No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
On the Margins: Eastern Canadian Theatre as Post-colonialist Discourse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
Canada became a country in 1867 through the Confederation of the two small eastern (Maritime) colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick with the larger, more inland colonies of Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec). Yet the flag remained the British Union Jack and the constitution resided in London. Canada's own flag was raised only in 1965, and the constitution repatriated only in 1982, both events accompanied by considerable controversy within the nation. The political controversy then (and now) reflects a constantly ambivalent attitude of Canadians towards the relationship between identity and nationalism, an ambivalence that encompasses protean forms of nationalism, including essentialist nationalism and a more elastic concept which recognizes the legitimacy of emotional and cultural ties beyond the national borders.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1996
References
Notes
1. See Filewod, Alan, ‘Between Empires: Post-Imperialism and Canadian Theatre’, Essays in Theatre 11, 1 (1992), p. 4Google Scholar. I am using the term ‘post-colonial’ in the sense in which it is used in The Empire Writes Back, p, 2Google Scholar, ‘to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is a continuity of preoccupation throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression.’
2. Saddlemyer, Ann, ‘Thoughts on National Drama and the Founding of Theatres’, Theatrical Towing and Founding in North America, ed., Conolly, L. W., (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 210.Google Scholar
3. See Sandwell, Bernard K., ‘Our Adjunct Theatre’, Addresses Delivered Before the Canadian Club of Montreal: Season 1913–1914 (Montreal: n.p., n.d. [1914]), p. 102Google Scholar. Sandwell's was one of many voices that took up the cry for cultural independence from the United States in the early years of this century. For a helpfully documented overview of the move towards cultural nationalism at this time see Salter, Denis, ‘The Idea of a National Theatre’, Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, ed., Lecker, Robert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 1991, pp. 71–90.Google Scholar
4. See Armstrong, Christopher, ‘The Flistory of the Imperial Capitol Theatre’, (Saint John: unpublished report for Bi-Capitol Project Inc., 1987)Google Scholar. In 1994 the title ‘Imperial’ has been reinstated to an excellent restoration of Golding's fine, but long unused theatre, thus indicating, however nominally, current acceptance of a traditionalist heritage stance. The theatre had been renamed the Capitol upon lease to Famous Players in 1929 and was the Full Gospel Assembly church (Pentecostal), from 1957 until its purchase by a citizens' group in 1983 with a view to restoration.
In the narrative of Maritime theatre, the only facility other than the Imperial to have been owned by Americans was James West Lanergan's immensely popular Saint John Dramatic Lyceum (1856–77), also built in response to local initiative. Other significant structures, such as the Academies of Music in Saint John (opened 1872) and Halifax (1877), and the Opera Houses in Moncton (1885) and Saint John (1891), were financed and operated by local merchants, doctors, and lawyers.
5. Golding was manager of the Nickel cinema, leased by the Keith-Albee company. Despite opposition from the company he introduced an orchestra which was so successful that the entire circuit copied his idea. Five other cinemas hi Saint John were owned locally (two of them by Golding).
6. There has been an ongoing controversy about what constitutes a Canadian writer.
7. Bessai, Diane, ‘The Regionalism of Canadian Drama’, Canadian Literature 85 (1980), p. 11.Google Scholar
8. Cf., for example, ‘Canadian literature … remains generally monolithic in its assertion of Canadian difference from the canonical British of the more recently threatening neo-colonialism of American culture’, Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London & NY: Routledge, 1989), p. 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Contrast with this, ‘The Maritimes, because of their longer history of European settlement, have maintained a cohesive traditionalist stance approximating a Canadian equivalent to the ethos of New England’, Keith, W. J., ‘Third World America: Some Preliminary Considerations’, Studies on Canadian Literature: Introductory and Critical Essays, ed., Davidson, Arnold E. (New York: Modern Languages Association, 1990), p. 14Google Scholar. The Maritimes have been as often eager to assert difference from Ontario as from the United States and Britain.
9. Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The Old History and the New: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 126Google Scholar. The author refers to Paris, the provinces, and France, where I have substituted Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Canada.
