Hear, ye Gods of Britain, hear us this day,

Let us not fall the Roman Eagle’s prey;

Clip, clip their wings, or chase them ’em home,

And check the tow’ring pride of Rome.

——, Purcell, Fletcher, Bonduca (1695)

Introduction

In 55 BC the Roman general, Julius Caesar, invaded what is now Kent on the island of Britannia with just two legions. From that date, Roman power and influence was extended across the island—its indigenous Celtic tribes forced into a compact requiring them to send hostages to Rome and pay an annual tribute to empire. This uneasy peace, between less powerful British tribes on the one hand, and the mighty juggernaut that was the Roman Empire on the other, lasted for about 100 years.

Boudicca’s Flogging and the Rape of her Daughters

The Iceni king, Prasutagus, was a Celtic client king of the Romans who planned to bequeath his kingdom and his wealth to his two daughters, thereby ensuring the succession of his line and the peace of his realm. Upon his death, however, the plundering Romans had other plans, as the Roman writer Tacitus records:

His dominions were ravaged by the centurions; the slaves pillaged his house, and his effects were seized as lawful plunder. His wife, Boudicca, was disgraced with cruel stripes; her daughters were ravished, and the most illustrious of the Icenians were, by force, deprived of the positions which had been transmitted to them by their ancestors. The whole country was considered as a legacy bequeathed to the plunderers. The relations of the deceased king were reduced to slavery.[1]

Iceni Uprising

So began, in 60 AD, a one-year uprising against the Roman colonisers. During this time Colchester, London, and St Albans were razed to the ground. Their inhabitants were put to the sword. This was not a battle to extract more favourable terms from their conquerors but a war of extermination. The Britons wanted the Romans out. They wanted to de-Romanise (today we might say ‘decolonise’) their country.

The final showdown occurred at a hitherto unidentified location—probably somewhere in the Midlands[2]—in 61 AD, and, writing later, the Roman writer Dio Cassius imagined the heroic words which the Iceni queen gave to her troops before the battle:

“You have learned by actual experience how different freedom is from slavery. Hence, although some among you may previously, through ignorance of which was better, have been deceived by the alluring promises of the Romans, yet now that you have tried both, you have learned how great a mistake you made in preferring an imported despotism to your ancestral mode of life, and you have come to realize how much better is poverty with no master than wealth with slavery. For what treatment is there of the most shameful or grievous sort that we have not suffered ever since these men made their appearance in Britain?[3]

Yet the dream of independence was not to be theirs; the Britons were apt at taking on poorly defended and weakly fortified settlements, but they were no match for the Roman General Suetonius Paulinus on the battlefield. The Britons were defeated. The fate of their queen was unknown, with some saying she was poisoned while others say she fell ill and died. But the Britons’ dream of independence died on the battlefield.

Medieval Historians and the Story of Boudicca

When the Roman Empire withdrew from Britannia in 410 AD and Catholic monks became the custodians of English history writing, Boudicca’s posthumous reputation took a further battering. Gildas (c.500–70 AD) De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae [On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain] had little time for the ancient warrior woman and called her the ‘treacherous lioness’ who was responsible for ‘the general destruction of every-thing that is good, and the general growth of evil throughout the land’.

At least Gildas acknowledged her! Other medieval historians simply ignored her—she appears nowhere in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum [Ecclesiastical History of the English People] (731 AD), neither is she present in the twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae [The History of the Kings of Britain] by Geoffrey of Monmouth, nor does she play any role in Nennius’s Historia Britonum [History of Britain] (c.760 AD).[4]

The English Renaissance and the Tale of ‘Bunduca’

We now fast-forward several hundreds of years to the reign of the Queen Elizabeth I (r.1558–1603) and thence to King James I of England and VI of Scotland. In English culture the literary and dramatic arts are flourishing, alongside the increasing availability, via new publications and translations, of classical texts.[5] Historians and antiquaries turned their investigative eyes on to their nation’s past, medieval and pre-medieval. Two men and  their books, especially, shined a light on the forgotten aspects of English history: John Leland’s Itinerary researches (1535–45) and Camden’s Britannia (1586).[6]

Writers, dramatists, and poets, too, turn their attention to their national past, medieval and pre-medieval. Shakespeare told the history of various English monarchs on the stage while for Edmund Spenser the Virgin Queen herself symbolised all that was noble and good about the nation, and in her honour was his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596) published.

