Heart of Oak, and other Trans-Atlantic Transformations
Odai Johnson, University of Washington, Seattle
Somewhere in the mid-1760s David Douglass, a Scottish immigrant, manager of a itinerant company of actors, and modestly, the founder of the American theatre, began to sign his name ‘Esquire’. When and how exactly the social promotion occurred is not clear, nor is it clear what exactly it entailed to be a member of what Roy Porter called ‘para-gentry’ (88), but some change in status or acquisition encouraged Douglass to begin to style himself a gentleman. It’s a small claim in a nation of self-fashioning strangers, but how a traveling actor-manager (a stroller in the true sense of the word) became a gentleman is central to understanding the American possibility of re-invention, individually as immigrants first and afterwards, collectively as a nation.
If we are considering the art of re-invention, of stowing away the past and assuming the promise of a new continent of self, no place was easier (and to a degree, safer) than shipboard on a transatlantic crossing. Here passengers discarded their old identities and in the open expanse of opportunity became anew in America. I want to look at one passage of one voyage that left a few legible traces of this sea-change on each of its passengers–actors, future signers of the Declaration of Independence, royalists, rebels, fence-sitters, all re-fashioned — and a reunion of that passage ten years later in the theatre, in which the old marks, histories, stigmata, were exposed afresh, and publicly unhistoried.
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