A Marrano in Montezuma’s Court

Abstract

In The Indian Emperour Dryden openly engages his audience in dialogue with texts drawn from authorities of high current reputation, and refracted through the action and characters of his play. Matters were not so simple in contemporary Spain, the colonial power responsible for the conquest and administration of Mexico. For, according to Catherine Swietlicki, seventeenth-century Spain may be compared in some respects to ‘the Stalinist Russia of Bakhtin’s time’. ‘There are’, she observes, ‘certain similarities between the two powers’ preoccupations with establishing unified ideologies and eradicating forces opposed to the dominant culture and its philosophy’. Not least of these similarities, she suggests, is the role played by the Spanish Inquisition and the Russian secret police in ‘enforcing … monolithic dogma’.