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Article Excerpt
Dear Queen, thou hast what rank cannot command,
Nor pageantry enforce-thy people's love; And to the utmost of thy realm Where'er the happy shadow of thy flag Falls on the earth to make it freedom's soil, Brave men of every race who own thy sway Give homage to thy office, and to thee Their unbought hearts. J.W. Bengough, "To Queen Victoria" (177)
"THESPIS' UNDISTORTING CAMERA"
Historians of Canadian theatre have always been embarrassed by the heroic closet dramas that have occupied the canonical centre of nineteenth-century Canadian drama. Benson and Conolly dismiss these patriotic Imperial verse-dramas as "arid," arguing that "Self-consciously literary detached from the theatrical realities that only live performance can provide, and distracted by foreign models, Canada's poetic playwrights succeeded only in satisfying themselves and a few of their literary peers" (14). The conventionalized narrative of Canadian theatre history argues a developmental thesis that playwriting "evolves" as a product of a professional theatre that models cultural "maturity." In this argument, the literary ineptitude that generations of critics have pointed to in nineteenth-century Canadian drama is a necessary colonial condition arising from the "absence" of a productive theatre culture. Literary value is in this way recruited as a sign of nationhood. By this logic, early Canadian playwrights could not be good because there was no Canadian theatre, and there was no Canadian theatre because there was not yet a Canadian nation. The circularity of this argument in effect devalues the entire canon of nineteenth-century Canadian drama, but it particularly devalues the poetic dramas that staged the cultural narratives of British Imperialism. The theatre in which they were staged was imagined, but it was a constituent and, indeed, an aesthetically legitimizing part of a broader theatre culture in the Empire played as spectacle.
Michael Tait, writing in 1963, posed the fundamental problem of a dramatic form that typified the age but which was clearly distanced from the popular stage in a theatrically busy era. His explanation has become a critical orthodoxy:
For want of even a minority demand for the performance of native plays, these would-be dramatists were compelled willy-nilly to write for the closet rather than the stage. Denied a vitalizing contact with the coarse realities of stage presentation, they produced works at once petrified and undisciplined. (13)
Decades of research by theatre historians have since exposed Tait's premise as incorrect--there was indeed a demand (or at least, local desire) for Canadian works, and there was all active local repertoire. But the basic problem that Tait identified is still a problem for historians. On the one hand, the theatre in Canada did not produce a canon of nation-building drama, as it did in the United States, and on the other, the playwrights who did attempt to monumentalize the emerging nation were rarely produced. This is a problem that invariably focuses on two much-discussed texts, Charles Mair's Tecumseh and Sarah Anne Curzon's Laura Secord, the Heroine of 1812.
In her very useful analysis of Curzon's work as early feminist practice, Celeste Derksen critiques Tait's thesis but agrees with his premise. In Derksen's analysis, Curzon not only exemplified the condition of the Canadian playwright who "wrote for print rather than the stage" because of American-dominated material conditions of production, but also looked to "a more `domestic' form of dramatic expression" because of the impropriety of the stage (8-9).
The proposal of the imagined theatre is a useful key that enables us to release these plays from the non-theatrical "closet" and to see them in new light as cultural scripts rather than as "virtually unactable" literary dramas, because it posits a theatrical context in which they can be seen as performances resituated in the theatre culture of Imperial Canada (Benson and Conolly 13). In order to develop this argument, I want to examine how these plays function as pageants that rehearse the mise en scene of Imperialism by citing and restaging contemporary practices of military performance and in so doing "upload" popular spectacle into the field of literary value.
Part of the historical dismissal of Tecumseh and Laura Secord is the recurrent attempt to see them as the most successful (or the most "literary") of the artistic failures that typify, Canadian playwriting in the late Victorian age. Against this, I suggest that they were not failures at all and that in their own terms they succeeded in commanding the imagined theatres of their authors. This becomes more clear when we consider their material connection of place and polemical context to a third, less noticed, play: James Bovell Mackenzie's Thayendangea. These three plays comprise a panoramic trilogy, a call and response that establishes a dialogue about aboriginality, empire, and homeland to envision a British Canada nation. It is crucial that they were all written in Southern Ontario and share a centralizing political vision of imperial federation and colonial nationalism. They are all consciously monumental, in the sense that Adolphe Appia described a generation later: "Every work is monumental which relies on its duration rather than upon immediate usefulness; therefore monumental works are intended to stimulate men's admiration rather than their gratitude" (Beacham 283).
My argument, that these three plays stage overlapping episodes in a larger cultural meta-pageant that circulated particular tropes of historical enactment, begins with their historical relationship. Mair published Tecumseh in 1886, with the avowed purpose of promoting a nationalist revision of history by restaging "the turning point of Canada's destiny" (4). The success of Mair's first edition likely made publishers more receptive to the proposal of historical verse dramas: Curzon followed with Laura Secord in 1887, noting in her preface that the play had been written in 1876 but that "owing to the inertness of Canadian interest in Canadian literature at that date, could not be published." She wrote her play "to rescue from oblivion the name of a brave woman and set it in its proper place among the heroes of Canadian history" (i). Twelve years later, Mackenzie published Thayendanegea as a clear refutation of Tecumseh, with the stern admonition that there could be "no more efficacious--no more convincing--method" of correcting the historical record than "Thespis' undistorting camera" (3).
