Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten

Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

To cite this article:

CIANCONI, Vanessa.

Fontainville Abbey

: William

Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American

playwright.

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Cênicas, Florianópolis, v. 2, n. 55, ago. 2025.

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Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi1

Abstract

Fontainville Abbey

(1794), by William Dunlap, inspired by Ann Radcliffe's

Romance of the

Forest

(1791), is a play that has been relegated to oblivion. Dunlap is considered an

outstanding historian, as well as the first American playwright and the first Gothic writer

in the country. Forgotten by his peers, Dunlap was also forgotten by the academy. The

aim of this article is to show how Dunlap's melodramatic dramaturgy and its dialogue

with American literature’s seminal texts serve as a receptacle for memory and how this

memory, in this case, the memory of the history of American melodramatic (Gothic?)

theater, is transformed into phantasmagoria.

Keywords:

William Dunlap. Fontainville Abbey. Gothic. Dramaturgy. Phantasmagoria.

Fontainville Abbey

: la obra gótica olvidada de William Dunlap, el primer dramaturgo

americano

Resumen

Fontainville Abbey

(1794), de William Dunlap, inspirada en el

Romance of the Forest

(1791)

de Ann Radcliffe, es una obra que ha quedado relegada al olvido. Dunlap está

considerado un excelente historiador, además de ser el primer dramaturgo

estadounidense y el primer escritor de literatura gótica del país. Olvidado por sus

coetáneos, Dunlap también fue olvidado por la academia. El objetivo de este artículo es

mostrar cómo la dramaturgia melodramática de Dunlap y su diálogo con los textos

seminales de la literatura estadounidense sirven de receptáculo para la memoria y cómo

esta memoria, en este caso la memoria de la historia del teatro melodramático (¿gótico?)

estadounidense, se transforma en fantasmagoría.

Palabras clave

: William Dunlap. Fontainville Abbey. Gótico. Dramaturgia. Fantasmagoría.

Fontainville Abbey

: a peça gótica esquecida de William Dunlap, o primeiro dramaturgo

estadunidense

Resumo

Fontainville Abbey

(1794), de William Dunlap, inspirada em

Romance of the Forest

(1791),

de Ann Radcliffe, é uma peça que ficou relegada ao esquecimento. Dunlap é considerado

um exímio historiador, além de ser o primeiro dramaturgo estadunidense e o primeiro

escritor de literatura gótica no país. Esquecido por seus pares, Dunlap também foi

esquecido pela academia. O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar como a dramaturgia

melodramática de Dunlap e seu dialogo com os textos seminais da literatura norte-

americana servem como receptáculo de memória e como esta memória, neste caso, a

memória da história do teatro melodramático (gótico?) estadunidense, se transforma

em fantasmagoria.

Palavras-chave

: William Dunlap. Fontainville Abbey. Gótico. Dramaturgia. Fantasmagoria.

1 PhD in Comparative Literature at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), with a research fellow at University

of Pittsburgh/Theater Department. Mellon School of Theater and Performance at Harvard University. Masters

in Letters (Science of Literature) at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Specialization in English

Language Literatures at UFF. Undergraduation at UFF, Liberal Arts. JCNE/FAPERJ. vcianconi@gmail.com

http://lattes.cnpq.br/5622089687976465 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1175-4919

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

“Certainly you must be very superstitious,”- said Mr. S-,

“or such things could not interest you thus.”

“There are few people less so than I am,” replied W-, “or

I understand myself and the meaning of superstition very

ill.”

“That is quite paradoxical.”

“It appears so, but so it is not. If I cannot explain this,

take it as a mystery of the human mind.”

“If it were possible for me to believe the appearance of

ghosts at all,” replied Mr. S-, “it would certainly be the

ghost of Hamlet; but I never can suppose such things;

they are out of all reason and probability.”

(Ann Radcliffe)

The opening of the curtains in the United States and its phantasmagorical

memory

Almost every ghost story has the same beginning, in oblivion. The case of

Fontainville Abbey

, a play written in 1794 by William Dunlap, was no different. My

first encounter with Dunlap was through his most popular play, André:

A Tragedy

in Five Acts

(1798), in a small collection edited by Professor Jeffrey H. Richards,

Early American Drama

, from Penguin Classics, originally published in 1997. The

theater, in the construction of the United States as a country, followed, for obvious

reasons, the British model. The American stage served the old Platonic purpose:

to present the new republic with a moral behavior appropriate for a country still

in its infancy. The question of example, or mimesis, should follow the precepts of

the Greek philosopher in considering that only good behavior should be shared

with the citizens, still in formation, of the new republican state. In other words, the

stage should serve to instill principles of good citizenship.

When reading the chapter “Gothic American Drama,” written by Heather S.

