1. Teltscher, Kate, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 2.Google Scholar

2. Ania Loomba, “Introduction” to The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue, ed. David M. Bergeron, in Middleton, Thomas, The Collected Works, ed. Taylor, Gary and Lavagnino, John (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007)Google Scholar [hereinafter: Middleton, Collected Works], 1714–22, at 1718.

3. As Hadfield, Andrew comments, “The fiction comes first”; see Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)Google Scholar, 7.

4. The essay reads the texts in terms of moral schematics. See Friedenreich, Kenneth, “How to Read Middleton,” in “Accompaninge the Players”: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580–1980, ed. Friedenreich, (New York: AMS Press, 1983), 1–14Google Scholar.

5. Bergeron, David M., “Middleton's Moral Landscape: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Triumphs of Truth,” in “Accompaninge the Players,” ed. Friedenreich, , 133–45.Google Scholar

6. Shakespeare's lack of contribution to genres such as pageantry and pamphlets is rather anomalous compared to the output of his contemporaries.

7. A presentist approach would emphasize that this bias primarily emerges from the way the current concerns of theatre historians shape the archive. See, for example, Belsey's, Catherine “Historicizing New Historicism” in Presentist Shakespeares, ed. Grady, Hugh and Hawkes, Terence (London: Routledge, 2007), 27–45Google Scholar.

8. See, for instance, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. Bevington, David and Holbrook, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Butler, Martin, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

9. Hill, Tracey, Anthony Munday and Civic Culture: Theatre, History and Power in Early Modern London, 1580–1633 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Hill, Tracey, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor's Show, 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

10. Most commentators consider that the sixteenth-century shows partly functioned as a replacement for religious pageantry such as the processions for Corpus Christi Day. See Manley, Lawrence, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Paster, Gail Kern, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Withington, Robert, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, 2 vols. (1918; reprint, New York: Blom, 1963)Google Scholar; and Bergeron, David M., English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642 (London: Edward Arnold, 1971)Google Scholar.

11. The livery companies were essentially combinations of trade associations and quasi-Masonic fraternities. Membership in a company was a requirement for trading legally within the city. The company of the new lord mayor was responsible for organizing the ceremonies surrounding the handover of the position each year, and this included sponsoring the shows.

12. Bald, R. C., “Middleton's Civic Employments,” Modern Philology 31.1 (August 1933): 65–78, at 74–5.Google Scholar

13. Manley, 259.

14. Kate D. Levin, trans., “Orazio Busino's Eyewitness Account of The Triumphs of Honour and Industry,” in Middleton, Collected Works, 1264–70, ll. 89–92.

15. Munday, Anthony, Camp-bell, or the Ironmongers Faire Feild (London, 1609), reproduced in Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday: A Critical Edition, ed. Bergeron, David M. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), ll. 101–2Google Scholar. The Ironmongers' Company complained about Munday's organization of this show. They objected to the fact that, among other things, “the children weare not instructed their speeches,” an element that had been expressly specified in their agreement with Munday. See A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485–1640, ed. Robertson, Jean and Gordon, D. J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 76Google Scholar. For the initial agreement between Munday and the Ironmongers' Company, see ibid., 73.

16. Levin, l. 92.

17. Manley, 215.

18. Nayar, Pramod K., English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2008), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Archer, John Michael, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1–22.Google Scholar

20. Witmore, Michael, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 105Google Scholar. See also Lamb, Edel, Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children's Playing Companies, 1599–1613 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Witmore, 96.

22. Witmore associates the child performers of royal pageantry with automata, showing that early modern ideologies of childhood constructed children as “thoughtless agents of . . . transmission,” which, Witmore argues, made them apt to take on roles as allegorical figures in civic display; ibid., 91.

23. Roach, Joseph, “Vicarious: Theater and the Rise of Synthetic Experience,” in Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, ed. Worthen, William B. with Holland, Peter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 120–35, at 121Google Scholar.

24. Roach, Joseph, “The Global Parasol: Accessorizing the Four Corners of the World,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Nussbaum, Felicity A. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 93–106.Google Scholar

25. Nayar, 1.

26. Sell, Jonathan P. A., Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).Google Scholar

27. The Triumphs of Honour and Industry (1617) was Middleton's second lord mayor's show. His first, The Triumphs of Truth (1613), had also been sponsored by the Grocers' Company and was one of the most expensive shows of the period. The shows of the intervening three years were written by Anthony Munday. In 1617, Munday received £5 compensation from the Grocers “for his paines in drawing a proiect for this busynes.” Thomas Dekker received a similar payment of £4. Robertson and Gordon, 93.

28. See Chaudhuri, K. N., The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Cass, 1965), 21Google Scholar.

29. Thomas Middleton, The Triumphs of Honour and Industry, in Middleton, Collected Works, 1251–63, ll. 42–51.

30. Stevens, Scott Manning, “New World Contacts and the Trope of the ‘Naked Savage,’” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Harvey, Elizabeth D. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 125–40, at 126Google Scholar.

31. For example, in a scene from Middleton and Rowley's A Fair Quarrel (ca. 1615), the Bawd refers to being stripped “naked as an Indian” as an example of humiliating punishment (4.4.39–40). As this example shows, the “nakedness” of “Indians” was quasi-proverbial. Stevens explores how the trope of the “naked savage” was presented as evidence for the (contradictory) views that Indians were either “insatiably licentious” or “wholly devoid of this sin.” See Stevens, 132.

