Chapter 6 Theatre, drama, performance

Jeffrey H. Richards
In examining the history of theatre and drama during this period, a scholar would find it nearly impossible to avoid transatlanticism. Nevertheless, the national focus of most critical and historical writing on literary texts has precluded serious efforts at comprehending both European and North American performance arts for the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries in light of the cross-oceanic reality of theatrical culture. To be sure, in the sheer volume of British playwriting for the period, one can more easily avoid invoking the transatlantic than one can with American writing; but even so, both dramatic literatures and performance practices reflect a bi-continental reality in the exchange of news, actors, practices, texts, and commodities (including bodies) as well as dramatic properties. Theatre, drama, and performance on both sides of the Atlantic richly interfuse not only each other but also transatlantic culture as a whole.
Although there is not a significant theatrical presence in the English colonized New World until after 1700, many plays on British stages reflect knowledge of or interest in North and South American settings or characters. One need look no further than The Tempest (1611) to find Shakespeare’s use of colonial material in his fanciful, West Indian-seeming island and in his native figure, Caliban, based upon accounts reaching England concerning the wreck of a supply ship in the “still-vexed Bermoothes.” Later variations on The Tempest, including John Fletcher’s Sea Voyage and Durfey’s Commonwealth of Women, suggest the continuing potency of the colonial theme and its exoticism to seventeenth-century British audiences.1 Other plays in the Stuart period focus on individual events or personages, including Captain John Smith, the transatlantic explorer, who complained that he and his adventures were being mocked on the English stage.2 By the time of the Restoration, the enhanced stagecraft of the period made possible elaborate productions of American situations, with such costume epics as Dryden and Howard’s The Indian Emperor and Dryden’s The Indian Queen gracing London boards. By 1680, with permanent colonies and more active trade between the British Isles and North America in place, references to New World personages and situations had become more or less commonplace. One example in a play not otherwise noted as a colonialist drama is an exchange in Thomas Otway’s The Atheist (1683), a text set in London. The protagonist, Beaugard, has been led to a mysterious location in London, when he is encountered by two women of color. His first thought is that he has been transported to Captain Smith’s Virginia: “What are you two, Maids of Honour to the Queen of Pomonkey? And is this one of her Palaces?”3 Although The Atheist was never acted in North America, nor Otway ever resident in the colonies, that the main character refers to a colonial situation already over a half-century out of date hints at the power of American scenes for English dramatists writing in and about London.
On the American side, opportunities were rare to return the favor, but colonials, even without any permanent playhouse buildings, remained conscious of European dramatic culture. The first known public performance in British North America is that famous ephemeral play, The Bear and the Cub, enacted at a tavern on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 1665. The three actors were recent migrants to the colony who put on this bit of merriment in costume; we know about it because someone complained to the authorities and brought a case against the actors in court. Although the court records are somewhat vague on the precise law the actors were said to have broken, two contradictory things happened: the three English immigrants were absolved of any legal guilt, but the case seems to have stifled any further interest in public performances for decades. Nevertheless, with the colonies enlarged by a constant influx of migrants, many of whom brought with them some interest in theatre, the theatricality of London had a place within the larger cultural parameters of what seemed to be a general indifference or even hostility, as in Puritan New England, to acting and playhouses. To be sure, a rising gentleman class in Virginia and elsewhere sent their sons (and, later, daughters) to England for schooling and business, exposing them to Restoration and post-Restoration theatre (as with, for example, William Byrd II), but it took until the 1710s and 1720s for anyone in the colonies to set aside buildings as theatre spaces.