For the newly Protestant nation which had faced down a Roman Catholic continental invasion force—the Spanish Armada—it should hardly surprise us that, in the era of the Virgin Queen, the story of an early warrior ruler began to receive renewed attention. Thus, Spenser, in his Ruines of Time (1591), recounts how Rome’s pride was once brought low by a mighty warrior queen:

But long e’er this, Bunduca, Britonness,
Her mighty Hoast against my Bulwarks brought;
Bunduca, that victorious Conqueress,
That lifting up her brave heroick Thought
‘Bove Womens Weakness, with the Romans fought,
Fought, and in Field against them thrice prevailed.

Spenser referred to this ‘Bunduca’ again in the Faerie Queene when he called her the ‘O famous moniment of womens prayse’.[7]

Beaumont and Fletcher

By far the most memorable portrayal of Boudicca’s heroic tale appeared on the stage around the year 1609 when Shakespeare’s one-time collaborator John Fletcher, wrote and had performed The Tragedy of Bonduca. Fletcher’s name is usually associated with his long-time friend, Francis Beaumont, with whom he wrote many plays, so much so that scholars usually refer to the ‘Beaumont and Fletcher canon’ when speaking of the two men’s works, even if they did not always collaborate.

Beaumont was born in Grace Dieu (now Thringstone) in Leicestershire in 1586. At the age of 10 he was enrolled as a ‘gentleman commoner’ at Broadgate Hall (now Pembroke College) at the University of Oxford where he would have received the standard classical education of the time with a view to practising law, which, by all accounts, he did not apply himself to fully, preferring writing to reading dusty old statutes. By 1607, his first play, written with his lifelong collaborator, co-habitant, and, indeed, lover,[8] John Fletcher, appeared on stage.[9] Their partnership was a successful one and the pair of them together wrote many fine dramatic pieces—52 in total[10]—though sometimes they wrote plays alone and sometimes they collaborated with others, as Fletcher did with Shakespeare on Two Noble Kingsmen.[11] Sometime around 1609, or 1613 according to some, Fletcher’s, Bonduca, was first staged.

The meaning of tragedy

Unlike Shakespeare’s tragic history plays, with their intricate plots and complex characters, Fletcher and Beaumont’s Bonduca revolves around a single event: the oncoming battle between the forces of the Roman colonizers and the indigenous British tribes. What it lacks in character development, it makes up for in its deep discussion of the moral and ethical questions, for such is the nature of tragedy which

…in its best form, concerns itself with the deepest, noblest, and most earnest side of man’s nature, striving to elicit our strongest sympathy in behalf of others who are vividly represented before us as actually taking part in certain scenes of life which bring upon them sorrow and suffering.[12]

The ‘deepest’ themes discussed in Bonduca are: Patriotism, honour, and imperialism. The purpose is not simply to stage history, but to cause us (and contemporary Jacobean audiences) to reflect on that history and the stories told therein.

Patriotism

Beaumont and Fletcher want the audience to feel a patriotic pride in the heroism of the British nation in resisting invaders. But to do so it creates a fantasy historical world in which figures, who never would have met in real life—and some of whom it is unclear ever existed at all—come together at the point of a grand historical battle which, though forlorn, is nevertheless meant to inspire.[13]

The dramatis personae lists three historical characters which, to an untrained eye, might seem unremarkable. These are: Bonduca, Caratach, and Nennius. The story of Boudicca has been given amply above; Nennius, listed in the play as ‘a great Soldier, a British Commander’, was the legendary Prince of the British people who (and he is assumed to be an entirely fictional character by modern scholars) allegedly fought a duel with Julius Caesar on his landing at Kent. Alhough he later died, he fought so well that he was able to wrest Caesar’s sword from him and with it kill a great number of the Roman invaders.[14] Even if Nennius were real, it is unlikely that he would be able to fight with Julius Caesar in 55 BC and then be present during the Iceni revolt a hundred years later.