Nathans for

The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic

, edited by Jeffrey

Andrew Weinstock, I came across William Dunlap’s name one more time. Known

for co-founding the National Academy of Design in New York, Dunlap was also an

accomplished historian and playwright of reasonable quality, according to critics

of his time. Author of several plays for the New York stage in the 1700s, he also

pioneered American theater historiography by writing

A History of the American

Theater from its Origins to 1832

, published in the same year by J. & J. Harper, New

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

York. The vision of the American theater historian, in its origins, initially shows the

importance of preserving theater history for American dramaturgy. Curiously,

despite being of fundamental importance to theater historiography of that country,

none of Dunlap’s plays appear in the most important anthologies, such as

The

Norton Anthology of Drama

, organized by J. Ellen Gainor, Stanton B. Garner, Jr.,

and Martin Puchner, published by W. W. Norton & Company, or in

The Harcourt

Brace Anthology of Drama

, edited by W. B. Worthen, published by Thomson Heinle.

Tice L. Miller, professor emeritus of theater at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,

in the 1995 reissue of Dunlap’s

A History of the American Theater from its Origins

to 1832

, points to the playwright’s pioneering effort in attempting to record

American theater for the first time and make it a reference point for all subsequent

stage histories in the country. According to Miller, in December of 1832, the

American Quarterly Review

published a lengthy review quoting extensively from

the book, drawing attention to its moral tone and stating that Dunlap elevated the

stage to make it subservient to the greater interests of society and morality.

Once again, we return to the Platonic issue of morality for a country on the

rise. In an article for

American Literature

in 1968, Fred Moramarco sheds light on

the debate by stating:

[…] but also because they reﬂect some attitudes about the dramatic art

which were an intrinsic part of the American consciousness in the late

eighteenth century. Particularly, they suggest the degree to which moral

considerations inﬂuenced and shaped American literary awareness in

that period (Moramarco, 1968, p. 9).

Morality on stage has become a widely debated topic amongst theater

historians in the United States.

Fontainville Abbey

, which premiered at the John Street Theater in New York

on February 16, 1795, was originally written in 1794, making it the first text written

in the United States under a Gothic poetics. According to Nathans, the term Gothic

served as a catalyst for audiences due to its popularity. Some critics argue that

incorporating European Gothic creations into the American scene served a less

scholarly purpose, but they seemed to forget that many of these productions

brought complex agendas to bear by addressing issues of race, class, and gender

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

in the national imagination. At that time, the political stage was in formation in the

United States, and Dunlap’s text conversed extemporaneously with Ralph Waldo

Emerson’s idea of a purely American Literature in

The American Scholar

, a speech

delivered in 1837 at Harvard College. This article is about Dunlap's melodramatic

dramaturgy and how the dialogue between American Literature’s seminal texts

serves as a receptacle for memory and how this memory, in this case, the memory

of American melodramatic (Gothic?) theater’s history, is transformed into

phantasmagoria.

From Jacobean theater to melodrama

The definition of melodramatic changes over time. Jeffrey H. Richards, in the

introduction to

Early American Plays

(1997), explains that, at the beginning of the

20th century, melodrama took on a new meaning, beyond that of a play with

music. The new concept of melodrama featured plays with overly sentimental

dialogue, stereotypical characters, moralistic plots, and no connection to “real life.”

In other words, it was vulgar theater of poor quality. Soon, it was relegated to

oblivion. Jean-Marie Thomasseau says that the initial definition of melodrama,

reproduced below, is a fallacy, as well as being reductive:

The word melodrama conjures up images of an exaggerated, tearful

drama, populated by verbose heroes spouting sentimental nonsense to

unfortunate victims hunted down by despicable villains, in an implausible

and rushed plot that defies all the rules of art and common sense, and

which always ends with the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice2

(Thomasseau, 1984, p. 3).

The researcher recalls that, even in the 18th century, melodrama served as

a reaction against the noir theater imported from England by ordering

the most daring attempts of revolutionary theater, promotes the cult of

virtue and family, restores the sense of property and traditional values,

2 Le mot mélodrame éveille en e!et en nous l’idée d’un drame outrancier et larmoyant, peuplé de héros

phraseurs débitant des fadaises sentimentales à de malheureuses victimes traquées par d’ignobles

troisièmes couteaux, dans une action invraisemblable et précipitée qui bouleverse toutes les règles de l’art

et du bon sens, et qui se termine toujours par le triomphe des bons sur les méchants, de la vertu sur le vice.

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

and ultimately offers an aesthetic creation formalized according to very

precise constraints3 (Thomasseau, 1984, p. 6).

