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Journal of American Drama and theatre welcomes submissions. Aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style.
Journal of American Drama and theatre welcomes submissions. Aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style.
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Journal of American Drama and theatre welcomes submissions. Aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Formati disponibili
Scarica in formato PDF, TXT o leggi online su Scribd
Volume 13, Number 2 Spring 2001 Editor: Vera Mowry Roberts Co-Editor: Jane Bowers Managing Editor: Kimberly Pritchard Editorial Assistant: Dalia Basiouny Circulation Manager: Lara Simone Shalson Circulation Assistants: Hillary Arlen Celia Braxton Edwin Wilson, Director Martin E. Segal Theatre Center THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Editorial Board Ruby Cohn Bruce A. McConachie Margaret Wilkerson Don B. Wilmeth Robert Vorl icky The Journal of American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. Our aim is to promote research on American playwrights, plays, and theatre, and to encourage a more enlightened understanding of our literary and theatrical heritage. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes (rather than endnotes). Hard copies should be submitted in duplicate. We request that articles be submitted on disk as well (3.5" floppy), using WordPerfect for Windows or Microsoft Word format. Submissions will not be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Please allow three to four months for a decision, Our distinguished Editorial Board will constitute the jury of selection. Address editorial inquiries and manuscript submissions to the Editors, JAD77Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309. Our e-mail address is: mestc@gc.cu ny .ed u Please visit out web site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc Martin E. Segal Theatre Center 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. Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Copyright 2001 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1044-937X) is a member of CEU and is published three times a year, in the Winter, Spring, and Fall. Subscriptions are $12.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an additional $6.00 for postage. Inquire of Circulation Manager/ Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309. THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE Volume 13, Number 2 Spring 2001 Contents WALTER MESERVE AND MOLLIE ANN MESERVE, 1 Aspirations, Challenges, and Accomplishments: America's Literary Dramatists of the 1850s VINCENT lANDRO, 23 Media Mania: The Demonizing of the Theatrical Syndicate MAURA CRONIN, 51 The Yankee and the Veteran: Vehicles of Nationalism ALICE PETERSEN, 71 "Wishing on the Eye of the Horse": The Concept of "Entity" in Gertrude Stein's Listen to Me JULIAN MATES, 85 William Dunlap's A Trip to Niagara CONTRIBUTORS 97 Journal of American Drama and Theatre 13 (Spring 2001) ASPIRATIONS, CHALLENGES, AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS: AMERICA 1 S LITERARY DRAMATISTS OF THE 1850s WALTER J. MESERVE AND MOLLIE ANN MESERVE In any generation an amazing number of people with literary pretensions will attempt to write for the theatre. There seems always to be that certain fascination with "the stage." Clearly, during the decade of the 1850s-when Nathaniel Hawthorne derided his competition as "a damn'd mob of scribbling women"-the number of playwriting efforts thrust hopefully into the faces of American theatre managers illustrates this point. Those aspiring dramatists who were essayists or editors of periodicals frequently exploited contemporary issues in their plays; others displayed an awareness limited to the classical literary world and echoing a traditional voice that brought satisfaction mainly to a few reclusive scholars. Surprisingly, however, a large number of both these types of writers received public hearings in theatres - even if each play occupied a select audience for a single evening. In fact, during this decade such writers were actively encouraged to create for the theatre - as successful writers would be throughout the nineteenth century (Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, to name a few) and are encouraged even today. Laura Keene, managing her own New Theatre in New York, was both daring and shrewd in making the following announcement in her playbill for 31 August, 1857: It will be the study of this management to produce in rapid succession, such a series of excellent plays as will sustain the high reputation this establishment has already achieved by the production, during the past season, of fifteen pieces by New Dramatists, besides the numberless dramas of English authorship . . . While selecting such pieces as have been stamped with trans-Atlantic success/ the management will also endeavor to present such American plays, of 2 MESERVE modern and historical nature, as will tend to the establishment of a truly American drama. 1 It should be pointed out, of course, that the financial panic of the same year ushered in a critical time for theatres, and Laura Keene was forced to promote her offerings in any way she could. Her own productions of G. P. Wilkins's The Siam Light Guard in September had limited success with Joe Jeferson in a comic role, but her presentation of Charles T. P. Ware's Splendid which made use of topical humor and the current financial crisis, failed in October. Miss Keene's nationalistic ploys, however, seemed admirable, and others obviously tried the same technique. Mrs. David P. Bowers, manager of Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre, announced in the Philadelphia Daily News, 12 December 1857, that she would produce the best new plays by native dramatists, but there is no evidence that she made good her promise. Still, her idea held merit. Meanwhile, journeymen playwrights were churning out amusements with reckless haste. More serious writers needed encouragement - and more experience. Among those journal writers and editors who with varying degrees of success also contributed to the theatre was Oliver Bell Bunce (1828-1890), for several years editor of Appleton's Journal. For Bunce playwriting seemed to be an early love, and his first play, The Morning of Life, had been produced at the Bowery Theatre in New York in 1848. In 1850, his second effort, Marco Bozzaris, dramatizing the recent revolt in Greece with a highly patriotic interpretation of the hero, played by James Wallack, was also staged at the Bowery. Although The Spirit of the Times was favorably disposed toward this tragedy, the play did not last. 2 Presumably Wallack, who, in distinct contrast to his nephew, Lester Wallack, deserves commendation for his support of works by American playwrights such as Nathania! Parker Willis, Robert Conrad, and Bunce, also appeared in Bunce's play entitled Fate/ or the a romantic tragedy in blank verse, published privately in 1856. This Gothic drama, with its images and impassioned, extravagant speeches, is well plotted but peopled with stereotypical and rapacious characters whose unrelieved excesses become quite dull. Rupert, banished by his father the Duke, returns home to see Corinna and in so doing spurns Lady Catherine, whose jealous revenge brings death to Corinna. Only at the end of the play does 1 George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage 7 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927-49), 29. 2 The Spirit of The Times_ 15 June 1850, 204. ASPIRATIONS 3 Catherine repent: "Remorse doth shake my nature" (V,v). But it is too late. Rupert, now gone mad from the strains of imbalance inherited from his insane mother, kills Catherine's co- conspirator and, in the act receives a mortal wound. Although Fate - with its foreign setting, poetic imagery, and Gothic atmosphere - did not play to the tastes of many audiences of the 1850s, Bunce's approach was typical among literary figures who tried to impose their traditional standards upon theatregoers. No matter that audiences craved light and extravagant amusement from their playwrights and spectacular performances by actors and actresses, whatever the vehicle might be. Bunce found moderate success on the stage only once -and this by the force of his own good writing. Love in 76 was first produced at Laura Keene's Theatre, 28 February, 1857, with Miss Keene cast as the heroine, Rose Elsworth. Based on "an incident of the Revolution" and taking place at the Elsworth home during a single afternoon and evening, the play provided lively entertainment. Laurence Hutton, writing later in the century and with limited information which has helped distort the modern reader's understanding of nineteenth-century American drama, called it the "only play of that period which is entirely social in its character; and a charming contrast to its blood-and-thunder associates." 3 Hutton was seriously wrong on the first count, right on the second, and only too shrewd in his observation that the play "was too pure in tone to suit a public who craved burlesque and extravaganza." In any event, it held the stage only two weeks. In Love in 76, Rose, a rebel in love with Captain Armstrong of the American army, controls the action of the play with her quick wit and determination, while Bunce supports his plot with some of the worn conventions of nineteenth-century comedy. As the daughter of a staunch Tory and the sister of a soldier in the British army, Rose encounters the obvious problems which create great comedy. The villain of the play, Major Cleveland of the British army, wants to arrest Armstrong as a spy and would rather enjoy taking Rose as his mistress; but he is no match for her cleverness. Having hidden captain Armstrong in the house, Rose feigns an interest in British captain Arbald and extracts a promise from Major Cleveland to protect "her captain," a promise she later holds Cleveland to when he catches Armstrong and Rose together. The persistent Major Cleveland then arranges a "military joke" and persuades Bridget, the maid, to disguise herself as Rose in a marriage to Armstrong. Always at least one step ahead of Cleveland, however, Rose 3 Laurence Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891), 20. 4 MESERVE disguises herself as Bridget, marries Armstrong, "her and threatens Major Cleveland with loss of honor if he does not free her husband. Although somewhat stilted and burdened with innumerable asides, the dialogue is remarkably clever and the plot effective in spite of its traditional curtain lines to the audience: "Do you approve the whiggish maid, and sanction her schemes so badly played? The heart of love is heroic in every age; and after all What difference can we affix, 'Twixt love to-day, and love in '76?" No fool in life, Bunce learned something from this and his other limited experiences in the theatre: no tangible rewards! He gave up writing plays and revived his earlier interest in other literary genres: stories such as A Bachelor's Story ( 1859) and The Opinions and Disputations of Bachelor Bluff (1881); a book on etiquette and grammar entitled Don't (1884); and two picture volumes, Picturesque America (1872-74) and Picturesque Europe (1875-79). A playwright of some potential, yet one clearly limited by the only literary conventions he understood, Bunce could not hope to please pre-Civil War audiences for long. After the conflict, theatre management and the structure of acting companies changed with the arrival on the scene of Augustin Daly and others, and with the subsequent changes in theatre fare, Bunce did not accept the challenges. During the 1850s a few of the more traditionally and classically oriented plays written by some of the moderately successful dramatists from the previous decade appeared on American stages. These writers, boasting major reputations in neither the literary world nor the theatre world, could not succeed in bridging the two, especially in light of the unsettled and uncertain condition of American literature and a highly fractious environment in the theatre. In the fall of 1850 the American actor McKean Buchanan purchased a revision of Isaac C. Pray's 1837 play entitled Poetus Caecinna; or, the Roman Consul, and The Spirit did its best to promote his efforts on the stage. 4 The play did not appeal. Nor did Joseph S. Jones's play Zafari the Bohemian, produced at the Boston Theatre in the winter of 1856, although Jones's reputation was still strong in spite of his being past his prime. During the fall of 1853 audiences in and around Cincinnati were thoroughly entranced 5 by Cornelius Mathews's poetic tragedy Witchcraft (1846) while his 4 The Spirit of The 5 October 1850, 396. 5 The Spirit of The Times, 24 September 1853, 374. ASPIRATIONS 5 Jacob Leister (1848) played in California in 1854. 6 In Boston "Acorn" (James Oakes), the celebrated critic for the Spirit, did his utmost to raise an audience for Epes Sargent's tragedy entitled The Priestess (1855) based on Bellini's Norma. Calling it "an effective acting tragedy, "Acorn" quoted passages from the play and declared it marked by "a strength of language, beauty of diction, as well as by the true soul and inspiration of poesy" 7 He hailed the production of this five-act tragedy in late March 1858, as a "great theatrical event." Spectacle though it was, however, The Priestess did not last in Boston on any other stage. The mid-nineteeth century American audience demanded spectacles. Many plays, of course, were light romantic extravaganzas that managed to stimulate only the slightest of emotions. Others were spectacles that might provoke thought and suggest the "moral convulsions of the earth" that shocked Walt Whitman as he wrote his essay on "The Eighteenth Presidency" in 1856. Meanwhile, many among the literati persisted in their attempts to write plays in a traditional mode - sometimes with the tastes of the audience in mind but more frequently interested only in appealing to a reading public. Andrti A tragedy in five acts by W. W. Lord, was described by the critic of The National Magazine, "Devoted to Literature, Art and Religion"(November 1857, 186), as "an attempt to contribute something to our legitimate American and national literature," while "the only stage on which he [Lord] contemplates the representation of his drama is the mind of the reader." Chronicles, by Josiah P. Quincy, who based his work on the life of Tiberi us, Emperor of Rome, was reviewed by The National Era (30 October 1856, 174) as a poetic drama "modelled on the plan of Greek tragedy." Tan-Go-Ru-a, a historical drama (1856) by H.C. Moorehead, a man of considerable experience with American Indians, explored in a quasi- dramatic form their problems with the white settlers of the Province of Pennsylvania at mid-eighteenth century. A story in dialogue, the play gave even the kindly disposed reviewer for Godey's Magazine (September 1856, 276) little opportunity. He found it undistinguished and lacking a "dramatic spirit." Such playwrights might argue that their grand configurations suggested events related to contemporary public outcry, but they seriously misunderstood the interests of America's theatregoing public. 6 The Spint of The Times, 27 January 1854, 600. 7 The Spirit of The Times, 24 February 1855, 19; 17 March 1855, 493; 31 March 1855, 74. 6 MESERVE Louisa Susanna McCord (1810-1879), generally associated with Charleston, South Carolina, where she was born and died, has held a reputation as a poet and essayist who tackled social problems. Her criticism of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Southern Quarterly Review for January 1853, for example, justified slavery as a humanitarian institution. Her five-act tragedy, Caius Gracchus, 1851, exposed her severe classical education as well as her disdain for acquiring the skills necessary for creating acceptable drama for contemporary theatre. McCord was not alone in her elitist approach to the theatre, however, and a perceptive reviewer of her play in The Knickerbocker (January 1853, 69-72) attempted to explain a problem relevant to mid-nineteenth century American literature and theatre that she and others faced: "The drama is no a favorite form in the poetical literature of the day; perhaps because the fashion is rather to deal with the general. and abstract, or to take a wider range in view of humanity than belongs to the expression of individual feelings, or the portraiture of individual character." The reviewer went on to suggest that "female writers" in particular tended to avoid the drama, a view which seems to be supported by the abundance of women novelists of the period. The reviewer's observation regarding the "poetical literature of the day" is clearly bolstered -as it would today-by the great popularity of light-hearted "local" and topical farces and melodramas in contrast to the limited public appeal of serious drama of historical and philosophical intent. Both forms, however disparate their contemporary reception, have been equally ignored by most modern scholars -to the detriment of a comprehensive understanding of American culture and society of the period. Plays featuring Mose the Fire B'hoy, the Yankee, or the stage Irishman, were legion at this time. Fewer extant plays provide evidence of more literary ambitions. Cortez., the Conqueror, published in 1857, was written earlier in the decade by Lewis F. Thomas (1808-1868), a poet and Journalist in and around Baltimore who later in life practiced law in Washington, D.C. In 1855 The National Era published a scene from this tragedy founded, as its title suggests, on the early conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. History inspired Thomas to dramatize his own opinion of the contemporary issue of slavery. Hassan, Cortez's Moorish slave, questions a Christian gentleman's advice that Hassan take his liberty and kill the tyrants, all in "Heaven's name!" Hassan, however, sees "another master-nothing more" and vows to report the incident. "If I must ASPIRATIONS 7 be a slave, I 'll prove, at least ,/Myself, a faithful, honest and true man." 8 Another Maryland poet, George Henry Miles (1824-1871), also a lawyer and a professor of English literature at Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, wrote at least four plays that were performed in New York. Upon receiving commendation from actor Edwin Forrest for his first tragedy, Michael di Lando, Gonfalonier of Florence, in 1847, Miles immediately submitted Mohammed, the Arabian Prophet to a contest for which Forrest offered a prize of $1,000 "for the best original tragedy in four acts." Although Forrest never produced the winning play from this contest, he sent the prize money to Miles-because his play most nearly met the conditions of the award. Brougham's Lyceum eventually produced the play on 27 October, 1851, with J.A. Neafie in the title role. Meanwhile, Miles wrote DeSoto (1852); a comedy entitled Blight and Bloom (1854); Mary's Birthday (1857); and Senor Valiente (1858)-all of which were produced in New York theatres. After receiving his appointment to the faculty of Mount St. Mary's College in 1858, he continued to write plays, some of them adapted from popular novels: Oliver Afraja the Sorcerer, The Parish Clerk, Emily Chester, Love and Honor, The Old Curiosity Shop, Thiodolf the Icelander, and a play called The Seven Sisters, which symbolized the Southern states that agitated for withdrawal from the Union. Miles evidently did not fight in the Civil War, although his hymn, "God Save the South," was very dear to Southern hearts during the conflict, and was sung in schools throughout the Confederacy. 9 During the last five years of his life Miles devoted his energies exclusively to literature and especially to the study of Shakespeare's major plays. Miles studied his resources thoroughly before writing Mohammed and explained his thesis in a preface to the published play: "The lesson conveyed by the life and death of the Arabian imposter is the inability of the greatest man, starting with the purest motives, to counterfeit a mission from God, without becoming the slave of hell." Mohammed first bullies his wife into accepting his dream that "there is no God but one-Mohammed is his prophet," and then believing himself a prophet, embarks upon his mission: to assert his presumption by imposture. Throughout the play, by willful deceit and cunning, he converts some and enrages others, makes many enemies, uses Ali to assume his guise in order that he may escape (III, ii), leads the forces of Medina against the people 8 The National Era IX (28 June 1855), 101. 9 See P. L. Duffy, "George Henry Miles" in Edwin Alderman, ed., The Library of Southern Literature (Atlanta: Martin and Hoyt Co. , 1907): 3641-43. 8 MESERVE of Mecca as an act of vengeance toward his enemies (IV, v) and finally succumbs to poison administered by the wife of a man he had killed. In his long death scene Mohammed shows his impossible arrogance: .. . a pen and a parchment! I'll write a book as much above the Koran, As Heaven above the sea that mirrors it ! Oh! -this is death! Now, angel, take my soul! (He extends both arms, fixes his eyes above, and leans forward.) Pardon my sins, 0 God! I come! I come- Amony my fellows-citizens on high! (V, iv) In spite of some impassioned speeches, Mohammed did not provide the great role that Forrest required. There is nothing of Metamora or Sparticus in his make-up. He is not a noble character; he has few strong lines and no spectacular or grand actions. Only a few scenes, in fact, are well dramatized-such as the climax of Act III, when Mohammed escapes his enemies disguised as a Bedouin and vows vengeance by the crescent moon. The play offers no humor, no change of pace-a fault shared by many literary plays of this period-only love and heroics opposed to villainy in long and talky scenes. Forrest knew what he wanted-and, perhaps more to the point, did not want-when he chose not to produce this play, but another good actor could find something there, as Mackean Buchanan later proved. After receiving permission from Miles, who had published the play in 1850, Buchanan reduced the play to three acts and reconstructed it with "such dramatic situations as I thought it needed" and performed the work successfully in London and other English cities. 10 Miles's drama, DeSoto, the Hero of the Mississippi, first produced by James E. Murdock in Philadelphia on 19 April 1852, enjoyed considerable popularity among theatre audiences during the 1850s. The imagery and the language of the play were frequently praised, but the spectacular scenery depicting Florida and the banks of the Mississipi River, along with the beauty of the Indian girl Ulah, added to an audience's pleasure. In his search for the great river, DeSoto doubts the fidelity of his Indian guides and seized Ulah, the daughter of the chief, as a hostage to insure their loyalty. At one point in his journey DeSoto must reinspire the dedication of his own soldiers, who show increasing signs of weariness and rebellion. Of far greater danger to DeSoto, a 10 The Spirit of The Times, 22 October 1853, 422. ASPIRATIONS 9 devoted husband to his wife in Spain, is the undisguised adoration of his lovely captive. Complicating the plot, Ulah is betrayed by one of DeSoto's soldiers and carried off by the Indian chief, Tuscaluya. When the Chief reveals to Ulah that she is not his daughter, but of Spanish blood, and then offers his love, she spurns him. DeSoto's dramatic rescue attempt ends as Ulah dies in his arms, a victim of Tuscaluya's dagger. At the Mississippi River where "the commerce of the world is riding," DeSoto stakes his claim in the name of Spain, pursues and gains revenge upon the Indians, and, as he hears of the death of his wife and child, receives a poisoned arrow in his breast. Bereft of hope and life, he speaks of the "everlasting waves" of Mississippi River as "my monument." In at least one production the tableau of DeSoto's death is described by a reviewer as imitating William H. Powell's painting of the "Burial of DeSoto in the Mississippi." Although the love of Ulah for DeSoto brings some sense of humanity to the play, and the spectacular scenery excited audiences, the unrelieved seriousness of the dramatist exposes his main purpose. 11 With Mary's Birthday, or, the Cynic (1857) Miles evidently tried to lighten his approach and suggest that he did, after all, possess a sense of humor. He could not, however, avoid the contrived and sentimental melodrama which was the mode of the day. George Lordly is the cynic whose ward, Mary, is engaged to his brother, Vernon. One of the few bright sentiments expressed in the play is George's declaration that he keeps an English butler "because your English flunkey has a genius for being kicked and cuffed about, and I never could find an American with the least talent that way" (III, 1). Mary is despondent on her birthday because Vernon not only loves another but realizes that Mary loves George. Such gloominess might prevail, but the dramatist manipulates events to permit not only two happy marriages but a joyous birthday as well. Although Laura Keene's acting the part of Mary Stillworth helped the play's brief run in New York, it was never popular. Even the kindly critic from The Spirit of the Times (14 February 1875, 21) found the dialogue preachy- certainly a lamentable weakness of many of the literature-oriented dramatists. For his last produced play, Senor Valiente (1858), a comedy in five acts, Miles set the action in New York City, where he placed a thoroughly modern character-a lawyer appropriately named Chiselby who charged exorbitant fees, rubbed his hands together 11 See reviews for productions in Boston, Baltimore and New York: Spirit, 2 April 1853, 73; Spint, 19 January 1855, 577; Spirit, 25 April 1857, 132. Powell's 1853 painting is entitled "Discovery of the Mississippi by DeSoto, 1541." A frieze in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington entitled "Midnight Burial of DeSoto in the Mississippi" was created late in the decade of the 1850s. 10 MESERVE gleefully, gulped his wine, hated all libraries, and spoke very rapidly. Miles also resorted to the tired boy-gets-girl formula, with the aid of much intrigue of plot and frequent disguise changes by Harry Clinton, who portrayed Valiente. Moderately successful for his day but distinguished by his peers as neither poet nor dramatist, Miles was granted an exposure that suggests both the hope of some theatre managers and the despair they must have endured. Two well-known literary figures from the 1850s whose few dramatic efforts were produced on the commercial stage, Julia Ward Howe and William Gilmore Simms, stand in sharp contrast to such minor writers as Laughton Osborn, George H. Calvert, and Charles James Cannon, all of whom wrote with an eye toward publication rather than production in the theatre. Employing traditional dramatic form, whether for the closet or the stage, both major and lesser authors uniformly considered their works as contributions to the generally neglected genre of American dramtic literature. Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) had from childhood enjoyed writing plays. Far from the mainstream of contemporary theatre, she was neither sufficiently knowledgeable nor skillful enough to imitate the classical traditions with any degree of success. Without diminishing the effect of Lenora; or The Worlds Own, her greatest dramatic achievement, this play probably owed its run of nights at Wallack's Theatre late March of 1857 to the difficulties theatre managers were facing during this year of financial panic. A plethora of novelties, spectacles, and poetic experiments by well-known literary figures found their way to the stages of New York and other cities during the lean years of 1857 and 1858. Best known for her stirring "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and her anti-slavery endeavors with her husband Samule Gridley Howe, whose energetic knight-errantry led him also to spectacular work with the blind and the dumb at the Perkins Institue, Julia Ward Howe maintains her position in the history of American poetry. She placed her romantic tragedy in the early eighteenth century, when Lenora, the queen of the village and loved by the artist Edward, is swept off her feet by Lothair, a nobleman in disguise. Her dewey- eyed admiration, however, quickly turns to hatred when she discovers that he is married; and the play follows her road to revenge and ultimately death by her own hand. Edward, while cast aside during much of the action of the play, mourns his loss in the curtain line: The wreck of all that's fair and excellent; A thing of tears and tenderness forever. ASPIRATIONS 11 In spite of a lavish production at Wallack's Theatre, featuring the admired efforts of Matilda Heron as Lenora, and certain passages of graceful and passionate poetry, the play did not please all critics. One confessed to losing "all sympathy for Lenora" after the first scene and to being repelled by a "society even worse than we had ever conceived that it could be." 12 Another reviewer commented on Mrs. Howe's lack of knowledge of the stage, her "straining for picturesque expressions," such as "chain of perfurmed breath, padlocked with kisses" and paving stones described as the "bosom of the street." 13 The withdrawal of the play from the stage before the production could become an embarrassment was accepted by The Spirit as a shrewd move. 14 With his reputation as a popular novelist, controversial essayist, critic, and political writer, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) might have been expected to try his hand at writing for the theatre. Having aligned himself with the "Young America" movement in the 1840s, Simms grew increasingly politically oriented, until politics completely dominated his life and work. After 1855 he found less and less time for writing, although his enthusiasm for the drama clearly revealed a lifelong interest in reading plays and attending the theatre. 15 In his novels he often quoted liberally from plays; he reviewed contemporary theatre productions, and he compiled and edited A Supplement to the Plays of William Shakespeare ( 1848). Thoroughly consistent in his action, Simms had no interest in writing closet drama and when he started to write plays immediately thought of Edwin Forrest. Forrest, however, did not find Simms's work sufficiently developed or stageworthy, and Simms was forced to become aware of his dramaturgical weakness-ineffective situations, for example, and lagging action. 16 Stubbornly, he persisted, but his lack of success made him take a more realistic look at his work, and when in 1852 he published Michael Bonham; ~ the Fall of Bexar (written in 1843-44) in the Southern Literary 12 The Spirit of The Times_ 21 March 1857, 72. 