In its wake, new entertainment forms would emerge and new ideological possibilities would be created. But a moment of considerable excitement, and fluidity, was now past.
Whatever political or cultural differences they may have had with England, American theatergoers embraced William Shakespeare as one of their own. Fully one-fourth of all the plays mounted in Philadelphia between 1810 and 1812 were written by the Bard, and twenty-one of his thirty-seven plays were performed there between 1800 and 1835. Nor was Shakespeare’s appeal solely Eastern: Chicago had only 4,000 people in 1837 when Richard III played. The Mississippi towns of Vicksburg and Natchez mounted at least 150 Shakespeare plays between 1814 and 1861, and by the 1830s, Shakespearean plays were being performed on riverboats in the North American interior.29
In the twentieth century, Shakespeare became the supreme symbol of high culture, the subject of intensive scholarly exegeses, textual reverence, and highbrow performance on stage and public television. Americans of the nineteenth century, though, knew Shakespeare on a much more chummy basis—and were not afraid to “improve” him for their own purposes. Juliet, for example, was typically older than she was in the seventeenth century, and did not kiss Romeo at their first meeting. Richard III became even more of a villain than originally written. And King Lear ended up a happy man. In general, the moral prescriptions of Shakespeare’s plays were more heavily underlined, the characters more dichotomized. This made the plays more simplistic, in keeping with the popular romanticism of the time. Yet in its own way, this moralistic stance was more sophisticated than the pieties of Enlightenment drama, where characters were evil because they didn’t know any better and where happy endings were simply a matter of applying the infallible logic of reason.30
Shakespeare aside, however, a call for plays by and about Americans was heard very early in the young republic and became ever more insistent over the course of the nineteenth century. The first major play to fulfill this prescription was Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787). The title referred to the difference between sturdy American republicans and effete British degenerates, embodied in the difference between the play’s protagonist, Revolutionary War hero Colonel Manly, and the duplicitous Billy Dimple, heir of a Hudson River estate. A secondary contrast was suggested through Dimple’s valet Jessamy and Manly’s waiter Jonathon. A simple, assertive, yet likeable yeoman, Jonathon was clearly intended to be Manly’s social and intellectual inferior. But he evoked the archetypal “Brother Jonathan” who emerged in this period and reappeared in numerous reincarnations in later plays (e.g., Zachariah Dickerwell, Jediah Homebred, and Solomon Swap, made famous by U.S. actor James Hackett). For the next thirty years, the representative American was a sparsely educated but quick-witted farmer who drove a hard bargain but had a soft heart.
By the 1830s and 1840s, Brother Jonathan had become less a national figure and more one associated with New England. New archetypes emerged, among them the rustic backwoodsman Davy Crockett, the riverboat pilot Mike Fink, and Mose the fireman. In their evocation of the Southerner, Westerner, and working-class city dweller, such archetypes represented the elaboration of a sectional, as well as national, identity whose accents gave U.S. actors an advantage over their British counterparts. Not only were their voices distinctive, but a full appreciation of their foibles depended on an immersion in the American milieu.31
It should be noted that these vernacular characters tended to appear in comedies. By twentieth-century standards, nineteenth-century dramas and tragedies often had a melodramatic quality—although, as has already been suggested, the romanticism and moral didacticism of the early nineteenth century can be seen as a reaction to Enlightenment drama, as well as a justification for what was still a suspect form of entertainment. In comedy, however, lower artistic and moral expectations permitted a kind of social commentary that was bracing in its frankness. This was especially true with regard to representations of women. Certainly, the stage was a patriarchal institution that treated women’s claims for autonomy as humorous. But such jokes could be revealing and even subversive. One can see this dynamic at work in William Dunlap’s 1796 play The Archers, in which a young woman tells her sweetheart not to go to war:
Cecily: I shall like you the better for it as long as I live—if you’re not killed.
Conrad: Why, you should like me better for dying for my country.
Cecily: Should I? Well maybe I should; but somehow I shall never like a dead man as well as a live one.
Conrad: Well I don’t know but that your taste is as well founded as your politics.32
The Archers, however, is still an eighteenth-century comedy of manners. A broader humor was evident in “The Magna Charter of Heaven,” a song from the 1822 play Deed of Gift:
While each freeman’s son
boasts of rights a plenty
Daughters have but one
E’en at one and twenty.
’Tis the right to choose
Tom or Dick or
Harry Whom we will refuse
Which we wish to marry
Chorus: ’Tis our chartered right Nature’s hand has penn’d it Let us then unite Bravely to defend it While our fathers fought For our Independence Patriot mothers taught This to their descendants: Daughters guard and save Rights too dear to barter Spurn the name of slave Freedom is our charter33
Such a song would only be permissible in the context of comedy—and if the charter was portrayed as of Heaven, not Earth. Nevertheless, it would not have had such vitality if it had not expressed a feeling that resonated with at least some of its audience, and a hope for this world, not the next one.
The mock-utopian injunction to “spurn the name of slave” in the “Magna Charter of Heaven” serves as an important reminder that freedom and equality in the pre-Civil War United States were predicated on whiteness. As everywhere else in the society, race was a major issue on the stage. After Europeans, the two most commonly represented racial groups were Native Americans and African Americans. Depictions of the former tended to occur in the realm of drama; the latter in comedy. The difference reveals a great deal about the relative place of each group in relation to white society.
From the very first settlement, European Americans tended to dichotomize red-white relations between nature and civilization. The rapid development of technology, coupled with progressive Indian removal westward (two processes that were, of course, intimately related), intensified this attitude, turning the Native American into something of a romantic figure—a tragic, dignified embodiment of a vanishing way of life. This portrayal usefully limited white guilt, for if the natives were doomed anyway, white incursions did not need to be seen as brutal. While in many cases portrayals of the destruction of Native Americans centered on evil white men, more often it was internecine conflict or bad Indians who were responsible.
If Indians were allowed a measure of respect, they were still not considered the white man’s equal. One important index of this was the treatment of women. Unlike with African Americans, with Native Americans there was at least some toleration of interracial sex, although for the most part playwrights implicitly or explicitly upheld racial separation. Indian women who did marry white men usually converted to Christianity or took up white folkways. And while white women were only sexually propositioned by the most vile villains, red women tended to have to contend with garden-variety boors (“Bad Man! Indian girl’s cheek grows redder with shame!” says one such victim).34
Perhaps the most well-known play about Native Americans was John Augustus Stone’s Metamora (1828), commissioned by Edwin Forrest, the most famous actor of his day. The story of an Indian chief who perished fighting New Englanders in King Philip’s War of 1675-1676, Metamora features the usual depiction of the noble savage who patiently endures his mistreatment by the white man. What makes this play unusual, though, is that Metamora finally strikes out against his oppressors. “Our Lands! Our nation’s freedom! Or the Grave!” he cries. Finally surrounded, he kills his wife rather than