The play is set in the 1880’s but has clear moral significance for the 1950’s or 1960’s. As its subtitle suggests, it is a parable, and so potentially timeless. For all its careful indications of place and time, it is also unhistorical, even (if one thinks about practicalities) highly implausible and unrealistic. How would four soldiers get home from an imperial colony? How could they conceal a skeleton and a Gatling gun?

Clearly John Arden wishes above all to make a point about guilt. Great Britain has for many years, he says, been making a profit out of imperialism—like most other developed countries, in one way or another. The victims of this exploitation, however, are double. There are the native people of the conquered colonies. There are also the agents of that conquest, the soldiers, sent abroad to do the dirty work of their rulers but receiving no share of the profits—as their rulers take no share in the dangers. The subtlety of the exercise, Serjeant Musgrave realizes, is that the two sets of victims fight and kill each other, when they should turn on those who make them do it. That is what he means to do. He is a sheepdog who has turned on the shepherd.

Another aspect of exploitation is the economic one, and that is why the play is set in a striking mining town. Here, in the strike, conflict has already been started between the rulers and the ruled. By all logic, the colliers should join the rebel soldiers. What stops them? One thing is Musgrave’s own lack of clarity, another is the dubious patriotism which the colliers have been taught (which makes them reluctant to identify their own condition with that of nonwhite native peoples in a conquered country). A third is their suspicion that anyone in a red coat is, in almost all cases, an instrument of oppression. The ironies of mixed and mistaken loyalty in the play are very strong. Walsh, the most intelligent of the colliers, fails to understand Musgrave until too late. In the end, even he accepts a drink, which the officer of the dragoons is pouring, to celebrate the return of “normal life.” Normal life, for Walsh, means going back down into the coal mine to make profits for the mayor. He has little to celebrate; however, without the Gatling gun, protest will do nothing for him—he might as well take the drink.

A final point is that Musgrave is mad. He is trying to avenge violence by more violence, and his cause is vitiated, if nothing else, by the violent death of Sparky. His remorse may do him credit, but his actions do not. Arden raises a difficult question: Given these facts, what would an acceptable and effective form of protest be?

Guilt
Feelings of guilt and remorse are central themes in Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. Musgrave is tormented by guilt over the death of Billy Hicks and the five civilians killed in retaliation. His fellow deserters, Attercliffe and Sparky, who also knew Hicks, share this sense of guilt. Their feelings of remorse partly motivated them to desert their posts and journey to the coal-mining town.

Musgrave aims to make England accountable for these deaths. To achieve this, he publicly displays Hicks’s skeleton, demonstrating to the townspeople the futility of Hicks’s death. Musgrave also plans to execute twenty-five of the town’s prominent citizens, but his nefarious plot is ultimately thwarted.

Ghosts
The ghost of Billy Hicks lingers over many characters in Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance . Musgrave, along with Attercliffe and Sparky, deserted their...