Royall Tyler

Royall Tyler 1757-1826, American jurist, author, and playwright, b. Boston, grad. Harvard, 1776. He served in the colonial army during the American Revolution and later in the suppression of Shays's Rebellion. Tyler was admitted to the bar in 1780; he practiced law in Maine, later in Massachusetts, and after 1790 in Vermont, where he was (1807-13) chief justice of the supreme court and professor of jurisprudence (1811-14) at the Univ. of Vermont. He is remembered for his play The Contrast (1787), which was the first American comedy produced by a professional company. He also wrote other plays and a novel, the Algerine Captive (1797). With Joseph Dennie he wrote witty Federalist verse and essays for the New Hampshire Journal.

Bibliography: See his Four Plays (ed. by A. W. Peach and G. F. Newbrough, 1941).

Tyler, Royall (1757–1826), American dramatist, author of The Contrast, a light comedy in the style of Sheridan's The School for Scandal and the first indigenous play to be produced in America. Tyler was a friend of Thomas Wignell, the leading comedian of the American Company, and it was probably owing to his influence that the play was given by them at the John Street Theatre on 16 Apr. 1787. In return for his help Tyler gave him the copyright. It was a success and was several times revived, though when given in Boston, Tyler's birthplace, it had, like Othello, to be disguised as a ‘Moral Lecture in Five Parts’. It was published in 1790, George Washington heading the list of subscribers, and in 1917 was revived by Otis Skinner. Tyler wrote several other plays, but none was as successful as The Contrast.

Tyler, Royall (1757–1826), born in Boston, after graduation from Harvard (1776) practiced law and helped to suppress Shays's Rebellion. While on a visit to New York City, he saw a production of The School for Scandal, and within three weeks wrote The Contrast (1787), a social comedy contrasting homespun American dignity with the alien foppery of the British, the second play and the first comedy to be written by an American. Within a month of its production, he followed it with a two‐act comic opera, May Day in Town; or, New York in an Uproar, which has not survived and is known only to have been a satire on contemporary manners, concerned with the confusion caused by spring housecleaning and moving. Another comedy, The Georgia Spec; or, Land in the Moon (1797), is also lost, but is known to have ridiculed the Yazoo frauds. In addition, Tyler wrote four unproduced and unpublished plays: The Island of Barrataria, a farce based on Don Quixote; and The Origin of the Feast of Purim, Joseph and His Brethren, and The Judgment of Solomon, blank‐verse Biblical dramas. Having moved from Boston to Vermont (1790) to continue his legal career, eventually becoming chief justice of the state supreme court (1807–13) and professor of jurisprudence at the University of Vermont (1811–14), he entered into a close friendship with Joseph Dennie. Using the pseudonym Spondee, while Dennie employed that of Colon, he collaborated in writing satirical verse and light essays, frequently showing a Federalist bias, which they contributed to the Farmer's Weekly Museum and other journals. In addition to a long poem, The Chestnut Tree, written in 1824 and first published in 1931, which depicts contemporary rural life but prophesies the rise of industrialism, Tyler is known for his picaresque novel The Algerine Captive (1797) and his Yankey in London (1809), a series of letters supposedly written by an American resident in England. Previously uncollected Verse and Prose appeared respectively in 1968 and 1972.