"Manly Exercises": Post-Revolutionary Performances of Authority in the Theatrical Career of William Dunlap

If we look back upon the history of nations, we shall find that their amusements mark the progress and degree of civilization they had attained at any one period. . . . When Greece was at the pinnacle of her refinement, . . . her citizens congregated at her public games, attracted by, and united in, manly exercises.

—William Dunlap, The History of the American Theatre (1832)

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

—John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)

In 1787, 21-year-old William Dunlap forsook his first-chosen vocation, painting, to venture a life in the theater. Called home to New York after three years' less-than-dedicated study in London under the expatriate American painter Benjamin West, Dunlap painted a portrait of his family, The Artist Showing a Picture from Hamlet to His Parents (1788), that provocatively registers the complex motives and aspirations of the young man's turn to the theater (see Figure 1). Not only the reiterated gesture of the presentation—a dutiful display of the results of his parentally sponsored study abroad—but also the subject of the painting-within-the-painting—Hamlet's encounter with his father's unhappy ghost on the castle ramparts—advertises the returned son's filial regard. "Filial Piety" was, in fact, the playing title of Hamlet in Philadelphia that spring (Pollock 141). But, just as that title masked Lewis Hallam's Old American Company's calculated evasion of local laws against theatrical productions, Dunlap's family portrait articulates the early subversive piety of the man known to literary historians as "the father of American theater."

Figure 1.

William Dunlap, The Artist Showing a Picture from Hamlet to His Parents, 1788. Reproduced by permission of the New-York Historical Society.

Although Dunlap's conventional theme seems, at first view, to be reinforced by the stock triangulated composition of his family group, the familiar trinity is significantly destabilized by the shadowy figures of Hamlet and his father's ghost, looming in the space between Dunlap father and Dunlap son. Through his disposition of the figures, young Dunlap acknowledges his father's disapproval of his theatrical ambitions: The stage has literally come between them.¹ During his time in London, instead of reporting to the Royal Academy for classes, Dunlap had fraternized with his new-made friends, including West's son Raphael, and seen "as many plays as his finances permitted" (Theatre 1: 146–147); summoned home to New York by his disappointed father, he was inspired by the recent success of Royall Tyler's comedy The Contrast (1787) to write his own play, "The Modest Soldier; or, Love in New-York" (never performed and now lost). Now Dunlap, emboldened by Hallam's acceptance of his first effort at dramatic composition, represents himself exhibiting his painting of a scene from a play, signaling his commitment to that which he later called the "inflammable material [he had] brought from abroad" (Theatre 1: 147).

In fact, it took another 10 years—and the death of his father Samuel in 1791—before Dunlap fully committed himself to the theater. Especially after his marriage to Elizabeth Woolsey in 1789, Dunlap devoted more and more time to his father's trade in fine glassware, china, and tea (advertised after 1790 as Samuel Dunlap and Son). But then, after his father's death—which Joseph Ellis argues "released his creative energies" (126)—he turned increasingly to writing and finally, in 1796, took on partners to help with the store and devoted himself full-time to the theater when he agreed to purchase a half-interest in the American Company (Canary 19–23; Leary 225–27). His 1788 Artist Showing a Picture from Hamlet to His Parents figures this hesitancy: His painting unfinished and unframed, the artist pauses midwork, palette and brush in hand, while his father explicates the painting for his seated...