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Royall Tyler

Boston, 1757 - 1826, Brattleboro, Vermont

Biographyfound: Men of Vermont, 1894: p. 176 (Royall Tyler, was born in Boston, Mass., July 18, 1757; his father, Royall Tyler ... died in 1771; he was named William Clark Tyler and on the death of his father, this was by legislative enactment changed to Royall; he wrote the "Contrast," the first American play ever staged; moved to Guilford, VT in 1791; in 1801 he was elected a judge of the Supreme Court and in 1807 was promoted to chief judge. He left the bench in 1812 after eleven years continuous service. Tyler's reports are from his pen; he was afflicted with cancer in his later years and died August 16, 1826)

Tyler, Royall (18 July 1757-26 Aug. 1826), author and jurist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Royall Tyler, a prominent merchant and revolutionary patriot, and Mary Steele. He was originally named William Clark Tyler, but in 1772 his mother, widowed the previous year, had his name officially changed to that of his father. Tyler, like his father, attended Harvard, graduating with a B.A. degree in 1776 (and he was awarded one from Yale ad eundem). His inheritance was sufficient to prevent his having any immediate financial worries, and he proceeded not only to study law (with Francis Dana, among others) but also to associate with the painter John Trumbull's (1756-1843) circle, where his wit and his tendency to "dissipation" (to use his term) were evident. Following his brief service as a major in General John Sullivan's unsuccessful campaign to liberate Newport from the British in August 1778, he completed his legal studies, received an M.A. from Harvard (1779), and was admitted to the bar (19 Aug. 1780). He began his legal practice at Falmouth (now Portland), Maine, but in the spring of 1782 he returned to the Boston area, settling in Braintree.

During the next five years occurred the two best-known episodes of his life. First was his love affair with Abigail Adams, niece of his landlord, Richard Cranch, and daughter of the future president John Adams, who doubted Tyler's sense of responsibility. Adams was no doubt pleased when Abigail turned her attention to Colonel William Stephens Smith, his secretary of legation in London, and broke off the match with Tyler in mid-1785. In the months of dejection that followed, Tyler welcomed the distraction of physical activity and in early 1787 joined General Benjamin Lincoln's (1733-1810) expedition against the rebel Daniel Shays and his followers in western Massachusetts, ultimately leading the pursuit of Shays into Vermont. His capable handling of this affair caused the Massachusetts authorities to assign him a related mission to New York in March. He had not been there before and eagerly took advantage of the city's amusements, including the theater. The result was the other famous event in his life: within five weeks of his arrival, he had written a comedy, The Contrast, and had seen it performed by the American Company, starring the famous comedian Thomas Wignell, at the John Street Theatre on 16 April 1787. He had presumably read British plays of the eighteenth century, for The Contrast made skillful use of the same conventions; but it adapted them to a native setting (using a traditional Yankee comic character, here named "Jonathan") and a patriotic theme (the contrast of the title being between a man with British affectation and a sincere, if less polished, "son of liberty"). The play, handsomely published in 1790, with a list of subscribers headed by George Washington, was the first American comedy produced professionally and thus remains a landmark in American theater history.

A month later Tyler's second play, May Day in Town, was produced; although it was less successful than The Contrast, Tyler evidently became something of a literary celebrity in New York. Nevertheless, in one of the fits of depression and abrupt moves that characterized his early adulthood, he returned to his legal work in Boston; and just as suddenly he settled in Guilford, Vermont, in 1791, quickly establishing an extensive practice there. In May 1794 he married Mary Hunt Palmer, daughter of Joseph Pearse Palmer, a revolutionary patriot in whose Boston house he had boarded. From then on, Tyler's life (in Guilford to 1801 and thereafter in Brattleboro until his death) was that of an increasingly eminent lawyer who wrote poetry, fiction, drama, and essays on the side. He became an assistant judge of the Vermont Supreme Court in 1801 and from 1807 through 1813 served as chief justice (the ninth in Vermont history); during this time he presided over a number of important trials (e.g., that of Stephen Jacob in 1802, involving slavery, and that of the Black Snake crew in 1808, dealing with smuggling on Lake Champlain), prepared two volumes (1809-1810) of Reports of the Vermont Supreme Court (covering 1800-1803), and became professor of jurisprudence at the University of Vermont (1811-1814). By 1818 Tyler and his wife had produced eleven children.

