Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (review)

{ 213 } BOOK REV IEWS ate an objective documentation, however, but instead presents another episode in the ongoing creative output of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. —MATTHEW CAUSEY Trinity College, Dublin \ Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries . By Tice L. Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. xi + 229 pp. $37.50 paper. Tice Miller likes to read old plays—plays that would have been performed in England and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; good plays and bad plays; sprightly comedies and moving tragedies; passé-subject-bound farces and dreary, turgid, mind-chilling dramas that slog their way through five acts of first-rate fustian. Miller likes to read these plays, and Entertaining the Nation is the result of that strange urge. Thank goodness for favors, small and large, because Miller’s passion for these dramas renders it probable that anything we might someday need to know about them is in his book, relieving us from the need to read the plays ourselves. Before you breathe a big sigh of satisfaction be forewarned that Miller captures his enthusiasm for this body of dramatic literature in 188 pages of exceptionally lively discourse. The book will arouse your curiosity and may very likely send you trundling to the bowels of the library to seek firsthand the fragile folios, dusty anthologies, and eyenumbing microfiche where most of this work, imprisoned, does hard time. Miller’s chapter headings refer to generally accepted periods in American history—“Colonial America,” “The Age of Jackson,” for example. He describes plays representative of dramatists who wrote during each period; however, he abandons this organization for his last two chapters, maintaining chronology while sorting his reading under the labels of melodrama and realism. He clearly emphasizes American drama, but understanding that no account of stage entertainment during these centuries would be complete without examining several popular plays by European dramatists, Miller does so where appropriate. The book focuses on the drama of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the chapter on realism justifiably spills over into the twentieth. The evidence Miller gleans from reading the plays produces a broadranging panorama of two centuries of theatrical performance, and he brings that picture to life by writing about the plays and their production in lively, de- { 214 } BOOK REV IEWS scriptive prose that kindles the reader’s imagination. The plays are the stars of his opus, and he displays them, more or less chronologically, on center stage. He is careful, however, to remind us of the production practices and theatrical styles pertinent to the historical moment. As a result, he brings the plays to life as theatre, not literature. Kudos for that accomplishment: failing to find such a balance has been the downfall of many a historian writing about the drama of past centuries. The strengths of the book are too numerous for the space allotted to this review, but here are a few. (1) He does a particularly fine job of sorting out the many contributions of William Dunlap in the early days of the American theatre , even devoting a page or so to “Dutch stuff”—Dunlap’s epithet for his popular adaptations of potboilers written by August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue. Dunlap deplored Kotzebue’s popularity, but he managed to hold his nose and use the dramas to keep his theatre afloat. (2) He gives proper credit to the Jonathan character and the Yankee plays, showing the super-important role they played in the development of truly American drama. His description of the Yankee plays makes one want to see them in performance. (3) He rescues many writers from the dustheap of neglect—Richard Penn Smith, Epes Sargent , and Augustus Thomas, to name three—by his lively reading of their obscure plays. (4) His running commentary about “novelties” of the stage sharpens his picture of the theatre as an important purveyor of entertainment to the entire nation, not merely to the population centers. My quarrels with the book are few and decidedly nonfatal. (1) Miller is on thin ice when he gives several pages to plays that were never produced. He admits that nobody ever saw them and few people read them. It is...