Primers to the Past: Colonial Fredericksburg and Theatrical Entertainment

Project Coordinator: Tom Clark, Stafford High School

Introduction

The Acting Companies

The Performance Spaces

The Audience and Plays

Theatre in Fredericksburg

Bibliography

Click on all images for larger view.

Going to the theatre in the 18th Century must have been both an exhilarating and exhausting event. Although performances ran for over four hours in often uncomfortable circumstances, they were anything but boring. On October 3, 1755 The Virginia Gazette records:

"You must go to the playhouses, and there always distinguish yourself as highly as possible in assuming every freakish air and saucy attitude; and when the profoundest attention is required for the hearing of any fine or pathetic speech, you must be suddenly seized with a loud fit of coughing, clap like a hero at what you should not, and hiss at what you understand not."

We can also find a different view put forward by author Arthur Hornblow:

"The pit of the theatre was the resort of wit and learning; while fashion, beauty, taste, and refinement, the proud and exclusive aristocracy of the land, took their place in the boxes, surrounding the assemblage of poets and critics below."¹¹

While we may attribute such differences in the ambiance of the audience to the classical city/country cultural clash, we do know that colonial audiences were on the whole better behaved than their English brethren and that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both fervent theatre patrons. Today, we can try to imagine them enjoying an evening's entertainment in such settings.

What they would have experienced at the theatre would have been a prologue to the play and then the main production itself. Typically the play would have been followed by "entr'actes" which could involve a wide variety of activities: dances, puppetry, specialty acts, acrobatics, or lectures. Then an afterpiece, or short play (usually a farce) would be performed followed by an epilogue.¹²

More often than not, many of the productions were American versions of the most popular London plays of the day. The Shakespearean adaptations of David Garrick,as well as his numerous afterpieces were among the most often produced. Colley Cibber adapted Shakespeare's Richard III, which became the standard 18th Century version of the play. A playwright of choice among colonist seemed to be George Farquhar, whose comedies The Beaux' Stratagem, The Recruiting Officer, and The Constant Couple delighted crowds. Of particular note is Joseph Addison's play Cato, which perhaps became the favorite of George Washington. Set in ancient Rome, the protagonist, Cato the Younger, commits suicide rather than submit to Caesar. Numerous lines from the play were quoted in Washington's correspondence throughout his life and "as a young man, he alluded to 'Cato' in a letter to William Fairfax's daughter-in-law, Sally, coyly comparing himself and her to the play's frustrated lovers. As an adult, he had Cato performed at Valley Forge."¹³

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Footnotes:
11. Hornblow..pg. 23
12. Playbill Colonial Williamsburg.
13. Brookhiser. Pg.124.

See bibliography for titles.

Playbills advertising the colonial dramatic fare for Williamsburg. Colonial Williamsburg magazine. Spring. 1995.