Racecraft and the Indian Queen in The Temple of Love (1635)

Critical race readings of early modern drama have often centred discourses on colour and the binary of black and white in English racecraft, with very important results. However, I submit the need to expand our analytical lenses further, to effectively engage the recognized instability of racial difference beyond skin colour and the dominant blackwhite binary. By doing so, we can unearth deeper nuances of the representation of women of colour on the early modern stage. Seventeenthcentury English drama witnessed a growth in portrayals of Indian queens or similarly elite Indian women, who, despite their layers of alterity in gender, race and religion, were frequently represented on reverential terms of wealth, power and authority. Crucially, this was achieved by their alterity being acknowledged yet carefully managed, enabling their celebration. It is this remarkable management, and indeed racial privileging, of the elite Indian woman in early modern English drama that is the subject of this paper. Here, I will address the potency of the Indian imperial woman or queen in the English cultural imagination in this period, built in no small part from her frequent dramatic representations, and how her influence emerged at a moment of national crisis: during the personal rule of Charles I and especially in relation to the contested queenship of his foreign consort, Henrietta Maria. I will examine William Davenant’s 1635 court masque, The Temple of Love, a production commissioned by Henrietta Maria and in which she performed Indamora, the Indian queen. This masque highlights perhaps the most significant yet overlooked aspect of Indian representations in early modern drama:

racecraft and the Indian queen.Applying an intersectional critical race lens to The Temple of Love, I establish that the Indian imperial woman was celebrated and privileged in the English cultural imagination.This was achieved by the careful management of her otherness and, most significantly her racial privileging that saw her occupy a fluid racial position.This racial fluidity not only enabled the Indian queen to transcend her racial alterity even when performed in blackface but, crucially, also enabled her to also pass White in early modern drama.In the pre-English colonial period of the seventeenth century, England represented a diminutive presence before the advanced economic and political authority that was the Indian Mughal Empire.The Indian queen thus represented an ascendant figure; her White racial passing in English theatre was an illustration of English aspirational alignment with privileged Indians rather than a reflection of Indians being White as a privilege.Meanwhile, the Indian queen's womanhood, rather than representing a disempowered layer of gendered alterity, was centred and valued as a symbol of Indian material fecundity and enrichment.I argue that in performing Indamora, Henrietta Maria deployed the Indian queen's uniquely privileged racial status and celebrated enriching fertility.The French consort did this to advocate for her own legitimacy and value to England; channelling the Indian queen, Henrietta Maria framed herself as a similarly foreign, religiously other and fecund queen bringing marital bliss to the king and legitimate heirs for the kingdom.

EARLY MODERN RACECRAFT AND THE INDIAN QUEEN
Indian imperial women were not exceptional on the English stage, but part of a tradition of dramatic representations of foreign female royalty.Between 1587 and 1640, there was a growth in racialized representations in popular drama. 3hakespeare's portrayals of foreign queens are numerous, from Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, to Amazonian queen Hippolyta. 4Muslim foreign queens and female royalty often featured on the seventeenth-century English stage.Examples include Marlowe's Egyptian princess Zenocrate in Tamburlaine the Great (1587), Massinger's Donusa, niece to the Ottoman Emperor in The Renegado (1630) and the niece to the Persian Sophy in The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607) by Day, Rowley and Wilkins.These elite Muslim women were frequently figures of wealth and influence as well as desire.Foreign queens were thus well established and, given their prevalence, popular in English dramatic productions.Indian queens joined as part of that tradition.The reasons for their popularity range from England's increase in travel, trade and transcultural encounters beyond Europe that entailed growing negotiations of others, to what Imtiaz Habib describes as 'the symbiotic relationship between drama and the other (…) so that different sexual or ethnic lives are the staple of the industry of the stage'. 5Performance of alterity, particularly in this period of increased foreign travel and engagement, cultivated a flourishing of foreign figures in English dramatic productions, many of whom were royal women.