13 The Spirit of The Times_ 28 March 1857, 74. 14 The Spirit of The Times_ 4 April 1857, 96. 15 See Jon L. Wakelyn, The Politics of a Literary Man, William Gilmore Simms(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973). 16 See Edd Winfield Parks, William Gilmore Simms as Literary Critic (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1961): 68-71. 12 MESERVE Messenger, he admitted that he had first written the play for the stage but later found that it read better as a story. 17 Succeeding in having only one play produced-and this twelve years after he wrote it-Simms's career as a dramatist illustrates the unrelenting demands placed upon American playwrights before the Civil War, all of which he could have anticipated. As a literary man and never a stranger in the theatre, Simms wrote opening addresses and criticism for the Charleston stage, particularly the New Charleston Theatre in 1837 and the Academy of Music in 1869. He wrote essays on the drama and commented in particular on Southern playwrights, such as Isaac Harby and William Ioor. At one time he wrote to a friend that "dramatic writing was my first passion, and I believe it to be my forte.' 118 The passage of time has proven him mistaken in this self analysis. After trying to sharpen his fledging skill with various dramatic sketches written between 1825 and 1835, Simms looked for help from Edwin Forrest with his major plays: Michael Bonham (1834-44) and Norman Maurie; or The Man of the People (1847). Forrest, however, had numerous playwrights vying for his favor, among them the excellent writer and successful novelist and dramatist, Robert Montgomery Bird, whose experiences with the actor soured his enthusiasm for the theatre and sent him back to writing fiction. In any event, Forrest could afford to be unimpressed by Simms's efforts. Perhaps unfortunately, Simms did have the loyal support of friends. Evert Duychinck, a "Young American" and one of two brothers who compiled the Cyclopedia of American Literature, praised Simms's work in the 1875 edition and stated, falsely, that "both of these [plays] have been acted with success." Meanwhile, Simms continued to turn out his poetic dramas. George Henry Boker, another unhappy but far more talented dramatist, told Simms in a letter in 1869 that he had just handed Simms's drama, The Peace of Elis, to the editor of Lippincott's Magazine, without effect. 19 While Simms lacked the skills necessary for writing for the stage and ignored the demands of contemporary theatre, his plays were nonetheless relevant to the period in which he lived. As strong political statements, they echoed the public voice in a far more substantial manner than the work of the numerous 17 Noted in Quinn, A History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War(New York: Appleto-Century-Crofts, Inc, 1943), 285. 18 Charles Watson, Antebellum Charleston Dramatists (University of Alabama Press, 1976), 119. 19 Jay B. Hubbell, "Five Letters from George Henry Boker to William Gilmore Simms," Pennsylvania Magazine LXIII (January 1939): 66- 71. ASPIRATIONS 13 journeyman playwrights who frequently mouthed the ideas of popular writers. Michael Bonham follows the expolits of the title hero through the Battle of the Alamo to his successful courtship of the governor's daughter. Love and honor, however, were in Simms's mind secondary to certain points of view he espoused. He energetically preached in favor of the annexation of Texas by the United States as a Southern response to the anti-slavery movement and considered his play a very "Texan" drama to which, when it was first produced at the Charleston Theatre in March of 1855, he added an "Ode to Calhoun" as a tribute to the man whose strong support of Texan annexation Simms greatly admired. In Norman Maurice; or, The Man of the People Simms advocated the admission of slave states from the West and attempted to portray the ideal leader of the people as one who would follow Simms's own principles. A physically powerful man, a fine orator, and a person of high standards, virtue and intergrity, Maurice, a young lawyer from Philadelphia, is living happily with his wife, Clarice, in St. Louis. There he is confronted by a villian from back East who, for no clear reason, would possess Clarice at any cost. Having consented to run for the Senate in Missouri, Maurice is challenged by his opponent's trumped-up charge of forgery, a charge supported by the villain. Clarice's struggle with this villain when he gives her the forged document, and her attempt to stab him, result in a false report of the villain's death at Maurice's hand- and Clarice's own death. When Maurice is finally absolved of both forgery and murder and elected to the legislative body, he returns home to find his wife dying. A major inspiration for Maurice as a true man of the people was Edwin Forrest himself, whose one venture into politics in 1838 reveals some similarity to Simms's hero. But despite its provocative subject matter, Forrest would not be persuaded to add this play to his repertoire. The highly melodramatic triangle energizes the basic plot of Norman Maurice, while politics controls its atmosphere. In Simms's mind the seriousness of his theme did allow for light intrusions, while his ponderous blank verse added to the uncomprmising impression of the drama. Although some critics admired the attempt to treat a contemporary political situation as tragic drama, Paul Hamilton Hayne, writing about "The Dramatic Poems of W. Gilmore Simms" for Russell's Magazine, declared that any "attempt to elevate the ordinary phases of political and sordid life, in our time" could not approach "the grave dignity of tragedy." 20 Writing earlier in the decade, a reviewer for Sartain's Union Magazine had 20 Russel/'s Magazine, II (December 1857): 240-59. 14 MESERVE found the plot simple and effective and the "language distinguished ... for terseness of expression" but complained of "broad defects" in the play. 21 Simms may have been more determined than many of his fellow literary playwrights to see his work on the stage, but, during this period of American theatre history, failure was virtually a foregone conclusion. Most authors of plays in verse wrote a few dramas and, apparently satisfied to see their plays in print, moved on to other pursuits. Some, however, created for themselves a considerable body of dramatic work. Charles James Cannon (1810-1860), while not a literary man by profession, published four volumes of his collected works in 1857 (Volume IV consisting of Dramas), following his Poems Dramatic and Miscellaneous, 1851. An aspiring writer, he felt neglected by critics who allowed him only a slight reputation as a promoter of polite literature for American Catholics. 22 Certainly, Cannon's classical training and his religious beliefs are evident in all that he wrote. Nonetheless, his great ambition, it seems, was to be a dramatist, and his plays-weak as they are in dramatic action and in general lacking theatricality-are not unlike and no worse than many poetic dramas which did appear on the stage during the 1850s. Not alone in his lack of knowledge of the contemporary stage nor his presumption that the playwright need not attempt to please a particular audience, Cannon had something to say to the people of America, and he was not without wit and a thoughtful frame of mind. Cannon's Rizzio explores the influence of the martyred David Rizzio upon Mary Stuart, Queen of the Scots, whom he served as secretary. It is a comment more than a play, however, as Cannon attempts to enliven his excessively romantic and image-ridden poetry with music and spectacular scenes. The Sculptor's Daughter is set in Italy, where a young woman whose father, furious with the improper advances of a suitor, stabs the man and flees the scene with his daughter. The melodramatic plot develops as the daughter becomes involved with a militant robber chief. Much of the last half of his five-act play-particularly Act III, Scene i and Act IV, Scene i-reveals cannon's sense of humanity, as the robber chief's decision to become the good man his poetic nature dictates determines the climax of the play. These scenes are also far more compelling than those dramatizing the sculptor's spiritual renewal and the daughter's reunion with her presumedly murdered lover. 21 Sartain's Union Magazine IX (1851): 277-8. 22 "C. J. Cannon's Works," Bronson's Quarterly II (October 1857): 503-27. ASPIRATIONS 15 Dolores: A Tragedy takes place in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. Actually writing a morality play rather than a tragedy, Cannon portrays Dolores as a "thoughtless prodigal " constantly tested by a Stranger (the Devil in disguise) whose duty is to bring her to ruin. The tests mount in intensity until finally, accused of sorcery and imprisoned, Dolores hears a voice from above-"On the Lord lay all thy care"(V). Instantly sustained, she conquers the Stranger with her crucifix and, on the road to her execution, dies "a glorified spirit." More overtly than his other plays, Dolores explores the intellectual and moral precepts found in Cannon's prose and poetry. Cannon's two most interesting plays are Better Late Than Never, published in 1854 and described as "an attempt at comedy," and The Oath of Office, a tragedy, 1850, published in 1854 with a dedication to Franklin Pierce: As thou the power but lent to thee-not given- Shall use to bless or curse thy native land. The time of Better Late Than Never is mid-nineteenth century, the scene New York. The characters include Allsides, a merchant running for Congress who tries to assure his victory by pledging himself to three different and opposing political parties; Scape, a money-lender, Sir Bryan O'Fallon, an Irish Baronet; Windfall, an actor; Tag, Rag and Bobtail, as political leeches, and Allsides's wife and daughter. Although the blank verse does not help this slight farce, the action is frequently humorous, the dialogue witty, and the characters, if hardly original, become at least interesting toward the ending, which is more amusing than didactic. Cannon's observations as expressed through his characters are clearly an echo of the confused, and confusing, "public voice" of this period. Allsides must be opposed to monopolies, commonalities, carriages, transportation at public expense, and any man who owns more than one coat. Theatres must be open and free to the public-day and night. People have the "right of universal suffering", Allsides's theory of the "grand education of salaries" determines that everyone, the President included, shall have one dollar a day. He is "opposed to all leveling tendencies," and he supports the gallows and perpetual charters for all banks. Another politician wants to keep all foreigners out of the country, which will thus rise "as a nation to a rank but little inferior to that of the great empire of China itself" (II, iii). As the plot unfolds, Allsides's duplicity is exposed; and, in traditional farce fashion, Scape reforms and the appropriate characters discover that they are mother and 16 MESERVE son, contriving a happy ending. With his infusion of irony and humor into much of the dialogue, Cannon may well have intended a similar ridiculing of society in his conclusion. His comments on money, banks, foreigners, China, suffrage and transportation were well echoed in contemporary newspapers, and the play, lacking any recorded performances, had it ever been staged, might well have been successful. The Oath of Office was produced at the Bowery Theatre in New York on 18 March, 1850. A weak play, it nevertheless conveyed a strong message, presumably directed at President Franklin Pierce. The scene is fifteenth-century Ireland, and the plot is evidently founded on a historical event. In a jealous fury the son of the mayor of Galloway kills his friend, at the time a guest in his father's house. As the sitting judge, the mayor sentences his son to be hanged. When no one else will do the deed, this honorable man feels obligated by his oath of office to perform the hanging himself: "The law is satisfied-it has his life-"(V, iii). But the mayor still has his own life to live. Despite the potential for powerful drama in Cannon's thesis, his blank verse was unequal to the challenge, as were his dramatic skills. The reviewer in Bronson's Quarterly was revolted even by the written word and found the unrelieved horror too horrible for the stage. More than his other plays, The Oath of Office reveals the unrelenting force of Cannon's opinions and provided a view of the author himself as a resolute man who, regardless of the attitude of others, wrote what he believed. George Henry Calvert (1803-1889), poet, essayist, dramatist, biographer, critic, and popular lecturer, was born into a wealthy and politically influential Maryland family, and grew up with all the advantages: private schools, a Harvard education, and travel in Europe. Having met Goethe and enjoyed the theatre in Berlin, Paris, and London, he returned home, evidently to enjoy life in Newport, and decided to pursue a literary career. The fact that he had once been dismissed from Harvard for rebelling against the college government may suggest something of his motivation at this point in his life. His interest in writing for the theatre having been inspired by his experience both in the library and among theatre audiences, Calvert may well have been fascinated by the challenge facing an American playwright at his time in history. His first effort was a translation of Don Carlos, his second a tragedy in blank verse entitled Count Julian, which he published in 1840. An inauspicious beginning, Count Julian illustrates the youthful playwright's dependency on Gothic horror and a habit of summarizing life in soliloquies. Another early effort, associated with American history, Arnold and Andre, was not published in its completed form until 1864 and is easily dismissed. ASPIRATIONS 17 By mid-century Calvert had become more serious in his playwriting endeavors and in establishing himself in the field of American drama. Showing a lighter side to his artistry than previously exposed, Calvert completed The Will and The Way in 1854 and sent it to an actor friend who tried without success to get it produced. But this gentleman subsequently seized an opportunity to read the play when asked to speak to the Mechanics Association at the First Baptist Church in Newport. To his gratification, the audience enjoyed the reading immensely. A five-act comedy in blank verse set in the fifteenth-centruy Syracuse, The Will and The Way, published in 1856, seems a harmless play about a prince who falls in love with Rosalie-"a witty wench, with will to match her beauty" (III, I)-and is confined to his room at his home for refusing to marry Matilda, the choice of his family. All things end happily, of course, and there is one fine and intellectually provocative scene in which the prince's friend returns from temporary banishment disguised as a clown to deliver a message to Rosalie: "Despised symbol of folly, how I honor thee! Badge of lowness, how I love thee! ... What a heels-over-head world it is, where contempt can be turned into a handle of strength, where a mask is the best wedge to gain entrance for truth, where deceptions become honest and folly wise. But for weeping, I could be the happiest man in the world by doing naught but laugh at it" (V, i). Although the plot is worn and common-place, Calvert gives it freshness with witty dialogue and an assortment of ideas worth pondering. Unlike the audience at the reading, however, the respected fathers of the First Baptist Church in Newport responded differently: they were insensed at the idea of a play being read in their church. A week later (30 December, 1854) Calvert published an apology in The Mercury, while defending American drama and his own attempt at comedy. In 1856 Calvert published Like Unto Like, a three-act comedy set in early sixteenth-century Florence and dramatizing the plight of the daughter of a wealthy man who wants her to marry a title rather than the man she loves. An unimpressive play, in both concept and treatment, it did nothing for Calvert's reputation. The following year he wrote an essay on "A National Drama" which was published in Putman's Magazine (February 1857, 148-51). Calvert saw a great future for American and English theatre, and he staunchly defended the kind of drama he was writing. Theatre, he contended, should be approached only with intellectual and political freedom, and good plays should depend less upon "native material than on universality of theme." Nevertheless, about 1859 he wrote a satire on contemporary hotel life, entitled The Gatch; or, Three 18 MESERVE Days at Newport The play is lost/ as he never published it 1 but he did leave a comment 1 for what it is worth: "On reading it over I find it full of fun 1 good hits 1 variety 1 rapidity 1 a good plot 1 a thoroughly American character .... The dialogue is spirited and generally progressive." 23 Calvert continued to write throughout his long lifer but none of his plays were produced. More philosophical in nature than keyed to contemporary American events/ he never appealed to the popular theatrical appetite. Mirabeau, a historical drama (1873) or The Maids of Orleans/ that same year 1 dealing with the hypocrisy and worldliness of a priesthood that was deaf to a spiritual message-these subject interested him. After his attempts failed to gain a production for The Maids of Orleans 1 Calvert complained about the "difficulty'/ of getting "a woman with both the soul and the body needed for the Maid." 24 In 1868 he wrote Brangomar, a tragedy concerned with the busy and vivid career of Napoleon 1 which he published in 1883. Considering the number of poetic dramas performed in America during the 1850S 1 Calvert perhaps had as much right as any to expect a production/ but he lacked the reputation of the better known literary figures. More significantly/ Calvert lacked friends in the theatre who might have helped him gain experience in writing for the stage. Laughton Osborn (1809-1878) was another hopeful dramatist of independent thought and action who wrote a great many plays 1 none of them performed in the theatre. Born into a wealthy New York family/ he graduated from Columbia University and after a year of foreign travel settled into a life of comfortable retirement in Manhattan 1 where he attempted to penetrate the literary world. Aggravated by the unfavorable reception of his early writing/ he began to attack other writers in fierce reviews; he warred against his critics andr at his own expense, issued successive and severely critical publications, sometimes unsigned. In his work on The Literati: Some Honest Opinions about Authorial Merits and Demerits (1850), Edgar Allan Poe spoke favorably of Osborn as a person 1 but even Poe thought that Osborn carried his ideas of "independence to the point of Quixotism/ if not of absolute insanity" (p. 56). Frustrated 1 Osborn published a volume of comedies in 1868 and a volume of tragedies in 1870, which carried such titles as The Heart's Sacrifice 1 Matilda of Denmarck, Bianco Capello/ and Mariamne/ a Tragedy of Jewish History. 23 Ida G. Everson, George Henry Calvert, American Literary Pioneer(New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 170. 24 Everson, 203. ASPIRATIONS 19 These published versions of Osborn's plays indicate that he wrote with a theatre audience in mind. On occasion, for example, he clarified upstage and downstage positions of the characters and even suggested that certain lines should be omitted in the staged version. Among his comedies are The Silver Head (1845); The Double Deceit (1856); The Montanini (1856); and The School for Critics; or a Natural Transformation (1867-68)-all in blank verse of an undistinguished quality. In The Silver Head, the hero, Manfred, is in love with Helen, a poor girl whose father's white hair "shall be to-night a veil/Between your beauty and my passion." Oscar, the hero's brother, whose love for his Creole mistress-the most interesting character in the play-is intended to show his base nature, tries to destroy the relationship between Manfred and Helen but fails when it is discovered that Helen is high born and her marriage to Manfred is appropriate after all. It may reveal a politically cynical quirk in Osborn's nature that at the end of the play he contrives for the villainous Oscar to depart the scene to become governor of Texas-with his mistress as his Secretary of State. Other than this stratagem, which has less to do with the play than with the situation in Texas in 1845, the play is long and dull. Hair again plays an important role in Osborn's Uberto (1859) whose hero, with his "disfurnish'd crown/and faded cheek," trades "a dozen years or more" to Lucifer for his soul-in order to win the hand of the lovely Gismonda. Ten years later Uberto, repenting his folly, decides that Gismonda should marry the young man who has been waiting all of these years. On a stormy night he stabs himself and dies, but because he was good and prayed on occasion, he is saved from Lucifer by the Archangel Michael. With his emphasis upon plot rather than character and a dramatis personae mixing mortals and immortals, Osborn wrote an interesting morality play in rather smoothly flowing blank verse. A later work, Ugo da Este (1861) a five act tragedy, is unfortunately, typical of the worst plays contributed by the literati of the period-poor plotting, weakly drawn characters, no confrontation or climax. The American theatre at mid-nineteenth century boasted a limited number of distinguished actors-such as Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman-who, bolstered by the traveling English actors who came to America, brought Shakespeare and the classics of the theatre to enthusiastic audiences across the country. But a great deal more theatrical activity occurred in America than these "stars" provided, and the public appetite for new plays seemed almost insatiable: an evening's entertainment might easily demand as many as three plays. It was to this audience that American playwrights had to tailor their offerings. 20 MESERVE Social awareness-or the practiced avoidance of it-permeates the kinds of dramas written by Americans during the 1850s. As always, the writer's approach to his material and the times could determine a play's success or failure. There were playwrights whose careers depended upon their knowledge of what was happening around them. Then there were those who made it a point to consider nothing that was not at least a century past, although they might relate past themes to present day events. Those dramatist who made it their business to show their sensitivity to the mounting tensions of the 1850s had the best chance of seeing their plays performed, even briefly, on the nation's stages, and in large part they were the journeymen playwrights of the type who amuse every generation. Some were quite successful-Charles W. Taylor, John Brougham, H. J. Conway, Clifton W. Tayleure, John Poole, and Thomas De Walden. Others, less prolific yet with some interest in a reading public, who achieved moderate success include Edward S. Gould, E. P. Wilkins, Henry Clay Preuss, William Henry Hulbert, Thomas Dunn English, Oliver S. Leland, and Oliver Bell Bunce. And then there were the staunchly literary writers who viewed the theatre mainly through the library door and resolutely believed in the poetic beauty of classical drama, the theories of Aristotle, and the dicta of Horace-which they aspired to follow. They wrote for those among the mid-nineteenth century audience who enjoyed seeing starring actors in classical plays, but their attempts seldom attracted the attention of those stars. It remains an irony in the history of American drama that the two best remembered and most appreciated dramatists of the 1850s represent the extremes of the demanding theatre of the time. One was a visitor from across the Atlantic Ocean who was to spend the better part of his remaining years in America, writing scores of plays and trying to catch the public fancy. The other was a respected native poet who wanted desperately to write for his contemporary stage and contribute to the literature of the American theatre. The first was extraordinarily successful during the 1850s but suffered a weakening of his professional reputation toward the end of his life, although his good name as premier creator of melodrama remains secure in theatre history; the other failed to please the mid-century theatre audiences and had to wait nearly thirty years for a new generation of theatregoers to recognize his dramatic skills-skills still admired by historians of the theatre. Considered together, the careers of these two dramatists-Dian Boucicault and George Henry Boker-clearly illuminate the problems and idiosyncratic demands that any dramatist must accept. "Who goes to an American play?" British critic Sydney Smith asked this question in a derisive fashion in 1820. Thirty years later ASPIRATIONS 21 it was still a good question, although by this time a substantial number of people were trying to provide the means to answer it. As the question implied, however, the answer assumed a theatre, actors, and a performance-a logical assumption for the nineteenth century, but one not uniformly held throughout history. Samuel Johnson, for example, declared that one should read Shakespeare's tragedies and see his comedies in the theatre. In late nineteenth- century America, David Belasco insisted on being called a playwright because he wrote his plays to be acted, not read. About this same time, William Dean Howells, novelist, critic, and playwright, approved of Augustus Thomas's work because he could enjoy reading his plays as well as seeing them on stage. Although his single-mindedness has ceased to be so deeply approved, Sydney Smith's assumption was valid in the 1850s. Actors fiercely exploited themselves, and the stage technician's genius was a major attraction of the evening. As the century progressed, both styles of acting and the kinds of plays presented changed: Ibsenism had its influence; dramatists had ideas to promote; the craft of theatre presentation advanced with scientific innovations; criticism of the theatre became a valid rhetorical genre. Yet throughout, commerce controlled the theatre. To be successful, a dramatist must write for and please his own generation. He or she must work with theatre people and have knowledge of their requirements. In the main, the literary dramatists of the 1850s lacked these relationships, and in spite of the resourcefulness of Laura Keene and a few others, the result was a void in the development of American drama and theatre that would not be filled until the Little Theatre Movement of the twentieth century. In contrast to the journeymen American playwrights who worked diligently to supply actors with an ever-changing fare of light comedies exposing current absurdities and frivolities of everyday life, were the serious writers, interested in language and the traditional characteristics of drama and theatre. It their use of poetic form was not satisfying to the hoi polloi, it was the accepted metier of such dramatists as Julia Ward Howe and Louisa Susanna McCord, who believed in the traditions of great drama to which they felt they were contributing. There were writers of social consciousness: George Calvert with The Will and the Way, Lewis Thomas with Cortez, the Conqueror, Laughton Osborn with The Silver Head. They held strong ideas about current political situations (William Gilmore Simms with Norman Maurice), the inhuman assumptions of man (George Henry Miles with Mohammed), and the moral world (James Cannon with The Oath of Office and Dolores). There were writers of wit and intelligence: Oliver B. Bunce with Love in 76 and Cannon with Better Late Than Never. 