Theatrical Aesthetics and Transatlantic Representation in Robert Hunter’s Androboros

Abstract

This essay argues that New York governor Robert Hunter’s 1715 play Androboros relies on a theatrical aesthetics that transcends dramatic form. Even though the play was never performed, its dramatic narrative still focuses on the body-on-stage, and negotiates the contingency that characterizes the coincidence of material and symbolic bodies in the theatre. Hunter’s theatrical aesthetics, this essay suggests, has political implications, as it intervenes in what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’ in the context of the early modern Atlantic world: Androboros’ comic (and scatological) representation of bodily materiality on stage is deeply connected with the dramatic dialogue’s regard for various political bodies (the colonial assembly, as well as representatives of the British crown and the Anglican Church). As the play negotiates the unresolved mismatches between physical and representative bodies, it deliberates persistent questions about the significance of transatlantic political representation in colonial New York.