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Curiosities of the American Stage.

by Laurence Hutton.

_THE ARGUMENT._

This book, as its name implies, is a series of chapters from the annals of the American Theatre; and it considers Plays and Players more particularly in their less familiar aspects. It does not pretend to be critical; and the greatest care has been taken to verify all the facts it contains (many of them here presented for the first time), in order that it may appeal to the small but select band of specialists known as Dramatic Collectors, as well as to those influential members of the community who are glad to call themselves Old Play-goers.

The chapters upon ”The American Stage Negro,” upon ”The American Burlesque,” and upon a ”A Century of American Hamlets,” appeared originally in HARPER'S MAGAZINE; the others have been printed, in part, in other periodicals, but as now published they have all been rewritten, elaborated, and extended.

The portraits with which the volume is enriched are in many instances very rare, and some of them, never engraved before, have been prepared especially for this work. They are from the collections of Mr. J. H. V.

Arnold, Dr. B. E. Martin, Mr. Thomas J. McKee, Mr. C. C. Moreau, Mr. Evart Jansen Wendell, and The Players, to all of whom the author here expresses his sincere thanks.

A double Index--personal as well as local--makes the book easily available for reference; and it will lend itself readily to extra ill.u.s.tration. It is intended to instruct as well as to entertain.

LAURENCE HUTTON.

THE PLAYERS, 1890.

ACT I.

THE NATIVE AMERICAN DRAMA.

SCENE I.

THE INDIAN DRAMA.

”Do you put tricks upon 's with savages and men of Inde?”

_The Tempest_, Act ii. Sc. 2.

The American play is yet to be written. Such is the unanimous verdict of the guild of dramatic critics of America, the gentlemen whom Mr. Phoebus, in _Lothair_, would describe as having failed to write the American play themselves. Unanimity of any kind among critics is remarkable, but in this instance the critics are probably right. In all of its forms, except the dramatic form, we have a literature which is American, distinctive, and a credit to us. The histories of Motley and of Parkman are standard works throughout the literary world. Was.h.i.+ngton Irving and Hawthorne are as well known to all English readers, and as dearly loved, as are Thackeray and Charles Lamb. Poems like Longfellow's _Hiawatha_, Whittier's _Snow-Bound_, Lowell's _The Courtin'_, and Bret Harte's _Cicely_ belong as decidedly to America as do Gray's _Elegy_ to England, _The Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night_ to Scotland, or the songs of the Minnesingers to the German Fatherland, and they are perhaps to be as enduring as any of these. Mr. Emerson, Mr.

Lowell, and Professor John Fiske are essayists and philosophers who reason as well and as clearly, and with as much originality, as do any of the sages of other lands. In our negro melodies we have a national music that has charms to soothe the savage and the civilized breast in both hemispheres. American humor and American humorists are so peculiarly American that they are _sui generis_, and belong to a distinct school of their own; while in fiction Cooper's Indian novels, Holmes's _Elsie Venner_, Mrs. Stowe's _Oldtown Folk_, Howells's _Silas Lapham_, and Cable's _Old Creole Days_ are purely characteristic of the land in which they were written, and of the people and manners and customs of which they treat, and are as charming in their way as are any of the romances of the Old World. Freely acknowledging all this, the dramatic critics are still unable to explain the absence of anything like a standard American drama and the non-existence of a single immortal American play.

The Americans are a theatre-going people. More journals devoted to dramatic affairs are published in New York than in any European capital.

Our native actors in many instances are unexcelled on any stage of the world; we have sent to England, to meet with unqualified favor from English audiences, J. H. Hackett, Miss Charlotte Cushman, Joseph Jefferson, Edwin Booth, John S. Clarke, Lawrence Barrett, Edwin Forrest, Miss Mary Anderson, Miss Kate Bateman, Augustin Daly's entire company of comedians, Mr. and Mrs. Florence, Richard Mansfield, and many more; while, with the exception of certain of Bronson Howard's comedies, ”localized”

and renamed, how many original American plays are known favorably, or at all, to our British cousins? _Rip Van Winkle_, although its scenes are American, is not an original American play by any means; it is an adaptation of Irving's familiar legend; its central figure is a Dutchman whose English is broken, and its adapter is an Irishman. Yet _Rip Van Winkle_, Joseph K. Emmett's _Fritz_, and _The Danites_ are the most popular of the American plays in England, and are considered, no doubt, correct pictures of American life.

That the American dramatists are trying very hard to produce American dramas all theatrical managers on this side of the Atlantic know too well, for shelves and waste-paper baskets are full of them to overflowing.

Frequent rejection and evident want of demand have no effect whatever upon the continuous supply. How few of these are successful, or are likely to live beyond one week or one season, all habitual theatre-goers can say.

During the single century of the American stage not twoscore plays of any description have appeared which have been truly American, and which at the same time are of any value to dramatic literature or of any credit to the American name.

By an original American play is here meant one which is the original work of an American author, the incidents and scenes and characters of which are purely and entirely American. In this category cannot be included dramas like Mr. Daly's _Pique_, or _The Big Bonanza_, for the one is from an English novel and the other from a German play; nor Mr. Boucicault's _Belle Lamar_, or _The Octoroon_, which are native here, but from the pen of an alien; nor plays like _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, which are not original, but are drawn largely, if not wholly, from American tales; nor plays like _A Bra.s.s Monkey_ or _A Bunch of Keys_, which are not plays at all.

The first purely American play ever put upon a regular stage by a professional company of actors was _The Contrast_, performed at the theatre in John Street, New York, on the 16th of April, 1787. It was, as recorded by William Dunlap in his _History of the American Theatre_, a comedy in five acts, by Royall Tyler, Esq., a Boston gentleman of no great literary pretensions, but in his later life prominent in the history of Vermont, to which State he moved shortly after its admission into the Federal Union in 1791. Mr. Ireland and Mr. Seilhamer preserve the original cast of _The Contrast_, which, however, as containing no names prominent in histrionic history, is of no particular interest here. Not a very brilliant comedy--it was weak in plot, incident, and dialogue--it is worthy of notice not only because of its distinction as the first-born of American plays, but because of its creation and introduction of the now so familiar stage-Yankee, Jonathan, played by Thomas Wignell, an Englishman who came to this country the preceding year. He was a clever actor, and later, a successful manager in Philadelphia, dying in 1803. Jonathan, no doubt, wore a long tailed blue coat, striped trousers, and short waistcoats, or the costume of the period that nearest approached this; certainly he whittled sticks, and said ”Tarnation!” and ”I vum,” and called himself ”a true-born son of liberty” through his nose, as have the hundreds of stage-Yankees, from Asa Trenchard down, who have come after him, and for whom he and Mr. Wignell and Royall Tyler, Esq., were originally responsible. Jonathan was the chief character in the piece, which was almost a one-part play. Its representations were few.

This Jonathan is not to be confounded with another and a better Jonathan, who figured in _The Forest Rose_, a domestic opera, by Samuel Woodworth, music by John Davies, produced in 1825, when Tyler's Jonathan had been dead and buried for many years. Woodworth's Jonathan was originally played by Alexander Simpson, and later by Henry Placide. It was long a favorite part of the gentleman known as ”Yankee Hill.”