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American Literature
DIR By: iulianstoian
Date: January 13, 2015, 6:57 pm
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American Literature: Drama, literature intended for performance,
written by Americans in the English language. American drama
begins in the American colonies in the 17th century and
continues to the present. r6j20jk
Most American plays of the 18th and 19th centuries strongly
reflected British influence. In fact, no New York City theater
season presented more American plays than British plays until
1910. The reasons behind this phenomenon are complex, but a
common language and the ready availability of British plays and
British actors offer the most obvious explanation.
Although the British repertory dominated the American stage for
so long, American drama had begun to diverge from British drama
by the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, from 1828 to 1836.
British plays, which typically reflected the attitudes and
manners of the upper classes, were by then in conflict with more
egalitarian American values. Despite this growing divergence,
British actors, theater managers, and plays continued to cross
the Atlantic Ocean with regularity, and most American plays
copied British models until the early 20th century. For this
reason some critics claim that American drama was not born until
the end of World War I (1914-1918).
By the end of the 19th century American drama was moving
steadily toward realism, illuminating the rough or seamy side of
life and creating more believable characters. Realism remained
the dominant trend of the 20th century in both comedies and
tragedies. American drama achieved international recognition
with the psychological realism of plays by Eugene O’Neill and
their searing investigation of characters’ inner lives. As the
century advanced, the number of topics considered suitable for
drama broadened to encompass race, gender, sexuality, and death.
Beginnings: 1600s AND 1700s
Because settlement was sparse and living conditions were arduous
in the American colonies, little theatrical activity took place
before the mid-18th century. The first-known English-language
play from the colonies, Ye Bare and Ye Cubb (1665), is lost. The
play’s existence is known as a result of the controversy it
aroused in the Virginia Colony, where a lawsuit was filed to
prevent the play from opening. Several colonies had passed
antitheater laws based on a Puritan belief that the seventh of
the Ten Commandments prohibited dancing and stage plays.
The oldest surviving American play is Androborus by Robert
Hunter (1714). Hunter, the New York Colony’s governor, published
the cartoonish play as an attack on his political enemies,
despite New York’s antitheater law. Intended for a reading
public rather than a viewing audience, it established a
tradition of political satire that became common fare in
American drama of the 1700s.
Before more American plays had appeared, a company of British
professional actors established a touring circuit in the 1750s
with an all-British repertory. By the early 1760s this group was
known as The American Company and American writers occasionally
submitted plays to the actors, though few were produced. But in
1767 The American Company staged The Prince of Parthia, a
tragedy by Thomas Godfrey, in Philadelphia. This is usually
considered the first professional production of a play written
by an American. The play itself is indistinguishable from
imitations of the works of English dramatist William Shakespeare
that abounded in Britain in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
During the American Revolution (1775-1783), most professional
actors moved to Jamaica. Satirical plays were written as
propaganda during the war, either supporting British control of
the colonies or attacking it. British soldiers presented some of
the pro-British plays. Few other plays were performed during the
war years, although they were widely read and recited. The
Battle of Brooklyn (1776), which was pro-British and written
anonymously, presented rebel generals, including George
Washington, as drunks, lechers, and cowards. The Blockade
(1775), written by British General John Burgoyne, was performed
in British-occupied Boston. The play’s ridicule of American
soldiers was subsequently burlesqued in The Blockheads; or the
Affrighted Officers (1776), written by an anonymous playwright
identified only as a patriot. The Blockheads depicts British
soldiers as so terrified of the Americans that they soil
themselves rather than go outside to use the latrine. Mercy Otis
Warren, who created several biting satires of the British, may
have written The Blockheads as well. She remained the strongest
American dramatic voice of the Revolution and championed the
rebel cause in The Group (1775), a play that describes Britain,
called Blunderland, as a mother who eats her own children. The
Patriots (1775?), a play by Robert Munford, was unusual in its
appeal for a neutral stance and its attacks on both sides for
their intolerance.
By the mid-1780s professional actors were touring in America
again. In 1787, when the Constitution of the United States was
being written, Royall Tyler wrote The Contrast, the finest
American play of the 18th century. This five-act comedy owes
much to The School for Scandal (1777) by British playwright
Richard Sheridan. Like Sheridan’s play, The Contrast is a comedy
of manners that satirizes the customs of the upper classes. It
compares British and American fashions and values and ultimately
sides with what it sees as American candor and patriotism over
British duplicity and artificiality. A masterful element of the
play is the Yankee character Jonathan, whose honest innocence
stands in stark contrast to the rumormongering and gossiping of
the play’s British characters and the American characters that
emulate them.
The 1700s also saw the first American play written by a woman
reach the professional stage. The melodramatic comedy Slaves in
Algiers (1794) by Susanna Rowson reflects troubles at that time
with pirates along North Africa’s Barbary Coast who interfered
with shipping and ran a white slave trade that involved selling
girls and women into prostitution. Although the villain was
treated comically, the conflict and resolution in this play
indicated a move toward melodrama, a form of drama that became
extremely popular in the 19th century.
Nationhood: The 1800s
American plays, while still a minority, began to appear in the
theater repertory in the 19th century. Although American plays
were still styled after British models, their subject matter
came to be based on specifically American incidents or themes.
In the United States as in Britain, many plays reflected the
influence of romanticism, a European literary and artistic
movement. Melodrama, with its outpourings of emotion, was the
most prevalent dramatic form in the 19th century. Gothic
melodramas, which emphasized horror, mystery, and the
supernatural, and melodramas with tragic endings appeared
regularly in American theaters from the 1790s on—in many cases
adapted or translated from German, French, and British plays.
