Going from an off-Broadway premiere in February 2015 to winning eleven Tony Awards, which included Best Musical, in 2016, this play about our country’s founding fathers being more human than our history books let on had become an unstoppable wildfire of a cultural phenomenon. For cast member Daveed Diggs, Lin-Maniel Miranda’s Hamilton:An American Musical was “an example of how to hold your country accountable and to start demanding the change you need to see (Adame).”
Rhetoric is widely considered an art or craft itself and has many different definitions. Overall, it can be condensed to the intent and accomplishments of its compositional techniques as a whole to sound off or persuade an idea. Out of this comes the rhetorical situation which is the relationship between the writer, what the writer is writing about or the exigency, and who the writer is writing to or the audience. Isabel C. May, Ph.D., the director of University of Maryland’s Baltimore Writing Center, describes this as a triangle with writer, exigency, and audience all on their own point (UMaryland). When one looks at Hamilton through the lens of May’s situational triangle it leads to many different interactions.
Miranda’s Hamilton had so much to offer and to be enjoyed because a lot of what he accomplished had never been done before, on Broadway or anywhere. He raps the tale of one of America’s usually forgotten founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, through the many “ups” and the voluminous “downs” of his life as he hoped to make all of these historical figures out as redeemable human beings, therefore good characters. From an interview with Rolling Stone, Manuel decrees:
“I really don’t accept the premise that we lionize any of these dudes, I think our goal is to present them as human, and not just the five facts you know about them from our history books. So it’s about how Washington f****d up a lot before he became the father of our country. It’s about how Hamilton kept his eye on his work and really f****d up at home. It’s about how Jefferson wrote really eloquently about freedom and owned over 600 people. Nobody gets off scot-free in our show (Binelli).”
While the production’s historical accuracies and inaccuracies came under scrutiny, among other aspects of the show, Miranda wrung out and separated his characters, so to speak, from what the world has come to know about them in the past two hundred years. He said to his audience there is more to their story, there is more to how their belief system develops which affected their politics and choices, and there is a reassurance to the audience that says, “your story matters too.” This could not be exemplified any further unless he were to cast all of the founding fathers as American people of color, except he did.
An organic lover of hip-hop, Miranda was writing the lyrics while envisioning rappers like Common as George Washington because they were both “wild” in their younger years and careers, and then they gained “stature and legacy (Binelli).” Leslie Odom, Jr., who caught fame with his performance as Aaron Burr, said, “It is quite literally taking the history that someone has tried to exclude us from and reclaiming it. We are saying we have the right to tell it too (Binelli).” The history that inspired the show, casting, and slavery were all topics of controversy that Miranda himself owned up to on Twitter on July 6, 2020:
“All the criticisms are valid. The sheer tonnage of complexities & failings of these people I couldn’t get. Or wrestled with but cut. I took 6 years and fit as much as I could in a 2.5 hour musical. Did my best. It’s all fair game (Miranda).”
That was the writers’ exigence- to assert his own belief that “part of the beauty of the show is that it changes who has the right to tell the American story (Arivett).” After all, Miranda and Jeremy McCarter said in their book, Hamilton: The Revolution, “history is entirely created by the person who tells the story (Miranda and McCarter).” In her paper, “The Timeliness of Hamilton: An American Musical,” Erika Arivett argues that the rhetorical space that Hamilton exists in is because of the times in which it came to be: “the makers of art are products of their time (Averitt).”
Even within its lyrics, Miranda acknowledged through his character, Alexander Hamilton, that “this is not a moment. It’s the movement where all the hungriest brothers with something to prove went,” in the song “My Shot” (Miranda). Arivett noted, in the time since its release in 2015, there have been multiple racially charged mass shootings, protests, struggles with immigration, a transition from the country’s first Black president in Obama to one whose position was founded upon building a wall to slow down immigration, and much more civil discourse online due to a pandemic:
While exigence is “something waiting to be done,”Arthur B. Miller argues that the rhetorical situation must be rightly timed (kairos) for that thing to be effectively received by the listeners. In other words, the need must speak to the constraints of the hearers for it to function as exigence. If the need is not perceived as relevant to the audience, Miller claims, then the constraints of the speaker and hearer do not agree, and the phenomenon of exigence does not occur (Arivett).
The rhetorical situation is largely instinctual. It is a process to better effectively understand what, how, and why we are communicating and how successful it can be. Miranda used it exceptionally to bring forth a historical narrative, rewrite it with purpose for its direct audience, and embed everything with his belief system through allusion, the plot, and delivery which has garnered a fandom across the world.