Perhaps the most culturally dense transatlantic text of the Restoration is Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter (1689), a British play about an incident in colonial Virginia, Bacon’s Rebellion. Drawing upon accounts of the functional civil war in Virginia in 1676 and upon the stage history of the colonies, including Dryden’s Indian plays, as well as her own personal experience in the New World, Behn crafted a theatrically messy but dramatically compelling text that reflects both London politics and the actual conditions for English New World colonists. The background of the rebellion is complex and confusing; the instigator of the revolt against royal authority was a royalist himself, Nathaniel Bacon, a lawyer who played to certain popular interests in suppressing the Native population, contrary to the official government line of appeasement of Indians. Behn fashions Bacon to meet the expectations of heroic tragedy, complete with a fancied love relationship with a Native queen, and thus impresses a high poetic style upon the wilderness. At the same time, she satirizes the lower-born colonists, who in Virginia have come into political power – in essence, pesky Whigs intruding upon Tory territory. In between the mocked council and the mourned tragic figures of Indian king and queen and Bacon is the Widow Ranter, a creolized figure who has used her situation as a New World widow to her economic and social advantage. Ranter is spunky, independent, and unfeminine – an accurate description, likely, of many women who traveled to America as indentured servants or as bought brides, but who found themselves after a point as valuable commodities in the colonial economy. On the one hand, Behn speaks to her understanding of Virginia as a place that, without some form of hierarchy, will degenerate into a democratic and ineffective polity; but on the other hand, she makes the colonists’ organization of themselves after the rebellion, and in particular Ranter’s ability to make a good match without losing her liberty, a commentary on the rigidity and oppressiveness of British society.4
In a more thoroughgoing critique of British society by importing American scenes or imagined situations, John Dennis’s Liberty Asserted (1704) situates itself in the uncertain territory between French and British efforts to control Native populations. Drawing upon beliefs among the English that Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) notions of liberty are more advanced than European, Dennis develops a biracial hero, Ulamar, who learns to rise above his ethnic composition (French and Iroquois) to become the spokesman for transatlantic and trans-ethnic notions of liberty. Whereas Behn reveals her royalist-Tory bias in much of Ranter, Dennis makes clear from the outset that his republican-Whig views will provide the ideal formula for the home country. Dennis, however, tries to recast his whiggishness as a creed of liberty that supersedes partisan bickering, hoping to unite Britons everywhere under the liberty flag. Ulamar represents a kind of transnational vision in which the act of “propping falling Liberty” falls to those who rise above national bigotries and localized self-interest.5 In that sense, then, the transatlantic provides a kind of disinterested (but still colonial) space that serves as a laboratory for European refashioning, whereby tyranny (a code word for French absolutism) is rejected and liberty adopted as a kind of universal political language.
Another curious example of transatlantic performance develops out of Joseph Addison’s Cato (1714). At first a Roman drama (set in Africa) that seemed to inspire both Tory and Whig in London, Cato became a signature play for Whigs, particularly later in the century for American revolutionaries. Part of the plot includes resistance to an imperial power, even when those who love liberty are hopelessly outnumbered and outmaneuvered by Roman central authority. But as Bernard Bailyn and others have pointed out, Cato is adopted so pointedly by patriot Whigs as virtually to become an American play. Nevertheless, given that its origins have little to do with America, the Cato of the American Revolution is a full cooptation of a vehicle meant to comment on the fate of British liberties when threatened by tyranny. As with many plays that originate in the British Isles, Addison’s drama becomes transformed in the transatlantic context to something beyond the author’s ability to control reader or spectator response. Read and performed secretly by colonial collegians, cited in newspapers or used as a pseudonym by patriot writers, and staged by George Washington himself in defiance of a ban on theatricals by the Continental Congress, British-originated Cato came to stand as the preeminent drama for patriotic Americans, extolling the ultimate sacrifice in Cato’s suicide while looking through Juba and the younger generation to a future free of tyranny.6
Some British plays at mid-century and a little after examine the transatlantic exchange between Great Britain and the West Indian colonies. In these plays, West Indians are assumed to be “hot,” that is, quick to anger or express passions in ways decorous metropolitans would shun as intemperate or uncivilized. If we think of Shakespeare’s Caliban as the original West Indian character, a Native whose lusts ultimately cause Prospero to enslave him, then we have the template for the Caribbean problem in drama. Samuel Foote’s The Patron (1764) is one such play that evokes the West Indian situation.7 Sir Peter Pepperpot, who makes an appearance in Act I, then departs the stage, never to be seen again, enters the London scene accompanied by “two blacks” (10), a standard entrance for the West Indian type. Like other such figures, Sir Peter is naïve, and is quickly employed as an unwitting tool of young Bever in securing his love, Juliet. Sir Peter is comfortable talking about turtle meat (a sure marker of the Anglo-Caribbean character) and is loud, obnoxious, and rude – the type not only of the West Indian but, as developed over time, the American in general.
