Nineteenth-Century American Theatre Research Articles

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey

Reviewed by: Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey Edel Lamb Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors. By Shauna Vey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. xv + 217 pp. Paper $40.00. Shauna Vey’s Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre is a fascinating history of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Comedians. This company of approximately thirty children toured from 1855 until 1863 performing popular plays for adult audiences. Vey impressively pieces together their activities to illuminate the economic, staging, and touring practices common to many troupes and the experiences of children in mid-nineteenth-century America. She participates in the recent scholarly trend to uncover the experiences of children through empirical and archival research to interrogate ahistorical assumptions. Vey’s book is a welcome addition to this field. She does recover some of the “lost voices” and experiences of children. Moreover, by interrogating the experiences of these professional children at “the moment just before American childhood would be utterly transformed,” she productively engages with debates around sentimental and economic understandings of childhood and questions of childhood autonomy (7). Acknowledging the paradoxical understandings of childhood at a moment in which the notion of the protected and sentimentalized child was gaining force and attitudes towards child labor were changing, Vey focuses on the professionalism of this troupe and its young performers to interrogate what it meant to be a child at this significant historical juncture. Vey’s study is a micro-history, and she persuasively asserts its value by claiming that the history of this little-known company is the “perfect vehicle for exploring the world of nineteenth-century actors and examining the societal construction of childhood, just as both were changing” (143). While she [End Page 139] draws occasional connections with other instances of children’s performance throughout history, the study is strongest when she focuses on the connections, and differences, between this juvenile troupe and wider theatrical practices and child performers in the period. The book’s careful structure facilitates the creation of an interesting narrative around the company that simultaneously engages with a series of larger thematic concerns pertinent to childhood studies. Following an introduction that ably sets out the case for the importance of this subject, six chapters explore the wider implications of child performance via a focus on different periods in the company’s brief history and its major personalities. Chapter 1 recounts the familial origins of the company by focusing on its founder, Robert Marsh, offering a vivid insight into the repertoires and practices of this novel company. Chapter 2 examines some of the difficulties faced by the company in the late 1850s and reads contractual documents and legal wrangling between Marsh and the parents of two actors, Louise Arnot and Alfred Stewart, to raise questions about the personal or collective agency of these child actors. It provides an exceptional view into the economic position of the child within cultures of labor and apprenticeship. Chapter 3 concentrates on Mary Marsh, daughter of the founder, who died in a horrific onstage accident. Analyzing her roles and contemporary perceptions of her as innocent victim, Vey proposes that her short acting career propagated the sentimentalization of the child. This chapter usefully extends Vey’s consideration of the curious paradoxes of the multiple versions of childhood in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 4 moves on to consider how the company overcame the difficulties posed by Mary’s death, the approaching civil war, and the fact that the children were aging. Vey stresses Robert Marsh’s role as a theatrical innovator as he takes advantage of opportunities to tour to California, Australia, and New Zealand. This chapter depicts the company as a professional and economic entity prepared to adapt to survive, even though, in spite of Marsh’s new strategies, the company would ultimately disband in 1863 when many of the key actors had grown up and moved on. The final two chapters return to focus on important actors: Louise Arnot, the company’s “leading man,” in chapter 5 and Georgie Marsh, the comic, in chapter 6. By charting the...

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors. By Shauna Vey . Theater in the Americas. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015; pp. xv + 224, 15 illustrations, $40 cloth, $40 e-book.

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors. By Shauna Vey . Theater in the Americas. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015; pp. xv + 224, 15 illustrations, 40 e-book. - Volume 57 Issue 3

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors. By Shauna Vey

<i>Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors</i>. By Shauna Vey

Childhood and nineteenth-century American theatre: the work of the Marsh Troupe of juvenile actors

Childhood and nineteenth-century American theatre: the work of the Marsh Troupe of juvenile actors

