JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume Ill
Vera Mowry Roberts
Number 1
Winter 1991
Co-editors
Walter J. Meserve
CUNY Graduate School
Managing Editor
Edwin Wilson
Assistant Editor
Joel Berkowitz-
CASTA Copyright 1991
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Brown University
From the Editors
Readers will note the somewhat eclectic character of the essays in
this issue--essays by two editors of the journal, an excerpt from a
1982 CUNY PhD Program In Theatre dissertation, iheatrical
biographies reprinted from a rare volume published in the mid-1850s.
Although such a collection was not our original design when we
started this journal, we believe that the content of this issue stead-
fastly promotes our previously stated aim to encourage research and
to provide opportunity for that enlightened understanding to_which
we all aspire.
As we began to organize this winter issue of 1991 , however,
necessity stimulated inventiveness. We are not receiving enough of
those carefully researched and thoughtful essays that give journals
the distinction that all editors desire. American drama and theatre
deserves scholarly attention, and "attention must be paid." What do
you have to say?
Vera Mowry Roberts Walter J. Meserve
Co-Editors
2
Volume Ill
Bruce McConachie
Nancy Wynn
Walter J. MeserVe
F.C. Wemyss,
compiler
Table of Contents
Winter 1990
Out of the Kitchen and
Into the Marketplace:
Number 1
Normalizing Uncle Tom's Cabin
For the Antebellum Stage ................... .. 5
Sophie Treadwell:
Author of Machinal .............................. 29
The American West of the
1870s and 1880s as Viewed
From the Stage .................................... 48
Theatrical Biographies of
Eminent Actors and Authors ............... 64
Contributors ......................................................................................... 75
3
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4
OUT OF THE KITCHEN
AND INTO THE MARKETPLACE:
NORMALIZING UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
FOR THE ANTEBELLUM STAGE
Bruce McConachie
Theatre historians examining the two most popular antebellum
stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin have focused on the extent to
which the two adapters, George L. Aiken and Henry J. Conway,
remained faithful to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery intentions.
Both dramatizations achieved immense success, playing to varied
audiences in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia from late in 1852
through 1853 and sparking a notorious "theatre war" in New York
City between the National Theatre, where Aiken's version ran for an
astounding 325 performances, and the American Museum Theatre,
where P.T. Barnum touted Conway's script as .. the only just and
sensible dramatic version of Mrs. Stowe's book." The Aiken adapta-
tion, most historians conclude, softened Stowe's objections to
slavery as an institution, but retained much of her sentimental
abolitionism. Piecing together the Conway version from letters,
programs, and newspaper reviews, historians supposed that this
adaptation sacrificed most of Stowe's strikes against slavery to
pander to northern audiences nervous about the political implica-
tions of her principles.
1
Now that Conway's script has been
recovered, however, it is evident that this version does not "make it
quite an agreeable thing to be a slave," as a reviewer for William
Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator asserted. In the context of Northern
debates about the South's "peculiar institution" In the earfy 1850s,
both adaptations were anti-slavery, though Aiken's version was much
closer to Garrisonian abolitionism than Conway's. 2
Stowe's novel was much more than a tract against slavery for
her antebellum readers, however. Recent scholarship on Uncle
Tom's Cabin reveals that her anti-slavery beliefs are embedded in a
nexus of values that challenged the secular, masculine, and capitalist
society of the antebellum North. In her seminal essay on the book,
cultural historian Jane Tompkins concludes that Stowe "attempted to
turn the socio-political order upside down" by witnessing the day
"when the meek-- which is to say women -- will inherit the earth."
Elizabeth Ammons adds that Stowe's spiritual vision is best
exemplified In her maternal characters, Uncle Tom included, since
5
Stowe converts "essentially repressive concepts of femininity into a
positive (and activist) alternative system of values .... " Gillian Brown
argues that Stowe posited a matriarchal utopia in which a pre-
capitalist domestic economy would replace the. market economy of
the status quo. And Theodore Hovet comments that Uncle Tom's
Cabin captured
not only an extreme form of social injustice but also the
fundamental conflict in modern western culture
between a spiritual vision of human existence, a vision
given its most powerful expression In the Christian
mystical tradition, and a modern materialistic ethos,
which treated the world, even human beings, only as
physical entities subject to natural law. a
While these and other critics and historians differ on several matters
of interpretation and emphasis, they would agree that the novel envi-
sions a society In which Christian values, maternal love, and eco-
nomic cooperation might finally triumph over individualism,
materialism, and exploitation. For Stowe, slavery was simply the
wqrst instance of the larger system within which it was embedded --
the system of market capitalism.
How, then, did the Aiken and Conway adaptations of Stowe's
novel position their northern audiences to respond to the realities of
capitalism enveloping their lives in the 1850s? Thomas Haskell's
influential essay "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian
Sensibility" provides a useful and revealing way into this question.
Haskell links abolitionism and similar humanitarian reforms in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a cognitive style" resulting
from the rise of market capitalism. In brief, he argues that the experi-
ence of market relations taught capitalists to value conscience as
well as calculation: several "men of principle," having profited from
the promise-keeping and the future-orientation of contractual rela-
tions, were led, "by subtle Isomorphisms and homologies," to
embrace a humanitarian sensibility. Hence, habits trained in the
marketplace led to a style of thinking which suggested the possibility
of moral progress and guided capitalist reformers in shaping their
strategies.
4
Clearly, Stowe's novel owes much to the cognitive style" of
humanitarian reform, despite its attack on capitalist exploitation. Like
the ideologies supporting market capitalism and female domesticity,
the social orientation of the sentimental novel expressed the moral
certainties of a dominant eighteenth-century middle class. s By the
nineteenth century, however, Stowe and others were constructing
6
sentimental values In unconventional ways. As Isabelle White notes,
Uncle Tom's Cabin uses an "individualist appeal for anti-individualist
ends," and the resulting contradiction harms her politics. Charting
the implications of this contradiction within the context of antebellum
debates between radical feminists and conservative defenders of
domesticity, Jean Fagin Yellin concludes that Stowe's book, despite
its radical ideas, celebrates "ordinary women who practice not femi-
nism and abolitionism but 'domestic feminism' and colonization."
Ultimately, states Yellin, "Uncle Tom's Cabin counter(s) the practical
measures urged by the black and white [feminists of her tlme] .6
Stowe's conservative methods contradicted her radical appeal to
conscience--a likely key to the immense popularity of her book.
Like the novel, both stage versions are complex sites of
ideological conflict. Also grounded in assumptions about con-
science and agency deriving from the historical dynamics of capi-
talism as described by Haskell, both adaptations, too, criticized
several of the effects of capitalism in the antebellum United States.
Whereas Stowe's book, by turning the mandates of individualistic
conscience against capitalistic consequences, remains conflicted
about the morality of market capitalism, Aiken's and Conway's adap-
tations move toward a resolution of this ambivalence. Both scripts
suggest that humanitarian sensibility and modest reform can solve
the problems of slavery and capitalism without altering the underly-
ing structure of capitalistic culture and society in the 1850s.
This implied resolution brought both adaptations more fully into
line with the traditional "cognitive style" of humanitarian reform and
with the values of the dominant antebellum culture than was Stowe's
novel. At a time when both political parties accepted capitalism as
the engine of progress--the Whigs touting the virtues of the "self-
made man" and the Democrats guarding the "free" market against
the incursions of "aristocrats"--Stowe's insistence that women's duty
to God often runs counter to man's economic self-Interest was a
cultural anomaly. Similarly, Stowe's abolitionism, based on mystical
notions of Christianity and motherhood rather than on a "masculine"
logic of perfectionist reform, was uncharacteristic of the 1850s and of
the tradition of humanitarianism? In effect, then, the stage adapta-
tions of Uncle Tom's Cabin normalized Stowe's novel, smoothing
away the radical challenges to the dominant culture implicit in its
mystical and matrifocal values. As the stage popularity of "the
world's greatest hit'' suggests, these versions of the novel were
closer to the traditional morality and contemporary practice of capi-
talism than the original.
This is not to say that all of Stowe's strikes against capitalism
are excluded from the two adaptations. Both Aiken and Conway
7
condemned the calculating greed of the slave catchers and the
cruelty of Legree' s economic exploitation. In addition to these
obvious and uncontroverslal targets, moreover, both playwrights
devised new characters and dialogue that point up the immorality of
more legitimate capitalistic practices in the North.
Aiken probably created the character of Gumption Cute to gener-
ate comic relief from the Legree-Tom scenes set in the South by
alternating them with scenes of comic confrontation involving Cute
against Topsy, Miss Ophelia, and others In the North. The new
character also serves the poetic justice of Aiken's plot by helping to
kill Legree near the end of the play. Along the way, however, Aiken
also uses Cute to censure the unfeeling calculation of the speculator.
A derivative of the stage Yankee, a character typically laughed with
for his cunning and Independence, Aiken's Cute Is written instead to
be laughed at for his failures and to evoke disgust for his heartless-
ness. Out for any "speculation" that will turn a profit, Cute, soon after
his initial entrance, tells Lawyer Marks about his past difficulties in
making money. His latest venture, he says, was as an overseer on a
plantation: "I made a pretty good thing of that, though it was dreadful
trying to my feelings to flog the darkies; but I got used to it after
awhile, and then I used to lather them like Jehu" (IV:1). In the end,
he and Marks try to blackmail Legree out of a thousand dollars by
agreeing to keep silent about his murder of St. Clare in a barroom.
This stratagem falls, too. Gumption Cute, in other words, is all Inept
calculation; despite his name, he lacks courage and cunning as well
as moral sensibility. Aiken wants his audience to understand that
speculators are allied with villains. a
Conway also added a stage Yankee, Penetrate Partyside, but
used him to uphold the capitalistic values of Yankee individualism.
Nevertheless, Conway distinguishes between the "cute and cal-
culatin' population" of New England (111:1) and the "English
aristocracy and capitalists who are only doing in another form what
the American planter does (11:4). Drawing on dialogue from chapter
19 of Stowe's novel, Conway has his St. Clare continue:
[The English laborer] is as much at the will of his
employer as if he were sold to him. The Slave holder
can whip his refractory slave to death; the English capi-
talist can starve him to death .. . . [The two systems]
are In nature the same, though different In name. One
set of humans are entirely appropriated to the use and
Improvement of the other without any regard to their
own. Raised in ignorance, living in want, and dying in
wretchedness (11:4).
8
Partyslde embraces St. Clare's sentiments. Later In the play,
Partyside seconds this critique of capitalism in a scene with Aunty
Vermont, a character based on Stowe's Miss -Ophelia. Pouring over
law books to discover a way of freeing Tom from Legree, Partyside
notes a statute that masters can only manumit old slaves if they
agree to provide them with food, clothing, and lodging. "Pity [the
law] weren't more general," says Penetrate. "Guess it wouldn't do
much harm to some of the rich folks in the North if they was obliged
to provide for all those who have gotten grey and superannuated in
their service" r-J:1).
Despite Conway's rousing rhetoric against capitalist exploita-
tion and Aiken's withering attack on speculators, both plays stop far
short of attacking the legitimacy of American market capitalism.
Cute, his failed speculations reflected in his increasingly shabby
clothes, declines in respectability as the play proceeds. Further, the
moral insensitivity he embodies hurts only himself; Aiken never uses
Cute's comic villainy to exemplify a social system of calculation and
exploitation. Conway's St. Clare and Partyside understand that treat-
ing people as property is an inherent problem in capitalism, not
simply the result of individual moral failing. But aside from Pene-
trate's mild rebuff of northern capitalists in Act V, the play locates the
problem of exploitation in England, not America. Stowe, of course,
excoriated English capitalism too, but she also used the English
system to generalize about conditions in America. Uke Aiken, Con-
way lifted entire passages of dialogue from the novel, cutting but
rarely adding to the speeches Stowe wrote for her characters. Con-
way did add to the St. Clare speech quoted above, however. Where
Stowe wrote, "The slave holder can whip his refractory slave to
death; the capitalist can starve him to death," Conway modified the
noun "capitalist" with the adjective "English: At a time when most
Americans contrasted what they believed to be the social justice of
their own national economy to the wickedness of the English factory
system, Conway's addition significantly undercut Stowe's Intended
attack on the systemic evils of American market capital.ism.
The bland concern in both adaptations about the inhumanity
of capitalism in general, however, masks a stronger link binding both
melocframas to the "cognitive style" deriving from capital.istic market
relations, as understood by Haskell. In particular, both plays
embrace the two main "lessons taught by the dynamics of the
market and celebrate "men of principle" as the model of male behav-
ior in a capitalist society. Haskell notes that the regimen of the
market taught entrepreneurs the necessity of keeping their economic
promises. Mutual promise-making and promise-keeping provided
9
the basis for contractual relations, without which trade, employment,
and banking could not develop. Because fulfilling a contract
presupposed some human control over nature and historical circum-
stances, capitalism also "expanded the range of causal perception
and inspired people's confidence in their power to intervene in the
course of events, Haskell 's second lesson. This magnification of a
sense of personal power and responsibility led capitalists both to
elaborate techniques for manipulating others for their own profit and
to apply many of those same techniques to humanitarian purposes.
Together, the two chief lessons of the market created the "man of
principle, .. the dominant model of ethical behavior In society by the
late eighteenth century. An "inner-directed" man concerned to act on
principle and focused on future consequences, this historical type
thrived best in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil
War, when, says Haskell, "the future was at once open enough to the
individual to be manipulable and yet closed enough to be foresee-
able.'t9
Interpreting the texts of these two plays within the context of
this cognitive style might best begin with a focus on the "man of prin-
ciple" norm in both adaptations. Both stage versions of Stowe's
novel contain characters who embody the attributes of this norm as
well as others who legitimate it through comic or villainous contrast.
In Conway's adaptation especially, the "man of principle" functions as
the implicit norm against which the actions and values of the other
characters are judged.
Conway and Aiken can only feature men of principle in their
melodramas, however, by eliminating all of Stowe's women of prlncl-
.. pie. Cut from both plays Is Mrs. Shelby who, in the novel, pleads
with her husband not to sell Tom and Eliza's little Harry to settle their
debts. Refusing to consider people as property, Mrs. Shelby
understands that the system of slavery cannot be ameliorated by
individual acts of morality; her critique of slavery announces Stowe's
attack on all systems of exploitation that contradict the model of the
Christian family. Also excised from both adaptations is Mrs. Bird, the
wife of an Ohio senator, whose motherly concern for Eliza conflicts
with her husband's desire to uphold the Fugitive Slave Law. As
Stowe makes clear in her chapter entitled "In Which It Appears That A
Senator Is But A Man, .. the morality of the heart must override the
legalities of the country. Finally, Aiken and Conway cut Rachel Hal-
liday, the Quaker mother who helps George and Eliza escape to
Canada. Critic Elizabeth Ammons notes that Halliday's "beauty
Issues from her perfection as a mother and from the way she uses
her power In what is in practice a matriarchal {because completely
home-centered) community.
1
o Without the image of Halliday's
10
kitchen on stage, the Conway and Aiken versions lack the matrifocal
utopia against which Stowe measured northern and southern social
relations in her novel.
For the most part, Aiken and Conway turn the major female
characters that remain into melodramatic stereotypes. Stowe, work-
ing within the conventions of the sentimental novel, also used
stereotypes, but attuned them to her own purposes. While she ini-
tially treats Aunt Ophelia with comic affection, for instance, she wants
her readers to understand that this overly efficient Yankee does learn
from her mistakes; Eva's death makes her a. true mother to Topsy. In
Aiken's version, Aunt Ophelia is mainly a comic old maid, laughed at
throughout the play for her busybody foolishness and, in scenes
invented by Aiken, for her pathetic attempts to gain a husband.
Aiken's use of her for comic relief from the Legree-Tom scenes over-
shadows the reform of her heart and her new-found love for Topsy.
Denied the opportunity to experience mother love by Conway
(because, in his version, Eva does not die), Conway's Aunty Vermont
is completely contained by the stereotype of the old maid. Sig-
nificantly, both playwrights eventually marry off their Aunt Ophelia
characters. Unlike Stowe, they can imagine no use for older women
who are unattached to husbands.
Stowe constructed Eliza as the mulatto version of the ideal
Christian wife and mother; whatever the cost to herself and her hus-
band, she will save her child. Stowe's Eliza, already close to the vic-
timized female of the melodramatic stage, is pushed over the edge
by Conway and Aiken. Conway reduces Eliza to a minor character,
refusing to dramatize the moment of her greatest heroism, her
escape over the ice. In the Aiken version, she is mostly innocent
desperation, her fate depending primarily on the resourcefulness or
sacrifice of men. Neither playwright shows the pacifying effect Eliza
has on her husband. In general, then, Aiken and Conway either
exclude Stowe's strong women or essentialize their passive or nega-
tive traits, thus countering their representation by the novelist.
In partial defense of the adapters, both playwrights were neces-
sarily drawing on production practices and theatrical conventions ill-
suited to realizing Stowe's matrilocal ideals in production. Strong-
willed mothers rarely appeared on the antebellum stage; most stock
companies would have been hard pressed to cast several such roles.
Since companies generally contained two to three times as many
male as female actors, Aiken and Conway knew they would have to
excise several of Stowe's female characters in their adaptations.
Then, too, the time constraints of conventional theatregoing
mandated both extensive cutting and the flattening of several com-
plex but minor characters. Even with both melodramas consuming
11
an entire evening's entertainment (a playwriting gamble in itself), the
playing time for both scripts could only last about one tenth as long
as it might take an average reader to get through the novel.
In this regard, Stowe's conservative feminism helped to insure
that many of her women would not make it onto the stage. Her
domestic ideology gave men the right to act in the world and
relegated women to the sidelines as keepers of conscience. Thus on
a plot level -- necessarily the main focus for any nineteenth-century
adapter of a long novel -- Shelby, George Harris, St. Clare, and
Legree are absolutely essential to the development of the story; Mrs.
