Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Spring 1997 v37 n2 p277(17)

Ben Jonson's 'Civil Savages.' Bach, Rebecca Ann.

Abstract: An analysis of Ben Jonson's plays, 'Bartholomew Fair' and 'The New Inn,' is presented. These plays were written at the time when the English were colonizing Virginia. The study focused on the changes and resistances to changes in the Indian cultures the English were confronting in Virginia. Both plays explicitly demonstrated English savagery as manifested in the form of drunkeness, lewdness, dialect, tobacco smoking, cozening and the need for aristocratic control.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 Rice University

Seagull. Come boys, Virginia longs till we share the rest of her Maiden-head.

Spendall. Why is she inhabited already with any English?

Sea. A whole Country of English is there man, bred of those that were left there in 79. They have married with the Indians, and make them bring forth as beautiful faces as any we have in England: and therefore the Indians are so in love with them, that all the treasure they have, they lay at their feet.

Scapthrift. But is there such treasure there Captain, as I have heard?

Sea. I tell thee, Gold is more plentiful there then Copper is with us.

- Eastward Hoe

Performed for the first time in 1605, after two unsuccessful English attempts at establishing a colony in Virginia, the play from which this essay takes its epigraph, Eastward Hoe, delineates and ridicules contemporary English fantasies about Virginia.(1) Although the authors mean the audience to laugh at the gulls who believe in a land of gold, those fantasies of Virginia, promulgated by early explorers like Sir Walter Ralegh, had as yet no competition. When the Lady Elizabeth's men revived Eastward Hoe for the court in 1615, these lines must have sounded even more ridiculous. Publicity by the Virginia Company had placed the colony firmly in the public imagination and its image had undergone substantial revision. It was now clear not only that Virginia had no gold, but also that the project of settlement would require hard work and would be accomplished, to some extent at least, against the resistance of its original inhabitants. Bartholomew Fair was acted at court the year before the revival of Eastward Hoe, and at that time the English colony in Virginia was surviving, though it was small and struggling. When Ben Jonson wrote The New Inn in 1629, about 3,000 English lived in the rapidly expanding Virginia colony. During the period of time between these two plays whose exploration tropes I focus on here, England was beginning to reconstitute itself in relation to its colonies. The 1620 A declaration of the state of the colonie and affaires in Virginia . . ., one of the many Declarations issued by the Virginia Company over that crucial fifteen-year period, states that the colony "hath as it were on a sodaine growne to double that height, strength, plenty, and property which it had in former times attained."(2) In those fifteen years England had become a colonial power outside of its contiguous empire in Ireland.(3) Jonson's plays helped to establish a growing English consciousness of an imperial identity.

New Historical investigations of the interconnections between colonial discourse and theatrical productions in early modern England have revealed strong affinities between these two types of representation. The most powerful models discern a particular cultural tendency or discursive mode operating across these genres. England or France thus "rehearses," in Steven Mullaney's terms, the "words and ways of marginal or alien cultures" as a preface to absorbing them and eradicating their independence; similarly Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV performs the marginal culture represented by Falstaff and his crew as he prepares to cast it off.(4) For Stephen Greenblatt, the radical skepticism displayed in Thomas Hariot's dealings with the Virginia Indians reinforces rather than undermines his project of domination, just as Henry V and the two parts of Henry IV "confirm the Machiavellian hypothesis that princely power originates in force and fraud even as they draw their audience toward an acceptance of that power."(5) Ben Jonson's plays do not offer a singular model of the workings of colonial power. Rather Bartholomew Fair and The New Inn reveal the transformations of colonial discourse at a time when conceptions of the project of English settlement in Virginia were rapidly moving from the fantasized abundance of Eastward Hoe to the strenuous creation of a new home for English men and women. Jonson's plays also reveal the reciprocal influence between theatrical production and Virginia Company propaganda. As the plays model methods of colonial control, they also talk back to propagandistic representations of control.

In this essay, I attempt, as Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler suggest, "to bring metropole and colony into a single analytic field, overcoming the tendency of the one to go out of focus as the other comes in."(6) A comparison of the poet-explorers and their worlds in Bartholomew Fair and The New Inn will reveal the related rhetorics of colonization as playwrighting and colonization as homemaking. Attention to these rhetorics enables us to see England, in Mary Louise Pratt's words, "constructing itself from the outside in, out of materials infiltrated, donated, absorbed, appropriated, and imposed" from its newest "contact zone," Virginia.(7) Finally, in order to understand the metropole and the colony together, I will look at the transformations and resistances to transformations in the Indian cultures the English were encountering in Virginia.

