H.M.S. Parliament , Canadian National Policy, and the North American Theatrical Triangle

This article examines William Henry Fuller’s satire of Canadian politics, H.M.S. Parliament; or The Lady That Loved a Government Clerk, and its five-month cross-Canada tour in 1880. A parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s hugely popular H.M.S. Pinafore; or The Lass That Loved a Sailor, Fuller’s play was a rare Canadian theatrical success. Popular with audiences and critics, it toured from Montreal to Halifax to Winnipeg, with more than thirty stops in between. Its target was the Conservative government’s high tariff policy, dubbed the National Policy, meant to protect the agriculture and industries of the new Canadian nation from US competition, and Canada’s British-oriented culture from US cultural influences. However, British immigrant and new Canadian Fuller chose a US company, the McDowell Comedy Company, to tour the show. It starred US actors Eugene McDowell and his wife, Fanny Reeves, who had both become Canadian celebrities. Analyzing the play’s text and performance alongside Canadian political cartoons of the era, the author argues that the production and tour of H.M.S. Parliament represented a uniquely successful theatrical instance of nineteenth-century colonial counter-discourse, a form of Canadian theatrical nation building aimed not just at US cultural hegemony but at the British imperium as well. It was a paradigmatic instance of what historian John Bartlet Brebner called, in the subtitle of his book The North Atlantic Triangle, “The Interplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain” (the game of influence between Canada, the United States, and Great Britain), that is, ‘the art of playing these powers against each other for Canada’s benefit’.