JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume Ill
Vera Mowry Roberts
Spring 1991
Co-editors
CUNY Graduate School
Managing Editor
Edwin Wilson
Assistant Editor
Joel Berkowitz
CAST A Copyright 1991
Number2
Walter J. Meserve
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From the Editors
It will be apparent to the readers of JADT that this Issue Is some-
what late In reaching them. (How long does "spring" last?)
Demonstrations opposing the New York State education budget
closed our editorial offices for a spell, and threw us behind schedule.
We apologize.
Since our note in the Winter issue, we have received a modest
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as it should be; the sharing of findings is the essence of scholarship.
Vera Mowry Roberts Walter J. Meserve
Co-Editors
2
Volume Ill
Laurence G. Avery
Sally Harvey
Robert L. Mclaughlin
Pat G. Ryan
Table of Contents
Spring 1991 Number2
Paul Green, The Lost Colony,
and Native Son ........... ............................ 5
O'Neill's Hughie and
Albee's The Zoo Story:
Two Tributes to the Teller
and His Tale ......................................... 14
"No One Is Alone":
Society and Love in the
Musicals of Stephen Sondheim .......... 27
The Horse Drama,
With Supernumeraries:
Bronson Howard's
Semi-historical Shenandoah ..... .......... 42
Book Notes .......... .... ... ... ...... ... ........... ............ ... ...... ............................ . 70
Contributors .................... ..................................................................... 71
3
Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago
Manual of Style, 13th ed., and should be submitted in duplicate with
an appropriately stamped, self-addressed envelope. Please allow
three to four months for a response. Our distinguished Editorial
Board will constitute the jury of selection. Address editorial inquiries
and manuscript submissions to the Editors, Journal of American
Drama and Theatre, Ph.D. Program in Theatre, CUNY Graduate
Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
CASTA Publications are supported by generous grants from the
Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in
Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University
of New York.
4
PAUL GREEN, . mE LOST COLONY, AND NATNE SON
Laurence G. Avery
Paul Green, first playwright from the South to attract national
and international attention, was also a key figure in the social devel-
opments we now associate with the emergence of the New South
during the first half of this century. Over the past decade as I worked
on an edition of his letters, I encountered the diversity in his life
directly and daily.
His writing itself is varied. Best known today as the pioneer of
a new kind of play, which he called symphonic because it allows all
of the presentational arts to "sound together,1 he also wrote seven
plays for New York productions, for one of which, In Abraham's
Bosom, he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1927. In addition to writing for
the theater, he published two novels and five collections of short
stories, wrote scripts for numerous motion pictures (State Fair [1933]
starring Will Rogers is perhaps the best remembered.), and avidly
collected folklore, a life-long effort culminating in the posthumous
Paul Green's Wordbook: An Alphabet of Reminiscence (1990). In
addition to his imaginative works, he published five volumes of
essays on the theater and modern social life, not to mention miscel-
laneous poems, articles, and reviews.
Along with the writing, however, went a fairly heavy schedule
of things he saw as responsibilities of citizenship. In this respect at
least, he resembles Bernard Shaw more closely than any American
writer among his contemporaries. From the 1920s on, he worked to
secure basic human rights for blacks and Indians: fair treatment in
courts of law, access to education and jobs, opportunities to vote.
His efforts on behalf of the poor and uneducated in prison led him to
advocate prison reform and the abolition of capital punishment --
causes that became crusades at times. At the University of North
Carolina, where at different times he was on the faculty of three
departments (English, Philosophy, and Dramatic Arts), he followed
his friend and colleague Norman Foerster In agitating for attention to
the humanities and teaching as a balance to the stress on science
and research. From the 1950s on, he became Increasingly active
and outspoken in opposition to the cold war between the United
States and Soviet Union and the resultant arms race, and he was
among the early opponents of American Involvement In Vietnam.
These are only the large scale causes he threw himself into.
Despite the diversity, however, his life was not fragmented. In
his published work and even more in his letters emerges a core of
5
ideas and values that unifies his writing and social activity. Complex
in their manifestations, these beliefs come into focus on the individual
human personality. When he articulates his basic outlook with
reference to his plays, he can tell a correspondent, "I have mainly
been interested in writing about people struggling to self-realization
as free and responsible Individuals, struggling through all kinds of dif-
ficulties, racial bigotry, ignorance, poverty, fanaticism, and so on."
2
When he articulates It with reference to a problem In society,
segregation for instance, he can exclaim: "What sin can be greater
than to cause a man to miss his own life. 3 In both cases the root
concern is the same. Nothing is more important than the individual
human personality; nothing more urgent than an opportunity for the
personality to unfold in ways usually called self-realization. His plays
show one or another of the myriad forms taken by the struggle of
men and women for self-realization. His social activity is a life-long
crusade against conditions that thwart self-realization. His life Is
unified by an absolute horror at anything causing people to miss their
own lives.
The Lost Colony, earliest of the full-fledged symphonic plays,
and Green's dramatization of Richard Wright's Native Son have Inter-
esting differences in origin, form, and production history. Themati-
cally, however, they are opposite sides of the same coin. One shows
the origin of a society founded on the principle of socially
responsible self-realization. The other shows the terrible costs when
that society fails to live up to its noblest principle for some of Its
citizens.
The Lost Colony, first done in 1937, came at a crucial time In
Green's career. His most recent play, Johnny Johnson, an anti-war
musical written with Kurt Weill and produced by the Group Theatre In
1936, had lasted nine weeks on Broadway. Roll, Sweet Chariot,
done In 1934, ran for only one -- on opening night the theater owner,
feeling the play would make little money, simply leased the theater to
another company for the following week. Tread the Green Grass,
optioned by the Experimental Theatre (successor to the Provin-
cetown Players) in 1928, then by Francis Fergusson's Lab Theater,
finally had no professional production, as both organizations fell to
the Depression. By the middle 1930s Green was despondent about
his prospects as a playwright. He could pay his bills by writing
motion picture scripts -- and did -- but given the conditions In Hol-
lywood at the time, that provided little sense of artistic accomplish-
ment. Success on Broadway, however, -- at the time, the only place
in the American theater where a playwright could achieve success --
required plays suited to the tastes of Broadway audiences. Dis-
inclined to accommodate what he considered the limited interests of
sophisticated city dwellers,
4
Green needed an alternative theater to
escape silence. That' s what was provided by the opportunity to write
6
a play for the 350th anniversary of the first English colony in the New
World -- Sir Walter Raleigh's short-lived settlement on Roanoke
Island off the coast of North Carolina in 1587.
The occasion of The Lost Colony, a historical celebration,
called for a play more faithful than most to the historical record, and
in his outline of the action Green Invented only the fate of the colony,
about which the record Is silent. Within the outline, however, he
devised a plot that deals with the meaning of the New Wor1d experi-
ence.
Tocqueville had said that "among the novel objects that
attracted my attention during my stay in the United States [in 1831 as
he prepared to write Democracy In America] nothing struck me more
forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people . ...
The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I
perceived that this equality of condition Is the fundamental fact from
which all others seem to be derived and the central point at which all
my observations constantly terminated."5 A little ear11er the English
social thinker William Godwin had attacked the background problem,
European social organization. "Reason and morality have declared
war" on social stratification based on family, he said. "Mankind will
never be, in an eminent degree, virtuous and happy, till each man
shall possess that portion of distinction and no more to which he Is
entitled by his personal merits."6 Wherever you look in the decades
near the Revolution -- I could quote Paine and Jefferson and a host
of others, of course, including the first historian of American drama,
William Dunlap -- the view is the same. The distinctive ingredient In
American society, the thing that sets it apart from Europe, is the prin-
ciple that in the game of life individuals should compete on a level
playing field.
The Lost Colony dramatizes that principle. English society Is
used to display traditional European social stratification. The play is
friendly to England, so it shows no one grossly abusing the power he
or she has by virtue of position. But the system Itself Is kept clear1y in
focus, and the system Is vicious. Power resides ultimately In the
queen. Even Raleigh, a great lord, debases himself In courting her
favor. But he Is left frustrated, unable to pursue the dream that gives
his life meaning, the dream of leading a colony to the New Wor1d. At
lower levels of the social hierarchy the same thing happens. Despite
admirable personal qualities, John Borden, a tenant farmer In
Raleigh's Devonshire, has no way of bettering his condition in
England. Nor can he marry the woman he loves, Eleanor White,
because her father has contracted a more advantageous marriage
for her with Captain Dare. While Raleigh's dependence on the queen
leaves him In a kind of philosophical melancholy, Borden's lack of
scope Is well on the way to making him a bitter cynic.
Eleanor is a special case of the same problem. As a person
7
conscious of the Importance of rank, she accepts her father's plan
for a socially advantageous marriage despite her love for Borden. As
a woman, however, she rebels against the notion, expressed even by
the queen, that exploring the New Worfd is a job for men. In England
her scope is limited by gender as well as class. At the bottom of the
social ladder Old Tom the beggar has no standing whatsoever, and
therefore no self-respect. In English society he is only a miserable
and useless drunk who is treated with contempt by nearfy everyone.
But in the New World things are different. Frontier conditions
hack away the vestiges of European social stratification and leave
only the democratic principle, equality of condition, and a corollary
that Green always attached to it, a corollary he explained to a cor-
respondent as "acceptance of public responsibility as a measure of
one's liberties."7
In the Roanoke colony authority under Governor White
devolves on Ananias Dare because of social position. While Dare Is
brave and hard working, he is also obtuse, indecisive, and a martinet.
Even his father-in-law Governor White recognizes the absurdity and
danger in Dare's practice of marching off his troops four-square to
fight Indians lying in wait behind trees. At his death Dare Is mourned
as any individual would be, but there is no sense that the colony has
lost one of its pillars.
On the other hand John Borden is a natural leader. Even
before the colonists left England, he rallied the faint hearted with the
challenge to come and help build a new nation, "our nation" he calls
it -- that is, a nation of common people. a On Roanoke Island he is
perceptive, energetic, and large-minded. Doing the work of ten, he
still directs and encourages others, who sometimes grumble in
admiration as he pushes them to do more, or do it better. After
White returns to England for supplies and Dare is killed, Borden
shoulders chief responsibility for the colony. He Is the one who
scouts the territory, agonizes over options, and leads the others In
deciding how to meet the Spanish threat that ends the play.
The comic sub-plot epitomizes the theme of individual growth
and responsible fulfillment within an open society. Old Tom, the
wastrel in England, In the New World earns the love of an Indian
woman, the respect of his fellow colonists, and a measure of self-
respect. His soliloquy toward the end of the play as he stands watch
at night, the lives of the colonists literally in his keeping, is an emo-
tional high point of every performance: ''There in England all remem-
bered me -- aye, with kicks and curses and a terrible usage of
tongues they did. Hah-hah-hah. And deep I drowned my sorrows in
the mug. But here -- where there is no remembrance I who was
lately nothing am become somebody. For -- item -- have I not now
the keeping of some sixty souls in my care - I who could never care
for my own? Verily, Tom, I hardly know thee in thy greatness. (Salut-
ing the air.) Roanoke, thou hast made a man of me. (He draws him-
self up and marches proudly back and forth a few times.)" (122)
His diary shows that Green read Native Son within a few
weeks of its publication in the spring of 1940. Like most people at
the time, black as well as white, he was shocked at the gruesome
details, especially those following Bigger's murder of Mary Dalton.
"Found [the novel] horrifying, brutal, and extraordi narily vivid, he
noted. "Reminiscent a bit of Crime and Punishment . ..g Unlike most
whites, however, he was prepared to accept the novel's indictment of
American society - prepared, because for two decades he had made
the same point, that racism was the glaring failure of American
democracy. Between the wars Green's. racial outlook was unusual
enough to repay consideration.
His playwrighting career began in the early twenties as a
sustained attempt to bring authentic black experience into the
drama. Lonesome Road, one of his early collections of short plays,
is subtitled Six Plays for the Negro Theatre. And his first Broadway
play, In Abraham's Bosom, is an astute and honest meditation on the
life of a Moses-like black man who aspires to lead his people out of
bondage by means of education. Among the playwrights interested
in black experience at the time- Ridgely Torrence, Eugene O'Neill,
and Marc Connelly were others -- Green was by far the best
acquainted with the daily life of blacks and the best able to Imagine
the experience of a black person sympathetically.
While his Imaginative work explores the ramifications of racism
in the attitudes and behavior of his characters, white as well as black,
Green's letters and essays deal with racism directly. A good exam-
ple is the "Introduction" he wrote for Congaree Sketches, a collection
of black folk tales by E. C. L. Adams published by the University of
North Carolina Press in 1927. Calling as It does for full equality of
condition for blacks, for an American social order in which race does
not count - that is, by Implication for racial Integration - It is hard to
over-estimate the audacity of the piece in Its time.
In the essay Green supports the radical W. E. B. DuBois, who
frightened most whites and many blacks in the early decades of the
century with his impatient crusade for freedom and justice for blacks.
And to make his point he uses Langston Hughes's "I Too Sing
America, with Its emphatic closing l ine, "I too am America. Blacks
are still "in the ditch doing the dirty digging and the white man on the
bank directing It, Green points out.10 But like all social relationships,
that one will change. He foresees the day when blacks will be out of
the ditch and on level ground with whites. When that happens the
two races may "stand In their separate place apart, but I doubt it.
They have too much in common not to pass a word with one
another .... And in the light of [the benefits of mutuality] I can see no
sense in the talk of segregation, back to Africa, and the like .... It all
n
seems beside the point" [xi].
Much of Chapel Hill's reputation as a hotbed of liberalism on
the race question in the twenties and thirties stemmed from the work
of the progressive sociologists led by Howard Odum at his Institute
for Research In the Social Sciences. But it would be the early forties
before any of them would avow, as Green did in 1927, that segrega-
tion was "beside the point. And when you look a few hundred miles
west, to Nashville, on the race question the view is appalling. Robert
Penn Warren was later embarrassed by the essay he contributed to
I'll Take My Stand. In that Agrarian manifesto of 1930 he had the
main article on race relations in the South. As a model for blacks he
holds up, not DuBois and Hughes, but Booker T. Washington, the
apostle of gradualism, and Warren's social analysis is unambiguous
in its support of segregation. The difference between Green and the
Agrarians is crystalized by Donald Davidson's complaint In the same
symposium that "Green's studies of negro life are palpably tinged
with latter-day abolitionism. 11
When the directors of the UNC Press discovered Green's
"Introduction" to Congaree Sketches, they did their best to squash
publication of the book, fearing the introduction would incite
demonstrations in the state and cause the legislature to cut university
appropriations. They were thwarted by a courageous and wily
editor,
1
2 but such things suggest the distance between Green and
most of his contemporaries on matters of race.
When Wright's agent told him Green wanted to dramatize
Native Son, Wright was pleased. In a letter he told Green that in 1936
"I had to resign my job as publicity director of the Federal Negro
Theater In Chicago ... because I fought for a production of your
'Hymn to the Rising Sun.' Indeed, I had to fight both Negroes and
whites to get them to see that the play was authentic." Native Son,
he feared, would face the same problem. "Bigger Thomas, if put on
the stage, will be a kind of character that many Negroes and whites
will not like. But. ... because of the many threads of Negro and
white life you caught in ['Hymn'], and because of the kind of insight
you displayed for the Negro characters in that play, I think you can
handle a boy like Bigger."13 Wright was in Cuernavaca, Mexico, dur-
Ing the spring of 1940, and in June, on his way back to New York
City, he stopped In Chapel Hill for two days while he and Green out-
lined the play. Then In mid-July he returned for a month, and the two
of them wrote a first draft. Through the fall and winter Green revised
the play, and in March 1941 Native Son opened for a substantial run
in New York City.
A book could be written on the dramatization, production, and
publication history of Native Son. For Instance, the first time through
Green and Wright let Bigger remember the murder of Mary Dalton in
a nightmare vision rather than showing the murder directly. That
10
way, they thought, they could better convey the cause of his panic -
the memories of lynchings and related atrocities that almost paralyze
him with fear when he realizes he is about to be caught with a white
woman In her bedroom. They also thought narration could hide the
Implausible way the murder takes place In the novel. The element of
phantasy clashed with the realistic treatment of the other scenes,
however, and they decided to present the murder realistically too.
What emerged was a script of ten scenes to be played without inter-
mission, each scene spare, direct, and explosive.
The play brings the thematic line of the novel into high relief.
Following the novel, it uses the contrasting symbols of rat and air-
plane, the one picturing Bigger's entrapment In segregated black
America with little opportunity for self-realization, the other objectify-
ing his longing for escape and a chance to find himself.
The play also follows the ironic curves in the action of the
novel. Bigger is Introduced into the family of the Daltons, and these
people -- white, rich, and noted for a social conscience - offer Bigger
just the opportunity he needs, It seems. But the Introduction
demonstrates the alarming truth that his experience Is so different
from theirs that neither can understand the other. The result of this
mingling of two worlds is not Bigger's salvation but his murder of the
daughter in the family. Again, however, the result is unexpected.
The terrible truth of what life In a closed society has done to him is
brought home by the fact that, as the search for Bigger intensifies, he
experiences a sense of release, a warped but exhilarating fulfillment,
because for the first time in his life he knows the white world is aware
of him. In the courtroom the system rather than the individual Is put
on trial. On the wall is a large portrait of the person who wrote: "We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Uberty and the pursuit of Happi-
ness. And his lawyer explains the failure of American society to
guarantee those rights for Bigger and his race, and asks for mercy.
The play ends with Bigger on death-row minutes before his execu-
tion.
The final scene -more precisely, a disagreement about the
final scene -- brings into focus an important dimension of self-
realization as Green understood it. John Houseman's Run-Through
is so far the best known account of the production of Native Son, but
Houseman distorts the disagreement beyond recognition. He pre-
sents it as If it were between Green and Wright when in fact it was
between Green and Orson Welles.
In 1941 Welles was on a roll. Within the past few years he had
launched his Mercury Theater with several sensational productions,
scared the wits out of the Eastern seaboard with the radio broadcast
of a Martian invasion of earth, and just finished the film Citizen Kane
11
before taking over as director of Native Son. Determined that it too
would be sensational, he decided to end the play with lights sud-
denly blazing forth from the electrocution chamber and Bigger, sil-
houetted in the glare, spread-eagle against the bars of his cell -- an
obvious symbol : Bigger as Christ crucified by racist America.
This powerful image of Bigger as victim harmonized with the
opening rat symbolism and the deterministic bent of the lawyer's
defense. It also corresponded with the general indictment of
American society that Green carried over from the novel. But early in
their collaboration Wright agreed with Green that Bigger should
experience some growth during the play, should come to some
understanding of his own involvement in the direction of his life. For
Green, in other words, self-realization presupposed a degree of self-
awareness and a willingness to accept responsibility for one's
actions. This emphasis too had a basis in the novel, particularly the
closing pages where his lawyer keeps prodding Bigger with ques-
tions that make him feel alive, that make him think. It is also implicit
in the symbolism of the airplane. The final scene of the play as
devised by Green and Wright therefore showed Bigger, in conversa-
tion with his lawyer, groping toward self-knowledge. At the end, the
plane droning overhead to suggest his longing for freedom, Bigger in
a gesture of self-determination walks unaided into the death cham-
ber.
When Green visited rehearsals and saw the last scene as
Welles had staged it, the two discussed things in a manner that may
have been heated. Green said Welles's ending cheapened the play,
reducing it from tragedy to pathos, and also made it socially
irresponsible, the simplistic presentation of Bigger as victim being
more likely to inflame racial tensions than to calm them.14 What
Welles said is not known, but that is no matter. Wright, who was
nowise at home in the theater and had taken little part in rehearsals,
went along with Welles, and for Green that ended it. After all, he
reasoned, the play was a dramatization of Wright's novel. So Welles
staged the play with his ending, which can be seen in the Best Plays
volume for 1941, and Green published the play with his, which can
be seen in the 1941 edition.15
The Lost Colony has affinities with early Greek drama and the
Corpus Christi plays of medieval England. Uke them, it is designed
for production outdoors before large audiences. And like them, it
dramatizes a value central to Its culture with the aim of revivifying
communal beliefs. Native Son, regardless of the ending (which
relates to Bigger's growth, not to the social theme of the play), does
the opposite. It makes an audience experience the waste when
native sons or daughters are denied their birthright. And It does so
most powerfully, not by social analysis or argument, but by showing
that Bigger had to kill in order to begin the process of self-realization.
