 1890s due mainly to the public’s continued interest in Indian insurrections. The Girl I Left Behind Me follows closely in time a string of massacres, including the murder of Sitting Bull at Standing Rock, the death of Chief Big Foot and 300 braves at Wounded Knee, and the massacres at the Pine Ridge and Rosebud agencies in 1890–91.67 The play is set at Post Kennion in Blackfoot country in Montana. General Kennion of the American army and John Ladru of the Blackfoot Sioux are engaged in a struggle over the disruption of the Indians’ 158

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sun dance ceremonies. Ladru protests that the ceremonies are religious in nature, but Kennion has orders from Washington to stop them. What begins as a sympathetic treatment of the Sioux vanishes in the third act when they kill several soldiers, attack the fort, and threaten to kill the men and “do worse” to the women. Kate and Fawn, the daughters of General Kennion and Ladru, play important roles in the battle, especially Kate, who is engaged to one officer (Lieutenant Morton Parlow) but discovers she loves another (Lieutenant Edgar Hawkesworth). Also in love with Hawkesworth, Fawn is killed attempting to assist the army in the battle. General Kennion, believing that all is lost, is ready to kill his own daughter in order to save her from “worse” when the Twelfth Cavalry, led by Hawkesworth, comes to the rescue. With the Sioux out of the way, the last act is devoted to tying up the loose ends of the romances. Lieutenant Parlow is proven a coward and a seducer, which leaves Kate and Hawkesworth free to marry. The situations were not new but were effectively used. Belasco built suspense superbly, especially in the third act, when the Indians appear to be on the verge of winning, having promised to kill everyone except for Kate, who faces a worse fate. The Sioux are depicted as bloodthirsty savages, much the same as they were presented in the popular journalism of the period. To remind his soldiers (and audiences) of the seriousness of this conflict, General Kennion makes reference to the massacre of General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876.68 Belasco’s success with The Heart of Maryland at the Herald Square Theatre in 1895 marked the beginning of his career as an independent manager and established his reputation as a playwright. He wrote the play to showcase the talents of his newest protégée, Mrs. Leslie Carter. Like others before him, Belasco used the Civil War as the background for a romantic story. The plot is built around the heroics of Alan Kendrick, a Northern officer, and his love for Maryland Calvert, a Southerner. Alan is falsely accused of spying and sentenced to be executed but is saved by Maryland (Mrs. Carter), who clings to the clapper of the old church bell so it will not ring and warn the sentries that he has escaped. Although critics hated the scene, audiences loved it, and the show ran 229 performances before touring, making Belasco rich and Mrs. Carter famous.69 The most interesting character in the play is not Maryland Calvert, however, but the Iago-like Fulton Thorpe, dismissed from the Northern army and now a spy for the South. When confronted by Alan for his treachery, he exclaims: “I don’t care which rag I serve under. I fight for my own hand.” Livid with rage, Alan tells him that he is “unfit to serve the States,” to which Thorpe replies: “Damn the States!” Audiences were shocked. Important to this success was Belasco’s new star, Mrs. Carter, a prominent Chicago society woman who had lost a scandalous divorce suit and needed 159

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a way of supporting herself. Belasco trained her for the stage and tailored the role of Marilyn Calvert to fit her talents. Her success in the play established her career. Recruiting and training a number of aspiring young actresses over his career gained Belasco a justifiable reputation as a “star maker,” suggesting an interesting trend in the American theatre of the 1890s. After The Girl I Left Behind Me and The Heart of Maryland, Belasco adapted Zaza from the French for Mrs. Carter. A prostitute who discovers her lover is married, Zaza goes to his home to confront his wife; however, upon meeting his child, she changes her mind and reforms to become a great artist and later is able to reject his offers of love. The play was considered scandalous by most critics but delighted the public and ran close to 200 performances, suggesting that little had changed from the reception given La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils some forty years earlier. Two years later, in 1901, Belasco wrote Du Barry for Mrs. Carter, a play based on the mistress of Louis XV who had been a seamstress before becoming Countess Du Barry. A lavish costume piece, Du Barry offended critics for its morality but ran for over 150 performances.70 Belasco kept his ear tuned to the tastes of American audiences, writing or adapting plays with emotional impact, spectacular mise-en-scènes, and enough novelties to satisfy the crowd. In 1898 he adapted John Luther Long’s short story Madame Butterfly into a melodrama, tailoring the role of ChoCho-San for another of his protégées, Blanche Bates. Opening on March 5, 1900, Madame Butterfly was an instant success. The same year, Giacomo Puccini viewed the play in London and adapted it into one of the most beautiful and popular operas in the world. Belasco returned to Bates again in 1905, creating for her one of his most memorable characters, Minnie in The Girl of the Golden West. Minnie runs the Polka Saloon in California during the gold rush of 1849–50. She masterfully handles the hard-drinking miners, teaching them, mothering them, protecting them from the law when necessary, storing their gold dust, and keeping the romantically inclined, including the sheriff, deftly at a distance. Clearly all the men love and trust her, and she relishes her unconventional job and her freedom. A stranger, Dick Johnson, arrives and is recognized as someone she met on the road to Monterey. What she doesn’t know is that Johnson is the road agent Ramerrez sought by Wells Fargo, and he has come to rob her saloon. But he becomes attracted to her and leaves empty-handed, showing up at her cabin early the next morning. When asked if she is lonely living by herself, Minnie gives one of the loveliest speeches in the play: Lonely? Mountains lonely? Ha! Besides . . . I got a little pinto, an’ I’m all over the country on him—finest little horse you ever throwed a leg over. If I want to, I can ride right down into the summer at the

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foothills, with miles of Injun pinks just a-laffin’—an’ tiger lilies as mad as blazes. There’s a river there, too—the Injuns call it a “water road”—an’ I can git on that an’ drift an’ drift, an’ I smell the wild syringa on the banks—M’m! And if I git tired o’ that, I can turn my horse up grade an’ gallop right into the winter an’ the lonely pines an’ firs a-whisperin’ an’ a-sighin’. Oh, my mountains! My beautiful peaks! My Sierras! God’s in the air here, sure. You can see Him layin’ peaceful hands on the mountaintops. He seems so near, you want to let your soul go right on up.71

Belasco crafted such speeches with the vocal patterns of Blanche Bates in mind, calling them “very Batesesque.” Conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama required romance. Minnie had turned down all the men who had come into the saloon until Dick Johnson. What was there about this road agent, this outlaw, that broke through her defenses? Belasco provides the first snow of the season to isolate them in the cabin and allow them to fall in love. When Dick asks Minnie if she would leave with him, she agrees to be his wife. Just as life looks hopeful for both, a posse arrives, having trailed Ramerrez/Johnson to this point. Johnson hides, and Minnie learns that the man she has just agreed to marry is the outlaw being chased by a Wells Fargo agent. While she doesn’t betray him, she turns angrily on him after the posse leaves and accuses him of intending to rob her. He admits that he originally came to rob the saloon, but his attraction for her changed his mind and now he has fallen in love with her. She throws him out of her cabin, yet takes him back and nurses him when he is wounded. A master craftsman in creating suspense, Belasco kept his audience in a perpetual state of anxiety. The posse returns suddenly, and Minnie hides Johnson in the loft. He seems safe until a drop of blood falls on the sheriff’s hand, giving him away. To save him, she tells the sheriff (who loves her) that she will play him a game of straight poker, two out of three hands. If the sheriff wins, he will get both the outlaw and Minnie. If he loses, she gets the outlaw. During the game, she distracts the sheriff and pulls five cards out of her stocking to win. The sheriff, holding to his end of the bargain, departs. The posse gives up the search, believing that since Johnson’s horse has been found, it seems likely that he died in the snow. While it looks now like Johnson will escape, Belasco has one more “obstacle” to throw in the path of the lovers. Johnson is captured while attempting to leave and brought back to the saloon in a last request to see Minnie before the sheriff hangs him. But this is theatre, not life: when the men see how much Minnie cares for him, they order the sheriff to let him go. A final scene finds her and Johnson camped out on the prairie on their journey back east together. The Girl of the Golden West was a

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huge hit in 1905, running 224 performances in New York with touring shows crisscrossing the country. Puccini adapted it also into an opera. Belasco continued as a force in the American theatre until 1930 but less and less as a playwright and more as a director and producer. All historians have had to confront the issues of authorship and plagiarism that Belasco’s plays invite. He was not an original artist. He was, however, a highly skilled craftsman who understood how to give his audiences what they wanted to see. He did not have the vision or talent to create a work that would survive beyond his own time. Fortunately, for two of his plays, Puccini did. If we remember Belasco today, it is because Puccini took two of his plays and created operas that are still performed today. William Gillette The Civil War inspired countless war dramas, although it took more than a generation for the horrors of the war to recede enough for the subject to become popular with the public, and then mainly as a background for heroics and romance. Augustin Daly’s Norwood, two years after the war, and Boucicault’s Belle Lamar in 1874 touched upon Civil War subjects; yet it was William Gillette’s Held by the Enemy, a huge success at the Madison Square Theatre in 1886, that seems the catalyst for the abundance of war plays that followed. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1855, Gillette began in the theatre as an actor, making his first appearance in New York in 1877 in Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age. His first play, The Professor, received a professional production at the Madison Square Theatre in June 1881, the same year he collaborated on Esmeralda with Frances Hodgson Burnett. The Private Secretary, another adaptation in 1884 from the German comedy Der Bibliothekar, preceded Held by the Enemy, which followed in 1886. A melodrama involving spies and romance, Held by the Enemy is set in a Southern city occupied by Northern troops. The plot concerns the love of two Union officers, Colonel Brant and Brigade Surgeon Fielding, for Eunice McCreery, who is engaged to a Confederate officer, Lieutenant Hayne. Arrested for spying, Hayne is tried at court martial; later wounded, he pretends to be dead so his “body” can be shipped through enemy lines. Fielding is about to discover Hayne’s secret when, to save Hayne, Eunice whispers to Fielding that she will marry him. The conflict focuses on which man Eunice will marry, not upon the significant issues of the war, and in the final scene both Fielding and Hayne step aside to allow Eunice to marry the man she truly loves, Colonel Brant. With a public not ready to deal with the carnage of the war, battles and deaths are kept offstage. By the late 1880s, ground rules for discussing the war placed sectional differences in the background. As noted in chapter 4, Bronson Howard’s 162

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Shenandoah made heroism, not partisanship, its theme. “There is an evenhanded recognition of the bravery of Northern and Southern men,” A. C. Wheeler wrote in his Dramatic Mirror review of Howard’s play, September 14, 1889, “that will make the play just as acceptable in South Carolina as it will be in Boston.” Jeffrey Mason suggests that by the time of Shenandoah, the subject had been framed in the nation’s discussion to create the myth of the Civil War.72 Slavery and other sectional differences were deemphasized, and characters on both sides were depicted as fighting for liberty and independence. All soldiers were brave, and all fought for a noble cause. Political issues were cast aside for the safer domestic and emotional ones as the mood of the country—especially in the North—favored reconciliation. The ideology of reconciliation associated the masculine ideal with the North and the feminine with the South. Union officers and the Confederate woman they loved became a cliché of Civil War drama. The success of Gillette’s Secret Service in 1895 suggests how popular the war had become as public entertainment. It originally opened in Philadelphia on May 13 and moved to the Garrick Theatre in New York the following October 5.73 For the New York production, Gillette played the leading role of Lewis Dumont, who, posing as Captain Thorne of the Confederate army, is spying for the North. He has fallen in love with Edith Varney, daughter of a Confederate general, who obtains for him a commission in the Telegraph Service. Benton Arrelsford of the Confederate War Office, also in love with Edith, suspects him and sets a plan to expose him. At a crucial point, Edith produces the commission from Jefferson Davis to save Thorne, and he secures the telegraph to send a message to Union forces in one of the most theatrical scenes of the play. Anticipating his actions, Edith reminds him that she has acted to save his life because she loves him, not to assist him in betraying her country. Love wins over patriotism, and Thorne does not send the message, which works to his advantage when he is captured at the end of the play. Usually it is a Confederate woman who sacrifices her country for the man she loves, but Gillette has reversed this, skillfully gaining audience sympathy for the choices of these characters. He builds suspense well and maintains continuous action. The play was successful in London, toured widely in the States, and was revived frequently. Played for years by Gillette himself in an emotionally restrained, economical style, Captain Thorne was the epitome of the cool and calculating romantic hero of his day. The absurdity of Thorne abandoning a dangerous mission on the verge of success that might bring victory to the Union is matched by the absurdity of the Confederate general not shooting a Northern spy, caught out of uniform behind enemy lines. But these absurdities must have seemed trifles for the audience when viewed against the dash, verve, romance, and style of Gillette’s acting and the heroics of the plot. 163

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Clyde Fitch That Clyde Fitch had ten plays running on Broadway or touring simultaneously during 1901 would suggest a playwright in touch with contemporary American culture.74 Born at the end of the Civil War in May 1865, Fitch grew up in Schenectady, New York, where as a child he wrote poems, stories, and plays and rehearsed his own theatre company. Later, he developed his interest in dramatics while attending Amherst College, acting female roles in college productions besides writing and directing. His big break came in 1889 when he was commissioned to write a vehicle for Richard Mansfield based on the character of Beau Brummell. Borrowing from an earlier play and a biography on Brummell, Fitch built a compelling drama, fitting the title role to Mansfield’s eccentricities, producing a character both foolish and heroic but always a gentleman and, in the end, sympathetic. Opening on May 19, 1890, at the Madison Square Theatre, the play received a mixed reception from critics but proved a hit for the actor, who played the role for years. And it launched Fitch’s career. Some sixty-two plays followed, including thirty-six originals, all but one dealing with American subjects. Like his predecessors Augustin Daly and David Belasco, Fitch wrote many of his plays as vehicles for stars, especially actresses Julia Marlowe, Ethel Barrymore, Clara Bloodgood, Olga Nethersole, and Maxine Elliott. With A Modern Match in 1892, Fitch wrote his first major play about American social life; his insights here and in later plays make him a valuable chronicler of his age. While female characters were secondary to Gillette, Thomas, and Howard, they were primary to Fitch. He had a special affinity for depicting women in his plays, which raises questions concerning his gender and sexual identity. He was considered a dandy and a “sissy boy” by his contemporaries. Robert Herrick called his qualities “feminine, without being effeminate.”75 Evidence suggests that he had a brief affair with Oscar Wilde in 1889 and 1890. In her essay “Clyde Fitch’s Too Wilde Love,” Kim Marra contends that Fitch’s transvestite impulses and same-sex attractions informed his female characters.76 She regards gender as central rather than peripheral to understanding Fitch’s plays. Fitch’s social comedies provide a special insight into the growing role of women in American cultural life, or what Ann Douglas calls the “feminization of American culture.” A cultural historian, Douglas notes that Victorian American women “comprised the bulk of educated churchgoers and the vast majority of the dependable reading public; in ever greater numbers, they edited magazines and wrote books for other women like themselves.”77 As they became the “prime consumers of American culture,” they began to exert a powerful influence over it. Her comments echo those of Henry Steele Commager, who wrote of the era: “Women not only controlled education 164

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and religion but largely dictated the standards of literature and art and clothed culture so ostentatiously in feminine garb that the term itself came to have connotations of effeminacy.”78 By 1900, this influence could be seen in contemporary drama as the heroic, action-packed melodramas gave way to sentimental, socially-oriented melodramas. The name Clyde Fitch became a synonym for this drama. Fitch’s plays written in the 1890s show the influence of the romantic drama. Set in the court of Charles II, the plot of His Grace de Grammont (1894) involves a cavalier spiriting away a mistress of the king. Mistress Betty (1895), also given an English setting, presents an actress marrying a duke with tragic consequences. Bohemia (1896) transferred Henri Murger and Theodore Barriere’s stories about the lives of Parisian bohemians from France to New York. The Moth and the Flame, adapted from a short play, was a hit in 1898, as was Nathan Hale the same year. The Spanish-American War may have helped create interest in the latter piece, although Fitch dealt less with the Revolutionary War and more with a character study of the unfortunate Hale. Like earlier plays based on Hale, Fitch also made him a heroic figure. He rewrote history with Barbara Frietchie (1899) by depicting Barbara as a young Southern woman in love with a Union officer, Captain Trumbull. After he is killed, she is shot hanging out his “blood-stained flag” from her balcony. While Barbara Frietchie was considered an effective melodrama, Fitch was criticized for altering John Greenleaf Whittier’s image of the Civil War heroine by making her a young woman instead of “fourscore years and ten”—an image that had become the orthodox version for most of the public.79 Having established his reputation in the 1890s as a commercially astute playwright, Fitch came to dominate the New York theatre during the first decade of the new century. During the 1900–1901 season alone he had four hits on Broadway: The Climbers, Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, Lover’s Lane, and Barbara Frietchie. The Way of the World, The Girl and the Judge, and The Marriage Game opened during the fall season of 1901. Touring during the year were The Cowboy and the Lady, Nathan Hale, and three companies of Lover’s Lane.80 No playwright at the time matched Fitch’s output. The Climbers is a serious attempt to depict social life in turn-of-the-century New York, although there are echoes here of Daly’s Divorce and Pique as well as Howard’s The Henrietta.81 The Climbers opens in the drawing room of the Hunters’ richly furnished home on Fifth Avenue on the day of Mr. Hunter’s funeral. A conflict breaks out almost immediately between Mrs. Hunter and Ruth Hunter, sister of the deceased. Ruth is a New England aristocrat of the old school who shuns the social scene and finds her sister-in-law’s social aspirations silly and frivolous. Climbing up the social ladder has been the main occupation of Mrs. Hunter, and her extravagance may have led to 165

