SOURCE: “James Nelson Barker's Pocahontas: The Theatre and the Indian Question,” in Nineteenth Century Theatre, Vol. 23, Nos. 1-2, Summer, 1995, pp. 5-32.

[In the following essay, Crestani examines Barker's The Indian Princess as the first American drama to explore the relationship between Euro-Americans and Native Americans.]

April 6, 1808. Philadelphia theatregoers witness at the Chestnut Street Theatre the première of James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess; or, la Belle Sauvage. The play excites curiosity for its complete novelty: it is the first play on a North-American Indian subject written by an American-born playwright and performed on a professional stage. And because of this parade of firsts the play is remembered in every American theatre history text.¹

As a cultural artifact, the play is part of the process of self-definition undertaken by the United States at the end of the eighteenth century. After the Revolutionary War, the acquisition of political independence dictated the parallel creation of original cultural productions. Many literary personalities advocated the rise of an independent national literature and drama. Because of its nature as a public forum, the theatre contributed with particular power to the construction of America's self-image. Most of the plays at the time were intended to convey nationalistic ideas by dealing with what were recognized as specifically American subjects. With the opening decade of the nineteenth century the major internal problem of the relationship between Euro-Americans and indigenous populations was emerging as a crucial one in the process of nation-building and was to become a subject of primary importance in theatrical and literary representations. The Indian Princess appeared at a particularly important moment in the political development of what is known as the Indian question. Only three years earlier, in 1805, President Thomas Jefferson had signed the Louisiana Purchase. This act represented in its essence the first concrete step towards the policy of displacement of native populations that became official later under President Andrew Jackson. The initial movements of this evolution disclosed a series of tensions and contradictions among political parties that called for a cultural response. Even if not entirely consciously, The Indian Princess was the earliest of such cultural responses in drama, in the dialectical relationship that the theatre has always held with the political and social life of a country.

The purpose of this essay is to examine The Indian Princess as the first attempt in American dramaturgy to deal with the vast question of what was to be perceived as an appropriate relationship between Euro-Americans and Native Americans. Barker's treatment of the subject, I shall argue, reflects the various and conflicting ways of thinking about this new and problematic issue that were prevalent in American society of the time. In particular, the play expresses the contradictory political behavior carried out by the Jeffersonian government in relation to that same issue. I will examine the relationship between the play and its source, Captain John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Islands (1624), to see how Barker manipulated the material contained in that text. The playwright created a play set with double messages that reveal the uncertainty and ambivalence of cultural, social, and political attitudes of nineteenth-century Euro-Americans with regard to the definition of their relationship with indigenous peoples.

The Indian Princess dramatizes selected passages from John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Islands. Captain John Smith, the well-known founder of the Jamestown colony, Virginia, 1607, wrote the Generall Historie in London, thirteen years after he had left the colony.² With this book, which Burl Grose calls the “greatest eulogy” composed by Smith for himself (54), the Captain was deliberately trying to enhance his reputation as a skilled leader and colonist. His purpose being to convince the Virginia Company of London, charter holder of Jamestown, to give him back his position as “president” of the colony,³ he did not spare any efforts in depicting himself as a brave hero throughout the book, especially in those sections dealing with his relationship with Native Americans. With regard to indigenous people, Smith reported detailed accounts of their customs and habits.⁴ As he portrays himself, his attitude toward the Indians is apparently peculiar for a European of the seventeenth century: he seems at ease in accepting at least the existence of differently shaped societies and boasts he immediately understood how to treat and trade with indigenes. He often considered the political organization among the Indians to be better than that of the English and showed respect for the chiefs he met. Yet, as was common in his time, he deemed Indians to occupy a low level in the human hierarchy, and he talks about them as “Salvages” and “tricky” people, at the same time dignified and “hellish.”⁵ In his writings he never missed the opportunity to vaunt the ease with which he could make fun of the indigenes' naiveté and the respect that the Indians showed for his authority. In general, as also noted by Robert F. Berkhofer, Smith “presented an ambiguous picture of the Indian to his readers” (19). A similar ambiguity, as we will see, was to be offered to his audiences two centuries later by Barker through the construction of his various Indian characters and their relationship with the English settlers.

Smith's narrative style in the Generall Historie is much more dramatic than in any other of his writings. Here he talks in detail about his capture by some three hundred Indians of the Pamunkey group and his rescue by chief Powhatan's favorite daughter, Pocahontas. The famous scene is described by Smith in the following terms:

At his [Smith's] entrance before the King, all the people gave a great shout. … Having feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could laid hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the King's dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms and laid her own upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperor was contented he should live to make him [Powhatan] hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper; for they thought him as well of all occupations as themselves.

(151)

By now most scholars agree that the rescue scene was performed by Pocahontas as a ceremony of adoption of the newcomer into the Pamunkey community.⁶ But the political meaning of this act was not understood by the colonists and had since been interpreted otherwise in both historical and fictional writings, principally emphasizing the romantic aspect of the episode. According to this romantic perspective, Pocahontas was struck by the charming peculiarity of Captain Smith and spontaneously ran to save him. Powhatan, moved by his daughter's touching gesture, changed his mind and accepted Smith into the community as a brother. Most likely, by making Pocahontas perform the rescue ceremony, Powhatan intended to tie the newcomers in a perennial relation of gratitude toward his magnanimity and consequently toward his people. Instead, from a European standpoint, this action was always interpreted, in literature as well as in historiography and political writings, as an Indian act of acknowledgment of the colonists' valor, if not of their superiority. In other words, to be accepted by the Indians meant that the latter allowed the settlers to enter their land and proceed with the colonization of the country.

With a similar romantic thread Barker embroidered this episode in composing The Indian Princess. Using several passages from Smith's account as well as inventing new scenes and characters, he gave central attention to the capture and rescue of Captain Smith and to the marriage of Pocahontas to the English merchant John Rolfe, which actually occurred in 1614.⁷ Barker had compelling reasons to take this particular piece of history and rewrite it as he did for the theatre: his determination to contribute to the creation of an independent American dramaturgy, the mythological significance that colonial history had acquired by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the importance of the Indian question in the politics of the time, to cite the most relevant ones.

James Nelson Barker (1784-1858) was a wealthy and brilliant young Philadelphian of twenty-four when he wrote The Indian Princess. He was to pursue a professional political career in local and national government, always combining it with a strong interest in the theatrical life of the United States and of Philadelphia in particular. Son of the three-time mayor of Philadelphia General John Barker, he followed his father into the Democratic party as a young man and was always a devoted Jeffersonian in his beliefs. Like many playwrights at the time, he was a talented amateur more than a professional, actively involved in the cultural life of his city.⁸ He always passionately advocated America's intellectual and political independence from England. In the preface to the second edition of his Marmion; or, The Battle of Flodden Field (1816), a play based on Walter Scott's poem Marmion, he wrote:

We may have geographical independence,—political freedom;—but a provincial sense of inferiority still lingers among some, even of our highest-minded, with regard to the arts and refinements of society. … We shall never acquire a national character until those Americans … shall arise from the debasement of servile imitation.