12
Endnotes
1
Paul Green, "Symphonic Drama," Dramatic Heritage (New York:
Samuel French, 1953), 14-26.
2Green to Barry P. Wilson, 15 January 1955, Paul Green Papers,
Southern Hist orical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill. Quoted by permission of the Paul Green Foun-
dation. Other unpubli shed l etters and diaries quoted or cited
hereafter have the same location and, except as noted, are used with
the same permission.
3Paul Green, Wings for to Fly (New York: Samuel French, 1959), 5.
4Paul Green, "Drama and the Weather," Drama and the Weather
~ e w York: Samuel French, 1958), 45-53.
Alexis de Tocquevllle, Democracy In America, trans. Phillips Brad-
ley, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 1:3.
6nquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1946), 2:98.
TTo John Pomfret, 31 January 1948.
BThe Lost Colony (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1937), 55.
9Paul Green diary, 29 April 1940.
10Paul Green, "I ntroduction," E.C.L. Adams, Congaree Sketches
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927), x.
11Donald Davidson, "A Mirror for Artists: I'll Take My Stand {1930;
reprint ed., New York: Harper Torch books, 1962), 59.
1
2-fhe whole story Is given In Daniel Joseph Slngal, The War Within:
From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 265-301.
13Richard Wright to Paul Green, 22 May 1940. Quoted by permission
of Ellen Wright.
14
Green to Orson Welles, 2 March and 10 March 1941 ; Green diary, 1
March 1941.
15(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), 132-44. Later versions of
the last scene can be seen in Black Drama: An Anthology, eds. Wil-
liam Brasmer and Dominick Consolo (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E.
Merrill Pub. Co., 1970), 173-n; and Paul Green and Richard Wright,
Native Son: the Biography of a Young American (New York: Samuel
French, 1980) , 94-99.
.. ..
O'NEILL'S HUGHIE AND
ALBEE'S mE ZOO STORY:
TWO TRIBUTES TO THE TELLER AND HIS TALE
Sally Harvey
Eugene O'Neill wrote his one-act play, Hughie, in 1942, near
the end of his career; Edward Albee wrote The Zoo Story in 1958, as
his career was just beginning. Although both plays demonstrate one
human being's need to communicate with another, the two plays
show marked differences in how such communication takes place
and what sort of relationship results.
1
In Hughie, the protagonist,
Erie Smith, finally establishes communication with the aloof Night
Clerk, who by the closing scene has begun to shoot dice with Erie,
both men making believe that the Night Clerk is the famous gambler,
Arnold Rothstein. In The Zoo Story, the protagonist, Jerry, finally
communicates with the equally aloof Peter, but the play ends not
with the two joining in a friendly game, but with Jerry goading Peter
into stabbing him. Thus, although both plays stress the importance
of reaching out to another, Hughie implies that the purpose of such
communication is primarily the reinforcing of illusions, while The Zoo
Story, in bold and violent terms, indicates that deep communication
strips away illusions, especially illusions about oneself. O'Neill
shows compassion for a humanity which needs pipe dreams, while
Albee passionately refuses to tolerate such excursions from reality.
Despite what may seem a polar opposition in theme, both plays
pay tribute to the storyteller, who takes the first step in reaching out
to others. Travis Bogard sees the theme of storytelling as an
underlying link between the two playwrights: '"To read Albee . .. is to
enter where O'Neill walked .... in an isolated, bizarre wasteland in
which a few characters wander, lost and desolate, seeking someone
to whom they can tell a story ... " (xvi). Erie Smith in Hughie and
Jerry in The Zoo Story seek someone to whom they can tell a story.
Although both men find an indifferent or unwilling listener, each
manages eventually to involve his listener in his story. In their
portrayals of successful storytellers, both O'Neill and Albee celebrate
the human drive to create--the ability to shape experience into
stories--as well as the need to share those stories, to make meaning
through the process of storytelling. Both playwrights seem to agree
that, whether a person weaves some threads of truth into the fabric
of fiction or creates an elaborate tapestry of lies, the tale gives both
teller and audience the strength to endure.
Storytelling becomes both the means of survival and the proof
14
that man is neither a vegetable nor merely an animal. Hughie pre-
sents this view in explicit terms, but such optimism might be missed
in The Zoo Story, with its "ambiguous suicide-murder" (Cohn, 134),
and the dying Jerry's final indictment of Peter: "You're an animal,
too" (61 ). Yet Albee also suggests that a person, through narrative
creativity, can rise above the animal state, even if one must often
start there In the attempt to communicate honestly with others. In
both plays, then, the metanarrative subtext serves not only to
celebrate the storyteller's craft but also to highlight the inter-
relationship between teller and audience, who establish through their
shared story a sense of kinship, a kinship which Michael Manheim
describes as a "rhythm of alternating hostility and affection (8). I
want to look at this theme of storytelling in Hughie and The Zoo Story
from two perspectives, then: first--perhaps the more obvious of the
two--the shared story as a symbol of the human need to communi-
cate; second, the storytelling "frame" as the author's own reflection
on his artistic medium.
Hughie opens with the gambler-storyteller, Erie Smith, seeking
kinship, looking for an audience. Erie has lost perhaps his only friend
before the play opens: Hughie, the easy-going night clerk who had
always been eager to listen to Erie's tales. The pall of death hangs
over the empty, drab hotel lobby, the setting for the play. Not only is
Erie haunted by death, but so too is the new Night Clerk, Charles
Hughes, who lives a death-in-life existence. He speaks "in the vague
tone of a corpse" (837) and leans on the desk in the semblance of a
"drooping waxwork" (835). We sense that Hughes's emotions died
long ago. He "has forgotten how it feels to be bored" (831); he can
hardly remember "the last time he was able to feel despair" (837).
Trapped in numbness, he seeks refuge In a fantasy world of noise,
destruction, and disaster, to which he escapes by means of the
sounds that he hears from outside--sirens, a policeman's footsteps,
clanging garbage cans. This, for Hughes, is survival. "Nothing excit-
ing has happened in any night I've ever lived through!" he tells him-
self (842), so he creates his own fiction to fill the vacuum of his exist-
ence.2
Erie, too, feels the pressure of such a vacuum, now that
Hughie Is absent from his life. Afraid to face the emptiness of his
hotel room, which serves as a physical reminder of his spiritual and
emotional Isolation, he Instead tries to engage Hughes In conversa-
tion, thus forcing the Night Clerk to make repeated return trips from
his own Isolated world. Hughes grows Inwardly Irritated at Erie's per-
sistent attempts to tell him about himself and about Hughie, yet the
Night Clerk remains outwardly polite. Still, Erie senses Hughes's
indifference and Inattention, remarking cynically: "Sorry if I'm keep-
Ing you up, Sport" (836). Erie knows that Hughes Is not Hughie,
despite the similarity in their names, but losing Hughie has awakened
....
Erie to the fact that he had depended on Hughie--and still needs
someone--to listen to his stories, to validate his fictions. For his own
emotional survival, Erie must transform Hughes into a living,
responsive human being, an audience. The surprising outcome Is
that, In so doing, Erie also unwittingly ushers Charles Hughes into a
more meaningful, if still illusory, existence.
The setting of Hughie is well suited for the triumph of Illusion.
O'Neill describes the hotel as "anything a paying guest wants It to be"
(831), but at the beginning of the play, this is a world of unshared illu-
sions, with Hughes shutting himself off from others by his repeated
journeys into fantasy, and Erie likewise escaping nostalgically to the
past. The play ends, however, in a world of shared illusions which
engender confidence, warmth, and affection--even if the stage direc-
tions remind us that it is "contemptuous" affection (851).3
Such shared Illusion, O'Neill implies, is vital to man's survival.
Both Erie and Hughes have found a new means of survival by the
time the curtain closes on the two engaged in their shared fantasy, a
crap game in which Erie uses fixed dice and Hughes, using Erie's
money, pretends to be the gambler Arnold Rothstein. We sense a
victory for humanity in this final scene, with Erie "purged of grief"
(851). Once both Hughes and Erie agree that life "is a goddamned
racket" (848), they can agree, too, on which illusion to take refuge in
as a defense against their own mortality and the meaninglessness of
existence. "Hughie focuses on the two things O'Neill thinks a man
needs to survive and to give his life meaning, Virginia Aoyd points
out: "the pipe dream and some type of human relationship" (564).
We can boil this down to one thing--a fiction shared between storytel-
ler and audience, even an audience of one.
Uke Hughie, The Zoo Story depicts a storyteller, Jerry, and an
audience of one, Peter. These strangers establish a relationship, too,
although it is briefer and perhaps more honest than that which Erie
and Hughes establish. Jerry, like Erie, is on a mission to communi-
cate with another human being. A recent experiment with his land-
lady's dog has enlightened him about the human condition, and he
wants to--perhaps we should say needs to--share his new aware-
ness. Peter, the reluctant listener who, like Charles Hughes, much
prefers his wortd of isolation, politely but persistently tries to continue
reading his book as he sits alone on "his" park bench, until Jerry
finally cajoles and taunts him into listening to his dog story. Peter
has managed up to now to Insulate himself from others, but not
through sojourns into noise-induced fantasies-Hughes's preferred
mode of insulation. Instead, Peter has fashioned a pseudo-identity
that allows him to remain aloof: the publishing executive immersed
in his reading. By the end of the play, however, he can no longer
hide behind his book or his position, for Jerry, unlike Erie who good-
1n
naturedly coaxes Charles Hughes out of isolation, violently strips
away Peter' s self-delusion and feigned indifference. Jerry even
involves Peter in a shared story, just as Erie involves Charles Hughes
in one, but does so in a far more shocking way, for Peter becomes
an active (if anonymous) agent in Jerry's evening news story of a
man stabbed to death on a bench in Central Park, the story which
Jerry has had in mind since he first approached Peter: "You'll read
about it in the papers tomorrow if you don't see it on your TV tonight"
(16).
In showing Peter that a person needs to reach out to a fellow
human being, Jerry may "save" Peter, as critics have noted,
4
but
Jerry, too, experiences salvation before his death; for even though
his relationship with Peter lasts only moments, he does succeed, as
Erie does with Hughes, i n establishing a basis for kinship. "I was so
afraid I'd drive you away, the dying Jerry tells Peter. Ironically,
Peter's unwitting act of violence becomes the communicating link
between the two. "I came unto you . .. and you have comforted me"
(60-61 ), Jerry tells him. Jerry's comfort comes In seeing that Peter Is
like him: "You're an animal, too," he tells Peter (61).
The "too" underscores the sense of kinship, as do Jerry's other
acts of "sharing" in the final scene: he repeats Peter' s silly story of
the parakeets making dinner, and he echoes "in scornful mimicry and
supplication" Peter's "Oh my God" (62) . The stage directions, which
call for a mixed tone in Jerry's dying words, bring to mind the mixed
message in Erie's "contemptuous, affectionate wink" at t he end of
Hughie. Jerry had earlier told Peter that we are "separated by bars
from everyone else" (49), but when he impales himself on the knife
that he has thrown to Peter, he breaks through those bars of sepa-
ration. Thus, both the action and the verbal communication at the
end of The Zoo Story convey a theme of sharing, communicating. 5
The shared story Is the artistic medium of O'Neill and Albee, as
It Is of all writers, since writers rely on their ability to create a story
and to involve an audience in that story. Writers also comment
within their stories on that artistic medium, perhaps more frequently
than we might at first notice. As Raymond Federman reminds us, all
works of fiction present In some way a self-reflexive commentary
about "their coming into being and maintaining existence," thus
allowing the reader "to witness the interplay between author and
creation" (1143, 1145). Such self-reflexive commentary Is certainly
evident In other O'Neill works. The Iceman Cometh alternately
damns and praises the storyteller, most obviously In the character-
ization of Hickey. Although Hickey finally tells the truth Instead of
persisting In "swapping lies" (699), he remains to the end the teller of
tales, still entertaining the audience of self-deluded "pipe dreamers
at Harry Hope's bar, even when he recounts his tragic murder of his
wife. Even In the early play, Bound East for Cardiff, O'Neill gives
...
storytelling a position of importance. The dying Yank reminisces with
his fellow sailor, Driscoll, in the final moments of the play, sharing
stories about their earlier experiences: "Remember the time ... ?
Remember the night ... ?" (43). Brutus Jones in The Emperor Jones
is a master of storytelling. He creates his own fiction--that he can be
harmed only by a silver bullet--and uses that and other "stori es" to
secure his position of power over the natives. As he reminds
Smithers: "Ain't a man's talking big what makes him big--long as he
makes folks believe it?" (831).
Albee, too, reflects on the role of storyteller in his other plays.
In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the shared story about a make-
believe son has helped George and Martha survive, even though It
has ironically hindered their emotional growth. Thus, George, in an
intensely creative act, fashions a story about the death of this son,
thus forcing Martha and himself to abandon their fictions and build
an honest relationship with each other. When George sings their old
"fun and games song--"Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf"-to Martha in
the final lines of the play, her response--"! ... am ... George"--
provides another reminder that storytellers can create destructive fic-
tions (242) . Still, George's ability to create a fiction that undermines
the earlier, destructive fiction, as well as Albee's casting of George as
an historian--a storyteller about the past--suggests Albee's underly-
ing commentary on storyteller as hero. Elizabeth In The Lady from
Dubuque serves as storyteller /heroine, who compassionately
creates a tale that the dying Jo Is happy to believe. Elizabeth claims
to be Jo's long-absent mother, come to comfort her dying daughter.
She tells stories of her past, "when I was growing up, back on the
farm in the outskirts of Dubuque" (145). Here, Albee reminds us of
her importance as a storyteller by her sharp response to the
unbelieving Sam: "Will you let me finish the story!?" (145). Asked
about the centrality of storytelling in his plays, Albee insists: "I don't
like them [the stories] there as symbols or signposts . ... They're
there for a reason, but I discover It afterwards" (quoted in Kolin, 184).
Perhaps that reason, whether Albee has or has not discovered it, is
the self-reflexive commentary that Federman describes. Such com-
mentary is certainly evident in The Man Who Had Three Arms. The
protagonist, Himself, is a lecturer/storyteller whose verbally violent
relationship with his audience recalls Jerry's with Peter.
Although a metanarrative subtext can be detected in other
O'Neill and Albee plays, that subtext is especially rich In Hughie and
The Zoo Story, perhaps because these plays narrow the focus to two
people-the storyteller and his listener. With the focus thus narrowed,
each play readily "turns back on itself (Federman, 1143), reflecting
the playwright's attitude about not only man's need to tell stories that
someone will listen to, but also about the artist's need (and ability) to
18
create. What this subtext reveals, then, is O'Neill's and Albee's own
celebration of their craft, as well as the unique motivation that drives
each author to tell stories.
In Hughie, Erie tells stories about Hughie and about himself,
including stories about his own storytelling. Erie admits that he often
lied in his boasting to Hughie, though "not any more'n a guy naturally
does"; he tries to make Hughes (and himself) believe that he did so
because Hughie "lapped it up, that his stories were solely a gesture
of kindness to Hughie: "I sure took him around with me in tales and
showed him one hell of a time" (845). Finally, however, Erie admits
that Hughie's belief In him and his stories gave his own life meaning:
"I 'd get to seein' myself like he seen me . .. . I was wise I was kiddin'
myself {845), he insists. But the belief In self that a believing listener
engenders Is a vital need. Thus, the more Erie fails to communicate
with Charles Hughes, the closer he comes to despair, until at last he
says, "Christ, It's lonely. I wish Hughie was here. I'd tell him a tale
that'd make his eyes pop!" (844) . Unlike Jerry, who when Peter com-
ments, "you're full of stories" (35), snaps back defensively, "You don't
have to listen" (35), Erie not only refuses to let Hughes's Indifference
and Inattention stop him, but even repeats his open plea for an
involved listener: "Christ I wish Hughie was alive and kickin'" (847).
Not long after this second exclamation of loneliness, when Erie has
almost given up on getting through to Hughes, he still "earnestly"
attempts once more to transform the Night Clerk Into an active
listener: "Usten, Pal" (848).6
Charles Hughes, as noted, Is actively involved in fashioning his
own self-Isolating, sound-induced fantasies. As long as he remains
his own storyteller, he cannot participate in Erie's tales. Yet as
Bigsby observes of many of O'Neill's characters, Hughes's creative
ability has limits: "Required to create their own meaning, they lack
resources. The failure Is partly one of Imagination and partly one of
will" (1: 1 0). Without the stimulus of outdoor noises, the Night Clerk's
imagination fails him, no matter how much he wills to escape. Thus,
when silence "presses suffocatingly upon the street" (847), Hughes's
mind "cannot make a getaway" (846). Cringing from that silence, he
suddenly and repentantly remembers Erie, and that a clerk should
always be attentive"; but even more crucially, Hughes becomes
aware of his own need to communicate with another human being: "I
need company" (847). This awakening to his own need for a com-
panion creates in Hughes a sense of desperation which enables him
to reach back Into the half-heard conversation and retrieve a thread
with which he can weave a connection between himself and the
almost-lost Erie: the notorious gambler, Arnold Rothstein, whom Erie
has worked for and whom Hughes Idolizes. Rothstein serves as a
springboard for their shared experience, as Erie's enthusiastic
response makes clear: "Say, Charlie, why didn't you put me wise
before, you was interested in gambling? Hell, I got you all wrong, Pal
. . . . That's the stuff. You and me'll get along" (850).
Just as Erie, while he is telling his "Hughie" story, not only
boasts about his own ability as a storyteller but also confesses a
great deal about his (and perhaps O'Neill's) need to tell stories, so
too Jerry, in setting up Peter to listen to his dog story, reveals a great
deal about himself as storyteller--about the kinds of stories that he
feels are Important, as well as the ones that he would rather not tell
or is unable to tell. Jerry is eager to fashion a "story" about Peter, by
analyzing and providing his own conclusions to every detail of
Peter's existence. Seeing that Peter smokes a pipe Instead of
cigarettes, he assumes that Peter' s reason Is to avoid lung cancer.
When he finds out that Peter has daughters, Jerry insists: "But you
wanted boys (17). When he discovers that Peter owns cats and
birds rather than a dog, Jerry remarks: "But that can't be your Idea.
No, sir. Your wife and daughters?" (20). Jerry asks Peter who his
favorite writers are, but answers for him: "Baudelaire and J. P.
Marquand?" (24).
Jerry thus fashions his own "fictions" about Peter. At the same
time, he insulates himself from his "real" world, past and present, just
as Peter, Erie, and Hughes find ways to avoid their unpleasant
realities. Jerry wants to teach through his experience, but only selec-
tively: he feels qualified--or safe--in analyzing certain isolated
aspects of his experience. Peter asks him why he lives in the squalid
rooming house that he describes, and Jerry answers guardedly, "I
don't know" (26). When Peter asks him why he keeps two empty pic-
ture frames, Jerry becomes even more defensive. Although Jerry
relates details of his unhappy childhood, he insists that he "has no
feelings about any of it that I care to admit to myselr (29). He also
seems either unwilling or unable to understand why he never goes
out with a woman more than once, merely observing: "It's odd, and I
wonder If it's sad" (29).
