Abstract
On October 21, 1773, Levi Ames, a twenty-two-year-old petty thief, died by hanging on Boston’s gallows. His ascent to the scaffold made him for a short time a celebrity of sorts, the focus of a spectacular performance of punitive power. His arrest, trial, and execution aroused significant public interest, and a sizeable audience turned out to see him “turned off” the scaffold. Although for only a few brief moments, Ames played a complexly scripted role in the Atlantic theatre of criminality and punishment. The language of performance and celebrity does not just describe Ames’s act casually or figuratively—it was indeed theatre, or perhaps a paratheatrical event. Ames, an amateur in his first and last performance of the kind, ended his life on a temporary stage specifically constructed for punitive display. Documentary evidence reveals the theatrical conventions that shape the public performance of a hanging. The execution itself presented scripted, conventionalized acts calculated to draw a crowd of spectators. Those performances started before Ames’s September 7, 1773, trial, with the confessions, evidence, and juridical proceedings included in some of the accounts. His September 10 sentencing sealed his fate, and on the Sabbath prior to the execution, Boston pastors Samuel Stillman and Andrew Eliot both preached sermons commissioned and supposedly attended by Ames. At the Thursday lecture, on the day of Ames’s execution, Samuel Mather preached another sermon, “Christ sent to heal the broken hearted,” which also claimed Ames’s attendance and bore his supposedly autobiographical life story when printed.
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Notes
Elhanan Winchester, The Execution Hymn, Composed on Levi Ames, Who Is to Be Executed for Burglary, This Day, the 21st of October, 1773, Which Was Sung to Him and a Considerable Audience, Assembled at the Prison, on Tuesday Evening, the 19th of October, and, at the Desire of the Prisoner, Will Be Sung at the Place of Execution, This Day ([Boston]: Sold by E. Russell, next the cornfield, Union-Street., 1773)
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© 2009 Peter P. Reed
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Reed, P.P. (2009). Gallows Performance, Excarceration, and The Beggar’s Opera. In: Rogue Performances. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622715_2
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