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Indigenous Spectacle & Shakespeare's Stage

March 11, 2026
En Medias Res: Making an Exhibit with Abbi Andrews

Upon being awarded the Gillespie Curatorial Fellowship in Shakespeare and the Book at the Kinney Renaissance Center, I was practically glowing. Then, almost immediately, the weight of responsibility settled on me: If I was going to curate texts that shape how we understand colonialism, race, and indigenous representation, I needed to begin where the questions felt most urgent to me.

My background in studying dramaturgy urged me forward. I started with The Tempest. I had read Shakespeare before, of course. But reading The Tempest now, as a curator rather than a dramaturg or performer, felt different. I wasn’t just asking what the play meant, I was asking what it did. Caliban’s declaration that “This island’s mine” landed harder than it ever had in a classroom. His rage felt less like villainy and more like dispossession. Ariel’s longing for freedom, framed through obedience, made me uneasy. Why does the compliance of indigenous people earn liberation, while resistance earns chains? When I turned to The Enchanted Island, a 17th century Restoration adaptation of The Tempest I felt a strange whiplash. The colonial tensions that pulse through Shakespeare’s play are softened into Restoration spectacle. Caliban becomes softened, more comic than threatening. The introduction of new characters and romantic plots distract from the moral implications of Caliban and Ariel’s subjugation. I found myself shocked and asking: Who benefits from this softening? Adaptation began to look less like an homage and more like a revision– a cultural rewriting of colonial encounters to suit a new political mood.

As I continued my research, I realized I was chasing a larger pattern. Characters such as Peter Pan’s Tiger Lily or the titular character of Disney’s Pocahontas portray the compliant, convertible figure whose culture is exotic but easy to romanticize. Early modern drama repeatedly stages versions of this figure, using Indigenous characters to stabilize European authority in “new” regions. This is shown in Ariel’s very first two lines of The Tempest, “All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! I come / To answer thy best pleasure…” (1.2.189-90). But what unsettled me was how recognizable these patterns still feel. The binaries of carnage vs. community continue to echo in contemporary media and politics. 

Bringing The Island Princess (1647) a play by John Fletcher that centers religion and colonization in the West Indies, into this project intensified this realization. Its white-savior narrative dramatizes conversion as triumph, framing violence as the necessary prelude to harmony. Then I encountered an interesting travelogue. Les Voyages De Thomas Gage dans la Nouvelle-Espagne (1699) Gage, an explorer and missionary, presents his travels as eyewitness truth, yet their depictions of Indigenous life mirror the curious and imaginative spectacle of play. Reading these works alongside The Tempest and The Enchanted Island, I began to see how stage and travel narrative collaborated, and how fiction and “fact” reinforced one another in constructing imperial fantasy.

I started to wonder: How were Indigenous figures represented onstage? How might we curate these materials to invite critical reflection? And as I mulled these broad ideas, my questions became more personal: How have fictionalized narratives of submission and conversion shaped the stories we read in the classroom? What does it mean for the upcoming generation of Indigenous students to inherit this archive?

As I move forward in my research and curation, my aim is to make those inheritances visible. By presenting these texts not as isolated masterpieces but as participants in an imperial conversation, I hope visitors will feel what I felt in the archive: recognition, followed by discomfort, followed by curiosity. If we can trace how adaptation, genre, and performance shaped colonial imagination, maybe we can begin to reshape our own.

During this extensive research, I discovered that Theobald’s 1733 edition of the Works of Shakespeare was the first to give Benedick the line “Peace, I will stop your mouth” and furthermore, he adds the stage direction, “[Kissing her,” transforming the embodied action of this moment. Theobald also includes a long footnote, explaining that this line “ought to be given to Benedick” and asking, “What can Leonato mean by This?”  While this question is a good one (and I share this curiosity), Theobald’s puzzlement is not strong evidence of a textual discrepancy or error. The closest argument he makes to editorial reason is that there is precedence in other plays in which to “stop” a “mouth” is meant to refer to a kiss (Figure 3).

