A public lecture by Associate Professor Kathryn Prince (University of Ottawa)
at The University of Western Australia.
Date: Monday 11 December 2017
Time: 5.30pm
Venue: Alexander Lecture Theatre (G.57, Arts Building), UWA
Enquiries: Katrina Tap (katrina.tap@uwa.edu.au)
The first play believed to have been both written and performed in Canada, Marc Lescarbot’s 1606 pageant Le théâtre de Neptune en la nouvelle France, transforms the subjugation of Canada’s indigenous Mi’kmaq into a display of French supremacy. Marking the safe return to Port Royal (in ‘Acadie’, present-day Nova Scotia) of the explorers Baron de Poutrincourt and Samuel de Champlain from an expedition in search of a more temperate site for the troubled colonial outpost, Neptune borrows from the French genres of réception and oceanic masque to mobilise emotions of triumph, conquest and patriotism. As an amateur performance by a small group of restless settlers facing the onset of winter in a climactically inhospitable land, Neptune is also an early example of the garrison play associated with Canada’s early theatre history, produced as an antidote to emotions such as boredom, despair and sedition. In the particular case of Neptune, amateur performance was also seen as an antidote to a potentially fatal emotional disturbance, ‘land-sickness’, that had driven the settlers to Port Royal from their initial trading post at Ste-Croix Island and then Poutrincourt and Champlain down the Atlantic coast on their expedition. Returning on 14 November 1606, already early winter in Acadie, Poutrincourt and Champlain instituted an urgent alternative antidote to land-sickness with the materials that they had to hand: instead of moving the outpost, some of its inhabitants became the founding members of l’Ordre de Bon Temps, a colonial chivalric order (that exists to this day) mandating weekly feasting and revelry. Neptune, created in these very particular circumstances for medicinal purposes, was the first of their revels. As a relic of historical emotions Neptune is a fascinating document, but it is not only that.
Plans for a quatercentenary production in 2006 resulted in controversy, cancellations and a new political play, Sinking Neptune – a collective creation by Montreal-based Optative Theatrical Laboratories. The sequence of events suggests a widespread recognition that performing Lescarbot’s celebration of indigenous subjugation was unacceptable in Canada in 2006, but there are other levels of oppression to consider: both the planned revival and the politicised rewriting were English-language interventions occurring in the context of the historical and ongoing oppression not only of indigenous Canadians but also of Canada’s French-speaking minority (and complicated struggles within that minority, not least between Quebec and francophones hors Québec, including Acadiens). The debate about Neptune displays layers of appropriation: it seems to have been conducted primarily in the English-Canadian media, with Anglophones both voicing outrage on behalf of indigenous Canadians for the play’s offensive portrayal of its Mi’kmaq characters and also articulating the play’s relevance to Canadian (not French-Canadian) theatre history.
This paper considers the case for performing Neptune and the conditions in which such a performance might be a productive intervention in current cross-cultural relationships between Canada’s various Anglophone, francophone and indigenous populations. In his history of New France published alongside Neptune in 1609, Lescarbot suggests that in Mi’kmaq culture performances serve as a kind of cultural memory, transmitting knowledge between generations. In light of this and Diana Taylor’s similar observation in The Archive and the Repertoire that performance is an ‘episteme, a way of knowing, not simply an object of analysis’, refusing to perform Neptune is a rejection of one way of knowing the emotions of 1606 because the play gives rise to uncomfortable emotions now. The emotional practices and emotional communities connected to this play in 1606 and in 2006 illuminate how performing, reforming and not performing this play can be understood as colonial interventions and as choices governing the circulation of historical and current knowledge. As a case study drawing on recent theories about empathy and epistemology, Neptune illustrates how even a gesture of solidarity can entail erasure and oppression.
KATHRYN PRINCE is Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Ottawa, as well as the General Editor of Shakespeare Bulletin. Her recent books include Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Cambridge University Press, 2012), History, Memory, Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Shakespeare and Canada: Remembrance of Ourselves (University of Ottawa Press, 2016).
This free public lecture is the opening keynote of the Society for the History of Emotions inaugural conference ‘Emotions of Cultures/Cultures of Emotions: Comparative Perspectives’ at The University of Western Australia, 11–13 December 2017.