Abstract
In George Villiers’ The Rehearsal (1672), love commands the gallant Volscius to doff his boots and bed his mistress. At the same time, honor commands him to set forth fully shod. Finding himself unable to reconcile this conflict of values, Volscius pulls off his boots, then puts them on, then pulls them off, then puts them on again. Finally, the befuddled knight hops off stage, wearing one boot and clasping the other. Volscius was a send-up of the heroes who had stormed the Restoration stage in plays such as The Indian Emperour (1664), and like any good parody, The Rehearsal is only barely an exaggeration. Throughout The Indian Emperour, the lofty ideals expressed by its characters seem less a window into an eternal realm of perfect virtue than an ironic comment on the fate of heroism in a world of material circumstance.1 The Spanish commander Cortez has no sooner sworn his everlasting love to a woman than he admits to having previously made this same pledge to another, now dead. The Indian emperor Montezuma insists that he prefers death to ignominy, but then abandons his own daughter to the Spanish to thank them for calling off an ambush. The Indian prince Guyomar vows revenge on a Spaniard for killing his brother, only to experience a sudden remorse that inspires a futile attempt to resuscitate his mortally wounded foe. Fueled by this strange mix of fervor and forgetfulness, Dryden’s heroes appear oddly adolescent. No less than the hapless Volscius, they are at once swashbuckling and scattered.
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Notes
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© 2011 Angus Fletcher
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Fletcher, A. (2011). The Indian Emperour and the Reason of New World Conflict. In: Evolving Hamlet. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118386_5
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