10. Bessai, , ‘Regionalism of Canadian Drama’, p. 7.Google Scholar
11. Knowles, Richard Paul, ‘Voices Off’, Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, ed., Lecker, Robert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 109.Google Scholar
12. Jean Sweet was one of the founders of the Saint John Theatre Guild whose constitution, in line with Sandwell and Massey's objectives, included a preference for Canadian and British plays. See Sweet, Jean MacCallum, ‘Small Potatoes’, The Curtain Call, 1938, pp. 11–13.Google Scholar
13. Parkhill, Frances's The Fair CountryGoogle Scholar exists in transcript, private collection, St. Stephen, NB.
14. Mark Blagrave: ‘[There] is nothing in De Roberval that could not be put (indeed, was not put) upon the nineteenth-century stage.’ See Blagrave, 's discussion of De Roberval in ‘Playwriting in the Maritime Provinces: 1845–1903’ (Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1983), pp. 154–79.Google Scholar
15. In attempting to give to pseudo-historical incident a variety of nationalistic/mythological significance, Duvar was following in the tradition of writers like Sangster, Roberts, or Richardson who, in poetry and prose fiction, were attempting the same thing.
16. Duvar, John Hunter, DeRoberval, A Drama; also the Emigration of the Fairies, and the Triumph of Constancy, a Romaunt (Saint John: McMillan, 1888), p. 40Google Scholar. The earliest scripted drama from the Maritimes, the marine masque Théâtre de Neptune by Marc Lescarbot (1606), is clearly colonial, a celebration of European expansionist ideology. Performed off Port-Royal, Nova Scotia, on ships decorated to imitate chariots belonging to Neptune and his Tritons, in canoes manoeuvred by Frenchmen costumed as Indians, and for an audience that included both Frenchmen and Indians, the mythological spectacle honoured Sieur de Poutrincourt on his return from a voyage of discovery, and was obviously designed to express the supremacy of the King's representative in New France, to inspire French patriotism, and in all likelihood to awe a subject people. Its purpose is political as well as ceremonial, blatantly civilizing and polemical, employing hegemonic cultural values as ideal, presuming to portray and to speak for (and in front of) the ‘Other’.
17. Ibid., p. 58.
18. Ibid., p. 83. It is helpful to place De Roberval alongside Bentley's discussion of the ways in which four poets of Georgian Canada treat the Indians stereotypically, thus denying them status and individual identity. See Bentley, David, ‘Savage, Degenerate, and Dispossessed: Some Sociological, Anthropological, and Legal Backgrounds to the Depiction of Native Peoples in Early Long Poems on Canada’, Canadian Literature: Native Writers and Canadian Writing, ed., New, W. H. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1968).Google Scholar
19. Presbyterian Witness, 16 08 1856.Google Scholar
20. Halifax Morning Chronicle, 16 06 1856.Google Scholar
21. For example, Bailey, Jacob, Humours of the Committee, or the Majesty of the Mob, ed., O'Neill, Patrick B.. Canadian Drama 15. 2 (1989), pp. 231–54Google Scholar and Edward Winslow's dramatic sketch Substance of the Debates of the Young Robin Hood Society (MS. accession 113. Saint John Regional Library, Saint John, 1795).Google Scholar
22. Davies, Gwendolyn, Studies in Maritime Literary History (Fredericton: Acadiensis, 1991), pp. 30–47Google Scholar, provides a useful discussion of Loyalist writing in the Maritimes.
23. Cogswell, Fred, ‘Literary Activity in the Maritime Provinces, 1815–1880’, Literary History of Canada, ed. Klinck, Carl (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 118–19.Google Scholar
24. See Murdoch, William, Discursory Ruminations, A Fireside Drama (Saint John: H. Chubb, 1876).Google Scholar
25. Johnson, Stephen, ‘“Getting to” Canadian Theatre History: On the Tension Between the New History and the Nation State’, Theatre Research in Canada 13. 1/2 (1992), p. 68.Google Scholar
26. The matinee at the Temperance Hall was Ten Nights in a Bar Room and the evening performance a combination of Actress by Daylight, Toodles, and The Lady's Maid. Professor Horton's Elocution class presented Cinderella and Old Peabody's Visit to the City elsewhere.
27. 6 July 1867.
