Play: The Old Glory

Overview
Robert Lowell's The Old Glory is a three-part dramatic sequence first staged in 1964 that mines American literature and history to interrogate national identity. Drawing closely on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Lowell reframes canonical short stories and historical episodes as theatrical tableaux in which myth, violence, and patriotism collide. The trilogy moves across eras, Puritan New England, the revolutionary ferment of the 18th century, and the age of Atlantic commerce, to test the moral vocabulary Americans use to define themselves.

Structure and Sources
The play assembles three distinct but thematically linked pieces adapted from Hawthorne and Melville: a Puritan episode centering on Governor Endecott and the emblem of the red cross, a dramatization of Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," and a stage rendering of Melville's "Benito Cereno." Lowell does more than transcribe plot: he reworks diction, compresses scenes, and reshapes point of view so the original narratives become instruments for theatrical interrogation. The shifts in setting and form produce a cumulative portrait of an evolving and often troubled American self.

Language and Theatrical Technique
A poet by training, Lowell brings a heightened verbal sensibility to the stage, blending lyric passages with period idiom and brusque modern speech. The plays exploit contrasts of register, sermonic Puritan rhetoric against crude mob talk, genteel nautical manners against the terse language of survival, to dramatize social fracture. Staging is often stylized and sometimes metatheatrical; choruses, asides, and abrupt shifts in tone remind the audience that historical narratives are constructed, mutable, and contested.

Themes and Moral Ambiguity
Patriotism and myth are treated with suspicion rather than reverence. Each episode poses questions about authority, complicity, and the costs of national self-fashioning. The Endecott vignette exposes the violence implicit in attempts to purify a collective identity. "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" focuses on humiliation and the inversion of social hierarchies in a revolutionary climate, showing how liberation and mob rule can blur. "Benito Cereno" delivers the sharpest moral puzzle: the surface civility of Atlantic trade and white authority is undermined by a hidden, ferocious resistance that forces characters, and spectators, to confront the grotesque realities of slavery and power.

Characters and Key Episodes
Lowell preserves the emotional core of his sources while amplifying their ambiguities. The Puritan magistrates crystallize theocratic rigidity; young protagonists in the Hawthorne piece embody vulnerability and disillusionment; in the Melville episode Captain Amasa Delano's gullibility and Benito Cereno's afflicted dignity are counterpointed by Babo's inscrutable agency. Confrontations, between magistrate and dissenter, traveler and mob, captain and mutineer, function as moral tests with no easy resolutions, leaving responsibility diffuse and culpability shared.

Legacy and Critical Resonance
The Old Glory is often read as Lowell's dramatic experiment in using classic American texts to diagnose contemporary anxieties about nationhood. Its ambition lies in refusing nationalist consolations and making audiences watch uncomfortable affinities among piety, rebellion, and commerce. While responses to its staging and stylistic unevenness have varied, the trilogy's sustained ethical probing and its fusion of poetic intensity with theatrical invention have secured it a distinctive place in postwar American drama and in discussions about how literature can be remade to critique the myths it once helped to form.