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Authors
Royall Tyler (1757-1826)
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As the Anthology introduction makes clear, Tyler was an enthusiastic amateur, and not a writer by profession. As the first “American” play produced in the new republic, the play enjoyed popularity and a long life on the stage - perhaps because it achieved a gratifying blend of the comfortable with the unfamiliar, the cliché with the new.
In Early American Drama (1997), Jeffrey Richards reprints The Contrast as well as several other plays that establish Tyler’s context. Marius Peladeau collected The Verse of Royall Tyler (1968). Donald Cook (1970) edited Tyler’s novel The Algerine Captive. G. Thomas Tanselle provides his biography in Royall Tyler (1967).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
1. If the opening of a comedy is crucial to holding an audience, what does Act I of The Contrast do to ingratiate itself with its watchers at the end of the eighteenth century? Why begin with two women talking about fashion? Why keep Manly off the stage until a later scene?
2. Differentiate the three major women characters in The Contrast. How thoroughly does Tyler develop distinctions among them? Depending on your experience, compare these characters to women in eighteenth-century British comedies about social life, or to modern American comedies (in film or on stage) that purport to show us young women as interesting characters.
3. With other students who like the play, choose one scene of The Contrast and stage it to bring out its comic and satiric dimensions. Keep track of how you interpret specific characters and exchanges. What do you have to do to bring life to the scene, or to recover or refresh the possibilities within it.
