The Group Theatre premiered Maxwell Anderson's Night Over Taos during its first season, in March of 1932. In his “Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties,” The Fervent Years, Group cofounder Harold Clurman remembered that his immediate impression of the script was “not a happy one. The play seemed bookish, contrived, uninspired. I was reluctant to have the Group do it.”¹ Although he finally decided that it would suffice as a “playable stage piece,” his lack of enthusiasm for Night Over Taos proved characteristic of subsequent reactions to the play. The Group production closed after only two weeks. Its director, Lee Strasberg, admitted that the “contemplative, cloistral tone” he established “was not what the play demanded”;² the cast was widely faulted, especially for its youth;³ but reviewers also blamed Anderson for a failure to bring his subject to life.⁴ Negative appraisals have dominated the critical tradition as well.⁵ Perhaps because the play has been consistently slighted or ignored in discussions of the Anderson canon, Clurman's additional references to its sources have remained unidentified and unexplored. As he recalled:

Anderson announced one day that he had read a play by Racine that had an intriguing plot line. A little later he came on an article in the American Mercury about the semi-feudal civilization of New Mexico just before the Yankees put in their appearance in that state. The classic French plot fitted the kind of world that was pictured in the Mercury article. He decided to do a play for us on this material.

In a short time his play, Night over Taos [sic], was completed.⁶

Studying the sources of Night Over Taos offers an unusual opportunity for observing Anderson's method of borrowing and assimilating diverse materials. Such an investigation also provides a new perspective on the play itself, a perspective that reveals its considerable strengths.

Anderson found the historical background of Night Over Taos in two (not just one, as Clurman recalled) among a series of six articles published in the American Mercury from May through October of 1931, under the general title of Rio Grande.⁷ He used primarily the third article, “The Feudal Lords of the Spanish Days,” which characterized the civilization of Spanish New Mexico, and the sixth, “The Strange History of Padre Martinez of Taos,” which detailed its nineteenth-century end. The author of Rio Grande, Harvey Fergusson, took a romantic, interpretative approach to his panoramic history of the American Southwest. His facility for communicating the charm and significance he found in the story of his native land is perhaps the most striking element of his chronicle. Fergusson later contributed a note to the program printed for the Group Theatre production of Anderson's play that distilled his perspective on the resistance of Spanish-settled Taos to the territorial expansion of the American government. The note concluded: “Taos was a tiny frontier settlement and its army was a ragged mob, but both of them were relics of a regime and of an ideology that had conquered continents and ruled the world. There was heroism as well as tragic absurdity in this last stand of a dying feudal world against the crescent power that was bound to destroy it.”⁸

Fergusson's third American Mercury article introduced the civilization of the ricos, or “rich ones,” who governed their land by grant of the King of Spain and with the absolute conviction that “human life is a hierarchy based upon land and blood and privilege” (p. 336). Native peons, “who in effect were serfs” (p. 338), farmed and ranched for them, and they maintained this “pleasantly lazy” life-style by a fierce dependence upon “the faithful observance of customs and traditions” (p. 336) and by a continual awareness that “The individual was nothing, the order of society everything” (p. 347). In Anderson's dramatization of this feudal community, the captain of the invading American army speaks from the perspective of an outsider and in terms similar to Fergusson's when he reminds a rico that “You've had it soft here, you and your class. Your peons / Jump when you speak.”⁹ Anderson's central character, Pablo Montoya, is leader of the resistant ricos and spokesman for the old ways of Spanish Taos. He inspires his followers to withstand change by reminding them of their long tradition. “We come of an old, proud race,” he says, and,

                                                                      this is our place,
We wrought it out of a desert, built it up
To beauty and use; we live here well, we have
Customs and arts and wisdom handed down
To us through centuries.

(p. 90)

As the feudal society of Spanish New Mexico was structured by obedience to God and King, each of its family units was structured by obedience to the man who was God and King in his own household. Fergusson was particularly interested in the phenomenon that “When men rule and women are subject the differentiating qualities of the sexes are always exaggerated” (p. 339). He described the men as cruel and hot-tempered: “Feuds were many and generally sprang from love affairs, for this was a time and place of romantic passion” (p. 340). By contrast, the women were compassionate and generous in their affections: “infidelity was all but universal, for this was almost the only possible form of feminine revolt against a complete and brutal masculine domination” (p. 341). The women of Taos found another means of revolt; they betrayed their men to the American invaders. Fergusson noted: “These women in all essentials were slaves and they had the deep duplicity … which tyranny always breeds” (p. 341). His discussion of feuds, adultery, and betrayal furnish animating motifs of Anderson's play. Pablo Montoya's two sons, Federico and Felipe, duel for the girl whom their father has already claimed as his own bride. The padre, Martinez, warns Montoya that so young a bride will inevitably prove unfaithful to him, but Montoya insists that “A woman goes to the stronger, as land and nations / Go to the stronger” (p. 115). Montoya has been betrayed before, by the woman who bore him Felipe and Federico. She “tried to poison me,” he recalls, but “I looked in her eyes, and changed the goblets, and drank / And she took the challenge and drank … she was no coward” (p. 170; ellipsis in the text). Carlotta also betrays him in betraying Taos. When her husband learns that she has slept with a gringo and has warned the northerner to summon military aid, he strangles her; Montoya reassures him that “If my wife had done as yours or spoken as yours did, I'd use the same measures” (p. 104). And Felipe reiterates this theme in direct paraphrase of Harvey Fergusson while speaking his final epitaph for Taos:

A girl goes where she's sent by her father, and when
She's chosen by an old man who can pay for her
Or who has her at his mercy, she's his, and a slave,
And all the women are slaves here! (That's why you can't trust them!)