I

To its London audience, Bartholomew Fair offers the fair with its puppets as all the world. The foreign who are colonized in the cast and in the play's Induction's references to England's newest possession - Virginia - signal the fair as England extended, an Imperial England at its birth. According to the play's denigrating Stagekeeper, the play's fair resembles the Virginia colony as much as it resembles London's Smithfield: "When it comes to the fair, once: you were even as good go to Virginia, for any thing there is of Smithfield" (lines 9-10). As much as they despise the Stagekeeper, the Bookholder and Scrivener who displace him also remind us of that resemblance; in the Scrivener's articles for a contract between the audience and author, he offers the audience "censures" in the play, lots of criticism that he compares to the lots that can be bought to support the Virginia project. When he presents Smithfield's puppets in place of The Tempest's "servant-monster," he offers the opportunity to see this Smithfield as critics have so long seen The Tempest's island: as a place to observe England's colonial other.

Bartholomew Fair's induction refers to the lotteries, licensed in 1612, that ran until 1621 and provided the chief support for the Virginia Company's enterprises.(8) The lotteries were in every sense a public project, depending on the broad-based support of audiences like Jonson's, literate and illiterate. The Virginia Company issued at least eleven publications to advertise the lotteries, including the five still extant which are all broadsides, most with simple texts that could easily have been read aloud at inns and other public places. The company depended on lotteries to raise up to [pounds]8,000 a year.(9) The "Standing" lotteries in which a lot cost 2s.6d. did not succeed as well as the less expensive lotteries; however, they were heavily promoted; and that promotion contributed to a widespread public awareness of the Virginia Company's projects. A lot in the "running lottery" that took place in Smithfield, Southwark, and other locations cost twelve pence, twice as much as the cheapest seat at Blackfriars where The New Inn played and probably twelve times as much as the least expensive seat in the Hope where one could have seen Bartholomew Fair; but the smallest prize was two crowns and prizes were as large as 4,500 crowns, a fortune at the time. The price of a lot would have been beyond the means of an apprentice, but not outrageous for many other Londoners, and the lure of such prizes must have attracted many who could not really afford the price. One argument for the suspension of the lotteries was their effect on the budgets of the "common sort." This concern for the "common sort" reveals the extent to which the Virginia lotteries had been successfully promoted in London.

The play's induction implies that its fair will show Jonson's audience what their money supports; even more importantly, it implies that they are already familiar with the colony that the lottery finances. Captain John Smith, writing at the same time about his experiences as a Virginia colonist and colonial leader, represents both the English men in foreign space and the native people he encounters as an English underworld: as criminals, cozeners, gallants, and prostitutes(10) - the denizens of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. Likewise, for Jonson, the metropolis figures the colonized, and behavior toward the colonized figures the metropolis. In Jonson's 1616 play The Devil Is an Ass, Manly remarks of the foolish gallant Fitzdotterel, "Old Afric, and the new America, / With all their fruit of monsters, cannot show / So just a prodigy" (I.v. 8-10). In that play and in Bartholomew Fair, Jonson refers to the "Bermudas," the popular name for London's seventeenth-century red-light district; and in Jonson's "Epistle to Sir Edward Sackville," London's "pirates" "Have their Bermudas, and their straits in the Strand" ("The Underwood," poem 13).(11) The dangerous other-infested areas of London are inscribed as colonial space and vice versa.

Bartholomew Fair explores how one can fashion a clean, controlled metropolitan area in the same manner as a clean, controlled colony. But it also implies that colonial control is impossible. Justice Overdo, who claims that he is a "Columbus; Magellan; or our countryman Drake of latter times," makes an inefficient and incompetent explorer (V.vi.37-8). Overdo finds himself overwhelmed (as his name implies) by the enormity of the otherness he encounters; he cannot properly interpret it and he therefore has no authorial control over it. He hides his identity to make his "discoveries" but is himself mistaken; he "discovers" goodness in the worst of the fair's rogues.(12) This is why his claim to be a famous world traveler is finally laughable.

