No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
A Question of Authorship: Mercy Otis Warren and The Blockheads
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Extract
Mercy Otis Warren, wife of General James Warren and sister of James Otis, was one of the most vocal supporters of the patriot cause during the American Revolution. Called “a definite stimulator of the Revolutionary leaders” (Christ 7), she wrote extensively: poems, sketches, letters, and plays, and was praised by John Adams as a “political pen which has no equal that I know of in this country” (Quinn 34). Of her plays, The Adulateur (1773), The Defeat (1773), The Group (1775), The Blockheads (1776), and The Motley Assembly (1779), she claimed only one, The Group, and that long after publication; all of her work was published anonymously. This anonymity poses no real problem for authorship for most of the plays, for there is reasonably strong documentary or internal evidence indicating that she wrote The Adulateur, The Defeat, and The Motley Assembly, as well as The Group, and there is general agreement that she wrote these plays.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1989
References
Notes
1 Gerald Weales suggests that Warren's desire for anonymity stemmed from “a sense of propriety,” for in a letter to John Adams she wrote that “a little personal Acrimony might be justifiable in your Sex, must not the female Character suffer” (889). That she was willing to engage in “personal Acrimony” albeit anonymously is evident from the tone of those works she is known to have written.
2 Katharine Anthony notes Warren's debt to both Shakespeare and Molière in First Lady of the Revolution (82–83). One indication of the scope of her reading is her paraphrasing and use of motifs and style of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. For example, a line she gives Hateall in The Group: “Till streaming purple tinge the verdant turf,” is undoubtedly paraphrased from Spenser's Faerie Queen: “And streams of purple bloud new dies the verdant fields” (1. 2. 17. 9).
3 Many scholars simply accept that Warren wrote the play but offer no argument in defense of their position. Among these are: Paul Leicster Ford in “The Beginnings of American Dramatic Literature,” apparently the first to attribute the play to Warren, Katharine Anthony in First Lady of the American Revolution, Lawrence J. Friedman and Arthur W. Shaffer in “Mercy Otis Warren and the Politics of Historical Nationalism,” and Joan Hoff Wilson and Sharon L. Bollinger in “Mercy Otis Warren: Playwright, Poet and Historian of the American Revolution.”
4 Arthur H. Quinn identifies certain historical figures which appear in The Group, The Adulateur, and The Blockheads as follows:
Quinn identifies Simple in The Blockheads as Eaton; however, Philbrick corrects this to Josiah Edson on the basis of internal evidence; Quinn identifies Crusty Crowbar as Josiah Edson in The Group.