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her husband’s death. At the reading of the will, Mrs. Hunter and her three daughters, Blanche, Jessica, and Clara, learn there is no inheritance. Faced with family debts, Hunter risked everything in the stock market and lost. Blanche’s husband, Richard Sterling, also lost money in the same investment and may be involved in a fraud. So the family faces ruin. The Hunter women now must find ways of coping. Ruth suggests that the daughters might go to work, but Mrs. Hunter finds this below the dignity of the family. Marriage, perhaps to a European aristocrat, she thinks a better solution. The arrival of three guests promises some relief. Although they are allegedly there to offer condolences, Miss Sillerton and Miss Godesby come to buy the dresses that the Hunters recently bought in Paris, knowing that the women can’t wear them this season because they are in mourning. The third guest, Mr. Trotter, wants to marry Clara Hunter. He has money but no class, and Clara Hunter will give him class. In the best scene in the play, Mrs. Hunter schemes to sell the dresses for more than they are worth, while Sillerton and Godesby scheme to buy them for less. It is ironic that this bargaining takes place in a Fifth Avenue drawing room. The focus of the play then moves to Blanche and her relationship with husband Richard, who has stolen money from Ruth Hunter and lost it in the stock market. “There were plenty of men around me making their fortunes!” Richard explains. “I wanted to equal them—climb as high as they; it seemed easy enough for them, and luck had begun to come my way. We’re all climbers of some sort in the world. I was a climber after wealth and everything it brings—” Fitch has a point to make about the competitiveness of modern life in turn-of-the-century New York, but it gets lost in a romantic subplot. Richard’s best friend, Warden, has been in love with Blanche for years but has never told her. He does everything in his power to protect her, including getting everyone to promise not to prosecute Richard. He finally confesses his love to Blanche, who acknowledges similar feelings but refuses to act because she is married to Richard and they have a son. When she discusses with Ruth Hunter the possibility of obtaining a divorce, she is told to remain with her husband, “bearing a cross for the sake of duty.” In words echoing Nora’s in A Doll’s House, Blanche asks, “But my own life, my own happiness?” Always the puritan, Ruth accuses her of being selfish: “The watchword of our age is self! We are all for ourselves; the twentieth century is to be a glorification of selfishness, the Era of Egotism.” There is a kind of rigidity in Ruth that begins to diminish the validity of her standards. Should a woman remain in a loveless marriage? Blanche asks Ruth the question that must have occurred to all women in the audience: “But I love Ned Warden. He loves me—life stretches out long before us. Dick has disgraced us all. I don’t love him—should I give my happiness and Mr. Warden’s 166

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happiness for him?” If Blanche divorced the wastrel Richard and married the honorable Warden, Fitch risked offending the audience in 1901. Knowing his public, he ended the play with Richard’s suicide, leaving Blanche and Warden free to marry. While much of the plot is conventional—social climbing and Wall Street speculation leading to ruin had become clichés by 1900—Fitch does make a convincing argument for divorce. And he creates a sympathetic character in Blanche, who, like Nora in Ibsen’s play, believes she has a duty to herself at least as important as her duty to her husband. The play ran for 163 performances on Broadway. Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines is set in New York, the opening scene at the landing dock of the Cunard Line.82 Newsboys hawk their papers, and everyone waits for the opera diva Madame Trentoni to depart the ship. Workers unload her trunks, and a detective arrives to make sure that she doesn’t smuggle any contraband into the country. Topical references to the Tribune, Boss Tweed, Horace Greeley, and Hoboken establish the time period and place. Captain Jinks and two friends are “on the town” when the captain makes a bet that he will make love to Madame Trentoni while she is in New York. There is something very American about this play, a kind of cheeky insolence in Captain Jinks that signals its nationality. Madame Trentoni, in reality Aurelia Johnson from Trenton, New Jersey (“Trentoni”), has been living and singing abroad. Captain Jinks introduces himself, asks her out, and is told he should call on her tomorrow. Two members of the Anti-French Literature League arrive with a petition signed by over six hundred women and schoolchildren to persuade Madame Trentoni not to make her debut in La Traviata because it is “the French drammer, ‘La Dame aux Camélias.’” More trouble arrives with the detective and his insistence that he look through Madame Trentoni’s trunks. When he throws her clothes on the ground, she is furious: If you ruin my clothes, I shall sue the city—I warn you of that! Do you take me for an Irish dressmaker, with a French name, smuggling in her winter models? My dear man, go on! Play hide-and-seek in every box, if you like? Climb down all the corners, use my hats for tenpins, empty out the shoes, scatter my lingerie to the winds! Jump on every stitch I own! . . . Captain Jinks, I leave, not my honor, but something much more fragile,—I leave my wardrobe in your hands!

With a new promise of a tryst that afternoon, Captain Jinks tries to bribe the detective to rush her luggage through customs: “Look here, now, it’s all right—the lady’s all right, and you and I are all right. We understand each other, don’t we?” They don’t. When he attempts to slip some bills to the detective, he is immediately arrested and hauled off to jail. His friends are 167

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delighted because this leaves them free to collect the bet. But Jinks wins a quick release on bail, proposes marriage, and Madame Trentoni (née Aurelia Johnson) accepts, but with one condition: he must ask permission of her music teacher, Professor Belliarti. At this point, complications threaten to derail the romance: Jinks’s mother arrives to demand that Aurelia give up her son because she is “an actress, I believe?” With a nod to Camille, Mrs. Jinks tells Madame Trentoni that the captain is in line for a “magnificent diplomatic position” that will be impossible if he marries an actress. Things go from bad to worse when Jinks’s friends tell Professor Belliarti about the bet and the professor demands that she break off the engagement. Further complications arise when Jinks forgets to appear in court on the earlier charge and a warrant is served for his arrest. Although Madame Trentoni’s American debut is a great triumph, she is heartbroken and decides to leave the stage and sail the next day for England. Just at this moment of decision, she receives a white camellia with a note attached from the captain: “I must see you—there is a terrible mistake—if you ever loved me, give me an interview—” They meet in her dressing room, each protesting that the other is responsible for the rendezvous. The bet is the issue between them, and Jinks asks his friends to tell her that he made the wager before he saw her and repudiated it afterward. In no mood to be charitable, his friends refuse. At the point that he has convinced her of his sincerity, a policeman arrives to arrest him. “Couldn’t you be just a little nearsighted, just to please me?” Madame Trentoni pleads. Charm and guile and a promise to appear in court the next day work wonders, and the policeman decides that he doesn’t see “a sign of him!” Now all that is left is to get Professor Belliarti’s permission. The curtain falls to the guests singing “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines” as the captain and Madame Trentoni leave the stage arm in arm. It was a charming romantic comedy that ran for 168 performances and subsequently was turned into a musical comedy in 1925. The role made a star out of Ethel Barrymore, who over a long career would became a grand dame of American stage and screen. Written in the early 1890s but not produced until 1901, Lover’s Lane 83 is a domestic comedy that looks backward to Herne’s Shore Acres (1893) and forward to Booth Tarkington’s Clarence (1919) and, to some extent, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It with You (1936). Fitch’s play concerns a liberal and broadminded minister who takes into his home all the misfits of the community and refuses to judge anyone harshly. His character functions much like Martin Vanderhof in the Hart and Kaufman play. Fitch’s world in Lover’s Lane is filled with gossips who have a narrow view of morality and want others to live by their standards. When the minister, Dr. Singleton, refuses to fire a singer in the choir because she is divorced, the rest of the 168

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choir threaten to resign: “If we go, the organist goes with us. Mrs. Canning says all the wealth of the Indies couldn’t make her play accompaniments for a divorced voice.” They also suspect that she is an actress. The divorced woman, Mrs. Woodbridge, and her lame son move into the minister’s home when they are kicked out of theirs. He learns the circumstances of her divorce: that her husband drank and gambled, losing all their money on the horses. Like in The Climbers, Fitch tiptoes into forbidden territory by suggesting that at times, divorce may be the best solution to a bad marriage. But like The Climbers, he provides an ending where contemporary morality wasn’t threatened: the divorced couple reconciles. Earlier, when preparing to marry a young woman and a much older man, the minister and the bride learn that the bridegroom is divorced and that his former wife is the same Mrs. Woodbridge now living at the parsonage. Singleton refuses to perform the wedding because he believes Mr. Woodbridge will not make the bride happy. Also, he has fallen a little in love with her himself. Unhappy with being deceived, the bride-to-be, Mary Larkin, remains behind, and Dr. Singleton appoints her to a teaching position in the school. Singleton gets into further trouble with his congregation when the billiard table he has ordered arrives for the young men’s club. Committee members from the church voice a number of complaints against his liberal practices. First, they accuse him of damaging the reputation of the church by allowing beggars to live in the parsonage; next, they want Mrs. Woodbridge and her son out on the street; in addition, they want Singleton married to one of the “well-favored women” from the congregation; and, most important, they don’t want his new liberal doctrine of “laxity and freedom” upsetting their lives. We don’t want a billiard table in the young men’s club. We don’t want playing cards in the social parlors. It’s rumored you’ve even written a sermon upholdin’ the new-fangled doctrine of there being no such thing as Fire and Brimstun! You have harbored in your house a woman who has, of her own free will, sundered her marriage vow, thus bringing scandal on the community—ahem! Do you deny any of these charges?

He doesn’t. Unless he dismisses Mrs. Woodbridge and her son from his home, the council will demand his resignation. He refuses and resigns. He owns the parsonage, however, and continues to take care of the misfits who live there. Six months later, the church has gone through several new ministers, and the most recent one is leaving. Delegates from the church council return, hat in hand, to ask that the sewing circle be allowed to meet again at the parsonage, that Mrs. Woodbridge return to the choir, and that Singleton return to the 169

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pulpit. By this time he and Mary Larkin have fallen in love and the Woodbridges have reunited. When asked by his congregation if he will return, he replies, “With all my heart!” There is a great deal of folksy humor in Lover’s Lane. Because he keeps getting involved in the messy lives of his congregation, Singleton is unable to finish a sermon on “Is there an actual Purgatory or not?” When provoked, he has a temper. Accused by Woodbridge of taking Mary from him, Singleton is willing to fight: “Preaching isn’t the only thing I can do. I’m the captain of our ball nine, and the Congregationalists didn’t knock out the Methodists last Spring for nothing. I can use my fists.” This is a play with a heart. Simplicity, an orphan dismissed from the orphanage, adores the minister and is jealous of Mary. She almost wrecks their romance, but it survives, and she is handled by Fitch in a charming manner. While the play is romantic and sentimental, it is well crafted and, like You Can’t Take It with You, reminds us that we need to take care of one another. Lover’s Lane ran for 127 performances. The fourth of Fitch’s hit shows of 1900–1901 was a holdover from the previous season. With Julia Marlowe in the title role, Barbara Frietchie continued its run of 83 performances. Fitch was at the zenith of his popularity. During the eight years before his death in 1909, he would write three of his best plays. The Girl with the Green Eyes opened at the Savoy Theatre on Christmas Day, 1902, and ran for 108 performances with Clara Bloodgood creating the role of Jinny Austin.84 This is a play about jealousy and how a jealous nature can destroy a marriage. Fitch develops his plot slowly, beginning on the day of the wedding of Jinny Tillman to John Austin when we learn of family secrets that may threaten the happiness of the newlyweds. Jinny’s brother, Geoffrey, and a bridesmaid, Ruth Chester, seem to be romantically involved, and this upsets Maggie, one of the housemaids. We learn that Geoffrey has secretly married both women, Maggie while he was a student at Yale and Ruth just recently. Before Jinny and John can leave on their honeymoon, Ruth finds John alone and asks him to be a good friend to Geoffrey. Jinny observes this and questions John about this encounter. Later in the evening, Maggie finds John alone and tells him the story of her marriage to Geoffrey and that she thinks he is planning to marry Ruth. John confronts Geoffrey about Maggie, and he confesses. Not realizing that Geoffrey has already married Ruth, John advises him that he must go to Sioux Falls and get a divorce before he marries Ruth. Geoffrey thinks this would scandalize the family too much and continues to buy Maggie’s silence. Act 2 begins two months later as Jinny and John are on their wedding trip in Rome. They learn that friends from home are in Italy and have brought Ruth Chester with them. Ruth has been depressed, and her mother thought the trip might cheer her up. John learns that Geoffrey and Ruth are married, 170

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and he now knows that Geoffrey is guilty of bigamy. He decides to cut the honeymoon short and return home to save his brother-in-law. Jinny, not understanding, concludes that Ruth is in love with John, and that is why she has come to Europe. Because Jinny adores her brother, John feels he cannot tell her the truth. So suspicions grow. They return to the States in act 3, and everything that John does to help Geoffrey and Ruth serves to confirm Jinny’s suspicions that there is something between Ruth and John. She mistakes a telegram about Geoffrey divorcing Maggie to mean John divorcing her. She confronts Ruth and accuses her of stealing John. Finally, she is told the truth and must once again ask John for forgiveness. This time her husband tells her he can never forgive her jealousy and storms out of the house “for good.” In the last act, Jinny tries to kill herself by turning on the gas, but John rescues and forgives her: “There’s one thing stronger even than jealousy, my Jinny. And that’s love! That’s love!” The rescue seems more deus ex machina than real, but except for the ending, Fitch handles the details of plot well. He makes it seem plausible that Jinny could mistake John’s assistance of Ruth for romantic interest. Her jealous nature turns every situation into her belief that her husband is cheating on her with Ruth. The Girl with the Green Eyes drew a vivid portrait of a jealous woman. The Truth in 1906 depicted a woman who was a pathological liar.85 The Truth remains interesting because of the complex nature of Becky Warder, a challenging role created for Clara Bloodgood. Becky simply can’t tell the truth but lies so charmingly that we like her in spite of it. Fitch provides two scenes at the beginning of the play to suggest her character: the first when she has invited into her drawing room Fred Lindon, the estranged husband of her close friend Eve; the second immediately afterward when, talking to Eve, she lies about this meeting. Becky lies about everything. Even when caught in a fib, she always finds a charming way of explaining herself without embarrassment: Laura: You said you won at bridge! Becky: Oh, you tedious person! You hang on to anything like a terrier, don’t you! I said I won because I didn’t want Eve to think I’d lost; I never can bear to own up I’ve lost anything before Eve.

Becky tells husband Tom that she has turned down an invitation by saying that “we’re going out of town.” The fact that they are not going out of town hardly disturbs her: Becky: I think that going out of town sounds so much more interesting. Besides, then they can’t possibly be offended that they aren’t asked here. Grace’ll be consumed with curiosity, too, as to where we’re going! 171

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Tom: But if they see us Friday? Becky: They’ll think we haven’t gone yet. Tom: But if Billy meets me down town Saturday morning? Becky: He’ll think you took an early train back. Tom: The truth’s so simple, so much easier—why not tell it? Becky: Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. I’m sorry I told you if you’re going to worry!

While faithful to her husband, Becky wants the attentions of other men: “I like men to like me, even though it really means nothing.” Eve describes her as a flirt, “what the French call an ‘allumeuse’—leads them [men] on till they lose their heads, then she gets frightened and feels insulted!” Becky had been asked by Eve to intercede with Fred because Eve wants him back. And in the spirit of getting the Lindons back together, Becky has been meeting Fred every day, not knowing that Eve has hired a private detective who has documented all their private trysts. Becky likes to flirt, but she doesn’t love Fred, nor has she any intention of having an affair with him. On the other hand, Fred has fallen for her, and his new ardor prompts her to dismiss him: “You can write me a little note and say: ‘Becky, I thought I loved you, but it was only a heart being caught on the rebound. Thank you for being sensible and pitching the heart back!’” Becky is lovable but naive. If she had had been more straightforward in her dealings with everyone, the crisis in her own marriage would not have occurred. Tom is a generous husband and is not jealous of Lindon; nevertheless, he is a late Victorian male: “No woman can have the ‘friendship’ of a man like Lindon for long without—justly or unjustly—paying the highest price for it.” The highest price at the time means her reputation. Tom resorts to playing the traditional role of husband by ordering her not to see Lindon again. She promises. But to Becky, a promise means nothing. Tom and Becky’s relationship resembles Torvald and Nora’s relationship in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Like Nora, Becky wheedles her husband for money, tells fibs, and flirts, and her actions are responsible for their marriage crisis. Tom, like Torvald, treats his wife as a doll wife, and when he thinks the marriage is over, he wants to keep up appearances for a time. The actions of both Nora and Becky offended most of the critics. A subplot involves Becky’s father, Roland, a lovable rascal but a gambler and spendthrift who depends on Becky and Tom for support. He has given his word many times to stop gambling, but it seems his word is no better than Becky’s. There is a touch of Alfred P. Doolittle of Shaw’s Pygmalion about him, with a carnation in his buttonhole and a “rusty springiness in his gait.” He has been living with a Mrs. Crespigny in Baltimore because

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she takes care of him and gives him money; lately, she has been pressing marriage. If heredity and environment are the determinants of destiny as preached by the realists, Roland provides the audience with a hint of Becky’s. When Tom Warder leaves Becky because he can no longer believe her, she goes to live with her father and learns that her mother left him because she no longer believed him: “I always hated the plain truth. I liked to trim it up a little.” Father and daughter come to an understanding about their common weakness and establish a relationship. Roland doesn’t want to live with his daughter, however, and sends Tom a telegram saying she is dying. He then arranges the room to resemble that of an invalid’s. When Tom arrives in anguish about her supposed condition, Becky defies her father and tells the truth. And Tom forgives her: “We don’t love people because they are perfect. . . . We love them because they are themselves.” Becky gains some self-realization about who she is and why she embellishes everything during her time spent with Roland, but the ending seems imposed by the iron hand of convention. This is the finest, most fully developed character, however, drawn by Fitch. In a letter to the playwright dated January 13, 1907, Rachel Crothers expressed her admiration: “I think you’ve done that most difficult of all things—given us all sides of a human being, and made her intensely appealing in spite of very grave faults—a very complex and interesting study.”86 Much of the time, Becky tells people what they want to hear and enhances the truth. There is nothing mean-spirited in her lies. Fitch’s goal to create truthful characters for the stage was almost realized in The Truth, although most critics were baffled. Theatre Magazine of February 1907 complained that the character of Becky was lacking in consistency and substance: “She repudiates the scheme [that she is dying] and tells the truth for once, by reason of which miracle the husband forgets the past and ‘views with delight the promised joys of life’s unmeasured way’ with his dear spouse. Where is substance of logic or completeness of this? Is she or is she not going to continue to lie?” The critic also did not know whether she was trying to bring Lindon and his wife together or was pretending. “The woman is a fool,” he concluded, “and not the amiable liar that comedy demands.” Apparently, New York audiences agreed with this assessment because the production closed after thirty-four performances. Yet, The Truth was a major success in London and on the Continent, establishing Fitch’s international reputation.87 After the opening in London in April 1907, Fitch wrote to a friend: “The Truth is a huge success!! . . . It is generally called my best play.”88 Clara Bloodgood toured in the play that season back home before her tragic suicide. Winthrop Ames revived The Truth in New York at the Little Theatre in April 1914 for a short run. Most historians regard it as Fitch’s best play.

