The Limits of Taste in Seventeenth-Century British America.

The homeland of the first English colonists boasted a culture of high artistic achievement. William Shakespeare was still writing plays as the settlers at Jamestown, Virginia, struggled to survive. English painters produced vibrant, lifelike works on canvas, and the music of English composers enlivened the banquets and balls of the gentry, nobility, and court. Yet for a variety of reasons the first American colonists seldom enjoyed the artistic achievements of seventeenth-century England. The fine arts required significant money, time, and talent to sustain them, and most of the early colonists' energies and resources were committed to establishing livable settlements. Most of these settlers came from the middle ranks of society, which found the luxuries of fine arts beyond their means, and thus rarely cultivated artistic taste. Puritan colonists consciously rejected fine arts such as the theater and some forms of...