22 MESERVE These are not writers to be dismissed lightly simple because they lacked an opportunity, overtly denied almost all aspiring serious dramatists by an arrogant theatre world determined to produce on American stages, as Washington Irving pointedly expressed through Andrew Quoz, "all the enjoyments in which our coarser sensations delighted." The fact that each play offered was or was not produced in the theatre, reveals something about the arts in America and the society which fostered them. Whether written for the armchair or the box seat, intentionally or by default, these plays of the 1850s are relevant to any cultural or social history of America. Journal of American Drama and Theatre 13 (Spring 2001) MEDIA MANIA: THE DEMONIZING OF THE THEATRICAL SYNDICATE VINCENT lANDRO The 1890s experienced a watershed in the business practices of the American theatre. Faced with chaotic and outdated booking practices that no longer matched either the volume of touring combinations or the needs of local theatre managers, entrepreneurs based in New York City centralized the booking operations and streamlined what had become an unreliable system. The most successful of these attempts at centralization was a pooling arrangement that eventually became known as the Theatrical Syndicate or "Trust." Almost immediately, the new organization came under attack by those who feared it would become an abusive monopoly. When evidence began to mount that initial suspicions were accurate, opposition intensified and, led by such powerful crusading figures as Harrison Grey Fiske, Minnie Maddern Fiske, David Belasco, William Winter, and Walter Prichard Eaton, transformed what might have been a debate about the benefits and weaknesses of a new system of theatre economics into a battle of contradictory impulses in American theatre at the turn of the century. According to its critics, the Syndicate was a rapacious monopoly under the dictatorship of a small group of vulgar and greedy hucksters whose only interest was money and whose power had created a stranglehold over the American stage. The organization was attacked as a ravenous octopus that used force and intimidation to destroy its competition, made janitors out of local theatre owners, blacklisted or bribed those who defied its control, forced actors and managers to pay exorbitant booking fees, and produced only the most tawdry productions in order to make a profit. This "media mania" transformed the issue into a melodrama in which the benefits of a centralized booking system were ignored while every perceived fault of the American theatre-dearth of new plays, corruption of artistic values, slavery of actors and managers, or the decline of "good taste" in audiences-was laid at the feet of 24 lANDRO the Syndicate. Subsequent commentators not only accepted the self-defined roles of independents such as the Fiskes and Belasco, who viewed themselves as oppressed victims fighting a moral crusade against an evil "octopus," but also credited these individuals (and later the Shuberts) with its demise. Eventually, the media surrounded these various Davids who had slain Goliath with a heroic aura and provided the melodrama with its necessary and satisfying ending: the values of the idealized cultured past had triumphed over those of the commercialized "bogeyman" of the present. Rather than illuminating the period's complex and contradictory realities, its diverse personalities, and its rough entrepreneurial energies, this master narrative has obscured our understanding of the Syndicate's role in revolutionizing the way Broadway theatre did business at the turn of the century. Using magazines and newspapers of the flourishing mass media, journalists shifted the focus of commentary from an analysis of commercial change to a blanket vilification unparalleled in the history of American theatre. The result was a demonizing of the Syndicate by means of a one- sided, biased scenario created by individuals who were bitter enemies of the Syndicate. In this essay I will demonstrate not only how the demonizing of the Syndicate has been carried forward by historians almost without change to the present day but also how it emerges in strikingly similar rhetoric within media commentary about contemporary Broadway. I also will suggest that the unprecedented intensity of the original attacks were based less upon a struggle for artistic freedom than upon ideological issues stemming from a sense of threat by ethnic, commercial based entrepreneurs to the dominant cultural authority and its elitist values. The result was a struggle in which critics of the Syndicate attempted to protect the artistic foundation of the modern American theatre by pushing it backwards into the nineteenth century. First, a brief review of the origins and practices of the Syndicate and its treatment by historians is in order. Sometime in 1896 six men who had become leaders in producing and booking regional theatre circuits decided to create a solution to the unwieldy business practices experienced whenever theatre managers across the country booked their seasons. The six men were three sets of partners: Charles Frohman, theatrical producer and head of the biggest booking agency in the country, and AI Hayman, a long-time business associate of Frohman; Abe Erlanger and Marc Klaw, booking agents for a circuit of theatres in the South; and Samuel F. Nixon and Frederick Zimmerman, who controlled a group of Philadelphia theatres and had additional theatrical interests in Baltimore, Washington, and Pittsburgh. At the outset, these MEDIA MANIA 25 partnerships controlled thirty-three first-class theatres. The idea was to pool various regional circuits into a centralized one-stop booking service that would provide reliable contracts, efficient travel routes, guaranteed playing dates, and competent productions, thus eliminating most of the problems with the old system. Other than a percentage of receipts or a flat fee for the service, the primary contractual condition was exclusivity: each local theatre manager must agree to book entirely with the Syndicate or not at all. By a combination of shrewd financial maneuvering, aggressive expansion, and competitive deal-making, the Syndicate captured and maintained its dominance of the touring process for the next fourteen years. Although estimates of the power of this arrangement vary, at its height the Syndicate is estimated to have controlled the booking arrangements for some five to seven hundred theatres across the country. However, rather than develop a balanced analysis of how the Syndicate's operation transformed production and booking practices within the period's new economically driven realities, historians have from the outset continued to repeat the original accusations. As early as 1919, Arthur Hornblow, for example, brings together all the accusations of Syndicate critics, demonizing those "theatrical despots" responsible for the decline in American theatre that "destroyed the art of acting, elevated mediocrities to the dignity of stars, turned playwrights into hacks, misled and vitiated public taste, and the drama from an art, became a business." 1 Oral Sumner Coad, Sheldon Cheney, and Arthur Hobson Quinn offer a similar scenario in the 1920s: the result of the Syndicate booking system was an American theatre prostrate under the stranglehold of a commercial trust. The villains were the bullying business managers of the Syndicate; the triumphant heroes were Fiske and Belasco. 2 Even Alfred Bernheim, who wishes to make an unprejudiced analysis that removes examination of the Syndicate's activities from the plane of personal animus is unable to maintain a completely objective distance. When he reviews the Syndicate's practice of demanding fees from both the theatre managers and the producers in order to book tours, Bernheim condemns the practice as a breach of faith, exploitative, flagrantly discriminatory, and 1 Arthur Hornblow, A History of the Theatre in America, (New York: Behjamin Blom: 1919), 2:318- 20. 2 See Oral Sumner Coad and Edwin Mims, Jr., "The American Stage" in ed. Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Pageant of America ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 14:308-309; Sheldon Cheney, The Theatre(New York, David McKay Company, 1929): 59, 541-43; Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the America Drama ( New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1927): 2-3. 26 l..ANDRO evidence of an "evil" caste system. In the end, he resorts to melodramatic language similar to the Syndicate's original critics: "In short, the attractions and theatres of the country were puppets, and the Syndicate, through the masterful hand of Abraham Lincoln Erlanger, pulled the strings." 3 Such outbursts are better understood when we note that Bernheim uses Belasco, Winter, Eaton, and articles from Fiske's New York Dramatic Mirror as primary sources- without acknowledging that these sources may be biased. Since succeeding historical surveys have tended to use Bernheim's commentary as a primary source, their descriptions repeat accepted assumptions as facts. Glenn Hughes, for instance, continues the assumption that the Syndicate was a deplorable result of the application of big business methods to the legitimate theatre. Hughes considers the "venerable" William Winter as someone who "cried out against the injustice and danger of the situation," and quotes his description of the founders of the Syndicate as "money- grubbing tradesmen." 4 A more recent analysis of the economics of American commercial theatre written by Jack Poggi uses Bernheim as its primary source, accepts statements by Belasco concerning the Syndicate's unfair practices, and concludes that the Syndicate was another example of the negative effect of the "octopus" of big business upon theatre art. 5 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Poggi's assumptions and analyses usually form the foundation for a scenario that continues to transform a battle between contrasting business practices into one between the values of high art and low commercialism. Garff Wilson's 1982 survey of American theatre characterizes the "infamous" Syndicate as an organization that "created more evils than it corrected," stifled competition, cheapened the drama, and produced shoddy plays that appealed only to the masses. Driven by its aim of financial profit, the Syndicate was guilty of ignoring the artistic goal of "elevating public taste characterized though presentation of masterpieces.' 16 Comparisons between Oscar Brockett's 1973 Century of Innovation and his 1999 history of the theatre reveal an almost unchanged continuation of the master narrative: The Syndicate by means of 3 Alfred L. Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1932): 6, 59. 4 Glenn Hughes, A History of the American Theatre (New York: Samuel French, 1951): 317-18. 5 Jack Poggi, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870- 1967(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), 13. 6 Garff Wilson, Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982): 160-161. MEDIA MANIA 27 ruthless maneuvers eliminated competition and took complete monopolistic control of the American theatre by 1900. Because it favored productions that attracted a mass audience, the Syndicate caused the American theatre to remain "a conservative, largely commercial venture." Although Brockett avoids the judgmental language of his predecessors, he does nothing to seek a more objective analysis. 7 In similar fashion, Walter Meserve provides an ennobling characterization of the opposition of Belasco and the Fiskes while the tyranny that finally expired from "internal discord, excessive greed, questionable contracts and competition from such ambitious impresarios as Keith and Albee and the Shubert brothers" remains a vilified entity. 8 Felicia Hardison Londre and Daniel J. Watermeier's survey is one of the few new works to suggest many of the charges brought against the Syndicate were not wholly justified; it reminds the reader that all accusations of illegal business practices were either dismissed by the courts or decided in favor of the Syndicate. 9 By and large, then, the chain reaction of history- turned-morality tale continues remarkably unchanged to the present day. Current historians cite Poggi, who cites Bernheim, who cites the Syndicate's avowed enemies-Fiske, Belasco, Winter, and Eaton. It is interesting not only how consistently historians have framed their attacks over the previous decades but also how their language continues to reflect a judgmental indignation and resentment shared with the original critics. The issue of the Syndicate remains primarily ideological : a small group of heroic and selfless artists who embodied an intellectual and moral leadership that transcended commercial values fight for an American stage threatened by unprincipled and uncultured businessmen whose only interest was profit and whose behavior was unnatural and corrupt. Instead of questioning the inevitable prejudices of the original sources and the extent to which their points of view were based upon personal animosity or examining rebuttal statements from other theatre professionals of the time, or, indeed, even appraising the Syndicate's positive contributions to the American theatre during a time of immense cultural and economic change, historical commentary continues to demonize the Syndicate. 7 Oscar Brockett, Century of Innovation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, 1973): 182-184; Oscar Brockett, History of the Theatre 8th edition (Allyn and Bacon: Boston, 1999): 455-457. 8 Walter J. Meserve, An Outline History of American Drama (New York: Feedback Theatrebooks & Prospera Press, 1994), 214. 9 Felicia Hardison Londre and Daniel J. Watermeier The History of North American Theater(Continuum Publishing: New York, 1998), 187. 28 LAN ORO * * * * * As details of the new pooling arrangement leaked out throughout 1896, media reaction against the Syndicate turned from wariness to outright opposition. The first direct attacks were led by Harrison Grey Fiske who, as editor of the New York Dramatic Mirror and husband of actress Minnie Maddern Fiske, discovered that his wife's career suddenly depended upon negotiation with the "Trust." Fiske began his crusade almost immediately as the new booking system was initiated and, fueled by a clumsy attempt by Erlanger to secure exclusive control of Mrs. Fiske's next tour, assumed the mantle of leader of the effort to destroy the Syndicate. Son of a millionaire whose family had fought in the Revolutionary War and member of New York's exclusive literary and social clubs, Fiske reveled in his role as leader of the crusade. He wielded his editorial columns like an axe. Although Fiske's commentary would today exist primarily in tabloids, it carried great authority at the turn of the century and is still cited without qualification by contemporary researchers. Fiske never seemed to tire of inventing new ways to attack Syndicate founders and their new booking system. He accused them of planning "the subjection of all other concerns for their own narrow and greedy purpose" and warned readers that their arrangement "already held the theatrical business of the country by the throat." In order to protect the distributors and printing company who did business with the Mirror from threat of a libel action as a result of his frequent personal attacks against Syndicate founders, Fiske published fifteen separate Supplements devoted exclusively to excoriating every aspect of the trust's activities. He assured readers that his Supplements would "handle the subject without circumlocution, in a definite manner, and positively without gloves." He promised that the crusade would last "until the trust shall vanish like a busted bubble." Although Fiske's alleged purpose was to free the American stage, his commentary was among the first to cast the struggle as one of cultural and ethnic opposites rather than one of differing views about the business practices of theatre. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the editorials of the Supplements. 10 The weekly Theatrical "Trust" Supplements covered a four- month period from 13 November 1897 to 26 February 1898. Each issue contained stories that uncovered alleged abuses by the Syndicate and chronicled ongoing efforts by the Mirror to bring that organization to its knees. Editorials called upon others to join the fight; columns were devoted to editorials reprinted from newspapers around the country that had enlisted in the struggle. 10 "It Has But Just Begun," New York Dramatic Mirror, 6 November 1897, 2. MEDIA MANIA 29 Each Supplement trumpeted an increasing momentum of support and the gradual weakening of the "Skindicate." Fiske pledged that his Supplements were "consecrated to the cause of theatrical independence," but his attacks as "a guardian of dramatic interests in this country" reveal a more complex bias rooted in defensive cultural warfare. He targeted those half dozen men "having little or nothing in common with our stage" as an "intolerable incubus . . . . unfit to serve in any but the most subordinate places in the economy of the stage" and as a "cabal alien to all impulses of art .. an unnatural, an abominable, an intolerable device of middlemen." 11 Fiske's actual mission, of course, was not to provide objective news reporting but to defend a cultural authority for which he was self- appointed guardian, i.e., to bring about "the defeat of a money- making scheme to monopolize the theatres of this country devised by speculators, adventurers and vulgarians." 12 There was no middle ground during this crusade: These middlemen are not capitalists; they are not noted for culture or for character; they have nothing in common with the better aspirations of the drama, or with those whose wish it is to see dramatic art sustained and not degraded; they contribute little or nothing to the economy of the theatre. They are schemers and shifters, pure and simple, and as long as they are dominant so long will the tendency of the stage, both artistically and commercially considered, be downward instead of upward . . . . [The Syndicate] will go down to stage history, branded as the most pernicious enemy American dramatic art ever knew. 13 What strikes the reader is the unrestrained rhetoric of Fiske's attack. The Syndicate had been operating only for about eighteen months and controlled perhaps sixty out of the country's two thousand legitimate theatres, but, according to Fiske, it already had become a "pernicious enemy" and a "peculiar abomination" degrading the high aspirations of the American stage. Its founders were not merely economic monopolists (or even capitalists) but 11 Harrison Grey Fiske, "The Usher," Theatrical "Trust" Supplement no. 1, New York Dramatic Mirror, 13 November 1897, 3; Theatrical "Trust" Supplement no. 7, New York Dramatic Mirror, 25 December 1897, 2; Theatrical 'Trust" Supplement no. 12, New York Dramatic Mirror, 29 January 1898: 2-3. 12 Theatrical 'Trust" Supplement no. 15, New York Dramatic Mirror, 26 February 1898, 2. 13 Theatrical "Trust" Supplement no. 8, New York Dramatic Mirror, 1 January 1898, 1. 30 lANDRO uncultured outsiders who had invaded a privileged place. Fiske was not arguing merely against the threat of monopoly; he was defending the status and cultural authority of an ideology that intended to sustain its dominance against unwanted and unnatural outsiders. Fiske wanted stasis, not change, and he brought to bear every weapon in his media arsenal. Accordingly, those who attempted to defend the Syndicate were ridiculed because the "Trust is indefensible." 14 Newspaper writers who pointed out Syndicate benefits were labeled notorious and disreputable, and their publications called "degenerate" and "uniformly unfortunate in character." 15 Moreover, Fiske's diatribes often placed the attack on a more personal level in language that contained deliberate slurs against ethnic interlopers who did not know their place: Water cannot rise higher than its source. A thorn-bush does not bear grapes, and there are no figs on thistle- stalks ... . What, then should be expected of the band of adventurers of inferior origin, of no breeding, and utterly without artistic taste, who by the devices that achieve a corner in pork or cattle or corn have seized upon the theatre of this country and are determined to reduce it for revenue alone to the level of a sweat shop? 16 Fiske apparently never felt the need for journalistic integrity or consistency to achieve his goals. He used innuendo in personal attacks against Erlanger and characterized Charles Frohman as "this pervasive little man, with his bumptious pretensions" while declaring in the same column that his campaign was being waged "without reference to the question of their [Syndicate founders] personal standing or character." 17 14 Theatrical "Trust" Supplement no. 7, 2. 15 Theatrical "Trust" Supplement no. 6, 2; Editorial, Theatrical "Trust" Supplement no. 8, 2; "The Usher," Theatrical "Trust" Supplement no. 12, 3. 16 "Keep It in Mind," Theatrical "Trust" Supplement no. 7, 2. 17 Harrison Grey Fiske, "The Usher," Theatrical 'Trust" Supplement no. 15, 3. If these comments were designed to goad the Syndicate into public defense, the strategy seemed to work. The attacks prompted a criminal libel suit by the Syndicate against Fiske. Fiske printed the ensuing court transcripts, capturing the sullen obfuscation of Hayman, Erlanger, and Klaw, and succeeding in publishing for the first time a copy of the original pooling agreement. The suit was eventually dismissed two years later. MEDIA MANIA 31 Fiske's self-congratulations in February 1898 that the Supplements were no longer necessary because he had already rescued the American theatre from the threat of conquest by the Syndicate turned out to be journalistic wish fulfillment. A new Syndicate agreement signed in August 1901 listed sixty-five theatres under Syndicate control; this number increased to eighty-three theatres in 1903. The Syndicate's power would not be significantly undermined until 1910, when the road began to decline and the small town circuits deserted that organization for the Shuberts. By this time, however, the Fiskes and Belasco already had found a "mutual understanding" with the Syndicate when they agreed to produce in both Syndicate and independent theatres. Fiske's attacks within the regular pages of the Mirror suddenly ceased altogether and Fiske sold the newspaper in 1911. Fiske's editorial attacks on the Syndicate set the tone for much that was to follow. The American theatre and its ideological guardians had to protect their social order against a growing and distasteful group of commercial entrepreneurs whose modern style and values collided with those of a cultural majority rooted in an idealized Victorian hegemony. These urgent and vicious attacks were fueled by an extraordinary speed of change and centralization of American business, a sense of loss of control and social fragmentation with its attendant anxiety, and an increasing break with cultural connections to the revered past. A changed cultural climate sustained a new economic order whose amoral values were bewildering to the cultural elite. One anecdote serves to typify the ideological threat underlying Fiske's furious effort to demonize his enemies. Mr. and Mrs. Fiske met Erlanger one day while out walking. As they passed, Erlanger was alleged to have made some derogatory remark about Mrs. Fiske, whereupon Fiske handed his cane, gloves and hat to his wife and struck Erlanger. This anecdote may be complete fiction, but its image of the Victorian gentleman thrashing a low-class ruffian to protect the honor of his wife illustrates how Fiske imagined the conflict and helps to explain the furious intensity of his attacks. The independence of the American theatre, therefore, was a secondary consideration; Fiske's real enemy was an organization led by unassimilated outsiders who threatened to change the rules. His solution was to strike it down. 18 Meanwhile, Fiske's crusade to destroy the Syndicate had found allies within national magazines. By 1898, scarcely two seasons after its inception, critics who shared his cultural biases began to blame the Syndicate for everything they felt was wrong with the 18 Brooks Atkinson, Broadway(New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1974): 34- 5. 32 lANDRO American theatre. In 1904, Leslie's Magazine, for example, carried a series of articles attacking the Syndicate. The series, based allegedly on a year-long investigation, claimed that the story was accurate and "fairly put." But the first article, entitled "The Dictators Rise from Obscurity," quickly established the editors' goal of personal attack upon Syndicate founders. Once again the language of the attack seems out of proportion to the nature of the disagreement. The rhetoric expresses vindictive ethnic slurs upon a group of men whose backgrounds apparently precluded any degree of artistic achievement and qualified them only as profit-taking thugs. The article accused the Syndicate of "using their friends until they were as dried-up sponges" and supplied abusive thumb-nail sketches of the six leaders that included a description of Erlanger, for example, as always in physical training and a dead shot with a revolver because he was "infected with the notion that he may be attacked by some discontented actor or manager." 19 The next installment, "How Six Dictators Control Our Amusements," detailed Belasco's struggle against the Syndicate, cast him as a hero, and stated that as a result of his challenges to the trust, he always walked in the middle of side streets after midnight for his own physical safety. 20 The fourth article went on to characterize the Syndicate leaders as "ignorant of art, of the finer shades in literature, indeed of anything approaching good taste, they make their vulgar fancies as the manifestation of the public." In what must surely have been unintended irony, the editors assured the reader that they "love fair play in America." 21 In the same year, Belasco joined the published commentary that condemned the Syndicate. Once an ally and collaborator of Charles Frohman, Belasco had experienced a falling out with the Syndicate and attacked Klaw and Erlanger in shrewdly written harangues that exploited media attention in such anti-Syndicate periodicals as Cosmopolitan and Harper's Weekly. If Fiske was the editorial leader of the crusade, Belasco found his niche as one of the most admired directors of his time fighting for artistic freedom against the evil money changers. Accordingly, Belasco assumed the high ground role of an anti-commercial, cultured seeker of art who had been victimized by dangerous forces of greed. He 19 "The Dictators Rise From Obscurity," Leslie's Monthly Magazine 58 (October 1904): 581, 585. 20 "How Six Dictators Control Our Amusements," Leslie's Monthly Magazine 59 (November 1904): 35, 42. 21 "Today and To-Morrow," Leslie's Monthly Magazine 59 (November 1904), 334. MEDIA MANIA 33 characterized the leaders of the Syndicate as "incompetent men of trade," blamed them for the decadence of American drama, labeled the combination a "commercial dictatorship," and related anecdotes of its abusive and unfair treatment of theatre managers and artists. Belasco's attacks focused on the presumption that profit-making business practices were always an enemy to art. He disavowed any commercial interests because business and art never mix. He understood the ideological basis of the battle and knew how to frame his accusations in the language of confirmed dominant values. In a Cosmopolitan article, for example, he argued that the theatre is a "noble religion" under attack by "the charlatan and the money-grabbers ... knaves and fanatics ... fastened upon by the octopus of greedy ignorance." Using an emotional context unsupported by any direct evidence, Belasco blamed the Syndicate for the decadence of the drama in America and provided his own carefully selected-and usually anonymous-anecdotes to prove it. Belasco waged the battle entirely upon terms of protecting the cultural values of an idealized past from the barbarians of commerce. The "greed of gain and lack of culture displayed by managers who have no veneration, save a commercial one, for the traditions of the past" is the enemy because "no pursuit classified as an art can be revolutionized and classified as a business." The Syndicate was evil because it had violated the rules that placed artistic issues ahead of financial ones. Interestingly, Belasco saw no contradiction between his own successful career in the commercial theatre and the activities of those he attacked. 22 Like Fiske, Belasco preferred nineteenth-century solutions to twentieth-century problems. Everything that was wrong with the American theatre could be cured by taking "a leaf from the old masters' book" based upon the work of such models as Palmer, Daly, and Wallack. Rejecting the current national momentum towards centralization and increased volume of production activity, Belasco believed that theatre management should remain a one- man business because a producer could give attention to only one work at a time: "plays cannot be shoveled out to the public like so many pecks of potatoes." Although the Syndicate and the Shuberts (as well as Keith and Albee in vaudeville) had used centralized booking practices on a national scale for years, Belasco in 1904 seemed bewildered by new industrial models. He could not 22 David Belasco, "The Theatrical Syndicate-One Side," Cosmopolitan 38 (December 1904): 193, 195, 198. 34 l.ANDRO understand how a few men in New York could successfully book hundreds of theatres across the country. 23 The attacks of drama critic William Winter outpaced both Fiske and Belasco in vituperation and mockery. Winter, one of the foremost drama critics during the last half of the nineteenth century, was an unrepentant elitist and Anglophile whose values remained rooted in the nineteenth century and who believed that "infections" of materialism and commercialism were the cause of the deterioration of American theatre. He was an ideologue who defended the dominant culture of the previous century in which certain rules were respected and certain classes of men produced theatre. Never one to mince words, he skipped objective analysis and went straight for the Syndicate's throat: [The theatre] has passed from the hands that ought to control it-the hands either of Actors who love and honor their art or of men endowed with the temperament of the Actor and acquainted with his art and its needs-and, almost entirely, it has fallen into the clutches of sordid, money-grubbing tradesmen, who have degraded it into a bazaar. 24 Rejecting the transforming forces that were driving America into the twentieth century, Winter's world remained one of fixed binary moral boundaries and class membership. A theatre artist belonged either to the genteel class of honor and pure cultural intentions or to the lower one of trade and commercial interests. There was nothing in between. Rejecting the argument that theatre is as much business as art, Winter attacked commercial interests as avaricious, rapacious tyranny and the typical producer as a "fungus of modern growth-a prig, who crams himself by consulting a cyclopedia, and who thrives by hood-winking some confiding female star, or some of the many fat-witted tradesmen now, for the most part, possessors of the American theatre." 25 In Winter's view, the manager who 23 David Belasco, " Presentation of the National Drama, " Harper's Week/y48 (3 December 1904): 184. The extent of Belasco's outdated views about commercial theatre production can be more clearly discerned when it is noted that during the 1904-1905 Broadway season, 224 new plays opened, up from 222 and 175 in the previous two seasons. By 1904, there were more than four hundred companies touring the nation. See the New York Times, 21 May 1905, IV, 4. 24 William Winter, Other Days(New York: Moffat, Yard & Company, 1908), 307. 25 Ibid. : 309, 316. MEDIA MANIA 35 aimed only at financial gain was a "public enemy and a disgrace to his profession." Responding to the defense of giving the public what it wanted, Winter believed the public wanted only "inanity, indecency, vulgarity, depravity, analysis of disease, spectacles of horror, fabrics of filth." "Give the public what it wants!," he thundered. "The ' public' wanted that Jesus of Nazareth should be crucified-and it got what it wanted." 26 Winter regarded the theatre as a temple under siege and himself as defender of the faith. In a letter to the New York Dramatic Mirror, for example, he argued that the stage "exerts a great influence upon society-almost as great as that of the church . . . and it ought to be free of every form of tyranny.'' 27 He characterized the battle not as a struggle between differing views of theatre practice but as a moral conflict between, on one hand, the "purveyors of theatrical garbage" led by unscrupulous and ignorant managers who had polluted the theatre and "sacrificed their duty to the gratification of their greed or the indulgence of their aberrant tendencies and standards," and, on the other, those to whom theatre is a "clear mirror of all that is splendid in character and all that is noble and gentle in conduct-showing ever the excellence to be emulated and the glory to be gained, soothing our cares, dispelling thoughts of trouble, and casting a glamour of romantic grace over all the commonplaces of the world." 