Literary Hangover is a podcast, released twice on Saturdays each month, in which Matt Lech and his friends chat about fiction and the historical, social, and political forces behind the creation of it and represented by it.

34 - 'The Widow Ranter, or, the History of Bacon in Virginia' by Aphra Behn (1689)
play_circle_outlinepause_circle_outline
00:00:00
01:38:00

Best wishes to everyone dealing with pandemic bs.

Full play text here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27273/27273-h/widow.html

Grace, Alex, and Matt are back with another Aphra Behn work, this time her posthumously performed 1689 play "The Widow Ranter, or, the History of Bacon in Virginia." We discuss her role as a tory propagandist and as a spy rewriting recent history to glorify the heroic individual. The righteous Levellers and "delegating" the power of the people. Behn makes Bacon an Indian lover and not hater. Semernia and Cockacoeske. Bacon not a populist. The drunk colonial judiciary. Defending inheritances you recognize as unjust. The Widow Ranter as a feminist libertine ideal. Behn's lasting fidelity to hierarchy.

Sources:

Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press.

Brown, Kathleen M. 1996. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.

MOWRY, MELISSA. ""PAST REMEMBRANCE OR HISTORY": APHRA BEHN'S "THE WIDDOW RANTER", OR, HOW THE COLLECTIVE LOST ITS HONOR." ELH 79, no. 3 (2012): 597-621. Accessed April 4, 2020. jstor.org/stable/23256768.

Pulsipher, Jenny Hale. "The Widow Ranter and Royalist Culture in Colonial Virginia." Early American Literature 39, no. 1 (2004): 41-66. doi:10.1353/eal.2004.0016.

Rice, James D. 2013. Tales from a revolution: Bacon's Rebellion and the transformation of Early America.

Washburn, Wilcomb E. 1957. The Governor and the rebel, a history of Bacon's rebellion in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.