These popular figures seeped from commercial and civic spaces to elite English courts.The performance of foreign figures is unremarkable for commercial and civic drama where imposture is the art of the paid actor.However, that dynamic takes a different turn when the performer is the queen herself.That Henrietta Maria performed at all was enough to trigger diatribes from antitheatricalist quarters, most notoriously perhaps from puritan pamphleteer William Prynne. 6 Yet, for Henrietta Maria to portray an Indian queen of several layers of otherness -racial to religious -is a particularly bold statement.This royal performance of a racial other at the most powerful theatrical space in the land is ideally positioned for an intersectional critical race examination, yet unusually few have afforded it that lens.Current historiography emphasizes three aspects of Henrietta Maria's identity: Catholic queen, historical personality and artistic and theatrical patron. 7Similarly, literary studies of Temple tend to draw connections between the masque and the Queen's Catholicism or as her celebration of Platonic love or chaste love. 8None, however, have considered Temple as a performance by Henrietta Maria, an unpopular, foreign, Catholic queen of England during the restless period of Charles I's personal rule, as Indamora, a foreign, religiously other Indian queen, and what that particular dynamic might mean.This essay seeks to address that absence.
Critical race scholars have, over the past decades, established that although race is itself a social construct without scientific basis, 'race-making' or 'racecraft' is a process by which inequalities are enforced between peoples based on arbitrary differences, such as skin colour. 9Race is not in itself real, nor is it a stable category that refers exclusively to skin colour. 10However, racecraft depends on this instability so that, in Ayanna Thompson's words, 'it can be mobilised at different historical moments to create structural and material inequalities.' 11In early modern English drama, we not only see an articulation of racecraft but also, I argue, it is one that involves a recognition of differences between racial groups.As England increasingly encountered the multilayered alterities of the world, it expressed these experiences on the stage.Crucially, as Kim F. Hall has shown us, race is highly gendered in Renaissance discourses; Blackness is opposed to Whiteness and also beauty, fairness and moral purity, attributes frequently associated with women. 12We see the manifestation of that in Queen Elizabeth's own image, which would be presented as excessively white to reflect beauty and purity.Similarly, on stage boy actors performing women painted their faces with white lead to emphasize the appearance of whiteness. 13Blackness, then, became an antithesis for womanhood in its opposition to ideals not only of beauty but also morality.While white is innocence, black is unrepentant sinfulness. 14he inextricably connected realities of Renaissance race-making and gender makes Black feminist methodologies crucial by which the interconnectedness of race, gender, class, religion and beyond can be examined.Intersectionality, introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, offers a lens to explore the layers of otherness engaged in the process of theatrical racecraft.Then, as now, the negotiation of racial difference was inflected by the intersecting identities of the figures in question.We have seen a vital growing voice given to the examination of racial others on the early modern stage through critical race lenses and employing Black feminist methodologies, yet these studies are often centred on an idea of a binary of blackness and whiteness. 15Less often do we see a comparative engagement with broader spectrums of racial difference, including those beyond discourses of colour.Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, in which royal performers portrayed Ethiopians in blackface, for example, has been a popular work for critical race studies. 16By contrast, The Temple of Love, despite its Indian cast, has not been examined through a critical race lens.
