The Stage Turk in Early Modern English Drama

with Ambereen Dadabhoy

hosted by Maryam Patton and Chris Gratien

| William Shakespeare's lifetime overlapped with the height of Ottoman prowess on the world stage, which is partly why so many Turkish characters graced the Elizabethan stage during the 16th and 17th centuries. As our guest Ambereen Dadabhoy explains, the representations of "Turks" and "Moors" in early modern English drama offer a window onto conceptions of race in Europe before the modern period. In this conversation, Dadabhoy shares her experience writing and teaching about race in early modern English literature, and we reflect on the value of Shakespeare for charting connections and transformations in conceptions of Muslim societies from Shakespeare's time to the present.

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William Shakespeare's lifetime overlapped with the height of Ottoman prowess on the world stage, which is partly why so many Turkish characters graced the Elizabethan stage during the 16th and 17th centuries. As our guest Ambereen Dadabhoy explains, the representations of "Turks" and "Moors" in early modern English drama offer a window onto conceptions of race in Europe before the modern period. In this conversation, Dadabhoy shares her experience writing and teaching about race in early modern English literature within the context of the US War on Terror, and we reflect on the value of Shakespeare for charting connections and transformations in conceptions of Muslim societies from Shakespeare's time to the present.

Contributor Bios

	Ambereen Dadabhoy is an Associate Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College. Her research and teaching focus on the representation of race and religion in early modern English drama. She's also interested in the Orientalist logics of the war on terror in its early modern and contemporary manifestations.
	Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region of the former Ottoman Empire from the 1850s until the 1950s.
	Maryam Patton is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program. She is interested in early modern cultural exchanges, and her dissertation studies cultures of time and temporal consciousness in the Eastern Mediterranean during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Credits

Episode No. 496
Release Date: 4 March 2021
Recording Location: Claremont, CA / Charlottesville, VA / Oxford, UK
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Music: John Sayles
Bibliography courtesy of Ambereen Dadabhoy

Further Listening

	Leslie Peirce	340 12/12/17	Hürrem Sultan or Roxelana, Empress of the East
	Jane Hathaway	369 8/5/18	The Sultan's Eunuch
	Fatih Parlak	460 4/19/20	Erken Modern Avrupa Oyunlarındaki Türk İmgesi
	Ayesha Ramachandran	223 1/30/16	Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe
	Wendell Marsh, Ann McDougall, Rabiat Akande	488 1/12/21	Islam at a Crossroads in West Africa The Making of the Islamic World
	Mohamad Ballan, Joshua White, Zoe Griffith, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, Neelam Khoja, Fahad Bishara, Maryam Patton, Jeannie Miller	489 1/16/21	The Early Modern Islamic World The Making of the Islamic World

Images

Frontispiece of The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603) by Richard Knolles. Source: British Library

Select Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bon, Ottaviano. The Sultan's Seraglio: An Intimate Portrait of Life at the Ottoman Court. Al Saqi, 1996.

De Busbecq, Ogier Ghislain. The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq: Seigneur of Bousbecque, Knight, Imperial Ambassador. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, London: 1603.

William Shakespeare, Henry IV part Two. Ed. René Weis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

William Shakespeare, Othello. Ed. Kim F. Hall. New York: Bedford/St Martins, 2007.

Massinger, Philip The Renegado. Ed. Michael Neill. London: Arden, 2010.

Marlowe, Christopher, Tamburlaine the Great. Part 1. Ed. Ernest Rhys, and Risa Stephanie Bear. RS Bear, 2007.

Kyd, Thomas. The tragedy of Soliman and Perseda. Lulu. com, 2002.

Secondary Sources

Dadabhoy, Ambereen. "The Moor of America: Approaching the Crisis of Race and Religion in the Renaissance and the Twenty-First Century." Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014. 123-140.

Dadabhoy, Ambereen. "Two Faced: The Problem of Othello’s Visage." Othello: The State of Play. London: Arden, 2014: 121-47.

Dadabhoy, Ambereen. "Skin in the Game: Teaching Race in Early Modern Literature." Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching. Vo.. 27.2, 2020.

Earle, Thomas Foster, et al., eds. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

El Hamel, Chouki. Black Morocco: a history of slavery, race, and Islam. No. 123. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Habib, Imtiaz H. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2008.

Hall, Kim F. Things of darkness: Economies of race and gender in early modern England. Cornell University Press, 1995.

Junne, George H. The Black Eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire: Networks of Power in the Court of the Sultan. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford University Press, 2002.

MacLean, Gerald, and Nabil Matar. Britain and the Islamic world, 1558-1713. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the age of discovery. Columbia University Press, 2000

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979.

Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800. Cambridge University Press, 2005.