However, Thomasseau argues that the melodrama of the time featured

characters in “exceptional situations”4 (1984, p. 11) and was “so rich in tormented

episodes and complicated machinations”5 (1984, p. 12) that it is difficult to separate

the origins of Gothic theater from those of the 18th-century melodrama. Tice L.

Miller, in the introduction to Dunlap's book, considers that the playwright

introduced many elements of melodrama to the New York stage, stating that

“invented five years earlier by Guilbert de Pixerécourt in Paris, mélodrame differed

little from Gothic drama, except for the use of music to enhance the dramatic

effect” (Miller apud Pixerécourt, 1997, p. XVI). Bertrand Evans further states:

“examination of the work shows it to be concocted of the very elements which we

have found in the Gothic plays acted in England during the last thirty years of the

eighteenth century” (Evans, 1947, p. 162). Perhaps is the systematic exploitation of

pathetic effects the bridge between melodrama and Jacobean theater?

Theater history points to something very curious. Jacobean theater, which

spanned the reign of King James I (1603-1625), is known for its darker themes,

complex characters, and exploration of moral and political issues. The plays often

featured Aristotelian heroes, narratives of revenge, witchcraft, and the

supernatural. This drama, often characterized as decadent, presented morally

reprehensible plots, with excessive violence and sexual perversions, and such

values, or lack thereof, also became associated with the popular, the socially low,

an easy way to attract an audience of dubious taste. Its most prominent

characteristics: phantasmagoria, madness, metatheatricality, brutal murders, and

morbidity raise questions about how so many scenes of horror and perversion

were possible in a theater dominated by such rigid moral and aesthetic rules. It is

undeniable, in a quick and immediate analysis, that violent crime is a key element

3 Elle apprécie en outre le mélodrame parce qu’il tempère et ordonne les tentatives les plus hardies du théâtre

de la Révolution, pratique le culte de la vertu et de la famille, remet à l'honneur le sens de la propriété et

des valeurs traditionnelles, et propose, en déﬁnitive, une création esthétique formalisée selon des

contraintes très précises.

4 […] situations d'exception […]

5 […] si riches d’épisodes tourmentés et de machinations compliquées […]

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

of those plots, as they demonstrate a fascination with how the act of violence is

carried out. In addition, they explore the lust and weaknesses that lead the

individual to destruction and proclaim the courage with which the victim and villain

face their own extinction. In Jacobean tragedies, violence serves as a reflection,

albeit painful and difficult, indicating how violence contaminates the characters'

morals, leading them to their final downfall.

The French Revolution (1789-1799) put an end to the sentimental culture of

the wealthier classes. The Revolution redirected much of the emotional and moral

fervor of sentimentalism into melodrama. While sentimental theater optimistically

assumed that evil characters could reform, most melodramas — based on popular

perceptions derived from the Revolution — divided humanity into good and evil

types. Melodrama promoted the belief that evil people would always conspire

against the innocent. English sentimental culture was based on the precepts of

the philosophy of “moral sense.” From John Locke (1632-1704) to Adam Smith

(1723-1790), there was a belief that people could be molded from early childhood,

so watching a morally appropriate play would also awaken in them the design of

an ideal spectator with feelings and conduct that would respond to social

pressures, ensuring that each person fulfilled their moral duty. For moral

philosophers, morality was inherent and natural; doing the right thing derives from

emotional sensitivity, not abstract reasons. However, Rousseau and many other

Enlightenment thinkers could not explain how human nature, which was

essentially good, turned to evil. Sentimentalism could not explain human

villainousness, so only the Gothic could account for such a problem. At the center

of the Gothic drama was the villain, usually a melancholic figure, who dominated

female characters in captivity and fought ghosts from his past in a ruined castle.

Bruce McConachie (2010, pp. 244–245), a renowned theater researcher, explains

that “Gothicism offered no complete answer for the evil of such protagonists, but

it did fix images of horror that fascinated audiences – all the more so because the

spectators’ sentimentalism could not explain the evil they witnessed”.

Perhaps it is possible, then, to say that the seed of Gothic theater lies in

Jacobean theater, and it is from the confluence of these Gothic and sentimental

influences that melodrama as we know it today was constructed. There is no

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

shortage of evidence. Part of the appeal of melodrama was precisely the

transposition of violence from behind the scenes to the stage. Moments of

heightened violence have always been moments when art suffers the most and

tries to fight against them. Thus, Peter Brooks, in

The Melodramatic Imagination

(1995), recalls that melodrama is an expression with origins in German

expressionism. For the American literary critic:

Melodrama is a form for a post-sacred era, in which polarization and

hyperdramatization of forces in conflict represent a need to locate and

make evident, and operative those large choices of ways of being which

we hold to be of overwhelming importance even though we cannot derive

them from any transcendental system of belief (Brooks, 1995, p. x).

There seems to be a historical connection between all these moments. It is

as if they are woven together, from their origins in Jacobean theater (called

noir

by Thomasseau) to Brooks' expressionist art, melodrama serves as a catalyst for

the horrors of humanity's resurgence, brought back to the stage.

Fontainville Abbey, William Dunlap’s melodrama

The search for William Dunlap's play was an adventure, remote, but it was.

Any theater researcher who comes across brief mentions of a play that was only

staged in 1795 and now, with the advent of the internet, finds no trace of its staging

or its original text available on any website, would be, at the very least, intrigued.

What happened to this play? And why? This is the story: the name William Dunlap

returns a few hits on Google, many more on Jstor or Project Muse, international

databases paid for by UERJ6, but insistently, the references only report on his most

famous play:

André

, written four years after

Fontainville Abbey

. I believe that,

initially, I tried all the usual ways to obtain the play’s text, but without success. In

an online search at the New York Public Library, I discovered that the text was

available for local research, which, unfortunately, would make it impossible for me

to access it from Brazil. Indeed, the full text of the play existed, but it was not

freely accessible on the internet, nor through the Library's online consultation. It

6 Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, a State University in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where I teach American

Literature.

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

was only through an email from the NYPL that I was able to obtain a PDF of the

play, but it missed the play’s epilogue. Through the search system of Yale

University's Beinecke Library and the help of a librarian7, I obtained the first edition

of volume XXII of the Longworth Edition of

The English and American Stage

, where

four original plays by Dunlap were published in 18078.

Very little has been written about William Dunlap. Robert H. Canary's “William

Dunlap and the Search for an American Audience,” published in the

Midcontinent

American Studies Journal

in 1963, is one of the few easily accessible texts on the

playwright. Canary's text reinforces the fact that Dunlap was forgotten because he

focused his efforts on drama, a field neglected by literary historians. And that was

probably not the only reason. His preference for Gothic themes distanced him

from what critics considered quality literature. In general, critics considered Gothic

literature to be a product of European decadence, a genre that did not lead to the

production of genuinely native literature (Canary, 1963; Fisher & Argetsinger, 2023).

Until the 1970s, there were no academic works of significance on his work. And

today, we can say, there still aren't any. The search for an American audience,

under scrutiny by Canary, has always been the playwright's holy grail. For the

professor

His

Fontainville Abbey

(1795)9 “was not announced as the publication of

an American, and we find in a publication of the day the following remark.

‘Can it be possible that the author thinks that such an avowal would

operate against it?’ There can be no doubt that he did think so, and no

doubt but that such an avowal at that time would have been enough to

condemn the piece” (Canary, 1963, p. 46, 47).

Perhaps this could serve as an explanation for the disappearance of

Fontainville Abbey

from the stage and, consequently, from the literary world, but

this is not the truth. Like so many other historians and theater theorists, Canary

brings the question of the average theatergoer's taste to his text:

7 Special thanks to Adrienne Sharpe-Weseman, Access Services Assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library at Yale University.

8 There is a discrepancy between the dates in the PDF (text from 1807), the playwright's note (1806), and the

printed editions (1807 and 1809). I chose to use 1807 because it was the first publication available.

9 Dunlap's text was written in 1794. As the first staging took place in 1795, many researchers indicate this year

as the year of publication.

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

If this class of men did not support the theatre, “the manager must please

the vulgar or shut his theatre”. The common man of Dunlap’s day was

best lured by “shameful exhibitions of monsters and beasts, and other

vulgar shows,” by which the “state was degraded” (Canary, 1963, p. 47).

Dunlap believed, as early as the late 18th century, that the voice of the

American people needed to be heard and that a purely American art form needed

to exist. The playwright was not in denial about the state of art in his time, but, as

an artist far ahead of his time, he anticipated much of what the Transcendentalists,

especially what Ralph Waldo Emerson would reinforce, reminding the audience

that the new Republicans did not need English patronage. The American stage

raised issues as important as the English stage, even when inspired by a novel

from the island. The first issue of the

Theatrical Register

10 reflects the growing

sense of nationalism that was developing in America. Thus, like his contemporary

Noah Webster, Dunlap advocated greater separation between America and

England and emphasized the need to develop native art forms. He realized that

the American stage had been imitative and derivative, but he envisioned a new

drama based on local culture.

Dunlap, in a short Preface to Volume XXII of

The English and American Stage

(1809), confesses that although he was inspired by works of European origin, he

does not reproduce them on stage, but creates the possibility of an original

American text, that is, he approaches the “heaven of invention”, of original literature

produced by an American:

Those who are well read in this species of literature will easily discover

whence I have borrowed, whom I have imitated, and what parts of my

work may be considered as original in the strictest sense. To combine

rather than to invent is the lot of modern dramatists. My readers may

perhaps be tempted to lament that I have soared so often into the

“heaven of invention” (Dunlap, 1809, p. b).

