1695+ZIBAII

The London Gazette claims to be the oldest surviving English newspaper and the oldest continuously published newspaper in the UK, having been first published on 7 November 1665 as The Oxford Gazette. The London Gazette was first published as The Oxford Gazette on 7 November 1665. Charles II and the Royal Court had moved to Oxford to escape the Great Plague of London, and courtiers were unwilling to touch, let alone read, London newspapers for fear of contagion. The Gazette was "Published by Authority" by Henry Muddiman, and its first publication is noted by Samuel Pepys in his diary. The King returned to London as the plague dissipated, and the Gazette moved too, with the first issue of The London Gazette (labelled No. 24) being published on 5 February 1666. The Gazette was not a newspaper in the modern sense: it was sent by post to subscribers, not printed for sale to the general public. In time of war, dispatches from the various conflicts are published in The London Gazette. When members of the armed forces are promoted, and these promotions are published here, the person is said to have been “gazetted”. Being "gazetted" (or "in the gazette") sometimes also meant having official notice of one's bankruptcy published. The phrase "gazetted fortune hunter" is also probably derived from this. Notices of engagement and marriage were also formerly published in the Gazette. Gazettes, modelled on The London Gazette, were issued for most British colonial possessions.

The Year 1695

The Parliament of England decides not to renew the Licensing Order of 1643 requiring press censorship. The Nine Years War (basically, France versus a coalition of other European countries including the Spanish and Dutch) continued to rage on. In September, English pirate Henry Every perpetrates one of the most profitable raids in history with the capture of the Grand Mughal ship Ganj-i-Sawai. In response, Emperor Aurangzeb threatens to put an end to all English trading in India. A poll tax as well as a window tax were imposed in England. Some windows are bricked up to avoid the window tax. Also, the call for abolition of the slave trade grew ever louder in England. Additionally, the nature of international events at the time also influenced the theatre, with a great interest in plays showcasing foreign (or foreign-sounding) characters and locations. One brilliant, lasting example of this is Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.


 * The Theatre Season of 1695-1696**

During this season the two companies- Rich-Skipwith at Drury Lane and Dorset Garden, and Betterton-Barry-Bracegirdle at Lincoln’s Inn Fields- had their first full year of competitive offerings. Both companies offered a large number of new plays, few of which were actually successful. According to a member of Rich’s Company, the actor-managers at Lincoln’s Inn Fields had a series of internal disagreements, with Thomas Dogget deserting Betterton and his colleagues. Though successful at first, they were ultimately unable to effectively govern themselves. Many began to “make their particular Interest more their Point than that of the general”. The rosters of the two companies are not fully known. Notably, the second phase of summer theatre in London began in 1695. Typically, summer theatre gave lesser known actors and plays an opportunity to find an audience while the senior players were on holiday.


 * Oroonoko (By Thomas Southerne, adaptation of Aphra Behn’s 1688 original)**



There are three significant pieces to the narrative, which does not flow in a strictly biographical manner. The play opens with a statement of veracity, where the author claims to be writing no fiction and no pedantic history. She claims to be an eyewitness and to be writing without any embellishment or theme, relying solely upon reality. What follows is a description of Surinam itself and the South American Indians there. She regards the locals as simple and living in a golden age (the presence of gold in the land being indicative of the epoch of the people themselves). It is only afterwards that the narrator provides the history of Oroonoko himself and the intrigues of both his grandfather and the slave captain, the captivity of Imoinda, and his own betrayal. The next section is in the narrator's present; Oroonoko and Imoinda are reunited, and Oroonoko and Imoinda meet the narrator and Trefry. The third section contains Oroonoko's rebellion and its aftermath.Oroonoko was not a very substantial success at first. The stand-alone edition, according to the English Short Title Catalog online, was not followed by a new edition until 1696. Behn, who had hoped to recoup a significant amount of money from the book, was disappointed. Sales picked up in the second year after her death, and the novel then went through three printings. The story was used by Thomas Southerne for a tragedy entitled Oroonoko: A Tragedy. Southerne's play was staged in 1695 and published in 1696, with a foreword in which Southerne expresses his gratitude to Behn and praises her work. The play was a great success. After the play was staged, a new edition of the novel appeared, and it was never out of print in the 18th century afterward. The adaptation is generally faithful to the novel, with one significant exception: it makes Imoinda white instead of black (see Macdonald), and therefore, like Othello, the male lead would perform in blackface to a white heroine. As the taste of the 1690s demanded, Southerne emphasises scenes of pathos, especially those involving the tragic heroine, such as the scene where Oroonoko kills Imoinda. At the same time, in standard Restoration theatre rollercoaster manner, the play intersperses these scenes with a comic and sexually explicit subplot. The subplot was soon cut from stage representations with the changing taste of the 18th century, but the tragic tale of Oroonoko and Imoinda remained popular on the stage.

Through the 18th century, Southerne's version of the story was more popular than Behn's, and in the 19th century, when Behn was considered too indecent to be read, the story of Oroonoko continued in the highly pathetic and touching Southerne adaptation. The killing of Imoinda, in particular, was a popular scene. It is the play's emphasis on, and adaptation to, tragedy that is partly responsible for the shift in interpretation of the novel from Tory political writing to prescient "novel of compassion." Notably, the novel was cited by anti-slavery forces in the 1760s, not the 1690s, and Southerne's dramatic adaptation is significantly responsible for this change of focus.


 * Conclusions**

The theatre, and the world, was in the midst of great expansion and change in the year 1695. War in Europe, expansion and exploration into the colonies, and conflicts within and between those colonies, gave Europeans a lot to think about at the time. Further, the issue of the Atlantic slave trade was a leading topic of the time. Southerne’s Oroonoko tapped into theatregoer’s desire for the exotic, for the African, and for the expansion of the homeland. Further, the play features a love story that is fairly straightforward, with traditional, almost folkish gender roles being maintained. The violence in the play no doubt quenched the English’s thirst for blood, as the conflicts outside England were on everyone’s mind and all over the papers. Finally, Oroonoko himself reflects the outside world as well. In Behn’s telling, the emphasis in this story is Oroonoko himself, as an unusually noble and civilized man; his noble qualities are juxtaposed with the violent elements of his character, thereby emphasizing his humanness. However, in Southerne’s re-telling, Oroonoko is presented as wholly noble. In doing this, Southerne uses Oroonoko to shift the focus of his play and criticize the barbarism of European society. Both tell the same story, but with a different focus and thus a different implication; Behn’s is an individual focus on an exceptionally unique man while Southerne’s expands to a wider societal critique.