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey

Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors by Shauna Vey

Ars Brevis, Vita Brevis

Ars Brevis, Vita Brevis Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan (bio) Benjamin McArthur . The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle: Joseph Jefferson and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 464 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $45.00. "'I may almost say that I was born in a theatre,'" wrote actor Joseph Jefferson of himself (p. 1). Benjamin McArthur takes Jefferson's starting point as his own, patiently detailing the actor's rise from itinerant player to the millionaire celebrity whose likeness appeared on cards packed into Duke cigarette cartons. Along the way, McArthur introduces the reader to an extraordinary number of nineteenth-century actors, plays, and playhouses and to Jefferson's own Autobiography, as well as to such unexpected if modest delights as the hippodrama—a genre "acted" by horses. The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle is an engrossing work of labor history and cultural history as well as a biography. Despite what turns out to be the elusiveness of the art and the artist at its center, it is a remarkably generous and useful act of scholarship. Born in 1829, Joseph Jefferson was reared in one of the many acting clans who trod the boards in England and America. Theaters, in McArthur's description, were household economies on stage; husbands, wives, children, and grandchildren labored together (p. 2). Joe's great-grandfather was an English itinerant actor, and Joe's grandfather, who immigrated to America in 1795, was a handsome and—for a time, in this unpredictable profession—a successful comedian. Joe's father was, McArthur notes with characteristic gentleness, "noted more for affability than dramatic genius," and he seemed to find his true calling more in painting sets than in performance (p. 5). As for Jefferson's mother Cornelia, McArthur makes clear that she confronted the endless challenges of the family's itinerant, entrepreneurial life without her husband's armor of a cheerful disposition. Joe grew up in and around stages and on the road; the childhood travels that McArthur's diligent research has unearthed included journeys to Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. The Jeffersons toiled during decades when "insecurity, hunger, illness, physical danger" and penury "were common hardships" for actors (p. 31). The constant presence of family, McArthur persuasively suggests, did not always ameliorate the difficulties: [End Page 514] the combination of "chronic financial worries" and "prolonged intimacy," in which "days of group travel and rehearsal were followed by evenings together at the performance," could and did lead to simmering discontent (p. 47). Nonetheless, Joe, like many another child of the stage, never seems to have considered another profession. Deciding early on that he was suited to the light comedies that had long been his family's mainstay, the teenaged Jefferson labored to support his mother and sister after his father's early death (p. 83). Despite the vagaries of the profession and the nineteenth-century economy, Jefferson, in McArthur's apt phrase, "moved steadily forward" throughout his young manhood (p. 135). At a time when audiences craved novelty more than theatrical perfection, Jefferson mastered a huge number of roles. He also traveled doggedly from theater to theater: Charleston, South Carolina; Wilmington, North Carolina; Columbus, Georgia; Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston all found him working as an actor and, in some cases, as a stage manager. In 1857, when Jefferson was twenty-eight, the mercurial and talented Laura Keene invited him to join her company in New York City. In McArthur's words, Joe's "scrambling days were over" (p. 134). Jefferson had made himself a desirable commodity and for the rest of his life would choose his roles and his venues—venues that ranged from Melbourne, Australia, to London, and across the United States. By the final years of Jefferson's life—he died in 1905—he traveled not from theater to theater but from vacation home to vacation home; a close friend to President Grover Cleveland, he gave genial lectures on theater to admiring students at Ivy League schools, and his final illness was the subject of sorrowful interest in many of the nation's newspapers. A great deal of Jefferson's long life is recounted in this book, and the effect...

The man who was Rip van Winkle: Joseph Jefferson and nineteenth-century American theatre

The most beloved American comedic actor of the nineteenth century, Joseph Jefferson made his name as Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle. In this book, a compelling blend of biography and theatrical and cultural history, Benjamin McArthur chronicles Jefferson's remarkable career and offers a lively and original account of the heroic age of the American theatre. Joe Jefferson's entire life was spent on the stage, from the age of Jackson to the dawn of motion pictures. He extensively toured the United States as well as Australia and Great Britain. An ever-successful career (including acclaim as painter and memoirist) put him in the company of the great actors, artists, and writers of the day, including Edwin Forrest, Edwin Booth, John Singer Sargent, and William Dean Howells. This book rescues a brilliant figure and places him, appropriately enough, on center stage of a pivotal time for American theatre. McArthur explores the personalities of the period, the changing theatrical styles and their audiences, the touring life, and the wide and varied culture of theatre. Through the life of Jefferson, McArthur is able to illuminate an era.

Burlesquing “Otherness” in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Image of the Indian in John Brougham’s Met-a-mora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs (1847) and Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or, The Gentle Savage (1855).

