ABSTRACT
John Howard Payne’s The Fall of Algiers (1825) for Drury Lane, with its captivity narrative sceptic, Timothy Tourist, was staged towards the end of a discrete phase of dramas in Britain and America written about Islamic north Africa. In one way or another, they were all concerned with the continuing problem of Barbary coast piracy. While, as discussed in the previous chapter, a long period of warfare leading up to Tippoo Saib’s demise in 1799 produced quite distinctive phases of response and eventual reversals of sentiment in the 1810s, Britain and America’s relationships with Barbary were subject to intermittent, inconclusive and often unpredictable military and diplomatic skirmishes, and consequently had different results. Whereas British drama developed a certain equanimity or comic fatalism with regard to piracy and enslavement, for the newly independent United States the experiences were much more profound, vigorously debated as aspects of foreign policy as well as in the theatre and other works of fiction. 1 In particular, American dramas about Barbary became vehicles for a number of patriotic registers concerning natural rights, while remaining immune to the rights of black slaves. The result is an untidy sequence of dramas and spectacles, quite distinctive according to their location on either side of the Atlantic, but presenting a considerable body of evidence as to the role of drama in reflecting contemporary opinion. Not least, in American writing about Barbary, including the performed dramas, arise embryonic notions of military intervention and occupation.
