Resources for Early American Studies

A little over twenty years ago, Jeffrey H. Richards's collection Early American Drama (1997) changed my life. I was a graduate student falling in love with the prose and poetry of the early United States but keenly aware that my commitment to beautiful language had been forged in the drama. By carefully editing for a general audience such works as Robert Montgomery Bird's The Gladiator (1831) and Anna Cora Mowatt's Fashion (1845), Richards showed me and so many others that there were indeed historical and aesthetic pleasures to be found in American drama prior to the Civil War.

With Nine Plays of Early America, 1765–1818, Sarah E. Chinn and Richard S. Pressman offer us a new volume in the ongoing effort to recover a slighted body of work, focusing on plays from a period when, in the words of the introduction, "contemporary military, political, and social debates followed American audiences into the theater" (16). In the introduction, Chinn acknowledges the impact of Richards's anthology, as well as Amelia Howe Kritzer's Plays of Early American Women (1995), even as she makes room for their volume. Though Nine Plays includes Royall Tyler's ubiquitous The Contrast (1787), it primarily offers works unfamiliar to most Americanists: Robert Rogers's Ponteach (1763), a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Pontiac and the Ottawa people's resistance to British forces; The Fall of British Tyranny (1776), a bellicose review of the war's highlights, purportedly by John Leacock; Robert Munford's measured The Patriots (1777), which was not publicly performed; Susanna Haswell Rowson's Slaves in Algiers (1794), focused on women held in captivity by Barbary corsairs; William Dunlap's André (1798), a tragic portrait of the controversial war time execution of British officer John André, and Dunlap's far more successful rewrite, The Glory of Columbia: Her Yeomanry! (1803); Mary Carr's portrait of conflict around Lake Erie during the War of 1812 in The Fair Americans (1815); and John Howard Payne's Brutus; or, The Fall of Tarquin (1818), a Roman tragedy outlining heroic, disinterested leadership. Each of these works receives a one-paragraph headnote by Chinn and ample foot-noting by Pressman.

The volume begins with Chinn's concise, heavy-hitting introduction, derived in part from her first-rate study Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage (Oxford UP, 2017). She emphasizes the didacticism and the accessibility of the early stage, reminding us that among the working class, especially in the mid-Atlantic and southern states, illiteracy and lack of money for printed texts meant the theater was far more influential than the novel. Further, she emphasizes that "the theater was the realm of working white men" (8) whose political influence was ascendant in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Because the drama sought to inculcate moral virtue and also reflected on contemporary events, it is not surprising that it became subject to the intense partisanship of the early nineteenth century. Overall, Chinn's introduction gives the general reader a powerful sense of the drama's palpable political work. It also provides a helpful bibliography of relevant scholarship, including works of theatrical history by Richards, Christopher Bigsby and Don Wilmeth, Heather Nathans, Matthew Rebhorn, David Grimsted, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. (I only wish the list included Jason Shaffer's excellent Performing Patriotism: National Identity in Colonial and Revolutionary Theater [U of Pennsylvania P, 2007].)

There is much to recommend Nine Plays for the classroom, not the least of which are the headnotes and footnotes assisting the reader with references to unfamiliar events and personages. It is a sturdy and easily navigable volume, with clean typeface and layout. Punctuation in each play is modernized, but original spelling has been largely retained to "maintain… a strong sense of the original" (3). Nine Plays is the fifth of six works published so far by Pressman's Early American Reprints, which aims to provide highly affordable, quality teaching texts for...