"Turn'd Turk": Islam and English drama, 1579--1624.
Item
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Title
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"Turn'd Turk": Islam and English drama, 1579--1624.
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Identifier
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AAI9946147
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identifier
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9946147
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Creator
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Burton, Jonathan H.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Barbara Bowen
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Date
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1999
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Religion, General | Theater
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Abstract
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In the period between 1579 and 1624 nearly sixty dramatic works featuring Islamic themes, characters, or settings were produced in England. Though not all of their Islamic references are specifically Ottoman, I am calling this group of works the "Turkish Plays" for two reasons. First, Islam and "Turkishness" were considered synonymous in early modern English parlance. Second, the plays' understanding of Islam is mediated by England's commercial and political connection with the Ottoman Empire. I offer dose readings of non-dramatic, archival sources pertaining to those relations, before bringing forward several rarely discussed plays and placing them alongside canonical works by Shakespeare and Marlowe. Rather than attempting to reconstruct an "authentic" Islamic subject to be later juxtaposed with "fictionalized" Muslims, this method intends to recover the Islam-related imagery and tropes that dominated the early modern social imaginary and pervaded the drama, regardless of their accuracy. I hope to establish relationships between works we traditionally consider Renaissance drama and the rarely discussed closet dramas and Lord Mayor's Day Pageants. This recovery and re-location of texts has four goals: First, it tries to illustrate the range of treatments of extra-European experiences, challenging the Manichean assumptions that underlie analyses of "The Renaissance Humanist and his Other." Second, it seeks to introduce religious difference into current discussions of otherness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Third, it attempts to demonstrate the importance of lesser known works by writers like Robert Daborne, Fulke Greville, John Fletcher, John Mason, Philip Massinger, and Thomas Middleton, illustrating how these authors participated in the transformation of English culture. Finally, in conjunction with my assertion of England's multiple configurations of Eastern otherness, it is intended to enable new and sometimes radical readings of familiar works like Tamburlaine, Jew of Malta, Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello. For if we recognize a greater complexity in English relations with the East, it follows that the numerous Islamic figures and locations in Tudor and Stuart drama can be read in more complex and provocative ways than has been allowed.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
