THE JEW. A COMEDY. PERFORMED IN LONDON, AND BY THE OLD AMERICAN COMPANY IN NEW-YORK, WITH UNIVERSAL APPLAUSE. BY RICHARD CUMBERLAND, ESQ. AUTHOR OF THE WEST-INDIAN, FASHIONABLE LOVER, NATURAL SON, &C. &C.
New-York: Printed and Sold by Samuel Campbell, No. 124, Pearl-Street, 1795. 54, [1], [1 blank] pp. Light to moderate foxing, disbound, corner chip costs a page number. Good+.
"Richard Cumberland's play The Jew was the first English play to have an admirable and virtuous Jew for its hero, an innovation that Irish and American editions immediately underlined by renaming it The Jew; or the Benevolent Hebrew. The play was exceptionally popular. From the first, it was repeatedly performed in London, Dublin, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston as well as in Providence, Rhode Island, Norfolk, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina. Within four years of its first printing in 1794, The Jew sold six London editions, three Irish editions, and three American editions (not to mention the German and Dutch translations) and it continued to be reprinted in Britain and America throughout the nineteenth century. . .
"As Michael Ragussis observes, The Jew 'represented a revolution in the representation of Jewish identity on the English stage.' Imitated by playwrights and novelists alike, Cumberland's benevolent Hebrew, Sheva, became the ancestor of Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, of Daniel in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and of the Monteverdos, father and daughter, in Maria Edgeworth's Harrington, characters deployed, like Sheva, to counter anti-Semitic prejudice. On the other side of the Atlantic too, as Louis Harap confirms, The Jew was one of the most important. . . plays of Jewish interest that was produced on the American stage during the early period, one that 'was familiar to practically the entire theater audience' in 'Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, Providence and Charleston.' It was among the relatively few plays selected from the extensive English repertoire for repeated performance in America" [online Free Library, Cumberland's Benevolent Hebrew in eighteenth-century Britain and America].
Rosenbach 102. Singerman 6092. Evans 28515. ESTC W27470. Item #40136
Price: $2,750.00