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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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Bridget Orr teaches at Vanderbilt University. She is author of Empire on the English Stage (2001) and British Enlightenment Empire: Dramatizing Difference (2019), both from Cambridge University Press.
Notes
1 Most of the commentary on the literary dimensions of the black legend focuses on the Renaissance, rather than the eighteenth century. See William S Maltby, The Black Legend in England; the Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1971, and Margaret Rich Greer, Walter D Mignolo and Maureen Quilligan (eds), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Classic essays on noble savagery appear in Edward J Dudley and Maximillian E Novak (eds), The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973. See also Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. In The Myth of the Noble Savage, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, Terry Jay Ellingson argues the figure disappears during most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
2 For a discussion of the competing imperial modes as they were dramatised in the Restoration, see Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage, 1660–1714, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. For a recent, trenchant account of the noble savage as cultural critic, see Doris L Garraway, ‘Of Speaking Natives and Hybrid Philosophers: Lahontan, Diderot, and the French Enlightenment Critique of Colonialism’, in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp 207–239.
3 Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, ‘Where and Whither Postcolonial Theory’, New Literary History 43, 2012, p 376.
4 For a good introduction to the play, see Alzire, ou les Americains, T E D Braun (ed), in The Complete Works of Voltaire, Vol 14, W H Barber and Ulla Kolving (eds), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989.
5 Benjamin Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925. Bissell speculates that the eighteenth-century popularity of the The Royal Commentaries stemmed from the ease with which El Inca could be construed as a deist recording the operations of natural law, see pp 18–33.
6 De la Vega, Garcilaso, The Royal Commentaries of Peru, Paul Rycaut (trans), London: for C Wilkinson, 1688 p 11.
7 Richard A Brooks, ‘Voltaire and Garcilaso de la Vega’, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Vol XXX, Theodore Besterman (ed), Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1964, pp 189–204.
8 Garcilaso, Royal Commentaries, p 491.
9 Garcilaso, Royal Commentaries, p 814.
10 Garcilaso, Royal Commentaries, p 856.
11 Garcilaso, Royal Commentaries, p 856.
12 See Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry and National Myth, 1725–1742, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
13 In her definitive account of Hill’s life, Christine Gerrard suggests that while Hill was for most of his life an orthodox Anglican, the Prompter defended the free-thinker Mathew Tindal from attack and in 1746, Hill published a deistic poem, Free Thoughts Upon Faith; or, The Religion of Reason. See Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp 236–237.
14 Aaron Hill, Alzira. A Tragedy, London: printed for John Osborn, 1737, I.i, p 19.
15 Hill, Alzira, I.ii, p 20.
16 Hill, Alzira, I.ii, p 21.
17 Hill, Alzira, I.iii, p 22.
18 Hill, Alzira, I.iii, p 22.
19 Garcilaso, Royal Commentaries, p 1019.
20 Hill, Alzira, II.i, p 31.
21 Hill, Alzira, III.i, p 35.
22 Hill, Alzira, III.ii, p 43.
23 Hill, Alzira, lV.i, p 45.
24 Hill, Alzira, IV.i, p 47.
25 Garcilaso, Royal Commentaries, p 1019.
26 Garcilaso, Royal Commentaries, p 1017.
27 Hill, Alzira, V.i, p 60.
28 For a recent overview, see Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783, New York: Basic Books, 2008.
29 The North Briton 35 (July, 1762) pp 228–229.
30 The North Briton, p 229.
31 Arthur Murphy, Zenobia, A Tragedy, London: W. Griffin, 1768, n.p.
32 Jesse Foot, The Life of the late Arthur Murphy Esq., London, 1812.
33 Charles Churchill, The Rosciad, 6th ed, London, 1766, p 29. There was also an extended attack on Murphy in the anonymous The Murphiad. A Mock Heroic Poem by ‘Philim Mocolloch’, London: J. Williams, 1761. This poem focused on Murphy’s supposed birth in the bog of Allen and the goddess of mud’s prophesies as to his future in the theatre, emphasising his Irish birth, his ‘popish zeal (18) and his pretentions to classical learning – ‘Grecian rules’, see pp 18, 13.
34 Arthur Murphy, The Gray’s Inn Journal, Vol 2, Dublin: William Sleater, 1756, Letter 69, pp 96–100.
35 The Gray’s Inn Journal, Vol 2, Letter 84, pp 181–185.
36 The North Briton, 141.
37 Arthur Murphy, ‘Advertisement’, Alzuma, A Tragedy, London: printed for T. Lowndes, 1773.
38 Murphy, Alzuma, I, p 3.
39 Murphy, Alzuma, V, p 70.
40 ‘An Account of Alzuma, a new tragedy, now acting at Covent-Garden Theatre’, Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, June 1747–December 1803, 52, March 1773, p 361.
41 The St James Chronicle # 1850, 6 March 1773.
42 ‘Plan of the Tragedy of Alzuma’, Sentimental Magazine, or General Assemblage of Science, Taste and Entertainment 5, March 1775, pp 26–27.
43 Plan, p 27.
44 Plan, p 26.
45 ‘Alzuma, A Tragedy as performed at the Theatre Royal in Covent-Garden’, Monthly Review; or Literary Journal, 1752–1825, 48, March 1773, pp 212–215.