American Themes
The first prolific writer of melodramas was William Dunlap, who
also translated several German plays for production in the
United States. Dunlap adapted Revolutionary War history in André
(1798), a fictionalized account of the final days of British spy
Major John André. In 1803 Dunlap reshaped the play as a musical,
Glory of Columbia, in which George Washington is elevated to
divine status. It was an early example of spectacle dominating
dramatic content. Dunlap took spectacle even further in A Trip
to Niagara (1828) by making the play’s purpose the duplication
of scenic wonders that the audience would recognize, such as
Niagara Falls.
Replication of local color, as in A Trip to Niagara, became the
norm in 19th-century American melodrama and encompassed details
of scenery, dialects, and gestures representative of specific
locations; contemporary slang, and historical incidents. An
early example is She Would Be a Soldier (1819) by Mordecai Noah.
The play depicts the military spectacle of the War of 1812
between the United States and Britain and features a heroine who
disguises herself as a soldier to help the American cause and
join the man she loves.
Although American drama of the 19th century usually followed
European models, its subject matter often came from specifically
American situations. Superstition (1824), a romantic tragedy by
James Nelson Barker, for example, was set in New England of
1675. It discussed conflicts between Native Americans and white
settlers, British interference in local affairs, Puritan
xenophobia (fear and dislike of foreigners), and the idea of
witchcraft. Superstition, in which the hero is tried and
executed for witchcraft, was the first of many American plays to
explore themes of isolationism, bigotry, and intolerance.
Barker’s The Indian Princess (1808) was the first professionally
produced play to explore Native American characters and themes.
It told the story of Pocahontas, a Native American who married
an English colonist. A vogue for so-called Indian plays began in
the 1820s and continued through the 1840s. While the Pocahontas
story was popular in these plays, the most famous such drama was
Metamora, or The Last of the Wampanoags (1829) by John Augustus
Stone. It was written as a vehicle for American actor Edwin
Forrest, who began in 1828 to offer annual awards for new plays
on American themes and gave Metamora first prize. This melodrama
was typical of most Indian plays in its setting in an earlier
period of frontier history (the 1670s) and its characterization
of the Native American hero. Metamora was viewed as natural but
uncivilized—that is, living in harmony with nature but
unfamiliar with what European settlers saw as civilized ways.
The play put forth sentiments in harmony with white values and
ended with Metamora’s inevitable death as the representative of
a displaced race that cannot survive with the white man. By
mid-century the waning importance of Indian plays was signaled
by works that lampooned them. Irish-born playwright John
Brougham, for example, wrote Metamora, or the Last of the
Pollywogs (1847), a musical burlesque that made fun of the
idealized and earnest original.
Also in the 1820s an African American acting troupe called the
African Theatre was organized in New York City by dramatist
William Henry Brown. The troupe produced plays by Shakespeare as
well as African American plays, including The Drama of King
Shotaway (1823) written by Brown. Although Indian plays of the
1820s and 1830s written by whites preached tolerance and
understanding for Native Americans, white toughs chased Brown’s
company off the stage, and no copies survive of the African
American plays it produced.
American romantic plays took various forms. But without the
American slant in subject matter, it would be difficult to
distinguish these plays from British melodrama and romantic
tragedy. What may be the best American play of the time,
Francesca da Rimini (1855), is a romantic verse tragedy by
George Henry Boker about an Italian noblewoman of the 14th
century. It presents a villainous fool, a forbidden love affair,
and a grotesque, semi-villainous hunchback in the role of the
protagonist. However, nothing in the play’s characters and
setting or its imitation of Shakespearean style marks the play
as American.
Forms of Melodrama
Melodrama was the most pervasive dramatic genre of the 19th
century. Melodramas were typically overflowing with emotion, set
in mysterious locations, and peopled with stereotypical
characters: heartless villains, heroines in distress, and strong
heroes who faced almost insurmountable odds in rescuing those
heroines.
Frontier melodrama enthralled audiences in the first half of the
19th century. Nick of the Woods (1838) by Louisa Medina
capitalized on the spectacle, romance, and danger of the
frontier—for example, when the title character escapes his
pursuers by plunging over a waterfall in a burning canoe.
Playwrights repeatedly glorified backwoodsmen and moved toward
making Native American characters into villains. One of the most
successful frontier melodramas, Davy Crockett (1872) by Frank
Murdoch, featured the so-called natural gentleman. This
character had developed from an earlier view of the Native
American but was now white and considered a gentleman, despite
his life outside society and his uncouth ways.
Another form of melodrama was the temperance play, which
illustrated the evils of alcohol and supported a ban on its
sale. An example is The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (1844) by
W. H. Smith. Temperance plays had American locations and were
staged frequently from the 1830s until the Civil War
(1861-1865), though they continued to be produced until passage
in 1917 of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the
manufacture and sale of alcohol. Most of these plays included
scenes of the acute stages of alcoholism; featured protagonists
who are lured into alcoholism by villains; and showed the
victims losing everything until the play’s climax, when they
convert to abstinence and regain their life and family. Because
the formulas of the plays accommodated moral lessons important
to social crusaders and reformers of the period, temperance
plays attracted audiences formerly opposed to the theater.
Melodramatic comedy appeared frequently in the 1800s, while
comedies of manners, so popular in the previous century, were
rare. A notable exception and one of the most successful and
well-written plays of the 19th century was Fashion (1845) by
Anna Cora Mowatt. Yet what most tellingly distinguished Fashion
from earlier American comedies, such as The Contrast, were its
melodramatic subplot and its heroine in distress. In the play, a
newly wealthy woman attempts to marry her unwitting daughter to
a morally corrupt French count. While satirizing Americans who
imitate European manners, it also prescribed a cure for this
so-called disease of imitation through extended exposure to a
rural environment. Like frontier melodramas, the play urged
Americans to resist British cultural models.
