The reaction against the Indian drama began to become apparent as early as 1846, when James Rees, a dramatist, author of Charlotte Temple, The Invisible Man, Washington at Valley Forge, but of no Indian plays, wrote that the Indian drama, in his opinion, “had of late become a perfect nuisance,” the italics being his own.
SCENE II.
THE REVOLUTIONARY AND WAR DRAMA.
| “List him discourse of War, and you shall hear A fearful battle rendered you in music.” Henry V., Act i. Sc. 1. |
The first of the purely Revolutionary plays presented in New York was, probably, Bunker Hill; or, the Death of General Warren, and the work of an Irishman, John D. Burke. It was played at the John Street Theatre in 1797; and it was followed the next year by William Dunlap’s André, at the Park. Mr. Brander Matthews, in his introduction to a reprint of André, published by “The Dunlap Society,” for private circulation among its members, enumerates a number of plays written shortly after the Revolution upon the subject of the capture and death of the British spy, many of which, however, were never put upon the stage. André had been dead less than twenty years when Dunlap’s André was first produced, in 1798, and Arnold was still living; and, curiously enough, The Glory of Columbia, also by Dunlap, in which Arnold and André both figured, was played at the old South Street Theatre, Philadelphia, in 1807, with scenes painted by André himself, who had superintended amateur theatricals at that house, and had played upon that very stage.
After Bunker Hill and André came at different periods in New York The Battle of Lake Erie; The Battle of Eutaw Springs; A Tale of Lexington; The Siege of Boston; The Siege of Yorktown; The Seventy-Sixer; The Soldier of ’76; Marion; or, The Hero of Lake George; Washington at Valley Forge; and many more of the same stamp—all of which were popular enough during the first half-century of our history, but during the last half they have entirely disappeared.