More can and should be done to push beyond the binaries to explore broader nuances of racial difference in early modern drama.An examination of Temple through a critical race lens not only returns Henrietta Maria's portrayal of an Indian queen, in all her alterities, to centre stage, but also opens explorations of interracial nuances in early modern race-making.What we then find is that early modern drama not only navigated racial differences with a nuance that deserves acknowledgement but also that early modern racecraft was not necessarily exclusively in the business of constructing structures of oppression.In the negotiation of Indian female royalty, for example, I posit that early modern racecraft engaged not only in othering and oppressing but also in negotiating and aspiring to a materially and imperially superior other.In such a context, intersectionality as a lens has its limits.To address the layers of difference the Indian queen represented and how Henrietta Maria deployed them, I will draw on Crenshaw's framework, but with some key differences to suit the dynamics presented by the Indian queen. 17ntersectionality concerns itself primarily with systems of discrimination and oppression, in which certain identity categories are privileged over others.It thus responds to certain power structures -race (White supremacy), gender (male) and class (wealthy) -and the inequalities they create.In such hierarchies, a woman of colour presents a figure of intersecting alterities that results in several layers of oppression. 18But what if the power structures at play are different, and authority and privilege are not necessarily centred in the White man?Cornel West acknowledges Critical Race Theory 'is an intellectual movement that is both particular to our postmodern (and conservative) times and part of a long tradition of human resistance and liberation'. 19In a context that predates our postmodern times, and predates the peak of White Western European imperialism, power structures and alterity take on different meanings and implications.Intersectionality offers a crucial means to explore the alterity of and oppressions experienced by women of colour in postmodern Western spaces in which White masculinity is dominant.But in the seventeenth century, before English imperialism was established, the power structures were different as were the terms of assessing otherness.In English engagements and representations of Indian queens, the latter represented a resoundingly superior imperial and economic entity, one which the English, far from oppressing, admired and aspired to.It is 17 Kimberle Crenshaw, 'Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color', Stanford Law Review, 43.6 (1991), 1241-99. 18 Alterity is here defined as a 'A Latinate term meaning "otherness", and commonly found in philosophy and literary theory since the 1970s.It often arises in analyses of relations between the self and the other (person), in discussions of encounters between different cultures, and in observations upon the difficulty of understanding the art and thought of past ages.This reality of layered alterity and its management is, I argue, notably evident in English theatrical performances of Indian queens, and particularly in Henrietta Maria's performance of Indamora in The Temple of Love.In the management of human difference that is the project of race-making, the emergent social hierarchy is as complex as the diversity of individuals that make up society.In today's world, we know that the racism faced by a West African woman is different to that experienced by a South Asian woman, for example.What we see in early modern England is in some ways no different: race plays differently between different groups.Indamora, and indeed Indian queens, bore a certain privilege in tune with the global standing of India in this period.In Henrietta Maria's project of legitimacy, Indamora's privileged status in the English cultural imagination was therefore potentially very beneficial.Furthermore, Henrietta Maria's deployment of Indamora was an implicit recognition of that privilege and benefit.
English ideas of India prior to direct travel identified the land with immense wealth and material promise.When direct travel was established, not only were these early ideas consolidated, but Mughal imperial authority was also made clear to the English.Mughal India was among the largest and wealthiest empires in the early modern world. 20Negotiations with the Mughal court further impressed upon the English the authority of Mughal queens, as seen in the interactions of English Ambassador Sir Thomas Roe (1615-1619) and India's most powerful queen, Empress Nur Jahan Begim (r.1611-1627). 21Indeed, Roe attended The Temple of Love and remarked 'the masque was yesternight performed with much trouble and wearisomeness'. 22These sentiments echo those expressed during his embassy in India; perhaps Indamora reminded him of his struggles with the imperious Nur Jahan.The relationship with India was thus centred in the knowledge of its world GDP of Western Europe was 19.9%.India's GDP was beaten only by China (29.2%).However, by 1700 India had surpassed China: India's share had risen to 24.4% to China's 22.3%, while Western Europe was at 22.5% of which UK was 2.9%.economic and imperial might.Furthermore, that the direct encounter with India coincided with England and wider Europe's shift towards mercantile capitalism meant material abundance was a source of admiration even when religious alterity was pronounced.These intersecting factors contributed to India's representations on the early modern stage.
It is further worth noting that Indians travelled to early modern England, but largely on terms of trade.The length and perilousness of the journey to India would cost lives aboard English ships.These ships would then often hire local Indian seamen to replenish their crew for the return journey, bringing Indians to English shores. 23Indian spouses of English travellers were another category of early arrivals; the case of Maryam Khan, wife of William Hawkins and later wife of Gabriel Towerson, is perhaps the most famous example. 24These were Indians travelling freely under terms of employment or marriage from one of the most powerful and prosperous empires of the early modern world, to a relatively small, poor and divided island nation.In the process of early modern theatrical race-making, we see the expression of these dynamics in the representations of Indian figures; this is resoundingly illustrated in the performance of Queen Henrietta Maria as Indian queen Indamora.

