What do the terms “India” and “Indian” signify? How has India, conceptualized as a distinct subcontinent both contained within and separate from Asia, been framed by and manifested in theatrical representation? This article examines the portrayal of India in early seventeenth-century popular theatre in London, specifically in how the image of India is invoked in two of the lord mayors' shows written for the City of London by the playwright Thomas Middleton. Middleton's use of images of and references to India participate in some of the ways that India was conceptualized at a key stage in establishing the framework for colonial discourse. Colonial discourse was thus shaped within and by popular culture and spectacle, and a historical long view' can illuminate the development of the concept of India in English, and later British, society and identity and the material consequences of that conceptualization. As Teltscher notes, the early seventeenth century marked the beginning of a transition in the way relations with India were seen in England, “from trading partner to ruling power.”Footnote ¹ This development was enacted and effected through representations that were presented and paraded through the streets of London.

This examination of India as represented in Middleton's shows will demonstrate how relations between England and particular geographical regions were presented for popular audiences in the early seventeenth century. Furthermore, the concept of India invoked both specific and general connotations, which refracted each other, creating a conflated sense of “India” as a broad type of foreignness that invited a particular kind of response. As Ania Loomba notes in her introduction to the text of Middleton's The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue (1622), the personification of India “is not just a generalized seventeenth-century trope for a feminized Orient but marks a specific playing with specific histories.”Footnote ² Without assuming a teleological inevitability, I will argue that the representation of India in Middleton's shows was part of a paracolonial discourse that enabled later, more intensive forms of colonialism. This discourse was promulgated in the public sphere by a popular form of theatre that crossed boundaries between elite and nonelite social forms and modes of performance.

The street theatre and pageantry of the period also had the power to define how engagement with various kinds of national and cultural difference was to be imagined. Configurations of India, Indianness, and the Other on these stages also participated in the formation of a range of identities that could be applied to a heterogeneous range of observers. The ways that India was presented in such circumstances created a set of generic expectations that, as has been demonstrated in relation to travel writing,Footnote ³ provides the interpretive framework for what people perceived about the world and relations within it.

Middleton's place in the theatrical canon as the author of some of the most well-known non-Shakespearean drama is not based upon his lord mayors' shows. For instance, in his 1983 edited collection “Accompaninge the Players”: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, Kenneth Friedenreich provided an introduction entitled “How to Read Middleton” that focused on Middleton's plays.Footnote ⁴ When Friedenreich talks about reading Middleton, he is assuming that the subject of discussion is scripts from the commercial theatre. David Bergeron's contribution to that volume is an exception to the usual dismissal of Middleton's lord mayors' shows by theatre scholars.Footnote ⁵ Like other forms of early modern occasional drama, these shows are dramatic texts that do not seem to count as drama. For many scholars, the symbolism of early modern occasional spectacle has been too esoteric for an understanding of theatre as mimesis, and its connections to patronage and power irretrievably sullied its claim on any notions of artistic integrity. When occasional drama is considered, it is read as context for the proper subject of scholarship: Shakespearean drama.

The dominance of commercial theatre in accounts of the theatrical culture of what is, after all, often referred to as the “Shakespearean period” bears examination.Footnote ⁶ That the paradigm of economic criticism is well established for Shakespearean theatre studies is, surely, partly because economic documentation is what has typically survived as evidence. Instead of artifacts such as buildings, clothing, and props, what remains for analysis are legal/economic evidence such as contracts, Henslowe's “diary” (really a book of accounts), legal proceedings, rent agreements, and the stationer's register. The nature of the evidence makes it likely that theatrical enterprise is defined as capitalist enterprise. Thus, scholars are more likely to see performances that took place within a venture such as the Globe auditorium as “theatrical” than non-profit-making civic entertainments.Footnote ⁷

As the recuperation of the court masque in the criticism of the past thirty years has shown, close examination of the densely symbolic texts of occasional drama can reveal illuminating and contradictory ideologies that refine our understanding of the operations of power and of theatre.Footnote ⁸ This article is thus partly about encouraging a similar trajectory for our understanding of the lord mayors' shows by differentiating them from other forms of spectacle and drama and offering some ways that critical interest in them can be sustained.

Tracey Hill's work on Anthony Munday and her most recent book, which is specifically on the lord mayors' shows, are the most recent studies in what is still an emerging field.Footnote ⁹ She takes a material approach to the shows, situating them within their performance contexts. Much work remains to be done to establish the theoretical underpinnings for understanding these shows within performance culture and for reading these texts qua texts.

