Anti-colonist discourse, tragicomedy, and the "American" Behn.(John Dryden, english playwrights of late 17th century)

Recent critical discussion of The Widdow Ranter has been nearly silent on the prologue and epilogue that John Dryden authored for the posthumous production of the play in 1689. (1) Highlighting Dryden's prologue forces two salient but little-discussed issues to the fore: the specific mixed-plot form and function of Behn's tragicomedy and the blanket dismissals of colonial American society that were widely circulated in England and forcefully espoused by many of Behn's fellow Royalist playwrights. Writing to an already hostile audience, many of whom would share Dryden's scorn of English colonials, Behn takes advantage of the mixed tragicomedic form to outline an attractive, complex colonial society, but this positive depiction had little appeal to her contemporaries and expresses what continued to be a minority view in England far into the eighteenth century. (2) Ultimately, her vision of colonial life is trumped on the stage by Dryden's friend Thomas Southerne and his highly successful and more traditional split-plot tragicomedy Oroonoko (1695), which, throughout its hundreds of performances, reinstates the image of a hopelessly depraved colonial world that Behn had contested in her own drama.

In his prologue, Dryden reveals that he considers Virginia to be just another "Foreign Shore" (2), and perhaps the most disagreeable one, among the many to be imaginatively re-created on the Restoration stage. (3) Thus, neither the production problems reported by "G.J." in the dedicatory letter to the 1690 printed edition, nor the fact that it was staged during the distractions of William's campaign in Ireland, tell the complete story of The Widdow Ranter's quick exit from both the theater and, until recently, English theatrical history. Along with the prologue, Dryden's scattered remarks about the American colonies illuminate the resistance that any production of Behn's play, however well done, would have faced in 1689. One glimpse of Dryden's views can be found in Mac Flecknoe (1682), in which he geographically locates Shadwell's empire of dullness in the following manner: "[F]rom Ireland let him reign/To farr Barbadoes on the Western main." (4) Situating the Atlantic colonial world as a social and cultural backwater, Dryden here expresses a somewhat jocular wish that Shadwell would remove, or perhaps be forcibly removed, to either of these locations as recompense for his literary offenses. (5) This equation of the empire of dullness and the English Atlantic casually reveals a set of prejudices that finds a decidedly more vehement articulation in a brief passage in The Hind and the Panther (1685):

 
   Here let my sorrow give my satyr place, 
   To raise new blushes on my British race; 
   Our sayling ships like common shoars we use, 
   And through our distant colonies diffuse 
   The draughts of Dungeons, and the stench of stews; 
   Whom, when their home-bred honesty is lost, 
   We disembogue on some far Indian coast: 
   Thieves, Pandars, Palliards, sins of ev'ry sort, 
   Those are the manufactures we export; 
   And these the Missionaires our zeal has made: 
   For, with my countrey's pardon be it said, 
   Religion is the least of all our trade. (6) 

This wholesale critique of colonial society is enhanced by the use of the term "common shore," which originally meant a particular area in a waterway employed as a public sewer and, by the time of this poem, was also a common slang term for prostitutes. (7) The passage draws upon both senses of the term: the colonies are dumping grounds for undesirables, who are figured as the feces of the English national body, many among them from malodorous "stews" or brothels. The mere imagining of the various effluvia literally and figuratively discharged by English colonial society sparks a visceral disgust in the poet, which suggests that his colonial slur of Shadwell was probably not as jocular as it seemed.

Significantly, Dryden's disparagement emerges in a short, shameful aside in his long religious poem, and the poet "blushes" while contemplating what his nation has wrought in America. The digressive gesture of condemnation flashes up in Dryden's work and powerfully illuminates a wider rhetorical landscape of castigation that should inform our reading of both The Widdow Ranter and much of the colonial literature of the Restoration and early eighteenth century. The contours of this landscape become clearer when we recognize that Dryden's scatological figuring of America as England's chamber pot is lifted from a powerful strand of seventeenth-century pro-colonial propaganda that J. Martin Evans has labeled the "purgative" model of empire. Evans draws our attention to the writings of important colonial projectors, including Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, who presented overseas territories as penal colonies into which England could metaphorically void or vomit detested castoffs from mainstream society. Ultimately, Evans argues that "the image of America as a transatlantic 'Bridewell' was a powerful element in English perceptions of the New World for most of the seventeenth century," and his work, in tandem with that of many historians, allows us to posit a commonsense belief in the vile nature of colonial society, a position that I distinguish as "anti-colonist," that was shared by large groups of English people, regardless of their views about colonization in general. (8) Thus, it is important to recognize that Dryden's lines in The Hind and Panther are anti-colonist in reference to the particular denizens of the English colonies, but they do not express an anti-colonial sentiment per se.

From his sporadic comments, it is easy to see why Dryden refrained from setting any of his heroic dramas in North America. Those who participated in the Restoration theater apparently shared Dryden's prejudices, a point that finds further clarification in Bridget Orr's valuable survey of the whores and rogues who are associated with the colonies in drama of the period and in her conclusion: "Almost without exception, Restoration plays imply the Western colonies are the last refuge of the scoundrel." (9) Since Orr cites only five marginal works, however, it appears that the corpus of Restoration plays is mostly silent on English America and that, when playwrights do speak about the subject, they, like Dryden, rehearse traditional anti-colonist sentiments. The historian Richard Koebner offers a compelling framework in which we can interpret this combination of contempt and disinterest at the heart of Restoration theatrical culture. Some four decades ago, Koebner argued that, even through the 1730s, only a "small minority" of English citizens had reason to be actively interested in their brethren across the Atlantic and that "the number who belonged to refined society was certainly very small. The imaginative effort needed for a sympathetic approach to the colonies was obstructed for many by unpleasant impressions of colonial morals." (10) Even though Koebner's work needs updating in several respects, his general thesis helps to explain why Restoration playwrights and their audiences had virtually no interest in drama about the English colonial world and preferred, as Orr has demonstrated, spectacular productions about the Spanish, Ottoman, Persian, and other world empires.

For a specific example of this dynamic, we might consider the immense diary of that avid playgoer Samuel Pepys, in which Virginia is referenced a mere two times: he makes a brief mention of a Virginia Lottery and notes a ship that was captured by the Dutch while on its way to the colony in 1667. (11) Working at the center of Stuart government, the inquisitive Pepys seems to have cared little about Virginia proper, and, if he did know more, he obviously did not feel it worth considering in his own personal diary. Such evidence also supports Koebner's thesis and, in the process, poses a challenge to Heidi Hutner's recent construction of a Restoration audience filled with those who were as interested in Virginian politics and history as Behn: "Bacon's speech about the necessity to honor one's government is undermined throughout the play by the conspicuous alteration of historical events in the ...