BECOMING INDAMORA
Henrietta Maria, the youngest daughter of Henry IV of France, was married to Charles I by proxy on 11 May 1625 at Notre Dame Cathedral.The marriage did not begin smoothly, partly due to the machinations of the King's favourite, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham.However, after the August 1628 assassination of Buckingham, relations between the King and Queen improved greatly and Charles never had another favourite.From this point, the Queen exercised considerable influence over her husband and the couple grew devoted.They had nine children and were seldom apart.
Yet the marital bliss of Charles I and Henrietta Maria was not necessarily cause for joy for their subjects, for the Queen was French and Catholic, and these two layers of otherness would forever mark her for suspicion.On her arrival in England she spoke no English, and through the years made little effort to learn.She was never officially crowned Queen of England, nor did she attend the coronation of Charles I. Her religious alterity as a Catholic consort of a Protestant king and kingdom was particularly held up for scrutiny.The couple's marital treaty included numerous dispensations that covered the religious rights of the Queen, her children and household.The advancement of the Catholic religion and protection of its followers were key concerns for the Queen as her godfather, Pope Urban VIII, had commissioned her to be a Biblical Esther to her Catholic subjects. 25The Queen interceded on behalf of Catholics, her days and seasons were structured around religious observance and she actively proselytized among her court women.She also helped reinstate formal ties with the Vatican. 26oncern surrounding the foreign queen took a deeper turn during the personal rule of Charles I. By the 1630s, the King had suspended Parliament and ruled as absolute monarch.The King's disintegrating relationship with his Parliament coinciding with his increasing devotion to his Queen stoked fears that Henrietta Maria was becoming the most powerful royal advisor in the kingdom.Cultural patronage became a medium through which the royal couple sought to counter critics, garner support and consolidate rule, particularly among elite and political classes at court.Marital bliss and an ideal of domesticity were key images cultivated by the King and Queen as part of this.During the 1630s, they commissioned portraits and masques that portrayed their marriage as a harmonious union.This sought to evoke the idea that the Queen's alterity was no threat to a healthy monarchy, and the happiness of the royal couple contributed not only to harmonious governance but continuity through legitimate heirs.
Court masques were key in bolstering this image; the King and Queen often sponsored masques that celebrated married love.The most prominent example is perhaps Thomas Carew's Coelum Britannicum performed by the King and his gentlemen in 1634. 27In it, the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria is celebrated as 'that great example of Matrimoniall union' and is commemorated with a new constellation named 'Carlo-Maria'. 28The following year the Queen commissioned and performed in her own masque, The Temple of Love.The masque especially appealed to the values of chaste and fecund matrimony in the royal household, drawing on the ideal of Indian fecundity centred in the Indian queen.Performed six years into personal rule and as part 25 Susan Dunn-Hensley, Anne of Denmark and Henrietta Maria: Virgins, Witches and Catholic Queens (New York: Palgrave, 2017), 13. 26 During her reign the first papal envoy Gregorio Panzani visited and gained an audience with the King, and a permanent papal envoy to the Queen's court was agreed upon. of a royal campaign to consolidate the King and Queen's authority, Temple and its Indian queen was at the centre of a crucial moment of national determination.In this performance, Henrietta Maria embodied the racially and religiously other Indian queen as part of the active campaign in which she and Charles I engaged to advocate for their rule at a time when support wore perilously thin.Given the ascendant position of the Indian Queen in the early modern English cultural imagination, including the management of her layers of alterity, this choice of protagonist performed by Henrietta Maria was undoubtedly a careful one.Created by William Davenant and Inigo Jones, The Temple of Love was first performed on Shrove Tuesday, 10 February 1635.Contemporary sketches of the Indian queen Indamora, played by Henrietta Maria, reveal a character whose racial alterity is not so visibly marked.Indamora has an elaborate and exotic feathered headdress. 29However, her costume is otherwise not all too different from an English courtly gown as would normally be worn by the Queen and her ladies.Neither is she in blackface nor any discernible racializing makeup or prosthesis.Indian complexions were varied and far from Anglo-European whiteness, and this would have been known and understood in England.Travel and trade with India were by this point well established.The decision to not racially mark Indamora would therefore seem potentially deliberate.