Then there was Caratach: listed in Bonduca as ‘General of the Britons’, he was a familiar figure on the Jacobean stage, appearing in R.A.’s (a playwright known by no other name), pro-Tudor play The Valiant Welshman (published as a quarto in 1615). Caratach, or in its Latinised form, Caratacus, was a British rebel leader of the Catuvellauni tribe who forlornly resisted Emperor Claudius’s invasion, and was taken a hostage back to Rome and displayed a street procession of Rome’s defeated enemies. Yet when before the Roman Senate, Caratach’s defiant speech was so inspiring that he was allowed to live in peace in the city. He had become, certainly by Beaumont and Fletcher’s time, a patriotic figure in English culture, appropriated in several literary works including the famous Tudor-era poetry anthology The Mirror for Magistrates (1559). Thus there are three patriots—Boudicca, Caratach, and Nennius—who come together in this play.  

Home is where the heart is—for Bonduca, at least. Not for her is the Romans’ refined way of life; when she is offered amnesty by Suetonius, she refuses, preferring to die, and she goes on to celebrate a pastoral ideal of Britain:

Bond. If Rome be earthly, why should any knee

With bending adoration worship her?

She’s vicious; and, your partial selves confess,

Aspires the height of all impiety;

Therefore ‘tis fitter I should reverence

The thatched houses where the Britons dwell

In careless mirth; where the blessed household gods,

See nought but chaste and simple purity.

‘Tis not high power that makes a place divine,

Nor that the men from gods derive their line;

But sacred thoughts, in holy bosoms stor’d,

Make people noble, and their place ador’d (4.4).[15]

Honour and Virtue

Paul D. Green writes that at its heart Bonduca is concerned with questions not only of patriotism but of the nature of honour and dishonour, being

A drama of ideas … develop[ing] a code of ethics for the heroic life.[16]

Green, and before him Ronald J. Boling, have previously argued that the most honourable group in the play are the Romans. Various elements are drawn upon to support this, such as the fact that the Romans are likened to brave animals such as lions, tigers, and eagles while the Britons are described as wolves, wasps, and buzzards.[17]

I take a different view, however; although many of the Britons in the play almost fall into the trap of committing dishonourable acts in order to win the war, the virtue of some among them, at various points, pulls them back from the precipice. For example, Bonduca’s two daughters learn that one of the Roman commanders, named Junius, has fallen love with one of them, they pair hatch a plan to lure Junius to their hiding place and kill him, thus depriving General Suetonius of one of his key battlefield allies. The daughters were raped and their anger and shame over having been subjected to this crime makes them (with good reason) hate all Romans.

When Junius and his men are lured to the girls’ lair, they both burst out into a not unjustified invective against these Romans:

First Daugh. Valiant Romans,

Ye’re welcome to your loves!

Second Daugh. Your death, fools! […]

First Daugh. Oh, how I’ll trample on your hearts, ye villains,

Ambitious salt-itch slaves, Rome’s master sins!

The mountain rams topt your hot mothers.

Second Daugh. Dogs,

To whose brave founders a salt whore gave suck!

Thieves, honour’s hangmen, do ye grin? Perdition

Take me forever, if in my fell anger

I do not outdo all example (3.5).

There’s two attacks here. The first is a personal one against Junius and his men; they are dishonourable because aspersions are cast upon their parentage. That ‘the mountain rams topt [their] hot mothers’ meant—for to ‘top’ even in early modern English meant ‘have sex with’—that they are product of bestiality. From denigrating Junius’s parentage the girls segue into impugning the glory of Rome itself. The founders of Rome were not, contrary to what their own myths might say, raised by a she-wolf but by a prostitute. This is indeed the more realistic explanation of Rome’s legendary founding, given the fact that the word for prostitute in Latin could also mean wolf, as Roman writer Livy explained:

Some think that Larentia [Romulus and Remus’s foster mother], having been free with her favours, had got the name of “she-wolf” among the shepherds, and that this gave rise to this marvellous story.[18]

According to this reasoning, then, the founders of Rome were illegitimate sons of a whore and by extension the entire Roman imperialist project lacks legitimacy. And so the two daughters ready their poisoned arrow tips to plunge into Junius and his men’s bodies. At this point, Caratach enters and puts a stop to the plot:

Second Daugh. A trick, sir, that we us’d;

A certain policy conducted ‘em

Unto our snare. We’ve done you no small service.

