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PREFACE
Since I began to study the Ottomans as depicted in early modern English plays and their sources, I have increasingly felt a connection between my academic concerns and the headlines. My first such experience occurred during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, as I was reading The Couragious Turke, a university play depicting the conquest of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Murad I.
The play dramatizes his victory at Kosovo in 1389 and his subsequent assassination by a wounded Serbian soldier, events to which Slobodan Milosevic frequently referred in his efforts to inflame Serbian Christians against Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. “So,” I exclaimed to myself, “that’s why they’re Muslim!” Apparently, the Ottoman presence in Eastern Europe had not loomed large in my college courses on European history, and I suspect that for most students since then the omission was not remedied until after September 11, 2001, if indeed it has been remedied at all. Another echo was sounded when, to the dismay of many observers, President George W. Bush responded to the attacks of September 11 by using the term “crusade.” I was also struck by the similarities between the martial rhetoric in histories and plays about the Turks, and the saber-rattling on both sides before the first Gulf War and before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.
In a sixteenthcentury English play about Selim I, Selim’s brother and rival for the throne instructs his captains to “Summon a parley to the citizens/ That they may hear the dreadful words I speak/ And die in thought before they come to blows.”! To anyone who watched CNN (or any network) in the days before the bombardment of Baghdad, Selim succinctly describes the goal of the rhetoric of “shock and awe.” A child of the Vietnam era, I am encountering for the first time in the American media a view of war and warriors analogous to that in Elizabethan conqueror plays. A thorough study of histories and plays about the Ottomans, I reasoned, was a worthy project in itself and might shed light on the discourse of our own day.
As I read the nearly forty extant plays and dramatic entertainments from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that feature specifically Ottoman (as opposed to Moorish or generically Muslim) characters, I found myself unsatisfied by the analysis of the “proto-Orientalist” attitudes that the texts were presumed to have reinforced in their various audiences.? Richmond Barbour, Jonathan Burton, Ivo Kamps, Jyotsna Singh, Nabil Matar, Daniel Vitkus, and others have helped modern readers distinguish early modern attitudes from the Orientalism so influentially defined and analyzed by Edward Said. Nonetheless, the prevailing view could still be summed up by Matar’s own assertion that in England, as in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, “the stereotype developed in literature” (specifically dramatic literature) and religious discourse “played the greatest role in shaping the anti-Muslim national consciousness”:
Government documents, prisoners’ depositions, and commercial exchanges show little racial, sexual, or moral stereotyping of the Muslims. . . . It was plays, masks, pageants, and other similar sources that developed in British culture the discourse about Muslim Otherness. . . . Eleazar and Othello [became] the defining literary rep-resentation of the “Moor,” and Bajazeth, Ithamore, and Amureth of the “Turk.”
It seemed to me then, as it does now, that the contribution (positive or negative) of dramatists to the English image of the Turk can best be assessed by looking at what they did with their sources. A comparison of the heroes of Shakespeare’s Othello or Marlowe’s 1, 2, Tamburlaine with the comparable figures in the sources of each play, I submit, does not support Matar’s provocative assertion. While I accept Ania Loomba’s dictum that “saving English literature” is a lost cause, I worry that in our scholarly need to generalize, to arrive at a “bottom line” about cultural matters, we may erase the evidence of contrary views and reify as natural and inevitable the very prejudices and ideological constructs we wish to dismantle. As historians have pointed out, before Milosevic could mobilize allegedly deep-seated and ineradicable animosities between Muslims and Christians in Bosnia and elsewhere, he had to silence or eliminate (by murder, imprisonment, and exile) Serbs who wished to live in peace with those of other religions and who had done so more or less successfully for generations. While Loomba herself and the other scholars listed above have done much to provide more nuanced accounts of western constructions of the east, there is significant work left to do.
I focus my investigation on English plays about Turkish history and their sources. In Turkish history plays, many or all of the characters are Turks, so there is inevitably a wider spectrum of representation than in a play like Muleasses, the Turke (1607) in which the “Turkish” character (an Jago-like villain) is an embittered alien in a western setting. Since the plays focus on specifically Turkish (rather than generically Muslim or ambiguously “Moorish”) themes, they illuminate a specific thread in western discourses of the east. Moreover, since these plays are based on extant historical sources, one can readily assess the dramatists’ specific interventions. A focus on history plays also complements the work of Jean E. Howard and others on plays about piracy and the Levant trade, such as A Christian Turnd Turke and The Renegado, the second genre in which Ottoman and generically Muslim themes appear.* Finally, history plays usually highlight the figure of the sultan as the embodiment of the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman culture, thus providing a convenient (though not exclusive) focus for analysis.
My initial hypothesis was that, given the relative infrequency with which the sultans “spoke” in the sources prior to the publication of Knolles’ Generall Historie of the Turkes in 1603, the need to invent dialogue for them in dramatic works might have permitted—even encouraged—playwrights to challenge the stereotypes present in histories and travel writing. In the event, my research revealed a more complicated picture. Not only were the practices of western historical writers more varied than I had supposed, but translations of eastern histories (works originating in Greek, Arabic, and Turkish) also played an important and hitherto unappreciated role. These texts complicated the versions of Ottoman history available to western readers and (paradoxically) modeled how the Ottomans’ words might be used against them.
