4/26: QUESTIONS FOR CAROL


-- I'm trying to understand the differences in attitudes (toward empire, colonialization, non-white peoples) between when these plays were written (1660s-80s) and 1710 when they were presented for the "Four Kings". What has changed? Do audiences see these plays differently in 1710? Help!

-- Why did Southerne make Imoinda white (a change which was criticized at the time)?

-- Surely the fact of King Philip's War (1675) changed how English viewed Iroquois, and how they viewed Indians. ["The war proved a critical turning point by destroying the interdependent world constructed jointly by white colonists and Native Americans and replacing it with a new culture in which native peoples were marginalized and the white settlers were dominant." (Wikipedia entry)]

Doesn't this view contradict Roach's idea of negotiation between "equals" (visit as Condolence Council) and an alliance against the French? Or does it?

-- In Southerne's Oroonoko, no one seems upset by the fact of a white slave (Imoinda). Why not?

-- How is the tension between aristocratic (Tory) contempt for mercantilism and greed (especially regarding slave trade) and desire for empire/pride in British identity playing into view of Africans/Indians and identity as White/English? In other words, what values are associated with English/White identity? As represented by whom? Is this tension between the idealistic and pragmatic/commercial values something that has been bequeathed to us today in terms of White identity/privilege? (duh!) Who won? Am I oversimplifying? (again: duh!)

-- What about this idea of the threat posed by colonists changing sense of identity reflected in plays? Image of slave trader and planters, for sure; otherwise?

-- Reading The Indian Emperour, I was really struck by the scene (4.1) in which Cortez is imprisoned and in chains and Almeria comes to murder him but cannot in the face of his absolute equanimity; instead, she falls in love with him. What a strange scene! Cortez does nothing but lie there and say, "I cannot feare so faire an Enemy," and Almeria is stopped in her tracks. She asks, "Whence can thy Courage come?" and he answers only, "From innocence." He is absolutely virtuous.
Along these lines, I'm wondering if there is something in the nature of Dryden's heroes, and in their connection to the libertine, which could be central to the developing sense of English identity during the Restoration (I sound like I know what I'm talking about...) I'm getting this from the introduction to John Dryden: Four Tragedies (1967, Beaurline and Bowers, eds.) in which the editors say that Dryden adapts the earlier English and continental hero "... to Restoration times and [depicts] him as a natural man who prized his freedom and self-respect above all things. That strain of primitivism was woven through contemporary libertine thought, and it was manifest in comedies of the age." They go on to cite contemporary ridicule of Dryden for making gallants into heroes. Then--I'm happy to say, because I read this after being knocked out by the prison scene--they discuss Cortez and the prison scene, and conclude that the virtue he shows in this scene (by remaining true to his first love, Cydaria, and honest with Almeria in the face of both his imminant death and her professed love) is repeated in subsequent scenes until "He wins both power and beauty, demonstrating that independence and truth to an inner code of natural virtue are finally consistent with power and public virtue."
So: Does Dryden's portrayal of this kind of hero (and the continued popularity of this and similar plays) reflect an attempt by the English to justify all the benefits gained through what they also seem to perceive as rapacious colonial mercantilism? Is it their attempt to have their cake and eat it too? How are our attempts to justify (and/or be blind to) White privilege similar to these earlier attempts? Are we doing the same thing, and, if so, are we re-producing, re-performing, the same behavior? Or am I being entirely too simplistic?