These us’d as we intend, we are for th’battle.

Car. As you intend? Taken by treachery?

First Daugh. Is’t not allowed?

Car. Those that should gild our conquest,

Make up a battle worthy of our winning,

Catch’d by craft? […]

And must we shame the gods from whence we have it,

With setting snares for soldiers? I’ll run away

Be hooted at, and children call me coward,

Before I set up s[c]ales for victories.

Give ‘em their swords (3.5).

Soldiers should be faced on the battlefield. They should be fought in an honourable manner, man to man, sword to sword. To do otherwise, in Caratach’s opinion at least, would bring shame on the Britons and incur the wrath of the gods. In fact, this is not the only time that Caratach, having a Roman leader in his grasp, allows him to go. Elsewhere in the play Caratach does the same with Judas the Roman and his soldiers, who, having been captured by Nennius, the two daughters, and Caratach’s nephew Hengo, enters to find a starving Judas and his men with halters round their necks ready to be executed. Caratach loosens their bonds, feeds them, and allows them to return to their camp for to treat prisoners of war thus is barbaric:

Car. Who shall fight against us, make our honours,

And give a glorious day into our hands

If we dispatch our foes thus? (2.3).

The code of ethics which the ‘uncivilised’ British armies follow, then, is as follows:

• The place for fighting is on the battlefield.
• Victory should not be won by subterfuge.
• The enemy is worthy of respect and must be treated honourably.

It is ultimately the Britons’, or Caratach’s, at times extreme adherence to a code of honour and ethics which leads to the Britons’ downfall. Junius and his men return to the Roman camp and provide Suetonius with vital reinforcements while, after the battle, it is Judas who kills Caratach’s nephew (and Bonduca’s son) Hengo, thus killing the last true son of Britain and heir to the Iceni throne.

Bonduca has little time for Caratach’s notions of honour. She is proved right. After the battle, as it is clear that the Britons are losing, she is under no doubt as to the dishonourable treatment that she will receive at Roman hands. In the midst of the battle, and surveying some of the cowardly British soldiers who decide to retreat, Bonduca harangues the men:

Bond. Shame! Wither fly ye, ye unlucky Britons

Will ye creep back into your mothers’ wombs again? Back, cowards!

Hares, fearful hares, doves in your angers! Leave me?

Leave your queen desolate? Her hapless children,

To Roman rape again, and fury? (3.5.)

The Romans claim to fight for honour but it is a sham honour, then. They are the uncivilised and dishonourable ones. The Britons, in spite of their rude and rustic ways, their mystical religion, are the truly enlightened ones. As the subsequent defeat of the Britons shows, it’s all well and good to live by a code of ethics, but if you’re fighting for your country against an enemy which has no code of honour themselves, then the idea of adopting an ethical strategy is rather pointless.

Anti-Imperialism

Beaumont and Fletcher contrast the values of the Britons, who are true patriots fighting for the liberty of the land they inhabit, and the imperialist Romans. What might subsequently seem as ironic given Britain’s later history of empire-building, the Britons represented in the play are firmly anti-imperialist, and on this note the play opens:

Bonduca. The hardy Romans? Oh ye Gods of Britain,

The rust of arms, the blushing shame of soldiers!

Are these the men that conquer by inheritance?

The fortune makers? These the Julians,

That with the sun measure the end of nature,

Making the world but one Rome (1.1.)

