Drama II: The First Professional Theater

Sources

American Company of Comedians. Despite continuing hostility to the stage, one itinerant group—The American Company of Comedians—brought the first professional theater to the colonies, monopolizing a modest audience for hundreds of productions throughout the 1760s and the early 1770s. They typically performed plays that were popular in London; the most popular playwright was William Shakespeare, whose work (especially Romeo and Juliet ) was performed from 180 to 500 times. To attract a reputable audience, or at least diffuse criticism, the American Company often advertised its plays as “moral dialogues” and printed testimonials to its “genteel” actors in newspapers.

The Prince of Parthia. After opening a new theater in Philadelphia in 1766, the company produced the first American play to be professionally performed in the colonies. The Prince of Parthia was a five-act tragedy first written in 1759 that was loosely based on an episode of classical history. Its author, Thomas Godfrey, borrowed from King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello as well as character types from the contemporary novel of seduction, sentimental drama, and revenge plays. While indulging a frenzy of rapes, suicides, insanity, sadism, and incest, the play’s references to slave and tyrants echoed the Whig political thinking about despotism and ambition that surfaced in contemporary protests to the Stamp Act. An evening at the theater typically lasted four or five hours. Lighted by candles, with painted backdrops, wigs, and costumes, the performance of a long play such as The Prince of Parthia was accompanied by interludes of vocal or instrumental music, as well as an afterpiece—a short ballad, opera, farce, or masque. The Prince of Parthia appeared with more than forty full-length plays performed over one hundred nights from 1766 to 1767. This season also featured Samuel Greville, the first American to become a professional actor, as Horatio in Hamlet. The performances sparked a tremendous public debate in local newspapers, with twenty essays considering whether the stage could inspire virtue and airing familiar moral complaints. Despite strong opposition from the Quakers, the American Company managed to complete its season, thanks largely to the patronage of Governor Penn.

Theater and Political Crisis. Struggling against innumerable setbacks, the company’s director, David Douglass managed to build the first permanent, brick theater in the colonies at Annapolis in 1771. Douglass’s efforts to build an audience for the professional theater in colonial cities ended once he became embroiled in the political crises of the mid 1770s. The Tea Act was passed just

as he was planning to build another brick theater in Charleston. Newspaper writers attacked once again the moral propriety of amusements at a time of crisis. With pressure from patriots to meet British trade policy with resolute and united action, the American Company was easily lumped with British luxury goods such as tea, and the aristocratic decadence of the gentry as part of a large conspiracy to seduce colonists into “slavery,” or economic and cultural dependence. While these charges were not new, the context in which they circulated was fresh; putting on plays hardly seemed to be a way to encourage manly independence and other Republican virtues to which Patriot propaganda appealed in building popular support for boycotts against the mother country.

Congress and the Theater. Although the company completed its season in Charleston, the grievances against it were still fresh when the Continental Congress met in 1774 and created the Continental Association, which provided for nonimportation, nonconsumption, and nonexportation. Between 1774 and 1775 the value of English imports fell by 90 percent. In October 1774 Congress moved to shut down cultural trade with Britain as well with a sumptuary measure in which the delegates resolved to “discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially horse racing, and all kinds of gaming, cockfighting, exhibition of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” Having targeted the American Company in particular, Congress sent the resolution to Douglass in a personal letter. A few months later Douglass’s company of actors dispersed, and he moved to Jamaica, never to return to America.

TAKING OTHELLO ON THE ROAD: PLAYBILL, 1761

KING’S ARMS TAVERN—NEWPORT—RHODE ISLAND

On Monday, June 10th, at the Public Room of the above Inn, will be delivered a series of MORAL DIALOGUES, in five parts.

Depicting the evil effects of jealousy, and other bad passions, and proving that happiness can only spring from the pursuit of virtue.

Mr. Douglas —will represent a noble and magnanimous Moor, called Othello, who loves a young lady named Desdemona, and after he has married her, harbors (as in too many cases) the dreadful passion of jealousy.

Of jealously, our being’s bane,
Mark the small cause, and the most dreadful pain.

Mr. Allyn —will depict the character of a specious villain, in the regiment of Othello, who is so base as to hate his commander on mere suspicion, and to impose on his best friend. Of such characters, it is to be feared, there are thousands in the world, and the one in question may present to us a salutary warning.

the man that wrongs his master and his friend,
What can he come to but a shameful end?

Mr. Hallam —will represent a young and thoughtful officer, who is traduced by Mr. Allyn, and getting drunk, loses his situation and his general’s esteem. All young men, whatsoever, take example from Cassio.

The ill effects of drinking would you see?
Be warn’d, and fly from evil company.

Mr. Morris —will represent an old gentleman, the father of Desdemona, who is not cruel or covetous, but is foolish enough to dislike the noble Moor, his son-in-law, because his face is not white, forgetting that we all spring from one root. Such prejudices are very numerous, and very wrong.

Source: William W. Clapp Jr., A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston & Cambridge: J. Munroe, 1853), pp. 8–10.

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).