The Black Crook Myth

Abstract

Dates and events are frequently useful scholarly pigeonholes into which may be neatly tucked whole periods of literature or significant literary trends. The scholar knows them to be oversimplifications, but so long as their limitations are recognized, they remain useful tools for teaching, talking, and writing. Occasionally, however, history is hung from a date so unreliable and so unjustified that delineation of material is blurred rather than clarified, traditions are obscured rather than illuminated, and fields of research are closed rather than opened. American theatre history affords a perfect example of the misused common reference point. The year 1866, with its production of The Black Crook, has been accepted as the landmark indicating the beginnings of American musical comedy. Cecil Smith, in Musical Comedy in America, says, “For all important purposes, the history of musical comedy in America starts with The Black Crook, as everyone has always said it did.”