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New Orleans' First Comedy–Celebrations in 1764

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

H. Gaston Hall
Affiliation:
University of Warwick

Extract

Readers of Grace King's New Orleans may recall that the first play ever performed in French Louisiane was The Indian Father, a tragedy inspired by an incident during the Marquis de Vaudreuil's administration and performed in the Governor's mansion in 1753. A Colapissa Indian fled to New Orleans after killing a Choctaw, whose relatives followed and demanded the murderer. When the Colapissa escaped, his father offered his own life in atonement in place of his son. A Choctaw chief then struck off his head.

Type
Notes and documents
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1980

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References

NOTES

1 King, Grace, New Orleans, the Place and the People (1895; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), pp. 7980.Google Scholar

2 Rowland, and Sanders, , ed., Mississippi Provincial Archives, French Dominion, Jackson, Miss. Dept. of Archives and History, 3 vols., 19271932Google Scholar, should have been followed by a fourth volume, The Final Years. Details of the performance are given on pp. 1008–10 of the typescript, which should now soon at last be published after suitable re-editing.

3 Pierre Cerou, L'Amant auteur et valet, édition critique par H. Gaston Hall (“Textes littéraires,” no. 29), University of Exeter, 1978. See pp. x–xi.

4 Some of the implications of such casting and characterization are explored in my article, “From extravagant poet to the writer as hero: Piron's la Métromanie and Pierre Cerou's L'Amant auteur et valet,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 183 (1980), pp. 117–32.

5 The figures for public performances are from Brenner, C.D., The Theatre Italien, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1961.Google Scholar They do not of course match those for the favorite Molière comedies, but they are higher than those for any but two of Voltaire's comedies. The figures for editions are extremely high and include two editions in French brought to light in my edition: the Marquis de Cambolas advises of an edition, Paris, Par la Compagnie des Libraires, 1775, 40 pp. (Univ. CatholiquedeL'Ouest); M. J.-D. Candaux advises of an edition in Chef-d'oeuvres dramatiques de Cerou et Mile Monicault, Paris, Belin and Valade, 1791 (with Le Dédain affect?), iv–58 pp.