Jerry steers Peter away from the stories that he doesn't want
to tell, and encourages Peter instead to ask him about the parts of
his life that he feels capable of explaining: "I would have thought that
you would have asked me about the pornographic playing cards"
(31). What he seems most certain about is his reason for coming to
the zoo; thus he returns to the promised zoo story, which provides
an opening for his dog parable, through which he hopes to teach
Peter something about human existence.
Jerry's introduction to his dog story, his description of his
repulsive landlady who victimizes him as "the object of her sweaty
lust (33), is actually a parable within a parable, providing several
insights into Jerry's attitude toward storytelling. He explains to Peter
that he fashions a fiction for the landlady, to ward off her advances:
?0
When she talks to me ... about her room and how I should
come there, I merely say: but, Love; wasn't yesterday
enough for you, and the day before? .. . and it is at this
moment that I think I might be doing some good In that tor-
mented house ... a simple-minded smile begins to form
on her unthinkable face, and she giggles and groans as she
thinks about yesterday and the day before; as she believes
and relives what never happened. (34)
The game of Illusion, similar to the one with which Hughie concludes
in that its effectiveness depends on the participation of both people,
apparently has meaning for Jerry, too. It is a repulsive, pathetic
game, but in participating, he feels that he "might be doing some
good in that tormented house. It is another example, like the dog
story, of Jerry's sincere conviction that "you have to make a start
somewhere" (42) in reaching others, even if that somewhere Is an
illusory world where people tacitly agree, as Erie and Hughes--and
the landlady--finally do, to pretend that the game is real. Perhaps
that is why Albee's stage directions at this point describe Jerry as
only "lightly mocking" Peter when he agrees with Peter that "fact is
better left to fiction" (35). One can almost see in Jerry's attitude
toward his landlady, in his understanding of her need for a shared
illusion, the characteristic O'Neill compassion.
Jerry's more pressing need (and perhaps Albee's), to teach
something through a story, becomes fully evident in his account of
his experience with the dog, a story that evokes in us, if not in Peter,
compassion for its teller, who discovers too late that the dog's
aggression was a sort of love, a "love" preferable by far to
Indifference. Although the dog's eventual apathy did guarantee for
Jerry "solitary free passage" (43) to his room, he realizes that he lost
far more than he gained. Hoping perhaps to save Peter from a
similar fate, he concludes his parable with an explicit statement of its
moral: "We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach
each other" (44).
Despite Jerry's lack of subtlety, Peter refuses to grasp any
meaning from the dog parable. Instead, he tries once more to isolate
himself: "I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE. I don't understand
you (45). This forces Jerry, who is no less desperate and far more
aggressive than Erie, to find a different way to reach his stubborn
listener. The new direction that he takes with Peter is signaled by the
physical contact Jerry makes when he tickles Peter. Just as Jerry
earlier told Peter, "sometimes a person has to go a very long dis-
tance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly" (25),
Jerry now takes Peter the long way around to grasp the important
message of involvement-vs.-apathy which Peter refused to see in
21
Jerry's dog story. He first involves Peter physically, with his tickling,
which puts Peter in the silly, creative frame of mind to fashion his
own "zoo story."
Up to now, Peter has been stubbornly holding onto a fictional
self-i mage, despite Jerry's barbing attempts to push him off his
pedestal. Now that Peter is beginning to participate in "animal
stories, Jerry Is ready to push Peter off his symbol of Isolation, the
park bench that Peter has claimed by right of his consistent
occupancy: "I sit on this bench almost every Sunday afternoon" (51).
Peter responds to Jerry's physical pushing by communicating at a
primitive, Instinctive level. Harold Bloom views "the battle for the
park bench [as] a territorial imperative, [which] has exposed to Peter
that we are all animals also" (6).
7
But is this the only moral of Jerry's
"Zoo Story"? Are Jerry's "calculated efforts to provoke at least an
animal response in Peter" (Bennett, 113) Albee's final, grim view on
the limits of human potential, with animal response as the most that
humans can hope for? The focus on stories and storytelling in the
play suggests a far greater potential for humanity, even If the final
scene reflects uncertainty about the fulfillment of that potential.
Jerry's death can neither be dismissed as an act of existential
despair nor merely as proof of man's animal baseness, for through
his death he not only awakens Peter but also performs a final crea-
tive act, fashioning another story--a murder mystery. On one level,
then, The Zoo Story ends as Hughie ends, with illusion triumphing,
for the story that will appear on the evening news, of an apparent
murder in the park, is an elaborate fiction--but one that Jerry hopes
may have accomplished "some good."
Psychologist Rollo May's analysis of human response to crisis
Is helpful in understanding the purpose behind Jerry's final story.
Speaking of the modern Individual, who--like Peter--has sunk Into
conformism, "giving up awareness, May concludes that
a crisis is exactly what is required to shock people out of
unaware dependence upon external dogma and to force
them to unravel layers of pretense to reveal naked truth
about themselves which, however unpleasant, will at least be
solid. (57)
Peter's final howl, "Oh my God" (62), suggests that Jerry, through the
crisis of his death and Peter's forced participation in that event, has
succeeded in bringing Peter to an awareness about his own need to
involve himself with others, in much the same way that the crisis of
Hughie's death brought Erie to an awareness of his need for another
human being. The final scene of Hughie shows the two actors finally
involved in one story--the crap game. The final scene of The Zoo
Story shows the same type of joint participation. "Here we are, Jerry
22
says triumphantly. And now you know all about what happened at
the zoo" (60). Peter has gained knowledge about much more than
what happened at the zoo. He has unraveled all of his own "layers of
pretense," with Jerry's help, and even helps Jerry fill in the details of
his final "story": Peter lets Jerry wipe his fingerprints off the knife;
then, at Jerry's admonition, Peter takes his book and hurries away.
Jerry has done "some good" by Involving Peter in this story.
We might say that he has taken on the role of psychotherapist that
May describes, liberating his "client," Peter, from "blind Isolation,"
from a "mere vegetating In his body, his dreams, his private wishes,
his conceit and his presumptions"; Jerry has prepared Peter "for a life
of . .. genuine community" (May, 157-58). "You're not really a vege-
table" (61), Jerry reassures Peter. Jerry the storyteller has finally
found an active listener. His stories save Peter just as Erie's stories
ultimately liberate Charles Hughes from his isolation and loneliness.
Eugene O'Neill and Edward Albee have embedded in these
two plays about storytellers their own views on the storyteller's role.
Although Bigsby sees in Hughie "an expression of O'Neill's fear of
the final futility of art In that Its subject is a story-teller whose stories
never communicate" (1:119), I see instead In Hughie an expression
of a continued faith In the storyteller. "The point is that life in itself is
nothing, O'Neill said. "It Is the dream that keeps us fighting" (quoted
in Bigsby, 1 :43). Erie Smith is such a fighter, an artist who cajoles
others into sharing his dream by his persistence In telling about it.
8
As much as Albee continues to insist that his mission Is "to
refute the whole argument of O'Neill [that man needs Illusions]"
(1981, qtd. In Kolin, 170), he seems consistent with O'Neill on the
Importance of storytelling. But like Jerry, who must teach through
his story, Albee feels that his tales must ultimately serve to expose
Illusions:
The playwright shouldn't let people off the hook. He should
examine their lives and keep hammering away at the fact
that some people are not fully participating In their lives ... .
Jerry has to shock [Peter) into understanding the tragic
sense of being alive. (1985, quoted in Kolin and Davis, 199)
Early In his career, Albee remarked that "the
responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic"
(1963, qtd. in McCarthy, 16). But the "demonic social critic" of the
1960's, who would even then have agreed with O'Neill about the
importance of the shared story, seems now closer to O'Neill also In
his views on the human need for illusion. "I do think people probably
need self-deception and lies," he says in a 1981 interview. "The only
distinction I would make is that I think people should have them but
be aware that they are deceiving themselves" (quoted in Kolin, 170).9
Granted, O'Neill describes this human need in more com-
passionate terms than Albee does. Most of us would rather admit to
having dreams--even "pipe dreams"--than we would to "self-
deception and lies." Still, as even Albee suggests, any storyteller--
himself included--must to some extent share O'Neill's optimistic view
of the dream that keeps man fighting: "If I were a pessimist I
wouldn't bother to write. Writing, Itself, taking the trouble, com-
municating with your fellow human being, Is valuable, that's an act of
optimism. There's a positive force within the struggle" (quoted in
Kolin and Davis, 193). Perhaps the Albee of the 1990's, who thirty
years earlier in The Zoo Story revealed an underlying affinity for
storytellers, even when they do mix fiction with truth, now might
more openly share O'Neill's admiration for the undaunted spirit of
human creativity that the storyteller embodies.
Sources Cited
Albee, Edward. The Lady from Dubuque. New York: Atheneum,
1980.
__ . The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox:
Three Plays. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1960.
__ . Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York: Atheneum, 1978.
Bennett, Robert B. "Tragic Vision in The Zoo Story. Essays on
Modern American Drama: Williams, Miller, Albee, and
Shepard. Ed. Dorothy Parker. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1987. 109-120.
Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century
American Drama. 3 vols. London: Cambridge University
Press, 1984.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Edward Albee. Modern Critical Views Series.
New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Cohn, Ruby. Dialogue in American Drama. Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 1971.
Federman, Raymond. "Self-Reflexive Fiction." Columbia Literary His-
tory of the United States. Ed. Emory Elliot. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988. 1142-1157.
Floyd, Virginia. The Plays of Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment.
Literature and Life Series. New York: Frederick Ungar Pub-
lishing Co., 1985.
Kolin, Philip C., ed. Conversations with Edward Albee. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1988.
__ and J. Madison Davis, eds. Critical Essays on Edward Albee.
?A
Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986.
Krafchick, Marcelline. "Hughie and The Zoo Story. Eugene O'Neill
Newsletter 1 o (Spring 1986): 15-16.
McCarthy, Gerry. Edward Albee. Modern Dramatists Series. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.
Manheim, Michael. Eugene O'Neill's New Language of Kinship.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982.
May, Rollo. The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychol-
ogy. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983.
O'Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays. 3 vols. The Library of America
Series. New York: Literary Classics of the United States,
1988.
Endnotes
1
Several critics have noted similarities between Hughie and
The Zoo Story. See Michael Manheim's brief comparison of the two
plays in Eugene O'Neill's New Language of Kinship, 163. According
to Manheim, the short-lived "kinship" between Peter and Jerry serves
only to highlight their "mutual acceptance of death"; Erie and
Hughes, on the other hand, manage to defeat death by establishing
a relationship that will allow them to live and by living justify exist-
ence." See also Marcelline Krafchick's brief comparison of the two
plays in The Eugene O'Neill Newsletter 10 (Spring 1986), 15-16.
Krafchik notes the many parallels between the two plays in both
"technique and idea. Hughes's and Peter's responses, says Kraf-
chick, show "what drama is all about: it can move an intransigent
heart. I shift that focus to the storytellers, Erie and Jerry, as they
express O'Neill's and Albee's views on what storytellig is "all about."
Yes, it can "move an intransigent heart," and because of that, it
enriches and reaffirms the teller as much as it does the listener.
2AU citations of O'Neill ' s works are from Eugene O'Neill:
Complete Plays, 3 vols. Bound East for Cardiff and The Emperor
Jones appear In vol. 1 ; The Iceman Cometh and Hughie appear in
Vol. 3.
3Manheim points out that neither Hughes nor Erie "in the
least believes in the fantasy he is creating .... They are only creating
the form or container in which their kinship may live and thrive" (162).
This is what I take to be their "shared story.
4Several critics see in Jerry a Christ-like redeemer of
mankind, giving up his life to get the message of interaction across.
See especially: Ruby Cohn, Dialogue in American Drama, 133-34, for
a comparison of Jerry to the prophet Jeremiah; C.W.E. Bigsby, A
Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama 2:259,
who notes Peter's "triple affirmation" of "Oh my God" in contrast to
the disciple Peter's triple denial of Christ. For views that refute such
an interpretation, see Gilbert Debusscher, "The Playwright in the
Making" (1969), reprinted in Critical Essays on Edward Albee, ed.
Philip C. Kolin and J. Madison Davis, 75-79. Debusscher sees Jerry
as an unconvincing "Christ-vagabond ... because he dies above all
to escape himself and his own Isolation. Robert Bennett, "The
Tragic Vision in The Zoo Story," discusses the "inadequacy of a strict
reading of Jerry as Christ-like." Bennett traces Jerry's realization that
"the fault for his loneliness lies not with God, the stars, or society, but
with himselr (112).
5
Bigsby sees the ending as "an urgent plea for human con-
tact" (2:259), echoing his earlier observation that O'Neill sees human
contact as the key to survival: "Relationship is inherently ambiguous
but It offers the only real resistance to an insensate world" (2:117) . I
consider the ending a celebration of the vehicle by which one makes
"human contact" (i.e., storytelling), rather than "an urgent plea" for
such contact.
61t is Interesting to note that at this point In the play, Erie
philosophically switches positions with the Night Clerk on the topic of
death. Earlier in the play, the Night Clerk muses that the dying man
in his fantasy of the ambulance Is "lucky" (844), but now it is Erie who
remarks that Hughie, having died, has "all the luck" (848).
7
Bigsby notes that Peter's "dispossession of the bench" is "a
symbol of his forced repatriation into the human community" (2:259),
a view with which I am more inclined to agree.
Sit is easy to see why Bigsby might surmise that, as his
career progressed, O'Neill became more like "Nietzsche, his chief
philosophical mentor," more approving than ever of man's "lying
ability" (1:105).
91n assessing the changes in Albee's attitude toward truth
and illusion, Bigsby remarks that in The Lady from Dubuque, "the
only inescapable truths are the fact of existence and the termination
of that existence. But those truths create other necessities--the
necessity for compassion and the necessity for the artist to create"
(327) . I find It Interesting that he uses the word "compassion" here,
since this term Is more often associated with O'Neill (see Bogard,
408).
26
"NO ONE IS ALONE": SOCIETY AND LOVE
IN THE MUSICALS OF STEPHEN SONDHEIM
Robert L. Mclaughlin
The cliche about Stephen Sondheim's musicals is that the
critics cheer them while the audiences stay home. This generaliza-
tion, however, hides more truth than It reveals. Although his shows
have never achieved the popularity of Phantom of the Opera or Les
Miserables, their life on Broadway, in London, in National Tours, in
regional and community productions, and in television versions indi-
cates an ever-growing audience for his work. Conversely, although
his shows have frequently received awards from the New York drama
critics, they have rarely been enthusiastically embraced by the
critics.
1
Critics and audiences find Sondheim's musicals difficult to
deal with not simply because of their Intellectual depth but because
of their defiance of the conventions of the musical theatre developed
during the Rodgers and Hammersteln years. There are two main
areas in which Sondheim has consistently defied these conventions.
First, musicals, like Shakespearean comedies, have traditionally
served the purpose of reaffirming certain positive values: virtue win-
ning out over evil, order winning out over chaos, and love winning
out over any obstacles or misunderstandings that come in Its way.
But for Sondheim, such reaffirmation, particularly of love, has never
come easily.2 Second, Sondheim's characters are ideologically
situated. They are products of and participants In social forces.
These two areas come together in Sondheim's convention-defying
treatment of that most traditional of musical-theatre situations, the
love story. Sondheim places his lovers In sociopolitical contexts
which affect the love relationship and problematize the possibility of
happily ever after. His shows suggest the difficulty if not Impossibility
of love in the contemporary world because of social pressures, divi-
sions between Individuals, and fragmentation within the self.
Through much of hls career, his lovers have been thwarted by
sociopolitical forces too powerful to be overcome, but recently a
guarded optimism has crept into his shows: love relationships must
be successful if individuals are to have any chance of changing a
society determined to destroy Itself.
But before beginning, we need to remember that a musical
play, perhaps more than any other art form, is the result of collabora-
tion and compromise: between the composer and the book writer;
between the authors and the director; between the director and the
choreographer; between the choreographer and the star, etc.3 Con-
27
sequently, it would be unrealistic to claim that the play resulting from
these collaborations and compromises is representative of any single
person's vision. This is especially so in Sondheim's case because he
has worked with many strong artistic personalities: Jerome Robbins,
Leonard Bernstein, Harold Prince, Michael Bennett, and James
Lapine, among others. This does not mean, however, that we as
theatregoers cannot be aware of and find significance in what seem
clearly to be Sondheim's continuing concerns; by these I mean
themes that return in various forms throughout his career regardless
of his collaborators. I will be studying the theme of the possibility of
love in contemporary society in four plays from various stages of
Sondheim's career: West Side Story, Company, Sweeney Todd, and
Into the Woods. In each of these plays, various love relationships
come under pressure from powerful social forces; the lovers' reac-
tions, failures, and victories serve as critiques of a society that has
become increasingly inhospitable to human life.
In West Side Story, Sondheim's first show, Tony's and Maria's
love is defeated on the most literal level by the bullet that kills Tony.4
But the events that lead up to this gunshot are shaped by the com-
bined and self-perpetuating pressures of a rationalized and
dehumanized society. This retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story is
set in the social context of New York youth gangs in the 1950s. The
young people here have been alienated by a society more interested
in ordered (and orderly) streets than in human concerns. They are
frustrated at every turn by adult rules, rationalizations, and
prejudices. This frustration is illustrated in "Gee, Officer Krupka,"
where the Jets satirize an overly specialized social-welfare
bureaucracy which, despite its ostensible purpose of helping
deprived youth, treats its clients like objects, specifically mirrors in
which a police officer, a judge, a psychiatrist, and a social worker all
see reflected their own theories of what is wrong with society. Sig-
nificantly, the few adults in the play, Krupke, Shrank, Glad Hand, and
Doc, are antagonistic, Ineffectual, or both.
The young people have responded to this alienation In two
ways. First, they have turned for companionship and protection to
various groups: the Puerto Ricans especially place a great impor-
tance on the inviolability of the family; the youths all take pride In
their ethnic or national heritage; and most importantly, they have
formed street gangs. But while these groups provide connectedness
for the youths, they necessarily create antagonism as well, since their
society is now defined by group members and non-group members.
This dilemma is seen in the play's first song, "Jet Song." Riff, the
gang leader, stresses the community advantages of gang member-
ship: "You got brothers around,jYou're a family man!jYou're never
alone,jYou're never disconnected!" (13). But in the second verse, the
gang as a whole chauvinistically expresses their superiority to non-
?R
gang members: Here come the Jets:jllttle world step aside!jBetter
go underground,/Better run, better hide!jWe're drawin' the line,jSo
keep your noses hidden! /We're hanging a sign/Says 'Visitors forbid-
den (15). Ironically, the gangs in their urge to connect with each
other repeat the adult world's methods of division and objectification.
The youths' second response to their feelings of alienation from the
adult world Is the philosophy of "cool. This is the belief that emo-
tional detachment is necessary for survival in society. To show emo-
tion is to be vulnerable and to give one's antagonist an advantage.
As Riff explains in his introduction to the song "Cool, No matter who
or what is eatin' at you, you show it, buddy boys, and you are dead.
You are cuttin' a hole In yourselves for them to stick In a red-hot
umbrella and open lt. Wide. You wanna live? You play it cool" (63).
But such an attempt to deny emotions is equally deadly. Peri-
odically, as in "The Dance at the Gym and The Rumble, the
repressed emotions burst out violently, destroying Indiscriminately.
As Anita explains to Maria, the gangs dance and fight to get rid of
"Too much feeling (75).
Such a social context necessarily destroys Tony's and Marla's
love. Through their love, Tony and Maria try to deny the artificial divi-
sions by which their society has ordered and alienated people. In
their love duet, "T onlght, they see past these divisions: they sing that
the world was just an address, a number arbitrarily assigned to a
house or building to create order, but when they met, "the world went
away (42). Their love allows them to see only each other: Maria
begins the song with "Only you, you're the only thing I'll see .. : (41 ).
After dismissing the world's divisions, Tony and Marla are able to
experience a unity through love. They spiritually merge, saying over
and over that they are joined, that they are the same. This is most
clearly expressed In their symbolic marriage ceremony where they
sing "Make of our hands one hand,/Make of our hearts one heart .. . .