(11)

Drama especially had to be freed from “the debasement of servile imitation,” for it is, according to Barker, of crucial importance for the development of democracy. In the first of a series of eleven articles entitled “The Drama,” published in the Philadelphia Democratic Press between December 1816 and February 1817, Barker wrote about the central position that drama should be granted among the arts in the new American democracy. The primary function of the drama, he claimed, was “to keep alive the spirit of freedom; and to unite conflicting parties in a common love of liberty and devotedness to country” (18 December 1816). The drama was the perfect didactic instrument for the promotion and development of both nationalism and democracy. Thus, in order to establish the national character he was writing about, Barker sought consistently “American” subjects for most of his plays: Tears and Smiles (1806), a comedy on American moral and social customs; The Embargo; or, What's News? (1808), which deals with an actual political affair in the relationship between America and England; The Indian Princess; or, la Belle Sauvage (1808), related to the Indian problem; Marmion; or, the Battle of Flodden Field (1812), on England's political behavior against any form of independence; The Armourer's Escape; or, Three Years at Nootka Sound (1817), based on the story of John Jewitt's three-year captivity among Indians; and Superstition; or, The Fanatic Father (1824), staging the destructive effect of bigotry and superstition on a New England town in 1675.

Historical dramas such as Superstition, The Indian Princess, and The Armourer's Escape were directly related to the cultural construction of “America.” After the Revolution, many American writers and historians felt the need to find a common ground upon which to assemble the image of their new country. To this purpose, they began to dig in their brief past to create an American mythology. The colonial era soon became the locus of origin of American identity—what Robert S. Tilton, in his Pocahontas: the Evolution of a Narrative, calls “national prehistory” (48). As protagonists of this mythological moment of history, personages like Captain John Smith soon rose to the position of founding heroes. By writing a play about John Smith's story, Barker obviously participated in the creation of an American mythology, while at the same time fostering the development of a national literature. But in order for this mythology to better serve the promotion of America's image, Barker also contributed to changing the reading of a crucial figure in the Smith narrative: Pocahontas.

In relation to the emergence of Smith as a hero, at the beginning of the nineteenth century Pocahontas began to assume a role significantly different from the one she had played in eighteenth-century minds. Tilton points out this fundamental evolution of the Pocahontas figure from the eighteenth-century “wife of Rolfe” to the nineteenth-century “savior of Smith.” Implied in this metamorphosis is an important cultural shift: as “wife of Rolfe” Pocahontas was an historical person, the actual mother and ancestor of a noble, and at the time still extant, family, and represented for the American culture an example of successful interracial mixture; as “savior of Smith” she became the symbol of civilized savagery and the means through which the English had been able to settle in the new country.⁹ Tilton also argues that this shift of emphasis from Pocahontas's relationship with John Rolfe to her rescuing of John Smith contributed to the end of the idea of interracial marriage as a solution to the actual problems in the relationship between Euro-Americans and indigenous peoples. Barker's move toward the definition of the new Pocahontas is therefore an important one, not only for the mythological and romantic aura it gave to the early American history, but also—and even more so—for the change of perspective it determined in the consideration of the Indian question.

The dramatic tie between Pocahontas and John Smith was first stressed in literature by John Davis, who wrote a highly romanticized, very popular, and “admittedly fictional” (Tilton 26) version of the story, Captain John Smith and Princess Pocahontas: An Indian Tale, published in 1805. Davis's Pocahontas, though marrying John Rolfe, is in love with Captain Smith. It is this secret but transparent love, Davis posits, that accounts for her heroic gesture toward Smith. With The Indian Princess Barker also contributed to the alteration of Pocahontas by emphasizing her romantic heroism, but he never questioned her love for John Rolfe. In the play the metamorphosis of Pocahontas is not complete. Though enchanted by Captain Smith's charm, Barker's Pocahontas considers him a “brother.”¹⁰ She still falls deeply in love with John Rolfe and is married to him. In the play Pocahontas maintains the roles of both wife and rescuer of the white man. As a result, her image in the play is twofold: as “wife of Rolfe” she represents a model of miscegenation and an ideal of Indian incorporation into the European social and religious system; as “savior of Smith” she becomes an active player in legitimating English colonialism and a symbol for the rightness of European expansionism in North America. Therefore, if the former image still suggests the viability of interracial marriage and supports the political ideal of assimilation, the latter rejects the idea of physical amalgamation and rather fosters the concepts of “manifest Destiny” and of the “doomed Indian” that were to play a decisive role in the cultural acceptance of indigenes' removal or physical extermination.

It seems important at this point to consider the type of audience to which The Indian Princess was first presented and to look at the kind of fictionalized Indian character to which Philadelphia theatergoers were accustomed prior to 1808.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia had grown to be a rather aristocratic city, where the theatre was a central cultural and social institution. Bruce McConachie observes that upper-class males “regarded playgoing as both an enjoyable and a necessary extension of their power and status in local public affairs” (6) and constituted a large part of the audience. The Chestnut Street Theatre offered them a vast repertoire, but by 1808 no fictionalized North-American Indian characters seem to have been present on the stage, with perhaps the exception of the 1794 summer production of Tammany, about which no documentation has survived.¹¹ Instead, the Chestnut Street Theatre did offer its audiences the opportunity to see actual Native Americans in the theatre: when Indian delegations gathered in Philadelphia to meet the President, theatre managers invited the “Red Chiefs” to attend a theatre show. Their presence in the audience was advertised through the newspapers, and people flocked to the theatre, attracted by the spectacle of this exotic otherness. Often the “Chiefs” were requested to perform on stage. Three of these visits occurred in Philadelphia before the première of The Indian Princess. Charles Durang, historian of the Philadelphia stage, recollects two of them:

In the month of January [1792], several Indians visited the city and appeared as spectators at the benefit of Mr. Partridge. In February, the same chiefs were introduced to make their first appearance, and upon “a grand aboriginal night,” they danced “The Terrapin Dance, Beaver Dance, Buffalo Dance, and Grand War Dance,” to a tremendous house.

(20 August 1854)

William B. Wood, manager of the Chestnut Street Theatre, reports one more episode:

Among the stars of the season [1802-1803], white and colored, I may mention “a party of Shawnee and Delaware Chiefs, who will exhibit the Corn Piece, many war dances, & c. The principal Chief will speak an address.” These dances were (as was said of them) so terribly in earnest, that in their furor piece after piece of their scanty drapery became so unfixed and disarranged, as to occasion the flight of several ladies from the boxes.

