SOURCE: Canfield, J. Douglas. “Heroes and States: Heroic Romance.” In Heroes and States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy, pp. 6-25. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000.

[In this essay, Canfield uses Dryden's Conquest of Granada as an exemplary heroic drama in order to uncover the political and ideological values that underlie the genre.]

The restored king and court had been quite taken with French drama in their exiled sojourn on the continent, particularly the rhymed romances and tragedies of France's greatest dramatist at midcentury, Pierre Corneille. So Charles II invited his courtier playwrights to follow suit. The very formal style of such plays, with their oratorical declamations, can only be appreciated today if we view them as operatic spectacles (indeed, such spectacles developed alongside them). Despite Puritanical strictures against the theater, Sir William Davenant had already staged the first version of the Restoration rhymed heroic play, The Siege of Rhodes, in 1656, an operatic romance he expanded into a two-part version for the stage in 1661. Heeding the king's call in addition were Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, Sir William Killigrew, and Sir Robert Howard. Howard was assisted by a professional playwright, the great John Dryden. In the early sixties, these authors developed the rhymed heroic romance as a celebration of the king's restoration and a reinscribing across the pages of a disintegrating cultural scripture of the chivalric code which had underwritten aristocratic society for centuries. They portrayed the aristocracy as naturally superior, born and bred and divinely appointed (if not anointed) to rule. They portrayed their enemies as self-interested statesmen and unruly mobs, who might mouth the rhetoric of rights but who simply desired power through revolt and usurpation. The villains of these plays critics call Machiavels, so named after the (in)famous Niccolò Machiavelli, who had preached in The Prince that it was better for a ruler to be feared than loved, that the end justifies the means, and that might makes right. Machiavelli's theories of de facto as opposed to de jure government had been brought home to England by Thomas Hobbes, who wrote his treatise of de facto absolutism, The Leviathan, while in exile with Charles II.

However beleaguered, the heroes and heroines of these romances are always vindicated; right finally makes might. The implication of this poetical justice is that it is underwritten by divine providence. If it were not, then the aristocratic politics of de jure hereditary monarchy and its ethics of obligation and loyalty and virtue would be exposed as the mere rhetoric that the Machiavels claimed it to be.

The Machiavels are as often women as men. The Restoration introduced actresses on the English stage, and the playwrights created great villainess roles for them, from Roxalana in Davenant's Siege of Rhodes; to Zempoalla in the Howard-Dryden Indian-Queen (1664) and her successors, Lyndaraxa in Dryden's Conquest of Granada (1670-71) and Nourmahal in his Aureng-Zebe (1675); to the versions of Alexander's scorned Roxana in John Weston's Amazon Queen (not acted; publ. 1667), Samuel Pordage's Siege of Babylon (1677), and Edward Cooke's Love's Triumph (probably not acted; publ. 1678); to the Queen Mother in William Whitaker's Conspiracy (1680).¹ Whatever the setting, this uppity-woman type symbolized the rebellious aspects of England, which should be the submissive bride of her king. Her promiscuous sexuality threatened the patrilinearity upon which the succession of property—and the very kingdom itself—depended. Against her was juxtaposed the virtuous woman, constant as lover, wife, queen. This concept of constancy or trust is central to aristocratic monarchial ideology. God entrusts kings and queens with government. The people owe them allegiance. Thus constancy, loyalty, trust are central to conflict on several levels: between friends, couples, subjects and kings, man and god.

Two of the early playwrights establish the pattern, for the conflicts in Davenant's Siege and Orrery's first plays are resolved in terms of trust. In the Siege, herself a model of constancy to her doubting lover Alphonso, Ianthe trusts so much to Solyman's honor that, even without safe passage, she goes to him to sue for peace, a design that Villerius says has Heaven's blessing. Thus Christian Rhodes is saved, at least temporarily. In Orrery's Generall (first acted as Altemira in Dublin, 1662; again as The Generall in London, 1664), trust in the ultimate might of the right is vindicated when the rightful king defeats the usurper in a trial by combat. And the code is validated by Altemira's apparent death for her constancy, her resurrection and reunion with her lover (the drug was not fatal), and her conversion of the Herculean Clorimun to virtue and mutual trust. In Orrery's History of Henry the Fifth (1664), the entire conflict between England and France is portrayed as one between might and right, the latter carrying the day. Meanwhile, when Henry trusts so much to Katherine that he enters the French camp disguised, she refuses to betray him. Friendship is such a powerful tie that, though he loves her himself, Tudor courts Katherine for his friend Henry, affirming, “Friendship above all tyes does bind the heart; / And faith in Friendship is the noblest part” (IV.288-89). Even enemies, Henry and Chareloys, trust each other. And the play concludes in a treaty between the English and the French, a sign of mutual trust. In what might serve as an epigraph to these heroic romances, Henry concludes, “Trust is the strongest Bond upon the Soul” (V.168).²

Rhymed heroic romance as continued by Orrery and Dryden and as created by their followers through the sixties and into the late seventies reinforces this ideology. As with Orrery's Clorimun, sometimes the valorous are diamonds in the rough who must be polished, usually by the power of love; they must be taught the chivalric code. The most obvious examples are Dryden's Montezuma, Almanzor, and Morat. Even Aureng-Zebe must learn to trust absolutely his lover Indamora. Sometimes when lovers or husbands distrust or violate their own vows, virtuous women seek a greater lover, a higher form of constancy—in a nunnery, as in George Cartwright's Heroick-Lover (probably not acted; publ. 1661).

The relationship between subjects and kings in these plays is depicted as ideally one of reciprocal trust. Not only must subjects remain loyal, but kings are bound, too. For example, Queen Cleandra in Sir William Killigrew's Ormasdes (1664?) says, “'Tis a Prince his chief Businesse to be Just, / The Gods impose on us no higher Trust” (II, 18). Even when faced with rulers who are usurpers or who break their sacred trust with their subjects, in almost all of these plays the heroes refuse to rebel, leaving vengeance to Heaven, as in Cartwright's play or Orrery's Tryphon (1668) or Dryden's Aureng-Zebe or Elkanah Settle's Cambyses, King of Persia (1671).

