Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)

Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture's fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period's most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the disempowered in the American theatrical imagination. Through analysis of both well known and lesser known plays and extensive archival research, this book challenges scholars to re-think their assumptions about the role of class in antebellum American drama. -- Back cover of book. Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture s fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period s most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the disempowered in the American theatrical imagination. Through analysis of both well known and lesser known plays and extensive archival research, this book challenges scholars to re-think their assumptions about the role of class in antebellum American drama. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 List of Illustrations......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 12 1 Atlantic Underclasses and Early American Theatre Culture......Page 14 2 Gallows Performance, Excarceration, and The Beggar's Opera......Page 40 3 Algerians, Renegades, and Transnational Rogues in Slaves in Algiers......Page 66 4 Treason and Popular Patriotism in The Glory of Columbia......Page 92 5 Pantomime and Blackface Banditry in Three-Finger'd Jack......Page 114 6 Class, Patronage, and Urban Scenes in Tom and Jerry......Page 140 7 Slave Revolt and Classical Blackness in The Gladiator......Page 164 Epilogue: Escape Artists and Spectatorial Mobs......Page 188 Notes......Page 202 Works Cited......Page 238 B......Page 256 C......Page 257 G......Page 258 L......Page 259 P......Page 260 T......Page 261 Y......Page 262