For the first time, this Toby anthology brings together a selection of plays that shaped the ways in which slavery was performed in the nineteenth-century American theatre. From SLAVES IN ALGIERS (by Susanna Rowson, 1794) to PECULIAR SAM; OR, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (by Pauline Hopkins, 1879); from the blatantly opportunistic adaptation of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1852) by George Aiken to the rare 1855 play THE CHRISTIAN SLAVE (the only dramatization of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN written by Harriet Beecher Stowe) and the ardently abolitionist THE STARS AND STRIPES (by Lydia Maria Child, 1858); and from a play written by a former slave, THE ESCAPE (by William Wells Brown, 1858), to racist, pro-slavery minstrel texts, this anthology allows readers to see how Americans from diverse backgrounds and standpoints staged slavery. In so doing, it also places important but hard-to-find texts like THE FUGITIVES (written by an anonymous abolitionist woman c.1840) and excerpts from 1839 play THE KIDNAPPED CLERGYMAN (one of the earliest abolitionist plays) in dialogue with popular drama like THE OCTOROON (by Dion Boucicault, 1859--published here for the first time with both of Boucicault's endings). The anthology's opening essay and the introductions to the individual plays offer a rich sense of the historical, biographical, socio-political, and literary contexts surrounding the drama of slavery in America.
