In the plays of William Shakespeare, the colony of Virginia (named for Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen) shows up only indirectly. Caliban in The Tempest isn't technically a Native American in the New World, though he can certainly be understood that way, and might have been by some of the play's original audience members.
In the first half of the play, Luke's character seems a bit ambiguous. In his youth, he squandered away his money, but now he is living with his brother. Lady Frugal (the titular City Madam) and her daughters abuse Luke. Has Luke ultimately reformed, or if given the chance, would he once more fall back into his old ways? Sir John plans to test him, and at the same time test his wife and daughters, who have been acting proudly, trying to follow the fashions of the court rather than just live humbly as a citizen of the City of London should.
What the fake "Indians" would have looked like on a 17th-century London stage, I don't know, but the play does give us some idea of how British people in that period might have felt about Virginia. Lacy's father, who is in on the plot, entreats Luke on behalf of Sir John:
Receive these Indians, lately sent him from
Virginia, into your house; and labour
At any rate with the best of your endeavours,
Assisted by the aids of our divines,
To make 'em Christians.
Luke, however, worships only money, and makes no attempt to convert the "Indians" to Christianity. Instead, they tell him they have a special arrangement with the devil. If he sends them a virtuous matron and two virgins to be sacrificed in Virginia, they'll send him back an entire mine of gold.
When Luke starts at the name of the devil, the chief "Indian" (Sir John) tells him, "if you / Desire to wallow in wealth and worldly honours, / You must make haste to be familiar with him." The satire here strikes me as more directed at British greed than at the actual religion of native Virginians. Still, the fact that Luke readily believes the natives can supply huge amounts of gold in return for female sacrifices might speak to the fantastic tales Britons received back from the New World.
Luke tells the women that the two daughters will be married off to Indian royalty, but they scorn the idea of emigrating to Virginia. According to one daughter, the people shipped to Virginia are "Condemn'd wretches, / Forfeited to the law" while the other calls them "Strumpets and bawds, / For the abomination of their life, / Spew'd out of their own country." Though the daughters had been portrayed as snobs, I imagine this was a common perception of the British colonists. In fact, Luke says that "Such indeed / Are sent as slaves to labour there."
At the end of the play, Sir John reveals himself. His wife and daughters are repentant, and Sir John turns out his wayward brother. "Hide thyself in some desert, / Where good men ne'er may find thee," he says, "or in justice / Pack to Virginia, and repent." Certainly, in the 17th century, Virginia must have seemed a wild place to Londoners, and a fitting wilderness in which to repent one's sins.
