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  • The Widow Ranter and Royalist Culture in Colonial Virginia
  • Jenny Hale Pulsipher (bio)

"None but those of the meanest quality and curruptest lives go [to Virginia]," wrote William Berkeley, governor of the colony, in 1663. When even Virginia's governor, a man concerned with promoting the colony's growth and welfare, admitted as much, it is no surprise that accounts of Virginia society on both sides of the Atlantic painted it as base, corrupt—the very inversion of proper order. One such depiction is found in Aphra Behn's play The Widow Ranter, which recounted Bacon's Rebellion of 1676. First performed in 1689 and published a year later, the play's dedicatory letter assured Madame Welldon that she would find it a good comedy, "(tho' low) by reason which many of the Characters are such only as our New gate afforded, being Criminals Transported" (2).

Indeed, the play boasts a rollicking cast of characters—most famously the Widow Ranter herself. She and others, including a former convict or two, are aptly described as "low." These characters' rise to positions of power and influence is crucial to the comedy of the play and has led some to think Behn intended it as an affirmation of creole society in the New World, where those on the bottom of the social hierarchy could quickly rise to the top. Such a view would be misplaced. Behn may have found aspects of colonial Virginian society appealing, but in her dramatic account of Bacon's Rebellion, as in the historical accounts, traditional order and hierarchy are affirmed and upheld, a clear demonstration of the continuity of English royalist culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Several recurrent themes in both The Widow Ranter and the historical records of Bacon's Rebellion illustrate common cultural values. These include loyalty to the king, commitment to a hierarchical social order, and the emergence of a royalist type—a Tory immigrant, often a second son, whose most striking characteristic is self-conscious honor. The appearance of these themes in both colonial history and English drama of the same period suggests that an Atlantic perspective, taking into account the writings of both the [End Page 41] old and New World English, could illuminate our understanding of both literature and history.

While Behn's reputation has enjoyed a remarkable revival in the last 25 years, riding largely on her novel Oroonoko and her play The Rover, The Widow Ranter has remained comparatively obscure.1 The play is well worth studying, not only because it is one of Behn's more neglected works but because it offers telling insights into the Atlantic World as a realm of shared culture, economy, polity, and society. Behn brought unique qualifications to her writing of The Widow Ranter. Like the characters she describes, she had been a colonist in the New World. She lived in the then British colony of Surinam as a young girl, staying with the Johnson family, the father of whom had been appointed lieutenant general of the colony (Goreau 12). There she gathered material for the work for which she is best known, Oroonoko. There, too, she and her brother were introduced to a group of Indians who served them a meal of "dressed Venison and Buffalo," clearly the original for the feast described in The Widow Ranter (Woodcock 34). In sympathy as well as experience, Behn had much in common with the colonists of Virginia. Like many of them, Behn was an ardent royalist. She worked for a time as a spy for King Charles II and, in spite of several incidents in which she suffered at his hands, her loyalty to him was unwavering. In plays such as The Rover, her heroes are exiled cavaliers; in The City Heiress and other dramas the protagonists are outspoken royalists and supporters of the reigning hierarchy, while the villains are foppish Whigs whom Behn skewers mercilessly. In a scene from the latter play, the young hero, Wilding, has an uncle who is a prominent Whig. Oblivious to his hypocrisy, the uncle laments of his nephew, "Before he fell to Toryism, he was a sober civil Youth, and had some Religion in him, wou...

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