“Kings and their crowns”: Signs of Monarchy and the Spectacle of New World Otherness in Heroic Drama and Public Pageantry

Kings and their crowns have but one destiny: Power is their life; when that expires, they die.

John Dryden, The Indian Emperor, V, ii

In Restoration England, the portrayal of exotic New World cultures in seventeenth-century heroic plays and public spectacle bears evidence of the imaginative introduction of alternative models of empire and rule along with their distinctive aspect and ambivalent connotation. The former splendor and subsequent downfall of the Aztec empire served as an appropriate theme for heroic drama during the English Restoration because it mirrored issues of contemporary interest such as imperial domination, the torture and martyrdom of a supreme ruler, and the fantasy of a prelapsarian state of innocence ruled by nature rather than art. The Aztec empire also continued to tantalize economically: were there yet undiscovered sources of wealth in the American continent which the “cruel Spaniards” may have failed to obtain, but which could be within the reach of the diligent English? “Indian plays,” as they came to be known, heavily relied on visual representation through scenery and costume for their original impact—as did the recently restored monarchy. In this article I examine specific costuming strategies that demonstrate the key role of performative practices within the scope of drama and public spectacle to nurture changing approaches to government, in particular those regarding the crown as symbol of monarchy and empire, in contrast with the feather headdress, an indispensable accessory for the characterization of exotic majesty. There were, as it turns out, significant costume exchanges between the dramatic and the public spheres that gave testimony to the two spaces’ perhaps unexpected cultural proximity. Juxtaposing exotic monarchs from the so-called Indian plays and public pageants with public images of the newly crowned Charles II reveals analogous processes in the construction of monarchical identity.

Scholars have long established that serious drama frequently contained allusions to the historical events surrounding the English crown from regicide to Restoration. More recently, they have underlined the significance of English Protestant defensiveness against continental Catholicism, burgeoning trade, and imperial concerns within the heroic plays of the period.¹ Bridget Orr has meticulously analyzed Dryden’s Indian Emperor to reassess the prevailing, traditional reading that “the preponderance of exotic settings in the heroic plays […] facilitated the presentation of domestic political crises or that they followed the French fashion for the representation of la gloire.” Instead, she proposes that

[the] heroic plays produced between 1658 and 1688 [also constitute] a collective narrative that depicts the most significant past possessors of universal monarchy. They dramatize crucial episodes in the classical, Oriental, and Hispanic empires, and explore the justifications for imperial conquest, the inevitability of endless expansion, and the equally inexorable centralization, corruption, and decline of such states.²

The pre-Hispanic Aztec empire with its widespread domination over vast territories and diverse peoples throughout Mesoamerica indirectly formed part of this group. Though English audiences may not have been fully aware of the extent and magnitude of the Aztec empire’s power, they were familiar with the dramatic reality of its downfall, even if their sense of its otherness kept them from categorizing it alongside more familiar empires, such as the Roman or Mughal. Derek Hughes in particular has drawn a parallel between Aztec human sacrifice and European practices of torture explicitly presented on stage in Dryden’s The Indian Emperor,³ while Bridget Orr explains the complex processes of both distancing and identification that audiences may have experienced, including the fact that presenting Montezuma’s torture on stage violated the conventions of heroicdrama.⁴ The Spanish annihilation of Aztec sovereignty in Charles V’s ambition to create a “universal monarchy” serves both as a warning to English expansionism, and a vehicle for the construction of English national identity in which presumably more civilized settlements served as the ideological justification for the appropriation of land.⁵

An overlapping of familiar and exotic symbols invariably occurred through the representation of an outlandish locale with extravagantly costumed Amerindian courtiers. This created a spectacle...