In every one of these rhymed heroic romances, the wicked antagonists are finally overthrown, the virtuous protagonists triumphant. And as the ultimate inscription of aristocratic ideology, somebody usually explicitly attributes the dénouement to an underwriting Logos, a verbum dei that underwrites word-as-bond. To take random examples, in John Caryll's English Princess (1667), a Richard III play, Richmond concludes, “Heaven, thou art just, and good! / So Tyrants rise, and so they fall in Blood” (V.vii, 58). The usurper Tryphon overthrown by his own hand, in Orrery's play of that name, the rightful king Aretus declares, “Now let us to the Gods Oblations pay, / For all the Blessings of this Glorious day” (V, 435). Darius concludes Settle's Cambyses, “Thus the gods guard those Virtues they inspire” (V, 84). In Settle's Conquest of China (1675), the apparently victorious, blasphemous Machiavel Lycungus condemns the hero and the heroine to death, exulting,

                                        Fate grants the High command
Of this Great Empire to a Martial Hand.
And to confirm my Interest with heaven,
The Gods to my Just Cause success have given.

[V, 62]

The pious hero Quitazo responds, “Savage Infidel, can you believe, / That there are Gods, and such a sentence give?” (64). The virtuous attribute their rescue to “th'high Powers” (67). “The Hand of Providence” is manifest in the dénouement of Thomas Rymer's Edgar (V.xi, 59; probably not acted; publ. 1678). “The gentle Calm of Peace from Heav'n descends” at the end of Cooke's Love's Triumph (V.xv, 62). In Pordage's Siege of Babylon, at the moment the heroes appear to have lost the lovers for whom they fought, they are cautioned that “The ways of Providence, do Riddles seem,” that they must nevertheless have trust (V.i, 51); indeed, the women are restored by divine agency, the villainess Roxana goes mad, blasphemes, and stabs herself, and the constant Statira concludes, “Thus Gods their Judgment show, / That poor ambitious Mortals, here may know, / They sit above, and see, and govern all below” (V.ii, 61).

Not all Restoration heroic romances are rhymed, and as we shall see in the following chapters, not all rhymed heroic plays are romances. But the unrhymed heroic romances embody the same aristocratic ideology, from Henry Cary, Viscount Faulkland's Marriage Night (1663) and the anonymous Irena (unacted; publ. 1664), both of which have providential endings in support of loyalty; to John Banks's Cyrus the Great (1695, but written earlier) and Edward Ravenscroft's version of the story of Edgar (1677, but also apparently written earlier), both of which have bizarre romance endings; to Nahum Tate's (in)famous adaptation of King Lear (late 1680), which ends with Lear alive, Cordelia married to the triumphant Edgar, and the pronouncement, “Then there are Gods, and Vertue is their Care” (V, 65); to Charles Saunders's Tamerlane the Great (1681), which ends with the title character recalled to aristocratic virtue, reconciled to his estranged loyal son and his bride, and thanking “Propitious Heav'n” (V, 59); to the anonymous Romulus and Hersilia (1682), which concludes with the title couple overcoming treason and distrust.

Thus, as one observes the dates of performance, it is obvious that the heroic romance, whether rhymed or unrhymed, figures prominently at least through the Exclusion Crisis of the early 1680s.³ It is not just a genre spawned by the restoration of Charles Stuart and petering out quickly as the euphoria waned. In the midst of that crisis comes Whitaker's Conspiracy; or, The Change of Government (1680), a retelling in an exotic Turkish setting of the English Civil War with the death of one sultan at the hands of rebels and the restoration of his son. As late as 1683, Thomas Southerne penned an unrhymed heroic romance, The Loyal Brother, whose title indicates its ethos. Despite the machinations of the play's Machiavellian statesman, the younger brother's undying loyalty to his sovereign brother—and his mirroring constancy to his beloved—are finally rewarded, and the chastened ruler, Seliman, exhorts, “[M]ay succeeding Monarchs learn from me, / How far to trust a Statesmans policy” (V.iii.295-96).

The greatest writer of these heroic romances was, hands down, John Dryden. Let us examine in detail his best contribution, with a final glance at his farewell not just to rhyme but to heroic romance on the stage. Dryden's Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (two parts, Dec.-Jan. 1670-71) opens with key imagery from the two games being held to celebrate the Granadan king Boabdelin's imminent marriage to Almahide. The first game is a juego de cañas and the second a juego de toros. The former is a ritualized form of combat consisting of darting blunted spears or “canes” between mock armies. In this particular game, groups of thirty or more of the two feuding factions in Granada are conducting (offstage) a typical “flying skirmish,”⁴ that is, fighting “like Parthyans” (158), until Tarifa, a Zegry, breaks the rules of combat, changes “his blunt Cane for a steel-pointed Dart” (162), and wounds Ozmyn, an Abencerrago. The act is characterized as “Treason” (164), because it violates fundamental sociopolitical codes designed to sublimate the very deadly rivalry it now precipitates, a rivalry governed only by rules of revenge.

Instead of ritual, Granada is faced with what René Girard in Violence and the Sacred calls a “sacrificial crisis” that threatens to destroy the city from within. The rivalry is imitated everywhere in the play. The old Abencerrago Abenamar is already a deadly rival of the Zegry chief, Selin, and their inveterate hatred causes them to violate the bonds of nature and attempt to kill their children, Ozmyn and Benzayda, who, like Romeo and Juliet, fall in love despite their clans' feud. Prince Abdalla and the Abencerrago chief, Abdelmelech, become deadly rivals for Lyndaraxa's hand. Abdalla also becomes a rival for his brother Boabdelin's throne, violating both the bonds of nature and of society. Lyndaraxa eventually becomes a rival with Almahide for the love of the heroic Almanzor. Almanzor becomes a rival with Boabdelin for the love of Almahide. And, of course, the Moors are deadly rivals with the Christians for the last Islamic stronghold in Western Europe. This is a world threatening to come apart in the “flying skirmish” of dialectical forces.

The bullfight is really an image of the same skirmish, as if the chief bull were a figure for what Girard calls the “monstrous double” of the sacrificial crisis, the unheimlich monster that really lurks within.⁵ The bull charges the stranger, Almanzor, who spears him once, sidesteps, and then decapitates him in one swordstroke. This is an image for Almanzor's conflict with himself, with his unruly passion. But it is also an image for Almanzor's contest with Boabdelin, for Christianity's contest with the Moors, and finally for the entire culture's struggle with a displaced version of its worst enemy—deadly rivalry brought about by the breaking of words, the perjury that eventually destroys Granada from within.

Almanzor is a great warrior summoned to help the Moors raise the Christian siege of Granada. His immediate past is extremely significant, but Boabdelin fails to read its lesson aright. Almanzor had been summoned to a similar scene of rivalry in Fez, where the Xeriff brothers feuded for the throne of Morocco. At first Almanzor fought for the Elder, the “juster cause,” but when he waxed ungrateful, Almanzor changed sides and placed the Younger on the throne (1.I.i.248-52). There are two lessons here: a people without a clear principle of succession, as Islamic peoples were popularly portrayed, is always in danger of civil war; a leader who is ungrateful for services rendered is liable to reap unhappy consequences.

