“What Town's this Boy?”: English civic politics, Virginia's urban debate, and Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter

Abstract

This essay explores Aphra Behn's play The Widow Ranter as evidence for a trans-atlantic discussion about urban political culture in the later seventeenth century. The play, written in 1688, is a heavily fictionalised dramatisation of a rebellion that had gripped the English colony of Virginia 12 years earlier. The rebel leader, Nathaniel Bacon, had burned down the colony's only city, Jamestown, and Behn's retelling of the story pays particular attention to this urban inferno. The historical Bacon's arson can be understood as a product of a long-standing dispute between ordinary Virginia settlers and the colony's governor over the particular ways in which town development was being pursued. But this colonial dispute was rooted in the contested nature of urban life in contemporary England, where the charter rights and freedoms of towns and cities were being challenged by royal efforts to consolidate control over the realm. This English conflict led to the circulation around the Atlantic world of contradictory definitions of the ideal political and social constitution for a town. This essay argues that Behn, a staunch royalist, recognised these strands at work in the events in Virginia. She dramatised the rebellion as a conflict between Bacon, the legitimate cavalier patriarch of Jamestown, and corrupt urban authorities. In this way, Behn used the government, social sphere, and eventual conflagration of Jamestown to comment on the status of the urban debate in England. The Widow Ranter, therefore, is not simply an English vision of the exotic colonial world but part of a circum-Atlantic debate over urban political culture in an era of expanding state and imperial control.