Theatrical Climates: Democratic Publics and the Ludic Sociality of Early National Theater

What can the theater tell us about the public climate of democratic formation in early national America? An often overlooked medium in American literary and cultural studies, the theater posed as an important site of... [ view full abstract ]

What can the theater tell us about the public climate of democratic formation in early national America? An often overlooked medium in American literary and cultural studies, the theater posed as an important site of collective assemblage and public expression, particularly in the early national period. This paper considers how climates of sociality fostered within the space of early national theater inform democratic political order. Examining the dramatic criticism and cultural commentary of Washington Irving and other contemporary patrons of the theater, I take stock of the exuberant, and often turbulent, material conditions of the early national theater. I argue that the theater served as a key locus through which “the public” of a newly formed democracy might be at once conceptualized and experienced. In other words, theater’s social ecosystem performed a constitutive role in enacting and cohering a democratic political climate. Indeed, while theater has often been understood as the volatile and disruptive double of deliberative modes of popular governance, its unruly slippage from democratic order nevertheless demonstrates the capacity to crystallize a demos within a space of social plenitude and enjoyment. As ludic space, moreover, early national theater offered its audiences a mode of socio-political apprehension and engagement that was both provisional and pleasurable. This paper therefore explores the extent to which the pleasures of theater’s ludic climate might shape practices of democratic sovereignty.