The lesson of the consequences of ingratitude is clear.⁶ Nevertheless, Boabdelin fails to read the lesson and thus is doomed to have history repeat itself. In Almanzor's first battle for the Granadans, he wins a victory and captures the mighty duke of Arcos, but then he heroically pledges to set him free to fight again. Boabdelin refuses to honor Almanzor's “promise” and absolves him from his “word” (1.III.i.5-6). Almanzor's response not only insists upon his right to his word but characterizes the king as a troth-breaker whose faction-ridden state is the result of his inconstancy:

He break my promise and absolve my vow!
'Tis more than Mahomet himself can do.
The word which I have giv'n shall stand like Fate;
Not like the King's that weathercock of State.
He stands so high, with so unfix't a mind,
Two Factions turn him with each blast of wind.

[7-12]

Predictably, Almanzor, who, as Dryden insists in the prefatory essay, “Of Heroique Playes,” “is not born their Subject whom he serves” (Works 11:16) and therefore owes them no allegiance, deserts Boabdelin and joins the rebellion of his rival brother, Abdalla.

Abdalla himself, however, though witness to Almanzor's Moroccan history, learns its lesson no better than Boabdelin. Nor does he profit from his brother's mistake, but breaks his own word to Almanzor, reneging on his agreement to let him set another captive free—this time, the beauteous Almahide, with whom Almanzor has fallen instantly in love. Abdalla yields to Zulema's threat to withdraw the support of the Zegrys, and Almanzor accuses him of rationalizing his “ingratitude” with empty “words” (1.III.i.502-4). Thus, Almanzor returns to Boabdelin, not to vindicate the latter's claim to the throne but simply to rescue Almahide and set her free. But after Almanzor keeps his “Promise” to Boabdelin (1.V.i.185) and again turns the tide, Boabdelin makes the mistake of swearing by “Alha” to grant him any desire (225). When Almanzor then asks for Almahide, Boabdelin naturally refuses to surrender his betrothed. Furious, Almanzor responds, “I'll call thee thankless, King; and perjur'd both: / Thou swor'st by Alha; and hast broke thy oath” (268-69). Almanzor deserts both brothers and departs for Africa. Even if there be an inadequate political system for succession and legitimation, pledged words ought to bind. Almanzor rejects a world where they do not.

With the loss of the heroic defender and with Abdalla's escape to join the Christians, Boabdelin's fortunes precipitately decline, and his people begin to rebel. In other words, his troth-breaking has produced anarchy. The “many-headed Beast” (2.I.ii.29), the mob, rebels in “The name of Common-wealth,” where “the People their own Tyrants are” (47-48). Boabdelin argues that “Kings who rule with limited Command / Have Players Scepters put into their Hand” (49-50), and Abenamar describes the results of the destabilizing dialectic that occurs when kings must contend for power, a dialectic that divides within and leads to conquest from without. Then, the mob will “want that pow'r of Kings they durst not trust” (58). Thus Dryden rouses memories in his audience of his own country's civil war—as well as fears lest it return, with its ultimate tyranny, as a result of factionalism—and of quarrels over principles of succession.

Boabdelin has been incapable of commanding the trust of his people from the beginning. He has always been a troth-breaker. As he often does, Dryden provides some original sin of distrust that lies like a curse over the land. Ferdinand's claim to Granada is twofold. The Spaniards have a prior “just, and rightful claim” to Spain because they were there before the Moors, who simply took it by conquest and therefore rule merely by “force,” de facto and not de jure (1.I.i.295, 303). Moreover, Arcos had once captured Boabdelin and his father and released them upon their “Contract” to resign the crown of Granada and rule as Ferdinand's vassals until the death of the father, when Boabdelin would “lay aside all marks of Royalty” (317-22). When that time came, however, Boabdelin refused to yield the throne, and Arcos accuses him, “[L]ike a perjur'd Prince, you broke your oath” (316). Such a king, according to the pattern of feudal literature, of which this baroque drama is a late example, will inevitably suffer a poetical justice that is a sign of a divine justice that avenges forswearing. Boabdelin is “slain by a Zegry's hand” (2.V.iii.171)—killed not by a Spaniard but by one of his own rebellious, troth-breaking Granadans.

Boabdelin might as well have been killed by his own brother, but Dryden has another fate in store for Abdalla, whose political rivalry with his brother, though it is based in part upon Zulema's Hobbist perversion of words, of such concepts as “Vertue” (1.II.i.208-13), “Justice” (226-27), and primogeniture (247-51), is complicated by a sexual rivalry with Abdelmelech over that central chivalric figure, the inconstant woman. Abdalla rebels because only with a crown can be obtain Lyndaraxa, who is preengaged, she maintains, to Abdelmelech.

Lyndaraxa's manipulation of her lovers at times borders on the comic. But she epitomizes the very grave threat of uncontrolled desire that seduces men away from the code of loyalty to participate in a rebellion against the very order of patriarchy. Jealous of Almahide, she wishes to be a queen—not simply a royal consort. No, she would “be that one, to live without controul” (1.II.i.148). Figuratively, she is the Dread Maternal Anarch, who threatens all the bonds of patriarchal society. She provokes Abdalla to Oedipal rebellion: “For such another pleasure, did he live, / I could my Father of a Crown deprive” (172-73). Abdelmelech laments, “With what indifference all her Vows she breaks!” (1.III.i.150), as she mockingly taunts him with libertine doctrine, “'Twas during pleasure, 'tis revok'd this hour. / Now call me false, and rail on Woman-kind” (141-42). She is also capable of manipulating by perverting the code of the word and accusing her two puppets of being the ones who are “faithless” and “false” (1.IV.ii.63, 75). When Abdelmelech tries to leave her because of her “falshood” (59), she hypocritically accuses him, “[Y]our breach of Faith is plain” (77). When Abdalla demands constancy from her, she explains that frailty's name is woman: “Poor womens thoughts are all Extempore” (180). He complains, “Is this the faith you promis'd me to keep?” (1.V.i.38), then calls her a “faithless and ingrateful maid!” (67). Old Selin properly brands her “faithless as the wind” (2.II.i.110).

Lyndaraxa is a symbol of the faithlessness always threatening feudal aristocracy. Mythologically, she is associated with Circe (1.III.i.93-96), that seducer of heroes who distracts them from the paths of true glory and turns them into beasts. More prominently, Lyndaraxa associates herself with the goddess Fortune, who, as she believes, governs events (265-69). And yet, as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance portrayed her, Fortune is ultimately a whore. Abenamar proclaims, “I have too long th' effects of Fortune known, / Either to trust her smiles, or fear her frown” (1.IV.i.7-8). Lyndaraxa proves incapable of being Fortune, of controlling events, and thus she turns eventually to Almanzor, who himself claims to Boabdelin, “I am your fortune; but am swift like her, / And turn my hairy front if you defer” (30-31). Lyndaraxa plans to assault him with her wiles, because “In gaining him, I gain that Fortune too / Which he has Wedded, and which I but Wooe” (2.III.iii.61-62).