28 Art and morality were inseparable. The battle lines, therefore, must be drawn to protect these ideals from enemies who "befoul it with unclean plays, alienate from it the respect and practical support of the better classes of society, and thus deliver a great power into the hands of speculators in freak, fad, dirt, and trash." 29 Winter's world view was not unique. It mirrored values shared by many of his contemporaries who struggled to prevent the Victorian aesthetic and spiritual traditions of their class from being overwhelmed. While American theatre moved decisively into the corporate industrial age, the voices of this cultural aristocracy became more shrill, angry, and vindictive as their efforts became less and less successful. 26 William Winter, "Theatrical Mismanagement," Harper's Weekly 54 (2 April 1910), 10. 27 William Winter, New York Dramatic Mirror, Theatrical "Trust " Supplement no. 6, 18 December 1897, 4. 28 William Winter, "Theatrical Ethics and Managerial Slanders," Harper's Weekly 54 (24 September 1910): 20; " Decadent Drama," Harper's Weekly 54 (7 May 1910), 34. 29 William Winter, "Theatrical Ethics, " 20. 36 lANDRO Walter Prichard Eaton certainly viewed himself as a member of this aristocracy and became one of the most widely published Syndicate critics. A Harvard educated drama critic of American Magazine and later a playwriting professor at Yale, Eaton was the model Eurocentric, eastern cultural leader attacking the Syndicate as unwanted and alien outsiders who needed to learn their place. Eaton admired Winter and adopted his moral crusade against the Syndicate. He added his own sense of condescension: the art of the theatre requires men of superior education and taste-especially those who follow European artistic traditions. Chronicling the "rise and fall" of the Syndicate in American Magazine in 1910, Eaton attributed the growth of the organization's power to the efforts of a few ignorant men who "never showed that they cared for the true interests of the theatre, or that they understood them, and so never had the first right to dabble with a fine art." Eaton sneered especially at Erlanger, who "never had any real artistic training," and cited anonymous sources who characterized Erlanger as being unable to tell a good play from a bad one until he read the morning papers. The chief cause of the decline of the American theatre was the absence of an elite leadership: "the best plays will always be discovered, and the best productions made by the best men, by men of breeding, sound taste, and theatrical skill ." 30 The men who were to guide the theatre's destiny, therefore, needed "a first-hand knowledge of good society and its usages, who speak the English language properly, who know how ladies and gentlemen comport themselves." 31 The Syndicate founders were dangerous and incompetent not because they did not know their jobs but because they did not share Eaton's exclusive social class background. In the world of this cultural aristocracy, theatre was something created by the few for the few. Not surprisingly, the ideals of the New Theatre seemed to have a major impact upon critics in the early twentieth century who condemned the American commercial theatre. Commentators considered the New Theatre superior to the commercial model represented by the Syndicate perhaps because its director, Winthrop Ames, a sophisticated New England gentleman and, like Eaton, a Harvard graduate, believed theatre should be treated as a temple of 30 Walter Prichard Eaton, "The Rise and Fall of the Theatrical Syndicate," American Magazine 70 (October 1910): 837, 842. Eaton's motives for his negative characterizations of Syndicate leaders may not have been entirely idealistic. He was discharged from his position as drama critic of the Sun after Klaw and Erlanger complained about his attacks on their productions. 31 Walter Prichard Eaton, 'The Neglect of Stage Management," American Magazine 71 (January 1911), 409. MEDIA MANIA 37 the arts. If the commercial taint of the Syndicate had led to the downfall of the American stage, then this new organization, characterized by William Lyon Phelps as "the most important dramatic event in America in the twentieth century," would finally redress the balanceY The New Theatre would succeed because its director belonged to the correct social class. In contrast to commercial managers who were "self-made and self-educated," Ames was "a college man, a man of luxury and refinement" who had the "requisite brains and ability, the artistic discrimination and the courage of his convictions which will one day make him our foremost producer of plays." 33 Despite the complete financial collapse of the New Theatre within two years of its founding, critics continued to defend a model based on Eurocentric snobbery. It did not really matter if the New Theatre succeeded financially. Its purpose was ideological, not artistic. It represented an idealized vision of an upper-class elitist majority to whom theatre was a great mission that should be insulated from the untutored, lower class commoners who threatened its future. Apparently the American theatre was no place for immigrant entrepreneurs who saw a profitable opportunity to change the way that theatre did business. While elitist presumptions may have been an inevitable result of the particular educational and social backgrounds of their advocates, the undercurrent of undisguised anti-Semitism in their condemnation of the Syndicate casts a pall over the behavior of these idealistic men. The personal assaults upon Syndicate members not only accused them of being uneducated and dictatorial tradesmen who lacked the artistic credentials and breeding to head such a powerful booking agency; they were also attacked because they were all Jews. The intensity of the attacks was fueled with judeophobia that deliberately characterized Syndicate founders as alien ethnics who had forced their way and their values into a cultural setting from which they must be ejected. Beginning as early as 1897, Fiske capped a string of epithets, such as "greedy and narrow-minded tricksters," "illiterate managers," and "insolent jobbers," with the characterization of the Syndicate as "the Shylock combination." 34 Life critic James Metcalfe referred to the Syndicate as "that Hebraic institution whose aim is to raise the price 32 William Lyon Phelps, The Twentieth Century Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 1914): 20, 25. 33 Chester calder, "What's Wrong with the American Stage?," Theatre Magazine (March 1913): xi, xv, 75. 34 Fiske, Theatrical 'Trust' Supplement no. 1, 2. 38 LANDRO of admission and depreciate the quality of the entertainment." 35 A poem in that same publication in 1905 accused the trust of murdering the drama that was "in the power of Shylock now." 36 The editors of the accusatory series described above in Leslie's Magazine made certain that its readers knew that "only one Christian is a member of the Theatrical Syndicate and he is said to be a convert." 37 And William Winter wrote that the Syndicate, "with its serpentine, blood-sucking tentacles," was an "incubus" comprised of "six Hebrew theatrical speculators" and "button-making hucksters." Interestingly, Winter's resignation from the Tnbune came shortly after the new editor refused to publish a poem with anti-Semitic overtones. 38 Performing artists also held anti-Semitic biases against members of the Syndicate. For example, Nat Goodwin, an actor who bolted the first rebellion against the Syndicate, longed for the time men and women made their booking arrangements when "no peeping Izzies or Sols had access to our books." 39 Similarly, Francis Wilson, a popular actor-manager who led an unsuccessful revolt against the Syndicate and later became the first president of Actors' Equity, describes the Syndicate founders as "mostly Hebrews" whom he equated with "the money-changers in the Temple" led by "this pudgy little Hebrew," Charles Frohman. "Certainly no one who knows the business careers and the racial instincts of these men can doubt the extent of the threat." Wilson's autobiography seethed with resentment about how "these people, scarcely removed from aliens" had forced out a man with several generations of American ancestors behind him. 4 Cloaking their attacks with noble and 35 Metcalfe, "An Afterward," 468. 36 Biggers, 214. 37 "The Dictators," Leslie's Monthly Magazine 58 (October 1904), 590. 38 William Winter, 'The Department Store Theatre," New York Dramatic Mirror, 17 June 1905, 10i Tice L. Miller, Bohemians and Critics (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 100. For a persuasive analysis as to how judeophobic Syndicate critics made exceptions of such figures as David Belasco, characterized as a "cultured Jew," see Mark Hedin, "The Disavowal of Ethnicity: Legitimate Theatre and the Social Construction of Literary Value in Turn-of-the- Century America," Theatre Journal52(2000) : 211- 226. 39 Nat Goodwin, Nat Goodwin's Book(New York: The Gorham Press, 1914), 99. 40 Francis Wilson, " Francis Wilson's Triumph," Theatrical "Trust" Supplement, No. 10, New York Dramatic Mirror, 15 Jaunary 1898, 3 and Francis Wilson's Life of Himself(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1924): 148, 160, 281. MEDIA MANIA 39 idealistic arguments, critics of the Syndicate appeared to resent the success and ambitions of those individuals who were not members of and did not share either the social values or religion of the cultural elite. In sum, the portrait of the Syndicate that has passed into historical surveys-a ruthless, evil octopus led by greedy, uncultured individuals driven by vulgar commercial motives that enslaved the American theatre, cheapened American acting, and undermined American playwriting- was derived from individuals whose agenda was less about selfless artistic freedom than about defending their own ideological authority. Their irrational and vindictive rhetoric, staggering elitism, and racialized thinking stemmed from desperate and deeply selfish motives. Unfortunately, it is this blanket condemnation of the Syndicate that continues to be the basis of our own understanding today. * * * * * Did no voice challenge this narrative? Was it true that, as Fiske insisted, "There is yet to be heard a single word in defense of the Trust from any person of prominence of character in or out of the theatrical profession?" There existed, in fact, many voices who argued that, whatever its specific abuses, the Syndicate overall was either a positive influence or made little difference to the long-term development of American theatre art. I will briefly examine a few of these rebuttals and then speculate why these arguments were ineffective and have been forgotten. 41 Although as a group the Syndicate founders tended to avoid public statements, Charles Frohman and Marc Klaw mounted counterattacks against their critics. Writing in Harper's Weekly in 1904, Frohman mocked "the bugaboo" of business management in theatre and believed the workings of the Syndicate had been misunderstood. He especially challenged the prevailing understanding of how the Syndicate was organized. Although there had been formed "a combination for the sole purpose of representing theatres and of facilitating what is known as the 'booking' of attractions for these theatres," this combination had nothing to do with the production of plays, engagement of actors, or running of theatres. Indeed, the participating managers all worked independently, competed with one another for plays and actors, did not combine finances and were, in effect, business rivals. 42 Usually considered disingenuous, 41 Editorial, Theatrical "Trust" Supplement no. 13, New York Dramatic Mirror, 5 February 1898, 2. 42 Charles Frohman, " New Phases of Theatre Management," Harper's Weekly48 (31 December 1904): 2022. 40 l.ANDRO this account appears to be an accurate statement of the founders' basic business agreement. As Peter A. Davis has demonstrated, the organization was not a genuine trust but a pooling arrangement that allowed individual members a wide degree of independent decision-making. The loose arrangement of independent units is also confirmed by the apparent lack of unified operational behavior. For years, Erlanger and Frohman reportedly rarely spoke to one another and operated sometimes to each other's discomfiture. The three partnerships that made up the Syndicate often did not appear to know what each other was doing and, in the case of Klaw and Erlanger, sometimes cheated on one another. 43 Marc Klaw adopted a more aggressive tone in rebutting his critics. Decrying the cutthroat, "dog-eat-dog" competition and "frenzied rivalry" that characterized booking practices prior to the Syndicate, Klaw in Cosmopolitan championed the contributions of his organization: The theatrical syndicate has brought order out of chaos, legitimate profit out of ruinous rivalry. Under its operations the actor has received a higher salary than was ever his, the producing manager has been assured a better percentage on his investment, and the local manager has won the success which comes from the booking of accepted metropolitan favorites. I know of no one, generally speaking, who has been worked an injury by the commercialization of the stage in America. 44 In his view, the theatre can never be an educator of the public because it is a purely business undertaking that operates under the law of supply and demand: The theater in the United States is not a public institution, and it is about time some one said so. . . . It is not out to dictate public taste. It is out to satisfy public demand. While even such a purely business undertaking must be hedged about with the essential suggestions of artistic requirement, I do not believe the public demands of 43 Peter A. Davis, "The Syndicate/Shubert War," in ed. William R. Taylor, Inventing Times Square, (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991): 147-157. 44 Mark Klaw, "The Theatrical Syndicate-the Other Side," Cosmopolitan 38 (December 1904), 201. MEDIA MANIA us that we give over our commercialism. Moreover, the public would have no such right. What the public has the right to ask of the manager is that he shall give it good, clean, decent entertainment of a wholesome sort. That is as far as the public should go. 45 41 In a 1909 article in The Saturday Evening Post, Klaw again attempted to separate myth from reality. He undercut the nostalgic version of the past by reminding the reader of the chaos of the era of "curbstone management" in which business was done with a small book and pencil "with about as much dignity and system as a bookmaker registers a bet on a horse." Local managers and producing managers had been at the mercy of each other, locked within a system of conflicting interests. The creation of the Syndicate marked a new epoch in the history of the American theatre because it effected a complete revolution in theatrical business in which management became a dignified calling removed from the curb and the cafe. In compelling the fulfillment of contracts, actors and playwrights were assured of steady employment and honest returns. A local manager now could come to New York and within forty-eight hours return home with contracts signed for a whole season's tour. The Syndicate was merely "a clearing-house for the theatre managers and the play producer . . . confining itself strictly to the matter of bookings, its influence upon stage productions has, of necessity, been neutral beyond the fact that it has insisted upon reputable plays." The Syndicate charged a fee for its service because it provided a specialized skill. The booking agent needed to know just what companies would be going west, what kinds of plays were in the same territory at the same time, and when to alter the mix if theatres closed or new attractions appeared. 46 Klaw allied the theatre to the values of the emerging consumer culture: The hue and cry that has been raised about the alleged ' commercialization of the drama' is as illogical as it is ridiculous. The theater to be successful must be conducted on a business basis ... . The performance in the theater may be artistic or it may be allied to art, but the business conduct of the theater is, and must be commercia/. 47 45 Ibid., 200. 46 Marc Klaw, "The Theatrical Syndicate from the Inside," Saturday Evening Post 181 (3 April 1909), 4. 47 Ibid., 3-4. 42 lANDRO A good example of the effectiveness of the Syndicate's specialized booking expertise and straightforward business dealing was provided by the testimony of Duncan B. Harrison who in 1897 sought a national tour for Digby Bell's production of A Midnight Bell. Harrison reported that in seven minutes Erlanger booked a route covering twenty-seven weeks' time embracing all the principal cities in the United States. Contracts were signed and delivered in a few hours with fair terms and no attempt to reduce Bell's share of the receipts. Under the old system such a consecutive tour would have taken weeks or months of correspondence, included expense for telegrams, postage, and clerical staff, and involved complication in shifting dates and changes. 48 Other managers rebutted the media's vicious stereotyping. In the Atlantic Monthly Lorin Deland, for example, attacked the media's habit of basing its views upon inaccurate caricatures: Upon this low person, so unerringly portrayed in the facetious pages of the weekly press, with his immaculate shirt-front, his diamond studs, his cigar in the corner of his mouth, his feet on his desk, a disgusted public visits its wrath. He is the cause of the degradation of dramatic art .. . .Why obviously! He is a coarse, grasping money-getter! Out upon him for a blasphemer of art! 49 To which Deland replied: "You have arraigned the wrong man!" Deland explained that the typical manager's fundamental duty was to survive financially by trying to give the fickle middle-class public what it wanted. Unfortunately, the public rarely knew what it wanted and this produced not a coarse bully but a very anxious individual whose survival depends upon satisfying the "gallery gods" whose response at the box office always dictated the manager's future. 50 Although Fiske would have his readers believe otherwise, not every journalist condemned the Syndicate. Franklin Fyles, dramatic critic of The New York Sun for twenty-five years, found the American theatre to be flourishing and attributed some of that 48 Duncan B. Harrison, "The 'Theatrical Syndicate'," The New York Times 25 March 1897, 7. 49 Lorin F. Deland, "A Plea for the Theatrical Manager," Atlantic Monthly 102 (October 1908), 492. 50 Ibid., 500. MEDIA MANIA 43 success to the presence of the Syndicate. For Fyles, the enormous growth of the American theatre-which by 1900 included over 3,000 legitimate and vaudeville houses worth about $100 million drawing one and one-half million persons each week-day night-had outpaced its clumsy and inefficient booking system and attracted entrepreneurs who inevitably organized the Syndicate. Although a powerful monopoly, the Syndicate had also been beneficial to the American stage: Under its operations contracts are enforced, larger salaries paid to actors with certainty, playwrights are encouraged and amply renumerated, and the traffic in the drama has been lifted from suspicion into esteem. The tastes of that portion of the public which demands good art in the theatre are satisfied in a larger degree than formerly, and, despite the application of this costlier and more skillful stagecraft to some regrettable plays, the standard of morality has been raised along with the other advancement. 51 Fyles believed that the theatrical business "has arrived at a commercial respectability which it did not enjoy a quarter of a century ago." 52 Brander Matthews originally was hostile to the commercial values of the Syndicate, saying in the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1898 that he thought it was evil and would fail of its own weight. 53 Looking back in 1920 he showed less patience with Syndicate critics and argued that, given the current set of economic and geographic realities, the centralization of theatre was the result of an inexorable process and, therefore, it was foolish to indulge in offensive personal attacks by "young persons who conceive of art as etherally detached from all financial considerations." Moreover, he rejected the art versus commerce arguments of Belasco: "In modern times . . . theater prospers as a business. No art can survive unless it affords a fairly satisfactory living to those who devote themselves to 51 Franklin Fyles, The Theatre and Its People (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1900), 71. 52 Ibid., 72. 53 Brander Matthews, "Brander Matthews on the Trust," New York Dramatic Mirror, Theatrical "Trust" Supplement no. 12, 29 January 1898, 1. 44 lANDRO it; and as the appeal of the drama is to the people as a whole it can never be independent of the takings at the door." 54 Although the Syndicate offered actors an unbroken succession of engagements in theatres whose bookings were arranged to provide the least competition and greatest economics in transportation, critics believed that the Syndicate's bottom line values had cheapened American acting. Commercialism had undermined the stock system and squelched the inspirational qualities of the stage to such a degree that, according to John Ranken Tawse, the English-born drama critic of the New York Evening Post, "There is not on the American stage today one solitary performer, male or female, of native origin, who is capable of first class work in either the tragic or comic department of the literary imaginative drama." 55 Not everyone accepted the judgment that the acting profession had been undermined by the Syndicate. Charles Frohman certainly didn't think so. Frohman declared that actors were among the chief beneficiaries of the system. Not only were more actors employed than in pre-Syndicate days, their careers were more stable. Compared to the uncertainties of the past, the actor now could forget about financial worries: "All the conditions which affect him are handled according to the best principles. The actor need not walk home now. The old-fashioned hard-luck stories are no more. The position of players has never been better than to-day, and the change is of vast importance to the accomplishment of good stage- work."56 Several noted actors went on record to confirm the accuracy of Frohman's views. Philip Lewis, an experienced touring actor, recalled a career that contradicted the negative reports of the critics. Lewis acknowledged the complaints about Klaw and Erlanger's monopolistic grip on the business, but also noted the benefits: The actors in 1905 were pretty well satisfied with things just as they were ... with them [the Syndicate], you could count on a full season's work. In fact, for about the first time since the business began, actors could see a lifetime ahead in the theatre. . . . You could see the future and it was at least forty weeks a year behind the new electric 54 Brander Matthews, Playwrights on Playmaking (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1923), 261. 55 John Ranken Towse, Sixty Years ofthe Theater(New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1916), 88. 56 Frohman, 2024. MEDIA MANIA footlights, subject to agreement on terms and billing. There had never been so many thousands of actors working. 5 7 45 Even Nat Goodwin, who had earlier assumed the leadership of the actors' revolt against the Syndicate, regretted his initial response: After all, what a silly fight I contemplated making and what a blessing it turned out that I did not consummate it. The theatrical syndicate has in fifteen years made more actors and manager rich, improved the drama to a greater extent, built more theatres and increased patronage more consistently than has been accomplished by any other factors during the last century. 58 Goodwin believed that in the future, contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the names of Klaw and Erlanger would be "synonyms for Honesty and Justice." 59 In 1940, historian Monroe Lippman, examined the charge that the Syndicate had corrupted American acting and, like Frohman, Lewis, and Goodwin, found it baseless. Lippman not only cited evidence that the general level of acting was probably no better or worse under the Syndicate, but also reminded the reader that American stock companies had disappeared twenty-eight years before the Syndicate was organized. To blame the Syndicate for the alleged decline in the art of American acting, Lippman concluded, "denotes either an insufficient acquaintance with the details of history of the American theatre, or careless handling of the facts." 60 Authoritative voices also challenged Norman Hapgood's notion that "nothing does more than the existence of this powerful association to prevent the growth of the American drama." 61 Charles Frohman emphatically rejected the notion that some great 57 Philip Lewis, Trouping: How the Show Came to Town ( New York: Harper & Row, 1935), 197. 58 Goodwi n, 107-8. 59 Ibid., 108. 60 Monroe Lippman, "The Effect of the Theatre Syndicate on Theatrical Art in America," Quarterly Journal of Speech 26 (April1940), 277. 61 Norman Hapgood, "The Theatrical Syndicate," The International Monthly (January 1900), 117. 46 l.ANDRO play had been lost to the American theatre because of the business practices of the Syndicate: "The idea of 'lost art' in the drama exists only in the minds of the very few who feel that the theatre ought to be a class room, and that the 'Oedipus Tyrannus' ought to be the standard of the high-class theatre." 62 Indeed, in 1909 George Jean Nathan reported that a "veritable tidal wave of plays" from all over the country had been pouring into producers' offices. Apparently, this playwriting craze was the result of articles that had described the huge amount of money made by successful playwrights. 63 Lippman, studying a compilation of important plays produced during the period of the Syndicate, concluded that more good plays had been presented by the Syndicate than by most other contemporary managers. The Syndicate's production history from 1890 to 1899 included Richard Mansfield's Arms and the Man, Beau Brummell, The Devils Disciple, and Richard III. AI Hayman featured Sarah Bernhardt in Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fedora, and Phedre. In 1897, Julie Marlowe performed in the Syndicate production of Countess Valska, while Charles Coghlin appeared in The Royal Box. The plays of authors such as James A. Herne, Clyde Fitch, William Gillette, and Augustus Thomas also found production in Syndicate theatres. Lippman reported that forty per cent of the "important productions" compiled between 1908 to the time the Syndicate was dissolved were Syndicate attractions; five of the seven plays chosen by Burns Mantle as the best plays of 1908-1909 also were Syndicate attractions. Because the Syndicate was primarily a huge booking agency that wished to present plays that would enjoy long runs in Syndicate theatres all over the country, that organization probably had encouraged playwrights by providing them with a greater opportunity than had been provided previously. 64 Finally, the record demonstrates that accusations about how the Syndicate's commercial values prevented it from supporting anything but tasteless and vulgar popular entertainment for an undiscriminating mass audience is completely without foundation. The Syndicate insisted that good drama be successful financially but understood that few audiences wanted production of the classics. Nonetheless, the Syndicate produced Sothern and Marlowe in 62 Frohman, 2024. 63 George Jean Nathan, 'The United States of Playwrights," quoted in Jurgen C. Wolter, The Dawning of American Drama (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993): 252-3. 64 Lippman, 277, 280- 81 and Monroe Lippman, 'The History of the Theatrical Syndicate: Its Effect Upon the Theatre in America," (Ph.D. Diss., University of Michigan, 1937), 192. MEDIA MANIA 47 Shakespearean repertory and Forbes-Robertson as Hamlet. Klaw and Erlanger were the first producers to bring African-American performers to Broadway. 65 Their New Amsterdam Theatre cost over a million dollars to build and was one of the most impressive examples of art nouveau interior decoration in the country. The "House Beautful" opened in 1903 with A Midsummer Night's Dream, a lavish production that cost almost $100,000, starred Nat Goodwin as Bottom, and featured orchestrations of Mendelssohn's music by Victor Herbert. In sum, there is more than adequate evidence that the characterization of the Syndicate as a ravenous octopus that almost destroyed the American theatre, the American actor, and the American playwright was not an objective portrait but a one-sided scenario created by its greatest enemies. If these rebuttals were so compelling, why did they fail to counteract the demonizing of the Syndicate? I suggest that the Syndicate never received a balanced critical analysis because the arguments in its defense were-and continue to be-rejected for ideological reasons. The defense of the successful centralization of the commercial theatre in terms of "efficiency," and "stability" based upon "strict business discipline" actually fueled opposition rather than reducing it. Charles Frohman's likening the Syndicate's booking system to a department store, for instance, was an apt business comparison since both are concerned with the distribution of goods rather than manufacturing. But that particular phrase confirmed to Winter and other critics that theatre meant no more to the Syndicate "than a factory of soap and candles" sunk to the level of "a bargain counter." 66 Similarly, Klaw's insistence that theatre was a private business-an idea later affirmed by the courts- succeeded only in driving his opponents into more frenzied condemnations of an organization they believed had corrupted a sacred public service. The ideological differences between the two sides were unbridgeable. On one hand, a cultural aristocracy rooted in nineteenth-century values was desperate to maintain its grip on a fixed sense of hierarchy and exclusivity; on the other, a new breed of theatre brokers, members of an emerging economic order unprecedented in size and power, had moved successfully from the margins into the center of an increasingly heterogeneous nation. The former found any rational arguments in favor of the Syndicate to be alien, unnatural, and violently hostile to all its traditional values. Thus, no matter how compelling, rebuttals that argued in terms of commercial benefits, business sense, amoral values, 65 Thomas L. Riis, Just Before Jazz (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1989): 67, 76, 109-111. 66 Winter, "Department Store Theatre," 10. 