(86)

Perhaps mindful of this experience, on 2 April 1808 (just four days before the performance of The Indian Princess), as Reese James wrote in his Cradle of Culture, 1800-1810, managers William Warren and William B. Wood of the Chestnut Street Theatre “assured the public that the visiting Oneidas, in presenting their War Dance, War Song, and Manner of Fighting, would wound no feelings of delicacy by their appearance and conduct” (105).

The appearance of actual Indians was confined to the pit or the stage, thus giving the occurrence the connotation of a spectacular event. On these occasions the distinction between the Indian as fictionalized character and the Indian as actual person was blurred, if not completely erased. Simply being in the theatre meant changing one's perception of any Indian from a person to a stereotyped character. It is not by chance that all the natives, either in the audience or performing on the stage, were called “Chiefs” and that they only performed “War Dances.” The wild, manly qualities of the warrior were the principal features in the European construction of the Indian. And these were the Indian characters that Philadelphians were used to seeing in the theatre before Barker's play appeared.¹²

The Indian Princess was announced as an “operatic melo-drame,” although it is not a typical melodrama as that genre became established later in the nineteenth century.¹³ Rather, in this case the term “melo-drame” still retains the early French and Italian meaning of a play with music. The tone throughout The Indian Princess is comic, and the few serious dramatic moments are always easily resolved. The definition of “operatic melo-drame” is very precisely related to the music:

As an Opera it possesses an overture, solo and ensemble numbers, choruses and finales. As a melodrama it contains spoken dialogue and dramatic action heightened by evocative orchestral music. …

(Yellin in Bray)

Nonetheless, Barker emphasized the sentimental and romantic note in several passages of his play and employed some dramatic devices typical of melodrama, such as sudden coups de théâtre or impressive tableaux. The Indian Princess is thus a hybrid product that includes elements characteristic of Elizabethan drama, operetta, and melodrama. The dramaturgical structure of the play comprises two plots, barely linked together in one story. The incidents of the play that are taken directly from Smith's Generall Historie are rearranged in time and space to serve Barker's dramaturgical purpose. In structuring the play, the author created a group of Shakespearean characters, made up of Larry the Irishman, Robin the malcontent, Geraldine (Percy's wife, where Percy was one of the historical Smith's men), Walter the English peasant, and his devoted wife, Alice (see Switzer 17-18). Walter forms the connecting link between these characters and those of the historical settlers. The group of invented characters plays their mini-Elizabethan comedy of errors and love in the Jamestown colony setting. Here all the typical situations happen: Robin attempts to seduce Alice without success, Larry's and Percy's wives arrive in Jamestown in page-like disguise, surprises follow thrilling revelations. Eventually, although not before a series of misunderstandings, everything is arranged and the couples happily reunited. Shakespeare was extremely popular on the nineteenth-century American stage, and theatergoers were accustomed to the dramatic structure of Elizabethan plays. The subplot added by Barker certainly matched the audience's theatrical taste and satisfied their demand for familiar and conventional situations on the stage.¹⁴

As a counterpoint to the action in Jamestown, the encounter between the colonists and the Indians takes place in the forest and in the Indian village of Werocomoco. The plot unfolds as follows: Smith and his men arrive in Virginia and begin to build Jamestown. At the same time, in Werocomoco, Pocahontas is unwillingly preparing for her wedding to the fierce Miami. During an expedition into the forest, Smith gets lost and is captured by a group of Indians led by Powhatan's son, Nantaquas. Smith is sentenced to death, but Pocahontas rescues him. Worried about Smith's prolonged absence, his men go in search of him and meet him in the forest, accompanied by Pocahontas and a group of Indians. Here Pocahontas and John Rolfe fall in love instantly, followed by Robin and Nima, Pocahontas's attendant. The colonists go back to Jamestown and continue their work of construction. In Werocomoco, Pocahontas begs Powhatan not to let her marriage with Miami happen. Powhatan agrees. Offended by this affront, Miami wages war upon Powhatan, but is defeated by the Powhatan-Smith alliance. Miami is furious. He and the Indian priest Grimosco devise a plan to get rid of the English. In the meantime nine ships loaded with supplies for the colony land at Jamestown, carrying also the disguised wives. Grimosco persuades Powhatan not to trust the colonists and to kill them during a false peace banquet in Werocomoco. Pocahontas finds out about the deception and races to a last-minute rescue of Smith and his men, not before having succeeded in warning the colonists and the recently disembarked crew of the danger. The slaughter is thwarted. Miami kills himself, Powhatan is forgiven, colonists and Indians become mutual friends. Jamestown is entirely built, and the five couples of the play are reunited for the happy ending in Werocomoco.¹⁵

Jamestown and Werocomoco (or, in general, the forest) come to assume in the play the role of two opposed cultural environments, the forest being the place where “savages” live and the colony being the home of European “civilized society.” The antithesis is evident: as the action proceeds, we see the English settlers engaged in the building of Jamestown, the symbolic and actual replacement of “wilderness” by “civilization.” At the same time, the colonists enter the wilderness, reach its core, the village of Werocomoco, and conquer also those human beings who inhabit the forest, the “savages.” The last scene of the play sets the colonists in Werocomoco, proclaiming their own victory over savagery and wilderness, and symbolically taking over the destiny of a conquered land. Significantly, it will be Pocahontas who will allow this final and decisive step in the encroachment of the colonists into her people's land by rushing to warn Smith and his men one moment before they are attacked by the Indians in Werocomoco.

The fact that Barker depicted the forest as the place where savages dwell does not mean that wilderness assumes negative connotations in the play. First of a series of ambivalent images, the luxuriant nature of the Virginia coast is described as “lovely” and “noble” by the characters of Smith and Rolfe.¹⁶ “Nature” is romantically conceived as the pure lost paradise, where “man, erect, can walk a manly round” (8), as opposed to the dehumanizing industrial environment of English cities, those “isle[s] of fogs” in which Smith's and Rolfe's “dull, sluggish countrymen … still creep around” (8). Yet it is to plant the seeds of European civilization that the colonists have reached that land: “Now, gallant cavalier adventurers, / On this our landing spot we'll rear a town / Shall bear our good king's name to after-time, / And yours along with it” (8), Smith exhorts his men.

Barker shaped the political side of the play in the forest's natural environment: the Indians, slowly and not without internal conflicts, realize the given superiority of the newcomers and decide to place their trust in them and to be friends. Barker never took into account the quarrels and the tensions between the English colonists and the Indians that Smith describes. In reality the relationship between the settlers and the Pamunkey always presented some problems, and eventually it degenerated into what is known as the Virginia massacre of 1622.¹⁷ There is no mention of such conflicts—neither present nor future—in The Indian Princess. The only trouble that Barker describes is caused by the conspiracy of the two invented characters of Miami and Grimosco.

