Re-Matriating Cockacoeske: Indigenous Resistance, Bacon’s Rebellion, and Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter

This article traces how Restoration playwright Aphra Behn dramatized a Pamunkey matriarch, Cockacoeske, into a nascent example of the “Indian princess” archetype in her posthumous play The Widow Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia (1690), entangling the character with a burgeoning logic of imperial feminism and helping to solidify the popular character on English stages in Europe and North America for centuries to come. Behn’s play, a dramatization of Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676–77 in the English colony of Virginia, reimagines Bacon as a classical hero and Cockacoeske, called Semernia in the play, as his tragic paramour. By recentring Cockacoeske and Indigenous peoples in the events of the Rebellion, this article seeks to re-matriate Cockacoeske’s voice from Behn’s play and to highlight the way English theatrical tropes, particularly the Indian princess, concealed the profound anti-colonial resistance of Indigenous women.