When Jonson rewrites Bartholomew Fair in 1629 as The New Inn, his revised author figure, the Lord Frampul, is a much more convincing explorer. The host of Jonson's New Inn, "The Light Heart," has seemingly lived two lives. As the play unfolds, he gives two accounts of his past; a past in which he left his family and his role as their patriarch, the Lord Frampul, and assumed the identity of Goodstock the inn's host. Early in the first act, the play's audience hears from the host that, as the tale goes, the Lord Frampul left "to turn puppet-master." His guest Lovel continues the story: "And travel with young Goose the motion man." The host replies: "And lie and live with the gypsies half a year together, from his wife" (I.v. 60-4). According to the host, popular opinion maintains that Frampul ran away with a traveling theater. But the end of the play tells quite a different story. When the host reveals himself to his newly found family he tells his audiences, without disclaiming his old tale, that

I am the Lord Frampul, The cause of all this trouble; I am he Have measured all the shires of England over, Wales and her mountains, seen those wilder nations Of people in the Peak and Lancashire, Their pipers, fiddlers, rushers, puppet-masters, Jugglers, and gypsies, all the sorts of canters And colonies of beggars, tumblers, ape-carriers, For to these savages I was addicted, To search their natures, and make odd discoveries.

(V.v.91-100)

At the beginning of the play we learn that Frampul left to be a puppet-master, at the end that he left to be an explorer - one who observes and discovers the nature of "savages."

As Frampul concludes this revelatory speech, he turns to his newly rediscovered wife and calls her a "she-Mandeville." He implies that he is constitutionally a Mandeville: not a man of the theater at all but an explorer. The mid-fourteenth-century text that bears the name Sir John Mandeville was printed in England six times between 1582 and 1639, the span of time in which the English turned from sporadic adventurers and pirates to determined colonists. Richard Hakluyt's first edition of the Principal Navigations, published in 1589, and Samuel Purchas's collection in 1625, the two major collections of travel and exploration materials issued as propaganda for the early British colonial and exploration efforts, both reprinted Mandeville. Mandeville was the urtraveler; Mary B. Campbell suggests that in his text "Mandeville-the-narrator emerges . . . as a pure wanderer, and travel as an activity in and of itself."(13) The text is a collection of earlier travelers' tales and purely imaginative fictions, but Mandeville's travels were clearly accepted in early modern England as "true travels."(14) Mandeville's Travels became a model for exploration literature and the name Mandeville an iconic name - an explorer, as Jonson's construction suggests. In Jonson's diction "a Mandeville" is a species that can have a female member as well as a male.

Lord Frampul as Mandeville would seem to be a different story from Lord Frampul as motion-man. A puppet-master is not an explorer; to explore and discover is not to run a traveling theater. This discrepancy could be resolved by pointing out that "pipers, fiddlers, rushers, puppet-masters" were among the people of the "wilder nations" that the Mandevillian Frampul has explored. Still, watching or exploring puppet-masters among others is not becoming a puppet-master. Of course the audience first learns of Frampul's adventures merely from Lovel's hearsay. And as Shakespeare reminds his audiences via Rumour's prologue to 2 Henry IV, stories change in transmission; so perhaps the story of Frampul as puppet-master evolved from his association with men of the theater. Such an explanation seems unlikely, however, since Jonson does not give the host an aside designed to put the audience right in the first account, although he has used that device just a few lines previously to inform his audience of Ferret's good guess at Lovel's "mouldy passion" for Frances.

I would argue that we do not need to resolve the two stories, and that indeed Jonson does not need to reconcile the two accounts, because in his late theater Jonson's playwright character is himself the explorer. The space of the theater that Goose the motion-man would inhabit and create is itself the space of the discoverer - it is Mandeville's world. The host's inn, the Light Heart, is the host's theatrical/colonial space; his - and the possessive is crucial here - his England, England's world, his world. Anne Barton notes that "[l]ike the Smithfield of Bartholomew Fair, although in very different ways, the inn at Barnet lays claim to inclusiveness. It provides, as the host himself points out . . . a metaphor for the world":(15)

Where I imagine all the world's a play: The state and men's affairs, all passages Of life, to spring new scenes, come in, go out And shift and vanish; and if I have got A seat to sit at ease here, i' mine inn, To see the comedy; and laugh and chuck At the variety and throng of humours And dispositions that come justling in And out still, as they one drove hence another.

