Civil War Theater: The War in Drama

Dr. Willard Welsh is a member of the staff of the Speech and Drama department at S.U.I, where he directs plays and conducts the Core Course in Modern Theatre. His Ph.D. dissertation treated in part the hero in Civil War drama. Civil War Theater: The War in Drama WILLARD WELSH WHEN JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS PUBLISHED HIS CHRONICLE of the Civil War, he entitied it America's Tragedy; and the name which Otto Eisenschiml and Ralph Newman gave to their "panorama" of this heroic period was The American Iliad.1 By their very choice of tides these historians reflected a feeling which must have occurred to many who studied the violent struggle between the North and Soutìi, a feeling that here was fact worthy to furnish inspiration for the mightiest forms of fiction, the dramatic tragedy and the poetic epic. This expectation would seem justified by the position of the Civil War as one of the truly significant events in the life of the United States. But important historical events do not necessarily evoke great legends. For every Trojan War glorified by dramas and epics, numberless other battles remain unsung. So it might be interesting for us to ask these questions: Have fictional representations of the Civil War occurred in significant numbers? Have they manifested a significance comparable to the event itself? Now that almost a century has passed since the struggle took place, it should be possible to survey the fictional output dealing with the Civil War and draw some conclusions regarding its size, its variety, and its meaning. For the sake of brevity, this investigation will be limited to dramatic representations of the event, and Civil War novels will be mentioned only when they furnished material for stage adaptations. If our survey is to include all of the dramas which had any bearing upon the Civil War, it must begin more than a hundred years ago with the appearance of one of the most expedient novels and dramas ever written, Uncle Tom's Cabin. From 1852 (the 1 James Truslow Adams, America's Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934); Otto Eisenschiml and Ralph Newman, The American Iliad (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1947). 251 252WILLARD WELSH year in which Uncle Tom's Cabin was not only published but also placed on the stage) until the present day, hundreds of plays have been written concerning both the issues that fomented the Civil War and the conflict itself, or have used the war as background for a dramatic story. It is impossible to estimate precisely the number of these dramas, because not even a majority of them are now in existence. Many were written for a single occasion, later to be discarded or lost. In the nineteenth century, there were no adequate copyright laws to protect the playwright, and scripts were therefore zealously guarded and widiheld from publication as long as they were stageworthy. The result of this practice was the eventual disappearance of many old plays. In most cases tìiose dramas had no literary or theatrical distinction, and their loss went unmourned. Unfortunately, this was not always true. One of the finest dramas about the Civil War, in the opinion of the best critics of the day, was lost when a fire which razed the author's home destroyed his collection of manuscripts . The play referred to is James A. Heme's The Reverend Griffith Davenport. All that remains of this admirable play is the fourth act, which the English critic, William Archer, had thought so interesting and well-constructed that he had personally requested and obtained a copy of it from the author. This fragment — together with a synopsis of the remaining four acts of the play, reconstructed by the playwright's wife and daughter after his death — tells us a great deal about Heme's play. In a somewhat similar fashion, a researcher can piece together a general picture of many lost Civil War dramas from programs, advertisements, and reviews. And for the purpose of this survey, it has been possible to secure from the special drama collections of several university libraries examples of the more uncommon varieties of war...