(p. 194; parentheses in the text)

Anderson used the wealth of anthropological details in Fergusson's third article to bring his dramatic world to life. For example, Fergusson briefly characterized the society of the ricos as polygamous: “One man had thirty-six legitimate children by three wives” (p. 399); Anderson indicates that Montoya's intended bride will replace two surviving wives as his favorite. Fergusson noted that one result of the idle life of the ricos, with their five meals a day, was that the women were “fat and middle-aged before they were thirty” (p. 342); Montoya's second wife speculates jealously that her young replacement will be “fat, though, fat before I am” (p. 23). Anderson gives us a flavor of what Fergusson called “elaborate, ceremonious and truly charming” manners (p. 342) when his ricos bow and embrace on meeting, and when Montoya honors Felipe's request that he eat by taking a “morsel of meat” and a “gulp of wine,” “lest it should be said that I have refused you anything” (p. 106). Fergusson observed that “Where there is no written literature poetry escapes the danger of becoming the possession of a class. Here almost everyone was a poet of a sort” (p. 343). Anderson's most masterful orchestrations of off-stage sound effects involve the persistent wails of peons in mourning when they fear that Montoya has been killed in battle (pp. 5, 14, 41); the welcome song they sing, first when he returns (pp. 85, 86) and then during the second act of the play (p. 145); and their wedding song for him and the young bride Diana (p. 150). Fergusson made special mention of a “long narrative poem … recited and enacted as a drama at Christmas time” that told the story of a Spanish surprise attack on the Comanche Indians: they “let down their long hair, painted their faces and rode forward chanting and yelling like Indians”; they left behind “whitening bones and skulls that littered the ground for many years” (p. 344). Montoya rallies his men at the end of Act I by reminding them of “a play that we perform at New Year's.” He describes how the men of Taos “don Comanche war-paint, / Trail feathers in their hair, and charge like Indians,” and how “A ring of bones still whitening in the wind” remains behind as proof that the great victory “was more than legend” (p. 92).

Fergusson's third American Mercury article was also the ultimate source of the set and costumes of Night Over Taos. The set described in Anderson's opening stage directions (p. 3) and executed by Robert Edmond Jones was one element of the Group Theatre production that reviewers unanimously approved.¹⁰ The single room that served for all three acts, the “great hall in the residence of Pablo Montoya,” corresponds to the “long reception hall” that Fergusson called the “principal room of every house.”¹¹ “A large hourglass … on a stand near the fireplace” is Anderson's sole contribution to Fergusson's detailed description of the homes of the ricos. Fergusson explained that the “walls were washed bonewhite with gypsum and covered with colored cloths to a height of four or five feet, so that the whitewash would not rub off”; Anderson calls for “adobe walls whitewashed to the beamed ceiling and covered with red tapestries to a height of four or five feet.” Fergusson wrote that the furniture “was all home-made and included only a dining table, a few wooden chairs with rawhide seats, and heavy carven chests for clothes and jewels”; Anderson specifies that a “long table, homemade, as is all the furniture, occupies the center, flanked with benches and chairs.” Fergusson noted that “Nearly all the houses had sacred images in little corner shrines,” and Anderson places “small altars on either side” of the entrance door. Fergusson's typical room was “dim,” with “Scant daylight” shining “through translucent windows”; Anderson's set is “dark,” with “three small and low windows, sunk deep in the four-foot wall and not glazed, but covered with translucent parchment.” Fergusson concluded by filling the reception hall with the “idle, soft-voiced women” who spent their days there, “waiting for men who were truly both lords and masters,” and Anderson raises his curtain on a “number of women and young girls … weeping quietly while they exchange news in awed voices,” waiting for their men to return from the battle with the Americans. When the men do appear, they wear the clothes that Fergusson described: “buckskin, dyed black, well cut by native tailors and ornamented with silver buttons. … Each had over his shoulder a blanket called a serape” (p. 342). Anderson follows each detail down to the silver buttons; he varies only by dressing Pablo, Federico, and Felipe in “white buckskin, the mark of the men of the Montoya family” (p. 26).