48 LANDRO statistics, or satisfaction of the audience acted as flash points that intensified criticism and confirmed racial stereotypes. It did not matter whether the rebuttals were true; an elitist media inevitably rejected the ideology of the new consumer economy upon which they were based. I suspect that the reason testimonials by Syndicate defenders have been ignored since then is because contemporary historians and commentators share the same ideological motives and anxieties as their predecessors. * * * * * The failure to separate issues of morality and commerce during turn of the century Broadway is important because in some ways that critical failure bears a striking resemblance to what is happening on Broadway today. Antimodernism appears still to maintain a tenacious influence on cultural authority as critics in contemporary media condemn a new demon: The Walt Disney Company. One hundred years after the Syndicate was formed, when today's economy is booming after bouncing back from a recession and advancements in technology are changing the way we live, the Disney company has redefined Broadway economics by restoring the New Amsterdam and producing two hit musicals targeted specifically to tourists with families: Beauty and the Beast in 1992 and Lion King in 1996. At the same time, a sense of uneasiness has appeared in the media. Despite evidence of corporate responsibility and the respect accorded such artists as Julie Taymor, the media suspect Disney as a low brow predator who wishes to turn Times Square into a theme park. 67 How closely the critical reaction approximates the campaign of vilification at the end of the last century. As critics condemn Disney for treating Broadway as "a retail outlet for licensed cartoon characters," there is the same sense that corporate culture has transformed theatre art into a banal commodity. 68 At a time when rules are being rewritten and lines blur between Broadway and nonprofit business practice, there is the same sense of simplistic binary thinking-art versus commerce, good versus evil, low versus 67 Frank Rose, "Can Disney Tame 42nd Street?," Fortune 24 June 1996: 97- 98. See also Herbert Muschamp, "A Palace for a New Magic Kingdom, 42nd St," the New York Times 11 May 1997, II, 1. For more details about how Broadway business practices are changing, see Rick Lyman, "2 Powerhouses of the Theatrer Meld Broadway and the Road," The New York Times, 9 June 1997, A 1; Peter Marks, "Broadway's New Corporate Playmakers," the New York Times, 10 June 1997, C 2; and Dan Cox and Greg Evans, "B'way Rules Rewritten to Heed 'Lion's' Roar, " Variety, 22 December 1997-4 January, 1998: 1, 78. 68 Editorial, "Tinseltown and Broadway," The New York Times 20 April 1998, A 18. MEDIA MANIA 49 high art. Again, the size of corporate involvement scares commentators who fear the "mouse-shaped gorilla" in their midst and spread stories of Disney's alleged bullying, take-it-or leave-it deals. 69 Like Frohman, Michael Eisner, Chief Executive Officer of Disney, defends his long-running hits and the primacy of the box office as the appropriate business response: "We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement." 70 This open testament to commercialism infuriates Frank Rich, for example, who frequently uses his column in the New York Times as a pulpit to denounce Disney's corporate culture and urge readers to liberate Broadway's stages from "theme-park culture" and "Disneyfication." Looking backward to a nostalgic past when his mother took him to New York for the first time, Rich sentimentalizes the past and wishes to stave off the "mailing of Times Square.' 171 Similarly, in an echo of Walter Prichard Eaton, Newsday critic Linda Winer wastes no time taking the moral high ground to prevent Disney from the "infantization" of our culture by establishing exclusive locations for low and high culture: Disney is a company that is dedicated to the fake, to making fake realities. If I thought they would just stay on 42"d Street, maybe I wouldn't be so nervous. If we could keep all the family entertainment, theme-park musicals and franchise productions on that block, the way the city tried to keep all the porno stores on one street, and let the real producers make real theatre somewhere else, maybe I wouldn't worry. 72 Winer's elitism and snobbery show through as she laments how sad it is "to have the theatre turned over to basically a corporate culture, where they talk about franchising product as opposed to making shows. It's just so homogenized and middlebrow and safe 69 Sylviane Gold, "The Disney Difference," American Theatre (December 1997): 14-16. 70 Michael D. Eisner, Work in Progress (New York: Random House, 1998), 100. 71 See Frank Rich, "Bring in the Funk," The New York Times, 20 November 1996, A 25; "Times Square's Act Two," The New York Times 20 April 1997, IV, 15; and "New York Bound," The New York Times, IV, 15. 72 Quoted in Gold, "Disney Difference, " 52. 50 lANDRO and conventional and loud." 73 Critics once again crusade to protect the American stage while attempting to impose their way of appreciating theatre as the only legitimate one available to those uniquely qualified to comprehend it, and seem determined to dismiss any outsider who appears to threaten their cultural hegemony. Waving banners of artistic freedom and crusading to protect the purity of the American stage, contemporary media critics actually seek to keep the theatre of the twenty-first century firmly placed in the twentieth. As John Lahr in his review of The Lion King so smugly expresses this antimodernist attempt to assert intellectual dominance of the commercial stage: "I call it brilliant Business Art, and the hell with it." 74 Perhaps it is time that we reject the demonizing of Broadway's recurrent reinvention of the way it does business and replace elitist myths with a more balanced analysis that no longer confuses moral outrage with historical evidence. The general assumption that free competition in the arts is inherently good while a Syndicate or investment by a large corporation is inherently bad oversimplifies what is truly a multi-faceted, complex, and contradictory blend of constantly shifting boundaries and alliances that has lasted throughout this nation's history. Broadway and show business have existed side-by-side throughout our lifetimes. The historical reality is that business-whether applied to the American theatre or to corporate practice-is an amoral force that requires reasonable rules and regulations. Chance, real estate, and entrepreneurial ambition have as much to do with the history of the American theatre as artistic breakthroughs. This is neither good nor bad, but the way our theatre is. 73 Ibid., 51. 74 John Lahr, "Animal Magnetism," The New Yorker73 (24 November 1997), 129. Journal of American Drama and Theatre 13 (Spring 2001) THE YANKEE AND THE VETERAN: VEHICLES OF NATIONALISM MAURA L. CRONIN "Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsityjgenuiness, but by the style in which they are imagined." 1 "Nations do not exist in nature. They are created by human cultures and they provide a conspicuous example of how human realities develop through languages, symbols and imaginative narratives." 2 "A national cultural identity is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth." 3 Though some scholars hesitate to define what brings about "nationhood" and what ideological elements make up a "nation," concluding that the social and political situation is too complex, Benedict Anderson offers a strikingly simple yet comprehensive explanation. In his book Imagined Communities, he outlines this elusive ideology as "an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.' 14 Following a line of argument similar to Anderson's, Lloyd Kramer asserts in Nationalism: Political Cultures in Europe and America/ 1775-1865 that nationalism developed in the late eighteenth century because of a change in the perception of identity. People have always held multiple identities, he maintains. They describe themselves (and others describe them) through position in their families, employment, economic level, gender, race/ethnicity, education, and 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Revised edition, (New York: Verso, 1991), 6. 2 Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism/ Political Cultures in Europe and America, 1775-1865(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1927), 9. 3 Ibid., 8. 4 Anderson, 6. 52 CRONIN religious affiliation. But in the later part of this century, rather than simply identifying themselves through close-knit communities (families, towns, provinces), people began to identify themselves primarily as a part of a larger community: the imagined community of a nation. With this new (though imagined) sense of "nation-hood," America was in a peculiar situation, for, as Appleby, Hunt, and Jacobs posit, 'There was no uniform ethnic stock, no binding rituals from an established church, no common fund of stories, only a shared act of rebellion. Americans had to invent ... a sense of solidarity." 5 To fulfill this desire for solidarity, Kramer suggests, nationalism began to be expressed "in texts and in state institutions . ... " These texts expressed "the coherence and unity of the nation ... '-6 - a nation bound by an ideology of sovereign rights. Moreover, these texts (newspapers, novels, and, I would posit, plays) began to construct a concrete image of the "American" and to promote a specific understanding of how nationalistic sentiment should be expressed. Kramer states that nationalistic texts have four common characteristics: they promote a shared and unique national language/ they express a quasi-religious sentiment for national history and heroes; they endorse a concern for the national family; and they offer a definition of the national citizen. Using these criteria Kramer identifies the poetry of Philip Freneau, the writings of historian George Bancroft, and speeches of President Abraham Lincoln as nationalistic texts. Many early American plays, likewise, can be determined to be nationalistic narratives, using the definition provided in Kramer's work. Specific use of language, quasi-religious sentiment, concern for the future family, and promotion of a specific image of 'citizen' in 5 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: Norton, 1995), 92. 6 Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism, Political Cultures in Europe and America, 1775-1865(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998): 3, 7. 7 In Kramer's work, 'language' refers to a linguistic system of communication as we normally conceive it, but also in the sense of 'narrative;' he writes, " ... the self-conscious advocates of the nation could not simply proclaim the nation's existence in the language and independence of its people. They had to show long-term continuities in the national literatures, religions, politics, and histories that separated their nations from other cultures and connected their nations to the past as well as to the spirit of their own era" (51). It should be noted, however, that while he does make a distinction here between two meanings of "language," the majority of his analysis suggests that nationalistic texts promoted a specific national language (in terms of a linguistic system). NATIONAUSM 53 Royall Tyler's The Contrast(1787), James Nelson Barker's Tears and Smiles (1808), and A. B. Lindsley's Love and Friendship (1810), place these works within the "evolving narratives in which Americans invented their national traditions and imagined their nation.'ra The Yankee and the Veteran, two figures employed in each of these dramatic texts, are crucial to this cause. These texts not only work in generating an imagined community; they actually propose an image of the ideal 'American, ' one that, like the community itself, is imagined. In the chapter devoted to language, Kramer writes "All nations and nationalisms must have languages to represent their political and cultural identities"; 9 therefore, he claims, one function of the nationalistic text is to promote a shared national language. To grow in unity and modernity, a nation must be able to communicate in an efficient manner. Divisions within the language must be eradicated and foreign tongues expelled. To illustrate this phenomenon, Kramer outlines narratives which sprang up in post-Revolutionary France. These texts, he explains, sought a nationally unified form of French by eliminating less popular, provincial versions of the language and by excluding German from social usage. But, Kramer also explains, not only do less legitimate dialects need to be rooted out from usage, a dominant form of the language must be identified and promoted. This language, Kramer argues, is one that is unique to the nation and, as a national commodity, must be protected; it must be "defended against other languages and cultures. " 1 Kramer asserts that language holds such an imperative position amongst nationalistic texts because political and societal cultures are shaped by countless communicative acts. These acts, in turn, gradually extend into everyday life and shape the ideologies of citizens. According to Kramer's analysis, linguistically, America was in a peculiar predicament in the post-Revolutionary era because its national language was English- the same as its British predecessor. How then, both Kramer and post-Revolutionary war texts ask, could America distinguish itself in terms of language? How could a language uniquely fitted for America be promoted? Historically speaking, the creative spirit often finds answers for some of the most complex social questions-and the field of linguistics is no exception. The Yankee, a figure that emerged in American texts after the war, exemplified creativity at work in the American language system, for, while still speaking English, this character 8 Ibid., 107. (Emphasis added.) 9 Ibid., 42. 10 Ibid.: 44-45. 54 CRONIN uses a style of language that is specifically American. His language was so distinctly American, in fact, that in later years when actors brought the American Yankee to the English stage, British audiences would actually complain about the incomprehensibility of the speech. 11 In his book Yankee Theater, Francis Hodge notes that British travelers had the same difficulty understanding real Americans. One diarist wrote, "Unless the present progress of change be arrested by an increase of taste and judgment in the more educated classes, there can be no doubt that in another century the dialect of Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman." 12 While the Yankee certainly exaggerated the American dialect on stage, certain regions of America had already solved the problem of differentiating themselves linguistically from the British. In New England, for example, a completely divergent strain of English had emerged. When this (Northern) version of English was spoken upon the stage, its dissimilarity from British English was emphasized. A nationalistic text, therefore, only needed to identify and promote this difference. In the plays The Contrast, Tears and Smiles, and Love and Friendship, the Yankee emphasizes the difference between specifically American grammar and its British precursor. He uses specific words such as ' tarnal, 'twer, sartain, ater, purtyish, sich, and afear'd. These words must have sounded like a butchery of English to any British citizen in the audience. For example, in The Contrast, the Yankee Jonathan, when describing his night at the theater says, "Mercy on my soul! Did I see the wicked players? Mayhap that 'ere Darby that I like so, was the serpent himself ... and I am sure where I sat it smelt tarnally of brimstone." 13 Likewise, Yank, in Barker's Tears and Smiles fumbles through language: "Sarvant, sir. Pray, sir-hem! As you come out o' yan house, you mought tell a body-Pray, sir-hem! What o'clock mought it be, sir?." 14 But of these three works, perhaps Lindsley's Love and Friendship is the most distinguished. Hodge calls Jonathan's speech in Love and 11 See Hodge on actors Charles Matthews, James H. Hackett, and George Handel Hill. 12 Francis Hodge, Yankee Theater: The Image of America on Stage, 1825- 1850. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964): 13-14. 13 Royall Tyler, The Contrast in ed. Don Wilmeth, Staging the Nation: Plays from the American Theater 1787-1909 (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 36. 14 James Nelson Barker, "Tears and Smiles" in Paul H. Musser, James Nelson Barker 1784-1858. (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 169. NATIONAUSM 55 Friendship the most "fully developed dialect" 15 of the Yankee Theater. In this text, Jonathan, one of the Yankee figures, finds himself in a bit of a bind when Jack, a rival shipmate and Yankee servant, steals his "Yankee Notions." Upon this discovery, Jonathan exclaims, There it is agin, by gum! I knew how't would be. It beets all nater! Never fetch me ' f I don't think how it was that rotten sailor feller cut up all these here witched capers. But it beets everything tewe see capun Horner git intewe sich a tarnal passion. Just as it was the fust night we left Boston; and all for nothen at all as a body may say, only 'caze I a axt um (for I jest cum from Suffield, where they makes wooden dishes, and never went tewe sea 'fore) as 'e lay acrost the door what goes down chamber 'f 'e lay acrost the door what the whul enduren night and how 'e'd stop her, with all that are cloth flyen top on her. Darnation!" 16 Not only is Jonathan's speech different from that of his British counterparts in its vocabulary, pronunciation, and sentence structure, but also his speech is distinctly American in its embodiment of the voice of a storyteller. Jonathan, like most Yankees, is a teller of tall tales 17 His speech is both aimless and endearing. He is not rushed nor quick to come to his point. He seems almost to lose his way in conversation-pausing to tell us where he was raised, adding in details about captain Horner, and later in the monologue even singing "Yankee Doodle," for no apparent reason. Hodge refers to this trademark digression as having "lack of a specific point" 18 and notes that it becomes characteristic of the Yankee in coming generations. 15 Francis Hodge, Yankee Theater: The Image of America on Stage, 182S- 1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964 ), 50. 16 A. B. Lindsley, "Love and Friendship; or Yankee Notions: A Comedy in Three Acts." (New York: Longworth, D., 1809), 10. 17 This quality is distinctly American, according to Alecia Cramer, who says, " ... Americans thought so much of the art of exaggeration that they developed a unique American genre-the tall tale." This genre, Cramer asserts, stems from the Yankee. Alecia Cramer. "The Yankee Comic Character: Its Origins and Development in American Literature through 1830," diss., Oklahoma State University, 1995, 18. 18 Francis Hodge, Yankee Theater: The Image of America on Stage, 1825- 1850(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 50. 56 CRONIN The Yankee, though in some ways similar to his Yorkshire counterpart John Bull, distinguishes himself through his style of speech. The Yankee is clever; he is honest; he is down to earth. He is simple, but earnest. The Yankee's specific speech and style made him into the "symbol of the new America." 19 No longer could this bumpkin figure be mistaken for the Yorkshireman, his speech and manner of speaking were far too divergent-they were truly American. Certainly, early American audiences found the Yankee's speech and doings as humorous as we do today. There was, however, a serious message behind the humor. As Marie Killheffer says, "While the audience laughed at his crudeness, it undoubtedly admired his virtues, especially his ardent patriotism." 20 The Yankee's speech pointed to the existence of a uniquely American dialect. It reaffirmed the country's motion toward linguistic independence and linguistic difference. The stage has always acted as a physical "site on which national prestige-the legitimacy and the renown of the nation in the eyes of its citizens as well as its rivals-is staged, acknowledged and contested". 21 In this sense, the mere act of giving voice to the unique American style of speech on the stage not only acknowledged its presence, but also confirmed its legitimacy. As Killheffer suggests, the Yankee was a figure of patriotism, so much so that "by the mid-1830s Yankee Jonathan had evolved the Uncle Sam costume, and everywhere he had become the symbol of the new American." 22 For example, in plays such as The Stage Struck Yankee (1845) the ordinary straight characters are described as wearing long-tail drab coats and/ or French gray trousers, but the Yankee is costumed quite differently, with a showy vest; a large bell hat; and red, white and blue-checkered trousers-the embodiment of Uncle Sam. 23 The Yankee was so innately American that he evolved into the physical replication of a national symbol on stage. 19 Ibid., 6. 20 Marie Killheffer, "The Development of the Yankee Character in American Drama from 1787 to 1861," diss., University of Chicago, 1927, 11. 21 Lauren Kruger, The National Stage. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998), 12. 22 Francis Hodge, Yankee Theater: The Image of America on Stage, 1825- 1850. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964): 5-6. 23 As found in 0 . E. Durivage, esq. 'The Stage-Struck Yankee, a farce in one act" in The New York Drama, a choice collection of tragedies, comedies, farces (etc). 1845. NATIONALISM 57 Part of his transformation stems directly from the patriotism he expresses even in these early Yankee plays. His speech is filled with praise of the nation, its forefathers, and its war heroes. For example, in The Contrast, Jonathan says, "I am a true blue son of liberty." 24 Likewise, Jonathan in Love and Friendship exclaims, "Huzza! Bunker hill forever tewe the enemies of Columby, and the sweet kisses of her pretty gals tewe her galyant sons." 25 Lindsley's work is filled with nationalistic exultations such as this; he also ends his play with an epilogue which reinforces American values. It bids us to "live-each honest Yankee Notion." 26 This is a play on words: the Yankees in the play are consumed with Yankee notions- items from Boston which they hope to sell in North Carolina. Yankee notions, in a less literal sense, are thoughts of Jonathan and Jack- and they are filled with praise of war heroes, tales of national wartime victory, and admiration of America's independence. On the topic of a quasi-religious sentiment which nationalism characteristically incorporates, Lloyd Kramer writes that nationalism offers, "consolations and explanations for violence, sacrifice and power." 27 People need a suitable explanation for suffering and death. They often need a cause to justify sacrifice and thereby assuage the pain over the loss of a loved one. Nationalism offers such comfort to citizens. Just as religion often works to console the grieving, Kramer asserts that nationalism functions similarly: an American mother can be contented in knowing that her son died bravely in the fight for freedom. Kramer writes: The modern nation was not eternal, but could rival religion in its comforting assurance of personal connections to a greater power that existed long before and after the life of every individual person. It could also resemble God insofar as it became the ultimate source of meaning and protection. 28 and continues: 24 Tyler, in Wilmeth, 27. 25 A. B. Lindsley, Love and Friendship/ or Yankee Notions: A Comedy in Three Acts (New York: Longworth, 1809), 30. 26 Ibid., 58. 27 Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism, Political Cultures in Europe and America, 1775-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998), 55. 28 Ibid., 65. 58 CRONIN Almost all the ancient religious themes could be adapted to fit into stories about nations: descriptions of a Chosen People, beliefs in a distinctive moral mission, explanations of current sufferings as the prelude to a more harmonious future, and reverence for the life giving sacrifice of blood and bodies. 29 Sentiments expressed by both the Yankee and the Veteran begin to offer this kind of quasi-religious outlook towards the new America. They venerate veterans as saintly martyrs, they posit Americans as a Chosen People-one with a Divine mission-and they urge caution in caring for the newborn nation. Yankees, as has been suggested, express abundant patriotic sentiments. Their speech is filled with nationalistic ejaculations and exultations, but the sentiments behind some of these speeches go far beyond mere platitudes or truisms. At times they express a quasi-worship for not-so-long-ago heroes of war and/or national conflicts. Jack, in Love and Friendship, says, " ... when the gale rages so I can carry sail no longer, I'll jump overboard and like the gal-gallant Somers and all true heart-hearted yankee tars (sic), when disabled from fighting and carrying sail any longer, gi-give three che-cheers and sink to the bottom with my colors flying and all my spirits about me." 30 This Yankee honors the heroes of the Somers, wishing that he might have (if need be) as honorable a death as they suffered. Likewise, though the song "Yankee Doodle" was probably appropriated from the British and became a popular ditty used in these early American plays for its entertainment value, 31 its words are filled with a kind of reverence for the war and its heroes: "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy, a Yankee Doodle do or die. A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July ... " It seems appropriate then, that nearly every Yankee to grace the American stage sings this song at some point in their plays. Similarly, the Veterans within these plays express an even greater quasi-religious sentiment towards the war and its heroes and victims. Colonel Manly, for example, in The Contrastconstantly 29 Ibid., 81. 30 Lindsley, 42. 31 Eric Lott, in Love and Theft tells of an account published in Dial in 1842 which claimed, "Our only national melody, Yankee Doodle, is shrewdly suspected to be a scion from British art". Eric Lott, Love and Theft Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. (New York: Oxford, 1993), 16. NATIONAUSM 59 expresses veneration for his fellow soldiers and a longing for their injuries to be acknowledged and honored. He prizes them as much as his own family members and cares for them as one would an aging blessed figure. Also, Charlotte critiques his quasi-religious sentiments, saying that when he speaks to her about America it is "as if I had been at church." 32 General Campton in Tears and Smiles, likewise, honors Sydney, a recent veteran, for his efforts to free the prisoners of Tripoli. The General admonishes his brother for believing that "the country is now old enough to take care of itself." He states, "Go welcome the prisoners from the dungeons of Tripoli with that sentiment! Dry with it the tears that are shed for those who fell in attempting their deliverance, or generously give it in thanks to the brave survivors of that action which accomplished it!." Sydney, having been part of this effort to free American prisoners, wins the General's approval: "The noble boy has arrived also, with the proud consciousness of having shared in the glory of their liberation!." 33 Persecuted saints and blessed martyrs are necessary in religious narratives, and likewise, they become necessary in nationalistic texts. In discussing America's nationalistic history, Kramer explains, "Puritan religious accounts of a new 'City on the Hill' ... helped generate a narrative of the Chosen People that would contribute decisively to the American Revolution and the subsequent development of America's national ideology." 34 According to Kramer, America has always considered itself a moral leader, a chosen nation. This ideology has become so ingrained in the definition of 'America' that our country continues to act on similar impulses today. Kramer states, "The young United States is perhaps the most instructive example of a nation in which a belief in high destiny has been . . . a forceful presence in the lives of men great and small" 35 Colonel Manly in The Contrast seems to uphold this notion; he posits America as a Chosen Nation. This Veteran says, "I am proud to say America, I mean the United States, has displayed virtues and achievements which modern nations may 32 Royal Tyler, The Contrast, in Don B. Wilmeth, eel., Staging the Nation: Plays from the American Theater 1787-1909(Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 22. 33 Ibid., 146. 34 Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism, Political Culture in Europe and America, 1775-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998), 67. 35 Ibid., 44. 60 CRONIN admire, but of which they seldom set us the example." 36 Not only is America one of the first to follow the correct path, according to Manly, not only should the other nations witness the 'Nation on the Hill' and follow suit, but implicit in his speech is his disappointment in the older nations for not having done so yet. Kramer asserts that the narrative of the Chosen People also expresses an acceptance of ' hard times' as being characteristic of this divine position. Just as Job was tested, the Chosen Ones too will be put through a time of suffering. There is, however, an element of hope within such suffering. Religious narratives suggest that, though the present may be filled with hardship for a Chosen People, the future is expectantly hopeful-it will be filled with graces and blessings from Above. Clinton Rossiter explains the forward- looking focus of the Chosen People narrative as an artifact of the newness of the nation. According to Rossiter, when a country gains independence, its people must create and embrace an "instant history." 37 In effect, national history begins with the birth of the nation; therefore, all preceding events are forgotten or unacknowledged. The events surrounding the struggle for independence become the nation's only history. Because this instant history does not span a great length of time, it tends to be forward-looking; the new nation focuses on recent victories, upcoming events, and future progress. The Yankee and the Veteran, both staunch supporters of the nation, are the dramatic characters best-suited to recount the nationalistic narrative and to express the nation's hopes for the future. The Veterans in The Contrast, Tears and Smiles, and Love and Friendship promote this kind of 'instant history' in their recounting of fairly recent American victories as deeply historical. The chronicle of America begins, in their eyes, with the War of Independence; this is the history drawn upon and departed from these texts. They also depict an expectant hope in the future of America. Colonel Manly, for example, admits that his nation is presently suffering economically, but trusts in its eventual reward. He regards his government notes as "a sacred deposit," 38 and he says, "Their full amount is justly due to me, but as embarrassments, the natural consequences of a long war, disable my country from supporting its credit, I shall wait with patience until it is rich enough to discharge 36 Tyler, 46. 