(I.iii.128-36)

Here the host not only gives voice to the topos of theater as world, he also lays claim to that world as a theater that he has constructed and produced: "i' mine inn." What seems merely a banal rehearsal of "all the world's a stage" is also a potent claim to ownership and control of that stage and therefore of the world. The host, who later compares himself to the playwright Jonson,(16) claims that the world he sees in the inn is of his imagination - a play that he has written, even a humors play, Jonson's first form. It is the host's "I" that controls the world as a stage "where I imagine" and "I have got." That "I" then is essentially the same as the "I" that will claim an identity as Mandeville, the "I" addicted to watching savages.

If we unpack the similitude that Barton notes, The New Inn resembles Bartholomew Fair in more than just its assertion of inclusiveness. In fact The New Inn's world/theater can be read as a later version of that other play's world/fair. The host is the puppet-master of his inn/theater/world. In his character Jonson rewrites aspects of a number of characters in Bartholomew Fair: Littlewit, the author of that play's puppet show who leads the way to the fair, and Lanthorn Leatherhead, the motion-man who interprets the puppet play and keeps its tent. And the "he-Mandeville" Lord Frampul, an ultimately triumphant explorer, who has seen the world and brought it home, is a more successful overseer of his Smithfield than Bartholomew Fair's foolish Adam Overdo. And as it rewrites the explorer and playwrights of Bartholomew Fair, The New Inn rewrites the objects of their exploration and the attributes of the earlier play's world. Both the inn and the fair house a stage-Irish character, the prototypical other to England; Bartholomew Fair has the Irish bawd Captain Whit, and The New Inn has the Irish nurse Sheleenien.(17) The earlier play contains as well two characters, Northern and Puppy, perhaps from Lancashire, the Northern England that the Lord Frampul has explored and whose dialects were objects of fun on the London stage. At both the inn and the fair one can indulge, as these foreign characters do, in the wildness of tobacco and drink and quarreling, all vices associated with the colonies in the colonial literature. Like the inn's, Smithfield's denizens take on disguises. Like the fair, the inn contains a theater as well as constituting one: the inn surrounds a central show, the court of love and valor.

At the end of its travels through the fair the audience experiences a puppet show that plays and parodies classic stories of love and friendship. Lovel's performance in the inn's theatrical "court" - platonic disquisitions on the perfect form of true love and the pure reason of true valor - are the exact antitheses of the puppet's rantings on bawdry and sordid betrayal. Love, the puppets say, is a matter of "a pint of sherry" and treading a goose; valor is breaking "heads with a pot." When challenged by Busy, Smithfield's puppets reveal themselves as genderless, while Laetitia-Frank, hired as a player in the host's theater, switches genders so often that she becomes strangely puppet-like.

While the host tells his newly found wife at the play's end that he has "coffined [himself] alive in a poor hostelry" (V.v. 105-6), in actuality he has made that hostelry into a receptacle for the specimens from his explorations. The men in his cellar are the "canters," "gypsies," and "beggars" of his Mandevillean exploits. Sir Glorious Tipto refers to the men in the inn's cellar as both "pioneers" and "mine-men." "Pioneer" certainly signifies here foot soldiers who "march in advance of an army" to dig trenches (OED). The OED mentions also figurative usage of the word at the time of Jonson's play to designate a worker in exploration. Tipto, who is so attracted to the men in the cellar, is also a devotee of anything foreign, especially Spanish. The Spanish signify continually in England's colonial literature as a touchstone. English explorers invoke the Spanish example either as a bad precedent or as the pattern for successful colonization. Like the English in Ireland, the Spanish were never far from England's self-image as colonizers. Surprisingly often, given their current rivalry on the political scene, the Spanish were seen as direct ancestors and models for the English colonial effort. In the 1622 text A declaration of the state of the colony in Virginia, written after the Indian rebellion in Virginia, Edward Waterhouse urges the English to take advantage of the situation: "So the Spaniard made great use for his owne turne of the quarrels and enmities that were amongst the Indians."(18) If the English demonized the Spanish, they also regarded them as successful overseas entrepreneurs who could provide examples for English colonial effort.