Shelby, Mrs. Bird, and several other women are not. Nonetheless,
Aiken and Conway could have Included several of Stowe's strong
matriarchs and could have refrained from stereotyping the major
female characters that remained. That they chose not to do so,
however, may be less an indictment of them than of the practices,
conventions, and expectations of the culture within which they
worked.
Lacking strong women of principle, both adaptations feature
several men of principle whose will and foresight animate the plots of
both plays. In the Conway version, the character who embodies
most of the attributes of this historical type is George Shelby. After
learning in the first act that his father has sold Tom to Haley, little
George makes this pledge:
I am only a boy, but listen to me and remember: if I live
to be a man you shall be free. See Uncle Tom, I have
bored a hole through this dollar and I now put it around
your neck. Kneel, Uncle Tom and listen to the promise
of a boy who will redeem it if he lives to be a man (1:3).
Sure enough, George grows up to be a man of principle and keeps
his promise. And the token of his pledge, in proper melodramatic
fashion, figures significantly in the action, one time saving Tom from
Legree's wrath. Conway used a minor event from the novel, George
Shelby's promise and gift to Uncle Tom, to frame his entire adapta-
tion: The promise occurs at the climax of an early scene and Its
redemption at the conclusion of the play.
Other men of principle dot the action of Conway's melodrama.
The playwright has Drover John plan the escape of George and Eliza
from the slavecatchers and then defend them when they are
cornered; he eliminates all the other Quakers, however. George
Harris, the white half of his mulatto nature emphasized on stage,
uses his freedom to plan the rescue of Eliza from Legree. (In Con-
way's version, Eliza Is lured from Canada and taken to Legree's
12
plantation; in effect, she's a substitute for Stowe's Emmeline.) Con-
way's Yankee character, Penetrate Partyside, described as a down
easter collecting materials for a book on human nature generally and
other materials on his own particularly (list of characters), acts on
humanitarian principles throughout. Taking his first notes on slavery,
Penetrate comments, Niggers chained like dogs ginerally because
they are going to be sold according to law particularly. Querel Who
deserves to be chained most, the niggers to be sold or the owners
who sell them? (11:2). Partyside befriends St. Clare, marries Aunty
Vermont, tries to rescue Tom at the slave auction, and searches for a
legal way to free Tom from Legree. These minor heroes of Conway's
melodrama are not scrupulous and respectable capitalists, but they
all embody the defining characteristic of the man of principle,
according to Haskell: "his willingness to act on principle no matter
how inconvenient it might be. 11
More closely allied to the storyline and themes of Stowe's
novel, Aiken's adaptation features fewer men of principle and relies
on them less frequently to move his plot. As in the book, a grown-up
George Shelby follows Tom to Legree's plantation, but his earlier
promise to rescue the slave is cut. Phineas Fletcher, a Drover John
character with much of the same altruistic good humor, actually has
more humanitarian work to do In the Aiken version than In Conway's
to save George and Eliza. And George Harris, when free, acts self-
lessly to save his wife and child as he does in the Conway adapta-
tion. But Aiken neither frames his plot around the promise of a man
of principle nor Introduces a Penetrate Partyside figure whose dis-
interestedness allows him to moralize freely and perform good deeds
when necessary. This is because the moral center of Aiken's play,
even more so than in Stowe's novel, is the death and apotheosis of
Uttle Eva. In contrast, at the end of Conway's melodrama Eva is as
alive as Uncle Tom. Consequently, the standard of the man of princi-
ple is less important in centering Aiken's version than Conway's.
In both adaptations, however, this norm helps to clarify
audience response to Augustine St. Clare. As Amy Schranger Lang
concludes, Stowe had difficulties with this character:
Augustine St. Clare is the only character in the novel in
whom masculine and feminine attributes are equally
mixed; because of this, he endangers the novel. Com-
bining virtue and power as he does, he could
presumably translate private feeling into public action.
He could, that is, both feel and compete. But to send
St. Clare out into the world as actor and regenerator"
would be to rewrite the book.
13
This is so, states Lang, because gender is the determining category
in the novel; disrupt what Stowe takes to be the fundamental dif-
ferences between men and women by a character who combines
both attributes and "the Mrs. Birds and the Mrs. Shelbys lose their
special capacity for right feeling, the state of the kitchen no longer
symbolizes the moral worth of the family it feeds, and domesticity
becomes indistinguishable from competition.
1
2 Consequently, as
soon as St. Clare is ready to act on the basis of Eva's Injunction to
free his slaves and preach abolitionism, Stowe must kill him off. And,
says Lang, she does it unconvincingly, awkwardly deploying the con-
ventions of sentimental fiction in St. Clare's death scene.
Conway and Aiken rely on the norm of the man of principle to
contain if not resolve the problem of St. Clare's ideologically trou-
bling androgyny. As Conway characterizes him, St. Clare is too
"feminine for his own "masculine good: His feelings get the better of
him and drive him to drink. The Boston Museum "programme of
scenery and incidents" for Act Ill, scene 7 of Conway's adaptation
charts the downward path of this failed man of principle: "Saloon In
St. aare's house. Grief and desolation. Agony of the wife and child.
DEATH OF ST. CLARE. Apotheosis of his mother! Tableau."13
Aiken's St. Clare, close to Stowe's in balancing "feminine feeling and
"masculine will, promises Tom he will give up drinking, pledges to
Eva that he will free his slaves, and is about to sign Tom's freedom
papers when Legree kills him. Through the salvific agency of Tom
and Eva, Aiken's St. Clare becomes a man of principle. The adapter
even evokes sympathy for St. Clare by having him apologize to Tom
--"I have forgotten to sign your freedom papers" (IV:5) --before he
dies. Consequently, St. Clare can appear in heaven for Aiken's final
tableau. In both adaptations, the man of principle is the implicit
standard by which Stowe's St. Clare is transformed and against
which his actions are judged. Arguably, both playwrights control this
character and his fate better than Stowe herself, since St. aare does
not threaten the moral calculus of their plays.
Many of Aiken's and Conway's comic characters are con-
structed to contrast to the heroic men of principle at or near the cen-
ter of both dramatizations. This is especially true of Conway's black
buffoons, whose characterizations are taken directly from the
stereotypes of the minstrel show. Conway depicts Sam on the
Shelby farm as a ragged but pretentious bumpkin. He and Chloe
dance a minuet "with the greatest extravagance and politeness while
the other slaves form a half circle" to watch them (1:1 ). St. Clare's
Adolph is a minstrel dandy; he speaks "foppishly, owns a "half pair of
specs," and is an scented over too, notes a surprised Partyside
14
(111:1 ). Topsy, when free, delivers a stump speech promising to join
"a benevolence s'ciety" in the North to 1ucidate to dat s'ciety de
necessity ob doin' somethin' for dere coloured brethren in bondage
(IV:1). All of these minstrel characterizations effect their comedy by
the implicit contrast between the respectable white man of principle
and the unrespectable black fool attempting to ape his betters.
14
Aiken, on the other hand, follows what George Fredrickson terms
the "romantic racialist attitude of Stowe in constructing Topsy, his
single comic black character.15 As in the novel , Topsy is childish
and trusting, full of mischief and eager to learn Christian morality.
Topsy, both before and occasionally after her reformation, delights in
lying, stealing, and fighting--attributes .that keep her unrespectable
even after she becomes a Christian. In line with Aiken's overall inten-
tions, Topsy contrasts primarily with Eva. Uke Conway's minstrel
stereotypes, she is also a counter to Aiken's men of principle.
This historical type of capitalist is also the absent other" both
melodramatists use to define their villains. While Stowe character-
izes Haley, Marks, Loker, and the other slave catchers as
businessmen and therefore evil, Aiken and Conway tend to separate
their villainy from their means of making a living. Aiken's Lawyer
Marks, for instance, is tight-lipped and greedy, as willing to make a
dollar from selling information to George Shelby or blackmailing
Legree as from catching slaves. Ukewise, the Simon Legree of both
adapters is the opposite of the man of principle. To the extent that
the antitheses of the feminine ideal and of the man of principle share
certain characteristics, Stowe's and the playwrights' arch villains are
the same. All three Legrees have rejected the love of their mother
(Conway's Legree even killed her), treat women and slaves as dis-
posable property, and live by force and cunning.
Unlike Stowe's character, though, the e g r e ~ of Aiken and Con-
way is not the embodiment of a social institution that systematically
exploits other people. In the novel, Legree's degradation of Tom and
the other slaves is rooted In rational economic motives. As Theodore
Hovet comments, "[Stowe's] Legree has recognized the full industrial
potential of slave labor .... His slaves are no more than interchange-
able parts in a complex machine of cotton production. . . . [Legree
himself] is not unlike the steam-powered machines which drive New
England mills."16 In both plays, on the other hand, Legree's evil is
reduced to his personality. An anti -man-of-principle, Legree acts
primarily out of cruelty and revenge, not to make a profit. In Con-
way's auction scene, for instance, Legree tells Tom, 1 will buy you
and the dearer you cost me, the dearer I'll make you pay for it (IV:3).
Stowe's Legree is alive at the end of the novel, a reminder that the
systemic inhumanity of slavery continues. Both playwrights,
15
however, follow melodramatic convention In killing off the villain:
Aiken has Marks shoot him when Legree turns on Marks and Cute for
attempting to blackmail him and Conway concocts a gothic death
scene where Legree, terrified by the ghost of his murdered mother,
"dies struggling" with unseen demons (V:3). In both adaptations,
Legree dies for his personal sins, not for his role In perpetuating a
system that exploits and degrades others.
Uncle Tom cannot represent a man of .principle In either the
novel or its stage versions because, regardless of his morality, the
character lacks the freedom to effect his will. Elizabeth Ammons per-
suasively argues that Tom is best understood as the "suffering
heroine" of Stowe's book; he embodies the womanly traits of intuitive
emotionalism, Christian meekness, and familial loyalty conventionally
reserved for virtuous female characters in sentimental novels.
Ammons points out that "feminizing Uncle Tom served Stowe's
basic argument "that home and mother must not figure as
sanctuaries from the world but as imperative models for its
reconstitution."
17
Thus, Tom's martyrdom marks the final commit-
ment that many of Stowe's strong females stand ready to make to
realize their domestic Ideals. In line with her conservative notion of
reform, Tom's Christian sacrifice was also meant to provide a model
for Stowe's women readers.
It is difficult to understand how Stowe's intentions for Tom
might have been realized on stage. Any image of the character,
necessarily embodied in the nineteenth-century theatre by a male
actor, could not have been as "feminine" for its audience as Stowe
wished for her readers to imagine. Aiken and Conway exacerbate
this fundamental difficulty by radically decontextualizing Tom's
womanly suffering and call to conscience. Audiences watching their
plays would not see Tom's actions as the most radical step possible
for American women because both adapters cut or reshaped all of
Stowe's strong mothers. Aiken at least dramatized the parallels
between Tom's death and Eva's, but without the Mrs. Shelbys of
Stowe's novel, Tom's passion remains only slimly connected to
Stowe's conservative agenda for social reform. Conway's Uncle
Tom, saved from martyrdom, floats free altogether.
Given the gendered basis of Stowe's religious and social
values--her assumption that a "feminine" moral sensibility is always
superior to a "masculine" one--the isolation of Tom from other strong
women characters radically undercuts her critique of patriarchal cap-
italism. All that remains in both scripts is a character whose
'womanly .. traits, though still preferable to the aggressive masculinity
of Legree and the slave catchers, make him child-like, spiritual, and
loyal. Stowe's novel also aligns degree of blackness with femi-
16
ninity"; fully African male slaves such as Andy on the Shelby planta-
tion and Tom are depleted as Inherently more "feminine" than
mulattos like George Harris. But without strong white women in both
plays, this alignment falls apart. Since no white adult Is as spiritual
and as vulnerable as Uncle Tom, race tends to replace gender as the
distinguishing basis of moral sensibility In both adaptations; on the
whole, however, no single touchstone of morality remains. In such
circumstances, better to be a white man of principle and control your
own future, these melodramas implicitly suggest, than a black slave.
As a result, Conway's and Aiken's treatment of Tom decouple
Stowe's antislavery sentiments from her gender-based excoriation of
market capitalism.
The legitimation of contractual relations in both adaptations of
Uncle Tom's Cabin also undercuts Stowe's critique of capitalism in
antebellum America. As Haskell notes, contract-making was the logi-
cal extension of promise-keeping among businessmen, a legal
method of binding strangers to ties of mutual trust and responsibility.
Contracts fostered the rapid expansion of market relations in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by allowing people "who shared
no tie of blood, faith, or community" to do business together.18
Because contracts were fundamental to the expansion of capitalism,
businessmen and those influenced by bourgeois culture began to
believe that other areas of social life might also be ordered along
contractual lines. In politics, for instance, many of the advocates of a
national government understood the Constitution as a contract
among the people which established and legitimized the power of
the state. And by the mid-nineteenth century, temperance leaders
typically viewed The Pledge as a contract between man and society.
Two traditions, Calvinism and sentimentalism. taught Harriet
Beecher Stowe to value the relations of God to man and of loving
parents to obedient children over the contractual relations of the
marketplace and Its perceived homologies. To be sure, Calvinism,
with its emphasis on a covenant binding the Chosen to God, con-
tained a significant germ of contractual thinking. But contractual
thinking assumes that both parties are free to enter into or to refuse
agreement. Consequently, the power of the Almighty and the sinful-
ness of man in Calvinism insured that their religious covenant would
never be mistaken for a secular contract. Stowe rejected the side of
Calvinism that preached the inevitability of sin to embrace a
Christocentric faith centering on man's ability, through the grace of
Christ, to attain salvation. But Stowe retained a strong belief in God's
omnipotence, both for salvation and damnation.
1
9 The salvific power
of the Deity insures Tom's "victory" over Legree and the concluding
sentence of Uncle Tom's Cabin warns ominously that "injustice and
17
cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God {Chap. 45).
Secondly, the sentimental tradition relied on an image of the
loving family, specifically the relation of parent to child, as the model
for extending compassion to the unfortunate. Centered on biologi-
cal ties, parental authority, and mutual affection, the relations of the
sentimental family could have little in common with contractual rela-
tions among strangers. Stowe makes her preference forcibly known
in the chapter featuring the escaping Eliza and Senator and Mrs.
Bird, a forthright attack on the Fugitive Slave Law. All of the
Senator's arguments about the legitimacy of the law, based on a
contractual understanding of state power, are swept away by Eliza's
daughter-like plight and the motherly compassion of Mrs. Bird.
2
0
Stowe's novel takes no stand on contractual relations per se; there
are even some minor instances in which contracts between
businessmen and workers are treated as ethically neutral. But to the
extent that contracts threaten the moral mandates of God or the ideal
of the sentimental family they must be set aside. Realizing Christian
motherhood has prior authority over fulfilling secular contracts.
Some of the business contracts mentioned in Stowe's book
are essentially unaltered In both adaptations. Aiken and Conway
depict the agreement among themselves about divid-
ing the profits for catching Eliza, George, and little Harry much as
Stowe had drawn it, for example. Conway borrows Stowe's descrip-
tion of the Implicit contract binding Drover John to his Kentucky
slaves directly from the novel. Says John,
I've got a gang of boys and I just tells 'em run now, cut,
dig, just when you wants to. I shall never come to look
arter you. That's they way I keeps mine. Let 'em know
they're free to run anytime and it just breaks up their
wantin' to . . .. And I tell you, stranger, no man in our
parts gets more out of his niggers than I do (1:5).
Aiken uses this speech of Stowe's for his Phineas Fletcher, but
changes the verbs to past tense because Fletcher is no longer a
slave holder. In the same scene, Aiken borrows from Stowe Mr. Wil-
son's description of the business relation he had with George Harris
and his master: [George] worked for me some half dozen years In
my bagging factory, and he was my best hand, sir. He is an
ingenious fellow, too; he invented a machine for the cleaning of
hemp.... His master holds the patent of it (11:3).
Although Stowe's lightly ironic tone and the context of both inci-
dents make it clear to the reader that she does not wholly approve of
the business relations between Drover John and his slaves and Mr.
18
Wilson and his "hands," Stowe does not condemn these contractual
relations outright. Indeed, she suggests that the primary injustice
with regard to George and his invented machine is that he cannot
profit from the fruits of his labor. In this instance, Stowe implicitly
endorses the legitimacy of factory relations and patent laws, and the
social morality of protecting private property which lies behind both.
Perhaps because Stowe assumes that these relations between white
employers and black workers involve only men and not women, she
is not overty troubled by the possibilities for exploitation within them.
Conway and Aiken erase Stowe's irony and ignore her contradictory
thinking regarding contracts. Neither the context nor the tone of
these scenes In their adaptations imply that there could be anything
immoral about contracts enabling farmers to pay black field hands
solely for their food, clothing, and housing or capitalists to hire gifted
black artisans for their factories. Finding little opposition in Stowe to
disparities of power based on race and class, Aiken and Conway
implicitly endorse contractual relations which elevate white male
paternalists over black workers.
Undertying all contracts is the assumption that human volition
can shape much of the future. For the most part, both adaptations,
like Stowe's novel, assume that God will not directly intervene In
human affairs, although human acts may occasionally embody His
authority. The saintly death of Eva, for example, has Christocentric
repercussions In both the novel and Aiken's stage version, but the
Deity has not caused these consequences. To the extent that spec-
tators and readers believe the Almighty to be controlling the action of
the play or the novel, however, they will understand that the power of
human characters to affect the course of events, through contracts
or other means, has been diminished. The Lord's most active inter-
vention in the human affairs of the novel occurs when Stowe's God
haunts Legree, leading him to change his behavior toward Tom and
incapacitating the villain from stopping the escape of Cassy and
Emmeline. Karen Halttunen, drawing on Joel Porte's Insight that the
effectiveness of gothic fiction drew on "the dark rites of sin, guilt, and
damnation" in Calvinism, ties Stowe's attraction to gothic themes,
especially her interest in the "tormented condition" of Legree's
divided soul, to the Calvinist heritage of the Beechers. 2
1
Both adapters follow Stowe in using gothic conventions to
dramatize God's power to counter ttie evil intentions of Simon
Legree. Aiken demonstrates Legree's guilt by having a long curt of
Eva's hair, reminiscent to the villain of his mother's golden locks,
twine around his finger. As in the novel, Legree screams, "Damna-
tion," and writhes "as if the hair burned him" (VI:3). Conway contrives
a similar effect with hair that Legree supposes actually came from his
19
murdered mother. Then, topping Stowe's psychological gothicism,
Conway depicts Legree's ghoulish death by unseen hands": an Illu-
minated window in Legree's haunted plantation house shows Eliza
dressed like his murdered mother -with a long white dress, bosom
bloody, and a long white veil. [She] points to Legree with her left
hand and to heaven with her right hand. Legree, beset by "demons
because of his guilt, dies in agony (V:3). Although Cassy and Eliza
stage the masquerade, a theatre audience, knowing that the monster
killed his mother and prompted by Eliza's gesture heavenward,
would surely understand that an Angry God effected Legree's death.