The London lord mayors' shows were an annual public celebration of the inauguration of the new lord mayor. They incorporated theatrical and spectacular elements from a range of theatrical traditions, including the pre-Reformation religious pageantry that was suppressed in England during the sixteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ By the early seventeenth century they had developed into elaborate and multilayered spectacles that included a waterborne pageant, a procession through the streets of London, oath taking, feasting, and religious observances. The procession followed a prescribed route that took in the most significant landmarks in the city and included pauses for short theatrical vignettes and tableaux. These praised the new lord mayor and typically presented allegorical or historical figures that emphasized some aspect of the city's privileges or of the new lord mayor and his livery company.Footnote ¹¹

Earlier criticism of these shows, like that of the masque, engaged in a kind of spot-the-reference descriptiveness, which, though useful, gave rise to the perception that such productions lacked coherence. R. C. Bald suggested that the form of the shows necessarily precluded what he termed “serious artistic achievement” because nobody could see all of the pageants that took place at the different stopping points. Furthermore, the entire business was simply about “[l]avish display,” and, Bald argues, did not say anything artistic and therefore interesting.Footnote ¹²

Lawrence Manley implicitly disputes the charge of incoherence by pointing out that the pageants that were performed on different parts of the route joined the procession, so that by the end of the show, “a continuous and complete sequence [was] visible in its entirety to all and any spectators who lined the culminating portion of the route.”Footnote ¹³ However, this is an optimistic assessment of the potentially rather frustrating experience of witnessing such street theatre. Manley overemphasizes continuity; the circumstances of the shows' performances hardly can have permitted such a complete and clear view. Eyewitness accounts of the shows highlight a great deal of pushing and shoving within the crowds and competition among more elite spectators to find space at windows that overlooked any part of the route. Orazio Busino, who saw The Triumphs of Honour and Industry in 1617, reported that “we saw a huge mass of people, surging like the sea, moving here and there in search of places to watch or rest—which proved impossible because of the constant press of newcomers.”Footnote ¹⁴ Furthermore, payment records show that it was common practice to employ whifflers, equipped with various weapons that included fireworks, to keep the procession route clear. It seems likely that most people who saw the pageant can only have seen part of it. It also seems likely that many of these witnesses could not have heard the speeches so carefully preserved by the texts. As much is admitted by Anthony Munday in his description of the Ironmongers' Show of 1609; he justifies using adult actors to deliver the speeches rather than children, because, Munday claims, their voices would have been inaudible against the tumult of “a crowde of such noyse and uncivill turmoyle.”Footnote ¹⁵

The shows are not Gesamtkunstwerke. Their “chaotic mixture,” to quote Busino again,Footnote ¹⁶ is open to a deconstructive approach by which the performance might be understood as a kind of deliberately overwhelming total theatre. To look for coherence in this genre is thus either to miss the point somewhat or to be insufficiently critical of the unifying agenda of the textual description. The shows enlisted a productive kind of incoherence to enable them to incorporate conflicting ideas and ideologies and to co-opt diverse groups. The shows demonstrated the power of civic authorities, who shut down normal access to heavily populated areas of the city so the procession could be held. In this sense they can be seen as an imposition of ideology, but they took place within their own sets of contingencies and limitations. The surviving texts can show us what kinds of statement are possible in such contexts and how the priorities of the trading elites of the city could be formulated for a range of audiences.

Perhaps because of the unusual level of organizational skills required, comparatively few playwrights wrote lord mayors' shows. Thomas Middleton, who received repeated commissions, wrote seven shows from 1613 to 1626. These repetitions partly reflect what must have been a good working relationship between Middleton and his patrons, particularly the Grocers' Company, and suggest implicit approval of the allegorical schemes that Middleton devised and incorporated in the shows.

These allegorical schemes both praised and pressured the lord mayor, articulating his privileges and responsibilities using the principle of laudando praecipere, or teaching through praise.Footnote ¹⁷ The shows took place in some of London's busiest streets, representing the city to itself at locations that operated synechdochically in the pageant. The shows appealed to a much broader audience, though, and some statements in the pageants constitute a polysemic form of address that attempted to contain contradictory perspectives simultaneously.

