"Manly Exercises": Post-Revolutionary Performances of Authority in the Theatrical Career of William Dunlap

Abstract

In 1787,21-year-old William Dunlap forsook his first-chosen voca tion, painting, to venture a life in the theater. Called home to New York after three years' less-than-dedicated study in London under the expatri ate American painter Benjamin West, Dunlap painted a portrait of his family, The Artist Showing a Picture from Hamlet to His Parents (1788), that provocatively registers the complex motives and aspirations of the young man's turn to the theater (see Figure 1). Not only the reiterated gesture of the presentation?a dutiful display of the results of his paren tally sponsored study abroad?but also the subject of the painting-within the-painting?Hamlet's encounter with his father's unhappy ghost on the castle ramparts?advertises the returned son's filial regard. Filial Piety was, in fact, the playing title of Hamlet in Philadelphia that spring (Pollock 141). But, just as that title masked Lewis Hallam's Old American Company's calculated evasion of local laws against theatrical productions, Dunlap's