Abstract
New experiences produce new forms. ‘It is no coincidence that the opening of the commercial playhouses in London in the 1570s coincided with the revival and expansion of the English overseas economy’, Daniel Vitkus writes, noting the emergence, too, of newly cosmopolitan types of drama.’ The strands of that cosmopolitanism are not all alike, however. While the successful Anglo-Ottoman trade was strongly felt in the forms, characters and attitudes of early modern drama, those suggestive material and economic realities simply do not obtain in the case of Persia during the period in question. Yet classical Persia still provided plots and possibilities for the stage. If, thanks to the work of scholars such as Vitkus, Jonathan Burton, Gerald MacLean and Matthew Dimmock we can now discuss the early modern genre of the ‘Turk’ or ‘Turkish’ play, a question begs itself: given the prevalence of Persians in early modern drama, is there also such a thing as a ‘Persian’ play?2 And if not, why not? This chapter explores the place of Persia in early modern drama, arguing for its distinctness (but not its dominance), and its accommodation and diffusion of the now quite divergent sources on Persia. What Renaissance drama more than romance or poetry shows is the breaking apart of the exemplary conception of the Persian empire, now into ‘high’ and ‘low’, élite and popular versions, less and less convincing as models for the English empire.
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Notes
Daniel Vitkus, ‘Adventuring Heroes in the Mediterranean: Mapping the Boundaries of Anglo-Islamic Exchange on the Early Modern Stage’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37.1 (2007): 75–95.
See also Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
See, for example, Jerry Brotton and Lisa Jardine, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion, 2000). Nabil Matar’s invaluable work in revealing the extent and variety of English contacts with the Muslim world, and his now famous observation that ‘Renaissance Britons were far more likely to meet or to have met a Muslim than a Jew or an Indian’ (Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 3)), has drawn some criticism for its rather static view of the Muslim on the early modern stage. See Burton, Traffic and Turning, pp. 20–1.
Niayesh, ‘Shakespeare’s Persians’, Shakespeare 4.2 (2008): 127–36 (pp. 130, 128).
See Vitkus, Turning Turk, pp. 1–24 (p. 23), 77–106; Lloyd Kermode, Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 4–5.
Niayesh, ‘Shakespeare’s Persians’, p. 134; Javad Ghatta, ‘Persian Icons, Shi’a Imams: Liminal Figures and Hybrid Persian Identities on the English Stage’, in Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, ed. Bernadette Andrea and Linda McJannet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 53–72.
See Jane Grogan, ‘“Headless Rome”: Titus Andronicus, Herodotus and Ancient Persia’, ELR 43.1 (2013): 30–61.
See Paolo Cherchi, ‘“My kingdome for a horse”’, Notes & Queries 46.2 (1999): 206–7.
Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 47.
See Jason Scott-Warren, ‘News, Sociability, and Book-Buying in Early Modern England: The Letters of Sir Thomas Cornwallis’, The Library 7.1 (2000): 377–98 (p. 392).
See Margaret Meserve, v Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 117–54.
Jonathan Burton, ‘Anglo-Ottoman Relations and the Image of the Turk in Tamburlaine’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2000): 125–56 (p. 125).
Emily Bartels and Matthew Dimmock also note Tamburlaine’s insistently Persian identity. See Bartels ‘The Double Vision of the East: Imperialist Self-Construction in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Part One’, Renaissance Drama 23 (1992): 3–24; Dimmock, ‘New Turkes’, pp. 138–41.
For a longer version of this argument about Persian Tamburlaine, see Jane Grogan, ‘“A warre … commodious”: Dramatizing Islamic Schism in and after Tamburlaine’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature 54 (2012): 45–78.
See Hutchings, ‘The “Turk” Phenomenon’, para 12, and Tom Rutter, ‘Marlovian Echoes in the Admiral’s Men Repertory: Alcazar, Stukely, Patient Grissil’, Shakespeare Bulletin 27.1 (2009): 270–38.
Alzada Tipton, ‘Caught between “virtue” and “memorie”: Providential and Political Historiography in Samuel Daniel’s The Civil Wars’, Huntington Library Quarterly 61.3 (2000): 325–43.
Kevin Curran, ‘Treasonous Silence: The Tragedie of Philotas and Legal Epistemology’, ELR 42.1 (2012): 58–89 (p. 58).
See also Hugh Gazzard, ‘“Those Graue Presentments of Antiquitie”: Samuel Daniel’s Philotas and the Earl of Essex’, Review of English Studies 51 (2000): 423–50 (p. 424).
On ‘functional ambiguity’ as a characteristic of early modern literature, see Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 18.
See Ian M. Green, Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 157–8.
For an opposing view in a slightly later period, see James Knowles, ‘“The Faction of the Flesh”: Orientalism and the Caroline Masque’, in The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era, ed. Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 111–37.
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© 2014 Jane Grogan
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Grogan, J. (2014). Staging Persia: ‘To ride in triumph through Persepolis’. In: The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549–1622. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318800_4
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