This dissertation surveys a range of English and Spanish drama, legal documents, and visual art to argue that discovery is a tool of early modern theatrical worldmaking, one that shines a spotlight on colonial violence. In doing so, I reframe discovery, which is often seen as a concept firmly rooted in the realm of poetics or rhetoric in Renaissance thought, as central to performance. In the introduction, I coin the term “theater of discovery” through a reading of the evocative graphite drawing by Adriaen Collaert, Americae Rectectio. Building upon this image, in Chapter One, I consider the dual nature of discovery as a process of “(un)making” in two plays: Lope de Vega’s El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón (1603) and Howard and Dryden’s The Indian Queen (1664). In Chapter Two, “Devising Discovery,” I transition from analyzing discovery as a theatrical concept to a theatrical device and technology. Namely, I examine Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687) and the stage properties employed in the play’s central discoveries, which reveal a concern towards mediation when accessing new worlds. In Chapter Three, “Discovering Spaces,” I think about the spatial logics of colonialism in two short plays, William Davenant’s The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659) and an untitled entremés by Cristóbal de Llerena (1588). Finally, in Chapter Four, “Inventing Indigeneity,” I purposely shift my language to shed the euphemism of discovery and recognize that the representations of indigenous characters in Spanish and English plays were, in fact, inventions of the European imagination. To rhetorically emulate my dissertation's key term, I return to where the project began – Lope’s El Nuevo Mundo – to “unmake” its representations of indigeneity. In applying a critical indigenous lens to “the theater of discovery,” I demonstrate how performance can both challenge and reify discovery in the European imagination.