Indigenous Critique and the Eighteenth-Century English Stage

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent accounts of ‘noble savagery’ by historical anthropologists suggest the Indigenous critique voiced in such texts should not be seen as Western projection but as echoes of interlocution between Europeans and first nation peoples. This essay argues that French and English plays about the Spanish Conquest of Latin America produced in the 1730s, Voltaire’s Alzire and Aaron Hill’s Alzira, similarly re-articulate the voices of Incan protest (by women especially) recorded in The Royal Commentaries of Peru authored by the half Incan Garcilaso de la Vega. Later in the century, Irish playwrights Arthur Murphy and Henry Brooke then rework these ‘black legend’ texts to mount their own covert critiques of English colonial oppression in Ireland, finding the Indigenous perspectives voiced in these texts particularly apt to their own national circumstances.