The best known of the transatlantic West Indian-themed plays is Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771). Although Cumberland moderates the eponymous type, Belcour still shows up in London with slaves and violates metropolitan social protocols with reckless abandon. In the end, though, despite his aggressive lovemaking and overall tropical temperament, he manages to accommodate somewhat to London ways, while the city folk come to appreciate Belcour’s overall benevolence.8 In Foote, such benevolence is mocked (one of the themes of The Patron), but in Cumberland it is ultimately affirmed. Thus, the West Indian elite (Belcour is rich, the implied product of a slave economy) is seen as not that different after all from the British gentry and finally not a threat to home-country cultural norms – in other words, just another version of the eccentric, so well loved on the English stage.
The immense popularity of The West Indian in both Britain and the colonies can be measured by an imitation, Judith Sargent Murray’s The Traveller Returned. Although the West Indies never figure directly in Murray’s Revolution-set comedy, she borrows a number of plot situations and motifs from Cumberland and thus evokes the British writer even when altering the location. In Murray, an Anglo-American, Rambleton, returns to North America after several years in England, following the dissolution of his marriage. Unlike the West Indian type, Rambleton is cool in his disguise, while he seeks an opportunity to observe if his one-time wife is still alive or what her circumstances are. As in Cumberland, Rambleton does not quite fit the American scene – he has missed much of the war and at one point is arrested and interrogated by a patriot Committee of Safety as a British spy. But courtesy of a plot twist and the actions of his as yet unknowing son, an American military officer, Rambleton is freed and ultimately reconciles with his estranged family and new country. Murray’s message is clear: it is time for the wartime combatants to unite under common language and interests in a transatlantic alliance in which past differences are forgiven.9 Thus in both Cumberland and Murray, drama serves to argue that reestablishing transatlantic bonds is to everyone’s advantage.
Indeed, Murray picks up a thread that had begun some years earlier: the relationship between the postwar United States and the Europe from which it has somewhat detached itself. Jabez Peck’s Columbia and Britannia (1787), for instance, written most likely as a school exercise, presents a patriotic pageant along with a spectacle of reconciliation among France, Britain, and the United States.10 Among professionally staged plays in the new republican theatre, Royall Tyler’s comedy of manners, The Contrast (1787), provides a popular example of this reimagined configuration. The contrast throughout is between native-born Americans who revere the republican origins of their country and those who sneer at how much United States culture falls short of British. Curiously, Tyler stages no Britons – only Americans, some of whom are caught up in “imitative” pursuit of European fashions and scorn for American customs. Thus, while located entirely in New York City, The Contrast implies a transatlantic vision, one in which the humility of North American circumstances can ultimately compare favorably to the more developed – and corrupt – culture of Great Britain. Even though the play sends a distinctly patriotic message through its hero, Colonel Manly, it does not really argue for isolation – only a recognition of American virtues in the greater global context.11
Sometimes, Americanization of an overseas text occurs without an American scene, simply by virtue of a play’s being performed in the United States. An example is one of the plays that inspired Tyler in his comedy, John O’Keeffe’s The Poor Soldier (1783). A popular afterpiece in Great Britain, it quickly grew in the years following its first American performance in 1785 to be the most performed play in the United States by 1800. O’Keeffe set his comic opera in Ireland, where returning British veterans of the Revolutionary War have come. The war is not a theme – only a backdrop to the love stories and shenanigans of various characters. But the situation of people of humble station returning home after years of battle is one easily responded to on both sides of the Atlantic. Further, The Poor Soldier proved a malleable vehicle, as local politics changed the ethnicity of one character from French to African in American productions.12 William Dunlap, a man returning home from Europe himself, honored the implied America in Poor Soldier by writing a sequel to O’Keeffe’s two Patrick plays (Poor Soldier and Patrick in Prussia), Darby’s Return (1789), in which the comic Irish peasant character, Darby, describes his version of his various sojourns with Patrick, including his visit to America. Dunlap does several things by this play: he acknowledges the source of American drama as British; he flatters that source by imitation; but he also strives to make of the play’s Americanism something distinctive. In essence Dunlap declares that there is no American drama without British, regardless of differences – in other words, the term American is functionally transatlantic, regardless of content.13
