A decade of brilliance: Dance theatre in late‐eighteenth‐century Philadelphia

Abstract

The Philadelphia stage, having become an accepted and even much appreciated institution in the Colonial period, managed to survive the austerities of the War for Independence, but it nearly had to go underground in the aftermath of that conflict, when anti-theatre laws were reinforced by the newly independent Pennsylvania legislature. A victory for the stage was achieved in 1789, yet even after the contest had been decisively won by the supporters of the theatre, the Quaker community kept up its volley of anti-theatre invective. For example, in 1793 the theatres were closed owing to a yellow fever epidemic, yet after the epidemic had passed, a committee of Friends petitioned the legislature to keep the theatres closed.' Later still in that decade, the moralist Robert Proud attacked the theatre, tracing strictures on the stage from the ancient Greeks through church history and into the contemporary age.2 Perhaps this gnawing distrust of amusements led a French traveler, Moreau de St. Mery, to write of his American journey in this period, It is to the influence and the number of Quakers in Philadelphia that one must attribute the melancholy customs of this city, which has less society than most places.3 Moreau did note hopefully that the Friends' population was dropping because many Quaker children leave the faith. The number of Quakers proportionally in the city had, indeed, dwindled to only about one-seventh of the population by the final third of the eighteenth century. Yet a music