Make of our lives one life . . . (82). And later Maria tries to explain to
Anita, "I love him; I'm his,/And everything he is/1 am too (126).
Where the gang members have joined together In antagonistic
response to a hostile world to which they feel, by virtue of their gang
membership, superior, Tony and Marla join In a mutual love that tries
to deny the outside world. They speak repeatedly of being "out of
the world" and "untouchable" (76). The stage directions emphasize
that when they meet and when they sing "Tonight, the city set and
the other characters fade Into the background. But such a denial of
the world Is, of course, impossible. Their violent society continues to
Intrude Into their relationship. The divisions they try to see past,
though artificial, are still powerful. The "Somewhere ballet Illustrates
the impossibility of flight. The lovers imagine a vague "somewhere"
where they can exist happily and Innocently, free of the violence
which the divisions In their society cause. But even in fantasy such
happiness can't last. The stage directions read: "The harsh shadows,
the fire escapes of the real, tenement world cloud the sky, and the
figures of Riff and Bernardo slowly walk on. The dream becomes a
nightmare: as the city returns, there are brief reenactments of the
knife fight , of the deaths" (1 08). The power of love Isn't strong
enough to propel the lovers beyond the pressures of their society. In
addition, Tony and Maria violate the philosophy of cool" and so
make themselves vulnerable to the hate of their society. Even
though a romance between a white boy and a Puerto Rican girl is
apparently unusual in this neighborhood, Bernardo, Anita, Doc, and
Chino all easily guess their relationship because Tony and Maria are
unable to hide their feelings for even a few moments. This openness
contributes to the deaths at the rumble and to Tony's death at
Chino's hands. Viewers wishing for a happy ending can't help but
wish the lovers were more discreet.
West Side Story ends with a vision of hope. After Tony's
death, the young people from both gangs join together In a proces-
sion, mirroring their actions In the "Somewhere fantasy and leaving
the adults behind, "bowed, alone, useless" (143) . But unlike the
reconciliation In Romeo and Juliet, which indicates that the families
have learned from the deaths of the lovers, everything In the musical
suggests that such unity can be only temporary. Society's pressures
encourage division, not unity, and surviving in society requires con-
forming to the denial of emotion, even if that denial leads to violence
Instead of love.
These same social pressures are at work In the 1970 concept
musical Company.
5
Company analyzes the idea of marriage In con-
temporary society through five couples and one bachelor, Robert.
The play is made up of a series of vignettes in which Robert and the
audience observe the couples In particular and marriage In general
and the audience observes Robert and his lifestyle. What the
audience sees Is that the characters here are no more successful
than Tony and Maria in defining a relationship between themselves
and their society and less successful in creating love relationships.
Company shares with West Side Story the geographical set-
ting of New York City, but Company's New York is a workplace and
playground for the privileged class. This New York society has two
defining characteristics, activity and alienation. The activity is seen in
the world of the busy signal, representing the many things people
can do to entertain themselves and fill their time. This is best heard
in the play's repeated "Bobby Baby" theme i n which the couples
implore Robert to join them at a concert, to go to the beach (12), to
take the kids to the zoo (16), and to spend an evening at the opera
(17) . Similarly, In "The ladies Who Lunch" Joanne lists the various
activities different kinds of wives engage In to keep themselves busy:
"Off to the gym,jthen to a fitting . ... Rushing to their classes In opti-
30
cal art .... A matinee, a Pinter play,jPerhaps a piece of Mahler's"
(1 06). Robert, a manifestation of the world of the busy signal, says of
his apartment, "I just seem to pass through the living room on my
way to the bedroom to get to the bathroom to get ready to go out
again" (87). But this constant motion and absence of a home sug-
gest the same problem the lovers In West Side Story faced.
Paradoxically, a society of never-ending activity discourages contact
between people and encourages alienation and withdrawal into the
self. Boris Aronson's set for the original production, a sanitized and
mechanized steel and plastic structure, with carefully defined living
spaces for the couples, illustrated the separation and isolation of life
In this society.s In "Another Hundred People" Marta sings of the "city
of strangers" where human contact Is frustrated by numerous Inter-
positions: "the crowded streets and the guarded parks, "the friends
of friends, and various answering services (55-56}. Activity, the busy
signal, cuts off communication and discourages human connections.
Robert's character represents the dangers of assimilating
completely to this social setting. Robert wants to define himself as a
social creature; that is, his self-identity is based on his actions and
relationships In society. Thus, he Immerses himself hedonistically in
the world of the busy signal . But his activity, his pot party with David
and Jenny and his sexual intercourse with April, for example, seems
devoid of meaning. At the same time, he is unable to make contact
with others. He Is frequently confused by the couples and his
girlfriends and often makes pseudosincere speeches rather than
engage in conversation. He senses that something is missing in his
life, but his attempts to connect with others fall short because he is
unwilling to give up the world of the busy signal. For example, in
"Barcelona, he begs April to stay with him rather than report to her
stewardess assignment and then is horrified when she agrees. And
in "Someone is Waiting, a song as hopelessly unrealistic as Tony's
and Maria's "Somewhere," he concocts an ideal combination of all
the wives, whom he then contradictingly Implores both to "Hurry" and
to "Wait for me" (54). Robert refuses to give up his social identity, but
since society's activities are empty, he Is, too.
Since Robert wonders if marriage is the answer to the problem
of how to function In society, the play gives us five married couples
to observe. Marriage offers the human connection the world of the
busy signal denies, but this connection entails a different kind of self-
identity problem. Trying to talk herself out of getting married, Amy
sings, "we'll/Both of us be losing our identities" (64). In marriage
one's social Identity Is lost, because one no longer functions in
society independently; Instead, one Is defined in relation to one's
spouse. In "The Little Things You Do Together Joanne and the
couples define marriage as a series of things you do, not alone, but
together, as a couple: "The concerts you enjoy together,jNelghbors
you annoy together,fChildren you destroy together" (31). The
couples all seem to long for the world of the busy signal which is
denied them unless they participate in it vicariously through Robert.
In "Have I Got a Girl for You" the husbands lasciviously try to fix
Robert up with the latest wild women they've come across, women
they can't legitimately pursue. They sing, "Boy, to be in your shoes
what I wouldn't give.fl mean the freedom to go out and live .. ."(52).
Similarly, the wives In "Poor Baby" sing that "Robert ought to have a
woman" (88), each barely concealing that she is the woman he ought
to have and reacting with mean-spirited jealousy when he proceeds
to have April instead. Marriage, then, may provide human contact or
"company," but it also means the end of one's identity as an individ-
ual social entity.
In the play's problematic climax, the song "Being Alive,"
Robert admits his need to connect with another. He is willing to let
his social identity and the freedom that goes with it be curtailed. He
sings, "Somebody hold me too close.;Somebody hurt me too
deep.jSomebody sit in my chair, and ruin my sleep . . ." (115). He
recognizes that his life of empty activity is not really living: "But alone
is alone, not alive" (116). But this admission is not action. Although
the relationship he describes here seems more realistic than the one
he envisions in "Someone is Waiting, the "somebody" he calls to
here is no more tangible than the "someone" he called to before.
Further, the play questions the efficacy of his epiphany as it leaves
him isolated on stage, ignored by the couples assembled for his sur-
prise birthday party. The couples have lost their vicarious connec-
tion to the life of society and Robert's situation seems unchanged?
So, like West Side Story, Company presents a society where
love relationships are difficult if not impossible to maintain. But in
Company the characters are not blatant victims of powerful
socioeconomic pressures. Instead, they have been seduced by the
superficial pleasures of their society, pleasures that alienate them
from one another. They have the option of rejecting the crowds and
the bustle of their world and concentrating on one other individual,
but they do not seem to want to. Society's activity may be empty,
but it is attractive and pleasurable, and Company's characters don't
want to be left out. As Joanne sings, they want to "keep in touch"
(106). Society may isolate and dehumanize, but human relationships
isolate too; they separate one from society. For the characters here,
human contact cannot make up for the feeling of missing something.
Placed in this social setting, these characters cannot be satisfied with
just love.
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, like West
Side Story and Company, presents characters who are victims of
societal forces, but unlike the other plays, it defines and explores
responses to these forces. 8 These forces are manifested in a his-
32
torical setting with obvious connections to contemporary society.
Set in nineteenth-century England, the play is acted out in the
shadow of a rigid social hierarchy /bureaucracy and the industrial
revolution. In Eugene Lee's set for the Broadway production, this
shadow was literally present. The superstructure of the set was a
reconstructed nineteenth-century Iron foundry, complete with work-
Ing machine parts, and the opening curtain depicted the "English Bee
Hive," the social hierarchy with the queen on top and descending
levels of power and importance. These two social forces, the social
hierarchy /bureaucracy and Industrialization, share several traits.
Both tend to separate the powerful from the powerless and then to
perpetuate the relationship; that is, these systems keep the power-
less in their places at the bottom of the heap and make sure all
power and profits flow upward. Sweeney imagines London as a
huge hole, and "At the top of the hole/Sit the privileged few,/Making
mock of the vermin/In the lower zoo,jTurning beauty Into filth and
greed" (9). Here Sweeney points to another characteristic these
systems share: they tend to become corrupted. As Max Weber
argues, bureaucracies Inevitably begin to stress their own survival
and augmented power over any real purpose they were meant to
serve. In an Industrialized capitalist system, profit becomes a more
important motivation than the manufacture of a product, worker con-
ditions, or the public welfare. Obtaining and keeping power and
profits are the primary goals of the society presented here. The
necessary result of these goals Is the objectification of people;
people become tools to be used and discarded by those with money
and power. The Beggar Woman haunts the play as a reminder of our
tendency to dismiss and deny the humanity of others.
Sweeney Is a victim of these social forces and their corruption.
He, his wife Lucy, and his daughter Johanna formed a happy and
loving family. But In the first indication that this kind of love cannot
exist In this society, the corrupt Judge, with the help of the Beadle,
disrupts the familial relationship, transporting Sweeney to Australia
on a trumped-up charge, raping Lucy, and then adopting Johanna.
Years later, Sweeney escapes from his exile and returns with a goal
of revenge against the Judge and Beadle. But when this specific
revenge Is thwarted, the Insane Sweeney decides to revenge himself
on the entire system that has victimized him, one person at a time. In
his thinking, the powerless are as guilty as the powerful because they
are all participants In the system. Explaining his philosophy of
revenge to Mrs. Lovett In his "Epiphany, he notes the dyadic rela-
tionship between victimizer and victim: "In all of the whole human
race, Mrs. Lovett,jThere are two kinds of men and only two.jThere's
the one staying put/In his proper place/And the one with his footjln
the other one's face .. . (87) . Each deserves his death sentence,
"Because the lives of the wicked should be--/Made brief./For the rest
.,.,
of us death/Will be a relief ... " (87) . The vehicle for this revenge,
Sweeney's partnership with Mrs. Lovett, is a macabre parody of their
Industrialized society. Sweeney says of society's noise, "It's man
devouring man, my dear,jAnd who are wejto deny It in here?" (92).
Their enterprise has a clear division of labor: Sweeney provides the
supplies by slitting the throats of the customers in his barber shop
and transporting them to the cellar via his mechanized chair; Mrs.
Lovett then uses the bodies as ingredients for her meat pies. They
objectify people, first denying their humanity by using them for their
own purposes and then literally turning them into objects: meat pies.
This process Is comically illustrated in the first act finale, "A Little
Priest," where Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett imagine their pies having the
same qualities as the types of people they were made from. The
appropriateness of their enterprise for a dog-eat-dog society is evi-
denced by Its great success; where before Mrs. Lovett had barely
any customers, her new Improved meat pies draw more than she can
serve. People can't get enough of a product made from other
people. As Gordon writes, "The exploitation and abuse at the core of
[Sweeney's] society Is given a concrete form In Mrs. Lovett's plan,
the perversion of the social contract and the breakdown of all fellow
feeling fittingly symbolized by the capitalistic cannibalism she pro-
poses" (237).
Even In such a competitive and dehumanized society, the
characters seek happiness through love relationships. But as in West
Side Story and Company, society discourages love relationships:
Sweeney is separated from Lucy in the years before the play's action
begins; and Anthony and Johanna, the play's innocent lovers, are
kept apart until the very end by the separate machinations of
Sweeney and Judge Turpin. The play's other "couples" are mis-
matched, pursuing the wrong person for the wrong reasons. Mrs.
Lovett loves Sweeney but desires him as an acquisition, just as she
desires new clothes, a cottage by the sea, and her harmonium. She
sees Sweeney as a vehicle to a better kind of l ife than she has had
alone. Sweeney is still in love with Lucy, whom he Imagines dead.
Toby, the symbolic child of the Sweeney-Mrs. Lovett relationship, is
in love with Mrs. Lovett, his "mother," and Increasingly jealous of his
rival Sweeney, his "father." The Judge' s lusting after his ward
Johanna suggests incest since the Judge has filled the role of father
to Johanna and had sexual relations (through rape) with her mother.
Interestingly, Anthony's and Johanna's love, the only traditional rela-
tionship in the play, seems unusual, while nontraditional relationships
predominate.
As products of social forces, these relationships become
excuses for greed, lust, dehumanization, hatred, and death, all in the
name of love. Mrs. Lovett operates from a position of pragmatic
amorality. Any action can be justified if it leads to something she
34
wants. She easily rationalizes the lie she tells Sweeney about his wife
dying, the lie that sets much of Sweeney's revenge in motion: "Yes, I
lied 'cos I love you!fl'd be twice the wife she was!fllove you!" (171).
Her love is her excuse for lying to Sweeney and for participating in
his deadly revenge. The Judge's love is his excuse for raping Lucy,
for wanting to wed Johanna, and, when she refuses, for separating
her from Anthony and committing her to an insane asylum.
Sweeney's love is his excuse for plotting to kill the Judge and Beadle
and, when these plans go awry, for revenging himself on all of
humanity. In the context of the rape and murder that have occurred
ear1ier in the play, Sweeney's and the Judge's sung admission "What
we do for/Pretty women!" (165) drips with irony. In Sweeney's case
the perversion of love is most clear. His need to kill outpaces any
specific revenge and any specific reason for the killing. After finally
slashing the Judge's throat, his ostensible goal throughout the play,
he sings to his razor, "Rest now, my frlend,fRest now forever./Sieep
now the untroubled/Sleep of the angels .. ." (166-67), but interrupts
himself to scoop the razor up again to look for and kill Toby. More-
over, in his eagerness to clear his shop for the Judge's arrival, he
quickly kills the Beggar Woman, who, he later discovers, Is his wife,
Lucy. His desire for revenge has become so overwhelming that he
kills the love that supposedly motivated it. Sweeney, who rose from
the grave at the beginning of the play, Is an antichrist, come to
destroy love through hate.
The play's darkest and most frightening message comes at
the very end of the play as the actors drop their characters and sing
to the audience the evening's refrain, "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd."
But here, strangely, the song changes to the present tense, suggest-
ing that Sweeney is still with us. In fact, Sweeney Is all around us:
someone we pass on the street, "Perhaps today you gave a nod/To
Sweeney Todd . . ." (176), someone we interact with every day,
"Sweeney waits in the parlor haii,/Sweeney leans on the office wall"
(176), or perhaps someone we know intimately, "No one can help,
nothing can hide you--/Isn't that Sweeney there beside you?" (176).
Then the actors accuse us all of being Sweeney, pointing to the
audience and singing, "There he is it's Sweeney! ... fTherel There!
There! There! (177). Finally, the resurrected Sweeney and Mrs.
Lovett tell us "To seek revenge may lead to heii,/But everyone does
it, and seldom as well/As Sweeney .. . ." (177) . This is Sondheim's
darkest statement of the problem of love in contemporary society:
like Sweeney, we respond to the forces that victimize us by becom-
ing like them, by victimizing others. We kill what we love through
selfishness and greed, and we isolate ourselves by objectifying and
dehumanizing others, by seeking love as something for us rather
than for others.
Into the Woods, Sondheim's 1987 musical based on traditional
fairy tales, also explores Individual responses to dehumanizing socie-
tal forces.
9
Society continues to have a debilitating effect on individ-
uals and couples, but this effect has become deadly: the entire sec-
ond act is played out under the threat of imminent total destruction
analogous to the threat of nuclear-tipped ICBMs we live under every
day. Change is imperative and just possible if individuals can
reestablish human contact, understanding, and sympathy.
Act One of Into the Woods presents the psychological growth
of several fairy tale characters to the point where they can achieve
love relationships. The play begins with the characters going Into the
woods on quests to solve certain problems caused for the most part
by disjointed families. Cinderella Is abused by her father's new fam-
ily; her quest is to go to the king's festival. Jack (of Beanstalk fame)
and his Mother are poor because his father has left them; Jack's
quest Is to get money by selling his best friend, his cow. The Baker
and his Wife are unable to have children; their quest Is to obtain the
items for the Witch's potion and remove the spell. The Witch Is an
old and ugly mother to her adopted (seized?) daughter Rapunzel;
her quest is to drink the potion that will make her young and beauti-
ful. To bring order to these chaotic familial relationships, each
character must not only achieve his or her quest but also mature
psychologically. Two of the Act One quests present challenges In
love relationships similar to ones In Company. Cinderella gets her
wish to go to the festival but confronts there a new dilemma: the
undivided attention of the Prince. Considering her cruel treatment at
home and the potential wealth and luxury that come with being a
Princess, we, the Prince, and even Cinderella have a hard time
understanding why she runs away from him each night. Like Robert
(and more significantly from a feminist point of view), she sees com-
mitment as limiting since any definite decision destroys all other pos-
sibilities. Running away from the Prince, she thinks that her best
course of action is to go home: "You'll be better off therejWhere
there's nothing to choose,/So there's nothing to lose" (63-64). In
addition, she fears that the Prince would not want her if he knew who
she really Is and that the Prince, in pursuing her like an animal in a
hunt, is objectifying her just as her family does. In leaving him the
clue of her shoe In the pitch, she tests his commitment in two ways:
first, to see if he will use the slipper to try to find her; and second, to
see if, once he sees her in ash-coated rags, he will still want and love
her. Of course, the Prince passes both tests and Cinderella answers
with her own commitment. She agrees to marry him, giving up all
other possibilities with the hope she will be happy in this one. The
Baker and his Wife begin the play like the couples in Company: they
are together but each bristles at lost independence. The Baker,
relishing his autonomy, at first refuses to let his Wife help in the
quest: "The spell is on my house.jOnly I can lift the spell ... (18}.
The Baker's Wife longs for the more handsome, wealthy, and
glamorous Prince. But in the woods the Baker and his Wife learn a
new interdependence. In "It Takes Two" they realize that their mar-
riage demands a loss of independence, but in return they gain the
positive qualities and love of the other person. The Baker sings, "I
thought one was enough,jlt's not true:jlt takes two of us" (54), and
his Wife describes him the way she had previously described the
Prince: "You're passionate, charming, considerate, clever- (55).
The Baker sums up their new interdependence, . .. I'm becom-
ing/Aware of us/As a pair of us,jEach accepting a share/Of what's
there" (55) . Cinderella and the Baker and his Wife, then, face the
problems the characters In Company couldn't resolve and through
their learning experiences in the woods become part, at least
temporarily, of interdependent love relationships.
