The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Contrast, by Royall Tyler

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Contrast

Author: Royall Tyler

Editor: Montrose J. Moses

Release Date: June 26, 2009 [EBook #29228]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONTRAST ***

Produced by David Starner, Brownfox and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

TRANSCRIBERS' NOTES

This e-book contains the text of _The Contrast_, extracted from
Representative Plays by American Dramatists: Vol 1, 1765-1819. Comments
and background to all the plays and the other plays are available at
Project Gutenberg.

Spelling as in the original has been preserved.

THE CONTRAST

_By_

ROYALL TYLER

[Illustration: ROYALL TYLER]

ROYALL TYLER

(1757-1826)

William Dunlap is considered the father of the American Theatre, and
anyone who reads his history of the American Theatre will see how firmly
founded are his claims to this title. But the first American play to be
written by a native, and to gain the distinction of anything like a
"run" is "The Contrast,"[1] by Royall Tyler. Unfortunately for us, the
three hundred page manuscript of Tyler's "Life," which is in possession
of one of his descendants, has never been published. Were that document
available, it would throw much valuable light on the social history of
New England. For Tyler was deep-dyed in New England traditions, and,
strange to say, his playwriting began as a reaction against a
Puritanical attitude toward the theatre.

When Tyler came to New York on a very momentous occasion, as an official
in the suppression of Shays's Rebellion, he had little thought of ever
putting his pen to paper as a playwright, although he was noted from
earliest days as a man of literary ambition, his tongue being sharp in
its wit, and his disposition being brilliant in the parlour. It was
while in what was even then considered to be the very gay and wicked
city of New York, that Royall Tyler went to the theatre for the first
time, and, on that auspicious occasion, witnessed Sheridan's "The School
for Scandal." We can imagine what the brilliancy of that moment must
hav