In fact, it is not merely the play that makes the stage transatlantic, but the actors who perform, as well. In colonial and early national American theatre, nearly every professional actor and manager was British born. With the exception of the actress Miss Tuke – later Mrs. Hallam – no American-born actors graced the major stages in the new republic. This would gradually change after 1800, but it is worth acknowledging that the actors playing American types, like Tyler’s Colonel Manly and the Yankee figure Jonathan, were British born. This created the situation where an American national theatre emerged out of British theatrical practice and personnel. Perhaps it is better to think of this system as transatlantic, even if the direction of travel seems almost entirely from east to west. While some spectators may have imagined that Britons were bringing culture to Americans, for the actors themselves there was a need to attend to American situations and mores. Dialects, lines of plays that too energetically praised the monarchy, and songs played by the orchestra all had to be adjusted in America to play differently there than in a provincial British playhouse.
The complexities of this translation across the waters can be seen in two plays, one British and one American, both speaking to the late war. The British example, Frederick Pilon’s Fair American (1785), tells the story of Angelica, an American (and loyalist) from South Carolina who is visiting her cousin Charlotte in England. We learn from two conversations that Angelica had been captured in South Carolina by the French, a fanciful history and one that deliberately creates a distinct, non-English enemy for London audiences. Over the course of the play, many complications of identity ensue that prevent Angelica from reuniting with the British officer who saved her from her Gallic captors – but of course, once all disguises are revealed, Colonel Mountford and his American lover come together in the usual mode of eighteenth-century comedies. Although, as a play, there is nothing terribly unusual about Pilon’s effort, the ending most certainly provides a reading on British understanding of the Revolution. Nothing is said directly about defeat or about Angelica’s loyalist status. Instead, Pilon follows early playwrights in wishing for a connection between the contending parties that reestablishes former bonds. Therefore, rather than Angelica return to Carolina, she remains in England, a colonial still. As her uncle, Bale, explains, “I’ll be your father when you go to church – and as you are resolved to settle on this side of the Western Ocean, the first toast after supper shall be, The union of England and America!” As if there were any ambiguity about what such a union might mean, the finale clarifies. In the first verse, the “union” means the two countries “like brothers still remain”; but in the second, John Bull asserts himself to consider Angelica the American as “a pilgrim blest,” come to the “Parent State” where colonial “children” are “enfold[ed]…to her breast!”14 Thus transatlanticism signifies British imperial power as the fixed point of all connection between the continents. America is not really an independent brother but a dependent girl, tied to Britain in a relationship of continued dependence and obedience. Perhaps that explains why Fair American received no more than two performances in the United States in 1789.15
The American example is another Dunlap play, André (1798). The playwright chose to dramatize one of the most controversial actions of the Revolutionary War, the execution of British Major John André in 1780 for his role in the treason (as the Americans viewed it) of General Benedict Arnold as that officer switched sides.16 The historical André was a handsome, talented, and popular officer who played a significant role in British military theatre in New York – a theatre imagined to be a piece of home for British soldiers in the rebellious colonies. After the capture of André in disguise, his trial, and his hanging, many in America, even patriots, mumbled about George Washington’s cruelty. To dramatize such an incident, with an implied critique in 1798 of the sitting president for his role as commander-in-chief almost two decades before, was a risky business. The relative failure of the play – three performances in New York, a few in scattered theatres elsewhere – told Dunlap and others that the transatlantic stage could be every bit as treacherous as the ocean itself. To be fair, some of the production problems rested on unprepared actors rather than transatlantic politics; still, the fact that John Hodgkinson (André) and Thomas Cooper (the young American officer, Bland) – both British by birth and training – embarrassed their American manager, Dunlap, suggests that the transatlantic significance of the play was lost on those putting it on. In the end, there is great ambiguity about who the hero is and how to read the event. Dunlap himself imagined theatre as a space that superseded national boundaries and distinctions, but while he was writing and managing, he found that it was difficult to reach such an ideal world as a suprapolitical, supranational stage. Even so, unlike Pilon, Dunlap indicates that the Revolution, rendered as drama, has complexities from the American perspective that it does not have from the British.