Barker made a very substantial change in his source in the rendering of the relationship between colonists and Indians: in the play the natives are given full responsibility for every action. They represent the active party, while the settlers are simply dragged into circumstances where they can demonstrate their moral, if not physical, superiority. In the Generall Historie Smith presented himself and his fellow colonists constantly imposing their will on the Indians. Among the latter, Powhatan is depicted as very assertive and of subtle intelligence. Smith often described his negotiations with the “Emperor” and the diplomatic skills they both deployed. Each of these episodes, however, unfailingly ends up with Smith outwitting Powhatan, in a demonstration of how the captain succeeded in affirming his rights to settle in Virginia. Smith portrayed himself as willing to negotiate with the Indians, generous if need be, but always firm and resolute, not disposed to change his mind on his decisions. Barker's colonist characters, instead, do nothing to impose themselves. Their authority is revealed more than decreed and they are depicted as forgiving, merciful, and beneficent. Thus, for instance, when the false banquet scene occurs and the Indian betrayal is disclosed, Powhatan, exposed and guilty, “is transfixed with confusion” (70). He says: “Shame ties the tongue of Powhatan. … I was to massacre my friends” (70). But Smith does not hesitate to forgive him with friendly words: “No more. … Your hand. The father of this gen'rous pair [Pocahontas and Nantaquas] I cannot choose but love” (70). The construction of the passive English characters is a device that Barker used to depict early American colonial history, not as the story of how English culture encroached upon the lives of the natives and caused their destruction, but as the story of how the natives willingly dissolved into the white culture.

This dramaturgical construction validates two cultural prejudices at the same time: first, the granted superiority of the colonists' culture that will raise the savages from their primitive conditions, and, second, the necessity for the natives to submit to the settlers' will in the conviction that this would be advantageous for the natives themselves. The assumption is that “the savages” will naturally realize this necessity and spontaneously accept the process of their civilization. Barker is expressing here an attitude that had accompanied British colonization of America since the seventeenth century and that had developed into one of the aims of President Jefferson's policy toward indigenous people: their assimilation into the new American culture in order to resolve the problem of European expansion into native lands.¹⁸ Jefferson's political attitude toward Native Americans was ambivalent: though supporting the indigenes' rights on their own territory on the basis that “the Indian [is] in body and mind equal to the White man,” he “graded people on a scale of superiority and inferiority.”¹⁹ He played a paternalistic role in the official encounters with natives: as Richard Drinnon points out, he “salut[ed] delegations as ‘Children,’ ‘My Children,’ ‘My Son’” (88), thus relegating them to a virtual inferior status. Unofficial governmental policies of bribery to make the Indians cede their lands and the fundamental philosophy of the assimilation of the weaker race into the stronger one informed all Jefferson's political actions and are present in his speeches (Drinnon 83, 87). Jefferson had also taken into consideration an alternative to assimilation: displacement. Drinnon shows how Jefferson cherished the idea of the final removal of “red noncitizens” and made it concrete with the Louisiana Purchase. Nonetheless, President Jefferson was officially not averse to miscegenation as a viable method for approaching the Indian question. Jefferson's involvement in the debate against Enlightenment European polemicists (Berkhofer 42-43) did not allow him simply to reject the issue of physical amalgamation. In any case, the possibility of miscegenation remained aleatory; as Tilton put it, “because this combining of the Indian and the white races will eventually happen, it can be speculated about without anyone having to take any concrete steps toward its fruition in the present” (25). Interracial mixture was at once accepted as an Enlightenment concept and denied as a real solution to the white expansion westwards.

Jeffersonian in his beliefs, and a literary man engaged in the process of forging a cultural attitude in relation to the question, Barker found himself face to face with these ambiguities. In his attempt to deal with issues like assimilation, interracial mixture, and expansion in Indian territory, he was caught in the trap of ambivalence and in his play could offer only contradictory messages. Thus, he initially seemed to support the ideal of assimilation through both the processes of civilization and of miscegenation, as the following scenes will demonstrate.

The first encounter in the play between whites and natives shows the capture of Smith by a large group of Indians. He fights bravely and kills several men before yielding, thus astonishing Prince Nantaquas, Powhatan's son, who “views with wonder the prowess of Smith” (17). The prince immediately realizes the superiority of the white:

Prince. Are thou then not a God?

Smith. As thou art, warrior, but a man.

Prince. Then art thou a man like a God.

(17)

And then this passage follows:

Smith. Prince, the Great Spirit is the friend of the white men, and they have arts which the red men know not.

Prince. My brother, will you teach the red men?

Smith. I come to do it. My king is a king of a mighty nation; he is great and good; go, said he, go and make the red men wise and happy.

(18-19)

The character of Nantaquas is invented. He represents the stereotype of the “noble savage” and, as such, is inclined to acknowledge his enemy's qualities. In this scene Smith confirms those qualities with answers that seem to echo the paternalistic tone characteristic of Jefferson's speeches: “My son [Kitchao Geboway], tell your nation, the Chippewas, that I take them by the hand, and consider them as a part of the great family of the United States, which extends … from the rising to the setting sun” (qtd. Drinnon 88).

It is interesting to note that Barker portrayed the Indians as completely unaware of the existence of any foreign human being. In reality Smith was not the first English person whom the Pamunkey met, but this device allowed Barker to make the coming of the colonists an absolutely amazing event for the Indians. Again, the settlers do not need to assert their presence through physical force, nor have they to face problems to be accepted in the country. When the prisoner arrives in Werocomoco, Powhatan speaks: “[M]y people, strange beings have appeared among us; they come from the bosom of the waters, amid fire and thunder; one of them has our war-god delivered into our hands: behold the white being!” “His [Smith's] appearance excites universal wonder” (26). Powhatan, who in the play is presented “in state, … his wives, and warriors, ranged on each side” (26), displays no grandeur in comparison to the magnificence described by Smith in the General Historie:

At last they brought him to Mernocomoco [sic], where was Powhatan their Emperor. Here more than two hundred of those grim courtiers stood wondering at him, as he had been a monster; till Powhatan and his train had put themselves in their greatest braveries. Before a fire upon a seat like a bedstead, he sat covered with a great robe, made of rarowcun [raccoon] skins, and all the tails hanging by. On either hand did sit a young wench of 16 or 18 years, and along on each side the house, two rows of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red; many of their heads bedecked with the white down of Birds; but every one with something: and a great chayn of white beads about their necks.