32. Barbour, Richmond explores some of the valences of the adolescent male body in “‘When I Acted Young Antinous’: Boy Actors and the Erotics of Jonsonian Theater,” PMLA 110.5 (October 1995): 1006–22.Google Scholar

33. Middleton, Triumphs of Honour and Industry, l. 50.

34. Taylor sees what he terms “laborphobia” as a far more significant social prejudice than color- or xenophobia in the period. See Taylor, Gary, Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip-Hop (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 166–70Google Scholar.

35. Singh, Jyotsna G., Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996), 19.Google Scholar

36. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (London: Macmillan, 1988), 271–313, at 305.Google Scholar

37. Quoted in Archer, 4.

38. Orlando's poetry in As You Like It satirizes this as cliché in the lines “From the east to western Ind, / No jewel is like Rosalind.” Shakespeare, William, As You Like It, ed. Brissenden, Alan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3.2.845Google Scholar.

39. Tazón, Juan E., “The Evolution of a Stereotype: The Indian in English Renaissance Promotional Literature,” in Beyond Pug's Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, ed. Barfoot, C. C. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 125–32, at 127–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. The pageant thus figures precolonial and neocolonial models of exploitation, which are indirect because local elites—or, in Spivak's terms, “comprador indigenous capitalists”—cooperate with imperial trade to oppress the subaltern labor force; Spivak, 287. The comprador is necessary for this fantasy of capitalist imperial domination because the exploitation of Indian labor is based not on the as-yet-unformulated system of race but on class. Gary Taylor has argued that Middleton is situated at the very moment where white and black become specifically racial categories in English, although he stresses that race is an anachronistic concept. He locates Middleton's 1613 The Triumphs of Truth as the first recorded instance of the use of the term “white” to refer to a social group in this way. See Taylor, 125.

41. Ahmed, Sara, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar, 5; Ahmed's italics.

42. The timing, nature, and effects of the emergence of capitalism continue to be the focus of historical and historiographical debate. See, for example, Brenner, Robert, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London's Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Aston, T. H. and Philpin, C. H. E., eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I follow the approach of Wood, Ellen Meiskins, outlined in The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 2002)Google Scholar.

43. As Stavrianos says, “the tribute [gained through conquest] went to one ruling elite rather than another”; Stavrianos, L. S., Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York: Morrow, 1981), 36–7Google Scholar.

44. Middleton, Triumphs of Honour and Industry, ll. 80–3.

45. Barbour, Richmond, Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 40.Google Scholar

46. Howard, Jean E., Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47. de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Rendall, Steven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 97–8; de Certeau's italics.Google Scholar

48. Manley, 221–39, quotes at 239.

49. In this respect, Paul Connerton's notion of the “accumulative practice of the same” is shown to intersect across a variety of time frames, creating links between public practices and events that take place daily, weekly, annually, or only rarely. See Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. I am influenced here by Wiles's, David discussion of processional theatre in A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, and by Joseph Roach's notion of how what he calls “mental maps” operate powerfully to define our responses to place and space; Roach, “Global Parasol,” 106.

51. The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity (1626) was Middleton's last show. It celebrated the mayoralty of Cuthbert Hacket, a member of the Drapers' Company. Displays featured in the show included “Sanctuary of Prosperity” and “Fountain of Virtue.” The description copies its opening lines from Middleton's first show, The Triumphs of Truth (1613). This is somewhat ironic because, having started his show-writing career with the most expensive of the era, Middleton ended on a much more constrained budget, notwithstanding the show's title.

52. Nayar, 24.

53. Teltscher, 19.

54. Nayar, 24.

55. Middleton, Triumphs of Honour and Virtue, l. 39.

56. Middleton, Triumphs of Honour and Industry, l. 80. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text (as THI).

57. As Levin points out in her annotations to the Oxford edition of Middleton; Levin, 1257.

58. This imagery is echoed in the clichés of profusion and excess in later travel writing; see Nayar, 9.

59. Jonson, Ben, The Alchemist, in Volpone and Other Plays, ed. Jamieson, Michael (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 185–317.Google Scholar The references to Dutch and Spanish interests occur at 3.2.23–4 and 3.2.48–9, respectively.

60. Ibid., 2.1.36.

61. Chaudhuri, 20.

62. The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue marked the 1622 mayoralty of Peter Proby, a member of the Grocers' Company. Along with the black Queen, allegorical figures such as Antiquity, Virtue, and Honor also gave speeches.

63. Middleton, Triumphs of Honour and Virtue, ll. 39–49. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text (as THV).

64. This partial recasting opens the way for later textual representations of India in which, as Gauri Viswanathan observes, economic exploitation is concealed within an ostensible attitude of disinterested observation. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 20 (quoted in Teltscher, 9).Google Scholar

65. Singh, 22. Her phrasing also reveals how religious faith could be conceptualized as inhering within place rather than within individuals during this period. The principle of cuius regio eius religio suggests that faith is a public performance of the kind enacted by the black Queen, whose conversion enlists entire peoples to Christianity.

66. He thus anticipates a 1628 petition by the English East India Company that, according to Singh, presented trade itself as a moral imperative; see Singh, 25.

67. Weber, Max, “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit' of Capitalism” and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Baehr, Peter and Wells, Gordon C. (London: Penguin, 2002).Google Scholar

68. Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 19; Taylor's italics.Google Scholar

69. Ibid., 28; Taylor's italics.

70. Teltscher, 21–8.

71. See Barbour, Before Orientalism, 151.

72. Singh, 8.

73. Greenblatt, Stephen, “Introduction: New World Encounters,” in New World Encounters, ed. Greenblatt, Stephen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), vii–xviii, at xvi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar