André (play)

"André" is a play by William Dunlap, first produced at the Park Theatre in New York City on March 30, 1798 by the Old American Company, published in that same year together with a collection of historic documents relating to the case of Major John André, the British officer who was hanged as a spy on October 2, 1780, for his role in the treason of Benedict Arnold. The play does not go into the historic details, but rather presents a fictionalized account of the American debate over whether to spare or hang him. Only three characters in the play are historic: André himself, George Washington (referred to throughout the text, except once in a passage inserted between the first two performances, simply as "The General"), and Honora Sneyd, who had been briefly engaged to André ten years earlier under the auspices of Anna Seward, who had done much to romanticize the affair in her Monody on Major André of 1781. (Actually, Honora Sneyd had died of consumption some months before André's death, and never went to America.)

Despite the fictionalization, the play genuinely shows the anguish felt by many on the American side over the necessity to hang the brilliant and charming young officer, and is written in unusually good verse for the time.

Apart from its merits, the play is noteworthy as the first American tragedy written on an American subject. Unfortunately, it was not a great success. Dunlap recycled much of it into his pageant-play "The Glory of Columbia, Her Yeomanry", a poor piece, but one which continued to be popular for fifty years.

External links

* [http://pws.prserv.net/jwkennedy/Andre/index.html http://pws.prserv.net/jwkennedy/Andre/index.html] -- Full text