In order to do this, the shows often invoked images of foreign or “strange” peoples and places. These images blended traditional modes of allegorical personification with representations of the places that provided the London trading companies with the wealth that enabled them to occupy their dominant social position. The images of foreignness presented in the pageants worked to establish and consolidate a sense of English identity that foregrounded the role of the London mercantile elite as pioneers of contact and communication. This promotion of mercantile activities established the terms for English interaction with protocolonial subjects. For example, Pramod K. Nayar argues that in travel literature, “the various tropings of India were transformative in nature, proposing particular roles for the English in India.”Footnote ¹⁸ Presentations of India onstage in the seventeenth century function in a similar way, but the spectacle also creates and consolidates a sense of Englishness as a cross-social category, aligning the interests of the merchants and profiteers with those of observers from other social classes.

Although I seek to disentangle the connotations of the term “India,” I argue that the entanglement itself is part of the term's power. I follow Archer's view that the term “Indian” reflects how attitudes that were developing in relation to the “New World” became transferable and began to apply to other parts of the world. The shows presented trade links that were established in the early part of the seventeenth century by the English East India Company as a form of discovery, making a clear conceptual link to the ventures of the New World colonists, such as the members of the Virginia Company, even though their projects were carried out in different locations and circumstances. In Archer's terms, this conflation is “para-colonial.”Footnote ¹⁹

The bodies that enacted the images of the Indian and the Indian woman in Middleton's shows were neither Indian nor female. In this period, roles in pageantry were taken by professional actors from the liveried acting companies, and this included the boys' companies and boys who worked in the adult companies playing women's roles. In the commercial theatre, the ironic disjunction between boy actor and role was regularly exploited to create what Witmore calls “a tickling frisson.”Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, on pageant stages, the malleability and lack of agency of child performers engendered a transparency grounded in “children's proverbial cognitive incompleteness, sexual immaturity, proclivity for mimicry, and appetitive absorption.”Footnote ²¹ The child actors on pageant stages function as apparent agents whose supposed semiotic emptiness offered a view through the body of the actor into another place, thus presenting a miniaturized, powerless, biddable, and reassuringly contained vision of the Other.Footnote ²²

An illuminating comparison can be made here with Joseph Roach's development of the notion of “vicariousness” as a pioneering feature of English theatre, whereby leisure became a “synthetic experience.”Footnote ²³ Roach's account concentrates on the Restoration theatre and thus can be backdated to the earlier part of the period and broadened to include nontheatrical performance. This is not least because the Restoration and eighteenth-century tropes he identifies functioned by continuing and developing established associations.Footnote ²⁴ If, as Roach argues, the theatre auditorium was the site of vicarious tourism, then pageantry's engagement with ideas of foreignness might enable the street itself to be seen in such terms.

Further generic comparisons can also be made between the lord mayor's show and the travelogue. In the case of a lord mayor's show, place came to London, recreated for pageantry. Instead of reading a travel narrative, the viewer of the pageants could experience the foreign from the position of a tourist. Nayar establishes how in travel narratives of India, “[a]esthetics . . . furnishes a descriptive vocabulary that enables the English traveller to cast India in ways that call for particular kinds of colonial or imperial responses.”Footnote ²⁵ Thus, how the “foreign” is represented in travel narratives participated in a preexisting discourse, one partly established by public pageantry.

The beasts and wonders described in travel narratives were doubtless familiar to readers of other travel narratives, and indeed, fidelity to preexisting descriptions has been shown to be more relevant to seventeenth-century evaluations of the quality of travel narratives than their relationship to actual places and events. Instead of presenting a record of experience, this genre is usually a collection of quotations about place, stitched together from existing textual sources. As Jonathan Sell and other commentators have demonstrated, the truth value of these texts is of a different order than what we would apply to modern guidebooks and travel writing.Footnote ²⁶ Pageantry provided an animated version of the stereotypical images of foreign places that travel narratives presented, a set of imagery that was independent of the geographical specificity of the places it represented.

Nevertheless, there were, of course, “real-world” connections between some aspects of the shows and the places they invoked. One clear reason for the shows' engagement with India was India's growing importance in the global trade activities of London merchants. Middleton's 1617 pageant, The Triumphs of Honour and Industry, honored Sir George Bowles, that year's new lord mayor and a member of the Grocers' Company.Footnote ²⁷ The Grocers were the livery company most closely associated with the activities of the English East India Company; they were one of the principal buyers and distributors of the pepper that formed the East India Company's staple product in the first two decades of its existence.Footnote ²⁸ Bowles was also personally associated with the English East India Company, having been an investor in the company's early voyages. Accordingly, two aspects of the cluster of associations of the term “India” were prominently displayed in linked pageants in the 1617 show. The first was what is described as a “company of Indians”:

The pageant shows a group of laborers working on the land, converting agricultural labor from a process into a spectacle. The description highlights nakedness as a natural and expected signifier of the laborers' nationality. This is unsurprising because nakedness, or partial nakedness, is “one of the recurring figures” of narratives of New World encounters, as Scott Manning Stevens points out,Footnote ³⁰ and is a trope frequently associated with the term “Indian” in the playtexts of the period.Footnote ³¹ The “nakedness” of the actors reveals the spectacularization of the young male body onstage. The “active youths” cavort about the stage for the pleasure of the spectator. Whether or not this can be read as titillating for the viewer,Footnote ³² the power is invested in the gazer, and the objectification of these figures is grounded in their assumed desire to please, a reading that transfers the pliability of the obedient child performer to the Indian laborers they represent.

Of course, the description reassures the reader that these figures wish to both please the spectators and “content . . . themselves,”Footnote ³³ a combination that allows European superiority to be naturalized and conceals the violence that is involved in extracting the labor from the non-European peoples involved. The figure of the happy laborer aligns the racial Other with the laboring Other.Footnote ³⁴ Never idle, the idealized “Indian” body is in this case constantly engaged in productive labor of either an economic or aesthetic kind, both of which are presented as in the service of European spectators. Thus, varying modes of objectification intersect in this scene, where youth, class, labor, and ethnicity/geographical location are all essentialized and put on display.

In The Triumphs of Honour and Industry, the homogenization of the performing figures also operates through implied contrast of the “Indian” performers with the spectators, who are homogenized as part of an assumed elite. The tableau is thus a way of representing and validating Bowles's involvement with the English East India Company and by extension the entire project of the company, aligning one of the most influential early engines of colonialism with an implicit sense of Englishness.

The pepper and other spices the text refers to place the referent of this pageant as the Spice Islands located in the East Indies—not what would be referred to as India today. The term “Indian” in the early seventeenth century was extremely vague and could refer to residents of the West Indies, the mainland of North and South America, the East Indies, and the entire area of India and Pakistan. The valley region of the river Indus (modern-day Pakistan) is the origin of the term—a very specific and distinct region of the world. One might be forgiven, therefore, for dismissing the use of this term as so hopelessly ill informed and vague as to be completely meaningless, but therein lies the importance of its usage in the context under discussion.

The slippage in terminology is a displacement. Its very indeterminacy demonstrates the point of colonial discourse analysis that the Other is a necessary reflection in Western identity formation. It tells us not about India but about London, Middleton, and the world he created in his pageant. Images of India, as Singh notes, “did not converge”; rather, they “proliferated in a range of associations.”Footnote ³⁵ In The Triumphs of Honour and Industry, the movements of Middleton's “Indians” present a stylized form of labor and a stylized signification of their assumed acquiescence to European methods and European control—in Spivak's terms, the “worlding” of the Third World. Spivak refers to this overlapping terminology when she notes that the label “American Indian” “commemorates a factual error on the part of Columbus” and compares this to the British use of the term sati to refer to the practice of widow self-immolation.Footnote ³⁶ Spivak brushes over the important point, noted by Thomas Hahn, that far from being a “simple error” on Columbus's part, this conflation “actually reflects a major aspect of late medieval and early modern ideology.”Footnote ³⁷

The profusion and variety of references to the term “India” and its cognates on London stages at the beginning of the seventeenth century testify to a productive ambiguity in the term and to an epistemological confusion that cleared space for a cipher through which Western, and specifically English, identity could be created. Often, this was accomplished through the use of hyperbole. Thus, Shirley invoked “the Indies” in The Grateful Servant (1629) in order to denote unimaginable wealth. “India” or “the Indies” were also often featured in lists of places intended to give a sense of adventure and travel. For example, “the Indies” is one of the destinations of Antonio's ships in The Merchant of Venice. This use of the term invokes a sense of extreme distance, and there are multiple examples of this connotation in the drama of the period.Footnote ³⁸ “India” or “the Indies” signify somewhere almost unimaginably distant and different, irrespective of any actual location.

An important ideological parallel can be found in the analysis of Juan E. Tazón, who traces the evolution in the early seventeenth century of how “Indians” of the “New World” were perceived: from landowning trade partners of another nation to ignorant savages who are therefore poor husbands of the land and in need of European tutelage.Footnote ³⁹ This is a crucial conceptual shift that enables the logic of colonialism. We can see it being articulated in relation to an entirely different group of people in Middleton's pageant, partly because the difference is concealed by the blurriness of the term “Indian.”

