Abstract
In the summer of 1622 news of sensational events in Constantinople began to reach Western Europe. Christians divided by war rejoiced at reports that the Ottoman Empire was in chaos: defeat by the Poles at Hotin had led to disaffected Janissaries storming the Seraglio and overthrowing the sultan.1 Informed, well-connected observers such as England’s ambassador to Constantinople, Sir Thomas Roe, and pamphleteers anticipated there would be a lively appetite for this news; the title of one London pamphlet proclaims:
The Strangling and Death of the Great Turk, and his two Sons; with the strange Preservation and Deliverance of his Uncle Mustapha from Perishing in Prison, with Hunger and Thirst; the young Emperor, not three Days before, having so commanded. A wonderful Story, and the like never heard of in our modern Times; and yet, all to manifest the Glory and Providence of God, in the Preservation of Christendom in these troublesome Times. Printed this fifteenth July.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Bibliography
Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: the Market and the Theater in American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Anglo, Sydney, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1997).
Anon., The Strangling and Death of the Great Turk, and His Two Sons (London: by I. D. for Nicholas Bourne and Thomas Archer, 1622).
Babinger, Franz, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, ed. William C. Hickman, trans. Ralph Manheim (1959; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn, 1978).
Barbour, Richmond, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Barker, Francis and Peter Hulme, ‘Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the Discursive Con-Texts of The Tempest’, Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 191–205.
Bawcutt, N. W., ‘Evidence and Conjecture in Literary Scholarship: the Case of Sir John Astley Reconsidered’, English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), 333–46.
Bentley, G. E., The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–68).
Bon, Ottaviano, The Sultan’s Seraglio: an Intimate Portrait of Life at the Ottoman Court, ed. Godfrey Goodwin (London: Saqi, 1996).
Bromham, A. A. and Zara Bruzzi, ‘The Changeling’ and the Years of Crisis, 1619–1624: a Hieroglyph of Britain (London: Pinter, 1990).
Bruster, Douglas, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Burian, Orhan, ‘Interest of the English in Turkey as Reflected in English Literature of the Renaissance’, Oriens, 5 (1952), 202–29.
Carlell, Lodowick, Osmond the Great Turk, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Berkshire: Golden Cockerel, 1926).
Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923).
Chew, Samuel, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937).
Clare, Janet, ‘Art made tongue-tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2nd edn, 1999).
Dimmock, Matthew, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
Dutton, Richard, ‘Patronage, Politics, and the Master of the Revels, 1622–1640: the Case of Sir John Astley’, English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), 287–319.
Elam, Keir, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 1980).
Epstein, M., The Early History of the Levant Company (London: Routledge, 1908).
Eysturlid, Lee W., ‘“Where Everything is Weighed in the Scales of Material Interest”: Anglo-Turkish Trade, Piracy, and Diplomacy in the Mediterranean during the Jacobean Period’, Journal of European Economic History, 22 (1993), 613–25.
Goodwin, Godfrey, The Janissaries (London: Saqi, 1994).
Grosrichard, Alain, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (1979; London: Verso, 1998).
Halio, Jay, ‘Gloucester’s Blinding’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 43 (1992), 221–3.
Heinemann, Margot, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Hoenselaars, A. J., ‘The Elizabethans and the Turk at Constantinople’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 47 (1995), 29–42.
Hutchings, Mark (ed.), Three Jacobean ‘Turkish’ Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming).
Inalcik, Halil, The Ottoman Empire: the Classical Age1300–1600 (London: Phoenix, 1994).
Loomba, Ania, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Marlowe, Christopher, Tamburlaine, ed. J. S. Cunningham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981).
Matar, Nabil, Islam in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
— Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
McJannet, Linda, ‘Bringing in a Persian’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 12 (1999), 236–67.
Middleton, Thomas, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor, Thomas Middleton: Five Plays (London: Penguin, 1988).
Middleton, Thomas, Women Beware Women, ed. William C. Carroll (London: Black, 1994).
Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16/3 (1975), 6–18.
Nicol, Donald M. (ed. and tr.), On the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Peirce, Leslie P., The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Rice, Warner G., ‘Turk, Moor, and Persian in English Literature from 1550–1650, with Particular Reference to the Drama’ (unpub. PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1926).
Roe, Sir Thomas, The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe in His Embassy to the Ottoman Porte (London: G. Strahan, 1740).
Said, Edward, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; London: Penguin, 1991).
Shakespeare, William, King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Skilliter, Susan, William Harbome and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–1582 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Smith, David Nicol, ‘Johnson’s Irene’, Essays and Studies, 14 (1929), 35–53.
Tricomi, Albert H., Anticourt Drama in England, 1603–1642 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989).
Vitkus, Daniel (ed.), Three Turk Plays from Early Modem England (Columbia University Press, 2000).
Vitkus, Daniel, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Wann, Louis, ‘The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama’, Modem Philology, 12 (1915), 423–47.
Webster, John, The White Devil, ed. John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960).
White, Hayden, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 1–25.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2008 Mark Hutchings
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hutchings, M. (2008). The Stage Historicizes the Turk: Convention and Contradiction in the Turkish History Play. In: Grant, T., Ravelhofer, B. (eds) English Historical Drama, 1500–1660. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593268_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593268_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52503-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59326-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)