Elsewhere in the play, it is said that wherever the Romans march they ‘measure out more ground, / to add to Rome’ (ibid). Make no mistake—this is, as the Romans themselves acknowledge, a pure land grab. There is no civilising mission. No ‘Ro-MAN’s burden’. As General Suetonius, on the eve of battle, declares:

….’ere this day run,

We shall have more ground to add to Rome, well won (3.2).

Yet the hitherto unstoppable march of Rome across Britain has decimated the Britons’ indigenous culture. At the sacrifice before the final battle, Bonduca makes this clear when she invokes the gods of Britannia, in particular Andate (Andraste), the British god of war:

Bond. Ye powerful gods of Britain, hear our prayers,

Hear us, ye great revengers; and this day

Take pity from our swords, doubt from our valours;

Double the sad remembrance of our wrong;

In every breast, the vengeance due to those

Make infinite and endless […]

Rise from the dust, ye relics of the dead,

Whose noble deeds our holy Druids sing:

Oh, rise, ye valiant bones! Let not base earth

Oppress your honours, whilst the pride of Rome

Treads on your stocks, and wipes out all your stories (3.1).

The Britons are the heirs to a proud and noble race and in this sacrificial scene the Britons’ ancestors are invoked to inspire them to be fearless, for the consequences of losing this battle will be the loss of the Britons’ ‘stories’ or history. It is a history which is protected by the Britons’ priests, the Druids, to whom they look for guidance on all matters. It is they who pass on the noble deeds of the ancestors. Beaumont and Fletcher, in touch with their nation’s history, had clearly read Camden’s Britannia, published just two years before the play’s premiere. The druids

…were the priests among the Britons and Gauls, and to whose care was committed the preservation of all their ancient traditions: and likewise the bards, who made it their business to celebrate all gallant and remarkable adventures.[19]

Druidic celebrations and rituals, in light of their connection to the earth and nature, were usually performed in sacred groves and not, as some might think, around standing stones like those at Stonehenge.[20] Caesar never mentioned the British Druids when he recounted his invasion of Britain (though he does refer to them in the Gallic Wars), but Tacitus in his Annals (finished c.68 AD) provides further information about the British Druids’ rituals and worship (and very little beside this is known) when those who resided on the Isle of Anglesey were decimated by Suetonius Paulinus’s forces:

On the shore [of Anglesey] stood the opposing army [of Britons] with its dense array of armed warriors, while between the ranks dashed women, in black attire like the Furies, with hair dishevelled, waving firebrands. All around, the druids, lifting up their hands to heaven, and pouring forth dreadful imprecations, scared our soldiers by the unfamiliar sight, so that, as if their limbs were paralysed, they stood motionless, and exposed to wounds. Then urged by their general’s appeals and mutual encouragements not to quail before a troop of frenzied women, they bore the standards onwards, smote down all resistance, and wrapped the foe in the flames of his own brands. A force was next set over the conquered, and their groves, devoted to inhuman superstitions, were destroyed. They deemed it indeed a duty to cover their altars with the blood of captives and to consult their deities through human entrails.[21]

‘Inhuman superstitions’ obviously reveals Tacitus’s biases and, though this text was available in book form since 1515, Fletcher’s Druids are much more sympathetic creatures. There is mysticism and animism, evinced in Bonduca’s mention of the ‘valiant bones’, the spirits of which, it is hoped, will rise and guide the Britons’ swords—but the scene is not bloody like Tacitus makes out. Instead, what we see are a simple people, imbued with patriotic love of their homeland, who want to ensure the continuation of their culture.

Alas! A bad omen accompanies the Britons’ sacrifice; in vain do they look for the sacred smoke to rise from the pyre to endorse their oblations. The battle plays out on stage as it does in real life. The Britons lose. Boudicca and her daughters commit suicide. Yet perhaps the battle for Britain was lost before it was even started. Caratach admires the Romans and his admiration for their more ‘civilised’ way of life is plain for all to see.

After most of the Britons have fled the battle and Judas kills Hengo, Suetonius enters with his soldiers and captures Caratach. Suetonius offers Caratach amnesty and asks him if he will consent to become a member of Suetonius’s regiment. Caratach accepts. He and Suetonius embrace each other as brothers. The Britons’ greatest general has gone over to the Romans’ side and the Romanisation of the island is near enough completed.