There is still a difference, however, between this kind of imperialism and colonial logic, because of the presence of a boy actor, personifying India, who oversees this display in an accompanying tableau.Footnote ⁴⁰ The display of Indian bodies and/as commodities exemplifies Sara Ahmed's refinement of Marx's formulation of commodity fetishism. She contends that it “involves the displacement of social relations of labour through the transformation of objects into figures.”Footnote ⁴¹ Middleton's pageant demonstrates three stages of this process: India is figured through the mimetic body (the laborers); it is metonymically associated with commodity through proximity to the display of the spices' production; and it is figured as the symbolic body of the personified “India.” It is this latter figure who constitutes a fantasy that works to conceal the social and material relations that produce it. The semiotic instability of the boy actor and the figure of “India” are thus particularly apt for the show's evasive engagement with the morally ambiguous concepts of accumulation and profit during a period when such practices were being transformed by the emergence of capitalism.Footnote ⁴²

L. S. Stavrianos argues that precapitalist imperialism was exploitative but not transformative. Precapitalist imperial powers plundered territories through war but did not make fundamental changes to the economic structures of those territories.Footnote ⁴³ Middleton's text demonstrates the emergence of capitalist imperialism, where unending expansion is self-perpetuating and labor is reorganized to support that expansion. The personification of Industry remarks that her power

According to Stavrianos, this kind of imperialism wrought radical social changes in the territories involved, but Middleton shows how this also applied to the colonizing power. Industry's speech uses an appeal to a kind of proto–fair trade by suggesting that the benefits that accrue from the expansive activities of the merchants are enjoyed by all. This includes by implication residents of London and, by extension, England, a presupposition of nationhood that works to create that which it takes for granted and enables anybody self-described as “industrious” to claim a share of the pageant's praise (though not necessarily a share in the wealth that underpinned it).

Richmond Barbour cautions against reading global imperial designs into Jacobean culture, emphasizing that imperial rhetoric in the period centered on the unification of England and Scotland and the control of Ireland. He notes that the “eastern initiative” of the early seventeenth century “was driven primarily by capital investment, not dynastic political design.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Any royal imperative to expand territorially must, therefore, be subsequent to mercantile expansionism conceived of as part of a “national interest.”

The lord mayors' shows in performance conflate symbolic and real locations to define this sense of nation. Unlike commercial drama, civic pageantry in some sense attempts to “transcribe” the city. Here, I reverse Jean Howard's observation that “through its fictions drama helped less to transcribe than to construct and interpret the city.”Footnote ⁴⁶ She concentrates on commercial theatre, but civic pageantry is surely even more closely connected to material conditions, imposing a performativity on the space it is representing and recruiting the locations of civic life (water conduits, meeting places, streets, and so on) into the performance of the idealization of civic community. The pageant thus “writes” itself onto the material space of the city streets in an extension of de Certeau's conceptualization of walking as a speech act. The pageant procession, in de Certeau's terms, appropriates the “topographical system,” engages in a “spatial acting-out of the place,” and “implies relations among differentiated positions.”Footnote ⁴⁷

These relations are drawn out by Manley's parallels between the route of the lord mayors' shows and that of other forms of processional spectacle during the early modern period, in particular the royal entry (the ceremonial entry of a monarch to the city, usually after his or her coronation). Manley notes that these processional forms share a central core that comprises “a hallowed ceremonial route between London's two main hilltops,” a route that was also demarcated by two churches—St. Peter's Church on Gracechurch Street, and St. Paul's Cathedral, the latter being, as Manley puts it, the “ceremonial heart” of the metropolis.Footnote ⁴⁸ The associations of this heavily symbolic route provided an important source for the shows' promiscuous intertextuality. They offered the viewer the potential to make connections among the displays of civic authority, royal power, and quotidian usage that occupy the same space at different times. The route included the busiest streets of the city, those that were used daily by all elements of London's population. Pageantry thus enlisted landmarks, physical space, past events, and daily movement into its allegorical scheme, making the ordinary symbolic.Footnote ⁴⁹

Another layer of symbolic space is added by the textual description of the pageant. Because a map is concerned with describing places and their interrelationships, the written text of the show can be conceptualized as a kind of map of a map.Footnote ⁵⁰ It translates the spatial significance of the event into a condensed and portable form. The travel narrative transcribed onto the city is retranscribed, and the text acts as a guide, giving signposts and instructions on the mental turns the reader takes in the course of remembering or reconstructing in the imagination an event that took place in time and space.

