The Colonial American Stage, 1665-1774: A Documentary Calendar, and: Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (review)

Despite what has traditionally been understood as a paucity of drama and theater in colonial America, there is much more to be found than one might expect from the standard histories. It is a matter of knowing where to look. On the one hand, as Heidi Hutner suggests in her study, Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama, British plays of the seventeenth century contain a number of references to things and situations American, most particularly for her purposes those related to the representation of Native women; but we can easily move from her focus to the larger matter of how the colonies in general were rendered on the London boards. To take just a few examples, most lying outside Hutner's purview, Samuel Foote and Richard Cumberland both portray West Indian planters—and their African-American slaves—in The Patron (1764) and The West Indian (1771), respectively. Native Americans appear in Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter (1689), Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (1695), John Dennis's Liberty Asserted (1704), and George Colman, Jr.'s Inkle and Yarico (1787). Some British authors refer to the Revolutionary War, albeit only briefly, as in Frederick Pilon's Fair American (1782) and John O'Keeffe's popular after-piece, The Poor Soldier (1783). At any rate, whatever the conditions of the American theater, British stages reflected a variety of (mis)understandings about the large, unruly, and troublesome lands across the ocean that early Americanists would do well to recognize.

On the other hand, looking at the texts of British drama does not mean we should ignore the American stage. As Odai Johnson and William J. Burling show in The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774: A Documentary History, there were many attempts, particularly after 1700, to put on plays, even in the face of political or religious opposition to the theater. Indeed, after reading through the annals in this book, one comes away with the idea that there were probably many more performances and attempts to mount dramas on stage than the authors can with certainty give credence to. For one thing, Johnson and Burling note that earlier historians of the American theater often omitted or disregarded "amateur" performances, even when those might not have been as "amateur" as the historians let on. For another, they include under one roof (or between two covers) performances in English in such venues as the Danish West Indies and Nova Scotia, parts of the wider theatrical network of North America usually marginalized or ignored by scholars of American theater. These hints at a virtual underground of dramatic renderings suggest that Americans were far more interested in the theater than we have understood them to be. Taken together with British interest in American subjects on the London stage, this American interest in staging British plays on their own platforms indicates a rich and largely unknown world of textual and performative complexity not given its full due.

Hutner's book indicates how much an investigator can find even with a narrowly conceived thesis. The author examines a select group of plays from Jacobean and Restoration England in pursuit of the methods by which the dramas evoke certain paradigms related to the figuration of Native American women in the theater. For Hutner, there are two key founding myths, the stories of Pocahontas and Marina/Malinche, Native female go-betweens whose functional taming by European males masks the latter's anxiety over the wildness and uncontrollability of women in patrilineal, patriarchal societies. In many ways, as Hutner notes, the drama elides the Native female subject, even as it calls her to mind. Shakespeare's The Tempest, for instance, would seem to bring forth an American Native presence on Prospero's colonized island; but the only...