The First American Play

I don’t think it is something we think about often but there were lots of American firsts. One that I only learned of recently is “the first American play.”

Theater had a slow start in the American colonies. We know there were performances of Shakespeare in Williamsburg in the early 1700s. The Southern colonies were more open to British customs, including plays. In the North, plays, theater and acting were more often seen as a sinful form of entertainment.

Massachusetts passed a law in 1750 that outlawed theater performances, and by 1760 there were similar laws in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. There seem to have been a few exceptions given special permission by the authorities. But all these performances were of British dramas.

Royall Tyler was born in 1758 into one of the richest families in Boston. But he had never been to a theater. On March 12, 1787, he saw a production of Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal, a well-known English comedy of manners from 1777. He was amazed – and inspired.

In the next three weeks, the 29-year-old wrote his own play, The Contrast. Tyler had attended Harvard, studied law, and joined the Continental Army. He was appointed the aide to General Benjamin Lincoln to help suppress Shays’ Rebellion. After Shay left Massachusetts for New York, Tyler was sent to New York City to negotiate for Shay’s capture. It was that NYC assignment that allowed him to see theater for the first time.

A mere one month later, The Contrast became the first play by an American writer to be professionally produced. It opened at the John Street Theater in New York City, and it was a success. It was performed four times that month in New York, which was very unusual. Then it moved on to Baltimore and Philadelphia, where George Washington went to see it.

The Contrast was a comedy of manners, clearly influenced by Sheridan’s play. The play is a humorous satire aimed at the evils and follies of the time. Royall uses this dramatic form to satirize Americans who follow British fashions and indulge in “British vices.”

Before The Contrast, the theater was looked down upon in the United States, but this play caused a shift in the opinions of Americans towards the theater by poking fun at Americans with European pretensions and contrasting the two cultures.

The play explores themes of American identity and contrasts American and British cultures, particularly through the characters of Jonathan, a patriotic American, and Dimple, who embodies British affectations. This reflection on national identity was significant in the post-Revolutionary War era as the United States was defining its cultural identity.

The play introduced enduring American character archetypes, such as the “Yankee” and the “City Slicker.” These archetypes would go on to influence later American literature and theater, shaping how Americans saw themselves and were seen by others. The main character, Jonathan, was the first “Yankee” stock character, a backwoods individual who spoke in a distinctive American voice and had American mannerisms.

It was advertised as the first truly American play, being written and set in America and the first to be professionally performed here.

I don’t know if the play is still performed very often today, but it has been seen on modern stages and is available in print.

Online text of the play

Classics Illustrated

Classics Illustrated is a comic book series featuring adaptations of literary classics such as Moby Dick, Hamlet, and The Iliad. The series began publication in 1941 and finished its first run in 1971, producing 169 issues. (Other companies reprinted the titles after that.)

I am probably not the only kid who was first exposed to classic literature through the series. For me, that happened in the early 1960s. Each issue of 64 pages was an abridged but accurate literary adaptation, and they featured author profiles and various educational little fillers. There were no ads. No ads!

I always read the back cover catalog of titles to decide what was my next purchase. Luckily, my mom thought they were good for me to read. I have very vivid memories of spinning the comic book stand at Sam’s Deli at Lenox & Madison Avenues in Irvington, NJ trying to pick my next purchase. I can hear stand squeak.

Most comics cost 12 cents – Classics cost 15 cents – which made it clear that they were “special.” Oh, I also bought Superman and Archie comics. Sometimes, there were “giant” issues for a quarter.

I loved having a quarter to spend. Two comics and still a penny candy. Maybe a sour apple gumball. No sales tax. Or one comic, a 10-cent fountain soda or Fudgsicle ice cream, and 3 penny candies. What a deal.

In 1942, the publisher became the Gilberton Company, Inc. with reprints of previous titles. With WWII, paper rationing forced a cut to 56 pages and costs later cut it to 48 pages.

These comics led me to begin reading the actual books.  I tore through the Jules Verne comics and I read the books. I doubt I could get through some of these the novels anymore. Though I have read Moby Dick and some H.G. Well and studied Shakespeare and other classics as an English major in college, some classics are a tough climb for me these days.

The series actually became Classics Illustrated in 1947 with issue #35,  The Last Days of Pompeii. (That is one I won’t reread.) In 1951, they added painted covers. By the time I was born, they had added Classics Illustrated Junior, some special issues, and The World Around Us series. They sold 200 million copies between 1941 and 1962 and then new titles ceased.