37 Clinton Rossiter, The American Quest 1790-1860(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), 40. 38 Tyler, in Wilmeth, 23. NATIONALISM 61 them. If that is not in my day, they shall be transmitted as an honorable certificate to posterity." 39 Colonel Manly waits patiently, guarding the new nation as one would a child and not only longing for, but expecting it to flourish and prosper. There is no doubt in his mind that America will do so one day, for it is the Chosen Land of new promise. This hope in a glorious future is not uncommon to new nations, Rossiter explains: "The founding generation of a nation ... usually talk[s] bravely about a glorious future." 40 In these three early American plays, Veterans not only expect their young country to soon prosper, but they are attentive to particulars which may channel national success and progress. They are often depicted as being more in touch than the ordinary citizen with the nation and its needs. Just as Colonel Manly realizes that the nation needs him to wait patiently to be paid for his services, other veterans too, seem to know instinctively what the nation requires. General Campdon says, " ... as I have fought, I can feel for the nation's interests.'"' 1 The General understands the nation's needs far more keenly than his brother, who escaped the war because he "preferred the shedding of ink to spilling blood:" and because he understands the nation's needs, he urges caution in national affairs. Having fought, he does not want to lose what had been gained. Manly expresses an anxiety that Lloyd Kramer finds common to nationalistic texts: "The national story could become a religious story of dangerous moral decline in which people betrayed the national cause to pursue their own selfish gains or to adopt the ideas and customs of other nations.'"' 2 Bruce McConachie posits Manly as the moral center of The Contrast and states, "Manly ... warns Americans that unless they are careful, they will repeat the decline of ancient Greece, where the common good was lost in pursuit of private interest.'"' 3 General Compton, in Tears and Smiles, also acts as moral center of that play, and he suggests a 39 Ibid. 4 Clinton Rossiter, The American Quest 1790-1860(New York: Harcort Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), 40. 41 James Nelson Barker, Tears and Smiles in Paul H. Musser, James Nelson Barker 1784-1858(New York: AMS Press, 1969), 146. 42 Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism, Polttical Culture in Europe and America, 1775-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998), 74. 43 Bruce McConachie, "American Theater in Context, from the Beginnings to 1870" in Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theater. vol 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 130. 62 CRONIN similar sentiment: that America still needs to be watched over and nurtured so as to not slide into moral decline. One of the keys to the prevention of moral decline is the family. Kramer writes, "Narratives about the imagined communities of modern nations rely constantly on metaphorical and political allusions to families and a family relationship," 44 and that, "The overlapping, contrasting and connected identities of women, men and nations became a prominent theme in nationalist writings about families.' 145 Nationalistic texts are concerned with families-and more specifically, women-because of the belief that the family acts as a cultural mediating institution for child development. Therefore, Kramer argues, if native women "fall" to foreign men, the nation becomes in danger of losing its national identity. Loss of American mothers could mean the loss of American children, thus weakening the national resources, leaving the country susceptible to military attack. Or, and perhaps even worse, Kramer asserts, loss of the national mother could breed foreign children in the nation's very midst. American children of European fathers are in danger of becoming Europeanized. If this were to occur, the next generations would not be adequately instructed in their national history and customs. Thus the nation may be susceptible to internal conflict and discord. The unity gained by the War of Independence would be lost. It therefore becomes vital to protect the American woman due to her expectant (and expected) motherhood. In this view of the family, women become "guardians of the crucial domestic sphere.'"' 6 A nation's culture flourishes only in an atmosphere of cultivated collective memory of the nation's past heroes and national achievements; therefore, " ... once a modern nation has come into existence, its first intention must be to go on existing, to guard itself against conquests, fission, decay and death.' 147 The most efficient means of guarding against conquests, according to Kramer's analysis, then, is to guard the women of the nation. Each one of these early American plays deals directly with this issue. Since they are sentimental comedies, each plot centers on the problem of an upcoming marriage. These plays seem to ask, 'Will the woman be able to marry the young, patriotic American 44 Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism, Political Culture in Europe and America, 1775-1865(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998), 85. 45 Ibid., 88. 46 Ibid., 90. 47 Clinton Rossiter, The American Quest 1790-1860 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), 75. NATIONALISM 63 male, or will she be forced to succumb to her father's unwise demand and be forced to marry the unsuitable Europeanized male?' In The Contrast, the young American woman, Maria, is in danger of marrying the Europeanized fop, Dimple. Similarly, in Tears and Smiles, the conflict centers on Louisa's upcoming marriage: will she be forced into an unnatural union with Fluttermore, the (again) Europeanized fop, or will she be able to unite with Rangely, the available young American veteran? Likewise, in Love and Friendship, Augusta may have to marry Dick Dashaway, the corrupt drunkard, rather than Algernon Seldreer, the honest young man from Boston. Both the Yankee and the Veteran serve as rescuers of the woman- this 'maiden-in-distress'-yet another reason for audiences to revere them. In The Contrast, the wise Colonel Manly defends Maria from Dimple's wickedness, and is finally seen to be the perfect suitor- thus acting as both prince and knight in shining armor. Tears and Smiles equally shows the Veteran as wise and brave in his attempts to save Louisa: General Compton offers shelter if she should choose elopement, against her father's wishes. Also, after Fluttermore, the Europeanized fop, is exposed for having dishonored a young girl, the Veteran is again Louisa's savior; in light of the new information, he urges her father to relent and agree to the more suitable marriage. General Compton is pivotal in urging this final concord and thus securing a happy (American) marriage. Similarly, the Yankees take on a crucial role in preserving the family in Love and Friendship. Augusta, the young woman, is in danger of being wed to Dick Dashaway. Both Captain Horner and Jack, sea-worthy Yankees, aid Algernon in his pursuit of and final victory in obtaining Augusta (and thus securing a suitable match). One does so by lending the young hero money, the other by exposing the rake for his treachery. The Yankee and the Veteran both have very honorable roles in these plays in that they help the 'right' man obtain the American woman. They are in pursuit of the pure American family by preventing the American woman from falling into the hands of a foreigner. The woman was not the only object 48 which required protection from foreign apprehension. The nation itself also needed to be protected. To maintain national safety, Kramer suggests, nationalistic philosophy and texts discouraged interracial or intercultural mrxrng. This sentiment comes out within the three plays. The European is not simply a dandy, but a malevolent power that at any time could bring destruction to the American community. 48 In nationalistic philosophy, women are objectified. Viewed solely as prizes, they are a means of producing American children. 64 CRONIN If he is not seen as stealing money from true Yankees, then he is pilfering young women from suitable mates, or getting drunk and challenging young American men to duels. Outside of identifying Americans as benevolent and Europeans as malevolent figures, the question still remains: "Who is the true American? And how is he different from the European?" To be sure, sometimes we are given tell-tale signs-in Tears and Smiles, for example, Gallimard speaks with a French accent-but at times we are left to come to our own conclusions. Bereft of a national identity, how does one identify a true "American?" To answer this question, Kramer relies upon a now commonplace understanding of difference; he claims that in nationalistic texts, "Definitions of difference appeared ... frequently ... because the imagined community requires outsiders or enemies in order to define the imagined unity and coherence of the nation." 49 In dealing with the issue of difference and contrast, Kramer asserts that while later nationalistic texts would concentrate more sharply on racial distinctions, early American nationalistic narrations concentrated on the delineation between the American and the European. This type of progression can be seen in the three plays under consideration. As the need for Americans to distinguish themselves changed, so did the stage images. In The Contrast, difference is shown through the juxtaposition of the American to the English. This stems from the fact that the play was written in 1787, only two years after the Revolutionary war ended. At this time the British became the symbol of all that was "anti-American" 50 because America's first concern was to differentiate itself from its former oppressor. As the war settled into more distant national memory, the scope of difference widened. For example, in Tears and Smiles, written in 1808, the American is distinguished not just from the British, but also from the European. Thus, the Europeanized fop is representative of all of Europe's failings (getting most of his bad habits from the French and Italians); the critique is no longer specific only to England. In 1810, when Love and Friendship was written, the main distinction is between the African American slave and the white man. The evolving definition of the "other" in these plays suggests that Hodge is correct when he writes "Yankee Theater thus has philosophical connotations beyond its immediate 49 Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism, Political Cultures in Europe and America, 1775-1865(Chapel Hill : University of North carolina, 1998), 41. 50 Ibid., 109. NATIONALISM 65 product, implications which it supports through interpretations of the evolving political life of America." 51 As Appleby, Hunt, and Jacobs state, "When Americans began self-consciously constructing a national identity, they emphasized those American practices and values which distinguished their society from the mores and institutions of old-regime Europe." 52 In early American dramatic texts, Americans are distinguished from the British and from Europeans in part through language. Whereas the Yankee's speech is rough but honest, the Europeanized fop affects polite, socially acceptable speech and never speaks his mind or the truth. American characters are further marked by their attitude toward the War of Independence and its heroes. The American regards his national heroes with quasi-religious sentiment, while the European judges them to be foolhardy rather than brave. As for the British, they are also characterized as oppressors of sovereign rights. European and American are also differentiated through their divergent attitudes toward American womanhood. The European, who wishes to seduce the American woman, is the harbinger of ruin to the American family; the American man does all in his power to defend the next generation by protecting the American woman from her European suitor. These cultural and textual distinctions between Americans and Europeans signal profound ideological differences between the two. In The Contrast, Tears and Smiles, and Love and Friendship, the European is concerned mainly with outward appearances-i:lothing, conversation or societal rules. He is affected. Being the most fashionable lady or the wittiest gentleman is important to the European. Jeessamy and Dimple in The Contrast, for example, are obsessed with exterior appearances. Contrastingly, their Yankee and the Veteran counterparts, Jonathan and Colonel Manly are simple, sentimental, and patriotic. The same contrast is seen in Tears and Smiles. After visiting Europe, Fluttermore becomes obsessed with manners and in this regard finds America to be substandard to its European countries. In this same vein, he finds his promised American fiancee uninteresting next to European countesses he encountered on his travels. Yank and General Compton, by contrast, are always occupied with good deeds and noble sentiments. In Love and Friendship, Dick Dashaway is interested in playing pool and drinking. By comparison to his honorable American counterparts, he seems even more of a drunk, 51 Francis Hodge, Yankee Theater: The Image of America on Stage, 1825- 1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964): 6-7. 52 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History(New York: Norton, 1995), 102. 66 CRONIN even more of an idler and loafer, even more unAmerican. Love and Friendship shows that the European is decadent and frivolous, while the American is practical, serious-minded, and sentimental. Through these three plays, a definition of the American begins to take shape. An American is a virtuous citizen-one who does not put on airs, one who is content with traditional American life, and one who takes marriage seriously. The European is decadent and frivolous, while the American is humble, sincere, faithful and patriotic. American patriotism, as seen through both the Yankee and the Veteran, can be said to reside in the heart- it is linked with sentimental affections. Though the distinction between patriotic Americans and European fops is clearly and starkly drawn, some questions of what it means to be an "American" still remain. Love and Friendship, for example, defines the American character further by offering another contrast-one with racial distinctions. Harry, the African American character in this work, is identified as an Other by Jonathan who comments, "There here Charleston's sich a rotten hot place there's no liven in't; then there's sich a tarnation sight 'f negurs black as the ole feller umself, a body kaynt stire but they has um at their nose or their heels. It beets all nater! ." 53 In suggesting that the black man is similar in appearance to the devil, Jonathan clearly separates the races. The American places himself within the Christian realm and posits the black man as outsider. According to this play, then, the American is white. Harry himself understands that he is different from white Americans, having come from Africa: What wicked worl dis white man worl be for true do! No like de negur country; no do sich ting dere? No hab rum for git drunk and fight. I wish I never bin blinge for lef it. I bin happy dere wid fater, moder, and frien; no de hab massa for scole, no ian bad ting and her him ebery day so much. Now see de young buckrah man, git drunk losa all he money, fight and stay out mose all de night, den come home and sleep half de day long. But what hurt me mose, some marry white man do same ting: he great deal wose den, for he make dear wife and fam'ly unhappy too. 54 He does not want to be in the United States, but not being a free citizen, he does not have the power to make decisions for himself; he cannot leave. As a black man he enjoys none of the rights or 53 Lindsley, 37. 54 Ibid. , 35. NATIONALISM 67 privileges of white Americans. Thus, the 'American' can also be said to be a free man. Unlike other non-Americans, the African American is not seen as an enemy-his manners are not altogether divergent from the American. He does not drink, nor steal American women, nor pilfer American money. Harry holds marriage sacred and he seems to understand the need to protect the family from danger. He is morally superior to many of the white characters in this work. The distinction between white and black seems to be simply a distinction, rather than a critique of blackness such as we see in later American texts. Though Harry is not a Christian, he is not criticized nearly as much as the European character. Arguably, at this point in American history, Americans did not have to fear the slave as they feared the European. The European could 'pass' as American at times, and thus, appropriate the American woman, but the African American could not do so. Harry is certainly posited as an outsider from his speech patterns and foreign identity, but this outsider is not an enemy. There is no fear that he will infect Americans with his particular evil and there is no fear that he could adversely influence the American family. He is an outsider who can function within American society because he poses no threat 55 . Though Harry remains distinctly non-American, he does seem to possess the innate spirit desired in the ideal American. He is patriotic (though for Africa rather than America), and he is moral. Similarly, the Frenchman, Gallimard, in Tears and Smiles is clearly depicted as an outsider through his difficulty with the English language, but he voices sentiments which ring as more American in spirit than those of his counterpart, Fluttermore. Gallimard wishes nothing more than to reside in America and to settle down with a "little Quaker girl." He disagrees with Fluttermore concerning the superiority of Europe saying, "For me, I tink Europe is like de old libertine, de courtesane; I am disgust vid her. Amerique is de lit demoiseele you point me in de street . . . [Like a Quaker girl, America is] so ingenue, so modest. I viii choose de contree and de quake for life. I viii marry one, and settle de oder." 56 The play's positive attitude toward Gallimard is perhaps due to his being a Frenchman-the French were seen as allies since the Revolutionary war. Could he be an American in spirit, though still an outsider to 55 This attitude toward African Americans will change when the African American is imagined as rebellious. Harry is unhappy being in America, but there is no sense that he will take any action to remedy the situation. He is a "good slave": easily managed, and well behaved. 56 Ibid., 156. 68 CRONIN the nation? Does he gain the full status as an American once he overcomes his French accent? When does an immigrant become an American' The text does not provide clear answers to these questions. Fluttermore, the fop character in Tears and Smiles, problematizes another aspect of American identity. Like Dimple and Dick Dashaway, Fluttermore was born in America and dwells in America. Yet these fops have picked up European values while traveling abroad and they have assumed European identities. For this they are depicted negatively. These nationalistic texts, then, do not simply promote the American-but versions of the ideal American. Simply being a homebred resident of America is not enough; even if one possesses native citizenship, one must strive to be American in spirit as well. Nationalistic texts create an imagined American in the same way they promote an imagined national community. The dramatic representation of the idealized American-the Yankee-was further complicated by the fact that the performers playing the character were usually English. In the first production of The Contrast, Thomas Wignell, an English actor, played the role of Jonathan. Hodge gives the following account of this production: Wignell's acting was probably related to the light comedy style required by Colman and Sheridan, and far from the vulgarity and broad humor of the later Yankees. Wignell probably had none of the individualized, particular touches of the Yankee eccentric. It is likely that he carried Tyler's country dialect onto the stage, where it sounded more like a stage Yorkshireman or other English country types, rather than a New Englander ... Wignell was first an Englishman, then an actor, and he could not be expected to tell an audience much about genuine native Americans." 57 The situation of an Englishman playing the imagined and idealized American-and, for that matter, playing it badly-was fairly common. Joseph Jefferson 58 -another Englishman-played Yank in 57 Francis Hodge, Yankee Theater: The Image of America on Stage, 1825- 1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 48. 58 See Gerald Bordman, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Theate0 2nd Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Joseph Jefferson I ( 1774-1832), born in Plymouth, England, a minor comedic actor at Drury Lane. He came to America in 1795 and made his American debut with Hodgkinson's company in Boston. His New York debut was at the John Street Theater in 1796. He left for Philadelphia in 1803, where he later became acquainted with James Nelson Barker. NATIONALISM 69 the first production of Tears and Smiles, and Hodge says that his performance "could have been scarcely more credible than that of the first Jonathan." 59 Hodge is critiquing these actors' performances for their lack of verisimilitude. However, this is not necessarily valid criticism because audiences at that time (American or British) did not expect realistic acting. Acting style was still largely presentational. Though his critique is suspect, it must be noted that even if the British actors wanted to present the Yankee realistically, they would have had a very hard time doing so. For example, in the first decade of the 1800s, actor Charles Matthews conducted sourcework, searching for the characters he wanted to portray on stage in his one-man show Trip to America. However, he did not find any within the streets and villages of the United States. Similarly, in his introduction to Tears and Smiles, the playwright, a Philadelphian, states, "The truth is, I had never seen a Yankee at the time [Tears and Smiles was written]. " 60 While Hodge asks, "How can 'outsiders' possibly delineate New England character?," 61 the more pertinent question may be, "Did this allusive American figure even really exist?" Few accounts offer concrete evidence of first-hand Yankee encounters. Just as Eric Lott in Love and Theft describes representations of (real) African Americaos in minstrel shows as stemming from imagined encounters with imagined African Americans, so too, the Yankee may be a completely imagined being 62 Lott suggests that Rice never actually encountered the 'Negro'-or for that matter any actual African American- from whom he created the character and dance of Jim Crow; likewise there is little evidence to suggest that the Yankee character actually existed in America save on the stage. 59 Ibid., 49. 60 James Nelson Barker, Tears and Smiles in Paul H. Musser, James Nelson Barker 1784-1858(New York: AMS Press, 1969), 138. 61 Francis Hodge, Yankee Theater: The Image of America on Stage, 1825- 1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 48. 62 Eric Lott, Love and Theft, Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. (New York: Oxford, 1993): 59, 39. Lott recounts Rice's fabrication of the Jim Crow figure and dance as it was reported in Atlantic Monthy (though the Atlantic Monthly reported it as though it was an actual occurrence) and, in a later chapter says, "Recall that ... Rice gets the minstrel idea without meeting any Blackman." He also says, "Black performance [as portrayed in the minstrel show] itself, first of all, was precisely 'performative,' a cultural invention .... " 70 CRONIN If this figure existed only in the mind, could anyone-let alone an outsider-possibly portray him realistically? By applying the work of Benedict Anderson and Lloyd Kramer on the contruction of national identity to three post-Revolutionary American plays, Tyler's The Contrast, Barker's Tears and Smiles, and Lindsley's Love and Friendship, we can see the extent to which their central characters, the Veteran and the Yankee, are imaginary, idealized figures through which the early American theatre audience was led to embrace national values and to understand and aspire to a new American identity. As vehicles of nationalism, these plays and their characters played an important role in molding the new nation and its citizens. Joumal of American Drama and Theatre 13 (Spring 2001) "WISHING ON THE EYE OF THE HORSE": THE CONCEPT OF "ENTITY" IN GERTRUDE STEIN'S liSTEN TO ME AUCE PETERSEN "No man is an island, intire of it self," wrote John Donne. 1 No man perhaps, but then John Donne never argued it out with Gertrude Stein. During her long career, Stein developed a principle of hermetic totality as the defining feature of both the literary genius and the truly original text. She called this concept "Entity." The term "Entity" is derived from esse, to be, the direct mode of being. The object that is an "Entity," be it person, text, character or word, possesses a lucky autonomy and hermetic independence. In both its construction and its existence, the "Entity" is an island, "intire of it self," or as Stein put it, "a thing in itself and not in relation" ( WAM, 88). 2 In this paper I use the concept of "Entity," as defined in Stein's late manifesto The Geographical History of America (1936) as an aid to reading Stein's play Listen to Me (1936). The close chronological relation that this theoretical text bears to the plays of the mid- thirties makes it particularly relevant to explicating the content and form of the creative works. Like any literary aesthetic, Stein's theories are open to criticism both in theory and in practice; Stein may not accomplish her goal of creating a hermetic text, but the theories provide a useful starting point for the examination of experimental and conventional texts alike. 1 Helen Gardner and Timothy Healy, eds., John Donne Selected Prose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 101. 2 Quotations from Gertrude Stein's works are cited parenthetically in the text using the following abbreviations: BTV: Bee Time VineandOtherPieces(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). 4: Everybody's Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937). GHA: The Geographical History of America Or the Relation of Human Nature to the Mind (New York: Vintage o o k ~ Random House, 1973). LA: Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935). LO&P. Late Operas and Plays, Carl Van Vechten, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). WAM: What Are Masterpieces, Robert Bartlett Haas, ed. (New York: Pitman, 1970). 72 PETERSEN "Entity" and the challenge to patriarchal convention Stein's work has long been hailed by feminist critics for its systematic undermining of literary convention. Focusing their attention on the experimental works of the first two decades of Stein's career, and adopting Stein's own understanding of her practice, critics following Marianne DeKoven contend that Stein's subversion of linguistic convention is tantamount to undermining prevailing ideological suppositions. Thus DeKoven's suggestion that the "opposition implicit in experimental writing to the cultural hegemony of sense, order, and coherence has ramifications on the largest scale,'a finds an echo in Shari Benstock's statement that "Stein discovered inherent inequalities in linguistic principles that mirrored similar inequalities in the world in which she lived. She found a discomforting reflection of the world in the 'word' and made grammar a method for discussing and illustrating the effects of patriarchy in 'language and life'. 4 Gertrude Stein's development of the concept of "Entity" and the hermetic autonomy which is its defining feature was her attempt to shut out the causal relations of Aristotelian logic. A concern with the sequential order of fact, tradition, and event is essentially other to Stein's perception of a world founded upon the concept of the self-contained whole. Ideally, for Stein, writing was "neither remembering nor forgetting, neither beginning nor ending" ( GHA, 150). Back in1927 Stein had made it clear that patriarchal traditions were alien to her way of seeing the world, emphatically reiterating that "Patriarchal poetry" was "their origin and their history patriarchal poetry their origin and their history" ("Patriarchal Poetry" in ~ 263). Their origin, their history-not hers. 5 At the level of the text, the concept of "Entity" ostensibly defies patriarchal convention by proclaiming the proud hermetic status of the text. Unlike T.S. Eliot's careful mosaics of intertextuality, Stein's ideal "Entity text" has no conception of an anterior tradition. Rather, the defining feature of the "Entity text" is the absence of any exterior reference that could possibly dictate meaning. Take, for example, the oft-quoted phrase rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Mulling over concept, noun, sound, and being, Stein attempts to create a textual object that exists independently of the shared meanings that form the history of the word. Relying upon reiteration for its effect (or what Stein would call "insistence"), the 3 Marianne DeKoven. A Dtfferent Language. Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 16. 4 Shari Benstock. Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 86. 5 For a discussion of Stein's disruption of a range of genres see Franziska Gygax, Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1998). GERTRUDE STEIN 73 relation between the noun and the concept rose is redefined in the course of a phrase by what in formalist terms may be described as a process of defamiliarization, for the fourth repetition just tips the noun over the edge of signification into a becoming sound and shape. Syntactically, the phrase is circular. Is it a statement or is it a question? Nor is the phrase teleologically driven. Where is its beginning? Its middle? Its end? It does not set out to be a definition, for it does not begin with an article, nor does it end with a botanical description of the presence of thorns or the configuration of leaves on a stem. "Entity" and the shift towards narrative convention In their discussions of Gertrude Stein's plays, critics Betsy Alayne Ryan and Jane Palatini Bowers support the notion that, ultimately, Stein's texts are hermetic objects. Ryan states that "The literature of Gertrude Stein, insofar as it conforms to its program of entity, is an absolute art, possessing aseity, or self-existence, as opposed to relations with the world. It exhibits an aestheticism in which the thing, the touchstone of her art, is finally superseded by the complete work". 