ABSTRACT
Although post-colonial theory has only comparatively recently begun to confront the multiply signifying texts of live performances, this theatrically aware version of post-colonialism offers some useful pointers in looking at Jonson in Australia. Post-colonialism reminds us that contemporary locations of early modern drama in Australia-in teaching and in theatrical production-continue to demonstrate these plays’ ongoing potential to function as agents of empire, both in the reiteration of their conservative sixteenth-and seventeenth-century race, gender and class politics and in the role they play in helping to maintain the notion of a classical canon of drama, originating from outside Australia and against which Australian theatre and drama is measured and always found wanting. However, Gilbert and Tompkins (1996:2), having suggested that post-colonialism is ‘an engagement with and contestation of colonialism’s discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies’, also acknowledge, if only in passing, that ‘the staging of the “intact” canonical play offers one kind of counter-discourse which might, through a revisionist performance, articulate tensions between the Anglo script and its localised enunciation’ (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996:16).1