By putting the Lord on stage and giving Him more secular power
than even Stowe allowed, Conway modified the authority of human
relations, including contracts, to shape the course of events. Aiken,
again following the novelist more closely, dramatized less efficacious
direct intervention.
Unlike the novel, however, Aiken's adaptation suggests that
contractual relations are as beneficent as God's authority in deliver-
ing social justice. In the slave auction when Legree buys Tom and
Emmeline, Aiken chalks up the evil outcome of the scene to the evil
character of the white men involved, not to the system of marketing
slaves by contract. In contrast to Stowe's abrupt, dispassionate
treatment of the auction as business as usual, Aiken expands the
scene by elaborating the villainy of one of the buyers, the auctioneer,
and Legree himself. The scene's ending--"Music. Legree stands
over (Tom and Emmeline] exulting (V:1)-focuses attention away
from the general, everyday fact of such injustice and toward the
pathos of these particular victims. The scenes involving Gumption
Cute and his "speculations offer positive examples of market forces
weeding out the inept and immoral. All of Cute's attempts to cut
deals--with Topsy, Aunt Ophelia, and Lawyer Marks--fail, primarily
because no one trusts him enough to make a contract with him.
Aiken assumes here that market relations are self-regulating and
ought to be, so that knaves like Gumption Cute will get their just
reward. Contractual relations originating in the marketplace are not
to blame for any evil and may lead to some good in Aiken's adapta-
tion.
Most of Conway's stage version endorses contractualism
wholeheartedly, contradicting the implicit power its gothic ending
gives to a Calvinist God to alter such human arrangements. Not only
is Conway's auction scene conducted by villains, It is also Illegal.
"We are prepared to prove that [Tom] was sold unlawfully, states
George Harris (V:1), returning to the South from Canada to free Eliza
as well as Tom. Indeed, this assertion follows a scene in which Pene-
trate and Aunty Vermont had outbid Legree to buy Tom at the auc-
20
tlon, but were foiled by an Illegal prior agreement between Legree
and the auctioneer. George Harris knows that Eliza was kidnapped,
and he discovers that Cassy Is also being held In bondage against
the law. Legree owns by a false bill of sale my wife's mother: he
states fY: 1 ). All of the slaves that the audience has any reason to
care about, In other words, Legree holds illegally. This plot con-
venience, of course, allows Conway to oppose slavery for three of its
victims, but to uphold the legal structure of slavery, Including the
Fugitive Slave Law. In the process, Conway embraces the con-
tractual basis of state power and legitimizes its laws.
In the end, Conway does not even oppose laws that define slaves
as property, so Important a basis of Stowe's objection to the Institu-
tion that she initially subtitled her novel, -rhe Man Who Was A Thing.
In the last line of the melodrama, Penetrate Partyside says:
You're free twice over. Your wife Chloe has sent money
enough to buy you and Duck [i.e., Aunty Vermont] and I
have as much more ready which shall buy, not your
wife and children because your young master here has
freed them already, but a lot of good land down East;
there ain't a spot of land there that wouldn't be honored
by having erected on it Uncle Tom's Cabin fY:3).
For Conway, buying slaves is essentially the same as buying land.
The contractual relations undergirding market capitalism and the
laws of the state are not part of the problem of slavery, according to
Conway; they are the keys to its solution, or at least its amelioration.
Let rich people buy the freedom of worthy slaves, Conway seems to
suggest, and we can forget about the rest. In this regard, Conway's
adaptation turns Stowe's novel on its head.
Stowe envisioned a very different future. As several of her
critics have noted, she used the Quaker settlement In Uncle Tom's
Cabin to posit a matriarchal domestic utopia which she believed
could replace the patriarchal expansionist capitalism of the United
States. Tompkins asserts that the true goal of Stowe's radical
undertaking Is nothing less than the institution of the kingdom of
heaven on earth. In the Quaker settlement, a vision ooth utopian
and Arcadian, motherhood fulfills the mandate of Christian love:
The form that Stowe's utopian society takes bears no
resemblance to the current social order. Man-made
institutions-- the church, the courts of law, the legisla-
tures, the economic system -- are nowhere in sight.
The home is the center of all meaningful activity;
21
women perform the most important tasks; work is
carried on in a spirit of mutual cooperation and the
whole is guided by a Christian woman who, through the
influence of her "loving words, gentle moralities, and
II motherly loving kindness, rules the world from her
rocking chair. 22
Stowe offered the Quaker settlement as an Ideal model, but sug-
gested no political strategies for realizing its attainment. In her Key
to Uncle Tom's Cabin {1853), she spoke of the love of Christ as the
only effective way to oppose the ambition "to be above others In
power, rank, and station.
2
3 A preacher's daughter, Stowe saw her
role as depicting the final goal and left the job of charting the path to
others. Implied In her picture of a matriarchal utopia, however, was
her belief that the "mothers of America, working in their families and
together cooperatively, could shape a radically different future than
the one emerging out of the dynamics of market capitalism.
Aiken shifted Stowe's utopia from this world to the next. Fol-
lowing melodramatic convention, the adapter painted his picture of
the ideal future in the final tableau:
Gorgeous clouds, tinted with sunlight. Eva, robed in
white, is discovered on the back of a milk-white dove,
with expanded wings, as if just soaring upward. Her
hands are extended in benediction over St. Clare and
Uncle Tom, who are kneeling and gazing up to her.
Impressive music. Slow curtain (VI :6).
By ending his play with Eva welcoming Tom and St. Clare into
heaven, Aiken drew attention away from the possibility of social
change on earth and focused it on the promise of life after death. As
Philip Fisher notes, "To use death as the central Image for suffering Is
to strengthen the passivity within sentimentality. . . . Slavery can be
abolished but, of course, not by a child like Uttle Eva.24 Centering
his drama on Eva's death and apotheosis, Aiken Induced more tears
than outrage. Nor does Aiken envision fundamental social changes
to improve the lives of the characters who remain alive; perhaps
more worthy slaves will attain their freedom, but men of principle and
contractual relations offer no impediment to this pious hope.
Conway foresees only business as usual. One contemporary
reviewer of the production of Conway's adaptation at Barnum's
Museum noted without elaboration that his version completely
destroyed "the point and moral of the story of Uncle Tom. 25 Though
probably not commenting on Stowe's critique of antebellum capi-
22
tal ism, this reviewer might very well have been. No utopian altenla-
tive or even heavenly reward is necessary for his characters to live
happily ever after because market relations and the legal protection
of private property already insure a bright future, especially for the
men of principle who populate his melodramatic world. Although
mildly anti-slavery, Conway's dramatization primarily induced smug
satisfaction with the status quo.
Why does such a gulf separate the social values endorsed by
the novel and Its versions on stage? Certainly Stowe had different
ideas in mind than Aiken and Conway. The main reason for this wide
disparity, however, lies not in authorial intention but in the differences
between the social formations within which both artisti'c practices
were produced and received. By the 1850s, women writers and
readers dominated the literary market for sentimental fiction. Work-
ing within this formation, Stowe wrote alone and at home, knowing
that her readership would consist primarily of the "mothers of
America .. whom she addressed directly in her final chapter. Stowe
could also anticipate that most of her readers would be middle-class
females living in or near small or medium-sized towns, not in big
cities. Before beginning Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe considered pub-
lishing it in the National Era, an abolitionist journal of small circula-
tion; indeed, the novel was first serialized in that newspaper. Con-
sequently, Stowe also wrote for readers she knew to be generally
sympathetic to abolitionism, however much they might disagree
among themselves about specific abolitionist factions and
strategies. 26
Aiken and Conway, on the other hand, produced their adapta-
tions to meet the needs of specific theatrical companies. Sig-
nificantly, neither playwright initiated the job on his own. A member
of the acting troupe at the Troy Museum, Aiken was asked by his
cousin, George C. Howard, the head of the company, to work up
Stowe's novel as a vehicle for Howard's daughter, Cordelia. Conway
got Involved when Moses Kimball, owner of the Boston Museum,
hired him to put together a script that mingled "the grave and gay"
elements of Stowe's book and featured his star performer, William
Warren.
27
.
Both playwrights also understood that the managers for whom
they were working would make changes in their scripts and would
retain ultimate control of their plays. George C. Howard, for
instance, mindful of his daughter's recent success as Little Dick in
Oliver Twist, insisted that Aiken inject some lines of dialogue from the
Dickens' novel. And when Aiken's initial four-act version of the novel
(which ended in Little Eva's death) proved popular, Howard commis-
sioned his cousin to write a sequel and then to conflate both scripts
23
into a six-act play. Kimball's stage manager, William S. Smith, who
had already gained fame as a play carpenter for the museum's long-
running hit The Drunkard, worked with Conway to suit his adaptation
to the acting company and audience of the Boston Museum. Smith's
hand is most apparent in the Conway script in those scenes when St.
Clare becomes a dipsomaniac. On 15 November 1852, Conway's
version opened at the Boston Museum, the same date as the Initial
performance of Aiken's six-act combination in Troy. Unlike the con-
ditions of Stowe's writing practice, the means of script production for
the theatre mandated that Aiken and Conway collaborate with and
sell their scripts to the managers who hired them. Copyright laws did
not protect plays In the early 1850s. 28
Aiken and Conway also anticipated audiences that were more
male, more urban, more working-class, and less persuaded by
abolitionism than Stowe's readers. Although museum entrepreneurs
had attracted respectable women to their theatres by producing
moral plays as family entertainment, the percentage of museum
theatregoers who were women remained far less than the percent-
age of women readers of sentimental fiction. Unlike most theatre
managers, operators of museum theatres in the early 1850s looked
to all classes for their spectators, specializing only in so far as they
catered to Protestant rather than Catholic audiences.29 Aiken and
Conway could anticipate that some of these Protestant, mostly
middle-Income spectators would be favorably inclined to anti-slavery
views, if not to outright abolitionism, but they and the managers for
whom they worked had little experience on which to judge the proba-
ble success of an anti-slavery play. Despite the enormous success
of the novel by the fall of 1852, an earlier stage adaptation produced
at a working-class playhouse In New York had achieved only a
modest run. Besides, the great success of minstrel troupes with
these same audiences must have suggested to these museum
playwrights and managers the inherent difficulty of i n d u i ~ white
spectators to take seriously the plight of black characters. Little
wonder, then, that Aiken's and Conway's versions of Uncle Tom's
Cabin erase many of the anomalies of Stowe's radical critique and
legitimate the underpinnings of antebellum market capitalism.
Endnotes
1Theatre historians writing on stage versions of Uncle Tom's
Cabin include: Harry Birdoff, The World's Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom's
Cabin (New York: S.F. Vanni), 1947; David Grimstad, "Uncle Tom
from Page to Stage: Limitations of Nineteenth-Century Drama,
24
Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (October 1970): 235-44; Barnard
Hewitt, uncle Tom and Uncle Sam: New Ught from an Old Play,
Quarterly Journal of Speech 37 (February 1951): 63-70; Richard
Moody, Introduction to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Dramas from the
American Theatre, 1762-1909 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1966), 349-
59; Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967); Laurence Senelick, The
Age and Stage of George L. Fox, 1825-1877 (Hanover and London:
University Press of New England, 1988); Robert H. Shipp, uncle
Tom's Cabin and the Ethos of Melodrama, (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia
University, 1986); and Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel
Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1974).
Short Introductory essays by theatre historians Glenn Loney,
Daniel Gerould, Errol Hill, and Vera Jijl are also available In Showcas-
ing American Drama: George L. Aiken, Uncle Tom's Cabin; A Hand-
book of Source Materials, ed. Vera Jiji (Program for Culture at Play;
Multimedia Studies In American Drama: Humanities Institute, Brook-
lyn College, Brooklyn, 1983). Also, I have written on Conway's ver-
sion of the novel: H.J. Conway's Dramatization of Uncle Tom's
Cabin: A Previously Unpublished Letter, Theatre Journal 34 (May
1982), 149-54.
Barnum quoted by Birdoff, p. 88.
2
1 rely throughout this essay on the Aiken version as published
in Moody's anthology, cited above, pp. 360-96, and on the
promptbook copy of Conway's adaptation, General Theatre Collec-
tion, Hoblitzelle Library, University of Texas at Austin. The
promptbook, used In a Boston Museum production in 1876 guest-
starring Mrs. George C. Howard as Topsy, Is Incomplete. Missing
are nearly all of scenes three through seven of Conway's Act Ill. In
place of these five short scenes, I rely on a Boston Museum program
for Uncle Tom's Cabin dated 7 December 1852 (Boston Museum
Collection, Boston Public Library). It is clear from the detailed des-
cription of scenes In this program that the 1876 promptscript was not
substantially altered, except for those five scenes. Indeed, with that
exception, the 1876 script may have been exactly the same play as
was performed in Boston in the ear1y 1850s.
Liberator, quoted In Birdoff, 114.
3See Tompkins, sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and
the Politics of Literary History, in Sensational Designs: The Cultural
Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985), 139; Ammons Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin, in Criti-
cal Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons
(Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980), 153; Brown, Getting in the Kitchen with
25
Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin," American Quarterly
36 (1984): 503-23; Hovet, "Modernization and the American Fall Into
Slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, New England Quarterly 54 (Decem-
ber 1981): 500.
4American Historical Review 90 (April and June 1985): 339-61,
547-66.
son the sentimental novel, see Herbert R. Brown, The
Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (1940; rpt., New York:
Pageant, 1959); Gregg Camfield, The Moral Aesthetics of
Sentimentality: A Missing Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Nineteenth-
Century Literature 43 (December 1988), 319-45; and Philip Fisher,
Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985). On sentimentalism, domesticity, and
capitalism, see Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: woman's
Sphere in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1977); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted
Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); and Barbara Welter,
Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976).
6Jsabelle White, The Uses of Death in Uncle Tom's Cabin,
American Studies 26 (Spring 1985), 13; and Jean Fagin Yellin, Doing
It Herself: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Woman's Role in the Slavery
Crisis, in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 101-2.
7
See Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers:
Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984) and Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom's Cabin
and American Culture (Dallas, Texas: Southern Methodist University
Press, 1985) for contemporary reactions to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Also
useful Is Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing
About Domesticity (New York: Haworth Press, 1982). Regarding
antebellum politics and abolitionism, see Herbert Aptheker,
Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989);
Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Lawrence J. Freidman, Gregar-
ious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-
1870 (Cambridge: University Press, 1982); and Blanche
G. Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist Abolitionists in America
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
8Shipp, disagreeing with Grimstad (1970), makes a good case
for this interpretation of Gumption Cute, 103-114.
9Haskell, 556, 561.
10Ammons, 155.
26
11
Haskell, 560.
12
Lang, 47, 47-48.
13Boston Museum program for 7 December 1852 In the
Boston Public Library.
1
4Richard Yarbrough, strategies of Black Characterization in
Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel: in New
Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, 45-84, points out, however, that
Stowe aslo stereotyped several of her black characters. Sam and
Andy on the Shelby farm, for instance, are already close to minstrel
blacks.
15See George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White
Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-
1914 (New York: Harper Torch books, 1971), 1 03.
16Hovet, 513, 514.
17 Ammons, 160.
18Haskell, 556.
19Qn Stowe and Calvinism, see Ann Douglas, The Feminiza-
tion of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); Chartes H. Foster,
The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England
Puritanism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1954);
and Karen Halttunen, Gothic Imagination and Social Reform: The
Haunted Houses of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Har-
riet Beecher Stowe," in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, 107-34.
20Qn Stowe and the sentimental tradition, see Camfield and
Fisher.
21
See Karen Halttunen, Gothic Imagination and Social
Reform, and Porte, "In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror
in Gothic Fiction, In The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark
Romanticism (Pullman, Washington: Washington State University
Press, 1974), 45.
22Tompkins, 141-42. Ammons (1980), and her later essay,
stowe's Dream of the Mother Savior: Uncle Tom's Cabin and
American Woman Writers Before the 1920s, in New Essays on Uncle
Tom's Cabin, 155-95, and Brown also comment extensively on
Stowe's Quaker utopia.
23Quoted In Ammons (1986), 169.
24
Philip Fisher, partings and Ruins: Radical Sentimentality in
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Amerikastudien 28 (1983): 289.
25Anonymous reviewer quoted in Gossett, 275.
26Qn Stowe's methods and readership see Baym and also E.
Bruce Kirkham, The Building of Uncle Tom's Cabin (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1977).
2
7
1n his letter to Kimball, Conway outlined his plan for adapting
the novel to the stage and noted, By all you will be able to judge
27
how far I have complied with your desire of blending the grave and
gay" (1 June 1852, Kimball correspondence, Boston Athenaeum
Libraryl.
2son the conventions of playwright-manager relations in the
antebellum theatre, see David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled:
American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1968). On Aiken's collaboration with the Howard
troupe, see Birdoff, Senelick, and Shipp. For the origin of Conway's
script in the context of the Boston Museum, see McConachie; and
Claire McGIInchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum
(Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1940).
