The Oxford Handbook of American Drama ed. by Jeffrey H. Richards and Heather S. Nathans (review)

As a body of work, early American drama has always seemed a bit belated, lagging behind other forms of New World literary production. Until quite recently, one could be forgiven for accepting the critical commonplace that there were only a few original American plays written before 1900, and most of them displaying a radically different, premodernist aesthetic. At the same time, the field’s late start, small canon, and short critical history have not been all liability. Perhaps thanks to its very belatedness, scholarship in early American drama also seems a bit less self-contained, less self-referential, less intellectually introverted than some academic fields. Scholars of early American drama share a range of reference and critical concern with later branches of American drama, and it thus seems appropriate that early Americanists would help produce a new and comprehensive account of American drama. Begun by the late Jeffrey H. Richards and completed under the able guidance of Heather S. Nathans, the Oxford Handbook to American Drama gathers short, evocative essays by well-known scholars into a comprehensive overview of the field.

As a book object and as a scholarly tool, this hefty handbook seems well conceptualized and executed. Short, tightly focused essays balance the need for clear outlines and introductions with creative and probing forays into the field’s central questions. Up-to-date citations and generous lists of sources ably guide scholars toward materials for further research. In short, it is—as one would expect from a major press—a well-conceived and executed handbook, a useful starting place for scholars new to the field and a valuable tool for those wishing to revisit the field’s central ongoing discussions.

It also shows the human contours of American drama studies. As impersonal as the business of producing (and reviewing) such handbooks can sometimes seem, it feels appropriate to acknowledge the profound personal and professional contributions of Jeff Richards to this volume. As his last scholarly project, the handbook certainly shows his scholarly contributions to the study of American drama. Richards’s most influential works expanded our sense of drama’s national and generic boundaries, and in so doing he opened up a richer, more diverse, stranger—and earlier—world of American drama. In Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607–1789 (1991), for example, he examined the pervasive idea of theater in places where the stage proper hardly existed. In his Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (2008) Jeff Richards took up questions of national identity in texts that often looked, delightfully, not very American. The Oxford Handbook, especially in the first third, shows the clear imprint of that work, and Heather Nathans (whose own work has carefully redefined our sense of the early American stage’s social world, and particularly ethnic and racial performance) seems an obvious choice to complete the work that Richards began. Sitting on my desk, this book reminds me that early Americanists have engaged fruitfully in intellectual—but also enthusiastic, avid, deeply personal—discussions that have profoundly altered our sense of American drama over the past few decades.

The Handbook’s essays focus primarily on Anglo-American drama, from its early colonial moments to the present. Readers might particularly sense Richards’s editorial touch in the essays (including his own) on colonial and early national drama. Of clear interest to early Americanists, these essays outline the field’s foundational narratives, occasionally linking them explicitly to other early American literary and cultural arguments. They trace the development of colonial theater, from its makeshift, peripatetic, and sometimes illegal beginnings to its achievement of monumental, profitable, and professionalized nineteenth-century legitimacy. Chapters on revolutionary and early national drama highlight performances of nationalism, and essays on melodrama and reform drama trace the theater’s rise as an active, rich, and often volatile public culture. As these essays show, the triumphal rise of early American...