Imperialism

Legs quivering,
A sea of strange faces
Before me.

I wince.

Cool Holy drops transfiguring
My acidic sweats
Into sadistic dew,
Searing into my forehead.

W-

-hen you imagine early modern England do you see Africans and Indians? We often think of the early modern world — the home of our beloved William Shakespeare — as white. This misconception stems from several significant influences upon our lives. These include the ways that history has been recorded and the way that it is taught; and the whitewashing of significant historical and religious figures – Cleopatra just one famous example.

The imperial and colonial ambitions of early modern England grew over a long period. Although the term imperialism may not have found common usage in English until the mid-nineteenth century, its roots lie far earlier. The term’s etymological origins may lie in the imperium of the Roman Empire, but the increasing prevalence of imperialist thinking in English cultural and political discourse is a distinctly early modern development. By the seventeenth century, we see evidence of racialisation and steps taken towards the colonisation of India. Between 1603 and 1625, the England of King James I and VI began to embark upon a programme of imperial expansion. Among the many victims were the Indian children seized by English merchants and taken to England, where they were made spectacles of in numerous ways.

Rembrandt Photogravure (print), after Anthony van Dyck. Portrait of William Feilding, 1st Earl of Denbigh. 1919 [1635-6]. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

These displaced children, as Imtiaz Habib has importantly explored, had their identities removed and were given Western names such as ‘Peter Pope’ (who was so named by King James himself in the early 1600s). The children were shown off in public, having been taught English and Christianity as part of a Western education. Their public baptisms presented the imperialisation of these Indian children and were a significant display of political propaganda. For example, Peter Pope’s public baptism had been extensively advertised and drew a large audience to behold the spectacle. It is, therefore, not surprising that renowned artists such as Shakespeare made reference to these children in their work.

Shakespeare’s magical dream world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595) introduces us to a nameless, lost Indian child through the longstanding argument between Queen Titania and King Oberon. As the sprite Puck observes, Oberon was exceptionally jealous of the Queen’s love for the boy:

For Oberon is passing and fell wrath
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy stolen from an Indian King-
She never had so sweet a changeling-
(Act 2. Scene 1. 22-3)

Shakespeare’s ‘stolen’ Indian royal is depicted as racially inferior, as a ‘changeling’, meaning idiotic fool or a substitute of lower value. Importantly, the only element conferring inferior status on the boy, here, are his origins. In the same way that the Indian children were seized from their homes, so, too, was Shakespeare’s ‘lovely boy’, seized from an Indian King. Just as the Indian children were assumed inferior, lacking Christian belief and a western education, so, too, Shakespeare’s supposedly idiotic boy. Where the Indian children were stripped of their names, Shakespeare’s ‘changeling’ is also nameless.

Eyes withered,
Lips shrivelled.

The shrieking liquid
Gouges my mind.

Matthieu Chapman records that in places where Africans and Indians were disliked or mistrusted due to perceived racial inferiority in a predominantly white Western world they were also treated as commodities. If you were a white Westerner in the 1600s, parading around with your non-white servant was just another way of showing off one’s wealth, status, and exclusivity. Shakespeare hauntingly echoes this bodily commodification as Titania remembers her time spent in India with the Indian boy’s mother watching the Indian sun-soaked sands:

Marking the embarked traders on the flood,
When we have laughed to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind
(Act 2. Scene 1. 127-9)

Shakespeare’s ‘changeling’ is not the human product of his parents. Instead, after losing his name and identity, he is conceived by the fertile ‘sails’ of the merchant's ships, penetrated by burgeoning English lust for imperial dominance.

Sir Peter Lely. Portrait of Lady Charlotte Fitzroy with her Indian Page. c. 1669-79. © York Art Gallery.

So what happened to these lost children after they were seized and moulded into spectacles of imperialism? Some children were kept as servants with little freedom; some girls and boys were married young; some were trafficked; and others were weaponised, returned to India with English merchants to spread the word of Christianity. Just as these children were not accepted as Indian, they were also never allowed to be English. An identity complexity felt by many in Britain today. And so-

-I embark on my return,
To my strange and foreign home.

Ameera Gill is an MA student on the Shakespeare Studies MA at King’s College London.

A special thank you to Professor Farah Karim-Cooper for leading me into the wonderful, colourful world of the early modern period.

Selected Bibliography.

Chapman, Matthieu A.. ‘The Appearance of Blacks on the Early Modern Stage: Love’s Labour’s Lost’s African Connections to Court’, Early Theatre, 12.2 (2014), pp. 77-94.

Habib, Imtiaz. ‘Indians in Shakespeare’s England as ‘The First-Fruits of India’: Colonial Effacement and Postcolonial Reinscription’, Journal of Narrative Theory, 36.1 (2006), pp. 1-19.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Greenblatt, Cohen, Gossett, Howard, Maus, and McMullan (Eds) The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd Edition (New York, 2016).

27 July 2021.