Transatlantic performance: Politics and the early American theatre

The dissertation explores the interactions between the multifaceted performance culture of eighteenth-century British North America and its liberal political culture before and during the American Revolution. The theatre served as both a means for fostering patriotic sentiment (whether British or American) in the colonies and a source for a symbolic language of colonial protest and revolution rooted in British culture but opposed to British political identity. I examine the roles in transatlantic British culture of three rhetorical figures---the tyrant, the sacrificial victim, and the patriot---prominent in eighteenth-century dramaturgy and political rhetoric. These "effigies" provided theatrical models for emulation or vilification in the theatres, the print culture, and the "street theatre" protests of British North America, characters equally legible to revolutionary and loyalist, Briton and American.;The first chapter examines the widespread colonial popularity of Joseph Addison's 1713 tragedy Cato, a popular theatrical spectacle that influenced patriot propaganda literature and the behavior of revolutionaries like George Washington and Nathan Hale. The second chapter considers the political implications of the changing composition of the early American theatrical repertoire to colonial political culture, placing special emphasis on the popularity of Shakespearean tragedies both in the colonial theatre and in the protest literature of the period. The third chapter analyzes a number of amateur productions and dramatic dialogues performed at colonial colleges, texts in which the patriotic figure of the King gives way to a series of liberal politicians and colonial insurgents and a creole nationalist consciousness emerges among American collegiate radicals as the Revolution nears. The final chapter interprets a series of propaganda dialogues and plays written during the Revolution by pro-American partisans like Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Thomas Paine. These plays and dialogues denigrate the "tyrannical" King George III and his ministers and venerate British and American military heroes such as Generals James Wolfe and Joseph Warren, as the guardians of both American and British liberty. A short conclusion considers Royall Tyler's 1787 The Contrast as a theatrical attempt to come to terms with the postwar United States' political independence from, and lingering cultural dependence on, Great Britain.