Notes 1 ATLANTIC UNDERCLASSES AND EARLY AMERICAN THEATRE CULTURE 1. London Morning Post, January 5, 1776. 2. Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 3: 65. 3. London Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, October 7, 1776. 4. Ibid. 5. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 5. 6. See E. J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York: New Press, distributed by W.W. Norton, 2000); E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1991); and Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975). 7. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 8. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 35–37. 9. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 17–76; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 10. Indeed, only The Gladiator appears in Jeffrey H. Richards, Early American Drama (New York: Penguin Books, 1997). 11. This is one of the recurring and valuable themes in Jeffrey H. Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 12. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968) and Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) explore the rela- tionships between markets and performance. 13. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 94–96. 14. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: With Explanatory Notes (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 75; emphasis in the original. 15. Marx had addressed the concept of a “lumpenproletariat” before publishing the Eighteenth Brumaire, although it is perhaps his first thoroughgoing exploration of the idea. Peter Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” Representations 31 (1990): 70, notes that Marx and Engels used the term in various conflicted ways, ranging from sartorial to racial. See also Robert L. Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels: The Rise of the Idea of the Lumpenproletariat,” History of European Ideas 8.6 (1987): 675–92. 190 Notes 16. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 124. 17. Ibid., 15. 18. Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 11; see also Gary B. Nash, “Poverty and Politics in Early American History,” Down and out in Early America, ed. Billy G. Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 1–37. 19. A few examples of the excellent recent scholarship on early American and Atlantic low include Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1986); Timothy J. Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001); Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); and A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 20. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 2003); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991). 21. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1992); Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999); Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 22. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 23. Irving’s commentary appears in the New York Morning Chronicle, December 4, 1802. 24. Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 5. 25. Elaine Hadley, “The Old Price Wars: Melodramatizing the Public Sphere in Early- Nineteenth-Century England,” PMLA 107.3 (1992): 524–37; Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 9, 144–54; Leonard L. Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 26. James Fennell, An Apology for the Life of James Fennell, Written by Himself (Philadelphia: Published by Moses Thomas, No. 52, Chesnut-Street, J. Maxwell, printer, 1814), 406. 27. Michael Denning, “Beggars and Thieves: The Beggar’s Opera and the Ideology of the Gang,” Literature and History 8.1 (1982): 41–55. Notes 191 28. Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 38; see also George F. E. Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964). 29. W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 15. 30. See also the first chapter of Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); Linebaugh, The London Hanged, broad- ens the possibilities of scaffold display in the wake of the foundational work of Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 31. George Clinton Densmore Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), 3: 58; Odell cites the New York Evening Post, February 19, 1823. 32. Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.2.20, in Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Andrew Gurr, eds., The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). 33. I of course borrow the immensely useful formulation of cultural work from Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xv. 34. Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); see also Claudia D. Johnson, Church and Stage: The Theatre as Target of Religious Condemnation in Nineteenth Century America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008). 35. Odai Johnson, Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre: Fiorelli’s Plaster (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 4. 36. Jeffrey H. Richards, Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607–1789 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 294. 37. Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 38. Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity, 17–33. 39. Johnson, Absence and Memory, 31. Odai Johnson, William J. Burling, and James A. Coombs, eds., The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774: A Documentary Calendar (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001) details the documentary evidence of these changes. 40. See Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jared Brown, The Theatre in America During the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 41. Nathans, Early American Theatre, 2. 42. Suzanne Sherman, Comedies Useful: History of Southern Theater, 1775–1812 (Williamsburg, VA: Celest Press, 1998); Charles S. Watson, Antebellum Charleston Dramatists (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1976); William Stanley Hoole, The Ante-Bellum Charleston Theatre (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1946). 43. Johnson, Absence and Memory, 24. 44. Thomas Clark Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre in the Eighteenth Century, Together with the