Book Description

Excerpt from Early American Plays, 1714 1830: A Compilation of the Titles of Plays and Dramatic Poems Written by Authors Born in or Residing in North America Previous to 1830 "T. T." was printed at Boston in 1751. Who "T. T" was is not known, nor can I trace a copy of the play Kittle of importance came to light previous to the Revolution, but that event, stirring as it was, seems to have been a stimulant to native ambition, and a number of dramatic productions were written and printed Among these may be mentioned The Battle of Bunker Hill and The Death of Montgomery by Brackenridge, then a schoolmaster; The Adulateur and The Group by Mercy Warren, afterwards well known as one of the foremost dames of the colonies; and several others, some from the Royalist side, as Sewell's Cure for the Spleen and an anonymous production, The Battle of Long Island The second war with England was also celebrated by our early playwrights, as was the war with Tripoli. The dramatic history of no country would be complete which did not celebrate the deeds and warlike exploits of its aboriginal inhabitants, and the American dramatist was not slow in recognizing the many-sided character of the North American Indian. His wars, his fluent oratory, his virtues, are all told, the best of these efforts being embodied in Stone's Metamora, made famous by the acting of Edwin Forrest. But all of the dramatic productions which were written prior to 1830 did not relate to America, and a glance over the list will show many plays which take for their groundwork the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian Empire and its people, while Love, that mysterious something which lays its finger upon all whether we will or no, is found, as in our fiction, in nearly all of them. What the dramatist, poet, and novelist would do without the help of the fickle goddess is an unsolvable problem. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.