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COPYRIGHT 2006 Matthew Steggle
"With Honour Quit the Fort": Ambivalent Colonialism in Dryden's Amboyna
Candy B. K. Schille
Georgia Southern University
schille@georgiasouthern.edu
Schille, Candy B.K. ""With Honour Quit the Fort": Ambivalent Colonialism in Dryden's Amboyna". Early Modern Literary Studies 12.1 (May, 2006) 4.1-30 .
For a play called by its author "scarcely [worth] a serious perusal" [1] and once deemed by its editors "beneath criticism" and "utterly worthless" (by Sir Walter Scott and George Saintsbury, respectively), [2] John Dryden's Amboyna, or The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants: A Tragedy (1673) has received a good deal of critical attention in the last fifteen or so years. The reasons are related to the reason Dryden wrote the play in the first place: a wide-spread and timely fascination with colonialism and empire building. According to most modern accounts, however, Dryden applauds English empire building in his play, while readings like those of J. Douglas Canfield, Bridgett Orr, Robert Markley, and Shankar Raman deplore it. Such readings seem to spring from a valuable deconstructive or postcolonial orientation that allows us to "read through" a text's apparent pernicious, coherently propagandistic intentions. What I would suggest instead is that Amboyna-particularly in those aspects of the play that have been neglected or confused in recent scholarship-displays Dryden's own ambivalence toward unalloyed jingoism and imperialism.[3] My project, then, is to reassess Dryden's supposedly unilateral, if wrongheaded, propagandistic stance vis a vis his subject, and in so doing to link the relatively inconsequential Amboyna to Dryden's more famous works, to his religious evolution, and to the arc of Restoration history.
Among the aspects of Amboyna which I will revisit are these:
The passage in which Dryden condemns Amboyna occurs in his dedication to Thomas Clifford, the Lord Treasurer. It reads: To this Retirement of your Lordship, I wish I could bring a better Entertainment, than this Play; which, though it succeeded on the Stage, will scarcely bear a serious perusal, it being contriv'd and written in a Moneth [sic], the Subject barren, the Persons low, and the Writing not heightned with many laboured scenes. (5) [4] Notable in Dryden's apology is his deeming his "Subject barren" and his "Persons low." This is at odds with many commentaries which have focused on the topicality of the "Subject"-read as a jingoistic rehashing of the Dutch "massacre" of English merchants in the Molucca islands in 1623--and its propagandistic relevance in the 70's when the English were engaged in the Third Dutch War. Such commentators have emphasized Dryden's strenuous efforts to elevate his merchant "Persons" by attributing to them the manners and ideals of the English gentry, as opposed to the materialistic Dutch "boors" (2.1.393)-overemphasized, I feel, since we shall see that Dryden's valorizing of the English is not absolute.
Further, in addressing his dedication to Clifford, Dryden is making his apologies to a dead man: On August 18, 1673, Clifford, a Catholic, had reportedly hanged himself in his "Retirement," having felt compelled to resign from the government after the passage in March of the Test Act requiring all office-holders to deny that transubstantiation occurs during the Eucharist.[5] Estimates for the premier of Amboyna vary from June 1672 to May 1673, but the play was not published, with its dedication, until November 24, 1673 (Dearing 257-58; 277 n.3; Gardiner 18-27), three months after Clifford's death. Thus, while Clifford's supposed suicide cannot have inspired Dryden's original composition of the play (though it may have had some impact on the published version), it is interesting that its tragic climax begins with a long debate between the play's hero and heroine as to whether suicide can be moral; finally, they decide it can. Their debate is deeply concerned with issues of Providence, a topic to which Dryden doggedly returns throughout his career. Notably, however, none of the recent discussions of Amboyna have mentioned this debate, much less investigated its relevance to whatever values Dryden is espousing.
Also under- or misrepresented in recent discussions is the ambiguous handling of the play's secondary couple: the Spaniard Perez and his wife Julia. Julia, also courted by an Englishman and a Dutchman, is usually treated as a symbol of contested colonies previously Iberian, but her nationality, her worth, and her allegiance require further investigation, as do the heroism or venality of Perez, and his motives.
To show how such matters suggest that Dryden's endorsement of the colonial project is considerably less than wholehearted, let me begin by sketching the plot of Amboyna in relation to its immediate political occasion, and its relevance to the larger cultural context of its composition.
I
By the opening of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had driven the Portuguese out of the Moluccas (islands lying between modern Borneo and New Guinea) and were attempting to expel the English. "Outgunned and out financed" (Markley 5), the British signed a treaty in 1619 which "allowed the Dutch to have two-thirds of the trade in the east, and the English one third, both companies [the Dutch East India Company or VOC, and the English East India Company] agreeing to fight as equal partners in declared and undeclared war on the Spanish and Portuguese" (Dearing 260). The event at Amboyna (now Ambon, the provincial capital of Seram) occurred when the Dutch accused the English there of conspiring with Japanese soldiers and Moluccan islanders (the Ternatans and Bandanese) to seize their fort, murder them, and use Amboyna as a stronghold from which to prey on VOC trade; they tortured and executed the English merchants. Dryden had read two pamphlets by a shareholder in the East India Company, Sir Dudly Digges, both published in 1624: A True Relation of the Unjust, Cruell, and Barbarous Proceedings Against the English at Amboyna (reprinted in 1651 and 1672-and hence used as propaganda to fuel the second and third wars against the Dutch as well as the first) and The Answere unto the Dutch Pamphlet, Made in Defense of the Unjust and Barbarous Proceedings against the English at Amboyna, in the East-Indies, by the Hollanders There. He had also read John Darrell's 1665 pamphlet, A True and Compendious Narration; Or (the Second Part of Amboyna) of Sundry Notorious or Remarkable Injuries, Insolences, and Acts of Hostility which the HOLLANDERS Have Exercised from time to time against THE ENGLISH NATION in the East Indies (Markley 5-6). [6]
Dryden was motivated to dramatize the events described in his sources to gain support for the Third Dutch War (1672-74). Referring to the first earl of Shatesbury's contention that "a War was absolutely necessary and unavoidable," Blair Hoxby tells us that "What Shaftesbury strove to do in Parliament [that is, argue that a a War was absolutelyl necessary and unavoidable'], Dryden tried to accomplish on stage" (180). Vinton Dearing, the editor of Amboyna in the California Works, remarks that Charles II's councellors wished to pass off [the war], political at root, as commercial in essence [and Dryden was] following the official line. He was, after all, poet laureate and historiographer royal, and Thomas Clifford, the Lord Treasurer, who had conceived the idea of suspending treasury payments except for the war effort, saw to it that Dryden got his full salary in 1672 and 1673. It may be that the play was another of Clifford's ideas, as it was later said to be. (257) "Political at root" refers to the fact that Clifford was one of only two councellors to whom Charles had confided the terms of the secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV (1670), which withdrew England from the Triple Alliance with Holland and Sweden against France and was intended to "prepare the...
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