Consequently, the present study analyzes the reception in England of eastern (and western) histories about the Ottomans and the use of dialogue in these works and in English plays about Ottoman history. The two phenomena may appear unrelated, but they are connected in several ways. The historical sources initially consisted of western scholars dialoguing with each other about the Ottomans. However, when western scholars began to translate Greek, Arabic, and Turkish histories, they entered into dialogue with their eastern counterparts (Orthodox and Muslim). Their prefaces grapple with the different view of events—and the world—contained in their sources, and their editorial practices reveal at least an initial willingness to let the other have his or her say. Consequently, the writing of Turkish history became less monologic in the general sense elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle. Second, while the preeminence of dialogue in drama distinguishes the plays from their sources, after mid-century, dialogue began to play an increasingly prominent role in narratives circulating about the Ottomans, and the speeches were sometimes drawn from eastern texts. Thus, the dialogue attributed to the sultan and other Ottoman notables was in part the product of the scholarly dialogue alluded to above. Moreover, during the period under consideration, it appears that the writing of popular history (as opposed to the archival projects of antiquarians like William Camden) became “narrativized”; that is, historians aimed increasingly to present real events with the vividness and completeness of a fictional work. While the narrative techniques of early modern histories do not exhibit the degree of polyphony that Bakhtin admired in the modern novel, their use of dialogue and commentary provides a fascinating index of this historiographical trend.
In an influential essay, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivack asked, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”° I propose to ask analogous but quite different questions about early modern representations of the Ottomans. The issue is not whether the sultan might have a voice, but in what way and to what effect his powerful, even fearsome voice—and by extension his deeds, his character, and the empire he governed—was represented in western historical discourse and drama, and to what extent his own chronicles were used to craft these representations. The chapters that follow seek to answer these questions.
A NOTE ON THE TRANSCRIPTION OF OTTOMAN PROPER NAMES AND OF EARLY MODERN TEXTS
In referring to the Ottoman sultans as historical figures, I will use the Romanized version of the Ottoman form of their names as found in Stanford Shaw’s History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (2 vols.. 1976-1977): Murad, Suleyman, Mehmed, and Bayazid. In citing European and English texts, I will use the names given them by the particular writer. Except for these proper names, I have silently modernized spelling and punctuation in extracts from all early modern texts. The Byzantine, Arabic, and Turkish works I discuss are necessarily cited in modern English translations, and canonical plays, such as Tamburlaine, are available in excellent modern editions. It seemed desirable that Fulke Greville, Richard Knolles, and other early modern writers should not appear more distant or quaint than Marlowe or Laonikos Chalkokondyles, whose history was written ca. 1470-1490. Where an element of the text is ambiguous or problematic, I have retained it and offered possible readings in brackets. For bibliographic reasons, however, in reproducing the titles of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English texts I have retained original spelling and capitalization but modernized typography (long s, u/v, and i/y/j).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In pursuing this project over almost ten years, I have incurred many debts that are a pleasure to acknowledge. Portions of chapters 4 and 5 appeared in a different form in English Literary Renaissance 36.3. I thank the editors for their kind permission to incorporate that material here. For sabbaticals during which I began and concluded my research, I wish to thank two department chairs, Bruce Herzberg and Maureen Goldman, and the members of the Bentley College Teaching and Scholarly Activities Committee. The librarians of the Houghton Library at Harvard University were unfailingly generous and knowledgeable. Many colleagues gave me useful feedback at the research seminars held during the annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America and at the Shakespearean Seminar at the Humanities Center at Harvard. I am particularly grateful to Jean E. Howard, Richmond Barbour, Suzanne Wofford, Edmund V. Campos, William Carroll, and Coppélia Kahn for timely comments and encouragement that meant more than they may have realized at the time. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Richmond Barbour, Jonathan Burton, and Bernadette Andrea generously shared prepublication versions of their work, and Marcia Folsom and Michelle Ephraim offered valuable scholarly advice and support. In addition, I am indebted to several colleagues and friends who read chapters of this book in draft form (and who may hardly recognize the revised versions thereof). A mentor and friend over many decades, G. Blakemore Evans read early drafts, as did Virginia Mason Vaughan, Jonathan Burton, Bernadette Andrea, Caroline Hibbard, and Jane Bachner. The reader for Palgrave Macmillan and Arthur F. Kinney and the editorial board of English Literary Renaissance were both generous and rigorous in their responses to the manuscript. I owe a debt of gratitude for all their comments and suggestions; shortcomings and errors that remain are entirely my own. Finally, I thank those closest to me, who honored my nonlinear creative process and tolerated my obliviousness to clocktime when thus engaged. To my daughters Lisa and Amanda Micheli, to Michael O’Shea and his daughters Jocelyn and Bethany, who all have creative projects of their own, this book is dedicated with love and admiration.
