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Robert Merry and the American Theatre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
The last years of Robert Merry's life, which were spent in America, have been enveloped in an obscurity which no scholar writing about him has attempted to dispel. The only two considerable biographical sketches written of him, the one appearing soon after his death in the Monthly Magazine for April, 1799, and the other in the Dictionary of National Biography, give the barest attention to his American exile. Fred Lewis Pattee, who writes more about him than any other historian of American literature, limits himself exclusively to the vagaries of the Della Cruscan School which Merry had founded in England, makes no mention of his connection with the American theatre to which he devoted all his writing here, indeed appears not even to have known that Merry emigrated to this country. I have here supplemented with new details the scanty record of Merry's life and especially that of his dramatic writing and connections with the stage in this country.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1965
References
NOTES
1 The First Century of American Literature, 1770–1870 (New York, 1935), pp. 107–115. For a fuller discussion of Merry's influence upon American poetry than Pattee's, see Ray Adams, M., “Della Cruscanism in America,” PMLA, LXXIX (June, 1964), 259–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 For an account of Merry's career as a radical in Italy, France, and England and its reflection in his writings as opposed to the Della Cruscan stereotype, see Ray Adams, M., “Robert Merry, Political Romanticist,” Studies in Romanticism, II (Fall, 1962), 23–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 See Diary of William Dunlap, ed. Dorothy C. Barck, New York Historical Society, 1930, III, 709.
4 William Wignell (c. 1753–1803), perhaps next to Lewis Hallam the most important theatrical pioneer in America, settled here in 1787, founded the Chestnut Street Theater in 1794, and recruited in England many of the best known players of the period. William Warren (1767–1832) was referred to by one dramatic critic in June, 1867, as one “to whom the American theater is more largely indebted than to any other actor,” Clark Davis, L., “Among the Comedians,” Atlantic Monthly, XIX, 758.Google Scholar He established through descendants by his third wife (Mrs. Merry was his second) a family theatrical tradition that, with its connections, lasted more than 100 years. It includes his son William Warren the Younger (1812–1888), who was sometimes rated as a comedian above his cousin Joseph Jefferson; the famous Yankee comedian Daniel Marble (1810–1849), who married a daughter; Joseph Jefferson (1829–1905), generally recognized as the greatest comic genius in America at the end of the nineteenth century, his grandnephew by marriage, who married a granddaughter; and Channing Pollock (1880–1946), dramatic critic and playwright, who married a great-granddaughter.
5 It should be stated here that she was widowed by the deaths of her first two husbands. For her early career as an actress in England under her maiden name Ann Brunton, see Genest, John, Some Account of the English Stage (Bath, 1832), VII, pp. 75–76Google Scholaret passim. For her American career, cut short by her death in 1808 at Alexandria, Virginia, at thirty-nine, see John Durang, unpublished “Memoirs of his Life and Travels” (1768–1822), pp. 110, 119, et passim; William Warren, unpublished “Journals” (1796–1833), numerous entries between September 4, 1796 and June 28, 1808; Dunlap, William, History of the American Theater (New York, 1832), pp. 173–177Google Scholaret passim; Durang, Charles, History of the Philadelphia Stage…1749–1855, I, 51–53Google Scholar, a bound collection of articles which appeared serially in the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, beginning May 7, 1854; Pollock, T. C., The Philadelphia Theater in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1933), pp. 59–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 63–64; James, R. D., Cradle of Culture: The Philadelphia Stage, 1800–1810 (Philadelphia, 1957), p. 44CrossRefGoogle Scholaret passim. For an account of the famous stage family to which she belonged and its literary connections, see Ray Adams, M., “A Newly Discovered Play of Robert Merry Written in America,” Manuscripts, XIII (Fall, 1961), 21–22.Google Scholar
6 The information about young Cooper and his relations with Merry is drawn from Wood's, William B.Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia, 1855), pp. 410–424.Google Scholar
7 Hutton, Lawrence and Matthews, Brander, eds., Retrospections of America, 1797–1811, by Bernard, John (New York, 1887), p. 164n.Google Scholar A daughter was to become the wife of Robert Tyler, son of President John Tyler.
8 Reprinted in the American Universal Magazine of Philadelphia, a short-lived Jeffersonian organ, for May 1, 1797.
9 Before coming to America he had written five plays, three of which had been produced at the Covent Garden Theatre; so his close association with people of the stage had begun in England. See his odes to Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Wells, and Miss Farren reprinted from the World in the British Album (1789). For his connections with numerous actors and dramatists in England, see Bernard, John, Retrospections of the Stage, 1756–1787 (Boston, 1832), II, 72–94Google Scholar and Boaden, James, Memoirs of John Philip Kemble (Philadelphia, 1825), pp. 217–218.Google Scholar
10 Philadelphia, Aurora, February 4, 1797.Google Scholar
11 Philadelphia, Monthly Magazine, I (March, 1798), p. 162.Google Scholar
12 Dunlap, , History, p. 118.Google Scholar
13 Philadelphia, Monthly Magazine, I, 219–221.Google Scholar
14 These and the above production dates are taken from the daybook of the Chestnut Street Theater as published in Pollock, supplemented by information from William Warren's unpublished “Journals” (1796–1832), which lists the performances of the Philadelphia company outside the city.
