Royall Tyler

Jurist

  • Born: July 18, 1757
  • Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
  • Died: August 16, 1826
  • Place of death: Brattleboro, Vermont

Other Literary Forms

Royall Tyler is recalled in contemporary anthologies of American literature principally as the author of the first professionally performed comedy by an American; this play, The Contrast, is one of five extant plays by Tyler. Readers of his own day, however, probably knew Tyler best as the witty and energetic author of the Spondee essays and poems, which he, along with his longtime friend Joseph Dennie, known as Colon, submitted for several years to various journals, gentlemen’s magazines, and newspapers. In these Spondee pieces, collected by Marius B. Péladeau in The Prose of Royall Tyler (1972), Tyler addressed himself to such contemporary subjects as current artistic tastes or preferences, social mores, slavery (to which he was vehemently opposed), his staunch support of Federalist politics, and attacks on the French experiment in democracy. His position in regard to these subjects was almost invariably that of the satirist. Tyler and Dennie, as Spondee and Colon, carried on a compatible, if sometimes strained (by geographic separation), literary partnership from 1794 until 1811. The pair often found themselves imitated by other literary partners who assumed such arresting signatures as “Messrs. Dactyl and Comma,” “Quip, Crank and Co.,” “Messrs. Verbal and Trochee,” and “The Shop of Messrs. Anapoestic and Trochee.”

Among Tyler’s other works is the two-volume Reports of Cases in the Supreme Court of Vermont (1809-1810); these volumes resulted from Tyler’s tenure as chief justice of Vermont’s supreme court. Tyler also published a single novel, The Algerine Captive (1797), which enjoyed a modicum of success and became one of the first novels by an American to be reprinted in London (in 1802 and again in Lady’s Magazine in 1804).

Tyler also wrote quite a few poems, collected by Marius B. Péladeau in The Verse of Royall Tyler (1968). Such poems as “Ode Composed for the Fourth of July,” “Spondee’s Mistresses,” “Choice of a Wife,” and “The Chestnut Tree” display Tyler’s penchant for witty satire. At the same time, these poems, especially “The Chestnut Tree,” demonstrate the poet’s underlying serious concerns.

Achievements

Although Royall Tyler is remembered today almost exclusively as the author of The Contrast, the first American comedy to be professionally produced (on April 16, 1787, at the John Street Theatre in New York City), his achievements as a literary artist were much more extensive than is currently recognized. Four others of Tyler’s estimated nine or ten plays have been published in the twentieth century, and several of the lyrics of his no longer extant May Day in Town: Or, New York in an Uproar (pr. 1787)—perhaps the first musical written and produced by an American—were discovered and published in 1975. Tyler’s contribution to American literature, however, does not end with his dramas. The Algerine Captive was one of America’s first native novels, as well as one of its first to be printed abroad, and Tyler’s collaborative efforts with Joseph Dennie on the Spondee and Colon pieces constitute one of the first American newspaper columns. Certainly his poetry, which is both witty and serious, deserves to be more extensively studied and anthologized. An all-around man of letters, Tyler distinguished himself as one of America’s first authors who self-consciously wrote as an American.

Biography

Born William Clark Tyler on July 18, 1757, in Boston, Massachusetts, Royall Tyler adopted his father’s name on the latter’s death in 1771. Tyler’s older brother, John Steele Tyler, had fallen out of favor with both parents and was disinherited; hence, most of the Tyler estate reverted to the young Royall. In 1772, Royall Tyler entered Harvard, from which he was graduated in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. Tyler and his classmates were much caught up in the rhetoric and ideas of revolt that led to independence.

Tyler’s days at Harvard were hardly, then, devoted entirely to disputation, to the study of the Latin and Greek authors, or to the pursuit of philosophy, theology, and mathematics. Indeed, at one point in his Harvard studies, Tyler, along with his roommate, was suspended for relieving the college president of his wig by means of a book dropped from their dormitory window. This incident did not mark the end of Tyler’s collegiate escapades. During the period of his attendance at Harvard, the college had a strict rule that, on penalty of expulsion, no student could have anything to do with directing, staging, or acting in plays. Certain incidents related in the autobiographical The Bay Boy, concerning the clandestine performance of drama in Boston, suggest that the future dramatist violated this restriction as well.

Shortly after Tyler began to pursue his vocation as a lawyer, he struck up a courtship with the young Abigail Adams, daughter of Abigail and John Adams, who were later to become the first family of the United States. Evidently, the father of seventeen-year-old Abigail heard rumors of the enthusiastic young Tyler (who in 1777 was accused of wayward conduct), for not too long after Tyler let Abigail know of his intention to marry her, John Adams demanded that his wife and daughter join him in London, where the future second president of the United States was negotiating the peace treaty between America and Britain.

Tyler’s abortive romance with Abigail, who was nicknamed “Nabby,” also has its irony. While Nabby was in London with her parents, she met and eventually married a Colonel William Stephens Smith, an attaché of the American contingency and one of George Washington’s protégés. While Adams was president, he remarked of his son-in-law, “All the actions of my life and all the conduct of my children have not yet disgraced me as much as this man. His pay will not feed his dogs; and his dogs must be fed if his children starve. What a folly!”