On the 19th-century American stage, the call for a “romanticized” representation of the Indian was part of the national effort to produce an indigenous literature. The popularity of such Indian stereotypes as the resistant but rapidly vanishing Noble Savage Metamora and the acquiescent Indian Princess Pocahontas was sustained by a wider political ideology that sought to define the limits and character of a distinctly American national identity. However, the highly sentimentalized Indian stereotypes that dominated the American stage in the 1820s and 1830s gradually turned white Americans’ attention from the historical reality of the Indians, whose presence had long required political action, to the imaginative realm of myth and symbol. John Brougham, an Irish actor-playwright who immigrated to America in 1842, quickly captured the essential discrepancy in the perception of the Indian as image/fiction and the native as reality. With his two burlesques, Met-a-mora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs (1847) and Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or, The Gentle Savage (1855), Brougham signaled the end of the serious Indian dramas of the 1820s and 1830s and awakened the American audience of the time into an awareness of the absurdly false images they had been seen for so long and the excessively sentimentalized acting style they had been applauding. Through their essentially humorous approach to the national image of the Indian, Brougham’s burlesques constitute a reliable register of the social, political, and cultural context of mid-19th-century American society. His Indian characters are rendered closer to the lower classes and satirize the dominant political ideology that offered white Americans a world vision and historical sense that blurred their perception of the interaction between myth and history, thus permitting them to celebrate the Indian-symbol while abusing the native.

Dangerous flirtations: politics, the parlor, and the nineteenth-century victorian amateur actress

Parlor drama has been largely ignored by existing theatre history scholarship—a remarkable fact given that this genre had its own scripts, both published and non-published, its own theatre architecture, its own acting styles, its own evolution, an entrenched culture specific to parlor drama, a vast following (at least among those of a particular class and social status), and the ability to convey ideological concerns that forced ruptures in the social fabric of Victorian female social norms. A likely reason for this glaring absence is rooted in the fact that unlike other forms of nineteenth-century American theatre, parlor drama was both ideologically and physically situated within the domestic sphere, a historically under-valued, feminine space. For the most part, parlor drama focused on the experience of middle-class white Victorian women and conveyed reflections on that experience to mixed-gender audiences. While parlor drama limited its purview to the privacy of the home, the act of middle-class, white Victorian women peforming a range of identities in these amateur dramas had both public and radically feminist implications.

Women's Contribution to Nineteenth-Century American Theatre

Most scholars of American drama and theatre acknowledge that women's contributions to the field, especially those prior to the twentieth century, have been underrepresented. Over the past twenty-five years, scholars have begun to address a number of those glaring omissions. Women in American Theatre (New York: Crown, 1981; rev, and exp,, New York: TCG, 1987), edited by Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins, fired the first resounding salvo, addressing an enormous range of material. Faye Dudden's outstanding Women in the American Theatre: Actresses &amp; Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) provided a more focused study and insight into countless previously unknown figures. Amelia Howe Kritzer's Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) brought to the surface many plays and dramatists never before anthologized.

Stage, Page, Scandals, and Vandals: William E. Burton and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre. By David L. Rinear. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004; pp. 272. $55.00 cloth.

One of the seven titles in Southern Illinois University Press's Theatre in the Americas series, David Rinear's book elevates the early nineteenth-century actor-manager William E. Burton to the front ranks of American theatre in the period of transition from stock companies to touring stars. As Rinear writes, “no one in the theatrical or literary world of pre–Civil War America left a mark so thoroughly on his age as William E. Burton. He was lauded as the greatest comic actor of his age, and his managerial acumen provided him with a tremendous fortune” (xii). Perhaps because Burton specialized in such little-studied areas as low comedy and management, this is the first thorough study to give due attention to his career.

Stage, page, scandals, and vandals: William E. Burton and nineteenth-century American theatre

