Robert Munford's "The Candidates"

Abstract

C_ OLONEL ROBERT MUNFORD'S play The Candidates is notable for several reasons. Strange as it may seem, this short, slapstick farce written in 1770 tells more about the inner workings of Virginia's colonial politics than many a thick book on that subject. The play is also one of the earliest native American comedies, antedating Royall Tyler's The Contrast which the textbooks generally regard as our first comedy by well over a decade. It introduces for the first time on any stage the Negro (in the person of Ralpho) as a comic type. It is, also, the first of a long line of rollicking American political satires, including such modern examples as Of Thee I Sing and State of the Union, to poke fun at that self-proclaimed peoples' choice-the office-hungry politician. Moreover, The Candidates, unlike many another ancient comedy, is still funny. Any reader with patience to work through a slow and prosy first act will be rewarded thereafter by rough and rowdy action as comic today as when Munford portrayed it in 1770. The success of The Candidates results more from its author's choice of subject than from his skill as a dramatic craftsman. Although more properly termed a man of letters than any of his Virginia contemporaries, the busy life and aristocratic viewpoint of a great planter kept Munford among the amateurs in the arts. In politics, however, he was strictly a professional, as his biography shows. Robert Munford was born at in Prince George County not later than 1730. Although practically nothing is known of his early years the fact that he completed his education abroad at the Wakefield School in Leeds, Yorkshire, where his cousin Theodorick Bland, Jr. and Richard Henry Lee also studied, indicates his family's position in the top rank of Virginia society.' In 1758 he served as captain in the French and Indian War under Colonel William Byrd III, whose son Otway later mar-