Racial, social, and economic tensions in American society before
the Civil War period found a way into popular drama, most
successfully in stage adaptations of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sentimental versions of the
novel filled so many professional stages that this material was
performed more often than any other American play of the time.
An 1852 adaptation by George Aiken was the most enduring
version. Stage adaptations of novels proliferated from the 1850s
until motion pictures took over the tradition in the 20th
century. Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), a stage
adaptation of the novel The Quadroon (1856) by Mayne Reid, is
the most well crafted melodrama on the subject of slavery and
racism in the mid-19th century. It combines local color from
Louisiana, ethnic mixes, spectacle in the form of a burning
steamboat, and a tragic heroine whose ancestry (a black
great-grandparent) prevents her from marrying the man she loves.
A Shift Toward Realism Drama after the Civil War was marked by
greater realism. Playwrights created plays in three-dimensional
settings with characters speaking authentic-sounding dialogue.
Beginning in the late 1870s European theater reached profound
levels of psychological realism, prompted by the work of
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. While melodramatic plots
still prevailed in late-19th-century American theater, several
American playwrights began to move in the direction of Ibsen.
Shenandoah (1888) by Bronson Howard told the story of two
friends who attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point
together, fought on opposite sides in the Civil War, and loved
the other’s sister. Despite the plot complications, the play
revisited the war with realistic detail and found enormous
popularity with audiences because of its combination of
melodramatic tension and comic romance. A master of melodrama in
a realistic style was actor and playwright William Gillette, who
excited audiences with his own Civil War thrillers. In Secret
Service (1896), for example, Gillette played a Northern spy
working in Virginia.
Other late-19th-century playwrights whose works marked the
gradual move toward realism included Steele Mackaye and William
Dean Howells. In Hazel Kirke (1880) by Mackaye, the title
character defies her father by marrying the man she loves,
rather than the man he has chosen for her. A melodrama without a
villain, the play was also notable for its more natural
dialogue. Howells, best known as a novelist and critic,
advocated realism in literature generally. Many of his short
comic plays, such as The Mouse Trap (1889), were set in Boston’s
Back Bay neighborhood, focused on a single incident involving a
married couple, and incorporated believable dialogue.
Howells also championed the work of other writers, including
actor and playwright James Herne, whose work came closest to
Ibsen’s. However, Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890) upset too many
American audiences with its harsh, raw treatment of infidelity
and marital distress, and its power was recognized only by later
generations. Herne had more success with gentler realism in such
plays as Shore Acres (1892), in which two brothers finally gain
an understanding of one another in old age.
The Modern Era: The 1900s
Realism continued to be a primary form of dramatic expression in
the 20th century, even as experimentation in both the content
and the production of plays became increasingly important. Such
renowned American playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee
Williams, and Arthur Miller reached profound new levels of
psychological realism, commenting through individual characters
and their situations on the state of American society in
general. As the century progressed, the most powerful drama
spoke to broad social issues, such as civil rights and the AIDS
crisis, and the individual’s position in relation to those
issues. Individual perspectives in mainstream theater became far
more diverse and more closely reflected the increasingly complex
demographics of American society.
Before World War I: 1900-1914 Realism reached new levels in the
prewar work of David Belasco and Clyde Fitch, both of whom
directed their own plays. Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West
(1905) sentimentally recreated a rural California town of the
mid-19th-century Gold Rush days, while Fitch’s The City (1909)
explored the evils of shady business deals and drug addiction.
Realistic portrayals of sensational subjects also flourished in
many plays of this era. For example, The Easiest Way (1909), by
Eugene Walter, dramatized the situation of a kept woman whose
acceptance of financial support from one man leads to her
rejection by the man she loves.
Social tensions in the United States began to preoccupy
dramatists in the years leading up to World War I (1914-1918).
An early example of this was The Great Divide (1906) by William
Vaughn Moody. The story of a New England woman’s move to
Arizona, the play juxtaposed a Western, rural sensibility
against an Eastern, urban one. The most prolific of prewar
playwrights with a social agenda was Rachel Crothers, who
addressed such issues as society’s double standard for men and
women in A Man’s World (1909). The New York Idea (1906), a
social satire by Langdon Mitchell, managed to entertain while
commenting meaningfully on divorce. The American family, and its
development and disintegration, was a recurring theme of
playwrights at this time, and it would dominate much American
playwriting for the rest of the 20th century.
From World War I to World War II: 1914-1939 With World War I,
European developments in modern drama arrived on the American
stage in force. A host of American playwrights were intent on
experimenting with dramatic style and form while also writing
serious sociopolitical commentary. From this time forward
Britain’s influence, although never absent, became much less
important to American drama.
One of the first groups to promote new American drama was the
Provincetown Players, founded in 1915 in Provincetown,
Massachusetts. The play Trifles (1916) by Susan Glaspell, a
subtle study in sexism, was among its first productions.
Glaspell’s husband, George Cram Cook, headed the company but its
star was Eugene O’Neill, the most experimental of American
playwrights in the 1920s. O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922) was one
of the first plays to introduce expressionism in America.
Expressionism was a movement in the visual, literary, and
performing arts that developed in Germany in the early 20th
century, in part in reaction against realism. Expressionism
emphasized subjective feelings and emotions rather than a
detailed or objective depiction of reality. The Hairy Ape
depicts a rejected ship laborer who feels he belongs nowhere
until he confronts an ape in a zoo. He sets the caged animal
free only to be destroyed by it.
