Recent critical discussion of The Widdow Ranter has been nearly silent on the prologue and epilogue that John Dryden authored for the posthumous production of the play in 1689. (1) Highlighting Dryden's prologue forces two salient but little-discussed issues to the fore: the specific mixed-plot form and function of Behn's tragicomedy and the blanket dismissals of colonial American society that were widely circulated in England and forcefully espoused by many of Behn's fellow Royalist playwrights. Writing to an already hostile audience, many of whom would share Dryden's scorn of English colonials, Behn takes advantage of the mixed tragicomedic form to outline an attractive, complex colonial society, but this positive depiction had little appeal to her contemporaries and expresses what continued to be a minority view in England far into the eighteenth century. (2) Ultimately, her vision of colonial life is trumped on the stage by Dryden's friend Thomas Southerne and his highly successful and more traditional split-plot tragicomedy Oroonoko (1695), which, throughout its hundreds of performances, reinstates the image of a hopelessly depraved colonial world that Behn had contested in her own drama. In his prologue, Dryden reveals that he considers Virginia to be just another "Foreign Shore" (2), and perhaps the most disagreeable one, among the many to be imaginatively re-created on the Restoration stage. (3) Thus, neither the production problems reported by "G.J." in the dedicatory letter to the 1690 printed edition, nor the fact that it was staged during the distractions of William's campaign in Ireland, tell the complete story of The Widdow Ranter's quick exit from both the theater and, until recently, English theatrical history. Along with the prologue, Dryden's scattered remarks about the American colonies illuminate the resistance that any production of Behn's play, however well done, would have faced in 1689. One glimpse of Dryden's views can be found in Mac Flecknoe (1682), in which he geographically locates Shadwell's empire of dullness in the following manner: "[F]rom Ireland let him reign/To farr Barbadoes on the Western main." (4) Situating the Atlantic colonial world as a social and cultural backwater, Dryden here expresses a somewhat jocular wish that Shadwell would remove, or perhaps be forcibly removed, to either of these locations as recompense for his literary offenses. (5) This equation of the empire of dullness and the English Atlantic casually reveals a set of prejudices that finds a decidedly more vehement articulation in a brief passage in The Hind and the Panther (1685):
