China and the West

Settle, Elkanah. The conquest of China, by the Tartars [ID D1745].
Sekundärliteratur
Frank Clyde Brown : The story which Settle says had 'History and Truth' for its basis, deals with war and revenge, treachery and ambition, fidelity and love, and is made exciting by much mental and physical torture, disguises, a combat between the champions of the two armies to decide the supremacy of China, poisonings, and stabbings. To add to the bloody spectacle, the king of China, after slashing himself with a dagger, writes his will in his own blood, and the bodies of all his wives, who follow his example of self-destruction, are presented on the stage with daggers and swords 'thrust through' their breasts. Besides the two pairs of romantic lovers, who balance each other in the two threads of the plot, there is the lovelorn princess of China who sacrifices her life to unrequited love, the plotting, ambitious villain who is satisfied with nothing less than a throne. But only for a short time is the plotter allowed to enjoy his power as the self-declared ruler ; as he is about to commit some heinous crimes to remove, as he thinks, all obstacles to his reign, retributive justice punishes him, rescues the heroes and heroines, and saves the play, in the very last scene, from ending as a horrible tragedy. The moving force in the conflict between the nations is revenge. The king of the Tartars is incited to vengeance by the ghost of his father who was murdered by the 'king of China'. The son of the Tartar king, one of the heroic lovers, has placed his affection upon one of the petty queens in China who, disguised as a man, leads the 'Chinan' forces and, as the chosen champion, meets her lover in single combat before the two armies. The villain is a prince of the Chinese court who, rejected by the princess and sole heir to the throne because she loves a prince pledged to another, is yet determined to win the throne by deeds of violence and treachery. The action is often slow, the speeches tiresome and ranting, and the characters without anything to give them interest. The play contains the most extravagant treatmen of the passion of heroic love of all of Settle's works, and is the only one in which there are such ranting speeches and puerile sacrifices.

Jeannie Dalporto : The Conquest of China reveals how Western perceptions of Eastern empires were a crucial influence on English political and economic ideology. The histories of far-flung and exotic empires of Morocco, Persia, and China offered Settle ideal political settings in which to subsume anxieties over succession issues within fantasies of political stability. These histories were able to function as such, in part, because of underlying assumptions on the part of many Europeans about how empires such as China represented universal truths about religious and sociopolitical origins. Settle's insistence that The Conquest of China had "History and Truth for her Excuse" underscores the way in which he believed that his sources contained certain accepted "Truths" about the political lessons that he wished to present in the play. Settle's source for the play was Martinus Martini's scholarly and widely-read history of the 1644 overthrow of the Ming dynasty by the Qing, De bella Tartarico historia [ID D1699], which became the "most authoritative and best-known description of the Manchu conquest."
Given the unsavory nature of either breaking the line of succession or of allowing the Catholic James II to become king, it is not surprising that Settle's tragedies are full of what appear to be plot contradictions and convoluted political scenarios that covered over political and religious differences between Chinese and Manchus and, by implication, between Stuart loyalists and Protestant opposition in England.
Settle's insistence on the parallels between the glories of a once-powerful Eastern empire and the Duke and Duchess of Monmouth implies that innate similarities between the two empires activate and underwrite a transcendent concept of legitimate political authority. In other words, the restored English monarchy carries with it an inherent legitimacy and superiority that transcends day-to-day internal political divisions.
Martini's chronicle of the causes and effects of the downfall of the Ming dynasty and subsequent acculturation of the Manchus provided Settle with an ideologically flexible historical precedent by which multiple, often contradictory issues of English political authority and succession could be mediated within reassuring conventions of heroic love and honor. The Conquest of China represents a broad range of English political expectations and fears and seeks to assuage these fears by rewriting Chinese history as a way to universalize the innate endurance of the Restoration settlement.
Settle's adaptation of Martini's account of the events of 1644 provided him with more than just a sensational vehicle for bloody battle scenes and heroic rant. Like Martini's history, Settle's play vacillates between an impulse to praise the invaders' ingenuity, strength, and commitment to the timeless values of the moral, political, and social order and the compulsion to validate the dynastic legitimacy that the Ming Emperor represents. In doing so, Settle subtly characterizes some of the same contradictory elements of the English political situation. He assuages his audiences' anxieties about popery and arbitrary government, exacerbated by widespread uncertainty about the succession by his portrayal of Zungteus, the strong military leader in Martini's account, who is ennobled and legitimized by his adoption of Chinese traditions and sensibilities. Settle's cooption of Zungteus, who restores Chinese social traditions and political principles after he captures the Chinese throne, allows him to become a reassuring political figure for both Royalists and Protestant traditionalists. The play suggests that no matter who occupies the throne, the restored monarchy's sociopolitical virtues would remain intact. Finally, Settle presents an imaginary solution to seemingly insoluble succession contradictions by positing an unhistorical joint rulership between the Manchu conqueror and a fictional Chinese prince, whose rightful claim to the empire based on Chinese law and tradition is honored at the end of the play. On several levels, then, the play reassures nervous English audiences that the institution and authority of monarchy were immutable and self-regulating, thus banishing the specters of Civil War and factious Interregnum politics, which had been raised by the prospect of a conflict over the succession.