To win Almanzor, Lyndaraxa must destroy “his vow'd Constancy” to Almahide (2.III.iii.65), and her ultimate weapon is to declare her nominalism and proclaim:

There's no such thing as Constancy you call:
Faith ties not Hearts; 'tis Inclination all.
Some Wit deform'd or Beauty much decay'd,
First, constancy in Love, a Vertue made.

[162-65]

When he resists her, she spitefully taunts, “The Fate of Constancy your Love pursue! / Still to be faithful to what's false to you” (181-82). Thus according to her—and to the secular, self-interested philosophy for which she stands—the faithful are the fools. And yet, despite all her wiles, despite perjury against Almahide and dirty tricks against Almanzor and Ozmyn, Lyndaraxa does not triumph. Abdelmelech kills Abdalla and then resists and rejects Lyndaraxa, throwing her philosophy back in her teeth and berating her for her inconstancy, which has been justly rewarded (2.IV.ii.130-33). Not finished yet, she finally joins the Christians in the last assault and is rewarded with the crown of Granada. She exults, “I knew this Empyre to my fate was ow'd: / Heav'n held it back as long as 'ere it cou'd” (2.V.iii.238-39). But she taunts Abdelmelech once too often, and he stabs her. Lyndaraxa, Queen of Rebellion itself, ironically charges her “fate” with “Rebellion” (262), but Abenamar passes the final judgment on her and her quest to master Fortune: “Such fortune still, such black designs attends” (267). In other words, however capricious be Fortune in her own person—and therefore a fitting figure for Lyndaraxa the Inconstant—Fortune is finally only an instrument of Nemesis. No “Blind Queen of Chance” rules this world (2.III.ii.17) but a Providence that underwrites the code of constancy.

Contrasted with the faithless Lyndaraxa, as Penelope with Circe, is the faithful Almahide, model of chivalric female behavior. When Almanzor falls in love with her, she protests she is “promis'd to Boabdelin” (1.III.i.376). He would disregard such bonds as mere “Ceremony” (388), but she tries to explain to this “noble Savage” (1.I.i.209), “Our Souls are ty'd by holy Vows above. … I gave my faith to him, he his to me” (1.III.i.392, 396). Later, when Almanzor again presses his suit, she protests, “My Fathers choice I never will dispute” (1.IV.ii.428), though this time she allows Almanzor to try to change that father's mind and retrieve her hand from Boabdelin. When Boabdelin breaks his oath to Alha to grant Almanzor any wish, denies him Almahide, condemns him to death, and then proceeds to demand that Almahide keep her promise to marry him, Almahide exclaims, “How dare you claim my faith, and break your own?” (1.V.i.347-48). How can there be troth among troth-breakers? Nevertheless, when her father insists, “No second vows can with your first dispence” (350), and when he guarantees that Almanzor shall only be exiled, Almahide capitulates—“honor ties me” (356)—and she gives her “oath” to be Boabdelin's wife (404).

Married to Boabdelin in the second part of the play, Almahide remains constant despite Boabdelin's jealousy, insisting, “That hour when I my Faith to you did plight, / I banish'd him [Almanzor] for ever from my sight” (2.I.ii.158-59). Forced to recall Almanzor to save her husband's throne, she fully intends to “square” her love by virtue (219). Unfortunately, she miscalculates Boabdelin's response to her yielding to Almanzor's request and giving him her scarf “for my Husbands sake” (2.II.iii.111)—that is, as a sign that he is their Champion. Of course, the scarf has the same significance as Desdemona's handkerchief: it is the very badge of marital chastity, a “publick” sign of a “private” “Gift,” an “Embleme” of “Love” (2.III.i.55-56). Consequently, at its sight in Almanzor's possession, Boabdelin breaks into a jealous rage and concludes Almahide “False” (54). Insisting on her “Loyalty” (127), she demands the scarf back and returns it to her husband. And she even makes the sullen Almanzor fight to save him.

Almahide's most crucial trial comes when Almanzor sneaks into her palace chambers and demands a tangible reward for his services. Unable to deter him by any of her arguments and unable to deny her own desire for him for a moment longer, she resorts to the ultimate remedy of the chaste matron, at least from the time of Lucrece—suicide: “You've mov'd my heart, so much, I can deny / No more; but know, Almanzor, I can dye” (2.IV.iii.265-66). Immediately Almanzor aborts both her and his attempts, and her chastity is preserved alive. Ironically, however, this temptation of Almahide takes place in the context of her imminent rape by Zulema and Hamet—as if to underscore the nature of Almanzor's assault as a form of rape. After Almanzor leaves, the second rape is begun, and Almahide, who calls on “heav'n” for help (293), seems to be saved only by the providential appearance of Abdelmelech: “I thank thee, heav'n; some succour does appear” (296). But hers appears to be a hasty interpretation, for Lyndaraxa and her brothers perjure themselves and accuse Almahide and Abdelmelech of adultery. Despite all the signs of fidelity his wife has given, Boabdelin immediately concludes her—and all women—false: “O proud, ingrateful, faithless womankind!” (362). He condemns her to summary execution without trial. But what is much more surprising is that Almanzor, who has just had such indelible proof of her chastity, likewise misogynistically concludes her—and all women—“false” (369): “She was as faithless as her Sex could be: … She's faln! and now where shall we vertue find? / She was the last that stood of Woman-kind” (2.V.i.3-6).

Thus, Hobbist philosophy seems momentarily to have triumphed: the faithful appear to be the fools, their code inefficacious, with no supernatural validation. It is as if the old gods have been overthrown, as Abdelmelech complains (2.V.i.15-18). Without such validation, to be virtuous is a joke on oneself, as Almahide complains nominalistically:

Let never woman trust in Innocence;
Or think her Chastity its own defence;
Mine has betray'd me to this publick shame:
And vertue, which I serv'd, is but a name.