With Fergusson's sixth American Mercury article on the fall of Spanish Taos, Anderson is more selective. Fergusson emphasized that the rebellion of Taos against the United States government meant “many things to many men.” To some, “It was to be a slaughter of infidels for the glory of God.” To the Indian peasants, “it was one more revolt of the primitive against civilization.” To the ricos, “It was to be a great patriotic enterprise that would restore the lost province to the fatherland” (p. 237). Anderson chooses to dramatize not the religious crusade, and not the native insurgence, but only the nationalistic resistance by the Spanish settlers of the Rio Grande. He also narrows the scope of that resistance. Fergusson described two major Spanish conspiracies. The first was an unsuccessful plot to capture Santa Fe and to kill all gringo inhabitants and their sympathizers. The second began with the horribly prolonged murder of the territorial governor, developed into a night-long rampage of looting and killing, and ended when an American army attacked Taos in retaliation. The Americans routed the Spaniards in a snowy mountain battle; the few surviving rebels fled to an old mission church for sanctuary, but were surrounded and eventually massacred. Fergusson further emphasized that the two Spanish conspiracies failed in their primary purpose to arouse people “everywhere” to “kill the gringos and seize the government” (p. 239). Anderson localizes the rebellion in Taos by eliminating all reference to other Spanish settlements in New Mexico; he treats only the final and most dramatic conflict, the snowy battle in the mountain pass; and he creates his own version of the aftermath among the Spanish survivors.

The changes Anderson makes in adapting Fergusson's narrative to the stage reveal his awareness of the precedence of the artist's own guiding principles for his play. In “The Essence of Tragedy,” written a few years after Night Over Taos, in 1938, Anderson describes how a playwright must analyze a potential subject for a play: “you must make a choice among visions, and you must check your chosen vision carefully before assuming that it will make a play. But by what rules, what maps, what fields of reference can you check so intangible a substance as … an inspiration … ?”¹² The rules that Anderson follows in adapting Rio Grande may have been intuitive, but they prove dramatically sound, primarily demonstrating his sure sense of the nature and demands of his genre. He begins by distinguishing drama from history. As he comments in 1943, while plotting Storm Operation: “I shall be able to trace only a tiny episode in that varied and historic campaign. The full story will have to be told later by historians.”¹³ While history must include and correlate all possible causes and effects, a play must limit itself to events and issues that can be contained within the brief span of dramatic action and maintained in single focus. Anderson formulates this principle in “The Essence of Tragedy”: “A play should lead up to and away from a central crisis. …”¹⁴ His further decisions about precisely how to narrow his source material to a workable crisis reflect his independent commitment to the tragic genre. In Fergusson's narrative, the Catholic Church survived the conflict of two nations, and the lives of the Indian peasants continued with little significant change, but the feudal civilization of the Spanish settlers of New Mexico vanished. Anderson recognizes the distinction, which Martinez voices for him:

The city of Taos
Will live on, then, and the church … and I myself …
But this is the end of the ricos.

(p. 178; ellipses in the text)

By limiting his play to the story of the nationalistic conflict of the Spaniards and the Americans, Anderson thus isolates and dramatizes the one conflict that ended tragically. Finally, his decision to characterize Taos as the insular center of the Spanish civilization in the New World allows him to focus on a single hero and to intensify that hero's experience. Anderson's Taos is so remote and so solitary that its cause seems futile and its end certain. By developing this sense of the inevitability of the defeat of Taos, he avoids any necessity of dramatizing the actual massacre that followed the battle. He is free to invent the plot contrivance by which the American forces leave for the winter, creating the uneasy hiatus in which Pablo Montoya works out his own tragic destiny.

Anderson's choice of Pablo Montoya as his hero is his most radical departure from Fergusson's narrative. As sugested by its title, “The Strange History of Padre Martinez of Taos,” Fergusson's sixth American Mercury article concerned a powerful priest who masterminded the conspiracies of Spanish New Mexico. Martinez was an enigmatic figure: “telling his pupils that the days of priestcraft were over, teaching them law and English, and at night squatting on housetops with his fellow conspirators, plotting a massacre of all the gringos and all their sympathizers” (p. 237); but he was unequivocally ambitious. In Anderson's dramatic version of the story of Taos, Martinez remains an important character, and, like Fergusson's padre, urges liberalizing reforms and establishes a printing press even while exhorting the ricos to fight for the old ways: “Believe in us and our cause and the great days / We've lived through in the past” (p. 51). But he is not the central character, and he emerges as less an enigma than a compromiser. He urges reform in order to preserve the tradition: “We must give them the shadow / Or they'll want the substance” (p. 118). And he is also prepared to survive the end of the tradition: “I'm no friend to / The north, and I'll never be … but I can live with it” (p. 179; ellipsis in the text). Instead, Anderson's central character is one among the leaders of the ricos whom Fergusson described as figurehead rulers for Martinez. The historical Pablo Montoya incited the mob that assassinated the territorial governor. After the ensuing rampage, Martinez “denounced Montoya, long and eloquently, as a murderer. … [Montoya] took thus publicly all the blame upon himself, and gave the padre an opportunity to pose before witnesses as one who deplored the violence and bloodshed.” After the battle in the mountain pass, “Montoya later was hanged in the plaza” (p. 239). Anderson's Pablo Montoya possesses many of the characteristics of Fergusson's typical rico and shares the leadership abilities of Fergusson's Padre Martinez, but he owes little else to Rio Grande.

