UNIVERSITAT DE VALÉNCIA DEPARTAMENT DE FILOLOGIA ANGLESAIALEMANYA ! o { Q i . , \ v - \yg ° / MAXWELL ANDERSONfS UNCERTAIN POSITION IN THE AMERICAN THEATER CANON DOCTORAL DISSERTATION Presented by: D. Russell Di Napoli Supervised by: Dr. Francisco Javier Coy Ferrer UMI Number: U603010 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Disscrrlation Püblish<¡ng UMI U603010 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying underTitle 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In preparing this book I have been immensely helped by many friends in both the United States and Spain. I depended considerably on the generous cooperation of the librarians at the Boston Public Library, at the New York City Public Library, at the Widener Library at Harvard, and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Library. I would like to record my debt to Pilar Bonet and Wilga Rivers for facilitating my access to these libraries. I am gratefiil to Laura and John Esteves for giving me a home whenever I am there. Thanks also to Errol Selkirk and Deborah Un, and to Deborah Stewart and Dan Tedlie for providing me with a base of operations. I am further indebted to Errol Selkirk for proofreading this book. In Spain I was helped by a number of people. I would especially like to thank Juan Vicente Martínez Luciano for helping me to get back on the right track. I am grateful to Javier Coy for patiently bearing with me and shrewdly guiding me through a half- dozen versions of this book. I am also indebted to Jordi Piqué for his constant and generous support, patiently heeding my many calis for assistance as I plodded through various drafts and helping me to set up at long last the final versión. Additionally, I'd like to record here my appreciation to Juan José Coy for providing me with helpful bibliographical material. Thanks to Claudio Boquet for the stars and to S. J. T ., a miracle worker. And finally, I am deeply grateful to Vicky Algarra and to Jodie for giving me a reason, and to Joan Beatrice Huehnerbein for the light. iii CONTENTS PROLOGUE 1 1. The Early Years 2 2. Ideology 6 3. Why Anderson Is Not Better Known Today 8 4. Diverse Critical Opinión 13 5. Work-In-Progress 14 CHAPTER ONE 20 DRAMA IN THE UNITED STATES FROMITS BEGINNINGS TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR 21 1. Theater in Colonial America 21 2. The American Theater after the War of Independence up to the Twentieth Century 24 3. The Early Twentieth Century 27 4. The Years Between the World Wars 30 5. The American Theater in the 193 Os 33 6. Opposing Views of the Social Drama 36 7. The Social Drama in the 1930s: A Synthesis 39 8. The Outcome of the Theater Collective Tradition 42 CHAPTER TW O 45 A CRITICAL OVERVIEW 46 1. The Early Period: Prior to World War II 47 a) The Plays 47 b) The Style of the Plays 52 c) Simply Shakespeare 53 d) The Critics' Evaluation 57 e) The Playwriting Theory 60 f) Verse in the Plays 61 iv g) Ideology in the Plays 66 2. The War Years 70 3. The Postwar Y ears 7 5 a) The Plays 75 b) The Style of the Plays 78 c) Simply Shakespeare 83 d) The Critics' Evaluation 87 e) The Playwriting Theory 92 f) Verse in the Plays 94 g) Ideology in the Plays 95 4. Gods o f the Lightning and Winterset 105 CHAPTER THREE 114 TRACES OF ANARCHISM 115 1. The Three Strands of Anarchism in Anderson's Plays 115 2. Anderson in Relationship to the Anarchists 117 3. Disillusion and Seclusion 123 4. Anderson and the GroupTheatre: A Parting of Ways 127 5. Anderson’s Anti-Communism 129 6. Three Plays Criticizing the Government of the United States 142 7. The Sacco-Vanzetti Case 154 8. The Erstwhile Anarchist 160 CHAPTER FOUR 168 THE DUAL CHARACTER AS THE ABSTRACT HERO 169 1. The Andersonian Tragic Hero Loser 169 2. The Character Contrasts 177 3. The Abstract Hero 184 4. The Misplaced Dyadic Association in Winterset 202 CONCLUSION 210 BIBLIOGRAPHY 219 1. Primary Sources 220 2. Secondary Sources 227 APPENDIXES 242 Appendix 1: Summaries of and Brief Commentaries on the Essays in The Essence ofTragedy and Other Footnotes and Papers and Off Broadway: Essays about the Theatre 243 Appendix 2: Hamlet in Winterset 262 PROLOGUE PROLOGUE 2 PROLOGUE 1. The Early Years Assessing the body of Maxwell Anderson’s works is no easy task. For at times the texts he wrote were paradoxical, brilliant now and then, yet pompous and superficial on occasion. Contradictory were some of the things he went on record as having said. It is therefore difficult to come to definite conclusions about