"Britain-gulf": Bonduca and the English Earth

In his introductory comments to the reader of the Restoration Bonduca, or The British Heroine (1696), George Powell reflects on the failure of late-seventeenth-century England's many Beaumont and Fletcher revivalists to bring this particular work before the public: "the whole Brotherhood of the Quill, have for many Years been blamed for letting so Ingenious a Relick of the Last Age, as Bonduca, lie dormant, when so inconsiderable an Additional Touch of the Pen was wanting to make it fit for an Honourable Reception in This" ("To the Reader").¹ Figuring Bonduca as a dormant "relick" of the last age, Powell's language foreshadows this opera's focus on the regeneration of objects buried in the earth.² It also marks Powell's view of the process of theatrical adaptation itself as regenerative, an idea that is reinforced in the actor's prologue and dedication, where Powell promises to bring us "proud Bonduca, in this fighting Age, / That English Heroine wakes to tread our Stage" ("Prologue"). The Bonduca of Restoration opera will establish a connection to England's past by reinterpreting that past. It will show us the ancient "English Heroine" revived, but altered to reflect a contemporary nationalist agenda. It will be Fletcher's play, but the players themselves have "bus'ness with the Living, not the Dead" ("Prologue").³

Despite Powell's ambitions for Bonduca, and its success early in the century, critics have remained universally unimpressed by the adaptation.⁴ Judith Milhous includes Bonduca among a number of Patent Company semi-operas designed to reuse Dorset Gardens scenery of which "the best that can be said . . . is that they were cheap to put on" (94). Although Curtis Price suggests that the music for Bonduca, composed by Henry Purcell at the height of his powers, "ranks among Purcell's finest" (Price, Henry Purcell 117), he also writes that the opera's adaptor failed to correct Fletcher's strange bias against his Briton heroes (Price, Henry Purcell 118). Derek Hughes echoes this appraisal, calling Powell's efforts "a crudely patriotic attempt to shift sympathy from the Romans to the British, which fails because the adapter does not sufficiently alter Fletcher to remove the Briton's flaws" (429).⁵ This essay makes a different case. Bonduca was, as Powell writes, "revis'd quite through" ("To the Reader") by its anonymous adaptor. The most meaningful alterations, I will suggest, are not the new scenes, songs, or characters, but the interpolation of more than a dozen images of fertile rot into scenes both new and original. Bonduca is filled with imagery of decaying Roman and British corpses that "Dung land Here" (II.19) and "Enrich[] our Soyl" (I.1).⁶ The Restoration Bonduca, like its Jacobean original, is concerned with questions of succession and the materiality of the British present as an inheritance from the ancient British past, yet where the original Bonduca saw an ancient island barren of life and an indigenous British nation cut off from posterity by Roman conquest, Powell's adaptor sees the legacy of war and even genocide as soil enriched with the blood and bodies of two martial peoples, a material inheritance of heroism, empire, and resistance to Rome that is passed on physically to Britons through the dirt beneath their feet. As Powell suggests, then, out of the decayed matter of the national past the adaptor of Bonduca has made something new, and newly relevant to Post-Revolution Britain—an "English story" with "Musick Tuned at Home" by Purcell ("The Dedication"), and a version of Bonduca that will allow Restoration Britons to claim both William and the warrior queen as "all our own Native Growth" ("Dedication"). Ultimately, I argue that Bonduca significantly alters Fletcher's play not by removing the flaws of the Britons, but by implying a material connection to the ancient British past to help create post-Revolutionary national-historical myths. Indeed, the 1695 Bonduca's intervention is particularly suited to the Williamite politics of its moment. Celebrating the violence of warfare, mixture, process, and assimilation as the genesis of Englishness, Bonduca envisions a national identity capacious enough...