However, after Act One shows that such love relationships are
possible, Act Two, like West Side Story, asks if they can survive in
their societal context. The widow of the giant Jack killed comes
down from the sky to seek revenge. The giant can be seen as sym-
bolic of any type of societal crisis that intrudes on the private lives of
people and forces them to respond in some way to save their way of
life. Faced with this crisis, the characters bicker and divide them-
selves. The wealthy royal family flees the country, leaving behind the
lower class characters. Those remaining can't agree on a plan to
deal with the giant, and while they bicker, more and more of them are
crushed. The futility of their divisiveness climaxes in "Your Fault,"
where they desperately try to blame each other for the calamity. The
Witch leaves them at this low point, when they are isolated and
dehumanized: "Separate and alone,jEverybody down on all fours"
(122). Eventually, however, the remaining characters, the Baker,
Cinderella, Jack, and Little Red Ridlnghood, are able to transcend
their pettiness through two Important steps. First, each loses the
person on whom he or she was dependent. Cinderella loses the
guiding spirit of her mother when the giant crushes the tree In which
she resided. Little Red Ridinghood loses her mother and grand-
mother when the giant steps on their houses. Jack loses his mother
when the Prince's steward kills her to keep her from provoking the
giant. And the Baker loses his Wife when the giant crushes her after
her dalliance with the Prince.
1
0 Although this seems to be another
Instance of outside forces destroying love relationships, these
characters must lose the people who support them so that they can
continue to grow psychologically. They need to become independ-
ent so that they can come to understand their interdependence on a
wide range of people, not just one person. This is the second step to
their eventual triumph. Although the outside forces encourage divi-
sion and Isolation, to accept such isolation Is a mistake. When the
Baker abandons the others after the death of his Wife, he meets the
Mysterious Man, his father, who years before had abandoned him
after the death of his mother. In "No More" the Mysterious Man
counsels the Baker that such isolation, while physically possible, is
mentally impossible and spiritually damaging: "Trouble is, son,jThe
farther you run,jThe more you feel undefined/For what you have left
undone/And, more, what you've left behind" (124). When the Baker
returns to the others, they pool their ideas and their abilities to defeat
the giant, and as they put their plan into action, they sing, In "No One
Is Alone" what they've learned: that as individuals they are helpless.
They need to connect with others and understand how their actions
affect others in the human community in order to accomplish any-
thing.
11
They dismiss their previous divisions and isolation: "People
make mistakes,jHolding to their own,jThinking they're alone (131).
Instead, one's actions touch many others: "You move just a fin-
ger,jSay the slightest word,/Something's bound to llnger,jBe
heard./No one acts alone" (130).
The play's finale, the last reprise of "Into the Woods, Is an
antithesis to the end of Sweeney Todd. There we saw a vision of
people thrust apart by their own hate and greed. Here, all the
characters return in a final dance, not divided, as the Act One finale
was, by class lines, but homogeneous and joyous. And Instead of
singling us out as Sweeneys, the cast points out our Inter-
dependence: "The way is dark,/The light is dim,jBut now there's
you,jMe, her and him" (137) . Our awareness of and willingness to
act on this Interdependence is necessary for the creation of the kind
of society where love relationships, like Tony's and Maria's and the
Baker's and the Baker's Wife's, can flourish.
Sondheim's current work-in-progress, Assassins, a musical
about people who have tried to kill U.S. Presidents, reportedly con-
tinues the theme of confronting the worst in our society so that we
may be able to change it. Frank Rich says that the characters
"demonstrate Mr. Sondheim's conviction that there Is a shadow
America, a poisoned, have-not America, that must be recognized by
the prosperous majority if the violence in our history is to be
understood and overcome" (B4). Such understanding must begin in
the kind of self-understanding that can lead to Interdependence in
human relationships and human communities. And such inter-
dependence, if extended far enough, can bring the wor1d back from
the brink of self-destruction.
Sources Cited
Furth, George, and Stephen Sondheim. Company. New York: Ran-
dom House, 1970.
38
Gordon, Joanne. Art Isn't Easy: The Achievement of Stephen Sond-
heim. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.
Henry, William A., Ill. "Some Enchanted Evening." Review of Into the
Woods, by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. Time, 16
November 1987, 96.
Holden, Stephen. "A Fairy-Tale Musical Grows Up." New York
Times, 1 November 1987.
Kramer, Mimi. 'The Theatre." Review of Into the Woods. The New
Yorker, 16 November 1987, 147.
Laurents, Arthur, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim. West
Side Story. New York: Random House, 1957.
Prince, Harold. Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the
Theater. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974.
Rich, Frank. "A Cast of Killers Made in America Sings Sondheim."
Review of Assassins, by Stephen Sondheim and John Weid-
man. New York Times, 28 January 1991, National Ed.: B1 +.
Sondheim, Stephen. "Theater Lyrics." Playwrights/Lyricists/
Composers on Theater. Ed. Otis Guernsey, Jr. New York:
Dodd, Mead, 1974. 61-97.
Sondheim, Stephen, and James Lapine. Into the Woods. New York:
Theatre Communications Group, 1989.
Sondheim, Stephen, and Hugh Wheeler. Sweeney Todd, the Demon
Barber of Fleet Street. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1979.
Zadan, Craig. Sondhelm & Co. 2nd ed. updated. New York: Harper
& Row, 1989.
Endnotes
1To get an idea of the wildly varying reviews Sondheim's
plays have received, see the summaries in Zadan 25-26, 92-94, 107,
126-27, 145-47, 190, 219-21, 256-60, 279-80, 312-13. For example,
while Time gushed, "Into the Woods is the best show yet from the
most creative mind in the musical theater today" (Henry 96), The
New Yorker griped, "What it adds up to, though, is little more than a
hodge-podge of cliches" (Kramer 147). But schizophrenically, the
critics and the theatre community have made Sondheim one of the
most honored dramatists. The Drama Critics Circle Award for Best
Musical of the Year was given to Company, Follies, A Little Night
Music, the 1974 Candide (for which Sondheim wrote the new lyrics),
Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George,
and Into the Woods. The Tony Award for Best Musical was given to
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, A
Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd. (Sondheim, incidentally, won
the Tony Award for Best Music and Lyrics for Company, Follies, A
Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods.) In addition,
,,..
Sunday in the Park With George won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for
Drama. (See Zadan's Appendix A [369-80] for awards won by Sand-
helm's shows.)
2Sondheim explains he will never have smash hit because
"what makes smash-hit musicals are stories that audiences want to
hear--and It's always the same story. How everything turns out ter-
rific In the end and the audience goes out thinking, that's what life Is
all about" (quoted in Zadan, 52).
3Harold Prince agrees that "The musical is the most highly
collaborative form there is" (32).
4
West Side Story, with book by Arthur Laurents, music by
Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, opened in
1957. The play was conceived, directed, and choreographed by
Jerome Robbins.
5Company, with book by George Furth and music and lyrics
by Stephen Sondheim, was directed by Harold Prince with musical
numbers staged by Michael Bennett. Gordon defines the term "con-
cept musical " as Indicating "that all the elements of the musical,
thematic and presentational , are Integrated to suggest a central
theatrical image or idea" (7). As a term It differentiates musicals in
which all the creative elements, especially the music, are justified by
the theme of the play from the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-type musi-
cal plays In which the creative elements, especially the music, are
justified by plot advancement and character development. In other
words, concept musicals are artistically unified around an Idea that is
to be explored rather than around a set of characters' progress. For
example, A Chorus Line Is an exploration into why Broadway dan-
cers do what they do.
6Gordon writes: ''The sleek set, sterile and cold, reflected the
detachment of a society whose goals are fixed on upward mobility,
both spatial and social: crowds struggling upward to nowhere.
These elevated empty spaces expressed the essence of the city, all
bustling efficiency, glittering surfaces, and emotional sterility" (41).
7
Prince writes that he doesn't understand the confusion
about the musical's message: "we regard It as a fervent plea for inter-
personal relationships" (149). In her discussion of "Being Alive" Gor-
don, too, argues that the play endorses commitment (72-73). I agree
that the play is critical of Robert's life and his lack of commitment,
but it is also critical of the couples and their lives. I think the play
refuses to give an answer to the problems It develops in Its analysis
of society and Interpersonal relationships. This refusal Is under-
scored by the play's alternate ending. In the pre-Broadway tour
Robert chose the wor1d of the busy signal In his final song, "Happily
Ever After," in a similarly ambivalent conclusion (see Sondheim,
"Theater Lyrics").
a sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened in
40
1979 with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh
Wheeler, and direction by Harold Prince.
9fnto the Woods has music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
and book and direction by James lapine.
10fhe implication of the Baker's Wife's death as punishment
for her adultery caused Kramer in The New Yorker to accuse the
authors of misogyny (148).
1
1 As Sondheim puts it, "All fairy tales are parables about
steps to maturity .. .. The final step is when you become responsible
for the people around you, when you feel connected to the rest of the
wortd ... . 'No One Is Alone' Is about how we are all interconnected"
(quoted In Holden).
THE HORSE DRAMA, WITH SUPERNUMERARIES:
BRONSON HOWARD'S SEMI-HISTORICAL SHENANDOAH
Pat M. Ryan
"The comedy ... passed pleasantly enough, but we doubt the
propriety of playing these sort of pieces."1 When Bronson Howard's
Feds and Confeds; or, Taking the Oath, was premiered 1 October
1869 at Harry C. Bates' Louisville Opera House, in Louisville,
Kentucky, "Marse" Henry Watterson's Courier-Journal (accepted in
the North as the postwar oracle of Southern opinion) deplored this
ameliorist Civil War script. And the Evening Express concurred: "It
would be better . . . if all dramas based on the late war were tabooed.
These presentations can do no possible good, and may do harm by
stirring up once more bad blood."
2
Touring comedian J.W. Albaugh,
who had starred as Union Lieutenant Kerchival West, afterwards
wrote the young Detroit playwright that his social comedy had
elicited appreciative laughter during the second act.3 But the bruised
border-state critics were not amused, deeming it still to soon for
serio-comic treatment of post-bellum North-South reconciliation. In
the case of this play, revision would require of its author twenty more
years.
Long before martial music, military drills, and eventually
horses infused his spectacular, triumphal Shenandoah (1888-89), of
which Feds and Confeds was the embryo, Howard had formulated
his quartet of sectionally estranged lovers who are reunited after the
War between the States. Kerchival West and Jenny (Haverill) were
principal characters in the 1869 Louisville version; and the final
script's focal lovers, Lieutenant West/Gertrude Ellingham and Robert
EllinghamjMadeline West, are all described in reviews of the inter-
mediary, experimental 1873 Detroit production of Drum Taps.
Recapitulating in 1893, the playwright emphasized that General Phil
Sheridan's momentary, galvanic appearance on horseback in Act
Three of the final version was merely a matter of technicality in the
writer's craft, whereas the "personal interest of the characters" was
paramount. Yet Sheridan's famous ride, revivified on the stage, had
guaranteed Shenandoah's resounding success. The theme of "a
new era [of] great national harmony between the Federal and the
Confederate (the phrase is from Grant's Memoirs) , Howard said,
had inspired him to blot out "every line . . . that might have hurt a
Southerner's feelings"
4
prior to Shenandoah's opening in Boston, 19
November 1888. In this purifying process, however, the author had
also expunged the Civil War's underlying social , political , and eco-
42
nomrc rssues. He provisionally dubbed the product "semi-historical.
This essay commemorates the recent centennial of
Shenandoah, surpassingly the most profitable native play of the late
nineteenth-century American stage. But Bronson Howard (1842-
1908) had twice miscalculated the U.S. public's mood and theatrical
tastes before crafti ng his essential combination of Union-style
patriotism, North-South romance, and military spectacle. The follow-
ing discussion traces this comedy-drama's evolution from its short-
lived Louisville tryout, through an elaborated, ephemeral Detroit edi-
tion, to the crucial1888 Boston script and revamped 1889 New York
version (extant In MS. and published In 1897). We shall examine, In
turn, Reconstruction-era public indifference to and managerial cau-
tion toward prospective Civil War comedy; the tardy advent and swift
proliferation of the so-called reconciliation theme in Gilded Age pop-
ular literature, and eventually in American drama; Howard's own
postwar New York newsroom/editorial tempering; and especially his
vexing thesis that It was not lantern code signals and the patriotic
coup de thetre of General Sheridan's onstage ride, but
Shenandoah's discreet, semi-historical dramaturgy that accounted
for this durable play's great success--and ultimate translation into
film.
By exploring the script's production and box-office history, we
may better understand post-bellum social and cultural history. The
latter (e.g. recent reader-response studies), correspondingly, should
illuminate concurrent American playwriting. Howard's master1y, cal-
culated subordination of provocative racial and/or sectional topics to
the commercial exigencies of "semi-historical" stagecraft is thus our
central theme.
'A society drama with a military background'
No script survives for Feds and Confeds, nor did Louisville
reviews publish any details of the play's action. Detroit newspaper
accounts attest that the three-act 1873 version Drum Taps
(apparently like its predecessor) was "a society drama with a military
background;"5 but though that version, staged by Howard, received
three charity performances featuring local amateurs, results were not
sufficiently positive for a New York production. Those summaries
also reveal that, by this stage, Shenandoah's focal romantic format
was already fully realized.
Drum Taps commenced on the lawn of Hazelwood Villa, John
Haverill's lower Hudson River residence, where Northern officer Ker-
chival West, newly graduated from West Point, courted a high-
spirited Georgian, Gertrude Ellingham, the sister of West's young
planter friend Robert Ellingham, who exchanged affections with
West's sister Madeline. Edward Thornton, West 's menacing rival
from Louisiana, also appeared; the men practiced pistol-shooting at
targets; and West and Thornton showed their feelings, "but without
forgetting their dignity as gentlemen. The foppish Heartsease, vari-
ously described as a Fifth Avenue exquisite" and a New Yorker of
the Dundreary type"; wealthy Uncle Haverill and his frolicsome,
sixteen-year-old daughter Jenny; Margery, the faithful old Irish ser-
vant; Barket, a Scots gardener; and Gertrude's octoroon slave maid
Nettie ("worth $2,000 in gold") were also introduced; and the action,
occurring 12 April 1861, culminated in announcement of Confederate
firing on Fort Sumter, division of the men into the opposing armies,
and resultant estrangement of the lovers.
During Act Two, "at a time when Pap Williams' corps is on the
march to the sea, a Union battalion noisily took possession of the
Ellinghams' Georgia mansion, "with drums beating, flags flying, their
bayonets ornamented with dangling chickens, young pigs, [etc.],"
and chanting The Battle Hymn of the Republic; and a quartet of
Union officers, gathering at the piano, lustily rendered Marching
Through Georgia. Gertrude coolly resisted her Northern lover's
friendly gestures in this Act; Robert, by now a Confederate leader,
was brought in by Colonel West as a Union prisoner; then West him-
self, delaying too long his last farewell to Gertrude, was captured by
guerrillas led by Thornton. Southern forces had regained control.
In Act Three, laid once more at Hazelwood Villa, 13 April 1865
(the date of Lee's surrender at Appomattox), Kerchivai West, sup-
posed to have died in prison, reappeared with Gertrude as his wife;
and the curtain fell on the reunion of Robert and Madeline and the
romantic pairing of Heartsease with Jenny. Detroit reviewers com-
mended Howard's treatment of sectional conflict as "delicate and lib-
eral" and remarked the discreet absence of "allusions at which the
most uncompromising of either section can rightly take offense. "6
Kerchival's return and recognition were so contrived as to provide
comic, rather than melodramatic, effects. The playwright wrote New
York theatre manager Augustin Daly that Drum Taps' success had
been "immense, of Its kind, ... a very taking comedy," and that
Chicago manager R.M. Hooley, having optioned the play in July,
would produce it in a month or so.? But neither Hooley, nor Daly,
nor any other producer was yet ready to tackle it; and Howard
shelved this script for fourteen years. By the late 1880s his improved
Civil War dramaturgy would precisely touch an altered public pulse.
The Reconciliation Theme
Robert Penn Warren, in The Legacy of the Civil War (1961 ),
reiterated an American cultural paradox: "In defeat the Solid South
was born; [and] in the moment of death the Confederacy entered
upon its lmmortality."8 Oscar Handlin, concurrently hypothesizing
44
upon the Civil War as historical actuality, ritual memorialization, and
generalized symbol, declared: "The great war which tore the nation
apart became a token of national unity as the nation moved along the
road to reunion [after] 1865 .... Every base element vanished; only
nobility remained .... The men of the North and of the South seized
upon the war as a symbol. But In doing so, they grotesquely dis-
torted the actuality of the war as it had been. And the continued
preservation of that symbol also obscures the surviving problems left
by the war:9 Bronson Howard's Shenandoah, as will be seen, com-
prises a focal dramatlco-literary artifact from that entangled historical
complex.
During the seven years between 1862 and the premiere of
Feds and Confeds, American readers had already cultivated a vogue
for Civil War fiction; numerous short stories and more than seventy
novels of the fratricidal conflict and its early aftermath had appeared
in that Interim. From a study of newspapers, magazines, novels,
sermons, and political rhetoric, Paul H. Buck concluded that North-
ern public opinion during the first decade after the Civil War was
aggressively hostile toward the South.10 Notwithstanding, John
Hay's brilliant 1869 sketch "The Foster Brothers: published In Har-
per's Monthly Magazine,
11
on which his friend Howard would found
the problematical play Moorcroft (1874), had announced an evolving
reconciliation theme. In that spirit of national accommodation, car-
petbag lawyer, politician, and novelist Albion W. Tourgee's sanguine
prediction of 1867, concerning the "eventual victory of the Con-
federate soldier in American literature," was partly realized. In 1888,
T ourgee would assert: "Not only is the epoch of the war the favorite
field of American fiction today, but the Confederate soldier Is the
popular hero. Our literature has become not only Southern In type,
but distinctly Confederate in sympathy."12
Three months after Appomattox, responding to war-theme fic-
tion's brief vogue, Publisher's Weekly had introduced a book-notices
section for "War Literature. But Robert A. Lively reported only
seventeen such novels Issued In the abrasive Reconstruction era of
the 1870s, contrasted with forty-nine during the ensuing decade.
From his analysts of 512 Civil War adult and juvenile novels In the Wil-
mer Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he
found twenty-five adult war novels written by Northerners between
1865 and 1880.13 Joyce Appleby, drawing on resources of the Henry
E. Huntington Library, subsequently discovered and analyzed more
than twice that number of extant titles for the same period; and she
noted that Buck, who had relied almost wholly upon Southern fiction
for his study of sectional reconciliation, cited only three such North-
ern novels in the fifteen-year aftermath of the war. "Most studies of
Civil War literature have lumped Northern and Southern authors
together, she demurs. "Northern authors have been neglected in
favor of Southern writers whose creative vigor in the postwar period
monopolized the attention of literary scholars."
14
Rebecca Washington Smith, chronicling the heightened
appeal of Civil War fiction after 1880, discloses that Civil War stories
and novels which Northern editors had rejected In the 1870s were
afterwards actively sought and published by these same opinion
leaders.
1
5 By the early 1880s, the reconciliation spirit was broadly
reflected across dime novels and genteel fiction alike, in heroic tales
glorifying both armies--productions which prompted John Hay to
grumble that the American nation had lapsed into a period of "blub-
bering sentiment."
1
6 As the newspaper had been the standard forum
for frontier humorists before the Civil War, so the magazine became
the chief outlet for post-bellum local-color writing, notably for the
work of Southerners. Northern magazine editors, as Frank Luther
Mott has stressed, were crucial in shaping the image of the riven,
postwar South.17
Southern magazine writers encountered neither receptive
editorial gatekeepers nor a profitable readership for the "mellowed"
plantation tradition until the 1880s; and the South's racial myth of a
Lost Cause (e.g., Cable, Harris, Page, Murfree) was to find Its pub-
lishing Mecca during that decade in New York City. Like Howard,
these authors avoided the horror and brutal ity of the battlefield and,
appealing to the new patriotism, formulated a legend of chivalry.
"The downfall of empire, Tourgee believed, "is always the epoch of
romance . ... In all history, no cause had so many of the elements of
pathos as that which fell at Appomattox."
1
8 Henry Nash Smith has
indicated that Scribner'sjCentury editors enforced their views by
blue-penciling phraseology "not sufficiently reconstructed," and he
ventures that Thomas Nelson Page's writing became acceptable to
Northern editors only after it could be viewed as "the romance of a
no longer dangerous South."
