Performing “A Ra-ree Show”: Political Spectacle and the Treason Trial of Stephen College

Stephen College’s 1681 treason trial, a “cause célèbre” of the Exclusion Crisis, has a great deal to tell us about the strategies the government used to regulate an emerging public sphere in the late seventeenth century.¹ The trial centers on a ballad, “A Ra-ree Show,” which College published in print and performed. During the trial, the prosecution aimed to prove that College was the author of the seditious ballad, and the entire courtroom was fascinated by the textual evidence they presented. Modern scholars have used this focus in the trial to identify the College case primarily as a Foucaultian moment of defining the author-figure. However, the limited textual evidence available failed to prove authorship, and as a result, the government was forced to use College’s performances of the ballad as evidence of his treasonous imagination. As literary historians, then, we cannot slide the College case into a simple narrative of emergent authorship. Instead, the case tells us about the complexity of the term “author” and the ways in which publishers could legally be considered “authors.” College was considered an author by virtue of having published the ballad. This legal strategy was not new: in the absence of a clear author, the government often considered printers, publishers, or anyone who was “conscious to the matter” of a text and involved in its creation or dissemination an author (L’Estrange qtd. in Loewenstein 114). What is particularly significant about the College case is that he was not the print publisher, but an oral publisher. The ballad form, with its dual publication, created a situation in which a performer could be punished as an author, because singing the ballad was considered a form of publication.

In fact, the whole ordeal revolved around performance, from College’s singing of the ballad, to his spectacular trial, to his scaffold speech. Even the ballad itself, in which Charles II treats Parliament as a traveling puppet show, addresses the intersection of politics and performance. By reevaluating the case with a focus on performance, we can see how a government aiming to regulate public expression of dissent must necessarily have been attuned to theatrical displays. The College case shows us the need to broaden an examination of theatrical regulation to performances outside of the patent theatres. I argue that by maintaining the expansiveness of the terms “author” and “publisher,” the government used Stephen College’s trial simultaneously to punish the “author” of a printed text and to regulate political performances outside of the King’s theatre.

The Protestant Joiner

While he is scarcely remembered today, Stephen College was well known in his own time as an unofficial spokesman for the emerging Whig party. He was a joiner by trade and put those skills to political use by building wooden Pope effigies for the Elizabeth Day Pope-burning pageants and by searching the buildings of Westminster for gunpowder before the second Exclusion Parliament in 1680 (Greaves 27-28). College also wrote political verses, likely including “A Ra-ree Show,” and was, according to witness Bryan Haines, often “in the Coffee-Houses bawling against the Government” (Arraignment 43). William Smith, author of Intrigues of the Popish Plot Laid Open (1685), writes that he met College in 1680 and describes the joiner as boisterous; during dinner, he writes, College “was often interrupting with his Quibbles and Rhime-doggerel” (27). College was well connected for someone of his social status, acquainted with William, Lord Russell and supported by Aaron Smith and the Earl of Shaftesbury in building his defense after he was arraigned. Throughout the Exclusion Crisis, College stayed close to the major players and political action.

When Charles II moved Parliament to Oxford in March of 1681, College followed, carrying with him pistols and poetry. After Charles’s quick dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, the Tories began to mount a counter-attack against the Whigs. They seized on information that there had been a Whig plot at Oxford, and College’s rabble-rousing made him the first target. The government accused College of treason on...