ARTicles vol. 3 i.1a: English Roots in Virginia Soil

In conceiving his production of John Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife, director Mark Wing-Davey turned to a variety of cultural references, including the clothing of 1970s British punk fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and the furniture of interior designer Phillippe Starck, both of whom draw from and recontextualize past historical periods to create new work for today. Like Westwood and Starck, Wing-Davey quotes from a wide array of fashions, trends, and regional styles in his production, filtering Vanbrugh’s Restoration text through many different ages and places. One of Wing-Davey’s sources of inspiration for his production of The Provok’d Wife was the society of early American “distressed cavaliers” – followers of Charles II who had fought for his father, Charles I, in the English Civil War and then emigrated to the Virginia colony after fleeing Puritan oppression under Oliver Cromwell. The history of the distressed cavaliers in Virginia begins in 1642, when newly appointed governor William Berkeley arrived to a sickly community of just 8,000. Berkeley immediately set out to shape the colony in the image of London, proving so successful that by 1724 Hugh Jones wrote in The Present State of Virginia, “The habits, life, customs, computations, etc. of the Virginians are much the same as about London, which they esteem their home … they live in the same manner, dress after the same fashion, and behave themselves exactly as the gentry in London.” Emigration was particularly enticing to the younger sons of England’s aristocracy and landed gentry who, due to their secondary status within the family, were denied inheritances. In Virginia, Berkeley promoted them to high office, gave them large estates, and incorporated them into an established ruling oligarchy. One of the most lasting impacts the distressed cavaliers had on their new home was linguistic. Many of these settlers were originally from the South and West of England. When they came to America, they brought with them their regional dialects, which over time combined with prolonged, embellished, and softened vowel sounds to create a distinctive Virginia accent. Although the sound of this new world cadence had its own idiosyncratic character, Virginian speech ways also remained closely linked to the vernacular of seventeenth century England. Words that had grown antiquated in England by the late eighteenth century, such as tarry, tote (as in to carry), woebegone, bellyache, flapjack, favor (as in to resemble), unbeknownst, moonshine, skillet, traipse, and yonder continued in popular use in Virginia for another three hundred years. Working with contemporary Virginian accents allowed The Provok’d Wife Company to explore and enjoy the language of Vanbrugh’s text, and provided a connection to Restoration roots in America. “Rather than having Americans do British accents or even a classic standard American, I was more interested in the aristocratic vowels of Virginia speech as the carrier of meaning,” explains Wing-Davey. “The Virginia accent is a particularly American speech pattern, and there’s a historical link between those accents and the accents of the distressed cavaliers who were the precursors of the audience for the Restoration drama.” This link has allowed Wing-Davey to form a bridge between the distant past and the present. The tension created in staging a seventeenth-century play for an audience of today, whose experience of life in and out of the theatre is so different from that of a Restoration audience, fascinates Wing-Davey. “I believe it is impossible to do any piece, however historical, without acknowledging that history is changed by the present,” he says. “This production borrows from the Restoration and colonial America, but everything is refracted through the prism of the present.” Quotations and information taken from David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America.