Theater Enough

The early settlers in America had a special relationship to the theatre. Though largely without a theatre of their own, they developed an ideology of theatre that expressed their sense of history, as well as their version of life in the New World. "Theater Enough" provides an innovative analysis of early American culture by examining the rhetorical shaping of the experience of settlement in the new land through the metaphor of the theatre. The rhetoric, or discourse, of early American theatre emerged out of the figures of speech that permeated the colonists' lives and literary productions. Jeffrey H.Richards examines a variety of texts - histories, diaries, letters, journals, poems, sermons, political tracts, trial transcripts, orations, and plays - and looks at the writings of such authors as John Winthrop and Mercy Oris Warren. Richards places the American usage of theatrum mundi - the world depicted as stage - in the context of classical and Renaissance traditions, but shows how the trope functions in American rhetoric as a register for religious, political and historical attitudes. Richards' interdisciplinary study is grounded in literary history, but also draws on scholarship in political history, sociology, anthropology, theory, and religion to show how the pervasive metaphor of the theatre provides a wide, revealing window on the politics and culture of the early Americans.