Tipto finds in the host's cellar the riff raft associated with the project of exploration. The host calls Tipto's "whoop Barnaby" and his "hoop Trundle," two of the cellar's inhabitants, "his two Tropics" (V.i.30-1). C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson gloss "Tropics" here as "turning points, with a quibble on the two circles of the celestial sphere." But "Tropics" might also signify the two circles of the earthly sphere. Directed by the gypsy Fly, the host's cellar houses Smithfield's underworld, even to its chamberlain (chamber pot) Jordan, a reincarnation of Bartholomew Fair's Jordon Knockem. As Smithfield becomes host to its namesake Bartholomew Cokes, one of the inn's guests is Bartholomew Burst, "citizen, courtier, gamester," now, fittingly, a "merchant adventurer."

But for all its wild inhabitants, for all that his cellar contains the tropical underworld and its adventurers, the inn itself is also almost the host's home. As a later development of Smithfield, The New Inn is a colonial space already almost domesticated. When all the fictional identities in the play's world are exposed in the fifth act, the host has been living there with most of his family. The Lady Frances Frampul, the visitor who exploits the inn as theater, though a little wild and having something of her father's spirit, is really Lord Frampul's eldest daughter; the "boy" pretending to be Frances's sister is really her sister. The drunken Irish woman Sheleenien Thomas, is not Irish at all but instead the Lady Frampul, an English noblewoman whose breeding Jonson assures his readers of in his argument to the play: "a virtuous gentlewoman, Sylly's daughter of the South." This noblewoman begins the play as one of the inn's exotic specimens, and ends as the heimlich wife and mother. Bartholomew Fair's stage-Irish bawd Whit speaks more lines than Sheeleenien Thomas, but Thomas plays a more structurally significant part. Although Overdo invites Whit home along with the other Bartholomew birds at the end of that play, Bartholomew Fair does not indicate that he will reform and be bawd no more. The New Inn explicitly recuperates Sheleenien Thomas as Lady Frampul, and restores her husband and family.

Bartholomew Fair showed a wild space out of doors; the play moves out of a home into the liminality of the market and the fair.(19) Even Littlewit's home, where the play begins, partly belongs to the fair as he has authored the puppet play presumably inside its doors. And the play's final movement into the domesticity of Overdo's home is unconvincing; the audience does not see it happen, and, if it did, that home, populated as it now would be with all the cast of the fair, would no longer look like "home." The play in its first Hope performance took place in the wild - in an amphitheater on the bankside used primarily for bear baiting, stinking of animality as the play's induction notes.(20) The induction draws attention to the smelly theater; then the play brings its audience into the pungent world of the fair and never convincingly escorts it out. The New Inn, in contrast, locates its gypsies below stairs: not only indoors, but also underneath the host's domestic theater. The puppet show of lust and betrayal at the limits of the fair has transformed to a courtly philosophical disquisition on love and honor in the inner gallery upstairs and the play's fifth act convincingly restores the nobility, transforming wildness into comforting and familiar domestic space. The play is set in the removed clean space of the country rather than in dirty London, and it was performed in the costly indoor theater of Blackfriars.

Don Wayne proposes that Bartholomew Fair "acknowledges that a regrounding of the social order [based on the market] is indeed under way in England, and the play offers an account of the principles upon which the new system of social organization will be constituted."(21) Wayne sees that emergent social order as predicated on market principles and contractual obligations rather than the "shared assumptions" of religion. I would add that this new order had everything to do with England's expansion into the world market. The increased capitalization of England and Europe and the encounter with unassimilable difference were transforming the ways in which England itself was viewed. The space of England that required social reorganization materially and in the English psyche was beginning to expand over the oceans. The underworld of London became the Bermudas redeemable by exploration, while Virginia became a new England whose Indian and English inhabitants could be imagined as cozeners. When Jonson rewrote Bartholomew Fair as The New Inn, he reorganized all the resulting exotica into the English family. What did the English man find when he set out as an explorer in imitation of Mandeville but the wonders of London - the exotica of home - these, if not quite assimilable, still comprehensible and controllable. In Bartholomew Fair Jonson displays the market and the colony; in The New Inn he shows his audiences the successful colonization of the same. In the earlier play gentlefolk go out into the revels while in the later the nobility bring their revels indoors and relegate the objects of their interest downstairs.

