Introduction

Abstract

On 15 September 1752, in Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, the first play performed in America by a fully professional company was presented. It was Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; its Virginia Gazette advertisement ended with the formulaic phrase “Vivat Rex.” It is hard not to see a certain symbolic significance in this production. First, company, play, and actors were British, as, of course, was the audience. After all, this was a British colony, and the Revolution was still more than two decades ahead. The influence of the British theatre, indeed, would remain central, if a matter of growing contention, throughout the period covered by this volume. Second, it was notable that the performance took place in a southern colony, for the fact is that theatre did not find a ready home on a continent that to some was to be a new Eden, a world in which God alone would have the prerogative of invention. The only Word, the only authorized text, was to be the Bible, and man’s role was to be obedient to He who alone was the author of the human drama. The frivolous, the sensual, the illicit were to be shunned. Display was seen as unseemly, the aesthetic as suspect. Boundaries were to be respected, not transgressed, and the theatre, as the Puritans well knew, had always been about transgression. Those on board the Mayflower had not suffered the privations of sea crossing and winter storms to worship Dionysus. They had another God, who would not be mocked by those who seduced by their skills of mimickry or claimed a license to portray the proscribed.

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