n the fullest recent study of the Caroline heroic play, Nancy Klein Maguire argues that the tragicomedies produced by Davenant, Orrery, and Dryden between 1658 and 1671 repetitively enacted a drama of rebellion against, usurpation of, and restoration of royal power in an attempt to negotiate and perhaps exorcise the traumas of recent political history.' The insight is a familiar one, if never so comprehensibly and convincingly documented: my purpose here is to address another crucial dimension of the plays' cultural function, one that is occluded by an exclusive emphasis on the heroic dramas' paralleling of "regicide and restoration." As critics have noted earlier, these plays are about "empire" as well as domestic sovereignty and subjecthood. Anne Barbeau Gardiner argued in 1970 that Dryden's heroic plays encoded a theory of history that celebrated the gradual triumph of Christianity, an account developed by John Loftis, who suggested that the representations of conflicts between Europeans and American Indians and Moors illustrated "the historical process as conceived to embody a widening territorial expansion of Christendom."2 More recently, David Kramer has analyzed Dryden's construction of an "imperial" literary persona in the context of the Restoration literary and military rivalry with France.3 None of these critics, however, attempted to relate their analysis of the imperial theme in the heroic drama to Restoration debates over empire, or extended their account beyond Dryden's texts to encompass the genre as a whole. Yet much of the heroic plays' significance in the two decades of the genre's emergence turns on their role in representing theatrically imperial expansion and decline, the translatio imperii-the westward transfer of empire-and the clash between Christian European and pagan non-European societies, all of which were central topics in