Strolling Players in Albany, Montreal, and Quebec City, 1797 and 1810: Performance, Class, and Empire

Abstract

Strolling Players in Albany, Montreal, and Quebec City, 1797 and 1810:Performance, Class, and Empire Douglas S. Harvey (bio) John Durang (1768–1822) was an American dancer, actor, equestrian, and clown, as well as "machinist, painter, designer, music compiler, the bill maker, and treasurer," who performed in both the theater and the circus.1 John Bernard (1756–1828), was an English comedic actor who came to the United States in 1797, hired by Philadelphia theater manager Thomas Wignell to face, as Bernard put it, "the perils of swamps, snakes, tomahawks, and Yankees in far-off America."2 Durang was a native of small-town Pennsylvania in the revolutionary era and came to represent a hybrid of traditional folk culture and what I call in this study a "culture of empire." John Bernard, son of a British naval officer, more emphatically represented this bourgeois imperial culture in his staunch support of so-called "legitimate" theater, both in England and the United States. Their memoirs parallel each other in several ways. Both performed at the Chestnut Street Theater in Philadelphia under Wignell and Alexander Reinagle, where they probably met. Both toured in Canada—Durang with Ricketts's Circus in 1797, Bernard with his own troupe in 1810. The accounts of their separate excursions to Canada reveal how conceptions of empire took shape along class lines in the early republic period. Historians of theater in the early republic have traditionally defined theater of the period as a largely elitist institution that did not countenance the yeomanry until the Jacksonian Period. This classification began with nineteenth-century histories and has continued up to the present, creating a trope that scholars have only recently begun to examine in-depth.3 That [End Page 237] historians focused their attention almost exclusively on the so-called "legitimate" theater says as much about the historical class structure of academia as it does about the history of performance in the United States. But circuses, melodramas, pantomimes, stunts, menageries, and even fireworks were also important in the emerging cultural milieu of the early republic and vital to historical analyses of performance from this period—to say nothing of Native and African-American performances. Many players and managers aspiring to establish "legitimate" theaters ignored these popular entertainments in their memoirs, and this erasure of folk culture is apparent in the elitist literature of theater history itself.4 Considering an expanded range of performances, like those found in the memoir of John Durang, facilitates a more nuanced analysis of the imperial culture represented by European colonists and their descendants in North America. While studies along the lines of race, class, and gender are the standard corrective to the traditional "Whig" literature, one analytical tool that unites all three of these categories is the concept of empire.5 As employed in the present study, empire is defined as the expansion of market economics for the benefit of a bourgeois-dominated ruling class. This expansion included the use of economic, political, cultural, and military methods for securing resources and markets; the subjugation or elimination of consciously denoted "Others" who possess and/or control those resources; and the control of dissent—extant or potential—within the population at large.6 Utilizing the memoirs of two notable performers, this paper is a study of the interplay of both folk culture and an imperial culture of bourgeois "politeness" in the early American republic. I argue that class, race, and gender issues are all attenuated by an over-arching culture of empire that influences to varying degrees the broad spectrum of performance in existence at this time. An important conflation was occurring in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America. The culture of empire as a purveyor of "modernity" was becoming intertwined with the very old folk cultures of Europe.7 Where feudal power structures permitted such culture to persist, if not exactly prosper, the culture of capitalistic empire and modernity infiltrated traditional folk culture, formulating a hybrid that facilitated the transition to modernity. This formulation subdued the more unruly aspects of folk culture with pacifying "entertainments" that seemingly upheld traditional values of home and family while they also validated and normalized the...