Amboyna
NB. Amboyna is a recent assignation for this untitled play, and should be viewed as a convenience for the database.
Historical Records
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: James I
1625, Feb. 21:
22. Locke to Carleton. ...The East India Company have ordered Greenbury, a painter, to paint a detailed picture of all the tortures inflicted on the English at Amboyna, and would have had it all acted in a play, but the Council was appealed to by the Dutch ministers, and stopped it, for fear of disturbance this Shrovetide. (CSP Dom 481)
1625, Feb 26. London.:
47. Chamberlain to [Carleton]. ...We are sadly fallen in the esteem of other nations, or the chief instrument of such notorious cruelties [in Amboyna] would not be permitted to walk up and down Amsterdam unpunished. Letters of marque are given agasint the [Dutch] East India Company, but policy may make our men forbear; the Dutch have lost their best friends here. Wilkinson has printed a sermon, with a bitter preface, against them, and a play is written on the Amboyna business, and also a large picture of it made for the East India Company, but both are suppressed by Council, and a watch of 800 men set to keep all quiet on Shrove Tuesday. (CSP Dom 485)
Letters of John Chamberlain
467. To Sir Dudley Carleton, London, Feb 26, 1625
(Differs substantially from the Chamberlain-Carleton letter in CSP Dom):
...a sermon newly printed but made long since by one Wilkenson, which I know not what relation yt can have to this late accident, (for I have not read yt) but the epistle or preface made by a minister is bitter enough; then of a play or representation of all the busines of Amboyna redy to be acted: and of a large picture made for our East Indian companie describing the whole action in manner and forme wherupon the counsaile gave order the picture shold be supprest, the play forbidden, and the booke called in: and withall for a strong watch of 800 men extraordinarie against Shrove Tewsday to see the citie be kept quiet. (Chamberlain 602)
(The Robert Wilkinson sermon newly printed is The stripping of Joseph: or the crueltie of brethren, 1625).
Theatrical Provenance
Apparently scheduled on or near Shrove Tuesday, 1625, Council suppression (resulting from appeals by Dutch ministers) ensured this controversial play was never performed. Heinemann (see Critical Commentary below) infers that a public playhouse was the intended venue.
Probable Genre(s)
History; Foreign History; Tragedy. (Not listed in Harbage)
Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues
As Karen Chancey neatly summarises it:
On March 9, 1623, ten English merchants were beheaded on Amboyna in Indonesia by order of Harman van Speult, the Dutch governor of the island. They died accused of plotting to seize control of Fort Victoria, the island's stronghold, in order to take over the local spice trade. Considering the number of lives lost in the centuries of conflict between Dutch and British merchants in the East Indies, the incident on Amboyna seems in hindsight to have been a rather insignificant affair. Yet the occurrence played an important role in English politics under the early Stuarts, and influenced English/Dutch relations for a century.
News of the incident, which the English came to know as the Amboyna Massacre, reached England on May 29, 1624, and caused a diplomatic dilemma. James I, who was negotiating an alliance with the Netherlands against Spain, chose to deal with the situation through diplomacy rather than military reprisals, a position his son supported. It was a decision for which neither the Stuarts' contemporaries nor their modern chroniclers would forgive them. (583)
In the flurry of propagandistic pamphlets published by the Dutch and English in the wake of the massacre (see Chancey 587ff), the torture and execution of the English was also related in a ballad, Newes out of East India: Of the cruell and bloody vsage of our English Merchants and others at Amboyna, by the Netherlandish Gouernour and Councell there (1624) EBBA.
The ballad concludes with a list of the executed and an ad for further reading, which may suggest an alternative or additional source: "You may read more of this bloody Tragedy in a booke printed by authory. 1624." The text referred to may conceivably be either of Sir Dudly Digges's 1624 tracts, A True Relation of the Unjust, Cruell, and Barbarous Proceedings Against the English at Amboyna (Internet Archive, 3rd edn), or The Answere unto the Dutch Pamphlet, Made in Defense of the Unjust and Barbarous Proceedings against the English at Amboyna, in the East-Indies, by the Hollanders There, both of which were read by Dryden prior to penning his own Amboyna, or The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants: A Tragedy (1673).
References to the Play
Only the Locke and Chamberlain references above.
Critical Commentary
Bentley (citing Chamberlain) only notes in an Appendix (the "Annals of Theatrical Affairs") that the "Privy Council had recently ordered a play on the Amboyna massacre, ready to be acted, to be forbidden" (7.58). He does not name the play or give it an entry elsewhere in his volumes.
Chancey (588) contextualises the play within the propagandistic pamphlet wars between the Dutch and English which followed the Amboyna massacre.
Margot Heinemann explains that the Privy Council's suppression of the play partially out of "fear of disturbance on Shrove Tuesday" is significant in that Shrove Tuesday was "the traditional day for apprentice rioting (which rather suggests that a public theatre performance, and not merely one for a privately invited audience, was intended)" (209-10).
For What It's Worth
Two years earlier, in 1623, a company at The Curtain had staged The Plantation of Virginia which was similarly steeped in recent history abroad involving the massacre of Englishmen. That play had ultimately been allowed after certain profanities were removed on Sir Henry Herbert's orders.
As Bentley notes, "inflammatory references to the Amboyna massacre and other unfriendly acts of the Dutch" (4.924) were still being censored by Sir Henry Herbert in 1633, with Walter Mountfort's dramatic defence of the East India Company's activities, The Launching of the Mary (written on his return voyage from India, and evidently intended for performance --- possibly subsidised by the Company itself).
Works Cited
Site created and maintained by David McInnis, University of Melbourne; updated 12 July 2010.