The shows' texts offer a reconfiguring of the relations between everyday spaces as ceremonial and fantastical. Instead of being fixed, spatial relations become flexible and mobile. For example, in Middleton's 1626 show The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity,Footnote ⁵¹ the Beautiful Hill is a reconfiguration of place within place, figuring London to itself and detaching the symbolic value of certain kinds of place from any sense of fixed physical location.

The symbolic properties of place are also an important element of the early modern travelogue, in which, as Nayar points out, “physical and moral topographies” are conflated,Footnote ⁵² a process Teltscher calls “moralizing geography.”Footnote ⁵³ Localized features of climate, landscape, disease, and so forth become symbolic of “moral conditions.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This, too, is the modus operandi of pageantry, which represents physical topography in order to convey moral or symbolic meaning, whether that meaning is explicitly allegorical (as in the case of the Beautiful Hill) or whether an actual place is made to stand in for symbolic meaning (as in the case of Middleton's description of the “Continent of India” in The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue in 1622).Footnote ⁵⁵

In The Triumphs of Honour and Industry of 1617, we find another mode of symbolic engagement that illuminates the influence of capitalist transformations on concepts of nationhood and identity. The 1617 show emphasizes the quasi-punning homophony of India and Industry, implying that they are interdependent. The complex of associations here is part of Middleton's strategy of productive ambiguity. The pageant praises the merchant Industry that creates “both wealth and love”Footnote ⁵⁶ and suggests interdependence between India and Industry and between the work of the merchants and contact with clearly differentiated Otherness, here signified by the term “India”; and yet, at the center of the display, India remains silent—it is the figure of Industry who speaks.

The internationality of Industry is also promoted through the Pageant of Several Nations that follows Industry's speech to illustrate her claim that nations that trade with each other not only increase their own levels of wealth but also enjoy the preserving effects of “harmonious peace” (THI, l. 84), preventing the depredations and costs of war. Potentially a nod to the Jacobean policy of pacifism, the pageant promotes the trading activities of the city merchants as the perfect means to promulgate the policy of peace as well as its chief boon through both the description's insistence upon “the prosperity of Love” and the iconography representing figures of “Peace, Prosperity, Love, Unity, Plenty, and Fidelity” (THI, l. ll. 99, 104–5).

The intermingling of nations is also synesthetically figured in several ways. Industry introduces the Pageant of Several Nations as “a joy true, though so strangely mixed” (THI, l. 86). This terminology can refer to both the foreignness of the nations represented and the unusualness of the pageant.Footnote ⁵⁷ The various nations engaged in trade “taste the harmonious peace [that] so sweetly sounds,” and the “Frenchman and Spaniard . . . have a thirst to utter their gladness” (THI, ll. 84, 109–12). To this admixture of senses, sight is added when the spectator is encouraged by Industry to enlist a “gracious eye” to enjoy the imminent pageant (THI, l. 85). This is presumably an appropriate sense to use, despite the speeches, because most of the nations personified remain silent, and the French and Spanish speeches were not translated in performance (though a translation is supplied in the printed text).

Although India is given a separate and prominent presence in the show overall, she does not figure in the Pageant of Several Nations. Only Western European nations are given speeches, and the rest of the Western (and mainly European) nations are lumped together. India is thus presented as different and exceptional, and the Eurocentric colonialist view emerges whereby India is seen as a place to exploit, a place where goods can be obtained and then sold to other nations (the other nations, therefore, being on a more equal footing than India). Apart from the way that this illuminates the emerging priorities of colonialism, the pageant demonstrates how these priorities are underpinned by the priorities of commerce.