American expressionism was distinguished from its German
forebears by a searching focus on the inner life of the central
character, whose detailed depiction is in stark contrast to all
other characters. The most famous example of American
expressionism is The Adding Machine (1923) by Elmer Rice, a play
that focuses on the emotional journey of the leading character,
Mr. Zero, after he is replaced at his job by an adding machine.
Rice was the first playwright to demonstrate silent film’s
influence on theater in On Trial (1914), which borrowed the
flashback technique. Some of the most novel expressionist
experiments employed collage-like scenic effects and cacophonous
musical and sound techniques to explore social issues. Such
plays include Processional (1925), a depiction of a West
Virginia miners’ strike by John Howard Lawson, and Machinal
(1928), a bleak study by Sophie Treadwell of the destruction of
a young woman.
The Glory Days The 1920s was the most prolific decade for
professionally produced plays on the New York City stage. During
the so-called glory days of the 1920s and early 1930s audiences
saw incisive and exciting American drama. What Price Glory
(1924) by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson was set in
France during World War I. Its portrayal of two soldiers’
behavior satirized the often-romanticized vision of warfare.
Anderson tried to reinvigorate drama in verse with such plays as
Winterset (1935).
During this period O’Neill reached for greatness with vast
five-hour plays. Strange Interlude (1928), a nine-act play,
explored through its leading female characters the way in which
hidden psychological processes affect outward actions. It was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1928. Mourning Becomes
Electra (1931), a trilogy, was a powerful adaptation of three
ancient Greek tragedies by Aeschylus that told the story of
Orestes and are known as the Oresteia. Set in New England after
the Civil War (which replaces the Trojan War of the Oresteia),
Mourning Becomes Electra recounts the moral, emotional, and
physical destruction of two generations of the Mannon family,
emphasizing the far-reaching consequences of adultery, incest,
jealousy, and vengeance. Both plays capture O’Neill’s lifelong
investigation of the human condition and the forces that plague
humankind. In 1936 O’Neill became the first American playwright
to win a Nobel Prize for literature.
Also in the 1920s and early 1930s, comedies of manners made a
comeback through delightfully glib, lightly satirical plays such
as Philip Barry’s Holiday (1928), about a man who decides to
enjoy his newly made fortune while he is still young. In a later
comedy of manners, End of Summer (1936) by S. N. Behrman, a
flighty, middle-aged socialite pursues both fascist and
left-wing men in an attempt to remain a player in a world
quickly passing her by.
African American characters became more visible in plays of this
period. In the play In Abraham’s Bosom (1926) by Paul Green, the
main character, whose father is white and mother is black, works
to help his black community but is defeated by the racial
prejudice of both whites and blacks. In Abraham’s Bosom won the
1927 Pulitzer Prize for drama. White playwrights wrote most of
the plays featuring black characters from this period, while
black playwrights remained on the margins of the theater world
until the 1950s.
Even the musical was overhauled in the bustling theatrical
activity of the 1920s and early 1930s. Most notably, lyricist
Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern teamed up to
create Show Boat (1927), a musical production adapted from a
novel of the same name by American author Edna Ferber. This was
the first American musical to fully integrate a musical score
with meaningful and consistent dialogue and lyrics.
The Great Depression
American theater attendance declined severely in the 1930s and
after, primarily as a result of new sound technology that gave
motion pictures a voice. But films were not the only drain on
theater attendance. The economic collapse of the Great
Depression of the 1930s closed many theaters permanently. The
austerity of the 1930s inspired a new wave of hard-edged drama
that tackled economic suffering, left-wing political ideologies,
fascism, and fears of another world war. European agitprop
techniques, which used literature and the arts for political
propaganda, animated many plays about the working class. The
most famous of these plays is Waiting for Lefty (1935) by
Clifford Odets. In the play taxi drivers decide to go on strike,
but the true concern of the play is a more abstract debate over
the pros and cons of capitalism. Odets also wrote one of the
finest expressions of 1930s anxieties, Awake and Sing! (1935),
in which a Marxist grandfather commits suicide for his family’s
financial benefit, and his grandson ultimately dedicates himself
and the life insurance money to helping his community rather
than seeking better opportunities elsewhere.
The plays of Lillian Hellman also displayed a social conscience.
Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), in which a child’s
vengeful anger causes the downfall of a school and the two women
who run it, explored the devastating effects of evil in an
intolerant society. Langston Hughes paved the way for acceptance
of African American drama with his successful play Mulatto
(1935), about the complexity of race relations. The global scale
of fears in the 1930s was reflected in the plays of Robert
Sherwood, whose satirical attack on weapons manufacturers in
Idiot’s Delight (1936) predicted the impending world cataclysm
of World War II. It was awarded the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for
drama.
Postwar Drama: 1945-1960
During World War II (1939-1945) little drama of note appeared
that was neither escapist fare nor wartime propaganda. With the
end of hostilities, however, two playwrights emerged who would
dominate dramatic activity for the next 15 years or so: Arthur
Miller and Tennessee Williams. Miller combined realistic
characters and a social agenda while also writing modern
tragedy, most notably in Death of a Salesman (1949), a tale of
the life and death of the ordinary workingman Willy Loman.
Miller’s The Crucible (1953), a story about the 17th-century
Salem witch trials, was a parable for a hunt for Communists in
the 1950s led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
Tennessee Williams, one of America’s most lyrical dramatists,
contributed many plays about social misfits and outsiders. In A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a neurotic, impoverished Southern
woman fights to maintain her illusions of gentility when forced
to confront the truth about her life by her sister’s
working-class husband. Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955),
which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, similarly focused on
pretense and its destructiveness and destruction in an unhappy
family.
