When one considers the impact of Russian literature on world literature, one thinks first of all of the novel. Russia excelled in the novel to the extent that the Greeks and the English excelled in tragedy. To the extent - but not in the same way, because Greek and English tragedies offer the defining examples of the form, whereas the Russian masterpieces, while surely the greatest novels, defy, rather than define, their genre.

From the time Russian novels began to be widely read abroad, two features struck Western readers: their inclusion of long philosophical arguments and their violation of the formal expectations of the genre. It was also clear that these features are intimately connected, because it is in part the philosophical passages that turn these novels into “loose, baggy monsters.”The essays in War and Peace, Levin's internal dialogues on the meaning of life at the end of Anna Karenina, Kirillov's mad meditations in The Devils, and Ivan Karamazov's “Grand Inquisitor” legend - all these striking sections, which seemed to have few counterparts in Western masterpieces, define the spirit of the Russian novel.

In the nineteenth century, after decades of imitations, translations, and a tradition of bawdy native prose, Russia began to challenge the West as the home of the greatest novels ever written. Are Russian “theories of the novel” comparably rich? The current fame of Mikhail Bakhtin might suggest that this is indeed the case. But Bakhtin was a pioneer: he began work on the novel during the 1920s, with what he considered to be only scattered and unsatisfying critical precedent at his disposal. He repeatedly declared that the protean nature of this genre, its unsystematicity and generosity of form, had made the very question of an adequate theory of the novel awkward for any literary tradition. Since the novel outgrows every definition imposed upon it and can incorporate its own parody without ceasing to be itself, its formal study does not reward that drawing of boundaries upon which respectable theory rests.

For this reason, many discussions claiming to provide a “theory” or “morphology” of the novel in effect provide a history of novels. The literary historian devises a chronology of select novel-types (picaresque, sentimental, utopian, psychological), attaches it to larger literary periods, and then appends to this structure valuable information about authors, origins, plot invariants, or the literary market. But such chronologies fall short of a unified concept of the genre, as the great comparativist Aleksandr Veselovskii acknowledged in his 1886 essay “History or Theory of the Novel?” Veselovskii viewed the novel as the endpoint of a lengthy process of narrative individualization.

All novels are Romantic in the sense that they defy generic categories, combining poetry and philosophy, reportage and fantasy. “Der Roman ist ein romantisches Buch” (“The novel is a Romantic book”), according to Friedrich Schlegel, one of the greatest of Romantic theoreticians. But to speak more strictly, there is such a thing as a Romantic novel, as distinct from other types of novels (realist, science-fiction, etc.). The Romantic novel, mainly cultivated by the German Romantics (Schlegel, Novalis, Eichendorff and, to some extent, Goethe), is a free, lyrical form, often incorporating lyric poetry, concerned less with linear plot than with the exploration of inner spiritual states, of love, the mystical and the supernatural. Another type of novel that may be termed “Romantic” is the tale of exotic adventure in the manner of Chateaubriand and Scott. Both these types of Romantic novel are represented in Russian literature of the early nineteenth century, but only among the works of second-rank writers like Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Aleksandr Odoevskii, and Nikolai Polevoi. The first two great Russian novels, Aleksandr Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin (1823-31, published in full 1831) and Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840), are already engaged in a struggle with Romanticism that in its intensity and explicitness goes well beyond the selfconscious play known as “Romantic irony.”

When trying to account for actors who have had a substantial impact on the history of the theatre, we frequently resort to metaphors of royalty. We refer to the finest performers of past generations as “player kings” or “queens” and allude to the stage and auditoriums over which they preside as personal “realms,” as if such spaces are determined primarily by the powerful allure displayed by the actor. We speak of the leading clans of the theatre world –the Kembles, the Booths, the Sotherns, or the Barrymores – as the “royal families” of the theatre. No doubt we do this in part because we feel the magnetism exercised by the most powerful actors’ calls for an unquestioning acceptance and loyalty, akin to the allegiance expected by monarchical authority, an appeal incidentally that few actors do much to counter. But our desire to make monarchs of stage performers may also have historical roots, in the close identity, especially strong in the eighteenth century, of acting troupes with royal patrons. In Europe, most actors who wished to achieve the social stature and respect that would ensure professional survival could do so only if they received the sanction of royalty. Their appearance on royally patented stages was even seen as a surrogate for the power of the prince himself.

