Gabriele Müller-Klemke: Amerikanische Dramatiker vor 1850. Ein bio-bibliographisches Lexikon

By her own reckoning, the author worked on these three volumes for about 10 years. The result is an amazingly rich collection of hitherto mostly unavailable data, and an extremely gratifying read for anyone interested in early American drama. The sheer delight in browsing through this ‘lexicon’, and discovering authors, plays, and connections as yet unknown and unheard of, constitutes an old-timey experience that has become a bibliophile rarity. At the same time, this delight in leafing back and forth through the haptic, paper presence of a total of 1,600 pages also indicates what the main problem with this presentation of research results is going to be: this is the third decade of the twenty-first century, and a collection like this one should have been made available in English, and free online, in a searchable database format. As it is, it has been published into a niche.

This does not detract from, or diminish, the merit of this remarkable in-depth and in-detail collection. Arguably, few American literature scholars would be able to name even a handful of North American dramatists before 1850. Royall Tyler would be one of them, and possibly William Dunlap. Feminist research over the past few decades has brought back into focus Susannah Haswell Rowson, Mercy Otis Warren, and Judith Sargent Murray. The upshot of this is that of the 798 authors Müller-Klemke has retrieved, not even 1 % have withstood the trial of time. The three women constitute a larger percentage of the approximately 70 female authors to be found in this ample record.

Besides the incredible detail of her bio-bibliographical research, there are more merits. One does not need to agree with, or follow, the division into the six periods that Müller-Klemke suggests for her material (before 1776, 1776–1783, 1784–1800, 1801–1814, 1815–1828, 1829–1849), or agree that all women writers are apparently grouped with those authors who were really journalists by trade (I, 29), as long as they are there. More importantly, North America in these volumes includes Canada and the Caribbean – justifiably, not only because many of the theater troupes in the rebellious colonies relocated to the Caribbean (I, 53–4) if not immediately back to the British Isles when the American Congress put an end to all forms of theatrical entertainment. Unofficially, her North America includes the British Isles, and in some cases other places in Europe, too: The bibliographical data register not only plays the respective authors – and composers! – produced in North America, and up until 1850, but also in their home countries, and earlier or later in their lives.

There are lots of surprises. The sheer number of plays with “Harlequin” in the title that echo the stereotyped patterns of the European Commedia dell’ Arte is astounding (III, 138–145), as is the number of dramatic adaptations of Cooper novels – and neither of the adventure-novel adaptation favourites, The Deerslayer or The Last of the Mohicans, top the list. That role goes to The Spy. There were European influences, of course, but some of them were more unexpected than others – there were, for instance, three plays and two authors with a French background before the revolution, and none during the war, but in period 3, from 1784 to 1800, there are 14 authors and 139 plays. That number drops to 42 again after 1800, and to a mere six in the post-Napoleonic period. In a somewhat ironic twist, these post-Independence potential influencers were probably monarchist refugees, which sheds an interesting light on the relations between the two ‘democratic’ revolutions. Fittingly, there are only four plays in the 1820s that topicalize the Greek fight for independence, which was all the rage in Europe at the time.

There is more. The infamous Major André turns out not only to have been the object of William Dunlop’s play, uncommonly ambivalent for the time, but also a playwright, actor, and stage architect himself (I, 96). The British General John Burgoyne, whose tour of duty in the War of Independence ended at Saratoga, was another unlikely dramatist. Occasionally, American and Canadian sources cross tracks, like in the case of Nathanael Barrington’s Wacousta (I, 113), likely based on Canadian veteran John Richardson’s novel of the same title. And one might wonder if Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” was somehow connected to Edwin Blanchard’s “The Ourang Outan and his Double; or, the Runaway Monkey” (I, 155) – only that Blanchard and his partner Cony usually specialized in “dog drama”, and the publisher of the Tales of the Grotesque & Arabesque was not the same Blanchard. Whether the Orang in this particular play was portrayed by another trained dog remains open to speculation.

A massive achievement of this size and kind cannot possibly be compiled without minor glitches, oversights, and mistakes. “Almoran and Hamet” for instance is not based on “a Persian story” but on John Hawkesworth’s English novel of the same title (I, 95) to name but one very minor instance. More importantly, the very existence of one of the earliest plays on the record, Benjamin Colman’s Gustavus Vasa, supposedly performed by Harvard students in 1690, is at best doubtful. Adolph B. Benson (“Was ‘Gustavus Vasa’ the First American Drama?”. Scandinavian Studies and Notes 6: 7, pp. 202–09) back in 1921 pointed to a central problem in early American Drama research: as in this case, some of the authors of the early histories copied from each other, taking their predecessors’ research results for granted, and also often lacking the opportunity to access the sources themselves. Müller-Klemke must have missed out on Adolph Benson’s article. There may be other, similar cases. The only larger omission seems to be Samuel Ludwig’s Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit. U of Wisconsin P, 2020, the great play referring to Major Robert Rogers Ponteach, or, The Savages of America, first published but admittedly not well-received in 1766. In a database, these errors and omissions could be quickly amended – in the huge three-volume effort that Gabriele Müller-Klemke has compiled, however, that is not so easily done. However, these are very minor moments in consideration of her achievement for which all North American drama scholars will no doubt be grateful – provided they read German, and get access to this massive 1600-page set.