In this first modern book-length biography of native Englander William E. Burton, theatre historian David L. Rinear explores s diary, letters, published reviews, and various reminiscences to reveal the tumultuous personal and professional lives of the mid-nineteenth-century actor/manager and his role in American literary history. Page, Scandals, and Vandals: William E. and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre provides insight into the cultural and artistic climate of an early period in American history when the country was still forming a national identity.Burton fled England in 1834 and came to America in the wake of a public scandal caused by his marriage to a sixteen-year-old orphan. was then already married with a ten-year-old son. Settling in Philadelphia, the thirty-two-year-old actor rapidly established himself in the city s theatrical productions and quickly became an audience favorite.In 1837, while continuing to act, founded and edited The Gentleman s Magazine, a monthly literary publication later called Burton s Gentleman s Magazine.Burton hired struggling author Edgar Allan Poe as coeditor, and the journal achieved literary acclaim as it first published many of Poe s short stories and poems.Burton sold the journal in 1841 and used the money to build a new theatre, which he managed, although the depression of the early 1840s soon drove his venture out of business. After declaring bankruptcy the following year, worked as a touring actor before returning to theatre management in 1845. For the next thirteen years, managed a succession of theatres in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York.Burton s work as a producer of Shakespearean comedies and romances marks him as the first of the intellectual theatre managers to raise the theatrical experience from mere popular culture to high art. made a fortune in his ventures, amassed the finest private Shakespearean library in the country, and built a grand seaside estate in Glen Cove, Long Island. Shrewd in his personal affairs and in business, also had a violent temper, which led him to viciously attack his competitors. His peculiar domestic relationships marred his brilliant career as an actor, manager, and man of letters; he may have been married to three women at once and lived with two of these women simultaneously.Fully revealing s contributions to American culture, Rinear traces s personal and professional pursuits from his emigration to his death in 1860. Bolstered by twenty-two illustrations, Stage, Page, Scandals, and Vandals sheds light on the history of American entertainment during the antebellum era, exposes the ruthless business practices required to succeed in theatre and literary magazine publishing, and reveals a sense of what constituted celebrity status in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. By John W. Frick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 225 + illus. $70 cloth.

From its beginning, John W. Frick's Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America does the work of overhauling the received tradition with respect to melodrama, progressivism, the temperance movement, and social and moral reform in nineteenth-century American theatre. Frick's thesis is that “nineteenth-century temperance drama was born of the intersection of temperance motives and ideology with progressive trends in literature and the arts” (13). Though his definition of progressivism is (I think, too) broad, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform is neither a survey of temperance plays (readers are referred to two dissertations that have undertaken this work) nor a survey of progressive trends. Rather, it seeks to illustrate “stages or facets of temperance ideology and/or production” (16).

Book Revew: The Dawning of American Drama: American Dramatic Criticism, 1746- 1915

Reviewed by: The Dawning of American Drama: American Dramatic Criticism, 1746–1915 John Russell Poole The Dawning of American Drama: American Dramatic Criticism, 1746–1915. Compiled and Edited by Jürgen C. Wolter. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993; pp. 319. $59.95 cloth. Until recently, serious exploration of American dramatic criticism prior to the twentieth century has eluded the attention of theatre scholars. The inferior quality of scripts and the absence of incisive contemporary criticism prior to the advent of the realist movement are among the reasons given by Jürgen Wolter, editor of this compendium of dramatic criticism and commentary, for such neglect. Wolter systematically has investigated American theatrical and literary popular journals to provide scholars and students a resource guide to “the most representative and illuminating texts from 170 years of dramatic criticism in America” (2). This includes almost 500 firsthand accounts and “heated debates” marking the direction of the American theatre; these are narrative artifacts that Wolter regards not only as a “treasure house of cultural memorabilia” but, more importantly, as a first step in the reclamation of early American dramatic criticism (2). Representative voices articulating the merits and defects of the early American stage are compiled into five sections. Chapters 4 and 5 document Wolter’s exhaustive search for commentary on the theatre arts recovered from a wide variety of American periodicals between 1746 and 1915. He also provides a meticulous, chronological list of dramatic criticism that will serve as an indispensable resource guide for the further study of nineteenth-century American theatre. The third chapter represents the bulk of the publication; it is here that Wolter offers representative “jeremiads and eulogies” of the dramatic arts in America spanning some six generations of theatre practice. Wolter subdivides this section of developing dramatic criticism prior to 1915 into three chronological categories: the nascent period of American theatre, 1746–1789; the utility of dramatic expression as a tool for defining American character and morality from 1790 to 1860; and, lastly, the advent of realism, 1860–1915. These “mirrors of public taste” (2) reflect the developing voices of early dramatic criticism, largely a chorus of lamentation either bemoaning the poor artistic state of the theatrical institution or its threat to religious and cultural morality in colonial America. The chronology of selected “dramatic criticism” reveals the formation of the emerging national character and the discourses of topical social issues—from women’s enfranchisement through economic empowerment, to the social plays of Ibsen. More importantly, the compilation in this section brings to light the then-ubiquitous concerns regarding the proper role of the theatre within the newly formed democratic nation, particularly as a tool for shaping a national identity and value system reflective of “American follies” and “American virtues” (11). On the whole, the collection becomes something more than a narrative of the shifting theatrical scene or of the economic dynamics of entertainment. Both critics and crusaders deal with significant issues—among them, the emergence of native playwrights from the shadow of European dramatists, the rise of melodrama, the decline of touring companies, the ascendance of the star system and its debilitating effect on the dramatic maturity of the writer’s craft, and the emergence and eventual domination of first “spectacle” and later realism. Often-lengthy passages become quite striking when intersected with the polemics of national ideology and contemporary social debate. Here, the theatre becomes a host for the immutable presence of both [End Page 252] the popular and the detested. When attacked, defenders of the theatrical institution aligned the issue of public performances to that of censorship and free assembly as a test of the underpinning principles of the fledgling democracy. If conservative moralists could indeed dictate “appropriate” forms of dramatic expression from above, as was their argument, what other forms of oppression might be impressed upon the people? When the role of theatre shifted away from one of social corruption to become an “instrument for the formation of national character” (13), it served to inculcate a strong sense of nationalism through its own peculiar representations of regional characteristics. American dramatists tapped into the young nation’s raw energy to create cultural icons of American folly as well as those...