(150)

This detailed description speaks both for Smith's sense of observation and for his admiration before such finery. But in the play the god-prisoner is silent and the Indians are those who have only expressions of astonishment at his sight. Pocahontas herself is struck with “peculiar admiration” as Smith is brought in as a captive: “O Nima! is it not a God!” (26). The rescue scene is very sentimental. Pocahontas “runs distractedly to the block, and presses Smith's head to her bosom” (29). The orchestra plays “plaintive music” while the Princess “leads Smith to the throne, and kneels.”

My father, dost you love thy daughter? listen to her voice; look upon her tears: they ask for mercy to the captive. Is thy child dear to thee, my father? Thy child will die with the white man.

(29)

As Powhatan, “looking on his daughter with tenderness,” decides to spare Smith, Pocahontas shows “the wildest expression of joy” and “the most extravagant emotions of rapture” (30).

By now the roles are established, the colonists take their position as benevolent teachers, and Pocahontas becomes the spontaneous savior of Smith and the first potential subject of civilization. The teach-and-civilize process is well presented in the love relationship between Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Pocahontas is amazed by the powerful sentiment she is feeling, but does not have a name for it:

Princess. To-day before my heart beat, and mine eyes were full of tears; but then my white brother was in danger. Thou art not in danger, and yet behold—(Wipes a tear from her eye.) Besides, then, my heart hurt me, but now! Oh, now!—Why is it so? (Leaning on him with innocent confidence.)

Rolfe. Angel of purity! thou didst to-day feel pity; and now—Oh, rapturous task to teach thee the difference!—now, thou dost feel love.

(38-39)

Barker pointed at Pocahontas's “purity” to enhance her image as the right subject of civilization. During a love scene between Pocahontas and Rolfe, she proves the perfect “scholar” to her “belov'd preceptor”:

Princess. O! 'tis from thee that I have drawn my being:
Thou'st ta'en me from the path of savage error,
Blood-stain'd and rude, where rove my countrymen,
And taught me heavenly truths, and fill'd my heart
With sentiments sublime, and sweet, and social. …
Hast thou not heaven-ward turn'd my dazzled sight,
Where sing the spirits of the blessed good
Around the bright throne of the Holy One?

(52)

The love story of Rolfe and Pocahontas, though sometimes passionate, is marked throughout the play with this kind of rhetoric, which shifts the spectator's (or the reader's) attention from the theme of love itself to the theme of civilization. Barker apparently wanted to emphasize the exemplariness of the union of Pocahontas and Rolfe. By framing their love as illustrated above, the playwright raised it to the level of a symbol of cultural assimilation rather than presenting it as an example of successful physical amalgamation. Barker is not suggesting the viability of intermarriage to promote assimilation. The transformation of the Pocahontas figure is evident in this love story: she is more an ethical entity than a physical one. Her personality is highly idealized, thus averting the implications of physical contact that would be associated with the idea of intermarriage. In a word, Barker—like President Jefferson—advocated miscegenation as an Enlightenment concept but rejected it as a realistic possibility in the relationship between Euro-Americans and Indians.²⁰ Rather, Barker promoted the idea of assimilation through Christian conversion and social transformation.

To erase any doubts about the inappropriateness of interracial mixture, Barker created two other significant episodes: Walter's narration scene and Robin's love story. Back from an expedition led by Smith among various Indian tribes, Walter tells his wife Alice about his adventures and talks especially about what he calls a “Virginian mascarado” (47), offered to the visiting colonists by a “mighty queen” (47) and her court of women. The episode is also recounted in the Generall Historie, although it happened on a significantly different occasion: Captain Smith and four of his men had traveled to Werocomoco to meet Powhatan, who was not in the village, but “was presently sent for: in the meane time, Pocahontas and her women entertained Captain Smith” with a “Mascarado” (182). Both in Smith's account and in Barker's play the performance is described as a “hellish,” “grotesque and diabolical” dance, the women singing and dancing “madder than mad Bacchantes” (Barker 47), “oft falling into their infernall passions” (Smith, ed. Barbour 182-83). Barker's ready-to-educate Pocahontas could never have acted this way; thus the playwright set the scene in a different context. Moreover, he used it as a parable to demonstrate the low morality of Indian customs. The passionate dance is described only slightly differently by Smith in The Generall Historie and by Walter in the play, though enough to cast rather dissimilar meanings on the two scenes.

Captain John Smith:

Then presently they were presented with this anticke; thirtie young women came naked out of the woods, onely covered behind and before with a few greene leaves, their bodies all painted, some of one colour, some of another, but all differing, their leader had a fayre payre of Bucks hornes on her head, and an Otters skinne at her girdle, and another at her arme, a quiver of arrowes at her backe, a bow and arrowes in her hand; the next had in her hand a sword, another a club, another a post-stick; all horned alike: the rest every one with their severall devises. These fiends with most hellish shouts and cryes, rushing from among the trees, cast themselves in a ring about the fire, singing and dauncing with most excellent ill varietie, oft falling into their infernall passions, and solemnly againe to sing and daunce; having spent neare an houre in this Mascarado, as they entered in like manner they departed. Having reaccommodated themselves, they solemnly invited him [Smith] to their lodgings, where he was no sooner within the house, but all these Nymphes more tormented him then ever, with crowding, pressing, and hanging about him, most tediously crying, Love you not me? love you not me? This salutation ended, the feast was set, consisting of all the Savage dainties they could devise: some attending, others singing and dauncing about them; which mirth being ended, with fire-brands in stead of Torches they conducted him to his lodging.

(Smith, ed. Barbour 182-83, italics added)

Barker:
Walter (to Alice). Imagine first,
The scene, a gloomy wood; the time, midnight;
Her [the “mighty queen's”] squawship's maids of honour were the masquers;
Their masks were wolves' heads curiously set on,
And, bating a small difference of hue,
Their dress e'en such as madam Eve had on
Or ere she ate the apple.
Alice.                                                                                                    Pshaw!
Walter.                                                                                                                        These dresses,
All o'er perfum'd with the self-same pomado
Which our fine dames at home buy of old Bruin,
Glisten'd most gorgeously unto the moon.
Thus, each a firebrand brandishing aloft,
Rush'd they all forth, with shouts and frantic yells,
In dance grotesque and diabolical,
Madder than mad Bacchantes.
Alice. Oh, the powers!
Walter. When they had finished the divertisement
A beauteous Wolf-head came to me—
Alice.                                                                                                                                            To you?
Walter. And lit me with her pine-knot torch to bedward,
Where, as the custom of the court it was,
The beauteous Wolf-head blew the flambeau out,
And then—
Alice.                              Well!
Walter.                                                  Then, the light being out, you know,
To all that follow'd I was in the dark.