Across the drama of the early modern period, the concept of India becomes quasi-proverbial as denoting excessive wealth, particularly in the form of precious stones and metals.Footnote ⁵⁸ The most common form of reference is to gold or to mines, a link that may initially seem to be specific to the Spanish areas of South America. References to tobacco in some contemporary drama suggest that a specifically South American context is being invoked. Such instances of specificity do not undo the overall vagueness of terminologies derived from “India”—rather, they incorporate the more specific meanings that are attached to geographical areas. For instance, in Jonson's The Alchemist, “the Indies” is elastic enough to refer to an area where the Dutch fleet is located (i.e., the East Indies) and an area considered to be the possession of the king of Spain (i.e., South America).Footnote ⁵⁹ The ultimate geographical fluidity of the referent of these terms is demonstrated by Jonson's earlier use of the term in the play, when Mammon claims that the philosopher's stone will enable him to transform the tin and lead mines of Devonshire and Cornwall into gold mines—and so “make them perfect Indies.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Gold is thus a key image for the conflation of different locations within the term “India” and its cognates. Whether or not gold was literally to be found in India, it came to stand for the riches acquired through East Indies trade. The description of The Triumphs of Honour and Industry uses the word “gold” repeatedly, drawing the reader's attention to, for example, the gold key the figure of Wealth holds at her heart and the golden crown of Perfection. India's position as adjacent to rather than as part of the Pageant of Several Nations implicitly presents her as the source for all of the gold that decorated the pageant. Gold is thus a resource that India produces but does not use herself and freely gives up. Gold is a particularly pertinent image in this show because the flow of gold bullion was an especially fraught issue in relation to the conduct of the English East India Company. The company had been given special permission to export gold bullion, a controversial privilege that it had to struggle to protect in the context of prevailing economic theory.Footnote ⁶¹

India reappeared both as person and place in Middleton's 1622 show for the Grocers' Company, The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue.Footnote ⁶² The description relates that a display

Describing India as a continent reifies the conflated connotations of the term, presenting them as inhering in an actual place. The figure of the continent, which is both movable and static in the show, paradoxically gestures toward both fluidity and solidity, enabling the pageant to accommodate contradictory meanings.

In this pageant, as in 1617, both Indian and English bodies are represented, but the clothing of these bodies is described in quite different ways. One set of actors is described as “Indians in antique habits.” Another set is described literally: “three habited like merchants” (THV, ll. 45–7). In these descriptions, we see how the possibility of subjectivity is subtly closed off for certain types of people, who are identified by clothing (and, implicitly, by complexion, if the adjective “black” is assumed to also apply to India's attendants). The strangeness of the Indian Other is emphasized by the adjective “antique” which, rather than ancient, here means something more like odd or strange. It contains echoes of the word “antic,” which is commonly used in the texts of court masques to connote behavior that is bizarre. Although it is sometimes used to indicate the concept of threat, the antic/antique terminology more usually connotes a performance whose strangeness is quaint and entertaining.

The three actors who represent the qualities of Commerce, Adventure, and Traffic are representative on several levels. As Middleton's text explains, the lord mayor and both sheriffs of the city were members of the Grocers' Company that year. To signify this, the three men who had held these positions the previous time this coincidence had occurred are, according to the text, also represented by the same three actors, “matched and paralleled with these three . . . as worthy successors” (THV, ll. 106–7). On one level, the individuated English bodies are set against a vague and undefined “Indian” anonymity. On another level, the three figures also personify a holy trinity of mercantile virtues, Commerce, Adventure, and Traffic. Furthermore, they also enact an idealized version of first contact by presenting the Queen of Merchandise with an emblem of Knowledge, described as “a bright figure, bearing the inscription of Knowledge, a sun appearing above the trees in brightest splendour and glory” (THV, ll. 47–9).

Thus, the power of consciousness is vested in Western authority and delivered by its agents. This is confirmed by the speech delivered by the black Queen, who asserts that

The exchange is the trading of the “gums and fragrant spices” (THV, l. 64) for the religious truth of conversion. This moves from the earlier model of imperial exploitation to something closer to the colonizing impulse. Instead of all parties benefiting in the same way from trade, the exchange becomes unequal. The black Queen states that “all wealth consists in Christian holiness” (THV, l. 79), eliding the fact that the merchants also acquire literal wealth. This significantly modifies the construction of economic interest in the 1617 show, which presented wealth as accruing to all parties.Footnote ⁶⁴

The colonizing power of the merchants' universalized knowledge is dramatized at the end of the 1622 show when the personification of Honor presents a Globe of Honor that represents the transcendence of the merchants over the worldly, even as it asserts their dominance of the world.