6 Bowers makes her claim for the resistance of Stein's plays to performance based on the primacy of the written text: "Her texts seem to resist the very performance they instigate. Stein attempts to oppose the physicality of performance, to stop the driving force of action and to prevent the written text, the writer's words, from being subsumed by other elements of the performance event". 7 Theoretically, the phrase rose is a rose is a rose is a rose may be considered to be an "Entity"; a textual object ready to be celebrated as tiny fragment of subversion. That said, we still have to deal with the fact that in the thirties and forties, Stein adopted the linear narrative conventions that she had previously so thoroughly repudiated, ostensibly to gain a wider audience. I suggest that in the works of her last two decades, Stein establishes female characters as embodiments of "Entity" as a consequence of her late coming to terms with her own sexuality. As Stein adopts the linear narrative and syntactic strategies of patriarchal discourse 6 Betsy Alayne Ryan, Gertrude Stein's Theatre of the Absolute (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Research Press, 1991), 32. 7 Jane Palatini Bowers, Gertrude Stein (London: Macmillan, 1993), 110. 74 PETERSEN she appears increasingly to activate the female subject as a site of opposition to this same discourse. In this respect the concept of "Entity" (previously operating implicitly at the level of the text) takes on an additional voiced political aspect. As Marc Robinson has written, basing his findings on Stein's late plays Dr Faustus Lights the Lights (1938) and The Mother of Us All (1946), writes about Stein's abiding interest in the human subject: Stein always kept alert to what surrounded her, the lay of her stage and the obstacles filling it, but she felt most urgently about discovering who surrounded her. Each of her plays helped her learn whether or not she could ever know another human being. That passionate project- writing her way toward people-kept her art from becoming the thinnest, most desiccated kind of abstraction. 8 In her careful analysis of the formal traits of Stein's works for theatre, Ryan has stated that Stein's works that include conventional aspects of staging and narrative "need to be considered departures from her general technique and aesthetic" (Ryan, 129). However, by basing her criterion for comparison on play traits, Ryan neglects to consider the development of Stein's aesthetic based on chronological relations. "at the same time as Stein was beginning to explore narrative conventions, she was also beginning to grant recognition to the female subject's power to embody the concept of "Entity" and in so doing to present an alternative to patriarchal narrative form. Stein begins the move towards valorizing the potential of female subjects to disrupt patriarchal narrative structures with a renewed appreciation of the power of her own voice. In the densely rich text The Geographical History of America (1936), Stein formulates a theory of the artist in relation to the artwork that runs counter to those of her contemporaries T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster. While Eliot's perception of the relation between the text and the artist is dominated by the concept of tradition, Stein conceives of the artist's vision as a panoramic gaze that is not situated in relation to time or literary tradition. Moreover, certain comments like "in this epoch a woman does the literary thinking" ( GHA, 223), indicate that Stein was reassessing the connection between her own gender and "Entity." As such The Geographical History of America not only offers us an alternative to modernism as it was being formulated in the work of Stein's male contemporaries, but it 8 Marc Robinson, 'The Other American Drama," Cambridge Studies in American Theatre(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 17. GERTRUDE STEIN 75 offers that alternative from the position of a specifically feminine writing subject. In The Geographical History of America, Stein sets forth her theory on the relation between the author and the text, using the landmass of the American continent as a metaphor for the material from which art is made. Stein describes the separation of the artist's vision from worldly affairs using the image of a light plane skimming over the landscape. She calls the agent of this kind of birdseye apprehension the "human mind": Why does the human mind not concern itself with age. Because the human mind knows what it knows and knowing what it knows it has nothing to do with seeing what it remembers, remember how the country looked as we passed over it, it made big designs big designs like human nature draws them without ever having seen them from above. ( GHA, 63) The "human mind" does not "concern itself with age" because it operates in a space that transcends the linear passage of time. The "human mind," "knowing what it knows," has no need to organize its material in a succession, for like a landscape viewed aerially, all experience is contained within the sight-lines of the immediate present. Therefore it is not governed by recollection, "seeing what it remembers," because it operates like a panoramic lens that sees everything simultaneously. The quotation cited above also makes reference to a second mode of apprehending the material of life: from down on ground level. These are the "big designs like human nature draws them without ever having seen them from above." Stein calls this agent of apprehension "human nature" and she sets it up in opposition to the apprehension described as the "human mind." "Human nature" sees things unfold in succession, just as a tiny figure would driving through the countryside. Governed by the structuring principle of succession (moving through the countryside as opposed to ranging above it), "human nature" can only make texts, its "big designs," from recollection. The role of recollection in the mode of apprehension called "human nature" means that its products exist in a state of being in relation; each component part relies upon another for its significance. For Stein, the "masterpiece" is the product of "knowing that there is no identity and producing while identity is not" ( WAM, 91). In this context, Stein places the concept of "Identity" in opposition to the concept of "Entity." For its function, "Identity" relies upon a second term apart from itself. For an object to have "Identity," it must be perceived by another: thus "Identity," like the mode of artistic vision described by the phrase "human nature," exists as a mode of being in relation. 76 PETERSEN "Entity" and teleology Stein was an artist acutely aware of both the process and the moment of creation: "The business of Art as I tried to explain in Composition as Explanation is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present" (LA, 104-105). The "complete actual present" is an aspect of "Entity." Stein attempts to make the product inseparable from the process of its own making by writing the moment of the text's creation into the work itself: I find that any kind of a book if you read with glasses on and someone is cutting your hair and so you cannot keep the glasses on and you use your glasses as a magnifying glass and so read word by word reading word by word makes the writing that is not anything be something. (GHA, 151) Stein's author is no Joycean God, indifferently paring his nails far up in the stratosphere. 9 As a creator, Stein is there having her hair trimmed in the text as she reads it, and as she writes it. Stein's interest in the "complete actual present" brought her into conflict with the theories of narrative proposed by E.M. Forster. The Aristotelian conception of plot is all about being in relation, notions reiterated in E.M. Forster's careful advice that the success of a story depends on what happened next In Aspects of the Novel, Forster was concerned to separate the organizing principle of time (the sequence concerned with the beginning, middle and end of the text) from the hierarchy of importance accorded to events in daily life: "daily life, whatever it may be really, is practically composed of two lives-the life in time and the life by values-and our conduct reveals a double allegiance". 10 To Forster, events must follow each other in sequence: "The time-sequence cannot be destroyed without carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its place; the novel that would express values only becomes unintelligible and therefore valueless" (Forster, 49). Teleology, by placing the phenomenon (or in narrative terms the resolution) at the end of a chain of causes and effects, makes design (or in narrative terms the progress of the text) subordinate to phenomenon. Contrarily, Stein believed that the individual moments that make up the progress of the narrative were all of equal importance. Stein's way of creating the thing itselfwas to constantly reiterate that the textual object is created at the moment at which it is perceived as a creation. 9 James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man (New York: Viking Press, 1982), 215. 'The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." to E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 36. GERTRUDE STEIN 77 Characters as "Entities" Wendy Steiner has stated that in Gertrude Stein's plays, the "transformation of concepts into characters, the linking of character and speech to subject and predicate, and the constant grouping and re-grouping of the elements of the theme are the play-genre's means of exploring an issue". 11 Following Steiner's lead, I suggest that as Stein's plays move away from their meta-textual focus and towards narrative convention, the concept of "Entity" and the challenge which it presents to the patriarchy become embodied in female characters. In The Geographical History of America, Stein's definition of the way characters operate in her conception of a "masterpiece" focuses on the properties associated with "Entity": "Now in a masterpiece what does anybody do they do what they do that is they say what they know and they only know what they are as they know what they are, there is no time and no identity, not at all never at all ever at all" ( GHA, 217). As this passage shows, each character is constantly expressing his or her own sense of self. Such constant self-generation defies "time" (perpetual self- expression is a constant beginning again) and "Identity," for if the characters completely express themselves in and of their own actions, they do not require the presence of other characters to justify their existence. Stein once explained her decision to write plays as a bringing together of "Entities": I came to think that since each one is that one and that there are a number of them each one being that one, the only way to express this thing each one being that one and there being a number of them knowing each other was in a play. (LO&P, 119) The problem for Stein as she approached conventional narrative was how to maintain the self-contained "Entity" of her characters at the same time as the exigencies of getting published required her to tell a story which would mean bringing them into relation with each other. Stein described the problem in one of the American lectures of 1934, "Plays": "as I say everybody hears stories but the thing that makes each one what he is not that" (LO&P, 121). In Listen to Me Stein approaches the problem of the opposing impulses of "Identity" and "Entity" by embodying them in two different 11 Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: the Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 203. 78 PmRSEN characters, both connected with the two very different notions of textual generation. Narrative convention and "Identity" are connected with Sweet William who wishes to tell stories. By contrast, "Entity," the notion of an unmediated relation between a word and its referent, becomes vocalized in the character of Lillian. The concept of "Entity" and the game of monosyllables At the centre of Listen to Me is the game of monosyllables. And so all together they say, I wish words of one syllable were as bold as old. I will tell in words of one syllable anything there is to tell not very well but just well. And so there is no curtain. Curtain is a word of two syllables. (LO&P,389) Here, for example, the syllable count of the word "curtain" precludes its use in the text, for it has two syllables and therefore does not meet the criteria for playing the game of "telling in words of one syllable anything there is to tell." However, the meaning of the word "curtain" also factors into the play, for it has a specific dramatic function. When the "curtain" falls, the play is over. Fortunately, "curtain" has two syllables so the play can continue. I would like to suggest that in Listen to Me, the monosyllable acts as a linguistic analogue for the concept of "Entity," for the monosyllable contains within one sound all that is required for the expression of whatever concept is represented by the word. For the characters in the text, the monosyllable represents the possibility of an unmediated connection between signifier and signified. One character in the play claims that monosyllables are more readily understandable: "And the first one the first one of the seven of them said in meditation. What is a word of one syllable is it easier to understand than one of several" (LO&P, 389). In Everybody's Autobiography(1937) Stein comments further on the monosyllable: "And in some fashion the letters chosen that make up the words of one syllable although they are so few are like letters which would make up a longer word. Are we for example " (4, 114). While Stein's definition appears to be maddeningly vague, the definition contains the notion that a monosyllabic word is a rendering down of essence. In my reading of Listen to Me I wish to consider Stein's use of monosyllables not just as a game-plan for the procedure of the play but as a means by which Stein critiques the complex diction and rhetoric of the patriarchy. Virginia Woolf is another modernist who sees in the monosyllable the potential for an unmediated connection between a word and its referent, as opposed to the latinate discourse of the patriarchy which in its aggregation of syllables draws a word further away from its referent. At the end of the village pageant in Woolf's novel Between the Acts (1941), a disembodied voice invites members of the audience to reflect on their own nature: GERTRUDE STEIN 79 Before we part, ladies and gentlemen/ before we go ... (Those who had risen sat down) .. .lets talk in words of one syllable/ without larding/ stuffing or cant. Lets break the rhythm and forget the rhyme. And calmly consider ourselves. Ourselves. Some bony. Some fat 12 The voice suggests that language is the site of illusion which disrupts the process of self-scrutiny. While circumlocutious puffery draws language away from its referents in the world, "words of one syllable" contribute to a more direct apprehension of the thing itself. The magic utterance here seems to be the word "one." "One" embodies a sense of undivided wholeness: one word; one syllable sound; one person; one all-encompassing vision. Characters and monosyllables Not all of Listen to Me is written in monosyllables. However, the concept of ennumerating syllables informs the action of the first group of characters in the play: those named after ordinal numbers (Second character, Third character and so on). These characters display the kind of "Entity" that Stein described in The Geographical History of America as being characteristic of the "masterpiece": "they do what they do that is they say what they know and they only know what they are as they know what they are" ( GHA/ 217). 13 The characters are named after numbers, they know about counting, they count for business and they make puns about counting for their own amusement. Thus the words that they utter define what they do: 12 Woolf, Virginia, Between the Act51941 (London: Hogarth Press, 1990): 123-124. 1 1'he concept that a character is according to what it does brings to mind Fenollosa's early twentieth century commentary on the Chinese ideograph and its close relation to transitive verbs: "The true formula for thought is: The cherry tree is all that it does." Ernest Fenollosa, "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," Ezra Pound, Instigations 1920 '(Freeport, NY: Books for Library Press, 1967), 382. 80 Character: And everybody counts. Second character: What is a count PETERSEN Third character: A count is a gentleman who has a name Fourth character: And what is his name Fifth character: His name is count. ( L O ~ 393) The preoccupation of these characters with counting provides the backdrop against which Sweet William and Lillian make their own very different enumerations of the world. The differing kinds of narrative produced by Sweet William the genius and his lady Lillian are also determined by the couple's relation to syllables. At first sight, the male and female characters fill the stereotypical subject positions designated by heterosexual convention. An early soliloquy in Listen to Me contains a definition of gender differences, aligning masculinity with activity: "That is what a man is they like to know that it is well done" ( L O ~ 387). Not only is Sweet William's masculinity firmly established, but so too is his subject position as the swain of Lillian: "Sweet William had his genius and so he did not look for it. He did look for Lillian and then he had Lillian" ( L O ~ 388). Lillian, on the other hand, appears to fulfill the ancient role of principal domestic muse for William. Now imagine a scene which is on this earth and as many come about as are and are not there. They are so careless with their luggage and luggage gradually gets reduced, at least they find there was a place where more could be put and so there was less in any other place. This is what Lillian had as her blessing. And Sweet William, sweet William had Lillian. ( L O ~ 391) While Sweet William has his "genius," Lillian's "blessing" is her ability to tuck luggage away in handy storage places! However, an examination of the relation of each character to the game of monosyllables shows that each represents a different form of textual generation: Sweet William represents the narrative of relations ("Identity"), and Lillian the unmediated utterance of the thing itself ("Entity"). Through her connection with the theoretically privileged concept of "Entity," Lillian brings into question her passive designation as luggage-bearer. Sweet William and patriarchal narrative In Listen to Me, conventional narrative and "Identity" are connected through Sweet William's quest to tell a story. The basic premise of Sweet William's character is that he is a writer seeking to tell a romance. However, in order to make patriarchal narrative (his "careful story") Sweet William requires the presence of Lillian: GERTRUDE STEIN Now Sweet William had his genius and so he could tell a careful story of how they enjoyed themselves. But he did not have his Lillian, he looked for Lillian and so he could not tell a careful story of how they enjoyed themselves. ( L O ~ 390) 81 That Lillian is indispensable to William is, as Wendy Steiner suggests, reinforced by the parallel internal structure of the names "William" and "Lillian" (Steiner, 198). But why does Sweet William need Lillian in order to make narrative? The answer lies in the function of being in relation that Stein perceived as being common to patriarchal narrative structures and the formation of "Identity." Patriarchal, or conventional narrative, depends on causal relations. Conventional aspects of plot like the beginning, middle, and end depend for their definition on their relation to each other. "Identity" too is the result of the gaze of recognition. One is an "Identity" in so far as one comes into relation with another. If we concede that according to Gertrude Stein's schema, patriarchal narrative exists by virtue of being in relation then Lillian does form part of the definition of Sweet William's very nature as a writer. He needs to be recognized by her in order to write the structured narratives of "Identity." Sweet William is further aligned with patriarchal narrative through his connection with polysyllables. As I argued above, monosyllables are associated with "Entity." By contrast, the diction of Sweet William is polysyllabic, for he is the bearer of patriarchal narrative, the classifier and the teller of stories. Like Kubla Khan, he decrees the creation of a pleasant landscape: Sweet William prepared verdure and fountains and he admired what he did. ( L O ~ 399) His words are not monosyllabic "Entities" that, in Stein's terms, contain all that is required for their existence. Rather, they are polysyllabic outcroppings of his "genius": Sweet William had his genius. Sweet William had his syllables. Sweet William had water and had no water in his pools sweet William had water in his water falls Water-fall Three syllables made up a two syllables and one syllable. ( L O ~ 400) In this example we see how the generation of the landscape is paralleled with Sweet William's mode of textual generation. Here Sweet William uses "his syllables" to create a fertile land. However it is not just syllable count that has a bearing upon the nature of his creation, but the meaning of the words too. The connection between polysyllables and their referents creates problems for Sweet William as he sets out to create his textual version of the world. There is no water in Sweet William's pools, because "pools" 82 PETERSEN is a monosyllable that does not contain the polysyllabic word "water." However "water-fall" does contain "water" and so there is water in his waterfalls. Throughout the play, William's process of creation seems to be focused on solving the questions raised by his diction rather than getting through to "the thing itself." When he considers events happening in his textual world he must first address a host of issues surrounding his choice of words, issues which almost prevent the event from happening: Sweet William: Suddenly there is a war Suddenly is a word of three syllables There is a war Words of one syllable Sweet William: Suddenly there is a war. Sweet William: What is suddenly there is a war. Sweet William: The earth is all covered over with people when this is so then it is not so that suddenly there is a war. Because suddenly if the earth is all covered over with people then sudden is not any more. ( L O ~ 405) The passage opens with Sweet William's customary enumeration of syllables, according to the game that governs the text. However, Sweet William goes on to become concerned with the import of the word "suddenly" and its relation to the meaning of the monosyllables "there is a war." What might be needed in order for a war to occur suddenly? First one must have warring factions: a populace. However if there was a populace then the war might not come as a surprise, and Sweet William could not use the adverb "suddenly" after all. With each new conjunction Sweet William's logic brings the event of the war into a new set of circumstances; the clauses wind about and about with "when" and "so then" and "because . . . if." Soon Sweet William is so caught up in the ramifications of his own diction that he almost talks himself out of noticing the war at all. By contrast, Lillian's relation to language is unmediated by questions of diction or the windings of logic. Her utterance, when it comes to us, contains a lucidity of vision that springs from a statement of "the thing itself and not in relation." lillian and monosyllables At the same time as Lillian's presence is necessary to William, she represents far more than the female muse, lover or even inbuilt audience, for Lillian embodies the concept of "Entity" privileged in Stein's theoretical framework. Lillian's speech presents an apatriarchal alternative to the "careful story" of Sweet William. Lillian produces text that is indivisible: "Lillian had no connection GERTRUDE STEIN 83 with syllables. Syllables are not so" L O ~ 399-400). She does not care to compartmentalize the world in this way: Lillian has never divided anything from anything and in this way the earth is the earth and the earth which is the earth is the earth which is, there is a hesitation not within but without, which is, there is no hesitation within without, which is, do not like what there is not to like, within, very quietly five enter. In no time at all there is no time. (LO&P, 394) Lillian lives outside the schema of syllables which classifies language, having never "divided anything from anything." She allows what she perceives, represented by the monosyllable "earth," to remain whole and true to its own nature. Unlike Sweet William's "pools" which contain no "water," Lillian's "earth" contains "earth." Thus, according to Stein's theories, the relation between signifier and signified is more closely mediated. Nor is Lillian's timelessness ("In no time at all there is no time") any coincidence, for Lillian's ability to describe and perceive the earth in its entirety is characteristic of the "human mind" which perceives the earth from a birdseye perspective. Lillian's main utterance occurs quite late in the play, and in fact it surprises us with its originality and its volubility. The only other time when Lillian speaks is in rather desultory dialogue with Sweet William: All of a sudden there is no all of a sudden. There are people everywhere. Sweet William: Where Lillian: Everywhere Sweet William: But do I like it. Lillian: You do not like it. Sweet William: Everywhere. L O ~ 406) In dialogue with her male counterpart, Lillian dully echoes Sweet William, trailing along after him, weighed down by the luggage of his concerns. When we finally hear Lillian speak, she is alone, for hers is the voice of "Entity" which does not speak in relation to another. Indeed, Sweet William is so busy organizing his own careful story that he misses Lillian's speech: Sweet William: There is no one because I like it. Sweet William: Because I like it there is no one there is no earth and there are not people everywhere on it. Lillian: There is a wish Lillian: There is a horse Lillian: There is a head Lillian: There is an eye Lillian: There is a kneel Lillian: There is a wish when I kneel on the eye of the 84 PETERSEN horse and wish it. Sweet William was not there. (LO&P, 412) Lillian's utterance is apatriarchal in two ways. First, it defies chronology by sending time forwards in the form of a wish, and then folding it back upon itself through the use of the present tense. The "wish" opens up possibilities for the future without committing the text to the exigencies of chronological time. Second, the utterance defies patriarchal syntax. Because of its syntactic position, the word "kneel" becomes a noun, only to revert to its customary usage in the last sentence. Without taking the interpretation too far, one might conjecture that it is not necessarily a coincidence that "kneel" has a changing allegiance, for it is customarily used to designate homage to a person of superior rank. Perhaps in miniature the word encapsulates Stein's uncanny ability to subvert ideology by bringing into question meanings and usages. Stein gives a source for Lillian's vision in Everybody's Autobiography. She describes a trip to Cornwall with Robert "Abdy and his wife Diana. One sight-seeing trip included a visit to an ancient chalk horse etched onto the hillside. Evidently Diana Abdy knelt on the eye of the horse to make a wish (EA, 300). Visualizing the version of this event contained in Listen to Me requires us as readers to employ the birdseye view of the "human mind." The changing syntactic position of the word "kneel" demonstrates just how the panoramic vision of the "human mind" challenges the reader to both value the discrete units of language and to see the text laid out beneath us like a landscape. The individual nouns which lead us up to the word "kneel" ("wish," "horse," "head," "eye") are laid out like stepping stones, rendered discrete from each other by repetition of the objective formula "there is." The noun/verb "kneel" provides the point at which the focus changes. In order to visualize the statement "there is a kneel" the reader must employ the panoramic view from above (it may be read as "there is a kneeling one"). Later, the word evokes the viewpoint of ground level when it is used as a verb in conjunction with the subjective "I": "when I kneel." "As readers we are at once close to and very far from the kneeling woman. We must rise above the hillside in order to fit the kneeling woman and the great horse into our field of vision. More than a representation of the beloved other necessary for the male character's own comfort and inspiration, Lillian embodies the approach to the text characteristic of the "human mind" privileged in the theoretical schema outlined in The Geographical History of America. I suggest that the shift is a part of Stein's move towards valuing her own voice as a creator and as a woman. It would not be inappropriate to suggest that the summons in the title of the play "listen to me" is a call to hear the utterance of other Lillians in the world. Journal of American Drama and Theatre 13 (Spring 2001) WILLIAM DUNLAP'S A TRIP TO NIAGARA JULIAN MATES The last play William Dunlap wrote was in many ways his best, though critics have tended to ignore it when evaluating Dunlap's influence on the American stage. Dunlap was America's first professional playwright, and the number of his plays-original, adaptations, translations-is about sixty. Almost all of these were written between 1797 and his insolvency in 1805. Only a very few of these were brought back season after season, notably his translations of August von Kotzebue and his patriotic plays. Still, his reputation was national: his dramas were produced in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Hartford, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Providence, to mention only a few. His theatre friends offered him free passes wherever he went. One of these friends was responsible for Dunlap's last burst of theatrical energy. Charles Gilfert, an old friend, was managing the Bowery Theatre and asked Dunlap to write some plays to counter those being offered at the Park. George Gilfert, his father, had been a music teacher and organist in New York in the 1790s, and he was a member of the John Street Theatre orchestra; too, he sold musical instruments at a shop on Broadway. 