Spectacle of Empire. Jerry WassermanЧитать онлайн книгу.
Fig. 1. Exterior view of the reconstructed Port Royal Habitation. Courtesy of Wikipedia. Photograph by Danielle Langlois.
As a latecomer to Canadian theatre, working in it as an actor and learning about it on the job as it became more and more my central academic focus in the 1970s and ’80s, I was first convinced that nothing prior to 1967 really mattered much. That was when a homegrown, fully professionalized theatre had finally emerged in Canada with plays, playwrights, and a performance history sufficient to delineate some kind of canon. It was only in the mid-1990s, when I reluctantly inherited and began to teach a course in pre-1967 Canadian theatre history at the University of British Columbia, that I started to see the error of my ways. Canadian theatre, it turned out, has a history as full of incident, human interest, theatrical event, folly, heroism, and humour as any other nation’s. As a hyphenated Ameri-Canadian, I developed a particular fascination with the long colonial struggle of Canada’s pioneer theatre artists and entrepreneurs to carve out a newly defined, hybrid “Canadian” theatrical space amid the conflicting territories already occupied by British and American theatrical, political, and economic interests, while also negotiating across the nation’s two internal solitudes: the French-English divide, and the even greater gap between First Nations and the Euro-Canadian settler-invader culture that came to dominate the northern half of the continent.
Marc Lescarbot’s The Theatre of Neptune in New France was an exciting discovery for me. It was a starting point, an originary moment. We could talk in class about Native American and Native Canadian ritual performance, examine photographic reconstructions and artifacts, and even watch a video of authentic-looking (but staged) performances by Kwakwaka’wakw dancers in full regalia in Edward Curtis’s 1914 film In the Land of the Headhunters. But when Eugene and Renate Benson published their new English translation of The Theatre of Neptune in 1982, and Anton Wagner reprinted it in his marvelous four-volume anthology, Canada’s Lost Plays, we had an actual first script to read and study. Although recording a one-time-only event that had no apparent influence on the subsequent development of theatre in North America, The Theatre of Neptune was paradigmatic of a kind of performance that was more than just art or entertainment, though it was those things, too. It engaged political and cultural issues that were specific to North American colonial history but that remain current. It was exotic – a strange theatrical hybrid staged in boats on coastal waters – but it seemed to me also familiar somehow, connected to other plays I had read about and studied, and to the kinds of site-specific performances I was increasingly seeing in Vancouver. It adapted old world forms to new world circumstances, not unlike a much later landmark in Canadian theatre history, the opening of the Stratford Festival (see Wasserman 9). And it was really old. Who knew that we had a theatre history on our own soil that went back as far as Shakespeare’s time? I found my students first bemused, then thrilled by the notion that they could trace the pedigree of the enterprise into which they were entering all the way back to 1606. It became the hook that snared them, and helped snare me.
Through it I discovered Lescarbot’s History of New France and rediscovered Champlain’s Voyages, a book I had known about since high school but hadn’t looked at since then. But soon the Bensons’ translation and Canada’s Lost Plays went out of print. That was when I found that there had been earlier translations, including one (also out of print) by a remarkable American woman, Harriette Taber Richardson, who, it turned out, had been instrumental in arranging for the historical reconstruction of the fort which housed the men who wrote, designed, and performed the play. That place, in the same country but on the other side of the continent from where I lived, suddenly started becoming real to me. Then one day I realized that the four hundredth anniversary of the performance of The Theatre of Neptune in New France would soon be upon us. My brainstorm was to get the play back into print by November 2006 in an edition that would include the original French text, two of the English translations, each offering different kinds of valuable insights, and another dramatic work, in English, by a very well known playwright, contemporary with The Theatre of Neptune and with parallels to its art and politics that could help illuminate both texts. And I would contextualize it all, critically and historically, providing in Joseph Roach’s term a “genealogy” of its performance (25–28), expanding on some of the excellent research previously published on these lesser-known forms: the nautical masque, the royal entry.
I owe great thanks to my publisher, Karl Siegler of Talonbooks, who not only agreed to my proposal but leapt at it with an enthusiasm that has inspired me. Thanks to Davinia Yip who kept the whip to me and shepherded this into print with her usual editorial precision and acuity. Thanks to my colleague Tony Dawson for his sharp critical eye and help, especially with Ben Jonson’s arcane language. I’m grateful also to Eugene Benson, Denis Salter, and Ellen Mackay for their willingness to share ideas about the project. To Sue, for her patience and love. To the University of British Columbia’s libraries and librarians for their extraordinary resources. To a host of international libraries and museums for their generosity in providing us with illustrations: Bibliotèque municipale de Rouen; Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth; Library and Archives Canada; Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne. To Dominique Yupangco for her help with electronic images. And to my colleagues in the Association for Canadian Theatre Research and the students of UBC’s Theatre 325 for always pushing me to get it right.
I dedicate this book to Patrick O’Neill. Enormously knowledgeable and generous, he knew more about the history of theatre in the Maritime provinces than I could ever learn in two lifetimes. Sadly, he didn’t live to see this anniversary.
Jerry Wasserman
University of British Columbia
Marc Lescarbot and the Spectacle of Empire
In November 1606, a tiny band of Frenchmen welcomed a small sailing ship into the sheltered waters of the North Atlantic harbour they had christened Port-Royal, in the land their king called La Cadie (a common aboriginal word for “place” [“Champlain Anniversary”]), later to become l’Acadie or Acadia. Aboard skiffs or canoes out on the water, a dozen of the men – some preparing to spend a third brutal winter in this distant outpost of France in the new world – honoured their returning countrymen by performing a play that, in an oblique way, would have reminded them of home. It enacted welcome and thanksgiving in an elaborate, small-scale spectacle of wishful imperial triumphalism. Its shipboard audience consisted of the colony’s leader, Jean Biencourt, Sieur de Poutrincourt; the expedition’s geographer/ chronicler, Samuel de Champlain; and the ship’s captain and crew. On shore, outside their fortified living quarters, others gathered: some to participate in the performance, some to help provide its special effects, the rest comprising a second important audience of colonists and local Mi’kmaq people, including their chief, Membertou.
Ritual and ceremonial dramas of First Peoples like the Mi’kmaq, various paratheatrical activities among early Viking and European explorers, and documented but unpublished performances by sixteenth-century Spaniards in Florida and New Mexico all jostle for the designation of “first North American play.” One of the primary candidates for the honour has to be Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France, written by lawyer, historian, and poet Marc Lescarbot in that tiny, short-lived French colony of Port Royal – the future Lower Granville, Nova Scotia – where it was performed on 14 November 1606 “on the waves,” according to Lescarbot, and along the shore of what today is called the Annapolis Basin. Unlike its competitors, the play was published and has survived as a script and literary artifact as well as a carefully documented performance. A rich store of theatrical, historical, and political detail, The Theatre of Neptune in New France vividly illustrates homo ludens, the human imperative to play, at a crossroads of art and ideology. It provides an unparalleled glimpse into the lost world of early seventeenth century North America,