The Leeward Islands Company

Abstract

It is a chilling irony that the lines of the prologue, which appear above, spoken on the opening night of a prosperous season for the American Company in Annapolis, unwittingly served as the epitaph on the last night of the Leeward Islands Company, whose playhouse on St. Croix was destroyed in the early hours of that very day, and they, themselves, heard no more. The two events remind us that, though David Douglass ultimately established his supremacy on the colonial American circuit, his American Company was by no means the only professional company that toured the Anglophone colonies. Indeed, throughout the eighteenth century, smaller, competing troupes performed a large provincial circuit that extended from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the north, to the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean. What follows is the story of one rival company and their untimely demise, a history presently unknown and as yet untold by scholars of colonial American and Caribbean theatre.