Robert Merry and the American Theatre

The last years of Robert Merry's life, which were spent in America, have been enveloped in an obscurity which no scholar writing about him has attempted to dispel. The only two considerable biographical sketches written of him, the one appearing soon after his death in the Monthly Magazine for April, 1799, and the other in the Dictionary of National Biography, give the barest attention to his American exile. Fred Lewis Pattee, who writes more about him than any other historian of American literature, limits himself exclusively to the vagaries of the Della Cruscan School which Merry had founded in England, makes no mention of his connection with the American theatre to which he devoted all his writing here, indeed appears not even to have known that Merry emigrated to this country. I have here supplemented with new details the scanty record of Merry's life and especially that of his dramatic writing and connections with the stage in this country.