1
9 Oaude M. Simpson speculates that
the real reason the Century deferred for several years publication of
Page's "Marse Chan" {1884) was not the faithful Sam's difficult Negro
dialect, but "Page's glorification of slavery."20
Lively had endorsed Buck's assumption that the reconciliation
theme first came from Southern pens In the 1880s, and he posited
that a "myth of war, synthetically nurtured in these writing, was
governed by "ante-bellum courtesies rather than by military neces-
sity. 21 But Appleby has persuasively challenged both these authors'
assumption that Northern writers followed the popular trend of
Southern conciliatory writing. "They actually originated it," she
counters, "introducing all the cliches of intersectional romance, con-
verted partisanship, and mutual respect for the opponent's
heroism."22 On the Northern stage, correspondingly, Howard's
archetypal war /chivalry drama of brothers, sisters, and divided sec-
tional loyalties (1869) anticipated by nearly two decades Page's
46
evocation of the reconciliation theme in "Meh Lady" (1886), whose
Southern heroine loses a brother in the war, nurses a Union soldier
back to health, and eventually marries him.
But the war came tardily onto the public stage, and when it
came, as Rollin G. Osterweis has remarked, "the playwrights, pro-
ducers, and critics who exploited the trend were nearly all North-
erners."23 William Gillette's Held by the Enemy (1885) , though linked
to no tangible historical persons or incidents, was the first play to
develop the reunion motif successfully. Buck has claimed that there-
after Civil War plays were the greatest "hits" of that time. "There was
as much love, and more tears, for the Gray as for the Blue, he writes.
"No American play except Uncle Tom's Cabin has ever aroused the
popular enthusiasm of Shenandoah, which brought the thrill of battle
to the very stage. 24
Let us have peace.
Howard passed the wartime years in his native Detroit, where
he penned anonymous sketches for the Detroit Free Press and
theatre reviews and other pieces for the Tribune. His first produced
script, Fantine (in five acts, based on Victor Hugo's Les Miserables),
received a single successful performance on 29 March 1865, at Garry
A. Hough's Atheneum. Hopefully bearing with him a comedy-in-
progress (a draft of his Civil War play), he emigrated early in 1867 to
New York City, where by June he had obtained employment on
Charles H. Sweetser's two-cent, short-lived "society" daily, The Eve-
ning Gazette, located at 1 Vesey Street, and its immediate
successor--from September 21--The Evening Maif.25 By his own
report, he wrote "about nine-tenths of the Editorials of the Mail and
the Evening Gazette, also various correspondence over 'Caradoc'
[his pseudonym}, and articles on Art, the Drama, books, etc. 26 The
fledgling journalist would extricate himself from this underpaying,
wheel-horse predicament in September 1868, when then managing
editor John Russell Young made him exchange editor of Horace
Greeley's popular New York Daily Tribune. Young was succeeded
by former Cincinnati war correspondent Whitelaw Reid in 1869.
Greeley & Co. had opposed Andrew Johnson's "restoration program
and dubbed the President "an aching tooth in the national jaw;" and
they promoted Congress' sterner Reconstruction policies in the
South and aggressively encouraged Negro suffrage and general
amnesty. Howard left this liberal Republican organ in August 1871
under a cloud of misunderstanding, to become assistant managing
editor of William Cullen Bryant's moderate, prestigious Evening Post
for over one year. He was admirably situated during these years in
the University Building, on Washington Square ("the college below,
the studios above"), a favorite resort of local artists and writers. He
A"7
was again based at Detroit between 1873 and early 1875; sailed for
England in mid-February 1875; and spent the next year in London,
"attached to the Pall Mall Gazette."
The dramaturgical distillation of Shenandoah's bland, apoliti-
cal Civil War was thus tempered by daily reports of sectional discord
(successively processed by Howard for the Daily Tribune and Eve-
ning Post) ; by the welter of partisan Reconstruction politics in
Washington; and by contending editorial positions of his own and
other Northern newspapers. When Howard entered upon his nightly
duties In the Tribune Tower, Greeley's chosen presidential candidate,
Ulysses S. Grant, had long since accepted the Republicans' nomina-
tion at Chicago. "Let us have peace, he said. But there was
widespread, unabated strife in the land. During late July the Four-
teenth Amendment, lacking formal ratification by three-fourths of the
states (which states?), had been twice proclaimed "in force" by Sec-
retary of State William E. Seward. There was fierce agitation, more-
over, for the Fifteenth Amendment ("impartial suffrage"), drafted and
initiated during 1867. The 1868 presidential campaign--General
Grant vs. Governor Seymour--was then nearing its electoral climax.
Republican exchanges, I.e. reprints and excerpts from "sterling"
Southern journals (Lynchburg, Raleigh, Columbia, Atlanta, Macon,
Columbus, New Orleans), in early fall 1868, were rife with partisan
rhetoric and accounts of political crimes and racial conflict. The
Tribune's editorial stance, exemplified by daily headlines (many
presumably devised by Howard), was persistently anti-Democratic.
In due course, President-elect Grant was inaugurated on 4 March
1869. "Missouri. The Political Campaign--Rebel Threats--
Wickedness of the Democratic Leaders . . . will stimulate the Radicals
to more zeal" (September 1 ). "Reconstruction. The Negro Members
of the Georgia Legislature Unseated . ... Next move is to put Demo-
crats into the vacant seats" (September 4). "The Ku Klux Klan. Gen-
eral Forrest . .. opposes the Radical administration [in Tennessee]"
(September 4). "Georgia. The Expelled Blacks. Election Law
Passed Over the Veto" (September 5). "The Arkansas Rebellion . ...
Rebel outbreak in Conway County . .. suppressed by Governor
Clayton" (September 7) . "The Ku Klux Klan Murders at Bowling
Green [Kentucky]--Arson in a Shaker Community" (September 8).
"Troops to Be Sent to Tennessee" (September 11). "Georgia.
Activity of the Rebels. The Blacks to Be Deprived of the Elective
Franchise. Serfdom to Be Established--the Old Secessionists at
Work" (September 12). "Georgia. Colored Men Excluded from the
Jury Box" (September 21 ). "The Rebellion in Georgia. The Reign of
Terror . . .. The Sanguinary Riot at Camilla" (September 23). "The
Camilla Massacre ... Republicans ambushed and assassinated"
(September 26). "The New Rebellion. All Republicans in Alabama
Threatened by the Brigands. Reign of Terror in Texas" (September
4R
29).
In the closing weeks of the national election campaign,
editorial invective was heightened--North and South. "A Uar Without
Shame. Horatio Seymour [asserts] more than $300,000 a year . ..
wasted . .. to keep the people of the South in subjection" (October
1 ). "The New Rebellion. The St. landry Riot--Truthful Account by
[Louisiana) Eye-witness" (October 12). "VICTORY. Democracy
Meets Its Waterloo [in] October Canvass . ... Vote for Grant and
Peace," "The Rebel Defeat" (October 13 & 15). "The New Rebellion-
Political Assassinations in South Carolina" (October 20). "Riot in
Gretna, La.--The Mob Order Away the Police ... . Murders in St.
Mary's Parish, La." (October 24). "The Rebel Democrats in Arms and
Shooting Negroes in the Streets [of] New Orleans" (October 29) .
"The New Orleans Riots" (October 30). "Tennessee. Half a Million
Behind the Masked Pirates and Assassins" (October 31). "EXTRA.
Victory. Republican Triumph. Ulysses S. Grant, President" (Novem-
ber 4). But factional conflict continued apace. "The New Rebellion-
A Month of Assassinations .. .. Is America a democracy divided by
murder?" (November 4). On the following day, notice was taken of
the Democratic New York World's ad hominem attacks upon .. . the
mob in the [Tribune] office." On November 11, Howard's paper
renewed its campaign against "The Reign of Terror in Georgia"; on
the 21st, it assailed "Ku Klux Outrages" there and on December 4, it
condemned the Democratic "Reign of Terror In Texas." This first- and
second-hand reportage--especially concerning hundreds of political
murders of Southern Negro voters and elected officials--would con-
tinue for the balance of Howard's stint with the Daily Tribune.
Exchanges headed "The Southern States, on January 1, 11,
and 13, 1869, cited further Klan atrocities. Amnesty and Suffrage--
The Virginia Press on the New Movement" on January 14 lengthily
reported "all shades of opinion from 12 metropolitan papers: "The for-
mer ruling class has steadily opposed Negro suffrage (having
abolished political opposition in the legislature on January 1). "The
Condition of the South," on January 23, concluded in a white
apologist, composite plea for reconciliation, woven of other con-
current exchanges: "On the whole, the south is looking up . . .. Let
the friends of Peace and Union unite on the basis of Universal
Amnesty with Impartial Suffrage, and [the isolated gangs] will soon
have vanished altogether. "The Democratic Massacres In Louisiana"
Oynchings and other outrages committed on colored voters for Grant
and Colfax), on January 25, however, mentioned a 296-page report
of 580 such killings relayed by the Radical Louisiana Legislature to
the Congress. Under the rubric of New Publications, on January 26,
were printed disarming excerpts from Major John De Forest's
"Chivalrous and Semi -Chivalrous Southrons" (in Harper's): "The
Southerner has more individuality than the Northerner, and is ... one
AO
of the most amusing persons on this continent, if not in the wortd.
In due course, President-elect Grant was inaugurated on 4
March 1869. "Washington Crowded with Carpet-baggers .... A new
administration begins its career, for better or worse. The editors
defended President Grant on March 3 against attacks in the Demo-
cratic press; and on April 12, following the closing day of Congress,
they approved "some excellent legislation completed" and praised
the President for his "statesmanship." In the promotional, descriptive
"North Carolina," on May 29, Republican sage Hinton Rowan Helper
deplored incompetence and corruption in the Legislature, which he
blamed on "ignorant and venal negroes on the one hand and . ..
illiterate and mercenary white men on t he other. The editors
rebuked the Times, on June 4, for retaining a Georgia correspon-
dent who justifies--or rather excuses--the recent assassination of
prominent Republicans in that State.
In "How Tammany Kept the Fourth," on July 7, the editors
made known New York Democrats' cynical views of the Civil War
and Union victory. On September 2, they declared a New England
election victory under the slogan "Let Us Have Peace" and reported
that in Virginia military commander George Stoneman still "refuses to
execute the Reconstruction laws. In "Shall There Be Peace?" on the
3rd, they staunchly defended Impartial Suffrage versus the New York
World' s racist threats of a unanimous Democratic vote against it.
On December 7, they printed the full text of Grant's message to Con-
gress, which Horace Greeley generously appraised as "one of the
wisest and most judicious messages ever transmitted.
By an Act of 26 January 1870, Virginia was re-admitted to the
Union. Greeley's paper reported on March 9 that Republ ican
provisional Governor William W. Holden of North Carolina, declaring
Alamance County in a state of insurrection, had sought intervention
by Federal troops. Black Mississippi Senator Hiram Revels' entry
upon the Senate floor was reported on March 19; the Fifteenth
Amendment was proclaimed "in force" on the 20th; and during late
May and early June the Daily Tribune explained the punitive
features--heavy fines and imprisonment--of the Fifteenth Amendment
Bill (the first of three "force bills" regulating elections). The Georgia
Act was passed and signed in mid-July; Congress adjourned; and on
the 18th the editors tentatively affirmed: "Four States have been
reconstructed and the Union restored, as far as legislation could do
it." But on August 3 they printed--without its author' s knowledge or
consent--the faulty transcript of a May 1870 private letter from
embattled North Carolina judge Albion W. Tourgee to State Senator
Joseph C. Abbott, detailing a dozen Klan murders in his district,
several arsons, and numerous housebreakings, and reporting more
than 1,000 Klan outrages.
Georgia's senators were at last admitted to Congress, during
fiO
February 1871, "and every state is now represented." Governor
Holden was deposed by North Carolina Conservatives' impeachment
in March; the Ku-Kiux Enforcement Act, passed and signed in April,
made Ku-Kiuxism a federal crime and authorized use of federal
troops to enforce it; and ensuing Ku-Kiux trials in North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Mississippi resulted in thousands of guilty ver-
dicts and imprisonments. Howard nightly confronted such sobering
exchanges, letters, and dispatches until his Daily Tribune leave-
taking in late August 1871.
When Howard joined the Evening Post's news force, housed
in third-floor editorial rooms at 41 Nassau Street, it comprised
Charlton M. Lewis, a former classics and mathematics professor at
Union College, as managing editor; himself, as Lewis' assistant; J.
Ranken Tawse, soon to become the paper's dramatic critic, as city
editor; the telegraph editor; the financial editor; and two reporters,
one salaried and the other "on space." William Alexander Linn would
ably succeed Tawse as city editor in the fall of 1871. Other col-
leagues during this Interim Included the music and dramatic critic
(and frequent traveler), William F. Williams; the literary editor, John R.
Thompson (a Southern poet and the prewar editor of the Southern
Literary Messenger); and such intermittent reviewers and free-
lancers as John Hay, Bayard Taylor, Charles Barnard, and Samuel
Osgood. When the editor, William Cullen Bryant, or his son-in-law
Parke Godwin were not in the office, Lewis and Howard bore full
responsibility for the editorial page_27
During late summer 1871, the Evening Post was
simultaneously pursuing "The Truth About the Ku-Kiux" (current con-
gressional hearings) and "Politics as a Trade" (its ongoing Investiga-
tion of Tammany/Tweed corruption). After Appomattox Bryant had
relaxed his former radical principles regarding the defeated South
and actively opposed extreme Congressional policies. He and his
colleagues argued that illiterate Negroes were as yet unfit to vote,
urged a Southern ballot based on a literacy test, and sought a
speedy end to military rule in the Southern states. Mississippi and
Virginia were editorially commended on September 1 as "the most
peaceful and the best governed of the reconstructed states;"
whereas in "What Is To Be done?" on the 4th, South Carolina's
"bloodied bands of Ku-Kiux ruffians and the most corrupt of 'carpet-
bag' plunderers were reproached; and a four-part, anonymous,
documented series on "The Ku-Kiux in South Carolina," on the 4th,
8th, 11th, and 19th, proffered "A Calm Review of the Facts by a Resi-
dent of the State. On the 14th, in its first report on the Ku-Kiux trials
at Raleigh, N.C., the editors tendered ambivalent political com-
mentary: ''The grand jury consists of whites and blacks, and contains
several men who cannot write their names. On the 18th, they ven-
tured anti-Radical sentiments on similar proceedings at Columbia,
S.C.: "Martial law is a bad thing for any people .... We have no faith
in the military government of the southern people by the rest of the
nation. Despite ensuing reports on the 22nd of racial discrimination
against colored men of Richmond and fresh Ku-Kiux outrages in
western Arkansas, the editors on the 25th defended their sanguine,
moderate, seemingly untenable position: "If the southern states are
not in rebellion--and it is absurd to say that they are--then we must
appeal to .. . laws for the preservation of the peace; let them be
enforced."
"A serious negro riot" at Danville, Virginia, and the summoning
of troops to restore order were reported on October 2. In "The Les-
son from Texas," on the 13th, the editors grumbled that "The Republi-
can party there holds ... little relation to the national Republican
party; the Evening Post [has) predicted Its defeat as the natural result
of the corrupt and despotic usurpations of Its leaders. On the 16th,
however, the paper reported that Governor Brown of Missouri "has
called out the militia to suppress the 'bush-whackers' [whose] out-
rages ... are mostly against Republicans." On November 14, It
exulted at "The Ku-Kiux in Chains--Penitents by the Hundreds--The
Jail Overflowed--General Panic" and editorially remarked: "In some
parts of [South Carolina] hardly a white man can be named who has
not been identified as a Ku-Kiux either by his own confession or
those of his fellow-members.
Such was the Evening Post's equivocal, at once anti-
Democratic and anti-Radical stance during Howard's eventful year-
plus of service. In a piece headed "Poor South Carolina," on Novem-
ber 15, the editors commented: "Between the Ku-Klux and the bad
financial arrangement of the state officers, South Carolina seems to
be sadly crushed. Despite its tenuous optimism, the paper pub-
lished a dispatch on the 27th detailing new Ku-Klux depredations in
Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia: "In Mississippi
[they have] burned near1y all the school-houses ... and driven the
teachers off. In Alabama [they) have [broken) up all the Methodist
Episcopal societies established since ... the rebellion by northern
missionaries." In "A Christmas Book for the South," on December 21,
the vexed editors again reviled "the scandalous course of public
affairs in the southern states and endorsed the demand for universal
amnesty as remedy: "The President [recently) urged It upon the Con-
gress, and we are rejoiced to see that the Senate has taken [this] up
... with some degree of earnestness." On 6 January 1872, in "The
Federal Government and the States, they lengthily rehearsed their
tendentious case that, "The interference of the federal government in
the affairs of the states produces no good and leads to unmeasured
evils ... , confusion, and anarchy; on the other side, where that Inter-
position has been withheld or restrained ... the recovery of the
states ... and their peaceful progress and development has been
most rapid." Conservative, border-state "endorsement" of a sort
appeared on the 15th, from a Missouri newspaper called The
Caucasian, whose masthead motto was "State Sovereignty! White
Supremacy! and Repudiation [of the Yankee war debt)! This is
Uberty!" and whose daunting platform was "The Constitution of 1860,
and the Rights of the States. This Is a White Man's Government ...
Forever! Down with the Fifteenth Bedamnedment!" (In unsmiling
political comment of July 12 on "The Southern Platform," the Evening
Post acknowledged that The Caucasian "has kept green the memory
of what the South fought for and lost, and forecast the inexorable
formation of the Solid South.)
Intermittent Ku-Kiux happenings, the Mormon Question in
Utah, prosecution of the Tweed Ring and Erie Ring in New York, pas-
sage of the Civil Rights and Amnesty bills by the Congress, progress
of the Alabama Oaims at Geneva, and Uberal Republicans' nomina-
tion of Horace Greeley for President at Cincinnati crowded the news
and editorial pages through the early months of 1872. Klansmen had
attacked unoffending Negroes aboard a moving railroad car in Ten-
nessee (February 6 & 9); a white sheriff was sued by the family of
one of the Negroes lynched by an Indiana mob (March 9); and
numerous Robeson County Negroes were murdered by the "outlaw"
Lowery gang in North Carolina (March 13). Liberal Republicans in
Ohio and Tennessee named their organization the Reunion and
Reform Party (March 15); while Negro Republicans in New York
formed the Thaddeus Stevens Club (April 2). Lewis editorially
repudiated Greeley's foredoomed candidacy in "The Fiasco at Cin-
cinnati .... Mr. Greeley has no settled political opinions" (May 4); and
though Bryant had frequently, sharply criticized President Grant, he
belatedly backed his bid for re-election in "Grant's Real Character ...
a plain American citizen, with his average defects, his average
ignorance, his average intelligence, and his average vices and
virtues" (August 2). Wendell Phillips took sides early In a published
letter: "I am for Grant. . . . I believe the plot to nominate [Greeley) was
hatched by southern rebels more than a year ago" (May 25).
Frederick Douglass urged Colored Fellow Citizens to ... cast our
whole weight into the scale for Grant and Wilson" (August 12); and
Richard Henry Dana, Jr., pleaded the President's wartime and
Reconstruction virtues in rallying colored men to support his election
(August 21 & 23).
Howard may be credited with the day-to-day authorship of
many evenhanded articles and editorials on the United States' hard-
bought campaign for monetary damages against Great Britain, which
had fitted the Alabama and other Confederate naval vessels with
armaments during the Civil War: "The question of this treaty ought to
be speedily settled either one way or the other" (June 10). He would
afterwards revive this thorny issue--"Two peoples . .. have suffered
mutual hostility for a term of years" --in the London Pall Mall Gazette.