[2.V.ii.5-8]

In other words, the play has brought us to the point of asking crucial questions about the chivalric code: What protection is there against perjury and hypocrisy? Why be virtuous if the innocent suffer? Are oaths and vows mere breaths of air? Either the rebels are right or some sign of divine protection must appear. That is why Dryden has Ozmyn demand a Trial by Combat, a jugement de Dieu as the French call it. Boabdelin begins by proclaiming, “And may just Heav'n assist the juster side” (2.V.ii.24). All the combatants swear the justice of their cause and kiss the Koran. The implication of the contest is clear: even if Almanzor is fighting only for reputation's sake, the audience knows Almahide is chaste and expects that Heaven will indeed assist the juster side. Almahide's Christian lady-in-waiting, Esperanza, urges her to “Trust” in a higher power than mere stoic virtue, “the Christians Deity” (2.V.ii.9-14), and Almahide asks that god for a sign of his “succour” (18).

Despite Lyndaraxa's dirty tricks, Almanzor and Ozmyn win. The truth emerges as Zulema confesses his party's treachery and perjury. Appropriately, Abdelmelech, who before had doubted the gods, concludes, “Heav'n thou art just” (2.V.ii.88), and Almahide thanks her new god, upbraids her husband for his distrust, and plans never to see him or Almanzor again, but to sublate her love upward “to Heav'n,” to a new “plighted Lord” (2.V.iii.63-64). At the end of the play, Almahide's constancy is not just vindicated but rewarded. By Boabdelin's death she is free from her former vow, and her new “Parent,” her godmother Queen Isabella, dispenses with her constancy to his ghost and gives her hand to Almanzor, whom she will marry after her “year of Widow hood expires” (331-37). Then she—and not her antithesis, Lyndaraxa—will receive a “Coronet of Spain” from Almanzor's family and will reign as princess (307), but one properly subordinated to her new husband, her new king, and her new god.⁷

Meanwhile, the young and heroic Almanzor is only potentially a culture hero. He is one of those diamonds in the rough who must be polished; he is a great source of martial and sexual energy that must either be socialized or remain anarchic and destructive. He must learn to control the raging bull of his own passion and to respect the code of the word, the bonds of society—ethical, political, metaphysical. Though he takes the side of the oppressed Abencerrages when he first arrives, he owes allegiance not only to no king but to the wrong god and to virtually no code of ethics. When Abdalla seeks his help rebelling against Boabdelin, Almanzor eschews talk of what's “right” or of the bonds of nature and society Abdalla is violating and bases his response on his “friendship” with Abdalla and on his desire for revenge against Boabdelin (1.III.i.22): “True, I would wish my friend the juster side: / But in th' unjust my kindness more is try'd” (27-28). In an important sense, within a culture with no clear principle of legitimation and where brother often fights with brother, there is no “juster” side; there is always the threat of Girardian anarchy. When Almanzor helps Boabdelin regain the throne, again he does so out of revenge against Abdalla for breaking his word—and also to have his will in setting Almahide free. What in this world exists to control his Will to Power?

But it is Almahide who tames him, and she does so especially by teaching him the value of constancy. She refuses to yield herself as a spoil of the war not only because brute force is wrong but also because she has plighted troth to Boabdelin. Thus she ennobles the savage. At one point Almanzor exclaims: “There's something noble, lab'ring in my brest: / This raging fire which through the Mass does move, / Shall purge my dross, and shall refine my Love” (1.III.i.422-24). Nevertheless, considering Almahide his “Right” by war (1.IV.ii.423), he still has no respect for the king's right to her (442) and little more for her father, who has given her to Boabdelin. He is justified in being angry with Boabdelin for breaking his word to grant his request, but he is not justified in demanding Almahide with no respect for her vows, and she upbraids him for it. Only her honoring her word saves him from death, as he is sent into exile. Upon his departure, she tries to teach him to have faith that “Heav'n will reward your worth some better way” than by having her (1.V.i.422). Finally, he stubbornly decides to live and “not be out-done in Constancy” (482), but his understanding of the term includes more obduracy than fidelity.

When Almahide calls him back from exile, she demands an even higher form of service: “Unbrib'd, preserve a Mistress and a King,” and he pledges, “I'le stop at nothing that appears so brave” (2.II.iii.100-101). She has apparently raised his love from the self-interest of a Lyndaraxa to the selflessness and even self-sacrifice of herself and the other models of such a love, such a constancy, Ozmyn and Benzayda. But he backslides, stubbornly contending with Boabdelin over the scarf, stubbornly refusing to fight after Almahide makes him give it back. Then when Boabdelin is captured, Almahide berates Almanzor for breaking his word (2.III.i.174-80). Stung by her rebuke, he honors his promise and fights again.

Against Lyndaraxa's temptation to inconstancy, Almanzor maintains his own constancy to his pledge, despite the lack of reward, though he still is too sullen:

Though Almahide, with scorn rewards my care;
Yet; than to change, 'tis nobler to despair.
My Love's my Soul; and that from Fate is free:
'Tis that unchang'd; and deathless part of me.

[2.III.iii.177-80]

But from this joyless resolution Almanzor proceeds once more after victory to press his suit to Almahide. In the name of the needs of “flesh and blood” (2.IV.iii.264), he demands payment for his services. As the ghost of his mother warns him, he pursues “lawless Love”—adultery, that is, the adulteration of aristocratic patrilinearity (132). Almanzor rejects the ghost's warning, however, and takes refuge in his theory of predestination. Though she has just informed him he is a Christian, he has not learned to trust in their god.

Almanzor now resembles his libertine counterpart in Restoration comedy. He excuses himself from his “bond” with the specious argument that it was compelled by “force” (2.IV.iii.164). He rejects as idealistic nonsense the notion that “purest love can live without reward” (166). When Almahide appeals to “honour” as “the Conscience of an Act well done,” “[t]he strong, and secret curb of headlong Will; / The self reward of good; and shame of ill” (190-95), he nominalistically responds that honor is “but a Love well hid” (191) and that her words are but “the Maximes of the day” (196) to be discarded at night, the time for “warm desire” (201). “Enrag'd” with such desire, he paints a vivid, lurid picture of the sexual “Extasie” they will have if she but yield (210-34). In vain are her appeals to his previous “Myracle of Vertue” (258) in serving her “unbrib'd,” her attack on his request as “mercenary” (244-46). Only her attempted suicide enables him to defeat that raging bull of his “desire” (274).