The 1940s also launched lighthearted musicals, most notably a
series with lyrics and score by the productive partnership of
librettist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Richard Rodgers.
Their first collaboration, the love story Oklahoma! (1943), set
the style for musicals until the 1960s with its thorough
integration of text and music.
Realism continued strongly in the 1950s with character studies
of society’s forgotten people. Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) by
William Inge told the story of the unfulfilled lives of an
alcoholic doctor and his wife. O’Neill’s painful
autobiographical play, Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956),
considered his masterpiece by many critics, premiered after the
playwright’s death in 1953. The play chronicled a day in the
life of the Tyrone family, during which family members
inexorably confront one another’s flaws and failures.
In the late 1950s African American playwriting received a
tremendous boost with the highly acclaimed Raisin in the Sun
(1959), the story of a black family and how they handle a
financial windfall. Written by Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in
the Sun was the first Broadway production to be directed by an
African American, Lloyd Richards. Also at the end of the 1950s
the semiabsurdist plays of Edward Albee, starting with Zoo Story
(1959), caught the American imagination with their psychological
danger and intelligent dialogue. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? (1962) depicted the destructive relationship of
a married couple primarily through their verbal abuse.
The Mainstream Redefined: The 1960s to the 1990s
The civil rights movement and antiwar protests of the mid-1960s
exploded in drama as regional and experimental theaters
proliferated and many talented new dramatists came to the fore.
Experimental theater companies, including the Living Theater and
the Open Theater, experimented with group dynamics by placing
performers and audience members in the same physical space. The
Serpent (1968) by Jean-Claude Van Itallie, which used this
elimination of physical barriers between actors and audience,
recreated Biblical stories through the depiction of modern,
often politically charged, events and images, for instance the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. Megan Terry’s plays, such as
Calm Down Mother (1965), experimented with traditional dramatic
structure through actor transformations, wherein one actor in
any given piece would be playing multiple roles and would switch
between characters without apparent transition. Terry, and other
feminist playwrights, challenged contemporary social codes of
behavior in their presentation of different points of view,
giving voice to traditionally disenfranchised members of
American culture—for example, lesbian women. Many African
American voices had a confrontational edge. In his violent
Dutchman (1964), Amiri Baraka portrayed white society’s fear and
hatred of an educated black protagonist. The autobiographical
Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962) by Adrienne Kennedy addressed the
difficulties of being an American of mixed racial ancestry.
Horror stories of the Vietnam War (1959-1975) found their way
into drama for several decades, most notably in Indians (1969)
by Arthur Kopit, Streamers (1976) by David Rabe, and Redwood
Curtain (1993) by Lanford Wilson.
Small-scale musicals, such as the modern romance The Fantasticks
(1960), written by Tom Jones with music by Harvey Schmidt, and
the antiwar rock musical Hair (1967), by Gerome Ragni and James
Rado, became long-running hits and continued to influence plays
in the late 20th century. Plays that dealt openly with
homosexuality also found large audiences, starting in the 1960s.
They included Boys in the Band (1968) by Mart Crowley, Torch
Song Trilogy (1981) by Harvey Fierstein, and Love! Valour!
Compassion! (1995) by Terrence McNally. Neil Simon emerged as
the premiere playwright of comedies for several decades with
such works as The Odd Couple (1965), about two bachelors living
together, and the autobiographical Brighton Beach Memoirs
(1983), about a lower middle class Jewish family.
Sam Shepard and David Mamet loomed large in American drama of
the 1970s, much as Miller and Williams had in the 1950s.
Shepard’s hard-edged drama, which explored the American family
and the often-destructive myths of the American West, was most
biting in Buried Child (1978) and True West (1980). Buried Child
won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Mamet created a darkly
comic style that imitated the fragmented speech of the
inarticulate and employed profanity as nearly every part of
speech. Mamet’s American Buffalo (1975) used a Chicago junk shop
as a symbol of American capitalism, and his Pulitzer-Prize
winning Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) depicted the moral decay
brought about by the win-at-all-costs ethic of the American
salesman.
The movement known as postmodernism found expression in the
American theater chiefly through staging and direction, rather
than through the plays themselves. Postmodern staging and design
tended toward the minimal and sometimes incorporated images from
earlier plays and productions. Postmodern directors sought to
uncover multiple layers of meaning in a play. Feminist
playwrights sometimes effectively appropriated these approaches.
Fefu and Her Friends (1977) and The Conduct of Life (1985), both
by Maria Irene Fornés, used spatial experiments, such as moving
the audience from room to room instead of changing stage
scenery. Wendy Wasserstein more safely explored the complex
social issues raised by the women’s movement in Uncommon Women
and Others (1977) and The Heidi Chronicles (1988), which won the
1989 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
In the late 1970s Lanford Wilson had success with realistic
ensemble pieces, which had large casts and no one central
character. His works, such as The Fifth of July (1978),
perpetuated the ensemble tradition of Odets, Williams, and Inge.
American musicals also enjoyed experimental developments in the
work of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. His romantic A
Little Night Music (1973) was written entirely in three-four
times, and his Into the Woods (1987) refashioned traditional
fairy tales for adults.
By the 1980s many American playwrights found themselves tied to
topics of current interest. The Normal Heart (1985) by Larry
Kramer confronted the devastation wrought by the AIDS crisis.
‘Night Mother (1983) by Marsha Norman discussed the question of
when suicide might be justifiable. In his M. Butterfly (1988),
David Henry Hwang artfully examined the famous opera Madama
Butterfly (1904), by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, and the
ways in which Western civilization feminizes Eastern
civilization.