Tyler went on to wed Mary Palmer of Boston in 1794, to adopt the state of Vermont as his permanent residence, and subsequently to become one of that state’s leading citizens. Probably, President Adams would not have been disappointed in having Tyler as his son-in-law. Tyler’s activities before his marriage to Mary Palmer, however, most likely would have disappointed Adams. In 1787, while on a diplomatic mission on behalf of his future state, Tyler was in New York, where he not only flouted the old Harvard restrictions concerning association with plays but also enacted total rebellion against those restrictions by writing The Contrast, performed on April 16. This success Tyler immediately followed with May Day in Town, produced on May 19. May Day in Town was America’s first musical comedy; regrettably, only the lyrics of the musical numbers survive.

Later, in Vermont, Tyler established a prosperous legal practice. He was elected an assistant judge of Vermont’s supreme court and in 1807 was elected Chief Justice of the Vermont supreme court. These distinctions were followed in 1811 by his appointment as professor of jurisprudence at the University of Vermont. Tyler’s middle years of success were also marked by his collaboration with Joseph Dennie on the Colon and Spondee series of newspaper and magazine articles, by the publication in 1797 of the novel The Algerine Captive, by the production in that same year of The Georgia Spec: Or, Land in the Moon (a play now lost), and by the publication of several poems on public events and prose works of legal commentary.

Shortly after 1820, however, Tyler’s fortunes began to decline rather rapidly. About this time, Tyler began to develop a cancerous growth on his face. This health problem and his advancing age limited his capacity to practice. Eventually, he and his wife became totally dependent on the benevolence of their children and neighbors. It is to Tyler’s credit that he attempted, during these declining years, to return to his pen. Between 1824 and his death on August 16, 1826, he wrote (usually with the assistance of amanuenses) three biblical dramas, as well as The Bay Boy, “The Chestnut Tree,” and “Utile Dulci,” which is a collection of miscellaneous writings devoted to moralistic instruction (intended for children) and to an explication of his ideas on marriage. It is also to Tyler’s credit that certain passages among these last works are among his best and his most intense.

Analysis

Although Thomas Godfrey’s The Prince of Parthia (pr. 1767) must be acknowledged as the first American play to be produced on an American stage, Royall Tyler’s The Contrast remains a play whose production on April 16, 1787, marked several firsts. The first American comedy, it also introduced to the American stage the prototype of the Yankee in the character of Jonathan and featured the first stage singing of “Yankee Doodle.” The Contrast was also the first American drama to receive a press review. Finally, Tyler’s play was, before 1916, the most commercially successful play written by an American.

Several of Tyler’s other dramatic works have survived, including one farce, The Island of Barrataria, and three biblical closet dramas. Some of the lyrics of Tyler’s May Day in Town, perhaps America’s first comic opera, have been found; when these lyrics are combined with information Tyler wrote in a letter to James Madison wherein a performance of the play is described, its plot can be almost wholly reconstructed. Three additional plays of which no copies are known to exist have been attributed to Tyler; these include The Medium: Or, The Happy Tea-Party (pr. 1795), The Farm House: Or, The Female Duellists (pr. 1796), and The Georgia Spec. Therefore, Tyler is the author of at least nine plays.

Tyler’s unfinished autobiographical work, The Bay Boy, which remained in manuscript until Péladeau’s publication of it in The Prose of Royall Tyler, provides two brief descriptions of his experiences with dramatic performances attempted within Puritan Boston’s unsympathetic boundaries. One details a homespun attempt to render Joseph Addison’s Cato (pr. 1713) into dramatic representation, and the other records the witnessing of a “forlorn fragment of monkish mysteries.” Addison’s Cato was performed under cover of night in a store emptied of all merchandise “excepting one or two counters and several empty hogsheads, barrels and boxes which served as pit, box and gallery for the spectators”; Tyler’s description suggests a makeshift Globe Theatre. Actors and spectators stealthily assembled after “Mater, Pater or guardian” were all safely asleep. Tyler next describes the exact procedure for securing the “theater” from unsympathetic passersby:

The front door of the store was closed and every crack and keyhole carefully stopped with paper or cotton that no glimmering light might alarm the passing watchman. The entrance was through a bye lane into a door in the backyard, and such was the caution observed that but one person was admitted at a time, while two, one at each end of the lane, were on the watch to see if the person to be admitted had been noticed. No knocking was permitted but a slight scratch announced the approach of the initiated.

Tyler then says that the thrill of this sort of performance was never equaled by public performances in New York’s public theaters.

Tyler’s depiction of the “monkish mystery” is a bit less spectacular, but it does express a persistent need for the dramatic despite puritanical restrictions. On a certain Christmas Eve during the Boy’s youth, the house wherein he found himself was visited quite suddenly by a group of traveling players who enacted a brief dueling scene that was most realistic but for the grotesque attire and masks of the players. Tyler calls this representation a “ masque” and at the same time somewhat satirically refers to it as reminiscent of early church mystery plays. Tyler’s early familiarity with mystery plays, as well as with such a contemporary drama as Addison’s Cato, suggests a dramatic background of some sophistication, belying the myth that Tyler wrote The Contrast some two 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.

Bibliography

Carson, Ada Lou, and Herbert L. Carson. Royall Tyler. Boston: Twayne, 1979. This volume offers the most convenient and available account of this early American lawyer, law professor, judge, and scholar.

Silverman, Kenneth. A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763-1789. Reprint. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. The most comprehensive survey of Tyler’s life and times. Silverman places Vermont’s first scholar in a historical and cultural context.

Tanselle, G. Thomas. Royall Tyler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. This volume has become the standard source on this early American playwright, poet, and novelist.