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While Fitch had multiple plays running each year on Broadway during the last three years of his life, the drama he planned as his “big play” opened shortly after his death. He finished The City in the spring of 1909 and cast it partially before he sailed for Europe on June 25. During a tour of France, he was stricken with appendicitis and, following an emergency operation, died at Châlons-sur-Marne (now Châlons-en-Champagne) on September 4. The play opened in New York on December 21 and proved to be one of his most popular efforts, running for 190 performances. It deals with the influence of city life on the prosperous Rand family, small-town bankers in Middleburg who move to New York. All members of the family except for the patriarch feel they have outgrown Middleburg. George Sr. has received an offer of a new position in New York but has no intention of giving up the ease and comfort of his small-town life. Cicely, the youngest daughter, complains: “You can’t tell the difference in Middleburg between a smart afternoon tea and a Mother’s Meeting, or a Sunday-school teacher’s conclave, or a Lenten Sewing Circle, or a Fair for the Orphan Asylum, or any other like ‘Event’! It’s always the same old people and the same old thing!”89 George Jr. is ambitious and wants new opportunities in business and politics that New York will provide, but his father argues that small-town life is the backbone of this country and that the city “turns ambition into selfish greed!” He is a pillar of his small community and not willing to play on a larger stage with different rules. Cracks are appearing already, however, in the comfortable environment of Middleburg. George Jr. learns that Hannock, a young man who has been employed in one of his father’s banks, is blackmailing George Sr. about illegal business practices. To make matters worse, George Jr. learns that Hannock is his father’s illegitimate son, a fact that Hannock himself doesn’t know. George Sr. makes his son swear that he will keep the secret and will assist Hannock in getting ahead. Shortly afterward, he has a stroke and dies, thereby freeing the family to move to New York. Time passes. Act 2 begins several years later in New York; the family has prospered financially and politically but not morally. George Sr.’s fears about the influence of city life on his family seem very prescient. George is certain to be nominated for governor. He must deal with his sister Teresa, who has left her husband and is involved with another man. Hannock, now the confidential secretary to young George, is collecting information on George’s illicit business practices for blackmailing purposes. George tries to get Teresa back with her husband, at least until after the election. Upon the advice of his political advisor, George fires Hannock, but not before he is reminded that his business deals are as shady as his father’s. George tries to sweep under the carpet the sins of the family until after the election, but he finds in the case of his youngest sister, Cicely, he cannot do that. She has fallen in love 174

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with Hannock and married him secretly. George is the only person alive who knows that Cicely and Hannock are half brother and sister. Reluctantly, he tells the truth to Hannock, who goes berserk and kills Cicely and tries to take his own life. George prevents this while knowing that Hannock’s death would remove the main obstacle to his being elected governor. In the final act, George has resigned from politics and is reimbursing his company for money and positions he acquired unfairly. Because he learned his methods from his father in Middleburg, he never thought about whether they were illegal or unethical. In his most famous speech, he defends the city as a crucible that makes or breaks the ambitious: “She strips him naked of all his disguises—and all his hypocrisies,—and she paints his ambition on her fences, and lights up her skyscrapers with it!—what he wants to be and what he thinks he is!—and then she says to him, Make good if you can or to Hell with you! And what is in him comes out to clothe his nakedness, and to the City he can’t lie! I know, because I tried!” Cicely is dead and George is brought low, but the play ends with a faint hint of optimism. With his business and political affairs in ruins, Eleanor, the woman he loves, stands by him. Fitch has been criticized for writing stock male characters that lacked the nuance and depth of feeling he gave to his women, and this is a weakness of The City. His men here are strong and aggressive but stiff and melodramatic types who seem almost interchangeable. Becky Warder’s unique voice is nowhere to be found. That The City was much more successful than The Truth is not surprising. Fitch’s death three months earlier prompted a strong show of support at the box office. The City provides strong melodramatic situations, broad character types, and a social message that contradicted the accepted wisdom that city life was corrupting. The subject of incest also served to sensationalize the production. As reported by the Dramatic Mirror, “women waxed hysterical” during the thrilling second act when Hannock discovers he has married his half sister: “It was, altogether, a scene so audacious in spirit, as well as in execution, as to stun one’s sensibilities with the impact of a bruising shock.”90 Moses suggests that Fitch “lost the thread of his deeper purpose in the play” because “his instincts were theatrical rather than spiritual.”91 The City is a good melodrama about the son of a small-town banker who comes to New York and continues the practices of his father, only to find out that much of what he has been doing is dishonest, if not downright illegal. Where much of nineteenth-century literature had romanticized small-town living and demonized the big city, Fitch presents the city in a different light: an arena where character is made or destroyed. On this issue, he was more modern than most of his contemporaries. Fitch wanted to establish for each of his plays a definite social milieu, and he provided detailed stage directions about settings, props, and costumes, 175

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including the color of the wallpaper and what kind of flowers should be on the table. Since he staged many of his own plays, he used contemporary songs, gossip, and newspapers to make his environments real. While he wrote about depicting men and women truthfully on the stage, at heart he was a romantic, not a realist, and viewed the world through the lens of the theatre. He drew his characters and plots not from life but from the melodramatic and sentimental theatre of his day. He wrote charming plays for audiences and was rewarded with unprecedented popularity for his twenty-year career as a playwright. The Frohman Era As the Theatrical Syndicate expanded its monopoly across America in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the road and middle America became the arbiters of taste. Moses calls this period the “Frohman era” and blames the age for the neglect of individual and unique voices.92 The problem lay with standardization, not with any personal vendetta of the Syndicate against serious writers. Charles Frohman, as the symbol of this system, regarded playwrights much as Hollywood studios later regarded screenwriters. Unique and individual voices were welcomed only after they had proven their ability to attract a mainstream audience. Augustus Thomas, David Belasco, and Clyde Fitch became wealthy because they wrote well-made plays for an age that demanded sentimental romances with happy endings. James Herne, William Vaughn Moody, Steel MacKaye, and others pushed against these limitations but understood that commercial success lay in their adherence. Belasco’s well-crafted melodramas and Fitch’s brilliantly drawn female characters were all at the service of a theatrical system that had to show a profit. That Fitch’s best play, The Truth, failed to do so haunted him the rest of his life. The Theatrical Syndicate weighed the commercial potential of any play or musical to determine whether it would be produced. Such a system strongly favored the status quo. Yet, in the midst of Belasco’s and Fitch’s most successful seasons, there was a growing realization that an audience existed that would support more challenging dramatic fare. While the Shuberts would in time enact the same policy as the Syndicate, in 1904 Sam S. and Lee Shubert presented Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern’s company in an eight-week engagement that included Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Sunken Bell, Percy MacKaye’s Jeanne d’Arc, and Hermann Sudermann’s John the Baptist together with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night. To get the new European plays before an audience, several independent producers, such as Mrs. Fiske, Richard Mansfield, and Arnold Daly, included them in their seasons. A number of prominent actresses attempted one of the Ibsen heroines 176

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for matinee performances or brief runs that made no money but created heated discussion and debate. Mrs. Fiske portrayed Nora in A Doll’s House in 1894, for example, and attempted other Ibsen heroines over the next ten years. Mansfield produced an impressive Peer Gynt in 1907, and his introduction of Shaw to American audiences was even more important: his Arms and the Man in September 1894 had the distinction of being the first Shaw play produced in the United States. Also important was Arnold Daly’s production of Candida in 1903–04 that ran 133 performances, suggesting that Shaw had commercial possibilities. This was reinforced by Charles Dillingham’s 1905 production of Man and Superman that ran for 192 performances and Daly’s two-month repertory season in the same year that included Shaw’s Candida, The Man of Destiny, You Never Can Tell, John Bull’s Other Island, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession, the most controversial of all.93 While Shaw was controversial, he was proving good box office. The commercial possibilities of the New Drama interested even the Theatrical Syndicate. William Vaughn Moody In the early 1900s, William Vaughn Moody—a native author—attempted to find a new kind of poetic drama for the twentieth-century American theatre. He was not a professional playwright in the same sense as Fitch and the others discussed here but a poet and scholar who had studied and taught poetry, drama, and literature.94 He and friends Percy MacKaye, Ridgely Torrence, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Josephine Preston Peabody brought a new idealism to their writing in reaction to the growing tendency toward realism and what they regarded as a loss of spirituality in American culture. Unlike Fitch, Moody did not regard his vocation as crafting hits for the Theatrical Syndicate. He planned a trilogy of poetic plays dealing with God’s relationship with man and completed the first two parts. Even though the verse plays of romantic drama were out of vogue, Moody believed that “modern life can be presented on the stage in the poetic medium and adequately presented only in that manner.”95 The practical considerations of the stage left him little choice, however, but to write prose drama. His The Great Divide opened at the Princess Theatre in New York on October 3, 1906, and became a major success, playing over one thousand performances. The Faith Healer in 1910 lacked the commercial success of The Great Divide but is regarded as a more important play because its theme is more universal. The Great Divide contrasts puritanical morality with the spirit of modernism and reveals the cultural differences between the eastern and western United States. While the theme is complex, the plot is simple. Ruth Gordon, her brother, Philip, and his wife, Polly, are attempting to strike it rich in southern Arizona. Ruth refuses to marry Winthrop Newbury, a young doctor from the 177

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East, because he is too traditional, too known, “a completed product.” She wants a man as free as the country in Arizona. A product of the East, Ruth yearns for the free spirit of the West and gets more than she bargains for. One night, while she is alone in the cabin, three drunken men attack her. To escape being assaulted, she offers to marry the best of the three if he will save her from the others. Stephen Ghent fights off the other two and takes Ruth away. He promises Ruth: “I’ll put you where you can look down on the proudest. I’ll give you the kingdoms of the world and all the glory of ’em.”96 Ruth and Stephen are married, establish a home, and have a son, but Ruth remains tortured by her conscience. Stephen becomes wealthy and attempts to make their marriage successful, but Ruth can neither accept his love nor their situation because she believes that sin must be punished and that her marriage was sinful. When her brother, Philip, finally finds her, she leaves Stephen and with their child returns to the East, to civilization. Stephen follows and confronts her morality with his more liberal and pagan concept of living: “Does it gall you the way we came together? You asked me that night what brought me, and I told you whiskey, and sun, and the devil. Well, I tell you now I’m thankful on my knees for all three!” While her puritanical ancestors believed in suffering and sacrifice to atone for sins, Stephen will have none of it: “Our law is joy and selfishness; the curve of your shoulder and the light on your hair as you sit there says that as plain as preaching.” Ruth finds the courage to turn away from her puritanical past where sins must be punished though wretchedness and self-torture: “You have taken the good of our life and grown strong. I have taken the evil and grown weak unto death. Teach me to live as you do.” Critical reaction was, for the most part, favorable. The Dramatic Mirror praised the play as setting a new standard for the American drama, where the interest lies in the clash of “two opposite natures” rather than the “power of the situations.”97 In his Evening Post review, however, Towse criticized the “final surrender of Ruth [as] not altogether consistent, probable, or agreeable. The doubt will suggest itself whether a refined and cultivated woman, in such circumstances, ever could forget or palliate, or ought to forget or palliate, an outrage so unspeakable.” Yet he lauded the play as a “notable piece of work,” a “real human drama” that was clear, sincere, fresh, and bold in conception.98 Historians generally regard Moody’s The Faith Healer as the most significant of his dramatic work. Arthur Hobson Quinn found that “it has a deeper imaginative quality than The Great Divide.”99 Hewitt saw in it “a tremendous advance” over the earlier play in “intellectual grasp and technical skill.”100 Yet the play was not successful at its New York premiere in January 1910. Most critics faulted it for being unclear and were confused about its purpose and 178

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meaning. Some took issue with its religion-versus-science theme. Others criticized the production as being uninspired. The Dramatic Mirror called it “a medieval subject in modern guise.”101 The production closed on Broadway after six performances but gave an additional invitation-only performance at Harvard, where it was well received.102 It is clear from the first scene that Moody had different aspirations for this play than for The Great Divide. The play opens on the day before Easter in an old-fashioned farmhouse in the Midwest. We sense a tension immediately as portraits of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer hang on the wall. Living in the farmhouse is the Beeler family: Matthew the patriarch and a firm believer in science; Mary, his wife and an invalid for the past five years; Annie, his daughter; Martha, his sister and a staunch pragmatist; and Rhoda, his niece. Visiting are Ulrich Michaelis and a deaf and dumb Indian boy. Since their arrival, a heavy fog has enveloped the house. The conflict between Beeler and Ulrich is apparent: a man of science, Beeler finds truth in pagan gods, in “growin’ plants, and frisky animals and young folks in love”;103 Ulrich is a man of faith who believes he has a calling to heal the sick. Throughout his life, signs have pointed to his calling, such as his seeing “the living Christ . . . standing before me on the mountain.” Also, he has raised a man from the dead, although, as Rhoda points out, the man may have been in a trance. Beeler’s science is losing ground as Mary and Rhoda have taken up religion. And the arrival of Uncle Abe pushes the family further into a world of superstition and the supernatural. Uncle Abe is “an old Negro, with gray hair and thin, gray beard,” who tells Beeler that a faith healer is here and the town is full of people wanting to be healed. Realizing that Ulrich Michaelis is this faith healer, Beeler is ready to throw him out when Mary walks out of her room, apparently healed of the illness that has bound her to a wheelchair for almost five years. Outside the house, the sick are singing hymns. They have come in search of Michaelis, who realizes that the mission he has been preparing for all his life is here. In the second act, the healing of Mary and the arrival of Uncle Abe have filled the house with religion rather than science. But Beeler brings home a colored print of Pan and the Pilgrim, which distracts Annie and disturbs Uncle Abe, who has heard Pan singing: “Chillun, chillun, they ain’t no Gawd, they ain’t no sin nor no jedgment, they’s jes’ springtime an’ happy days, and folks carryin’ on.” Uncle Abe calls Pan “old Nick” and thinks he has cast a spell on Michaelis. While Mary Beeler explains to Uncle Abe that there is no devil except the one inside each one of us, she has noticed also that Michaelis appears weaker. Rhoda, who has fallen in love with the visitor, believes she is responsible. The print of Pan and the Pilgrim alludes to the conflict within Michaelis between his love for Rhoda and his spiritual mission. Reverend 179

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Culpepper brings orthodox religion into the household, and the arrival of Dr. Littlefield brings science again into the fray. When Rhoda and the doctor meet, it is clear that they have been lovers. She had been wild then and now believes herself a wicked woman and responsible for Michaelis’s weakened faith. He had arrived with firm dedication to his ministry but, having fallen in love with her, he has lost his focus and his power to heal. Believing in nothing except nature, the doctor attributes Mary’s newfound ability to walk to the “power of the mind over the body.” As Michaelis’s faith crumbles, a baby dies and Mary loses her ability to walk. The act ends with Michaelis in despair. The theme of the first two acts seems apparent: Michaelis’s dedication to his spiritual mission has resulted in miracles. But when he falls in love with Rhoda, he loses his sense of purpose because he cannot believe that body and spirit can be integrated. Act 3 begins early on Easter morning. The pictures of Darwin and Spencer go back up after the collapse of the spiritual, and Beeler accuses the women of believing in “hocus-pocus” rather than nature. Uncle Abe convinces Beeler to give him the picture of Pan so he can put a spell on it, believing Pan has bewitched Michaelis. Michaelis will be content with loving Rhoda and abandoning his life’s work, but she refuses to let him: “You loved me, and that love was dreadful to you. You thought it was so because I was a woman and stole your spirit’s strength away. But it was not that. It was because I was a wicked woman.” It is her former relationship with the doctor that has made her a wicked woman, she believes, and now the doctor again tempts her to go with him and live life to the fullest: “We’ll go west and renew our youth. Country’s big, and nobody to meddle.” He threatens to force her, but Michaelis now defends Rhoda and, in defending her, discovers how much he loves her. He comes to understand how his previous commitment to his spiritual mission alone was insufficient: “I have come to know that God does not deny love to any of his children, but gives it as a beautiful and simple gift to them all.” The depths of Rhoda’s despair allow Michaelis to discover her need for him and his love for her. And with this knowledge, he regains his sense of purpose and his ability to heal. “Pan and the Pilgrim” have been integrated in Michaelis. Mary walks, and the baby lives. The play ends with a rejuvenated Michaelis walking out into the crowd to fulfill his life’s work. Audiences did not know what to make of The Faith Healer in 1910. Did it support or condemn faith healing? Did it approve or disapprove of science? Was Christianity lauded or ridiculed? Audiences probably found it difficult to see through these issues to the ones Moody cared about: the human need for integration of the Dionysian and the spiritual; the necessity of love for a fulfilling life; and the limitations of work. Each person or group of persons in the play had a piece of the truth and thought it was the total truth. The 180

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character of Michaelis recalls that of Ibsen’s Brand, a young priest whose “all or nothing” philosophy had no place for love. Seeing himself as a failure, Brand takes the villagers into the mountains to find God, but when their faith weakens, they stone him and, except for the mad Gerd, abandon him. In his dying moment, when he asks God, “How shall Man be redeemed?,” a voice replies, “He is the God of love.”104 Michaelis has pursued an “all or nothing” philosophy regarding his spiritual mission, but until he finds love with Rhoda, he could not fulfill it. Now they will ascend the mountains together, not only to find God but to experience life at a richer and deeper level: “Let us go there together, step by step, from faith to faith, and from strength to strength, for I see depths of life open and heights of love come out, which I never dreamed of till now!” The play was filmed in 1921. Much has been made of The Great Divide as the first modern American play, although it seems today to belong more to nineteenth-century conventional drama than with the New Drama of Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, and Strindberg. While emotions are underplayed, the characters and situations seem more dependent on the conventions of melodrama than on anything happening outside the theatre. The willingness of Ruth to return to Ghent seems dictated less by psychology and more by the audiences’ penchant for sentimental and happy endings. The Great Divide, like Fitch’s The City, shocked its audience just enough to be thought advanced and adventuresome before bringing the plot around to its required happy ending. It might be more appropriate to classify The Great Divide as a summation of nineteenthcentury dramatic practices. On the other hand, The Faith Healer looked to the future, exploring themes of religion, faith, and spirituality that would be treated with more originality by Eugene O’Neill in the 1920s. The critics had a point in that it was difficult to know exactly what Moody was saying about these issues, although a better production in 1910 might have helped. Towse, writing in the Nation, suggested that the appeal might be more literary than dramatic, that the work “will make a strong appeal to the imagination of all intelligent readers.”105 An off-off-Broadway revival at the Metropolitan Playhouse in 2002 received respectable reviews. Most of the dramatists discussed in this chapter came to playwriting through the theatre itself or through journalism and looked upon their profession as a business. Moody was an academic who had studied and taught drama, who knew dramatic literature of the past and understood something of its role in previous cultures. He brought an artist’s sensibility to his work and thus aimed for something more than commercial success. A group that formed around him shared his philosophy. One of his students, Josephine Preston Peabody, followed her mentor into writing poetry and plays. Her verse drama The Piper, based on the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, won the 181

