Abstract
This essay intervenes in scholarly debates over Anglo-American performance and eighteenth-century dramatic sensibility by enacting a new reading of the dramatic relation between Royall Tyler's The Contrast (1787), as the first play of so-called ‘American Genius’, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1777). Prioritizing theatrical and philosophical notions of ‘promissory consideration’, comedy, and character writing, this article assesses the manner in which Tyler's Contrast achieved a new brand of affective ridicule as a stage-and-page response to Sheridan's British dramatic forms. Arguing that Tyler constructs an original Comedy of Right Feeling by means of an ‘English’ transatlantic exchange, Cook demonstrates Tyler's deft refiguring of stock types for early US comedy.
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