Though the genre of Ponteach seems very much of the early eighteenth century, for many readers its language echoes Shakespeare, whose work would almost necessarily be an influence for a less-experienced playwright. Shakespeare’s plays were among the most produced and most popular of the day. As Charles Beecher Hogan documents, approximately one-sixth of all plays staged in London in the eighteenth century were by Shakespeare (2: 715), and in colonial America, Romeo and Juliet was the most-performed play and Richard III was the third most popular. The second most popular play was George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Strategem, from which Rogers borrows the tune to ‘Over the Hills and Far Away.’ These plays were not all identical to the Shakespeare that we know today: many were cut down, edited for specific emphases, or even entirely rewritten (perhaps most notoriously in Nahum Tate’s happy-ending King Lear). Particularly between the 1740s and 1760s, ‘the new alterations of Shakespeare which prosper … present a domestic Shakespeare who is at the same time eminently patriotic, identified at once with virtuous family life, vigorous trade, and British glory’ (Dobson 187). As Jean Marsden points out, by the later century, ‘managers, actors, and playwrights actively sought to evoke the experience of sympathy, and, increasingly, audiences came to the theater expecting not only to be spectators of distress but to be able to identify personally with the distresses they witnessed’ (29). And so the combination of high heroics and human identification that I will argue is so central to the political implication of Ponteach also links to Rogers’ attempt to meet contemporary audience desires and contemporary ideas of great dramatic art, embodied in the ‘bardolatry’ (Hudson ‘Vexed’ 44) of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. Throughout the play there is evidence of Shakespeare’s influence: the Romeo and Juliet qualities of the lovers from opposing tribes in Chekitan and Monelia; in Ponteach’s King Lear-like speeches near the end of the play, and in the plot of a parent betrayed by an overambitious and immoral child; in Ponteach’s occasional associations with Othello’s efforts to negotiate a foreign system that both grants him status and constantly holds over him the threat of denying that status. These are only the first of many examples of the importance of Shakespeare to Rogers’ notion of playwriting, dramatic language, the tragic, and the heroic, but they will suffice to demonstrate the debt.
Among all of these disparate authorial and generic models and audience expectations, the most direct literary precursor of Ponteach still seems not to be Lear or Othello or Cato, but Oroonoko, the African prince created by Aphra Behn in 1688 and brought most famously to the stage by Thomas Southerne in 1695. Oroonoko is a prince, tricked into slavery by the slick language and bald-faced lies of an English captain. Though he is later treated well and has his status recognized by his English owner (within the framework of slavery, of course), he is driven by the pregnancy of his wife Imoinda24 to lead a rebellion to attempt to free the next generation of slaves. The rebellion is unsuccessful, partly because those fighting for him lack his noble bravery, and partly because he mitigates his actions because he is unwilling to kill the English randomly. In Behn’s version, Oroonoko fulfils the request of his pregnant wife that he kill her (rather than see her ravaged by the English and their child left a slave); he is then captured, tortured, and dismembered by the English. In Southerne’s version, Imoinda kills herself when Oroonoko cannot do it; Oroonoko then kills the corrupt governor and stabs himself, and the final word is delivered by the representative good Englishman, Blanford:
I hope there is a place of happiness
In the next world for such exalted virtue.
Pagan or unbeliever, yet he lived
To all he knew. And if he went astray
There’s mercy still above to set him right.
But Christians guided by the heavenly ray
Have no excuse if we mistake our way. (V v)
The nobility of the leader of a rebellion, the blank verse form (at least in Southerne’s tragic main plot), the dangers of taking the English at face value (and of using their language), and the problematization of Christianity all recur in the most famous plays of the eighteenth century on African and American Indian rebellion.25 There are obvious differences too, but since the Oroonoko narrative was widely referenced in the eighteenth-century anti-slavery movement, with new dramatic adaptations in 1759, 1760, and 1788,26 its potential as a source text is substantial. Further, the use of Oroonoko as a touchstone in the larger debate on race, humanity, and power provides evidence for the possibility of a Rogers’ seeking some sort of public political effect from Ponteach beyond what he certainly also hoped would be profitable dramatic biography.
PONTEACH, OR THE SAVAGES OF AMERICA: A TRAGEDY
While Ponteach clearly tries to appeal to the trends and values of eighteenth-century theatre, it does so from a uniquely historicized position. Rogers’ personal observation of the conflicts between Indigenous and colonial cultures, and his individual interactions with the historical Pontiac, provide a foundation for a distinctly atypical dramatic representation of race, heroism, and violence. Rogers’ play is highly unusual for the time in its sympathetic portrayal of Ponteach and the circumstances faced by his people. Ponteach offers detailed criticisms of colonial policy and very lightly veiled attacks on individual historical figures, such as Fort Detroit commandant Major Henry Gladwin’s apparent embodiment in the acid-tongued Governor Sharp. A critique of dehumanization and cultural eradication can only be powerful, however, if the objects of cultural construction and destruction are established as undeniably human to begin with, rather than accepted as mere ciphers or passive tools for paeans to European enlightenment. As Linda Colley points out, ‘From the beginning of settlement through to the Revolution of 1776 and beyond, the people called Indians were integral to how men and women in early modern Britain perceived that part of their empire that was America’ (Captives 140) and, equally importantly, that this triangulation of identities was critical in the construction of contemporary ideas of nation and the national identity of the Briton.
