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Theatre Society and the Nation Staging American
Identities First Edition S. E. Wilmer Digital Instant
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Author(s): S. E. Wilmer
ISBN(s): 9780521802642, 052105088X
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 Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging
American Identities

Theatre has often served as a touchstone for moments of political change or national
definition and as a way of exploring cultural and ethnic identity. In this book Wilmer
selects key historical moments in American history and examines how the theatre, in
formal and informal settings, responded to these events. The book moves from the
Colonial fight for independence, through Native American struggles, the Socialist
Worker play, the Civil Rights Movement, and up to works of the last decade,
including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. In addition to examining theatrical
events and play texts, Wilmer also considers audience reception and critical response.

s . e . w i l m e r is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and formerly Director of

the School of Drama. He has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and
University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the faculty of the International
Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies, in Finland. He is editor of Portraits of Courage:
Plays by Finnish Women (Helsinki University Press, 1997) and of Beckett in Dublin
(Lilliput, 1992), among other works. Wilmer is also a playwright, with his works
performed at the Manhattan Theatre Club and Lincoln Center.
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN THEATRE AND DRAMA

General editor
Don B. Wilmeth, Brown University

Advisory board
C. W. E. Bigsby, University of East Anglia
Errol Hill, Dartmouth College
C. Lee Jenner, Independent critic and dramaturge
Bruce A. McConachie, University of Pittsburgh
Brenda Murphy, University of Connecticut
Laurence Senelick, Tufts University

The American theatre and its literature are attracting, after long neglect, the crucial
attention of historians, theoreticians and critics of the arts. Long a field for isolated
research yet too frequently marginalized in the academy, the American theatre has
always been a sensitive gauge of social pressures and public issues. Investigations into its
myriad of shapes and manifestations are relevant to students of drama, theatre, literature,
cultural experience and political development.
The primary intent of this series is to set up a forum of important and original
scholarship in and criticism of American theatre and drama in a cultural and social
context. Inclusive by design, the series accommodates leading work in areas ranging from
the study of drama as literature to theatre histories, theoretical explorations, production
histories and readings of more popular or para-theatrical forms. While maintaining a
specific emphasis on theatre in the United States, the series welcomes work grounded
broadly in cultural studies and narratives with interdisciplinary reach. Cambridge Studies
in American Theatre and Drama thus provides a crossroads where historical, theoretical,
literary and biographical approaches meet and combine, promoting imaginative research
in theatre and drama from a variety of new perspectives.

books in the series

1. Samuel Hay, African American Theatre
2. Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama
3. Amy Green, The Revisionist Stage: American Directors Re-Invent the Classics
4. Jared Brown, The Theatre in American during the Revolution
5. Susan Harris Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art
6. Mark Fearnow, The American Stage and the Great Depression
7. Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860
8. Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World
9. Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard
10. Michael A. Morrison, John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor
11. Brenda Murphy, Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film,
and Television
12. Jorge Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth
13. Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906
14. Brooks McNamara, The New York Concert Saloon: The Devil’s Own Nights
15. S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities
Theatre, Society and the Nation
Staging American Identities

S . E . W ILM E R
Trinity College, Dublin
         
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© S. E. Wilmer 2004

First published in printed format 2002

ISBN 0-511-04152-7 eBook (netLibrary)

ISBN 0-521-80264-4 hardback
 Contents

Acknowledgements page vii

Introduction 1

 From British colony to independent nation: refashioning

identity 16

 Federalist and Democratic Republican theatre: partisan

drama in nationalist trappings 53

 Independence for whom? American Indians and the

Ghost Dance 80

 The role of workers in the nation: the Paterson Strike

Pageant 98

 Staging social rebellion in the 1960s 127

 Reconfiguring patriarchy: suffragette and feminist plays 151

 Imaging and deconstructing the multicultural nation

in the 1990s 173

Notes 203
Select bibliography 250
Index 267

v
 Acknowledgements

I want to thank my colleagues in the School of Drama at Trinity College,

Dublin for allowing me generous study leave to research this book and the
Academic Development Fund and the Arts and Social Sciences Benefaction
Fund at the Trinity College, Dublin for financial help. I also want to thank
my students at Trinity College, Dublin, Stanford University, and University
of California, Berkeley for the stimulating discussions concerning many of
the topics in this book, and especially the faculty (Pirkko Koski, Bruce
McConachie, Janelle Reinelt, Freddie Rokem and Bill Worthen) and stu-
dents at the International Center for Advanced Theatre Studies (ICATS)
at the University of Helsinki for commenting on several of the chapters
of this book in draft form. Parts of this book, in different versions, have
appeared in Acta Americana (vol. 7, no. 2, 1999, pp. 25–45), the Irish Journal
of American Studies (vol. 8, 1999, pp. 119–179), Nordic Theatre Studies (vol. 12,
1999, pp. 94–103), Theatre Survey (vol. 40, no. 2, 1999, pp. 1–26) and Theatre
Symposium (vol. 5, 1997, pp. 78–94). I am very grateful to the Department of
Drama at Stanford University, especially Michael Ramsaur and Ron Davies,
for accommodating me during my research visits to the United States, and
I am particularly indebted to the series editor Don Wilmeth and to Vicki
Cooper at Cambridge University Press for their guidance and encourage-
ment, to the copy editor Maureen Leach for her careful work, and to Mary
Ellen O’Hara at TCD for her help with the index. Lastly and most im-
portantly I want to thank my family – Marja, Tania and Alex – for their
support in spite of long and painful absences.

vii
 Introduction

Ivarious
n the historical development of the nation-state,
forms of cultural expression have been instrumental in helping to
construct notions of national identity. Recent works on cultural nationalism
(such as Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, Homi Bhabha’s Nation and
Narration and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities) have analyzed
this process, but to a large extent they have undervalued the role of theatre.
For example in Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson highlights the
influence of print journalism and literature in establishing the concept of
the nation, but hardly mentions the stage. This book attempts to widen
the discussion on cultural nationalism by demonstrating the importance of
drama and theatrical performance in having contributed to and in contin-
uing to influence the process of representing and challenging notions of
national identity.
Theatre has often acted as a site for staging national history, folklore and
myths and for formulating national ideology in many parts of the world.
With its rhetorical and semiotic features, theatre has offered a particularly
effective means of conveying notions of what is national and what is alien.
Furthermore, because plays purporting to express national values can be
performed in the actual presence of the community (in a public theatre),
they can serve not only to make claims for a national identity, but they
can also gain immediate communal support or rejection for that assertion.1
Unlike the solitary reader of a novel or a newspaper who reacts in isolation,
the theatregoer is part of a community of spectators who can express their
approval or disapproval to the performers and to each other. As Stephen
Greenblatt has shown, theatre “is a collective creation,” both as “the prod-
uct of collective intentions” and also because it “addresses its audience as
a collectivity.”2 But theatre is, moreover, a place for interaction between
performers and audience. In a manner consonant with Renan’s notion of


 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

the nation as a “daily plebiscite,”3 the theatre can act as a public forum in
which the audience scrutinizes and evaluates political rhetoric and assesses
the validity of representations of national identity. The theatre can serve as
a microcosm of the national community, passing judgement on images of
itself.
In the late eighteenth century, Goethe and Schiller wrote of the poten-
tial of theatre to galvanize the nation. After the French Revolution, Schiller
went so far as to argue that the theatre could help not only to establish
national values but also to create a new German nation. “If a single charac-
teristic predominated in all of our plays; if all of our poets were in accord and
were to form a firm alliance to work for this end; if their work were governed
by strict selection; if they were to devote their paintbrushes to national sub-
jects; in a word, if we were to see the establishment of a national theatre:
then we would become a nation.”4
In Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, plays and the-
atre performances became important sites for expressing notions of national
identity both in established nation-states and in emerging nations. German
Romanticism (including the work of Klopstock, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist
and Wagner) encouraged the rise of nationalist drama and opera in vari-
ous European countries, such as the work of Oehlenschläger in Denmark,
Victor Hugo in France, Katona and Kisfaludy in Hungary, Pushkin in
Russia, Alfieri, Manzoni, Niccolini and Verdi in Italy, Ibsen5 and Bjørnson
in Norway and Yeats in Ireland.6 Writing of the theatres in Northern and
Eastern Europe, Laurence Senelick has emphasized the counter-cultural
nature of much of this type of work. “Most national theatres arose in reaction
to a dominant culture imposed from without; they were a means of protest
as well as of preserving what were considered to be salient features of the op-
pressed group. Theatre was a catalytic factor in the formation of its identity.”7
Moreover, Marvin Carlson has suggested that this kind of nationalist the-
atre affected most of Europe. “Few of the emerging national/cultural groups
of the post-Romantic period neglected to utilize the drama as a powerful
tool for awakening a people to a common heritage and, not infrequently, en-
couraging them through an awareness of this heritage to seek both national
identity and national liberty in opposition to the demands of dominant and
external political and cultural influences.”8
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson emphasizes this notion of
“awakening from sleep”9 as a common trope for nascent nationalism, i.e. that
the people of the nation are awakened to the call of their “natural” national
allegiances. In the nationalist drama and the work of many national theatres
INTRODUCTION 

from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century, one can see the attempt
to awaken the nation to its natural sense of nationhood. But how natural are
these notions of nationhood? To what extent is the nation’s history fabri-
cated? How common is the heritage? In how many ways might it be config-
ured? Which voices are suppressed in order to create a national (and possibly
univocal or homogenous) discourse? One could argue that notions of na-
tional identity are continuously being contested by different vying groups
within the nation, seeking to assert or impose their own cultural values at
various points in time. Andrew Higson has suggested that, “The search for
a stable and coherent national identity can only be successful at the expense
of repressing internal differences, tensions and contradictions – differences
of class, race, gender, region, etc.” Higson also notes the importance of
“historical shifts in the construction of nationhood and national identity;
nationhood is always an image constructed under particular conditions.”10
Thus, one could propose that notions of national identity are constantly
being reformulated, revised and reasserted in an ongoing battle to assert
and maintain a hegemonic notion of the nation. Likewise, subaltern groups
have confronted the homogenous image represented by the dominant group
in asserting a more pluralistic or counter-hegemonic identity.
This book demonstrates that theatre in the United States has often been
used to define or challenge national values and the notion of the nation.
The North American tradition of this type of drama predates German
Romanticism. It was already manifest in the earliest drama of the English
colonies, and it continues until today. Particularly at times of national cri-
sis, the theatre has served as a political and ideological tool to help re-
configure the nation. The purpose of this book is to investigate important
examples of this process from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in or-
der to illustrate the role of the theatre and live performance in reformulating
concepts of national identity.
Rather than focusing on hegemonic nationalism, however, Theatre,
Society and the Nation concentrates as much on counter-hegemonic and
subaltern discourses. For example, it analyzes plays and performances that
formulated a positive identity for marginalized or oppressed groups in
society and that posited an identity for the nation that privileged rather
than minimized the position of such groups. Divided into chapters relating
to specific political and social movements, the book discusses representative
plays and performances that emerged out of those movements. In addi-
tion to examining theatrical events and the printed text of plays and the
messages implicit or explicit therein, it considers the audience and critical
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

response (both of the dominant and oppressed groups in society). In gen-

eral the strategy of Theatre, Society and the Nation is, rather than seeking to
cover every drama or theatrical performance within each social or political
movement, to analyze a few of the more illustrative plays and performances
in depth.
The image of the United States has been evolving since the republic
was founded in the eighteenth century. As in other countries, the concept
of the nation has responded to social change and times of stress. Theatre
and other media have contributed to the changing discourse about national
values and national identity. As J. Ellen Gainor has written, “Our culture
is always constructing and representing itself to itself.”11 Before the devel-
opment of film, radio and television, theatre and live performance played
an important role in staging the national character in front of a live public
audience which could immediately indicate their acceptance or rejection of
such images, for example by applause or booing or other forms of interven-
tion. In the first century of the republic, the discourse that was circulating
in other media (such as newspapers, novels, magazines and public speeches)
could be converted for stage presentation. Equally, plays and performances
could introduce new ideas and images that could take hold of the popular
imagination, and be reinforced through their dissemination in other me-
dia. Unlike public speeches and literature, the theatre often works through
live visual images that carry sub-textual or symbolic messages, and so the
rhetoric is not only conveyed in the verbal dialogue and written text. More
recently, the theatre and live performance have competed with radio, tele-
vision, film and other media in this enterprise. This book does not try to
cover the wide range of media but concentrates on the changing ideologies
evident in drama and live performance that have presented various notions
of national identity over the course of three centuries.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish, British, French and
Dutch colonies were established on land belonging to American Indian
tribes on the East Coast of North America that would later become part
of the United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the British
colonies dominated the territory that would encompass the initial expanse
of the United States of America. Furthermore, although there were immi-
grants from different countries and of different religious faiths, the English-
speaking white Protestant had gained a dominant position by this time.
In 1740, an Act of Parliament enabled settlers in the American colonies
to become British citizens after seven years of residency and after taking a
Protestant oath. Jews and Quakers were exempt from the oath, but Catholics
INTRODUCTION 