10 In the 1790s there were several magazines publishing articles on American theater and the development of

dramaturgy in general. Probably the most important of these was the

New York Magazine

, which published

a series of reviews of the New York stage between November 1794 and April 1796. These reviews appeared

under the title “The Theatrical Register,” and although the magazine's policy of anonymity makes it

impossible to know for sure who the author was, the available evidence suggests that they were written by

William Dunlap. For a convincing summary of this evidence, see Mary Rives Bowman, “Dunlap and ‘The

Theatrical Register’ of the New York Magazine,” Studies in Philology, XXIV, 413-425 (July 1927).

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

Although Ann Radcliffe never wrote a play, her literary output inspired many

playwrights around the world, especially in Germany.

From

The Romance of the Forest

(1791) came two plays, Boaden's

Fontainville Forest

(C. G. March 1794), and an anonymous melodrama,

Fontainville Abbey; or, The Phantom of the Forest

(Surrey, March 1824)

(Evans, 1947, p. 91).

Bertrand Evans ignores the existence of the 1794 adaptation by the American

William Dunlap of the same novel by Radcliffe and nominates James Boaden as the

first playwright to adapt a novel by the English writer. Boaden adapted

The Romance

of the Forest

(1791) in the same year that Dunlap adapted the same Gothic novel. In

a note to the reader dated 1806, Dunlap mentions: “Mr. Boaden's play of

Fontainville

Forest

must have been performed about the same time in London” (Dunlap, 1807).

It is worth remembering that James Boaden's theatrical adaptation is available

online at the Internet Archive, while William Dunlap's has been forgotten. Evans

further states that:

It is impossible to measure the full extent of her influence. As we have

found earlier, definite debts other than adaptations can rarely be

established in Gothic plays (1947, p. 91).

And,

Mr. Boaden had read the

Romance of the Forest

with great pleasure, and

thought that he saw there the groundwork of a drama of more than usual

effect. He admired, as everyone else did, the singular address by which

Mrs. Radcliffe contrived to impress the mind with all the terrors of the

ideal world; and the sportive resolution of all that had excited terror into

very common natural appearances; indebted for their false aspect to

circumstances, and the overstrained feelings of the characters./But, even

in romance, it may be doubtful, whether there be not something

ungenerous in thus playing upon poor timid human nature, and agonizing

it with false terrors. The disappointment, I know, is always resented, and

the labored explanation commonly deemed the flattest and most

uninteresting part of the production. Perhaps, when the attention is once

secured and the reason yielded, the passion for the marvelous had better

remain unchecked; and an interest selected from the olden time be

entirely subjected to its gothic machinery. However this may be in respect

to romance, when the doubtful of the narrative is to be exhibited in the

drama, the decision is a matter of necessity. While description only fixes

the inconclusive dreams of the fancy, she may partake the dubious

character of her inspirer […] (1947, p. 91, 92).

Evans also brings up the issue of Radcliffe always having a rational

explanation for everything that seemed supernatural in her novels. Boaden's

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

adaptation, on the other hand, removes the author's rational explanations from

the plot. Radcliffe, in her novels, described scenes that seemed explainable only

through the supernatural; however, in the end, everything was explained as having

come from natural causes.

According to Evans:

Boaden believed that "the passion for the marvelous had better remain

unchecked." His decision, therefore, was to omit, not Mrs. Radcliffe's

excesses, but her natural explanations of the supernatural. For the first

time, a playwright undertook to out-Gothicize a novelist. The result was

a play more elaborately Gothic in its furnishings than any previously acted

(1947, p. 92).

Dunlap's adaptation follows the same logic as Boaden's adaptation; there is

no explanation for the supernatural elements in the play. The aforementioned

epilogue to Dunlap's play, entitled “In the Character of Cupid,” reinforces this idea.

Dunlap adds a twist to his text by presenting a parade of tragic Greek characters

tributary to love stories who, when performing Cupid, affirm that “Shakespeare's

best plays gain not their force from Love”11 (1807, p. 211). By contemporizing the

loss of the tragic muse in the light of comedy, “for Love and Hymen ever are her

theme” (1807, p. 211), the playwright introduces yet another supernatural element

to the play, since Cupid did not originally appear in his adaptation.

The difference between those two plays now lies on the puritanical values of

self-righteousness that have always been ingrained into the American character.