The "Semi-historical" Matrix
Paradoxically, Bronson Howard believed from the outset that a
"Civil War" novel or drama "must touch but lightly upon the historical
surroundings in which its imaginary people are supposed to move. 28
Horace Scudder, writing in 1887, had anticipated this perspective.
"We stand, perhaps, too near the scenes of the late war ... to bear
the spectacle of that drama reenacted on the stage; but In due time
the events . . . of the moral and political conflicts will be reduced In
epitome and made vivid In action, which concentrates the thought of
the historic movements Into a few characters and situations. 29
Scudder's readers and Howard's audiences stood nearer, as we
have noted, to the political and psychic ordeals of Radical
Reconstruction. In both Feds and Confeds and Drum Taps Howard
had amplified comedy, minimized physical combat, and
demonstrably avoided sectional issues. The l atter script's prewar
opening act and postwar closing one were laid in the neutral milieu
general of Uncle Tom Haverill's upstate New York villa; while its
wartime middle act was vaguely localized in the Ellinghams'
unscathed Georgia mansion. Fort Sumter's bombardment was but
distantly reported In this version's Act One, not Immediately
observed; Act Two had trafficked in martial music and marching,
comic spectacles, and stock military melodrama (without death or
bodily harm to anyone); and Act Three, though briefly darkened by
Robert's elapsing prisoner status and by unfounded fears for Ker-
chival's safety, advanced to a peacetime tableau of "three happy
couples and a reconstructed home. Thornton was here merely
West's romantic rival, a Confederate but no deep-dyed villain. "With
the exception of the second act, in which the only military display is
made, the play proceeds wholly upon pleasing domestic Incidents
arising out of the memorable struggle, the Detroit Free Press reas-
sured its readers, "and with these Mr. Howard has succeeded In fash-
Ioning one of the most delightful comedies imaginable. 30 The
playwright himself could scarcely have better stated the case for his
discreet dramaturgy.
While acknowledging a studied neglect of the war's basic
Issues, Howard biographer Charles J. Boyle critically affirms
Shenandoah's "symbolic reuniting of the divided sections, chiefly
through Gertrude and Kerchival's war-torn relations. But he con-
siders the complementary North-South pairing of West's sister
Madeline and Robert Ellingham quite dispensable. "Yet lest the
audience get the Idea that the Southern girt was weak or traitorous to
her love, Howard shows a Northern girl doing exactly the same
thing." Boyle also praises the rituals of reconciliation arising from
54
Confederate officers' chivalrous treatment of wounded and dying
Frank Haveriii/Bedloe: "The Confederate physician ... gently covers
his face ... [and] the Confederates and the Federals join in the fu-
neral procession." The cast's sole unsympathetic figure, in fact, is a
man neither Northern nor Southern, but a traitor whom Ellingham, a
real Southern gentleman, describes with loathing: Captain Edward
Thornton, of the Confederate Secret Service. Having skillfully
estranged this villain from North, South, and the audience, Boyle
notes, Howard "was then free to take Thornton into whatever
treachery his plot would require."31
(Most other academic commentary, by contrast, has been
prevailingly deferential andjor impressionistic. Drama historian
Arthur Hobson Quinn wholeheartedly applauds the old-fashioned
play's "dignity of sincerity;32 whereas Uoyd A. Frerer, Jr., deploring
its "melodramatically contrived" plot, considers Gertrude "forceful
and Interesting," but objects that Thornton Is "only barely
motivated. "33)
"I made more mistakes in that play than in any other I ever
wrote," Howard had afterwards allowed of Shenandoah, dis-
ingenuously suppressing that two earlier scripts had preceded the
five-act Boston version. "They were mistakes in the art of playwriting,
and I saw them after it was produced."34 But this confession is now
cryptic, since the published interview included no examples of his
self-impugned "mistakes." Perhaps he had only meant to imply
cumulative shortcomings of Feds and Confeds and Drum Taps. Yet
the changes made between Boston (1888) and New York (1889), he
said, "were great enough to make a new date of 'first' production."35
The overhauling process had begun fortuitously. "Howard
remarked that he must write another play to keep from being too
idle," during the winter of 1887-88 in the University of Michigan
Ubrary, at nn Arbor. Here he at length discovered "a dramatic inci-
dent that would properly represent and stand for the war as a whole.
Given a pre-existing chronological frame of Sumter and Appomattox,
his "dramatic incident of the proper scope to use as the nucleus of
my plece36 comprised events culminating In the Battle of Cedar
Creek, 19 October 1864.
"I read twelve volumes of Scribner's military history
[Campaigns of the Civil War)," he related. "I found incidents in
plenty, but some were too large and of too great scope to be hand-
led adequately upon the stage. But when I came upon those false
signals with which the Confederate army caused Sheridan to make
his great ride, I was satisfied. In the meantime I had marked, In my
readina, enough points upon which might have been based a dozen


Happily the playwright's penciled markings are extant,
throughout his personal copy of George E. Pond' s The Shenandoah
Valley in 1864 (Vol ume XI of Scribner's Campaigns) ,38 now among
Howard's books and manuscripts In the Butler Library of Columbia
University. His pasteboard slip still marks the opening of Chapter
Xlll--the Battle of Cedar Creek; and his emphatic marginal strokes
frame these key chapter passages:
"The affair might have proved, however, very serious, had not
the Union right been strengthened by Sheridan . . .. 'I hastened from
Winchester . . . and found the armies between Middletown and New-
town . ... I here took the affair In hand, and quickly united the corps-
formed a compact line of battle just in time to repulse an attack of the
enemy.' Sheridan to Grant, October 19th, 10 p.m." (237)
"New consternation spread among the Confederate ranks,
until division after division gave way, and the army that had swept
over the field In triumph at dawn was a mass of fugitives at night. . . .
Never was greater rout seen on a battle-field since Bull Run" (238).
"Only the chance discovery of an obscure and even fictitious
warning, taken from a Confederate signal station, gave to the Union
Army the services of the two cavalry divisions, that were just depart-
ing on an expedition to the Virginia Central Railroad" (242).
From these and other historical suggestions the playwright
readily generated Shenandoah's "semi-historical" matrix, embracing
the evocative Shenandoah Valley setti ng, Act Three's signaling
scenes and Confederate code-key episodes, and Sheridan's climac-
tic Act Four ride, reversing the Union soldiers' ragged retreat.
Howard "did not choose the subject of Sheridan's ride for 'war-play',"
he said, until he discovered "that the cause of Gen. Sheridan being at
Winchester, and not at Washington, when the battle of Cedar Creek
occurred, was a dispatch in cipher signaled by the Confederates
from Three Top Mountain."39 He now actualized Sumter's bombard-
ment; wrought vibrant characterizations of General Haverill, Frank
Haverill, Constance, and Thornton; and poignantl y reinforced his
animating reconciliation theme.
The "obscure and even fictitious warning" cited in Howard's
source was a Confederate dispatch taken down as it was flagged
from the Three Top Mountain signal station and translated by Union
signal offi cers, who knew the Confederate signal code: "To
Lieutenant-General Early: Be ready to move as soon as my forces
j oin you, and we will crush Sheridan. Longstreet, Lieutenant-
General. Sheridan's account of this incident , given i n his
posthumous Memoirs (1888), reveals that when General Horatio G.
Wright had relayed this message to him in Front Royal, en route to
conference with War Secretary Stanton in Washington, he was skep-
tical. "I first thought it a ruse, and hardly worth attention, but on
reflection deemed it best to be on the safe side, so I abandoned the
cavalry raid toward Charlottesville, in order to give General Wright
the entire strength of the army."
4
0 Jubal A. Earl y told General
'""
Richard Irwin, a Northern writer, in 1890 that the Longstreet-Early
message was indeed a fraud. Having learned that Union signalmen
had broken the Confederate code, his own signal officers had lately
devised a new one; then Early ordered the fictitious message sent in
the old code.41 But, as succeeding events and Howard's play dis-
closed, Early's "ruse backfired.
Out of this complex, real-life "nucleus" grew Shenandoah's
"semi-historical" Act Two sequence of General Haverill's concern dur-
ing Sheridan's absence ("Since his departure, we have reason to
believe that the enemy are about to move, and we must be able to
read their signal dispatches, H possible"); an intercepted Confederate
dispatch found in Thornton's possession ('Watch for a signal from
Three Top Mountain to-night"); and Lieut. Bedloe's heroic exploit
whereby the Confederate code-book is obtained and a crucial mes-
sage thereby translated ("Sheridan Is away ... We will crush the
Union army before he can return"). Haverill orders intercepted mes-
sage relayed to Sheridan; "a Signalman, who has a burning torch on
a long pole ... , hurries up the elevation;" and the Act curtain falls on
the Signalman sending his fiery warning. (William Dean Howells'
review alludes to "the shifting lanterns employed for this action."
4
2)
Sheridan's Ride
In the play, although General Sheridan reportedly considers
the decoded message "a ruse of the enemy, he nonetheless orders
"some changes in our line, then seems to forego the rest of his
Washington journey to accomplish the famous, inspiring ride. Such
were the changes required to accommodate a week's historical
action (12-19 October 1864) into two "days" of Shenandoah's
dramatic time. In the process, further, Sheridan's celebrated mount
Rienzi (which the General had actually carried with him on the train to
and from Washington)
4
3 became Gertrude's ubiquitous "Con-
federate" horse Jack--confiscated, Unionized, and the focus of scat-
tered invented incidents. ("While the writer cannot claim that the
horse belonging to a Southern girl, in Charleston, and being cap-
tured at the battle of Fair Oaks, are historical facts, he can claim that
no human being ... can say they are not. 44)
The General's fourteen-mile ride from Winchester to the Cedar
Creek battlefield, glorified on canvas, In popular verse, and in song,
at once became a topic of controversy. Some said it was but a
cautious canter; others claimed it was a breakneck gallop. By his
own account, Sheridan had reached the field about 10:30 a.m. on
October 19, but he did not regroup his forces for counter-attack until
nearly 4 o'clock that afternoon. His victory cost more than 5,600
Union casualties, as compared with Early's reported 2,900; but Lee's
weakened army was shattered by the clash and McClellan's peace-
F.7
at-any-price political campaign was halted.
4
5 Spurning such com-
plex actualities, Howard's Boston/New York script proffered only two
wounded Union officers, Lieut. Bedloe's poignant deathbed tableau
(''the most pathetic I have ever seen"46), and the hurrah-boys-hurrah
procession over the scene of a mounted, mute General Sheridan.
"I am in the last throes of rehearsal," Howard wrote to Atlantic
editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich from Boston on 12 November 1888. "A
horse joined the cast this morning; and I fully realized for the first
time that I had at last reached the horse drama, with super-
numeraries, gunpowder and a brass band. But I started for a military
play and have not flinched. "
47
This genre's gaudy antecedents
embraced Continental Ritterstiicke, "hippodramatic spectacle" at
London's Sadler's Wells and Astley's Amphitheatre, and such trans-
atlantic permutations as N.H. Bannister's "new grand National and
Equestrian Drama of Putnam; or, The Iron Son of '76 (1844).
The first version of Shenandoah was premiered at the Boston
Museum 19 November 1888; ran six weeks and purportedly "cap-
tured the town;" but was appraised a commercial failure. Yet Broad-
way producer Charles Frohman, who had met Howard about two
years before, and was struggling to find his own managerial footing
in New York and on the road, entrained for Stamford, Connecticut,
where the playwright was staying, and negotiated a contract with
him.
"You are a very great dramatist, Mr. Howard, and I am only a
theatrical manager, he modestly proposed. "But . .. I think two acts
[III-IV] should be merged into one, and I don't think you have made
enough out of Sheridan's ride."
"Mr. Frohman, you are right, the author reportedly
acquiesced, "and I shall be very glad to adopt your suggestions. 48
The changes that Howard made during the ensuing year,
according to Frohman's biographers, Isaac F. Marcosson and Daniel
Frohman, "were the ones that helped to make It a great success, as
he was afterward frank enough to admit." (But Sheridan's ride had
already assumed, as Howard himself believed, the palpable locality
of "horse drama.") The four-act version unveiled at the Star Theatre,
New York, 9 September 1889, was the product of a chastened,
anxious Howard's painstaking reconstructive labors.
The playwright also took an active part In enhancing
Shenandoah' s spectacular element, even presiding over Act Three's
pivotal "Sheridan's ride" effect, an experiment attended by some risk:
"I never felt quite safe till that horse was across the stage. On open-
ing night, he and Frohman stood behind the scenes, waiting, and
uncertain whether the appearance of Black Bess would be greeted
by the laughter of ridicule or the applause of success.
As the horse entered the wings and dashed across the stage
we held our breath," Howard told an Interviewer. As the applause
58
burst forth Frohman exclaimed, 'Thank God! the horse is across!'
'Yes, thank God!' said I, and we breathed a sigh of reliet.49
7he horse drama, with supernumeraries
Paradoxically, Shenandoah was not customary melodramatic
spectacle, although horse-transfixed Howard and Charles Frohman's
bedazzled biographers were to remember it so. Neither a grand
stage synthesis of the Civil War nor a Unionist patriotic epic, as the
Herald remarked next day, the script seemed "closer to being a com-
edy than a 'military comedy-drama.'" The Sun commended the
elaborate Act Three battle scene specifically because it had not
attempted a clap-trap "red-fire" tableau.
"The final groups of beaten and broken soldiers, posed with
pictorial skill that looked unstudied, and through which the mute
Impersonator of Sheridan dashed on horseback, was as remarkable
for Its dissimilarity to ordinary stage spectacle as It was for Its strong
effect upon the spectators. There was rapt silence until the curtain
was down, and then an outpouring of the heartiest applause
imaginable: Howard was twice called before the curtain and a
speech was demanded of him, the Sun reviewer disclosed, but he
good-naturedly restricted his thankfulness to bows and smiles.
Thereafter, for a stunning run of 250 performances (six weeks at the
Star, and continually thereafter at Proctor's Twenty-third Street
Theatre), the play reportedly grossed over $1,000 a night. Marcos-
son and Daniel Frohman claim box-office receipts to have averaged
$10,000 a week. After three years, from the New York production
and various concurrent Shenandoah companies criss-crossing the
northern and western United States, Charles Frohman, AI Hayman,
and A.M. Hooley divided $140,000 In profits; and Howard received
$100,000 In royalties. 50
Charles Frohman mounted an elaborate revival of the play at
the Academy of Music, New York, 30 August 1894, featuring Georgia
actress Odette Tyler, the daughter of Confederate General William W.
Kirkland, as Gertrude Ellingham, with E.J. Radcliffe as Kerchival
West, and "as many horses as possible . .. restive enough to make
folks In the orchestra stalls nervous. 5
1
And Shenandoah flourished
anew during the jingoistic fervor attending the Spanish-American
War. When It was revived in May and June 1898, at the Academy of
Music, the New York Dramatic Mirror described the audience as
being nearly as martial in appearance as the play. "Scattered every-
where through the house were Grand Army and other veterans.
Keenly they watched and lustily they cheered!"52 Maurice Barrymore
and Mary Hampton co-starred in another, "Grand Spectacular
Revival;" while other companies toured America trumpeted by
advance stories promising "Cavalry! Infantry! 250 Men! 50 Horses!"
.::n
On Dewey Day--1 May 1899--New York' s Broadway Theatre was
lavishly festooned with flags and bunting for a performance grandilo-
quently hailed as "more excellent in every respect than any prior ver-
sion. By mid-1899 the play had grossed "about $1,250,000. 53
Nor was this to be Sheridan's last histrionic ride.
It was graphically reincarnated on film in Sheridan's Ride
(Vitagraph, 1908), In the Shenandoah Valley (Selig, 1908) , With
Sheridan at Murfreesboro (Champion, 1911) , Sheridan's Ride
(Bison, 1912), and Kennean Buel's screen version of Howard's play,
Shenandoah (Kalem, 1913), which employed several hundred extras
for its realistic battle sequences. Studio president Frank Marion,
uncertain whether audiences "would sit through such a long picture,
ordered Buel 's film shortened from the original four and one-half
reels (each reel running ca. twelve minutes) to three. Film historian
Jack Spears credits Shenandoah cameraman George Hollister's
spectacular battle panoramas, shot from a nearby mountainside, with
1oreshadowing (D.W. Griffith's] The Birth of a Nation.54
A World War I revival of Shenandoah, with Tyrone Power and
Jessie Arnold, at Clune' s Auditorium, in Los Angeles (site of The Birth
of a Nation's 1915 premiere), reputedly rivaled the palpable historicity
of silent movies. "No motion picture, It is declared, ever attempted
anything more realistic than will be done in 'Shenandoah'."55
"The only dramatic effect, apart from the personal interests,
really aimed at was the change from a broken and dispirited retreat
of the Union army to an enthusiastic advance," Howard solemnly
pleaded in 1893. "The ride of Sheridan across the stage is only a
means of making the cause of that sudden change so Instanta-
neously apparent to the audience that they accept the whole move-
ment as a reality .. .. General Sheridan, in this case, is merely a part
of the machinery of the piece, as any other supernumerary may be,
and not in any way a person of the true dramatic interest. In other
words, Shenandoah has In it absolutely no character, with or without
words, that Is historical. 56
These unwonted disclaimers, published in the wake of popular
and critical enthusiasm for his play's spectacular element, rested on
his ensuing premise that Shenandoah was "semi-historical , as all
plays must be that deal with recent dates. Howells, avatar of what
Howard derisively dubbed the "jelly-fish school" of playwriting, had
praised Shenandoah In Harper's Monthly Magazine tor "effects that
ravish and kindle the fancy, by the legitimate realization of facts that
cannot be put into dialogue or action" (e.g. the cavalry bugle calls
and night-signaling). "It was a brave stroke, too, of the imagination to
pour half a battle, with all its unblinking tragedy of blood and dust
and wounds and death, across the stage." (But he objected to
Thornton's lecherous harassment of Constance Haverill , since ,he
pursuit of wives by villains is not 'representative or typical' of our
soclety.5
7
Nym Crinkle (A.C. Wheeler), on the other hand, advanc-
ing a "structuralist" (well-made play) position In the New York
Dramatic Mirror, faulted the playwrights's "overcomplicated" plot and
reproached his tendency to wander from his script's dramatic points:
"The arrival of Sheridan from Winchester to stem the tide of Union
retreat Is thrilling enough In Itself, but It had little or nothing to do with
the characters of the play, and robbed the close of Act Three of
climax In which some of them might have figured promlnently."58
Howard thus found himself In strange critical company. It was like
the blind men and the elephant.
In an understandable desire to dissociate dramatic effect from
stage-machinery ("I think that the word 'realism' has been per-
verted"), the author defensively blurred distinctions between the two.
For consistency, he should also have claimed--though he does not-
that Act Two's riveting signal scenes lay similarly outside "true
dramatic Interest. Lewis Strang vividly remembered "the representa-
tion of signaling by torches ... after the recollection of the plot and
characters became dim;" and Willa Cather, reviewing a Lincoln,
Nebraska, road-company performance of Shenandoah early In 1895,
had justly Inveighed against the producers for stinting Integral,
realistic stage effects, especially their elimination of the Three Top
Mountain signaling, of which she had read In New York news-
papers. 59 Three decades later, George Jean Nathan nostalgically
affirmed: "Across the centuries, the signal fires In Aeschylus's
Agamemnon evoked the same emotional response as those In
Bronson Howard's Shenandoah."60 Yet the aesthetic paradox
underlying Howard's conservative, tenuous assertions still obtains. 51
"Realism does not always mean truthfulness, Howard once
told a reporter. "An artificial means may often produce a truthful
Impression, [as] In Shenandoah. When we came to stage the piece
we saw that If the ladles wore gowns of the period, so outrageously
at odds with modern styles, the audiences would have an
Impression-well, that they were hardly ladies. That would have been
a false Impression. So we gowned them In modern styles [and] the
Impression was so truthful that not one of the critics said a word. "62
In like vein, Brander Matthews has cited one of Shenandoah's
realistic, expensive, and distracting scenic marvels as a warning
against the danger of sacrificing the major to the minor. "There was
a wide window at the back of the [Act One/Charleston] set, so that
the spectators could see the curving flight of the bomb and its final
explosion above the doomed fort, he wrote. "But It was never visible
after the first night because It drew attention to Itself, as a mechanical
effect, and so took the minds of the audience from [those] whose
loves were suddenly sundered .... At the second performance, the
spectators, did not see the shot, they only heard the dread report."63
By the mld-1890s, however, such paradoxical niceties were
usually buried under gratuitous spectacle. Whereas the initial Boston
and New York versions included but one horse, Charles Frohman's
lavish August 1894 revival proffered "as many horses as possible.