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Stratford Prize Competition in March 1910 and was performed at Stratfordon-Avon in July. The following year it received its first American production at the New Theatre.106 And Moody’s friend Percy MacKaye, having learned from both his father, Steele MacKaye, and a Harvard education, sought to create through poetry, myth, and spectacle the power of Greek tragedy. The Shuberts presented his Jeanne d’Arc in 1907 in repertory at the Lyric Theatre in New York. Sappho and Phaon, based on Greek myth, was not successful, playing only seven performances the same year. His most successful play, The Scarecrow, received a Harvard Dramatic Club production in 1909 before professional productions in England, France, and Germany. MacKaye found the theatre of his day too limiting for his vision and turned his many talents to creating large community-centered dramatic events with thousands of people in sports stadiums. Langdon Mitchell Langdon Mitchell’s The New York Idea, like Moody’s The Great Divide, seemed more important at the time than it does a century later.107 While Mitchell demonstrated a high level of skill in writing witty dialogue that reveals character and produces laughs, in dealing with the issue of marriage and divorce in American society his play advances the subject very little beyond Augustin Daly’s 1871 play Divorce. Opening in Chicago on October 15, 1906, at the Grand Opera House, The New York Idea was revived regularly for years. Mitchell begins his comedy in the wealthy New York home of Philip Phillimore. To get the tone of this play right, he provides detailed stage directions describing how Philip’s mother, aunt, and sister should look and what kind of furniture and props should dress the stage to suggest a hidebound and old-fashioned family. The occasion is the wedding of Philip, lately divorced from Vida Phillimore, to Cynthia Karslake, lately divorced from John Karslake. A cousin, William Sudley, arrives to give his opinion on this marriage: Philip is a prominent judge, and a marriage to a divorced woman will do nothing to help his career. Also arriving is Philip’s brother, the Reverend Matthew Phillimore, who in his position as a clergyman of a fashionable congregation has just given a sermon: “If Death is not final—why should marriage be final?” Into this family comes the spirited Cynthia, described by Mitchell as “a young creature in her twenties, small and high-bred, full of the love of excitement and sport.” Cynthia is selfish, immature, opinionated, and obsessed with horse racing, but she is alive and immediately likable. It is plain that Philip and Cynthia do not belong together. Next we meet Vida, Philip’s ex-wife. Fashionably dressed in the latest French mode, she is a vamp and instantly unlikable. Then John Karslake is introduced, described by Mitchell as “a powerful, gener182

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ous personality, a man of affairs, breezy, gay and careless.” At once it is plain that Cynthia and John belong together. And in spite of some close calls, by the end of the play, they have bridged their differences. Due to a technicality, their divorce was never legal and they remain married, happily so. Clearly the play’s success did not lie in this hackneyed plot alone. Daly, Howard, and Fitch all wrote plays about divorced or estranged couples, and all found a way of reuniting each couple by the final curtain. But Mitchell created more distinctive characters, and his dialogue fairly sparkles with bon mots. His Sir Wilfrid Cates-Darby, an English character straight out of French farce, attempts to make love to both Cynthia and Vida. And he has some of the best lines: “New York is bounded on the North, South, East and West by the state of divorce” and “Awfully chic way you Americans have of asking your divorced husbands and wives to drop in, you know—celebrate a christenin’, or the new bride, or—.” Mitchell was a clever playwright who wrote a number of other plays, including an adaptation of Becky Sharp for Mrs. Fiske, but none achieved the popularity of The New York Idea. Other plays, including Avery Hopwood’s The Demi-Virgin (1921) and Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story (1939), handle the subject of divorce much as Mitchell did in 1906, suggesting that commercial success lay in reuniting estranged couples by the final curtain. Like the Karslakes, Hopwood’s couple was never really divorced, while Dexter and Tracy in The Philadelphia Story resemble the Karslakes in being the most alive characters in the play.108 Entertaining the nation was the business of American playwrights at the turn of the twentieth century. With the enactment of an international copyright law in 1891, it was now possible for writers to be financially rewarded for their work. Dramatists wrote about subjects that, they hoped, would attract the public. Just a glance at The Best Plays of 1899–1909, edited by Burns Mantle and Garrison P. Sherwood, will suggest what interested audiences in this first decade of the twentieth century. These plays, while their well-made structures and melodramatic plots seem quaint today, informed their audiences about American life, while the drama that audiences viewed in colonial America informed them about English life. Even some seventy-five years later, in the mid-nineteenth century, Whitman and Poe found that native drama was little more than reworked English and French plays. Now, American audiences could view Augustus Thomas’s plays about America—about Arizona and Alabama, not about Litchfield and Shrewsbury. Fitch’s The City concerned New York, not London or Paris. The locus of American playwriting had moved to this country. Playwrights wrote about Wall Street, the West, domestic life, New York social life, the Civil War, and politics. Plays reflected American culture as both created and disseminated by popular journalism. The subject of American drama was American life. 183

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Yet, at the beginning of the twentieth century, American drama, like much of western drama, had become mired in convention. Audiences viewed stock characters, recycled plots, and broad physical action in whatever play was on the bill. There is something about an Augustus Thomas play, for example, that resembles those written by David Belasco and Bronson Howard. Melodramas about the Civil War came to seem more alike than different. The conventions that required a romance and happy ending resulted in plots becoming overworked and trite. The machinery of the well-made play made drama accessible to the masses but at the cost of originality. Puritanism still held American culture captive, stifling any attempt to depict men and women truthfully. Audiences were slow to protest against the immaturity of this drama, perhaps, because they felt a sense of security in the familiar rhythm and flow of melodrama with its predictable endings. Their own values were slow to change in the late Victorian period. The world of the horse and buggy to Hutchins Hapgood suggested “an unchanging world.”109 For the public to move beyond a romantic view of nature, it required their acceptance of a worldview that included less religion and nineteenth-century optimism and more science and psychology. While the plays discussed in this volume have failed to survive as American classics, they exist today as historical documents that tell something about the age in which they were written and produced. Melodramas with their predictable endings allowed some innovation as long as playwrights were willing to validate the audience’s moral world. Even small changes in familiar patterns are worth noting: for example, the “fallen woman” character allowed to live, unreformed; city life praised and rural life ridiculed; women depicted as rational and independent characters; men portrayed as less macho and more sensitive individuals; and divorced couples staying divorced. In finding these changes, we are able to glimpse the vitality of these plays and appreciate the interest they once held for American audiences. They are useful today as a valuable source of information about our past and the way that we integrate new ideas into the culture. And finally, these plays help us to understand the difficulty of getting beyond the status quo and bringing about real change in American society.

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Epilogue Plays, like magazine stories, were patterned. They might be pretty good within themselves, seldom did they open out to—where it surprised or thrilled your spirit to follow. They didn’t ask much of you, those plays. Having paid for your seat, the thing was all done for you, and your mind came out where it went in, only tireder. —Susan Glaspell, The Road to the Temple, 1926

“Like any other accomplishment of modern times,” Eugene Walter wrote in 1925, “playwriting is just a plain job.” It is little different from the work of the newspaperman, the electrician, the doctor, or the dentist. The measure of accomplishment is financial: with hard work, he reported, a “playsmith” can earn “from fifty to one hundred thousand dollars a year.”1 Walter’s belief that “playwriting is a trade” left little room for thinking about it as an art. Such sentiments aptly characterize writing for the American stage well into the third decade of the twentieth century. The goal of the playwright was to craft a well-made play with wide enough interest for a long run on Broadway before a tour of the provinces. Decisions were made for business, not artistic, reasons. Unpleasant subjects were either avoided or sensationalized with an eye toward attracting an audience. With few exceptions, playwrights did not deal honestly with the important issues of the day—issues such as divorce, women’s suffrage, war, race, urban life, and sexual morality. Instead, American plays, much like the novels of Gene Stratton Porter, Harold Bell Wright, and Booth Tarkington, furnished the public with sentimental stories of adventure and romance. They differed little from the stories published in the Atlantic, North American Review, Century, and Harper’s Weekly—stories that provided the reader with an escape from the messy and often painful world of reality. Yet a cultural change had been well under way by the first decade of the new century. The business crash of 1893 and the depression that followed convinced many Americans that something was wrong with this country’s direction and leadership. The second major economic crash since the Civil 185

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Epilogue

War, it suggested that unregulated capitalism could result in a series of booms and busts that would bankrupt the country. A few men such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan had become wealthy beyond imagination, but the majority of working men and women were desperate to scratch out a living. An economic failure of this magnitude brought into question the validity of cultural assumptions that had guided the country since the Civil War. The commonly accepted tenets of hard work, individual initiative, faith in God, and love of country were challenged by the realities of the marketplace and by science. No longer would the optimism and idealism so ingrained in nineteenth-century America be sufficient to ameliorate the shortcomings of the nation. The economic crash provided the impetus for a whole array of reforms: Teddy Roosevelt took on the trusts; Upton Sinclair and others exposed the working conditions in slaughterhouses, sweat shops, and factories; journalists, labor leaders, writers, artists, and politicians worked to reform institutions corrupted during the “Gilded Age.” Their efforts led to the first minimumwage law in 1912, the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment (graduated income tax) and Seventeenth Amendment (direct election of senators) in 1913, and the Nineteenth Amendment (women’s suffrage) in 1920. Historians label this period of American history the Progressive Era. It was a progressive era also in the world of art and letters. Influenced by modernist ideas sweeping in from Europe, writers and artists turned inward, making the self rather than the expectations of the public the determinant in artistic creation. Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser drew men and women who were shaped by their environment, not just by the conventions of the age. The “Ash Can School” of painting brought gritty subjects instead of pretty pictures before the public. Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell wrote plays about unpleasant subjects with unhappy endings. Rejection of what George Santayana called the “Genteel Tradition” energized critics such as George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken to ridicule Victorian standards in Smart Set magazine. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Greenwich Village in New York became a hotbed of radical activity. Mabel Dodge’s salon on lower Fifth Avenue was at the very center. Returning from Europe in 1912, Dodge established her salon to attract “movers and shakers”: “I wanted . . . to know the Heads of things, Heads of Movements, Heads of Newspapers, Heads of all kinds of groups of people.”2 Her salon drew in a wide variety of New York’s most interesting people, including novelist Susan Glaspell, late of Chicago, and her husband, George Cram Cook; socialist Emma Goldman; labor agitator and journalist John Reed; writer Hutchins Hapgood; and Max Eastman, founder and publisher of the Masses, a radical magazine that supported labor 186


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causes and modern art and literature. These and others attacked the cultural values held by most of the nation. Two events in 1913 suggested that American culture was poised for change. The Armory Show at the Sixty-ninth Regimental Armory Hall gave most Americans their first glimpse of cubism and of the work of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, and Georges Braque. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase created enormous controversy. Was this art? And how were we to define art that broke all the rules? The Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden brought together striking silk workers from the mills in New Jersey, the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), and the radical intellectuals from Greenwich Village.3 John Reed wrote and directed the pageant, aided by Robert Edmond Jones, Dodge, Hapgood, Glaspell, and others. This was political theatre, and although it failed to help the workers, it suggested a way of confronting the vital issues of the day. Many of this group would be instrumental in the creation of the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod in the summer of 1915. The American theatre, especially, was ripe for change. Old-line critics J. Ranken Towse and William Winter clamored for a return to the repertory stock company system. With the goal of establishing a national theatre, wealthy patrons raised the money and built the New Theatre in 1909 on Central Park West. Ill-conceived (it was too big and too expensive), it failed in two years. Younger critics suggested that the noncommercial theatres of Europe offered a better model. The Théâtre Libre in Paris, the Freie Bühne in Berlin, and the Abbey Theater in Dublin were organized more as private clubs than as commercial theatres, able to offer controversial plays to subscription audiences. The Irish Players came to America in 1911 and succeeded in impressing audiences with their one-act folk plays and ensemble acting. Max Reinhardt’s Sumurun arrived in 1912, bringing New Yorkers a glimpse of the new stagecraft promoted by Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia. Harley Granville-Barker arrived from London in 1915 to offer short runs of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion and Anatole France’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife. In 1917, Jacques Copeau and his Vieux Colombier from Paris also offered examples of simplified staging in the New Stagecraft style. He showed that plays did not need heavy, realistic scenery to be theatrically effective. Home-grown little theatres also sprang up over the nation, led by the Chicago Little Theatre, Boston’s Toy Theatre, Detroit’s Arts and Crafts Theatre, and New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse and Washington Square Players. A new audience was being created for a different kind of drama than was offered on Broadway. In the summer of 1915, a group of amateurs created a new “little theatre” on Cape Cod that was to significantly change American drama. 4 To escape 187


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the heat of New York, Mabel Dodge and several regulars from her salon were vacationing in Provincetown. More from boredom than anything else, the group turned to writing plays. According to Hutchins Hapgood: “They felt the need of rejecting everything, even the Systems of Rejection, and of living as intimately and truthfully as they could; and, if possible, they wanted to express the simple truth of their lives and experience by writing, staging, and acting their own plays.”5 Except for Jones, they were all amateur thespians. The group included Crook and Glaspell; Hapgood and his wife, writer Neith Boyce; Reed and Dodge; Wilbur and Margaret Steele; Max Eastman and his wife, painter and poet Ida Rauh; novelist Mary Heaton Vorse and her husband, Joe O’Brien; painter and sculptor William Zorach and his wife, Marguerite; and Jones, who had worked with Reed on the Paterson Strike Pageant. He would later become the most celebrated scenic artist in the country. The first plays written by the group consisted of Boyce’s Constancy and Glaspell and Crook’s Suppressed Desires. Boyce’s one-act dealt with Reed and Dodge’s relationship, while the latter satirized the obsession at the time with psychoanalysis. The plays were performed in the Hapgoods’ rented cottage. Later that summer, plays by Crook and Wilbur Daniel Steele were given in a fish-house at the end of an old wharf. It was in the second season at the Cape that Eugene O’Neill made his debut as a playwright with his one-act Bound East for Cardiff. Glaspell later wrote: “I may see it through memories too emotional, but it seems to me I have never sat before a more moving production than our ‘Bound East for Cardiff,’ when Eugene O’Neill was produced for the first time on any stage.”6 This group of amateurs had accomplished what Charles Frohman and the Theatrical Syndicate for all their power and money had not succeeded in doing: discovering a playwright of the first-rank who could engage the imagination of the audience. After the summer of 1915, the Provincetown Players opened their theatre off Washington Square in Greenwich Village and began to attract attention from New York critics. Glaspell and O’Neill headed a growing list of writers. Sentimental plays with happy (and conventional) endings would continue to fill Broadway theatres and roadhouses until the film industry displaced the theatre as the purveyor of entertainment for the nation. But in Cape Cod and Greenwich Village, a revolt against this system by artists and audiences created a climate where drama could transcend its role as entertainment and rise to the level of art.

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1

Notes Bibliography Index

Miller Notes.indd 189

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Notes 1. British Drama and the Colonial American Stage 1. Interested in economic as well as political issues, Davis argues that anti-theatricalism in colonial America came from a multitude of reasons other than religious; see his “Puritan Mercantilism” and “Playwrights to 1800.” 2. Nathans, Early American Theatre, 123–49. 3. Davis, “Playwrights to 1800,” 222–24. 4. Johnson and Burling, Colonial American Stage, 103; Silverman, Cultural History, 60. 5. Rankin, Theater in Colonial America, 25–28. 6. Odell, Annals, 1:19. 7. Nathans, Early American Theatre, 7–18. 8. Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 7. 9. Banham, Hill, and Woodyard, Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre, 197. 10. Johnson and Burling, Colonial American Stage, 127; Wright, Revels in Jamaica, 26–30; Hill, Jamaican Stage, 23–24. 11. Burnim, David Garrick, 9–10. 12. Ibid., 178. 13. Johnson, prologue. 14. Dunlap, History, 8–9. 15. Most scholars list Cibber as the author, but Johnson and Burling make the case that Henry Carey wrote the opera (Colonial American Stage, 68). 16. Odell, Annals, 1:56. 17. Seilhamer, History of the American Theatre, 1:64. 18. Johnson and Burling, Colonial American Stage, 62–70. 19. Silverman, Cultural History, 65. 20. Westfall, American Shakespearean Criticism, 37. 21. D. McCullough, John Adams, 90. 22. Westfall, American Shakespearean Criticism, 38. 23. Dunlap, History, 19. 24. D. McCullough, John Adams, 48–49. 25. Rankin, Theater in Colonial America, 23. 26. Ibid., 191. 27. Johnson and Burling, Colonial American Stage, 66–67. 191


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Notes to Pages 7–19

28. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage, xi. 29. Johnson and Burling, Colonial American Stage, 109. 30. Silverman, Cultural History, 374. 31. The Beaux Stratagem, act 1, scene 1, in Kenney, Works of George Farquhar, vol. 2 (cited hereafter as WGF). Other references are to act 3, scene 3; and act 5, scene 4. 32. The Recruiting Officer, act 3, scene 1, in ibid. 33. Shaffer, “Great Cato’s Descendants,” 8. 34. Cato, act 2, scene 2, in Guthkelch, The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison. 35. Silverman, Cultural History, 82. 36. Cato, act 4, scene 4. In Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies, the author disputes that Nathan’s last words were borrowed from Cato but were “put into his mouth many years later” by his friends. See pages 31–32. 37. Johnson and Burling, Colonial American Stage, 109, 116, 145–46, 157, 203. 38. Odell, Annals, 1:121–48. 39. J. Brown, Theatre in America, 24, 27, 90, 99. 40. The Busy Body, act 2, scene 3, in The Dramatic Works of the Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre, vol. 2. 41. Mays, introduction to Barton, The Disappointment, 12. 42. Hippisley, Flora, act 1. 43. Fielding, Mock Doctor, scene 1. 44. Coffey, Female Parson, act 1, scene 3. Other references are to act 2, scene 1; and act 3, scene 2. 45. Carey, Damon and Phillida, act 1, scene 4. 46. Ravenscroft, Anatomist, act 1, scene 2. Other references are to act 2, scene 1. 47. Porter, With an Air Debonair, 29. 48. Bickerstaffe, Maid of the Mill, act 3. 49. Bickerstaffe, Padlock, act 1, scene 1. 50. Ibid., act 2, scene 8. 51. Dizikes, Opera in America, 23. 52. Garrick borrowed the plot from an earlier play, An Hospital for Fools by James Miller, that had failed in 1739 and from John Vanbrugh’s Aesop (1697). See Stein, David Garrick, 25–26. Garrick revised the piece several times over his career, adding and deleting characters to fit current tastes. 53. Lethe: or, Esop in the Shades, in Plays of David Garrick, 1:25. 54. The Lying Valet, act 1, scene 1, in ibid., 1:38. Other references are to act 2, scene 1. 55. Like Lethe, The Lying Valet owed its origins to earlier English and French comedies: All Without Money, the second act of Novelty; or, Every Act a Play (1697) by Peter Motteux, which is little more than a translation of the French Le Souper mal-apprêté by Noel Le Breton sieur de Hauteroche (see Stein, David Garrick, 69). 56. Like for his other farces, Garrick borrowed from older plays, in this instance from La Parisienne (1691) by Florent Carton sieur Dancourt and possibly from Thomas Baker’s Tunbridge Walks (1729) (see Dircks, David Garrick, 20). 57. Miss in Her Teens, act 2, scene 1, in Plays of David Garrick, 1:94–97.