La Motte's regret stems from the simple fact that he still fears the devil, who was

believed to exist in the forests of puritanical America. After all, the forest was the

home of the Indians, hence, the demons. The demonic figure of the other has

always served to terrify the puritans' righteousness. However, weren't they the

ones who represented this conflict between good and evil?

Dunlap returns precisely to this typically American puritan past in his play,

perhaps the basis for the creation of the Gothic imagination that is not only

characteristic of that country's literature but, in my view, is exactly what represents

a departure from the old European Gothic. The Indians described as savages by

11 This epilogue can only be found in the printed versions from 1807 and 1809.

Fontainville Abbey

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William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation were “cruel, barbarous, and most

treacherous, being most furious in their rage, and merciless where they overcome;

not being content only to kill, and take away life, but delight to torment men in the

most bloody manner that may be […]” (Bradford, 2007, p. 108, 109). The new world

was described as a wild territory, inhabited by demons, ready to take the souls of

the good Puritans. And that, metaphorically speaking, they did attack. The year 1692

saw one of the darkest moments in American history, when “a game of accusation,

confession, denial, and death took the community, through an obscure struggle for

political and social power, on a bizarre and deadly course when its citizens were

seized by the conviction that the devil was on the loose in their homes”12 (Cianconi,

2021, p. 514). The Salem witch hunt had begun. Defending the attack on the women

of Salem, Cotton Mather wrote

Wonders of the Invisible World

(1692) as a response

to a world that was becoming increasingly secular. Matter saw the presence of the

devil in Salem as a final campaign to undermine and destroy the Puritan

community. The same community that was transforming the wilderness, inhabited

by demons, into a new Eden, a garden where its inhabitants inaugurated the idea

of the American dream. The forest, or wilderness, that surrounded Salem became

the devil's territory.

It is not surprising that Dunlap's play, written only about 100 years after the

attack on the alleged Salem witches, reflected the superstitious concerns of that

era: “O, sir, I fear'd the phantoms of the place sure in such a place ill spirits dwell”

(Dunlap, 1807, p. 156). Still in Peter’s words:

O, for pity, sir!

We ne'er shall sleep in safety, never rest.

For in such places murders oft were done,

In times long past, and here the restless sprites /Walk night by

night (Dunlap, 1807, p. 156).

And,

[…] None have liv'd there lately. There owls and bats inhabit.

What a noise the devils made! and, clattering round my head,

They blew my light out with their flapping wings […]

(Dunlap, 1807, p. 162).

12 se iniciou um jogo de acusação, confissão, negação e morte que tomou a comunidade, através de uma

obscura luta por poder político e social, um rumo bizarro e mortal quando seus cidadãos foram tomados

pela convicção de que o diabo estava à solta em seus lares.

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

The Puritan reference to the demons of the forest is clear in the servant's

words. The abbey, lost in the middle of the forest, was inhabited only by nocturnal

animals, which he compared to demons. These frightening animals, believed to be

evil beings, hid in the dark.

In contrast, at the end of Act I, La Motte compares the same abbey to a castle,

because there he would have freedom. The idea of the house on the hill, the new

world as a paradise representing the new Republic and a possible synonym for

freedom were also put on stage by Dunlap. For La Motte: “But this, compar'd with

prisons, is a palace, A paradise—for here I've liberty” (Dunlap, 1807, p. 162). The

ethos of the American freedom, from its roots, is repeated in Dunlap's play.

John Winthrop's sermon on the Arbella in 1630 directs what would become

known as God's chosen people to this new paradise on earth, claiming that they

are the example to be followed by the rest of the world, a “city on a hill”13, and that

the eyes of the world would be upon them. However, the dangers of the past still

haunted Madame La Motte, which Peter assures her do not exist, as they say there

are ghosts there:

All about this abbey. We're safe enough,

For no one will come near us. They say ghosts—

(Dunlap, 1807, p. 168)

The images described by Adeline are truly terrifying. As Adeline attempts to

investigate the crime committed inside the abbey, she encounters a past filled

with horrors that somehow come back to haunt her. The past returns to haunt not

only the young woman, but everyone in the abandoned abbey.

Image of death! phantom of desolation!

Nay, rather witness real of hellish crimes!

Why sink I not? What braces firm my limbs?

Undaunted innocence walks firmly on,

Though death's deep shadows lengthen at each step.

(Dunlap, 1807, p. 176).

13 For wee must consider that wee shall be as a city upon a hill. The eies of all people are upon us. Soe that if

we shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee have undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his

present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouthes

of enemies to speake evill of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. Wee shall shame the faces

of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into curses upon us till wee be

consumed out of the good land whither we are a goeing.

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

And,

Exploring still another room,

I found A worm-gnaw'd chest. Impell'd, I touch'd the top,

But shrinking back, chill fear pass'd sudden o'er me.