Transatlantic also meant French as well as British, and, by the mid-1790s, German as well (as in Dunlap’s translations of Kotzebue dramas). With the Revolution in France in 1789 and the rebellion in Haiti in 1793, a number of French-speaking theatre people and properties migrated to the United States or in New Orleans, then still part of Spanish territory. Small companies of French performers graced a number of US stages, including Charleston, and others joined English-speaking troupes in Norfolk and elsewhere. Haitian performers, including people of color (notably Minette), played in Louisiana, but otherwise it was next to impossible for African-American actors to work in white-owned theatres in the territory of the United States. Meanwhile, musicians from a number of European countries joined theatre bands and orchestras in many US cities. German musicians in particular had significant influence on playhouse music, bringing with them new styles and tunes. In short, there was no “American” theatre before 1830 in any sense other than transatlantic.
Even so, many transatlantic plays and performances, regardless of origin, reflected in some measure an American spin. The French play, La Veuve du Malabar (1770) by Antoine-Marin Lemierre, arrived in American theatres in 1790 courtesy of a translation, The Widow of Malabar (1790), by the American diplomat and Connecticut Wit poet, David Humphreys. The play in its original used a South Asian location and the presence of a French colonial army in India as its means to critique superstition and the power of the clergy in France. Humphreys provided the Old American Company in Philadelphia with a text that followed the original quite closely, down to the funeral pyre for the seemingly doomed Indian widow, but inserted a few lines to make a case for the civility of United States culture. Following its 1791 reprise, Widow next appeared under the same title but in a different translation, this time by the British writer Mariana Starke. Succeeding performances in the United States then followed the British version, which changed the hero and the colonizers from French to English. Thus Widow provides an interesting conflict, whereby rival translations, reflecting American conflicts over which European power to favor in its new independence, play out on stage floors.17 If we take the venue as meaningful, then we end up with European authors, American translator and stages, and transpacific subject matter in a complex interaction of international cultures and prejudices.
Another play reflecting the global reach of 1790s theatre, Susanna Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers (1794), locates its action in North Africa and situation to match the capture of Americans by Algerian corsairs for ransom. Rowson herself is a transatlantic product, having been born to British parents, relocated to the American colonies while her father served in the British army, sent back to England after her father was arrested by the Americans early in the Revolution, and then returning to the former colonies in 1793, just in time to greet the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia – though she escaped contagion. In 1794, she made her debut on the Philadelphia stage as an actress and her further debut as a playwright with Slaves. The situation is that Muley Moloch, dey of Algiers, is gloating over his prisoners, both British and American, and thinking to serve his lusts with Olivia, an Anglo-American woman. Meanwhile, her American mother and British father are held captive as well. A rebellion by the slaves eventually leads to the release of Olivia and others from bondage in a fantasy of resistance and self-determination. With the dey as essentially a comic buffoon and the play full of entertaining songs, Slaves is less a serious commentary on current events than it is a testimony to the taste for exotic locales on stage. Rowson manages to work in a feminist theme – women are the prime movers of liberation from captivity – while aiming an appeal at American patriotism. In the end, though, the real claim is that Britons and Americans need to unite against common foes (for instance, Muslims) – in essence a claim that transatlanticism makes the best ideology on the British-inflected American stage.18
