Drama: The Emergence of American Theater

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Drama: The Emergence of American Theater

The Contrast. Playwright Royall Tyler benefited from and contributed to the growing acceptance of the theater among early national Americans, becoming the nation’s first successful playwright. His play The Contrast, first performed in New York on 16 April 1787, was a critical and popular success, commanding many repeat performances. Reviewers saw Tyler’s play as an illustration of the advantages of theater and praised his achievement as living proof of American cultural vitality. The prologue to The Contrast proclaimed its nationalist purposes, describing the play as a “piece, which we may fairly call our own.” The play took conventional plots and characters from eighteenth-century British drama and gave them a distinctively American cast. As a realistic depiction of American social life and manners, Tyler’s play contributed to the quest for a literature based on American topics and themes.

JONATHAN VISITS THE THEATER

In The Contrast Royall Tyler used the character Jonathan to satirize the naive innocence of rural Americans and to offer a fresh point of view on the ways of more sophisticated city dwellers. In the following scene Jonathan describes his first visit to a theater:

Jonathan: So I went right in, and they shewed me away, clean up to the garret, just like meeting-house gallery. And so I saw a power of topping folks, all sitting round in little cabbins, “just like father’s corn-cribs”; and then there was such a squeaking with the fiddles, and such a tarnal blaze with the lights, my head was near turned. At last the people that sat near me set up such a hissing—hiss—like so many mad cats; and then they went thump, thump, thump, just like our Peleg threshing wheat, and stampt away, just like the nation; and called out for one Mr. Langolee, —I suppose he helps act the tricks.…
Jessamy: Well, and did you see the man with his tricks?
Jonathan: Why, I vow, as I was looking out for him, they lifted up a great green cloth and let us look right into the next neighbor’s house. Have you a good many houses in New-York made so in that ’ere way?
Jenny: Not many; but did you see the family?
Jonathan: Yes, swamp it; I see’d the family.
Jenny: Well, and how did you like them?
Jonathan: Why, I vow they were pretty much like other families;—there was a poor, good-natured, curse of a husband, and a sad rantipole of a wife.…
Jenny: Well, Mr. Jonathan, you were certainly at the play-house.
Jonathan: I at the play-house!—Why didn’t I see the play then?
Jenny: Why, the people you saw were players.
Jonathan: Mercy on my soul! did I see the wicked players?—Mayhap that ‘ere Darby that I liked so was the old serpent himself, and had his cloven foot in his pocket. Why, I vow, now I come to think on’t, the candles seemed to burn blue, and I am sure where I sat it smelt tarnally of brimstone.
Jessamy: Well, Mr. Jonathan, from your account, which I confess is very accurate, you must have been at the play-house.
Jonathan: Why, I vow, I began to smell a rat. When I came away, I went to the man for my money again; you want your money? says he; yes, says I for what? says he; why, says I, no man shall jocky me out. of my money; I paid my money to see sights, and the dogs a bit of a sight have I seen, unless you listening to people’s private business a sight. Why, says he, it is the School for Scandalization—The School for Scandalization!—Oh! ho! no wonder you New-York folks are so cute at it, when you go to school to learn it; and so I jogged off.

Source: Royall Tyler, The Contrast: A Comedy (Philadelphia: From the Press of Pritcahrd & Hall and published by Thomas Wignell, 1790).

Virtue versus Luxury. In The Contrast Tyler expressed Americans’ political and ideological concerns about their nation’s republican character. The central theme is the conflict between virtue and luxury. The plot centers on the arranged engagement of the virtuous and sentimental Maria Van Rough and the dissolute Billy Dimple, who has learned his rakish ways during a trip to England. Maria’s father, a merchant whose constant refrain is “mind the main chance,” is preoccupied with commercial opportunity. He arranges Maria’s engagement because he believes that Dimple’s fortune makes him a good match. Tyler introduces Maria singing “The Death Song of Alknomook,” a lament on the nobility of a dying Indian, setting up a contrast between Maria’s sentimentality and her father’s shrewd practicality. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the courageous and honest Col. Henry Manly, a hero of the American Revolution. Although Manly and Maria fall in love, they are bound by Maria’s engagement to Dimple to deny their feelings for one another. While Manly embodies the self-sacrificing virtue considered essential to republicanism, Dimple personifies the qualities that endangered these ideals—luxury and hypocrisy. The play ends happily after it is revealed that Dimple has squandered his fortune in England and plans to jilt Maria so that he can marry an unattractive but wealthy woman while taking one of Maria’s friends as his mistress. In the final scene Maria’s father approves of the marriage of Maria and Manly and bestows his fortune on them. Manly’s victory over Dimple represents the victory of republican virtue over European corruption. Critics commended The Contrast for this republican moral, which validated arguments in favor of theater as a stimulus to republican virtue. As one critic concluded, the point of The Contrast was “to render superlatively ridiculous the cox-comical extravagance of the age, and the subversion of natural simplicity, into the imp of luxury —and holding high to view, in letters of the purest gold, all the virtues of the human heart.”

Manly and Jonathan. Tyler set up another contrast, however, that complicated the message of The Contrast: the opposition between Manly and his servant Jonathan. While Manly represents classical republicanism, Jonathan exemplifies the independent and democratic Yankee. Tyler furthered this characterization of Jonathan by having him sing “Yankee Doodle” in the first known stage performance of the lyrics to this song. While Jonathan’s rustic, backwoods dialect is often a source of comedy in the play, Tyler also made Manly’s formality and pomposity the object of mockery. Clearly Tyler did not favor either of these character types as the ideal American, suggesting that he possessed a more detached perspective on republican ideals than his contemporaries may have realized.