29'fhere Is no general study on the audiences for antebellum
museum theatre. Nonetheless, low ticket prices (twenty-five cents
for adults, twelve-and-a-half cents for children), seating arrange-
ments (orchestra-balcony seating replaced box-pit-and-gallery), the
exclusion of prostitutes and alcohol from the theatres, and the
predominance of Protestant-oriented moral drama in their repertories
suggests that these theatres catered predominantly to middle-
income Protestant families, women and children included. This con-
clusion accords with critic William W. Clapp's statement about the
Boston Museum Theatre in 1853: "[Kimball's] museum attracted all
classes, and it was the resort not only of the middling and lower
classes, but of the more wealthy residents, for the pieces were well
put upon the stage and the actors above mediocrity. The museum
. . . is now patronized by a large class who do not frequent theatres"
[A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston: James Munroe, 1853), 471 ).
30'fhe Charles W. Taylor version of Uncle Tom's Cabin had a
two-week run beginning August 23 at Purdy' s National Theatre in
New York, and enjoyed occasional revivals thereafter. On minstrel
audiences, see Toil.
28
SOPHIE TREADWELL:
AUTHOR OF MACHINAL
Nancy Wynn
Sophie Treadwell wrote thirty original full-length plays for the
stage (excluding revisions), in a variety of forms, modes, and styles:
comedy, domestic tragedy, history, biography, melodrama, express-
ionism. She wrote nothing in verse and did not consider herself a
poet or writer of poetic dialogue. She favored the form of what she
called the well-made play, which was actually her version of
melodrama. In the melodrama of the time of Treadwell's youth, emo-
tions and language were sentimental, Incidents were sensationalized,
morality was simple and obvious, villainy and virtue were
exaggerated. While never completely adhering to these character-
istics, Treadwell's plays tended to utilize these elements but in subtle
ways.
* * * *
In April and May, 1927, Treadwell sat in on the murder trial of
Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, although she was not officially covering
the trial as a news assignment. Because Treadwell was a newspaper
woman, she was curious about the events in the trial of two lovers
who murdered the woman's husband, a story that consumed hun-
dreds of columns of newsprint. Briefly, Ruth Snyder, after attempting
unsuccessfully to murder her husband on seven prior occasions,
persuaded her lover, Judd Gray, to be her accomplice In the eighth
attempt. In March, 1927, they bludgeoned the sleeping Albert
Snyder, an art editor for a boating magazine, with a window sash-
weight. It was not a cleverly planned murder, and they were put on
trial by mid-April. Both were convicted May 9, and they were
executed by electrocution in January, 1928. This act of murder was
to have been "a step toward the larger freedom, a fuller enjoyment of
life. 1 The paradox of the brutal act juxtaposed with the rationale that
this was a step toward freedom piqued Treadwell's curiosity: What
crushing set of circumstances could compel the woman to murder
her husband to attain freedom?
After the Gray-Snyder trial, Treadwell was Involved with the
out-of-town tryouts for Wild Honey. She probably worked with the
concept and outline for Machinal in the summer of 1927, and com-
29
menced dictating the dialogue after the unsuccessful tryout of Wild
Honey in October.
2
She finished the bulk of the play after the Gray-
Snyder executions in January, 1928. Machinal was copyrighted 21
April1928.
Evidently, Treadwell was able to interest director-producer
Arthur Hopkins almost immediately in her play. They worked on it
together in the summer of 1928, and, after one month's rehearsal,
Machinal premiered at the Plymouth Theatre on 7 September 1928,
to critical acclaim.
Treadwell had evidenced hints in the past of her ability to give
unconventional dramatic treatment to a play. Her one-acts, Eye of
the Beholder and To Him Who Waits, were departures from the well-
made play structure and realistic dialogue she usually adopted in her
writing. But it is in Machinal that Treadwell Is finally able to blend her
concerns for women's rights and socio-economic inequities; her
journalistic knowledge of an interesting, topical story well told; and
her artistic experience in combining the right dramatic style with
those elements of theme and plot. The right dramatic style was
expressionism, a mode which flourished in Germany in 191 0-20 and
was introduced in America by the Theatre Guild's 1922 production of
Georg Kaiser's From Morn To Midnight (1916), Eugene O'Neill's The
Hairy Ape (1922) and The Great God Brown (1926), Elmer Rice's The
Adding Machine (1923), and John Howard Lawson's Processional
(1925), among others. Treadwell's use of this presentational style
not only is the perfect choice for her story of murder and adultery,
but it transforms those tabloid cliches into sensational drama which
suggests a universality of concerns. Machinal combines cogency
and palpability of theme with sympathetic insight into the main-
springs of the woman's motives. 3
In his introduction to the published version of Machinal, John
Gassner summed up what many of the critics thought of the play and
placed it in historical perspective:
One of the most unusual plays of the twenties,
Machinal, appeared on the stage in the very last year of
that decade [Machinal was produced in 1928]. almost
as if it had been deliberately produced to sum up trends
in the theatre of that period. In Machinal were to be
found formal experimentalism, recognition of the
machine age and concern with individual struggles
viewed against a general background of modern life in
America, and a vague protest against the blight of
materialism. Formally, it belonged to the main theatrical
adventure of the twenties, the telegraphic imaginative
30
style ... known as expressionism . ... Sophie Tread-
well's use of this subjective style of distortion and
depersonalization was, however, quite unique. In her
play, expressionism, although applied to a sensational
murder, was subdued and was given a muted musical
function, being used as a sort of obligato to the
heroine's failure. Her first numb state of mind, her
awakening to love, her desperation, and her defeat
found a theatrical translation in the automatic move-
ment, sound, and speech of the play ....
In this play, Miss Treadwell was able to convey a rare
compassion for her character as an individual and yet
make her story representative of many lives; and this in
spite of the unusual murder of the climax. In the
process, besides, Machinal managed to project the
mechanical essence of a world in which private frustra-
tions and heartbreaks can seem only half real in spite of
their acuteness. If the author had poured the same
story into the mold of an ordinary three-act realistic
play, it would have been quite unremarkable ... .
4
Something Treadwell saw in Ruth Snyder's sordid act of
violence and her subsequent trial transcended the act itself and trig-
gered her deep sympathy for the position of women in the world.
Once again it aroused her resentment of what she perceived to be
woman's essential helplessness in the power structure of society.
Submission is the key to Helen Jones's agony in Machinal. She has
been forced to submit to her mother, to society's expectation that
she must marry, to her husband's ardor, to the birth of an unwanted
child, to society's condemnation for having taken a lover, and, finally,
to the prison barber who shaves the crown of her head before she Is
electrocuted. 5
YOUNG WOMAN
No! No! Don't touch mel I will not be submitted--this
Indignity! No! I will not be submitted!--Leave me alone!
Always to have to submit--to submit! No more--not
now--l'm going to die--1 won't submit! Not now!
BARBER
(Finishing cutting a patch from her hair) You'll submit
my lady. Right to the end. You'll submit! There, and a
neat job too.
31
JAILER
Very neat.
MATRON
Very neat.
YOUNG WOMAN
(Her calm shattered) Father, Father! Why was I born?
PRIEST
I came forth from the Father and have come into the
world--1 leave the world and go into the Father.
YOUNG WOMAN
(Weeping) Submit! Submit! Is nothing mine? The hair
on my head! The very hair on my head . ... Am I never
to be let alone! Never to have peace! When I'm dead,
won't I have peace?6
Once again, one of Treadwell's women finds that she needs some-
thing more than the world is prepared to grant her; she yearns to find
herself freedom/joy /peace, but is thwarted in her search by a
society which expects passivity, sweet compliance, submission.
In his column, "Offstage and On, New York Herald Tribune,
20 September 1928, critic Arthur Ruhl acknowledged Treadwell's
attempt to make a special plea, not for murderesses, but for all
women:
There is a curious quality in Sophie Treadwell's
fine play "Machinal, a kind of desperate intensity at
once wistful, defiant, and fiercely in earnest--which, for
want of a better word, we might call "feminine ....
There is no doubt of her blazing sympathy and indigna-
tion.
The whole thing tingles and vibrates like a fine
wine, plucked as it nears the breaking point. And there
is something more than sympathy and indignation for
the Individual victim, something of a broader revolt
against the Inescapable facts of what is still largely a
man's world.
There are bits, here and there, which it seemed to
us only a woman could have written; lines which have
an uncanny touch of feminine authenticity . . ..
32
In three pages of notes explaining the original version of
Machinal (before Hopkins), Treadwell mentions her fascination with
the effects of radio, and its implications for the vast American
audience. She was acutely aware of this first electronic mass
medium, and she felt her Machinal audience would have been
"trained to radio, and so accustomed to the drama of the lovely
unaided voice." Consequently, she wanted snatches of music, per-
haps In Imitation of the sound of a radio dial being spun In search of
a station. She felt that the monologues, a11 the voice of the woman
coming from out a dark stage" (a disembodied voice as out of a
radio), should be "connecting channels of action." She speculated
on whether or not these monologues might not approach closer to
"the scattered ness, unexpectedness of the relaxed meditating mind,"
than the usual "demand that the thought move through them in an
approximately straight line" (as in realistic drama). In these notes
outlining her intentions, Treadwell never mentions the genre of
expressionism as a starting point, although she uses the word
expressionism" once. Obviously, she had a sense of the elements
which make up the expressionistic genre; but it seems that she was
approaching what she called the style of Machinal through a sort of
inductive process: combining a set of particulars (radio cacophony,
repetition, city sounds, stream of consciousness, the concept of a
spiritual journey, explosion of emotion), and arriving at a dramatic
style of production. For the characters of the play (other than the
Young Woman), she directed that they
are to be played as "personifications" of what they
represent (genuinely, type actors giving type perform-
ances). Their make-up (dress and facial) should be in
the "expression" of the kind of people they represent,
and once found should remain fixed (so as to become
clear and established in the imagination of the
audience). Gestures should not be quite automatic but
simple and repetitious (as the make-up--constantly
declarative of what the characters are).7
There has been some speculation concerning just how much
of the final production of Machinal was Treadwell's idea and how
much was provided by Arthur Hopkins and Robert Edmond Jones.
These notes make clear that her style of writing and original intention
not only dictated the scheme for Hopkins' production but the set
design and striking lighting effects as well. She wanted a unit set
with suggestions of a door and windows and only essential pieces of
furniture and props--things "full of character." The revolutionary
33
departure in setting and lighting attributed to Robert Edmond Jones
was actually Treadwell's original intention, although he Is to be
credited for his artistic Interpretation and final execution of those
technical elements. Because of the unity created by her single art-
istic vision, she was more responsible for the total masterpiece of
Machinal than most playwrights are in other commercial produc-
tions. Her experience in all the.component elements of theatre
served her well in the creation of Machinal.
Certainly the contribution of both Hopkins and Jones was con-
siderable. Of all the directors and designers with whom she worked,
Treadwell preferred these two and developed life-long close friend-
ships with them. In an article, "The Hopkins Manner, Treadwell indi-
cated his style as a director and alluded to the way In which he
helped her as a playwright:
. . . He chooses a play that he himself wants; and
having chosen it, he enters Into it, explores it, questions
it, looks at it, listens to it. If it is not the way he thinks it
should be, he tells the playwright so--and waits until It
is . ...
In other words, Mr. Hopkins does not put a script
into rehearsal until he himself knows this script and
feels it is right ... He does not expect values that are
not there to suddenly appear. He knows that produc-
tion is no alchemy, that it cannot turn palpable weak-
ness Into strength, or make real dullness glitter .. . . He
. uses his knowledge ... when it will do the most good--
on the written script before it is put into rehearsal ....
The ancient battle of conflicting forces In the
theatre--the battle as to who is pre-eminent, actor,
playwright, scene designer, or director, is here settled
without even a contest. And the answer is the d irec-
tor. The answer is "Arthur Hopkins. a
Certainly Hopkins helped Treadwell tighten and focus the
monologues of the Young Woman. A comparison of portions of
these speeches, before and after Hopkins, probably shows his
influence. In the original version (Episode 1):
. .. Now I'm going to marry Mr. J. He's asked me so I
suppose I am. I wish he hadn't--then I wouldn't have to.
Now I suppose I'll have tcr-l'd be crazy if I didn't. He
says he wants to--so--but I don't want to. Why does he
want me, I wonder, when I don't want him? He says it's
34
my hands. He says he loves my hands. He says he
loves my hands--1 don't like his. Mine are tapering. His
are fat. They're awful fat. I don't like them to touch me.
He likes to touch me--that's love--he loves me ....
In the published version (Episode One):
Marry me--wants to marry me--George H. Jones--
George H. Jones and Company--Mrs. George H. Jones.
Mrs. George H. Jones. Dear Madame--marry--do you
take this man to be your wedded husband--1 do--to love
honor and to love--kisses--no--1 can't--George H.
Jones--How would you like to marry me--What do you
say-why Mr. Jones 1--let me look at your little hands--let
me hold your pretty little hands--George H. Jones--Fat
hands--flabby hands--don't touch me--please--fat hands
are never weary--. . .
As expressed in her notes accompanying the first typescript
version, it was Treadwell's goal somehow to combine
uncompromised dramatic artistry with commercial viability and per-
haps touch women especially by this play:
The hope Is (by accentuation, by distortion, etc.),
to create a stage production that will have 'style', and at
the same time, by the story's own Innate drama, by the
tremendous interest and curiosity already aroused in It
by the actual and similar story of Ruth Snyder, by the
directness of its telling, by the variety and qulck-
changlngness of its scenes, and the excitement of Its
sounds--(and perhaps by the quickening of still secret
places In the consclousnesses of the audience, espe-
cially of women)--to create a genuine box office attrac-
tion.
Machinal assaults the senses of the audience with an array of
stimuli. The play is inextricably interwoven with music and sound.
After the advent of sound in films Treadwell would refer to these
sounds and the music accompanying her later play, For Saxophone,
as soundtracks. In Episode One of the published version of
Machinal, Treadwell specifies that before the curtain rises, the
audience hears the sounds of office machines going, and they
accompany the Young Woman's thoughts after the scene is blacked
out. The pace of this scene is rapid, whipped along by the clacking
35
of typewriter keys and the chanting of telegraphic dialogue. The
speed suggests the pace of modern life.
ADDING CLERK
(In the monotonous voice of his monotonous thoughts;
at his adding machine) 2490, 28, 76, 123, 36842,
1 1/4, 37, 804, 23 1/2, 982
FILING CLERK
(In the same way--at his filing desk) Accounts - A.
Bonds - B. Contracts - C. Data- D. Earnings -E.
STENOGRAPHER
(In the same way) Dear Sir--in re--your letter--recent
date--will state-
TELEPHONE GIRL
Hello--Hello--George H. Jones Company good
morning--hello--hello-George H. Jones Company good
morning--hello.
FILING CLERK
Market - M. Notes - N. Output - 0. Profits -
P ....
The boss, George H. Jones, has offered marriage to the
Young Woman, and she ends the scene with a monologue in which
the audience hears her concerns: Should she marry Mr. Jones, even
though his touch repulses her; the fear of losing her job and being
unable to pay the bills; the crush of the subways and the pace of life--
both of which are too much for her.
Machine sounds segue Into radio sounds, and the Young
Woman is seen eating dinner with her mother with whom she has no
more connection than she has with the office characters. They are
obsessed with work routine, her mother with food and its dregs--
garbage:
YOUNG WOMAN
Ma--l want to talk to you.
MOTHER
Aren't you eating a potato?
36
YOUNG WOMAN
No.
MOTHER
Why not?
YOUNG WOMAN
I don't want one.
MOTHER
That's no reason. Here! Take one.
YOUNG WOMAN
I don't want it.
MOTHER
Potatoes go with stew--here!
YOUNG WOMAN
Ma, I don't want it!
MOTHER
Want it! Take it!
YOUNG WOMAN
But 1--oh, all right. (Takes it--then) Ma, I want to ask you
something.
MOTHER
Eat your potato.
YOUNG WOMAN
Ma, there's something I want to ask you--something
important.
MOTHER
Is it mealy?
YOUNG WOMAN
S'all right. Ma--tell me.
MOTHER
Three pounds for a quarter.
37
YOUNG WOMAN
Ma--tell me-- (Buzzer)
MOTHER
(Her dull voice brightening) There's the garbage.
JANITOR'S VOICE
(Offstage) Garbage.
MOTHER
(Pleased--busy) All right. (Gets garbage can--puts it
out. Young woman walks up and down.) What's the
matter now?
YOUNG WOMAN
Nothing.
MOTHER
That jumping up from the table every night the garbage
is collected! You act like you're crazy.
YOUNG WOMAN
Ma, do all women--
MOTHER
I suppose you think you're too nice for anything so
common! Well, let me tell you, my lady, that it's a very
important part of life.
YOUNG WOMAN
I know, but if you--Ma--
MOTHER
If it weren't for garbage cans, where would we be?
The sounds of the radio playing a sentimental song about mother
fade into a jazz orchestra which plays behind Episode Three--
Honeymoon. Appalled by the thought of consummating the mar-
riage she didn't want, the Young Woman cries for her mother, and
then, .. Somebody, somebody--. The jazz band segues into the
sound of steel riveting, a striking choice for the sound to accompany
the hospital scene--Episode Four. She now has a child she didn't
want, but no one explained to her how not to have one. She thinks
aloud again in a speech In which -.he single emotional word [or short
38
phrase] replaces the involved conceptual sentence"9 and in which
punctuation--the dash--is one of the crucial tools of visualization.
The words and dashes together indicate the use of the pause as a
means of expression and their combination "form a kind of linguistic
chiaroscuro."
1
0 This significant means of expression shows the
kinship between expressionist dialogue and music, which can create
a theatre of multiple emotional levels inaccessible to conceptual
speech. (Episode Four):
Let me alone--let me alone--let me alone--l've submitted
enough . . . --tired--too tired--dead--no matter--nothing
matters--dead--stairs--long stairs--all dead going up--
going up to be in heaven--golden stairs--all children
coming down--coming down to be born--dead going
up--children coming down--going up--coming down--
going up--coming down--stop ...
Her final lines In this scene, "I'll not submit any more--1'11 not submit--"
are the last words heard before riveting slowly fades to electric piano.
In Episode Five she meets a Man In a speakeasy. He Is a
romantic figure of freedom, one who has won his own life by killing
Mexican bandits with a pebble-filled bottle: "Ain't a bad weapon--first
you got a sledge hammer--then you got a knife." (Episode Five):
YOUNG WOMAN
Why did you?
1st MAN
What?
YOUNG WOMAN
Kill'em.
1st MAN
To get free.
YOUNG WOMAN
Oh.
In Episode Six, the Young Woman is Intimate with the man and expe-
riences emotion, from which she has been alienated, for the first
time. She has made a connection--she is saved: "I never knew any-
thing like this way! I never knew that I could feel like this! So--so
purified! . .. Purified."
11
As a result of her purification, she is "born
39
again" and cannot return to the old ways.
In Episode Seven--Domestic, she contemplates suicide or
escape as possible ways out:
(Seated at opposite ends of the divan. They are both
reading papers--to themselves.)
HUSBAND
Record production.
YOUNG WOMAN
Girl turns on gas.
HUSBAND
Sale hits a million.
YOUNG WOMAN
Woman leaves all for love--
HUSBAND
Market trend steady--
YOUNG WOMAN
Young wife disappears--
The Young Woman is reminded of her lover toward the end of the
scene. The words "stones--small stones--precious stones--
millstones" echo in the darkness, and she kills her husband, the
violence unseen by the audience as In a Greek tragedy.
In Episode Eight the automatic actions and relentless routine
of society return. She is in the hands of the law. The ritual of the trial
is accentuated by sequential repetition and telegraphic exchanges,
accompanied by the clicking of telegraphic instruments:
LAWYER FOR DEFENSE
I object! I object to the introduction of this evidence at
this time as irrelevant, immaterial, Illegal, biased,
prejudicial, and--
JUDGE
Objection overruled.
LAWYER FOR DEFENSE
Exception.
40
JUDGE
Exception noted. Proceed.
LAWYER FOR PROSECUTION
I wish to read the evidence to the jury at this time.
JUDGE
Proceed.
LAWYER FOR DEFENSE
I object.
JUDGE
Objection overruled.
LAWYER FOR DEFENSE
Exception.
JUDGE
Noted.
"The words and movements of these people except the Young
Woman are routine--mechanical--each is going through the ...
motions of his own game." {Episode Eight) Treadwell even satirizes
the press and makes the reporters part of the clacking machine
slowly drawing in the Young Woman:
1st REPORTER {Writing)
Under the heavy artillery fire of the State's attorney's
brilliant cross-questioning, the accused woman's
defense was badly riddled. Pale and trembling she--
2nd REPORTER {Writing)
Undaunted by the Prosecutions's machine-gun attack,
the defendant was able to maintain her position of
innocence In the face of rapid-fire questioning that
threatened, but never seriously menaced her defense.
Flushed but calm she--
When an affidavit from her lover is read testifying that they had
"intimate relations," the Young Woman confesses three times: "I did
it! I did it! I did it!" Three reporters end the ritual of the trial with a
trio of lines: "Murderess confesses. Paramour brings confession. I
41
did it! Woman cries."
12
The stage directions specify that '1here is a
great burst of speed from the telegraphic instruments. They keep up
a constant accompaniment to the Woman's moans."13
In Episode Nine the final elements in the aural accompaniment
supply irony as they play out the tragedy: a priest chanting prayers, a
Negro singing spirituals, the whir of an airplane flying, keys rattling.
The Young Woman calls for answers, seeks comfort; and the priest
impersonally intones selections from his prayerbook:
YOUNG WOMAN
Father, Father! Why was I born?
PRIEST
I came forth from the Father and have come into the
wor1d--l leave the wor1d and go into the Father.
YOUNG WOMAN
... Is nothing mine? ... The very hair on my head--
PRIEST
Praise God.
YOUNG WOMAN
... When I'm dead, won't I have peace?
PRIEST
Ye shall indeed drink of my cup.
YOUNG WOMAN
Won't I have peace tomorrow?
PRIEST
I shall raise him up at the last day.
YOUNG WOMAN
Tomorrow! Father! Where shall I be tomorrow?
PRIEST
Behold the hour cometh. Yea, it is now come. Ye shall
be scattered every man to his own.
On the now-black stage, the voices of the reporters come out
of the darkness with the question and answer that encompass the
theme of the play (Episode Nine):
42
1st REPORTER
Suppose the machine shouldn't work!
2nd REPORTER
It'll work! --It always works.
The machine, the routine, the society--the process: It always works.
With her final cry, "Somebody, the cry which has been her motif of
yearning throughout the play, the Young Woman's voice is cut off
and the priest's voice drones on in the darkness.
Not indicated in this published version is the description of
Episode Ten--In The Dark--found in the acting version of Machinal at
the Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York City.
Lines are spoken in darkness until a light comes at the end. The
acting version specifies: "Overhead lights come up on cyclorama first
faint blue--then red--then pink--then amber--they are thrown up full--
pause--then curtain." The critics' attempts to describe this clear con-
tribution of Robert Edmond Jones indicate that its effectiveness was
unquestionable. "The morbid, drooping climax is heightened by a
complicated curtain of colored lights supposed to represent ... the
migration of a woman's soul ......
14
"At the end of the play, just after
a terrifying moment of complete darkness--the electrocution is heard,
not seen--the frame [of the stage] has been taken away, the rose
lights on the burlap [sic] cyclorama remain for a long minute and the
curtain quickly falls."
1
5 '"Somebody, somebody!' she screams at the
end. Only a pulsating flood of terrifying crimson light, like a still
flame, makes reply."16 Joseph Wood Krutch praised "the gradual
emergence of a blood red glow out of the darkness In which the play
ends ... " as "one of the most unobtrusively effective bits of stage
techniques seen here in a long time."
17
Percy Hutchinson inter-
preted it as an empty stage with the light of morning creeping up on
the hanging .... "18 Stark Young was profoundly affected by Jones's
.. genius of light" which left "only the vacant stage, no object, no
people, no events, only the light growing brighter, flame colors at the
bottom rising into blue, the moment of death for the tormented being
in the electric chair.19
Treadwell finally had achieved a commercial and critical suc-
cess. Although Machinal ran for only ninety-one performances on
Broadway, it was subsequently performed all over the world bringing
its author substantial royalties. The initial critical notices were full of
acclaim and secured her reputation as a master craftswoman of
drama. Percy Hammond acknowledged the successful departure
from conventional drama:
43
Unlike most efforts to liberate the stage from its
old-fashioned harness, "Machinar cuts the straps with
considerable facility and releases an Interesting study
and well-told tale .... The speech of the play is simple
utterance of human beings; the action is directed by Mr.
Hopkins with a canny view to illusion, and the lights and
settings . . . are just bizarre enough to further the pur-
poses of one of the best of the unusual dramas. 20
Brooks Atkinson called Machinal "the tragedy of one who
lacks strength":
From the sordid mess of a brutal murder the
author, actors and producer . . . have with great .skill
managed to retrieve a frail and sombre beauty of
character .... But Sophie Treadwell has in no sense
capitalized on a sensational murder trial in her
strangely-moving, shadowy drama. Rather she has
written a tragedy of submission; she has held an individ-
ual character against the hard surface of a mechanical
age .. .. Subdued, monotonous, episodic, occasionally
eccentric in style, 'Machinal' is fraught with a beauty
unfamiliar to the stage. 21
In his review cited above, Pierre de Rohan felt that Treadwell
had achieved at least a critical success:
Sophie Treadwell has done for the theater what
Theodore Dreiser did for literature. She has created a
complete picture of life's bitterness and essential mean-
ness, painted with the small, oft-repeated strokes of the
realist, yet achieving in perspective the sweep and
swing of expressionism. In short, she has written, in
"Machinal," a great play, but {or perhaps therefore) one
which is not likely to find a large audience.
Gilbert Gabriel praised Treadwell's mastery of genre and
evoked the name of Eugene O'Neill:
You forget to be annoyed by the allegorical
naming of the characters as Mr. A. and Miss Q., a Hus-
band, a Man, Richard Roe. The breath of a warm, plain,
pitifully real existence gradually fills these types and
44
travesties, and, once filled, they remain buoyant and
unpuncturable and alive. That, I think, is Miss Tread-
well's finest feat. Few have achieved it with this by now
benighted form of playmaking. . . . She has written it
with an extreme simplicity which generates a power all
its own. The episode in the lover's room is told as
tenderly as really. It has needed something more than
common craftsmanship to turn a Graphic titbit [sic] into
an O'Neill splendor. 22
John Anderson called the play a magnificent tragedy- and
was obviously deeply affected by it:
Here are superlatives for the superlative--a trag-
edy of sullen splendor .... It is superb and unbearable
and harrowing in a way that leaves you bereft of any
Immediate comparison, and leaves you, too, for that
matter, a limp and tear-stained, wreck.
There is a fine fluency in the writing of the
scenes. Miss Treadwell has stripped them down to
bare bones of drama, and flung them across the play in
a swift stacatto [sic] movement which gives it huge
power and terrific momentum . ... 23
Every artist involved in the production received praise from the
critics: Arthur Hopkins; Robert Edmond Jones; Frank Harling, who
composed the Incidental music; Zita Johann, the Young Woman;
George Stillwell, the Husband; and Clark Gable, the Man--her lover,
in his first major stage role prior to Hollywood stardom.
In the final analysis, Treadwell wrote a timely, exciting play
which satisfied the critics, the audience, and herself. To satisfy her-
self, she wrote an experimental, unusual and powerful drama which
documented how the world treated a woman who sought the same
kind of freedom of choice accorded men, a woman unable to adapt
to that sexist world. She dramatized a social problem happening to
an individual, but she was able to make that individual represent a
larger group. She blended her own style of didacticism with the
emotional punch of melodrama so that the audience experienced
thrills, tears, and horror: a catharsis.
Machinal made Treadwell's reputation as an important
American playwright, and provided income the rest of her life, in spite
of the fact that it closed on Broadway after ninety-one performances.
* * * *
Sophie Treadwell had a long and enormously productive
45
career. She was an ambitious, versatile high-achiever: a college
graduate (a non-traditional achievement for women of her time), an
editor of the college humor magazine, teacher in a country school,
actress, investigative reporter, correspondent, noted journalist,
playwright, producer, director, novelist. The distinctive quality of
those impressive achievements is that she worked in a time when it
was more difficult for a female to be accepted as a serious career
woman, a time in which it was assumed-expected--that males were
serious career men. Work was the most important element In Tread-
well's life. To say that she was goal-driven or compulsive may be
overstating her concern, but certainly her work took precedence over
her personal life. There are numerous references to the importance
of work in her diaries throughout her life. Even the last entry written
the night she suffered the stroke said, " . . . To bed early after supper .
. . . Feel hopeful that I can finally get to my work now. 24
Copyright 1990 Estate of Nancy Wynn
Endnotes
1Edmund Wilson, "Judd Gray and Mrs. Snyder, The American
Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties (Garden
City, New York: Doubleday, 1958), 6 3 ~
2Probably as a result of her newspaper experience, Treadwell
developed the habit of dictating the dialogue of her plays from a
detailed outline of incidents. Characteristically, she would spend
several weeks perfecting the outline of a play before she began dic-
tating dialo.gue to a stenographer.
3Cfipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, Nancy Wynn Archive (in
Aurora, New York; hereinafter referred to as NWA), Kelcey Allen, "Zita
Johann Gets Ovation in Machinal," Women's Wear Daily, 10 Septem-
ber 1928.
4Sophie Treadwell, "Machinal," Twenty-Five Best Plays of the
Modern Theatre; Early Series, ed. John Gassner (New York: Crown
Publishers, Inc., 1949), 494.
svvonne B. Shafer, "The Uberated Woman in American Plays
of the Past," Players, Vol. 49, no. 3-4 (Spring 1974), 97.
6Treadwell, Machinal, 527. The dialogue of Machinal used in
this study is. from the published version In the Gassner collection
cited above. In this version Treadwell reinstated sections of dialogue
which had been cut from the acting version.
46
7
Sophie Treadwell, Machinal (Introduction to First Version),
TS, University of Arizona (hereinafter referred to as UALSC), Box 10,
n.p.
8Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA. Sophie Treadwell,
''The Hopkins Manner," The Stage World, 25 November 1928.
9Walter H. Sobel, ed., An Anthology of German Expressionist
Drama (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
1963), xviii.
101bid .
,XIX.
11Treadwell, Machinal, Episode Six, 516.
1
21bid., 526.
1
31bid., 526.
14
Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 1 o, NWA, Pierre de Rohan,
"'Machinal' Ugly But Great Play; New York American, 8 September
1928.
15Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, S. Jay Kaufman,
"Hopkins Does 'Machinal' Magnificently," New York Telegraph, 8
September 1 a28. .
16Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, J. Brooks
Atkinson, "Against the City Clatter," The New York Times, 16 Septem-
ber 1928.
17Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, Joseph Wood
Krutch, "Behaviorism and Drama, .. The Nation, 26 September 1928.
18Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, Percy Hutchinson,
"As the Theatre Practices the Art of Homicides," The New York
Times, n.d.
19Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, Stark Young, Joy
on the Mountains," New Republic 31 October 1928,299.
20CJipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, Percy Hammond,
''The Theaters," New York Herald Tribune, 8 September 1928.
21 Clipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 1 o, NWA, J. Brooks
Atkinson, "The Play," The New York Times, 8 September 1928.
22Ciipping, Treadwell Scrapbook 1 o, NWA, Gilbert W. Gabriel,
"Last Night's First Night," The New York Sun, 8 September 1928.
Treadwell Scrapbook 10, NWA, John Anderson,
"Snyder Case Suggested In a Magnificent Tragedy," New York Eve-
ning Journal, 8 September 1928.
24Sophie Treadwell, 1970 Diary, February 11, NWA.
47
THE AMERICAN WEST OF THE 1870s AND 1880s
AS VIEWED FROM THE STAGE
Walter J. Meserve
Spectacles have always fascinated mankind. Whether they
were Dionysian celebrations in ancient Greece, the Hundred
Entertainments of T'ang Dynasty China, church pageants in medieval
Europe or public hangings in Elizabethan England, spectacles have
provoked and focussed public attention. Theatre managers in mid-
nineteenth century America understood this fact very well and acted
accordingly. In a country still trying to determine its national charac-
ter and to explore its geographical and ideological boundaries there
were spectacles to be found in all directions--among the diverse
people, on the land they inhabited, and in the events they created.
Much of this mass of spectacle appeared upon the stages of
American theatres--exploited by character actors in such roles as
Jonathan, Paddy, Mose, or John Schmidt; presented through the
scenic designer's art in historic battles on land and sea, burning
boats and buildings, and reproductions of New York architecture;
and dramatized in such diverse and appealing forms as prancing
horses and scantily clad young ladies. These were the prevailing
theatrical spectacles reflecting the developing nation, of which the
West--that land beyond the Mississippi River, reaching the Pacific
Ocean and now appearing in stories, paintings, and legends as well
as historical documents--was Itself a spectacle of Immeasurable
dimensions.
As the American people emerged from the most strenuous of
all political upheavals, a civil war, the challenge of developing the
West and viewing its spectacles was as urgent to some as dealing
with the problems of reconstruction or the growth of industry, and in
many ways it was more attractive. There were the heroes of legend
and history--Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill--and a Wild West which lent
itself easily to the demands of melodrama. It was the task of theatre
managers to be aware of the mood and idiosyncrasies of the
American public and the fad or fancy currently popular with
audiences. In contrast to the tameness of an effete East (deplored
and ridiculed by critics with more vigorous imagination than search-
ing intellect) the vital wildness of the West provided an abundance of
physical adventure involving '\tarmint redskinsN and the vagaries of
an untamed nature. Considering the character of the American
48
stage, there was no better place to bring this vitality to the attention
of an American public that might be presumed to thrive upon it. Yet
the stage of this period was not glutted with plays depicting the
movement westward nor of the public Involved, notwithstanding the
variety of spectacles presented by actors, scenic designers, and
theatre managers. This is, perhaps, surprising until one understands
the place and the nature of mid and late nineteenth century theatre in
America.
The Mormon Trek, the Gold Rush, the Homestead Act, the
completion of the transcontinental railroad--all encouraged move-
ment toward that land Horace Greeley urged American youth to
seek. At this point in history, however, the American theatre was
concerned with its own survival. For the generation of theatre-goers
after the Civil War it was an actor's theatre In America which, like
England, could boast no dramatist of Inspiring stature. The popular
and financially sustaining theatrical entertainments of these years
were spectacles such as Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Black Crook or
one-character plays in which actors such as Frank Mayo (Davy
Crockett), Frank Chanfrau (Kit Carson), Joseph Jefferson (Rip Van
Winkle), John T. Raymond (Col. Sellers), or Denman Thompson
(Uncle Josh Whitcomb) built substantial careers. In spite of vigorous
activity in a number of towns and cities across the country, the
theatre remained largely an eastern establishment where managers
and playwrights understood their obligation to entertain eastern
audiences.
The literary center of the United States at this time was
Boston, while New York claimed a superior position in the theatre
world. As these two hubs of intellect and Imagination began to
merge toward the end of the last quarter of the nineteenth century
and the flames of literary and artistic nationalism leaped higher,
critics begged more Insistently for the American play, but
playwrights, by and large, did not look westward In thought or plot.
Records clearly establish that after mid-century more and more
dramatists tried to depict American city life and American society
where it might be recognized, in such areas as traditional Philadel-
phia, Back Bay Boston, Knickerbocker New York, and Tidewater Vir-
ginia. It was this social comedy approach to theatrical entertainment
that critics enjoyed, as one reviewer for The Critic of 21 October
1882 explained:
For months we have been crying on the housetops.
