Grafting and Ecological Imperialism in John Fletcher’s Bonduca

Abstract

Drawing upon a horticultural discourse, this chapter investigates John Fletcher’s Bonduca (1612) and its pervasive treatment of grafting as a meditation on the horticultural practices that were considered essential to early modern English colonialism. Through metaphorical imagery as well as physical gestures of grafting, Bonduca attends to the ecological repercussions of Britain’s colonial history and explores the potential risks of colonial expansion. In addition, the play represents the Roman exposure to several metaphorical diseases, which registers an early understanding of disease transmission as pathogenic, and which imagines a reversal of the effect of Old World diseases on indigenous human populations in the New World. These dramatized grafts sanction a complex representation of empire formation, where non-human actants play a more prominent role in determining the outcome of a political, military, and colonial struggle than human agents.