1 - American identities and the transatlantic stage

Summary

In many ways, identity is both the oldest and the newest theme for American writing and culture. Who are we? asked residents of the new United States as they faced the fact of war with the once-parent country. Who are we? they asked again, when peace was declared and something had to be made of independence. Who are we? Americans still ask after more than two centuries of “freedom,” decades of identity politics, the retreat of former great powers before the overwhelming military and economic power of the United States, and the dynamic of a population influenced by immigration from lands hardly imagined by men and women in the early republic. It is the inevitable result of the question in a pluralistic society that “we” are perhaps no nearer to an answer now than were the founders.

One of the registers and molders of public understandings of Revolutionary American identity was the theatre. From its humble origins in the colonial period to the all-pervasiveness of the stage in the mid-nineteenth century, the American theatre displayed before its citizens a variety of depictions of characters and types that gave back clues about the ways in which residents of the United States imagined who they were – or were not. Even though most of the plays that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans encountered were of British authorship and purported to take place in locations other than North America, the popularity of some dramas offers insight as to what mirror was being held to the audiences.