The 1790s were a volatile period in politics. The excitement over the French Revolution, while the glow from the Franco-American wartime alliance still lingered, produced an outpouring of pro-French and liberationist texts and attitudes early in the decade, but the reaction against the Terror and the hardening of Anglophile attitudes made for bitter attacks by and against the Francophiles in the United States, who still suspected British policies and intentions. This meant that playwrights had to walk narrow pathways on their way to dramatic success – one slip, one untoward lean towards French or British sympathies, and a dramatist could tumble into the brambles and never escape. Of course, if a writer covered tracks with fustian, then such concerns mattered less. John Daly Burk, an Irish émigré writer escaping proscription in 1797, sailed the Atlantic to the US and wrote on board ship the spectacle Bunker-Hill, or the Death of General Warren. Burk’s play proved to be a hit, full of fireworks and high drama. Although the play functioned as an American patriotic vehicle, it negotiates the uncertain space between American and British by having a British officer fall in love with an American woman. He learns from her, in essence, that the American cause is a noble one – he is made sympathetic by the alteration of his views, if not his allegiance. Thus the play leaves a door open to reconciliation with Britain, even as it affirms the American side in the war.19
American history would continue to inform the transatlantic nature of US and British playwriting. Such topics as the British colonization of North America (James Nelson Barker, The Indian Princess [1808]), the War of 1812 (Mary Carr, The Fair Americans [1815]), the Algerian and Tripolitan contentions (J. Ellison, The American Captive; or, Siege of Tripoli [1812], and David Everett, Slaves in Barbary [1817]), and King Philip’s War (John Augustus Stone, Metamora [1829]) appeared on American stages or in American publications, along with such transatlantic amusements as David Humphreys, Yankey in England (1815). British playwrights looked to American incidents or characters to create interest in London theatres: Pilon, for example, with the Revolution, or George Colman, Jr., Inkle and Yarico (1787) and John Fawcett, Obi, or Three-Fingered Jack (1800) with slavery in the West Indies, staged their versions of Western hemispherical material. In short, the histories of North America and Europe were understood as appropriate subjects for the other’s theatres, even if, in the end, the real subject was the home country.
It seems as if the connections between Europe and North America are inescapable for playwrights during this period. A South Carolina writer, William Ioor, wrote two plays for the Charleston stage that indicate how much American playwrights look to Europe for inspiration or as a point of comparison. His first play, Independence (1805), is set in Britain and based upon a novel by British writer Andrew McDonald, The Independent (1784). Despite the fact that location and characters are British – not a mention of the US – the play might have been read as having very much to do with American history and aspirations. The desire of the freeholder to maintain his abode is no different from the colonial desire for independence – thus the slight shift in title from novel to play.20 This spirit of the transatlantic informs Ioor’s play of the Revolution, The Battle of Eutaw Springs (1807). The playwright drew on accounts of an actual encounter in South Carolina that turned out to be something of a draw. Again, as with Burk, the play affirms American valor but does not make the British outright villains: no one reading or seeing the play would be overwhelmed with the kind of patriotic sentiment that would diminish the other side.21 These postwar plays rewrite history to make possible a cultural reunion of old antagonists as if Americans and Britons participate in the same shared desire for liberty.
Sarah Pogson, like Ioor a South Carolinian, exploited French history for her play, The Female Enthusiast (1807). Her drama follows Charlotte Corday on her personal mission to assassinate Jean-Paul Marat, the fiery and sanguinary revolutionary, in 1793. For Pogson, Corday’s murderous act is punished in the killer’s execution but also explained as an attempt to stop the excesses of the radicals. Corday justifies her actions through the similarity of domestic and national spheres; in her case, both have gone bad: “The chord of harmony is broke forever. / Since the blest spirit of my mother fled / To join the blissful choristers of heaven, / Peace fled with her – and discord sprang in France.”22 Following Charlotte’s death, the play turns its attention to, among others, her brother Henry, who in a final scene reunites with his beloved Estelle in a restoration of domestic harmony (although her father disapproves) and decides to leave France, for, of course, the United States: “There, we may yet enjoy tranquility; / And, ’midst the sons of true-born liberty, / Taste the pure blessings that from freedom flow” (p. 181). Rather than endorse revolution, Pogson affirms a transatlantic vision of domestic simplicity and retirement that, in the chaos of European social upheaval, can only be found on the American shore, even if expressed in eighteenth-century English sentimental terms like “our peaceful cot.”