Jonson marks the space of the fair as the space of the colonies as the space of the theater. Those other to the English are visualized and controlled through the frame of theater in the theater. If we read The New Inn not only as Barton does as a possible nostalgic glance toward Shakespeare's late theatrical practice, but also as a development of Jonson's own theatrical practice, the play becomes the Fair extended. The earlier play's author remained offstage, and the world of the fair remained imperfectly colonized; it had only an Adam Overdo as its Francis Drake, who despite his constant talk of discovery resembles more the ineffectual disguised ruler than an incarnation of a bold adventurer. Frampul on the other hand has authored his play; he has explored and played the "gypsy" and brought the exotic home. In the later play, the host has settled England's others in his inn to watch over them. But those others remain strange and displayed until the metamorphoses of the fifth act make the inn into the host's actual home, the space of the English family. The Irish drinking woman becomes the Lady Frampul. The unruly, addicted, wild woman transforms into the English noblewoman. The New Inn shows strangers collected from the wild who become grafted to the stem of "Goodstock," the English family, as Sheeleenien, a speaker of broken English, a representation of drunken Irish savagery begins to speak as the English noblewoman.

Still for all its gestures toward a home-making out of a space once savage, and for all that the host has mastery over discovery, The New Inn's world remains imperfectly colonized; it remains a testimony to the impossibility of representing the absolute control of alterity to a theater audience itself far from homogeneous. Even in Blackfriars there were cultural differences, and the attractions of disquisitions on godliness were few. At the end of the play the host leaves his theater to the gypsy Fly, and presumably the downstairs revels will move upstairs. The New Inn ends in the bourgeois accommodation, a series of loving marriages, and the establishment of individual homes: the new settlement in early modern England which will also be the possibility of settlement in Virginia. By 1629 the Virginia Company had started to import women into the colony and the colony had started to divide the land into counties. The company realized that Englishmen would come and stay only when the social structure and political structure of the "New World" resembled or could be made to resemble the old.(22) The New Inn ends with the redemption of wildness into civility; but on the English stage, the host leaves the colonial theater to the "civil savage." Despite its Alchemist-like ending, The New Inn appears to have been a failure. Jonson could show the complete conversion of wildness to an ideal Englishness in his masques, but the public stage audience had no patience for such closure. Jon Lemly notes of the play that "in some key respects it resembles a masque."(23) Perhaps The New Inn was too close to a masque to succeed on the stage. The play's last act represents and anticipates an ideal conversion, but the public stage with its demands for improvisation and its love of playing was perhaps not the ideal space for that particular fantasy. As London reimagined itself in terms of its colonies, its public stages could not successfully represent that imagination controlled. The fair, the market, and the colonies were perhaps still too inviting as spectacles.

II

Both Bartholomew Fair and The New Inn show Jonson displaying English "savagery." Witness, they say to their audiences, drunkenness, lewdness, dialect, tobacco smoking, cozening, and the need for aristocratic control; look and you will see not only the Bermuda straits of London, but the larger world, the Bermudas of the "New World" in need of an explorer to settle it in the proper English mode. Jonson's vision of "civil savages" depended on a variety of sources: travelers' histories, Virginia Company propaganda, his audience's understanding of a notion of savagery. When Wasp tells Bartholomew Cokes in Bartholomew Fair that his tenants are "a kind o' civil savages that will part with their children for rattles, pipes and knives" (III.iv.37-8), Jonson's diction draws on and shapes his London audience's notion of their colonial others. Wasp could be quoting from any number of colonial narratives; by 1614 the notion of the savage with no comprehensible notions of value and with an insatiable hunger for trinkets had attained a canonical place in the colonial and exploration literature.(24) Jonson's offhand use of it implies that his public theater audience also knew this topos well.

Since the Virginia Company depended both on a large subscription by its London audience to its lottery and on a continual influx of colonists from the city to Virginia, it needed to generate awareness of its goals and enthusiasm for the project. Unlike his masques, Jonson's representations for the public stage existed in a matrix of representations of the colony and the colonized rather than in line with any official version of the project.(25) During the period in which Jonson wrote for the public stage, the Virginia Company had placed its project more and more in the public eye. The company, composed of London merchants, represented the project to Londoners as a civic duty in their lottery advertisements, "hoping that the inhabitants of this honorable Citie adventuring even but small summes of money, Would have soone supplied so little a summe appointed to so good a Worke."(26) Their discourse connects the honor of the city and, by association, of its people, with the success of the lottery and thereby the colony. In its 1620 declaration, the company published lists of adventurers, both individuals and companies like the cloth workers, the barber-surgeons, and the fishmongers. Their publications postulate the support of all of London's communities.

