Patriot, Satirist, Bagman: Picturing John Brougham’s Columbus Burlesque

Abstract

In another of his burlesques, Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or, The Gentle Savage (1855), which engages the romantic myths of the seventeenth-century Jamestown colony, Brougham performed as John Smith, who is appropriately described as (among other things) a "Statesman, Pioneer, and Bagman," accompanied by "a crew of Fillibusters [sic]," or soldiers of fortune seeking to establish political power in a sovereign nation.10 Certainly, Brougham's Columbus fits the same description, and Brougham prompts laughter through the idea that the revered explorer was also a conman, racketeer, and filibuster who bears little or no resemblance to figure enshrined in American myth. Amy E. Hughes encourages scholars of nineteenth-century theater to look not only to dramatic texts but also to records of actual performances, such as "playbills, newspaper advertisements, and cast books," taking up "quirky remnants in tandem with other sources" to "gain a more nuanced understanding of the content and craft of theatermaking during the 1800s. With the recognition that even more work needs to be done on Brougham's use of music (especially his parody of popular tunes and deployment of patriotic sing-alongs), I bring new focus here on scraps of the visual culture informing the text and the staging of Columbus, hoping to bring us one step closer to the richness Brougham's art and at the same time trouble any conclusions regarding the politics of his art. By the time his performance career ended in 1879, Brougham had "played at least 477 roles in at least 443 different plays" in theatres across the country, penned no fewer than 160 theatrical scripts, and published at least thirty-five dramas with Samuel French, in addition to multiple collections of short fiction and poetry.14 As Marc Robinson has it, "For every form the American theater puts forward-heroic tragedy, romance, history play, melodrama-Brougham counters with plays less poised, less linear, less respectful of polarities of good and evil.