were excluded. Non-English-speaking immigrants such as Germans were

expected to learn English and their children to attend English-speaking
schools.12 Enslaved Africans were imported as laborers and American
Indians were pushed westward. Gradually the other competing European
colonial forces were displaced by the British in much of North America.
The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was taken over by the British and
renamed New York in 1664, and the Spanish Floridas and French Canada
were acquired under the Peace of Paris in 1763. (Other colonies would be
acquired by the United States after it became independent such as the
Louisiana Purchase from the French in 1803, the Spanish colony of Florida
which had reverted to Spain after the War of Independence in 1819, and
much of the Spanish territory in the west including Texas and California
in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.) Thus, an English-speaking
Protestant identity gained ascendancy in the territory that would form the
first thirteen states of the new republic.
A Native American performance tradition existed in North America long
before European settlement. With the advent of Spanish, British, French
and Dutch colonies, European styles of drama began to appear in North
America including religious performances in the Spanish colonies as early
as the 1520s.13 Because of the emphasis on national identity in the United
States, this book begins with the period shortly before independence when
the North American English colonies were manifesting their loyalty to the
British Crown.
The first chapter examines the period prior to independence from Britain,
and the plays that either promoted a Loyalist or a Patriot stance. Until the
Stamp Act of 1765, the few dramas written in the British colonies of North
America supported British colonial policies and promoted the image of
settlers as being loyal to the Crown. With the rebellion over the Stamp
Act, colonial drama engaged in the debate about the identity of the settlers.
Some dramas demonstrated continuing loyalty to the Crown while others
expressed a new sense of national identity. These early plays, which were
mainly written to be read rather than performed, presumably appealed to a
literate elite rather than a mass audience.
With independence, a new national identity was legally defined along
racial, gender and class lines. The rights of citizenship were generally re-
stricted to white property-owning males.14 In drafting the Constitution and
the Bill of Rights, the founders of the new nation-state ignored the nat-
ural birthright of African Americans and American Indians, and in the
1790 Act of Congress made it clear that only white immigrants (“free white
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

person[s], who shall have resided within . . . the United States for the term
of two years”) could gain citizenship.15
The Federalists argued for a strong central government as opposed to a
loose confederation of states, and following the election of Washington as
the first President, they favored their kinship and neocolonial-mercantile
ties with Britain in formulating national values and a foreign policy. Anti-
Federalists argued for states’ rights and accused the Federalists of trying
to ape British aristocratic values. Partly to suppress dissent, the Federalists
introduced more stringent legislation in the Alien and Sedition Acts of
1798 that limited immigrant rights and freedom of speech, defined who was
an alien and indicated on what basis immigrants could be deported. This
legislation further determined who was to be included in the nation-state
and who was to be excluded (e.g. those with pro-French and anti-Federalist
sympathies.)
The second chapter looks at the period in the 1790s, when the theatre
became increasingly a site of confrontation between the two rival political
factions. These groups staged performances that reflected partisan values
(such as attitudes about class and social status and about loyalties to par-
ticular foreign governments), while endeavoring to posit these values as
national and in the national interest. Federalists defended class distinctions
and promoted strong links with Britain, while Democratic Republicans sup-
ported close ties with France and advocated the more egalitarian values of
the French Revolution as reflecting the goals of the founding fathers of the
American republic. Progressing from an elite to a middle-class art form, the
theatre broadened its appeal by presenting more American material. Such
performances as John Burk’s anti-Federalist Bunker-Hill attracted artisans
as well as upper-class members of society.
In the nineteenth century Americans increasingly questioned the cultural
hegemony of Britain and encouraged American artistic efforts and images.
The playwright James Nelson Barker urged his countrymen to support na-
tionalistic plays and warned that otherwise they “must be content to continue
the importation of our ideas and sentiments, like our woollen stuffs, from
England.”16 Certain overlapping stereotypes of American character began
to emerge in the theatre such as the American Veteran, the Yankee and the
backwoodsman or frontiersman. These were white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
male characters who, although sometimes comic, provided a positive image
of an independent American spirit. The Yankee character in such plays as
Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787), James Nelson Barker’s Tears and Smiles
(1808) and A. B. Lindsley’s Love and Friendship (1810) spoke with a peculiar
INTRODUCTION 

American dialect and exhibited a homespun wisdom unsullied by old world

(e.g. British) decadence.17 In some examples, such as Dan Marble in The
Vermont Wool Dealer (1838) or The Stage Struck Yankee (1845), the Yankee
character adopted the dress of the figure of Uncle Sam.18 Of this character,
Bruce McConachie has written, “Like several earlier stage symbols of the
nation, Yankee stars played a large role in the social construction of white-
ness . . . Although accommodating the values of republican simplicity and
sentimental virtue, the stage Yankees actually advanced the cultural system
of rationality and the whiteness it assumed.”19 Likewise, the rugged fron-
tiersman conquering the American continent, taming the environment and
fighting against American Indians in the name of civilization exuded the
values of the individualist pioneer. Such plays as James Kirke Paulding’s
Lion of the West (1830) which was adapted by William Bayle Bernard as The
Kentuckian (1833), Louisa Medina’s Nick of the Woods (1838), W. R. Derr’s
Kit Carson, the Hero of the Prairie (1850) and Frank Murdock’s Davy Crockett
(1872) helped entrench this mythical hero into the public consciousness.
They also promoted the concept of what Sacvan Berkovitch has called the
“American jeremiad,” the spiritual mission of Americans to conquer the
wilderness.20 The association of the frontiersman with a religious quest, or
alternatively as an “American Adam” seeking his fortune in an American
garden of Eden,21 also reflected an ongoing ethnic, religious and gender
prejudice in the country that would encourage the notion that the country
belonged to a specific type of person and that its fruits were for their benefit
and should be denied to others. As Donald Pease has written, “Alongside
the nexus of belongingness established for the national community, the
national narrative represented other peoples (women, blacks, ‘foreigners,’ the
homeless [and Native Americans]) from whom the property of nationness
had been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the
national people depended for the construction of the universality of their
norms.”22
President Andrew Jackson, who acquired the image of the individualist
frontiersman and democratic yeoman, encouraged cultural nationalism in
the theatre: “It is time that the principal events in the history of our country
were dramatized, and exhibited at the theatres on such days as are set apart as
national festivals.”23 Dramatists complied by writing melodramas featuring
various types of Jacksonian figures in particular for the actor Edwin Forrest,
who was closely associated with Jacksonian values, viz., Robert T. Conrad’s
Jack Cade (1835), Augustus Stone’s Metamora; Or, the Last of the Wampanoags
(1829) and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator (1831).24 The struggle
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

for cultural autonomy from Britain was perhaps most clearly displayed in the
Astor Place riots of 1849 (in which twenty-two people died) when supporters
of the American actor Edwin Forrest clashed with supporters of the visiting
English actor William Charles Macready.
With the increase of Irish immigration in the 1830s and 1840s, anti-
Catholic prejudice grew and the stage Irishmen and stage Irish immigrant
figures emerged as popular comic stereotypes.25 As slavery became more of a
contentious issue, abolitionist groups used the theatre to promote the cause
of freedom. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was
adapted by many theatre groups and performed throughout the northern
states. George L. Aiken’s adaptation received an unusually long run in New
York and the New York Spirit of the Times commented that “the performance
of this drama has made converts to the abolition doctrine many persons, we
have no doubt, who have never examined the subject, and know nothing of
its merits.”26 Other plays addressed the slavery issue, notably The Octoroon
(1859) by the Irish immigrant Dion Boucicault, and The Escape; Or, A Leap
for Freedom (1857) that William Wells Brown, as a former slave, wrote from
personal experience and read in public to promote the abolitionist cause. In
the south, the fear of northerners dramatizing Uncle Tom’s Cabin was ex-
pressed by the editor of the New Orleans Daily Picayune: “The gross misrep-
resentations of the south which have been propagated extensively through
the press, with the laudations of editors, politicians, and pious fanatics of
the pulpit, are to be presented in tableaux, and the lies they contain acted by
living libellers before crowds of deluded spectators.”27 Southerners counter-
attacked with alternative versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that conveyed the
superiority of southern life, such as Joseph M. Field’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
or Life in the South As It Is, Dr. William T. Leonard’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in Louisiana and George Jamieson’s The Old Plantation; or, Uncle Tom As
He Is.28
While opposing the institution of slavery before the Civil War, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin continued to be popular as entertainment after the abolition of
slavery. As Jim Crow laws followed the newly won freedom of African
Americans during the reconstruction era, “Tom Shows” by white actors in
black face depicted demeaning stereotypes like the self-effacing Uncle Tom
and the uncivilized Topsy. Likewise, other plays and minstrel shows (which
had started as early as the 1820s by African Americans or white artists in
black face and which toured the country during much of the nineteenth
century) created demeaning stereotypes for African Americans, e.g. comic,
dancing figures, tragic mulattos, brutes or Mammy caricatures.
INTRODUCTION 

Other ethnic characters such as Irish Americans and Native Americans

were particularly popular in the melodramas and comedies of the time, but
the values and culture of Anglo-Saxon Americans remained dominant with
members of other ethnic groups often being shown on the stage in comic
roles. This became increasingly apparent following the gold rush, industri-
alization, the building of the railroads, the growth of the cities and the enor-
mous increase in immigration especially from Europe and Asia. The threat
to white Protestant hegemony because of immigration entered the subtext
of numerous new plays, such as McCloskey’s melodrama about the rail-
roads, Across the Continent. On the other hand, immigrants brought their
own culture and performance traditions with them, and numerous immi-
grant ethnic groups performed theatre to their own communities usually in
their native languages.
Native Americans tried to preserve their cultures and their ways of life in
the nineteenth century despite white settlers depriving them of their land,
their language and their religions and confining them on reservations. In
some cases they were pushed to the extreme and reacted aggressively, but the
white settlers, reinforced by the government and the military, continued to
insist on their right to take over the country. In early American drama such
as Metamora, Native Americans were often portrayed as noble savages who
were tragically disappearing from the landscape.29 However, by the middle
of the nineteenth century, this image changed as settlers on the frontier
wanted Native Americans to disappear more rapidly. For example, when
Forrest presented Metamora in Augusta, Georgia in 1831 while the Georgians
were in the process of evicting the Cherokees, the audience reacted angrily
to the sympathetic treatment of Indians.30 Having been represented in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth century as proto-Americans and even, in
cultural nationalist parlance, as the American “volk,”31 Indians had become
“un-American” or “anti-American” by the mid nineteenth century. Rep-
resentations of Native Americans as tragic noble savages gave way by the
1850s to ridiculous comic portrayals on the stage as in the burlesques by
John Brougham, such as Metamora; Or, The Last of the Pollywogs (1847), or
to uncivilized and warlike predatory figures as in W. R. Derr’s Kit Carson,
The Hero of the Prairie (1850) or Augustin Daly’s Horizon (1871). Such depic-
tions provided the settlers with the moral justification to abrogate treaties
and deprive the Indians of their lands.
The third chapter explores the response of the Native Americans and
more specifically the Lakota to their loss of sovereignty in the western plains.
Although Native Americans sometimes performed in Wild West shows and
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

were often represented (and sometimes appeared) in playhouses, this chapter

does not examine representations of Native Americans in the mainstream
theatre or Native American performances for a paying public. It discusses
a religious ritual that spread across the country and was interpreted by the
Lakota in a particular fashion. The chapter demonstrates that the Lakota
rendition of the Ghost Dance was a performative cultural and religious
response to their loss of sovereignty and functioned as a demand for an
independent Native lifestyle. The Ghost Dance, which spread across the
United States, reflected a widespread belief that the millennium was near.
The Native Americans were faced with the obliteration of their culture
and the extermination of their people, but the Ghost Dance represented
a dream that the whole process of white incursion could be reversed. The
whites would disappear, the buffalo would return and the Indians would
reunite with their ancestors. As such, the Lakota Ghost Dance redefined
the notion of the nation that was being promulgated by the white settlers
and the government in Washington. The Ghost Dance operated as a form
of political theatre, similar in function to the pamphlet plays for the white
population in the previous century.
In spite of the increasing diversity of the United States in the nine-
teenth century with immigrants from many parts of the world in addition
to the early white settlers and the indigenous and African American peoples,
the dominant notion of the nation remained monocultural and united. This
was particularly emphasized following the Civil War as a rhetorical means
to express a common and undivided national identity. Unlike the nations
of Europe that could claim the organic development of a national spirit
through a common history, folklore, literature, ethnicity, language, etc.,
America’s common identity needed to be more artificially constructed be-
cause of its diversity of ethnicities, religions, languages and customs. Despite
severe social prejudice, a hierarchical social structure and legalized forms of
social discrimination, some of the factors that were represented as uniting
the country were the English language, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture,
and the common dream of prosperity founded on notions of liberty, equality
and free enterprise. According to Frederick Jackson Turner, “To the frontier
the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and
strength . . . that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but
powerful to effect great ends . . . that dominant individualism, working for
good and for evil.”32 Likewise, David Huntington wrote, “It is a wondrous
impulse to the individual, to his hope, his exertions and his final success,
[thus] to be taught that there is nothing in his way; – that he stands fair
INTRODUCTION 

