Description
Book SynopsisSelected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
During the eighteenth century, North American colonists began to display an increasing appetite for professional and amateur theatrical performances and a familiarity with the British dramatic canon ranging from the tragedies of Shakespeare, Addison, and Rowe to the comedies of Farquhar, Steele, and Gay. This interest sparked demand for both the latest hits of the London stage and a body of plays centered on patriotic (and often partisan) British themes. As relations between the crown and the colonies soured, the texts of these plays evolved into a common frame of reference for political arguments over colonial policy. Making the transition to print, these arguments deployed dramatic texts and theatrical metaphors for political advantage. Eventually, with the production of American propaganda plays during the Revolution, colonists began to develop a patriotic drama of their own, albeit one that still stressed t
Trade Review
"Jason Shaffer has written a much-needed transatlantic account of the theater of the eighteenth-century British North American colonies and the early U.S. and its relationship to imperial and revolutionary politics." * Sandra M. Gustafson, University of Notre Dame *
"An engrossing genealogy of patriotism in early American theater. . . . The author looks at the way theater shaped-and was shaped by-America's transformation from province to colony to sovereign nation." * Choice *
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1. Theater, Nation, and State in Early America
Chapter 2. Cato and Company: A Genealogy of Performance
Chapter 3. Free-Born Peoples: The Politics of Professional Theater in Early America
Chapter 4. A School for Patriots: Colonial College Theater
Chapter 5. Bellicose Letters: Propaganda Plays of the Revolution
Epilogue. Postrevolutionary Patriotism and the American Theater
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
