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This chapter looks at William Congreve's enormously popular but now unfamiliar play The Mourning Bride (1697) alongside Aphra Behn's play about an Indian queen, The Widow Ranter, and her heroic novella about an enslaved African prince, Oroonoko. The Mourning Bride has become almost invisible in scholarship, but it remained one of the most frequently performed tragedies throughout the eighteenth century and consolidated Congreve's reputation as a serious artist. This tragedy persists mostly through the misquotation “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. The discussion focuses on Zara, a powerful African queen reduced to captivity and humiliated by her European lover for whom she betrays her nation. Zara echoes the powerful Indian queens created by John Dryden. Dryden's Mesoamerican plays first appeared at the beginning of England's entry into the African slave trade in the form of a royal monopoly; The Mourning Bride appeared in the midst of a pamphlet war over the fate of the Royal African Company generated by the threat to its monopoly when its governor, James II, fled the country. While The Mourning Bride does not depict plantation slavery or the slave trade itself, it nevertheless registers the impact of trafficking in African bodies. Congreve's Zara evokes the exotic queens of the Restoration, but is a more complicated figure who demands respect for her dignity and empathy over her abuse. As the chapter suggests, Zara moved audiences not just as a “woman scorned,” but as an African who has been deracinated and enslaved.

The Afterword explores commercial drama from the interregnum and early Restoration periods, when colonies and colonizers began to be staged in the London playhouses. These staging practices were innovative and also show the persistence of certain New World memes that we first see in drama pre-1642: talk of cannibalism, of Indian display and the futility of the religious mission, and of the prodigal Virginia adventurer. Here also we find a genre shift to “heroic drama.” Yet when drama represented the English in the New World, it either prophesized their arrival in some imagined future or fell back on London comedy typologies: Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter combines both the Dryden model of drama and the London comedy model. While earlier drama used Virginia as a way of explaining or enhancing certain London types, in Behn’s play London types are employed to make legible a new type of character: the Virginian.

This chapter explores how “mixed marriages” captivated audience sympathies. In their dramas, John Dryden (The Indian Queen; The Indian Emperour); Elkanah Settle (The Empress of Morocco); Edward Howard (The Womens Conquest); and Aphra Behn (The Rover; The Widow Ranter) explore intercultural romance as a figure for the benefits and volatility of cosmopolitanization. Often in the plots, opposition to affection across boundaries is what leads to disaster. Restoration theater culture produced some remarkably powerful exoticized women. The dramatic unions between European men and foreign women point in two directions at once. On the one hand, they work through new questions about race, gender, and identity in a globalized context. The sexual union of two figures from different nations explores the boundaries of identity and of humanity itself. At the same time they have a specific referent that has attracted less attention. The paradigmatic “mixed marriage” in this period was between Charles II and his Portuguese bride. Dryden's and Settle's plays work through broader issues of shifting identities in a globalized context through powerful exoticized women who resonate as figures for the Portuguese queen. Settle, creates a vicious Empress of Morocco at the height of conflicts over the expense of defending Tangier as an English colony. Dryden, offers a more complicated picture. His Indian queens seek power, but also remains vulnerable to falling in love and suffering rejection and abandonment. These abandoned women also evoke the losers of not just love but of history, those peoples left vulnerable by England's cosmopolitanizing ambitions.