Abstract
In The White Castle, Orhan Pamuk’s novel about Renaissance go-betweens, the Turkish writer has the scientist from Florence and magician from Istanbul change identities, when their combined genius fails to provide the Sultan with the “incredible weapon” he needs to storm the ultimate fortress of the title.1 They spend the remainder of their lives inside each other’s customs, clothes and minds; both blaming their double for the futile obsession with those illusory weapons of mass destruction, on which they together wasted all the reason of the West and wisdom of the Orient. Back in Florence, the Muslim taken for the Christian, and author of “a stack of books describing his unbelievable adventures among the Turks” (p. 140), might have been “the Leonardo of the seventeenth century” (p. 142), it is often said, if he had not fallen into slavery at the primitive and superstitious hands of Islam. But in Istanbul the real Florentine—who ends the book installed as the Imperial Astrologer—is haunted by the recognition that:
I loved Him. I loved Him the way I loved that helpless, wretched ghost of my own self I saw in dreams, as if choking on the shame, rage, sinfulness and melancholy of that ghost, as if overcome with shame at the sight of the selfishness of a son of my own.
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Notes
Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, trans. Victoria Holbrook (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), pp. 98, 142–4.
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 1.
Andrew Vella, An Elizabethan-Ottoman Conspiracy (Malta: Royal University of Malta Press, 1972), p. 72; and see also “A Sixteenth-Century Elizabethan Merchant in Malta,” Melita Historica, 5:3 (1970), pp. 198–238.
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, rev. ed., trans. Siân Reynolds, abr. Richard Ollard (London: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 572.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 118–19.
Marjorie Garber, “‘Here’s Nothing Writ’: Scribe, Script, and Circumscription in Marlowe’s Plays,” in Christopher Marlowe, ed. Richard Wilson (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 30–53.
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 50.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge, 1955), 1.3.93.
Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 48–9.
Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), pp. 121–33.
Richard Halduyt, The Principal Naroigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation, 9 vols., ed. John Masefield (London: J.M. Dent, 1907), vol. 3, pp. 65–6.
For the rise of the trading factor, see T.S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), pp. 1–33.
Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 3–4.
See also B.E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), pp. 258–9.
See Ralph Davis, “England and the Mediterranean,” Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England, ed. F. J. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 117–37.
Derek Massarella, A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 54.
For the foundations of the East India Company, see also William Foster, England’s Quest of Eastern Trade (London: A.C. Black, 1933), pp. 144–54.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx and Anti-Semitism,” in Christopher Marlowe, ed. Richard Wilson (Harlow: Longman, 1999), p. 147.
D.F. Allen, “Attempts to Revive the Order of Malta in Stuart England,” Historical Journal, 33 (1990): 939–52, esp. 941; CSPF, August 1589–June 1590, p. 451.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. T.W. Craik (London: Ernest Benn, 1966), p. 37;
Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 90.
Cecil Roth, “The Jews of Malta,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 1929, pp. 187–251, esp. pp. 187 and 210.
Ibid. pp. 215 and 218. For the Maltese slave trade, see especially Braudel, The Mediterranean, p. 628; and Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970), chapter 5.
Quoted in Stephen Clissold, The Barbary Slaves (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977), p. 132.
Earle, Corsairs, pp. 75–6 and 87. For Jews as agents of slave redempdon, see Earle, Corsairs, p. 172; Clissold, The Barbary, p 105–6; Ellen Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. 59;
and Christopher Lloyd, English Corsairs on the Barbary Coast (London: Collins, 1981), pp. 116–17.
Frederick Boas, Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), p. 132;
Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 135–9;
David Katz, The Jews in the History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 65.
For the representation of the specifically Portuguese Jew on the Elizabethan stage, see also Ton Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 54–5.
Harold Pollins, Economic History of the Jews in England (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1982), p. 25.
Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 98, 100 and 106;
Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 73.
Richard Baines, “Concerning his [Marlowe’s] Damnable Judgement of Religion and Scorn of God’s Word,” rept. A.D. Wraight, In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A Pictorial Biography (London: Macdonald, 1965), pp. 308–9. For a commentary, see Jonathan Goldberg, “Sodomy and Society: The Case of Christopher Marlowe,” in Christopher Marlowe, ed. Wilson, pp. 54–61, esp. p. 57.
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 251; Katz, The Jews, pp. 112–14.
CSPV, p. 51; CSPF, July 1593–December 1594, p. 496. For the background to the Anglo-Ottomon treaty, see Brandon Beck, From the Rising of the Sun: English Images of the Ottomon Empire to 1715 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 30–1;
Lansing Collins, “Barton’s Audience in Istanbul,” History Today 25 (1975): 262–70;
A.L. Horniker, “William Harborne and the Beginning of Anglo-Turkish Diplomatic and Commercial Relations,” Journal of Modern History, 14 (1942): 301;
H.G. Rawlinson, “The Embassy of William Harborne to Constantinople,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 5 (1922): pp. 1–27;
S.A. Skilliter, William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–1582 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 23–75;
and Dorothy Vaughan, Europe and the Turk: A Pattern of Alliances, 1350–1700 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1954), pp. 167–9.
Hakluyt, The Principal, pp. 369–70. William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two, ed. A.R. Humphreys (London: Routledge, 1966), 5.2.48.
For the development of the stereotype, see Lucette Valensi, “The Making of a Political Paradigm: The Ottomon State and Oriental Despotism,” in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Anne Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 173–203.
Braudel, The Mediterranean, p. 261; Lisa Jardine, “Alien Intelligence: Mercantile Exchange and Knowledge Transactions in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 101.
Brenner, Merchants, pp. 62, 64–5 and 73; M. Epstein, The Early History of the Levant Company (London: Routledge, 1908), pp. 28–33;
A.C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London: Frederick Cass, 1935), pp. 22–3;
T.S. Willan, “Some Aspects of English Trade with the Levant in the Sixteenth Century,” English Historical Review 70 (1955): 399–410.
Thomas Nashe, “The Praise of the Red Herring,” The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald McKerrow, 4 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), vol. 3, p. 173.
Repr. in Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), vol. 3, pp. 226–8.
C.A. Patrides, “‘The Bloody and Cruel Turk’: the Background of a Renaissance Commonplace,” Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1963): 126–35, esp. 130.
See also Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: the Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958), chapter 10.
Shakespeare, Othello, ed. M.R. Ridley (London: Routledge, 1958), 5.2.354.
James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia, 1996), pp. 184–5.
Historic Manuscripts Commission: 9: Salisbury MSS, 19, pp. 473–4; rpt. in Edgar Samuel, “‘Sir Thomas Shirley’s Project of the Jews’— The Earliest Known Proposal for the Resettlement,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 24 (1974): 195–7.
See also David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 164–5.
William Empson, “Two Proper Crimes,” The Nation 163 (1946): 444–5.
CSPF, June 1591–April 1592, pp. 503–4. For the background to the Lopez prosecution, see P.M. Handover, The Second Cecil: The Rise to Power of Sir Robert Cecil, 1563–1604 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1959), pp. 111–20.
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© 2007 Goran V. Stanivukovic
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Wilson, R. (2007). Another Country: Marlowe and the Go-Between. 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_8
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