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The Recruiting Officer in the Penal Colony

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Memory and Enlightenment

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ((PMMS))

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Abstract

Staged by transported felons in the New South Wales penal colony on 4 June 1789, George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706) was the first play to be performed by Europeans in Australia. This chapter discusses the assimilation into cultural memory of the 1789 performance through two memory-making fictions: Thomas Keneally’s 1987 novel The Playmaker and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (1988). I argue that the cultural memory of the 1789 performance propagated by these texts now constitutes a myth of enlightenment, one that requires revision as well as rehearsal.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Tom Keneally , The Commonwealth of Thieves (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 235.

  2. 2.

    Thomas Keneally , The Playmaker (London: Sceptre, 1988), first unnumbered page preceding title page. Further references given after quotations in the text.

  3. 3.

    ‘AQA GCE A Level Specification: Drama and Theatre’, 2018, p. 14, http://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/drama/specifications/AQA-7262-SP-2016.PDF

  4. 4.

    Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement in Port Jackson in New South Wales (London: G. Nicol and J. Sewell, 1793), p. 25.

  5. 5.

    David Collins, An Account of the English Colony of New South Wales (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1804), p. 61.

  6. 6.

    Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), p. 81.

  7. 7.

    Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009; rev. ed., 2016), p. xiii.

  8. 8.

    Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), p. 186.

  9. 9.

    Annalisa Pes, ‘A Restoration Drama at The Antipodes. George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer in Thomas Keneally’s The Playmaker ’, in Susanna Zinato, ed., Rehearsals of the Modern: Experience and Experiment in Restoration Drama (Naples: Liguori, 2010), pp. 149–58 (p. 150).

  10. 10.

    Joseph Roach , Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 27–8.

  11. 11.

    Roach , pp. 29–30.

  12. 12.

    George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer , ed. Tiffany Stern (London: Methuen, 2010), V.vii.155, p. 144. Subsequent references given parenthetically.

  13. 13.

    Audrey Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), p. 4.

  14. 14.

    John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 300–1.

  15. 15.

    Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 4.

  16. 16.

    Robert Jordan, The Convict Theatres of Early Australia , 1788–1840 (Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency Press, 2002), pp. 6, 30.

  17. 17.

    Carol B. Bardenstein, ‘Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Israeli and Palestinian Collective Memory’, in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Presses of New England, 1999), pp. 148–71, 148.

  18. 18.

    Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7–24, 13.

  19. 19.

    Philip Roberts and Max Stafford-Clark, Taking Stock: The Theatre of Max Stafford-Clark (London: Nick Hern, 2007), p. 157.

  20. 20.

    Robert Baker-White, The Text in the Play: Representations of Rehearsal in Modern Drama (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999), p. 16.

  21. 21.

    Timberlake Wertenbaker, Our Country’s Good (London: Methuen, 2003), p. 65, citing The Recruiting Officer , V.iii.

  22. 22.

    BBC Radio 4, Our Country’s Good , dir. Sally Avens, broadcast 17 December 2011.

  23. 23.

    Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40 (1988), 519–31, 526, 520.

  24. 24.

    Jan Assman, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 24.

  25. 25.

    Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler : From Norms to Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 63.

  26. 26.

    Emilie Pine , The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 4.

  27. 27.

    Susan Letzler Cole, Directors in Rehearsal : A Hidden World (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 4.

  28. 28.

    Jim Davis, ‘A Play for England: The Royal Court Adapts The Playmaker ’ in Alan Reynolds, ed., Novel Images: Literature in Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 175–90, 175, 187.

  29. 29.

    Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 22–3.

  30. 30.

    Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 103, 88, 61.

  31. 31.

    Bertolt Brecht, Trumpets and Drums, trans. Rose and Martin Kastner, in Collected Plays, vol. 9 (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 297; Joel Schechter, ‘Eighteenth-Century Brechtians’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 33 (2013), 187–209, 194.

  32. 32.

    Brecht , Trumpets and Drums, p. 267.

  33. 33.

    Kevin J. Gardner, ‘George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer : Warfare, Conscription, and the Disarming of Anxiety’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25 (2001), 43–61, 48.

  34. 34.

    Stern, ‘Introduction’, The Recruiting Officer , p. xxi.

  35. 35.

    Damien Short, ‘When Sorry Isn’t Good Enough: Official Remembrance and Reconciliation in Australia’, Memory Studies, 5 (2012), 293–304, 295.

  36. 36.

    Ann Rigney, ‘Do Apologies End Events? Bloody Sunday, 1972–2010’, in Marek Tamm, ed., Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 242–61, 246.

  37. 37.

    John Rickard, Australia : A Cultural History (London: Longman, 1988; 2nd ed., 1996), p. 24.

  38. 38.

    John Martin Staniforth, ‘Re-Imagining the Convicts: History, Myth and Nation in Contemporary Australian Fictions of Early Convictism’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2015, p. 130. I am grateful to the author of the thesis for allowing me access to it in advance of its being made publicly available.

  39. 39.

    Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborignes (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), p. 10.

  40. 40.

    James Ward, ‘The Masculine Economies of Banished’, in Katherine Byrne, Julie Taddeo, and James Leggott, eds, Conflicting Masculinities: Men in British Television Period Drama (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), pp. 15–34.

  41. 41.

    Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8 (2006), 387–409, 388, 387.

References

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  • ———, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009; rev. ed., 2016).

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  • Goldie, Terry, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993).

    Google Scholar 

  • Horning, Audrey, Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

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  • Hutcheon, Linda, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994).

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  • Keneally, Thomas, The Playmaker (London: Sceptre, 1988).

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  • ———, The Commonwealth of Thieves (London: Vintage, 2007).

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  • Kerrigan, John, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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  • Letzler Cole, Susan, Directors in Rehearsal: A Hidden World (London: Routledge, 1992).

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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  • Wolfe, Patrick, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8 (2006), 387–409.

    Article  Google Scholar 

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Arts and Humanities, Ulster University, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK

    James Ward

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Ward, J. (2018). The Recruiting Officer in the Penal Colony. In: Memory and Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96710-3_6

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