weeks after having been initiated into the English comedy of manners during a brief stay in New York, when he was an adult of almost thirty. In these two instances, Tyler also gives present-day readers a rare glimpse of how drama exerted itself even in a period during which it had been outlawed (stage plays in Boston, the place of Tyler’s birth and youth, were forbidden by a law enacted in March of 1750).

The Island of Barrataria

Of Tyler’s five extant plays, The Island of Barrataria is, next only to The Contrast, the most appealing and the most actable. The three blank-verse closet dramas are based closely on stories from the Old Testament; though too constrained and formal for performance, they contain some of Tyler’s best poetry. By far the most significant of these five plays is The Contrast, and it is this drama which most clearly demands the attention of critics.

The Contrast

Indeed, The Contrast remains so popular that it not only appears in nearly every standard collection of early American literature but also has enjoyed the distinction of being adapted as a musical. On November 27, 1972, The Contrast: A Musical, adapted by Anthony Stimac, premiered at New York City’s Eastside Playhouse. Don Pippin composed the music, and the lyrics were by Steve Brown. Tyler’s play itself can hold the interest of today’s readers and audiences because of its steadfast censure of affectation at all social levels, because of its avowed concern to emphasize the corrective function of Thalia (the Comic Muse), because of its intelligent yet humorous depiction of human behavior in terms of seemingly interminable contrasts, and because of its refusal to fit easily within the bounds of a single comedic genre.

Commentators on The Contrast frequently emphasize the charge of the play’s opening lines: “Exult, each patriot heart!—this night is shown/ A piece, which we may fairly call our own.” To be sure, Tyler is, in many of his works, pointedly moved to encourage the quest for American literary independence. In their attempts to ferret out the play’s “patriotic gore,” however, commentators often obfuscate many other possible themes. Indeed, the prologue asserts other intentions for the play. Investigation of these additional intentions reveals that Tyler endeavored to produce not simply a play by an American or a distinctly American play but rather a play that bears the signature of Royall Tyler.

Throughout Tyler’s prose and poetry runs the forceful strain of a moralist—though it must be observed that he stops just short of adopting the role of a didactic prescriber of conduct. In The Contrast, Tyler most clearly manifests this moral strain in his summary condemnation of affectation and insincerity at all levels of human behavior. In the ninth couplet of the verse prologue, the playwright asserts that “our free-born ancestors” despised the “arts” of the fashions or follies of their age: “Genuine sincerity alone they priz’d.” The major theme of the play is the playwright’s desire to reject the behavior of “modern youths, with imitative sense,/ [who] Deem taste in dress the proof of excellence” and to reclaim the refined, though unadorned, “native worth” which is the “solid good” of the virtuous American’s heritage. Tyler condemns what he sees as the corrupting influx of European affectation and strongly endorses the “honest emulation” of the behavior and customs that characterized those who struggled for American independence.

Billy Dimple, whose effete-sounding name signals his character, most fully embodies the postrevolutionary American who has embraced the European “Vice,” which “trembles, when compell’d to stand confess’d.” To such an extravagant expression have Dimple’s affectations brought him that he stoops to all manner of deceit in order to dupe the young, desirable, and wealthy Maria Van Rough into a marriage of convenience—so that Dimple can carry on in his excessive and profligate manner, thereby avoiding bankruptcy yet experiencing no interruption of his many affairs of lust. When Dimple attempts to seduce Charlotte, sister of Colonel Manly, Dimple’s antithesis, he and his “Vice” do indeed tremble before Manly’s capable sword. The insipidity of insincere affectation, whether European, American, or extraterrestrial, is vividly “confess’d” by Jessamy, Dimple’s valet, to Jonathan, Manly’s “waiter.” In a lively and hilarious scene derived from the classical subplot of the servants whose behavior both mirrors and comments on the behavior of their “betters,” Jessamy presumes to instruct Jonathan in the “art” of proper display of amusement at the theater. Jessamy even points out how his master has clearly marked the texts of plays as to the precise juncture when the spectator should titter a “piano” or laugh a “fortissimo.”

This sort of affected behavior Tyler aspires gently to correct by means of Thalia, the Comic Muse: “the wisdom of the Comic Muse/ Exalt your merits, or your faults accrue./ But think not, ’tis her aim to be severe.” Tyler does not intend to offend his audience; rather, he hopes to “amend” human foibles. Throughout the history of the drama, the intention of the writer of serious comedy has always been constructive and corrective.

Tyler’s seriocomic intentions are much in evidence in the first scene of act 2. Charlotte and her friend Letitia, who is another of Dimple’s targets, are engaging in prattling banter about the nature of insincerity in friendship. Charlotte seizes this opportunity to expound her theory of the virtues of scandal. After admonishing Letitia not “to turn sentimentalist,” Charlotte continues, “Scandal, you know, is but amusing ourselves with the faults, foibles, and reputations of our friends.” Ironically, the process Charlotte describes strikingly parallels the action of the play itself; that is, Tyler’s audience is engaged in the process of amusing itself “with the faults, foibles, follies, and reputations” of these characters on the stage. Charlotte has further suggested that such a process cannot attend the sentimentalist. She then reinforces her judgment by making this antisentimentalist remark: “Indeed, I don’t know why we should have friends, if we are not at liberty to make use of them.”