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58. Arthur Murphy, quoted in ibid., 1:391. Murphy was a contemporary playwright and critic. 59. Johnson and Burling, Colonial American Stage, 69. 60. Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 1. 61. [Stevens], Lecture on Heads, 19, 39, 67. 62. Rankin, Theater in Colonial America, 110. 63. Androboros; A Biographical Farce in Three Acts, in Meserve and Reardon, Satiric Comedies, 3–40. 64. Davis, “Playwrights to 1800,” 226–27. 65. The Paxton Boys, scene 2. 66. Silverman, Cultural History, 53–54. 67. Rogers, Ponteach, act 1, scene 1. 68. Nevins, “Life of Robert Rogers,” 102. 69. Pennsylvania Gazette, Apr. 16, 1767, quoted in Quinn, History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War, 29 (cited hereafter as History BCW). 70. Silverman, Cultural History, 105. 71. Mays, introduction to Barton, The Disappointment, 6–7. 72. Quinn, History BCW, 24–26. 73. The Prince of Parthia, in Quinn, Representative American Plays, 7–8. 74. Silverman, Cultural History, 106. 75. Davis notes a number of pamphlets and dialogues of the 1770s. See “Playwrights to 1800,” 235–38. 76. Richards, Mercy Otis Warren, 3. 77. Anthony, First Lady, 82. 78. J. Brown, Theatre in America, 13. 79. Meserve, Emerging Entertainment, 68 (cited hereafter as EE). 80. The Defeat, act 1, scene 1, in Plays and Poems of Mercy Otis Warren, 6. 81. Anthony, First Lady, 110, 115. 82. Dunlap, History, 51. 83. Richards, Mercy Otis Warren, 103. Richards states that “almost all of the evidence of her authorship is circumstantial.” 84. Ibid., 108–9. 85. Introduction to The Sack of Rome in Plays and Poems of Mercy Otis Warren, 11. 86. Anthony, First Lady, 150–51. 87. Moses, Representative Plays, 1:239. 88. The Candidates, act 1, scene 3, in Munford, Collection of Plays and Poems, 22–23. 89. The Patriots, act 1, scene 1, in ibid., 72–73. Other references are to act 1, scene 7, and act 2, scene 1. 90. Quoted in Witham, Theatre in the United States, 1:20. 2. American Drama of the New Republic 1. Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 238; Morrison, Oxford History, 310; D. McCullough, John Adams, 224. 2. Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 120.

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3. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:101–2. 4. The Contrast, in Quinn, Representative American Plays, 48. Other references are to act 2, scene 2. 5. Daily Advertiser, April 17, 1787, quoted in Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A., 34–35. 6. Moses, introduction to The Contrast, in Representative Plays, 1:438. 7. For historical information, see my introduction to Dunlap, History, ix–xxiii. 8. Coad, William Dunlap, 19–20. 9. Darby’s Return, in Meserve and Reardon, Satiric Comedies, 105–13. 10. Rinehart, “Manly Exercises,” 271–72. 11. The Federalists were pro-British and anti-French. 12. Odell, Annals, 1:382. 13. Rinehart, “‘Manly Exercises,’” 278–79. 14. Dunlap, preface to André, in Moses, Representative Plays, 1:508–9. 15. The French Directory and Foreign Minister Talleyrand demanded a bribe before they would negotiate with the American commissioners sent by President John Adams to France in 1798. The Senate printed the correspondence, referring to the Frenchmen as X, Y, and Z. This incident almost provoked a war between France and the United States. It did lead Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts, which deprived many Americans who sided with the French of their civil rights. See D. McCullough, John Adams, 493–514; and Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 569–79. 16. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:84–87. 17. The Glory of Columbia, act 1, scene 2, in R. Moody, Dramas, 95. 18. Wilmer, Theatre, 76–79. 19. New York Magazine, vol. 5, Nov. 1794, 654. 20. Quoted in Odell, Annals, 2:44–45. 21. Broekman de Vries, “Kotzebue on the American Stage,” 78. 22. Odell, Annals, 2: 44. 23. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 10. 24. Kotzebue, Fraternal Discord, act 1, scene 1. 25. Quinn, History BCW, 98. 26. Coad, William Dunlap, 234. 27. Odell, Annals, 2:99. 28. Ibid., 98. 29. Ibid., 133. 30. Canary, William Dunlap, 73–74. 31. Coad, William Dunlap, 81. 32. Doty, Career of Mrs. Anne Brunton Merry, 49. 33. While many sources claim the Chestnut was based on the Theatre Royal at Bath, Wolcott argues that it was the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden. See “Chestnut Street Theatre Company,” 179. 34. The novel was published in over 160 editions. See Quinn, History BCW, 121; and Meserve, EE, 116. 35. Rowson, Slaves in Algiers, ii. 36. Quinn, History BCW, 122.

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37. Rowson, Slaves in Algiers, act 1, scene 1. Other references are to act 1, scene 1; and act 3, scene 1. 38. Meserve, EE, 116–17. 39. Tears and Smiles, act 1, scene 1, in Musser, James Nelson Barker, 154–55. Other references are to act 4, scene 1, 185. 40. Durang, The Philadelphia Stage, in Musser, James Nelson Barker, 17. 41. Quoted in Musser, James Nelson Barker, 54. 42. Quinn, History BCW, 144. 43. Preface to Marmion, in Musser, James Nelson Barker, 141–42. 44. National Registar, July 27, 1816, 1:22. 45. Musser, James Nelson Barker, 23. 46. Superstition, in Quinn, Representative American Plays, 111–40. 47. Quinn, History BCW, 114. 48. Hodge, Yankee Theatre, 56. 49. R. Moody, Dramas, 147. 50. The Forest Rose, act 1, scene 3, in R. Moody, Dramas, 162. 51. Hodge, Yankee Theatre, 81. 52. Playbill reprinted in ibid., 107. 53. Ibid., 199. 54. Quinn, History BCW, 299. 55. The People’s Lawyer, act 1, scene 3, in Moses, Representative Plays, 2:407. 56. Brougham, The Irish Yankee, act 3, scene 4. 57. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage, 35. 58. Overmyer, America’s First Hamlet, 77–81. 59. Moses, Representative Plays, 2:94. 60. Overmyer, America’s First Hamlet, 161. 61. Quinn, History BCW, 171–74. 62. Brutus; or, The Fall of Tarquin, act 1, scene 1, in Moses, Representative Plays, 2:101–75. Other references are to act 1, scene 3; act 2, scene 2; act 3, scene 4; and act 4, scene 3. 63. Charles The Second; or, The Merry Monarch, in Quinn, Representative American Plays, 143–64. Other references are to act 2, scene 1. 64. For dates on these plays, see Porter, With an Air Debonair, 425–542. 65. The history of Paul Pry provides a glimpse of the nature of playwriting in the nineteenth century. John Poole wrote a three-act comedy, Paul Pry, performed at London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1825. Two years later, Douglas William Jerrold rewrote the play, turning it into a farce. Jerrold is better known for Black-Ey’d Susan; or, All in the Downs (1829), a nautical drama. The version at the Park in 1826 was obviously Poole’s. Odell, Annals, 3:186. 66. Hamlet, act 2, scene 2. 3. Drama in the Age of Jackson 1. See Remini, Andrew Jackson; and Schlesinger, Age of Jackson. 2. R. Moody, Edwin Forrest.

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3. Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A., 109. Ginger Strand’s analysis of Forrest’s relationship with James Oakes suggests a more complex sexuality than the masculine image he projected from the stage. “‘My Noble Spartacus’: Edwin Forrest and Masculinity on the Nineteenth-Century Stage,” in Schanke and Marra, Passing Performances, 19–40. 4. R. Moody, Edwin Forrest, 88, 89. 5. Mason, Melodrama, 32. 6. Quoted in R. Moody, Dramas, 202. 7. Mason, Melodrama, 28. 8. Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags, act 1, scene 2, in R. Moody, Dramas, 208. Other references are to act 5, scene 5, 226. 9. Vandenhoff, Leaves from an Actor’s Note-book, 200–201. 10. Account Ledger, Park Theatre, 1832–1841, “Receipts on the nights of E. Forrest’s performance at the Park Theatre, N.Y., 1832–1841,” Edwin Forrest file, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 11. Dramatic Mirror 1 (Oct. 2, 1841), in Meserve, Heralds of Promise, 52. 12. Quinn, History BCW, 206. 13. R. Smith, The Eighth of January, act 3, 46. Other references are to act 2, 43 and 32. 14. The Triumph at Plattsburg, in Quinn, Representative American Plays, 165–80. 15. The Sentinels; or, The Two Sergeants, in R. Smith, The Sentinels and Other Plays, 1–30. 16. R. Smith, The Disowned; or, The Prodigals, act 1, 25. 17. R. Smith, Caius Marius, act 2, scene 1. 18. Ralph H. Ware and H. W. Schoenberger, preface to R. Smith, The Sentinels and Other Plays, vii. 19. Quinn, History BCW, 216–17. 20. Meserve, Heralds of Promise, 57. 21. See Dahl, Robert Montgomery Bird; and Foust, Life and Dramatic Works of Robert Montgomery Bird. 22. Quinn, History BCW, 222. 23. R. Moody, Edwin Forrest, 396. 24. Strand, “‘My Noble Spartacus,’” 19–37. 25. The Gladiator, act 1, scene 1, in R. Moody, Dramas, 242. Other references are to act 2, scene 3; and act 5, scene 7. 26. In his personal journal entitled “Secret Records,” Bird described the opening performance. Harris, “Young Dramatist’s Diary,” 18. 27. New York Evening Post, Sept. 27, 1831 (cited hereafter as NYEP). 28. New York Morning Courier and Enquirer, Sept. 27, 1831, 2. In his “Secret Records,” Bird notes that “Mr. Webbe of the Courier and Inquirer made a savage attack upon the piece, saying it was damned. . . . I wonder if Mr. Webbe understands the meaning of the phrase ‘to thrust an iron into one’s soul’?” Harris, “Young Dramatist’s Diary,” 18–19. 29. NYEP, Oct. 3, 1831.

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30. See R. Moody, Edwin Forrest, 148. 31. Account Ledger, Park Theatre, 1832–1841. 32. See Tragle, Southhampton Slave Revolt; and Duff and Mitchell, Nat Turner Rebellion. 33. Harris, “Young Dramatist’s Diary,” 16–17. 34. Harris mentions this in his introduction to “Young Dramatist’s Diary,” 10; also in Carroll, Slave Insurrections, 83–117; Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 264–76; and Masur, 1831: The Year of the Eclipse, 9–62. 35. See Mayer, All on Fire; and Cain, William Lloyd Garrison. 36. Harris, “Young Dramatist’s Diary,” 22. 37. See R. Moody, Edwin Forrest, 180. 38. “‘The Gladiator’—Mr. Forrest—Acting,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 26, 1846, in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, 2:158–59. 39. See “The Union vs. Fanaticism,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 9, 1846, in ibid., 2:81. 40. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 117. 41. Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage, serial 3, chap. 16, 52. 42. Quinn, History BCW, 236 and 239. 43. Introduction to Jack Cade, in Moses, Representative Plays, 2:431. 44. Moody says he was drunk. See Edwin Forrest, 195. 45. Jack Cade, act 4, scene 2. Other references are to act 4, scene 3. 46. R. Moody, Edwin Forrest, 233. 47. See Bradley, George Henry Boker; and Evans, George Henry Boker. 48. Letter dated Oct. 22, 1855, quoted in Evans, George Henry Boker, 16, and in Bradley, George Henry Boker, 174. 49. Boker to Richard Stoddard, Jan. 7, 1850, Princeton University Library, in Evans, George Henry Boker, 18, and in Bradley, George Henry Boker, 79. 50. Calaynos: A Tragedy, in Boker, Plays and Poems, 1:1–112. 51. Bradley, George Henry Boker, 58. 52. Quinn, History BCW, 340. 53. Evans, George Henry Boker, 36. 54. Anne Boleyn, in Boker, Plays and Poems, 1:113–234. References are to act 4, scene 5; and act 5, scene 2. 55. The Betrothal, in Boker, Plays and Poems, 2:1–122. 56. Bradley, George Henry Boker, 97–98. 57. Leonor De Guzman, in Boker, Plays and Poems, 1: 235–345. 58. Boker, Francesca Da Rimini; R. Moody, Dramas, 423–73. For commentary on the play, see Quinn, History BCW, 349–56; Bradley, George Henry Boker, 123–60; and Evans, George Henry Boker, 71–88. 59. Skinner, Footlights and Spotlight, 261–66; R. Moody, Dramas, 429. 60. Bradley, George Henry Boker, 170. 61. Ibid., 336. 62. Quinn, Representative American Plays, 332. 63. Moody, America Takes the Stage, 200.

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64. See T. Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity; and Auser, Nathaniel P. Willis. 65. Quinn, History BCW, 255. 66. Bianca Visconti: or, The Heart Overtasked, in Halline, American Plays, 201–30. 67. Knickerbocker, APS Online, 353. 68. Tortesa the Usurer, in Quinn, Representative American Plays, 255–92. 69. Quoted in Auser, Nathaniel P. Willis, 124. 70. Sargent, Velasco; a Tragedy, in Five Acts, reel 334.17. References are to act 2, scene 5; act 3, scene 5; and act 5, scene 2. 71. Quinn, History BCW, 261–64; Meserve, Heralds of Promise, 79–81. 72. Quinn, Representative American Plays, 387. 73. Leonora, act 1, scene 1. Other references are to act 1, scene 1; act 1, scene 3; and act 3, scene 4. 74. Rodwell, Young Widow, 25. 75. Meserve, Heralds of Promise, 111. 76. Hartnoll, Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 660. 77. Odell, Annals, 3:655. 78. Moody in Wilmeth and Miller, Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, 87. 79. Hawes, “John Brougham as Playwright,” 187. 80. Hawes makes this point in his article. 81. T. Brown, History of the American Stage, 288. 82. Richardson, “Plays and Playwrights,”1:279–80. 83. Odell, Annals, 7:238. 84. Robert Emmet, act 1, scene 3. Other references are to act 3, scene 5. 85. Quoted in Lott, Love and Theft, 23. 86. Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, viii. 87. Virginia Mummy, in Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 159–77. 88. Marble, The Minstrel Show; or, Burnt Cork Comicalities, 2–4. 4. The Age of Melodrama 1. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:86. 2. Mott, American Journalism, 215–52. 3. Poe, “Mrs. Mowatt’s Fashion,” 61. 4. Poe, “Mrs. Mowatt’s Comedy Reconsidered,” 65, 63. 5. “A Suggestion—Brooklyn Amusements,” Brooklyn Evening Star, Oct. 27, 1845, in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, 1:228. 6. Critics included Henry Clapp Jr., Edward Wilkins, Fitz-James O’Brien, Ada Clare, and others. See Miller, Bohemians and Critics. 7. Poe, “Mrs. Mowatt’s Comedy Reconsidered,” 63. 8. The play is readily available in several anthologies: Quinn, Representative American Plays, 297–328; Halline, American Plays, 231–72; and R. Moody, Dramas, 309–47. References are to act 1, scene 1; act 5, scene 1; and act 4, scene 1. 9. Poe, “Mrs. Mowatt’s Comedy Reconsidered,” 63. 10. Miller, “Image of Fashionable Society in American Comedy,” 243–52.

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11. Browne, Our Best Society, act 3, scene 1. 12. Pardey, Nature’s Nobleman, act 1, scene 1. 13. Odell, Annals, 5:373. 14. Morris, Curtain Time, 135–36. 15. Hindley, True History of Tom and Jerry, 168, 175, 200. 16. Odell, Annals, 3:60. 17. Ibid., 5:373. 18. B. Baker, Glance at New York, act 1, scene 1. Other references are to act 1, scene 1; and act 1, scene 2. 19. Schlesinger, Almanac of American History, 262. 20. Odell, Annals, 6:238. 21. Ibid., 310. 22. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, act 1, scene 1, in R. Moody, Dramas, 360–61. Other references are to act 2, scene 2; act 3, scene 2; act 4, scene 2; and act 5, scene 3. 23. Toll, Blacking Up, 51–55. 24. R. Moody, America Takes the Stage, 42. 25. Toll, Blacking Up, 30. 26. Lott, Love and Theft, 5. 27. New York Herald, Aug. 29, 1854. 28. New York Saturday Press, Aug. 27, 1859. 29. Leader, Mar. 29, 1862. 30. Spirit of the Times, June 10, 1865 (cited hereafter as ST). 31. Dramatic Mirror, Apr. 7, 1888. 32. Morris, Curtain Time, 181. 33. Editorial included with the script of London Assurance. 34. Odell, Annals, 4:534. 35. Solberg, Copyright Enactments of the United States, 43. Also see Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A., 187 and 256; and Quinn, History BCW, 369–70. 36. “American Memory,” Library of Congress, . 37. Boucicault, The Poor of New York, act 2, scene 1. Other references are to act 5, scene 2. 38. J. Daly, Life of Augustin Daly, 74. 39. Quinn, History BCW, 372–73. 40. Boucicault, The Octoroon, act 1, scene 1. 41. New York Saturday Press, Dec. 10, 1859. 42. Quinn, History BCW, 308. 43. Quoted in McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 211. 44. For biographical information about Daly, see Felheim, Theatre of Augustin Daly; and J. Daly, Life of Augustin Daly. 45. Nym Crinkle (A. C. Wheeler), “Our Feuilleton,” New York World, Oct. 31, 1869. 46. Under the Gaslight, in Watt and Richardson, American Drama, 157–91. References are to act 1, scene 1; and act 4, scene 3.