28. Millidge, J. W., ‘Reminiscences of St. John from 1849–1860’, Collections of the New Brunswick Historical Society 10 (1919), p. 135.Google Scholar
29. Lawson, Jessie I. & Sweet, Jean MacCallum, Our New Brunswick Story (Toronto: Canada Publishing, n.d.), pp. 193–4.Google Scholar
30. Smith, Mary Elizabeth, ‘Three Political Dramas from New Brunswick’, Canadian Drama 12. 1 (1986), p. 146.Google Scholar
31. Anglin was anti-Confederate editor of the Catholic organ, The Saint John Morning Freeman. Following Confederation he became a member of Parliament and Speaker of the House of Commons. He was father to the well-known Canadian actress, Margaret Anglin.
32. 13 June 1866. For another example of this kind of writing see the description of the opening of Willis and Hatheway's Dramatic Company (the Provincial Legislature) at Fredericton under ‘Provincial Entertainment’ in The New Dominion and True Humorist, 18 03 1871.Google Scholar
33. 6 March 1869.
34. See Philbrick, Norman, ed., Trumpets Sounding: Propaganda Plays of the American Revolution, (Salem: Ayer, 1977)Google Scholar. In his introduction (pp. 1–2), Philbrick states that ‘at least thirteen propaganda plays and dialogues, exclusive of nontheatrical tracts, were printed in the colonies’.
35. New Dominion and True Humorist, 3 03 1870Google Scholar. Elsewhere I have discussed in some detail how Measure by Measure turns ‘Shakespearian tragedy into mock-heroic verse drama for the purpose of influencing public opinion on contentious issues of the day’. Measure by Measure and Other Nineteenth-Century Satires from New Brunswick', Theatre History in Canada, 5, 2 (1994), p. 172Google Scholar. Some non-political plays from New Brunswick mock inherited form and substance, as well. For instance, The Lost Half-Penny! or the Pea-nut Boy's Revenge! is a very short, five-act piece that mocks the conventions of melodrama.
36. Carleton, John, More Sinned Against Than Sinning (New York: Dewitt, 1883).Google Scholar
37. Carleton, John, Coom-na-Goppel (Chicago & New York: Dramatic Publishing, 1906).Google Scholar
38. Blagrave, Mark, ‘Ireland and the Irish in Three Canadian Plays (1882–1906)’, Canadian Drama 16, 2 (1990), p. 144.Google Scholar
39. Smith, Mary Eizabeth, Too Soon the Curtain Fell: A History of Theatre in Saint John 1789–1900 (Fredericton: Brunswick Press, 1981), p. xi.Google Scholar
40. Fullerton, Carole, ‘The Theatre Criticism of George Stewart’, Theatre History in Canada 9. 2 (1988), pp. 147–56Google Scholar, discusses Stewart's theatre criticism and his various literary activities.
42. Progress, 19 03 1892.Google Scholar
43. Halifax Morning Herald, 31 10 1884.Google Scholar
44. Halifax Morning Herald, 22 07 1882.Google Scholar
45. Halifax Morning Herald, 29 10 1884.Google Scholar
46. Halifax Morning Herald, 22 07 1882.Google Scholar
47. Halifax Morning Herald, 4 07 1887.Google Scholar
48. Halifax Morning Herald, 6 05 1887.Google Scholar
49. Halifax Morning Herald, 3 06 1888.Google Scholar
50. See Button, Marshall, ‘Lucien’, The Proceedings of the Theatre in Atlantic Canada Symposium, ed. Knowles, Richard Paul (Sackville: Mount Alison University, Anchorage Series 4, 1988), pp. 169–92.Google Scholar
51. Realization of identity through difference rather than essence is characteristic of post-colonial societies. Cf., for instance, Ashcroft, , The Empire Writes Back, p. 167Google Scholar, ‘Just as the two geographical entities, the Occident and the Orient, in Said's terms, “support and to an extent reflect each other”, so all post-colonial societies realize their identity in difference rather than in essence. They are constituted by their difference from the metropolitan and it is in this relationship that identity both as a distancing from the centre and as a means of self-assertion comes into being.’
52. I am grateful to my colleagues, Mary Brodkorb and Robert Moore, and to my graduate students, Susan Flagel and Carl Killen, for stimulating discussions about the material for this paper.