Edwin Forrest's Redding Up: Elocution, Theater, and the Performance of the Frontier Matthew Rebhorn On a cold New York City night in mid-December, 1829, a twentytwo -year-old actor named Edwin Forrest revolutionized both the art ofpublic speaking and the history ofAmerican drama. The audience who came to the Park Theatre that night not only witnessed a star being born,but also experienced a seismic change in the waywords conveyed meaning. Appearing onstage in John Augustus Stone's Metamora, or, The Last ofthe Wampanoags, Forrest was costumed in Indian tunic, pants, and moccasins, accoutered with tomahawk, club, and knife, and colored with a burnt umber concoction called "Bollamenia."1 When he bounded onto the scene at the beginning ofthe play, ejaculating the first of the many Indian sounds he would utter that night, few knew that American culture would be hearing the echoes of his voice for years to come. Forrest's singular performance as Metamora exists at the intersection between two distinct discourses: the discourse surrounding the voice, oratory, and elocution in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America and the discourse ofthe frontier epitomized by the antebellum American fascination with Indian plays. Forrest's "loud mouthed ranting style,"asWaltWhitman dubbed it,2 coupledwith the actor's embodiment ofa wild"noble savage,"does more than convenientlyyoke together these two historically disparate discourses, however. Forrest's "redding up"—his merging of a "savage" voice with a "savage" performance— opens up a critical space between these two discourses that helps us read the discursive limitations of both, even as it reveals the critical traction 455 456Comparative Drama Forrest got from both discourses to put pressure on the way American culture made, and continues to make, sense of the frontier. Critical discussions about thepublic sphere in the earlyrepublic have focused almost exclusively on those forms ofwritten expression that articulated the nation.As Larzer Ziffstates,"The establishment ofthe United States and the spread of print culture went hand in hand."3 It was the written word—the "res publica of letters," as Michael Warner puts it4— that legitimated the nation and contributed to nation formation. "What was needed for legitimacy," summarizes Warner, "was the derivative afterward ofwriting rather than the speech ofthe people."5Warner's overt privileging of"writing" over"speech"has been challenged by Christopher Looby, who has recently asserted that"there is a distinct countercurrent in the literature of the period that valorizes the grain of the voice in addition to, or instead of, the silence ofprint."6 In a pointed reversal of Ziff's proposition,in fact,Loobysuggests that"vocal utterance has served, in telling instances, as a privileged figure for the making of the United States."7 Looby's work has broken the stranglehold that textuality has had in critical discussions of early republican nationalism, revealing the risks that privileging the text can cause. Yet, Looby's attention to the "vox Americana" suffers from a kind of critical myopia surrounding not textuality, or orality, but rather performance. Revealingly, John Adams lamented to his friend, Benjamin Rush, that "scenery has often if not commonly in all the business of life, at least of public life, more effect than the characters ofthe dramatis personae or the ingenuityofthe plot. Recollect within your own times.What but the scenerydid thus? or that? or the other? Was there ever a coup de théâtrethat had so great an effect as Jefferson'spenmanship oftheDeclaration ofIndependence?"8Adams's "antitheatrical prejudice"—his insistence that theater is merelyscenery— dovetails nicely with the impatient jealousy he felt towards Jefferson's seeminglyeffortless creativity: both theater and Jefferson,Adams snipes, deserve our contempt.Adams continued his tirade about the Declaration ofIndependence, confessing that he always considered it a "theatrical show," and that "Jefferson ran away with all of the stage effect ofthat . . . and allthe gloryofit."9Morethan merepettiness,Adams's remarks about Jefferson do two things—first, they derogate Jefferson's theatrical predi- Matthew Rebhorn457 lections, and second, as Looby insists, they anxiously acknowledge "the historical efficacyofsuch theatricality,performativity, or, as I would prefer to call it, rhetoricity."10 What strikes me as strange is Looby's own discomfort with what is clearly "theatricality" and "performativity," not just "rhetoricity." Adams...
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