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American Colonial Disturbances as Political Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Mark Fearnow
Mark Fearnow
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the Pennsylvania State University.
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Extract

To view street actions of the American colonial period as theatrical events is nothing new. As Jeffrey Richards has shown in his much-admired book of 1991, writers of the colonial period—even in towns where “official” theatre performances were strictly prohibited—preferred the metaphors of theatre over any others in describing the actions of individuals and crowds upon what these writers saw as the “world stage.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , May 1992 , pp. 53 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1992

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References

1 Richards, Jeffrey, Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

2 Warren, Joseph, “First Boston Massacre Oration” of 5 March 1772, rpt. The Colonial Idiom, ed. Potter, David and Thomas, Gordon L. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 242Google Scholar; reference to second oration (1775), 250.

3 Gilje, Paul A., The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1764–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Shaw, Peter, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Silverman, Kenneth, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763–1789 (New York: Crowell, 1976).Google Scholar

4 Gilje, 8–10.

5 Gilje, 6.

6 Gilje, 11.

7 Gilje, 8.

8 Gilje, 89–92.

9 Gilje quotes accounts from Weyman's Gazette of 12 May 1766 and the Gazette: Post-Boy of 8 May 1766 about the destruction of an unnamed New York theatre in 1766. Theatre-going was seen by the working-class crowd as an expression of sympathy with the British. Gilje reports that the theatre had been closed throughout the Stamp Act crisis, but reopened in the spring with disastrous results. Whether the resentments were against the theatre or theatre-goers is not exactly clear. Was the theatre the special province of English officers? Had the theatre acquiesced to stamps on tickets? Gilje interprets the event purely as an expression of class resentment, as the wigs and fancy clothes of the theatre-goers were ripped off as they were in the class-conscious actions against wealthy at Harvard commencements (see note 19 below):

On opening night a mob arrived, huzzahed, shouted “Liberty, liberty,” and drove the theater patrons helter-skelter into the street, often with the loss of “their Caps, Hats, Wigs, Cardinals, and Cloaks … torn off (thro’ Mistake) in the Hurray.” The building was ‘Torn to Pieces” and the debris dragged into the Common, where it was burned as a public spectacle. (51)

10 Gilje, 20.

11 Hoerder, Dirk, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 72–73.Google Scholar

12 Gilje, 26.

13 Gilje, 19.

14 Headley, Joel Tyler, “The Negro Riots of 1712–1741,” in Pen and Pencil Sketches of the Great Riots (1882; rpt. New York: Arrio Press, 1969), 37–39.Google Scholar In the absence of any physical evidence, the “conspirators” were convicted solely upon the word of one witness–an African servant named Mary Burton. Threatened, bribed, and then offered immunity from prosecution, Burton identified every African brought before her as having been present at a “secret meeting” in which Africans and their white leaders schemed to burn down the city. No lawyer was willing to defend the accused. A full account of the trial and its historical context can be found in Davis, Thomas J., A Rumor of Revolt: The “Great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York (New York: The Free Press, 1985).Google Scholar

15 Hoerder, 50.

16 Morgan, Edmund S. and Morgan, Helen M., The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 123.Google Scholar The Morgans give the street name as “Newbury,” but Hoerder gives Orange Street (97).

17 This account of the events of 14 August was assembled largely from the impressive research of Dirk Hoerder (94–102), which is based on letters and diaries of John Adams, John Rowe, Rev. Samuel Mather, Cyrus Baldwin, John Avery, Jr., Jonathan Mayhew, on contemporary newspaper reports, and histories written soon after the revolution.

18 Hoerder, 99.

19 This kind of attack on the symbols of wealth was not unprecedented in the colony. Hoeider (71–72) relates that on several occasions in the 1750s, plebian crowds had attacked the coaches and possessions of the wealthy in attendance at the Harvard commencement, ripping expensive silk apparel and knocking down personal servants; the attacks were promoted by broadsides that denounced the annual celebration by the colony's elite as a “Pagan” display of wealth and licentiousness.

20 Maier, Pauline, From Resistance to Revolution, Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 36.Google Scholar

21 Gilje, 52–58.

22 Gilje, 66.

23 Labaree, Benjamin Woods, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) pp. 140–143.Google Scholar

24 Gilje, 73.

25 An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research, November, 1991, in Seattle, Washington.