"Give us a good American play. Let us get rid of the
masterworks of Mr. Bartley Campbell and Mr. Fred
Maeder. Let us get rid of Mr. Wallack's stupid English
49
comedies with their ever1asting 'haw, haw.' Let us get
rid of Mr. Palmer's artificial French drama, mauled and
mangled in the adaptations. Give us a well-written
native play, presenting scenes which appeal to every-
body. Let the same skill which Frenchmen apply to
French life and Englishmen to English life be applied by
Americans to American life." Mr. Bronson Howard has
answered this appeal. (2:287)
The play the reviewer praised was Young Mrs. Winthrop by an author
whose interest in and knowledge of geographical America was
limited to land east of the Appalachian Chain. Among those
playwrights mentioned, Wallack and Palmer were theatre managers,
interested by necessity in box office returns. The work of Campbell
and Maeder, however, though clear1y lacking in some of Howard's
dramatic skills and clear1y outside the interest of the reviewer for The
Critic, is vital to a discussion of plays dealing with Western America.
Eastern America acquired much of its education about the
West from the stories of Bret Harte and the numerous Dime Novels
that Erastus Beadle began to publish in the ear1y 1860s. From habits
formed before mid-century many American playwrights took their
inspiration from stories published in newspapers and weekly maga-
zines, and their adaptation from page to stage was a recognized art
form for which permission was rarely sought. In this manner the far
West was brought into the theatres--by known and unknown theatre
hacks as well as by the established playwrights of the day.
During the 1870s the major American dramatists included
Augustin Daly, J.J. McCloskey, Bartley Campbell, Steele Mackaye,
Clay Green, Fred Maeder, Bronson Howard, Edward Harrigan, and
B. E. Woolf. Of these, the first six wrote plays about the West or
featuring some aspect of the West. Add to their number during the
1880s Edgar Fawcett, A.A. Cazauran, A.C. Gunter, David Belasco,
and James A. Herne, none of whom during this decade depicted
Western America in their plays. Several lesser playwrights, of
course, contributed melodramas about the West, including such
literary giants as Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte and, in particular, Mark
Twain, whose fascination with the theatre and covetous interest in
the big money it sometimes provided induced him to try to write the
popular one-character plays. Among others who wrote Western
melodramas for popular consumption were William Bausman, Wil-
liam H. Young, Ned Buntline, John Wallace Crawford, Joseph Clifton,
Char1es Foster, and Howard Hill. But Western melodramas were not
the only route through which the West came into the theatre. There
were also numerous vehicle plays made popular by James Wallack,
50
Frank Chanfrau, Frank Fayne, and Clara Butler, as well as the several
plays dramatizing the exploits of Buffalo Bill.
Once called ,he greatest of our American dramatists, Bartley
Theodore Campbell (1843-1888) started writing plays in 1871 after
working as a reporter, a magazine editor, a dramatic critic, a poet,
and a novelist. From 1879 to 1885 he was not only the most popular
American dramatist but was considered by some critics as the best.
1879, the year My Partner (one of Campbell's most popular suc-
cesses) opened, also marks the beginning of a mental breakdown
that eventually caused Campbell's death. It was a period of
tremendous pressure as well as tremendous success as Campbell
sometimes sent out from his New York office as many as six theatre
companies, each touring with one of his plays. His evident self-
satisfaction is revealed in the large diamond collar button he wore
and a letterhead emblazoned with two busts--one of Shakespeare
and one of Campbell. By early 1886, however, the man whom "Nym
Crinkle" (drama critic Andrew C. Wheeler) later described as "killed
by his own sensibilities" drew public attention to his violent behavior,
was legally charged as irresponsible, and was eventually committed
to the State Hospital for the Insane in Middletown, New York, where,
declared incurable, he died on 30 July 1888. Wheeler's final com-
ment in the New York Dramatic Mirror, 4 August 1888, noted the
great power in Campbell's plays, undisciplined though it was, and his
"emotional nature, so unbalanced. He was reminded, he wrote, of a
"literary Abe Lincoln. He has the same rusticity and homeliness of
method all in a smaller way. "1
Of some thirty-four plays written by Campbell, several revised
and produced under different titles, at least four depict Western
scenes and characters, and at the time of his breakdown he was
working on a play set in Denver, Colorado, during its boom days and
to be called Romance of the Rockies. The Vigilantes; or, The Heart
of the Sierras, 1878, was adapted from an earlier play entitled How
Women Love; or, The Heart of the Sierras with a debt he acknowl-
edged to Bret Harte's Outcasts of Poker Flat. From its opening to
closing scenes in the Sierras, It is a story of love and adventure,
rejection and seduction, a good woman and a dissipated man, all of
which is given a Western flavor with the introduction of an old miner
named Joe Comstock and scenes in the mountains and in San Fran-
cisco. Through Fire, 1871, a "sensation play" produced In 1873 as
Watch and Wait; or, Through Fire, Is a melodrama combining pas-
sionate love and irresponsible thievery. Act Ill opens on the Western
plains where the hero, a wagoner, induces the heroine to sleep in her
wagon rather than in the ranch house which is set on fire by Indians
during the night. Part of Act IV takes place in a rich Californian's
51
home, part in a mountainous area. The first and last acts are set in
New York.
Campbell's fascination with the broad scope of the American
scene actually began with his first pl ay, a Historical Allegory of
America, 1871, composed of three parts--The Past, 1860 and 1971.
Concentrating upon the issues of the CivU War, Campbell allows all of
the States to present their points of view. Finally, Progress speaks In
1971:
America has progressed at wondrous speed.
We've railroads to Alaska's frozen vales,
And railroad tunnels do away with sails. (Part Ill, I)
With the exception of two plays, however, Campbell's attention to the
American West remains generally superficial. Neither characters nor
actions realistically represent any particular region.
In My Partner, 1879, which many consider his masterpiece,
Campbell managed to create a definite Western tone with the
obvious help of Bret Harte's tales and the stories and plays of Joa-
quin Miller. The plot is simple and sentimental: two men, partners In
a gold mine claim but not of equal moral fortitude, love the same
woman. With predictable recognitions, confrontations, and
sacrifices, Campbell mixes a little humor and some satiric comments
on politics and religion before contriving a happy ending. Local
color in scene, speech, and manner obviously helped the play to
succeed, but critics were also impressed with the realistic qualities of
incidents and character, none of which appeared extravagant. Wing
Lee, a Chinaman, and Major Britt, a heavy drinking long-winded
legislator, are not only Western personalities appropriate to Siskiyou
County, California, but are vital to the plotting of the play. For con-
temporary American audiences sentiment held a high priority, and
loyalty was next to godliness. "My partner," says Joe, the hero, is
better than a brother; for brothers they quarrel sometimes, but Ned
and I have worked together on the same pan, slept under the same
blanket" (l,i). As the play ends and the villain is punished, Joe,
played by Louis Aldrich, who was billed as "the leading exponent of
the strong, virile American character upon the stage (New York
Telegram, 17 September 1879), explains to Mary: "Yes, dear! The
night has been long and dark. But on the height of happiness, where
we are standing now, our love will illuminate our lives forever- (IV). A
well-paced melodrama, with humor, moral standards, local color,
excellent suspense, and good use of music and calcium fire, My
Partner combined Western America and the American dream.
A Brave Man, 1882, a five-act melodrama set at a Western
52
ranch, exists only in a prompt-book manuscript and may never have
been acted. Its plot imitates popular scenes from various plays, and
the interaction between the characters is confusing. The West,
however, is everywhere evident--in the scenery, the characters, and
the action. The major conflict lies between the villain Ranforth and
Douglass Macair, a straight and honest hero and a brave man who
confronts the villain at the climax of Act I. With his many friends and
their pistols, however, Macalr is able to rescue Flip, the abused
daughter of Ranforth: ,he gal goes with met One interesting revela-
tion concerning the social mores of the West appears in a humorous
exchange between Sambo and Aanagan, who taunts the black man:
"Nigger, nigger, never die--black face and Chinese eye" (1) . But when
Sambo removes his coat, to reveal two big pistols at his belt, the
Irishman is property Intimidated. The character of Flip, an Intriguing,
adolescent tom-boy, is the best part of the play, which ends with the
villain dead and Douglass, reunited with his wife, providing a good
home for Flip.
Exciting melodrama was Campbell's forte, and when he chose
the West as his setting, he melded those Western peculiarities of
scene and people, then popular with journalists and story-tellers, with
the most admired qualities of the American character to create
sentimental and sensational spectacles of tremendous effect.
Like Campbell, James J. McCloskey (1825-1913) tried to bring
to the theatre the great popularity of Western story-tellers. George
C. D. Odell, reporting in the Annals of the New York Stage, IX, on a
production of McCloskey's Schneider; or Dot House von de Rhine at
the Olympic Theatre on 17 July 1871, commented that "McCloskey
wrote plays as easily as Young America eats or dances."
Unfortunately, except for a temperance play called The Fatal Plan
and Across the Continent, the scripts of McCloskey's plays have
been lost, but many of his accomplishments were recorded. As a
young man, McCloskey went to California in the rush for gold and
started a career as an actor and theatre manager, later capitalizing
on his experience in his plays. In addition to his most lasting suc-
cess, Across the Continent; or, Scenes from New York Life and the
Pacific Railroad, he wrote other plays about the West--The Far West;
or, The Bounding Fawn, 1870; Poverty Flat; or, California in '49,
1873, Over the Plains, 1874--although the number and quality can
never be determined.
Across the Continent maintained Its appeal for audiences
throughout the nineteenth century despite a hodge-podge of struc-
ture that is frustrating to describe. Essentially the play first surfaced
in the 1860s as an unsuccessful production entitled New York in
1837; or, the Overland Route. It was so unsuccessful, In fact, that
53
McCloskey sold the play outright to another actor, Oliver Doud Byron
(1843-1920), who tinkered so well with his purchase that a version he
performed in the fall of 1870 somehow caught the public fancy and
supported him remarkably well for the next thirty seasons. Simply
stated, the play Byron performed had something for everyone--
minstrel show humor, farce, local color from New York, Western
scenes, Indian raids, melodramatic rescues, and numerous stage
characters identified by dialects and personal idiosyncracies (New
Yorker, Irish, Italian, Dutch, Negro, Chinese, Indian). The first act
dramatized the currently popular temperance theme, ending with a
pledge--and a thrilling fire on stage. Acts II and Ill are structured
around the popular gambler-victim thesis, but the betrayed and the
deceived, controlled by their own weaknesses and an unscrupulous
villain, are saved just in time by the hero, Joe the Ferret. The West is
depicted in Act IV at a station house on the Union Pacific Railroad
where Joe is the stationmaster of the 47th U.P. Railway station. In
this act, with a Chinese and a Negro for farcical humor and an Indian
chief and his band helping the villain intimidate the hero, McCioskey-
Byron took advantage of the completion of the U.P. in 1869 and the
still mysterious telegraph placed in the hands of Joe, who taps out a
message to station #46: Get help and send back the train at lightn-
ing speed. I am surrounded by Indians. Joe also has two helpless
females to protect, but the message goes through, the train arrives in
time, loaded with soldiers who kill the Indians and the villain as
"Louise rushes into Joe's arms, forming the picture as down comes
The Curtain. This was the West as many Americans Imagined and
understood it--spectacular, thrilling, ana entertaining.
Augustin Daly (1838-1899), a major theatre manager and
playwright of the last half of the nineteenth century, was scarcely
known, except on rare occasions, for having an interest in American
dramatists or the American scene. With an eye to profit he encour-
aged the dramatic efforts of such literary giants as W.O. Howells,
Mark Twain, and Henry James, but he might have chosen better
candidates for the kind of theatre he supported. A few of his plays
touched on eastern American society, and his interest in adapting
popular works to the theatre led him to write Horizon, 1871, a frontier
play in five acts and seven tableaux. The story starts with the arrival
of Captain Van Dorp at Fort Jackson on the western plains, pretty
well out towards the Horizon. Van Dorp's major task is to protect
the Congressional land grant of Sundown Rouse, a man of con-
siderable influence in Washington, but the play quickly evolves Into a
love story remarkably similar to Bret Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker
Flat. Calling it a play of contemporaneous events on the border of
civilization," Daly enlisted the aid of a sentimental gambler, a con-
54
firmed drunkard, a Vigilante Committee, numerous Indians, and the
U.S. Army to create a spectacular melodrama about the real and
imaginary American West. Indian warfare was rampant during the
years following the Civil War, and Daly's portrayal of Wannemucka
suggests some of the conventional attitudes Americans held toward
the Indians as well as the basically poetic Indian legend and lore
which were in key with the moral and romantic atmosphere of the
play.
Steele Mackaye (1842-1894) held that spark of genius which
has garnered him some fleeting fame In several aspects of theatre
development during the late nineteenth century. His play Hazel
Kirke, 1880, had phenomenal success among American audiences.
His inventions helped change American theatre, and his designs for
the Spectatorium for the Chicago Exposition of 1893 vividly represent
an American theatre dream. As an actor, theatre manager, Inventor,
teacher, and playwright, Mackaye made his mark in theatre history
and at the same time gained a reputation as one who was generally
outwitted in financial transactions. Among the thirty plays he wrote
from 1872 through 1894, Won at Last, 1877, Hazel Kirke, and Paul
Kanver (Anarchy), 1887, were the most popular products of his art-
istry. Although his work is Infrequently associated with the American
West, his notebooks and memorabilia at the Dartmouth College
Library clearly indicate that the West was on his mind a great deal, a
fact revealed in his numerous unpublished playscripts.
One of these plays, Colorado Joe, "An American Comedy in 4
Acts," opens in Colorado in 1876, has some action in New York In
1883 and concludes back in Colorado in 1884. The plot follows the
sometimes confusing and frequently thwarted pursuit of the heroine
by Joe Dean, a fur trapper whose noble character bears the scars of
his struggle before the play reaches its happy ending. Another
Western play by Mackaye, Grizzly Jack, dramatizes the emotional
problems of Kate, the daughter of an old miner, loved by Panther
Jack but married to Arthur whose previous marriage is revealed by
the forsaken wife who charges bigamy. Although the westerner,
Jack, had previously stepped aside for Arthur, he soon asserts his
noble feelings and wins the girl in the final act as Arthur goes to
prison. Reckless is another Mackaye play of love, violence, and
sacrifice in the West, part of the action taking place on top of the
shafting of the Good Hope Mine in a canyon of Colorado.
Sometime during the 1880s Mackaye also outlined a Buffalo
Bill play which he called The Wild West and planned to produce in
Madison Square Garden. True to his belief that nature was the basis
of all art and his tendency to think on a very large scale, his play sug-
gested historical scope and theatrical innovations--Savage life,
55
Pioneer life, Settler life, and Frontier life. His sketch indicates a
gigantic production comparable to the Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows
that were becoming popular toward the end of the decade through
the entrepreneurship of Nate Salisbury. There were to be pony
races, shooting competitions, Indian dances and Indian raids, an
enactment of Custer's massacre, and the scene on the plains where
Buffalo Bill killed Yellow Hand. Mackaye's personal contact with
Salisbury reveals the seriousness of his plans, but these, along with
his other western plays, were all to remain unfinished scripts by one
of the great imaginative artists of the nineteenth century. If Mackaye
had concentrated his efforts to reveal the West to the American
people, the public might have been better served on the subject. As
it was, his plays suggest an interest in the Western spectacle and a
popular subject but no evidence of the detailed knowledge that
would have made such plays a cantribution to Western theatre or lit-
erature.
By the early 1890s Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Show with
Col. William F. Cody as president and Salisbury as vice-president
and manager had achieved European acclamation for spectacular
performances in England, Scotland, France, Spain, Italy, and
Germany. The beginning of this phenomenon, however, one that
helped introduce the American West to the American people as well
as the Western wor1d, occurred in the ear1y 1870s. Fred G. Maeder
(1840-1891), son of the actress Clara Fisher Maeder, started the fad
which immediately sent the Bowery Boys into a frenzy with Buffalo
Bill, King of the Bordermen, 1872, a dramatization of Ned Buntline's
story (ms in Harvard Theatre Collection). It was, to say the least, a
broad and frequently absurd melodrama, opening at Buffalo Bill's
cabin in Kansas and emphasizing the murder of his father by Col.
Jake McKandless before the eyes of his adoring family. Pursuit of
the villainous Jake motivates Buffalo Bill, his friend Bill Hickok, and
much of the action of the play, but there are also sentimental scenes
in the Cody household mixed with scenes of love and mischief
involving Kitty Muldoon, Snakeroot Sam, Fire-Water Tom, and Major
Williams, the "old Vet."
J.B. Studley played Buffalo Bill with all the fervor of Western
melodrama at its most colorful. At the climax of Act I Bill wounds
Jake who in Act II steals Lettie, Bill's feisty sister. Scene 3 of this act
was particularly popular as Bill, to get some sleep safe from Indians,
chooses a hollow log to crawl into, only to find his hideout the scene
of an Indian powwow and his log part of the campfire. With gunpow-
der and some cautious wriggling, Buffalo Bill escapes and enjoys the
explosion that scatters the Indians. The act concludes with a knife
fight between the villain and hero and the rescue of Lettie. Con-
56
frontations between Whites and Indians accompanied by a lot of
music and a minimal plot encumber the last act until Buffalo Bill
provides the final rescue amid cheers and red fire --distinctive yet
all very typical of numerous Buffalo Bill plays.
Maeder's play was produced in February, 1872, at the Bowery
Theatre where Edward Z.C. Judson, alias Ned Buntline, took Col.
Cody to see the show. That summer Buntline conceived the idea of
putting Cody on the stage. At first Cody refused, but Buntline was
persistent. When he met Cody and his friend, Texas Jack
Omohundro, In Chicago the following December, he put together in
about four hours a piece called The Scouts of the Plains (essentially
what he could remember of Maeder's play plus a role for himself)
which was produced at Nixon's Amphitheatre with Cody and Texas
Jack as actors. Although it consisted of little more than a lot of
shooting, mainly at Indians, and a rambling conversation between
Buntline and the two scouts, a new kind of spectacle had been
created. Plays featuring Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack
soon caught the public fancy, and Indians added to the excitement.
Maeder's The Scalpers; or, Life on the Plain, 1874, for example, had
ten Comanche Indians In the cast. Buntline's The Scouts of the
Prairie, 1873, featured Cody, as Buffalo Bill, and twenty Indian war-
riors. The Prairie Waif, 1880, Included a band of Cheyenne Indians.