Having overcome his passion thus, Almanzor appears to have earned what his mother's ghost has promised: the secret of his birth. In the ensuing battle, as the duke of Arcos relates, “Heav'n (it must be Heav'n)” intervenes and reveals to him his son through unmistakable signs (2.V.iii.187), and Almanzor's mother, expressly sent from Heaven (2.IV.iii.106), restrains him by crying twice, “Strike not thy father” (2.V.iii.196). Himself a child of passion, born in exile, raised in captivity, Almanzor is an embodiment of his father, who rebelliously married the king's sister without permission. Therefore, he is a perfect double of the monstrous bull, an energy that must be contained and socialized or it will wreak havoc. And the restraining order is the patriarchal monarchial code: he is brought to know and kneel at the feet of his father (205), to acknowledge and pay allegiance to his kinsman as king—his cousin Ferdinand (278-85)—and to respect the laws of sexual constancy, which protect the patrilineal genealogy, and legitimate succession. Finally, he is brought to serve the ultimate validating ideological patriarch, the Christian god, to spread his “Conqu'ring Crosses” to the rest of Spain (346). It is that god who has ratified the code of the word by his repeated providential interposition.

Hence, rivalry and revenge have finally been conquered in this Christian conquest of Granada, and they have been overcome by a countervailing set of values, best epitomized in the Ozmyn and Benzayda subplot. In the face of their fathers' inveterate hatred, they refuse to accept the code of revenge. Despite her father's commands, Benzayda refuses to kill Ozmyn as payment for her brother Tarifa's death. Out of her “pity” grows love between them (1.IV.ii.240). They are rescued by his father, Abenamar, only to have to flee his hatred, as Ozmyn refuses to renege his “vows and faith” to Benzayda (1.V.i.141). Succored by the Christians, who respect such noble pity and love, they yet refuse to turn against their own country. Then, Ozmyn rescues Selin from his own father, being careful to preserve both elders. Selin is vanquished by his generosity and embraces both youngsters, surrendering his revenge. When Selin is later captured by Abenamar, Ozmyn and Benzayda go separately to offer themselves as sacrifices in his stead: as Selin says of his daughter, she “comes to suffer for anothers fau't” (2.IV.i.49). Finally, this spirit of sacrifice, of selfless love, vanquishes even Abenamar.

Self-sacrifice rescues civilization from endless rivalry. Ozmyn and Benzayda do not actually die. But their actions recall the significance of the Cross in which sign the Christians conquer. It is as if their faith—as well as that of Almahide—is sublated upwards, converted into the Faith. What Abdalla has said to Lyndaraxa in scorn is, of course, true in the world of the play: “There is more faith in Christian Dogs, than thee” (1.V.i.71). The Zegrys scorn the Abencerrages for possessing not only some Christian blood but even the Christian value of charity to prisoners. The real conquest of Granada is the triumph of Christian values. As Isabella expresses it, Granada is finally “At once to freedom and true faith restor'd: / Its old Religion, and its antient Lord” (2.I.i.26-27). That “Lord” is at once its rightful king and its god, a god that the Spaniards—and all peoples, Dryden seems to imply by those “Conqu'ring Crosses” that spread out over not only Spain but the New World—should serve by keeping faith: to lovers, fathers, kings, and the Christian father-king-god.⁸

Richard Braverman has provocatively argued that this play does not follow the typical pattern of the aristocratic family romance—and a pattern with particular appeal during the Restoration—where the perdu, the lost son, is restored in the end to his legitimate throne (Plots and Counterplots 118-25). Indeed, like Corneille's Cid, Almanzor will earn Almahide by his service to a legitimate monarch, and he will be rewarded by sharing the throne of Granada—but not that of Spain itself. Thus the aristocratic ethic of trust is underwritten, but perhaps a subtle message is sent not only to potential rebels in England but even presciently to the king's illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth: that the throne of the realm is not open to him, despite his heroic energy.

Oedipal rebellion lurks at the heart of feudal patrilineal monarchy.⁹ As the emperor in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe (1675) puts it, “What love soever by an Heir is shown, / He waits but time to step into the Throne” (II.i.426-27). Other heroic romances have tended to displace rebellion onto others, particularly Machiavels, and from the beginning in Orrery's Generall they have developed a figure for loyalty—he who does not himself merit the throne but who, sometimes late, like Almanzor, comes to support it. But in his last rhymed heroic romance Dryden confronts the problem head on. Morat, the emperor's youngest son, is an Oedipal rebel whose “Will” to “Pow'r” (IV.i.322, 376) drives him to fully supplant the father who invited him to the throne by laying claim to his father's intended paramour, the beautiful queen of Kashimir, Indamora: “I've now resolv'd to fill your useless place; / I'll take that Post to cover your disgrace, / And love her, for the honour of my Race” (350-52). Girard's reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex in Violence and the Sacred enables us to interpret the son's desire as not for his mother as object libido but for the sign of his father's power, potency. Morat is the Oedipal “Monster” his father fears (354). He defies Father as Superego:

Could you shed venom from your reverend shade,
Like Trees, beneath whose arms 'tis death to sleep;
Did rouling Thunder your fenc'd Fortress keep,
Thence would I snatch my Semele, like Jove,
And midst the dreadful Rack enjoy my Love.

[360-64]

A new Jove defies the thunder of the old, even as he assumes Jove's divine potency. Morat will “secure the Throne” by “Paricide” (IV.ii.170).¹⁰

The Oedipal triangle is tripled in the play. Aureng-Zebe too desires Indamora, who has been granted to him by his father—a grant on which the emperor would now renege because his own desire for her has been aroused. And his right to her is the one right that Aureng-Zebe refuses to relinquish to his father. Meanwhile, the emperor's current queen, Nourmahal, like Phaedra, falls in love with her stepson but, unlike Phaedra, nominalistically defies traditional morality:¹¹

I stand with guilt confounded, lost with shame,
And yet made wretched onely by a name.
If names have such command on humane Life,
Love sure's a name that's more Divine than Wife.
That Sovereign power all guilt from action takes,
At least the stains are beautiful it makes. …
Custom our Native Royalty does awe;
Promiscuous Love is Nature's general Law.

[III.i.364-69; IV.i.131-32]

She herself leads a rebellion that ironically costs her own son, Morat, his life, and she dies in classical fashion, poisoned with her own monstrosity. Morat, too, receives a condign punishment, dying at the hands of other rebels against his father's throne.

