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The Theatre's Qualified Victory in an Old War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2009

Claudia D. Johnson
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Extract

After a century-long attack from the Puritan progeny of nineteenth-century America, the theatre by 1860 had long since come to accept as a way of life the religious public's antipathy to the stage. The story of the war between church and theatre is an old but, understandably, not a very popular one with theatre historians; nevertheless, some of the most surprising ironies in American cultural history lie in the dynamics — the death of a president, the death and burial of a respected actor, and an ultimate concession on both fronts — which by the turn of the twentieth century brought a winding down of clerical attacks against the stage and a qualified victory for the comparatively poor, scorned, unorganized theatrical forces over their powerful adversary.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , November 1984 , pp. 193 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1984

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References

NOTES

1 For a description of anti-theatrical bias in the first decades following the American Revolution, see Dunlap, William, A History of the American Theatre (1832; rpt. New York: New York Historical Society, 1963), pp. 23–27, 120–23, 242, 252.Google Scholar

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