Jane Shore and the Jacobites: Nicholas Rowe, the Pretender, and the National She-tragedy

Abstract

Nicholas Rowe had begun process of developing she- tragedy as a vehicle for promoting cultural politics of sympathy with The Fair Penitent in 1703. But subsequent movements in political events and passions also led a new attempt associate spectacle of woman in pain with state politics, and in particular with threat of Jacobitism welfare of British nation. The apparent precariousness of Protestant succession pushed Whig writers confront a crisis that would put whole nation at risk; they frequently responded by depicting that risk as sexed or sexual. On stage, national crisis becomes national she-tragedy in Rowe's Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714). Despite fact that one of provisions of Treaty of Utrecht bound King Louis XIV to give neither harbour nor assistance Pretender, and acknowledged Queen's title and Protestant Succession, Whig partisans in winter of 1713-1714 worried that a reconciliation between two nations—arranged in no small part by highly placed Jacobite sympathizers like Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke—was but first step in Tory ministry's plan bring Stuarts back from across water. 1 Between fallout from fiasco that was Sacheverell trial and successful conclusion of peace with France, Whig party and Whig principles absorbed blow after blow. 2 Decades later, Bolingbroke looked back on peace as the period at which millenary year of toryism should begin. 3 Queen Anne's illness drove partisan anxieties even higher. Nicolas Tindal's history calls winter of 1713-1714 a dangerous situation during which the friends of Pretender believed, that all things were preparing for his restoration. 4 Jacobitism appeared gather momentum, emblematized by publication of a hefty new folio volume: The Hereditary Right of Crown of England Asserted, replete with examples drawn from Treasurer Robert Harley's own extensive library. 5