My work examines the rich connections and mutual influences between the early American theatre and the press.  These two different arenas of performative public discourse shared important similarities that often made for a dynamic relationship between them, including similar funding models, a defining instability that allowed and encouraged talented individuals to continually form new partnerships and associations, and a reliance on material adapted (or stolen) from a variety of different media, including each other. 

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville writes that, "in America...the press constitutes an extraordinary power, so peculiarly compounded of goods and evils that without it liberty cannot survive and with it order can scarcely be maintained."  Throughout the period of my study, one finds frequent examples of journalists who sought to take the important function and undeniable power of the press to the stage, writing plays that fused political and social commentary with the dramatic form. Yet one also finds playwrights who, while editing politically active newspapers and journals, drew clear distinctions between their politics and their productions.  I ask how the overlapping worlds of the stage and the press alternately delineated and dissolved the boundaries between notions of public and private discourse, as well as what (or who) determined which subjects were (in)appropriate for each discursive field.   I examine what role each of these forms played in helping readers and audiences situate themselves in the body public and politic.  And I explore the process by which the theatre could either attenuate or magnify the political attacks of a writer, suggesting the power of live performance to blur the lines between rhetorical and actual violence.