Juxtaposed to these figures of inconstancy, disloyalty, radical rebellion are Morat's wife, Melesinda, Indamora, and Aureng-Zebe. Despite Morat's unfaithfulness to her, Melesinda remains absolutely faithful to him—to the point of committing suttee. Dryden's editors fall over backwards trying to make sense of this Hindu action by a Moslem. Dryden seeks not cultural geographical but ideological consistency, however. Melesinda is a Penelope figure of absolute constancy. The “better Nuptials” she goes to knit anticipate those of Dryden's Cleopatra (V.i.620). As opposed to those dominated by “Int'rest,” her “love was such, it needed no return” (628). The piety of her constancy is contrasted with the impiety, the impiousness, the impudence of Nourmahal's promiscuity. She figures forth the pure, unadulterated vessel of patrilineal seed absolutely necessary to (the ideology of) late feudal aristocracy.¹²

Aureng-Zebe is a figure of filial piety. Dryden attempts to negotiate the Oedipal crisis by having Aureng-Zebe not rebel against his father. He fights for his father throughout and actually at the end restores the emperor to the throne Morat has briefly usurped: “[A]ll the rightful Monarch own” (V.i.504). In direct contrast to the emperor's statement that every heir waits impatiently for the death of his father, Aureng-Zebe proclaims, “Long may you live! while you the Sceptre sway / I shall be still most happy to obey” (I.i.320-21). Critics who find Aureng-Zebe unbelievable do not understand the genre; they are like his follower, Dianet:

The points of Honour Poets may produce;
Trappings of life, for Ornament, not Use:
Honour, which onely does the name advance,
Is the meer raving madness of Romance.

[II.i.532-35]

Aureng-Zebe is indeed a figure out of romance whose piety is not supposed to be psychologically but ideologically believable.

Not that he is perfect. Like pious Aeneas, he has an Achilles heel: “by no strong passion sway'd / Except his Love” (I.i.102-3). That passion causes him momentarily to draw his sword against his father, a “Crime” his “Virtue … Exerts it self” to rectify immediately, thanks to Indamora (462-64). And that passion causes him to distrust her through jealousy twice, almost at the price of losing her. But Aureng-Zebe's distrust is not just some domestic concern. It is related to the mega-theme of trust in the play. All trusts are interrelated, the domestic and the political, for the world of aristocratic ideology is built on trust.

Indamora, like a Spenserian heroine, teaches Aureng-Zebe and even Morat the value of aristocratic virtue. When Aureng-Zebe draws his sword against his father to assert his right to her, she speaks in the imperative:

Lose not the Honour you have early wonn;
But stand the blameless pattern of a Son.
My love your claim inviolate secures:
'Tis writ in Fate, I can be onely yours.
My suff'rings for you make your heart my due:
Be worthy me, as I am worthy you.

[I.i.455-60]

This is Cornelian worth, related to the gloire that Indamora's superannuated admirer seeks in his self-sacrifice to save Aureng-Zebe, to the gloire that Melesinda seeks as “a glorious Bride” in self-immolation (V.i.635). It is the gloire to which Indamora summons Morat, experienced “when to wild Will you Laws prescribe” (V.i.108). Morat becomes her “Convert” (511), and finally turns to his wife to ask her forgiveness before he dies.

As emperor at the end of the play, Aureng-Zebe would seem to have merited succession to the throne by worth instead of birth, for he is not the eldest of the four sons of the emperor. Is Dryden suggesting a counterplot to the normal aristocratic plot, as Braverman would have it (125-34)? I think not. First, the play is not proposing a bourgeois theory of political succession. Despite the fact that early in the play we are apprised that Aureng-Zebe's “elder Brothers, though o'rcome [by war], have right” (II.i.466), Dryden submerges them (and history: see Works 12:385-86) into forgetfulness and makes the conflict between Aureng-Zebe as elder and Morat as younger brother. Aureng-Zebe insists on no “right” to the throne (476). When his father willfully misunderstands his claim to “the birth-right of my mind” (that is, his self-possession) as a claim to succession (III.i.208), Aureng-Zebe insists again, “I, from my years, no merit plead” (217). Yet later the emperor will berate himself for ignoring both “Right” and “Nature” in his surrendering Aureng-Zebe's succession to his younger brother (IV.i.366). Moreover, Morat sees the contest in classical primogenitive terms:

Birthright's a vulgar road to Kingly sway;
'Tis ev'ry dull-got Elder Brother's way.
Dropt from above, he lights into a Throne;
Grows of a piece with that he sits upon,
Heav'ns choice, a low, inglorious, rightful Drone.
But who by force a Scepter does obtain,
Shows he can govern that which he could gain.
Right comes of course, what e'r he was before;
Murder and Usurpation are no more.

[V.i.66-74]

The play certainly does not support this de facto position. Implicitly, “Heav'ns choice” appears no “inglorious rightful Drone” but the glorious, rightful, active Aureng-Zebe. There also seems to be an implicit form of criticism of the Muslim model, where the father's choice may be arbitrary and where his son's path to the throne is a different form of parricide (literally, killing one's relatives): fratricide. Victor in his father's name, Aureng-Zebe extends his virtue of piety by decree: “Our impious use no longer shall obtain; / Brothers no more, by Brothers, shall be slain” (V.i.412-13). Finally, Aureng-Zebe finesses the Oedipal crisis by restoring his father to the throne—only to have the latter abdicate in his favor. So he accedes to the throne with no parricidal blood on his hands, not even over the emperor's dead body. And the emperor also withdraws from sexual rivalry with his son(s), regranting to Aureng-Zebe his beloved, constant Indamora:

The just rewards of Love and Honour wear.
Receive the Mistris you so long have serv'd;
Receive the Crown your Loialty preserv'd.
Take you the Reins, while I from cares remove,
And sleep within the Chariot which I drove.

[671-75]

No supplanting Jove, Aureng-Zebe passively succeeds, married to his non-passive, instructive royal consort, whose wit and wisdom may suggest a figure of Sophia.

Implicit in the endings of Dryden's two great exotic heroic romances, The Conquest of Granada and Aureng-Zebe, is that a country without a clear mechanism for succession, one preferably sanctified with religious rhetoric, is in danger of the endless reciprocal violence of feuding brothers, clans, factions. England could take comfort in having such a mechanism. But as all Englishmen knew, it was a mechanism damaged by regicide and only tenuously restored. The message of the plays would seem to be that patrilineal, primogenitive succession must be rigorously adhered to lest another civil war erupt.

As James Thompson has suggested, throughout The Conquest of Granada runs a subtext of imperialism, what Laura Brown has called “the romance of empire.”¹³ King Ferdinand's “Conqu'ring Crosses” represent not only La Reconquista of Spain from the Moors but also the conquest of the New World. They represent the rationale for the conquest and colonization of the entire world by Western Europe because its god is the One True God. The dramatic prologue to Dryden and Robert Howard's Indian Queen features an Indian boy and girl waking from an idyllic sleep at the invasion of the New World by the Old. They are mindful of prophecies that foretold this event, but the sight of the conquerors puts them at ease, for “Their Looks are such, that Mercy flows from thence. … By their protection let us beg to live; / They came not here to Conquer, but Forgive.” Forgive for what? Obviously, for being pagans.