with his comrades, on the same great arena, – with no social impediments,
and that the prize is always certain for the fleetest in the race. This is the
natural influence of the democratic principle of our Revolution.”33
The image of America as a land of opportunity for the hard-working
individualist applied to immigrants and citizens alike and fostered the
concept of a national community of individuals who could all prosper.
Despite widespread anti-Catholicism, Jim Crow laws, the confinement to
reservations of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and
other forms of ethnic and religious discrimination, the image of a national
homogenous population of white Protestants persevered and was reinforced
by the metaphor of a national melting pot in which all the diverse elements
could end up emulating the white Protestant archetype, bolstered by the na-
tional motto e pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” Furthermore, in spite of an
increasingly forceful implementation of the Monroe doctrine, foreign wars
with Mexico and Spain, and the acquisition of conquered territory such
as parts of Mexico, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hawaii, the
dominant image of the nation remained democratic and anti-imperialistic,
encouraging freedom and self-determination.34
The Chautauqua movement helped solidify the notion that America
was homogenous and rural, despite (and because of ) trends to the contrary.
Like the cultural nationalism that spread through Europe in the nineteenth
century and owed its origins to German Romanticism and the ideas of
Herder and Rousseau, the Chautauqua gatherings emphasized rural rather
than urban values as the distinctive virtues of the nation. The Chautauquas
were annual cultural events that dated from the late nineteenth century
and occurred in thousands of small towns and villages across the United
States. From the early twentieth century, national touring organizations
sent out packages of events lasting from three to seven days, consisting of
public speeches, musical numbers, plays and other amusements. Although
the shows were sold to the communities as morally uplifting rather than as
commercial entertainment, the enterprise was hugely profitable for the orga-
nizers, with an estimated annual attendance of almost thirty million people
at its peak in 1924. While professing such foundational ideas as freedom of
religion and equality, the dominant values of the Chautauquas were white,
Protestant and capitalist.35 The hard-working white American Protestant
was idealized, and would be, according to Conwell’s ever popular “Acres of
Diamonds” speech, rewarded financially.36 European immigrants could be
transformed into model American citizens, as was shown in Zangwill’s The
Melting Pot (1908), which became a popular play on the Chautauqua circuit
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

from 1914, if they denied their former values, adopted American ways and
assimilated into the dominant culture.37
By contrast with the homogenous depiction of America by the Chautau-
quas, various marginalized and excluded groups used theatre to reverse the
stereotypical images conveyed by the dominant discourse in the theatre and
other media (including the budding film industry). The labor movement
in the United States used the theatre to protest their subservient status
under capitalism especially during the economic depression of the 1930s.
Workers’ theatres organized a national infrastructure for performing plays
around the country in order to increase class solidarity and participated in
a popular front to express a wide coalition of leftist political opinions in the
country. The Roosevelt government initiated the Federal Theatre Project
which absorbed some of the radicalism of this movement and at the same
time contained it within a government-funded institution.
Chapter 4 considers the counter-hegemonic ideology of this movement
and analyzes a seminal event in 1913 in which Paterson silk workers staged
scenes from an industrial dispute for a massive and predominantly working-
class audience in Madison Square Garden. Rather than showing a united
and homogenous population, the Paterson strike pageant depicted a nation
polarized by class divisions with the workers, unhappy under the capitalist
system, attempting to transform the structures of society.
Likewise, the suffrage movement used the stage to alter the image of
women as passive and dependent creatures. The “new woman” was repre-
sented as equal to men, capable of a career as a doctor, lawyer or political
leader, and as entitled as men to the right to vote. In the 1920s African
American playwrights in the Harlem renaissance began to write “race plays”
that depicted African American characters from their own perspective and
reversed the demeaning stereotypes of the nineteenth century.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, leftist ideas were crushed
under the national war effort. Japanese Americans were confined to concen-
tration camps and social and industrial discontent was suppressed. Following
the war, a new “reality” replaced the pre-war social turmoil.38 The white
heterosexual male character returned as the dominant representation of
American national identity in the media. The image of the American hero in
war films was extended into cowboy-and-Indian films and television shows
where white cowboys defended humanity and civilization against Indian
savages. Film, television and the mainstream theatre projected the role
model of the white heterosexual male as a universal value and marginalized
the values and interests of others. Women played supportive roles, African
INTRODUCTION 

Americans appeared as comic characters, Asian Americans as evil men or

lascivious women, and gays and lesbians were invisible. Counter-hegemonic
images emerged in the theatre such as Arthur Miller’s challenge to the cap-
italist ethic in Death of a Salesman (1949) and his criticism of the McCarthy
witch-hunt for un-American activity in The Crucible (1953). Similarly, in
Edward Albee’s The American Dream (1961), the character of the young man
who describes himself as a “clean-cut, midwest farm boy type” and is rec-
ognized by the grandmother as “the American dream,” has lost any sense of
feeling or compassion and will do anything for money. He arguably symbol-
izes the loss of humanity in America under capitalism, while his twin brother
who has disappeared seems to represent those who are rejected or rendered
invisible by American society and unable to attain the American dream.
From the 1960s, marginalized groups challenged the dominant discourse
through the civil rights movement, student protests, demonstrations against
the Vietnam War and the widespread rejection of dominant cultural values.
Successful anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia encouraged ethnic
pride and stimulated separate cultural nationalist movements amongst
African American, Chicano, and Native American populations. Such groups
used the theatre to write their histories in the face of historic misrepresen-
tation, calling attention to the suffering that they had endured and the
struggles in which they were engaged. They showed that the dominant
discourse in America had served the purposes of certain privileged groups
and had disenfranchised others. In the late 1960s many ethnic-based groups
produced work within and for their own communities.
Chapter 5 focuses on the Black Revolutionary Theatre headed by Amiri
Baraka, the Teatro Campesino founded by Luis Valdez, and the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War as significant groups that called for urgent social
and political change and took their message to the people. Baraka’s cultural
centres in Harlem and Newark produced drama, often in the streets, that
reflected the Black Power movement and Black Nationalism. The Teatro
Campesino created work that initially responded to the strike in California
by the United Farmworkers and performed it on a flatbed truck in the
fields. Gradually, they moved into a wider representation of Chicano iden-
tity and investigated their cultural heritage including the spiritual prac-
tices of the Aztecs and Mayans. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War
mounted search-and-destroy enactments in the streets and country roads
of the American hinterland to persuade the American public to abandon
the war in Vietnam and recognize their responsibility for the atrocities that
were being committed overseas in their name.
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

The political turbulence in the 1960s encouraged women to reexamine

their status in society. Initially their claims were largely ignored, not only by
the establishment but also by male dominated counter-hegemonic political
organizations. In the 1970s and 1980s the women’s movement provided a new
discourse on gender and sexuality that interrogated the patriarchal norms in
society. Likewise, the gay liberation movement used the theatre to challenge
heterosexual norms with drag shows, camp theatre, as well as realistic plays
such as Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979), Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy
(1982) and William Hoffman’s As Is (1985), fantasy performances such as
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992), and campaigning pieces such as
Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) about the aids crisis and Tim
Miller’s Glory Box (2000) that urged new legislation for gay partnerships.
Chapter 6 draws links between the role of the theatre during the suffrag-
ist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century and the feminist
movement towards the end of the millennium. It discusses the work of suf-
fragists like Elizabeth Robins and the suffrage pageant in 1913 before turning
to the second wave of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s which applied liberal,
radical and materialist (socialist) strategies. It concludes with a discussion of
a return to radical feminism in the enormously successful Vagina Monologues
(1996) by Eve Ensler.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, multiculturalism provided an answer to the
accusations of essentialism embedded in identity politics, with artists, aca-
demics and policy makers urging a new attitude to American society that
celebrated its pluralism and diversity rather than its uniformity. The final
chapter examines the work from the 1990s of Anna Deavere Smith, Tony
Kushner, Velina Hasu Houston, Brenda Wong Aoki, the Colorado Sisters
and Guillermo Gómez-Peña that constructs various images of a multicul-
tural, transnational and even postnational society.
In the early days of the United States of America, writers used theatrical
forms to present revolutionary values as national values. In the nineteenth
century as America colonized the west, such values evolved to support
entrenched privileged positions while the Protestant Anglo-Saxon figure of
Uncle Sam came to represent the dominant image of American national
identity. Justified under social Darwinism as survival of the fittest and by
expansionists as “Manifest Destiny,” Americans conquered the continent,
removing the indigenous peoples to reservations despite their protests.
During the twentieth century marginalized groups used theatre and live
performance to present counter-hegemonic values and promote more plu-
ralistic and diverse notions of national identity for various types of audience.
INTRODUCTION 

They challenged the dominant white patriarchal archetype and the concept
of a homogenous and unified country. In postcolonial fashion, as Homi
Bhabha writes, “The peoples of the periphery return[ed] to rewrite the his-
tory and fiction of the metropolis.”39 As we move into a new millennium,
contemporary American theatre artists continue to redefine the notion of the
nation.
 

From British colony to independent

nation: refashioning identity

Iof nthethe second half of the eighteenth century, many

settlements in North America underwent a major political and ideo-
logical transformation from isolated and dependent colonies to a united and
independent nation-state. Writers with differing political perspectives and
agenda used drama as a means to help define the values of the inhabitants
of the territory and their political relationship with Europe. During this
period, plays by Loyalist Americans and by the British military encouraged
the loyalty of the settlers to the British crown. Whig or Patriot drama, on the
other hand, inspired Americans to rethink their connection with the British
government, and began to redefine the American colonies as potentially a
separate and independent nation. This chapter will examine the changing
constructions of identity in these plays and dialogues, from the early didac-
tic plays in the 1760s that underlined the responsibilities of the American
colonies to the British crown, to the drama of the 1770s that, in some cases,
promoted a new notion of the nation as independent from Britain.
In eighteenth-century America, prominent religious communities, such
as the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Quakers in Pennsylvania and the
Presbyterians in New Jersey, disapproved of the theatre. The Massachusetts
legislature passed a bill in 1750 prohibiting theatrical performances because
they “not only occasion great and unnecessary expenses, and discourage
industry and frugality, but likewise tend generally to increase Immorality,
impiety, and contempt of religion.”1 The Church of England, which domi-
nated the southern states, was more tolerant of theatre, though the Reverend
Samuel Davies of Virginia reprimanded his congregation because “plays and
romances” were “more read than the History of the blessed Jesus.”2
Religious antipathy to theatre in the seventeenth and eighteenth century
stunted the growth of American playwriting and performance. On the other
hand, pamphlet drama had become important in the religious reformation


