The 1790s were an important decade for clarifying and reaffirming the values of the newly created United States of America. Following the establishment of a Federal constitution and the election of George Washington as the first President, political factions in America used the theatre to promote contradictory political agendas. Leading theatre scholars have described many of the plays from this era as nationalistic. In this essay, I want to look closely at the rhetoric of four of these plays and at their political and social context in order to demonstrate that they contributed to a dynamic political discussion about the future of the country. Rather than simply uniting the audience in proclaiming the virtues of their heritage, some of these plays were partisan and divisive. By contrasting their rhetoric, I will examine how each play helped to define the values of the nation in a particular manner.

The English actress Fanny Kemble, whose 1832–1834 tour left her unrivaled among female performers in this country and who has been touted by historians as a sterling example of antebellum womanhood, emerges as a far more equivocal figure than previous histories suggest. Indeed, for someone who disdained the spurious histrionics of public life, she routinely exposed her own paradoxical nature: she hated the stage, yet recovered her family's fortunes through a luminous albeit brief acting career; she yearned for the simple pleasures of domesticity, yet castigated American women as “drudges” in her published controversial journal of 1835; she made a fortune performing Juliet and yet was described as “unfemininely masculine” by Herman Melville who, in a letter to a friend in 1849, went on to exclaim, “had she not, on impeccable authority, borne children, I should be curious to learn the result of a surgical examination of her person in private.” Kemble was a woman whose identity was in constant flux throughout the 1830s and 40s, which makes her American career an excellent site for materialist investigations of gender.

Since the 1980s, new approaches to theatre historiography, the study of what Sue-Ellen Case has called the “convergence of history and theory,” have begun to arise in a challenge to generally accepted principles of theatre history, such as the supremacy of independent facts, the autonomy of dramatic texts, and the hierarchy of text, performance, and culture. The French critic and philosopher Michel Foucault has pointed out that the grouping and ordering of events into historical periods creates a “space of reference,” which lends some events a heightened meaning, while obscuring or submerging others. In a substantial challenge to traditional methods of theatre history, historiographers influenced by this view have begun to examine the theoretical underpinnings of historical periodization. In theatre theory, Thomas Postlewait has investigated the often unarticulated assumptions by which theatre historians isolate a group of historical events and designate them with period names.Many scholars now center their attention on historical discontinuity: searching for ruptures in the historical narrative, focusing on dynamics which lend instability rather than stability to historical periods, and reconceptualizing temporal historical narratives into spatial relationships. For example, from a perspective of discontinuity, a play is conceived not simply as a fixed entity created at some moment in history, but as a representation of layers of historical influences; likewise, a theatre building is not simply a material location in space, but a physical expression of historically emergent architectural styles and sociopolitical circumstances, and a performance is not simply a translation of a text to the stage, but a collage of past and emergent cultural and aesthetic processes.

“At last, Hollywood publicists and their high-profile clients have a chance to pay homage to their patron saint, Sarah Siddons,” claimed the August 17–23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter in its story on the concurrent exhibits of portraits of Sarah Siddons this summer at the J. Paul Getty Museum and he Huntington Art Collection (27 July-19 September). Also characterizing Siddons as calculating media mogul, the Los Angeles Times of July 25 compared the fame of the historical tragic actress (1755–1831) to that of current stars like Madonna, O.J., Diana, and even Monica. England's highly respectable muse of tragedy would likely reject these dubious associations, but the first actress of preeminent stature on the English stage was a symbol of female success, the subject of public scrutiny, and an emblem of ideal femininity. Siddons, who achieved celebrity status during an extraordinarily successful, forty-year career in England, Scotland, and Ireland, recently inspired a constellation of events which included not only these two art exhibitions, but a new play produced by Mark Taper Forum and an academic conference at the Huntington as well. In addition to detailing her sublime acting and renowned position in the Georgian theatre, these happenings emphasized Siddons' use of portraiture to cultivate and maintain her celebrity status.