Radical Nationalism

Two plays of 1792, Samuel Morton's Columbus; or, A World Discovered and John Thelwall's The Incas; or, The Peruvian Virgin, literalized Helen Maria Williams's portrait of British-Inca kinship by inserting actual English characters into the scene of Spanish American conquest. Both plays draw upon what Joseph Donahue has called the ‘currently fashionable materials’ of the Spanish conquest of America and reveal a significant reliance on the plot and characterization of Marmontel's influential novel Les Incas. But while both plays were submitted to Covent Garden's Thomas Harris, only Morton's Columbus was produced. According to Michael Scrivener, Harris's choice was explicitly political. The Incas was an ‘ideologically provocative,’ ‘revolutionary, Enlightenment play.’ Columbus, by contrast, was an overtly ‘nationalistic play’ whose ‘politically conformist’ message agreed with a climate in which ‘the government was moving quickly toward declaring war against France and domestic radicals’ (Scrivener, Incas, 83, 87). The ideological differences between The Incas and Columbus certainly reflect Britain's political polarization in the years following the French Revolution. Yet the subject of Spanish America did not lend itself easily to the advocacy of any single political agenda. Rather, as we have seen in the cases of Les Incas, the American histories of Robertson and Raynal, and Williams's Peru, the figure of Spanish America consistently functions to expose the constitutive overlap between apparently antithetical ideological positions.