Dignity Overpowers Conspiracy of Race Politics and Mercantilism in Thomas Southerne’s Oronooko PDF Free Download
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Dignity Overpowers Conspiracy of Race Politics and
Mercantilism in Thomas Southerne’s Oronooko
Dr. Samuel Obed Doku
Vista Street, NE, Washington
District of Columbia
United States of America
dokusamuel@gmail.com
John Dryden describes Thomas Southerne as “pure” in reference to the purity of his
language, and Alexander Pope delineates Southerne in his “Epistle to Augustus” as an
“elderly dramatist skilled in expressing „the passions‟” and cites him along with Johnson,
Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Wycherley, and Rowe as great English playwrights”
(qtd. in Kaufman 10). However, not many critics are that generous to Southerne, the only
playwright courageous enough to bring a black face on to the English theater in 1695, except
Shakespeare who did it with Othello in 1603. The best position critics rank Southerne, author
of ten plays, is as the sixth best playwright in English Restoration Theatre. Probably, because
of the parasite formula that was in vogue in the 17th century when Southerne wrote Oronooko
and which he profoundly capitalized on to write his most famous play, he is not particularly
regarded as one of the ingenious playwrights of his era. At best, many critics regard
Southerne‟s talent as falling short of the mercurial abilities of Dryden, Etheridge, Wycherley,
Congreve, and Otway. Some critics, however, are of the view that although Southerne was not
fashionably original, his creativity in his ability to refashion and reconfigure the original works
he preyed on to make them refreshing and entertaining, should render him as one of the best
during the apogee moments of the Restoration era. In this piece, I argue that the antimony of
racial politics and the salience of mercantilism in Southerne‟s Oronooko dignify women and
minorities, even as it simultaneously agitated and mollified the nerves of dealers and supporters
of the slave trade.
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Between 1660 and 1710 when the Restoration epoch is regarded as experiencing the
best years of English dramatic production since the Elizabethan Age, the plays written during
those fifty years have been critiqued either as reflections of the immensely licentious,
concupiscent, and immoral underpinnings of that society or classic attempts to expose society‟s
foibles and peccadilloes through satire and wit, with an exemplary manifestation and
signification on the stage. John Barnard points out that “the comedy written between 1660 and
1710 is the greatest achievement in English drama outside the Elizabethan and
Jacobean period.” Furthermore, Barnard argues that “these years are also remarkable for an
outpouring of heroic tragedies, tragi-comedies, adaptations of earlier writers, translations,
operas, and sentimental comedies . . . many of which attain depths of bathos and vulgarity
rarely equaled” (382).
Written and performed in 1695, Southerne‟s Oronooko, which is a reformulation of
Aphra Behn‟s novella by the same title that was published in 1688, falls within the confines of
the tragi-comedies of the Restoration, whose bathos is compelling; its pathos is cathartic, and
the message Oronooko conveyed and still conveys, is appreciated for its profundity,
appropriateness, and timeliness (kairos). From the perspectival lenses of Joyce Green
MacDonald, she asseverates the qualities of the play: “. . . besides Behn, his [Southerne‟s] work
looks backward to the pathos of such Restoration heroic tragedies as Otway‟s Venice
Preserv’d. The tone of the play‟s declamatory speeches about the plight of its tragic lovers and
much of its language for describing Oronooko‟s blackness hearken back even farther to
Shakespeare‟s Othello” (427). In a commentary on eighteenth century marriage, Ingrid Tague
writes that many women at that time “believed that marriage was deteriorating into a business
contract. Rather than being respected as an institution ordained by God and necessary to social
stability, the argument went, marriage was an object of mockery, used only as a cynical means
of increasing wealth” (76).
Similar to John Dryden who used double formula in Marriage a la Mode, Southerne
also capitalizes on the split-plot formula in his tragi-comedy, which many critics label as
affective tragedy, but crucially, the split-plot allowed him to incorporate and critique the social
phenomenon of marriage in England, which was back then, largely regarded, as Tague has
pointed out, the commodification of women, an institution not predicated on love and affection
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as it is supposed to be but on a woman‟s estate. In fact, Southerne adopted another of Behn‟s
plays appropriately titled The Fatal Marriage, a play whose theme is that of the distressed wife,
to critique his society. As a result, the split-plot enabled Southerne to preserve Behn‟s original
thematic framework while modifying it to suite the tastes of his time. Imoinda, the heroine,
becomes a white woman in the play while she is a beautiful black goddess in Behn‟s text.
