The play takes place over the course of a night that Henry spends in jail. In jail, Henry talks with his simple but earnest cellmate Baily, who is awaiting trial.The play incorporates various flashbacks tracking the series of events that led to Henry’s arrest.
At the end of Act 1 of the famous play The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence, Emerson visits Henry David Thoreau after he has been jailed.
Complete summary of Jerome Lawrence, Robert E. Lee's The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. eNotes plot summaries cover all the significant action of The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail.
Quotes from Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. Learn the important quotes in The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail and the chapters they're from, including why they're important and what they mean in the context of the book.
The way the stage is set up immediately emphasizes the importance of thought and imagination. The audience cannot see the walls around Henry, which is an early indication that these walls don’t truly contain him.
Henry’s nature-inspired rapture cannot be contained by the cell walls (themselves imaginary), and this intellectual freedom allows him to see things others miss (i. e. the beauty in a bird song). Bailey asks how a man as educated and well-spoken as Henry ended up in jail.
Related Quotes with Explanations. The light fades on the brothers and rises on Waldo and Lydian again. Lydian tells Waldo that he gave a splendid lecture. Waldo worries aloud that he’d lost his place a couple of times, and he says he thought he saw one boy asleep in the audience, sitting with his eyes closed.
This moment symbolically illustrates the ease with which we can forget about Thoreau and the conditions that produced him , and also foreshadows Waldo’s eventual complacency and betrayal of Henry. Emerson the historical figure also suffered extreme memory loss late in life.
He is in jail for “not doing” something, Meaning that his activism takes the form of resistance. Lydian and Waldo, continuing to illustrate the ease with which we forget the past, recall that Henry was “strange” and that he often disobeyed and even directly inverted societal norms.
Henry is doubtful of Ellen’s presence because it is passive. When she says she just wants to listen, Henry emphasizes that his class is not a place for listening, but for acting. But in “telling” her to be herself, Henry ironically undermines his own message.
Henry clearly abhors conformity, and refuses to teach from books because they represent institutional control of learning. “Huckleberrying” is significant in that it encourages the students to look carefully and inquisitively at the world around them, while the play is asking its audience to do the same with respect to the Vietnam War. Huckleberrying is a kind of safeguard against conformity.
Henry and Waldo argue in the next scene. Henry insists that Waldo use his influence to speak out against slavery. Waldo replies he's already voted. Change can't be rushed, he tells Henry. Angrily Henry informs Waldo that Williams couldn't wait for change and was shot by a Boston policeman while fleeing to Canada.
Henry and Waldo have switched roles since Act 1. Now Henry is the advisor, pleading with Waldo to live up to the ideal that first inspired him. Henry's call to "Simplify!" comes from Thoreau's book Walden, where it means scaling back the resources one needs to live and finding a basic unity and simplicity of existence.
The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail Summary. The play takes place over the course of a night that Henry spends in jail. In jail, Henry talks with his simple but earnest cellmate Baily, who is awaiting trial. The play incorporates various flashbacks tracking the series of events that led to Henry’s arrest. The play’s first flashback shows Henry sitting ...
The play’s first flashback shows Henry sitting in on one of Waldo ’s lectures at Harvard, then shows Henry’s brief career as a teacher, which ends when Henry is made to whip his students with a belt for asking too many questions and his subsequent decision to quit rather than having to perform such punishment again.
He refuses to pay his taxes because he will not give money to a government using its power to wage what he considers to be the unjust Mexican War. When Waldo hears of Henry’s imprisonment he arrives at the jailhouse and asks Henry why he is in jail.
When Waldo hears of Henry’s imprisonment he arrives at the jailhouse and asks Henry why he is in jail. In response, Henry asks Waldo why he isn’t in jail. In another flashback we see that one day an escaped slave called Williams stops by Henry’s cabin at Walden Pond. Williams is trying to reach Canada to attain freedom.
Henry tries to teach her about transcendentalism but cannot make her understand. Later, John proposes to Ellen but she says no. Henry and John celebrate their own brotherhood in response. Get the entire Thoreau in Jail LitChart as a printable PDF.
In his closing speech, Henry says he cannot go back to Walden, because he is needed elsewhere.
Williams is trying to reach Canada to attain freedom. The two men talk about the nature of freedom and the depravity of laws that victimize blacks. This scene gives way to one in which Henry and Waldo are having a heated argument.
Act 1The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail takes place in Concord, Massachusetts, and the surrounding area. As the stage directions note, "time and space are awash here." The play starts in one time period and then abruptly shifts around to many other times and places. At all times throughout...
Henry tries to talk to Bailey about conformity, but Bailey is not an educated man. Henry teaches Bailey how to spell his name, then grabs a chair from the jail cell and moves to the front of the stage, shifting back in time to when he was a teacher. He is interrupted by Deacon Nehemiah Ball, the Chairman of the Concord School Committee, who criticizes Henry's deviations from the approved school textbooks. Henry gets into a theological argument with Ball, who is outraged at Henry's transcendentalist beliefs, and Henry provokes the class to laugh at Ball. John later tells Henry he should apologize to save his job, which Henry does. However, although Ball excuses him, he forces Henry to whip six of his students for laughing. Henry reluctantly does this, then quits teaching, just as Waldo quits his position as Unitarian pastor, in another time-space shift.
