Throughout Simms’s career, one of his paramount concerns was the connection between art and history, and the role of the literary artist in conveying history.  While readers see Simms exploring these connections in his Revolutionary Romances, other scattered works of fiction, and the essays in Views and Reviews, one of the writer’s most intriguing presentations of the ability of art to interpret history is in the genre-mixing Benedict Arnold: The Traitor. A Drama, in an Essay.  Critic Miriam J. Shillingsburg regards Benedict Arnold as worthy of commendation for its “thoughtful ...

           “I have also a very Texan drama unpublished in my desk,” Simms wrote to state legislator, Armistead Burt, in January 1845, “which will make a rumpus, be sure, if ever it reaches light upon the stage.”[1]  That drama, Michael Bonham, was originally published pseudonymously (by “A Southron”) in the Southern Literary Messenger from February to June 1852.  Richmond publisher, John R. Thompson, released it as a small pamphlet after its serial run in July 1852.[2]  The drama is based on James Butler Bonham, a South Carolina native and lieutenant in the Texas Calvary, who died ...

                Throughout his long career, Simms was regularly concerned with theatre, though drama would always be the genre with which he had the least commercial and critical success.  Norman Maurice; or,The Man of the the People is perhaps Simms’s best dramatic work, though its failings are typical of his theatrical frustrations.  Norman Maurice was a lofty experiment, mixing contemporary politics with common language presented in the format of the Elizabethan tragedy.  Written in strict blank verse, Norman Maurice is a play in which the Constitutional and slavery questions that ...