Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theatre (review)

{ 233 } BOOK REV IEWS Rugged Path, The Twilight, and On the Beach. Although a veteran of two world wars, Sherwood found the cold war a “shocking and confusing development,” a “sad end to his hopes for a world of peace and freedom”(297). Chapter 10,“The Message Is Lost,”features both his transition to cold warrior and troubles at the Playwrights’ Producing Company, closing with his November 14, 1954, death. “Act Two”resolves with an epilogue wherein Alonso speculates what might have been if Sherwood had lived to see the 1960s. The strength of “Act Two” is its ability to mark ways in which deep conviction, government service, and creative writing persistently generated both thrill and turmoil within Sherwood’s personal and professional life. Carefully researched and cogently written as part of the University of Massachusetts Press’s American History series, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War is more than accessible to an eclectic readership beyond that of this publication. —SCOTT R. IRELAN Augustana College \ Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theatre. By Jason Shaffer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 228 pp. $45.00 cloth. Performing Patriotism explores the patriotic function of drama, performed and printed during the formative years of America’s creation, that nation-building project that began with the run-up to the Revolutionary War. The work wisely embraces a wide range of performance engaged in the growing trade of patriotism : the professional theatre in America, the academic tradition of performance in the early colleges, the occasional street protest of the Sons of Liberty, and the published, circulated, but unproduced “closet dramas” of the Revolutionary period. Introduction aside, this sampling is undertaken in four stanzas: “Cato and Company,” “Free-Born Peoples,” “A School for Patriots,” and “Bellicose Letters.” Collectively, they range from the early to the close of the eighteenth century, in an America under construction. It is not the author’s intention to build a causal argument but rather to map the theatrical landscape, page and stage, amateur and professional, enacted and imagined, in its broadest context. { 234 } BOOK REV IEWS The book hits its stride with chapter 2, “Cato and Company,” with an impressive genealogy of performance of Addison’s hymn to Republican virtues. It opens with a survey of some of the better-known cultural quotations of Cato: Nathan Hale on the gallows, Patrick Henry’s St. John’s Day speech, and the numerous collegiate productions of this singular play. The list of productions reminds us to what extent the revolutionary generation internalized the Catonic gambit of inspiring failed revolts. Chapter 3,“Free-Born Peoples,”samples the professional theatre in colonial America, from the Thomas Heady Company in New York, circa 1730s, to the departure of the American Company some forty years later. Working from such texts as The Recruiting Officer, Tamberlane, and Richard III, Shaffer constructs an argument of a radical American base politicizing a British repertory through a sea change into something uniquely topical to the colonial social landscape. In this, Shaffer only partly succeeds. The difficulty is that the argument advances as a sort of gentleman’s agreement without the kind of binding evidentiary support we have come to expect from a local reading (Jill Lepore’s work, e.g., or Jeffrey Richards’s, or Heather Nathans’s). There is but slight context for the productions—who is in power, who is in the house, indeed, even who is in the roles. They are advanced as topical performances but treated at best wholly as transhistorical texts, or at worst as speculations of topicality: “Tamberlane was omitted, possibly due to the sensitivities of Roman Catholic Marylanders”(82). The chapter concludes wonderfully, however: “Not the least of these [imperial] fictions was the British diaspora myth of an unbroken westward expansion of human freedom from classical antiquity to the Americas, a narrative commonly endorsed by the eighteenth-century theater and its champions in Britain and America” (104). This is the kind of writing one wishes had a larger presence in the text, and precisely where the disappointment enters. Often, too often, the chapters conclude where they rightfully ought to begin. The fourth chapter, “A School for...