Introduction

Summary

Cuzco, Peru, 1570. As Viceroy Francisco de Toledo makes his formal entrance into the city, he is greeted with elaborate pageantry. In the main square, once site of the Inca festivals, a Moorish castle and an enchanted wood have been erected for the celebration. The mock-Moors emerge from the castle to capture young women at a fountain, only to be pursued by valiant Christian knights, who engage them in fierce mock combat. The conquistadors play “themselves.” The Moors are played by the Indians.

Bristol, England, 1613. To celebrate Queen Anne's visit, the city stages a water-combat between a Christian ship and two Turkish galleys. After a lively mock battle, the “Turks” are brought as prisoners before the Queen, who laughingly observes that they are “not only like Turks by their apparell, but by their countenances.”

The representation of an encounter with the other is always fraught with difficulties. To mime such an encounter is also, fundamentally, to set the self adrift in a space where identity becomes nothing but props and costume. The two examples above convey some sense of the complexity of intercultural performance on early modern imperial stages. In the first, a time-honored Mediterranean script is produced in an American setting, casting the natives of the New World as the Islamic bogeymen of the Old.