INTRODUCTION
SK —_
According to Rana Kabbani, author of a study of nineteenth-century travel narratives, “post-Crusader Europe would never wholly emerge from the antagonism [of] its ‘Holy Wars.’ ” As late as 1920, she reports, the French general Gourand, on arriving at the tomb of the famous Saracen leader in Damascus, “announced gloatingly, ‘Nous revoila, Saladin\’”! Edward Said once asserted that the roots of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalism can be traced to antiquity,” but critics since have challenged the existence of so sweeping and persistent a cultural binary. One author heatedly described Said’s project as “Oriental[ism]-in-reverse,”* while another argued that even Orientalism itself was not monolithic; rather, different “Orientalist modes were constructed in different times and places in Europe.”* Said himself later demonstrated that when a theory “travels” it is often “reduced, codified, and institutionalized,” especially when applied to social moments and texts other than those which gave rise to it,° and some have seen the reception of Orientalism itself as a “spectacular and depressing instance” of such “traveling theory.”° A number of scholars have shown that Old French chansons de geste and Italian Renaissance epics alike “had a long tradition of respect for certain Saracens” and conspicuously lack “a sense of European superiority over Turks and Arabs.”” Overall, scholars of the early modern period, while benefiting greatly from Said’s insights, have attempted to differentiate both the early modern historical context and its discourses from the Orientalism Said described.8
THE OTTOMANS AND EUROPE: CONQUEST, IDEOLOGY, AND COMMERCE
In the early modern period, the Ottoman Turks were the dominant imperial power in the Eastern Mediterranean and much of Eastern Europe.’ By the seventeenth century, they controlled Hungary, the Balkans, Greece, Istanbul and the Anatolian Peninsula, Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, the Arabian shore of the Red Sea, Egypt, and the North African littoral from Alexandria to the border of Morocco.
They were a European power even before Constantinople fell to Mehmed II in 1453. Murad I conquered parts of Thrace and moved his capitol to Hadrianople in 1369. He defeated the Serbs at Kosovo in 1389, and his son Bayazid I overcame a combined Christian army on the Danube in 1396. Ottoman powers prevailed again at Varna in 1444 and at the second battle at Kosovo in 1448. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmet I annexed Serbia (1454-1455) and took Morea from Venice (1458-1460).
Suleyman the Magnificent (reigned 1520-1566) led several successful European and Mediterranean campaigns. Belgrade was conquered in 1521, and Rhodes fell the next year. He was victorious at Mohacs in Hungary in 1527, and parts of Wallachia and Transylvania came under Ottoman suzerainty. Suleyman besieged Vienna in 1529 (without success), but his military and diplomatic strategies achieved a standoff with the Hapsburgs until Hungary, too, was annexed in 1541. The Turks took Cyprus in 1570, and a Christian fleet enjoyed a rare victory at Lepanto in 1571, but from 1575-1590, the sultans were chiefly engaged in the east, notably in a prolonged and bitter war with Persia. The empire experienced the first assassination of a reigning sultan in the early seventeenth century, followed by a brief revival under Murad IV (reigned 1623-1640). But after Mehmed IV’s unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683 and the defeat at Zenta, the treaty of Karlowitz (1699) effectively provided for the Ottoman withdrawal from Europe. The vestiges of Ottoman system ended only with the revolution of Kemal Ataturk in 1923 and the abolition of the Sultanate. In the early modern period, however, the Ottomans were seen as masters of a sophisticated and ably administrated empire. As Barbara and Charles Jelavich have remarked:
The negative opinion often held of Ottoman civilization is usually based on judgments made in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the state was in a period of obvious decline. In the 15th and 16th centuries, however, Ottoman institutions may have offered the Balkan Christian a better life than he had led previously.
