Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607-1789The 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
American Origins | 38 |
A Theater against Theaters | 61 |
II | 99 |
Copyright | |
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Abigail action actors American Revolution Anne Bradstreet Anne Hutchinson Antinomian appears applause audience Awakening becomes Boston British Captain John Smith Cato century Christ Christian church colonies comedy comic Cotton Mather crisis culture David diary discourse divine drama England English entertainment expressed eyes Facsimile reprint fear glory God's Heimert histrionic Hooker human hypocrisy hypocrite John Adams John Smith Jonathan language later letter Liberty literary London Lord Magnalia mask Massachusetts Mercy Warren metaphor ministers moral nonconformist patriots performance Perry Miller person play players playhouse poem political preacher preaching Providence providential Puritan quoted religious Revolutionary rhetoric Richard ritual role scene seems sermon Shakespeare social society speak spectacle spectators speech stage Stoic suggests theater theater metaphor theatrical figures theatrum things Thomas Thomas Hooker tion tragedy trope turn University Press Virginia vision Warren Whitefield William William Prynne Winthrop words writers York