Purcell’s Opera

Fletcher’s play was performed by the company of actors called the King’s Men sometime between 1609 and 1613. The play seems to have been forgotten about for some time until it was published in the First Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s collected works. There are no records of its performance until after 1695. In that year, the great English composer, Henry Purcell, turned his attention to Fletcher’s play and composed new songs to accompany a new production on the Restoration Stage.

The premiere of this new play—retitled as Bonduca; or, the British Worthy—with Fletcher’s text alongside Purcell’s compositions, featured rousing songs such as ‘Britons Strike Home’, ‘To arms, to arms’, ‘Sing ye Druids’, occurred in October 1695.[22] This new version quickly became a favourite of eighteenth-century audiences—the London Stage Database lists well over 50 such performances in this century—with the song ‘Britons Strike Home’ winning a place in Georgian hearts as one of the era’s most-loved patriotic songs, on a par with the later ‘Rule Britannia’.

‘Britons Strike Home’ is a sung by the Druid chief in Purcell’s opera and its lyrics read thus:

Britons, strike home!

Revenge, revenge your Country’s wrong.

Fight! Fight and record. Fight!

Fight and record yourselves in Druid’s Song.

Fight! Fight and record. Fight!

Fight and record yourselves in Druid’s Song.

For Georgian audiences, an imaginary Druid from Britain’s deep past, singing about avenging his country’s wrongs, in an era of several wars as well as heightened antiquarian research into the country’s past, was too good not to admire. Even at the end of the century was the song sung heartily; in 1797, when Britain’s Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger announced there would be no peace France and that subsequently Britain was at war with the new republic, MPs burst out into a rendition of ‘Britons Strike Home’.[23]

Thus, the song itself acquired a life of its own independent of its original context, just like ‘See Now the Conquering Hero Comes’, originally from an opera about the great Jewish freedom fighter Judas Maccabeus but which became a song dear to the British army. For example, after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, when pro-democracy demonstrators were mowed down by the cavalry, a print titled ‘Britons Strike Home’ appeared. It showed the cavalry mercilessly mowing down innocent demonstrators. The words ‘strike home’ in this context, as Matheus Mello argues, is an ironic inversion of the song’s original meaning. The ‘enemy without’ in Fletcher and Purcell’s plays was Rome; in post-Napoleonic era Britain, the government treats its own citizens (‘home’) as an ‘enemy within’.[24]

Boudicca: A New Symbol of British Imperialism

Purcell’s opera became popular at a time when Britain had embarked on its own imperial project. The original anti-imperialist message of Boudicca’s life, as articulated by Fletcher, was lost. In its place was a reinterpretation of the life of this ‘British Worthy’ which celebrated empire, as it is in William Cowper’s ‘Boadicea: An Ode’ (1780), when a Druid priests tells the queen that though she will lose the battle against the Romans in her own lifetime, attests:

Then the progeny that springs

     From the forests of our land,

Arm’d with thunder, clad with wings,

     Shall a wider world command.

Regions Cæsar never knew

     Thy posterity shall sway,

Where his eagles never flew,

     None invincible as they.

[…]

She, with all a monarch’s pride,

     Felt them in her bosom glow;

Rush’d to battle, fought, and died;

     Dying, hurl’d them at the foe.

Ruffians, pitiless as proud,

     Heav’n awards the vengeance due;

Empire is on us bestow’d,

     Shame and ruin wait for you.[25]

The words ‘Regions Caesar never knew, / Thy posterity shall sway’ were emblazoned on the statue of Boudicca erected outside the Houses of Parliament in the early twentieth century. The placement of this proud queen, alongside her two daughters, ready to do battle with the most awesome power of the then known world—a symbol of British might against unconquerable odds—and with Cowper’s lines at her feet, marked Boudicca’s transition to an imperial figure.