For the early modern English reader, the Sultan might be “the Terror of the World,” but he had never been the “sick man of Europe.” During the Renaissance, learned opinion was divided on how Christendom should respond to its Islamic rivals in the east, particularly with respect to the morality of war against them. As Timothy Hampton observes, “Opinion varied . . . from the claim that the Turks must be wiped out through a new crusade, to the notion that they were a scourge sent by God to teach Christian Europe about its own sins.”!! In De bello Turcico (1530), Erasmus represented the Turks as sensualists capable of monstrous cruelty toward Christian captives, but in his Adagia (or Adages, 1515) he praised their piety: they are “to a great extent half-Christian, and probably nearer true Christianity than most of our own people.” Further, as Hampton points out, he repeats “this astonishing phrase” in the later work.!? Alberico Gentili, an expatriate scholar at Oxford, repeated the Christian humanist view of unprovoked war with the Turks, namely that men’s consciences cannot be forced, that Muslim and Christian communities alike are included in the societas gentium, and that the law of nations gives the Ottomans as clear a title to their dominions as Christian dynasties have to theirs. Were the Turk to keep the peace one could not legitimately oppose him, but, Gentili goes on, “when do the Turks act thus?”!3 Gentili’s complaint is not without foundation; like most imperial powers, the Ottoman Empire depended upon expansion. Conquest provided recruits (voluntary and involuntary) for the army and the bureaucracy, and it provided the land (preferably that of non-Muslims) with which to pay them.!* Ultimately, Gentili’s position is ambiguous: the Turks share a “common nature” with the English, but because of geopolitics and history they become an almost “natural enemy.”!®
While confrontation between east and west encouraged ideologies of difference, myths of common origins also wielded significant power. Although variously interpreted (and misinterpreted), the Bible views all peoples as descended from the sons of Noah.!° European Christians were conscious of drawing upon a long and still vital tradition of Eastern learning. They viewed the Fertile Crescent as the birthplace of many advances in human culture.!? The primacy of Arabic treatises in mathematics, medicine, and alchemical “science” was well recognized. Gower praises Avicenna in his poem “Upon the Philosopher’s Stone”; portraits of the father of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, frequently showed him in a turban, amid similarly turbaned Arab scientists.!8 Rosicrucian writings as well as alchemical treatises merged Arabic wisdom with Christian philosophy and theology. As Europe rediscovered classical works (thanks in large part to their preservation by the Arabs), ancient eastern history was “naturalized” and assimilated to the Renaissance imagination. Within the classical tradition, the east already had complex and contradictory meanings, ranging from the admiring portrait of Cyrus in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia to the Roman suspicion of Antony with his “Asiatic” habits and his liaison with Cleopatra.!? The ancients, too, had their myth of shared origin: the princess Europa, to whom Europe owes its name, was a Phoenician.?° Early modern Britain was proud, on the slim thread of imagined etymology, to trace the founding of Britain to Trojan “Brute,” who like Aeneas was supposed to have traveled west from the ruins of Troy in Asia Minor.
The east had primacy in universal history. It was the Holy Land of divine providence and the model of legitimate earthly empire. John Speed’s A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (1627), the earliest atlas compiled in English, gives “Asia the prerogative, as well for worth as time.” “Europe,” he explains,
shall not want her due, in her due place.... But in Asia did God himself speak his miraculous work of the Creation. There was the Church first collected; there was the Savior of the world born. . . . And if we should compare her to the rest, in that earthly glory of kingdoms, empires, and nations, which sounds fairest to men’s sense, she would still keep her rank.?!
The tradition of the so-called Four Monarchies, alluded to above, identified a succession of empires from the earliest times to the Christian era.?” Typically, the list included the Assyrian, the Persian, the Greco-Macedonian, and the Roman empires. According to this tradition, these “monarchies” were divinely sanctioned by God to provide order in a fallen world, and their excesses were sometimes justified as punishment for human sin. The Roman Empire was further seen as having provided the pax Romana into which Christ was born and under whose somewhat sheltering umbrella the Christian religion would take root and ultimately be adopted by the state. Thus, in aspiring to imperial status themselves, western kingdoms were emulating the east, as Rome had before them. For them, “empire” was not a dirty word. Even General Gourand’s words, quoted earlier, emphasize ancient rivalry rather than “gloating”; they convey that mixture of competitiveness and respect with which military leaders often speak of opponents they honor. “Nous revoila” (“Here we are again” or “We meet again”) stresses the shared “we” of mighty opposites, not the “I” of domination or victory (compare Julius Caesar’s first person emphasis: “Veni, vidi, vici”’).
Although military and political conflicts persisted, commerce often throve along the coastal cities and from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Kabbani asserts that between the Islamic conquest (ca. 675 CE) and the emergence of the Carolingian empire in 800 CE, “the Mediterranean gradually changed ... from being a channel of commercial and cultural intercourse into a barrier to movement of most sorts save the openly piratical”; consequently, “the East seemed more and more the enemy.”?? During the Crusades, certainly, this enmity became a violent reality, but the Crusades themselves were a major stimulus to east-west exchange. Art historians have traced the so-called Gothic arch to its Arabic origins. Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St. Paul’s, wrote that the Gothic style was really the “Saracen style: for those people wanted neither arts nor learning; and after we in the west had lost both, we borrowed again from them, out of their Arabic books.”** Highlighting portrait medals, tapestries, and equestrian art, Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton have shown that trade between Europe and the Ottomans created a shared imperial iconography as well as political and economic relationships.?°
In any event, during the Renaissance, more or less peaceful eastwest trade recommenced. In 1536, as the Ottoman armies clashed with Charles V in Hungary, Suleyman granted France the right to trade in Ottoman lands and required all other European merchants to seek its permission and protection. The French operated largely under French law and were granted other privileges. Elizabeth I recognized the benefits of alliance with the Ottomans, both to counter the power of Catholic Spain in the Mediterranean and to gain access to the Levant trade. In the late 1570s, she corresponded with Murad III, pointing out that she (like the Great Turk) was an enemy of “all kind of idolatries.”*° Formal diplomatic relations were established in 1581, including an English representative in Istanbul, trading privileges, and legal protection for English merchants in Turkish territories. The Levant Company received a base in Smyrna, and in 1583, the first English trading mission arrived in Aleppo. On several occasions, Elizabeth appealed to Murad for redress of grievances (such as the taking of a ship by pirates). In 1599, she dispatched craftsman Thomas Dallam to Istanbul with a fabulous mechanical organ as a present for Mehmed III. (Dallam’s diary survives, though it was not published till 1893.)
