Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun observed that “if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws”. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is now testing an expansion of this proposition: if you could make all the ballads, need you care what is taught in the schools? In the academy admiring portraits of great statesmen have not been entirely fashionable for some time, not even warts-and-all style portraits. Given what we are sometimes told ought to interest us about American history, Hamilton, widely praised for dramatic innovation, is startlingly retrograde: a celebration of the Founding via biographies of a few members of an elite, one recounting the lives of generally upper class men engaged in war and high politics, with generally upper class women included via a romance plot or an adultery plot. One frequently hears an additional claim that this material is peculiarly unpromising for a newly diverse population, which may be a little hard to square with the conspicuously multi-racial cast’s visible exhilaration with the play it is performing, and (at least during the performance I saw in April) its unusually diverse audience.
Maybe Lin-Manuel Miranda learned to appreciate his theme at the excellent university he attended, but if so he might have trouble doing that today. Looking over the on-line offerings of its history department, this semester Miranda’s alma mater doesn’t offer any course on the founders or the Revolution. The Spring list offers “Comparing Revolutions: The United States and Early Canada, 1774-1815”, but the course catalog explains that “Students in this seminar will read widely in the literature of the revolutionary era as it pertains to American, Canadian, and Native groups…What did Benjamin Franklin think of Montreal? Where did Iroquoia go after 1783? How did the creation of states such as Vermont compare to the division of Quebec the same year? What impact did David Thompson’s exploration for the Hudson’s Bay Company have on Lewis and Clark?”
This is not the Revolution as Miranda seems to imagine it, as a heroic or for that matter a national event, nor even as one fit for what Polonius called the tragical-historical treatment. The course description concludes with the promise to “encourage students to consider the Revolution as a continental rather than national event.” The comparative study of revolutions is an old and usually richly rewarding approach to the study of their history, but attending closely to what Ben Franklin thought of Montreal was not the method of comparison traditionally employed.
No-one has yet accused Hamilton of being hip hop jingoism, probably because Miranda is so clearly not doing secular hagiography: Daveed Diggs, the rangy, velvet-clad actor cast as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Jefferson, plays him as elegant, languid and snobbish, conveying something of a dandy and perhaps just a touch of a pimp. Jefferson was six foot two, Hamilton five foot seven, and the casting as well as the acting lets the physical difference dramatize the social distance between the two historical figures. Lincoln noted that a slave-owner makes his bread with sweat wrung from other’s faces, and a pimp does the same; if the visual reference is intended by the actor or the playwright it certainly works, which, as Miranda notes, Jefferson didn’t.
Miranda seems persuaded that his hero was an abolitionist: as part of an exchange of rhyming dialog his Hamilton observes to Jefferson “…hey neighbor. Your debts are paid because you don’t pay for labor”. Miranda more broadly and quite dazzlingly reanimates verse to dramatize political history on the eve of that technique’s disappearance from a noted American Shakespeare festival, so stichomythia—an older version of the dozens—isn’t the only old trick he reworks and makes new. A lot of critics comment on the race blind casting, but in other physical terms some of the casting is quite traditional, for a few of the actors possess some of the physical properties of the originals. In addition to Digg’s Jefferson towering over the actors playing Hamilton, Christopher Jackson, who plays Washington, has the physical mass and solidity every contemporary seems to have noticed in the man he’s portraying. This may be the body as metaphor: in an interview, Miranda noted Jackson’s ability to get across Washington’s massive integrity, which along with Washington’s physical mass was another thing noted by a lot of the people who met Washington.
Diggs observed, of the rhyming idiom in which the play is written, “It feels important, because it allows us to see ourselves as part of history that we always thought we were excluded from.” The music helps too, although not, perhaps, in the most obvious sense. Beaumarchais claimed that “What is too silly to be said may be sung”, to which Kenneth Clarke wisely added “what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious — these things can also be sung and can only be sung.” Miranda’s musical idiom along with his verse form lets political nobility and unabashed patriotism back on an American stage without seeming in any way ponderously worthy or corny, and has so far let what might have been scorned as an obsolete and naïve view of the Founding escape any censure.
If you teach for a living, probably also if you don’t, you will have heard the assertion that hostile majorities (and their academic spokesmen) made and make minorities feel excluded from any high-toned version of American political history, and there’s surely something in that theory. Hamilton suggests that some practices and rhetoric within the academy may play their own part in preserving that sense of exclusion. If you are told that the history of the founders and the founding is not your history, you are not being done any favors. A century ago, anyone being told that would have known that he or she was being insulted. Nowadays we are likelier to be told that we are being congratulated. That is not necessarily progress—but if Fletcher of Saltoun had the right of it, Hamilton certainly is.