References

[1] Tacitus [online], ‘Tacitus on Boudicca’s Revolt’, ed. Joshua J. Mark, accessed 22/12/2024

[2] Margaret Hughes [online], ‘On Boudica’s trail: possible sites for Boudica’s last battle’, accessed 22/12/2024

[3] Dio Cassius [online], Roman History, Loeb Classical Library 32 (Harvard University Press, 1914), accessed 22/12/2024.

[4] Margaret C. Steyn [online], ‘Iceni to iconic: Literary, political and ideological transformations of Boudica through time’, Literator, 40: 1 (2019), accessed 22/12/2024,

[5] Joseph Rykwert, ‘The Seventeenth Century’, in Seventeenth-Century Britain, ed. by Boris Ford, The Cambridge Cultural History of Britain, 3^rd edn, 10 vols (London: Folio Society, 1995), IV, p. 10.

[6] Rosemary Hill, Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism, 2^nd edn (London: Penguin, 2023), pp. 12–13.

[7] University of Chicago [online], ‘Boudicca’, accessed 22/12/2024

[8] See Rictor Norton [online], ‘The Gay Guide to Westminster Abbey’, accessed 22/12/2024

[9] George Colman, ‘Life of Francis Beaumont’, in The Dramatic Works of Beaumont and Fletcher: Printed from the Text and with the notes of the Late George Colman, ed. by George Colman,/ 3 vols (London: John Stockdale, 1811), I, p. 5.

[10] Anon., ‘Preface, 1711’, in The Dramatic Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, I, p. xv.

[11] Colman, ‘Life of John Fletcher’, in Dramatic Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, I, p. 8.

[12] John S. Keltie, ‘Origin and Early History of the British Drama’, in The Works of the British Dramatists, ed. by John S. Keltie (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1875), pp. ix–lvi (p. ix).

[13] Ronald J. Boling, ‘Fletcher’s satire of Caractach in Bonduca’, Comparative Drama, 33: 3 (1999), pp. 390–406 (p. 396).

[14] Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 107.

[15] Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ‘The Tragedy of Bonduca’, in The Dramatic Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. by George Colman, 3 vols (London: John Stockdale, 1811), II, p. 439. All subsequent references to the play will be in parentheses in the main text, listing act and scene numbers.

[16] Paul D. Green, ‘Theme and Structure in Fletcher’s Bonduca’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 22: 2 (1982), pp. 305–16 (p. 305).

[17] Green, p. 307.

[18] Titus Livius (Livy) [online], The History of Rome, Book 1, ed. by Benjamin Oliver Foster, accessed 24/12/2024.

[19] William Camden [online], Britannia, accessed 24/12/2024

[20] Joseph Ritson, Memoirs of the Celts, or Gauls, ed. by Joseph Frank (London: Payne and Foss, 1827), p. 73.

[21] Tacitus [online], The Annals. Tacitus, Trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York: Random House, 1942), accessed 24/12/2024

[22] London Stage Event [online]: September 1695 at Drury Lane Theatre, London Stage Database, accessed December 24, 2024. https://londonstagedatabase.uoregon.edu/event.php?id=1983.

[23] William Hague, William Pitt the Younger: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 2005), p. 415

[24] Matheus Rodrigues da Silva Mello, ‘Histórias de horror, crimes e sangue: os penny bloods e a imprensa radical nos anos 1830 – 1840 na Inglaterra Vitoriana’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2024), p. 50. In original: O título “Britons Strike HOME” (com ênfase no “HOME”) é interessante porque é uma referência a uma canção patriótica muito famosa intitulada “Britons Strike Home” na ópera “Bonduca” de Henry Purcell, originalmente escrita por Beaumont e Fletcher (amigos de Shakespeare), que conta a história da revolta de Boudicca contra a autoridade injusta dos romanos. A canção de ópera “Britons Strike Home” exorta os antigos britânicos a atingirem seus alvos (os romanos) com precisão e conquistá-los, pois “to hit home” significa atingir um alvo. Entretanto, o “lar” nesse título não é um inimigo conquistador estrangeiro, mas os próprios britânicos

[25] William Cowper [online], ‘Boadicea: An Ode’, accessed 24/12/2024