By 1595, the Levant Company had 15 ships furnished with 790 seamen engaged in trade with Alexandria, Cyprus, Chios, Sante, Venice, and Algiers and the numbers grew steadily.” Consequently, actual encounters between English people and Muslims, whether in the context of diplomacy, commerce, or captivity, were by no means infrequent. A Briton was far more likely to encounter a Muslim than a Native American or a sub-Saharan African.?® In the seventeenth century, Britons took up coffee-drinking in establishments frequently dubbed “the Turk’s Head” and adorned with the bust of Murad IV (who ironically had opposed coffee-drinking and closed coffee houses in his dominions).?? In 1589, Richard Hakluyt defended the Levant trade but noted ironically that several imported products, such as apples, wheat, barley and rye, were already considered “English,” and, in a stunning reminder of the transferability of symbols as well as commodities, Mary C. Fuller points out that the English national flower, the “damascene” or damask rose, is originally from Damascus.*” Symbols of identity and difference often point to the historical facts of exchange, appropriation, and mingled roots.
In restoring to ourselves this important aspect of early modern cultural and political history, we may allow our own excitement at the discovery to exaggerate the sense of western “anxiety” or “panic” regarding Islam or the Ottoman Empire. As Robert Boerth put it, “troubled by internal conflicts and disunity and in search of a coherent cultural identity . . . [Europeans] saw in the Turkish Empire a model to emulate as well as an enemy to be kept at bay.”*! English newsbooks of the period do not portray the Turks more negatively, or in substantially different terms, than Catholic adversaries.** Alarm at Ottoman expansion was frequently expressed by writers (notably religious polemicists) for whom it was either a genuine concern or a useful rhetorical strategy. For Roman Catholic writers, the Ottoman conquest of “proud Byzantium,” for example, was cited as “proof of God’s vengeance against schismatics,” and thus implied a similar deserved fate for Protestants.** Turning the tables, Protestant writers blamed the fall of Constantinople on the perfidy of the Pope and Catholic powers, whose failure to aid the Byzantine Christians illustrated their corruption and apostasy from the true Church. But, as suggested above, diplomatic and trade relations grew despite military hostilities—witness the establishing of diplomatic relations with the Porte and the founding of the Levant Company in 1581, a mere decade after the Battle of Lepanto. The keynote of English attitudes toward the Ottomans was pragmatic ambivalence not ideological consistency. As the Turkish scholar Stiheyla Artemel observed, English writers “adopted different attitudes, according to the circumstances and the demands of the work at hand” and drew on contradictory “attitudes and traditions which very often existed side by side.” ** In addition to being a cause for indignation and outrage, the Ottoman pressure on Europe and particularly Catholic Europe was for English Protestants, first, a fact of life, second, a welcome source of diplomatic leverage and economic opportunity, and, third, a rich vein for self-criticism.
DIALOGUE AND POLYPHONY IN DRAMA AND NARRATIVE
With this historical context in mind, and drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle, I will take a dialogic approach to western historical discourse about the Ottomans in the sixteenth century. Broadly put, dialogism asserts the shared, interactive, and unfinalizable nature of language, and it posits particular, embodied utterances (not a language system) as the locus of all meaningful communication. It distinguishes between predominantly monologic and dialogic (or polyphonic) utterances and genres, and it privileges the latter. I will focus on dialogue in two senses: as a mode of literary representation and as a process of scholarly and cross-cultural exchange. As a mode of literary representation, dialogue and “reported speech” are the essence of drama and a staple of narrative works. Although speeches attributed to the Ottomans in plays and histories are my primary concern, I am also interested in the scholarly, cross-cultural dialogue that arises from the translation and circulation of texts about (and ultimately by) the Turks and other eastern peoples. This kind of dialogue occurs between author/translator and reader, between a translator and his text, and between one text and another.
Dialogue and the Dialogic in Drama
In its simplest literary sense, dialogue is an exchange of words between two speakers, though I will broaden the term to include set speeches and direct (or indirect) quotations in which the interlocutor’s response, if any, may not be represented. Dialogue is, of course, the defining medium of drama. As a rule, dramatic action and speech unfold in the here and now, unmediated by any extra-dramatic narrative voice.** Technically speaking, a character (even an Ottoman Sultan) addresses the spectator or reader on the same ontological footing as any other member of the dramatis personae. People may bring ethnic or social stereotypes to bear on their viewing or reading, and stock types may invite stock reactions, but as far as the play itself is concerned, each character has equal (direct) access to the audience. If a playwright wishes to influence audience reaction to a character, he or she may do so through choruses and other characters’ comments or reactions, but these voices do not have, a priori, any greater authority than those they comment upon. Audience members must evaluate the claims of each character based on his or her words and actions, on their assessment of motives, and so on. Even an abstract, extra-dramatic character such as Time in The Winter’s Tale or the Chorus in Henry V lacks the authority that may be exercised by the implied author or the narrator of a novel or a history. A chorus contributes to the voices of the play, but it does not control them.
