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Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New
Republic
Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic investigates the way
in which theatre both reflects and shapes the question of identity in post-
Revolutionary American culture. Richards examines a variety of phenomena
connected to the stage, including closet Revolutionary political plays, British
drama on American boards, American-authored stage plays, and poetry and fiction
by early republican writers. American theatre is viewed by Richards as a transat-
lantic hybrid in which British theatrical traditions in writing and acting provide
material and templates by which Americans see and express themselves and their
relationship to others. Through intensive analyses of plays both inside and outside
of the early American ‘‘canon,’’ this book confronts matters of political, ethnic, and
cultural identity by moving from play text to theatrical context and from historical
event to audience demographic.
JEFFREY H. RICHARDS is the author of Theater Enough: American Culture and
the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607–1789 (1991), and Mercy Otis Warren (1995), and
has edited three other books. He has published articles in Early American Literature,
William and Mary Quarterly, and other journals and collections. He has taught at
the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and is currently Professor of
English at Old Dominion University.
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN THEATRE AND DRAMA
General editor
Don B. Wilmeth, Brown University
Advisory board
C. W. E. Bigsby, University of East Anglia
C. Lee Jenner, Independent critic and dramaturge
Bruce A. McConachie, University of Pittsburgh
Brenda Murphy, University of Connecticut
Laurence Senelick, Tufts University
The American theatre and its literature are attracting, after long neglect, the
crucial attention of historians, theoreticians, and critics of the arts. Long a
field for isolated