Drama I: Colonial Era

Sources

Moral Objections. Many colonial Americans viewed the professional theater with deep suspicion. Especially during tough economic times, Quakers and Congregationalists, for example, argued that the stage distracted people from their work, wasted scarce money, and promoted dissipation. Much of this moral suspicion of the theater was informed by Protestant religious beliefs that, in associating spiritual devotion with self-denial, were inherently conservative: any forms of levity and mirth led easily to sin, and the toleration of public amusements could infect an entire community with the corrupt tastes of a few individuals. Graven images and secular music, no less than the theater, were condemned by Puritan ministers because they interfered with spiritual devotion and religious duty. Theater, however, was unlike the other arts an unqualified evil in Elizabethan and Puritan culture alike. In part this was because the theater became so popular among working-class peoples. The specific objections to the stage were often repeated and lasted until the end of the eighteenth century: theater did not, like “improving” forms of recreation, let one return to work refreshed, but rather exhausted actors and audience alike; it promoted sexual adultery or deviance among actors; acting encouraged deceit and hypocrisy; because it appealed vividly to the senses, theater could exert a powerful influence on spectators that rivaled religious worship, promoting a false, if not heretical, view of life; and it encouraged public disorder by gathering people from all walks of life together in large crowds for the purpose of amusement. Some of the condemnation of the theater was rooted in an elitist disdain for “rude and riotous” working-class amusements in general, such as cockfighting and boxing matches, with which it was often linked.

Bans on Theater. The fate of professional theater in the colonies was affected by debates about its moral legitimacy that were mainly regional in scope. A few theatrical troops managed to perform in taverns, private houses, or warehouses, but they were short lived. A 1750 law simply prohibited theatre in Boston. Rhode Island passed a law in 1762 that punished actors and the renters of stage space with heavy fines. Citizens in New York and Philadelphia signed petitions and passed laws to prevent the building of theaters. The Massachusetts Assembly outlawed theater in 1767, so there were no productions in the state throughout the Revolutionary era. That these measures were needed suggests that there was a small but growing acceptance of the theater in public opinion, particularly among the southern colonies, college men, and others seeking to emulate the urbane and aristocratic refinements of London.

The Theater of Politics. If the professional stage struggled to gain a foothold in the colonies, the amateur theater of the Revolutionary era was vibrantly alive and, more than any of the other arts, central to the political upheavals leading to independence. This theater took place in the streets of Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and other cities rather than on a stage; the performers were colonial patriots expressing themselves as political actors through rituals and ceremonies charged with allegorical significance. The Sons of Liberty, for example, were artisans and shopkeepers who organized mass demonstrations to protest the Stamp Act; such demonstrations included burning effigies of colonial administrators. Each of the crises in the 1760s and early 1770s provoked mock funerals to “Fair Liberty,” which involved thousands of ordinary people in symbolic dramas. To protest taxes on tea in 1773, patriots in Boston and New York dressed in Indian costume and sang odes to the king while dumping cargoes into the ocean. These actions grew from the European tradition of popular urban protest, in which traditional festival days provided illiterate masses with a “safe” means of challenging authority under the guise of holiday play. Dramatic performances of political protest gave colonists a means of expressing their emotions and opinions on current events, but they also allowed aggrieved British subjects to assume new political roles as patriots and citizens, to rehearse a new cultural identity as Americans. Contemporary reports frequently invoked theater as a metaphor for the political conflict in general, as when a New York writer described the tea embargo as a “curious East Indian farce, lately prepared in England to be played in America for the entertainment of the British Colonies.... It was intended only as a kind of an overture, prelude, or introduction to a grand performance (I don’t know whether to call it Comedy or Tragedy).”

Sources

Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987);

Gordon Wood, ed., The Rising Glory of America 1760–1820 (New York: Braziller, 1971).