In arguing that an early modern drama might be dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense, I extend Bakhtin’s concepts and insights further than he was prepared to do. Although he emphasized the dialogic nature of all language, he regarded polyphony as the distinguishing feature of the modern novel and genres influenced by it. His last writings soften this view somewhat, but for the most part he viewed dialogue in classical plays and earlier forms of narrative as inert and monologic.*° Since drama lacks a narrator whose language embraces that of the characters, he argued, it cannot achieve polyphony; the speeches of the characters simply follow one another without true dialogic interpenetration or mutual modification.*” Bakhtin celebrated heteroglossia, the incorporation of the dialects of different regions, classes, and professions, as one ingredient of a polyphony, but, he maintained, if the author fails to call attention to a character’s dialect or use of jargon in and of itself, the effect is still monologic.** For Bakhtin, the presence of dialogue or heteroglossia alone was insufficient to make a text dialogic; the different voices must somehow be registered, digested, and commented upon, implicitly or explicitly, by an overarching sensibility, by the narrator or (I infer) by the characters themselves. If the speakers simply talk at one another, a truly dialogic exchange has not occurred.
Nonetheless, Bakhtin’s theories seem congenial to the analysis of drama and especially early modern English drama. Bakhtin insisted that true dialogue required embodied speech, not abstract exercises in logic: “judgments must be embodied, if a dialogical relationship is to arise between them and towards them.”*? By guaranteeing that all views expressed in a work will be “embodied,” spoken by a particular person in a particular situation, the drama would seem the prime genre for dialogic exchange. In addition, speeches in good plays do not merely “follow” one another. In the opening scene of King Lear, for example, one feels the intense circulation and exchange of verbal and emotional energy as the three daughters listen to each other, two trying to anticipate or outdo what the other might say; the third confiding her disgust in asides and steadfastly insisting on her “Nothing,” even when her father ominously echoes her word (“Nothing will come of nothing.”). In act 3 scene 3 of Othello, the hero is ensnared by Iago’s ability to “dialogue” with Othello’s unspoken fears about his marriage and to adopt the language of virtue, loyalty, and moderation as if he believed it. Not all plays based on Turkish history display such dialogic mastery, but the Shakespearean examples demonstrate that drama is far from incapable of the effects Bakhtin admired in the modern novel.*°
In addition, early modern dramatic conventions seem designed to set up dialogic relations between character/actor and the audience. The speaker of a soliloquy resembles a narrator addressing the reader, with the audience positioned as “superaddressee” (Bakhtin’s ideal listener). He steps back from the action and represents himself and often comments on the words and motives of others. By definition, remarks delivered “aside” provide a verbal channel for a “sideways glance” between character and audience. In King Lear, Edmund’s soliloquies adopt and parody the language of orthodoxy and superstition (“fine word ‘legitimate,’ ” “O, these eclipses do portend these divisions!” ). Hamlet similarly echoes, analyzes, and satirizes the language(s) and worldviews of other characters. In many of his speeches, whether dialogue, aside, or soliloquy, one can find the “sideways glance,” the “invisible quotation marks,” and the passionate self-consciousness that Bakhtin admired in Pushkin and Dostoevsky. From mordant puns (“a little more than kin and less than kind”), to oblique allusions (“Jeptha had a daughter”), to mockery of Osric’s dueling jargon (“Is “t not possible to understand in another tongue?”), Hamlet’s speech regularly displays the hallmarks of Bakhtinian polyphony. As for heteroglossia, one could point to the satiric display of professional and religious jargon in Jonson’s The Alchemist (or any Jonsonian comedy) and to the language of Shakespeare’s bumpkins, Irishmen, and Welshman, to whose dialects and social sensitivities they and others call attention (consider Captain Macmorris in Henry V: “Of my nation? What ish my nation?”).
Bakhtin’s views notwithstanding, most students of drama take it as a given that the genre is polyphonic, dependent upon clashing perspectives for its energy, and permitting the expression of views that the playwright may admire or abhor. That this notion is not merely a modern one can be seen in Thomas Newton’s preface to his translation of Seneca. Newton criticizes those who would ascribe to Seneca the views of his (evil) characters. While “it is by some squeamish Areopagites surmised that... these tragedies... cannot be digested without great danger of infection,” the reader must consider “why, where, and by what manner of persons, such sentences are pronounced”; such speeches, he asserts, cannot “at any hand be thought and deemed the direct meaning of Seneca himself, whose whole writings . . . are so far from countenancing vice” that a more moral author cannot be found.
Newton believes that dramatic dialogue is genuinely dialogic and that it is up to the readers to sort out the truth of the matter themselves. As Bakhtin did in the case of the novel, Newton locates the author’s view not in the words of any one character, but in the design of the whole work, as he understands it.
