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Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black. By Heather S. Nathans. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009; pp. x+275, 9 illustrations. $98 cloth.

There is more than one reason to read Heather S. Nathans’s book Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black. First, it offers an illuminating examination of American theatre in relation to the young republic’s increasingly divisive issue of slavery. Second, it raises the bar on writing theatre history. It is inspiring to see research, reporting, and analysis conducted and communicated with such finesse. Nathans takes “sentimental representation” as a through line that ties in plays, illustrations, and historical events from the end of the American Revolution to the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861. Lifting what Thomas Jefferson referred to as a “veil of black” involves looking beyond the outer appearance of the depersonalized other to lay bare emotional qualities that invite sympathetic bonding with the black slave. While “sentiment” remained a staple of discourse throughout this period, its meaning and applications evolved considerably. Nathans’s command of the historical context and the dramatic literature enables her to tease out meaningful examples from an impressive range of materials. In the decade or so after the Revolution, Americans struggled for a sense of legitimacy through language and legal concepts, yet the issue of slavery forced sentiment into the equation. Mungo in the British play The Padlock and Sambo in John Murdock’s The Triumphs of Love both elicited sympathy from their audiences, but the latter also intertwined legal and moral considerations in his discourse. The nation may well have come closer to the possibility of abolishing slavery during this early republican period than in subsequent decades, when economic interests hardened and audiences became less attuned to legal considerations interlarding sentimental appeals. Nathans draws upon five plays of the early 1800s to show the increasing complexity of issues facing abolitionists. James Cobb’s Paul and Virginia (1800) is instructive in terms of differences between the British and American versions, with the latter using softened antislavery rhetoric, perhaps in response to widely reported slave uprisings that made many Americans nervous. Part of the problem was concern about how free blacks would fit into the social fabric, and this period Book Reviews