Moreover, Southerne transforms the brutal savage Oronooko is in Behn‟s text to the role of a
rational, prudent, and civilized man in the Play. In a way, Southerne seems to be recalling both
Thomas Hobbes and Jacques Jean Rousseau simultaneously. Hobbes postulates in the
Leviathan (1651) that in the absence of a coercive power, man‟s desire for power is insatiable,
so life becomes “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes notes in the Leviathan in Chapter
13:
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is
uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of
the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no
instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no
knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no
society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death;
and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes, who wrote the Leviathan during the Civil War in England, wrote to justify the need
for royalty, where the monarch‟s authority would be deemed powerful and reverential enough
so that the rule of law would be obeyed and violators duly punished. For, in the absence of a
republic, the tyranny of the majority sways over the minority, leading to abuse of power and
injustice. In this sense, the absence of effective governments and the rule of law, compelled
Hobbes to lament the inherent danger of man‟s propensity for power and greed in the absence
of a coercive authority. However, Hobbes‟s assertion also delineates humanity in its natural
state.
In the Play, Oronooko is famously depicted as a “noble savage,” who is adversely
influenced by Western civilization, but in Behn‟s Oronooko, the tragic hero‟s short life
legitimizes Hobbes‟s while Southerne‟s is an astounding reminder of Rousseau. Rousseau has
famously asserted that “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” In promulgation of
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his social contract theory, Rousseau advocates for a binding agreement between the ruled and
the ruler to circumvent the liberty of the ruled from being violated. In that sense, there is a
symbiotic preservation under the social contract. Rousseau also argues for a conflated
collective he calls the sovereign. The sovereign comprises the gamut membership of the society
whose individual members may seek their own interests, but the sovereign strives for the
common good. Southerne himself states in his “Epistle Declaratory” to the Duke of Devonshire:
“Whatever happened to him [Oronooko] in Surinam, he has mended his condition in England.
He was born here under your Grace‟s influence and that has carried his fortune farther into the
world . . . .” The mending of condition Southerne speaks of is the way he transforms the original
Oronooko from a gentle brute in the novel to a sophisticated and honorable gentleman in the
Play.
The plot of Oronooko is at once fabulous and simple. An African prince, Oronooko, is
deceived by a perfidious English Captain, who responds to the name Driver. He is kidnapped
and taken to Surinam, a British slave-holding colony in South America. By a twist of fate,
Oronooko is reunited with his fiancée, Imoinda who had earlier been sold into slavery for being
disloyal to the king of Angola. In Behn‟s text, however, Imoinda is a black goddess from Gold
Coast, but in the Play, she is white. In Surinam, Blanford, who represents the governor, buys
and takes Oronooko to the slave plantation where he sees Imoinda, but their reunification turns
into a fleeting phenomenon as the vicious and relentless lieutenant governor is simultaneously
captivated and disoriented by Imoinda‟s beauty, so he attempts to seduce her, even after being
told that she is pregnant. As a result, Aboan, Oronooko‟s loyal servant, convinces Oronooko
to lead a rebellion to free his pregnant wife, the rest of the slaves, and himself from the savagery,
debauchery, and dehumanizing nature of slavery.
Initially, Oronooko is skeptical about the wisdom in such a revolt since he is being
treated with respect on the plantation although he is in slavery. But, in the end, he resents
deeply the idea that his child would be born into slavery, so he finally acquiesces to lead the
revolt. While the planning of the rebellion is in its final stage, however, Hottman, the Uncle
Tom on the plantation, reveals the plan to the lieutenant governor and the planters, and the
rebellion is quelled. In the melee, Oronooko kills his traitor, Captain Driver. Based on
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Blanford‟s plea with Oronooko and coupled with the lieutenant governor‟s promise of amnesty
to him, Oronooko surrenders to create the possibility to be with his Imoinda. The scheming
lieutenant governor, however, quickly reneges on his promise of amnesty to
Oronooko to substantiate the hero‟s lack of trust in the European. He is apprehended after
surrendering. In the process, the lieutenant governor, unable to resist the beautiful Imoinda,
attempts again to defile her but for the timely intervention of Blanford who had already freed
Oronooko. Fully conscious of the lieutenant governor‟s persistence and obstinacy to ravish
Imoinda, the couple resolves to die rather than lose their honor and dignity. Imoinda kills
herself honorably, but before Oronooko dies, Southerne does not allow the lieutenant governor
to escape with his life, so Oronooko kills him first, after being discovered by a motley of
dissemblers parading as militia men searching for Oronooko.
The killing of Captain Driver and the lieutenant governor is poetic justice in the love
and honor plot. Christopher Wheatley points out that “there are many brave villains in
Restoration comedy and many characters whose courage or cowardice is probably irrelevant to
an understanding of the ethical framework of the plays” (2). Oronooko‟s courage and bravery
in Southerne‟s play are necessary in unraveling the moral contours of the play because the
message the tragic hero and Imoinda send is that regardless of how well colonizers treat the
enslaved, the deprivation of their liberty means they could be subjected to any form of brutality
at the least provocation. However, whether or not it was ethically right for Oronooko to lead
the rebellion when he was fully aware that there was an insurmountable obstacle on the way,
some may argue, smacked of a lack of vision and prudence on his part. However, it is the same
lack of ethical values and dearth of sound judgment on the part of Captain Driver and the
lieutenant governor that prompt Oronooko to distrust them and the system under which they
are held bondage; therefore, he and Imoinda‟s willingness to die honorably through their own
hands.
The comedic part of the play brings the Welldon sisters, Charlotte and Lucia, to Surinam
in search of men to marry because of the scarcity of eligible men in England. Some social
commentators have observed that by the mid-17th century, women outnumbered men thirteen
to ten in England, but toward the end of that century, women were outnumbering men two to
one. In Surinam, Charlotte disguises herself as a man and tricks the wealthy widow, Lackitt
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into a relationship. Through a clever machination, Charlotte does everything with Lackitt, but
when it comes time for the consummation of their relationship, Stanmore‟s cousin, Jack does
the rest. Furthermore, Charlotte, through a witty connivance, gets part of Lackitt‟s wealth (one
thousand pounds in gold and jewelry), which she gives to Stanmore, with whom she has fallen
in love, for safe keeping, with an instruction that if something should happen to her abruptly,
he must hand over the money to Charlotte‟s cousin, who would be arriving from England.
Charlotte, then, removes her disguise and becomes the cousin being expected from England.
Through this clever legerdemain, Charlotte and Lucia get their husbands, and so too do Lackitt
and her son who also marry; Daniel marries Lucia and Lackitt marries Jack Stanmore.
Southerne opens the comedic part of Oronooko with Lucia wondering if “husbands
grew in these plantations” in Surinam. Welldon Charlotte then responds that “they grow as
thick as oranges, ripening one under another. Week after week, they drop and fall into some
woman‟s mouth” (I.i.5-9). Clearly, the intentions of the two sisters are not subliminal, and their
design to get men of quality in Surinam and not men whose only interest is fiduciary, is
substantiated by Welldon Charlotte‟s claim of the ripening nature and thickness of the men in
Surinam. As Barnard points out, “In this society [Restoration], the ethics of marriage became
predominantly mercenary. If the Royalists, impoverished by their exertions for Charles I,
needed to repair their fallen fortunes, rising merchants struggled to marry their daughters to a
good estate, since this would bring them not only wealth but also the additional perquisites of
landed property and social status” (386). Just like slavery, therefore, profit became the driving
force of marriage at that time. Throughout Restoration Drama, instances of fathers easily
disinheriting their daughters and sons or the threat thereof abound, if they thought they were
going to marry spouses they had not approved of. The satirizing of marriage to expose the
disingenuousness of the institution became necessary because as Charlotte puts it, “marriage is
serious business.” And, in the words of Samuel Butler, “For matrimony‟s but a bargain made/
To serve the Turns of Interest and Trade/ Not out of Love and kindness, but designs, To settle
Land and Tenements like Fines” (292). In order to escape from being used as pawns in the
chess game of marriage to satisfy the whims and caprices of not only their parents but also their
future husbands, Charlotte Welldon and Lucia travel to Surinam where they marry men who
would not treat them as commodities. Welldon asserts:
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. . . . They have the benefit of their bragging, by recommending their abilities
to other women. Theirs is a trading estate that lives upon credit and increases
by removing it out of one bank into another. Now, poor women have not these
opportunities; we must keep our stocks dead by us at home to be ready for a
purchase when it comes—a husband, let him never so dear, and be glad of him.
Or, venture our fortunes abroad on such rotten security that the principal and
interest—nay, very often our persons—are in danger. If the women would agree
(which they never will) to call home their effects, how many proper gentlemen
would sneak into another way of living, for want of being responsible in this?
Then, husbands will be cheaper. (IV.i. 60-75)
In these lines, Charlotte Welldon laments the destiny of women in vindication of the necessity
to move to Surinam to get men to marry. Barnard also state that marriage contracts were not
concerned with feelings but with finance. Young men suffered as much as young women in the
front to their humanity when their personal life was subjected to accountancy, but the newly
married woman suffered even more heavily in law. Primogeniture, coupled with the lack of
any Married Women‟s Property Act, meant that all her property became her husband‟s: for a
wealthy young woman, her husband was her only and final investment. (386)
As Elin Diamond suggests, “Women in the seventeenth-century marriage market took on the
phantasmagoric destiny of fetishized commodities; they seemed no more than objects or
things” (600). Interestingly, nouns like “commodities,” “objects,” “things,” and “properties”
that were used to describe women in seventeenth-century England were the same nouns used
to delineate blacks in slavery. The analogy here is Mammonism is the sine qua non of avarice,
and 17th century merchants of England epitomized it. They glorified Mammonism at the
expense of human dignity. Cuckolding the institution of marriage and ossifying women to
acquire wealth, then, was the norm in the Restoration era. On the same trajectory, black people
were first deprived of their dignity and, then, enslaved. For this reason, many Restoration
comedy writers satirized marriage in attempts to rectify a wrong, even as they exposed the
buffoonery and impishness of rakes and charlatans. In this sense, Diamond avers that
“Restoration, from the earliest Etheridge and Sedley through Wycherley, Dryden,
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Vanbrugh, D‟Urfey, and Congreve, mocked the marketplace values of marriage, promoting the
libertine‟s aesthetic of „natural‟ love, verbal seduction, and superiority over jealous husbands
and fops” (600). Southerne takes it a notch further by ensuring that good men get equally good
women to marry, including “boobish and sloven” Daniel. In her determination to marry again,
the Widow says, “The young, ill-flirting girls, forsooth, believe nobody must have a husband
but themselves, but I would have „em to know there are other things to be taken care of beside
their greensickness” (IV.i.114-118). Moreover, when Daniel feels he is unprepared for
marriage and says, “No wife, I care not,” his mother admonishes him: “I‟ll swing you into
better manners, you booby” (I V.i. 220-224). Marriage might be a commodity being sold in
England, but in the slave-holding colony of Surinam, it is a serious institution.
If Southerne‟s comic plot glorifies itself in the commercialization and dignity of
marriage, the tragic plot endears itself to the commercialization and vindication of slavery, and
subliminally, it exposes the indignity, debauchery, and perfidious demeanor of some of the
colonizers and planters. This exchange between Oronooko and Aboan succinctly sums up
Oronooko‟s ethical judgment and the dishonesty of the lieutenant governor who in this case is
a synecdoche of the colonizers:
Aboan.
Remember, sir,/ you are a slave yourself, and to command/ Is now
another‟s right. Not think of it!/ Since the first moment they put on my
chains,/ I‟ve thought of nothing but the weight of „em/ And how to
throw them off./ Can yours sit easy.
Oronooko.
I have a sense of my condition/ As painful and as quick as yours can be./
I feel for my Imoinda and myself,/ Imoinda, much the tenderest part of
me./ But though I languish for my liberty,/ I would not buy it at the
Christian price/ Of black ingratitude. They shannot say/That we
deserved our fortune by our crimes./ Murder the innocent.
Aboan.
The innocent!
Oronooko.
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These men are not whom you would rise against./ If we are slaves, they
did not make us slaves,‟ But bought us in an honest way of trade/ As we
have done before „em, bought and sold/ Many a wretch and never
thought it wrong./ They paid our price for us, and we are now/ Their
property, a part of their estate,/ To manage as they please. Mistake me
not,/ I do not tamely say that we should bear/ All they could lay upon
us. But we find/ The load so light, so little to be felt. (Considering they
have us in their power/ And may inflict what grievances they please),/
We ought not to complain. (III.ii. 100-139) The exchange above
convinces an otherwise reluctant Oronooko to lead the rebellion.
Clearly, Oronooko unfolds hubris, indicative of a man with a profound
sense of integrity while distrusting the religion of the enslaver.
Oronooko‟s admission that the slaves were bought in an “honest way of
trade” is a confession that spuriously vindicated the slave trade as purely
predicated on seventeenth-century mercantile ethos, but later on, the
barbarity, dishonesty, and disrespect visited on the enslaved were what
motivated abolitionists to demand the curtailment of the trade in human
cargoes.
The political implications of Oronooko‟s behavior in the play is that abolitionists in England,
including William Fox fiercely campaigned for the boycotting of sugar cane from the West
Indies in England. According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Honor
Code: How Moral Revolutions Are Made: “One measure of the anti-slavery movement‟s
success was the fact that in the early 1790s, between 300,000 and 400,000 people joined
boycotts of slave-grown sugar—prompted by arguments such as those in William Fox‟s 1791
„Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West
Indian Sugar and Rum‟” (112). Ernest Baker writes: “We not give ear to the whispers of a
liaison with the heroic black. A different emotion inspires the tale, the same feeling of outraged
humanity that inflamed Mrs. Stowe. Oronooko is the first emancipation novel. It is also the
first glorification of the Natural Man” (xxiii). Furthermore, the disparaging of Christianity by
men like Captain Driver and the lieutenant governor, whose dishonesty and lack of morality
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make Oronnoko look like an angel in the eyes of justice-loving people, was an undeniable
indication that Christianity was being disrespected and being treated grovelingly by the types
of Driver and the lieutenant governor. Anthony Kaufman points out that “Southerne plays on
the opposition between Christian and heathen, dramatizing the traditional proposition that the
heathen is a better Christian” (8). Kaufman also notes that “the fatal error of Oronooko is his
failure to realize that he is in the hands of men entirely without his own sense of honor and
decent practice. His death and Imoinda‟s, like those of Antony and Cleopatra, are a
condemnation of a world too small and too sordid for them. The comic plot reinforces this
perception: the Europeans‟ greed, cynicism, and capacity for double-dealing are seen in both
plots as essence of the European colonists” (8). Moreover, Aboan‟s reminder to Oronooko that
princes have the responsibility to save their people from the pernicious claws of oppression
also recalls Gramsci‟s theory of hegemony in which he argues that society creates forces of
oppressive machines in their institutions to perpetually subjugate the subaltern to keep the
bourgeoisie in power. Slavery was such an institution as black people were first disrespected
and dehumanized as uncivilized savages, who needed to be brought to the New World to be
civilized through slavery. However, Southerne‟s humanization of Oronooko returns the
dignity, honor, and respect that the first white visitors had for Africans on their initial visits
before the genesis of slavery. In this sense, Appiah delineates the importance of honor and the
code that cracks it as a dignified attribute: “An honor code says how people of certain identities
can gain the right to respect, how they can lose it, and how having and losing honor changes
the way they should be treated” (175). Obviously, the way Oronooko is treated makes him lose
respect for the colonizers and Christianity. From that perspective, despite Blanford exerting his
influence to ensure Oronooko and Imoinda are treated favorably on the plantation, Oronooko,
still does not believe in the integrity of the lieutenant governor, hence, his decision to lead the
rebellion.
Again, Aboan‟s plea and his mention of a prince to redeem his people from pain and
suffering recalls the concept of The Great Chain of Being originally postulated by Plato and
Aristotle and revived during the Italian Renaissance. The hierarchical taxonomy of the Chain
has God at the helm followed by the nine angels, led by Seraphim. In Saint Thomas Aquinas‟s
reformulation of the Great Chain, thieves, pirates, and gypsies occupy the last spectrum of the
human chain while beggars come before actors. The gamut Chain comprises
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God, Angels, Kings and Queens, Archbishops, Dukes and Duchesses, Bishops, Marquises, and
Marchionesses, Earls and Countesses, Viscounts and Viscountesses, Barons and Baronesses,
Abbots and Deacons, Knights and Local Officials, Ladies-in-Waiting, Priests and Monks,
Squires, Pages, Messengers, Merchants and Shopkeepers, Tradesmen, Yeomen and Farmers,
Soldiers and Town Watchers, Household Servants, Tennant Farmers, Shepherds and Herders,
Beggars, Actors, Thieves and Pirates, Gypsies, Animals, Birds, Worms, Plants, and Rocks.
The Chain is an affirmation of the divine right of kings to rule, with the human chain being a
dichotomy between the nobility and commoners. As a result, one would wonder why Southerne
inserted the lines delivered by Aboan into the play: “Oh royal sir, remember who you are,/ A
prince born for the good of other men,/ Whose godlike office is to draw the sword/ Against
oppression and free mankind” (III.ii. 153-58). The Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 that
brought William and Mary onto the throne in England, weakened the legitimacy of the
monarchy and invested greater powers in Parliament. Southerne, in his life time, was known to
be a Tory sympathizer, so probably, he elevated Oronooko from the passive pages of a novel
to the active and lively arena of the theater to accentuate the fact and rather powerfully, even if
sentimentally, that the glorious days of the monarchy were over with the final stroke being
administered with the death of Oronooko. However, the tragic effect of Oronooko is the value
inherent in it that allows readers to see the play from an anthropocentric viewpoint, which
delineates man in a struggle without any success against the decrees of fate and reminding
humanity about the pride gained by observing a man doing so well yet entangled in life‟s
morass of ineptitude.
Indeed, the treatment of Oronooko, the hero, on stage in England evokes many
questions. Who played Oronooko in the dramatic rendition? Was Oronooko played by a black
man? What was the reception British audiences gave to the idea of an African prince marrying
a white woman albeit a slave? Was miscegenation perceived as the new normal in Britain back
then? My research indicates that Oronooko was initially played by Jack Verbruggen, who in
fact, resurrected his acting career by playing that role. His wife played Charlotte Welldon. In
Hazel Waters‟s Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black
Character, she compares the performances of Theodore D. Rice, a British originator of
minstrelsy and Ira Aldridge, an African American performer. Aldridge tried to counteract
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Rice‟s negative portrayal of blacks through his minstrel shows, but the former‟s efforts
seemingly did not have much of an impact on his white audiences. In the book, Waters argues
that racism and the denigration and demonization of black identity was not all that precipitous
in Britain until Rice internationalized his minstrelsy to Europe where he portrayed blacks as
Sambos, Coons, Uncle Toms, Mammies, and Pickaninnies, among others. According to Marlon
Riggs‟s documentary, Ethnic Notions, a Sambo was a docile black man who perpetually acted
like a child; the Coon was a lazy black man who perennially wanted to remain in slavery; Uncle
Tom was a loyal black man to his white master who would never betray him while the Mammy
was depicted as a dark-skin black woman without any sexual allure who was in charge of her
master‟s household. The picaninny was a young black child perceived in the image of the noble
savage who walked around naked. And,
Joycelyn Buckner argues that “Waters credits the shift in attitudes toward race, from
demonization to comical representations of blackness, to the influence from America . . . that
altered the tendency of English racial attitudes and beliefs, channeling them in new ways” (1).
In other words, the English were compatible and comfortable with black identity until Rice
burst onto their theatrical stage with the negative stereotypes on black people he had created,
and everything started going downhill for blacks from then on.
The popularity of Oronooko for well over a century after it was first performed in 1695
substantiates Waters‟s findings, for Rice created his minstrel shows on black identity first in
1828, and they became very popular from the mid-1830s. Kaufman writes that “Oronooko was
the mainstay of the repertoire for nearly one hundred and fifty years. It was often produced in
America between 1792 and Junius Brutus’s revival in 1832” (7). Evidently, Southerne placated
the nerves of slaveholders with the theme of mercantilism in the play, and
Oronooko‟s admission that Africans were equally guilty of their own enslavement provided
slaveholders with some relief, but the reality was that those who professed to be Christians
should have known better, at least in the delicate arena of honesty and decency. From Behn
and then to Southerne, the dignity of the black man was returned to him until Theodore Rice
burst onto the theatrical scene and made it awry.
