Back in 2015, a picture of yourself with the Playbill from Hamilton was just about the highest form of social currency you could get your hands on. (Seriously: It was normal to pay up to $1000 for a ticket at one point.) Now, with Disney+ premiering Hamilton on July 3, the price tag is down to $6.99 if you want to see Lin-Manuel Miranda and co. Though, there’s still a barrier to entry—you can’t even stream the thing with a free trial.
If you’re just entering the world of rap battles and revolution that is Hamilton, which Miranda wrote and starred in, then you’re in for a treat. But unlike those lucky 2015 theatergoers, you won’t be seeing Hamilton for the first time with the rest of the world. There’s been nearly five years of discourse around the Tony-winning play, which is partially based on Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. While most of it praises Hamilton as a historically accurate, diverse retelling of an American legend, several critics and historians have said that the play doesn’t entirely do right by history.
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Before we get into those criticisms, note that Miranda and Chernow, who worked as a historical consultant on Hamilton, have repeatedly maintained that historical accuracy was top of mind in Hamilton’s creation.
"I felt an enormous responsibility to be as historically accurate as possible, while still telling the most dramatic story possible," Miranda said to The Atlantic in 2015 . "And when I did part from the historical record or take dramatic license, I made sure I was able to defend it to Ron, because I knew that I was going to have to defend it in the real world. None of those choices are made lightly."
Chernow backed Miranda up on those decisions, too, telling The New York Times' T Magazine, “I think he has plucked out the dramatic essence of the character—his vaulting ambition, his obsession with his legacy, his driven nature, his roving eye, his brilliant mind, his faulty judgment.”
As far as Hamilton’s plot beats go, consensus is that Miranda and Chernow’s work holds up. There probably will be (and have been) a thousand college theses comparing Hamilton, bar for bar, with an AP History textbook equivalent, but the framework is solid. Aaron Burr and Hamilton really were bigtime rivals, Angelica Schuyler and the Founding Father flirted endlessly, Hamilton had an affair with Maria Reynolds, and Eliza Schuyler devoted the rest of her life to maintaining her late husband’s legacy.
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Hamilton, though, isn’t really criticized for what it put on the stage. It’s more what the play omitted that has had people questioning its legacy the past few years. In an essay collection titled, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, historians argue that Hamilton is part of the recent “Founders Chic” trend, which is essentially the glorification of America’s Founding Fathers in response to modern political turbulence.
That said, historians have honed in on Hamilton’s view of its lead character as an unwavering abolitionist—while in real life, Hamilton and his family likely owned slaves. Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history of law at Harvard, pointed out to The New York Times that Hamilton’s record shows little action against slavery, even if he did openly attack Thomas Jefferson’s racist views. Gordon-Reed said the view of Hamilton as an ardent abolitionist is “an idea of who we would like Hamilton to be.”
With only one named Black character in Hamilton, critics have even argued that the play almost entirely silences the voices of people of color during America’s founding era. In an essay about the erasure of the Black past in Hamilton, Rutgers-Newark history professor Lyra D. Monteiro writes, “With a cast dominated by actors of color, the play is nonetheless yet another rendition of the ‘exclusive past,’ with its focus on the deeds of ‘’great white men’ and its silencing of the presence and contributions of people of color in the Revolutionary era.”
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There’s even an entirely different play that reckons with the people Miranda left out of Hamilton. And it’s called… The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Written by Ishmael Reed, the play debuted in 2019, depicting Miranda as he’s tormented by the ghosts of Native Americans, white indentured servants, and slaves who were left out of Chernow’s biography. “I think Hamilton is probably the biggest consumer fraud since The Blair Witch Project,” Reed has said about Hamilton, adding that the historians who gloss over the uglier parts of the Founding Father’s legacy “want to get awards.”
On the Hamilton creators’ end, Chernow has been much more vocal than Miranda in responding to the arguments of Monteiro, Gordon-Reed, and negative critics of the play. “This show is the best advertisement for racial diversity in Broadway history and it is sad that it is being attacked on racial grounds,” Chernow said in an email to The New York Times.
Despite the criticism, Hamilton still has 11 Tony awards and a Pulitzer Prize to snap back with, for anyone trying to at least make an argument that it doesn’t deserve a spot in the Broadway canon. So, if you haven’t watched Hamilton yet, snag that Disney+ subscription and see what the hype is all about. Just make sure you have at least a cheat-sheet’s worth of Revolutionary War knowledge going in so you can judge for yourself.
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