The Lord of the Manor Americanized

The new issue of Colonial Williamsburg’s Trend & Traditon magazine offers an interesting article by Jon Kukla about a 1781 copy of the play The Lord of the Manor.

That copy is also featured in this online exhibit from Stanford University, the current owner.

The Lord of the Manor was a loose adaptation of the French comic opera Sylvain. It opened at “the Theatre Royal Drury-Lane” in 1780 and was a hit.

William Jackson of Exeter Cathedral had composed the new score, and once the play was a success the author of the libretto came forward: John Burgoyne, home from his flop in America.

Burgoyne arranged for his script to be published with a preface. A copy of that publication crossed the Atlantic to the household of Patrick Henry, who wrote his name on the title page.

But that wasn’t all. Kukla guesses that some of the many Henry children put on their own production of The Lord of the Manor and that, before they did so, their father edited the text for them.

Henry “deleted three passages with dialogue referring to prostitution or adultery—as well as the sleazy remarks of an upper-class character lusting after a servant girl.” (Not that Virginia aristocrats didn’t lust after their servants—they just didn’t remark about it in front of the children.)

Also edited out were two scenes satirizing British customs that didn’t pertain to America. One went on about hunting laws, and the other portrayed an army recruiting officer. The latter, Kukla says, was already “extraneous” to the plot, created by Burgoyne for some laughs.

Most interesting, Henry made changes to Americanize a few lines, though the play still seems to be set in Britain. He replaced “old Britons” with “our Fathers,” removed the words “king and” from the phrase “enemies of my king and country,” and added a speech about one’s “birth-right as a free man.”

Henry also took out Burgoyne’s criticism of the French—a long-standing national habit made especially acute in wartime. The line “though I hate the French in my heart, as a true Englishwoman, I’ll be friends with their sunshine…” became “though I never was in France, yet I’ll be friends with their sunshine…” After all, in the 1780s France was America’s far-off friend.