Jonson's plays and popular London opinions troubled the identity that the Virginia Company attempted to promote between a virtuous London that would support the colonial endeavor and a pure Virginia colony that would civilize the Indians around it. In opposition to that purified hornology promulgated by the company, the population of the city posited an equivalence between London's underworld inhabitants and the dangerous presences in the colonies - both Indians and "corrupted" Englishmen. Rumors identified London and the colony but only by incorporating the wildness of the colony, its dangerous presences, into representations of the metropolis and the wildness of the metropolis into representations of the colony. Likewise, that which cannot be domesticated in Jonson's fair resembles and represents a wild and dangerous colonial otherness. Both the company's defensive stance in its propaganda and the slang that Jonson picks up and uses in his plays respond to the rumors current in London that the colony abounded with thieves and scoundrels - the population of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair - and that the "wild" Indians and the colonists were becoming indistinguishable. A 1610 broadside, A Publication by the Counsell of Virginea, touching the plantation there attests that "some few of those unruly youths sent thither, (being of most leaud and bad condition) . . . are come for England againe, giving out in all places where they come . . . most vile and scandalous reports."(27) The text calls these youths "lascivious sonnes, bad servants," "ill husbands," and "an idle crue." We can hear in their rhetoric the cast of characters in his play. Both London and the colony looked like a new world, addicted to tobacco, gambling, and other forms of savagery.

Although both Virginia Company documents and Bartholomew Fair and The New Inn share a vocabulary of otherness, they employ those stereotypes to different ends. Both identify London and the colonial world; but where the Virginia Company hoped to reproduce an ordered England, these plays reveal and at times revel in the disorder that shaped London as well as England's colonial efforts. Simultaneously, the actual threatening disorder in the Virginia settlement commented on the colonial fantasy encapsulated in Lord Frampul's renovated home and family, which was in its own way as outrageous as Eastward Hoe's Seagull's land of gold.

Recent efforts to see theatrical representation not as monolithic but as contest have theorized an "anthropological order of the theater" always present "[b]etween dramatic representation and theatrical performance."(28) Ben Jonson's own antitheatrical stance stems from the problem of controlling the players and the audience in theater. Phyllis Rackin's recent work in Stages of History shows us down-stage characters on England's stages voicing resistance to the progression of elite male history. Those critics who read England's colonial stages must remember to keep this space - the space of resistance, of other voices - open. If the English by 1629 were beginning to conceive of Virginia as another home, as another England, the Powhatans had already massively signaled their resistance to that script. Having housed and fed the colonists for a number of years, in 1622 they rebelled and killed 375 colonists. And this rebellion was only the largest, not the first, act of resistance; from the moment of the English landing in Virginia, the Indians attempted to discourage the English settlement with force. Rather than speaking the words of the English, these Indians objected with force to English doublespeak. Like the clowns and other down-stage figures inside the theatrical representations in London theaters, the Indians who rebelled against colonial Virginia expressed in their actions another world view. But in those actions they had already acceded to a transformation of culture, since in the rebellion of 1622 they used English weaponry - guns they had by various means taken from the colony. They, like the English, had been transformed by contact; still, they were not ready to capitulate to English rule of their territory, to English definitions of home. We must remember this if we are to refuse to read the establishment of colonial Virginia as a series of triumphs and if we are to refuse to accede to the English readings of themselves as inevitable and honorable conquerors.(29)

NOTES

1 The epigraph is from Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston, in The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), Eastward Hoe, III.iii.14-26. Further references to Jonson's works are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2 A declaration of the state of the colonie and affaires in Virginia: with the names of the adventurors, and summes adventured in that action. By his majesties counseil for Virginia, T Snodham and F. Kingston, 22 June 1620, STC#24841.2, A3.

3 On England in Ireland see Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, "Dismantling Irena," in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Summer, and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Routledge, 1992); Nicholas Canny, "Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity," YES 13 (1983): 1-19; and David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966). For a rich discussion of Ireland and The Tempest see Paul Brown, "'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism," in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 48-71.

