Abstract
Appended to the 1663 edition of The Siege of Rhodes, Davenant’s dedicatory epistle to the Earl of Clarendon makes an overt comparison between the fictive world of the play’s Mediterranean setting and the real world of the play’s production in London of the early Restoration which amounts to rather more than a playful conceit. As the playwright acknowledges, he has good cause to be grateful for the countenance of so powerful a patron since “Dramatic poetry meets with the same persecution now, from such who esteem themselves the most refin’d and civil, as it ever did from the Barbarous. And yet whilst those virtuous Enemies deny heroique Plays to the Gentry, they entertain the People with a Seditious Farce of their own counterfeit Gravity.” As the epistle makes clear, there is an inverse reciprocity to be drawn between the two worlds: whilst the Turkish sultan manifests a “civility & magnificence” that refutes his archetypal barbarism, those factious elements of contemporary London are charged with affecting a civility that belies their own barbarity. This pre-emptive defense indicates both the persistence of moral opposition to public theater as well as Davenant’s characteristic ability to align himself with the prevailing political wind. By the time of the appearance of the play’s 1663 edition, Davenant had capitalized upon his position as one of only two playwrights licensed to produce public theater whilst The Siege of Rhodes had established him as the first exponent of a strand of “heroic drama” which, taken by Dryden and his imitators, was set to dominate the English stage for the next twenty years.
Your name is so eminent in the Justice which you convey through all the different Members of this great Empire, that my Rhodians seem to enjoy a better Harbour in the Pacifigue Thames, than they had on the Mediterranean; and I have brought Solyman to be arraign’d at your Tribunal, where you are the Censor of his civility and magnificence.
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Notes
Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 496.
Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 496.
Conversely, in her study, Laura Brown emphasizes the supposed primitiveness of Davenant’s production. Arguing that the stylized nature of the action grows out of the physical conditions of its staging, Brown writes, “The play’s form in itself prescribes that distance, elevation, and stasis … The enactment of such a standard is inevitably episodic and static, a series of emblematic scenes that display rather than involve.” Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660–1760: An Essay in Generic History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 6.
Susan Wiseman’s reading of the play is an important basis for my own although, as I shall argue, the play’s representation of the Sultan does not depend upon the diminution of the perceived threat of the Ottoman Empire but a radical reappraisal of its notional relationship with Western Europe and England in particular. Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 153.
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Commonwealth, 1653, ed., Mary Anne Everett Green (London: H.M.S.O., 1878), pp. 157–8.
Of the Queen, Wiseman speculates that “the female figures in [Davenant’s] plays—such as Ianthe—may perhaps bear traces of his admiration of her” (Drama and Politics, p. 140), whilst Hedbäck asserts that her “activities during the first years of the Civil War parallel strikingly those of Davenant’s Ianthe.” Ann-Mari Hedbäck, The Siege of Rhodes: A Critical Edition (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia 14, 1973), p. xxxi.
Cromwell famously declined the crown (prompting comparisons with Richard III) and Protectorate government differed from Charles’s personal rule in several important ways, not least in how it saw itself. Nevertheless, Cromwell’s eventual acceptance of the “Humble Petition” in its revised form (May 25, 1657) did prompt criticism from both Royalists and Republicans alike. For a discussion of the “draft towards kingship” in the 1650s, see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 324.
Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 66.
The most recent biographer of the playwright is Mary Edmond, Rare Sir William Davenant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).
Of course, Davenant never held any such position in an official capacity. Nevertheless, it was reported that songs to the “victor” had accompanied his first piece of licensed theater in the 1650s, The First Days Entertainment, whilst the poet had also composed an epithalamium to Cromwell’s daughter upon the occasion of her marriage to Lord Falconbridge (entered in the Stationer’s Register for December 7, 1657). In this respect, Davenant was in good company—both Waller and Cowley published poetry in praise of Cromwell, whilst Dryden himself had contributed to a collection of verse Upon the Death of his late Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector of England and Scotland, and Ireland only to emerge as staunchly Loyalist in the very next year. Alfred Harbage, Sir William Davenant Poet Venturer 1606–1668 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935), p. 141.
John Cleveland, The Character of Mercurius Politicus (London, 1650), p. 4. The career of the mercurial Nedham is a good example of the degree to which the tenor of the times transformed public loyalties. For a discussion of Mercurius Politicus, see Joseph Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent: A Critical Biography of Marchamont Nedham, 1620–1678 (Lanham: University Press of America, 1980).
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© 2007 Goran V. Stanivukovic
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Birchwood, M. (2007). Turning to the Turk: Collaboration and Conversion in William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes . In: Stanivukovic, G.V. (eds) Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601840_12
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