By choosing as central character a historical figure who received very little attention from Fergusson, Anderson frees himself to create his own tragic hero. And, by deciding on a leader of the ricos as hero, Anderson focuses his story on the character most representative of, and most involved in, the nationalistic conflict that he has chosen to dramatize, the conflict that offers him the elements of tragedy. His hero loses far more with the end of Spanish civilization in the New World than does Fergusson's Padre Martinez. The story of Martinez is the story of a survivor, of a man who loses his political power, but who retains his religious leadership when New Mexico is no longer Spanish. His story is pathetic rather than tragic. Even had Anderson imposed the tragic formula on Fergusson's story of the Rio Grande by engineering the death of Martinez, that death would have been complicated with suggestions of Christian martyrdom by the simple fact of his priesthood, and thus would have been transcendent rather than tragic. So Anderson chooses a hero who lives in one world rather than in two, a man who is fully committed to the present, political world. With the struggle to resist the territorial expansion of the United States government, the fate of Anderson's Pablo Montoya is finally determined.

It is in this central image of the man of destiny that the worlds of Harvey Fergusson and of Jean-Baptiste Racine conjoin. Although Harold Clurman did not know, or did not specify, which Racine play intrigued Anderson, the plot similarities of Night Over Taos and Mithridates are so striking that there can be no doubt of the source play's identity.¹⁵ Both plays center on older heroes. We see them as great leaders stubbornly defying subjugation by an ascendant military power, and we see them as aging lovers desperately seeking to regain their youth and claim their immortality through a young girl. When each play opens, its hero is assumed dead following his first military defeat. During his absence we meet his two sons: one betrays his father in war and claims his father's intended wife as an inheritance; the other is loyal as a son and patriot, but discovers that his father's bride returns the secret, troubled love he feels for her. When each hero returns, his status is enhanced by the force of the archetypal resurrection motif. But his power is slowly eroded as he learns of his sons' differing treacheries, and he is eventually defeated both in war and in love. Finally, each takes his own life. Even in the subplots, ending happily for the conscientious son and the young bride, the two plays are parallel.

Anderson borrows not only the plot structure, but also specifics of scene and situation from Racine. In both plays, the truer sons are early distinguished from their less admirable brothers by their filial concern: in Mithridates, Xiphares worries that his father may not have received his proper burial rites; in Night Over Taos, Felipe returns to search the mountain pass for Montoya's body. Xiphares has been seriously wounded while regaining a city for Mithridates; Felipe has been winged while calling Montoya's name in the pass. With Mithridates and Montoya assumed dead, Xiphares and Felipe confess their love to their fathers' brides, Monime and Diana, but the young couples have only moments together before they are interrupted by Pharnaces and Federico. Although Xiphares and Felipe learn something of their brothers' political treachery before their fathers' returns, they have little choice but to keep silent, as Pharnaces and Federico warn them to do with their thinly-veiled threats to reveal Xiphares' and Felipe's own deceptions in love. When the fathers return, they chastise their sons for failings that seem minor in light of the infidelities just revealed. Mithridates reminds his sons that they should have remained in the cities under their jurisdiction; Montoya chides Felipe for risking his life by searching the battle area, while simultaneously implying that Federico is an unnatural son because he did not. Both heroes are eager to see their brides; Montoya gives Diana a tiara, reminiscent of the crown that Monime already wears as Mithridates' queen. But the heroes grow suspicious, and confront their brides with the accusation that the girls love their sons. Monime and Diana nearly betray Xiphares and Felipe in their quilty surprise, but Mithridates and Montoya interrupt just before they do so, naming instead Pharnaces and Federico, whom the brides can honestly disclaim as lovers. Xiphares and Felipe are their fathers' favorite sons, and so the eventually revealed fact that these two challenge them for their brides is as painful a betrayal for them as the political treachery of Pharnaces and Federico.

As strikingly exact as his borrowings from Mithridates are, Anderson remains selective in the use to which he puts them. For example, he borrows a speech in which Xiphares justifies his love for Monime by the fact that he has admired her before his father knew her, when she was still a young, innocent, flowering girl. But Anderson gives the speech to Montoya, who muses that he himself has watched Diana during her girlhood, “dreaming / Of a child-wife” and seeing her grow “maiden-like, flower-like, woman-like” (p. 140). Anderson owes his plot to Racine, but differs significantly from him in the conception and characterization of this aging hero. Unlike Racine, he focuses unflinchingly on his hero as the motive force of his play. In Racine's play, Mithridates himself spreads the rumors that he has fallen in battle with such efficacy that no one doubts his death. Thus, when Monime and Xiphares share their first, hesitant encounter, Pharnaces is the chief threat to their mutual happiness and the main subject of their conversation. In Night Over Taos, however, Montoya is the central figure even when absent and before appearing on stage. He holds a certain mystical status with his people. They are unwilling to admit that he could be captured: “Who would believe a great liar like that when he says General Montoya is taken prisoner by gringoes [sic],” scoffs one peon (p. 7); or that he could be dead: “We cannot believe that,” asserts another (p. 13). Those close to him are plagued by the idea of his invincibility as well. When Felipe and Diana talk alone for the first time, they confess their unreasoning convictions that he is still alive and thus remains the chief obstacle to their happiness. Despite all that is at stake, Felipe cannot wish Montoya dead; both “love and honor” (p. 69) bind him to the man who is also his rival for Diana. All fates depend upon Montoya's. He remains at the center of his world and of Anderson's play.