Throughout Ponteach, ideas of identity, especially in terms of race, are constituted through language, often specifically through discourses of gender. This allows established power hierarchies to be taken as given, insofar as that which is feminized is devalued, even at times rendered less than human. The gendered fluidity given to racial difference by several of the play’s characters shifts male to female and equates Algonquian identities with weakness and failure. Though such parallels were not likely foremost in Rogers’ own mind, the play offers intriguing insights into the relationship between race and gender in the ongoing development of the identity of colonial America.27
The depiction of Indigenous characters in Rogers’ play replicates – perhaps consciously, perhaps not – the convention that widely accepted European constructions of gender function as one of the naturalized foundations for the linguistic and social construction of racial difference. This construction of race, in turn, is the foundation for inappropriate and perhaps dangerous political and social policy in Rogers’ understanding of colonial conflict. The agonies on all sides created by Pontiac’s Rebellion are written here not as collateral damage from military might, but as the inescapable outcome of policy based upon a badly constructed and misperceived identity. Rogers recognizes remarkably early that the futures of several nations are grounded in language, performance, and negotiated fictions. In the early days of not-yet-America, Ponteach reaches conclusions very similar to those that were not explicitly articulated until much later by modern historians like Robert Berkhofer and Richard White: much conflict was the perhaps unavoidable result of ‘the stories these various peoples invented about each other. Both sides had no choice but to respond to the version of themselves the other side invented, and in responding they blurred the line between invention and actuality, between the people who existed in the minds of others and those who acted on their own behalf, between objects and subjects’ (White, ‘Fictions’ 64). The importance of fictions of the Other in t
imes of conflict had, of course, been recognized and dramatized from at least Shakespeare’s history plays onward (and with particular relevance in Othello, for example, and Southerne’s Oroonoko). Not least because of his first-hand experience in such conflicts, however, Rogers’ staging of the performative nature of racialized identity adds another element: in Ponteach, Rogers seeks first to establish the authority inherent in his personal knowledge of North America and its people,28 and to then problematize what he sees as the dangerous misreadings of constructed racial identities by others with less knowledge but more social, political, and economic standing.
Rogers’ dramatization conveys to a broad English audience the political complexity of the Seven Years’ War in America, given Ponteach’s assertion that though the French had been defeated (whom Pontiac had supported in the war and who had supplied the Ottawas with weapons to fight the English), the Indigenous people had not been conquered, and they still claimed sovereignty over the land and independence from the Europeans:29 ‘Think you, because you have subdu’d the French, / That Indians too are now become your Slaves? / This Country’s mine, and here I reign as King’ (I iii). Rogers’ fictionalization of Pontiac and his rebellion is set after the meeting described in Concise Account, in which the Ottawa sachem responded to exactly the sort of gestures of disrespect Rogers warns against in his historical account and that he renders so explicitly in the first act of his play.
More importantly, Rogers writes both historical subjectivity and allegory, recognizing the importance of each for his revisionist version of the grand colonial narrative. As I will argue in the following pages, Ponteach is offered historical subjectivity; the Mohawk princess Monelia is his allegory. The play in some ways functions as a metadramatic embodiment of the pattern of ambivalent colonial mimicry that is so central to Rogers’ depiction: it is a text about the conquest of the Ottawas by the colonists, and as such is, of course, a reflection of the great colonial mythologies of conversion and civilization. But making Pontiac the central consciousness in the depiction of that ostensibly universally recognized narrative leaves it ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha, ‘Mimicry’ 126; original emphasis) – a near perfect reflection of the privileged cultural narrative, but one that recognizes its inversion in a clear assertion of ambivalence. As Homi Bhabha explains, mimicry is ‘the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both “normalized” knowledges and disciplinary powers’ (‘Mimicry,’ 126).
Bhabha’s concept of mimicry is typically applied to a situation in which Indigenous writers in a colonized culture mimic the colonizers’ discourse, and it is not conventionally operated by writers from the colonizing culture. That said, Rogers’ Ponteach is clearly written as a document of resistance, existing both within and outside of the dominant British culture. Rogers himself occupied an oddly marginal position in transatlantic British culture: born in North America, he is outside Britain, and yet is often on the fringe of (or even firmly rejected by) agencies of official authority in America. Rogers’ perspective thus originates from shifting affiliative ground, his own voice hybridized by a lifetime spent in sites where no single discourse was entirely dominant, at the fringes of empire, but firmly surrounded by Indian cultures and modes of authority. Susan Castillo terms such figures ‘Creole settlers’ who move ‘between identifications with the European colonizing power and the native, alternately invoking and suppressing the indigenous components of it symbolic economy’ (198).