4 Steven Mullaney, "Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance," in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 65-92, 84.

5 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 65. Some other excellent treatments of the interactions between the theater and colonialism in early modern England include Kim F. Hall, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice, "Rend n.s. 23 (1992): 87-111; Emily C. Barrels, "The Double Vision of the East: Imperialist Self-Construction in Marlowe's Tamberlaine, Part One," Rend n.s. 23 (1992): 3-24; Margo Hendricks, "Managing the Barbarian: The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage," Rend n.s. 23 (1992): 165-88; Jean E. Howard, "An English Lass amid the Moors: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and National Identity in Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, "in Women, "Race, "and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 101-17.

6 Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, "Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule," American Ethnologist 16, 4 (November 1989): 609-21,609.

7 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 137. See also Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) for an elegant exposition of this theoretical position.

8 See vol. 10 of Jonson's Works, Commentary, p. 175.

9 See Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932); see also the introductory essay to Three Proclamations concerning the Lottery for Virginia 1613-1621 (Providence: John Carter Brown Library, 1907); Robert C. Johnson, "The Lotteries of the Virginia Company, 1612-1621," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 68 (1966): 259-92; Terence H. O'Brien, "The London Livery Companies and the Virginia Company," VMHB 68 (1960): 137-55, and Johnson, "The 'Running Lotteries' of the Virginia Company," VMHB 68 (1960): 156-65.

10 See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980).

11 See the entry, "Bermudas," in Ben Jonson's London: A Jacobean Placename Dictionary, ed. Fran C. Chalfont (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1978), p. 38.

12 "Discovery" is one of Overdo's favorite words. Overdo's self-identification as a new Columbus shows that it is active in his discourse in its relatively recent sense. The first usage that the OED records for "discovery" as "the finding out or bringing to light of that which was previously unknown" is from a 1553 text collected in Hakluyt's Voyages, 1589.

13 Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), p. 149.

14 See Campbell, p. 126. See also Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); and Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991).

15 Anne Barton, "The New Inn and the Problem of Jonson's Late Style," ELR 9, 3 (Autumn 1979): 395-418, 399.

16 See Harriett Hawkins, "The Idea of a Theater in Jonson's The New Inn," Rend 9 (1966): 205-26, 216.

17 See Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 56.

18 Edward Waterhouse, A declaration of the state of the colony in Virginia with a relation of the barbarous massacre, G. Eld for R. Mylbourne, 1622, STC#25104, D4v.

19 On liminality and the carnivalesque quality of the fair see Jonathan Haynes, "Festivity and the Dramatic Economy of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair," ELH 51, 4 (Winter 1984): 645-68; Susan Wells, "Jacobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City," ELH 48, 1 (Spring 1981): 37-60; and Michael McCanles, "Festival in Jonsonian Comedy," RenD n.s. 8 (1977): 203-19.

20 See Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988).

21 Don Wayne, "Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: An Alternative View," RenD n.s. 13 (1982): 103-29, 115.

22 See Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).

23 John Lemly, "'Make odde discoveries!' Disguises, Masques, and Jonsonian Romance," in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1986), pp. 131-47, 138.

24 For an exploration of this topos and its meaning for Renaissance cultures see Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from "Utopia" to "The Tempest" (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992).

25 On Jonson's masques as colonial representations see my "'Ty Good Shubshects': The Jacobean Masque as Colonial Discourse," MRDE 7 (1995): 206-23. See also Yumna Siddiqi, "Dark Incontinents: The Discourses of Race and Gender in Three Renaissance Masques," RenD n.s. 23 (1992): 139-63.

26 By his majesties councell for Virginia, F. Kingston for W. Welby, 1613, STC#24833.6, A.

27 T. Haveland for W. Welby, 1610, STC#24831.7.

28 Robert Weimann, "Representation and Performance: The Uses of Authority in Shakespeare's Theater," PMLA 107, 3 (May 1992): 497-510, 499; see also Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978). An immensely fruitful exposition of these ideas can be found in Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990).

29 I am grateful to Anne Cubilie, Judith Filc, Myra Jehlen, Brad Jordan, Phyllis Rackin, Peter Stallybrass, and Max Thomas for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Rebecca Ann Bach is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. This essay is part of a book-length project entitled "Colonial Transformations."