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47. Odell, Annals, 8:304. 48. See Quinn, A History of the American Drama From the Civil War to the Present Day, 1:13 (cited hereafter as Quinn, History CWPD). 49. Horizon, act 1, scene 1, in Wilmeth and Cullen, Plays by Augustin Daly, 107. Other references are to act 1, scene 1; and act 4, scene 1. 50. Leader, Mar. 25, 1871. 51. Odell, Annals, 9:21. 52. “The Statistics of Divorce,” Nation, June 18, 1891, <www.NationArchive.com>. 53. Mott, History of American Magazines, 312. 54. Ibid., 446. 55. A. Daly, Divorce, act 2. Other references are to acts 3 and 5. 56. J. Daly, Life of Augustin Daly, 109–10. 57. Leader, Sept. 9, 1871. 58. New York Telegram, Oct. 1, 1879, 76. 59. Catherine Sturtevant, introduction to Divorce, in A. Daly, Man and Wife and Other Plays, 103. 60. A. Daly, Pique, act 1, scene 1. Other references are to act 2, scene 1; act 3, scene 1; and act 4, scene 1. 61. Odell, Annals, 10:16. Charley and his brother Walter were kidnapped. Walter escaped, but Charley was held for ransom, and in spite of attempts by the family to buy his release, he was never seen again. See <www.ushistory.org/germantown/upper/charley>. 62. New York Tribune, Dec. 15, 1875. 63. Ours, act 3, in Tydeman, Plays by Tom Robertson, 85–134. 64. ST, Mar. 20, 1869, 80. 65. Nym Crinkle, “The New School,” New York World, Oct. 16, 1870. Nym Crinkle (the critic A. C. Wheeler) argues that the “merit of the new school is its respectability. It is conventionally polite, impartial, and genteel. It never outrages a prejudice, never inculcates a truth except by inference. Its heroes are self-subdued gentlemen, never deep-breathing, outspoken men. Its women are constantly struggling to be ingenuous and natural and to act with spontaneity, but without conviction. A terror of impropriety subdues them all to a common level of deliciousness.” 66. Odell, Annals, 8:130. 67. Howard, Saratoga; or, Pistols for Seven, act 1, scene 1. Other references are to act 1, scene 1; act 2, scene 1; and act 5, scene 1. 68. Odell, Annals, 9:14. 69. ST, Dec. 24, 1870, 304; Jan. 28, 1871, 384. 70. NYEP, Jan. 12, 1874. 71. Howard, Autobiography of a Play, 14. 72. Quinn, History CWPD, 1:52. 73. Odell, Annals, 12:18. 74. Young Mrs. Winthrop, act 1, scene 1. Other references are to act 4, scene 1. 75. The Henrietta, in Halline, American Plays, 407–53. References are to act 1, scene 1.

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76. Shenandoah, act 3, in R. Moody, Dramas, 600. 77. Medina, Nick of the Woods. 78. NYEP, Aug. 30, 1876. 79. Davy Crockett; or, Be Sure You’re Right, Then Go Ahead, act 1, scene 1, in Goldberg and Heffner, Davy Crockett and Other Plays. Other references are to act 4, scene 1. 80. New York World, Mar. 15, 1874. 81. This information is noted by Stuart D. Sherman in the introduction to The Poetic Works of Joaquin Miller; Halline, American Plays, 380. 82. NYEP, Aug. 23, 1877. 83. ST, Apr. 8, 1882, 268. 84. New York World, Jan. 27, 1884. 85. NYEP, Feb. 15, 1881. 86. Po-ca-hon-tas; or, The Gentle Savage, in Meserve and Reardon, Satiric Comedies, 115–55. References are to act 2, scene 3. 87. Hawes, “John Brougham as Playwright,” 185. 88. Brougham, Columbus El Filibustero!!, act 1, scene 1. Other references are to act 1, scene 2; and act 2, scene 1. 89. Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice, in Wells, Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques, 77–116. 90. R. Moody, Dramas, 399. 91. Jefferson, introduction to Rip Van Winkle as Played by Joseph Jefferson, [by Dion Boucicault,] 12. References to the play are from act 1, scene 1; act 3, scene 1; and act 4, scene 4. 92. NYEP, May 28, 1921. 93. C. Smith, Musical Comedy in America, 16–17. 94. The Black Crook, act 4, scene 6, in Matlaw, The Black Crook and Other Nineteenth-Century American Plays, 373–74. 95. New York Tribune, Sept. 17, 1866. 96. Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 109. 97. C. Smith, Musical Comedy in America, 19. 98. New York Saturday Press, Feb. 3, 1866. 99. Odell, Annals, 7:9. 5. Realism and American Drama

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Hamlin Garland, “Truth in the Drama,” Literary World 20 (September 14, 1889): 308. 1. New York World, May 31, 1874. 2. NYEP, Aug. 30, 1876. 3. Ibid., Aug. 23, 1877. 4. Quoted in Miller, Bohemians and Critics, 83–85. 5. See Kirk, W. D. Howells; Brooks, Howells; Cady, Road to Realism; Meserve, Complete Plays of W. D. Howells; R. Moody, Dramas, 611–17; and Quinn, History CWPD, 1:66–81. 201


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6. Cady, Road to Realism, 109. 7. Ibid., 136. 8. “Plays of the Day,” Illustrated American (Jan. 24, 1891): 395. 9. See J. McCullough, Hamlin Garland; Holloway, Hamlin Garland; Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career; and Perry, James A. Herne. 10. Garland quoted in J. McCullough, Hamlin Garland, 32. 11. Literary World 20 (Sept. 14, 1889): 308. 12. Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career, 80–81. 13. Boston Evening Transcript, July 8, 1890. 14. R. Moody, Ned Harrigan, 5; Quinn, History CWPD, 1:82–104. 15. Quinn, History CWPD, 1:86. 16. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 14, 1911. 17. R. Moody, Ned Harrigan, 45. 18. The Mulligan Guard Ball, act 1, scene 1, in R. Moody, Dramas, 562. 19. New York Evening World, Nov. 28, 1892, in Alan Dale Scrapbooks, 2:58. 20. R. Moody, Dramas, 540. 21. Illustrated American, Jan. 24, 1891. 22. Dale, Aug. 29, 1893, in Alan Dale Scrapbooks, 2:92. 23. ST, Dec. 13, 1890, 808. 24. Hoyt, Five Plays, vii–xv; Quinn, History CWPD, 1:96–104; R. Moody, Dramas, 629–58; Moses, Representative American Dramas, 3–5. 25. A Bunch of Keys; or, The Hotel, act 1, in Hoyt, Five Plays. 26. Hoyt, preface to A Texas Steer, in Moses, Representative American Dramas, 7. Other references are to act 1, scene 1, 13–14, 17. 27. A Texas Steer, act 2, in ibid., 21–22. Other references are to act 4, 43–44. 28. A Trip to Chinatown, act 1, scene 1, in Hoyt, Five Plays, 113–14. Other references are to act 1, scene 1. 29. ST, Nov. 14, 1891, 632. 30. Ibid., Sept. 23, 1893, 300. 31. R. Moody, Dramas, 632. 32. Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A., 250. 33. Schanke, Ibsen in America, 10. 34. Amy Leslie, quoted in Schanke, Ibsen in America, 10. 35. Winter, Wallet of Time, 591–93. 36. ST, May 23, 1891, 806. 37. Quoted in Schanke, Ibsen in America, 13. 38. Albert Edmund Lancaster, “Ghosts at Ambergs,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Apr. 4, 1891. 39. New York Times, Feb. 18, 1894, quoted in Schanke, Ibsen in America, 15–16. 40. Clipping, Nov. 18, 1897, in Alan Dale Scrapbooks, 5:[n.p.]. 41. Quinn, History CWPD, 1:126–27. 42. Hazel Kirke, act 1, in Quinn, Representative American Plays, 511. Other references are to acts 2, 3, and 4. 43. NYEP, Feb. 5, 1880.

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44. New York Dramatic Mirror, June 4, 1887. 45. Richardson, American Drama, 179. 46. New York World, Jan. 1, 1888. 47. Perry, James A. Herne; Herne, Shore Acres and Other Plays. 48. Perry, James A. Herne, 60. 49. Herne, Early Plays of James A. Herne, ix. 50. “Editors Study,” Harper’s 83 (June-Nov. 1891): 478. 51. Quoted in Odell, Annals, 15:9, who is quoted in Perry, James A. Herne, 170. 52. Shore Acres, act 1, in Herne, Shore Acres and Other Plays, 30. 53. William Dean Howells, “A New Kind of Play,” Literature, n.s., 1 (Mar. 31, 1899): 266. 54. New York Times, Jan. 11, 1887, 7. 55. Loudon, “Theatre Criticism,” 129–30. 56. New York Times, Sept. 2, 1888, 2. 57. ST, Jan. 15, 1887. 58. Quinn, History CWPD, 1:239–64. 59. Thomas, Alabama, act 3. 60. Thomas, preface to In Mizzoura, 5. Other references are to p. 8. 61. Odell, Annals, 15:590 62. Thomas, Arizona, act 4. 63. The Witching Hour, in Moses, Representative American Dramas, 99–142. References are to acts 3 and 4. 64. NYEP, Feb. 19, 1918. 65. New York Tribune, Feb. 19, 1918. 66. See Winter, Life of David Belasco; Belasco, Theatre through Its Stage Door; Timberlake, Bishop of Broadway. 67. Winter, Life of David Belasco, 1:405. 68. The Girl I Left Behind Me, act 2, in Belasco, Heart of Maryland and Other Plays. 69. Belasco, introductory note to Heart of Maryland and Other Plays, 172. References are to Heart of Maryland, act 2, scene 1. 70. Timberlake, Bishop of Broadway, 453. 71. The Girl of the Golden West, act 2, scene 1, in Belasco, Six Plays by D. B., 311–408. Other references are to act 4, scene 1. 72. Mason, Melodrama, 155–86. 73. Secret Service, in Quinn, Representative American Plays, 573–648. See also Moses, American Dramatist, 164–68; and Quinn, History CWPD, 1:212–38. 74. See Moses and Gerson, Clyde Fitch and His Letters; Fitch, Plays by Clyde Fitch (cited hereafter as PCF); Marra, “Clyde Fitch’s Too Wilde Love,” 23–54; Quinn, History CWPD, 1:265–96; and Moses, Representative American Dramas, 145–88. 75. Quoted in Moses and Gerson, Clyde Fitch and His Letters, xii. 76. Marra, “Clyde Fitch’s Too Wilde Love,” 25. 77. Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 7. 78. Commager, American Mind, 22–23.

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79. Whittier, “Barbara Frietchie,” line 18. 80. Mantle and Sherwood, Best Plays of 1899–1909, vi. 81. The Climbers, in PCF, 2:459–721. References are to act 2 and act 4. 82. Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, in PCF, 2:195–457. References are to act 1, scene 1; act 2, scene 1; and act 3, scene 1. 83. Lovers’s Lane, in PCF, 1:209–405. References are to acts 1 and 3. 84. The Girl with the Green Eyes, in PCF, 3:225–422. References are to act 1, scene 1; act 2, scene 1; and act 4, scene 1. 85. The Truth, in PCF, 4:197–441. References are to act 1, act 2, act 1, and act 3. 86. Moses and Gerson, Clyde Fitch and His Letters, 332. 87. Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A., 297. 88. Moses and Gerson, Clyde Fitch and His Letters, 335–36. 89. The City, in PCF, 4:458, act 1, scene 1. Other references are to act 3, scene 1. 90. New York Dramatic Mirror, Jan. 1, 1910. 91. Moses, Representative American Dramas, 149. 92. Ibid. 93. Statistics on length of runs from Mantle and Sherwood, Best Plays of 1899–1909. 94. See M. Brown, Estranging Dawn; W. Moody, Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody; Quinn, History CWPD, 2:1–26; Quinn, Representative American Plays, 805–39; R. Moody, Dramas, 721–56. 95. Quinn, History CWPD, 2:1. 96. The Great Divide, act 1, in W. Moody, Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody, 2:46. Other references are to act 3. 97. New York Dramatic Mirror, Oct. 13, 1906. 98. NYEP, Oct. 4, 1906. 99. Quinn, History CWPD, 2:16. 100. Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A., 296. 101. New York Dramatic Mirror, Jan. 29, 1910. 102. M. Brown, Estranging Dawn, 253. 103. The Faith Healer, act 2, in W. Moody, Plays and Poems of William Vaughn Moody, 2:244. Other references are to act 3. 104. Meyer, Ibsen, 243. 105. The Nation 88 (Feb. 18, 1909). 106. M. Brown, Estranging Dawn, 254; Quinn, History CWPD, 2:17–23. 107. The New York Idea, in R. Moody, Dramas, 757–811. References are to act 1, scene 1. 108. Ron Wainscott has suggested the relationship between The Demi-Virgin and The New York Idea. 109. Hapgood, Victorian in the Modern World, vii. Epilogue 1. 2.

Walter, How to Write a Play, vii. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 83–84.

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3. Green, New York 1913. 4. Sarlós, Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players; Deutsch and Hanau, Provincetown; Kenton, Provincetown Players and the Playwrights’ Theatre; Black, Women of Provincetown. Works on individual playwrights include Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell; Gainor, Susan Glaspell in Context; and Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Playwright. 5. Hapgood, Victorian in the Modern World, 394. 6. Glaspell, Road to the Temple, 195.

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Wolcott, John R. “Chestnut Street Theatre Company.” In American Theatre Companies, 1749–1887, edited by Weldon B. Durham. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Wright, Richardson. Revels in Jamaica, 1682–1838. 1937. Reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969.

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Index abolitionism, 30, 71–72, 100–104 actors, 80, 110, 134–35, 164; English, migration to America, 49–50, 58–59 Adams, Abigail, 6, 24 Adams, John, 6, 26, 35 Adams, John Quincy, 57 Addams, A. A., 73–74 Addison, Joseph, 2, 6, 10–11, 35, 51 afterpieces, 5, 54–55 Ah Sin (Twain and Harte), 126 Aiken, George L., 100–104 Algiers, 40, 41 Allen, Robert C., 133–34 Allingham, John Till, 55 American Company, 7, 12, 16, 21, 23–24, 28, 33 American Dramatists Club, 120 Americans in England (The Columbian Daughter; or, Americans in England ; Rowson), 40 American Theatre (New Orleans), 59 America Takes the Stage (Moody), 79 Anatomist, The; or, The Sham Doctor (Ravenscroft), 5, 15–16 Ancient Briton, The (Stone), 61, 62 André (Dunlap), 33–35, 39 André, John, 33–35 Androboros (Hunter), 21–22 Anglin, Margaret, 83 Anthony, Katharine, 26 “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World” (Walker), 71 Arch Street Theatre (Philadelphia), 48, 61, 62 Armory Show, 187 Arnold, Benedict, 33–35

Ash Can School, 186 Atlantic Monthly, 138–39 audience: changing tastes, 55–56; opposition to theatre, 19–20; romantic age, 58; working class, 87, 141, 147 Baker, Benjamin, 97–99, 120, 147 Barker, James Nelson, 41–45, 129 Barras, Charles, 131–34 Barrett, Lawrence, 78, 79 Barry, Philip, 183 Barrymore, Lionel, 157, 158 Barton, Andrew (Thomas Forrest), 23 Bates, Blanche, 160, 161 “Battle Hymn of the Republic, The” (Howe), 83 Battle of Bunker’s Hill, The (Brackenridge), 26–27 Battle of New Orleans (Grice), 44 Beaux Stratagem, The (Farquhar), 5, 7, 8–9 Beggar’s Opera, The (Gay), 2, 3, 13, 23 Belasco, David, 151–52, 158–62, 176 Bennett, James Gordon, 92 Bernard, William Bayle, 48, 85–86 Best Plays of 1899–1909, The (Mantle and Sherwood), 183 Bickerstaffe, Isaac, 16–17, 64 Bill of Rights, 29 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 60, 66–73, 125; Gladiator, 67–72; Nick of the Woods, 66–67, 125; Pelopidas, 66–67; “Secret Records,” 71; Sheppard Lee, 72 Black Crook, The (Barras), 131–34 blackface performances, 88–90, 103–4 Blind Girl, The (Morton), 54 Blockade of Boston, The (Burgoyne), 21, 26

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Index Bloodgood, Clara, 171 Boker, George Henry, 60, 75–80; Anne Boleyn, 76–77; Bankrupt, 79; Betrothal, 77; Calaynos, 75–76; Francesca de Rimini, 78–79; Glaucus, 79; Königsmark, 79; Leonor de Guzman, 78; Nydia, 79; Plays and Poems, 79; Widow’s Marriage, 77 Bold Stroke for a Wife, A (Centlivre), 13 Booth, Edwin, 83, 135 Booth, Junius Brutus, 50 Born to Good Luck (Power), 87 Boucicault, Dion, 87, 95, 106–10, 128, 158; Jessie Brown, 110; London Assurance, 87, 95, 106; Octoroon, 106, 108–10, 128; Old Heads and Young Hearts, 106; Poor of New York, 106, 107, 110; Rip Van Winkle, 131–32 Bound East for Cardiff (O’Neill), 188 Bowery Theatre (New York), 60 Box and Cox (Morton), 86 Boyce, Neith, 188 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 26–27 Bradley, Edward Sculley, 79 Brass Monkey, A (Hoyt), 146–47 Bride of Genoa, The (The Genoese; Sargent), 81 British officers, performances by, 21 British West Indies, 3 Broadway, 164 Broadway Theatre (New York), 77, 78 Broekman de Vries, Jenny, 36 Brougham, John, 43, 49, 62, 86–87, 129–31; Columbus el Filibustero!!, 130; Dred, 129; Game of Love, 87; Great Tragic Revival, 130; Irish Yankee, 49, 87; Metamora, 62, 129–30; Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice, 130; Po-ca-hon-tas, 43, 129; Row at the Lyceum, 130–31; Temptation, 87 Broun, Heywood, 157 Brown, Isaac Hull, 95 Brown, Jared, 21 Brown, T. Allston, 87 Browne, Irving, 97 Bryant, William Cullen, 61 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 50, 79 Bunch of Keys, A; or, The Hotel (Hoyt), 143 Bunker Hill; or, The Death of General Warren (Burk), 27, 38, 44 Burgoyne, John, 21, 26 Burk, John Daly, 27, 38, 44