Although I disagree with Bakhtin’s comments on drama and premodern narratives, I will rely on his insights about embodied speech and polyphony as I investigate early modern texts about the Turks.*” I will also employ conventional rhetorical analysis (attention to voice and address, the use of particular tropes) and draw on recent work on narrativity and the writing of history.
Dialogue, History, and Narrativity
Whereas dialogue is essential to drama, in narrative, it is a secondary element: “a narrating voice of some kind” subordinates or assimilates “dialogue and scene” to the act of narration.** Narrative theory (or narratology) is generally concerned with fictional genres,** but it can also illuminate the literary aspects of nonfiction narratives, such as histories and travel writing. Summarizing the “linguistic turn” in the philosophy of history, Hans Kellner suggests that older positivist views of history have been “joined, if not supplanted, by a focus on the historical work as a whole vision which draws its meaning from a plot and its authority from a voice.”*° Going further, Hayden White surveys three approaches to writing history and concludes that the “historian” (as opposed to the “annalist” or “chronicler” ) resembles a narrator in a fundamental sense: whereas the annalist may simply list events (seemingly randomly) as they occurred in God’s good time and the chronicler may organize the events of a particular reign without reference to any overarching narrative or sense of closure, the historian is expected to “narrativize” history, to display real events with “the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary,” and to assess their moral significance.*° Kellner’s and White’s insights suggest that a history can and should be analyzed for its narrative strategies as well as for its factual content (if such a category be granted). In discussing nonfiction narratives about the Turks, I will attend closely to the ethos and rhetoric of the narrator, as well as to the tales he has to tell. This ethos may be constructed in the apparatus as well as in the body of the text: prefaces, marginalia, and endnotes are powerful sites for authorial commentary.
Although the goals of “coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure” and the emphasis on “moral significance” have been rejected by some historians in our own time, they were embraced (if not always achieved) by early modern historians. For them, moral significance was at the heart of the enterprise. In collections of historical anecdotes, the explicit purpose was to demonstrate a moral truth, as the titles of George Whetstone’s The English Myrror Wherein al estates may behold the Conquests of Envy (1586) and Thomas Beard’s The Theatre of God’s Judgement (1597) clearly show. Full-length histories, too, were often unified by a religious or moral subtext.*” Paraphrasing, Cicero, Peter Ashton, translator of an Italian history of the Ottomans, wrote: “An history is the witness of times, the glass of truth, the keeper of remembrance, the guide of our lives, and a messenger and tidings-teller of all antiquity.”*® Historians like Machiavelli and Perondinus, who followed classical models, saw primarily secular forces (fortune and pirtw) at work in human events while the Providential strain remained strong in the works of John Foxe, Richard Knolles, and others. My survey of histories of the Turks suggests that, whether secular or religious in their emphasis, the writers increasingly sought to produce the kind of vivid, narrativized account that White describes.
One technique for doing so was to include set speeches, dialogue, and memorable sayings. By representing the very words of historical figures, a historian increases verisimilitude and persuasiveness: he positions the reader as an aural witness to events. Further, as in drama, dialogue in a narrative “allows an author to reveal a wider range of ideas, emotions, and perspectives that would be possible with a single voice.”*? At the same time, dialogue and “reported speech” exemplify “the politics of quotations,” the question of “how much of the other’s meaning I will permit to get through when I surround his words with my own.”°° Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, a work once attributed to Bakhtin but now generally attributed to Valentin Voloshinov, a member of his circle, contains an insightful discussion of reported speech.®! Voloshinov affirms that while dialogue “in the narrow sense” is only one form of “verbal interaction” it is “a very important” one.” Like Bakhtin, he distinguishes the “linear” handling of reported speech (preserving a quotation’s integrity with quotation marks or other clear boundaries) from a more “pictorial” treatment (paraphrasing, fragmenting, digesting, or indirectly representing it, as the narrator of a polyphonic novel might do).°? He acknowledges that the linear mode (the one most often encountered in the histories I will discuss) may result in “inert” or monologic reporting, but he also insists that it.
provides “wide opportunity for the retorting and commenting tendencies of authorial speech.”*4
Drawing on these concepts, I hope to show that histories and utilitarian works on the Turks, as well as popular plays and closet dramas, engage in imaginative dialogue with Ottoman figures and Ottoman culture to a significant degree. A prime factor in this engagement was the translation of continental and eventually eastern sources about the Turks and their dissemination in England. I view these translations as instances of scholarly dialogue, initially among western Europeans, but ultimately between eastern and western writers.