15 Entries for March 20 and 26 in the “Journals.” The manuscript of the Journals” remained in the hands of Warren's descendants until in 1952 it was presented to Howard University by his great-great-granddaughter, Helen Channing Pollock, daughter of Channing Pollock, as a part of the Channing Pollock Theater Collection. I am indebted to Miss Pollock and the authorities of the University for the privilege of examining and quoting from this important document in the early history of the American stage.
16 Philadelphia, Aurora, March 25, 1797.Google Scholar
17 Retrospections of America, pp. 72–73. This volume is largely made up of stage reminiscences.
18 “A Newly Discovered Play of Robert Merry Written in America,” op. cit., pp. 20–26. Since the publication of this article on the Tuscan Tournament I have come across what appears to be the single reference extant to it in an entry for November 11, 1797, in William Dunlap's Diary where he mentions “a talk with Mr. Merry concerning a tragedy he has written The Tuscan Tournament” and Merry's statement that “the story was related to him by Fennell” (I, 169).
19 History, p. 176.
20 Retrospections of the Stage, II, p. 94.
21 Dunlap had known Mrs. Merry before her marriage. While studying painting under Benjamin West in London he had seen her debut at Covent Garden in 1785. His miniature of her is preserved in the Channing Pollock Theater Collection at Howard University.
22 Personal Recollections, p. 63.
23 For a lively account of the Philadelphia company's run in New York, see Odell, George C. D., Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1927–1936), I, 445–472Google Scholar, which is based in large part on Warren's unpublished “Journals.”
24 Retrospections of America, pp. 50, 57–58, 71.
25 Cramb writes, for example, without any factual support that I have been able to find, that “he for the most part contented himself with the unofficial laureateship which the younger writers…readily granted to his London reputation.”
26 See the entries for May 18, July 2, August 14, October 8, and November 16 in Warren's “Journals.” According to the daybook of the Chestnut Street Theater, there were no performances between May 5, 1798, and February 5, 1799.
27 Retrospections of America, p. 124.
28 Personal Recollections, p. 64.
29 History, p. 176.
30 See Diary, I, 152–159, 163–165, 172, 322; III, 614. See also in this connection Osborne Earl, “The Reputation and Influence of William Godwin in America” (1938), an unpublished Harvard dissertation, pp. 212–235.
31 See Ray Adams, M., “Robert Merry, Political Romanticist,” op. cit., II, 32.Google Scholar Since the appearance of this study, through the kindness of Professor Lewis Patton and the Duke University Library I have had the opportunity to examine the unpublished “Diaries” of Godwin in a microfilm of the manuscript in the collection of Lord Abinger of London. There are forty-two entries that record meetings with Merry between May 28, 1792, and July 28, 1796. During this period just before his emigration few men seem to have been in as frequent communication with Godwin.
32 See Green, David Bonnell, “Letters of William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft to William Dunlap,” Notes and Queries, NS, III (October, 1956), 441–43.Google Scholar
33 Clark, D. L., Charles Brockden Brown (Durham, N. C., 1952), p. 131.Google Scholar
34 See “Biographical Sketch of Mrs. Warren [Mrs. Merry],” Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor, I (February, 1810), 311.
35 Personal Recollections, pp. 63–64. In this entry the month is erroneously given as January.
36 Retrospections of America, pp. 143–145.
37 I have ascertained the place of burial from the Maryland Historical Society in a letter of May 7, 1963. According to another source of information the grave was marked by a simple stone bearing an inscription from his The Pains of Memory, A Collection of American Epitaphs (ed. Timothy Alden, New York, 1814), V, 121. Among the extant cemetery records of Saint Paul's Parish the listing of Merry's grave does not appear, but a great many of the records were destroyed in the Baltimore fire of 1904. My personal search for the grave has been unsuccessful. The cemetery has been so long neglected that many of the stones have been completely dilapidated or buried under dense jungle growth. I am indebted to the Rev. Halsey Cook, rector of Saint Paul's Parish, for help in this search.
38 Retrospections of the Stage, II, p. 93. For examples of his frolicsome humor, see the autobiographical Apology for the Life of James Fennell (Philadelphia, 1814), pp. 325–326 and Bernard's, Retrospections of America, pp. 124–125.Google Scholar
39 Ibid., p. 145.
40 See the number of each Philadelphia newspaper for December 29, 1798, and that of the Baltimore newspaper for December 26.
41 Quoted in A Collection of American Epitaphs, V, 121–122.
42 Vol. VI, Pt. II (August, 1798), 129.
43 Biographical sketch. Monthly Magazine, VII, Pt. 1 (April, 1799), 258.