Publisher's Synopsis
The rhetoric, or discourse, of early American theater emerged out of the figures of speech that permeated the colonists' lives and literary productions. Jeffrey H. Richards examines a variety of texts-histories, diaries, letters, journals, poems, sermons, political tracts, trial transcripts, orations, and plays-and looks at the writings of such authors as John Winthrop and Mercy Otis Warren. Richards places the American usage of theatrum mundi-the world depicted as a stage-in the context of classical and Renaissance traditions, but shows how the trope functions in American rhetoric as a register for religious, political, and historical attitudes.