"He would not goe naked like the Indians, but cloathed just as one of our selves": Disguise and "the Naked Indian" in Massinger's The City Madam

These [Indians] were clothed in beasts skins, and did eat rawe flesh, and spake such speech that no man could understand them, and in their demeanor like to brute beastes, whom the King kept after a time. Of the which upon two yeeres after, I saw two apparelled after the maner of Englishmen in Westminster palace, which that time I could not discern from Englishmen, till I was learned what they were, but as for speech, I heard none of them utter one word.

—Robert Fabian, "Of the Sauages which Cabot brought home presented vnto the King in the foureteenth yere of his raigne," in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589)

Truth is a Native, naked Beauty; butLying Inventions are but Indian Paints.

—Roger Williams, A Key into the Languages of America (1643)

to go naked is the best disguise.

—William Congreve, The Double Dealer (1694)

As has long been noted, the early modern commercial theater in London abounded with non-English and non-Christian characters and, in Ania Loomba's estimation, allowed the bulk of its visitors to get "their images of foreign people from the stage, rather than from books or from real-life interactions."¹ But if audiences expected to encounter an American Indian character on one of their visits to the theater, they would have been sorely disappointed.² No extant play performed prior to the closure of the playhouses at the beginning of the English civil war incorporates an Indian character within its plot, an absence that might reflect a more general lack of interest in transatlantic matters on the part of playgoers and playing companies, in contrast to the wealth of drama that explored the Mediterranean and "Eastern" world, as has been traced in recent years by Richmond Barbour, Daniel Vitkus, and Jonathan Burton.³ Indeed, there are no plays set in the Americas until William Davenant's The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) and The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659), albeit three more sadly now-lost plays may have employed New World settings, judging by their titles—The New World's Tragedy (anonymous, 1595), The Conquest of the West Indies by John Day, William Haughton, and Wentworth Smith (1601), and A Tragedy of the Plantation of Virginia (anonymous, 1623)—and thus may well have featured Indian characters.

The lack of Indians in commercial drama is surprising given that in addition to the long, albeit little documented, history of Native Americans being put on display in European courts and cities (alive or, as in Trinculo's grisly example from The Tempest, dead), Indian characters feature in other forms of dramatic representation in the early modern period.⁴ In the interregnum and Restoration periods Indians played prominent roles in Davenant's two productions of the late 1650s and again when the pieces were incorporated in his dramatic anthology The Play-House To Be Let (1663), in John Dryden's The Indian Queen (with Robert Howard; 1664) and The Indian Emperor (1665), and in Aphra Behn's The Widdow Ranter (1690). Indian or Indian-like figures were represented in court masques, such as George Chapman and Inigo Jones's The Memorable Masque of the Two Honorable Houses or Inns of Court, the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn (1613), The Masque of Flowers (financed by Francis Bacon and performed in 1614), Ben Jonson and Jones's News from the New World (1620), and Aurelian Townsend and Jones's collaborations Tempe Restord (1632) and Florimène (1635). They also appeared in civic pageants such as Thomas Middleton's The Tryumphs of Honor and Industry (1617), The Triumphs of Loue and Antiquity (1619), and The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue (1622), Thomas Dekker's Londons Tempe; or, The Feild of Happines (1629), and Thomas Heywood's Londini Artium & Scientarum Scaturigo (1632) and Porta Pietatis; or, The Port or Harbour of Piety (1638). Yet despite the crossover in creative personnel (Chapman, Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and Heywood all wrote for...