The ‘double vision’ of Ponteach’s Creole colonial mimicry, ‘which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (Bhabha, ‘Mimicry’ 129), is articulated throughout the play, but in terms of Ponteach’s characterization as historical subject, the play’s first three acts make explicit that his actions are neither simple nor natural, but enforced upon him by the acts of dishonest traders, murderous hunters, and negligent, embezzling administrators. Rogers’ play uses a language of metaphor (the same, but not) to assert categorically that Ponteach is not an example of the natural man or noble savage, but rather the product of a compulsory savagism imposed upon him by the negotiated fictions of a prescriptive culture that, in defining itself as superior, required that resistance be located in acts outside of its social and linguistic control, limiting others to marginal speech and acts of violence or other extremity.
This play, though, is very explicitly not just about Pontiac the man, but at several points directly articulates the connection between the private and public realms between which Ponteach/Pontiac moves in the play and in history. The traders’, soldiers’, and governors’ serial gestures of disrespect in the first act demand a violent response because Rogers writes their actions to be emblematic of the larger political treatment of Indigenous North Americans. The play’s depiction of racial conflicts that are relatively small and personal allow easier comprehension by a European audience trained on heroic drama and conventional tragedy: it is much more possible to identify with humiliation and betrayal on that scale than on the scale of the attempts at cultural eradication that Rogers witnessed in person and records in the play.30 The fundamental implication of Rogers’ staging of the motivations behind Pontiac’s conspiracy is very much the early recognition that the personal is indeed political.
This twentieth-century truism is articulated in eighteenth-century terms at several points through the play, most significantly in the scene where several sachems meet in a war council.31 Ponteach asserts that
’Tis better thus to die than be despis’d;
Better to die than be a Slave to Cowards,
Better to die than see my Friends abus’d;
The Aged scorn’d, the Young despis’d and spurn’d.
Better to die than see my Country ruin’d.
His adviser Tenesco reasserts the necessary equation between private acts of disrespect and larger acts of cultural violence as he notes the need to challenge ‘Their Pride and Insults, Knavery and Frauds, / Their large Encroachments on our common Rights … What calls on us more loudly for Revenge, / Is their Contempt and Breach of public Faith.’ Tenesco ends his speech with, ‘Wrongs like these are national and public, / Concern us all, and call for public Vengeance.’ To which Ponteach’s fictionalized son Phillip tellingly replies, ‘Public or private Wrongs, no matter which’ (III iii).
By politicizing so explicitly the personal experience of Ponteach, Rogers’ play removes itself from the sphere of the constructed noble savage, allowing its protagonist to be bitterly angry at the English; treacherous in his plotting to ‘reign alone’ over all of the Indian tribes once the colonists have been driven off by the confederacy’s collective might;32 monstrous in his willingness to torture the innocent; and greedy in his decision to save them only for future ransoms. Rogers’ Ponteach is not Rousseau’s pure natural man,33 but a complex human character driven to horrific acts by deceits and manipulations great and small that are the more debilitating because, as one of the better-known Indigenous leaders of his day, Pontiac’s personal humiliations are witnessed and borne by all of his people. Had it been widely staged, Rogers’ play might have been the first devastatingly human representation of the colonial agenda to audiences who, more or less accepting the myths of noble generosity or animalized savages needing civilization, did not fully fathom the human costs of their beaver hats and tobacco.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, ethnographic information on Indigenous cultures was fairly widely available in sources ranging in accuracy from the informed first-person accounts of The Jesuit Relations (1610–73),34 for example, in French and Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations (1747) in English, to innumerable scurrilous knockoffs like Ned Ward’s A Trip to New Eng
land, a detailed first-person travel and ethnographic account cobbled together from previously published accounts: Ward had never set foot on North American soil. As Benjamin Bissell’s old, but still useful overview of English accounts of North American Indians puts it, ‘Taken together, these works constitute a very large bulk of printed matter, a curious mixture of fact and fiction regarding the Indian’s character, customs, and mode of life: sometimes correct observations exaggerated or misunderstood; sometimes novel theories, showing the writer’s imagination or ingenious fancy’ (12). Though accurate sources were available, more widely read outside of political circles were the necessarily short accounts in popular media like The Spectator and The Gentleman’s Magazine,35 and the generally highly fictionalized and often lurid and extremely violent accounts of captivity narratives from America.36 In between fall contemporary novels such as Charles Jonstone’s popular Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea (1760), in which a section on Sir William Johnson offers both some reasonably accurate information and some egregious exaggeration of Indigenous sexual practice, and Tobias Smollett’s later Humphrey Clinker (1771), with its interpolated captivity narrative. Several less financially successful novels also offered fictionalized accounts around the same time, including the pseudonymous Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (1767) and Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1769).
Ponteach, or the Savages of America Page 5