The strained poetry of these lines attests to a conflict between a desire to praise the profits accrued by the merchants and a desire to distance the show from the powerful negative associations of hoarding and excessive wealth. Later texts partly resolve this problem through the trope of religious conversion, a goal that, as Singh notes, becomes a crucial element of the “moral imperative for the discovery, and later conquest, of the non-Christian, ‘heathen’ lands” in accounts of India in the period.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Middleton's pageantry, the conversion rationale is presented as an addition to the primary goal of trade and moneymaking. Rather than seeking to conceal the mercantile motivation, Middleton's pageantry celebrates the economic productivity of the merchants as an end in itself.Footnote ⁶⁶

Middleton struggled to accommodate capitalist practices in the rhetoric of praise his genre required because he was still working within an aristocratic model of virtue in which inherited wealth was the marker of social status. He was writing at the very earliest stages of the emergence of what Weber theorized as the Protestant work ethic. His figuring of India as a woman can thus be situated within a wider ongoing reconceptualization of power and trade that was necessary for the establishment of colonial and economic dominance and made possible the radically different kinds of subjectivity Weber would later identify.Footnote ⁶⁷

There is an important contrast in Middleton's texts between the absolute specificity of London (particular parishes, streets, churches, etc.) and the deliberate nonspecificity of India as woman. The “body” of the city is far more clearly articulated than the body of the human figure made to stand in for the idea of India. Yet it is not somehow incidental that it is the Indian woman whom Middleton invokes. The world is staged in the city in Middleton's shows, and India in particular is conceptualized through being staged. Although it is important to recognize that the dominant mode of representation in pageantry, as in much of early modern culture, is allegorical and not mimetic, the mixture of allegory and mimesis results in a slippage between them, and symbolic meanings become attached to actualities.

The sleight of hand that Middleton's shows perform does more than homogenize the Other as Indian Woman and the Indian Woman as Other; it also homogenizes the audience for the pageant in relation to this demarcation of Western identity. The Othered bodies on display presuppose a homogenized English audience that is itself figured through the singularity of the lord mayor—nominally the audience, or “beholder,” of the show.

The written texts form a separate component of these mechanisms of homogenization because they are the most prominent element of the extant archival material. Unlike other forms of archival material gathered by theatre historians, the show text is already an archive that the agents and participants themselves constructed. The texts make and remake memory, restating what readers already know in terms of a collective narrative that privileges the livery companies and those who are highly placed in those companies. This is most often done in terms of the shows' presentation of London, the mayoralty, and the livery companies. For example, in Anthony Munday's shows, dead lord mayors are frequently presented as having returned from the grave to give their blessing to current proceedings. Current events are interwoven with representations of historical and mythological figures and of historical and legendary events. The texts blur distinctions between accounts of the lived experience of current events, of agreed historical narratives, and of myths of nationhood, civic pride, and class identities.

The texts, then, encourage the reader to accept the dichotomy Diana Taylor identifies “between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports ritual).”Footnote ⁶⁸ In this sense, then, the texts have what might be described as a telescopic relationship to the events they relate, because they both expand upon and contract the source event in particular ways in order to construct an archive. These evasions, additions, and concealments can be examined to excavate their ideological engagements.

However, as Taylor notes, “instead of privileging texts and narratives, we could also look to scenarios as meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The idea of the scenario could be applied productively to the shows as a whole, but more important for this article is the particular scenario relating to India that they reiterate. This is a repeated playing out of unequal exchange cast as fair trade, a scenario whereby dominating mercantile relations become the mode through which engagement with the Indian Other is to be understood. Middleton invokes the concept of India in his pageantry to establish an English identity against the bulwark of the “strange” or foreign in a scenario that also specifically celebrates the economic and trading activities of the lord mayor, his company, and the other members of the merchant elite by presenting them as heroic.

Instead of the real being the starting point for mimetic representation, the imagined accounts of India and Indianness on London pageant stages became the starting point for understanding the actual. Teltscher observes this phenomenon in relation to the commercial stage in her analysis of Thomas Roe's references to Marlowe's Tamburlaine in his account of the Mughal court.Footnote ⁷⁰ Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal court, was part of the London mercantile elite. Both his grandfather and uncle had been lord mayor of London, and his role as ambassador is conflated with that of trade envoy.Footnote ⁷¹ This is not to imply that the subsequent development of colonial discourse and the British imperial engagement with India was inevitable. Nevertheless, as Singh suggests, a “modality of colonialism” persists that “enabled the power of the colonial and, later, the nationalist state to expand and consolidate.”Footnote ⁷² Thus, despite the utter irrelevance of the representations of India onstage to material conditions, mimesis became the way that these representations were read and implemented. If, as Greenblatt suggests, “the discourses of colonialism actually do much of the crucially important work of colonialism,”Footnote ⁷³ then the ways that India was represented in Jacobean London's pageantry are deeply implicated in the development of colonial practice and ideology.