Having focused our attention on Pablo Montoya, Anderson arouses our interest in his fate by making him a sympathetic character. Again he deviates from his model, Mithridates, who is an unattractive hero. Mithridates is paranoiacally suspicious of others, including his sons, and miserly with any unselfish emotions. He is a clever and ruthless manipulator of those around him, and of their more human emotions. He uses subterfuge first in spreading the rumor of his own death, and again in confirming to himself that Monime loves Xiphares. He announces to her that he has decided to marry her off to his younger son; her incredulous surprise overcomes her native caution, and she assures Mithridates that if he is not to be her husband, then she will be extremely happy with Xiphares. Later, in an agony of alternating hopes and fears, she tells her companion and confidante, Phaedime, that she suspects Mithridates' motives; Phaedime reassures her, ironically, with her conviction that so powerful a king would have no need of, and would scorn to use, such petty artifice. Phaedime's accurate sense of what is honorable and kingly, however, is not embodied by the man who seems only less admirable by the force of the contrast.

Unlike Mithridates, Montoya is a man of principle. Given his view of the world and his role in it, he acts with integrity. He stoops to deceit only with the unsympathetic Federico, who has forfeited his rights and privileges by betraying the battle plans to the enemy and leading his own men to their slaughter. When Montoya lures Federico into a false sense of security, but then produces the map that shows how his son has bargained with the American captain for a share of Taos, he earns our respect for his shrewd unravelling of the mystery of the betrayal of the Spanish forces. We are relieved that evil, in the person of the false Federico, is thwarted. Although we have an early foreshadowing of Montoya's weakness, his love for a girl forty years his junior, a weakness that causes men to “laugh a little” (p. 21), we also have other evidences of how well and wisely he governs. For example, we see him deciding the case of the murder of Carlotta by making Carlotta's vengeful daughter, Nuna, Mateo's judge; when given this responsibility, Nuna confesses that he had cause to kill the traitoress. Mateo's harshest judge absolves him, so no one can feel dissatisfied with the decision. Again, we see Montoya questioning his three American prisoners about the battle, sizing up one as a coward and a liar, identifying another as the leader, and, after goading the Captain into telling him a false story about the betrayer of Taos, saying, “Go on. If you tell enough lies I'll know the truth” (p. 127). Montoya commands our admiration as surely as he controls the situation.

Our reactions to Montoya grow increasingly complex, however, as he himself undergoes changes. Pablo Montoya is a dynamic character, again unlike his prototype, Mithridates, who is essentially static. Although we receive reports of Mithridates' great prowess as a leader, we ourselves see him only in defeat. He has accepted it and has come to terms with it by the time he returns from battle. He says he is ready to recommence his life-long struggle with the Romans, but he is more concerned with Monime than with plans of war, and so the Roman invasion catches him unprepared. His final effort to resist a force larger than himself seems to be an act of desperate bravado. When he kills himself rather than be taken alive, he once again accepts defeat by the Romans. Only the sudden successful appearance by Xiphares, in the role of deus ex machina, lends a note of triumph to the lingering death of Mithridates. By contrast, Montoya returns from battle undefeated in spirit, insisting that the men of Taos have been victorious because they have survived the betrayal of their plans to the enemy. We watch him in the painful process of learning that Taos will not survive unchanged, after all.

He begins confident that he can prevent change and alter destiny. But our first sign that he is fallible comes with his assurance to Raquel that her husband Pedro will return to her. Raquel believes that she “can take [his] word” (p. 110), but, soon after, we learn with Montoya that Pedro has sacrificed himself trying to assassinate the American officer to whom he had inadvertently revealed the battle plans of Taos; Montoya has broken faith with Raquel in promising her something outside his knowledge—and beyond his control. His faith in his power is further shaken by the discovery of Federico's traitorous bargain with the Americans. He warns Federico of his contempt for such compromise when he executes his American prisoners. He has promised one of the three his life in exchange for cooperating in the questioning, but we hear three volleys from the firing squad, and he tells Federico coldly: “Someone told me the truth, / And that's his reward for it” (p. 153). Then he arrests Federico and chains him in the public square outside his home. When he hears Federico “spreading sedition” (p. 162) to the peons who gather there, he stabs his chained and helpless son. He is equally capable of murdering Felipe and Diana when he discovers their infidelity, and readies for each a glass to hold a fatal dose of poison. Martinez halts him, then, and desperately tries to show Montoya what he has become by his inability to compromise his allegiance and his principles:

                                                                      If you execute Felipe
They'll no longer respect you. The news will spread
That Pablo Montoya's raving in his house
And murdering his sons. Can you command them
With that in their minds?