(46-47)

Though Smith always emphasized the “savage” and “infernal” character of natives' customs, he nevertheless described, in the above passage, a performance which includes both passion and solemnity, and that at a certain moment comes to an end, giving way to other entertainments and “dainties.” Smith certainly was not worried about presenting native women in a favorable light, but he was not directly implying sexual offerings in his rendering of the dance, nor was he stating that there was something more than a “salutation” in the women's “hanging about him.” Soon afterwards, in fact, the “salutation” is over, the women “reaccommodate” themselves, and when bed time comes he is simply “conducted” to his lodging. Earlier in the Generall Historie, however, Smith had reported a similar episode in talking about “entertainments” among the Pamunkey. When “any great commander” came to visit the tribe's Werowance, he was greeted with a vehement “Oration” spoken by “their chiefest men.” Then “at night where his lodging is appointed, they set a woman fresh painted red … to be his bed-fellow” (Smith, ed. Barbour 120-21). The offering of a partner for the night here is explicit, but the element of the exciting dance is missing; thus, the narration appears to be just the description of a common ritual and lacks any moralistic condemning tone. Instead, the “Mascarado” contains the right exotic and sensual ingredients but is vague about sexual consequences.²¹

Not so in Walter's report. He sets the scene in the night, dramatically illuminated only by the firebrands in the dancers' hands. The dancers are naked and perfumed and “glistening” as the white man likes them, and at the same time “mad” and “diabolical.” The party ends with a suggestion of sexual offerings from a “beauteous Wolf-head,” as was “the custom of the court.” By combining the provocative dance and the active proposal from the “beauteous” (where in Smith the woman was “set” for the visitor), Barker portrayed the morally debased nature of the Indian culture and depicted the Indian woman as implicitly depreciated. Logically, his Pocahontas does not even live in the same tribe as those dancers.

In any case, the faithful Walter hastens to reassure his upset wife:

In faith I went to sleep.
Could a grim wolf rival my gentle lamb?
No, truly, girl: though in this wilderness the
Trees hang full of divers colour'd fruit,
From orange-tawny to sloe-black, egad,
They'll hang until they rot or ere I pluck them,
While I've my melting, rosy nonpareil.

(47)

Barker designed Indian women as inferior to the white ones by stressing their physicality. Indian women are like fruits to be plucked, but Walter plainly states that a white woman and wife is always to be preferred by an honest man. And if a white man plucks one of those fruits, he must be of dubious morality, as in the case of Robin.

Robin is at the same time a comic and a vulgar character. Because of his unpleasant behavior throughout the play he can be viewed as an early “villain” type, although not completely developed. When Pocahontas and Rolfe fall in love with each other, Robin also falls in love with Nima, Pocahontas's attendant. After a comic scene between the two he succeeds in conquering her heart. It is significant that a villain can with impunity obtain the woman he wants. No melodramas at the time allowed the bad character to get married and be happy. Robin would never have been given a white woman, but in Barker's play he can take for himself an Indian attendant, a “wild thing, sir, that I caught in the wood here” (73), as he introduces her to Smith.²² If on the one hand the Pocahontas-John Rolfe marriage works because of its symbolic value, on the other the practice itself is depicted as despicable through the union of these two low characters. In the description of this affair Barker showed to his audience how the mixing of the two races was not to be considered proper for any respectable American citizen.²³ But there is more to it than this. Playing on his name, Robin's few lines in relation to his love story and his Indian woman continually refer to the natural world. In the last scene he defines himself and Nima as “a pair of pigeons, sir; or rather a robin and a dove” (73). Nima had used similar language when she had first met Robin, comparing him to a “racoon,” which “bite[s]” and “run[s] up the tree” (35). Even if this kind of language is deployed primarily to achieve comic effects, the reference to nature acquires a different meaning if considered consistently with the particular role of wilderness identified above. The equation nature-wilderness-savagery suggests that only by going back to a sort of pre-civilized status has Robin been able to enter in direct contact with the Indians. The fact that Robin is not a respectable character might have facilitated his reversion. Thus, interracial unions are not only inappropriate; they also imply a regression to savagery, a movement backward into the forest that denies any value to “social refinement.”

By means of these two scenes Barker moved toward another, different approach to the problem of the relationship between Euro-Americans and Native Americans. It seems that the issues of conversion and civilization do not apply equally to any Indian tribes the colonists meet. In his rendering of the expedition, Walter reports to Alice about their conquests: “We've made thirty kings our tributaries” (45) and taken “all” their “treasures” (46). No alliances are made with those tribes, no attempts to civilize them—in a word, no relationship is established with those Indians but one of subjugation: “for our exploits,” Walter continues, “if posterity reward us not, there is no faith in history” (45). There is no choice for those tribes; they have to submit, this time not culturally but materially. Pocahontas's gesture allowed assimilation or, by the colonists' choice, mere encroachment and exploitation. Here, in contrast with the idea of assimilation, Barker presented, even if only as a hint, the possibility of considering any Indian tribes and territory to be completely at the disposal of Euro-American government. The problem of which relationship to establish with Native Americans could simply be avoided by keeping Indians and Euro-Americans apart. The white expansion in Indian territory would lead in this case to the displacement of the indigenous inhabitant to different, appropriate environments. The episode of Robin shows that in fact there is no possibility for de-civilized and savage characters to enter the Euro-American community. Robin is denied an answer to his hope of being re-admitted to Jamestown with Nima. He asks his captain: “When I have clipt her wings, and tamed her, I hope (without offence to this good company) that we shall bill without biting more than our neighbours” (73). Smith, surrounded by all five couples, says only: “Joy to ye, gentle lovers, joy to all …” (73) and goes on with his final panegyric, leaving in doubt whether Nima and Robin will ever be allowed to be part of the civilized world, even after Nima has supposedly been educated. They irremediably belong to wilderness and savagery.

Smith's final speech of “joy” confirms the ambiguity of such an attitude:

Methinks Wild Nature smooths apace her savage frown,
Moulding her features to a social smile.
Now flies my hope-wing'd fancy o'er the gulf
That lies between us and the aftertime,
When this fine portion of the globe shall teem
With civiliz'd society; when arts,
And industry, and elegance shall reign,
As the shrill war-cry of the savage man
Yields to the jocund shepherd's roundelay.

(73)

Smith's panegyric of the new, civilized, progressive, and free America suggests the ultimate elimination of any trace of the original Indian culture and the complete incorporation of it into the whites' way of life. But at the same time, especially in its two final lines, this speech can also be read as hinting more than absorption, namely removal. The savage man can give place to the shepherd either by dissolving into the latter's culture and so becoming a shepherd himself or by simply leaving his land to the shepherd and going to live in a different territory.