Despite its pompously archaic resonance, Mackenzie's notion of "Thespis' undistorting camera" points to the relationship of spectacle, epic staging, and scholarly documentation that underlies each of these three plays. This relationship is the ideological principle of the pageant, the form that, even more than the popular melodramas, typifies the theatrical imaginary of Victorian Canada.
"THE HABILIMENTS OF A NATION"
The zenith of the British dream of a world empire can be identified to the exact minute, but the time of that minute moved with the rotation of the earth. On Sunday, June 26, 1897, to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, the Sons of England organized a service of "Thanksgiving for Her Majesty's Accession to the Throne" sixty years earlier, "to be held in continuous succession through the British Colonies around the World." The service was so planned that in every, colony congregations would sing "God Save the Queen" at 4 p.m. local time. Distributed with the text of the service was a chart of local starting times for the anthem, set beside "Time at the Heart of the Empire--Windsor Castle." The service commenced in Fiji at 4:20 a.m. GMT and moved west around the globe, finishing eight hours later (12:13 GMT) in Victoria, BC. For the duration of that day, someone, somewhere, was always singing the royal anthem.
Throughout the empire, the Jubilee was the occasion of holidays and public performances. In London, Ontario, the Jubilee celebrations included a "Grand Military Tournament," with 2000 troops from eight regional units, a "Monster Society Procession," baseball games, bicycle races, and a mass concert of Handel's Samson. In Victoria, the four-day celebration included a military review by the local militia and the seaman and marines of the Royal Navy garrison, lacrosse matches and baseball games, a pyrotechnic display, a regatta, and a "Grand Spectacular Extravaganza of the Carnival of Madrid." As Lytton Strachey wrote of the Jubilee, "Imperialism is a faith as well as a business" (Hudson 223).
For millions of British subjects, some enthusiastic, many more unwilling, the Empire was made visible through such spectacular displays and public performances. The theatrical spectacle of empire permeated every, level of society and crossed borders of class, race, and nation. It began with the massive ceremonial spectacle of the monarchy itself, and its vice-regal replications around the world. The empire staged itself through a vast hierarchy of pageants, re-enactments offered as proof of their origin. Pageants are regulatory readings that propose and stabilize ideologically determined communities, and, in that sense, they recruit the audience as complicit co-performers. The reception of the representation is the reception of the event it enacts--or literally re-stages. Consequently, because pageants leave no room for critical negotiation, they offer a parade of icons that progressively accumulate as a narrative embodiment of the (presumably) consensual ideology shared by the audience. Authenticity is provided by the exercise of power that requisitions and mobilizes the pageant in the first place.
Pageantry theatricalized the public sphere through the iconic power of state ceremonial. Even in a provincial backwater like Toronto, a "Grand Military Review," such as the one held in 1901 for the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York in Toronto, could parade 11,000 militia troops in a mass patriotic spectacle. This was nothing in comparison to the immense Indian durbars that mobilized entire divisions and the annual maneuvers of the British army at Aldershot, staged to awe the world. Perhaps the greatest pageant of all time in this vein was the Diamond Jubilee Naval Review at Spithead, in 1897, in which the entire Home Fleet of the Royal Navy performed itself with a procession of 21 battleships, 53 cruisers, 30 destroyers, and 24 torpedo boats (Hudson 176). (1) For most citizens of the empire, these displays of state spectacle were rare events, more commonly known through newspaper reports, broadsheet songs, and popular illustrations. The range of state spectacles in imperial Canada included a variety, of spectacular practices, from government-sponsored pageants such as the massive Quebec Tercentenary, (in which tradition we can place the 1929 Confederation Jubilee in Ottawa, and most lavish of them, the Centennial Celebrations of 1967) to semi-private affairs that replicated the ceremonies of the royal court in Rideau Hall.
The most energetic of the vice-regal dramaturges was the liberal reformer Lady Aberdeen, who occupied Rideau Hall from 1893-98. Although nominally her husband's consort, she was, as Sandra Gwyn argues, "the real Governor General and he was her consort" (Gwyn 277). Lady Aberdeen was not the first to stage theatricalized spectacles in Rideau Hall; in 1876, Lady Dufferin had established a glittering precedent with her Fancy Dress Ball (Gwyn 145-156). Lady Aberdeen's innovation was the integration of the costume ball with the ideological spectacle of the historical pageant, in which the resources of the state enacted an argument of national and imperial genealogy.
In her journals, Lady Aberdeen describes three such historical pageants. The first was a staged series of tableaux representing "Canadian Historical Scenes" at the Queen's Theatre in Montreal; the second was the lavish Historical Fancy Dress Ball in the...
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