General Haverill and his men had arrived on stage in Act Two astride
skittish mounts; both West and Gertrude performed on horseback;
and when Bedloe rode off on his dangerous mission, he was fol-
lowed by twelve mounted troops. Sheridan' s ride i n this revival was
"wilder and more exciting than ever, a New York Times reviewer
attested. "A whole troop of cavalry followed the commander, (and]
the retreat of the Union infantry, cavalry, and artillery, and their rally
under the Influence of Sheridan's presence, is a magnificent pic-
ture."64 That tableau caused such an uproar, the Sun reported, that
the first-night audience "demanded two more sights of it."65 Since
Howard had superintended rehearsals and took bows after Act
Three, such spread-eagle embellishments can only have carried his
sanction.
Jacob Litt's successive productions in 1898-1900, coincident
with the Spanish-American War, flagrantly interpolated sanguinary
stage battles (including 250 men, 50 horses, an old brass twelve-
pounder, and anachronistic breach-loading rifles), anticlimactic pic-
nic and school-concert scenes, and a profusion of American and
Cuban flags. "Even the horses carried a flag, t he Boston Evening
Transcript noted unappreciatively.66 Thus did Howard' s patriotic
piece accommodate the current American mood for global
expansionism. The 1917 revival in Los Angeles showed "the com-
plete destruction of a house by a shell; " soldiers plunged head-
foremost down an embankment; and Sheridan's ride was reputedly
accorded "hair-lifting impersonations" of the General and his staff. 67
This "modern" impulse for spectacular literalism (onstage, in
movies, or on television) was by no means new. "There is nothing
out of date at all in this American propensity to be distracted from
what is essentially unreal by a display of things which are needlessly
authentic, as Boyle pointedly asserts, "while comparatively little
criticism has been leveled against an absence of what one might call
essential realism."68 Strang had recalled that mil itary trappings "and
to a mild extent the horrors of war" were splendidly utilized and
"made the most lasting impression;69 Boyle attributed the play's
appeal to "an interest in superficial realism and a love of spectacle;70
and Frerer also speculated that "this overpowering imp,ortance of the
spectacle" was a key to Shenandoah's great success. 1
'High and unselfish motives and unselfish heroism
New York Daily Tribune critic William Winter approvingly
observed that Howard's 1889 script had put little emphasis upon Civil
War strife;72 and his Times colleague Edward A. Dithmar, while com-
plaining of the drama's "complexity of interest," ascribed its first-night
success to the pathos and humorJ3 Contrastingly, Howells credited
Shenandoah with expressing "history from a patriotic point of view in
such terms and characters as did justice to the high and unselfish
motives and unselfish heroism of both sides; and he reappraised it
in 1916 as being "still the most original of our dramatic works."74
Quinn, acclaiming the play for its universal motives of love,
patriotism, and self-preservation, believed its balance of sympathy
between North and South had been "artfully kept without in any way
weakening the appeal of patriotism to a generation long enough
removed from the Civil War to view It with interest." It was, he
allowed (invoking Howard's own useful phrase), a 'satisfactory'
play.75
Shenandoah was Indeed a satisfactory play, the most suc-
cessful and profitable play of post-Civil War America, precisely
because Howard did not attempt--Boyle's term, again--"essential
realism." No matter that Howard did not portray regional distinc-
tions, nor address the war and Its underlying causes, nor In the end
contemplate political reconstruction. Though the Southern Idea of
an aristocracy by birth stood in obvious contrast to Northern exalta-
tion of aristocracy by wealth, he also declined to articulate this his-
torical opposition dramatically.
Neither did he, as one writer has recently proposed, merely
cash in on "an already created popular taste" for the magazine-fiction
mythology of chivalrous planters and gallant colonels,76 since his
Unionist "semi-historical" dramatic matrix predated these narrative
counterparts. Louisville reviewers had summarily censured his
innocuous Feds and Confeds, after all, even urging that all such
dramas based on the late war should be proscribed; and
Shenandoah's candid depiction of cavalier festivity on the eve of Fort
Sumter's bombardment, not unlike incongruous Northern picnicking
along First Bull Run's bloody battleground, reportedly "exasperated
and disappointed" its original Boston audience. Charleston's atmos-
phere of "frivolity . .. in the midst of social and national calamity" In
Act One, though historically authentic, had proved unacceptable to
some beholders.77 The Southern gentlemen who cheered after
shots came back from the beleaguered Union fort did so, Cleveland
Amory asserts, convinced that "they had started what they firmly
believed would be a chivalric war. 78
Nor did Howard's comedic love-vs.-flag philosophy of the final
version, a quarter century after Appomattox, escape censure. In Act
Three, Kerchlval enjoins his sister Madeline: "Every woman's heart,
the world over, belongs not to any country or any flag, but to her
husband--and her lover. Pray for the man you love, sister--it would
be treason not to." To a Pasadena woman, Grace Ellery Channing,
who demurred at this sentiment ("as crude an insult as was ever
launched at the loyal hearts of women"), the playwright responded:
"The love of man and woman Is above and below patriotism: the
object and cause of patriotic sacrifice .... Patriotism is an attendant
and protector of this love; and we honor patriotism in the highest
degree when we place it second to the impulse on which the exist-
ence of our race and of our country depends. [Madeline and
Gertrude], who exchange their allegiance when the men they love
are in battle, are simply acting as natural young women.
7
9
Howard's discreet omissions and corresponding romantic
idealization of wartime manners (i.e., neglect of the South's biracial
population, feudal Institutions, and slave-based agrarian economy;
removing the slave-maid Nettie of previous versions; peopling his
Union Army almost totally with officers), like his play's offstage
bands, military choruses, intermittent farce, and the time-worn hand-
kerchief, letter, clipping, and locket, all reflect his calculated
deference to postwar Northern theatre-goers' proved tolerance
levels. "The Negro . . . remained even in the midst of his literary well-
wishers an object of contempt or dread, or an uncomfortable
reminder of abandoned obligations, or a pestiferous shadow,
emblematic of guilt and retribution," Daniel Aaron believed. "Only a
few writers before and after 1865 appreciated the Negro's literal and
symbolic role in the war. 80 The tortuous path to Shenandoah's pub-
lic acceptance could only have been "semi-historical. The play did
not tour in the South.
Herbert Bergman, in a presentist survey of late nineteenth-
century Civil War plays, peevishly denounced these scripts--
excepting only James A. Herne's The Reverend Griffith Davenport
(1899)--as almost devoid of serious content. "One looks in vain for
more than cursory treatment of slavery, for political convictions or
ideas," he fumed. "One finds, instead, rather hackneyed plots,
embodying the reconciliation theme, lack of sectional bias, romanti-
cally melodramatic characters and action, and contrived comic
relief."81 Though Bergman probably recognized that more forthright,
historically-oriented scripts might have been commercially untenable,
even In the prosperous, Gilded Age North, his essay manifests
limited concern for the moral climate of authorial inhibition.
After Reconstruction, Northerners had ceased to wave the
bloody shirt, as Northern writers abandoned the villification of
Southern ways. "A culture which in its life was anathema to the
North," Buck allowed, "could in its death be honored."82 Osterweis
was convinced, moreover, that Howard's and others' muted stage
portrayals actually helped the Lost Cause ethos f ind "not just
tolerance but acceptance In the Northern heart. 83 Howells, who
once defined critical realism as "neither more nor less than the truth-
ful treatment of material," had pronounced Shenandoah's mimic ver-
sion of historic conflict both authentic and compelling. Quinn, writing
in the mid-1930s, similarly endorsed the script's melodramatic con-
trivance as "the art that conceals art;" confessed that Jenny
Buckthorn's Act Three soldiering charade (admired at a performance
seen in his youth) "still lives in my memory with a charm that still
defies both analysis and time;" and felt Howard's play "could be pro-
duced to-day with little revision. 84
Shenandoah, which faithfully reflects the American temper,
mores, and theatrical appetites of its day (plus those of later, suscep-
tible eras), need not now be reproached for imputed failure to "docu-
ment" the War between the States.
Endnotes
1
Louisville Courier-Journal, 2 October 1869.
2Louisvil/e Evening Express, 2 October 1869.
3Cf. ALS, Bronson Howard to J.W. Albaugh, New York, 26
October 1869, Walter Hampden-Edwin Booth Memorial Theatre Col-
lection, Library of The Players, New York.
4
"History in a Play," The First Book of the Authors Club (New
York: Authors Club, 1893), 282, 287.
5Detroit Tribune, 22 September 1873.
6Detroit Free Press, 26 September 1873.
7 ALS, Bronson Howard to Augustin Daly, Detroit, ca. Sep-
tember 1873, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. In an
earlier Howard letter to Daly, New York, 7 April 1871 (Folger),
reference Is made to a completed script entitled Taking the Oath [I.e.
Feds and Confeds], which Daly had already refused and which
Howard planned to offer to comedian George Fox.
8Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (New
York: Random House, 1961), 15, 95.
90scar Handlin, "The Civil War as Symbol and Actuality, The
Massachusetts Review 3 (1961), 134-35, 143.
10The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 (Boston: Little, Brown,
1937).
11Harper's Monthly Magazine 39 (September 1869), 535-44.
1
2Aibion W. Tourgee, "The South as a Field of Fiction," The
Forum 6 (December 1888), 405.
f3Ffction Fights the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1957).
14Reconciliation and the Northern Novelist, 1865-1880," Civil
War History 10, II (June 1964), 117.
15The Civil War and Its Aftermath In American Fiction
(Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, 1937), 30-31. Cf. Ernest E.
Leisy, The American Historical Novel (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1950).
1
6Wifliam R. Thayer, Life and Letters of John Hay (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, 1915), II, 32.
1
7
A History of American Magazines (Cambridge, Mass: Har-
vard University Press, 1938), Ill, 47-49.
18"fourgee, 418.
19Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et
al. (New York: Macmillan, 1948), II, 791.
20The Local Colorists: American Short Stories 1857-1900
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 10n.
21Fiction Fights the Civil War, 42.
22Appleby, 119-20.
23The Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865-1900 (Hamden, Conn.:
Archon Books, 1973), 103.
2
4
Road to Reunion, 233-34.
25Howard, autobiographical note ("Bronson Howard," 1889),
Walter Hampden-Edwin Booth Memorial Theatre Collection.
26ALS, Bronson Howard to John Russell Young, New York, 5
November 1868, Library of Congress.
27 Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism
(New York: Bani & Llveright, 1922), 421-23.
2B"History in a Play," 282.
29Horace Scudder, Men and Letters: Essays in Character-
ization and Criticism (Boston: Houghton & Co., 1887), 131-32.
30Detroit Free Press, 26 September 1873.
3
1
"Bronson Howard and the Popular Temper of the Gilded
Age" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1956), 202-7. Buck
claims embodiment of the reconciliation theme in five romantic pair-
ings in the final act of Shenandoah; but Boyle correctly notes that
only two of these couples (KerchivaljGertrude and Robert/Madeline)
involve North-South pairings--all the others are Northerners.
3
2
A History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the
Present Day (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), 58.
33Bronson Howard: Dean of American Dramatists" (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Iowa, 1971), 296-97.
34Boston Sunday Herald, 24 May 1903.
35ALS, Bronson Howard to George H. Cliff, New York, 26
April 1898, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
36Cf. Boston Sunday Herald, 24 May 1903; Grace Hortense
Tower, "Bronson Howard--Dean of American Dramatists, Theatre
Magazine (April1906), 99-102.
37T ower, 99-1 02.
38(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1886). Inscribed
inside front cover: "Bronson Howard/ New Rochelle, N.Y." Butler
Library, Columbia University.
39"History in a Play, 284-85. Howard's causal implication
here is overstated. Sheridan was at Washington, D.C., 17 October
66
1864, from 8 a.m. until noon, when he and his party left the city
aboard a special train. Reaching Martinsburg about dark, his group
spent the night there; and they started up the Valley pike early the
next morning (October 18), to arrive at Winchester between 3 and 4
that afternoon. The General writes that he went to bed about 10
o'clock and that his first intimation of a Confederate attack came
about 6 o'clock the next morning (October 19), when the officer on
picket duty came to his room to report hearing artillery firing from the
direction of Cedar Creek. After eating breakfast, about 8:30 or 9
o'clock, he and his men mounted their horses; and at the edge of
town they could hear "the unceasing roar" of artillery. Sheridan,
however, "as yet was utterly ignorant of the actual situation. Per-
sonal Memoirs of P.H. Sheridan (New York: Charles L. Webster &
Co., 1888), II, 65-73.
40Personal Memoirs, II, 62-64. (Though reviewed as early as
November 1888, Sheridan' s Memoirs first went on sale in December
1888.)
4
1Richard B. Irwin, History of the Nineteenth Corps (New
York: G.P. Putnam, 1892), 407.
42Harper's Monthly Magazine 81 (June 1890), 155.
43Cf . Richard O'Connor, Sheridan the Invincible
(Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merriil , 1953), 66, 110.
44"History in a Play," 285.
4
5"As a footnote to [Read's] poem it may be pertinent to
observe that Sheridan's men had been thoroughly surprised; that
Early showed pluck and skill in his attack upon superior numbers;
that the Confederate loss of victory after they had seemingly won it
was due partly to their demoralization in plundering the Union
camps; that the Southern generals were not able fully to control their
troops, who judged for themselves 'when it was time to retire' ; and
that Sheridan's losses far exceeded those of Early, the 'wreck' of
whose army carried off 1,500 Union prisoners and subsequently
faced Sheridan's whole force north of Cedar Creek without his
attacking it." James G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and
Reconstruction, 2nd edn. (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1969), 437.
46Howard, cit. In Boston Herald, 10 June 1894.
4
7
ALS, Bronson Howard to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Boston,
12 November 1888, Harvard Theatre Collection.
48Daniel Frohman and Isaac F. Marcosson, "The Life of
Charles Frohman: 'Shenandoah' and the First Stock Company,"
Cosmopolitan 40 (February 1916), 414.
4
9-fower, 100.
50Lewls Strang, Players and Plays of the Last Quarter
Century (Boston: L.C. Page and Co., 1902), II, 213.
51New York Times, 31 August 1894.
52New York Dramatic Mirror, 28 May 1898.
53ALS, Bronson Howard to Charles T. Scott, Camden,
Maine, 28 August 1899, Butler Library, Columbia University.
5
4
The Civil War on the Screen and Other Essays (South
Brunswick, New York, & London, 1977), 26 & 28. Mack Sennett also
burlesqued Howard's play in Salome Versus Shenandoah (1919) .
55Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1917. Five years later,
Howard's friend Henry Tyrrell had novelized the play, incorporating
most of its original dialogue, as Shenandoah: Love and War in the
Valley of Virginia (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1912).
56"History in a Play, 282-83.
57Harper's Monthly Magazine 81 (June 1890), 155.
58New York Dramatic Mirror, 14 September 1889.
59Cf. Strang, Plays and Players, II, 156; Cather, Nebraska
State Journal (Lincoln, Nebraska), 17 April 1895.
60-The Audience Emotion, American Mercury (June 1927),
246.
6
1
Cf. Bronson Howard, our Schools for the Stage, The
Century 61 (November 1900), 30: "The art of acting is the art of seem-
Ing to move, speak, and appear on the stage as the character
assumed moves, speaks, and appears in real life, under the circum-
stances indicated In the play.
62Boston Herald, 10 June 1894.
63"The Art of t he Stage-Manager, Inquiries and Opinions
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), 302. Cf. Boston Herald,
20 November 1888: "Mechanical devices were used to represent the
firing at Fort Sumter.
64New York Times, 31 August 1894.
65New York Sun, 31 August 1894.
66Boston Evening Transcript, 27 February 1900.
67LosAngeles Times, 21 May 1917.
68Bronson Howard and the Popular Temper of the Gilded
Age," 192.
69Piays and Players, II, 155.
70Bronson Howard and the Popular Temper of the Gilded
Age,"190.
7
1
"Bronson Howard: Dean of American Dramatists, 287.
72New York Daily Tribune, 10 September 1889.
73New York Times, 10 September 1889.
7
4
Cf. Harper's Monthly Magazine 81 (June 1890), 155; Har-
per's 33 (June 1916), 147.
75A History of the American Drama, 58-59.
76Qsterwels, The Myth of the Lost Cause, 103.
n Boston Herald, 20 November 1888.
78Who Killed Society? (New York: Harper' s, 1960), 89.
79Cf. "An Open Letter to Bronson Howard ... , New York
Dramatic Mirror, 30 June 1890; Howard's letter of 3 July 1890, New
68
York Dramatic Mirror, 19 July 1890.
eooaniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the
Civil War (London & New York: Oxford University Press), 1973), xviii
&332.
81 Major Civil War Plays, 1882-1899," Southern Speech
Journa/19 (March 1954), 224.
82The Road to Reunion, 208.
83The Myth of the Lost Cause, 103.
84A History of the American Drama, 58-60.
BOOK NOTES
Wayne State University Press has just Issued the latest title In
Its African American Life Series. JADT readers should be pleased to
note that this is The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology
of Early Plays, 1858-1938, edited by Leo Hamalian and James V.
Hatch, with a Foreword by George C. Wolfe. Of the thirteen plays
included (from William Wells Brown's The Escape: or, A Leap for
Freedom [1858) to Abram Hill's On Strivers Row [1938]), five have
never before been in print, and only three others are presently avail-
able anywhere. Six are by women.
James V. Hatch supplies an Informative introduction on
African American dramatists from the beginnings to the present, and
contrasts their work with the Image of blacks created by white
writers. Each of the included plays is prefaced by a short biographi-
cal sketch of the dramatist and a brief bibliography. The volume con-
cludes with a comprehensive bibliography. This publication should
prove a valuable contribution to American studies and to American
drama and theatre.
As its first Limelight Edition, Proscenium Publications, Inc.
(New York) has Issued the l ong-awaited memoirs of Norris
Houghton, entitled Entrances and Exits: A Life in and out of the
Theatre. For those of us privileged to know Norris Houghton per-
sonally, the book reads like the witty, self-deprecating raconteur we
have loved over many years. Readers not so privileged will still
delight in the recognition of persons, places, and events that mark
the life of a perceptive participant in many of the signal events of
American theatrical life after World War I. The Princeton Triangle
Club, the University Players, Broadway in the 30s, the first visit to
Russia, the saga of the Phoenix Theatre, the years at Vassar, Colum-
bia, Barnard and finally SUNY /Purchase are narrated in lively fashion
and become a panorama of the American theatre of three-quarters of
the twentieth century. Houghton knows everybody and has done
just about everything, and to read his book Is to have the last 75
years come vividly to life. Though his previous fiVe books have, each
in Its own way, become something of a classic, this new one caps
the career of one of the most delightful, idealistic, and caring of
twentieth century theatre practitioners.
70
CONTRIBUTORS
LAURENCE G. AVERY teaches in the Department of English at the
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
SALLY HARVEY is a member of the Department of English at the
University of California, Davis.
ROBERT L. McLAUGHLIN is on the faculty of the Department of
English at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois.
PAT M. RYAN is Senior Lecturer in American Civilization, University
of Trondheim, Norway.
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