First Theater in America / When was the drama first introduced in America? An inquiry, including a consideration of the objections that have been made to the stage.

by Charles P. Daly

[18] A MS. volume, small 4°, Pp. (xvii), I-CXXX; Appendix, pp. XVI. Handsomely engrossed, with ornamental or fancy lettering for the title, the whole apparently the work of a professional clerk. Bound in old mottled calf, with gilt border, stamped back once gilt and lettered.

POEMS
By
A. H.
ESQR
MS.

Bought from a London dealer in 1890, by William Nelson, of Paterson, New Jersey.

[19] “New-York Times,” Sunday, December 15, 1895.

[20] Dunlap, p. 16.

[21] Dunlap gives the full cast of the “Merchant of Venice,” the first play enacted by the Hallam Company in America, at Williamsburg, September 5, 1752, as he received it from Lewis Hallam, Jr., by which it appears that Mrs. Hallam, the manager’s wife, was the Portia, that Miss Hallam represented Jessica, “her first appearance on any stage,” and an actor named Malone played Shylock. The author of the novel states that his wish was simply to depict some Virginia scenes and personages ten years before the Revolution, or the Virginia of 1765, and trusts that his picture is at least truthful as far as it goes, which it probably is, with the anachronism of the appearance, in the year 1765, of Miss Hallam, a young girl of about eighteen, as Portia, thirteen years after she had made her first appearance on the stage in the same play as Jessica. But liberties of this kind are pardonable in a novelist. They are taken by great authors. Scott, in his novel of Kenilworth, the scene of which romance is laid in the year 1575, represents Lord Leicester, in passing through the court-rooms, stopping to compliment Shakespeare on the success of his recent poem of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare being then eleven years of age. The poem was printed in 1593, eighteen years after the event described by the novelist, or when Shakespeare was twenty-nine years of age.

[22] 2 Dunlap, 24, 48: London ed.

A CONSIDERATION OF THE OBJECTIONS MADE TO THE STAGE.

This supplement began with the statement that among the earliest information that we possess respecting the drama in America, is a passage in a letter objecting to the performance of a play, and it may be appropriately closed by a brief enumeration of the objections generally made to the theater, and the conclusion that seems to follow from a review of them.

It is a characteristic of those who object to the theater altogether that they rarely, if ever, give any consideration to the origin of the drama, to its long continuance, or appreciate that it will continue as long as civilization continues, and this applies as well to those who have written elaborate treatises against it, like Jeremy Collier, as to those who object to it generally. The briefest form of stating this consideration is that the theater has its origin in human nature. In the researches made as to its origin it is found that it has sprung up spontaneously among different peoples, and has not been transmitted by one people more advanced in civilization to another that was less so. Thus the rise of the drama, such as it is, in India and in China has in no way been influenced by the Greeks, who carried the cultivation of it to a higher degree than any other people of antiquity. The oldest civilization with which we are acquainted is that of Egypt. Whether it existed among the Egyptians, whether they had what we call a theater, the extensive researches that have been made within the present century so far as I have been able to ascertain do not indicate,[23] but that it existed at a very early period in China, in Persia, and in India we have ample evidence, and in China and India it has from its beginning been a recreation greatly enjoyed by the people; to which may be added as a general observation that certain races have more aptitude for the enjoyment of it than others, and greater natural capacity either as a gift from nature or for acquiring what is requisite in the actor or dramatist. That some men are endowed by nature in a higher degree than others with the qualities that make a man eminent as a dramatist or an actor is sufficiently indicated in the one case by Shakespeare, and in the other by Garrick, of the latter of whom it may be said, in the language of Mr. Baker, the historian of the London stage, that “without any previous apprenticeship, preparation, or drudgery, at a remote end of the town that had hitherto been as unknown to fashion as the wilds of Africa, without preliminary puffing of any kind, he took the whole play-going public by storm, made men old in prejudice forget the idols of their youth and like Pope confess that he never had his equal. * * * From “Richard III.” to “Abel Drugger,” from “King Lear” to “Don Felix,” from “Macbeth” to “Bayes,” his tragic force, his keen sense of humor, his marvelous genius carried everything before it;” and this combination of equal excellence, and in the highest degree, in both tragedy and comedy is the more remarkable, for the two great Roman actors, Roscius in comedy and Æsopus in tragedy, never crossed the limits of their respective branches, and both reached the preëminence they attained by the most careful and assiduous study. It is said of Roscius that, in the very height of his reputation, he did not even venture upon a gesture that he did not carefully consider and practise in private, and yet, notwithstanding this elaborate study, there was no mannerism or affectation in his acting, but everything he did seemed natural to the character he represented; and having referred to these two great Roman actors, it may be mentioned, as an example of being endowed like Garrick with qualities that enable him who possesses them to soar easily and at once to the highest reach of his art, that Terence, the most elegant, subtle, and felicitous in expression of the Roman comic dramatists, is supposed, his biography being but imperfectly known, to have been born a slave, who at the age of twenty-seven offered his first play, the “Andria,” to the conductors of the theatrical exhibitions, who referred him to an eminent playwright of Rome for its examination, where, unknown and meanly clad, he read, seated upon a low stool, his opening scene, afterwards declared by Cicero to be a model of narrative, and his genius was at once recognized.[24]