As Theobald notes there is another mouth stopping moment in Much Ado. In Act 2, when Hero and Claudio are engaged to one another in front of the whole company, Beatrice teasingly calls out to her cousin “Speak, cousin, or, if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss and let not him speak neither.” Here, even though Hero does not speak, she is able to use the kiss as a means of communicating her love for Claudio, while at the same time playfully silencing both of them. A similar moment occurs in Troilus and Cressida, when the title characters are first confessing their feelings for one another. In this case, Cressida makes first confession of her love, saying “Prince Troilus, I have loved you night and day” and then immediately seeming to regret her admission, saying: 

Why have I blabbed? Who shall be true to us

When we are so unsecret to ourselves?

But though I loved you well, I wooed you not;

And yet, good faith, I wished myself a man;

Or that we women had men’s privilege

Of speaking first. Sweet, bid me hold my tongue,

For in this rapture I shall surely speak

The thing I shall repent. See, see, your silence,

Cunning in dumbness, from my weakness draws

My very soul of counsel! Stop my mouth.

Here Cressida is admonishing herself for her own speech and commanding Troilus to save her from herself by silencing her with a kiss. In both these cases, “mouth stopping” is preoccupied with women’s speech, and kissing is a playful and intimate way to account for a woman who speaks too little or too much.

However, by only noting Much Ado and Troilus and Cressida, Theobald obfuscates other, more sinister uses of the phrase. His footnote prompted me to investigate where and in what context “mouth stopping” is used in Shakespeare’s other plays, and to what effect. In Othello, for example, a man whose “mouth is stopped” is not a man who has been kissed, but rather a man who has been murdered. This chilling variation unsettles the seemingly lighthearted romantic troupe, and reveals the potentially violent undercurrents of this line, widening the dramatic range of the phrase.

After tracing other examples, I am now homing in on two specific instances of “mouth stopping” in Shakespeare beyond Much Ado. The first is, Henry V, in Act 5 when King Henry woos the French princess Katherine. This scene is predicated on the performance of wooing. Henry has defeated France in war, and Katherine has already been married off. Their engagement is already said and done. Yet, the scene in which Henry romances Katherine is lengthy and linguistically complex (and sexually suggestive) as the pair navigate the language barrier between English and French. Once she is “won,” Henry tries to kiss her and she responds that it isn’t the fashion for ladies of France to kiss before they are married. Henry ends the scene by turning that argument back on Katherine, saying that they, as monarchs, can make the fashions and that he will “stop” Katherine’s “mouth,” as a metaphor for how he will govern and silence the subjects of both France and England:

Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined 

within the weak list of a country’s fashion. We are 

the makers of manners, Kate, and the liberty that

follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults,

as I will do yours for upholding the nice fashion of

your country in denying me a kiss. Therefore,

patiently and yielding.

The second play I’m working with more closely is Titus Andronicus. In Act 2, Scene 3, Chiron, one of the brothers who rapes and mutilates Lavinia says he will stop Lavinia’s mouth before she is taken off stage and subjected to this sexual and bodily violence. In the final moments Lavinia begs Queen Tamora to spare her, to which the queen replies “So should I rob my sweet sons of their fee. No, let them satisfy their lust on thee.” Then Chiron says “Nay, then, I’ll stop your mouth” before they drag Lavinia off stage. Here, the potential meanings are two-fold for this instance of mouth stopping. There is first, the possibility that her mouth is about to be stopped with a kiss as a pre-cursor to rape, and then the eventuality that her tongue is cut out, silencing her permanently.

In each of these instances the mouth stopping of Beatrice, Katherine, and Lavinia’s are crucial to the genre mechanics of the play. Shakespeare’s three major dramatic genres: comedy, history, and tragedy each attend to distinct structural politics. In broad terms, comedies explore the politics of marriage and social union, histories examine the making of the nation, and tragedies interrogate revenge and its consequences. Lavinia’s silencing incites Titus’ climactic and deadly revenge of the final act. Katherine’s marriage represents the political fruition of Henry’s invasion. Beatrice’s marriage resolves the social and romantic tension between Beatrice and Benedick who both swore they would never marry. Interrogating these specific moments have sparked more questions for my curatorial research: How is mouth stopping defined both inside and outside of the theatre? Is mouth stopping inherently violent? At what intersection of politics and gender across genre does mouth stopping operate? To these ends I am now examining early modern dictionaries and further probing editions of Titus and Henry V to examine the editorially and politically fraught history of these stopped mouths.