Apes, Indigeneity and the Early Modern Travel Narrative

This chapter starts with a discussion of early modern travel narratives in the context of what Kim F. Hall calls their ‘obsessive linking of apes and African through metaphor’. It offers a reading of Caliban which plays off retellings of the story of the pedlar and the apes to explain his fury at Trinculo and Stefano for stopping to collect clothes when they are supposed to be helping Caliban rebel against Prospero. The second half of this chapter is a reading of a little-known Oxford masque performed in 1636, Mr Moore’s Revels. The chapter builds on Hall’s work to investigate the specifically theatrical nature of the masque, and the ways in which its genre determines how its metaphors operate. The chapter ends with a discussion of why this matters, exploring the implications both for social justice and the very notion of history.