Charles Foster's Twenty Days; or, Buffalo Bill's Pledge, 1883, was
another popular vehicle, and Wild Bill; or Life on the Border, 1875,
made a hero of Wild Bill Hickok by advertising his combat scene with
a wild bear. Texas Jack starred in an 1877 version of Scouts of the
Plains and, with his wife, a dancer named Madam Morlacchi, was
featured in Texas Jack; or, Life in the Black Hills, 1877.
Ned Buntline's story and his subsequent Idea to put the real
hero on stage stimulated production of two types of popular
entertainment: the one-character vehicle and the extravagant spec-
tacle. Both had existed before this date, of course, but the West
added a particular flavor. Cody the actor eventually found more
satisfaction and money with the spectacular exhibition of his Wild
West Show, but the s o ~ play his life illustrated became generally
associated with the heroic activities on the western frontier. Because
shooting was a major attraction, experts with firearms, such as Frank
Fayne and Clara Butler, developed their careers in plays like The
Scouts of Oregon and The Scouts of Sierra Nevada, 187 4, and
Orolosa; or, Dead Shot of the Sierra Nevadas, 1873, In which they
shot apples off each other's heads. N.S. Wood, more actor than
expert rifleman, starred in The Boy Scouts of the Sierras, 1880, and
James Wallack was popular in the leading role of William H. Young's
southwestern melodrama of The Cattle King, 1887. Kit the Arkansas
57
Traveller by J.B. De Walden and Edward Spencer gave Frank Chan-
frau an excellent vehicle as Kit Redding, a fast man with a pistol or
Bowie knife. About this time, too, Frank Mayo was enjoying his pop-
ularity as Davy Crockett, but the scene In Tennessee was too far east
to be considered real frontier drama. Although the chief spectacle
and attraction of these dramas was the actor, the Western scene was
also of major importance to Americans intrigued by the romance and
adventure they saw as keys to the western reaches of their country.
Among the best-known story-tellers of the West, Joaquin Mil-
ler, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain also tried to recreate the West In
American theatres. Miller, the Poet of the Sierras, had greater suc-
cess than the others, particularly with The Danites in the Sierras,
1877. Concerned with Mormon vengeance, this melodrama was a
popular vehicle for McKee Rankin for several years. Forty-nine, 1881,
provided another fine role for Rankin, who played a sentimental
miner whose noble sacrifice makes possible a happy ending.
Although Miller had considerable knowledge of the West, he
incorporated not only his own work into The Danites but also charac-
ters from Bret Harte's stories; yet, he was not capable of creating an
actable drama, and T.A. Fitzgerald was paid to make The Danites
stageworthy.
Bret Harte's stories Inspired a number of plays. J.H. Warwich
dramatized one in California; or, The Heathen Chinee, 1878; Clay
Green adapted M'/iss, 1878; Bartley Campbell adapted two stories to
the stage. Harte also tried his hand in The Two Men of Sandy Bar,
which failed in the theatre. Obviously trying to incorporate into his
play too many of his favorite characters, Harte developed some inter-
esting scenes and vivid acting roles, but his play is at best a confus-
ing and involved work that bewildered audiences. One character,
however, Hop Sing, played by C.T. Parsloe, inspired Harte and Mark
Twain to write Ah Sin, 1876. Critics found this play both laughable
and lively, and audiences watched it for some five weeks, entertained
more by its absurdities than by any true picture of the American
West. With the exception of Sue, which he wrote with T. Edgar Pem-
berton In 1896, Bret Harte was never able to adapt his own stories
successfully to the theatre.
Equally eager to write for the stage and gifted with a sense of
the theatrical as well as a knowledge of the West, Mark Twain had
even less success as a playwright. Fascinated by the theatre and
closely associated with it during intervals of his life, Mark Twain
clearly lacked an ability to structure and sustain a full-length play.
Nor did he really understand the demands of the theatre; yet, the way
his Imagination worked and the potential for making money that
came with a successful play frequently caused him to think of his
58
work in dramatic form. In 1870, for example, he began to consider
Roughing It as a Western play; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and
the Prince and the Pauper were both begun as plays. One of his
most sustained dramatic efforts was Colonel Sellers as a Scientist,
written with William Dean Howells, a failure in which the two friends
clearly demonstrated their inability to collaborate on a play. If Bret
Harte was stagestruck, as Mark Twain contended, so was Mark
Twain. Unfortunately, neither of these writers, whose work helped
illuminate the West for contemporary American audiences, was
capable of creating for the contemporary stage.
Of the scattered plays set In the West that have been
preserved, for one reason or another, for modern readers, few were
produced in New York theatres. Most are moderately to poorty con-
ceived melodramas, written for regional theatres and produced
infrequently. Their Importance lies mainly in the modest suggestion
that they represent honest and typical efforts, perhaps indicative of
more abundant playwriting. John Wallace Crawford (1842-1917) fits
the pattern first cut by Maeder, Buntline, and Cody. Identifying him-
self as "the poet scout, Crawford worked as a scout in the Black
Hills, acted with Cody "on the road" in Life on the Border, 1876, and
in 1877 shot himself in the leg while acting the role of Yellow Hand in
Cody's play of The Right Red Hand. That same year he wrote
Fonda; or, The Trapper's Dream, 1877, with the help of Sam Smith,
another minor playwright. Something like Life on the Border and
strongly anti-Mormon, Fonda follows the handsome scout through a
series of adventures ending with his rescue of the heroine from--a
bad marriage. Crawford liked to contrast his work with Cody's Buf-
falo Bill plays, declaring that his were ''the best, cleanest and most
truthful plays of Frontier American life and history that have ever
been written" and that Cody's were "gross exaggerations and
untruthful fictions of frontier life and characters. 2 In 1879 Crawford
copyrighted his play as California Through Death Valley. The Mighty
Truth; or, In Clouds of Sunshine, copyrighted in 1889 as Tat; or,
Edna, the Veteran's Daughter, is a play about women and what they
should do, Indian women as well as white women, and is liberally
sprinkled with Crawford's naive poetry and embellished by his own
self-conscious and autobiographical prose. It is true that Crawford
wanted to present the West as he saw it, but he was also a reformer,
and his idealism must be noted by any reader.
Across America during the 1870s and 1880s the West held a
certain fascination for the theatre public. Except for a few plays per-
formed by well-known actors, however, Western or frontier drama
never developed a popularity comparable to plays on the
temperance issue, for example, or plays about New York City. It
59
was, rather, a scene and a theme or a quality of character that inter-
ested some playwrights and entertained audiences on either coast
and In between where theatres existed. The number of these
Western plays, however, may never be known, and their quality was
certainly not distinctive. Early California, 1872, for example, was the
first play of William Bausman, a native of San Francisco where the
play had a good run at the Metropolitan Theatre before touring In
other California cities. Although the style of the play suggests literary
pretensions, it Is poorly structured around a murder and a revenge
theme. The murdered man's daughter stimulates much of the action
until the hero's false arrest creates a crisis and the guilty villain Is
arraigned. Lacking any distinction as melodrama, the play makes
the most of California local color and dialect. On the east coast
George Jessop and J.B. Polk wrote a comedy entitled A Gentleman
from Nevada, 1880, with such characters as English Jack, a tough
snoozer but lightning at keards, and Egerton, the jawmaster general
of the Sierras. Placing an Englishman in Nevada and having him
cope with the natives and win was a novel twist, but the scenes
involving mining in California and gambling in Nevada, the Irish in
California and the Chinese in Nevada, provided minimal insight into
frontier life.
The setting for Howard Hill's The Angel of the Trail, 1884(?), is
the mission of the Silver Chimes near Needle Mountain, San Bernar-
dino, California. The plot evolves from the efforts of Gerald, a U.S.
Secret Service man, to capture Don Michael, an evil man who plans
to steal the chimes. Perdita, the angel and a crack shot with a pistol,
loves Gerald and eventually helps him capture his man but not
before disguises, fights, a humorous sub-plot, and good suspense
show this melodrama to be better than average as entertainment.
Joseph Clifton is credited with writing The Ranch King, 1886, and
Chick, 1889. Although J.J. McCloskey printed a romantic comedy
with the title of The Ranch King in 1886, the quality of writing In this
play--barely literate in the manuscript copy deposited in the George
Poultney Collection of the Gleeson Library of the University of San
Francisco--seems inferior to his other work. Set somewhere in
Texas. the play pits a villain named Mannering against Donald
McDonald, the ranch king. For some unrevealed reason Mannering
swears to ruin McDonald, but his plots fail. Also, his attempt to
seduce the daughter of another man is thwarted by McDonald
through a game of cards, and his robbery scheme falls through.
Confused and poorly constructed, this play reveals very little about
Texas. Except for the heroine, Chick, a mountain waif, Clifton's later
play, Chick, might have taken place in any rural area. A murder has
been committed and the wrong man placed in jail only to be rescued
60
by Chick who covers the jailer with her pistol: "lay a finger on him
and I'll blow your brains out .. (IV). At the end right triumphs; liquor
and greed are condemned; three sets of lovers are united; and the
most western reference is the name of the wrongly accused man's
fiancee--Mabel West.
The Cattle King, 1887, may have been written by William H.
Young, but a Marie Townsend Allen also copyrighted a play by that
title in 1885. (Plays at that time could be copyrighted by an author
who supplied only the title.) The scene is a ranch in the territory of
New Mexico, and the play contrasts an American cattle king, Bob
Taylor, alias Dare Devil Dick, a champion poker player, with Don
Pedro Jose Mexia, a Mexican cattle king. The well-paced action
which involves shootings, a big card game, and a lot of drinking also
features the usual melodramatic love problems and a spectacular
fifth act rescue. The Western woman is pictured as a strong and
determined heroine In one instance and by Molly, a frontier woman
who wears a broad leather belt with two large sized Colts and a
Bowie knife at her back. More than most melodramas, this play com-
ments on the relations between America and New Mexico. After a
long speech against Mexico, Bob (as Dare Devil Dick) condemns the
practice he sees around him: "You seize this poor man's cattle and
that squatter's land .. (IV,ii). At the climax of the play Don Pedro is
assured of punishment under a warrant for his arrest signed by the
governor of the New Mexico Territory.
Clay Greene was a minor dramatist of some reputation in New
York at the end of the century. In The Golden Giant Mine, 1887, he
attempted to take advantage of the Western atmosphere in Golden
Run, Idaho, in the ear1y 1880s. There is mystery from the beginning,
but it is not a Western mystery. Two partners in a mining venture
argue: one stays with the mine; the other, a villain, leaves, but his
wife comes to Golden Run to find a new life, which she eventually
does with the other partner. When the villainous partner reappears,
to claim the wealth of the mine, the dramatist saves the happiness of
all by producing a twin brother. A rather traditional and complex
melodrama, The Golden Giant Mine has little, unfortunately, to
identify it with Idaho.
The American stage has frequently been stricken with popular
fads and fancies, and one might expect that the opening of the
American West with its Indian wars, the struggles of frontier life, the
dreams of great wealth, and a panorama of romantic adventures
would have stimulated a long and spectacular movement In
American theatre. With some notable exceptions such popularity did
not take place. Although most of the major playwrights of the period
did write about the West in a play or two, there was not a con-
61
centrated effort to bring the West to the center of American theatre
activity in the East where the major theatre managers such as Wal-
lack and Palmer eschewed American plays and Daly was extremely
selective. Audiences appeared to enjoy foreign plays, spectacles,
one-character plays performed by favorite actors, and melodramas
or farces concerned with distant lands or American city and social
life. Not even Mark Twain and Bret Harte could finagle success In the
theatre with the same stories that brought them popularity in print.
Bartley Campbell and J.J. McCloskey gained some success portray-
Ing the West in their plays, but they were not eventually persuaded
that the material would bear either much repetition or investigation.
The great success of Buffalo Bill was the creation of the Wild West
Show which appealed to the American's love of spectacle and
moved on the momentum created by the circus, the showboat, and
the minstrel show. Meanwhile, the Western play and the Westerner
generally faded into the American local color drama to be captured
occasionally by Augustus Thomas in Arizona and Colorado and
finally determined by William Vaughan Moody in The Great Divide as
a basis for distinction--although this is a broad oversimplification for
the course of Western frontier drama.
Those plays written during the 1870s and 1880s that did
emphasize the West can be described in certain discrete ways. The
West was largely masculine, and the plays emphasize male activities
of gambling, drinking, and card playing along with rough living and
fighting. Violence was popular--against Indians, against uncouth vil-
lains, against nature. If women were present, they were either
strong, rowdy, and independent or helpless and weak and, therefore,
eastern in temperament. There was generally shooting; people in the
West were pictured as living by their guns. language, also, was
rough and ungrammatical, and the houses were primitive. In such
ways playwrights attempted to intensify the atmosphere of the West,
contrasting the rugged and distinctive scenery of mountains with the
coastal regions. It was a very physical life that playwrights
described, and melodrama was the appropriate genre for their
expression--large scenes, unshaded characters, violent actions.
Dramatists made very few comments on society in the West or on
social custom. Local color was sometimes represented in scenery,
language, and general activities but seldom in what might be termed
manners. For most of the playwrights the West was an exceedingly
broad expanse of land reaching form Missouri to California, Texas to
Idaho, but there was little in most of their works to tell where in that
huge area the setting of any play actually occurred.
In the 1870s and 1880s a sketchy outline of the West was
being created for American theatre audiences--and not on a very
62
broad scale at that, nor a very popular one. The refinement of that
outline has been long in the making--by Lynn Riggs, by William
Saroyan, by William lnge, by Preston Jones.
Endnotes
1
See also Wayne H. Claeren, Bartley Campbell: Playwright of
the Gilded Age, Unpublished diss. University of Pittsburgh, 1975;
Napier Witt, ed. The White Slave & Other Plays, America's Lost
Plays, XIX. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1965.
2
Paul T. Nolan, John Wallace Crawford (Boston: Twayne Pub-
lishers, 1981 ), 60.
63
From
Theatrical Biographies
d
Eminent ActOlS and AUthors
compiled by
F. C. Wemysa
New York: Estate of Wm. Taylor, n.d.
[185?)
Memoir of Mr. F. S. Chanfrau
Mr. Francis S. Chanfrau, the subject of this memoir, is another
instance that talent and genius are not heredity, and that the road to
distinction is but too often attained after many discouragements,
hardships, and even defeats.
Mr. C was born in New York on the 22d of February, 1824, his
parents' domicile being a wooden tenement, well known as the "Old
Tree House," at the corner of the Bowery and Pell Street. After
receiving a respectable English education, his propensities led our
hero to the west, the El Dorado of so many youthful dreamers, where
he attained considerable expertness as a ship carpenter and joiner;
but he was soon glad to return to his native city, under the most dis-
couraging circumstances, with more experience in his head, but not
even a copper in his pocket. His wandering spirit having been
satisfied, young C turned diligently to his trade, and it is not a little
remarkable that he aided to adjust the first timber of the High Bridge
on the Croton Acqueduct.
Up to this period the sock and buskin had never seemed to
have troubled our hero, either in his sleeping or his waking dreams;
but on the occasion of seeing Mr. Forrest act at the Bowery, the
latent flame was kindled. He joined an amateur association, which
finally organized itself under the name of the "Forrest Dramatic Asso-
ciation," in which he played quite subordinate parts, his mechanical
ingenuity being much more available than his dramatic abilities. Sub-
sequently this association united itself with the "Dramatic Institute,"
and together they hired the Franklin Theatre, where they murdered
64
Shakespeare to poor houses, and not without the perpetration of
many ludicrous mistakes. On one occasion Chanfrau attempted
MacBeth. The carpenters had not been paid, and refused to hoist
the curtain on the second act until their claims had been tangibly
acknowledged. Every penny in the box office was taken to satisfy
these claims, and the curtain rose to both an empty house and treas-
ury. Another act went off tolerably well, when lo! a second difficulty
presented itself. Lady MacBeth demanded her salary! No money,
no acting, was her motto, and as there was not a shilling to be had,
she actually left the theatre. MacDuff refused to play without her, and
doffing the plaid also disappeared. Nothing disheartened, Chanfrau
finished the tragedy without the aid of the principal characters, and
ended the fifth act by speaking to MacDuff off the stage, counterfeit-
ing the confusion of a combat and rushing on, already wounded, to
die. The audience gave three cheers and vanished, better pleased
probably to have that denoument than none at all.
Soon after this, Mr. C engaged himself as supernumerary and
property-assistant at the Bowery; and here it was that his peculiar
talent began to develop itself. His excellent private imitations of Mr.
Forrest attracted the attention of Mrs. Shaw and others; and on the
occasion of the eat Masque being represented, wherein each
character was at liberty to recite any speech which he might select,
Mr. C mixed with the mothley [sic] group as MacBeth, and gave one
of the soliloquies In imitation of Mr. Forrest, which was recognized,
and received with the most vociferous applause. From this time he
gradually rose in the profession, and soon accepted an engagement
of Mr. John Rice, of the Buffalo and Detroit theatres; after which
engagement, he went to the American Theatre at New Orleans. Mr.
C subsequently played at Boston and at the Bowery and the Park in
New York, with much success, gradually becoming a leading and
attractive actor.
But it was at Mitchell's Olympic Theatre that Mr. C suddenly
woke up one evening and found himself famous. His Yankee in the
Chinese Junk, King Almode in the burlesque on the Astor Place
Opera, Jeremiah Clip (with Imitations of every actor of note) in the
Widow's Victim, and a Frenchman in A Model of a Wife were all
pieces of acting which attracted the delighted auditors. But his Mose
in A Glance at New York was his great triumph. It at once stamped
him as possessing an Intuitive perception, which neither his mere
imitations nor previous performances had led his audiences to
suspect. He at once became the dramatic non of the town; his like-
ness pervaded every window, and his sayings were uttered by every
urchin in the city, as well as by a very great portion of the older part
of the male community.