Thomas Middleton's The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue has shown that Indian queens were also at times performed in blackface: 'this black is but my native dye'. 30Yet here too, Middleton's Indian queen calls on audiences to 'view me with an intellectual eye', thus decentring her visible Blackness to, instead, centre her material abundance: Of gums and fragrant spices I confess, My climate heaven does with abundance bless, And those you have from me; 31 The Indian queen in Honour and Virtue transcends her Blackness and is celebrated, while Indamora in The Temple of Love is performed White.It is thus clear the Indian queen can perform both Black and White.This unique dynamic illustrates my intervention on early modern racecraft of 29 It is notable that in this period ideas of the Indian in English cultural representations were fluid and interchangeable between South Asia and the Americas.We see this evidenced here; despite Indamora being identified as a Hindu queen of Narsinga (Vijaynagar), her costume's feathered headdress was evocative of Virginia and Native American attire.This essay centres Mughal Indian encounters and negotiations.While acknowledging the fluidity at play in Henrietta Maria's costume, I focus on the evident South Asian reading and representation of Indamora.Indian queens: that the Indian queen occupied a privileged space of racial alterity in which she is racially fluid and thus capable of racial passing.In The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue, she is capable of performing Black yet transcending that visible marker of racial difference to retain and centre her celebrated status as a figure of wealth.In The Temple of Love she is capable of passing White and circumventing visible markers of racial difference.
Randall Kennedy defines passing as, 'a deception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct.'The example of a 'classic racial passer' Kennedy offers is: the 'white Negro': the individual whose physical appearance allows him to present himself as 'white' but whose 'black' lineage (typically only a very partial black lineage) makes him a Negro according to dominant racial rules. 32though passing may not have existed as a term in early modern England, I suggest we see a form of passing cultivated in the race-making of the period for the Indian queen.Despite being foreign, she enjoys a racial fluidity that permits her to transcend visible racial alterity and associated oppressive tropes.In this, we see the privileging of the Indian character in the management of her racial alterity to render it less discernible and, thereby, render her more empowered.
Complexion is not the only area in which the Indian queen experiences management, and indeed privileging, of her alterity.Indamora presents an intersecting network of otherness.In race she is Indian, in religion Hindu, and in gender female.Yet, we see the Indian queen's differences managed and rendered benign.Indamora is identified as Queen of Narsinga, a name for the Hindu Kingdom of Vijaynagar. 33As an Indian, she could have been Muslim, the faith of the ruling Mughals.Yet Islam, in this period strongly associated with the conquering Ottoman Turks militarily encroaching on Christendom's borders and converting Christians, represented a pronounced threat.Being Indian rather than Turk permits Indamora to escape definitive Islamic associations; Mughal India, a land ruled by a Muslim minority, was associated by the English more with trade and wealth than religion.Instead, she is identified as Hindu, by which her religious alterity is rendered non-threatening.That Mughal India was a Muslim empire ruling over a large Hindu population is probably a fact that furthered an idea of Hinduism as benign.To seventeenth-century Europeans, the overarching view of India was of 32 Randall Kennedy, 'Racial Passing', Ohio State Law Journal 62.3 (2001), 1145-93 (1145). 33Narsing and Bisnagar are the two names by which early modern Europeans knew Vijaynagar.Joan-Pau Rubies offers a valuable look at the European understanding of Vijaynagar in Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India Through European Eyes, 1250-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
the Muslim-dominated Mughal empire, with its syncretic court splendour and treacherous imperial politics set against the background of a brahmin-dominated society of naked ascetics, idolatrous temples and inflexible caste rules. 34ile the Muslim Mughals were characterized by imperial dominance and power, the Hindus were associated demographic dominance and pagan practices whose subjection to minority Muslim rule highlighted their political vulnerability.Hinduism also presented certain parallels; Jennifer Linhart Wood has argued that the English considered Hindu temples as comparable to churches as religious houses where bells were rung. 35Indamora's religious alterity is thereby managed in a manner to render it not only non-threatening but almost aligned with Christianity.Indamora is not alone in the management of her Indian faith either: a similar case is the late Indian mother, a 'vot'ress' of Titania, in A Midsummer Night's Dream. 36As a 'vot'ress', she is a worshipper or devout follower of Titania.Her religion is different yet benign, a magical form of otherness in its devotion to the fairy queen herself.Here too, the Indian woman's religious alterity is managed to neutralise it.