FROM BRITISH COLONY TO INDEPENDENT NATION 

movement in Germany in the sixteenth century. The enormous dissemi-

nation of religious and political pamphlets from the sixteenth century in
Europe manifested the power of printed material (often in dramatic or dia-
logue form) to educate, instruct and persuade. By the 1760s in the colonies,
a history of writing plays as propaganda had already been established.
Religious advocates printed dramatic dialogues as a means for teaching
virtuous behavior to the young, such as “Dialogue Between Christ, Youth
and the Devil” (published anonymously in 1735), or for resolving doctrinal
disputes, such as Dialogue Between a Minister and an Honest Country-Man,
Concerning Election and Predestination (published by John Checkley in 1741).
Few American plays appeared before the end of the eighteenth century, and
those that were written were often intended only to be read rather than to
be performed. Possibly because so many of the colonists looked down on
theatre as immoral and frivolous, drama tended to be used more as a means
to instruct rather than to entertain. Accordingly, a high proportion of the
plays written in America during the 1760s and 1770s were didactic.
The Hallam family, who brought the first major professional touring
company (the London Company of Comedians) to the colonies in 1752,
resorted to disguising their plays as “moral tracts” in order to find favor with
the local authorities.3 They met with receptive audiences in the southern
towns and the prosperous West Indies but had to negotiate their way more
carefully in the northern colonies, discovering that resistance was especially
strong in New England and also at times in New York and Philadelphia.
The play that they performed most often (other than Shakespeare) was
George Lillo’s George Barnwell.4 Because of its moral instruction to young
people, it was more acceptable to religious communities, especially during
the Christmas and Easter seasons. In time the Hallam/Douglass company
established permanent venues such as the Williamsburg Theatre in 1752
(where George Washington was a frequent member of the audience), the
Chapel Street Theatre in New York in 1761 (and, after that was destroyed, the
John Street Theatre in 1767), the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia in 1766,
and the West Street Theatre in Annapolis and the Church Street Theatre
in Charleston in 1773. They developed a touring circuit and performed
regularly at these various sites (depending upon the climate of public opinion
and such natural disasters as yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia) until
the Continental Congress discouraged theatre performances in 1774, as the
colonies prepared for war.
Because they were public forums where large crowds gathered, the newly
established theatres in important towns such as New York and Philadelphia
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

soon became a focus for displays of political sentiment. At performances by

the Hallam/Douglass troupe, the audience indicated their sensitivity to the
ideological content of the plays.5 English plays reflecting a Whig perspec-
tive, such as Joseph Addison’s Cato (and even Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar),
became especially popular during this period because of their speeches ad-
vocating freedom from imperial oppression.6 In some cases strong political
feelings led to riots. The Sons of Liberty, for example, disrupted the activ-
ities of the Chapel Street Theatre in New York during protests associated
with the Stamp Act. A crowd invaded the audience that was attending a
performance, one person was killed in the melee and the rioters tore down
and burned the theatre “to the Satisfaction of many at this distressed Time,
and to the great Grievance of those less inclined for the Publick Good.”7
With the repeal of the Stamp Act, political protests quieted down. But
in order to curry favor, the actors changed their name from the London
Comedians to the American Company and introduced American pieces
that would appeal to their local audience, such as Thomas Forrest’s The
Disappointment (which had to be removed from the program because it
threatened to cause a local scandal) and Thomas Godfrey’s The Prince of
Parthia. Furthermore, the theatre company introduced politically relevant
material to otherwise neutral performances such as at a Philadelphia per-
formance of Hamlet in 1773, when they added a prologue which referred to
the “sweets of Liberty.”8
The company also introduced other aspects of indigenous culture in their
performances to gain local support. In 1767, after constructing a new theatre
in New York at John Street to replace the one that had been destroyed, the
American Company provided box seats to Cherokee Indian Chiefs (who
were passing through on their way to Albany to negotiate a treaty and were
being hosted by General Gage) for a performance of Richard III. The event
turned into a major occasion. According to the local press, “The Expectation
of seeing the Indian Chiefs, at the Play on Monday Night, occasion’d a great
Concourse of People, the House was crowded, and it is said great Numbers
were obliged to go away for want of Room.”9 On their return to New York
after signing the treaty, the Indians agreed to perform a war dance on the
stage following a performance of the play, The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a
Secret! Ostensibly to prevent a disturbance by those uncomfortable with
Indians in war paint but obviously selling the event in the same stroke, the
manager warned in his advertising, “It is humbly presumed, that no Part
of the Audience will forget the proper Decorum so essential to all public
Assemblies, particularly on this Occasion, as the Persons who have
FROM BRITISH COLONY TO INDEPENDENT NATION 

condescended to contribute to their Entertainment, are of Rank and Conse-

quence in their own Country” (New York Journal, 7 April 1768). The unusual
event, which included a piece “for the Entertainment of the Cherokee
chiefs and warriors” about Harlequin, took place without incident.
Again this performance was in a sense an attempt by the manager to de-
velop the notion of Native American culture on the stage, in contrast to the
English farces and tragedies that represented the bulk of their repertory.
In the early 1770s members of the audience, particularly in the cheaper
seats, continued occasionally to disrupt performances for political reasons.
In Philadelphia in 1772, members of the gallery objected to the Tory sen-
timents of A Word to the Wise. A critic, commenting on the disturbances,
chastised the gallery for requesting partisan songs from the performers.10
Such disturbances often reflected social and class differences. The artisans
and mechanics tended to be the most vocal in announcing their anti-British
feelings in the theatres.11 In December 1772 the Philadelphia theatre expe-
rienced a riot outside the gallery door, followed by a burglary in which
the robbers removed “the iron spikes which divide the galleries from the
upper boxes” in a symbolic act against the class divisions in the theatre (and
society).12 The event indicates an attempt by American-Patriot demonstra-
tors to use the theatre symbolically to redefine the nation, moving towards
a more egalitarian notion of national identity.
Other symbolic activity by the Sons of Liberty and like-minded Patriot
agitators often took on a decidedly theatrical appearance, such as demon-
strations in which they hanged British leaders in effigy and erected liberty
poles. For example, the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party performed a
symbolic act by disguising themselves as Tuscarora Indians, thereby iden-
tifying themselves as natives of America rather than as British settlers.13 In
some cases, these events involved a certain amount of acting as well as set,
costumes and props. For example, the press reported that in Wilmington
in 1766 at the height of the stamp act crisis,

a great Number of People again assembled, and produced an Effigy

of liberty, which they put into a Coffin, and marched in solemn
Procession to the Church-Yard, a Drum in Mourning beating before
them, and the Town Bells, muffled, ringing a doleful Knell at the same
Time; But before they committed the Body to the Ground, they thought
it adviseable to feel its Pulse; and when finding some Remains of Life,
they returned back to a Bonfire ready prepared, placed the Effigy before it
in a large Two-armed Chair, and concluded the Evening with Rejoicings,
on finding that liberty had still an Existence in the colonies.14
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

In 1774, with the threat of war on the horizon and in order to concentrate
the minds and energies of the Patriots, the Continental Congress declared
its disapproval of theatrical entertainment in the colonies, resolving to “dis-
countenance and discourage, every species of extravagance and dissipation,
especially all horse racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock fighting, exhibition
of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”15 The
American Company emigrated to the West Indies where they remained for
the duration of the war. For most of the war years American Patriots re-
frained from theatre performances and produced drama mainly in the form
of pamphlet plays, to be read rather than staged.

Early dramatic propaganda: loyalty to King and country

Political drama began early in the colonies. Androboros, the first play to
be printed in the British colonies in America, was a Swiftian satire on
the political intrigues of New York. Robert Hunter, the British-appointed
Governor of New York, published his “biographical farce in three acts”
in 1714 or 1715.16 The play, which satirized his political enemies and local
government, is an amusing and irreverent picture of legislative assemblies
and power politics, with thinly disguised portraits of the Governor himself,
his political friends and his opponents. In an early scene, the legislative
assembly (which seems to be located in a sort of mental institution) is
shown to be in chaos as representatives try to overthrow the rules and laws
in a spirit of anarchy. Coxcomb, one of the opponents of the Keeper (i.e. the
Governor), moves and the House agrees “That neither this House, or they
whom we Represent are bound by any Laws, Rules or Customs, any Law,
Rule or Custom to the Contrary Notwithstanding” and Mulligrub (another
opponent), resolves, “That this House disclaims all Powers, Preheminencies
or Authoritys, except it’s own.” Solemn, a supporter of the status quo (and
evidently representing a friend of the Governor), opposes the motions.
Recalling the origins of the assembly, he attacks the delegates for their abuse
of power and their disloyalty to the higher authority (i.e. the Governor and
Britain):
Here we are Maintain’d at their Charge with Food and Rayment suitable
to our Condition, and the Fabrick kept in Repair at the no small Annual
Expences of our Land-Lords. And what Returns do we make? Have not
many of us from our private Cells thrown our Filth and Ordure in their
Faces? And now in a Collective Body we are about to throw more filthy
Resolves at them. (p. 4)
FROM BRITISH COLONY TO INDEPENDENT NATION 

For his pains, Solemn is expelled from the assembly, and Coxcomb pro-
poses that the Keeper “ought to be dismiss’t from having any further Au-
tho[rity over] us.” The Keeper enters and terminates the session by ordering
the representatives, “To your Kennels, ye Hounds” (p. 8). Having been
temporarily thwarted, the opponents of the Keeper then concoct a new
scheme to gain independence by creating a religious organization. Fizle
(another opponent) argues, “You see he can Dissolve our Senate with a
Crack of his Whip, so there is nothing to be done that way. Let us in-
corporate our selves into a Consistory; That I believe He dare not touch,
without being Reputed an Enemy to the Consistory; and if he does, we
may hunt him down” (p. 9). Moreover, Fizle comes up with a plan to dis-
credit the Keeper by falsely accusing him of befouling the holy vestments
of the church. The conspirators finally decide to get rid of the Keeper by
means of a trap door. In the denouement Androboros, an opponent who is
temporarily blinded, falls down the trap that was intended to ensnare the
Keeper. The conspirators, trying to save him, plunge in after him in slapstick
comedy tradition, leaving the Keeper in control. The farce discredited the
political opponents of the author, strengthened his position as the British
Governor of New York, and reaffirmed the loyalty of the colony to the
British Crown.
No other play texts written in the English colonies of America have been
discovered for the period from 1715 to 1764, but in 1764 two plays were pub-
lished that similarly advocated the loyalty of American settlers to the British
Crown. Both plays commented on the Paxton Rebellion, an uprising in west-
ern Pennsylvania in which settlers from the outlying districts displayed their
anger at the inadequate provisions made by the colonial authorities to protect
their interests. Following the first wave of Pontiac’s insurrection in which
his and other tribes attacked British forts and settlements, the Paxton rebels
attacked Indian villages and marched on Philadelphia in pursuit of Indians
who had sought shelter there. The events obviously frightened the inhab-
itants of Philadelphia, and, without the skillful intervention of Benjamin
Franklin, it seems that the riotous crowd might have attacked the local
residents and/or been massacred by the British militia.17
Both The Paxton Boys and A Dialogue, Containing some Reflections on the
late Declaration and Remonstrance, Of the Back-Inhabitants of the Province of
Pennsylvania were published anonymously in the same year as the Paxton
rebellion. The Paxton Boys, which was reprinted twice in the same year,
derided the rebellion and the support given to it by the Presbyterians,
and evoked sympathy for the Quakers, the Church of England and the
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

British monarchy. The play ridiculed the local citizens of Philadelphia for
their cowardice, the rebels for their divisive actions, and the Presbyterians
for conspiring to aid the rebels. One of the main villains of the piece, a
loudmouthed anti-monarchist Presbyterian whose ancestors supported the
Cromwellian rebellion in England, claims,

I would freely Sacrifice my Life and Fortune for this Cause, rather than
[that] those Misecrants [sic] of the Establish’d Church of England, or
those R[asca]ls the Q[uaker]s, should continue [any] longer at the head
of Government. (p. 7)

The Presbyterian boasts that he has collected thousands of pounds in

support of the rebels and that he had distributed money, powder and am-
munition to them as they approached Philadelphia. He vows to attack the
city, “Now we go on Triumphantly, let us Extipate [sic] those People, Root
and Branch, and not leave one Soul alive . . .” (p. 8). A Quaker confronts
him and discovers his plot to overthrow the government. But the Quaker,
as a pacifist, is then faced with the moral dilemma of whether to resort to
arms against the conspirator. When the Quaker accuses the Presbyterian
of being a dissident, the Presbyterian identifies him likewise as a dissident
because of his religion. The Quaker reacts angrily:

But my Disenting [sic] does not proceed from any dislike to the King, or
the Government, but from a Religious scruple of Conscience in bearing
Arms, but thou art a Desenter [sic] from the wickedness of thy heart, like
fallen Angels, and let me tell thee, that unless thou mends thy ways, thy
condition may be like unto theirs. (p. 15)

The play ends with the arrival of the rebellious Paxton Boys in Philadelphia
and the Quaker vowing to fight the Presbyterian, “’tis Time to Arm, and
do thou attack me if thou dares, and thou shalt find that I have Courage
and Strength sufficient, to trample thee under my Feet” (p. 15).
The Paxton Boys focused on the responsibility of the citizens of the colony
to defend themselves. Although the British militia was mentioned, the
rhetoric of the play did not emphasize the obligation of the British gov-
ernment and British military to maintain law and order. The playwright
clearly believed that it was the responsibility of the Philadelphia citizens
to employ armed force to quash rebellion, and in the play he situated the
Quaker in a pivotal position in order to make the case. The play outlined
the duty of the citizens to take responsibility for ensuring their own safety,
and it added a moral coda after the final speech to emphasize its message:
FROM BRITISH COLONY TO INDEPENDENT NATION 

