'Not as a poet, but a pioneer’: Fancy and the Colonial Gaze in William Davenant’s Madagascar (1638)

In the late 1630s, the court poet William Davenant applied his literary energies to Madagascar, an island off the eastern coast of Africa: ‘Thus in a dream did I adventure out, between the southern Tropic and the line’.

While previous scholarship has highlighted the poem's ambiguous attitude towards empire, focusing more on the rising interest in eastern diplomacy at Charles I's court, this paper argues that the poem becomes an important space for prominent poets – Davenant, but also friends and fellow wits including John Suckling and Endymion Porter – to reflect on issues of desire, truth, and fantasy in the context of colonial expansion. The use of fancy in Madagascar, and in the wider court poetics of the 1630s, becomes key to understanding the colonial gaze at court, and the particular aesthetics of empire it helped create.