‘Sir William and His Apes’: Davenant, Monkeys and the Staging of Disorder

It has long been recognised that monkeys were used in the anti-royalist propaganda of the Civil War to expose Cavalier lasciviousness and immorality. But, as the last chapter demonstrated, monkeys were not useful just to the Parliamentarian cause, as the works of Sir William Davenant also confirm. This chapter explores Britannia Triumphans (1638) and The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658), to show how Davenant used his monkeys, what they might have meant to their audiences, and how changing political and social circumstances modified those meanings. The earlier masque sees Davenant using the topsy-turvy of the antimasque to expose the debasement of good order and show how Charles’s ‘right-sight’ allows him to read the realm accurately. The metaphorical ramifications of rope-dancing inform Davenant’s use of the tumbling apes in The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, disguising a dangerous political joke about Cromwell as a variety act. The contexts of the masque suggest that Davenant’s pragmatic co-operation with the Protectorate disguised a subversive Royalist agenda, using performing monkeys to expose Cromwell as fraud and usurper, if only to a coterie audience.