Another dramatist mining European history for purposes of praising America is the British transatlantic writer Frances Wright. Although she had written the play before settling in the United States, her Altorf (1819) honors the Swiss history of liberty fighters in terms that allowed her to extrapolate to an ideal America. As with Burk and his Bunker Hill spectacle, Wright left the corrupted old country for the promise of a purified republic, which she honors in her play. Altorf is fiction but set in the general time of William Tell, a popular figure on stage in British and American theatres. As with Pogson, Wright champions the idyll of the small freeholder; Altorf, similarly to Henry Corday, dreams of living in “A little cell upon some mountainside.”23 Although he dies in the struggle, the victory of the Swiss over the Austrians is seen as “freedom’s” own; in her epilogue, Wright makes explicit that America is that “blessed land, / Where Freedom holds her rod, and Peace her wand,” while “the children of Columbia must aye / Follow the upright” (p. 278). Wright gives voice, then, to a kind of universalism that America represents – not a distinct nation in the manner of France or Great Britain but a global entity, the repository of values that make liberty possible. That Wright after many years’ residence in the US returned to Britain does not obviate the transatlanticism that is at the heart of her tale of fourteenth-century Swiss patriots, especially as it was played upon North American boards.
Meanwhile, a second war disrupted American–British relations, the War of 1812. Preceded by a long period of contentions over rights at sea, trade, and other matters, the new war inspired further plays. One of the most notable is Mary Carr’s The Fair Americans, a play that like Pilon’s uses love relationships to stand for and disguise the political and economic causes and effects of war. The play begins “on the banks of Lake Erie” with the arrival of a recruiter and his news of the US involvement in the new war.24 Sergeant Dash is full of bluster (he is a variant on all the Flash characters in British drama, that comical miles gloriosus type) and makes clear we understand that Americans are going to war “out of revenge to England for plundering our ships at sea” (p. 188). In the early going, Carr keeps us mindful of her patriotic intentions, with “spirit of our forefathers” speeches and huzzahs to the American cause (p. 191). Before long, though, countrymen begin to refuse Dash’s entreaties to enlist, but that is a momentary slip before the brave men who step forward. Through Act IV, Carr has her Americans, men and women, cheer the victories as they come, but at the end of the act, a dumb-show scene displays a British officer, Belford, saving two American girls from an Indian tomahawk. Although now technically an American prisoner, Belford is attracted to one of those girls, Sophia, and thus the play ends with another Anglo-American domestic alliance to stand in the place of the two nations reconciling. Thus we have a reversal of Pilon’s play, where it is now the British officer who will become the new American. In either case, for all their differences as comedic plays, each relies on a transatlantic sensibility for its declarations of sympathies: weave in home-country patriotism but indicate in some fashion the possibility and hope of reconciliation.