This remark is indeed hardly that of a sentimentalist; neither is it that of a moralist. Within comedic limits, Charlotte’s assertion of immorality—wanton abuse of one of the most sacrosanct of human institutions, friendship—is simply too ludicrous to be taken seriously; hence, the audience’s response is inevitably one of amusement. Within the constraints of Tyler’s avowed hope to correct such foibles, however, his motive is at its most serious. Tyler’s implicit acknowledgment here of the value of sincere friendship is intensely moral, yet his casting of this moral instruction within the mold of comedy prevents its becoming oppressively didactic.

No less instructive but, happily, more amusing are the many contrasts that pervade the play. Tyler has created the foppish Dimple, who appears to have much in common with the insidious Charlotte. Charlotte, as does Dimple, contrasts dramatically and often according to her own words with her somber, painfully moral brother, Colonel Manly. Maria Van Rough, who is betrothed to Billy Dimple, ironically seems perfectly fitted to become the partner in life to Colonel Manly. Charlotte recognizes the affinity of Maria for Manly when she exclaims to Letitia, “Oh! how I should like to see that pair of penserosos together.” Tyler quite cleverly includes a subplot in which the servants of Dimple and Manly imitate somewhat questionably the actions of their masters. This scene, which opens the fifth act, strongly suggests that the playwright recommends, as preferred conduct, neither Manly’s melancholic disposition nor the foppishness of Dimple. Rather, Tyler bridges these two extremes when he holds up each for ridicule, thereby advancing a golden mean between them.

The scene opens as Jessamy and Jonathan discuss the success (or lack of it) that Jonathan has experienced in his endeavor to seduce Jenny, waitress to Maria. Much as would her mistress, Jenny has soundly rebuffed Jonathan’s advances. Jessamy’s promise to Jonathan of “cherubim consequences” has, alas, been shattered. Jessamy appears at a loss as to how to explain Jonathan’s failure to seduce Jenny, much as Dimple is later dumbfounded that his consistent exercise of all of his arts, prescribed for him in Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, gets him nowhere but in a court of law for bankruptcy and in a possible duel with Manly for his lustful intemperance. In a state of consternation (one that typifies much of the play), Jessamy concludes that Jonathan’s failure can only be attributed to his lack of “the graces.” Significantly, Jonathan misunderstands the use of the word “graces” and exclaims, “Why, does the young woman expect I must be converted before I court her?” In this exclamation, Jonathan reveals that, though he is certainly familiar with the rhetoric of Protestant conversion, he has not himself capitulated to it. Hence, Jonathan is every inch an American, who, though schooled in the doctrines of John Calvin, has refused to allow himself to become a saint; rather, he retains the proverbial Yankee independence.

Jessamy next attempts to instruct Jonathan in the art of acting natural—that is, appearing sophisticated while at the same time behaving with artless grace. First, Jessamy reproves Jonathan for having laughed too naturally at the theater. Jonathan retorts with a most sensible rhetorical question, “What does one go to see fun for if they can’t laugh?” Undaunted, Jessamy explains to Jonathan, whom he perceives to be a sort of country bumpkin, that he must affect “natural motions . . . regulated by art.” The explicit contradiction here is hardly lost on the not-so-dumb Jonathan. Then Jessamy details so unnatural a gamut of “artful” audience response to comedic action that, if such descriptions were drawn out on the stage, they would approach some of the distorted, contorted figures of Dante’s Inferno. Picture an entire audience with mouths twisted “into an agreeable simper.” How does one “twist” oneself into an agreeable anything?

Nevertheless, so misshapen is Jessamy’s conception here that he sees such a scene to resemble a “chorus of Handel’s at an Abbey commemoration.” Jonathan, however, is not persuaded; he responds much as the audience of Tyler’s own time doubtless did: “Ha, ha, ha! that’s dang’d cute, I swear.” As Colonel Manly is not at all convinced by the pseudo-sophisticated behavior both of his sister and of Dimple, Jonathan does not for a moment seriously consider adopting Jessamy’s counsel concerning the proper response to comedy. Indeed, he has allowed himself to be advised by Jessamy in his approach to Jenny, which has proved most unrewarding. Now he joins the audience, and the comic spirit, in his gentle but definitely unapproving laughter at poor Jessamy, who is diseased with most foolish affectation.

This scene exposes affectation for what it is, insincere behavior that only the most lamentably foolish can long sustain in a world that always prefers reality to falsehood. It also predicts Dimple’s inevitable exposure, Charlotte’s reform, and Manly’s triumph. One essential difference between Jonathan and his master, however, must be pointed out. Unlike Jonathan, who achieves a measure of disinterestedness and aloofness from the action and who learns not to be so gullible, Manly remains relatively static. Even before the action of the play begins, Charlotte tells Letitia that her brother once instructed her that “the best evidence of a gentleman” was that he “endeavor in a friendly manner to rectify [the] foibles” of his lady. At the crucial moment when he realizes that he loves Maria and she loves him but her betrothal to Dimple prevents their happiness, he finds solace in his injunction to Maria and to himself that their respective virtues merit that “we shall, at least, deserve to be” happy. Maria and Manly overcome this obstacle. The point here, however, is to emphasize the difference between master and servant; in keeping with the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, the servant is actually the superior of the master. Jonathan’s gentle laughter at Jessamy’s specious logic firmly grounds The Contrast in the real world, while Colonel Manly continues to reside within a world of morose idealism.

Though virtue wins and vice pays the price of depravity, the Comic Spirit who instructs by means of gentle laughter appears still to have the upper hand in The Contrast. In good-naturedly correcting excessive behavior, Tyler has created comedy of neither manners nor sentiment nor of morals. What he has created is a play that bears his own signature—one characterized by an easily recognizable morality but stamped with the gentle judgment of a comedic spirit that anticipates that of George Meredith.