(p. 173)

Montoya tries to deny the force of the priest's argument. But the peons have watched silently and accusingly, pressing in at the door of the reception hall, and Raquel has begged for Felipe's life. Because his people will not accept the execution of Felipe, the American spirit of individual freedom of choice has succeeded in invading where the American army could not. Montoya cannot fight both his own people and the Americans, and he needs Felipe to maintain the loyalty of his people, but he cannot knowingly tolerate Felipe's betrayal. So he makes, defiantly, the only choice open to a man of his convictions.

Anderson emphasizes in “The Basis of Artistic Creation in Literature” that “The story of a play must be the story of what happens within the mind or heart of a man or woman. It cannot deal primarily with external events. The external events are only symbolic of what goes on within.”¹⁶ That which occurs in the mind of Pablo Montoya is what Anderson calls in “The Essence of Tragedy” a “recognition scene”: “a discovery by the hero of some element in his environment or in his own soul of which he has not been aware—or which he has not taken sufficiently into account.”¹⁷ Montoya discovers his own fallibility. As symbolized by the blood of Federico that stains his white buckskin all through the third act,¹⁸ he has not remained unmarked by the actions he has taken in desperation. He has lost control of himself in his attempt to control the destiny of Taos, and has jeopardized his self-respect, as well as our sympathy. He realizes that “what I did / Would have been right once,” but that for this time, “I was wrong.”¹⁹ The catalyst in the change of values is that force that “he has not taken sufficiently into account.” As symbolized by the large hourglass that Anderson adds to the stage properties, Pablo Montoya confronts the force of time. Federico and Felipe have warned him that it is only a matter of time before the American army overwhelms Spanish Taos, and he finally admits that the time of Taos has come, and that time is an antagonist he cannot defeat. In his last speeches, the word “old” echoes and re-echoes. He perceives that he is too old to barter for love with his son, and that his Taos is too old to survive in a new world. In the face of the external chaos he apprehends, he claims his internal victory by his final act of defiance for new ways, new values, and the spirit of compromise: “In all Taos / There's only one man who could not surrender and live” (p. 199). Pablo Montoya recognizes that the world as he knows it has collapsed, and he chooses not to inhabit the world that succeeds it.

In Racine's play, Mithridates lives long enough to see Xiphares mount an attack and rout his old foe, the Roman army. Xiphares is the reincarnation of his father: he will continue to fulfill his father's dreams, fight his wars, and love his woman. Racine's play is essentially circular in structure, but Anderson's is not. Felipe is not another Pablo, and Montoya's ways die with him. All of Anderson's adaptations and alterations of his two sources are designed to make more moving the tragedy of a man in conflict with time, a man who dies with the understanding that “That is what death's for— / To rid the earth of old fashions.”²⁰Night Over Taos dramatizes a moment of transition, when something fresh is gained, something valuable is lost, and everything is changed; when “Taos, a little island of things that were, / Sinks among things that are” (p. 199).

Anderson returned to the subject of Spanish Taos in 1933, a year-and-a-half after completing his play based on Racine's Mithridates and on Fergusson's articles in the American Mercury. The occasion was the publication of the book Rio Grande.²¹ Harvey Fergusson added a half-dozen chapters to his articles to complete his story of the American Southwest; Anderson reviewed the book for The Nation.²² Like Clurmans' references to the sources of Night Over Taos, the review has been overlooked by Anderson scholars, but also like those remarks, it provides an important perspective on the play. While reviewers of Rio Grande characterized the book as “a panorama of the different sorts of life that have been in the Southwest,” and, if they referred to the history of Taos, mentioned it only as one tale among many,²³ Anderson writes almost exclusively of the conflict between the Spanish settlers and the American invaders. Fergusson “goes back further into origins and takes the tale on into later times,” Anderson admits, “but the essence of this tragic history is in this touching of two civilizations at a vital point in a vital time.” Clearly, Anderson sees in the story of Taos a universal truth: “Here, in little, is an epitome of history. An ancient order, laboriously built up on blood and conquest, settles down to a brief period of flower. The rabble of another race overruns it and sets up another system of living.” This is the truth about man and time that Anderson gives dramatic life in Night Over Taos. He discovered it in the situation described in Harvey Fergusson's chronicle of the American Southwest, Rio Grande; he gave it form with the classical plot of Jean-Baptiste Racine's Mithridates.²⁴ And he made this tragic truth moving through an independent creation and a successful one, through the person of Pablo Montoya.

Notes

1. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1945), 72.

2. As recalled by Clurman, p. 74. In his review of the production for the New York World-Telegram, March 10, 1932, 18, Robert Garland noted: “I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Lee Strasberg's over stylicized [sic] direction has something to do with the piece's persistent unreality.”

