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During the last decades, Daniel Vitkus, Nabil Matar, Matthew Dimmock, Jonathan Burton and Stephen Schmuck have demonstrated that the Islamic world and especially the Ottoman Empire were of more political and cultural importance to early modern England than has previously been acknowledged. In contrast to the heyday of Orientalism in Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries, early modern England encountered the powerful and expansive Ottoman Empire from a position of relative weakness. The political, economic and military connections between England and the Islamic world at the end of the 16th and at the beginning of the 17th century were tight, but also varying in scope and intensity, depending on the changing political interests of the ruling monarchs. After her excommunication in 1570, Elizabeth I established close economic and political ties with the Ottoman Empire and regarded the Ottoman emperor Murad III as an important ally in her war against Spain. In her correspondence with Murad III, the Queen even emphasised the anti-idolatrous religious affinity between Protestantism and Islam. When James I ascended the English throne and was committed to peace with Spain, he turned away from his predecessor’s alliances with the Ottoman Empire.
In many of his publications, Nabil Matar has emphasised the ongoing fascination which the Islamic world held for the early modern English population. He shows that this fascination was not only of a fictional and fantastic nature, but grounded in reality. In his book Islam in Britain, Matar writes that “the likelihood of an Englishman’s or Scotsman’s meeting a Muslim was higher than that of meeting a native American or a sub-Saharan African […]”. In this seminar, we will discuss early modern English representations of Islam and the “Turk” in sermons, pamphlets, travellers’ and prisoners’ reports, histories and especially in dramas because they offer an important perspective on representations of the Self and the Other before the beginning of the period of Orientalism proper. The texts selected for discussion show that early modern English representations of the Islamic Other were more ambiguous and fluid than in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. They were tendentious, hateful, often polemic and sometimes favourable, characterised by a blend of fear, admiration and imperial envy.
We will discuss the following dramas:
Christopher Marlowe: Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I & II (1587/88)
Thomas Kyd: The Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda (1588/1592-93)
Robert Greene: The tragical reign of Selimus, sometime Emperor of the Turks (1594)
Fulke Greville: Mustapha (1587-1609, with later revisions)
John Mason: The Turk (1609)
Robert Daborne: A Christian Turn’d Turk (1612)
Thomas Goffe: The Courageous Turk, or Amurath the First (1618)
Secondary literature will be provided at the beginning of the seminar. |
