Early American Drama Beyond the Script: The Blockade of Boston and the Ancillary Archive

Abstract

Abstract Although eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans encountered drama at least as often as other literary forms, situating the plays they saw in literary scholarship has proven to be a challenge. Because so few remain, complete playscripts offer only a taste of the period’s strange and varied repertoire. Many plays exist only as traces: fragments of scripts, playbills, songs, broadsides, and account books for theater companies that hint at the details of productions they staged. Focusing on the strange case of General John Burgoyne’s play, The Boston Blockade, which lacks an extant script, and the archive surrounding its aborted 1776 performance in Faneuil Hall, this article proposes choric reading as a method that connects performance theory to work by literary historians Caroline Wigginton, Derrick Spires, and Matt Cohen that expands our sense of what constitutes a literary text in the early US. Reimagining the performative elements of staged plays and of the print archive opens even scriptless plays to current readers and makes a provocative and understudied archive accessible to literary scholars. The unusual archive surrounding The Blockade of Boston . . . demonstrate[s] how choric reading bridges . . . the scenario and . . . the publication event, allowing us to enter the world of a play through its archive and resituate its work despite a missing script.