In the early years of the American republic, this sense that actorial authority is somehow monarchical in nature casts the theatre into intriguingly anomalous light. As the newly independent nation grew, it emphatically asserted its freedom from royal shackles and assiduously constructed a political system, the principle aim of which was to ensure that relations between ruler and ruled were subject to constitutional limitations that guaranteed the rights of the individual citizen.

Introduction

Theatrical performances do cultural work of historical significance through their repeated circularity over time. A performance genre, the interplay of conventional actions and responses, is repeated for a few years until groups of performers and spectators find other modes of interacting that are more entertaining. Theatre historians have traditionally jumped in to explain this ongoing circular process at the many points of production, but the moments of reception – the points at which the feedback loop is complete – also require explanation. Explaining audience response necessarily leads the historian to embed performance events into their social and cultural milieu; spectator response, in turn, is potentially the most important key to historical context. Consequently, this summary chapter on the context of American theatre from 1600 to 1870 focuses on historical audiences and the major genres they enjoyed.

Because the most relevant context for theatre audiences is frequently other types of performances, this overview will also include comments on sporting events, religious rituals, and other kinds of public performances beyond the theatre. All American cultures enjoyed a range of performance events, only some of which ever found their way onto a stage. Many historical groups, of course, had neither the cultural inducements nor the material necessities to establish theatre as a separate institution. Of the three major cultures in North America after 1600, only white Europeans began with an itch for “theatre” as it is usually understood; Native Americans and Africans had institutionalized other modes of performance. A history of the American theatre limited to performances in a European language on a raised stage automatically excludes the performance traditions of many Americans.

The colonial period

Until the arrival, in 1749, of identifiable actors and managers in the eastern part of the American continent, the nature and practice of theatrical performance are matters almost entirely of historical conjecture. What records exist of theatrical activity make little or no mention of playhouses, scenery, or modes of performance. We know from at least one instance in the sparse chronicles of colonial theatre that, in 1665, three young men, who were accused of “acting a play of ye Bare and ye Cubb, on ye 27th of August” (quoted in Odell, 1, 4), were ordered to appear in court in “those habilments that they acted in” before the judge in Accomac County, Virginia. Whether it was the costumes they wore or the excerpts from the play they recited for the judge’s edification, we know that he was persuaded to find them not guilty.

If the young men at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, indulged in theatrical activities (as some believe), they left little evidence of their efforts, but a few historians have read into these intimations a sense that the Virginia colony, and the South in general, was somewhat more tolerant of theatrical practice than its northern counterparts. Their position is strengthened by the discovery of the foundations of a playhouse, built sometime between 1716 and 1718, in Williamsburg. Erected by William Levingston, a merchant of New Kent County, the playhouse was probably nothing more than a large barn built with wood posts and beams with joists carrying the weight of the floor and ceiling.

On 15 September 1752, in Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, the first play performed in America by a fully professional company was presented. It was Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; its Virginia Gazette advertisement ended with the formulaic phrase “Vivat Rex.” It is hard not to see a certain symbolic significance in this production. First, company, play, and actors were British, as, of course, was the audience. After all, this was a British colony, and the Revolution was still more than two decades ahead. The influence of the British theatre, indeed, would remain central, if a matter of growing contention, throughout the period covered by this volume. Second, it was notable that the performance took place in a southern colony, for the fact is that theatre did not find a ready home on a continent that to some was to be a new Eden, a world in which God alone would have the prerogative of invention.

The only Word, the only authorized text, was to be the Bible, and man’s role was to be obedient to He who alone was the author of the human drama. The frivolous, the sensual, the illicit were to be shunned. Display was seen as unseemly, the aesthetic as suspect. Boundaries were to be respected, not transgressed, and the theatre, as the Puritans well knew, had always been about transgression. Those on board the Mayflower had not suffered the privations of sea crossing and winter storms to worship Dionysus. They had another God, who would not be mocked by those who seduced by their skills of mimickry or claimed a license to portray the proscribed.