The comic book series was created by Albert Lewis Kanter who wanted to introduce some great literature to kids who were not reading the original books. It was also a time when the comic book industry was coming under attack for its “negative influence” on youth.

Sterling North, a columnist for the Chicago Daily News led the attack. He wrote that comic books were “badly written and badly printed. A strain on young eyes and young nervous systems the effect of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant [and] unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the comic magazine.” Kanter’s plan eventually worked for a time.

What happened?  Television, Cliff’s Notes (for those who had used the comics as such; many a book report was faked using the comics), increased mailing, paper and printing costs.

I actually had a teacher who had issues in the classroom for us to read. He also gave me a box of old issues at the end of the school year which I still have. The series ranked as the largest juvenile publication in the world for a time.  Even kids who were avoiding reading the novels (or Shakespeare plays) were still exposed to some literary tales that would have otherwise never known.

Classic Illustrated Comics was probably one of the things that led me to be an English major and teach some of these classics.

I remember reading The War Of  The Worlds (#124) and I remember reading the book which I had ordered in school through the Scholastic Book Club. (Thanks again, Mom, for always letting me order a book.)  Number 124 was a classic Classic. I’ve seen the old and new movie versions of that H.G. Wells classic, but my vision of what a Tripod looks like is still in that comic book. The comic of The Invisible Man had better special effects than any film of the time.

I don’t know if there is an equivalent for today’s kids. Graphic novels, perhaps, and, of course, comic books still exist – but classics? Movie versions of classics? Not many of those are made anymore, but you can stream films of  To Kill A Mockingbird, Great Expectations, Romeo & Juliet et al. I’d rather see a kid read the comics.

Pipe Dreams

I came across one of my grandfather’s pipes in a drawer last month. It is the only thing I have of his. After he died, I wanted his mantle clock that chimed throughout my early childhood but a cousin snatched that and also took grandpa’s humidor and pipes. Well, he was a pipe smoker like grandpa and I was just a young teen, so I suppose it made sense. But the clock – that should have been mine.

Later, I found another pipe of his in a drawer when my mom was helping clean out his house and I pocketed it. It looked newer and that seemed good to me. But I would later discover that new pipes need to be seasoned. This one was lightly seasoned. It may have been a pipe my family bought for his last birthday as cans of pipe tobacco were a common gift.

I loved the smell of the tobacco and I liked the smell of the smoke. When I eventually tried smoking a pipe in college, I found the taste to be unappealing. I found pipe smoking to be appealing in a Romantic way, somehow mixed in my undergraduate mind with whiskey and literature.

There are many materials used for pipes. The bowls of tobacco pipes are commonly made of briar wood, meerschaum, corncob, pear-wood, rosewood or less commonly cherry, olive, maple, mesquite, oak, and bog wood. In my college days, pipes were more likely to be used to smoke pot and they were made of all kinds of thing including glass and soapstone.

A pipe with a briarwood bowl like the one I have is the type that you must break in/ That process is called seasoning and it adds a protective layer (“dottle”) of carbon inside of the bowl. That layer keeps the wood from burning, drying out, and cracking.

I have smoked grandpa’s pipe a few times over the decades since I obtained it. I’m not a smoker these days but a pipe seems different from cigarettes and cigars. I suppose it’s not healthy to smoke anything these days, but when I do on rare occasions it seems almost ceremonial. I always think of my grandfather and the days I spent with him at his house in Newark, New Jersey. Our family went there for Sunday dinner with cousins almost every week. I loved his garden and he taught me things about growing vegetables and flowers that I think about every time I am in my garden.

Sherlock Holmes smoking a pipe in an illustration by Frank Wiles first appeared in 1914 in the Strand Magazine to illustrate the first installment of “The Valley of Fear.” Link

My experience with grandpa’s pipe is echoed in one of the essays by Alan Lightman in his collection, Dance for Two. His writing usually mixes science and literature. The essay “Time Travel and Papa Joe’s Pipe” is one of my favorites in the book. It is a Proustian moment he has with Papa Joe’s pipe as he imagines all the places the pipe has been and the people who have held it.

When I read it, I did take out my grandfather’s pipe. I bought some tobacco and filled it and sat out in the woods hoping to conjure him up in the smoke. Lightman says that “There is a kind of time travel to be had, if you don’t insist on how it happens.”

