The early settlers in America had a special relationship to the theater. Though largely without a theater of their own, they developed an ideology of theater that expressed their sense of history, as well as their version of life in the New World. Theater Enough provides an innovative analysis of early American culture by examining the rhetorical shaping of the experience of settlement in the new land through the metaphor of theater.
The rhetoric, or discourse, of early American theater emerged out of the figures of speech that permeated the colonists’ lives and literary productions. Jeffrey H. Richards examines a variety of texts—histories, diaries, letters, journals, poems, sermons, political tracts, trial transcripts, orations, and plays—and looks at the writings of such authors as John Winthrop and Mercy Otis Warren. Richards places the American usage of theatrum mundi—the world depicted as a stage—in the context of classical and Renaissance traditions, but shows how the trope functions in American rhetoric as a register for religious, political, and historical attitudes.
- Contents
- Preface. Toward a Theatrics of Culture
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Prologue. Democratic Spectacles: Medium, Message, and Metaphor
- I. A Theater of the World, to 1630
- 1. Politics, History, and Theatrum Mundi: Some Early Formulations
- 2. American Origins I: A Theater of Theaters
- 3. American Origins II: A Theater against Theaters
- 4. Prospero in Virginia: The Example of Captain John Smith
- II. The Theater of Faith, 1630-1730
- 5. A Theater on a Hill: Puritans and the Rhetoric of Performance
- 6. Playing the (Trans)Script: The Antinomian Crisis
- 7. Theatrou Mestoi: The Example of Cotton Mather
- III. The Theater of Action, 1676-1776
- 8. The Field or the Stage: Democracy, Theater, and Anglo-American Culture
- 9. Theater of Blood: The Rituals of Republican Revolution
- 10. Providential Actor: The Example of John Adams
- IV. The Theater of Glory, 1776-1789
- 11. A Theater Just Erected: America at War
- 12. Play and Earnest on the Postwar Stage
- 13. Stage Metaphor and the New Republic
- Epilogue. Instant Theater
- Works Cited
- Index
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