Assimilated or displaced, Indians have no choice but to accept their fate. Barker never stated this inevitability, but he did show that there is no alternative. Miami, the fierce, noble Indian who refuses to submit to the colonists, does not have any space in the new order and must die. He embodies the prototype of the “doomed Indian,” which was to become famous in the 1830s and 1840s with Forrest's interpretation of Metamora; or, the last of Wampanoags and which led to the long series of romantic “The Last of's …”. Miami incorporates the types of both the noble savage and the red devil. He possesses all the undeniable qualities of the brave Indian warrior, but also knows the passion of love in his devotedness to Pocahontas. He is generous, but becomes malicious and dishonest in his rage toward the English colonists.²⁴ Miami stubbornly refuses the intrusion of the English colonists and struggles in vain against the new settlers throughout the play. When it becomes clear that all the attempts to get rid of the settlers will fail and that Pocahontas will never be his, he commits suicide:

Miami. Miami's tortures shall not feast our eyes! (stabbing himself)
Smith. Rash youth, thou mightst have liv'd—
Miami. Liv'd! man, look there! (pointing to Rolfe and Princess. He is borne off)

(70)

Pocahontas has sided with the colonists since the beginning and cannot go back to savagery. Miami understands that the traditional way of life in which he believes is doomed to extinction. It is necessary to give way to the fulfillment of the manifest destiny that has always accompanied the English in their expansion westwards.²⁵ The conclusion of The Indian Princess, with five happy weddings, Miami's suicide, and Smith's final speech, fails to offer any coherent thought about the Indian question and remains open in its ambivalence. One thing is sure: Euro-Americans have both the right and the duty to dominate their new country.

To Barker, re-proposing the history of the first settlers was to reinforce the rightness of the very existence of the United States. And to choose the Pocahontas story meant to explore this rightness in relation to the ever more problematic coexistence with indigenes. The Indian Princess, far from offering a clear position in relation to the problem, reveals the difficult balancing of different perceptions of that same question. In its continual playing back and forth with opposite ideas, the play comes ultimately to be one of the first products in American culture to work toward the acceptance and therefore the legitimation of such political processes as removal and displacement of native peoples.

Notes

1. Prior to The Indian Princess, two other serious plays on North American Indians had appeared in the United States, neither of the two by American playwrights. The plays are Major Robert Rogers's Ponteach; or, The Savages of America (1766) and Mrs. Hanne Julia Hatton's Tammany; or, The Indian Chief (1794). Rogers was a British soldier. His play, printed in London and published in 1766, was never produced. Mrs. Hatton's Tammany had few productions between 1794 and 1796. No text survives. The author, Sarah Siddons's sister, was born in England and moved to New York only in 1793. See Jones 1-19. According to Jones, Tammany was performed in Philadelphia during the summer season of 1794, fourteen years before The Indian Princess appeared. Most likely the play was part of the New York Park Theatre stock company's summer touring repertoire. The Indian Princess maintains its status as “first” both as a surviving text and as the first “Indian play” ever written by an American-born playwright.

2. The Generall Historie is only one—and the longest—of the books that Smith wrote. For the history of Smith's publications see Smith, ed. Barbour, vol. 1, and Emerson.

3. Captain Smith had left Jamestown in 1609 because of a severe injury. In 1622 a group of Virginia natives attacked the colony, killing more than 300 colonists. The Virginia Company of London was put under investigation by King James. Smith hoped to be appointed again in the eventuality of a reorganization of the Company and invested in publicity in the years 1623-24. Unfortunately, the Court of King's Bench decreed the Virginia Company dissolved on 24 May 1624. The Generall Historie was entered for publication on July 12 of the same year. See Emerson 55-56, and Smith, ed. Barbour 2: 29. Hereafter all quotations from the Generall Historie are taken from Volume 2 of this edition, the page number cited parenthetically.

4. Smith's account of native American customs and ceremonies is one of the few and most accurate descriptions of the Indians of Virginia in the seventeenth century and represents a fundamental work for anthropologists and ethnohistorians. Yet scholars are conscious of the one-way perspective Smith employed in his observations: in most cases Smith very likely could not understand the social and political meaning of the natives' actions towards the colonists. Lemay explores Smith's character and professional qualities. See also Kupperman.

5. Smith, ed. Barbour, vol. 2: passim. As Emerson argues, a basic humanistic evolutionist philosophy informed Smith's attitude toward different civilizations: while appreciating natives' manual abilities, their skill in warfare, and their generosity, Smith conceived humanity as ascending from “the naturally minimal order of savage life” to the “higher life of Christian civility.” Native Americans occupied the “minimal order, with its natural aspiration” to Christian civility (50).

6. Of Smith's three accounts of Virginia, the Generall Historie is the only one in which the author tells how Pocahontas saved his life; Smith mentions Pocahontas in the other accounts but never talks about her gesture. Smith's different versions of his captivity have given rise to doubts about the truth of the story. The debate began in the last century and essentially rests now on the shared conviction that the rescue episode was in reality a ceremony of adoption. See the illuminating article on this issue by Williamson.

7. Pocahontas and John Rolfe were married in Jamestown. Soon after, they traveled to England, where she entered the high-society milieu and was received as an “Indian princess” by King James I. She died at Gravesend in 1617, leaving a son, Thomas. Some of her descendants were back in America by the middle of the eighteenth century. Following Barker's play, several other dramatic works were written on the Pocahontas story: Pocahontas, or, The Settlers of Virginia by George W. P. Custis (1830); Pocahontas: A Historical Drama by Robert Dale Owen (1837); The Forest Princess by Charlotte M. S. Barnes (1848); Po-ca-hon-tas, or, The Gentle Savage,an extravaganza by John Brougham (1870); Pocahontas: A Melo-Drama in Five Acts by Samuel H. M. Byers (1875); and Pocahontas: A Burlesque Operetta in Two Acts by Hendrick Welland (1886).

8. For details, see Musser's biography of Barker.

9. Tilton passim. Bruce Marchiavafa in The Influence of Patriotism in the American Drama and Theatre, 1773-1830 and Tilton talk extensively about the creation of mythic heroes and incidents derived from colonial history. Tilton especially deals with “the growing popularity of the Pocahontas narrative in the forty years after the Revolutionary War” (3) and points out that Pocahontas's “saving of Smith grows to be paramount. … In fact, by 1804 John Burk can discuss how her marriage to Rolfe rather than to Smith might lead one to disbelieve the entire narrative” (26). Though at the time the story of Pocahontas was known to the American public through the writings of the Marquis de Chastellux and Robert Beverly, it was with John Davis and James Nelson Barker that it came to occupy a prominent place in American cultural history as a founding narrative (Tilton 3, 10). Tilton's work on the Pocahontas narrative is an invaluable contribution to the study of Pocahontas dramas, but he concentrates on literature and on the analysis of Chapman's painting The Baptism of Pocahontas and does not discuss dramatic literature nor theatrical productions on the subject, although he does mention them.

10. In this respect Barker stuck with what he read in the Generall Historie, where Smith reports how he was usually called brother by Pocahontas.