If Shakespeare Had the Chance to Write Screenplays

I used to tell my young students a story. There was a king who was killed by his evil and jealous brother so that he could take over the throne. The king’s son, the prince who should be the next king, is deceived by the uncle. Some student would inevitably interrupt me and call out “That’s The Lion King!” Well, yes, it is, but it’s also Hamlet. We would talk about it further. Nala is Ophelia, Timon and Pumbaa are like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Rafiki is Horatio. Plus ghosts.

Of course, The Lion King is about lions and is both tragic and comedic – and almost everybody dies at the end of Hamlet.

William Shakespeare has been adapted in many ways for the screen. There are a lot of filmed versions of the plays. I think that if he had lived in our age, Will would have written for TV and the movies. He liked being popular, the money is good and I bet he could knock out series episodes easily. Since he’s not here, other writers have adapted his wonderful and copyright-free plots and characters frequently.

I saw the film Forbidden Planet when I was a kid. When I was in college, I realized it was Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Prospero becomes Dr. Morbius and Prospero’s daughter Miranda becomes Altaira. The shipwrecked sailors are replaced by astronauts arriving on the planet.

My teacher in high school made it clear that West Side Story was Romeo and Juliet updated to gangs in New York City but with music and dancing. Would William have been surprised by it? Probably not, but he may have been surprised to see Warm Bodies (2013) where his plot gets the zombie treatment and “Juliet” falls in love with the wrong (dead) boy. Spoiler: reversing Will’s plot, Romeo is brought back to life thanks to her love in this version. Tragedy becomes “comedy” (in the Shakespearean sense).

The 2001 Othello update simply called O replaces warriors and the beautiful Desdemona with prep school students and basketball.

It’s harder to identify The Tempest as a source for HBO’s The White Lotus but Shakespeare does have some influence on this satire of the hospitality industry.

The romantic comedy She’s the Man is based on Twelfth Night. Both follow the confusing love-story plot.

And the film 10 Things I Hate About You is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and uses many of the play’s character names and a modern spin on the plot. Both center on two very different sisters. Will has the younger Bianca unable to marry until her strong-willed sister, Katherine “the shrew” is wed. In the 1999 film, Bianca can’t date until Kat does. I haven’t seen the film Deliver Us From Eva but I heard it is also based on the Shrew.

“Teen films” in particular seem to use Shakespeare quite a lot. It’s a bit of a stretch but 2004’s Mean Girls borrows some things from Julius Caesar and Macbeth including some of Bard’s language and themes. And it does have Gretchen’s Julius Caesar rant.

Of course, it’s not just Shakespeare that gets used for new screenplays. The teen favorite film Clueless is loosely based on Jane Austen’s Emma. I’m not sure Jane would immediately recognize Cher as Emma but the film’s plot parallels the novel’s but with modern twists.

One of my favorite recent takes on classics is the very imaginatively filmed Apple TV+’s Dickinson series which uses elements of Emily Dickinson’s life and lots of her poetry and wildly mixes period piece settings, characters, and costumes with modern music and references. It surprised me and I was quite taken with all 30 episodes.

Bildungsroman

Wear your coming of age proudly

The word bildungsroman showed up in an article I was reading.  It is a German word that you are only likely to encounter in a literature class. It describes a novel of formation, education, or culture. In English, we are more likely to call a novel or film like this a “coming-of-age” story.

Generally, these are stories of youth, but reading it now much later in my life got me wondering about when coming-to-age ends. In some ways even with six decades passed, I still feel like one of those protagonists.

The typical young protagonist is a sensitive, perhaps a bit naïve, person who goes in search of answers to life’s questions. They believe that these experiences will result in the answers. Supposedly, this happens in your twenties, but I don’t know if I have finished this journey yet. I suspect I am not alone in having this unfinished feeling.

Young adult novels certainly deal with this, but so do literary novels whose authors would not want the YA label stamped on their book’s spine. These are good novels to teach. They often focus on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood and character change is very important.

Scanning my bookshelves I see lots of books that fall into this category, from The Telemachy in Homer’s Odyssey from back in 8th century BC, to the Harry Potter series. I would include the early novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding,  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Lord of the Flies by Aldous Huxley and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

When I taught middle school and high school, teaching The Outsiders, Romeo and Juliet, The Pigman, To Kill a Mockingbird and other bildungsroman works just seemed like the right places to spend time with my students.

In our western society, legal conventions have made certain points in late adolescence or early adulthood (most commonly 18-21) when a person is “officially” given certain rights and responsibilities of an adult. But driving a car, voting, getting married, signing contracts, and buying alcohol are not the big themes of bildungsroman novels. Society and religion have even created ceremonies to confirm the coming of age.