65
During this successful career at the Olympic, several of his
friends, unsolicited, bought the lease of the Chatham Theatre, and
placed it in Mr. C's possession. It redounds much to Mr. C's reputa-
tion as a man of honor (and of which this is not the only instance we
know) that notwithstanding the accession of business on his hands,
he faithfully fulfilled his engagement with Mr. Mitchell, untU the close
of the Olympic, playing for several weeks at both theatres on the
same evening. We conclude this brief sketch with the following
remarks by T. W. M. from the New York Sunday Mercury:
To say that Mr. Chanfrau's Mose Is acted so well that it
seems to be reality, is but to say the truth, while to
imagine that it partakes, in the remotest manner, of the
characteristics of the man, is to labor under a vast mis-
take. In private life Mr. Chanfrau is kind, affable, and
gentlemanly. Although the writer of this has known him
intimately from boyhood, he can point to no one bad
quality belonging to him. As an actor we have shown
that he Is without his equal for versatility and the faculty
for Imitation; as a man we known him to be all that can
be desired in a good citizen. His generosity and worth
are freely acknowledged by all who have the pleasure of
his acquaintance. He is entirely free from the vices
which so frequently ensnare the successful young
actor, and bids fair to become not only rich in the
esteem of his fellow creatures generally, but In the more
sordid and mercenary acceptations of the term.
Memoir of Thomas S. Hamblin
The late Thomas S. Hamblin, for twenty-five years manager of
the Bowery Theatre, was born at Tentonville, Islington, near London,
on the 14th of May, 1800. He made his first appearance upon any
public stage at Sadlers' Wells, reciting Rolla's Address to the
Peruvians, between the pieces, and although perfectly satisfied with
himself upon that occasion, as he often related to the writer, yet it
appears the Manager had formed a very low estimate of the abilities
of the new aspirant for histrionic honor, refusing to employ him about
the theatre at all, even In the most humble situation, and without
remuneration, for the proffered service; but Hamblin's mind was cast
in the right mould; once determined to accomplish an object he per-
66
severed, in the face of every difficulty, until he generally obtained it,
and having made up that mind, that he would be an actor, he was not
to be daunted by this most unpromising beginning; he sought and
obtained an interview with Scott, then Manager of the Sans Pare!
(now the Adelphi) Theatre, in the Strand, London, who prided himself
at all times on having in his theatre the best-looking men, and the
handsomest women, the London Stage could supply. Pleased with
the appearance of young Hamblin, to whom his only objection was
his height, he offered him ten shillings per week, to dance in the Bal-
let, go on in all groups, and render himself generally useful. Hard
work, the reader will say for twenty-two cents per day--aye, and night
too, for 12 o'clock, P.M., frequently found him still on duty; but he
had placed his foot firmly on the first round of the ladder he was
determined to ascend, and the sequel of his history will prove, he
never receded until he attained the proud position of a leading actor,
then became a star, and finally an active and enterprising manager.
How long Mr. Hamblin remained in this subordinate situation
we have no positive means of ascertaining, but that he must have
made good use of this time, and learned rapidly the first lessons of
his art, we have the best proof in the fact, that on the twenty-sixth of
December, 1819, he made his first appearance with success on the
boards of Drury-Lane Theatre, as Trueman in George Barnwell. Here
he remained for two or three seasons, until on one occasion Mr. Rae
having to perform Hamlet, was suddenly taken ill in the theatre; as
luck would have it (and every actor's fate was decided by luck, either
for good or bad) all the principal actors who could have supplied his
place, were at the instant nowhere to be found. Hamblin having
been a student from the commencement of his career, had com-
mitted to memory the words of Hamlet, without an idea at that period
of its proving of any further use than keeping "his study" in good
training, by reading his favorite Shakespeare, he stepped forward
and modestly proffered his services. The manager hesitated, but it
was now past the hour for the curtain to rise, the audience were bec-
oming clamorous, and the only alternative between the Horatio of the
play-bill--for Hamlet--was a change of the play. It was decided that
Hamblin should act the part.
With every nerve strained for the effort, with a determined will
to succeed, a thrill passed through him as he listened to the apology,
and the coldness with which it was received caused a feeling of fear,
of stage fright, to take possession of him, which had near1y proved
fatal to his hopes: but as the prompter's whistle sounded for the
change of scene his self-possession returned. He so surprised the
audience, that at the end of the play he was called before the curtain,
an honor of rare occurence, at that time to receive the plaudits of the
67
audience, bowed his thanks and retired, his reputation firmly fiXed as
one of the most promising young actors on the London stage. The
next morning he entered the theatre an altered man-he had acted
Hamlet, under most trying circumstances, successfully at Drury-Lane
Theatre; he well knew, that the engagements of the theatre would
preclude the possibility of (even if the management had the Inclina-
tion) placing him before the audience, In the position he coveted, and
the increase of salary--the reward of his last night's exertion--could
not reconcile him to the idea of taking one backward step; he
preferred playing the leading characters in Birmingham, Bath and
Dublin, to any subordinate situation in a London theatre, and at the
end of the season retired from Drury-Lane, until the day should arrive
when he might return as one of the leading Tragedians of the day.
No provincial actor ever enjoyed a greater share of public approba-
tion than Thomas S. Hamblin. In 1825 he was married at St.
George's Chapel, Hanover Square, to Miss Elizabeth Blanchard, one
of the daughters of Mr. W. Blanchard of Covent Garden Theatre, and
the event, which he then looked upon as the happiest of his life,
proved the bane of his future existence. For a time the young couple
(the young lady was an actress of acknowledged talent) were
received with enthusiasm wherever their names were announced.
Wealth, fame, and happiness, at this period, attended all their move-
ments.
Hamblin having heard that rapid fortunes were accumulated in
the United States, entered into an engagement for himself and his
young wife to visit the New World, under the auspices of Price and
Simpson; and early in the fall of 1825 he made his appearance at the
Park Theatre, New York, in his favorite, Hamlet. Mrs. Hamblin acted
on the following evening Letitia Hardy in The Belle's Stratagem; they
both succeeded to their heart's content and visited as "Stars" all the
leading theatres of the United States. From this time Hamblin's name
and history belong exclusively to the American Stage.
In 1830 or 1831, Mr. Hamblin became joint lessee of the
Bowery Theatre with James H. Hackett. This was the year when
theatricals were at the lowest ebb; the attempt therefore to resus-
citate the legitimate drama, notwithstanding the powerful array of
talent announced nightly in the play-bills, was a failure. Hackett
retired, leaving the whole management in the hands of his late
partner--who then turned his attention to the production of Melo-
Dramatic Spectacles. Mazeppa was produced, and its success
raised the Bowery Theatre to its present high standard, and by a judi-
cious course of management. not forsaking Tragedy or Comedy, but
making these peculiar dramas, Mazeppa, The Water Witch, Last Days
of Pompeii, LaFitte, Norman Leslie, Putnam, &c., the principal feature
68
he realized in an Incredible short space of time a handsome fortune.
While thus prosperous, the theatre was consumed by fire in 1836,
and in one night, the labor of years was wrested from his hands. He
now leased the ground to Mr. Wm. Dinneford, by whom the theatre
was re-built in 1837 and again destroyed by fire In 1838. Within
Indomitable Industry and perseverance he contrived to erect it once
more by issuing proposals for a loan, to be refunded in tickets of
admission, and such was the popularity of his name at this time that
the whole amount required was subscribed, and the theatre re-
opened to the public early in 1839. Now it was that calumny was
busy with his name, and stories of the most Improbable character
were circulated. The New York Herald was particularly severe in its
strictures, so much so as to goad Mr. Hamblin beyond the bounds of
prudence, which led him to commit an assault upon the proprietor,
for which he had to pay very severely. Now It was, when all
abandoned him, that James Wallack, Sen., as Wellborn says in the
play of A New Way to Pay Old Debts, took him by the hand and set
him upright. He gave him a complimental benefit, at the old National
in Leonard Street, the proceeds of which enabled him to carry out his
own views. He crossed the Atlantic and made his appearance at
Covent Garden Theatre as Hamlet, but not with the success he
hoped or anticipated. His old enemy, the Asthma, attacked him at
the very moment he most wanted the aid of his voice, and although it
could not be called a failure, it was not a performance of that nature
to induce the managers to offer engagements, and he returned to the
United States.
While his own theatre was being rebuilt, he resuscitated the
fortune of the Park Theatre for a short period by producing those
dramas which had made his own fortune, but should never have
been tolerated on the boards of the Old Park; that Simpson made
money by the operation is true, but he furnished to his opponent at
the same time the sinews of war--money. In 1839 the Bowery was
again opened, and after various vicissitudes was once more a prey to
the devouring elements in 1845.
Mr. A. W. Jackson rebuilt it during the same year--made a
handsome independence and retired, selling out to Mr. Hamblin In
1848, since which time to the hour of his death it continued in his
possession. In 1848 Mr. Hamblin also obtained a lease on the old
Park Theatre, which had been the object of his ambition for many
years. He laid out a large sum of money to adorn and decorate it,
but it proved from the commencement a losing concern, and
although by its destruction by fire, he lost seventeen thousand dol-
lars, yet the loss was a gain; another illustration of luck in the life of
actors and managers. It is true it made Burton's fortune, but it saved
69
his own, for the continued drain upon the treasury of the Bowery
Theatre to support the Park must, if continued, have crushed both.
As an actor Mr. Hamblin belonged to the Kemble School, now fast
passing from the world. Those who remember Cooper, Kemble,
Hodginson, Hallam, Duff, and Henry, must hold up their hands in
wonder when they compare the present generation of actors to
those of former years--the mechanism of the Stage has Improved,
but mind and genius have been sadly on the wane; the art of acting
in tragedy has given place to sound and fury, signifying nothing,
while Comedy, perhaps, was never better represented than it is at
present.
As a man, in all his business dealings, he was scrupulously
just, scorning to take advantage of the Bankrupt or Insolvent laws to
free himself from one cent of honestly incurred debt. At the very
moment he had it in his power, to pay all his creditors, he was sud-
denly called to his last account. The last time he acted was MacBeth
in his own theatre, for the benefit of the American Dramatic Fund
Association, Dec. 15, 1852. He died, January 8, 1853, and was
buried in Greenwood Cemetery on Tuesday January 11, 1853. To no
one more than to Thomas S. Hamblin was the American Stage
indebted for fostering native talent. There is scarcely a name from E.
Forrest down, who has not been indebted to him for affording them
an opportunity to display their ability under the most favorable cir-
cumstances. The Stage will mourn his loss--they could well have
missed a better man.
Memoir of James H. Hackett
James Henry Hackett was born at 72 William Street, in the city
of New York, March 15th, 1800. His father, Thomas G. Hackett,
though born in Holland, resided for several years in New York, and
was a lineal descendant of one of the old Feudal Barons of Ireland
who constituted the original Irish Peerage, most of which has
become extinct; but according to a pedigree of the "Hackett FamilY
issued from the Herald Office of Ireland in 1834, and attested by the
Marquis Wellesley, then Lord Lieutentant and Governor General of
Ireland, the original founder was that "Haket who came over to
England from Normandy with William the Conqueror, and whose
name, as one of his victorious generals, is recorded and is legible to
this day upon the pillar of "Battle Abbey, near Hastings. (According
to the original orthography of the name, which Is "Haquet," it is evi-
70
dently derived from that of a fish peculiar to the coast of Normandy--
the Haque: which fish appears on the shield among the other
Heraldic and amorial bearings of the Hackett family.) One of the
lineage of this .. Haket" accompanied Strongbow to Ireland, and it was
from this branch that the father of the subject of this memoir was
derived. His mother was a daughter of the Rev. Abraham Keteltas of
Jamaica, Long Island. This gentleman was the son of a Mr. Abraham
Keteltas who came to America from Holland about the year 1720. He
is represented to have possessed unusual talents, which were
improved by profound erudition. It is worthy of notice that, after set-
tling at Jamaica on Long Island, he frequently officiated in three dif-
ferent languages, having preached in the Dutch and French lan-
guages in his native city of New York. He was also, In 1777, chosen
a member of the convention to frame the constitution of his native
state.
"Union HaW Academy, at Jamaica, Long Island, was the
institution to which the subject of this memoir was indebted for his
early education. He here displayed that voracious, imitative turn of
mind, which subsequently qualified his so admirably for the stage;
and his histrionic talents were originally exerted in hitting off the
peculiarities of his tutors, which he did in a manner to call forth the
unqualified delight and approbation of his schoolfellows. In the
autumn of 1815, he was admitted a student of Columbia College; but
a severe fit of illness interrupted his classical pursuits, and, on his
recovery, he betook himself to the study of the law. Coke and Black-
stone were found to be uncongenial companions, however, for one
so possessed with the spirit of Momus.
In 1817, he entered the counting-room of a relative, with the
view of becoming a merchant. In 1819, Mr. Hackett married and took
from the stage Miss Lee Sugg, of the Park Theatre, who was at that
time a distinguished favorite with the public, and removed to Utica.
He subsequently became extensively engaged in trade, until,
ambitious of extending his sphere of enterprise, he returned to the
city of New York, and became a merchant, in Front Street. Here he
unfortunately became innoculated with the mania for speculation,
which prevailed so universally In 1825, and, in common with vast
numbers of his commercial brethren, was involved in heavy losses,
by the violent fluctuations in the markets and the failures, which daily
took place. It was now, that he looked to the stage for the means of
extricating himself from his embarrassments, and procuring the facili-
ties for effecting an honorable adjustment of his affairs.
His first appearance on the boards of any theatre was at the
Park Theatre, March, 1826, as Justice Woodcock, in Love in a Vil-
lage; but his success did not equal his own expectations or those of
71
his friends. He seems to have been abandoned by his accustomed
humor and self-possession. He resolved, however, on making a sec-
ond attempt; and appeared in an entertainment, in which he gave
imitations of popular actors, and stories illustrative of American char-
acteristics. In this experiment he was entirely successful, and for a
series of nights drew large audiences. His second great hit, was In
personating one of the two Dromios in The Comedy of Errors, in
which he presented a capital imitation of Barnes, who then per-
formed the twin brother.
The applause which had been bestowed on his desultory
imitations of Yankee peculiarities, now Induced Mr. Hackett to try the
experiment of introducing a live Yankee Into some established play,
where the necessary alterations could be made, without an undue
violation of the probabilities of the plot. He selected the younger Col-
man's comedy of Who Wants a Guinea? the title of which he
changed to that of Jonathan in England, and substituted the charac-
ter of Solomon Swap to that of Solomon Gundy. The success of the
experiment is well known. Solomon Swap contributed much towards
helping Mr. Hackett on the high road to fame and fortune; and it is
still one of his most laughable characters. When he proposed play-
ing It in England, Colman grumbled somewhat, and made rather an
obvious pun upon the name of his American emendator; but if those
may laugh who win, the representative of Solomon Swap had no
cause to be lachrymose on the occasion.
Mr. Hackett has made several visits to England, and his
professional success there has, of late years, been of the most flatter-
ing description. In April, 1828, he tried his Yankee stories at Covent
Garden; but they were found undramatic, ill-arranged, too local, and
too lengthy. Some imitations of Kean and Macready, however, with
which he garnished his entertainment, turned the tide in his favor,
and drew down the most hearty applause. He re-appeared upon the
london boards, after a lapse of years, and succeeded greatly, not in
his Yankee parts, but in Falstaff and Sir Pertinax McSycophant. His
Monsieur Morbleau, Nimrod Wildfire, and Rip Van Winkle, were
admitted to be performances full of original vigor, talent, and humor.
In Lear, he also made a highly favorable impression. During his last
visit to England, he received a royal intimation, that it would be
agreeable to the Queen to witness his performances, and he accor-
dingly appeared at the Haymarket Theatre, the 26th of May, 1845,
her Majesty and Prince Albert being present. We believe, Mr. Hack-
ett is the first American performer, towards whom the same attention
has been extended.
From Mr. Hackett's range of parts, it will be seen that he pos-
sessed remarkable versatility of talent. He played O'Catlaghan in the
72
farce of His Last Legs, before a Dublin audience, with complete suc-
cess, notwithstanding they had the recollection of Power and other
Irishmen in the character fresh in their minds. Mr. Hackett has
recently connected himself In the capacity of manager, with the
theatre known as the Howard Athenaeum, in Boston, a beautiful
and commodious house; and if the experiment of which he has the
direction, should not prove successful, It will be from no lack of expe-
rience, ability, and enterprise on his part.
73
A PUBLICATION OF INTEREST
TO JADT READERS:
Rodopi (Amsterdam and Atlanta) has just published, as its DQR
Studies In Literature 7, a paperback volume called Theatre West:
Images and Impact, edited by Dunbar H. Ogden with Douglas
McCermott and Robert K. Sarl6s. With a foreword by William Ever-
son, it presents nineteen essays, divided into four sections. All the
material derives from frontier and/or the western United States, offer-
ing a diversity of materials on theatre and entertainment. The volume
is dedicated to Alois M. Nagler, founding member and first president
of the American Society for Theatre Research, at whose annual meet-
ing in San Francisco in 1978 the idea for the volume was born.
74
CONTRIBUTORS
BRUCE McCONACHIE teaches courses in theatre and American
Studies at the College of William and Mary. Currently a visiting
professor at Northwestern University, Professor McConachie
emphasizes the approach of the historiographer In his searching
analysis of American drama and theatre.
NANCY WYNN (19351986) headed the theatre program at Wells
College, Aurora, New York, and chaired the Theatre Department at
Sweetbriar College, Sweetbriar, Virginia, from 1984-1986. The essay
published here Is taken from her unpublished dissertation (CUNY
Graduate School, PhD Program in Theatre, 1982) on Sophie Tread
well.
WALTER J. MESERVE teaches courses in American drama and
theatre at the CUNY Graduate School PhD Program in Theatre. The
present essay was written for a collection of essays on the American
West to be edited by Professor Kristen Douglas, University of New
Mexico, and titled The Splintered Image.
FRANCIS C. WEMYSS was an active theatre manager during the
second quarter of the 19th century in America. He also acted, wrote
plays, and added to American theatre history with A Chronology of
the American Stage, 1852 and Twenty Six Years of the Life of an
Actor and Manager, 1847.
75
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