Burke, Charles, 131 burlesques, 129–30 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 162 Burnim, Kalman A., 4 Burton, W. E., 110 business world, portrayal of, 122–24 Busy Body, The (Centlivre), 2, 11–13 Caldwell, James H., 59 Cameron, Beatrice, 140, 147 Camille (Heron), 104–5 Campbell, Bartley, 110, 127–28 Candidates, The; or, The Humors of a Virginia Election (Munford), 27 Cannon, Anthony J. (Tony Hart), 140 Carey, Henry, 5, 15 Carter, Mrs. Leslie, 159–60 Cather, Willa, 186 Cato (Addison), 2, 6, 10–11, 35, 51 Centlivre, Susan, 2, 11–13 Chanfrau, Francis S., 97, 98 Charles I, 43–44 Charles the Second; or, The Merry Monarch (Payne), 53–54 Charleston, South Carolina, 2 Chernow, Ron, 3 Chestnut Street Theatre (Philadelphia), 39, 40, 41, 43 Christy, E. P., 89 Cibber, Colley, 2, 15 Civil War plays, 124–25, 153, 159, 162–63 Clapp, Henry, Jr., 105, 134 Clare, Ada, 104 Clifton, Josephine, 59, 80, 81 Clinton, Henry, 21, 34 “Clyde Fitch’s Too Wilde Love” (Marra), 164 Coelina, ou l’enfant du mystèrie (Pixérécourt), 38 Coffey, Charles, 2, 14–15 Cohan, George M., 147 Collier, Jeremy, 4 Colman, George (the younger), 38, 47, 54; Blue Beard, 38, 54; Forty Thieves, 54; Love Laughs at Locksmith, 54; Who Wants a Guinea?, 47 comedy: cup and saucer, 119–20; French, 63, 64, 66, 86; realism in, 140–47; social, 120–25. See also farce

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Index comedy of manners, 30 comic opera, 13–17, 40, 54, 134 Commager, Henry Steele, 164–65 common man, 57–58, 67–68 Confessions of Nat Turner, The (Gray), 70–71 Congreve, William, 9, 10 Conrad, King of Naples (Conrad), 73 Conrad, Robert T., 60, 73–75 Conscious Lovers, The (Steele), 5 Constancy (Boyce), 188 Constant Couple, The (Farquhar), 7 Constitution, 29 Contented Woman, A (Hoyt), 146 Continental Congress, 20, 27–28, 32 Contrast, The (Tyler), 28, 30–32, 41, 42, 55, 94, 96, 125 Conway, F. B., 65 Cooke, George Frederick, 50, 58 Cooper, James Fenimore, 39, 60, 64, 152 Cooper, Thomas A., 33, 37, 38, 39, 50, 59 Copeau, Jacques, 187 copyright law, 106–7 Cordelia’s Aspirations (Harrigan), 142 Country Wife, The (Wycherly), 8 Crinkle, Nym. See Wheeler, A. C. Crockett, Davy, 125, 126–27 Crook, George Cram, 186, 188 Crucible, The (Miller), 44 cubism, 187 Cultural History of the American Revolution (Silverman), 6 culture: democratization of, 92–94; feminization of, 164–65 Cumberland, Richard, 21 cup and saucer comedies, 119–20 Curtis, George W., 96 Cushman, Charlotte, 50, 76, 135

Darby, Margaret, 44–45 Daughter of the Middle Border, A (Garland), 140 Davenant, William, 7 Davenport, E. L., 78, 83 Davenport, Jean M., 104 Davies, Peter, 2 Davy Crockett; or, Be Sure You’re Right, Then Go Ahead (Murdock), 126–27 Dead End (Kingsley), 147 Death of General Montgomery, The (Brackenridge), 26–27 Declaration of Independence, 6, 29 Dekker, Thomas, 37 De Mille, Henry C., 158 democracy as theme, 51 Densmore, G. S., 126 Devlin, Mary (Mrs. Edwin Booth), 87 Dickens, Charles, 110, 129 Disappointment, The; or, The Force of Credulity (Barton), 23 Dithmar, Edward A., 148, 154 Divorce (Daly), 114–15 divorce theme, 114–17, 168–70, 182–83 Dodge, Mabel, 186, 188 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 140, 147, 166 Doty, Gresdna, 39 Douglas, Ann, 164 Douglas (Home), 50 Douglass, David, 3, 7, 19, 23–24 Drake, Samuel, 88 Dreiser, Theodore, 186 Drifting Apart (Herne), 140, 152 Drury Lane Theatre, 4, 28, 38, 43 Dryden, John, 2, 7 Du Barry (Belasco), 160 Dumas, Alexandre (fils), 104 Dumas, Alexandre (père), 58 Dunlap, William, 6, 32–39; André, 33–35, 39; Darby’s Return, 32–33; Father, 32; Fountainville Abbey, 33; Fraternal Discord, 37, 38; Glory of Columbia, 34–35, 38–39, 44, 55; History of the American Theatre, 39; Indians in England, 37; Italian Father, 37; Kotzebue, translations of, 35–38; Lover’s Vows, 36–37, 38; Modest Soldier, 32; Tale of Mystery, 38; Trip to Niagara, 39, 48; Voice of Nature, 38

Dale, Alan, 141–42, 148 Daly, Augustin, 110–20, 126, 162, 177 Dame aux Camélias, La (Dumas), 104–6, 160 Damon and Phillida (Cibber/Carey), 5, 15 Dance, Charles, 86 Danites, The; or, the Heart of the Sierras (Miller), 127, 137 Dan’s Tribulations (Harrigan), 142 Dante Alighieri, 78

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Index Durang, Charles, 42, 72 Duval, Alexander, 53

Forest Rose, The (Woodworth), 45–46, 48 Forrest, Edwin, 50, 55, 59–61, 62, 73, 129; as common man, 67–68; divorce, 134–35; in Jack Cade, 74–75; playwriting contests, 60, 65, 66–67 Forster, John, 69 Founding Fathers, 29, 35 Fountainville Abbey (Dunlap), 33 Fox, G. W. L., 100 France, 34 France, Anatole, 187 Fraternal Discord (Dunlap), 37, 38 French plays, 104–6, 120, 135; adaptations of, 63, 64, 66, 86 Frohman, Charles, 124–25, 176 Frohman era, 176–77 Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 100 Fyles, Franklin, 158

East Indian, The (Lewis), 38 Eastman, Max, 186 economy: depression of 1873, 139; depression of 1893, 185–86; financial panic of 1857, 107 Egan, Pierce, 97–98 Emmett, Dan, 89 Engaged (Gilbert), 121 English repertoire, 2–3, 19, 30–31, 55 Enlightenment, 35 entre-acte entertainments, 4 equality, 29–30, 40, 55; in Contrast, 30–32 Esmerelda (Gillette and Burnett), 162 Evacuation Day, 30, 38 Evangeline (Rice), 134 Evans, Oliver H., 78–79

Gallery Slave, The (Campbell), 128 Gardener, Helen H., 153 Garland, Hamlin, 137, 139–40, 148, 152 Garrick, David, 2, 4, 5, 54, 59, 109; farces, 17–24, 54; modifies Shakespeare, 7, 28 Garrison, William Lloyd, 71 Gay, John, 2, 3, 13–14 genteel tradition, 79–80 George III, 20 German romantic drama, 35–37 Ghosts in the City (Ibsen), 148 Gilbert, W. S., 121 Gilbert, William, 134 Gilded Age, The; or, Colonel Sellers (Twain), 126, 162 Gilfert, Charles, 59 Gillette, William, 162–63 Girl I Left behind Me, The (Belasco), 158–59 Girl of the Golden West, The (Belasco), 160– 62 Gladiator, The (Bird), 67–72 Glance at New York, A (Baker), 97–99, 120, 147 Glaspell, Susan, 186 Glory of Columbia, The : Her Yeomanry! (Dunlap), 34–35, 38–39, 44, 55 Glory of His Country, The (Landis), 157 Godfrey, Thomas, 23–24 Goffe, William, 43–44

Fair Penitent, The (Rowe), 5 Faith Healer, The (Moody), 178–81 Fall of British Tyranny, The; or, American Liberty Triumphant (Leacock), 26 Family Jars (Lunn), 55 farce, 13–17, 54–55, 85–86, 121; Garrick’s, 17– 24; realistic, 143–47 Farquhar, George, 7–10 Fashion (Mowatt), 86, 93, 94–97, 121 Federalists, 34, 35 Female Parson; or, Beau in the Sudds, The (Coffey), 2, 14–15 Fennell, James, 39 Feydeau, Georges, 121 Fielding, Henry, 2, 14 Fifth Avenue Theatre, 120 Fiske, Stephen, 128, 146, 147–48, 153, 154 Fitch, Clyde, 157, 164–76; Barbara Freitchie, 165, 170–71; Bohemia, 165; Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, 167–68; City, 174–75; Climbers, 165–67, 169; Girl with the Green Eyes, 171–73; His Grace de Grammont, 165; Lover’s Lane, 168; Mistress Betty, 165; Modern Match, 164; Moth and the Flame, 165; Nathan Hale, 165; Truth, 171–73, 176 Flash of Lightning, A; or, City Hearthsides and City Heartaches (Daly), 112–13 Flora; or, Hob in the Well (Hippisley), 2, 13–14

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Index Goldman, Emma, 186 Goldoni, Carlo, 138 Goldsmith, Oliver, 10, 19 Goodman’s Fields, 18 gothic drama, 33, 38 Gray, Thomas R., 70–71 Great Awakening, 2 Great Divide, The (Moody), 177–78, 181 Grecian Captive; or, The Fall of Athens (Noah), 44 Greek mythology, 17, 182 Greeley, Horace, 92 Green Mountain Boy, The (Jones), 48 Greenwich Village, 186–87 Grice, C. E., 44 Grimsted, David, 37 Hackett, James Henry, 47, 59, 131 Hale, Nathan, 11 Hallam, Lewis, Jr., 12–13, 20, 30 Hallam Company of Comedians: Anatomist, 15–16; Beggar’s Opera, 13 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 5, 135 Hampden, Walter, 83 Handel operas, 13 Hapgood, Hutchins, 186, 188 Harlequin Collector; or, The Miller Deceived, 5 Harrigan, Edward, 139, 140–43 Harris, Richard, 71–72 Hart, Moss, 168 Harte, Bret, 126, 137, 139 Hawe, David S., 87 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 60 Haymarket Riot, 151 Hazel Kirke (MacKaye), 148–50 Heart of Maryland, The (Belasco), 159 Hearts of Oak (Herne and Belasco), 151–52 Hedda Gabbler (Ibsen), 147–48 He Knew He Was Right (Trollope), 114 Held by the Enemy (Gillette), 162 Henry, John, 20, 30, 32 Her Lord and Master (Marryatt), 117 Herne, James A., 139–40, 151–54, 168 Herne, Katharine, 152 Heron, Matilda, 83, 104–5 Herrick, Robert, 164 Hewitt, Barnard, 147

Hill, George Handel, 47–48 Hippisley, John, 2, 13–14 History of Massachusetts (Hutchinson), 43 History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (Dunlap), 39 H. M. S. Pinafore (Gilbert and Sullivan), 134 Hodge, Francis, 47 Hodgkinson, John’s, 33 Holcroft, Thomas, 38 Home, John, 50 Honest Whore, The (Dekker and Middleton), 37 Hooley, Richard M., 127–28 Hopwood, Avery, 183 Horizon (Daly), 113–14 Howard, Bronson, 110, 120–25, 162–63; Aristocracy, 125; Banker’s Daughter, 122; Brighton, 120; Fantine, 120; Henrietta, 123–24; Peter Stuyvesant, 125; Saratoga, 120–22; Shenandoah, 124–25, 162–63; Young Mrs. Winthrop, 122 Howard, Caroline, 100 Howard, Cordelia, 100 Howard, G. C., 100 Howe, Gridley, 83 Howe, Julia Ward, 80, 83–85 Howe, William, 7, 21 Howells, William Dean, 137–39 Hoyt, Charles H., 139, 143–47 Hugo, Victor, 58, 66, 117, 118, 120 Hulett, William, 5 Humphreys, David, 45 Humphreys, Mose, 97 Hunter, Robert, 21–22 Hutchinson, Peter, 25 Hutchinson, Thomas, 25, 43 Ibsen, Henrik, 79, 140, 147–48, 166, 176–77 Incas, plays about, 37–38, 73 Indian Princess; or, La Belle Savage, The (Barker), 43 Indians, portrayal of, 22–23, 44, 60–62, 64, 114; burlesques, 129–30; cavalry vs. Indians plays, 158–59 individualism, 58 international plays, 54 Ireland, Joseph N., 61 Irish characters, 141–42

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Index Irish vehicle plays, 86–88 Irish-Yankee plays, 49, 86–87 Irving, Washington, 53, 131 Italian castrati, 13

35; Pizarro in Peru, 37; Stranger, 35–36; Versöhnung oder der Bruderzwist, 38; Virgin of the Sun, 37–38 Lafayette, Marquis de, 44–45 La Fayette; or, The Castle of Olmutz (Woodworth), 45 Landis, Frederic, 157 Last Days of Pompei (Bulwer-Lytton), 79 Leacock, John, 26 Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper), 60 Leaves from an Actor’s Note-book (Vandenhoff), 62 Lecture on Heads (Stevens), 19–20 Lee, Nathaniel, 5 Leonora; or, The World’s Own (Howe), 83– 85 Leslie, Amy, 147 Les Misérables (Hugo), 117, 120 Lethe; or, Esop in the Shades (Garrick), 5, 17–18, 54 Levingston, William, 2 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 33, 38 Lhamon, W. T., Jr., 89 Liberator, 71 Licensing Act of 1737, 13 Lillo, George, 2, 3, 5 Limmerick Boy (Pilgrim), 87 Lincoln, Abraham, 29 Lion of the West (Paulding), 125 little theatre, 187–88 Little Theatre (Haymarket, London), 19–20 local-color literary movement, 139, 154 London Merchant, The (Lillo), 2, 3, 5 Long, John Luther, 160 Lott, Eric, 103–4 Love for Love (Dryden), 2 Love in a Village (Bickerstaffe), 16, 54 Lover, Samuel, 87 Lover’s Vows (Payne), 50 Lunn, Joseph, 55 Lyceum Theatre (London), 85–86, 87 Lying Valet, The (Garrick), 2, 5, 18, 54

Jack Cade (Aylmere; Conrad), 73–75 Jackson, Andrew, 57, 68; as character in play, 63–64 Jacksonian Age, 57–58 ; Jim Crow plays, 88–90; novelties, 85–91. See also Boker, George Henry; Howe, Julia Ward; Philadelphia School; Sargent, Epes; Willis, Nathaniel Parker James IV, 42 Jane Shore (Rowe), 5 Jarrett, Henry C., 132 Jefferson, Joseph, I, 41 Jefferson, Joseph, III, 110, 131–32 Jefferson, Thomas, 29, 35 Jeunesse de Henri V, La (Duval), 53 Jim Crow plays, 88–90, 103 John Bull (Colman the younger), 86 John Bull at Home; or, Jonathan in England (Hackett), 47 John Gabriel Borkman (Ibsen), 148 Johnson, Samuel, 4 John Street Theatre (Theatre Royal; New York), 7–8, 12, 21, 32 Jonathan in England, 47 Jones, Joseph S., 48–49 Jones, Robert Edmond, 187 Joshua Whitcomb (Thompson), 154 Kahan, Gerald, 20 Kaufman, George S., 147, 168 Kean, Charles, 59 Kean, Edmund, 50, 51–53, 58, 59 Keene, Laura, 104, 110, 120 Kemble, Charles, 59 Kemble, Fanny, 59 Kemble, John Philip, 39, 50, 59 King Philip’s war, 61 Kingsley, Sidney, 147 Knight, Thomas, 54 Knowles, John Sheridan, 59 Kotzebue, August von, 35–38, 58, 116; Das Kind der Liebe, 36–37, 50; Die Indianer in England, 37; Menschenhaus und Reue,

MacKaye, Percy, 151, 182 MacKaye, Steele, 148–51, 182 Macready, William, 50, 59 Madame Butterfly (Belasco), 160

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Index Maguire, Tom, 151 Maid of the Mill (Bickerstaffe), 16–17, 54 Main-Traveled Roads (Garland), 139, 140 Major, The (Harrigan), 142 Mansfield, Richard, 147 Mantle, Burns, 183 Marble, Dan, 49 Marble, Ed, 88–90 Margaret Fleming (Herne), 140, 152–53 Marlowe, Julia, 170 Marmion (Barker), 42–43 Marmion (Scott), 42 Marplot in Lisbon (Centlivre), 12 Marra, Kim, 164 Marryatt, Florence, 117 Marshall, E. A., 77 Maryland, 1 Marylebone Theatre (London), 83 Mason, George, 29 Mason, Jeffrey, 61, 163 Massachusetts Colony, 25 Masses, 186–87 Mather, Cotton, 2 Mathews, Charles, 45, 46–47 Mayo, Frank, 126 McConachie, Bruce, 72 Medina, Louisa, 73, 125 melodrama, 38, 51, 64–65, 88, 92, 97, 136, 184; Daly, 110–20; London imports, 119–20; novelties, 129–35; realist, 148–50, 162– 63; sensational, 106–10; social comedy, 120–25; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 99, 100–104; urban, 110–20 Melville, Herman, 60 Mencken, H. L., 186 Merry, Mrs. Anne Brunton, 38, 39, 59 Meserve, Walter J., 86 Mestayer, Maria Pray, 87 Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (Stone), 61–62, 67, 72, 73 Middleton, Thomas, 37 Milk White Flag, A (Hoyt), 147 Miller, Arthur, 44 Miller, Joaquin, 127, 137 Minstrel Show, The; or, Burnt Cork Comicalities (Marble), 88–90 Minute Men of 1774–75, The (Herne), 152 miscegenation theme, 108–10

