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

Jason Shaffer’s Performing Patriotism, a study of American theatre’s Atlantic genealogies, returns to the archives to recover the complexities of early American stage and performance practices. By Shaffer’s account, early American theatre—focused on the revivals and influences of traditional British offerings such as Joseph Addison’s Cato, Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved, and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer— looks distinctly and deliberately un-American. Shaffer, however, sees the Anglo-Atlantic tones of early American performance not as evidence of national underdevelopment but as an opportunity to examine the collaborative, constructed, and contingent aspects of American identities. Even before William Dunlap’s 1830 history of American theatre, observers had alternately bemoaned and celebrated the ever delayed-but-inevitable emergence of American theatre as a national(istic) cultural institution. Less concerned with the origins of an emergent American theatre, Shaffer demonstrates that even at a moment of national political origins, the practices of a national theatrical imaginary happily recycled, revised, and reinvented the materials bequeathed by English theatre.

Shaffer formulates national identity as a constantly shifting process of restaging and revising the performative relics of the circum-Atlantic world. Roots matter, but culture’s routes—a concept early American theatre history seems uniquely able to comment upon—emerge as the study’s dominant theme. American theatre, and even Americanness itself, becomes a matter of genre, of the constant repetition and revision of circulating performances. This process continues today, Shaffer contends, and early American theatre remains important not as a static originary point for American culture, but because it transmits forward (even to Mel Gibson’s 2000 blockbuster film The Patriot) the perdurable processes of mythmaking and identity-rehearsal occurring on the northwestern edges of the Anglophone circum-Atlantic world.

Shaffer selects his sampling of early American dramas not by their supposed “American” qualities but by their popularity and frequency, avoiding the teleological and tautological problems of earlier American theatre histories. Formal rather than chronological organization foregrounds theatre’s overlapping survivals and substitutions rather than linear historical progressions. Shaffer’s discussion of Addison’s Cato, for example, moves deftly from script to staging to offstage reprisals of the roles, gleaning a powerful sense of “collective improvisation” from multiple and multivalent deployments of the play. Subsequent chapters treat other under-examined forms of performance, including colonial college theatre, revolutionary propaganda plays, and post-Revolutionary comedy. The sequence has its logic, as dramas shifted from cagey analogy to outright propaganda. Although the book rarely relies on easy linear narratives of historical developments, it does leave an impression of American theatre as increasingly engaging its immediate cultural contexts.

Performing Patriotism serves at least three masters, contributing to related conversations in Atlantic cultural history, early American literary studies, and theatre and performance history. Shaffer’s study represents the still-debated Atlantic and cultural turns in American history, examining the cultural representations of political expression and national identity. Despite engaging some polarizing issues in early American history (the possible “Anglicization” of American culture and the nature of early American governance), Shaffer understands that the broad array of evidence indicates multiple, simultaneous, and competing deployments of English performances. To its credit, the study avoids the oversimplification of claiming one simple political or cultural function of theatre. Shaffer’s study, especially its treatment of the relationships among theatrical conventions and print culture, also engages literary scholarship in early American print performance culture such as Jay Fliegelman’s Declaring Independence, Sandra M. Gustafson’s Eloquence Is Power, Christopher Looby’s Voicing America, and Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic. Shaffer’s study can provide early American literary scholars an expanded picture of the early American relationships between texts, manuscripts, material culture, and ephemeral performances.

Performing Patriotism speaks most directly to recent work in performance studies and American theatre history, which shares many of these concerns. Developing the performance-studies notion that the ritualized, scripted, and re-enacted qualities of theatre...