Stir then good People be not still nor quiet,

Rouze up yourselves take Arms and quell the Riot;
Such Wild-fire Chaps may, dangerous Mischeifs [sic] raise,
And se[e] unthinking People in a blaze. (p. 15)

In a sense, therefore, The Paxton Boys identified the civic responsibili-

ties of Philadelphia citizens as British subjects. The author indicated that
Philadelphians should show their allegiance to the British Crown, not as
passive subjects reliant on the British military for their protection, but as
active citizens ready to fight alongside the British military as a local militia.
The play portrayed the Presbyterian rebel as the villain of the piece because
he wanted to overthrow the colonial government and replace it with an anti-
monarchist government. The author used the Quaker as a protagonist with
whom the readership could empathize, moving from a position of pacifism
to militarism in defense of the colony.
A Dialogue, Containing some Reflections on the late Declaration and Remon-
strance, Of the Back-Inhabitants of the Province of Pennsylvania tackled the
same events. The frontispiece of the text, which indicated that the author
was “a Member of that Community,” underscored the rhetorical intention
of the piece in its subtitle: “With a serious and short Address, to those
Presbyterians, who (to their dishonor) have too much abetted, and conniv’d
at the late Insurrection.”
Unlike The Paxton Boys which contained some dramatic moments, A
Dialogue . . . was little more than a political conversation about the rights
and wrongs of the recent events. Three characters – Positive, Zealot and
Lovell – speak their positions, with the author clearly siding with Lovell.
Positive declares his support for the actions of the Presbyterians in attacking
and killing the Indians, marching on Philadelphia and presenting their
written demands. Zealot, who has participated with Positive in composing
the rebels’ demands, expresses his concern that their document suffers from
faulty reasoning and that their actions may be construed as traitorous to
the government. Lovell denounces their actions and attacks their declared
grievances, criticizing the rebel document point by point.
The play develops into a discourse on the nature of good citizenship.
Lovell attacks the Presbyterians for having persecuted both the Indians and
the Quakers, and he argues that the Indians are becoming good Christian
citizens and require government assistance. Positive opposes this:

Christians! I swear it can’t be true; nor shall this, or any Thing you can
advance in their Favour, alter my fix’d Opinion of them; nay, if I tho’t
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

that any of their Colour was to be admitted into the Heavenly World, I
would not desire to go there myself. (p. 9)

Discovering that Positive is too bigoted to accept that Indians might become
Christians, Lovell changes tack to suggest that the Presbyterians have made
government assistance to the Indians necessary by their rebellious actions:

As to the great Expence you complain of, are not you yourselves the abso-
lute Cause of it? . . . And did not you oblige them to take those distressed
People under their fatherly Protection, to save a considerable Number
from Destruction? And where could they be safer than here, from the
Fury and Rage of an incensed, riotous and lawless Mob? You are the last
that should complain of this Expence, as you yourselves are the Occasion
of it. (p. 10)

Furthermore, Lovell argues that the actions taken by the Paxton Boys are no
less than seditious and would have landed them on the gallows in England.
He compares their professed loyalty to King George III to that of Judas
when he kissed Jesus, and declares them to be “dangerous to the Common-
wealth; and, if not nipt in the Bud, God only knows where such unwar-
rantable practices may end” (p. 11). When Zealot asks why their marching
on Philadelphia was wrong since they did not harm anyone and “were very
civil,” Lovell responds by calling the rebels worse than highway robbers.
“Tumult, Sedition and Rebellion . . . are more inexcusable than [the activ-
ities of the highway robbers] who have sometimes a better Right to plead
Necessity.” In a thinly disguised plea from the author, Lovell calls on the
Presbyterians for a proper show of loyalty to the King, for a respect for law
and order, and for civility towards all their neighbors.
Androboros, The Paxton Boys, and A Dialogue, Containing Some Reflec-
tions . . . all essentially supported the status quo of British rule in America
and denounced acts of disobedience or rebellion. All three plays ridiculed
local political and religious figures who challenged the authority of the
colonial government. Androboros lampooned rebellious local assemblies. The
Paxton Boys and A Dialogue, Containing Some Reflections . . . criticized rebel-
lious settlers and their supporters. The good citizen was shown to be a loyal
British subject.

Transitional plays
Following the French and Indian War which ended in 1763, the relation-
ship between Britain and her American colonies began to deteriorate. The
FROM BRITISH COLONY TO INDEPENDENT NATION 

British government tried to place a greater share of the financial burden

for running the colonies on the shoulders of the colonies themselves. At
the same time the colonies sought greater provision for self-rule, resent-
ing British interference in their political and economic affairs. The British
introduced more stringent measures of control and taxation that met with
numerous acts of civil disobedience such as the Stamp Act riots in 1765. In
the wake of the dispute over the Stamp Act, the ideological discourse in
American plays and dramatic dialogues began to change as settlers ques-
tioned the benefits of colonial dependency. The anti-colonial attitudes stim-
ulated a chauvinistic pride in an American as distinct from a British identity,
amidst a growing tide of nationalism. Ponteach; Or, the Savages of America,
which has been attributed to the Massachusetts-born Robert Rogers and
was printed in London in 1766, marked a transition away from the rhetoric of
loyalty to the British Crown. The author had served as a major in the British
army and had personally negotiated with Pontiac for the right of the British
to cross his lands during the French and Indian War.18 Pontiac had conceded
the right of passage on the agreement that his people would be treated with
respect. When they were not, Pontiac organized other tribes to help him
mount a war against the British-held forts and the surrounding settlements
in the west in order to drive them back across the Allegheny Mountains.
Like A Dialogue, Containing Some Reflections . . ., Rogers’s play portrayed
Indians in a more sympathetic light than their adversaries. Despite the in-
surrection threatening the lives of the settlers, the five-act tragedy justified
revenge by the Indians on the white settlements and outposts because of the
poor treatment they were receiving. It depicted a frontier society ruined by
personal greed and ambition. The first act demonstrated the ways in which
traders, hunters, the military and the English administration all connived
to take advantage of the Native American. McDole, a trader, sums up the
attitude of the whites in boasting, “Our fundamental Maxim is this, That
it’s no Crime to cheat and gull an Indian” (p. 4). The traders alter the scales
to deprive the Indians of a just price for their goods and they get them drunk
on rum. The hunters murder them and steal their pelts. The military ignore
their complaints, and the representatives of the Crown steal their gifts to
the King and the King’s gifts to them. Ponteach, the Indian chief whose
characterization seems to have been influenced by the popular eighteenth-
century notion of the “noble savage” that Rousseau was articulating at the
same time in Europe, warns the administrators:
Tell your King from me,
That first or last a Rogue will be detected,
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

That I have Warriors, am myself a King,

And will be honour’d and obey’d as such;
Tell him my Subjects shall not be oppress’d,
But I will seek Redress and take Revenge. (p. 24)

Subsequently, the clergy also come in for criticism when an immoral French
priest, who resorts to conjuring tricks to impress the Indians with his reli-
gion, tries to rape an Indian princess. After Ponteach’s son intervenes and
prevents the rape, the priest improvises a novel doctrine to justify his lustful
actions:
I have a Dispensation from St. Peter
To quench the Fire of Love when it grows painful.
This makes it innocent like Marriage Vows;
And all our holy Priests, and she herself,
Commits no Sin in this Relief of Nature:
For, being holy, there is no Pollution
Communicated from us as from others;
Nay, Maids are holy after we’ve enjoyed them,
And should the Seed take Root, the Fruit is pure. (p. 72)
The play justifies Ponteach’s rebellion as an act of retribution for all the
mistreatment the Indians have received. However, the Indians seem only
slightly more moral than their English oppressors because many of them,
including Ponteach and his son Philip, hatch their own plots for personal
gain. Some of the later scenes of revenge by the Indians undermine the
audience’s sympathy that has been built up in the first scenes of the play.
For example, in one scene the Indians play with the scalps of the white men
that they have killed.
Nevertheless, in criticizing the British treatment of the Indian, and ulti-
mately justifying the rebellion, Ponteach represented an ideological transition
in American playwriting. Rather than expressing an underlying loyalty to
the government or the British Crown, the play justified greater Indian
independence and, by implication, rebellious activity against the British
government.19 At the end of the play, Ponteach has lost his lands but not
his spirit of rebellion, and he continues to seek revenge:
But witness for me to your new base Lords,
That my unconquer’d Mind defies them still;
And though I fly, ‘tis on the Wings of Hope.
Yes, I will hence where there’s no British Foe,
And wait a Respite from this Storm of Woe;
FROM BRITISH COLONY TO INDEPENDENT NATION 

Beget more Sons, fresh Troops collect and arm,

And other Schemes of future Greatness form;
Britons may boast, the Gods may have their Will,
Ponteach I am, and shall be Ponteach still. (p. 110)

The Candidates; or, the Humours of a Virginia Election, a satirical farce on

election practices by Robert Munford, indicated a different type of tran-
sition. While far from justifying rebellion, it implied a subtle discursive
move towards responsible self-government. Munford, who owned one of
the largest estates in Virginia and served in the House of Burgesses from
1765 to 1775, wrote from experience about the corrupt practices in local elec-
tions. He may have intended his play, which was written in 1770 or 1771, for
the Hallam/Douglass troupe but, unlike his later play The Patriots, there
is no evidence of a performance or publication during his lifetime, nor
until his son published it in 1798.20 The play upheld the patrician values of
the land-holding gentry and attacked self-serving politicians who deluded
the voters by spreading rumors against upright candidates. Munford, like
other Virginian landholders, regarded it as a moral duty for men of his
class to serve the common people as elected representatives in the House of
Burgesses, even though the position was without pay and interfered with the
responsibilities of running an estate. Like George Washington, who often
complained of the burden of public office, the central character Wou’dbe
(the would-be representative) declares, “It surely is the duty of every man
who has abilities to serve his country, to take up the burden, and bear it
with patience” (p. 42).
Alongside two virtuous political figures – Worthy (an incumbent repre-
sentative who has decided not to seek re-election) and Wou’dbe – Munford
juxtaposed Strutabout, a dandy, Sir John Toddy, an alcoholic, and Small-
hopes, a gentleman interested in horses. Through the character of Wou’dbe,
the author deplored the lack of suitable candidates for electoral office:
strutabout. Sir, I am as capable of serving the people as yourself;
and let me tell you, sir, my sole intention in offering my-
self is, that I may redress the many and heavy grievances
you have imposed upon this poor county.
wou’dbe. Poor, indeed, when you are believed, or when coxcombs
and jockies [sic] can impose themselves upon it for men
of learning. (pp. 34–5)

The play provides a remarkable picture of eighteenth-century election

campaigns. Because alcohol features in many of the scenes, and because
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

drunkenness is used for satirical effect, the playwright evidently wished

his audience to recognize the importance of soberly electing their leaders.
Strutabout employs liquor to buy votes, while Worthy (speaking on behalf
of the playwright) laments, “I’m sorry, my countymen, for the sake of a little
toddy, can be induced to behave in a manner so contradictory to the candour
and integrity which always should prevail among mankind” (p. 45). At a
campaign barbecue, Sir John Toddy and his friends Mr. and Mrs. Guzzle
get so drunk that Sir John falls and cannot get up and Mrs. Guzzle passes out.
Guzzle plays a trick on his wife and the disgraced politician by dragging her
sleeping body on top of Sir John. In order to persuade her husband that she
has not been unfaithful, the awakened Mrs. Guzzle beats Sir John (whom
she does not recognize) shouting, “ I’ll learn you to cuckold a man without
letting his wife know it” (p. 40). At the same time as amusing the audience,
the playwright provided a serious insight into the hazards of alcohol abuse.
The author also inserted another serious theme into the comedy – that
elected representatives should act independently of their constituencies and
maintain their right to make unpopular decisions. Wou’dbe at one point in
the campaign is blamed for high taxation. He counters that it is the entire
legislative body rather than one individual that should take responsibility for
such actions. He refuses to make popular promises (such as lowering taxes)
in order to get elected. In the playwright’s view, political leaders should
be expected to make objective decisions rather than acting in their own or
their constituents’ interests, and their re-election campaign should not be
adversely affected by having to make unpopular decisions.
At the end of The Candidates, Worthy reverses his decision to retire
from politics and agrees to stand for re-election in order that Wou’dbe
will also be elected. The play presents his action as one of admirable self-
sacrifice on behalf of the interests of the community, rather than for self-
aggrandizement. In a remarkable election scene in which the candidates
are chosen by a voice vote with the candidates thanking each voter for his
vote (which, rather than a secret ballot, was presumably the custom of the
day), the electorate choose the right men and the play ends happily with
expressions of self-congratulation, “We have done as we ought, we have
elected the ablest” (p. 50). As in The Paxton Boys, the playwright added a
moral coda to clarify his didactic intentions,
Henceforth, let those who pray for wholesome laws,
And all well-wishers to their country’s cause,
Like us refuse a coxcomb – choose a man –
Then let our senate blunder if it can. (p. 51)
FROM BRITISH COLONY TO INDEPENDENT NATION 

The play focused on the high moral responsibility that political represen-
tation entailed and the need for citizens to discriminate between worthy
and unworthy politicians. In a sense, it is a perennial issue. The malaise of
voters in the twentieth-first century perhaps mirrors Munford’s concerns
in the eighteenth century that elected officials should not be elected on the
basis of sectional and personal interests but for their integrity, their ability
and their responsibility to the community as a whole.
The Candidates also reflected the growing self-reliance of the colony on
the leadership of their own elected representatives. Unlike The Paxton Boys,
A Dialogue Containing Some Reflections . . ., or Ponteach, there is no mention
of the British government or loyalty to the Crown. Munford favored the
independence of the representatives in running the affairs of the colony.
Assuming that the play was not altered between its date of original com-
position in 1770–1 and its publication in 1798, one can see implicit in The
Candidates a subtle transition from advocating political dependence on the
British Crown towards seeking a state of independence. Munford portrayed
the growing sense of political responsibility that would ultimately lead to
self-government. In a mood of self-congratulation at the end of the play
that reflects the transition, Wou’dbe uses prescient words in thanking his
supporters for electing Worthy and him. “You have in that, shewn your
judgment, and a spirit of independence becoming Virginians” (p. 50).