the man and his works. For often when one establishes a premise, the opposite assertion seems to apply as well. In his youth Anderson read the English classics with a passion. A. S. Shivers says that Anderson was “above all, romantic in temperament” (1983, 10). At the University of North Dakota, he was influenced by his association with F. H. Koch, who is said to have made his students “glow with his own abundant love for Shakespeare and the other masters of thespian magic” (40). The “glow” stuck with Anderson throughout his playwriting career. Not unlike G. H. Boker, whose verse drama Francesca da Rimini was fírst produced in 1855, revived in 1882, and staged again in 1901, Anderson tried to bring verse drama back into the theater. He was also influenced by other nineteenth century American dramatists. His Night Over Taos (1940g) brings to mind David Belasco’s The Rose o f the Rancho , about the American conquest of Spanish-held lands; and Anderson’s melodrama Cavalier King (1952) which was never produced, is similar to Charles //, by H. Payne and Washington Irving-interestingly enough, Washington Irving appears as the narrator in Anderson’s Knickerbocker Holiday (1938a). PROLOGUE 3 The American theater at the tum of the century was more geared to entertainment than artistic expression. Vaudeville artists such as W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers attracted large audiences, as did galas like the Ziegfeld Follies and musical comedies like George M. Cohan’s Johnny Jones. Believing that Americans preferred entertainment to art, Anderson tried to incorpórate the musical and slapstick aspects of these theatrical traditions into plays like Knickerbocker Holiday (1938a), High Tor (1940c), and Lost in the Stars (1949a). But unlike the earlier American playwrights, Anderson strove to make his texts both entertaining and serious: Knickerbocker Holiday criticizes govemment, High Tor comes out against corporate greed, and Lost in the Stars attacks racism. Early American theater also influenced Anderson. Both Your Houses (1933), which satirized the United States Congress, is similar to Androboras , a farce that ridiculed the New York Senate, and which may have been written by the Govemor of the Province, Robert Hunter in 1719. Additionally, in Valley Forge (1940f) Anderson pays homage to the British players who, during the American War of Independence, staged plays theaters in Philadelphia and New York. After obtaining a f Master’s in English, Anderson became a professor at Whittier College. Later, his fondness for scholarship was reflected in his many history plays. But nowhere is his academic inclination more apparent than in his playwriting rules. His “Prelude to Dramatic Poetry,” in which he explains his dramatic theory, reads like a conference paper on dramaturgy-only the footnotes are missing: “There is no instance in the theatre of a writer who left behind him a body of unappreciated work which slowly found its public as, for example, the work of Shelley and Keats found a belated public after they had left the scene” (Anderson 1935a,l). His essays on playwriting are published in two books: The Essence o f Tragedy and Other Footnotes and Papers (1939) and Off Broadway: Essays About the Theater PROLOGUE 4 (1947a). However, I believe Anderson was a better playwright than dramatic theorist. His playwriting rules are not original, and, as R. J. Buchanan notes, in the plays there are “important deviations from the rules” (1970, 67); for example, there is no hero in Winterset (1940a). With reason, most authors criticize his playwriting theory: E. Wilson (1937), E. Foster (1942), P. J. Rice (1953), D. Gerstenberger (1963), E. M. Jackson (1973). Anderson had been an editorial writer for the Globe and the New York World before he became a playwright. While the tendency to editorialize is particularly obvious in the joumalist drama Gods o f the Lightning (1928a), it remains apparent in many of his other plays. At times, the editorialist clashes with the poet-playwright, as can be seen in Winterset (1940a), where the subject of the Sacco-Vanzetti case is represented in verse. Additionally, he was a poet who not only had poems published in nationally recognized magazines like New Republic , but he was also one of the founders and editors of The Measure: A Journal of Poetry. However, he had only one book of poems published in his lifetime: You Who Have Dreams (1925b). A second book of poems, Notes on a Dream (1971), was published posthumously.