Tyler's literary interests led him, early in his Vermont years, to a group of witty young literati--chief among whom was Joseph Dennie, who in 1794 became Tyler's partner in the "Colon & Spondee" columns, a series of satiric essays and verses that were published in local newspapers. As "Spondee," Tyler wrote most of the poetry; and his total output of sprightly patriotic and humorous verse was considerable, though only about fifty poems can be attributed to him with certainty. In the same years Tyler turned again to playwriting and had some association with the theater of Boston through his brother, John Steele Tyler, a theater manager there; but apparently only one or two of his plays were performed in Boston (1796-1797), and the text of only one of his plays from this period (not one of those two) is known to survive (The Island of Barrataria, an adaptation from Don Quixote). Tyler's most widely read work during his lifetime, also dating from these years, was his novel, The Algerine Captive, published in Boston in 1797 and reprinted in London in 1802 (making it one of the earliest American novels to be republished abroad) and in Hartford in 1816. The book, capitalizing on the public interest in the Barbary pirates, devoted half its space to a satiric account of its hero's precaptivity life in America and carried an important preface calling for a native literature. Although Tyler continued to write for his own satisfaction, he published only one more significant work, The Yankey in London (1809), a series of delightful epistolary essays on aspects of English life and perhaps his most successful effort to define, through "contrast," the unaffected and forthright character of Americans.

To his contemporaries Tyler was first of all a distinguished jurist and public servant. But his enduring reputation rests on his literary writings (which, except for a few poems and an oration, were published anonymously) and on the way his literary life epitomized the place of the writer in the early republic. His three major published works are of intrinsic value; they are also landmarks in the early history of American drama, fiction, and nonfiction prose. Furthermore, their very existence shows what a person of strong literary inclination could achieve within the rounds of a busy life of affairs at a time when belles lettres could not be a primary occupation. Even in his last years, suffering from cancer and forced to accept public charity, he continued to write. His lively mind and insuppressible wit found natural expression in writing about the world around him, and in the process he demonstrated, at a critical moment, some of the possibilities for a native American literature.

Bibliography

Tyler's papers are in the Vermont Historical Society and include a long manuscript memoir of Tyler by his son Thomas Pickman Tyler (excerpted in Proceedings of the Vermont Bar Association 1 [1878-1881]: 44-62), preserving the texts of many documents not otherwise known to survive. There have been several notable posthumous editions of some of his writings: The Contrast, ed. T. J. McKee (1887) and ed. James B. Wilbur (1920); The Chestnut Tree, a poem written in 1824 (1931); four previously unpublished plays (three of them poetic closet dramas on biblical subjects), Four Plays, ed. Arthur W. Peach and George F. Newbrough (1941); and The Algerine Captive, reprinted with an introduction by Jack B. Moore in 1967; Marius B. Péladeau prepared collected editions of The Verse (1968) and The Prose (1972) that must be used with caution (see G. T. Tanselle's criticisms in American Literature 41 [1969]: 117-19 and in Early American Literature 9 [1974]: 83-95); and Martha R. Wright produced a flawed edition of The Bay Boy (1978), Tyler's unfinished late revision of the early chapters of The Algerine Captive (see Tanselle's review in Early American Literature 14 [1979]: 131-32). Two significant published writings by Tyler were only discovered in the 1970s: see Katherine S. Jarvis, "Royall Tyler's Lyrics for May Day in Town," Harvard Library Bulletin 23 (1975): 186-98, and T. D. Seymour Bassett, "Discovery of Royall Tyler's Unfinished Essay The Touchstone [1817]," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 73 (1979): 346-48. The principal biographical and critical study is Tanselle's Royall Tyler (1967); the only other book-length study, a less comprehensive overview, is Ada Lou and Herbert L. Carson's Royall Tyler (1979). The reminiscences of Tyler's wife were published in 1925 as Grandmother Tyler's Book and are supplemented by G. F. Newbrough, "Mary Tyler's Journal," Vermont Quarterly 20 (1952): 19-31. There are three principal bibliographies of Tyler: the annotated checklist in Tanselle's 1967 book, which includes manuscript material and secondary works; and two descriptive bibliographies, one by Tanselle (Book Collector 15 [1966]: 303-20) and the other by Michael Winship (Bibliography of American Literature 8 [1990]: 387-96), the latter including a useful list of Tyler's "unlocated publications." Some of the more substantial assessments of Tyler are found in Walter J. Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment (1977); Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (1984); and Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word (1986). Useful specialized studies include Roger B. Stein, "Royall Tyler and the Question of Our Speech," New England Quarterly 38 (1965): 454-74; Richard S. Pressman, "Class Positioning and Shays' Rebellion: Resolving the Contradictions of The Contrast," Early American Literature 21 (1986): 87-102; and John Engell, "Narrative Irony and National Character in Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive," Studies in American Fiction 17 (1989): 19-32.

G. Thomas Tanselle

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Citation:
G. Thomas Tanselle. "Tyler, Royall";
http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-01681.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Tue Aug 06 2013 11:40:29 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.

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