College dialogues
Another dramatic form that manifested the changing political discourse in
the 1760s was the dramatic dialogue that was presented as part of college
commencement exercises. Despite religious reservations, American colleges
had occasionally staged theatrical events from the beginning of the eigh-
teenth century. Students at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg,
Virginia, for example, performed a “pastoral colloquy” in 1702, and by 1736
they were staging plays such as Addison’s Cato. By the middle of the century,
college commencement ceremonies in the British colonies made use of
dramatic dialogues. Although these were more exercises in rhetoric and
public oratory than theatrical events, they used dramatic form to comment
on current affairs at a public occasion and they manifested some of the
changes in political thinking. In the early days these performances favored
a loyalist stance. For example, at the 1761 commencement in the College
of Philadelphia (later renamed the University of Pennsylvania), An Exercise
Consisting of a Dialogue and Ode, Sacred to the Memory of his late Gracious
 THEATRE, SOCIETY AND THE NATION

Majesty George II glorified the reign of the previous King of England

and expressed gratitude for his benevolent influence over the American
colonies:

Beneath his equal sway,

Oppression was not; justice poiz’d her scale;
No law was trampled, and no right deny’d;
The peasant flourish’d, and the merchant smil’d.
And oh! my friend, to what amazing height
Of sudden grandeur, did his nursing care
Up-raise these colonies. (p. 5)

This was followed in the next year by An Exercise Containing a Dialogue and
Ode On The Accession of His present gracious Majesty, George III 21 that was
again obsequious in its idolatry of the new monarch:

Bound every Heart with Joy, and every Breast

Pout the warm Tribute of a grateful Praise!
For o’er the Realms of Britain reigns supreme,
The darling of his People, George the Good. (p. 5)

Likewise at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), a musical

tribute entitled The Military Glory of Great Britain was performed in 1762 to
assert the might of the British war machine. Praising the military victories
of the recent past in various parts of the globe, the piece predicted a glorious
victory for Britain in the French and Indian War, and the punishment of
her enemies:

Ye Sons of War, pursue the Foe;

Your Albemarle has struck th’auspicious Blow.
See, Victory waits with laurel-Wreath to crown
Your Temples; fondly hovering round
Your glittering Arm. ‘Tis Courage fights,
Courage conquers. Pour your Wrath abroad;
With martial Sound
The Foe confound;
Assert your British Rights;
And bid them feel the Weight of your avenging Rod. (pp. 13–14)

In the following year, the Dialogue in the commencement exercises at the

College of Philadelphia praised the newly attained peace, and credited King
George:
Exploring the Variety of Random
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 From insinuations he proceeded to open accusations. After
having kept himself secluded for a fortnight, he one day appeared in
the public fold and proclaimed that he had at last discovered the
cause of the drought. After keeping the audience in suspense for a
short time, he suddenly broke forth: “Do you not see,” he asked,
“when the clouds cover us, that Hamilton and Moffat look at them?
Their white faces scare them away, and you cannot expect rain so
long as they are in the country.” This was a home stroke. The people
became impatient, and poured forth their curses against the poor
missionaries as the cause of all their sorrows. The bell which was
rung for public worship, they said, frightened the vapours; the
prayers even came in for a share of the blame. “Don’t you,” said the
chief one day rather fiercely to Mr. Moffat, “bow down in your houses
and pray, and talk to something bad in the ground?”
But to shorten a long story, after exposing the missionaries to
much risk and danger by his insinuations and accusations, the tables
were turned in their favour. The rain-maker now was suspected, his
gross impositions were unveiled, and he was about to pay the
penalty of death,—the well-merited reward for his scandalous
conduct, when Mr. Moffat generously interfered, and through his
presence of mind and humanity succeeded in saving the life of one
who had so often threatened his own, and who would not have
scrupled to take it could he thereby have served his purpose. Death,
however, soon overtook him, for he was eventually murdered
amongst the Bauangketsi nation.
There is scarcely a savage country on the face of the earth but
has its professional rain-makers; Figi has; and these, like other
players of a game of chance, occasionally win in a manner that
seems surprising even to an educated European.
During Mr. Seeman’s stay in Figi, one of the days was rainy,
preventing him from making an excursion. On expressing his regret
to that effect, a man was brought who may be called the clerk of the
weather. He professed to exercise a direct meteorological influence,
and said that, by burning certain leaves and offering prayers only
known to himself, he could make the sun shine or rain come down;
and that he was willing to exercise his influence on Mr. Seeman’s
behalf if paid handsomely. He was told that there was no objection to
giving him a butcher’s knife if he could make fine weather until the
travellers returned to the coast; but if he failed to do so, he must give
something for the disappointment. He was perfectly willing to risk the
chance of getting the knife, but would not hear of a forfeit in case of
failure; however, he left to catch eels. “When returning,” says Mr.
Seeman, “the clouds had dispersed, and the sun was shining
brilliantly, and he did not fail to inform me that he had ‘been and
done it.’ I must farther do him the justice to say, that I did not
experience any bad weather until I fairly reached the coast; and that
no sooner had I set my foot in Navua than rain came down in regular
torrents. This man has probably been a close observer of the
weather, and discovered those delicate local indications of a coming
change with which people in all countries living much in the open air
are familiar; and he very likely does not commence operations until
he is pretty sure of success.”
This was not the only singular ceremony witnessed by the
gentleman just quoted, and who is the most recent of Figian
travellers. While out one day he and his friends met a company of
natives, and were struck with the fact that all the young lads were in
a state of absolute nudity; and, on inquiry, learned that preparations
were being made to celebrate the introduction of Kurudwadua’s
eldest son into manhood; and that until then neither the young
chieftain nor his playmates could assume the scanty clothing
peculiar to the Figians. Suvana, a rebellious town, consisting of
about five hundred people, was destined to be sacrificed on the
occasion. When the preparations for the feast were concluded, the
day for the ceremony appointed, Kurudwadua and his warriors were
to make a rush upon the town and club the inhabitants
indiscriminately. The bodies were to be piled into one heap, and on
the top of all a living slave would lie on his back. The young chief
would then mount the horrid scaffold, and standing upright on the
chest of the slave, and holding in his uplifted hands an immense club
or gun, the priests would invoke their gods, and commit the future
warrior to their especial protection, praying he may kill all the
enemies of the tribe, and never be beaten in battle; a cheer and a
shout from the assembled multitude concluding the prayer. Two
uncles of the boy were then to ascend the human pile, and to invest
him with the malo or girdle of snow white tapa; the multitude again
calling on the deities to make him a great conqueror, and a terror to
all who breathe enmity to Navua. The malo for the occasion would
be, perhaps, two hundred yards long, and six or eight inches wide.
When wound round the body the lad would hardly be perceivable,
and no one but an uncle can divest him of it.
“We proposed,” says Mr. Seeman, “to the chief that we should be
allowed to invest his son with the malo, which he at first refused, but
to which he consented after deliberation with his people. At the
appointed hour the multitude collected in the great strangers’ house
or bure ni sa. The lad stood upright in the midst of the assembly
guiltless of clothing, and holding a gun over his head. The consul
and I approached, and in due form wrapped him up in thirty yards of
Manchester print, the priest and people chanting songs and invoking
the protection of their gods. A short address from the consul
succeeded, stirring the lad to nobler efforts for his tribe than his
ancestors had known, and pointing to the path of fame that
civilization opened to him. The ceremony concluded by drinking
kara, and chanting historical reminiscences of the lad’s ancestors;
and thus we saved the lives of five hundred men. During the whole
of this ceremony the old chief was much affected, and a few tears
might be seen stealing down his cheeks; soon, however, cheering
up, he gave us a full account of the time when he came of age, and
the number of people that were slain to celebrate the occasion.”
To return, however, to the rain-making business. Lucky is it for the
dim-minded heathen that these false priests of his have not the
advantage of studying for their profession either in England or
America; if it were so, heaven only knows the awful extent to which
they would be bamboozled. Rain-makers especially would have a
fine time of it, at least, if they were all as clever as Mr. Petherick,
who, in his “Egypt and the Soudan,” unblushingly narrates how he
“Barnumized” the Africans as a rain-maker.
“The rainy season was now approaching, and still no tidings of my
men, and the natives daily continued to surround my encampment,
and attempted, sometimes by the report of the murder of my men,
and at others by night attacks upon ourselves when in the darkness
we could not see them, to induce us to return to our boats and
abandon our property. This they more strenuously insisted on, as
they were convinced that as long as we remained in the country the
rain would not fall, and both themselves and their cattle would be
reduced to starvation. This idea being seriously entertained, I one
day plainly stated to the chief and several of the principal men the
absurdity of their assertions, and endeavoured to explain that God
alone,—who had created heaven and earth,—could exercise any
power over the elements. The attention with which my discourse was
received induced me to prolong it, but to my discomfiture, at its
close, it was treated as a capital joke, and only convinced them the
more that I endeavoured to conceal from them my own powers.
Finding no relief from their increasing persecutions, I at length was
reduced to a ruse; and after a reference to an antiquated Weekly
Times, I told them that the Supreme Being whose it was to afford
them the so much-required rains, withheld them in consequence of
their inhospitality towards myself; this, although it had the effect of
procuring increased temporary supplies, could not induce them to
furnish me with porters. Endless were the straits and absurdities to
which I had recourse in order to obtain a respite, but the one creating
the greatest amusement to myself and my followers was the
following. A deputation of several hundred men, headed by a
subchief, from their kraals some miles distant, in the most
peremptory manner demanded rain or my immediate departure; the
latter they were determined at whatever sacrifice to enforce. Placing
my men under arms in an enclosure, and with a pair of revolver
pistols at my waist, and a first-rate Dean and Adams’ revolver rifle in
my hand, I went into the midst of them, and seated myself in the
centre of them, opposite to the subchief, a man fully six feet six
inches high, and proportionably well made. I stated that no
intimidation could produce rain, and as to compelling me to withdraw,
I defied them; that if I liked, with one single discharge of my gun, I
could destroy the whole tribe and their cattle in an instant; but that
with regard to rain, I would consult my oracle, and invited them to
appear before me to-morrow, upon which, with as much dignity as I
could command, I withdrew. Various were the feelings of the
savages. Some expressed a wish to comply with my desire, whilst
others showed an inclination to fall upon me. Although I was
convinced that the chief, Tschol, secretly encouraged his men, he in
the present instance made a demonstration in my favour; he
threatened them with a curse unless they dispersed. Some device
now became necessary to obtain a further respite for the desired
rains; and setting my wits to work, I hit upon an expedient which I at
once put in execution. Despatching some men to catch half-a-dozen
large flies, bearing some resemblance to a horse-fly, but much
larger, which infested a temporary shed where my donkey had been
kept; the men, confident in the success of anything I undertook, set
about the task with a will. In the course of the afternoon they were
fortunately obtained, and were consigned to an empty bottle. At the
appointed time my persecutors did not fail to appear, and shaking a
little flower over my flies, I sallied out amongst them, bottle in hand.
Referring to their wants, I treated them to a long harangue, touching
the depredations which I had learnt in conversation with the chief
they had committed upon the cattle of neighbouring tribes, and
assassinations of unoffending men who had fallen into their power;
also to several abstractions of girls from poor unprotected families of
their own tribe, without the payment of the customary dowry in cattle,
and dwelt upon the impossibility of their obtaining rain until restitution
and satisfaction were made. They unanimously denied the charges;
when I told them that it was nothing less than I had expected, but
that I was furnished with the means of satisfying myself of the
veracity of their assertions. The proof would consist in their restoring
to me the flies, which I intended to liberate from the bottle I held. In
the event of their succeeding, they should be rewarded with
abundant rain; but if one fly escaped, it was a sign of their guilt, and
they would be punished with a continuation of drought until
restitution was made; therefore it was in their own power to procure
rain or otherwise. Hundreds of clubs and lances were poised high in
the air, amidst loud shouts of ‘Let them go! let them go! let them go!’
With a prayer for the safety of my flies, I held up the bottle, and
smashing it against the barrel of my rifle, I had the satisfaction of
seeing the flies in the enjoyment of their liberty. Man, woman, and
child gave chase in hot pursuit, and the delight of my men at the
success of the stratagem may be imagined. It was not until after the
sun had set that the crest-fallen stragglers returned, their success
having been limited to the capture of two of the flies, though several
spurious ones, easily detected by the absence of the distinctive flour
badge, were produced. A long consultation ensued, and in the firm
belief of my oracle they determined to adopt measures for the
carrying out of its requirements, but with a threat that if the promised
rain did not follow, I should incur their vengeance. Aware of the
difficulties in store for them from their unwillingness to part with cattle
under any circumstances, I promised myself a long cessation from
their molestations. I was not disappointed.”
Further still into the country, and still no sign of amendment; not
that it should be expected, as in this region—Equatorial Africa—the
Christian crusader never yet penetrated, unless indeed we so regard
Mr. Du Chaillu, who certainly appears to have done his best by
example, at least, to convince the barbarous people among whom
he found himself of the advantages of Christianity. Here is a sample
of one of many Sabbaths spent by the renowned gorilla hunter
amongst the savages here abiding.
“The next day was Sunday, and I remained quietly in my house
reading the Scriptures, and thankful to have a day of rest and
reflection. My hunters could scarcely be prevailed upon not to hunt;
they declared that Sunday might do for white people, but the blacks
had nothing to do with it. Indeed, when customs thus come in
contact, the only answer the negro has to make—and it applies to
everything—is, that the God who made the whites is not the God
who made the blacks.
“Then the king and a good many of his people gathered about me,
and we astonished each other with our talk. I told them that their
fetishes and greegrees were of no use and had no power, and that it
was absurd to expect anything of a mere wooden idol that a man
had made, and could burn up. Also that there was no such a thing as
witchcraft, and that it was very wrong to kill people who were
accused of it; that there was only one God, whom the whites and
blacks must alike love and depend on. All this elicited only grunts of
surprise and incredulity.
 “Then the king took up the conversation, and remarked that we
white men were much favoured by our God, who was so kind as to
send guns and powder from heaven.
“Whereupon the king’s brother remarked that it must be very fine
to have rivers of alougou (rum) flowing through our country all the
year round, and that he would like to live on the banks of such a
river.
“Hereupon I said that we made our own guns, which no one
present seemed to believe; and that there were no rivers of rum,
which seemed a disappointment to several.”
It would appear that our traveller betrayed at least as much
curiosity respecting the singular rites and superstitions of these
Equatorial African heathens as they evinced in the matter of
Christianity.
“One day the women began their peculiar worship of Njambai,
which it seems is their good spirit: and it is remarkable that all the
Bakalai clans and all the females of tribes I have met during my
journeys, worship or venerate a spirit with this same name. Near the
seashore it is pronounced Njembai, but it is evidently the same.
“This worship of the women is a kind of mystery, no men being
admitted to the ceremonies, which are carried on in a house very
carefully closed. This house was covered with dry palm and banana
leaves, and had not even a door open to the street. To make all
close, it was set against two other houses, and the entrance was
through one of these. Quengueza and Mbango warned me not to go
near this place, as not even they were permitted so much as to take
a look. All the women of the village painted their faces and bodies,
beat drums, marched about the town, and from time to time entered
the idol house, where they danced all one night, and made a more
outrageous noise than even the men had made before. They also
presented several antelopes to the goddess, and on the 4th, all but a
few went off into the woods to sing to Njambai.
“I noticed that half-a-dozen remained, and in the course of the
morning entered the Njambai house, where they stayed in great
silence. Now my curiosity, which had been greatly excited to know
what took place in this secret worship, finally overcame me. I
determined to see. Walking several times up and down the street
past the house to allay suspicion, I at last suddenly pushed aside
some of the leaves, and stuck my head through the wall. For a
moment I could distinguish nothing in the darkness. Then I beheld
three perfectly naked old hags sitting on the clay floor, with an
immense bundle of greegrees before them, which they seemed to be
silently adoring.