I’ve passed all of those milestones, but I still feel like I haven’t arrived.

Charles Dickens wrote in David Copperfield, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” We are all the protagonists of our own lives. But hero…  I’m not so sure.

Since I am still coming of age, I am a sucker for films and television live in that world of transition.  If I was teaching a course on Bildungsroman Cinema, I might include Bambi, American Graffiti,  The Breakfast Club, Stand by Me,  The Motorcycle Diaries, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Boyhood, and Moonlight. I could include many other “teen” films of lesser quality.

On television, series like The Wonder Years, Freaks and Geeks, Malcolm in the Middle, and The Goldbergs are all ones that deal with coming of age. They are also all family sitcoms. Coming of age has a lot to do with the family. And it can be funny as well as tragic. It’s good material for books and media because it has all that plus relationships, sex, and love. On the visual side, it means physical changes that you can actually see, while internal growth is often hidden and slow to catch up with physical growth.

I have read plenty of things that contend that adolescence is being prolonged and therefore adulthood and coming-of-age are being delayed. The new Generation Z cohort is supposedly an example of this. I have also read about the Boomerang Generation. This is a very Western and middle-class phenomenon and the term is applied to young adults who choose to share a home with their parents after previously living on their own. They are boomeranging back to their parent’s residence.

I remember reading about the “Peter Pan syndrome” which was a pop-psychology concept of an adult who is socially immature. It is not a condition you’ll find in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a specific mental disorder.

In Aldous Huxley’s 1962 novel Island, a character refers to men who are “Peter Pans” as “boys who can’t read, won’t learn, don’t get on with anyone, and finally turn to the more violent forms of delinquency.” He uses Adolf Hitler as an archetype of this phenomenon.

Do some people never come of age? How old were you the last time someone told to “grow up” in some way or another?

Huxley’s Peter Pans are a problem, but what about people who are quite mature and adult but still are in search of answers to life’s questions and the experiences that might result in the answers? What’s the name for that syndrome?

Have a Fictitious Meal

A book club I participate in recently asked members what characters from fiction they would like to host for a dinner. I went with Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye), Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces), Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing (Fear of Flying), T.S. Garp (The World According to Garp), and Juliet Capulet (Romeo & Juliet) If they are allowed to bring a plus one it would be, in order, Phoebe, his mother, Adrian, Jenny, and Romeo Montague.

But what about the food? I’m not much of a chef and not very adventurous with menus. But how about a fictitious meal?

Fictitious Dishes is a bit of a cookbook without recipes, maybe a coffee table book that people page through, one they borrow from the library or give as a gift to a literary person who likes to cook. It is a pretty book. It has re-creations of meals from classic and contemporary literature with some excerpts from books, information about the food, author, their works, and the food itself.

I can see someone doing Mad hatter’s Tea Party from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Maybe you can read The Bell Jar while eating its crab-stuffed avocado. Not every selection is elegant. From The Catcher in the Rye, we get a cheese sandwich (on rye?) and drink a malted.

But how about an elegant jazz age party with Gatsby: “glistening Hors-d’oeuvre” and cocktails. Looking to be fancy? Boeuf en Daube from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Some New England clam chowder with Ishmael and Queequeg from Moby-Dick

I love the novel Moby-Dick. I don’t love clams in or out of chowder. Ever since I dissected a clam in AP biology and discovered that people eat the part that filters junk out of the water I haven’t been a fan. I grew up with the Manhattan tomato-based version and the New Jersey variation which has Old Bay crab spices and asparagus and the less clam the better. I can live with the Moby addition of salted pork (Jersey Taylor ham or pork roll?), pounded sea biscuit, and lots of butter. Some good crusty bread and good coffee and I might just reread Melville again with a bowl of chowder in front of me the next cold November in my soul.

As I said, I’m not that adventurous when it comes to food. I tend to like the peasant foods from every culture – Italian, Mexican, French, Indian, German – take your pick. I’m going to go simple American with my meal from a favorite book – To Kill a Mockingbird‘s fried chicken, tomatoes (from my Jersey garden), beans, scuppernong (I had to look that up. They are a Southern big, white grape that is tart) and nice fresh-from-the-oven rolls. Dessert is some apple pie ala mode (coffee or cinnamon ice cream is my preference) from On the Road. Ala mode on the road. Sounds good.