Royall Tyler

Royall Tyler ( born June 18, 1757 Boston, Massachusetts, † August 26, 1826 in Brattleboro, Vermont) was an American jurist and playwright.

Life

Tyler came from the Puritan Boston, attended Harvard University, was a soldier and worked as a lawyer. He was the author of the first professionally produced American play The Contrast (1787 ), which is primarily by the contrast between America and Europe and formally strongly reminiscent of English comedies of its time. With Jonathan, the Yankee, Tyler managed a very popular " creation" for the American stage.

In 1801 he was elected judge of the Supreme Court of Vermont, later became its Chairman. A candidacy for the United States Senate in 1812 was unsuccessful.

Tyler had several illegitimate children, including the mother of his future wife. This married woman committed suicide probably why later. Tyler himself died of a cancer that had previously eaten it for years and the whole face disfigured.

His written heritage and of his wife Mary Palmer Tyler (1775-1866) is now in the Vermont Historical Society Library ( VHS).

Tyler was the model for the figure of the judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, the villain in Nathaniel Hawthorne 's novel The House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne's wife was a niece of Tyler's wife Mary Palmer Tyler.