Du Chaillu’s Peep into a Heathen Temple.

“When they saw me they at once set up a hideous howl of rage,
and rushed out to call their companions from the bush; in a few
minutes these came hurrying in, crying and lamenting, rushing
towards me with gestures of anger, and threatening me for my
offence. I quickly reached my house, and seizing my gun in one
hand and a revolver in the other, told them I would shoot the first one
that came inside my door. The house was surrounded by above
three hundred infuriated women, every one shouting out curses at
me, but the sight of my revolver kept them back. They adjourned
presently for the Njambai house, and from there sent a deputation of
the men, who were to inform me that I must pay for the palaver I had
made.
“This I peremptorily refused to do, telling Quengueza and Mbango
that I was there a stranger, and must be allowed to do as I pleased,
as their rules were nothing to me, who was a white man and did not
believe in their idols. In truth, if I had once paid for such a
trangression as this, there would have been an end of all travelling
for me, as I often broke through their absurd rules without knowing it,
and my only course was to declare myself irresponsible.
“However, the women would not give up, but threatened
vengeance, not only on me, but on all the men of the town; and as I
positively refused to pay anything, it was at last, to my great surprise,
determined by Mbango and his male subjects, that they would make
up from their own possessions such a sacrifice as the women
demanded of me. Accordingly Mbango contributed ten fathoms of
native cloth, and the men came one by one and put their offerings on
the ground; some plates, some knives, some mugs, some beads,
some mats, and various other articles. Mbango came again, and
asked if I too would not contribute something, but I refused. In fact, I
dared not set such a precedent. So when all had given what they
could, the whole amount was taken to the ireful women, to whom
Mbango said that I was his and his men’s guest, and that they could
not ask me to pay in such a matter, therefore they paid the demand
themselves. With this the women were satisfied, and there the
quarrel ended. Of course I could not make any further investigations
into their mysteries. The Njambai feast lasts about two weeks. I
could learn very little about the spirit which they call by this name.
Their own ideas are quite vague. They know only that it protects the
women against their male enemies, avenges their wrongs, and
serves them in various ways, if they please it.”
Before Chaillu left Goumbi a grand effort was made by the people
to ascertain the cause of their king’s sufferings. Quengueza had sent
word to his people to consult Ilogo, a spirit said to live in the moon.
The rites were very curious. To consult Ilogo, the time must be near
full moon. Early in the evening the women of the town assembled in
front of Quengueza’s house and sang songs to and in praise of the
moon. Meantime a woman was seated in the centre of the circle of
singers, who sung with them and looked constantly towards the
moon. She was to be inspired by the spirit and to utter prophecies.
Two women made trial of this post without success. At last came
a third, a little woman, wiry and nervous. When she seated herself,
the singing was redoubled in fury—the excitement of the people had
had time to become intense; the drums beat, the outsiders shouted
madly. Presently the woman who, singing violently, had looked
constantly towards the moon, began to tremble. Her nerves twitched,
her face was contorted, her muscles swelled, and at last her limbs
straightened out, and she lay extended on the ground insensible.
The excitement was now intense and the noise horrible. The
songs to Ilogo were not for a moment discontinued. The words were
little varied, and were to this purport:

“Ilogo, we ask thee,

Tell who has bewitched the king!
Ilogo, we ask thee,
What shall we do to cure the king?
The forests are thine, Ilogo!
The rivers are thine, Ilogo!
The moon is thine.
O moon! O moon! O moon!
Thou art the house of Ilogo.
Shall the king die, O Ilogo?
O Ilogo! O moon! O moon!”

