ABSTRACT
Attitudes toward Edwin Forrest's characterization changed both with time and with the native population's ever-diminishing fortunes in the country. In the tradition of the tragic stage, however, Metamora is more than eloquent when he describes the white men, and Forrest's "declamation seemed to make the whole tragedy of the story of the American Indians breathe and swell and tremble." When Forrest the first American-born actor to achieve recognition as a tragedian, announced the first playwriting competition for American dramatists in 1828, his stipulation was that the "hero, or principal character" of the five-act tragedy "shall be an aboriginal of this country." His performance and characterization of Metamora's "rude and savage, yet noble nature," as refracted through the Jacksonian sensibility, combined both the "pesky injuns" and "noble savages," advancing the ideology of a necessarily vanishing race. By embodying such a mythic and poetic past for a politically young nation, Metamora/Forrest served the burgeoning nationalistic interests of Jacksonian America.