The American stage: social and economic issues from the Colonial period to the present

List of illustrations Notes on the contributors Preface Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller Acknowledgements Introduction: American theatre history scholarship Oscar G. Brockett 1. The theatre and its audience: changing modes of social organisation in the American theatre Douglas McDermott 2. Puritan mercantilism and the politics of anti-theatrical legislation in colonial America Peter A. Davis 3. 'Lady-managers' in nineteenth-century American theatre Vera Mowry Roberts 4. Hustlers in the house: the Bowery Theatre as a mode of historical information Rosemarie K. Bank 5. Museum theatre and the problem of respectability for mid-century urban Americans Bruce A. McConachie 6. Social awareness on stage: tensions mounting, 1850-1859 Walter J. Meserve 7. The development of the American theatre program Marvin Carlson 8. The Hyers Sisters: pioneers in black musical comedy Errol Hill 9. Money without glory: turn-of-the-century America's women playwrights Felicia Hardison Londre 10. 'For laughing purposes only': the literature of American popular entertainment Brooks McNamara 11. E pluribus unum: Bernhardt's 1905-1906 farewell tour Stephen M. Archer 12. Commercialism glorified and vilified: 1920s theatre and the business world Ronald H. Wainscott 13. Quicksilver revisited: a portrait of the American stage in the 1930s Charles H. Shattuck 14. The economic structure of the Federal Theatre Project Barry B. Witham 15. The American Repertory Theatre (1946-1947) and the repertory ideal, a case study Daniel J. Watermeier 16. Sojourning in Never Never Land: the idea of Hollywood in recent theatre autobiographies Thomas Postlewait 17. Consuming the past: commercial American theatre in the Reagan era Alan Woods 18. Narrative strategies in selected studies of American theatre economies Margaret M. Knapp 19. Multiculturalism versus technoculturalism: its challenge to American theatre and the functions of arts management Stephen Langley 20. Checklist of selected books on American theatre, 1960-1990 Don B. Wilmeth Index.

When they weren't doing Shakespeare: essays on nineteenth-century British and American theatre

When they weren't doing Shakespeare: essays on nineteenth-century British and American theatre

A Complex Causality of Neglect

fortunes of American drama under critical regimes both old and new and in doing so has challenged the academy, and in particular practitioners of interdisciplinary American Studies, to remedy the situation. This appeal has been presented in the pages of American Quarterly rather than American Literature, perhaps because American Studies as a newer field embracing social and cultural contexts as well as texts, cultural theory as well as audience and theatre history, may be better placed than departments of literature to provide serious examination of American drama in performance. Much of the best recent scholarship on American theatre has come from history departments: two notable contributions to the understanding of nineteenth-century American theatre, for example, are the work of ASA scholars approaching the theatre from social and cultural history. David Grimsted's Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) and Lawrence Levine's William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation, American Historical Review 84 (February 1984) build from specific details of playscript, production history, and audience reception larger interpretations of the functions of certain dramas for their only partly visible popular audiences. Both pieces set a high standard for a new, integrated scholarship of American