However, perhaps the most notable case of managed alterity is the negotiation of Indamora's gender.The Indian queen's womanhood becomes a celebrated marker of enriching fecundity, a symbol of the multiplying wealth of India.This is not exclusive to Temple and Indamora, but a frequent trope to be found in early modern drama.The case of The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue, where the Black Indian queen shifts attention from her complexion to centre her fertility in terms of abundant commodities, has been mentioned.In A Midsummer Night's Dream, merchant ships are imagined in terms of the Indian votaress's childbearing: Marking th' embarkèd traders on the flood, When we have laughed to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait, Following (her womb then rich with my young squire), Would imitate and sail upon the land To fetch me trifles and return again, As from a voyage, rich with merchandise. 37e Indian queen's sexual potential is rendered a source of enrichment; complexion is overlooked and sexual heat becomes the warming climes for abundant growth creating the desired commodities.Her gendered alterity 34 Rubies, Travel and Ethnology, 1. 35 Jennifer Linhart Wood, Sounding Otherness: Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive (New York, Palgrave, 2019), 206.
is thus managed by rendering her womanhood and sexual potential into the loci of celebrated mercantile procreation and enrichment.Seventeenthcentury civic pageants often represented Indian wealth as an elite and richly costumed woman or queen through whom that wealth must be accessed.The Indian queen herself thus became the fertile embodiment of Mughal wealth and the womb of trade.It was this privileging of the Indian queen's celebrated fecundity which Henrietta Maria sought toise in her performance of Indamora.The Indian queen was more than a figure of entertainmentshe was the theatrical representation of an imperial and mercantile ideal.It was an ideal to which the English aspired, and the English court turned in this moment of instability.The Indian queen, as a foreign, religious other yet celebrated queen in the English cultural imagination, made for a fitting figure for Henrietta Maria to channel in her quest to garner support as a foreign and religiously other queen of England.
To advocate for her own fruitful marriage to Charles I, Henrietta Maria mobilised Indamora's enriching fecundity as Indian queen.In Temple, we therefore see less of Platonic love and more of marital 'chaste love' that provides 'legitimate' heirs for the kingdom. 38Despite the title of the masque, in the opening Argument, the first reference to the Temple identifies it as 'the Temple of Chast Love'. 39This temple is described to inflame 'a company of noble Persian youths' by its fame, and they are further 'inspird with chast flames' at the sight of the Indian queen.These 'chast flames' lead to 'faithfull Observance' and 'legitimate affections'.When the Temple is finally revealed by Indamora, 'Chast Love descends to invoke the last and living Heroe (Indamora's royall Lover)', a reference to Charles I. Love here is not Platonic and spiritual, but chaste, faithful, legitimate and with a noble lover; descriptors that hold true for the sacred bond of marriage as an institution of committed love and legitimate procreation.This form of love is inspired and enabled by the Indian queen, a figure of enriching fecundity in early modern English drama.When the Temple is revealed by Indamora, it brings forth Chaste Love as well as her Lover in a reference to the devoted and fecund partnership of Henrietta Maria and Charles I.