In the 1980s two new playwrights repeatedly took audiences into
new territory, while expressing themselves in language as far
apart as their subject matter. August Wilson set about creating
a history of the African American experience in the 20th century
in narrowly focused domestic dramas. Fences (1983) portrayed
conflicts between father and son as the result of their coming
of age in different eras. The Piano Lesson (1990) focused on
conflicts between a brother and sister over selling a family
heirloom to buy the land that they work and that their ancestors
worked as slaves. Both plays won Pulitzer Prizes. Eric Overmyer
harnessed sophisticated language, satire, and vibrant
theatricality to dissect a corrupt social and political
infrastructure in On the Verge (1986) and In Perpetuity
Throughout the Universe (1988).
A central event in drama of the 1990s was the two-part Angels in
America by Tony Kushner. The two parts, titled Millennium
Approaches (1991) and Perestroika (1993), won a Pulitzer Prize
in 1993; Tony Awards for best play followed in 1991 and 1994.
Angels in America follows eight characters over a six-year
period, chronicling the effects of AIDS on their lives. Through
its subject matter, bright humor, and visual theatricality
Angels in America inspired audiences across the country.
The 1990s also saw the return of exciting domestic drama by
playwrights assumed by many to have finished their careers:
Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass (1994) and Edward Albee’s Three
Tall Women (1994) received popular and critical acclaim. Younger
established playwrights continued to challenge audiences, mostly
in small or regional theaters. Mamet’s Oleanna (1992)
investigated sexual harassment. Overmyer’s Dark Rapture (1992)
combined crime, greed, and sex in the style of motion-picture
thrillers. Wilson’s Seven Guitars (1995) revisited the black
experience in 1940s America. Wasserstein’s An American Daughter
(1997) looked at gender politics in Washington, D.C. Sondheim’s
musicals became darker in his treatment of presidential
assassination in Assassins (1990) and out-of-control love and
guilt in Passion (1994).
Recent Trends The direction of American drama presented
troubling questions as the 20th century drew to a close.
Economic woes of regional and experimental theaters resulted in
a multitude of plays with a single setting and no more than two
or three characters, which made them less expensive to produce.
The aging of American theater audiences and competition from
other forms of entertainment also endangered drama’s future.
Theaters were rejecting many large-scale plays as too risky and
unlikely to draw big enough audiences to cover production
expenses. Consequently, musicals, which were reliable
crowd-pleasers, and revivals dominated Broadway theater seasons.
Almost all nonmusical plays originated in regional theaters. The
expense of touring productions meant that most new plays reached
a geographically diverse audience only if they were adapted to
motion pictures or television. Many playwrights appeared to
write with a film or television adaptation in mind, a tendency
accentuated by the fact that motion-picture companies owned many
theaters and producing organizations.
Although experimentation continued and poignant subject matter
was still addressed in some quarters, many playwrights worried
that American theater had become too conservative in its
mainstream and too specialized in its smaller venues. The chief
concern as the 20th century ended was whether the 21st century
would provide enough opportunities for strong new dramatic
voices.
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), English playwright and poet,
recognized in much of the world as the greatest of all
dramatists. Shakespeare’s plays communicate a profound knowledge
of the wellsprings of human behavior, revealed through
portrayals of a wide variety of characters. His use of poetic
and dramatic means to create a unified aesthetic effect out of a
multiplicity of vocal expressions and actions is recognized as a
singular achievement, and his use of poetry within his plays to
express the deepest levels of human motivation in individual,
social, and universal situations is considered one of the
greatest accomplishments in literary history.
Life
A complete, authoritative account of Shakespeare’s life is
lacking, and thus much supposition surrounds relatively few
facts. It is commonly accepted that he was born in 1564, and it
is known that he was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon,
Warwickshire. The third of eight children, he was probably
educated at the local grammar school. As the eldest son,
Shakespeare ordinarily would have been apprenticed to his
father’s shop so that he could learn and eventually take over
the business, but according to one account he was apprenticed to
a butcher because of declines in his father’s financial
situation. According to another account, he became a
schoolmaster. In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, the
daughter of a farmer. He is supposed to have left Stratford
after he was caught poaching in the deer park of Sir Thomas
Lucy, a local justice of the peace. Shakespeare and Anne
Hathaway had a daughter in 1583 and twins—a boy and a girl—in
1585. The boy did not survive.
Shakespeare apparently arrived in London about 1588 and by 1592
had attained success as an actor and a playwright. Shortly
thereafter he secured the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd
Earl of Southampton. The publication of Shakespeare’s two
fashionably erotic narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and
The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and of his Sonnets (published 1609,
but circulated previously in manuscript form) established his
reputation as a gifted and popular poet of the Renaissance (14th
century to 17th century). The Sonnets describe the devotion of a
character, often identified as the poet himself, to a young man
whose beauty and virtue he praises and to a mysterious and
faithless dark lady with whom the poet is infatuated. The
ensuing triangular situation, resulting from the attraction of
the poet’s friend to the dark lady, is treated with passionate
intensity and psychological insight. Shakespeare’s modern
reputation, however, is based primarily on the 38 plays that he
apparently wrote, modified, or collaborated on. Although
generally popular in his time, these plays were frequently
little esteemed by his educated contemporaries, who considered
English plays of their own day to be only vulgar entertainment.
Shakespeare’s professional life in London was marked by a number
of financially advantageous arrangements that permitted him to
share in the profits of his acting company, the Chamberlain’s
Men, later called the King’s Men, and its two theaters, the
Globe Theatre and the Blackfriars. His plays were given special
presentation at the courts of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I
more frequently than those of any other contemporary dramatist.
