For those of us who teach US theatre history, our subject's story in prerevolutionary America gets off to a slow start. Fortunately Peter A. Davis's latest study now enables us to form a deeper understanding of New World theatrical sensibilities by giving us the story as well as the text of Robert Hunter's Androboros, the first original script to be written and printed in the colonies that would eventually band together to form the United States. In addition to providing the reader with a facsimile copy of the original manuscript (complete with marginalia) as well as a more readable version set in modern typeface, the author contributes three chapters that vividly delineate the social, political, and even topographical context of the time. Other useful chapters track the play's impact and aftermath.
These latter chapters form the crux of the study. Davis asserts that the ties between Androboros and the American Revolution are much more direct than previous scholars have maintained, and he goes on to demonstrate how the script inaugurated a concatenation of events that led to the imperatives of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
To have this lacuna of early US theatre history filled by such a diverting work of scholarship is welcome indeed. Moreover, Davis's book serves as a valuable corrective to presiding narratives of early American history. Our view, from a perspective of three hundred years after the book's main events, tends toward the teleological—we smooth over differences and imagine a seamless process from New Amsterdam to New York. Instead, Davis shows us a teeming yet struggling group of colonists, all of them searching for political and economic supremacy. (Full Anglicization did not really get underway until after 1691, he observes [17].) When Hunter became governor of New York in 1710, he brought his strong ties with literary London and Dublin to this crazy quilt of unruly colonists. Among his cronies were Swift, Addison, Pope, and Steele (to whose satirical magazine The Tatler he contributed). Even before his tenure in office, Hunter was an active and avid theatregoer in an era when censorship laws were being relaxed, which meant he witnessed firsthand the power of comedy to excoriate and enlighten, and correspondingly, the role of a free press to promulgate new ideas. In this way, the future governor found himself in perfect concord with the literary impetus for much of the eighteenth century—a sensibility he later introduced to the fledgling colony of New York.
Davis meticulously details the political antics that drove Governor Hunter to pen Androboros, his satirical squib. The details of who is being lampooned and how close the satirical portraits are to their real-life counterparts is, alas, a dry study. (For devotees of the era, Davis includes well-documented appendixes that identify the major characters and why they appear in the play.) Just as dissecting a joke kills its dramatic timing, the closer you scrutinize Androboros, the less amusing it becomes; its publication now will not lead to spate of reconstructive productions, nor did Davis undertake this study to promote that. Ultimately, Davis reluctantly concedes that Androboros itself, as a work of theatre, is essentially a curiosity. He notes that Hunter passed the script around among a few friends following its 1714 printing, and beyond that its influence on developing American letters is nil. Davis also acknowledges that no productions of the play were mounted or likely even envisioned, and only a handful of people knew it existed.
Of far more importance for us today, he asserts, are the ramifications for a truly free press on American soil. Androboros's original printer, a firebrand named John Peter Zenger, found himself in jail years later (1735) when his newspaper's incendiary criticism of a later governor, William Cosby, led the governor to file libel charges. In due course, this led to a precedent-setting defense that completely redefined libel. As so often happens in courts of law, the trial's outcome in favor of the printer was decided on a semantic matter. The defense lawyer, Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia, was a conspicuous legal eagle of his day. He knew well that the benchmark precedent for libel leaned toward the tautological, citing printed material that constituted “a certain false, malicious, seditious and scandalous Libel” (124, emphasis in original). During the trial he seized on this standard by challenging the accuser to prove the allegations were true: “I will agree, that if [the prosecutor] can prove the Facts charged upon us, to be false, I'll own them to be scandalous, seditious, and a Libel. So … Mr. Attorney has now only to prove the Words false, in order to make us Guilty” (124, emphasis in original). In the end this argument not only won the day, but also set a lasting yardstick for both sides of the pond. Henceforth the very definition of a libel turned on the question of whether or not statements levied against an individual were true. The ruling's effect on the public imagination was profound. During the years leading up to the Revolution, colonies' increasingly vociferous demands for a free press became a cornerstone of the proindependence platform, right up to the crafting of the First Amendment to the Constitution, where freedom of the press is institutionalized to this day.
It's a fascinating chain of cause and effect from Androboros quietly inaugurating a new American tradition of using satire to inform politics, to its printer getting quashed decades later for “libelous” material. Even so, the entire Androboros caper remains a footnote to theatre history, notwithstanding its demonstrable connection to the First Amendment. Nevertheless, inquisitive and acquisitive historians will be fascinated by this book's vivid account of an era too little known in its cultural aspects. Peter Davis's absorbing study will enlarge scholarly understanding of the contentious years leading up to the American Revolutionary War.