Miss in Her Teens; or, The Medley of Lovers (Garrick), 5, 18–19, 54 Mitchell, Langdon, 182–83 Mitchell, Maggie, 87 Mock Doctor, The (Fielding), 2, 14 modernism, 136 Modern Standard Drama, The (Sargent), 81 Moncrieff, W. T., 98 Montaldo, Antonio, 81 Moody, Richard, 45, 60, 72, 79, 103, 130–31 Moody, William Vaughn, 177–82 moral instruction, in plays, 19, 26 Mormons, 127 Morris, George P., 46 Morris, Lloyd, 105 Morris, Mary, 3, 39 Morris, Owen, 3, 39 Morton, John Madison, 86 Morton, Thomas, 38, 54 Moses, Montrose J., 147, 176 Mott, Frank Luther, 114 Mowatt, Anna Cora, 86, 93, 94–97, 121 Mrs. Wiggins (Allingham), 55 Mulligan Guard Ball, The (Harrigan), 141–42 Mummy The (Bernard), 85–86 Munford, Robert, 27 Murdock, Frank, 126–27 Murdock, James E., 73, 76, 83 Murray–Kean Company, 2, 6, 7, 11–12, 13; Garrick’s farces, 17, 18 music, 23, 38, 129 My Partner (Campbell), 128 Mysterious Monk, The (Ribbemond), 38 Nassau Street Theatre (New York), 12, 15, 18 Nathan, George Jean, 186 Nation, 138 National Theatre (New York), 100–101 Nature’s Nobleman (Pardey), 96, 97 neo-Elizabethan style, 66–67, 75 Nevins, Allan, 22–23 newspapers, 92–93 New Theatre (Central Park West), 187 New Theatre (New York), 11, 33 New York: British occupation of, 7–8, 21; elites, 94–97, 105; urban underclass portrayed, 140 –43 ; working-class plays, 97–99, 141

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Index New York Commercial Advertiser, 36 New York Critic, 60 New York Daily Times, 92 New York Herald, 92, 96 New York Idea, The (Mitchell), 182–83 New York Mirror, 46 New York Sun, 92 New York Tribune, 92 Noah, Mordecai Manuel, 44, 61 nouveaux riches, 94–95 novelties, 85–91; melodrama, 129–35 Nus, Eugène, 107

Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy (MacKaye), 150–51 Paul Pry (Poole), 55 Pauvres de Paris, Les (Nus), 107 Paxton Boys, 22 Paxton Boys, The (anonymous), 22 Payne, John Howard, 50–54, 59; Charles the Second, 53–54; Tragedy of Brutus, 51–53 Peabody, Josephine Preston, 181–82 penny press, 92–93 People’s Lawyer, The (Jones), 48–49 Perle noire, La (Sardou), 113 Perry, John, 152 Phelps, Samuel, 76 Philadelphia, 1, 3, 21, 39 Philadelphia School, 60, 73. See also Bird, Robert Montgomery; Conrad, Robert T.; Smith, Richard Penn; Stone, John Augustus Pilgrim, James, 87 Piper, The (Peabody), 181–82 Pique (Daly), 117–19 Pixérécourt, Guilbert de, 38 Plantation aristocracy, 3 playwriting contests, 60, 65, 66–67, 80 Ploughboy, Jonathan (character), 45–47, 48 Pocahontas, 43 Pocock, Isaac, 54 Poe, Edgar Allan, 81, 93, 94 political positions, drama used to advocate, 24–27 Ponteach; or, The Savages of America (Rogers), 22–23 Pontiac, Chief, 22–23 Poole, John, 55 Poor Pillicoddy (Morton), 86 Poor Soldier, The (O’Keeffe), 32 Porter, Susan, 16 “Potiphar Papers, The” (Curtis), 96, 97, 124 Power, Tyrone, 86–87 Presbyterians, 1 Prince of Parthia, The (Godfrey), 23–24 Professor, The (Gillette), 162 Progressive Era, 186 Provincetown Players, 187 Puccini, Giacomo, 160, 162 Puritans, 1, 43–44

O’Brien, FitzJames, 96 Odell, George C. D., 2, 11, 36, 38, 86, 98, 106, 135, 156 Ogden, Samuel, 94 O’Keeffe, John, 32, 54 Old Homestead, The (Herne), 154 Oldmixon, Mrs. (Georgina George), 39 Old Times in Virginia; or, The Yankee Pedlar (Hill), 48 Oliver, Peter, 25 Olympic Theatre (Philadelphia), 42 One Hundred Wives, 128–29 O’Neill, Eugene, 186, 188 Orphan, The (Otway), 2 Otis, James, 24, 25 Otway, Thomas, 2 Our Best Society (Browne), 97 Ours (Robertson), 119 Owens, John E., 48, 49 Paddy, the Piper (Pilgrim), 87 Padlock, The (Bickerstaffe), 16, 17, 54 Palmer, A. M., 122, 154 Palmer, Harry, 132 Pamela (Richardson), 16 pamphlets, 24–25, 70–71 pantomime, 5 Pardey, Henry, 96, 97 Park Theatre (New York), 13, 35–36, 38, 42, 44, 50, 61, 93, 94 pastiche operas, 16 Patch, Sam, 49 Paterson Strike Pageant, 187, 188 Patriots, The (Munford), 27 Paulding, J. Kirke, 125

Quadroon, The (Reid), 108 Quakers, 1

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Index Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 48, 66, 73, 76, 79, 80, 122–23, 178

Rodwell, Thomas G., 85 Rogers, Robert, 22 romanticism, 35–37, 58–60, 92, 136–37 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 6, 7, 109 Roosevelt, Teddy, 186 Rory O’Moore (Lover), 87 Rowe, Nicholas, 5, 35–36 Rowson, Susanna Haswell, 39, 40 Rowson, William, 39 royalties, 106

Rachel, Mademoiselle, 105–6, 129 Radcliffe, Ann, 33 Rankin, Hugh, 2, 6–7 Ravenscroft, Edward, 5, 15–16 Raymond, Henry J., 92 realism, 136–37, 183–84; Belasco, 158–62; comedy, 140–47; Fitch, 157, 164–76; Garland, 137, 139–40; Gillette, 162–63; Harrigan, 139, 140–43; Herne, 151–54; Howells, 137–39; Hoyt, 139, 143–47; Ibsen, 147–48; MacKaye, 148–51; Mitchell, 182–83; Moody, 177–82; Thomas, 154–58 Recruiting Officer, The (Farquhar), 2, 5, 7, 9–10 Red Scarf, The; or, Scenes in Aroostock (Daly), 113 Reed, John, 186, 187 Rees, James, 62 Reid, Mayne, 108 Reignolds-Winslow, Catherine Mary, 148 Reilly and the Four Hundred (Harrigan), 142 Reinagle, Alexander, 39 Reinhardt, Max, 187 religious intolerance, 43–44 republicanism, 10–11, 29–30, 44–45 Republicans, XYZ affair and, 34 Restoration, 1, 2, 4, 7, 18 Reverend Griffith Davenport, The (Herne), 153 Revolutionary War, theatre banned during, 20, 27–28, 32 Ribbemond; or, The Feudal Baron (The Mysterious Monk), 38 Rice, Edward E., 134 Rice, Elmer, 147 Rice, T. D., 88–89, 103 Richard III (Shakespeare, Cibber version), 2 Richardson, Gary, 87 Richardson, Samuel, 16 Rip Van Winkle (Irving), 131 Rise of Silas Lapham, The (Howells), 139 Rivals, The (Sheridan), 19, 21, 93 Robert Emmet, the Martyr of Irish Liberty (Pilgrim), 87–88 Robertson, T. W., 119–20

Sag Harbor (Herne), 153 Salvation Nell (Sheldon), 147 Sam Patch the Jumper (Marble), 49 Santayana, George, 186 Sardou, Victorien, 113 Sargent, Epes, 80, 81–83 satire, 21–22, 24–28, 129 School (Daly), 120 School for Scandal (Sheridan), 30 Scott, Walter, 42 Secret Service (Gillette), 163 sentimental plays, 35–37, 46, 51 setting, 37, 121 Shaffer, Jason, 10–11 Shakespeare, William: borrowings from, 23–24, 81, 83; burlesque of, 130; colonies and, 6–7, 15; Garrick’s modifications of, 7, 28; Hamlet, 5; influence of, 75; Julius Caesar, 25; King Lear, 6, 7; Merchant of Venice, 5, 6; Much Ado about Nothing, 15; offered as moral lectures, 19; Othello, 6, 19; Restoration changes to, 7, 49–50; Richard III, 5, 6, 7; Romeo and Juliet, 6, 7, 109; Taming of the Shrew, 7 Shaw, George Bernard, 187 Sheldon, Edward, 147 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 19, 21, 32, 37, 95 Sherwood, Garrison P., 183 She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), 10, 19 She Would Be a Soldier; or, The Plains of Chippewa (Noah), 44, 61 Shingle, Solon (character), 48 Shore Acres (Herne), 153, 168 “Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage” (Collier), 4 Shubert, Lee, 176, 182 Shubert, Sam S., 176, 182

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Index Siddons, Sarah, 39, 59 Siege of Tripoli, The (Noah), 44 Siege of Yorktown, The (Noah), 44 Silsbee, Joshua, 49 Silverman, Kenneth, 6, 11 Simpson, Edmund Shaw, 13 Sinclair, Catherine, 134 Sinclair, Upton, 186 Skinner, Otis, 78 slavery, 29–30, 40, 99, 100–104, 108–10, 128; Nat Turner insurrection, 70–71 Smart Set, 186 Smith, Cecil, 133, 134 Smith, Richard Penn, 60, 62–66; Actress of Padua, 65–67; Bravo, 64; Caius Marius, 65; Charlotte Temple: Tale of Truth, 40; Deformed, 65; Disowned, 64–65; Eighth of January, 63–64; Slaves in Algiers, 40; Triumph at Plattsburg, 64; Volunteers, 40; Water Witch (Cooper/Smith), 64; William Penn, 64 social comedy, 120–25 social unrest, 1880s, 150–51 Society (Robertson), 119 Son of the Middle Border, A (Garland), 140 Sons of Liberty, 20 South Carolina, 2 Southern, E. A., 83 Southwark Theatre (Philadelphia), 23 Spanish Fryer, The (Dryden), 2 Speed the Plow (Morton), 38 Spirit of the Times, The, 119, 121–22, 128, 142, 154 Squatter Sovereignty (Harrigan), 142 stagecraft, 137, 175–76, 188 Stagg, Charles, 2 Stagg, Mary, 2 Stamp Act protests, 11, 20 Steele, Richard, 5 Steele, Wilbur Daniel, 188 Sterne, Laurence, 32 Stevens, George Alexander, 19–20 Stoddard, Robert, 80 Stone, John Augustus, 60, 61–62, 129; Ancient Briton, 61, 62 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 99, 100–104, 129, 138 Strand, Ginger, 67 Street Scene (Rice), 147

strolling players, 2 Stuarts, 1, 2 suffrage movement, 114–15 Sullivan, Arthur, 134 Superstition; or, The Fanatic Father (Barker), 43 Tate, Nahum, 7 Taylor, Bayard, 80 Taylor, C. W., 100 Tears and Smiles (Barker), 41–42 temperance plays, 146, 152 Temperance Town, A (Hoyt), 146 Texas Steer, A (Hoyt), 143–45 theatre banned, Revolutionary War era, 20– 21, 27–28, 32 Theatre Royal (Covent Garden), 39 Theatre Royal (John Street Theatre) (New York), 7–8, 12, 21 Theatrical Syndicate, 176 Theodosius (Lee), 5 Thespians, 7–8 Thomas, Augustus, 154–58, 183, 184; Alabama, 154–55; Arizona, 154, 156; Copperhead, 157–58; In Mizzoura, 154, 155–56; Witching Hour, 156–57 Thompson, Denman, 139, 154 Times, The; or, Life in New York (Hackett), 47 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 30, 92 Toll, Robert, 103 Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London (Egan/Moncrieff), 97–98 Tories, 25, 30 Towse, J. Ranken, 127–29, 132, 137, 150, 181, 187 tragedies, 33–34, 50 Tragedy of Brutus, The; or, The Fall of Tarquin (Payne), 51–53 Tragedy of Jane Shore (Rowe), 35–36 transatlantic travel, 19 Tree, Ellen, 59, 83 Trip to America, 47 Trip to Chinatown, A (Hoyt), 145–46 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 32 Trollope, Anthony, 114 “True Story of Lady Bryon’s Life” (Stowe), 138

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Index Turner, Nat, 68–69 Turnpike Gate, The (Knight), 54 Twain, Mark, 126, 128, 139, 162 Two Men of Sandy Bar, The (Harte), 126, 137 Tyler, Royall, 28, 30–32, 41, 42, 55, 94, 96, 125 tyranny as theme, 51

Wemyss, Francis Courtney, 13, 74, 98 Wesley, John, 2 western themes, 113–14, 125–29 Western Yankees, 49 West Indian, The (Cumberland), 21 Wheatley, William, 132 Wheeler, A. C. (Nym Crinkle), 105, 110, 111, 119, 127, 128, 137, 151, 163, 200n.65 Whigs, 21 Whiskey Rebellion, 40 Whitefield, George, 2 White Slave, The (Campbell), 128 Whitlock, Eliza Kemble, 39 Whitman, Walt, 72, 93 Who Speaks First? (Dance), 86 Widow’s Son, The; or, Which Is the Traitor? (Woodworth), 44–45 Wignell, Thomas, 30, 39 Wilkins, Edward G. P., 96, 109–10, 135 Williams, Barney, 49, 86–87 Williamsburg, 2, 4, 5, 6, 11 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 80–81; Bianca Visconti, 80–81; Tortesa the Usurer, 81 Wills, Gary, 29 Winter, William, 105, 119, 134, 137, 147, 187 women, views on equality, 40 women’s magazines, 105 Wonder! , The : A Woman Keeps a Secret (Centlivre), 13 Woodhull, Victoria, 115 Woodworth, Samuel, 44–46 working-class plays, 97–99, 141 Wycherly, William, 8

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Aiken), 100–104 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 99, 100–104, 128 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Taylor), 100 Under the Gaslight (Daly), 111–12 Unofficial Patriot, An (Gardener), 153 Upton, Robert, 6 urban melodrama, 110–20 Valley Forge, performances at, 11, 17 Van Damn, Rip, 6, 7 Vandenhoff, George, 62 vaudeville, 140–41 Velasco; a Tragedy, in Five Acts (Sargent), 81–83 Vesey, Denmark, 71 Vestris, Madame, 86, 87 Vining, Fanny, 83 Virginia Minstrels, 103 Virginia Mummy (Rice), 88, 89 visual artists, 186, 187 Walker, David, 71 Wallack, James, 59, 81, 119–20 Wallack, Lester, 119 Wallack’s Theatre, 119–20 Walnut Street Theatre (Philadelphia), 59, 64, 77–78 Walpole, Robert, 13 Walter, Eugene, 185 War of 1812, 41, 42, 64 Warren, James, 24 Warren, Mercy Otis, 24–27, 28; Adulateur, 24; Blockheads, 25, 26; Defeat, 25; Group, 25; Ladies of Castille, 25, 26; Massachusetts Spy, 25; Motley Assembly, 26; Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, 26; Sack of Rome, 25, 26 Warren, William, 39 Washington, George, 3, 6, 32, 34; performances of plays and, 11, 20 Weber, Maria von, 132

XYZ affair, 34 Yale Literary Society Linonian, 7 Yankee theatre, 45–50, 86 Yankey in New England, The (Humphreys), 45 yellow fever epidemic, 38 You Can’t Take It with You (Hart and Kaufman), 168, 170 “Young Dramatist’s Diary, A” (Harris), 71–72 Young Widow, The (Rodwell), 85 Zaza (Belasco), 160

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Tice L. Miller is a professor of theatre arts at the University of Nebraska– Lincoln. He is the author of Bohemians and Critics, coeditor of The American Stage and the first edition of the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, and, since 1988, an advising editor and contributor to The Cambridge Guide to Theatre.


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Theater in the Americas The goal of the series is to publish a wide range of scholarship on theater and performance, defining theater in its broadest terms and including subjects that encompass all of the Americas. The series focuses on the performance and production of theater and theater artists and practitioners but welcomes studies of dramatic literature as well. Meant to be inclusive, the series invites studies of traditional, experimental, and ethnic forms of theater; celebrations, festivals, and rituals that perform culture; and acts of civil disobedience that are performative in nature. We publish studies of theater and performance activities of all cultural groups within the Americas, including biographies of individuals, histories of theater companies, studies of cultural traditions, and collections of plays.


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Miller

THEATER

Southern Illinois University Press 1915 University Press Drive Mail Code 6806 Carbondale, IL 62901 www.siu.edu/~siupress

American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Tice L. Miller is a professor of theater arts at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is the author of Bohemians and Critics: The Development of American Theatre Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, coeditor of The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present and The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, and an advising editor and contributor to The Cambridge Guide to Theatre.

ENTERTAINING THE NATION

I

n this survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American drama, Tice L. Miller examines American plays written before a canon was established in American dramatic literature and provides analyses central to the culture that produced them. Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries evaluates plays in the early years of the republic, reveals shifts in taste from the classical to the contemporary in the 1840s and 1850s, and considers the increasing influence of realism at the end of the nineteenth century. Miller explores the relationship between American drama and societal issues during this period. While never completely shedding its English roots, says Miller, the American drama addressed issues important on this side of the Atlantic such as egalitarianism, republicanism, immigration, slavery, the West, Wall Street, and the Civil War. Entertaining the Nation effectively outlines the civilizing force of drama in the establishment and development of the nation, ameliorating differences among the various theatergoing classes, and provides a microcosm of the changes on and off the stage in America during these two centuries.

isbn 0-8093-2778-3 isbn 978-0-8093-2778-2

Southern Illinois University Press

ENTERTAINING

THE NATION

American Drama in the Eighteenth

and Nineteenth

Centuries Tice L. Miller

Printed in the United States of America

T. Miller cover Mech.indd 1

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Entertaining the nation: American drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

History of the Balkans, Volume 1: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Modern Philosophy: The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries

Modern Philosophy: The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries

A Small Town in Syria: Ottoman Hama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Entertaining in the Raw

American Drama in the Age of Film

The Family in Twentieth-Century American Drama

American Drama in the Age of Film

Central Works of Philosophy: The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries

Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (The History of Medicine in Context)

American Drama: The Bastard Art (Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama)

The American Nation: Primary Sources

Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West

Walking and the French Romantics: Rousseau to Sand and Hugo (French Studies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, V. 13)

The Philosophical Canon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Essays in Honour of John W. Yolton

Liberty And American Experience In The Eighteenth Century

Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama)

Entertaining The Delaneys

Literary and Sociopolitical Writings of the Black Diaspora in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The Fate of Nations: The Search for National Security in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Entertaining The Delaneys

Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Studies in Christian Mission)

American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

The Fractious Nation?: Unity and Division in Contemporary American Life

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