A Study Guide for Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535836395

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The Emperor Jones

Eugene O’Neill

1920

Introduction

The Emperor Jones was part of an amazing first year for O’Neill as a Broadway playwright. His very first Broadway play, Beyond the Horizon, had appeared in February of 1920 and eventually won him the Pulitzer Prize for drama, but The Emperor Jones was so successful in its Off-Broadway production in November that it moved to Broadway by the end of the same year and became another high-profile success for the newly acclaimed playwright. By 1930, at the end of an astoundingly productive first decade, O’Neill was widely recognized as America’s greatest dramatist.

The Emperor Jones was also the first of several experiments with Expressionism for O’Neill. O’Neill found inspiration for Expressionism in the work of Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912), whose A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907) explored and represented on stage complex states of mind, eschewing realistic style and imitating instead the fluid associative structure of human consciousness. After The Emperor Jones, O’Neill used expressionistic techniques most fully in The Hairy Ape (1922) and to some extent in Strange Interlude (1928), where his five-hour play focused on the interior monologue of its main character, Nina Leeds.

The Emperor Jones was also the first American play to offer an racially integrated cast to a Broadway audience and feature a black actor in its leading role. Prior to O’Neill’s ground breaking drama, black roles in integrated productions were played by Caucasians in black-face makeup. But O’Neill insisted that black actor Charles Gilpin play Brutus Jones in the Provincetown Playhouse premiere of The Emperor Jones, and a precedent was set that would eventually lead to this country’s present level of racial equality in the arts.

Author Biography

Apparently destined for a life in the theatre, Eugene O’Neill was not only born the son of an extremely popular American stage actor, James O’Neill (1846-1920); he was also literally born on Broadway—October 16, 1888—in the since demolished Barrett House family hotel on Broadway and Forty-third Street (the area presently called Times Square), while James O’Neill was touring in his most famous role as the Count of Monte Cristo. O’Neill’s childhood and adolescence were mostly unhappy because of his unstable family life, and many of his plays, especially his most famous play, Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), focused on disturbed, dysfunctional families.

O’Neill’s formal schooling culminated in very brief stints at both Princeton and Harvard. His short stay at Princeton included a two-week suspension in 1907 for an act of drunken vandalism. After a short and unsuccessful first marriage, O’Neill’s next few years included a mining expedition to