1 As manager of the Old American Company, Dunlap knew him and was later friends with his son, Charles. In 1826, Charles was selected as general manager of the Bowery Theatre. The competition with the Park was fierce. One of Gilfert's lasting accomplishments was the stress on dance. An article in the New York Evening Post, 1 December 1828, said, in part: It is with sentiments of unaffected surprise that I have read a most illiberal attack upon the charming ballet of the Bowery Theatre . . . . That what is called the legitimate drama has ceased to charm, the managers of theatres can testify to their cost. Are they then to blame, finding that even Shakespeare 1 George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927): I, 327, 368; II, 38, 413. 86 MATES will not attract; that Macready's fame and talents will not produce audiences commensurate with the expences of his engagement; are then the caterers for public amusement to be arraigned for seeking in pageantry and the dance, that remuneration which the most sublime poetry, and the best actors will not afford them? ... . Melo-drama had its day .... What was to be done--opera was resorted to . . . at the end of a year [Garcia] was obliged to go to Mexico. The dance alone remained untried; and to the managers of the Bowery Theatre do we owe the introduction of an entertainment which has beguiled us of many a care, and which has probably received as much patronage from the ladies of our city as any other species of entertainment . . . woe to the organization of that State whose foundation is to be sapped, by the graceful attitude of an accomplished woman." But the dance, however important to the history of American theatre, was not sufficient to keep the Bowery Theatre afloat, even with such luminaries as Charles Vestris and his wife, Ronzi, and Mlle. Celeste. The Park theatre, Dunlap's old stamping ground, had been presenting plays on American themes, especially James Hackett's performance in John Bull at Home, or Jonathan in England, and the Bowery needed a response. Too, the Park had shown scenes of other countries in dioramas, and the Bowery could combine both theme and diorama with an assignment for Dunlap. The source for many of the scenes was a long anecdote told to Dunlap by John Wesley Jarvis, later recounted in Dunlap's History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. 2 'The last piece I wrote for the stage," Dunlap wrote elsewhere, "was a farce called A Trip to Niagara, the main intention of which was to display scenery." 3 Dunlap wrote and translated several pieces for the Bowery in the 1820s, at the request of Gilfert, "and in the plain way of trade, receiving meagre compensation for poor commodities."" As was frequently the case, Dunlap denigrated his work, and scholars have taken his word; yet the play had much to recommend 2 William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States(1834; Reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1969): II, 91-2. 3 William Dunlap, History of the American Theatre {1832; Reprint New York: Burt Franklin, 1963): II, 280. 4 Ibid. DUNLAP 87 it. The New York Mirror, 22 November 1828, managed to whet its readers' appetites: The species of moving scenic exhibition, which causes the pleasing delusion of making the spectator feel as if he moved and passed the scenes which in reality pass before him, was, we believe, first displayed at the Park Theatre to an American audience. It was followed by a pleasing spectacle of the same kind at the laFayette, and, again, in the pieces now performing of London and Paris and the Dumb Savoyard, at the Park. The managers of the Bowery have had, for months past, in preparation a display of this nature, which, from the talents of those engaged, is expected to equal any thing of the kind seen by us of the western world. With great judgment the scenes of our native country have been selected for the pencil and the brush, and a native dramatist [the coy reference is to Dunlap] employed to compose the plot and dialogue which is to give intellectual entertainment while the external senses are delighted by the magnificent views which our rivers and mountains present .. . . Too much praise cannot be given to the managers for the selection of the subject, and for the liberality evinced by calling upon the talent of the country to delight or instruct its citizens, rather than servilely receiving the maukish, and, frequently, ill-suited, effusions of London playwrights, because they can be obtained cheap. The idea of the diorama was to display a series of scenes while the characters of the play sat in a steamboat, and the scenery rolled past them, giving the illusion of actually passing each place; a canvas area of 2,500 square feet was used. The New York Evening Post said, "As the 'getting up' of this piece has been very costly, we hope the manager may reap the benefit of his labours." The first few advertisements listed the treats to be expected, and after awhile instead of the description, mention was made of a separate list available to potential theatre-goers. The high cost of the production can be ascertained from the first descriptions. 5 The Eidophusicon, or Moving Diorama The new and splendid scenery painted by Messrs. Jones, Gordon, and Reinagle, assisted by Messrs. Haddock, White, 5 The list below, including the painters for each scene, is from 'The Bowery Theatre" in the New York Evening Post, November and December, 1828. 88 MATES and Leslie, from correct sketches taken on the spot by the respective artists. The extensive and complicated Machinery of the Diorama invented and executed by Mr. Danes. The Steamboats and other mechanical and moving objects on the Hudson by Mr. Haddock. The Music composed and selected by Mr. Gilfert. "DESCRIPTION OF THE SCENERY 1. The Dining Room of the City Hotel. Painted by Messrs. White and Leslie. 2. Steamboat Wharf-Steamboat ready to saiL-Painted by Mr. Gordon. 3. The Bowery. Painted by Mr. Reinagle. 4. The Eidophusicon. Painted by Mr. Jones. Commencing with a view of Governor's Island, with shipping at anchor, from which the spectator is carried opposite Jersey City, with the U.S. frigate Hudson at anchor, including the varied shipping and animated imagery of that part of the river. From thence the view proceeds to Hoboken, where the steam vessel Constitution appears in her progress. From Hoboken the view proceeds, passing Wehawk, to those stupendous and gigantic cliffs the Palisades, which, for singularity of appearance and grandeur of natural beauty, are not to be rivalled in the world. In this part of her progress the vessel encounters one of those violent and sudden storms so frequent on the North River. The steamboat and surrounding scenery are gradually lost to the view of the spectator in a dense fog, which is followed by thunder, lightning, and all the varied and alarming features of a summer storm, which in that season so often terrifies while it excites the admiration of the traveller in that wild and romantic region. The storm subsides and the view shows Haverstraw Light House and adjacent scenery, with Caldwell's Landing and Entrance; from which the spectator approaches the Highlands, with all their rich variety of mountain, wood, and cliff. He then passes West Point, with its concentration of beautiful and intersting objects, and which are seen under the imposing effect of a bright Sunset. Leaving West Point night approaches, and the soft and silvery light of the rising Moon begins to tint the rugged fronts of the rocky eminences which overhang the river. The Constitution pauses under the wooded banks of Polypus Island, which receding from the sight, the broad and beautiful expanse of waters which form Newburgh Bay spreads before the audience-the town of Newburgh in the DUNLAP distance, and the bay enlivened with fishing boats and other shipping. From thence the dioramic view proceeds up the river, till it shows the concluding general view of Catskill Point and distant Mountains, by Moonlight. The whole animated by the various craft which navigate the North River. 5. The Bar Room of an Inn at Catskiii-(Rip Van Winkle's Cottage in Embryo.) Painted by Mr. White. 6. Catskill Mountain House, at the Pine Orchard, by Sunrise-the morning mist upon the country beneath. Painted by Mr. Gordon. 7. That picturesque and romantic spot the Cauterskill Falls. Painted by Mr. Jones. 8. State-street, Albany. Painted by Mr. Reinagle. 9. The Canal and Aqueduct at the Little Falls, on the Mohawk. Painted by Mr. Gordon. 10. Inn at Buffalo. Painted by Mr. Leslie. 11. Niagara! The stupendous cataract of the Falls of Niagara, with all its terrific grandeur and sublime effect, presented with the superior advantages of the immense altitude that this Theatre affords. Painted by Mr. Jones." 89 This was the scenery against which Dunlap had to weave his play. As a man who had spent a large part of his life professionally involved with the theatre, he was not only able to work the effects into his play, but to write a more-than-competent play, to boot. A Trip to Niagara begins in an apartment in the City Hotel, New York. Amelia Wentworth is writing to her sister in England about the delights she finds in America, such as superb steamboats and the vision of the people. Her servant, Nancy, wants to return to England, because in America she is considered no better than a black, and because America has no royalty. She is afraid that her near-fiance, Thomas, wants to stay here. "[H]e will go into the woods, and buy wild lands, and be a Congress-man.' 16 Wentworth, Amelia's brother, enters. He is disgusted with America, calls it the "fag-end of creation.'' He misses the celebrated ruins of Europe. Her response "If America takes warning by the errors of Europe, she will soon be the pride of the Universe!" He is contemptuous of everything in America, where he is treated like everyone else. He leaves to secure them berths on a steamboat to Albany. John Bull surprises Amelia. He is an Englishman who had courted her in England, where she had insisted that he travel before 6 William Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara (New York: E.B. Clayton, 1830), 6. 90 MATES they committed themselves. He still wants to marry her, and they strike a bargain: if he can convince her brother to give up his prejudices about America, she will consider matrimony. Nancy's Thomas has left his employment as servant, and Nancy hopes to hire Job Jerryson as a replacement. He is black, a bit of a dandy, and totally without any hint of the standard portrayal of black speech and manners. He refuses to leave his employment at the hotel and paraphrases Othello: "I would not my free condition put in confinement for seas of wealth." 7 (He is the manager of a black theatre company, "The Shakespeare Club.") His character and speech reflect Dunlap's attitude toward the picture of slaves and slavery itself. Soon after his father died, he freed the family slaves; he was on the executive committee of an abolitionist society; and most of his published works have some reference to the evils of slavery. Now Dennis Doherty comes in, the last in a long line of Dunlap stage Irishmen. Dunlap came of Irish stock and at least seven of his plays contain Irishmen: Darby's Return, The Glory of Columbia, Bonaparte in England, Lewis of Monte Blanco, The Wife of Two Husbands, Yankee Chronology, and this one. 8 He confuses "favor" with "fever" and wants advice about getting back overseas as quickly as possible. Now Bull enters disguised as a Frenchman and is the recipient of one of Dennis's complaints. "Did not I see a shop full of coffins the first day I landed? 0, what a divil of a place is it where the coffins stand ready to catch a man the moment he stips ashore.' 19 He has been in America for two weeks, but since there is no ship available to take him back, he is resolved to travel north to canada where he can live safely under His Majesty's flag. Amelia returns but does not recognize Bull until he reveals himself. Dennis again tells his story, now confusing "hate" and "heat.'' Wentworth comes in, is amused by Dennis's account of America and resolves to help him. Bull tells Amelia of his plans and his various disguises "borrowed from the Bowery Theatre" as they prepare for the trip to Niagara. The second scene takes place on the Steamboat Wharf at the bottom of Courtland Street. "View of Jersey City. Ships in the stream, & c." The language of the runners gives some excellent local color. 'The North America is the fastest, Sir!" "This way, Sir!-We beat them by twenty minutes last trip.'' "We beat them, 7 Dunlap, Niagara, 13. 8 Oral Sumner Coad, Willam Dun/ap(1917; reprint New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 179. 9 Dunlap, Niagara, 15. DUNLAP 91 sir." Wentworth enters followed by Porters and Amelia, Nancy (with her "ridicule''), and Dennis. Job shows travelers to a boat: "Permit me to have the honour of showing you the way." 10 Bull comes on, now disguised as Jonathan, a Yankee; he argues with the Engineer, and they all go on board at the end of Act I. The second act shows the Bowery, with a view of the front of the Theatre. Dennis is convinced that Job is black as a result of a fever and insists that he stand away from him. Dennis has lost his way, and there is some farcical stage business as he drops one parcel and picks up another. Job directs him to the pier. The next stage direction is "Diorama, or Moving Scenery." The panorama, with a special building and special lighting had been invented in 1787; the diorama was invented by a Frenchman in 1822-a painting with a transparent effect (the terms tended to be used interchangeably). 11 The steamboat seems to be passing up the river as eighteen scenes are shown. The boat stops, and the passengers put off in a small boat; they go ashore at Catskill, at night. Wentworth enters the inn with the landlord, complaining all the while. When Amelia enters, the landlord does for her what he can to be helpful. Wentworth: So sister, here we must stay, in this wretched dog-hole tonight. Amelia: Dog-hole, brother? Every thing is very comfortable! And the people are very obliging. 12 She speaks of their delightful journey; he retorts that he was reading newspapers in the cabin. Bull, in the guise of a Frenchman, torments Wentworth who runs off to end the act. The third and final act begins at "the Mountain, or Pine Orchard House." There is a view of distant scenery, and the sun rises during the scene. Wentworth believes the Frenchman is trying to murder him. Suddenly, Leatherstocking appears, in part to help display yet more scenery, but also to portray James Fenimore Cooper's hero as the kind of American Wentworth can admire; too, his ideas represent something of America's: the building of a great nation at the cost of the loss of the natural beauty so important to Americans' idea of their country and their relation to it. Leatherstocking speaks of how the country has changed. "The beasts of the forest all gone! 10 Dunlap, Niagara, 21-22. 11 Walter J . Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 182B(Bioomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 312. 12 Dunlap, Niagara, 28. 92 MATES What is worth living for here, now! All spoilt!" He speaks of how the country was "When the trees began to be kiver'd with leaves, and the ice was out of the river; when the birds came back from the south, and all nater lifted its song to its Maker-think you not that the hunter's thanksgiving went up to Heaven with the song of all around him" He offers to show some of the splendors of nature to Amelia, and even Wentworth cannot criticize Natty Bumpo and is reduced to repeating, "After breakfast-after breakfast." 13 It is not surprising that Dunlap should compliment Cooper through the use of Leatherstocking. Cooper and Dunlap were good friends; indeed, Cooper was a big help financially in Dunlap's last years. Dunlap had painted a scene from Cooper's novel, The Spy, and years later, in The Pilot, Cooper wrote. "We shall, therefore, proceed to state briefly the outlines of that which befell them in after life, regretting, at the same time, that the legitimate limits of a modern tale will not admit of such a dilation of many a merry or striking scene, as might create the pleasing hope of beholding hereafter some more of our rude sketches quickened into the life by the spirited pencil of Dunlap." 14 At the end of Scene 1, Bull enters as the Yankee, Jonathan, and finds ways to torment Wentworth before they all go in to breakfast. Scene 2 gives the scenic artists and mechanics an opportunity to display a waterfall and a cave. Leatherstocking has taken Amelia and Wentworth to view the place, over Wentworth's constant complaints. Leatherstocking says he is going west, where the land is still unspoiled. The next scene takes place on State Street, in Albany. Bull, as Jonathan, finds additional means of tormenting Wentworth, so that the latter will do almost anything to contradict Bull. Scene 4 is set on the Little Falls of the Mohawk. Amelia gives us a bit of historical local color: 'The opportunity we so frequently have, of stepping from the canal-boat, and thus walking on the bank, adds to the pleasure derived from the ever changing scenery that is presented to us." She speaks of America's debt to Fulton and Clinton. Wentworth, of course, complains, this time of the possibility of having his head knocked off by a bridge as he stands on the canal boat. Dunlap did not need to mention the call " low bridge!/' all too familiar to his audience. 15 Dennis at last catches up to them and joins the party. 13 Dunlap, Niagara, 32. 14 James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot(New York: President Publishing Co., 1849), 434. 15 Dunlap, Niagara, 42. DUNLAP 93 A hotel at Buffallo, scene 5, finds Wentworth complaining as usual, now supported by Bull as Jonathan. After an assortment of tall tales, Wentworth objects:" ... you know that neither the people nor the country are as bad as you make them." He goes on, "I begin to think that I have done both the people and country injustice." 16 At this point the plot is revealed, and Wentworth is delighted that his sister and Bull will marry. The final scene reveals the "Falls of Niagara as seen from below, on the American side." Leatherstocking is taking his last look at places he loves, before going off to the prairie. He and Wentworth shake hands, the Englishman and the American. "Henceforth, forever friends!" says Wentworth.U * * * Dunlap referred to A Trip to Niagara as a farce, with "pretensions to no higher character." 18 And yet the New York American, before giving the cast or describing the diorama, wrote of "the dramatic piece in three acts written by William Dunlap." The cast was a good one: John Fisher as Wentworth, W.B. Chapman as John Bull (and the Frenchman and the Yankee), Read as Job Jerryson, H. Wallack as Dennis Doughterty, Forbes as Leatherstocking, Mrs. Hughes as Amelia, and Miss A. Fisher as Nancy. The Evening Post lists the minor characters as well, and ends with "Travellers" as played by the "Corps de Ballet." While the Evening Post continually stresses the scenery, the American rarely mentions the scenery but most often refers to the "new dramatic piece in three acts by William Dunlap" and sometimes the "drama" of A Trip to Niagara or "the much admired new drama." For the Evening Post, Dunlap's play was the thing. A Trip to Niagara was sometimes given as an afterpiece, though most often it was the main work of the evening. Occasionally extra acts such as songs by Mr. Sloman were mentioned in advertisements or M. and Mme. Vestris dancing a "grand pas de deux." 19 On Wednesday, 31 December, the Bowery happily 16 Dunlap, Niagara, 50. 17 Dunlap, Niagara, 53. 18 William Dunlap, "Preface," A Trip to Niagara (New York: E.B. Clayton, 1830). 19 "For the Evening Post," in the New York Evening Post, 1 December 1828. 94 MATES announced Dunlap's play's twenty-fifth performance. Odell wrote that the Dunlap piece had saved the season. In its own time, A Trip to Niagara gained mostly favorable notices. As always, the Evening Post was most impressed with the scenery. 'This beautiful representation, or rather succession of pictures, drawn from some of the most splendid scenes of nature, continues to attract crowded houses to the Bowery theatre." The New York Mirror, as we have seen, had prepared its readers (22 November 1828) by giving the history of the diorama in America, and then some description of the wonders to anticipate. When the play opened, the Mirror (6 December 1828) advised its readers to go see the show. Then, on 20 December, it noted something special : Mr. Dunlap's play of a Trip to Niagara-Friday and Saturday last were distinguished at the Bowery Theatre by the remarkable circumstance, that the entertainments of the first evening were repeated in the next, in consequence of the press to see two pieces, on the same night, both popular, and both from the pen of the same dramatic writer. On Friday evening the house overflowed, and, literally, hundreds went away disappointed. The manager gave immediate assurance of the repetition of both pieces on Saturday, and was rewarded by another bumper ... the author has wielded the lash of satire so playfully, that even the patient must join in the laugh which is raised at his expense, but for his cure. The second play by Dunlap was Thirty Years, or the Gambler's Fate, a translation of a French melodrama by Prosper Goubaux and Victor Ducange. Dunlap's translation ran agains one at the Park, and was considered the better of the two. Dunlap had been instrumental in introducing melodrama to America, and it is not surprising that his knowledge of the conventions and his experience pleased the Bowery's audience. And the "lash of satire" was directed at English travelers and travel writers who took every occasion to hold in contempt all things American. The trend to criticising America reached its peak with Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans in 1832. When the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia produced Dunlap's A Trip to Niagara, Coyle and Leslie were the scene painters, and DUNLAP 95 Charles Durang thought the staging accurately and beautifully done. 20 Not all contemporary accounts were favorable. The Irish Shield said of Dunlap's play: . . . the most satiating namby pamby production that ever disgusted our audience; words without ideas, scenes without conexion of probability; low jests, and mawkish sentiment clothed in the poorest language . . . . Such a play as this would stigmatize with contempt the name of any author, who had not given before, unquestionable evidences of dramatic talent and literary capacity." 21 * * * Later evaluations of A Trip to Niagara have tended to be more mixed than those bf Dunlap's day. His first biographer, Oral Sumner Coad, found the play "merely a series of disconnected and puerile scenes and irrelevant characters," with humor that is "frequent and boisterous." 22 Arthur Hobson Quinn found "There is little to be said in its favor," though he admits to an interest in the five caricatures that Dunlap portrays ("The Yankee, French, English, Irish, and negro types'') and tends to accept Dunlap's own evaluation of his play. 23 Robert H. Canary, here as elsewhere in his treatment of Dunlap, is ambivalent. He calls the play "well-done hackwork," says "Perhaps he [Dunlap] was led to underrate the play," calls it "a workmanlike job," and "Since this is a Dunlap play, the suddenly good-natured Wentworth acquiesces to their engagement," and finally, "Not a great play, it is still the best of the surviving original plays by Dunlap and by no means an unworthy end to his long career as a dramatist." 24 2 Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre, The Image of American on Stage, 1825- JSSO(Austin: UniversityofTexas Press, 1964), 162. 21 The Irish Shield, January 1829, 30-31, quoted in Meserve, 113. 22 Coad, 177. 23 Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama From the Bginning to the Civil War(New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), 107. 24 Robert H. Canary, William Dunlap (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970): 71-5. 96 MATES Aside from its value as a play, A Trip to Niagara inspired other dioramas, such as views of European cities, and such displays as the "Burning of Moscow." 25 Walter Meserve points out other effects of Dunlap's play: . . . with their articulated awareness of American idiosyncracies, American dramatists responded to the desires of the people for a vivid scenery as well as an understanding of a national character. William Dunlap's A Trip to Niagara (1828) provided a beginning that was exploited by the popular dioramas and the spectacular theatre settings from Nick of the Woods to the numerous scenes of city life in A Glance at New York and many other plays. Generally, Jacksonian Americans did not care to be thoughtful; they wanted only to know what they looked like, individually and as a country. 26 In Yankee Theatre, Francis Hodge suggests that the character of Wentworth is a mild satire of Charles Matthews, then praises Dunlap's play as "among his most amusing pieces and certainly merits much greater attention than it has usually received." 27 Dunlap must have thought that the play's popularity on the stage, one of the most popular he ever wrote, might result in the sale of the text (and it is also possible that he thought more highly of his work than he let on). In any case, he published the play, and as almost always the case with a Dunlap project, probably lost money. A letter dated 18 November 1830, to friends, reads: I sent a bundle of my farce of a Trip to Niagara to your care with the request to place them for sale with a Bookseller who is known as a dealer in dramatics. Retail price 25 cents. I know from experience that either of you will do this or more to [serve] Your friend William Dunlap 28 25 Wolfgang Born, American Landscape Painting ( 1948; Reprint Connecticut: Greenwood, 1970), 90. 26 Walter J. Meserve, Heralds of Promise, The Drama of the American People During the Age of Jackson, 1829-1849 (New York: Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986), 197. 27 Hodge, 162. 28 General Collection, Rutgers University Library. CONTRIBUTORS WALTER MESERVE is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Ph.D. Programs in Theatre and English, The City University of New York. MOLLIE ANN MESERVE is editor of The Playwrights Companion (1985-1999). The Meserves have co-authored A Chronological Outline of World Theatre (1992) and co-edited two volumes of pre-World War I American plays: When Conscience Trod the Stage (1998) and Fateful Lightning! (2000). They are currently editing selected American plays from the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. VINCENT LANDRO is Visiting Professor of Theatre in the School of Theatre and Dance at Northern Illinois University. He has published articles on regional theatre management practices and playhouse management in Renaissance London, and is currently at work on a study of publicity agents in American theatre at the turn of the centruy. MAURA CRONIN is a Ph.D. student in Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh. ALICE PETERSEN is a graduate of Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario and the University of Otago, New Zealand. JULIAN MATES is Emeritus Professor at C.W. Post College of Long Island University. He is the author of several books on the musical theatre and the Renaissance. His biography of William Dunlap will be published by Southern Illinois University Press. 97 SIA VIC AND EAST EUROPEAN PERFORMANCE Daniel Gerould, editor. 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An indispensable resource in keeping abreast of the latest theatre developments in Western Europe. Each issue contains a wealth of information about recent European festivals and productions, including reviews, interviews, and reports. Winter issues focus on the theatre in individual countries or on special themes. News of forthcoming events: the latest changes in artistic directorships, new plays and playwrights, outstanding performances, and directorial interpretations. Published three times per year. $15 per annum/$20 U.S. foreign WES@gc.cuny.edu To order any of these publications, please send your request to our Circulation Manager at: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016-4309 MESTC@ gc.cuny .edu Please make checks payable to the journal title. The Graduate Center of CUNY offers doctoral education in Faculty includes: Mirella Affron William Boddy Jane Bowers Royal Brown Jonathan Buchsbaum Marvin Carlson George Custen Miriam D'Aponte Morris Dickstein Jonathan Kalb Samuel Leiter Stuart Liebman Marvin McAllister Judith Mi lhous Benito Drtolani Tony Pipolo Leonard Quart Joyce Rheuban James Saslow Pamela Sheingorn Ella Shohat Alisa Solomon Gloria Waldman Elisabeth Weis David Willinger es and a Certificate Program in ilm studies interdisciplinary options with distinguished Graduate Center faculty in other fields and through a consortia! arrangement including New York University and Columbia University Recent Seminar Topics: English Restoration and 18 C. Drama Arabic Drama lnterculturalism Animation as Art and Cultural Form Ethnic Theatre Kabuki and No Muller & Modern German Drama The Current New York Season Eastern European Theatre Lesbian and Gay Theatre and Performance American Film Comedy Theories of the Tragic African Cinema affiliated with the The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, Journal of Amarican Drama and Theatre, Slavic and EIISt European Performance, Western Europeen Stagas Classicism Melodrama Feminist Theory and Performance Dramaturgy European AvantGarde Drama Latin Ameri can and Latino Theatre Poststructuralist Dramatic Theory The American Movie Musical Postcolonial Performance American Political Drama Theatre and Theatricality in Renaissance Art and Architecture Acting Executive Officer: Professor Pamela Sheingorn Ph.D. Program in Theatre CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 100164309 telephone 121218178880 fax 121218171538 e-mail: theatre@gc.cuny.edu www.gc.cuny.edu
(Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History) Rick DesRochers (Auth.) - The New Humor in The Progressive Era - Americanization and The Vaudeville Comedian-Palgrave Macmillan US (2014)
The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., and Tina Payne Bryson, PhD. - Book Summary: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind