7 - Susanna Rowson and the dramatized Muslim

Summary

Susanna rowson, the english novelist turned american actress, was, like her fellow United States playwrights, a tyro, but she had the advantage, if one wants to speak in those terms, of having lived in England during the Revolution and the decade after and therefore having opportunity to attend London and provincial theatres during a time when the American stage was either moribund or in transition to its post-war revival. Her first successful effort as a dramatist was Slaves in Algiers, a comedy of Barbary captivity that had a modest run in Philadelphia and other cities. With its topical subject of Americans being held for ransom in North Africa and its portrayal of liberty-seeking women, the play has attracted some recent attention on both those scores. But in many ways, Slaves in Algiers is more dependent on earlier plays with Islamic characters than it is on current events. For all of Rowson's contributions to a feminist and a republican drama, the text of her play owes a considerable debt to at least one well-known tragedy of Christian captivity and to a character tradition that spanned two centuries. Her portrayal of an Algerian court is a musical comedy version of other such courts, often developed as more threatening than that of the dey in her play, Muley Moloc. By 1794, the bewhiskered, beturbaned Muslim tyrant had already become a well-worn stereotype that Rowson exploits for topical value; at the same time, she draws upon a long and complex history of rendering Islamic characters that informs her text in both overt and covert ways.