Boadicea onstage before 1800, a Theatrical and Colonial History

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Summer, 2009 by Wendy C. Nielsen

Wendy C. Nielsen, Boadicea Onstage before 1800, a Theatrical and Colonial History

This essay examines the theatrical legacy of Boadicea, the British warrior queen defeated by the Romans around 61 AD, in three plays: John Fletcher's The Tragedy of Bonduca, or the British Heroine and two unrelated dramas titled Boadicea by Charles Hopkins and Richard Glover. Performance histories attempt to explain why audiences respond to Boadicea with ambivalence. Each production underplays the defeated queen and gives starring roles to one or more of her daughters and a male lead, who contrast with Boadicea's supposed brutality and provide British audiences with lessons about ways to rule in an ostensibly civilized fashion.

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Immortalized by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1864, Boadicea, the British warrior queen who led an army against the Romans around 61 A. D., was celebrated by Victorians in a variety of media. In several closet dramas, for instance, Boadicea stars as an appropriately Victorian figure, a caring mother defending her brood against foreign invasion. (1) In visual culture, a statue of Boadicea and her Daughters (1856-71) by Thomas Thornycraft graces Westminster Bridge facing Parliament. (2) Before enjoying such austere Victorian privileges, however, Boadicea proved an enticing though problematic subject for onstage dramas, one that spelled failure in short-lived productions. Yet she inspired several reimaginings of her role as a figure at once resisting empire (the Romans) and embodying British expansionism. This essay will examine the shifting representations of Boadicea--from beleaguered mother to barbaric warrior--in a number of plays staged between 1600 and 1800. It will ask how far we may proceed in assigning nationalistic impulses to Boadicea for each of her British audiences. Various seventeenth-and eighteenth-century observers note that Boadicea is either chastised too much or too little, and at the very least, she represents an unconventional version of femininity to the audiences of the time, which is perhaps the reason critics disagree so radically on her treatment. In other words, Boadicea does not really work as a national icon because she evokes too many contentions for British audiences, who appear to react with typical canniness to this ambivalent figure. It is nonetheless curious that writers who dramatize the end of Boadicea's life turn out to be so heavily invested in the colonial projects of Greater Britain.

Significantly, the voice of this monument comes from a Romantic poet well-known for the mock-heroic mode, William Cowper; lines from Boadicea: An Ode (1782) accompany the aforementioned statue (erected following victory in the Second Anglo-Boer War) and seem to legitimize empire: "Regions Caesar never knew, / Thy posterity shall sway." (3) Some recent authors claim that Boadicea allegorizes this kind of expansionist brand of nationalism. According to Vanessa Collingridge, Boadicea becomes popular in the eighteenth century because she embodies national pride. (4) Boadicea's "'story' could be made to fit as an allegory or celebration of British (that is, largely English) nationalism, while the background of Roman imperialism fitted nicely with Britain's own expanding empire in the Americas. Together, the two ancient cultures of Britain and Rome gave strength and depth to a developing pride in modern English culture." (5) However, performance history complicates the association of this figure with English patriotism. For, in fact, audiences abroad did not seem to reject dramas such as Boadicea, or the Queen of the Celts, which succeeded in New York in 1849, only months before the Astor Place Riot, when anti-British sentiment flared following William Charles Macready's feud with the American actor Edwin Forrest. (6) Moreover, another anonymous play was published in New York in 1860, presumably for an American audience. (7) So it is not at all clear, as Marilyn Gaull points out, how Boadicea comes "to represent British nationalism, and a permanent rebuke to the Roman invaders, any invaders, or the declining fortunes of the British empire." (8)

In performance, Boadicea generally fares poorly, a trend that continues in televised productions. (9) Carolyn D. Williams suggests that "only by quitting the stage could [Boadicea] become a national institution," a claim that has some merit, given the longevity of this figure in poems, closet dramas, and sculpture. (10) Yet, as I hope to show, Boadicea's status as "a national institution" is questionable. Plays about Boadicea sometimes made timely responses to national crises, but on the whole they never achieved lasting success. The manager of Drury Lane, David Garrick, starred in Richard Glover's Boadicea play in 1753 (11) and Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin brought at least two pantomimes about Boadicea to Sadler's Wells and the Royal Circus in the years around 1800. (12) However, George Colman's July 1778 revival of John Fletcher's tragedy (ca. 1612) on this subject remains the most enduring adaptation because it resonated with audiences during the so-called invasion scare. (13) In contrast to tradition, this summer production considered women-at-arms in a semiserious manner. Normally, actresses played women in breeches for comedies and farces. Dorothy Jordan (1761-1816) made her career through such roles: Viola in Twelfth Night, Priscilla Tomboy in The Romp, Hippolita in She Wou'd and She Wou'd Not, and the schoolboy Little Pickle in the farce, The Spoiled Child, a part for which she was long remembered. (14) Nonetheless, in an audience's laughter at caricatures or even failure to respond to plays, we can perhaps better understand social and cultural taboos. As Daniel O'Quinn suggests in his recent study of imperialism in late-eighteenth-century London theater, in times of national crisis the theater can be read along the lines of "autoethnographic acts," meaning the ways in which plays co-author fictions about national identity. (15)