Henry proposes to John that they start their own unconventional school , which they do. Henry and John stand in a meadow teaching a number of students, including Ellen, a beautiful young woman who is much older than the class. Henry criticizes Ellen for trying to take notes, a method used in conventional schooling. The action shifts back to the jail cell, where Bailey has successfully learned how to write his own name. Henry encourages Bailey to unlearn it and remain uneducated. Henry pushes the jail cell's locker box to the front of the stage, where it becomes a boat by a pond. John tells Henry their school is losing all of its students. John leaves, and Ellen enters. Henry uses the opportunity to invite her for a boat ride, during which he tries to explain his transcendentalist views to her and profess his love to her; both attempts are unsuccessful, and Henry suggests that Ellen go to church with John.
Henry's mother asks Henry why he is in jail, and he gives vague answers, a tactic that he uses throughout the play. Henry shows what his mother calls his strangeness by questioning the order of the alphabet. Henry's brother, John, comes into the jail cell, and their mother leaves. The location shifts to a sunny field at an earlier time, when Henry has just returned from Harvard. Henry and John talk about Henry's education, which Henry counts as worthless except for hearing the lectures of Waldo, whom he says he wants to emulate. Back in the jail cell, Henry talks with his cellmate, Bailey, who has been accused of burning down a barn; Bailey has been waiting for his trial for three months, a fact that outrages Henry.
When Lawrence and Lee wrote The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, they used Thoreau’s historical protest against the Mexican War as a form of current protest against the Vietnam War. This method of protest was more subtle than many other antiwar protests used during Vietnam. Common methods of protest during Vietnam included men burning their draft cards, which legally obligated them to report for duty in the military. Because skipping this duty was a punishable offense, some were not content with destroying their cards, and fled the country—
The play, which was a clear protest against the war, used a related incident from America’s history to comment on the current war. In 1846, the writer, Henry David Thoreau, spent a night in jail for not paying his taxes. Thoreau refused to pay money that would support the war that was currently being waged against Mexico. This incident later provided the basis for Thoreau’s popular essay, “Civil Disobedience.” Lawrence and Lee’s immensely popular play, which was deliberately produced in regional theaters as opposed to on or off Broadway, struck a chord with Vietnam-era audiences. In fact, the play was so relevant to the times that it was temporarily shut down shortly after its first performances in 1970, when another anti-Vietnam protest—at Kent State University—resulted in the death of several students.
John Thoreau is Henry’s much-loved brother, who shares many of Henry’s beliefs, but does not have the same conviction as Henry. John welcomes Henry home from Harvard, and the two brothers discuss their lack of faith in conventional education. However, John convinces Henry to apologize to Deacon Ball, so that Henry can save his job. After the school founded by Henry and John fails, John goes back to his job at the pencil factory. Both John and Henry are attracted to Ellen Sewell, a young woman who asks to join their school. When Henry’s attempt to win her love fails, he encourages her to see John. However, although she accompanies John to church, Ellen does not accept his marriage proposal, because her father does not like the Thoreau brothers. Also, as John and Henry discuss, it appears that she wants both brothers, not just one or the other. John dies from blood poisoning, after he cuts himself shaving with an old razor. In Henry’s nightmare, John is a Federal soldier, who dies at the end of the dream.
In Henry’s nightmare, the farmer serves as a soldier.
The overriding message in the play is the struggle for freedom , which manifests itself in several ways. The idea of racial freedom is addressed through the many references to slavery. During the play, Henry meets a slave, Williams, who plans to go “North as I kin git! They say the Norther ya git, the free-er ya git!” However, although Henry supports Williams’s escape to Canada, he warns him that men in the north are not free, either: “Every man shackled to a ten-hour-a-day is a worfc-slave. Every man who has to worry about next month’s rent is a money-slave.”
Bailey is Henry’s vagrant cellmate, who has landed in prison after he fell asleep in somebody’s barn and burned it down by accident. Henry tries many times to talk to Bailey about his crusade against conformity, but Bailey is an uneducated man, who says he cannot even write his own name, much less understand Henry’s preaching. Henry shows Bailey how to write his name, but then encourages him to unlearn it, since writing will only get him in trouble. Bailey is excited to hear about Henry’s place in Walden Woods, and says that he [Henry] had a place to call home. Bailey gets panicked about the idea of a trial, and asks Henry to be his lawyer, since he is an educated man. Henry refuses, and Bailey frantically asks him what he can do. Although he does not believe in it, Henry suggests prayer, and Bailey asks Henry to help him pray. Henry is outraged when he finds out that Bailey has been waiting three months for a trial, and at the end of the play, threatens to sit in the jail cell until Sam Staples intervenes on the behalf of Bailey. Bailey is touched, since nobody has ever stuck up for him before, and says that when he gets out of jail, he may come visit Henry at Walden Woods. However, Henry says that the Walden stage of his life is over, and he needs to rejoin civilization and take a stand. In Henry’s nightmare, Bailey is a civilian soldier who refuses to fight.
Lydian is the wife and supporter of Waldo , and encourages Henry to settle down, get married, and conform. Although Lydian appears to agree with many of Henry’s ideas, she refuses to go against her husband by supporting Henry. Lydian is a lonely wife, since Waldo is often away giving lectures. She tells Henry that Waldo cannot possibly live up to the ideal image that Henry has painted of her husband. It is Lydian who comes in place of Waldo, to tell Henry and the assembled crowd that her husband is not ready to speak yet. In Waldo’s old age, Lydian helps her befuddled husband remember Henry’s name, the event that starts the play.