A Complex Causality of Neglect

Abstract

fortunes of American drama under critical regimes both old and new and in doing so has challenged the academy, and in particular practitioners of interdisciplinary American Studies, to remedy the situation. This appeal has been presented in the pages of American Quarterly rather than American Literature, perhaps because American Studies as a newer field embracing social and cultural contexts as well as texts, cultural theory as well as audience and theatre history, may be better placed than departments of literature to provide serious examination of American drama in performance. Much of the best recent scholarship on American theatre has come from history departments: two notable contributions to the understanding of nineteenth-century American theatre, for example, are the work of ASA scholars approaching the theatre from social and cultural history. David Grimsted's Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) and Lawrence Levine's William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation, American Historical Review 84 (February 1984) build from specific details of playscript, production history, and audience reception larger interpretations of the functions of certain dramas for their only partly visible popular audiences. Both pieces set a high standard for a new, integrated scholarship of American