4 - American author, British source: writing revolution in Murray's Traveller Returned

Summary

Aside from the political plays written in the early to mid-1770s and various pageants and ephemeral patriotic productions in the immediate post-war years, American writers of the new republic penned relatively few full-length plays about the Revolution that made it to the stage. Although the stage entertainments about the war might be held to be “commemorations” in the same vein as speeches, parades, and other forms of Revolutionary remembrance, they also have another history, the determining shape of British theatre. For early republican British Americans, this meant that reading the Revolution in the theatre often depended on spectator and manager response to British-authored plays, including John O'Keeffe's The Poor Soldier, a text that unusually alludes to the war but for the most part steers clear of direct statements about the politics behind the conflict. Even so, a few plays that directly confront the Revolutionary United States did make it to American stages. Royall Tyler's The Contrast remains the best-known such drama, but it sets the scene in post-war society and refers to the conflict itself largely through Colonel Manly's praising of Washington and Lafayette. Among plays that actually portray wartime America, John Daly Burk's Bunker-Hill, or The Death of General Warren (1797) stands out as a spectacle of battle, declamation, and pyrotechnics, one that William Dunlap loathed but that audiences embraced, at least enough for most of the major theatres to support multiple productions.