Translation as Dialogue
For most of the sixteenth century (and indeed up to our own day), works available in Western Europe necessarily represent the Ottomans from the outside. Few Europeans knew Ottoman Turkish or could read the Arabic script in which it was written. Turkish treatises were not printed,°° and official documents would not have been accessible to outsiders.°° For information about the Turks, western readers had to rely upon works by other Europeans: ethnographies, newsbooks, learned histories, and the accounts of former captives, private travelers, and diplomats, who drew on their experiences and on the knowledge of native informants, often mingling fact and fantasy.” Consequently, in most of these texts one finds westerners dialoguing with each other about the Turks, initially in Latin, but eventually via various vernacular translations. While I will compare the front matter of the sources and the translations, it is beyond the scope of this book to compare the two texts word for word. However, to the extent that the English translations reflect a specific sensibility, they are more, not less, useful as an index of English views of the Ottomans. Recent work in translation theory views the influence of culture on translation not as a pitfall to be avoided but as a phenomenon at the heart of the enterprise, to be studied in its own right.°®
At mid-century, some new sources about the Ottomans became available. In 1556, Conrad Clauser translated a Byzantine account of the fall of Constantinople into Latin; a French translation appeared in 1577. In 1588, extended excerpts from a five-volume Turkish history were published, also in Latin. An allegedly Arabic life of Timur (including his encounter with Bayazid I) appeared in French in 1595 and in English in 1597. Ahmad ibn Muhammed ibn Arabshah’s Timur Nameh was published in Arabic, with a Latin preface, in 1636 and in French twenty-two years later. A translator is, by definition, engaged in cross-cultural dialogue, mediating between (as the theorists put it) “the source language/original” and the “target language/ receptor.”°” However imperfect, a translation is a first step toward hearing the voice and glimpsing the perspective of a cultural other. While one must not mistake the translation for the thing itself, and while the reception of that voice and perspective is always problematic (issues that I will take up in more detail in chapter 4), these translations were Europeans’ first opportunity to read accounts of the Turks by Orthodox and Islamic writers.°° Consequently, Arab, Byzantine, and Turkish historical perspectives became available to educated western readers, and western scholars entered into dialogue with the Turks and other Muslims as well as dialoguing about them.
As it happens, extended quotation of the sultans—whether invented or purportedly historical—was relatively rare in the continental histories and anecdotal collections that circulated in English before mid-century, but the eastern sources are full of episodes in which the sultan and his generals spoke at length. They thus provided many examples of dialogue and set speeches—the other sense of “dialogue” with which I am concerned—that westerners could read and incorporate into their own works.
THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK
The chapters that follow are organized both chronologically and thematically. I seek to trace the translation history of continental and eastern works about the Ottomans in England from the 1540’s through the publication of Richard Knolles’ Generall Historie of the Turkes in 1603. However, several works I discuss (such as Greville’s Mustapha) have afterlives, so I have carried the discussion past 1603 when it seemed useful to do so. Thematically, the book has two movements. Chapters 1-3 trace the use of dialogue and authorial commentary in continental sources circulated in England and culminate in a detailed comparison of the narrative and dramatic treatments of the story of Timur and Bayazid, with an emphasis on Marlowe’s innovations in 1,2 Tamburlaine. Chapters 4—6 trace the transmission of Byzantine, Arabic, and Turkish histories and their influence on Knolles’ Generall Historie and analyze representations of Suleyman and his son Mustapha in narrative and drama.
Before turning to particular works, chapter 1 historicizes the “raging Turk,” a common trope in early modern commentaries, and explores early modern practice with regard to direct, indirect, and “narratized” speeches, previewing the subtle effects possible in each mode. Chapter 2 examines continental histories of the Ottomans made available to English readers during the sixteenth century. The authors’ and translators’ prefaces provide a useful index of English attitudes towards the Turks, and the texts themselves illustrate the uses of dialogue in these genres. Chapter 3 considers Marlowe’s Turks. It compares the representation of Bayazid I in continental histories and in 1, 2 Tamburlaine, and it considers other dramatic representations of the sultan, including Selim Calymath in The Jew of Malta, up to 1600.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the influence of Greek, Arabic, and Turkish histories that became available in the latter decades of the sixteenth century. In chapter 4, I analyze how the disseminators of the Latin editions viewed their authors and the uncomfortable “truths” they offered, and I consider the interventions of later vernacular translators of these texts. Chapter 5 examines Knolles’ landmark Generall Historie for its portrayal of Bayazid I and for its explicit citing of “the Turks’ own chronicles,” which I take to be the historiographical equivalent of letting the sultan speak. I trace Knolles’ effort to balance “eastern” material with Christian commentary, and I speculate that the eastern versions of the story of Timur and Bayazid may have suggested how to use the Turks’ own chronicles against them. Chapter 6 compares the story of Suleyman and Mustapha in closet dramas and in their sources to show how the dramatists increasingly mitigate the sultan’s culpability. The epilogue glances at the first direct English translation of a Turkish history, William Seaman’s The Reign of Sultan Orchan (1652), a text that both contrasts with and foreshadows the later Orientalism described by Said and others.
My goal throughout is to recognize the moments at which western writers enter into dialogue with Ottoman civilization and construct more complicated images of the east. Early modern writers have been criticized for circulating and giving credence to ideas that were later used to justify imperialism, but they must also be credited with an imaginative engagement with others—however ambivalent—that was silenced or overwritten as England moved toward empire. Their eagerness to learn about the Ottomans and (if only imaginatively) to hear the sultan speak can resonate with the effort to repudiate the remnants of Orientalism in our own day and can encourage individuals to explore its lingering effects with a critical eye. I hope that this study may contribute, if only in a small way, to that goal.
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