activities among early Viking and European explorers, and documented but unpublished performances by sixteenth-century Spaniards in Florida and New Mexico all jostle for the designation of “first North American play.” One of the primary candidates for the honour has to be Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France, written by lawyer, historian, and poet Marc Lescarbot in that tiny, short-lived French colony of Port Royal – the future Lower Granville, Nova Scotia – where it was performed on 14 November 1606 “on the waves,” according to Lescarbot, and along the shore of what today is called the Annapolis Basin. Unlike its competitors, the play was published and has survived as a script and literary artifact as well as a carefully documented performance. A rich store of theatrical, historical, and political detail, The Theatre of Neptune in New France vividly illustrates homo ludens, the human imperative to play, at a crossroads of art and ideology. It provides an unparalleled glimpse into the lost world of early seventeenth century North America, co-existing as a dense archeological site of early modern theatre history, a window into colonial North American social history and ethnography, and a snapshot of European strategies for imperial conquest.
As a living colonial artifact in a postcolonial age, the play still has the power to engage – and enrage. In response to a Nova Scotia theatre company’s plans to celebrate the historical milestone of Neptune’s four hundredth anniversary by re-enacting it on site on that date, Montreal’s Optative Theatrical Laboratories developed a project called Sinking Neptune to counter such celebrations. Presenting it as a work-in-progress, first at the Anarchist Theatre Festival and then at the inFRINGEment Festival in Montreal during the spring of 2006, Optative characterized The Theatre of Neptune as “an extremely racist play . . . designed to subjugate First Nations through the appropriation of their identities, collective voices and lands.” Through “masquerade and role appropriation, the play attempts to re-frame First Nation cultures into an exploitative Euro-centric social reality, and recast aboriginal peoples as subordinates” (King 5–7). For two years leading up to the anniversary, the company invited “political activists, theatre educators, culture-jammers” and others to help create a subversive, deconstructive counter-performance, “building a critical mass of cultural resistance to the play and re-enactment” (54). As we go to press in September of 2006, the Sinking Neptune project remains on track. But ironically, the re-enactment it was to confront in November has had to be cancelled for lack of Canada Council funding. What a quintessentially Canadian scenario. In any event these controversies indicate that after four hundred years The Theatre of Neptune remains a living, breathing dramatic enterprise, not just a theatrical museum piece. (See figs. 2 & 3.)
The Theatre of Neptune in New France was by no means the earliest Euro-American theatrical event. The Cambridge History of American Theatre lists four performances on its North American timeline preceding Lescarbot’s play (Wilmeth and Bigsby 22–23). Spanish comedias were played in Florida in 1567 and Cuba in 1590. In 1598, just north of the Rio Grande in presentday New Mexico, Spanish soldiers performed an original comedy written by one of their officers in celebration of their conquests – “the first documented play written in the New World,” though neither the script nor its title has survived (Davis 217). As well, various paratheatrical activities – ludi, or diversions, including musical ceremonies – may have taken place as early as 1000 A.D. among the Vikings who settled in Newfoundland, and on board the ships that took Jacques Cartier to Hochelaga (Montreal) in 1535 and Martin Frobisher farther north in 1576 (Gardner 1982, 7, 114–32). David Gardner argues that the first Canadian theatrical performance may have occurred as a “kind of folkloric prototheatre” in the form of mumming during Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage to Newfoundland, either on board his ship Delight or on shore in St. John’s harbour in August 1583, where Gilbert “took possession of Newfoundland” for the English queen in a formal ceremony. Gardner makes his case based on first-hand reports that musicians accompanied the expedition along with such “toyes as Morris dancers, Hobby Horsse, and Maylike conceits to delight the Savage people” (Gardner 1983, 227).
Fig. 2. Charles W. Jefferys’s drawing for The Theatre of Neptune in New France, published in his popular Picture Gallery of Canadian History (1942). This has become the standard scenario by which to imagine the staging of the play. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada (C-106968).
Fig. 3. Optative Theatrical Laboratories’ poster for their Sinking Neptune project plays on Jefferys’s popular drawing. Courtesy of Donovan King.
But The Theatre of Neptune is certainly the first theatrical script to have been written and produced in what would become Canada. Its 1609 publication also represents a literary landmark of early Americana, marking the beginning of American literature in the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays in Brown University’s John Hay Library (“Early American Literature”). We have an account of the production from the playwright himself; a brief eye-witness confirmation of Lescarbot’s gaillardise (translated as “jollity” or “jovial spectacle”) by Samuel de Champlain, published in Champlain’s 1613 Voyages (see fig. 4); and an extant script with detailed production commentary (though how accurate it may be, we cannot know) preserved by Lescarbot in an appendix to his popular Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, published in Paris in 1609 and reprinted four times by 1618. Written by a member of the community and performed on site by soldiers, sailors, and artisans of the garrison, the play tells us a good deal about the life of that early North American settlement and the intrinsic importance of theatre to its survival.
Fig. 4. Title page of Champlain’s Voyages. Published in Paris in 1613, it included Champlain’s version of many of the same people and events Lescarbot described in his 1609 Histoire de la Nouvelle-France.
This first published play written and performed in North America represents, in Richard Schechner’s terms, a movement back and forth across the continuum of ritual and theatre, a braiding of entertainment and efficacy (performance enacted to effect transformations) no less organic than that of the dramatic ceremonials created and performed by the land’s original inhabitants. The Theatre of Neptune was performance intended to divert and entertain as well as to create, reinforce, and ensure the present and future well-being of its participants: performance that, in Schechner’s words, “makes happen what it celebrates” (128). “[W]hen efficacy and entertainment are both present in equal degrees – theater flourishes,” he argues, citing as an example the Elizabethan era coterminous with Lescarbot’s work (134). Although The Theatre of Neptune was a one-time-only event, it retains a theatrical potency that can be fully understood only by looking at the historical moment of the play and the material conditions of its performance in its original contexts.
In November 1606, Port Royal was the only European settlement in the Americas north of Florida. The French had continued fishing off Newfoundland and trading for furs along the St. Lawrence River after Jacques Cartier and the Sieur de Roberval abandoned their colony at Québec in 1543. But not until after 1598, when the Edict of Nantes and the Treaty of Vervins ended long-standing religious and civil conflicts and the war between