11. For the Tammany performance, see note 1 above. According to Weldon Durham, by 1808 the Chestnut Street Theatre had produced several plays and a few afterpieces on South American and Caribbean Indians. Several afterpieces were built on the fantastic adventures and transformations of Harlequin, and it is possible that some of them portrayed North American Indians. Durham does not report any title explicitly referring to such characters (1: 178-93).

12. In her article “Staging the ‘Native’,” Rosemarie Bank points out the spectacular character of the official meetings between the President of the United States and the Indian delegations at the White House. Bank suggests studying these occurrences as performances and notes that the stereotype of the Indian character was also constructed on these models and validated by the evident “truth” of the model itself.

13. See the title-page to the 1808 edition of the play, The Indian Princess; or, la Belle Sauvage. An Operatic Melo-drame. Barker initially intended to write a regular dramatic piece, but worked it up into what he called “an opera” at the request of John Bray, actor and composer at the Chestnut Street Theatre. The musical score was written by Bray himself. See Dunlap 378. As a close to the play, Barker had composed a masque entitled America, “a brief, one act piece, consisting of poetic dialogue, and sung by the genius of America, Science, Liberty, and attendant spirits …” (Dunlap 376). The masque was never performed nor printed, and is lost. The play was performed again in Philadelphia only on 1 February 1809 “with applause” (Wood 118). The first New York presentation took place at the Park Theatre on 14 June 1809 (Odell 2: 318-19). According to Barker, it was “frequently acted in, I believe, all the theatres of the United States” (qtd. Dunlap 379). Although it is very hard to find any record of these stagings, the play was included by Margareta Sully West (widow of Thomas Wade West) in her company's repertory. The first representation occurred on 6 December 1809. See Curry 12, and Shockley 297. The weekly Philadelphia magazine The Ordeal (27 May 1809) reviewed one production of The Indian Princess: “The radical objection to this production, is the melo-dramatick cast which is given to it; but it contains occasional touches of nature. … The Indian character is generally well preserved. …” The reviewer gives an extract of “a fair example of the phraseology of an Indian warrior” from the text and judges one of the love scenes between Pocahontas and John Rolfe as “well wrought, replete with tenderness, and superior to the composition of most of the modern European play-compilers.”

14. Playgoers at the time were particularly resistant to complete novelties: Jones reports a case of an unsatisfied audience at one of the few performances of Tammany in New York in 1794. The audience very rudely hissed the composer, James Hewitt, and loudly demanded that he “begin with a familiar popular song rather than his overture” (17). He complied with the demand. On the relation between Barker's dramaturgy and the work of Shakespeare, see also Richardson.

15. Barker used in his play some classic stereotypes of the “savage” character: princess (Pocahontas), noble savage (Nantaquas and, to a certain extent, Powhatan), and red devil (Grimosco). By 1808 these stereotypes were in use in literature and on the stage principally as characters in European plays, where the tradition of the “exotic savage” (from both eastern and western Indies, including China and North America) was more than a century old. With particular regard to the stereotype of the princess, however, Barker detached himself from the tradition. According to Jones, Barker's Pocahontas is the prototype of the “happy-ending” Indian heroine, actively engaged in helping the whites to settle in her country, and finally rewarded with love for her actions (41-62). Powhatan in the play is not a very well-defined character. He is certainly noble and brave, but he also reminds us of the comic character of the king-marionette, who is maneuvered either by his priest (to accomplish evil plans) or by his son and daughter (for the sake of goodwill). In this play Powhatan ends up being manipulated also by the colonists.

16. James Nelson Barker, The Indian Princess; or, la Belle Sauvage. An Operatic Melo-drame (Philadelphia: T. & G. Palmer, 1808) 8. All quotations of the play are from this edition.

17. As Williamson points out, King Powhatan and Smith at their first meetings took their time to study each other. The two groups wanted to establish a political relationship that allowed one society to exert its power over the other. “The failure of each attempt at alliance,” she explains, “was due, in part anyway, to neither party understanding the intentions of the other” (365).

18. “To civilize the Powhatan” was also a “primary goal” of the Virginia Company, which sponsored Smith's expedition (Williamson 376).

19. Qtd. Berkhofer 42. See Berkhofer's discussion of the contemporary polemic on the degenerative effect of the New World on European colonists, 42-43.

20. Already in the eighteenth century the acceptance of the dignity of Pocahontas and John Rolfe's union depended greatly upon Pocahontas's “royal” status (Tilton 18). Her situation was very different from that of common people. Half-blood products of contemporaneous unions “were by definition and by law ‘spurious issue’” (Tilton 18).

21. Lemay points out that for Smith, “as so for many writers, the touchstone of the exotic was sensualism” and that his not explicitly referring to a sexual aftermath of the dance enhances the sensuality of the description: “tantalization, not consummation, characteriz[es] the best sexual exoticism” (73). According to Lemay, the fact that Pocahontas participated in the “Mascarado” “proved that she was considered, within the Algonquian culture, mature enough to play a woman's role in an orgiastic tribal fertility rite” (73), but I do not see any “fertility rite” in the entertainment dance offered by the women to their guests while waiting for Powhatan to come back.

22. Afterwards in theatre history, as Grimsted shows, melodrama continued to reveal “latent reservations about the Indian's full equality. Even the purest of Indian maidens might be propositioned by merely vulgar characters” (215). The opposite possibility was absolutely inconceivable in the theatre as well as in literature and in true life. As Sheehan observes, intermarriage between white men and Indian women strengthened the defense of civilized superiority: “The father presumably would bring into the wilderness the ways of civilization. The most publicized unions between white female and Indian male had taken place in captivity, which meant the subjection of the white and the preservation of savagery” (178). “The idea of a union between an Indian man and a white woman” adds Tilton, “was and would remain too repulsive for most European colonists to support” (195, n. 31).

23. As Butsch observes, “A concern for respectability infused all aspects of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture and daily life” (374).

24. Although Mason in “The Politics of Metamora” claims that Metamora (1829) is the very first Indian stage character to incorporate the usually separate features of noble savage and red devil, I would say that the same duplicity was present in Miami about twenty years before, with the only difference that Miami loves a woman who does not want him and will not die for him, but who will live for the English cause.

25. The noble Indian came to represent in the American mythology the primitive purity that was to be lost in the process of civilization as natural evolution. See Mason, Melodrama, and “The Politics of Metamora.”

Works Cited

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Musser, Paul H. James Nelson Barker, 1784-1858; with a Reprint of his Comedy “Tears and Smiles.” Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1929.

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Richardson, Gary A. “In the Shadow of the Bard: James Nelson Barker's Republican Drama and the Shakespearean Legacy.” Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt, eds. When They Weren't Doing Shakespeare. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.

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