It is really easy to look at the work’s reception within its many various audiences. Fortunately, there are two significant instances in which Hamilton has entered the public sphere: once, when it debuted on stage, and the second time, when it was released on the streaming platform Disney+ to be enjoyed at home in the midst of a pandemic. These two moments were important as the cultural movement surrounding it had progressed while it stayed the same. In an interview with Wired, Miranda noted this and stamped down what his show is all about:
“One of the great surprises of Hamilton is that it doesn’t change. We haven’t changed the text of the show since 2015 and yet it feels like it changes because the world around it changes so fast. Things that popped out when Obama was President may not be the things that get a reaction when Trump is President. ‘Immigrants- we get the job done’ certainly has a different reaction. If there’s anything political about the show Hamilton, it’s thesis is everything good or bad that was present at the founding at the roots of the birth of this country are still present. The fights we have then are the fights we still have now. I think one of the biggest themes of the show is ‘You don’t get to control how you are remembered.’ You don’t get to control how you are remembered and who survives you. And the show doesn’t escape that fate either. And so different things within it will rise and fall based on where we are (Nast).”
Hamilton successfully became a rhetorical artifact as Miranda’s intentions to make the show memorable with the humanity within each character are prominently executed across various mediums: stage, recording, or film. It met the criteria through and through as it connected with so many people of many social communities through its use of different musical genres and honest approaches to dialogue giving each character their own appeal to ethos as imperfect people.
Analysis does not conclude with just comparing the show’s goals to its accomplishments, for its accomplishments, good and bad, deserve a conversation on their own. It would be important to take audience reviews into consideration with specific questions asking about the show’s themes over its visual or musical characteristics. By asking the audience how the show taught its many various lessons of the accessibility of “the American Dream”, consequences of choice, representation, and narrative theory, over the normal questions of “Was it fun?” or “Would you recommend this?,” it would lead to much more visceral reactions instead of initial reactions to the grandeur of it.
Perhaps, the greatest unanswered question regarding the show’s relationship to the Rhetorical Situation is its legacy. Miranda said that even he does not “get to control” how it is “remembered (Nast).” It would be safe to predict that the legacy of the show does not lie solely in its public memory, but how it inspires an approach to fully listening to an individual’s story before passing complete judgment.
Whether it is applied to politics, art, family, friendships, or the workplace, taking one’s narrative into consideration was a big theme of Miranda’s as he reached with both arms as the writer towards, both, the various audiences and the various exigencies that he hoped to address. Just as the cast came together to belt out the phrase “History Has Its Eyes on You” to sold out audiences night in and night out, it is easy to see that Miranda was breaking the fourth wall on that one.
Works Cited
Adame, Marisol. “History Has Its Eyes on US: The Importance and Relevance of 'Hamilton' Today.” The Prospector, The University of Texas at El Paso, 21 July 2020, https://www.theprospectordaily.com/2020/07/21/history-has-its-eyes-on-us-the-importance-and-relevance-of-hamilton-today/.
Arivett, Erika. "The Timeliness of Hamilton: An American Musical." The Popular Culture Studies Journal (2020): 126-144.
Binelli, Mark. “Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 9 July 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/hamilton-creator-lin-manuel-miranda-the-rolling-stone-interview-42607/.
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives, Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, Calif, 2013, pp. 146–146.
Hamilton: Original Broadway Cast. “My Shot.” Hamilton: An American Musical Original Broadway Cast Recording, Bill Sherman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Black Thought, Questlove, Alex Lacamoire, 25 Sept. 2015.
Miranda, Lin-Manuel, and Jeremy McCarter. Hamilton: The Revolution. Melcher
Media, 2016.
Miranda, Lin-Manuel. “Appreciate You so Much, @Brokeymcpoverty. All the Criticisms Are Valid. the Sheer Tonnage of Complexities & Failings of These People I Couldn't Get. or Wrestled with but Cut. I Took 6 Years and Fit as Much as I Could in a 2.5 Hour Musical. Did My Best. It's All Fair Game. Https://T.co/mjhu8sxs1u.” Twitter, Twitter, 6 July 2020, https://twitter.com/Lin_Manuel/status/1280120414279290881?s=20&t=Q4E4nsJXAAGIQzHb6C_m9Q.
Nast, Condé. “The Hamilton Cast Answers Hamilton Questions from Twitter.” Wired, Conde Nast, 3 July 2020, https://www.wired.com/video/watch/the-hamilton-cast-answers-hamilton-questions-from-twitter.
“Rhetorical Situation.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 61, no. 3, National Council of Teachers of English, 2010, pp. 611–611, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40593346.
University of Maryland, Baltimore. “Workshop.” University of Maryland, Baltimore, https://www.umaryland.edu/writing/online-workshops/how-to-plan-and-write-a-paper/workshop/.
コメント