American Drama

Even though the quantity and quality of twentieth-century American drama is now widely recognized, the American drama of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still seems to be reserved for the eccentric specialist. With the exception of the plays available in the standard editions, the bulk of American drama written and produced prior to O'Neill is virtually unknown. This obscurity is even more true of dramatic criticism, especially that which was written before the movement toward realism at the end of the nineteenth century. Merrill G. Christophersen's statement of 1956 is still valid today: "Most historians of American dramatic criticism seem to have decided that they have no subject matter extending behind a time barrier set up somewhere around 1870." And even with regard to the dramatic criticism of the advocates of stage realism, Brenda Murphy argues that scholars have not given it sufficient attention either.

To a certain extent the neglect seems to be justified by the low standard both of the plays and the criticism. Poe, for example, complained: "How absolute is the necessity now daily growing, of rescuing our stage criticism from the control of illiterate mountebanks and placing it in the hands of gentlemen and scholars!" And as late as 1908 Frank Moore Colby stated that "no American dramatic critic has thus far in our history published a volume that was particularly worth reading."

The lack of intellectual depth in the majority of the critical discussion of early American drama and theatre is, however, more than counterbalanced by the spontaneity of these firsthand accounts. The best of them reflect the heated debates over the direction theatre and drama in America ought to take. In pre-Revolutionary times public discussion started as a religious controversy over morality, then, in the formative decades before the Civil War, turned into the quest for an adequate expression of the American national character on the stage, and, finally, attempted to redefine American drama and theatre in terms of national reality and individual experience. All writers acknowledged the European, especially English, origins of American drama and theatre, but they differed radically in their views about what use Americans should make of these origins and how closely American dramatists, managers, and actors should adhere to the norms set by their non-American counterparts.

As a sourcebook for courses on the history of the American theatre it aims to bring to life the prolonged dawning of the American drama, to outline America's continued quest for a national drama and theatre, and to provide a survey of the development of dramatic criticism in America. For over a century dramatists and critics alike were in search of "a drama of our own, based on our own manners, habits, characters, and political institutions."

The texts collected provide a survey of the changing attitudes of Americans toward their drama and theatre from the eighteenth century to 1915, that is, from the first appearance of periodicals on the American literary market to the middle of that "formative decade" When the Provincetown Players and other enthusiasts, inspired by European developments, inaugurated a new epoch on the American stage. The texts present the various arguments put forward both for and against drama and theatre in almost two hundred years of American criticism. In addition, they give graphic descriptions of die early American theatre, which some transformed into a zoological exhibition, a drinking saloon, or a whorehouse, and they offer suggestions for the improvement of its morals, its architecture (e.g., its safety and ventilation), but also its frequently rioting members of the audience.

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