It is known that he risked losing royal favor only once, in
1599, when his company performed “the play of the deposing and
killing of King Richard II“ at the request of a group of
conspirators against Elizabeth. In the subsequent inquiry,
Shakespeare’s company was absolved of complicity in the
conspiracy.
After about 1608, Shakespeare’s dramatic production lessened and
it seems that he spent more time in Stratford, where he had
established his family in an imposing house called New Place and
had become a leading local citizen. He died in 1616, and was
buried in the Stratford church.
Works
Although the precise date of many of Shakespeare’s plays is in
doubt, his dramatic career is generally divided into four
periods: (1) the period up to 1594, (2) the years from 1594 to
1600, (3) the years from 1600 to 1608, and (4) the period after
1608. Because of the difficulty of dating Shakespeare’s plays
and the lack of conclusive facts about his writings, these dates
are approximate and can be used only as a convenient framework
in which to discuss his development. In all periods, the plots
of his plays were frequently drawn from chronicles, histories,
or earlier fiction, as were the plays of other contemporary
dramatists.
First Period
Shakespeare’s first period was one of experimentation. His early
plays, unlike his more mature work, are characterized to a
degree by formal and rather obvious construction and by stylized
verse.
Chronicle history plays were a popular genre of the time, and
four plays dramatizing the English civil strife of the 15th
century are possibly Shakespeare’s earliest dramatic works (see
England: The Lancastrian and Yorkist Kings). These plays, Henry
VI, Parts I, II, and III (1590?-1592?) and Richard III
(1592-1593?), deal with evil resulting from weak leadership and
from national disunity fostered for selfish ends. The four-play
cycle closes with the death of Richard III and the ascent to the
throne of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, to which
Elizabeth belonged. In style and structure, these plays are
related partly to medieval drama and partly to the works of
earlier Elizabethan dramatists, especially Christopher Marlowe.
Either indirectly (through such dramatists) or directly, the
influence of the classical Roman dramatist Seneca is also
reflected in the organization of these four plays, especially in
the bloodiness of many of their scenes and in their highly
colored, bombastic language. The influence of Seneca, exerted by
way of the earlier English dramatist Thomas Kyd, is particularly
obvious in Titus Andronicus (1594?), a tragedy of righteous
revenge for heinous and bloody acts, which are staged in
sensational detail.
Shakespeare’s comedies of the first period represent a wide
range. The Comedy of Errors (1592?), a farce in imitation of
classical Roman comedy, depends for its appeal on mistaken
identities in two sets of twins involved in romance and war.
Farce is not as strongly emphasized in The Taming of the Shrew
(1593?), a comedy of character. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
(1594?) concerns romantic love. Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594?)
satirizes the loves of its main male characters as well as the
fashionable devotion to studious pursuits by which these
noblemen had first sought to avoid romantic and worldly
ensnarement. The dialogue in which many of the characters voice
their pretensions ridicules the artificially ornate, courtly
style typified by the works of English novelist and dramatist
John Lyly, the court conventions of the time, and perhaps the
scientific discussions of Sir Walter Raleigh and his colleagues.
Second Period
Shakespeare’s second period includes his most important plays
concerned with English history, his so-called joyous comedies,
and two of his major tragedies. In this period, his style and
approach became highly individualized. The second-period
historical plays include Richard II (1595?), Henry IV, Parts I
and II (1597?), and Henry V (1598?). They encompass the years
immediately before those portrayed in the Henry VI plays.
Richard II is a study of a weak, sensitive, self-dramatizing but
sympathetic monarch who loses his kingdom to his forceful
successor, Henry IV. In the two parts of Henry IV, Henry
recognizes his own guilt. His fears for his own son, later Henry
V, prove unfounded, as the young prince displays a responsible
attitude toward the duties of kingship. In an alternation of
masterful comic and serious scenes, the fat knight Falstaff and
the rebel Hotspur reveal contrasting excesses between which the
prince finds his proper position. The mingling of the tragic and
the comic to suggest a broad range of humanity subsequently
became one of Shakespeare’s favorite devices.
Outstanding among the comedies of the second period is A
Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595?), which interweaves several plots
involving two pairs of noble lovers, a group of bumbling and
unconsciously comic townspeople, and members of the fairy realm,
notably Puck, King Oberon, and Queen Titania. Subtle evocation
of atmosphere, of the sort that characterizes this play, is also
found in the tragicomedy The Merchant of Venice (1596?). In this
play, the Renaissance motifs of masculine friendship and
romantic love are portrayed in opposition to the bitter
inhumanity of a usurer named Shylock, whose own misfortunes are
presented so as to arouse understanding and sympathy. The
character of the quick-witted, warm, and responsive young woman,
exemplified in this play by Portia, reappears in the joyous
comedies of the second period.
The witty comedy Much Ado About Nothing (1599?) is marred, in
the opinion of some critics, by an insensitive treatment of its
female characters. However, Shakespeare’s most mature comedies,
As You Like It (1599?) and Twelfth Night (1600?), are
characterized by lyricism, ambiguity, and beautiful, charming,
and strong-minded heroines like Beatrice. In As You Like It, the
contrast between the manners of the Elizabethan court and those
current in the English countryside is drawn in a rich and varied
vein. Shakespeare constructed a complex orchestration between
different characters and between appearance and reality and used
this pattern to comment on a variety of human foibles. In that
respect, As You Like It is similar to Twelfth Night, in which
the comical side of love is illustrated by the misadventures of
two pairs of romantic lovers and of a number of realistically
conceived and clowning characters in the subplot. Another comedy
of the second period is The Merry Wives of Windsor (1599?), a
farce about middle-class life in which Falstaff reappears as the
comic victim.
Two major tragedies, differing considerably in nature, mark the
beginning and the end of the second period. Romeo and Juliet
(1595?), famous for its poetic treatment of the ecstasy of
youthful love, dramatizes the fate of two lovers victimized by
the feuds and misunderstandings of their elders and by their own
hasty temperaments. Julius Caesar (1599?), on the other hand, is
a serious tragedy of political rivalries, but is less intense in
style than the tragic dramas that followed it.
Third Period
Shakespeare’s third period includes his greatest tragedies and
his so-called dark or bitter comedies. The tragedies of this
period are considered the most profound of his works. In them he
used his poetic idiom as an extremely supple dramatic
instrument, capable of recording human thought and the many
dimensions of given dramatic situations. Hamlet (1601?), perhaps
his most famous play, exceeds by far most other tragedies of
revenge in picturing the mingled sordidness and glory of the
human condition. Hamlet feels that he is living in a world of
horror. Confirmed in this feeling by the murder of his father
and the sensuality of his mother, he exhibits tendencies toward
both crippling indecision and precipitous action. Interpretation
of his motivation and ambivalence continues to be a subject of
considerable controversy.
Othello (1604?) portrays the growth of unjustified jealousy in
the protagonist, Othello, a Moor serving as a general in the
Venetian army. The innocent object of his jealousy is his wife,
Desdemona. In this tragedy, Othello’s evil lieutenant Iago draws
him into mistaken jealousy in order to ruin him. King Lear
(1605?), conceived on a more epic scale, deals with the
consequences of the irresponsibility and misjudgment of Lear, a
ruler of early Britain, and of his councillor, the Duke of
Gloucester. The tragic outcome is a result of their giving power
to their evil children, rather than to their good children.
Lear’s daughter Cordelia displays a redeeming love that makes
the tragic conclusion a vindication of goodness. This conclusion
is reinforced by the portrayal of evil as self-defeating, as
exemplified by the fates of Cordelia’s sisters and of
Gloucester’s opportunistic son. Antony and Cleopatra (1606?) is
concerned with a different type of love, namely the middle-aged
passion of Roman general Mark Antony for Egyptian queen
Cleopatra. Their love is glorified by some of Shakespeare’s most
sensuous poetry. In Macbeth (1606?), Shakespeare depicts the
tragedy of a man who, led on by others and because of a defect
in his own nature, succumbs to ambition. In securing the
Scottish throne, Macbeth dulls his humanity to the point where
he becomes capable of any amoral act.
Unlike these tragedies, three other plays of this period suggest
a bitterness stemming from the protagonists’ apparent lack of
greatness or tragic stature. In Troilus and Cressida (1602?),
the most intellectually contrived of Shakespeare’s plays, the
gulf between the ideal and the real, and both individual and
political, is skillfully evoked. In Coriolanus (1608?), another
tragedy set in antiquity, the legendary Roman hero Gnaeus
Marcius Coriolanus is portrayed as unable to bring himself
either to woo the Roman masses or to crush them by force. Timon
of Athens (1608?) is a similarly bitter play about a character
reduced to misanthropy by the ingratitude of his sycophants.
Because of the uneven quality of the writing, this tragedy is
considered collaboration, quite possibly with English dramatist
Thomas Middleton.
The two comedies of this period are also dark in mood and are
sometimes called problem plays because they do not fit into
clear categories or present easy resolution. All’s Well That
Ends Well (1602?) and Measure for Measure (1604?) both question
accepted patterns of morality without offering solutions.
Fourth Period
The fourth period of Shakespeare’s work includes his principal
romantic tragicomedies. Toward the end of his career,
Shakespeare created several plays that, through the intervention
of magic, art, compassion, or grace, often suggest redemptive
hope for the human condition. These plays are written with a
grave quality differing considerably from Shakespeare’s earlier
comedies, but they end happily with reunions or final
reconciliation. The tragicomedies depend for part of their
appeal upon the lure of a distant time or place, and all seem
more obviously symbolic than most of Shakespeare’s earlier
works. To many critics, the tragicomedies signify a final
ripeness in Shakespeare’s own outlook, but other authorities
believe that the change reflects only a change in fashion in the
drama of the period.
The romantic tragicomedy Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608?)
concerns the painful loss of the title character’s wife and the
persecution of his daughter. After many exotic adventures,
Pericles is reunited with his loved ones. In Cymbeline (1610?)
and The Winter’s Tale (1610?), characters suffer great loss and
pain but are reunited. Perhaps the most successful product of
this particular vein of creativity, however, is what may be
Shakespeare’s last complete play, The Tempest (1611?), in which
the resolution suggests the beneficial effects of the union of
wisdom and power. In this play a duke, deprived of his dukedom
and banished to an island, confounds his usurping brother by
employing magical powers and furthering a love match between his
daughter and the usurper’s son. Shakespeare’s poetic power
reached great heights in this beautiful, lyrical play.
Two final plays, sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare, presumably
are the products of collaboration. A historical drama, Henry
VIII (1613?) was probably written with English dramatist John
Fletcher (see Beaumont and Fletcher), as was The Two Noble
Kinsmen (1613?; published 1634), a story of the love of two
friends for one woman.
Literary Reputation
Until the 18th century, Shakespeare was generally thought to
have been no more than a rough and untutored genius. Theories
were advanced that his plays had actually been written by
someone more educated, perhaps statesman and philosopher Sir
Francis Bacon or the Earl of Southampton, who was Shakespeare’s
patron. However, English writer Ben Jonson and others who saw in
him a brilliance that would endure celebrated him in his own
time. Since the 19th century, Shakespeare’s achievements have
been more consistently recognized, and throughout the Western
world he has come to be regarded as the greatest dramatist ever.
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