Chapter The Close of Eighteenth Century of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

The Parting Glass is in the lighter mood of the old Cavalier Poets. On the Ruins of a Country Inn shows the influence of Thomas Gray. In one long poem, The House of Night, Freneau enters the weird domain afterward so skillfully worked by Edgar Allan Poe.

A "Curiosity of Literature."

A singular example of precocious literary development is found in the work of a negro girl, Phillis Wheatley. Brought from Africa at the age of seven or eight, she became a slave in the household of a family in Boston. She learned rapidly under the guidance of her mistress and began to write verse in the conventional style of the English classical poets -- verse as good as that produced by any of their American imitators. A volume of Phillis Wheatley's poems was published at London in 1773, the genuineness of the work being vouched for by prominent people in Boston. At the appearance of this volume, Phillis could have been scarcely twenty years of age, her precocity marking her development phenomenal.

The Drama in America.

The beginnings of dramatic literature in America belong to this same period. Quite early in the century English plays had been acted by amateurs in New York, but it was not until 1752 that a professional company had been seen in the colonies presenting standard plays. In that year, an English troop of London players began a series of presentations at Williamsburg, Virginia, afterward playing in New York and Philadelphia. The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, and Hamlet were included in their repertory. Two or three plays had been written by Americans previous to the Revolution -- for the most part so- called reading-plays. Hugh H. Brackenridge (1748-1816), a classmate and associate with Philip Freneau, afterward Judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, wrote, in 1776, a drama called The Battle of Bunker Hill. Brackenridge was then a school-teacher, and the play was presented by his pupils. Theaters had been built in Philadelphia, New York, Annapolis, and Charleston previous to the war. Boston's earliest play-house dates from 1794.

Early American Plays.

The first American play to be performed by a professional company was The Contrast, written by Royall Tyler (1757-1826). It was produced in New York, April 16, 1787. The theme of this comedy was patriotic; a contrast is drawn between those who ape foreign fashions and those who hold to the plain but wholesome manners of home. In this play the Yankee, Jonathan, is introduced effectively as a typical character. Tyler was himself a Vermonter of versatile talent. He produced other plays, a novel and several poems. In 1789, another American comedy was produced, -- The Father, or American Shandyism. This was the work of William Dunlap (1766-1839) of New Jersey. This play, one of some sixty written by Dunlap, and the most worthy of them, contains two characters modeled after the famous Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim of Lawrence Sterne's whimsical novel, Tristram Shandy. Dunlap became a theatrical manager, and later wrote a History of the American Theatre (1832). He was also the biographer of the first American novelist of note, Charles Brockden Brown.

The American Novel.

Contemporaneous with the appearance of the drama in our literature, we have to record also the entrance of the novel. The first native experiment in this form of fiction, modeled -- very distantly -- after Richardson's Pamela,¹ was entitled The Power of Sympathy. This work has a curious history. Madam Sarah Wentworth Morton, its author, a member of one of New England's most aristocratic families, had won provincial fame as a "poetess," under the sentimental name of "Philenia"; she had, indeed, been described by one distinguished admirer as "The American Sappho." For her plot, Mrs. Morton utilized a miserable scandal which had blighted her own family life, and made the identity of her principal characters so obvious that the persons most interested bought the entire edition from the publisher -- and The Power of Sympathy, thus incontinently suppressed (1789), was never published in that generation.²