In the late fall of 1762 seven stern-faced Puritans gathered in the drafty study of President Holyoke's house to ponder a recent rash of "frivolity" fast spreading through the Yard. After an hour of heated discourse the Corporation unanimously ruled:

"Whereas the attending upon stage plays, interludes and theatrical entertainments tends greatly to corrupt the morals of a people and particularly with respect to the college must needs . . . be highly detrimental to their learning by taking off their minds from their studies, drawing them into such company as may be very ensnaring to them, expensive to their parents and tending to many other disorders: Therefore, Voted that if any undergraduate shall presume to be an actor in, a spectator at, or any ways concerned in any such . . . plays . . . in the town of Cambridge or elsewhere he shall for the first offense be degraded according to the discretion of the President and Tutors and for repeated offense shall be rusticated or expelled."

In the late fall of 1952, 190 years later, this severe regulation was still on the books and although the penalties had been allowed to lapse, its basic bent, though mellowed over time into a sort of apathy, lingered on in the University's administration.

Pusey Brings Hope

In the late fall of 1953, with the statute still there but a new president in the chair, indications are that the last remnants of this Puritanical crust, have disappeared from all but the record books and that the theater is at last about to emerge as a respected and vital part of University life.

The two centuries of history which lead up to the changes of this year are by no means theatrically arid. Quite the contrary, they are filled with a rich, varied dramatic heritage which, although rarely encouraged and often actively trammeled by the University, has managed to persist.

The existence of theatrical activity at Harvard is evident even before the regulation of 1762 and evinced by the very need for such a regulation. There are written records which show that in 1690 Gustavus Vasa, by Benjamin Colman '92, the first play written by an American, was performed at commencement. This must have had the blessing of the College, though probably not of the Commonwealth, since as early as 1665 there is record of amateurs being summoned to court for presenting a play.

In the 18th century we have the first indication of clandestine theatrical activity among students here. From the diary of Nathaniel Ames '61 come the notations in 1785: "July 6, Cato to perfection;" "July 14, Cato more perfect than before." In 1760 he wrote, "Acted Tancred and Sigismunda for which we are likely to be prosecuted," and, five years later, "Scholars punished at college for acting over the great and last day in a very shocking manner, personating the June, Devil etc."

But shortly after the Corporation ruling of 1762 there are indications that the College did allow some theatrical activity. For in 1765 the regulation was explained "as not to prevent such exercises as shall be performed under the direction of the President and Tutors." Following this there is in the Faculty Records for the '60's a notation that "This day was the Public examination and the Overseers being present, Oliver and Antington were allowed to exhibit a scene in Terence before the Committee, they desiring it, but in Private, in the library none being present but the Committee, the President and Tutors."

The gradual liberalizing of the regulations in the College followed soon after similar changes in Commonwealth law. In 1792, John Gardner came to the defense of the drama in a speech in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, in which he said that "the illiberal, unmanly, and despotical act which now prohibits theatrical exhibitions among us, to me, Sir, appears to be the brutal, monstrous, spawn of a sour, envious, morose, malignant and truly benighted superstition." In 1794 the first theater opened in Boston.

But the change did not come at once. In 1794 President Dwight of Yale was speaking for Harvard as well when he said in his "Essay on the Theatre" that "to indulge a taste for playgoing means nothing more or less than the loss of that most valuable treasure, the immortal soul." And as late as 1821 the Faculty Records show that three students were fined ten dollars each for attending the theater in Boston.

Gradually the College's forbidding attitude toward theater softened, and various forms of drama slowly developed here. The two most prevalent forms during most of the early and middle 19th century are at the extremes of the dramatic spectrum: classical plays in either Greek or Latin, and burlesque musicals. The former were produced by a number of Classics clubs, while the latter flourished among a seemingly endless series of social and theatrical organizations. Some like the Harvard Theatricals and Sophomore Theatricals produced one or two shows and folded. Others were more successful. Pi Eta produced an annual musical from 1870 through 1941 and Hasty Pudding Theatricals have run with uninterrupted success since 1844.

Upswing in the 80's

Serious drama in a significant degree began at Harvard in the 1880's. In 1881 the Cercle Francais initiated the annual French play, and shortly afterwards the German and Spanish clubs added their productions. 1844 saw the start of the first College club seriously devoted to productions of English drama: the Harvard chapter of Delta Upsilon which produced Elizabethan comedies through the 1930's. In 1889 the first of a number of Harvard Shakespeare Clubs gave Julius Caesar in Sanders Theater before "a large and representative audience."

The so-called "Golden Age" of Harvard theater began in the 1890's. With the exception of the later days of the Baker Workshop, the two decades straddling the turn of the century were the high-point of theatrical activity at the University. Up to this time the productions had been on a fairly small scale, but in the '90's they became much more ambitious. In 1889 the students of the American Academy of Dramatic Art, by invitation of the Greek Department and with the aid of Harvard actors, presented an elaborate production of Sophocles' Electra to a packed Sanders Theatre. This began a tradition of classical extravaganzas which stirred tremendous enthusiasm at Harvard and throughout the area. The next few years saw production of Phormio and Ocpedipus Rex, culminating in a gigantic Agamemnon in the Stadium in 1908. In 1895 Sanders was transformed into an Elizabethan playhouse for Ben Johnson's The Silent Women. The year before, Union Hall in Boston was jammed to see the Cercle Francais produce Molicre.