The theme of fecund matrimony continues in the stage design.The masque's proscenium arch appears to show the extremes of Platonic love and illicit love against which is contrasted the harmonious balance of chaste love in the centrally positioned Templum Amoris.The arch is described in detail: 38 While many have valuably suggested that Temple is a masque that draws on the cult of Platonic love led by Henrietta Maria at the Caroline court, I argue Temple is framed less to celebrate spiritual Neoplatonic love as to celebrate chaste marital love that produces heirs.The theme follows in a parallel tradition increasingly in vogue at the English court from the early 1630s of celebrating chaste fecund love.Henrietta Maria had a taste for 'plots about constant love' and this she and Charles I deployed in their patronages and performances.(…) on the one side upon a basement sate a naked Indian on a whitish Elephant, his legges shortning towards the necke of the beast, his tire and bases of severall coloured feathers, representing the Indian Monarchy: On the other side an Asiatique in the habit of an Indian borderer, riding on a Camell; his Turbant and Coat differing from that of the Turkes, figured for the Asian Monarchy: over these hung sheild like Compartiments: In that over the Indian was painted a Sunne rising, and in the other an halfe Moone; these had for finishing the Capitall of a great pillaster, which served as a ground to sticke them of, and bore up a large freeze or border with a Coronice.In this over the Indian lay the figure of an old man, with a long white haire and beard, representing the flood Tigris; on his head a wreath of Canes and Seage, and leaning upon a great Vrne, out of which runne water, by him in an extravagant posture stood a Tyger.
At the other end of this freeze lay another naked man, representing Meander, the famous River of Asia, who likewise had a great silver urne, and by him lay an Vnicorne.
At one side of the arch is the representation of extreme illicit love: a naked Indian sat upon an elephant described as a 'beast', and over them rises a painted sun.An illustration of the perceived uncontrolled lust and destructive nature of elephants is offered by seventeenth-century English traveller to India, Edward Terry: the male Elephants when they grow lusty are sometimes mad for their Femals, but in few dayes come again in temper; before which time they are so mischievous, that they will strike any thing (…) to prevent mischief they are kept apart from Company, fetterd with strong chaines unto trees; but if by chance in their phrensie they get loose (as sometimes they do) they will make after every thing they see stir, in which case they have no means to stop them in their violent course, but by firing of Crackers made of Gunpowder, whose sparkling, and noyse makes them to stand still and tremble. 40e elephant therefore represents an apt symbol of the excesses of illicit love.Further above it on the arch lays an old man representing the river Tigris, his long hair and beard flowing as he leans upon 'a great Vrne, out of which runne water'.By him is a tiger 'in an extravagant posture'.The image deploys a sense of the wild and uncontrolled; a comment on the transgressive 40 Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (London: 1655), 147-8: <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/a95658.0001.001/175?page=root;size=125;vid=115803;view=text> (accessed 25 June 2021).nature of illicit love.Akin to the beasts represented by the elephant and 'extravagant' tiger, as well as the wild overflowing river Tigris, this is a love that is intemperate and beyond containment.Heated by a blazing sun, its outcome is uncertain and potentially destructive.
By contrast, on the other end of the arch is a portrayal of an imaginary ideal of Platonic love.Here a dressed 'Asiatique' in a turban and coat is sat upon a camel and above them is a half-moon.Contrasting the old man with flowing hair lays a naked man, representing the river Meander, who bears a silver urne and has beside him a Unicorn.The image is one of extreme calm; the tame camel a symbol of tamed passions, the half-moon cooling rather than heating.Unlike the overflowing urn of the Tigris, the river Meander here is contained in a silver urne, an image not only of control and temperance but of polished idealism.This is particularly brought to life by the unicorn; Platonic love, like the imaginary magical beast, is an unattainable fantasy.As a form of love, it is unnatural and as a union sterile.Like the lawlessness of illicit love, the illusionary ideal of Platonic love is no less untenable.
Midway between these extremes is then located the Temple of Love: 'In the midst of this Compartiment in an Ovall was written TEMPLVMAMORIS'.In this space of balance and harmony, the extremes of love make way for the perfection of chaste love that is virtuous in its courtship, moral in its marital union and fecund in its legitimate heirs.The ideal of the fecund loving union is driven home by the arrival of Indamora, Queen of Narsinga, who alone can open this Temple of Love.Henrietta Maria as Indamora enters upon a chariot encrusted with riches in an image evoking the enriching fertility of Indian queens.The chariot is adorned with shells, corals and pearls.Its wheels are golden and the queen is sat upon 'a rich seat, the backe of which was a great Skallop Shell'.The masquers are dressed in pale fawn Isabelline embroidered with silver and wear silver and white feathered headdresses.The spectacular and extravagant arrival of Indamora marks a salvation; the queen, a symbol of the abundant riches and imperial power of India, restores chaste fecund love by her 'miracle'.Crucially, this queen is embodied by Henrietta Maria; the ideals of chaste love, fertile enrichment and the miraculous capacity to bring salvation are centred in the Queen of England.By becoming Indian, Henrietta Maria mobilises the celebrated foreign, racially and religiously other Indian queen and channels it in her French and Catholic self.The performance suggests alterity need not be a threat but can be a source of deliverance and enrichment for the kingdom.Like the Indian Hindu queen is celebrated, so can the French Catholic queen be.Just as Indamora restores chaste love to Britain, so does Henrietta Maria through her loving royal household that ensures a contented King and legitimate heirs enabling national stability and continuity.Becoming the beloved Indian queen thus became a pathway to becoming a beloved English queen.
