In Le Temps retrouvé, Proust's Narrator complains about politics invading the space of literature. Thus writers who put before the demands of literature the search for justice, as in the Dreyfus Affair, or the advocacy of national unity in the context of the First World War, are rebuked by the Narrator: ‘How many . . . turn aside from writing!’ (6: 233; iv, 458). While this could be read biographically as the view of an author long embarked on a career of literary production, the forthright defence of the claims of literature belies the fact that the younger Proust responded with some urgency to major political events of his day. Thus in a letter of December 1919, a quarter of century after Dreyfus's initial conviction, Proust could still boast of his early role as an active defender of Dreyfus, who had been found guilty of spying for Germany in December 1894: ‘My signature was on the very first of the pro-Dreyfus lists and I was an ardent Dreyfusard, sending a copy of my first book to Picquart in the Cherche-Midi prison’ (Corr, xviii, 545).

The representations of the Dreyfus Affair in Proust's work are to be found principally in Jean Santeuil and À la recherche du temps perdu and they demonstrate a significant evolution in response, from the campaigning eagerness of the early novel to the retrospective consideration in the Recherche of a crisis, the intensity of which had been substantially diminished by the time of composition of the novel. Proust was an early believer in the innocence of the Jewish captain from Alsace who was humiliatingly stripped of his military rank at a degradation parade in January 1895 and imprisoned on L'Île du Diable. He worked to secure the support of Anatole France for the Dreyfus cause and in a letter of January 1899 congratulated the high-profile novelist on his intervention (Corr, ii, 272).

Proust's public involvement in political campaigning preceded the years he spent working on À la recherche. His eager defence of Dreyfus is conveyed in Jean Santeuil where he delivers a forthrightly moral condemnation of judicial and military power, which is depicted as acting squarely in defence of la raison d'État. The other major issue on which he campaigned was Church–State relations. As an outspoken critic of the Combes government's policy of laicity, he opposed the separation of Church and State which was brought about in 1905. His ‘La mort des cathédrales’ [‘Death of the Cathedrals’] (Le Figaro, 16 August 1904) provides a cultural defence of France's religious heritage, seen in his lofty yet implicitly political view as the legacy of a medieval, Christian faithful who form ‘a great silent democracy’ (CSB, 149). Writing to Georges de Lauris on 29 July 1903 (in a letter which Proust refers to as stupid and embarrassing, and one to be destroyed by its addressee), he provides a revealing snapshot of his political thinking at this time. Reflecting both on ‘the dangerous mindset that gave rise to the [Dreyfus] Affair etc’ prevalent in the late 1890s and on the growth in anticlericalism, Proust argues that in both cases, ‘on travaille à faire deux France’ (Corr, iii, 382) [‘the thrust of political life is to divide the country in two’]. Concerned by ‘the fermenting of hatred among the French’ (Corr, iii, 383), Proust notes how the press reinforces prejudice in the laicity debate and stifles independent thinking. He was to restate this view in Le Temps retrouvé where Charlus points to newspaper readers' deluded belief in their autonomous actions: ‘“ce public qui ne juge ainsi des hommes et des choses de la guerre que par les journaux est persuadé qu'il juge par lui-même”. En cela M. de Charlus avait raison’ (iv, 367) [‘“this public which judges the men and events of the war solely from the newspapers, is persuaded that it forms its own opinions”. In this M. de Charlus was right’ (6: 122)]. Suspicious of virulent forms of nationalism during the First World War, Proust shows press influence to be a key agent of ideological formation.

With the recent shift in literary studies towards what is often described as a “global Renaissance,” it is hardly surprising that figures of merchants and travelers both in early modern travelogues and plays have come under greater scrutiny as sites for understanding the formation of a fluid English identity, transnational commerce, emergent colonialism, and nation building. What still remains largely unexplored, however, particularly in the context of the East Indies trade, is the impact of this emergent globalization on the bodies of the European women who were closely related to the merchants or factors. While scholarship on plays such as Fletcher's The Island Princess or Dryden's Amboyna emphasizes the roles of both European men and their beloved native women, the white woman still remains a shadowy presence at the fringes of our current academic interest in the early modern spice trade.

This essay seeks to address this gap by turning to the public stage, particularly to a play that explores how the emergent trade with the East Indies appeared to affect the physical and moral complexion of one such European woman. In the trial scene of John Webster's play The Devil's Law-Case (1623), Jolenta, the sister of Romelio, an East Indies merchant enters with “her face colour'd like that of a Moore,” accompanied by two Surgeons, “one of them like a Jew.” Although the assembled people quickly recognize her they still comment on her changed complexion. Ariosto the advocate exclaims, “Shee’s a blacke one indeed” (5.5.40) while Ercole, one of her suitors, wails “to what purpose / Are you thus ecclipst?” (5.5.57–58). Of course, Jolenta’s transformation is temporary and apparently superficial; yet her blackening appears to gesture towards deeper concerns regarding the impact of the East Indies trade, particularly on a woman who has never left her home or sailed the high seas to profit from pepper, cinnamon, cardamom and mace.