Robert Munford has some claim to being regarded as the first American comic dramatist. While his plays have generally been thought slight, derivative artistic achievements, they nonetheless retain interest for their commentary on the social life and politics of pre-Revolutionary Virginia.

The son of a well-descended but impoverished colonial family, Munford was favored by William Beverley, his uncle and the father of his future wife, with an education in England at the Beverley School and Wakefield Grammar School from 1750 to 1756, whence he returned to acquire legal training in the law office of his cousin Peyton Randolph. Marriage to Anna Beverley in 1760 or early 1761 and the extension of his family's tobacco plantation in the following years made Munford one of the wealthiest landowners in the Virginia that would provide the milieu of his plays. After the formation of Mecklenburg County, he became county lieutenant in 1765 and sat in the...