In its conclusion, Temple brings the celebration of chaste fecund love centred in Indamora/Henrietta Maria to the fore in the songs of 'Sunesis and Thelema' and 'Amianteros, or Chast Love'.In Sunesis and Thelema, chaste marital love is invoked in the recognition of 'one virtuous appetite' that enables a love 'created to endure'.Like the marriage of Henrietta Maria and her king, this is a love that is morally virtuous before God and enduring.The closing song of 'Chast Love' then concludes the masque in a final evocation of committed love that secures a fertile and enriching future for England under the queen: Softly as fruitfull showeres I fall, And th'undiscern'd increase I bring, Is of more precious worth than all.
A plenteous Summer payes a Spring.This is a 'fruitfull' love that brings 'increase' that is 'precious' and 'plenteous'.It is a love that 'But fructifie each barren heart, / And give eternall growth to Love.' The diction throughout invokes procreation and plentitude.The scene ends celebrating the marriage of Henrietta Maria and Charles I, and their many offspring: To CHARLES the mightiest and the best, And to the Darling of his breast, (Who rule b' example as by power) May youthfull blessings still increase, And in their Off-spring never cease, Till Time's too old to last an hower.This is no barren Platonic love, but a chaste, committed and fecund attachment; the love for the 'Darling of his breast' is devout, the offspring of their bond never ceasing.The closing image is one of a doting and fruitful kingdom, enriched and joyous in its present and certain of its future.Although the King is referenced here, the agency of enrichment and continuity is firmly located within the Queen.It is she who restores the Temple and restores the land by it.It is the royal 'offspring' she bears that mark continuity for the kingdom.Through becoming Indamora, Henrietta Maria imagines not only a legitimate, bountiful and celebratory present for herself as Queen of England but also a stable and abundant future.She reclaims alterity for the English throne by becoming the Indian queen.CONCLUSION By her performance as Indamora in The Temple of Love, Henrietta Maria fashions herself as not only desirable but necessary for England, attaining for her kingdom the enriching and imperial ideals her subjects so desire.Nonetheless, she was not ultimately successful in her endeavour.Indeed, her engagement in theatrical performance was used against her.However, the political effectiveness of Henrietta Maria's efforts does not detract from the reality of early modern English cultural discourses: that the Indian queen, despite being foreign, female and racially and religiously other, was well established, celebrated and indeed privileged in the English cultural imagination.Furthermore, the Indian queen's celebration involved a complex negotiation of her layered alterity that included enabling her the racial fluidity to pass White.Such was the privileged position of the Indian queen in this moment that she was more acceptable and revered than a beleaguered French Catholic Queen of England.It was enough to influence the latter to seek to become an Indian queen of England to secure her own position adjacent the Crown.While she ultimately failed to secure the love of her subjects, Henrietta Maria nonetheless enjoys a rich legacy as a patron of the arts in England, including the celebration of the popular and venerated Indian queen.
such a context, adjacent to considering the 'intersectional' implications of performing otherness, I have referred to what I term 'layered alterity': a means of identifying the layers of difference represented by a foreign figure without necessarily locating those layers in a dynamic of oppression.I also consider what I term 'managed alterity': a method of negotiating the intersecting alterities of an admired or politically superior other in a process of rendering them nonthreatening and attainable.