Drama Uncloseted in Boston

Chapter 1, “Drama Uncloseted in Boston,” argues that American urbanity began at home. The cosmopolitanism practiced in elite domestic spaces after the American Revolution signaled an urban future; in opening these homes to a broader public, novels would transform it. But not without serious resistance. Instead of embracing urbanity after the revolution, Bostonians strained to negotiate competing desires for republican equality and cosmopolitan sophistication. This tension found a fitting narrative in a public scandal of incestuous infidelity, pregnancy, and suicide involving Perez Morton, a prominent Boston lawyer and drama aficionado; his wife, poet Sarah Wentworth Morton; and her sister, Fanny Apthorp, whose published suicide notes were widely read. I trace the scandal’s circulation through Boston newspapers, as a subplot in William Hill Brown’s 1789 novel The Power of Sympathy, and in three plays, two by Brown himself, that were printed for private performances in Boston, where public theater remained illegal. These texts offer a fascinating case study of the formally diverse and multivocal print culture in which cosmopolitan culture clashed with new ideas about American urbanity. The epistolary novel emerged as a form concerned not with the past or present, I argue, but with the future—a future that writes out of existence the varied voices, especially female and Black voices, present in the plays, poetry, and papers.