Reviewed by Jason Shaffer | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Jason Shaffer | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Jason Shaffer, United States Naval Academy

The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774: A Documentary Calendar. By Odai Johnson and William J. Burling. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2001. 519 pages. $55.00 cloth). Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People. By Heather S. Nathans. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 258 pages. $75.00 (cloth).
Gone are the days when "early American drama" meant the works of Eugene O'Neill. Fresh explorations of the history of the theater in pre-twentieth-century America have been appearing at a surprising rate in recent years, reviving a scholarly tradition that began with playwright and theater manager William Dunlap's History of the American Theatre (1832). These studies, including the work of Gary A. Richardson and Jeffrey H. Richards, as well as the first volume of Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby's Cambridge History of American Theatre, have also begun to address some of the major challenges still facing American theater historians.¹ Documentary evidence pertaining to the colonial American theater is scattered and often difficult to obtain and many early historians treated primary source documentation cavalierly. Furthermore, many important sources for pre-twentieth-century stage history are local histories that by definition cannot capture the full American scope of the theater. Lastly, scholarly knowledge of the relationship between the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American theater and society at large still pales next to the academic understanding of the social roles of contemporaneous theaters in London, Paris, or even Dublin.	1
Odai Johnson and William J. Burling, in The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774, supply for the first time a thoroughly documented and complete record of known theatrical activity throughout the British Americas. Heather S. Nathans, in Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson, treats the early republican stage not only as an artistic institution but also as part of a group of interconnected social institutions crucial to the development of an American national identity. In each case the authors have made a valuable contribution to the field. Johnson and Burling's volume, along with Barry Witham's Theatre in the United States, will facilitate the sort of carefully documented research in early American theater that historians now commonly perform on the theaters of eighteenth-century Europe.² Nathans demonstrates that, even amid the flux of the Republic's first decades, the American theater was as closely intertwined with other elements of society as were its European counterparts.	2
Johnson and Burling's work catalogs the records of performances spanning from the 1665 performance of the lost play The Bear and the Cub in Pungoteague, Virginia, to the congressional ban on theatrical performance and subsequent departure of David Douglass's American Company from North America in 1774. This book is a highly valuable resource because it consolidates many sources and because Johnson and Burling purge a number of errors from the records and supply primary source documentation for performances (usually from newspaper advertisements or playbills) whenever possible. Moreover, the authors document not only well-known troupes such as the Murray-Kean Company, the London (and later American) company of the Hallam family, and William Verling's New American Company but also lesser known troupes playing throughout the Carolinas, New England, the Caribbean, and Canada. The book's extensive introduction contains information that will be useful to novice and expert alike on topics such as stage design, the pay structure of eighteenth-century acting companies, and the relationship between ticket prices and colonial currency valuation. The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774 is unquestionably the single most valuable volume on colonial theater to date.	. . .

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