The Lost Queen (1925)

Olive Archibald

The Lost Queen, by Olive Archibald, was published in June 1925, in the Acadia Athenaeum , a student publication at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. The script was signed O.M.A. '26, so Archibald was probably entering her final year at Acadia when she published The Lost Queen. Like "The Locals" and Sir John and Sir Charles, The Lost Queen was probably not meant for performance, but was a short story presented as a drama.

This short play is loosely based on A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play begins on a June night, with a picaresque description of "a quaint stone house,"

whose roof top is silvered by the gleaming moon. A rose-covered arch over a wicket gate leads to a garden in the foreground. A flagstone walk, lined with pink and white clove pinks and English daisies winds through the garden. It breathes the loving fragrance of flowers which are everywhere-gaudy tulips, shy forget-me-nots, dainty mignonett, old-fashioned larkspur, slender lilies and budding roses. (4) [indent]

A fountain and a "moon-bathed sun dial" complete the ideal middle-classed colonial home, but for good measure Archibald adds "(There may be played for a few moments a very soft strain of Liszt's Nocturne in E by the violin.)" (4).

Elaine, a little girl with blond hair, wearing a pink kimono and slippers, dances through the garden. Her father, George, with the "unmstakable air of a prosperous business man," enters the scene and questions her about being out so late. Without seeing George, Elaine's Aunt Mary yells at the girl, saying "You're just cram full of your mothers fool notions!" (6). Slowly, the dialogue between Elaine and her father reveals that George's wife has left them, and that the disciplinarian member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, Aunt Mary, is raising Elaine while George is away on business.

When asked why she was outside, Elaine explains to her father that every full moon the fairies have a big ball, and that she was taking the place of the fairy queen because the queen's husband, King Oberon, drove her away. Archibald doesn't make the reader work very hard to realize that George is King Oberon, and that the missing fairy queen is Elaine's mother, who left because George was always away at work. Through Elaine's story, George realizes the error of his ways and resolves to win his wife back.

Shakespeare, then, saves this middle-class family from breaking up. The importance of Shakespeare to the family unit is ironic, because Shakespeare left his wife, Anne Hathaway, and his three children in Stratford for approximately a decade while he was working and writing in London. Moreover, the obviousness of the adaptive transposition from Shakespeare to Archibald points to a key issue in Shakespearean adaptation generally: the recirculation of canonical power through the authorial alignment with Shakespeare. Archibald uses Shakespeare as an emblem of British, middle-class family values and thereby establishes a frame for the transmission of those values into Canadian culture.

Since the father's name is George, the play also lends itself to an allegorical reading for the British Empire under the rule of King George V (1910-1936). What role does Canada play in this type of reading? Are we the wife gone absent from neglect, or the child starved for attention? Canada wouldn't be recognized as independent from Britain until 1931, with the Statute of Westminster. Does the mean Aunt Mary represent the United States, with her membership in the Women's Christian Temperance Union representing America's eighteenth amendment to the constitution made the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol illegal from 1919 to 1933? (During this time, Canada supplied alhohol to the States through illegal "rum runs.") This association with America would explain Mary's opposition to Elaine and her mother's Shakespeare-based 'fairy garden.'

Irene Makaryk writes that Shakespeare has often been used in Canada "as a bulwark against other traditions or cultures. In English Canada, Shakespeare served as protection against the incursions of American commercialism" (64). Archibald, then, may be invoking Shakespeare to express nostalgic United Empire Loyalist sentiments shortly before Canada's political independence from Britain.

Gordon Lester

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Sources:

Makaryk, Irene. "Canada." The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 64.