Again advancing, with a desperate force,

I op'd it there my every fear confirming,

A grinning skeleton my eyes saluted,

Startling, I dropp'd the lid. The hollow sound

Re-echo'd solemn from the neighbouring walls;

All the apartment shook; and clattering round

A shelf with rubbish fell and strew'd the floor.

This parchment roll'd among it; having seiz'd […]

(Dunlap, 1807, p. 179, 180).

To which Madame La Motte replies: “O my dear child, what horrors thou'st

disclos'd! And can it be this marquis—" (Dunlap, 1807, p. 180). Adeline intently reads

the parchment she found, which tells stories of the abbey's horrific past. The

marquis's brother was imprisoned in the tower by his own brother and allegedly

was murdered there. Adeline sees the “grinning” skeleton and, at first, does not

know who it is or where it came from, but soon grasps its meaning. “Image of

death! Phantom of desolation!” exclaims the girl.

The last act of the play begins with La Motte entering Adeline's room with a

dagger in his hand to complete what the marquis ordered him to do, - to kill

Adeline in a gruesome way:

Ha! if I longer stand I shall relent.

It must be done. Now, fiends of hell, assist me!

Life, life's the prize—fortune, life, liberty! (Dunlap, 1809, p. 190).

Signing the devil's black book was something the Puritans believed they could

do. The forest, almost enchanted by evil powers, was a character itself in American

history. The demonic nature of the Puritan forest was what could give La Motte

the strength to finally end with Adeline's life. However, the dualities imbued in the

supposed righteousness of that people chosen by God served as a form of self-

control. La Motte's integrity brings up, once again, the question of American self-

righteousness, the citizen who cannot escape his own control. Despite the utopian

tone of

What is an American?

(1782), Crèvecouer saw the North American as the

“new man”: individualistic, self-confident, pragmatic, hardworking, a solid man of

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

the earth, free to pursue his self-defined goals and, in the process, reject the

ideological zeal that had ravaged Europe for centuries. Thus, La Motte probably

sees himself as this new man, master of himself, capable of saying no to the

temptations inflicted by the devil.

Marquis:

What change is this? Whence is this new found courage?

La Motte:

By nature upright, vice a coward made me;

Resolving to be virtuous, I am brave (Dunlap, 1809, p. 194).

The early history of the United States aligned the possibilities of a new

narrative of god's chosen people who, even though haunted by demons, were

capable of defeating them. La Motte recounts that he lived in a dream, like a

sleepwalker in a horrible delirium. Interestingly, Brockden Brown14, in

“Somnambulism: A Fragment” (1797), tells the story of a crime committed by

someone who, like La Motte would do, to protect his beloved, kills her while he

sleeps. Somnambulism, still mysterious, serves as an excuse for a heinous crime.

O no, Hortensia! I've been in a dream,

A walking sleep, a horrible delirium (Dunlap, 1809, p. 195).

Like Boaden, Dunlap removes from the play anything that could make the

supernatural plausible, since anything without a logical explanation is beyond

natural causes. What was given to Boaden's adaptation as Gothic, in Dunlap, at

least in my view, is the representation of this new man in a world that is being

built, the self-righteous man, always capable of acting in a morally correct manner.

The idea of being for the new colonist in relation to society came from

contradictions in the Protestant Reformation and the intellectual tradition of the

colony. In that conjecture, the initial Puritan thinking, which included strong

support for the community, is transformed so that it is once again expressed with

a characteristic emphasis on the development of this being as the result of what

the new American citizen should become. Since the Puritans believed they had

14 Charles Brockden Brown and William Dunlap were close friends, which led the playwright to write his

colleague's biography in 1815, entitled The Life of Charles Brockden Brown. The influence was probably

mutual.

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

discovered the truth, it was their duty to eradicate error before it spread15 (Cianconi,

2014, p. 34). As previously mentioned, La Motte, in a way, becomes the

representation of the righteousness of this new man by challenging the power of

the devil: the Puritans' number one enemy. The divine superpower of self-control,

stemming from the girl's innocence, is what prevents the fugitive from killing her,

as La Motte explains below:

This poignard then I brandish'd, high uplift,

And Terror, worst of fiends, urg'd on the stroke;

But Innocence hung hovering o'er thy couch,

And dash'd the dagger from my powerless arm:

Thy angel looks then rescued me from hell,

And I resolv'd to give my life for thine (Dunlap, 1809, p. 198).

As bruxas como desculpa

(2014), I argue that the imaginary idea of a New

World led the 15th-century man to construct many legends and, consequently, to

the desire to find that longed-for paradise. The idea of an “earthly paradise” located

at the “end of the east” at the end of the medieval era was added to another

fundamental myth: Sir Thomas More's myth of

Utopia

, inaugurated in 1516.

