Rowe's Fair Penitent as Global History: Or, a diversionary voyage to New South Wales

Abstract

Scholars from Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown to Mita Choudhury and Joseph Roach have documented the complex ways that eighteenth-century drama reflected and intervened in Britain's overseas expansion and materialized its transoceanic flows. But what do we do with plays that, although performed wherever the British dared to tread, were not "about" empire in any sense? This essay will explore the global fate and meanings of one such play, Nicholas Rowe's Fair Penitent, tracking its performance from England to Jamaica, Calcutta and New South Wales. In these colonial sites, the theatricality of colonial power, the counter-theatre of the enslaved, the indigenous and the incarcerated, and the performativity of English theatre, converged to make Rowe's she-tragedy a remarkable index of local power struggles and a contested carrier of the values of Englishness itself. One could say that this study demonstrates an early example of the working of the "capitalist machine" of empire, whereby English theatre and social performance collided to "deterritorialize" foreign lands in order to "reterritorialize" them as British possessions. Or one could say more simply that the global fate of Rowe's distinctly unrepentant heroine eloquently exemplifies how culture travels, and how it is transformed.

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