In providing a brief but important history of the play, Kaufman affirms that the play
opened in November 1695 at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, and it was a smashing success
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outright that compelled one critic to say, “It had uncommon Success, and the quality of both
Sexes were very kind to the Play and to the Poet” (qtd. in Kaufman 7). Kaufman adds that the
success was very much needed by the Theatre Royal because earlier, the leading actor of the
day, Thomas Betterton, had revolted against the management and led a group of actors out to
establish a new theater at Lincoln‟s Inn Fields. The remaining company at Drury Lane was
shaken, and the success of Oronooko as well as Vanbrugh‟s The Relapse and Aesop a year
later, helped them weather the stormy waters of their careers. The departure of Betterton meant
Jack Verbruggen had to be relied on to play Oronooko. In fact, Verbruggen was reported to
have played the part so brilliantly and so ingeniously that his reputation rose majestically and
exponentially from then on. A contemporary critic was compelled to admit:
“By doing the Author Right, he [Verbruggen] got himself the Reputation of one of the best
Actors of his time” (qtd. in Kaufman 7). Imoinda was played by Mrs. Rogers. After her
husband‟s murder, Susanna Mountfort married Verbruggen, so she played Charlotte Welldon,
where she was reputed to have vindicated her reputation as an excellent actor. Indeed, observers
have pointed out that when the theatres re-opened in England in 1660, there were many
connections with the past. Restoration drama was no longer observed as a hugely
French importation. Clifford Leech states that “the influence of Corneille on [Restoration
drama] is indeed obvious, but it is easy to trace the pre-War English ancestry of Restoration
comedy and to see premonitions of the heroic drama in Fletcher and Shirley and in
Davenant‟s Caroline plays. But the war and the Interregnum did mark an important break in
the history of English drama” (151).
Southerne passed away at the mature age of eighty-seven after a great career in which
he experimented with many dramatic forms and even ameliorated some of the forms that
predated him. As Kaufman points out, “His [Southerne‟s] contemporaries valued him for his
ability to portray intensely emotional scenes and for his „pure‟ language. He worked in the
tradition of Otway, and his tragedies point the way to his successor, Nicholas Rowe. In comedy
his subject is the distressed wife, and here he offered a pattern for such playwrights as
Vanbrugh, Cibber, Congreve, and Farquhar” (10). Finally, Kaufman observes that “today
readers are interested in his psychological realism, his portraits of complex characters, often
women in throes of domestic distress, and his coldly realistic, often harsh, analysis of corrupt
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societal relations” (10). Indeed, Oronooko is a portrayal and an analysis of dyspeptic, asinine,
and corrupt societal relations. Southerne‟s dignified and honorable treatment of the black tragic
hero is as important today as in 1695 when the play was first performed, and feminists will love
the mastery and the brilliant legerdemain that Charlotte Welldon employs to ensure that she
and her sister marry according to their terms and not on the terms of their parents. Indeed,
Blanford asserts with emphatic clarity at the end of Oronooko with a powerful injunction that
panegyrizes Oronooko, even as it chastises plantation owners parading as Christians:
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.353-359)
Southerne‟s motif in the play seemingly is that if professed Christians like
Captain Driver and the lieutenant governor could learn from their errant ways,
the whole world would be a better place for all to live in and, indeed, a joy to
behold forever. But, unfortunately, it is not.
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Works Cited
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Are Made.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.
Barnard, John. “The Restoration Theatre.” The Penguin History of Literature: English Drama
to 1710. Ed. Christopher Ricks. New York: Penguin, 1987. 381-412.
Buckner, Jocelyn L. “Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representations of Slavery and the Black
Character.” Review. Theatre History Studies 29 (2009). 1-2. Literary Resource
Center. Web.
Diamond, Elin. “Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn‟s The Rover.” Restoration and
Eighteenth- Century Comedy. Ed. Scott McMillin. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. 597611.
Kaufman, Anthony. “Thomas Southerne: Irish Paywright (1660-1746).” Restoration and
Eighteenth-Centruy Dramatists: First Series. Ed. Paula R. Backscheider. Dictionary of
Literary Biography 80 (1989): 1-10. Web.
Macdonald, Joyce Green. Ed. Oronooko (1695). The Broadview Anthology of Restoration &
Early Eighteenth-Century Drama. Concise Edition. Ed. J. Douglas Canfield. New York:
Broadview Press, 2004. 427-475. Print.
Southerne, Thomas. Oronooko (1695). The Broadview Anthology of Restoration & Early
Eighteenth-Century Drama. Concise Edition. Ed. J. Douglas Canfield. New York: Broadview
Press, 2004. 427-475. Print.
Tague, Ingrid H. “Love, Honor, and Obedience: Fashionable Women and the Discourse of
Marriage in the Early Eighteenth Century.” Journal of British Studies 40 (2001):
76106.
Wheatley, Christopher. “Ethics and Drama.” Literature Criticism from 1400to 1800 114
(2005): 1-15. Literature Resource Center. Web.
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