Reviewed by: Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Jeffrey H. Richards Tice L. Miller . Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi + 229. 37.50. Tice Miller's new book covers two centuries of theatrical and dramatic activity in about 180 pages of text, enough to mention key writers, plays, and periods without expounding very much critically or culturally on any one playwright or work. The first chapter covers the colonial period; the second, the early republic; the third, the Jacksonian period; the fourth, the antebellum and postbellum history of melodrama; and the fifth, the rise of realism at century's end. While much of the first chapter properly focuses on the British staples that first appeared on North American colonial stages, it concludes with mention of a few writers and plays from the Revolutionary period. Thereafter, except to note certain influential foreign dramas (often French) that stimulated American productions, Miller focuses almost exclusively on plays written by U.S. American playwrights. In his view, the march of American drama is a long one towards American materials treated freshly—something that, in his analysis, does not occur until the twentieth century. Miller covers a lot of ground with economy. He notes in chapter 1, for instance, the popularity of such writers as Shakespeare, Centlivre, Farquhar, Addison, Bickerstaffe, and Garrick to New World theaters, with mention of a few other vehicles, such as Stevens's Lecture on Heads, that proved malleable scripts when colonial managers faced opposition to theater per se, but avoids critical engagement with these works. As an illustration of his basic method, he rightly notes the popularity of Bickerstaffe's comic opera The Padlock and its blackface servant Mungo, played in British America by Lewis Hallam, Jr., but does not engage with the deployment of race in the play. This pattern of identifying key plays with often complex social signifiers, but for the most part skirting the issues such signifiers raise, holds for much of the book. On the one hand, Miller clearly knows his stuff on the dramatic world of early America and packs in a lot of information in a small space; but, on the other, he has to sacrifice critical judgments of the ways the drama might have interacted with the culture of the period. This approach [End Page 511] is more or less consistent throughout, reflecting the limitations imposed upon the project, to be sure—he can only say so much in a short book—but having to ignore the cultural studies approach that has enriched recent work on the drama. Miller confines his discussion of native-authored texts to a few well-known pieces, such as Robert Hunter's Androboros, Robert Rogers's Ponteach, Mercy Warren's political plays, and Robert Munford's The Patriots, along with Thomas Godfrey's The Prince of Parthia and Thomas Forrest's The Disappointment. These are all signal texts and all well known to scholars of eighteenth-century American drama, but the scope of the book means Miller must leave out others, equally of interest, such as the other Revolutionary political plays by both whigs and tories. In this regard, then, readers would want to supplement Miller's first-chapter discussion with a book like Jason Shaffer's recent Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (2007) for a fuller context. For new republican drama, Miller hits many of the important figures: Royall Tyler, William Dunlap, Susanna Rowson, James Nelson Barker, and John Howard Payne. The discussion of Dunlap is noteworthy for Miller's stress on Dunlap as a translator of Kotzebue and the importance of the German-language writer to the development of early American theater, a fact that needs to be emphasized for understanding the stage of the 1790s. Miller also charts the rise of Yankee theater and correctly identifies Samuel Woodworth's The Forest Rose as a key text in the repopularization of the Yankee as an indigenous theatrical type. Again, though, The Forest Rose, a well-known musical comedy in its day, contains within its Yankee humor a deeply racist, often vicious characterization...