Abstract
In his oft-quoted 1802 parody of audience behavior, 19-year-old law student Washington Irving (writing as Jonathan Oldstyle) detailed the social behavior of three distinct groups of men in the playhouse. First, the working class, which sat up in the gallery: “The noise in this part of the house is somewhat similar to that which prevailed in Noah’s ark … stamping, hissing, roaring, whistling, … and groaning in cadence.” In the boxes were “the votaries of fashion … the beaus of the present day, who meet here to lounge away an idle hour, and play off their little impertinencies for the entertainment of the public … They even strive to appear inattentive.” And finally, there were “the honest folks in the pit … a host of strapping fellows, standing with their dirty boots on the seats of the benches.”2 Irving spent the least amount of time speaking about the pittites, likely because he surveyed the spectacle of the playhouse (physically and philosophically) as one of them and also because they inspired less fascination than the manly extremes of the gallery gods or the beaux critics.
What then is the American, this new man? … [L]eaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, [he] receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds … Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men…. The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions.”
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, 17821
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Notes
J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Albert Stone (New York: Penguin, 1981), 69–70.
Royall Tyler, The Contrast, in Early American Drama, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 25, 26.
Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4.
Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11–14.
Beginning with Robert Staples’s foundational study, the last 30 years have seen enormous growth in works directly and indirectly addressing the African-American masculine experience: Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009);
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2007);
E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003);
Devon Carbado, Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1999);
Don Belton, Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997);
Robert Staples, Black Masculinity: The Black Man’s Role in American Society (San Francisco: Black Scholar Press, 1982).
Specific to the world of the theatre, see the following works that directly and indirectly address issues of black masculinity: Heather S. Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006);
and Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
For the treatment, portrayal, and performance of Native-American identities, see Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006);
and Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
Bruce McConachie and Lawrence Levine both indirectly make links between changing visions of national masculinity and transformations in theatrical preferences and practices: Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992);
Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
For recent works that have explored the construction of American masculine identity, see the following: Kimmel, Manhood in America; Greenberg, Manifest Manhood; David Greven, Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005);
Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998);
E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993);
David G. Pugh, Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth-Century America (Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).
For examinations of masculinity in the context of post-World War II American drama, see Carla J. McDonough, Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary American Drama (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997);
Robert Vorlicky, Act Like a Man: Challenging Masculinities in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). For issues of gender, men (including Edwin Forrest) and women, up to 1969,
see Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra, eds.,in Passing Performance: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). For an examination of women assuming the roles of men on the nineteenth-century American stage,
see Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
The following monographs and anthologies explore American manhood in film, television, and occasionally, theatre: Hamilton Carroll and Donald E. Pease, eds., Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011);
Elwood Watson and Marc E. Shaw, eds., Performing American Masculinities: The 21st-Century Man in Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011);
Rebecca Feasey, Masculinity and Popular Television (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009);
Kenneth MacKinnon, Representing Men: Maleness and Masculinity in the Media (London: Bloomsburg, 2003);
and David Savran, Take It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72–75.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, trans. Henry Reeve (1850, reprint New York: A. S. Barnes, 1858), 145.
Edmund Kean, quoted in Actors on Acting, ed. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (New York: Crown, 1970), 327–28. Joseph R. Roach, who places the historical study of acting within evolving understandings of physiology and psychology from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, describes the difference between perceptions of spontaneity—“coming freely without premeditation or effort, growing naturally without cultivation or labor”—and the ways in which artists consciously employed technique—“a coincidence of meaning that evokes not the free overflow of emotions but their progressive canalization into habit … Reflection shapes memory into an expressive illusion—an illusion of feelings spontaneously overflowing as if for the first time. This is not Nature, then; it is second nature” (The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993], 162–63).
James E. Murdoch, The Stage or, Recollections of Actors and Acting From an Experience of Fifty Years; A Series of Dramatic Sketches (Philadelphia PA: J.M. Stoddart, 1880), 87.
For a thorough examination of Cooper’s life and career, see F. Arant Maginnes, Thomas Abthorpe Cooper: Father of the American Stage, 1775–1849 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004).
Henry Dickinson Stone, Personal Recollections of the Drama; or, Theatrical Reminiscences (Albany, NY: C. Van Bentuysen, 1873), 207.
Francis Courtney Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years in the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer, and Company, 1847), 75.
Murdoch, The Stage, 79, 82. For the most detailed biography of Cooke, see Don B. Wilmeth, George Frederick Cooke: Machiavel of the Stage (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).
William Hazlitt, Hazlitt on Theatre, ed. William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 8.
John W. Francis, Old New York, or, Reminiscences of the Past Sixty Years (New York: Charles Roe, 1858), 218.
William Charles Macready, Macready’s Reminiscences and Selections from His Diaries and Letters, ed. Frederick Pollock (New York: Harper, 1875), 527.
James Sheridan Knowles, Lectures on Oratory, Gesture and Poetry (London, n.p., 1873), 134.
William Charles Macready, The Diaries of William Charles Macready, 1831–1851, ed. W. Thompson, (New York: Putnam’s, 1912), 1: 282.
George Henry Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting (New York: Holt, 1878), 3.
For theatrical performance in Colonial America, see Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007);
Jared Brown, The Theatre in America During the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
and Hugh F. Rankin, The Theater in Colonial America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).
Pennsylvania Journal, quoted in Richard Moody, Dramas From the American Theatre, 1762–1909 (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1966), 31.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, Letters to his Son by the Earl of Chesterfield on the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, ed. Joseph R. Seabury (New York: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1902).
Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), ed. William Wallace (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1873), 73.
Charleston National Gazette, March 6, 1793. Also see Heather Shawn Nathans, “‘All of the Federalist School?’: Choosing Sides and Creating Identities in the Boston Theatre Wars,” New England Theatre Journal 11 (2000): 1–18.
William Dunlap, Andre, in Early American Drama, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 90.
Darby’s Return, quoted in Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama From the Beginning to the Civil War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923), 77.
Quoted in Richard Moody, Edwin Forrest: First Star of the American Stage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 16. Douglas was based on the Scotch ballad Gil Morrice.
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© 2012 Karl M. Kippola
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Kippola, K.M. (2012). Introduction: A New Race of Men. In: Acts of Manhood. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137068774_1
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