Yankey in England, The

Yankey in England, The (1814), a comedy by David Humphreys. This work was produced by amateurs in 1814 but seems not to have been performed professionally. It deals with an American Whig and a Tory who become an admiral and a general after the Revolution, and who find themselves in London, where they meet a French count and countess. The countess is an adventuress who has a “Yankey” servant named Doolittle who is a typical comic Yankee, bumptious, naïve, and yet cunning. However, when the countess's schemes go awry and she prepares to swallow poison, another, more sensible, Yankee named Newman sets matters to right. The play is the first to transplant the traditional stage Yankee to foreign parts, a device that was revived with contemporary variations in American musical comedy ninety years later. David HUMPHREYS (1752–1818) was a Connecticut‐born, Yale‐educated gentleman‐author who served as Washington's aide‐de‐camp and later was a Federal official. He wrote essays, poems, and one other known play, the romantic drama The Widow of Malabar (1790).