These words were repeated again and again with little variation.
The woman who lay for some time as she had fallen was then
supposed to be able to see things in the world of Ilogo, and was
brought to after half an hour’s insensibility; she looked very much
prostrated. She averred that she had seen Ilogo, that he had told her
Quengueza was not bewitched.
Chaillu heard one day by accident that a man had been
apprehended on a charge of causing the death of one of the chief
men of the village, and went to Dayoko, the king, and asked about it.
He said yes, the man was to be killed; that he was a notorious
wizard, and had done much harm.
Chaillu begged to see this terrible being, and was taken to a
rough hut, within which sat an old, old man, with wool white as snow,
wrinkled face, bowed form, and shrunken limbs. His hands were tied
behind him, and his feet were placed in a rude kind of stocks. This
was the great wizard. Several lazy negroes stood guard over him,
and from time to time insulted him with opprobrious epithets and
blows, to which the poor old wretch submitted in silence. He was
evidently in his dotage.
When asked if he had no friends, no relatives, no son or daughter
or wife to take care of him, he said sadly, “No one.”
Now here was the secret of this persecution. They were tired of
taking care of the helpless old man, who had lived too long, and a
charge of witchcraft by the greegree man was a convenient pretext
for putting him out of the way.
 The Wizard in the Stocks.
Chaillu went, however, to Dayoko, and argued the case with him,
and tried to explain the absurdity of charging a harmless old man
with supernatural powers; told him that God did not permit witches to
exist, and dually made an offer to buy the old wretch, offering to give
some pounds of tobacco, one or two coats, and some looking-
glasses for him, goods which would have bought an able-bodied
slave.
 Dayoko replied that for his part he would be glad to save him, but
that the people must decide; that they were much excited against
him, but that he would, to please Chaillu, try to save his life.
During the night following our travellers heard singing all over the
town all night, and a great uproar. Evidently they were preparing
themselves for the murder. Even these savages cannot kill in cold
blood, but work themselves into a frenzy of excitement first, and then
rush off to do the bloody deed.
Early in the morning the people gathered together with the fetish
man, the rascal who was at the bottom of the murder, in their midst.
His bloodshot eyes glared in savage excitement as he went round
from man to man getting the votes to decide whether the old man
should die.
In his hands he held a bundle of herbs, with which he sprinkled
three times those to whom he spoke. Meantime a man was stationed
on the top of a high tree, whence he shouted from time to time in a
loud voice, “Jocoo! Jocoo!” at the same time shaking the tree
strongly.
Jocoo is devil among the Mbousha, and the business of this man
was to keep away the evil spirit, and to give notice to the fetish-man
of his approach.
At last the sad vote was taken. It was declared that the old man
was a most malignant wizard, that he had already killed a number of
people, that he was minded to kill many more, and that he must die.
No one would tell Chaillu how he was to be killed, and they proposed
to defer the execution till his departure. The whole scene had
considerably agitated Chaillu, and he was willing to be spared the
end. Tired and sick at heart, Chaillu lay down on his bed about noon
to rest and compose his spirits a little. After a while he saw a man
pass his window, almost like a flash, and after him a horde of silent
but infuriated men. They ran towards the river. Then in a little while
was heard a couple of sharp piercing cries, as of a man in great
agony, and then all was still as death. Chaillu got up, guessing the
rascals had killed the poor old man, and turning his steps toward the
river, was met by the crowd returning, every man armed with axe,
knife, cutlass, or spear, and these weapons and their own hands and
arms and bodies all sprinkled with the blood of their victim. In their
frenzy they had tied the poor wizard to a log near the river bank, and
then deliberately hacked him into many pieces. They finished by
splitting open his skull and scattering the brains in the water. Then
they returned; and to see their behaviour, it would have seemed as
though the country had just been delivered from a great curse.
By night the men, whose faces for two days had filled Chaillu with
loathing and horror, so bloodthirsty and malignant were they, were
again as mild as lambs, and as cheerful as though they had never
heard of a witch tragedy.
The following is a fair sample of “witch-test,” as practised in this
region. A Gaboon black trader in the employment of a white
supercargo, died suddenly. His family thinking that the death had
resulted from witchcraft, two of his sisters were authorised to go to
his grave and bring his head away in order that they might test the
fact. This testing is effected in the following manner: An iron pot with
fresh water is placed on the floor; at one side of it is the head of the
dead man, at the other side is seated a fetish doctor. The latter
functionary then puts in his mouth a piece of herb, supposed to
impart divining powers, chews it, and forms a magic circle by spitting
round the pot, the head, and himself. The face of the murderer, after
a few incantations, is supposed to be reflected on the water
contained in the pot. The fetish man then states he sees the
murderer, and orders the head to be again put back to its proper
grave, some days being then given to him for deliberation. In the
mean time he may fix on a man who is rich enough to pay him a
sufficient bribe to be excused of the charge, and if so he confesses
that the fetish has failed.
In the central regions of Eastern Africa all that is sacerdotal is
embodied in individuals called Mganga or Mfumbo. They swarm
throughout the land; are of both sexes: the women, however,
generally confine themselves to the medical part of the profession.
The profession is hereditary; the eldest or the cleverest son begins
his education at an early age, and succeeds to his father’s functions.
There is little mystery, says Burton, in the craft, and the magicians of
Unyamwezi have not refused to initiate some of the Arabs. The
power of the Mganga is great; he is treated as a sultan, whose word
is law, and as a giver of life and death. He is addressed by a kingly
title, and is permitted to wear the chieftain’s badge, made of the base
of a conical shell. He is also known by a number of small greasy and
blackened gourds filled with physic and magic hanging round his
waist, and by a little more of the usual grime, sanctity and dirt being
closely connected in Africa. These men are sent for from village to
village, and receive as spiritual fees sheep and goats, cattle and
provisions. Their persons, however, are not sacred, and for criminal
acts they are punished like other malefactors. The greatest danger to
them is an excess of fame. A celebrated magician rarely, if ever, dies
a natural death; too much is expected from him, and a severe
disappointment leads to consequences more violent than usual.
The African phrase for a man possessed is ana’p’hepo, he has a
devil. The Mganga is expected to heal the patient by expelling the
possession. Like the evil spirit in the days of Saul, the unwelcome
visitant must be charmed away by sweet music; the drums cause
excitement, the violent exercise expels the ghost. The principal
remedies are drumming, dancing, and drinking till the auspicious
moment arrives. The ghost is then enticed from the body of the
possessed into some inanimate article which he will condescend to
inhabit. This, technically called a Keti or stool, may be a certain kind
of bead, two or more bits of wood bound together by a strip of
snake’s skin, a lion’s or a leopard’s claw, and other similar articles
worn round the head, the arm, the wrist, or the ankle. Paper is still
considered great medicine by the Wasukuma and other tribes, who
will barter valuable goods for a little bit: the great desideratum of the
charm in fact appears to be its rarity, or the difficulty of obtaining it.
Hence also the habit of driving nails into and hanging rags upon
trees. The vegetable itself is not worshipped, as some Europeans,
who call it the devil’s tree, have supposed; it is merely the place for
the laying of ghosts, where by appending the keti most acceptable to
the spirit, he will be bound over to keep the peace with man. Several
accidents in the town of Zanzibar have confirmed even the higher
orders in their lurking superstition. Mr. Peters, an English merchant,
annoyed by the slaves, who came in numbers to hammer nails and
to hang iron hoops and rags upon a devil’s tree in his court-yard,
ordered it to be cut down, to the horror of all the black beholders.
Within six months five persons died in that house—Mr. Peters, his
two clerks, his cooper, and his ship’s carpenter. Salim bin Raschid, a
half caste merchant, well known at Zanzibar, avers, and his
companions bear witness to his words, that on one occasion, when
travelling northwards from Unyamzembe, the possession occurred to
himself. During the night two female slaves, his companions, of
whom one was a child, fell without apparent cause into the fits which
denote the approach of a spirit. Simultaneously the master became
as one intoxicated; a dark mass—material, not spiritual—entered the
tent, threw it down, and presently vanished, and Salim bin Raschid
was found in a state of stupor, from which he did not recover till the
morning. The same merchant circumstantially related, and called
witnesses to prove, that a small slave boy, who was produced on the
occasion, had been frequently carried off by possession, even when
confined in a windowless room, with a heavy door carefully bolted
and padlocked. Next morning the victim was not found although the
chamber remained closed. A few days afterwards he was met in the
jungle, wandering absently, like an idiot, and with speech too
incoherent to explain what had happened to him. The Arabs of Iman
who subscribe readily to transformation, deride these tales; those of
African blood, believe them. The transformation belief, still so
common in many countries, and anciently an almost universal
superstition, is, curious to say, unknown amongst these East African
tribes.
The Mganga, Mr. Burton further informs us, is also a soothsayer.
He foretels the success, or failure of commercial undertakings, of
wars, and of kidnapping; he foresees famine and pestilence, and he
suggests the means of averting calamities. He fixes also before the
commencement of any serious affair fortunate conjunctions, without
which, a good issue cannot be expected. He directs, expedites, or
delays the march of a caravan; and in his quality of augur, he
considers the flight of birds, and the cries of beasts like his prototype
of the same class, in ancient Europe, and in modern Asia.
 The principal instrument of the Mganga’s craft is one of the dirty
little buyou, or gourds, which he wears in a bunch round his waist,
and the following is the usual programme when the oracle is to be
consulted. The magician brings his implements in a bag of matting;
his demeanour is serious as the occasion, he is carefully greased,
and his head is adorned with the diminutive antelope horns, fastened
by a thong of leather above the forehead. He sits like a sultan, upon
a dwarf stool in front of the querist, and begins by exhorting the
highest possible offertory. No pay no predict. The Mganga has many
implements of his craft. Some prophesy by the motion of berries
swimming in a cup full of water, which is placed upon a low stool,
surrounded by four tails of the zebra, or the buffalo, lashed to stakes
planted upright in the ground. The Kasanda is a system of folding
triangles, not unlike those upon which plaything soldiers are
mounted. Held in the right hand, it is thrown out, and the direction of
the end points to the safe and auspicious route; this is probably the
rudest appliance of prestidigitation. The shero is a bit of wood, about
the size of a man’s hand, and not unlike a pair of bellows, with a
dwarf handle, a projection like a muzzle, and in a circular centre a
little hollow. This is filled with water, and a grain, or fragment of wood
placed to float, gives an evil omen if it tends towards the sides, and
favourable if it veers towards the handle or the nozzle. The Mganga
generally carries about with him, to announce his approach, a kind of
rattle. This is a hollow gourd of pine-apple, pierced with various
holes prettily carved, and half filled with maize grains, and pebbles;
the handle is a stick passed through its length, and secured by
cross-pins.
The Mganga has many minor duties. In elephant hunts he must
throw the first spear, and endure the blame if the beast escapes. He
marks ivory with spots disposed in lines and other figures, and thus
enables it to reach the coast, without let or hindrance. He loads the
kirangoze, or guide, with charms to defend him from the malice
which is ever directed at a leading man, and sedulously forbids him
to allow precedence even to the Mtongi, the commander and
proprietor of the caravan. He aids his tribe by magical arts, in wars
by catching a bee, reciting over it certain incantations, and loosing it
in the direction of the foe, when the insect will instantly summon an
army of its fellows and disperse a host however numerous. This
belief well illustrates the easy passage of the natural into the
supernatural. The land being full of swarms, and man’s body being
wholly exposed, many a caravan has been dispersed like chaff
before the wind by a bevy of swarming bees. Similarly in South
Africa the magician kicks an ant-hill, and starts wasps which put the
enemy to flight.
Here is an account of a queer dance witnessed in this land of
Mgangas and Mfumbos and fetishes, furnished by the celebrated
explorer Bakie:—“A little before noon Captain Vidal took leave of
King Passol, in order to prosecute his observations. I remained, but
shortly afterwards prepared to leave also. Passol, however, as soon
as he perceived my intention, jumped up, and in a good-humoured
way detaining me by the arm, exclaimed, ‘No go, no go yet; ‘top a
little; bye-bye you look im fetish dance; me mak you too much laugh!’
It appeared that the old man had heard me some time before, on
listening to the distant tattoo of a native drum, express a
determination to the young midshipman who was with me to go
presently to see the dance, with which I had little doubt that it was
accompanied. The noise of the drum, almost drowned by the
singing, whooping, and clamour of a multitude of the natives, was
soon heard approaching. When close to us the procession stopped,
and the dancers, all of whom were men, ranged themselves in
parallel lines from the front of an adjoining house, and commenced
their exhibition. They were specially dressed for the purpose, having
suspended from their hips a complete kilt formed of threads of grass-
cloth, manufactured by the natives of the interior, and likewise an
appendage of the same kind to one or both arms, just above the
elbow. Some had their faces and others their breasts marked with
white balls, given to them by the fetish as a cure or safeguard
against some disease which they either had or dreaded. The
dancing, although not elegant, was free from that wriggling and
contortion of body so common on the east coast. It consisted
principally in alternately advancing and drawing back the feet and
arms, together with a corresponding inclination of the body, and, at
stated times, the simultaneous clapping of hands, and a loud sharp
ejaculation of ‘Heigh!’ Although I have remarked that it was not
elegant, yet it was pleasing, from the regularity with which it was
accompanied. There were two men who did not dance in the line
among the rest, but shuffled around, and at times threaded the
needle among them: one was termed the master fetish, and the
other appeared to be his attendant; neither wore the fancy dress, but
they were both encircled by the usual wrapper round the loins. The
former had on a French glazed hat, held in great request by the
natives, and the other, chewing some root of a red colour, carried a
small ornamented stick, surmounted at the end like a brush with a
bunch of long and handsome feathers. At times one of these men
would stop opposite a particular individual among the dancers, and
entice him by gestures to leave the line and accompany him in his
evolutions, which finally always ended where they began, the
pressed man returning to his former place. For some time I had
observed the master fetish dancing opposite to the house, and with
many gesticulations apparently addressing it in a half threatening
half beseeching tone. Old Passol, who was standing close by me,
suddenly exclaimed, ‘Now you laugh too much; fetish he come!’
“Sure enough, forthwith rushed from the house among the
dancers a most extraordinary figure. It was a man mounted on stilts
at least six feet above the ground, of which from practice he had
acquired so great a command that he certainly was as nimble in his
evolutions as the most active among the dancers. He was
sometimes so quick that one stilt could hardly be seen to touch the
earth before it was relieved by the other. Even when standing still he
often balanced himself so well as not to move either stilt for the
space of two or three minutes. He wore a white mask with a large
red ball on each cheek, the same on his chin, and his eyebrows and
the lower part of his nose were painted with the same colour. Over
his forehead was a sort of vizor of a yellow colour, having across it a
line of small brass bells; it was armed in front by long alligator’s
teeth, and terminated in a confused display of feathers, blades of
grass, and the stiff hairs of elephants and other large animals. From
the top of his head the skin of a monkey hung pendant behind,
having affixed to its tail a wire and a single elephant’s hair with a
large sheep’s bell attached to the end. The skin was of a beautiful
light green, with the head and neck of a rich vermilion. From his
shoulders a fathom of blue dungaree with a striped white border
hung down behind; and his body and legs and arms were completely
enshrouded in a number of folds of the native grass-cloth, through
which he grasped in each hand a quantity of alligator’s teeth, lizard’s
skins, fowl’s bones, feathers, and stiff hairs, reminding me strongly of
the well-known attributes of Obi, the dread of the slave-owners of
Jamaica.
“The fetish never spoke. When standing still he held his arms
erect, and shook and nodded his head with a quick repetition; but
when advancing he extended them to their full length before him. In
the former case he appeared as if pointing to heaven, and
demanding its vengeance on the dancers and the numerous
bystanders around; and in the latter as one who, finding his
exhortations of no avail, was resolved to exterminate, in the might of
his gigantic stature and superior strength, the refractory set. The
master fetish was his constant attendant, always following, doubling,
and facing him, with exhortations uttered at one minute in the most
beseeching tone, accompanied hat in hand by obsequious bows,
and in the next threatening gestures, and violent, passionate
exclamations. The attendant on the master fetish was likewise
constantly at hand, with his stick applied to his mouth, and in one or
two instances when the masquerader approached, he crouched
close under him, and squirted the red juice of the root he was
chewing into his face. For upwards of an hour I watched the dance,
yet the fetish appeared untired; and I afterwards heard that the same
ceremony was performed every day, and sometimes lasted three or
four hours. I at first thought that it was merely got up for our
amusement, but was soon undeceived; and when, under the first
impression, I inquired of a bystander what man it was who performed
the character, he answered, with a mixture of pique at the question
and astonishment of my ignorance, ‘He no man; no man do same as
him; he be de diable! he be de debil!’ Still I was a little sceptic as to
their really holding this belief themselves, though they insisted on the
fact as they represented it to me; and therefore, after I had received
the same answer from all, I used to add in a careless way to try their
sincerity, ‘In what house does he dwell?’ ‘What! fetish! I tell you he
de debil; he no catch house; he lib (live) in dat wood,’ pointing to a
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