Dramatic Strategy and Cultural Colonization in Our Country's Good

Our Country's Good is one of the representative works of Timberlake Wertenbaker, a British contemporary woman writer. This play employs the meta theatrical device of play-within-the-play to tell the story of a group of transported British convicts mangaged by Second-lieutenant Ralph Clark rehearsed George Farquhar's comic The Recruting Officer. Dramatic strategy embodies the liberation and redemption of prisoners, but in essence it is a complex and hidden cultural means of colonization. This article tries to prove that dramatic strategy still belongs to the colonial discourse of hegemonic culture from three aspects as hierarchical identity presupposed by dramatic enlightenment, the colonial effect of discipline and assimilation created by dramtic produce, and the constrcution of dramatic art to the identity of British Empire.