3. In Maxwell Anderson: The Man and His Plays (New York: Samuel French, 1933), Barrett H. Clark explained that “most of the cast being young people there was lacking a note of authority from the players of the major roles,” and he described a “first night audience that was not so much unsympathetic as unable to see in the immature leading actors the characters conceived by the poet” (pp. 25-26). Others referring to the youth of the cast included reviewers J. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, March 10, 1932, 25; John Mason Brown, New York Evening Post, March 10, 1932, 13, 131 and March 19, 1932, sec. III, 8; Gilbert W. Gabriel, New York American, March 20, 1932, sec. E, 7, Edith J. R. Isaacs, Theatre Arts Monthly, 21, (October 1937), 763; Burns Mantle, Daily News, March 10, 1932, 39; George Jean Nathan, Vanity Fair, 38, (May 1932), 66, 76; Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, Catholic World, 135, (April 1932), 76, and an anonymous critic for Theatre Arts Monthly, 18 (August 1934), 605, which captioned a photo essay, “Range of Life in One Man's Plays.” Also critical of the acting and of individual performances were reviewers Atkinson, Gabriel, Isaacs, Mantle, Nathan, John Hutchens Theatre Arts Monthly, 16, (May 1932), 360-62, Richard Lockridge New York Sun, March 10, 1932, 20; Arthur Ruhl New York Herald Tribune, March 13, 1932, sec. VII, 1, 6; Stark Young, New Republic, March 30, 1932, 181-82, and the author of “Twilight of the Hidalgos,” Stage, 9 (May 1932), 32-35.

4. Joseph Wood Krutch, writing for Nation, March 30, 1932, 378, said that “There is suspense and there is violence but the whole seems remote and, all too often, merely picturesque at the very moments when it ought to be tragic or, at least, moving.” Atkinson, Brown, Gabriel, Garland, Lockridge, Mantle, Nathan, and Ruhl agreed, as did David Carb in Vogue May 15, 1932, 100, 108, and the anonymous reviewer for Arts and Decoration, 37, May 1932, 63.

5. Besides Clark, the play's defenders include Laurence G. Avery, “The Conclusion of Night Over Taos,” American Literature, 38 (November 1965), 318-21, Edward Foster, “Core of Belief: An Interpretation of the Plays of Maxwell Anderson,” Sewanee Review, 50 (January-March 1942), 87-100; Ima Honaker Herron, The Small Town in American Drama (Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1969); Arthur M. Sampley, “Theory and Practice in Maxwell Anderson's Poetic Tragedies,” College English, 5 (May 1944), 412-18; Walter Fuller Taylor, The Story of American Letters, rev. ed. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956). Herbert Ellsworth Childs, “Playgoer's Playwright: Maxwell Anderson,” English Journal, 27 (June 1938), 475-85 and Edith J. R. Isaacs in “Good Playing a Plenty,” Theatre Arts Monthly, 18 (January 1934), 9-18, and “Slumber Song—Marching Song,” Theatre Arts Monthly, 21, (October 1937), 763, defended the play in direct response to the New York critics.

   But sharing the reviewers' criticisms of artificiality, disunity, and artistic as well as commercial failure are Winifred L. Dusenbury, “Myth in American Drama Between the Wars,” Modern Drama, 6 (December 1963), 294-308; Edmond M. Gagey, Revolution in American Drama (Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1969); Arthur M. Sampley, “Theory and Practice in Maxwell Anderson's Poetic Tragedies,” College English, 5 (May 1944), 412-1974; Jean Gould, Modern American Playwrights (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966); Gerald Rabkin, Drama and Commitment: Politics in the American Theatre of the Thirties (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1964), and Homer E. Woodbridge, “Maxwell Anderson,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 44 (January 1945), 55-68. Calling the characterizations thin and the language contrived are Allan G. Halline, “Maxwell Anderson's Dramatic Theory,” American Literature, 16, (May 1944), 63-81; Jordan Y. Miller, “Maxwell Anderson: Gifted Technician,” The Thirties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, ed. Warren French (DeLand, Fla.: Everett Edwards, 1967), 183-92; Harold Rosenberg, “Poetry and the Theatre,” Poetry, 57 (1941), 258-63; Howard Taubman, The Making of the American Theatre, rev. ed. (New York: Coward-McMann, 1965). Critical of the ending as contrived and sentimental are Mabel Driscoll Bailey, Maxwell Anderson: The Playwright as Prophet (London and New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1957); Eleanor Flexner American Playwrights: 1918-1939, The Theatre Retreats from Reality, Essay Index Reprint Series (1938; reprinted, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969); Philip Stevenson “Maxwell Anderson: Thursday's Child,” New Theatre, 3 (September 1936), 5-7, 25-27; Gerald Weales “The Group Theatre and Its Plays,” American Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 10, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967), 67-85.

   Particularly characteristic are the responses of Carl Carmer, who says Night Over Taos is “to be praised more for its greatness of conception than for its execution” in “Maxwell Anderson, Poet and Champion,” Theatre Arts Monthly, 17, (June 1933), 443, and of Alfred S. Shivers, who dismisses the play as one that he has “no alternative but to omit or give only passing notice.” Maxwell Anderson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 10.

6. Clurman, 21-22.

7. Avery first identified Harvey Fergusson's articles as having “provided the basis for Night Over Taos.” Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1977), 41.

