Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (review)

In an impressive study, Jeffrey Richards demonstrates that early American stages were transatlantic sites that incorporated local concerns and inchoate notions of American identity. Nonetheless, he argues, it was British theatrical traditions rather than actual transatlantic events or playwrights' and spectators' own lives that shaped the dramatic plots, cultural situations, and character types of early American drama. Richards thus interweaves a transatlantic approach with what might be called (with some license) an intertextual approach: he locates specific British models for the dramas produced in early American theatres. This is the book's strength, and it is an important one. Like Heather Nathans, Richards acknowledges the fluidity of early American notions of identity while offering a veritable treasure trove of information about and analysis of early American dramas and their possible British prototypes. One of the advantages of this approach is that it accounts for the complexities of how identity formation is negotiated through recycled scenes, images, and figures in the theatre; another advantage is that it accounts for ethnic and class stereotypes that misrepresented early Americans' lived experiences.

Richards argues that identity in the theatre is "inflected by social and political conditions on the one hand, but given shape by long-standing dramatic and theatrical practice on the other" (7). He largely emphasizes the latter—British models shaping inchoately American plays—which may lead readers to ask, upon occasion, if Richards overstates his case. Are some plays and theatres more influenced by earlier British models than others? Are there also other European models at play, as with Susanna Rowson's Slaves in Algiers, which, according to the playwright herself, is based on an episode in Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote? Did other performance traditions—social storytelling and political satires, for instance—exist alongside and sometimes inform the stage from a variety of national traditions? Perhaps a playwright used a generic model rather than one particular dramatic model, especially if that specific play emerged decades earlier or if (as with Thomas Forrest's The Disappointment) there is evidence of a real person serving as a prototype. Richards's investigation is so rich and revealing, so significant in its own right, that its claims need not be overstated.

In part 1, Richards examines how early American plays staged the Revolution, revealing that American-ness is often associated with confusion or dispossession. In Landscapes, for instance, Crevecoeur wonders how loyalists will reestablish order in the face of Whig excesses. In these Revolutionary plays, British settings and character models converge or are displaced: the Irish scenes of John O'Keeffe's The Poor Soldier are reset in an American village, for example, with a stage African replacing the stage Irishman as the title character. An actress or African American actor replaces the male Englishman portraying the soldier. New ostensibly American types of womanhood, Richards illustrates, emerge in plays by Rowson and Judith Sargent Murray. Plays about American Committees of Safety (established to enhance patriots' independent rights), however, actually revalue British "civility, order, and class position" (122). Richards ends part 1 with a fascinating exploration of William Dunlap's Andre (1798), which, as he explains, "queers" American identity: "men give their all for other men . . . in a republic of the personal" (133).

In part 2, "Coloring Identities," Richards explains that early American drama represented "race, religion, and the exotic" (141) through familiar British stereotypes, even as audiences tried to accommodate fluid notions of American-ness. Stage distortions of Muslim, Jewish, Native American, Irish, Indian, or African peoples reflected British traditions. Chapter 7 offers a fascinating analysis of Rowson's staging of the Muslim stereotype, influenced by British character traditions that spanned two centuries. Chapter 8 focuses on the Native American type, as Richards reads James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess (1808) in the context of George Colman, Jr.'s Inkle and Yarico (1787). Richards notes the various ways in which Yarico, the pagan love interest, is...