Plays By Early American Women, 1775-1850 (review)

For too long, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drama has been seen only as a footnote to cultural history. All that is changing now, as new critical work challenges received ideas and traditional canons. Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850 is an attempt to add plays written by women to the rapidly changing picture of early American drama. While all eight women included in Amelia Howe Kritzer’s anthology were well-known enough to be published in their own day, most of their names are rare in our century’s theatre histories.

Kritzer’s collection gives one a sense of women’s wide-ranging accomplishments. Mercy Otis Warren’s pamphlet play The Group is a serious-minded but vicious Revolutionary satire. Susanna Haswell Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers is a more cautiously constructed political melodrama, while Judith Sargent Murray’s The Traveller Returned and Mary Carr’s The Fair Americans are domestic dramas set against backgrounds of political change. Sarah Pogson Smith’s The Female Enthusiast and Frances Wright’s Altorf, verse dramas on the French and Swiss revolutions, follow eighteenth-century paradigms for political tragedy. Louisa Medina’s Ernest Maltravers stands out as the collection’s only melodrama. But perhaps the most exciting find here is Charlotte Barnes’s The Forest Princess, which is impressive not only for its scholarship and its stagecraft, but for its refusal to perpetuate the romantic legend. Contrasting with other treatments of Pocahontas, such as James Nelson Barker’s The Indian Princess, it brings our attention to the fact that the “Indian question” was dramatized in a gendered way.

All of the plays demonstrate the politicized nature of the early American playhouse. Even when not choosing openly political themes, the playwrights address their productions to the era’s hotly-debated subjects: liberty, republicanism and national character, interweaving affairs of the state with those of the heart. It is tempting to attribute this tendency to a feminine perspective, but to do so would misrepresent the theatrical habits of the new nation, where male and female playwrights alike regularly combined love plots with historical or political themes. If the playwrights selected by Kritzer share a feminist outlook, it is manifested in their propensity to center their plays on strong women, alone or in communities, who are always subjects rather than objects.

The danger in grouping women playwrights together in this way, however, is in effacing the vastly different theatrical, historical, and cultural milieus in which they worked. Kritzer’s introduction provides biographies of the individual playwrights, but does not mention the huge difference between, for instance, Mercy Otis Warren’s composition of a pamphlet play in 1776, when performance would have been outlawed, and Susanna Rowson’s creation of a spectacle which she herself would act on American stages just a few years later. These women were separated only by few years in time, but by a gulf in theatrical and cultural conditions. Similarly, Louisa Medina, writing “blood and thunder” melodramas for the Bowery Theatre’s raucous working class audiences, was doing a different thing from her contemporary Barnes, who researched her play at the British Library and saw it performed in England and America.

That Kritzer does not point out these differences does not pose problems for an anthology: readers can have the fun of figuring it out themselves. There are places, however, where Kritzer’s lack of research is problematic. In her discussion of Smith’s Female Enthusiast, she asserts that the play was probably produced in Charleston, home to a large French community, arguing that Charles Watson “misinterprets the play as ‘anti-French’” (19). But the play, dealing with Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Jean Paul Marat, clearly partakes of popular anxieties about the excesses of the French Revolution at a time when developing political partisanship was coded by foreign allegiance.

Kritzer’s footnotes also suggest unfamiliarity with early American history and culture. Some are simply wrong: she glosses “fusee”—a light...