One of the topical interests to arise in the 1820s was the Indian play. Indians had appeared in English plays dating to the early seventeenth century, but did not become a staple of the American theatre until the late 1820s. To be sure, plays like the 1808 comic opera The Indian Princess kept the Indian theme alive on stage, but Stone’s Metamora, written to respond to actor Edwin Forrest’s contest for an American play on a Native figure, gave the movement its greatest impetus. At first blush, nothing could be more American than an Indian play, but for Stone, that also includes a healthy dose of transatlantic situations and meaning. The scene, King Philip’s War in New England, which took place largely in 1675–76, is a story about English settlers more than fully formed Americans. The main plot involves the Indian chieftain, Metamora, a version of the historical Metacom, leader of the Wampanoags, and his struggle against the English campaign to subdue, even exterminate his people. The English leaders, notably Errington, have no sympathy for Native peoples; once they are at war, the English only see an Indian as enemy, even the otherwise innocent Nahmeokee, the wife of Metamora, or her infant son. Metamora’s death, a functional liberty suicide, comes as the inevitable conclusion of the meeting between the original Americans and their English colonizers.25
An odd episode of the transatlantic serves as a subplot. A character named Mordaunt, the father of the principal female protagonist, Oceana, turns out to be an escaped regicide who has fled to New England to escape certain execution in England for his part in the execution orders for Charles I. His wife has died in the New World and he fears the presence of a newly arrived English royalist, Fitzarnold, who knows Mordaunt’s secret and uses it to extort the hand of Oceana in marriage. Thus even in a contest where American nativity is the chief characteristic of the hero, the playwright complicates the picture with an overseas history that an American audience must understand in order to make sense of the narrative. For all its American distinctiveness, Metamora is finally a transatlantic drama, offering multiple histories. The two young characters, Walter and Oceana, join in love at the end but also as interpreters of a new American history, whereby Metamora’s nobility – but not his body – survives in the white Anglo-American characters who are his (relatively powerless) champions. As with earlier playwrights, Stone presents American colonial history as a contemporary riff on British–American alliance.
The period of 1680–1830 is one of energetic and palpable transatlanticism in British and American drama and theatre. Each national practice imagines a cross-oceanic other determined by the home country perspective, but neither British nor American drama can be said in the main to be entirely removed from the other. For American playwrights in particular, American is transatlantic, an amalgamation of North American historical circumstances and British colonial origins along with inherited theatrical performance traditions. Future criticism of both dramas needs to recognize the element of transatlanticism to prevent continuing reiterations of narrow nationalist perspectives.
NOTES
1 Heidi Hutner, Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
2 Philip L. Barbour, “Captain John Smith and the London Theatre,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83 (1975), 277–79.
3 Thomas Otway, The Atheist; or, The Second Part of the Souldiers Fortune (London: Bentley and Tonson, 1684), p. 31.
4 Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter (1690), in The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800, ed. Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner (New York: Routledge, 1997).
5 John Dennis, Liberty Asserted (London: n.p., 1704).
6 Joseph Addison, Cato, in The Miscellaneous Works, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 2 vols. (London: Bell, 1914).
7 Samuel Foote, The Patron, in Dramatic Works of Samuel Foote, 2 vols. (1809; New York: Blom, 1969).
8 Richard Cumberland, The West Indian (London: Dilly, 1792).
9 Judith Sargent Murray, The Traveller Returned (1796), in Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850, ed. Amelia Howe Kritzer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
10 Jabez Peck, Columbia and Britannia (New London, CT: Green, 1787).
11 Royall Tyler, The Contrast (1787), in Early American Drama, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin, 1997).
12 John O’Keeffe, The Poor Soldier (Dublin: n.p., 1786).
13 William Dunlap, Darby’s Return (New York: Hodge, Allen, and Campbell, 1789).
14 Frederick Pilon, Fair American (London: Almon, 1785), p. 63.
15 George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 15 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–49), I: 278.
16 William Dunlap, André, in Early American Drama, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin, 1997).
17 David Humphreys, The Widow of Malabar, in Miscellaneous Works (New York: Hodge, Allen, and Campbell, 1790).
18 Susanna Rowson, Slaves in Algiers (1794), in Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850, ed. Amelia Howe Kritzer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
19 John Daly Burk, Bunker-Hill, or The Death of General Warren (1797), in Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762–1909, ed. Richard Moody (Cleveland, OH: World, 1966).
20 William Ioor, Independence (Charleston, SC: Bounetheau, 1805).
21 William Ioor, The Battle of Eutaw Springs (Charleston, SC: Hoff, 1807).
22 Sarah Pogson, The Female Enthusiast (1807), in Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850, p. 141. Subsequent page references are given in the text.
23 Frances Wright, Altorf (1819), in Plays by Early American Women, p. 245. Subsequent page references are given in the text.
24 Mary Carr, The Fair Americans (1815), in ibid.
25 John Augustus Stone, Metamora, in American Drama, Colonial to Contemporary, ed. Stephen Watt and Gary Richardson (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1995).