Conquer or Die: Staging Circum-Atlantic Revolt in Polly and Three-Finger'd Jack

Abstract

The 1777 resurrection of John Gay's Polly represents a watershed moment in the stage history of Atlantic underclasses: its first self-conscious act of racial mimicry. This self-reflexive blackface also activated a cohort of lower-class types; Polly marks class with theatrical blackness. John Fawcett's 1800 pantomime Obi, or, Three-Finger'd Jack, revives such resistant characters, enacting new forms of social disorder and performing another version of the multiracial underclass crew Marx would name the "lumpenproletariat." Together, Polly and Three-Finger'd Jack imagine the convergence of race and class identity in the Caribbean. Most importantly, however, they imagine such rogues, with their tendencies to don burnt-cork makeup and perform piracy and banditry, as already theatrical. These plays and their rogue antiheroes performed threats to the existing social order, becoming a charismatic and popular part of the Atlantic theatre culture.