   The articles included in the Rio Grande series for American Mercury are as follows: “The River, the Valley, and the People,” 23 (May 1931), 1-10; “The Seven Golden Cities of Cibola,” 23 (June 1931), 209-22; “The Feudal Lords of the Spanish Days,” 23 (July 1931), 336-49; “The Rise and Fall of the Mountain Men,” 23 (August 1931), 478-92; “The Common Folk of the Valley,” 24 (September 1931), 108-17; “The Strange Case of Padre Martinez of Taos,” 24, (October 1931), 230-42. The last article, listed as “The Strange Case …” in the table of contents, reads as “The Strange History of Padre Martinez of Taos” on page 230.

   Subsequent page references will be included in the text, with all references to the third article from Volume 23 and all references to the sixth article from Volume 24 of American Mercury.

8. Harvey Fergusson, “The Historical Background of ‘Night Over Taos,’” program “published by the New York Theatre Program Corporation,” p. 14. Maxwell Anderson Collection, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

9. Maxwell Anderson, Night Over Taos (New York: Samuel French, 1932), 37. Night Over Taos has been published twice, neither time with the correct ending. Avery has outlined the textual problems in “The Conclusion of Night Over Taos.” I follow the first edition with the ending that he has supplied. Subsequent references will be included in the text.

10. Lauding the set were Atkinson, Carmer, Gabriel, Garland, Hutchens, Mantle, Ruhl, and Young, as well as Eugene Burr, Billboard, March 19, 1932, 16-17; Julius Cohen, Journal of Commerce and Commercial, March 10, 1932, 18; Arthur Pollock, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 10, 1932, 22; “Ibee” Variety, March 15, 1932, 50, and the anonymous reviewer for New York Evening Journal, March 10, 1932, 18. For Brown, New York Evening Post, March 16, 1932, 6; Carb, Wyatt, and the reviewer for Arts and Decoration, the set was the most successful element of the production.

11. The following description of the typical Taos room and, in particular, the reception hall are all from page 339 of Fergusson's third American Mercury article.

12. Anderson, “The Essence of Tragedy,” The Essence of Tragedy and Other Footnotes and Papers (New York: Russell & Russell, 1939), 5.

13. Anderson, “A Dramatist's Playbill,” New York Herald Tribune, September 19, 1943, sec. V, 1.

14. Anderson, “The Essence of Tragedy,” 7.

15. Two translations of Mithridates were available to Anderson: one by Robert Bruce Boswell, in The Dramatic Works of Jean Racine: A Metrical English Version (London: G. Bell and Sons, a series of editions from 1890 to 1918), II, 72-132, and another by Howard Davis Spoerl, Mithridates, Tragedy: English Acting Version in Blank Verse, with an introduction by Leo Rich Lewis (Tufts College, Mass.: Tufts College Press, 1926).

16. Maxwell Anderson, “The Basis of Artistic Creation in Literature,” The Bases of Artistic Creation: Essays by Maxwell Anderson, Rhys Carpenter, Roy Harris (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1942), 8-9.

17. Anderson, “The Essence of Tragedy,” 6.

18. This striking visual image is doubly important in preparing us for Montoya's suicide: first, it symbolizes the psychological toll on Montoya of the murder of his son; second, it reminds the audience of the murder, reinforcing moral and aesthetic demands for his death in turn. It is surprising, therefore, that the motif was not used in the Group Theatre production, where only Federico and Felipe wore the “white buckskin” that Anderson specified for the Montoya family. Montoya's jacket was dark and highly decorated and even with its large white collar scarcely provided the dramatic effect that Anderson obviously sought. Young noted that Montoya wore “velvet and gold” in contrast to the sons in “their beautiful white jackets.” See “Range of Life in One Man's Plays” for a small group photo, and “Twilight of the Hidalgos,” for several excellent close-ups.

19. These lines are among those omitted in the first edition. I quote from Avery, “The Conclusion of Night Over Taos,” 320.

20. Ibid.

21. Fergusson, Rio Grande (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933).

22. Anderson, “Rio Grande,” review of Rio Grande, by Harvey Fergusson, Nation, August 16, 1933, 190-91.

23. The review has been omitted from all bibliographies of Anderson's writings; Avery rediscovered it through a reference in one of Anderson's letters, adding it to the canon of Anderson's known works in 1977 (Dramatist in America, 41).

24. Paul Horgan's review of Rio Grande in Yale Review, N. S. 23 (Autumn 1933), 211-13 is quoted. Other reviewers, all with a similar perspective, are: R. L. Duffus (New York Times Book Review, July 23, 1933, 1, 10); Howard Roosa (New Mexico Quarterly, 3 (August 1933), 190-92); Stanley Walker (New York Herald Tribune “Books,” 93, July 23, 1933, sec. VII, 1, 2; Withers Woolford (New Mexico, 11 (August 1933), 29); “F. S. A.” (Boston Evening Transcript, August 5, 1933, Book Section, p. 1); “C. L. F.” America, September 9, 1933, 546, and an anonymous reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor, August 5, 1933, 8.