1 - The Drama of the Approaching Revolution

Summary

Before the first shots of the Revolution were fired, the approaching thunder could be heard in the plays, both Whig (favoring the attempt to establish a new nation) and Tory (sympathetic to the British cause), that appeared in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war. Most of these plays were written to be read rather than to be performed, and, perhaps as a consequence, were crude and naϊve as drama. Nevertheless, as Moses Coit Tyler pointed out in his Literary History of the American Revolution, the plays have historic significance because they reproduced and vivified “the ideas, the passions, the motives, and the moods of that stormful time in our history with a frankness, a liveliness, and an unshrinking realism not approached by any other species of Revolutionary literature.” Walter J. Meserve calls these plays, disseminated in “newspapers or in privately printed pamphlets, … a major source of literature during the war.” Since pamphlets as well as newspapers were inexpensive (often costing no more than a few pennies), the plays gained a wide readership among literate people on all points of the political spectrum.

In a 1965 article, Ralph Borden Culp counted 128 non-Shakespearean English plays presented in the colonies between 1758 and 1776. Of these, he counted at least 88 that “were filled with ideas, images, and attitudes similar to those addressed by Whig and Tory propagandists.…”