Thus, even as Restoration heroic romance represents a late feudal swan song for aristocratic ideology, in its ubiquitous exotic settings it reveals a subtext of Western Europe's struggle for cultural and economic hegemony—over the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian oceans. In a couple of remarkable operatic tableaux, Sir William Davenant, manager of one of the two legitimate theaters in London after the Restoration, portrayed incipient English hegemony in particular: The History of Sir Francis Drake and The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, both written and performed during the Interregnum but resurrected and cobbled together as part of a drollery to pass the summer doldrums in 1663, The Play-house to Be Let. Drake's English sailors sing,

Then Cry One and all!
Amain, for Whitehall!
The Diegos we'll board to rummidge their Hold;
And drawing our Steel, they must draw out their Gold.

[Works 90]

A chorus sings of granting “clemency” to those Indians who submit to England, who shall then “seem as free as those whom they shall serve” (93). Thus England portrays itself as Liberator. And her destiny reaches beyond America. A maroon takes Drake to a famous tree in Panama whence he can see the two Atlantics, north and south. Drake cannot wait first to see, then to sail, the south Atlantic, which yet no English ship has sailed. The maroon, a former Spanish slave now liberated by Drake, prophesies that Drake will appropriate that ocean for his isle as well. The chorus sings

                              This Prophesie will rise
                              To higher Enterprise.
The English Lion's walk shall reach as far
As prosp'rous valour dares adventure War.
As Winds can drive, or Waves can bear
Those Ships which boldest Pilots stear.

[96]

Of course, the lament of the Peruvians anent their colonization by the Spanish subverts for the wise the jingoism of the English liberators, who will treat their West Indian servants, whom they benignly forgive and protect, no differently:

Whilst yet our world was new,
                              When not discover'd by the old;
                              E're begger'd slaves we grew,
For having silver Hills, and strands of Gold.
                    Chorus. We danc'd and we sung
                              And lookt ever young,
And from restraints were free,
As waves and winds at sea.

[105]

Dryden and his colleagues can appropriate and romanticize American and Asian Indians, but it is an act of cultural imperialism that is part and parcel of incipient British imperialism.¹⁴

Notes

1. Dates are of first performances insofar as we know them (as in The London Stage, corrected by the scholarship of Hume and Milhous over the years). References to plays are by act.scene.line or by act.scene, page. Sometimes scene numbering is absent or superfluous, as in Clark's edition of Orrery and Todd's edition of Behn, where they have numbered lines continuously throughout acts without clear scene divisions.

2. For a provocative and persuasive reading of these two plays by Orrery as reaffirming Stuart ideology even as they negotiate class heterogeneity, see Flores, “Orrery's The Generall and Henry the Fifth.”

3. There are rhymed heroic romances I have not mentioned: Sir Robert Howard, The Vestal Virgin (1665); Orrery, The Black Prince (1667); John Crowne, The History of Charles the Eighth of France (1671); Settle, Ibrahim the Illustrious Bassa (1676); Banks, The Rival Kings (1677). Note their dates as well.

4. Works 11:23 (part 1, act I, scene i, line 10, hereafter abbreviated as 1.I.i.10).

5. For the concept of the unheimlich, see Freud's classic essay, translated as “The Uncanny.”

6. John Wallace brilliantly analyzed the theme of ingratitude in “John Dryden's Plays and the Conception of an Heroic Society.”

7. Quinsey argues that Almahide's subjectivity is thus suppressed. It is important to remember that she is merely a trope in a patriarchal paradigm, the trope of the faithful Penelope, guardian of her chastity. True, she wishes to be free of both Boabdelin and Almanzor after they doubt her faith. But like Isabella in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, her function is not to sequester her reproductive role but to play it out.

8. For a complementary interpretation, see Barbeau, The Intellectual Design of John Dryden's Heroic Plays 105-26.

9. See my Word as Bond, esp. chap. 6; see also Boehrer, esp. 5-11, and Tumir, 415.

10. The California editors in their notes to this word when it occurs in the play fail to see that it has the specific meaning of seizing a throne by both regicide and patricide.

11. For a good contrast between Nourmahal and Racine's Phèdre, see McCabe 264-72, although he seriously misreads Aureng-Zebe's metaphor of virtue centering on itself; moreover, to quote with approval his father's sarcastic misrepresentation of Aureng-Zebe's piety as “‘self-denying cant’” is disingenuous. For the philosophical implications of the metaphor of circle and center, especially as used by Dryden, see my “Image of the Circle in Dryden's ‘To My Honour'd Kinsman.’”

12. She may also, as Bhattacharya suggests, be a figure for the feminized exotic, needing the conquest of dominant British masculinity. The “emasculated” Aureng-Zebe that Bhattacharya sees may, on the other hand, be not so much a feminized exotic other ripe for dominance as a potential Oedipal rebel weak from the return of the repressed. For Dryden's appropriation of the Indian other into Britain's own self-image with incipient imperial consequences, see Choudhury, chap. 5.

13. Thompson, “Dryden's Conquest of Granada and the Dutch Wars”: “The religious victory of the distant empire in historical Granada promotes the immediate, commercial ends of the immediate empire, as Dryden's play celebrates both the origin and the extension of European hegemony over the third world. … The aged Empire [of Ferdinand's remarks at the opening of the play] is not Moorish, but the Moorish conquerors, Portugal, Spain, and by extension, France, whose hegemony will shortly be overrun by ‘some petty State,’ the maritime nation and future commercial giant, England” (219). Brown's title of her watershed article on Behn's Oroonoko, first published in 1987, was “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves,” which now, in an expanded, further theorized version, constitutes chap. 2 of Ends of Empire.

    See also Barthelemy, Black Face Maligned Race 186-97, for a reading of the distortion of Moorish culture in both The Conquest of Granada and Don Sebastian for purposes of cultural imperialism. Seeing the connection between the political and the sexual in these plays, Barthelemy notes quite rightly, “Fathering children through the women of the enemy represents the ultimate symbol of political and cultural conquest” (197).

14. Another prediction of Rule, Britannia, amazing in its anachronicity, occurs in Orrery's History of Henry the Fifth. The war with France is won as much at sea as at land! Henry, whose brother, of course, commanded the fleet, predicts English imperial hegemony:

    That Prince, whose Flags are bow'd to on the Seas,
    Of all Kings shores keeps in his hand the Keys:
    No King can him, he may all Kings invade;
    And on his Will depends their Peace and Trade.
    Trade, which does Kings and Subjects wealth increase;
    Trade, which more necessary is than Peace.

    [V.i.57-62]

Bibliography

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Bhattacharya, Nandini. “Ethnopolitical Dynamics and the Language of Gendering in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe.” Cultural Critique 25 (1993): 153-76.

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———. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993.

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———. Word as Bond in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

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