Introduction

For those living during the transition, more than a new century seemed to dawn with the year 1801. Twelve years of centralizing, pro-British Federalist government was giving way to a new era. The ascendant Democrat-Republicans promised a reorienting of the nation’s political, economic, social, and cultural agendas. But despite Federalist fears of a wholesale dismantling of federal power and an embracing of radical French republicanism, the new cast of political leaders, epitomized by Thomas Jefferson, remained fundamentally committed to the established government infrastructure, to gentry governance, and to the preservation of republican virtue. As Robert Wiebe has noted, though members of both political parties saw their differences in stark contrasts, their dissimilarities were finally struggles “over the interior design of the same ideological house” (xiii). Though often distanced by both temperament and class from those they governed, this new leadership was destined to oversee a new wave of westward migration into the territories of the Old Northwest and the Louisiana Purchase, the United States’s tentative forays into international politics, and a second war with Britain. In turn, Jackson and his successors would grapple with the shift of political power to the frontier, the expansion of a commercial economy, the “Indian question,” an influx of new immigration and the consequent growth of cities, the emergence of irreconcilable sectional rivalries, and, eventually, a civil war that would irreversibly set the national course by ending slavery and establishing the primacy of the Union over the states.

Introduction

American culture before 1800 is not renowned for its theatre, and American theatre before 1800 is not known for its dramatic literature. The period is often characterized as a relatively barren era in which rare examples of theatrical writing appeared on odd occasions. Theatre historians describe long fallow stretches punctuated by sudden bursts of crude dramatic creativity, with plays remarkable only for their scarcity and inherent inferiority to European models. It is a perception that has influenced the development of American plays and playwrights since the first performances by Europeans more than four hundred years ago, and it still forms the basis of our present understanding of early American theatre.

A closer examination, of course, reveals a surprising number and variety of plays, written by an equally surprising assortment of playwrights, from politicians to preachers. Indeed, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced a remarkable collection of scripts, dialogues, dramatic discourses, masques, and other dramatic and paratheatrical endeavors. Far from being a barren and unproductive period, pre-nineteenth-century America saw drama as an integral part of culture and society. Admittedly, the dramatic literature of this early period has received scant attention, its significance overlooked and perhaps deliberately shunned by social critics fearful of idle representations or even aesthetic patriots determined to distill a purified American drama by expunging those works deemed unworthy and inferior.

Introduction

There are two areas of management (decision making) in the theatre. Artistic decisions about the physical setting (scenery and costumes) and the actors’ performances occupy the foreground and are normally made by the appropriate artists in terms of current conventions (styles). These change over time because of innovations introduced by individuals who find current practices unacceptably restrictive. The discussion of these sorts of decisions and changes belongs to other chapters of this book.

The background is occupied by a context of other conventions by means of which the theatre operates as a social institution. It is these nonartistic conventions and their changes that are the subject of this chapter. This goal of social management is to organize the relationship between performers and the public in such a way that it provides the theatre personnel with a living. In a commercial (nonsubsidized) theatre such as that in the United States, the management must arrange for the performance of something attractive to an audience at a convenient time in a convenient place at an acceptable price, so that the gross box office income at least equals (and preferably exceeds) the gross cost of creating the performance.

Obviously there is a middle ground in which the two areas of management meet. When artistic decisions require the spending of money they affect the cost of the performance and therefore its possibility of profit. Any decision to spend more money on theatres, scenery, costumes, or actors must be justified in terms of its potential to increase revenue more than it increases cost and thereby increase net income.

Introduction

The actress Olive Logan, reviewing the state of American theatre in 1866, found much about which to complain. The New York stage, once the home to Kean’s Shakespeare, was now filled with blood-and-thunder melodramas, appealing only to “Bowery B’hoys,” and with fantastic, fairy amazonia, drawing rows of “Bald Heads.” Since managers were only interested in cash rather than “the drama,” few standards remained. Everything, Logan claimed, “from educated dogs, performing fleas to the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher now comprises the show business.” As the rest of her essay made clear, Logan was only trying to make a salutary, pointed joke. As an aspiring author for the legitimate stage, she thought it possible that firm boundaries between frivolous, minor amusement and edifying drama might be reestablished. Yet, in giving us such an encompassing definition of the show business, even in irony, she exposed an important truth about the development of commercial amusements in America that would have been unthinkable only thirty years before. No matter how ludicrous the juxtaposition of secular fleas and the priestly Beecher, their respective performances were now fueled by the same energies of profit, fame, and celebrity. All forms of performance achieved their value on the same level ground of commercial return.