Similarly, in the Puritan imagination, the New World was analogous to the Paradise

Lost, and the wilderness functioned as a kind of testing ground, where the struggle

between good and evil was met. For Roderick Nash (1982), the Bible characterizes

the wilderness as the cursed land, the environment of evil, a kind of hell on earth.

The colonizers of New England, immersed in the Old Testament ideology, believed

that it was their god's command to transform the wilderness into a paradise similar

to Eden. Soon, their imaginative minds recreated the ever-present image of the

devil terrorizing their lives in the unknown vastness of the New World.

La Motte’s final move of leaving the forest, or the wilderness, as it represented

a lawless locus where anything was possible, that including the supernatural, is to

go precisely in the direction of protection against the demon that lurks there.

I fear the marquis's return. Let's fly

To Fontainville, upon the forest's border,

15 This paved the way for the idea of the “Manifest Destiny,” a term coined by John O'Sullivan in 1845. The

belief in the “Manifest Destiny” was often associated with religious ideas, asserting that Americans were

destined to spread civilization and democracy throughout the world.

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

And put ourselves within the law's protection (Dunlap, 1809, p. 198).

At the end of Act V, before La Motte is acquitted of the crimes he committed,

it becomes clear to the reader that “to prove that converts true to virtue's law”

(Dunlap, 1809, p. 208) is the puritanical issue that serves as the backdrop for the

final resolution of Dunlap's play. By converting the savages into believers in their

god, they cease to be the representation of evil in the forest and become virtuous

in the eyes of their angry god16, who could cause harm to those who did not please

him. Puritanical righteousness, once again, is placed under scrutiny. Here, the New

World became the city on a hill. Winthrop's divine beings had to follow the will of

what they considered divine to become examples to the world, as they were aware

of Satan's constant vigilance and the need to build communities that embodied

their god’s divine will.

The American voice on the stage of the 1700s: a conclusion

Marvin Carlson, in

The Haunted Stages

(2003), asserts that every play is

necessarily haunted. For him, all theater brings a spectral presence of those who

return, not necessarily to stay, but in an instrumentalized way, drags the past into

the present and remains in the now to remember something that once was.

Throughout literature history, the ghostly function serves as the work of a memory

that cannot be forgotten. Probably because it is an archive of memory or one that

raises the need for memory, theater is the art form that comes closest to history.

It is important to remember that, for the professor, there is a direct relationship

between the past and the theater as a receptacle of memory.

The close association of the theater with the evocation of the past, the

histories and the legends of the culture uncannily restored to a

mysterious half-life here, has made the theater in the minds of many the

art most closely related to memory and the theater building itself a kind

of memory machine (Carlson, 2003, p. 142).

16 See Sinners in the

Hands of an Angry God

, written by Jonathan Edwards in 1741. Edwards deliberately

compromises Puritanism with the terror of modern man, the terror of insecurity. God was no longer bound

by any promise, neither metaphysical nor legal. Curiously, the same god who was supposed to make them

feel safe probably terrified them with the fear of condemnation, which, according to Edwards, would come

“slowly and, most likely, quickly” upon many of the faithful.

Fontainville Abbey

: William Dunlap’s forgotten Gothic play, the first American playwright

Vanessa Cianconi

Florianópolis, v.2, n.55, p.1-21, ago. 2025

Carlson reflects on the relationship between the past and the theater through

an evocation of the past. His choice of vocabulary immediately recalls Freud's

concept of the uncanny or unfamiliar, but at the same time, providing a certain

comfort. The theater building itself confronts us with the ghost of our previous

visits to the theater and how much we underestimate it. The building as a memory

machine transforms the United States into a haunted house.

By calling William Dunlap's play Gothic, the idea of the country as a (haunted?)

house is reinforced.

Fontainville Abbey

(1794) does not inaugurate American

theater per se, but haunted by the seminal texts of American history, from its

founding as an English colony, reverberating what appeared to be the cultural

choices of the island, to the proclamation of its independence, Dunlap's play

carries the phantom of a history founded on Puritan concerns, which probably

inaugurated the Gothic poetics in that country. To rediscover Dunlap is to look at

a new way of narrating the United States, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would claim

some forty years later. Thus, Marvin Carlson, in affirming the existence of a direct

relationship between the ruins of the past, the anxieties about a hopeless future,

and the theater as a receptacle of memory, amalgamates the thread that weaves

theater history, melodrama, and the Gothic in the United States of America.

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Received in: 08/06/25

Approved in: 21/07/25

Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina

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Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Cênicas

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Centro de Artes, Design e Moda – CEART

Urdimento

– Revista de Estudos em Artes Cênicas

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