A Companion to the Global Renaissance. Группа авторов

A Companion to the Global Renaissance - Группа авторов


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literary studies away from geography or ethnicity and toward religion as the principal category through which Europeans represented themselves and others during the period. Even as geo-ethnic categories of identity have been challenged, the methodology most associated with them, the study of images or representations of “the other,” has remained front and center. Superb scholarship has already been done on the representation of Islam in the English Renaissance, from Nabil Matar’s pathbreaking book Islam in Britain to Jonathan Burton’s Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama. So it is with some trepidation that I suggest Islam was not represented on the early modern English stage. Of course, as with studies of ethnicity, religious studies in the period take the failure of the image into account, especially in the case of the theater, for they are largely about misrepresentations in the sense of stereotypes and tendentious preconceptions, on and off stage. Islam may have been more profoundly misrepresented still, however, to the point of virtual absence despite the staging of putatively Muslim characters, beliefs, and rituals in a range of plays. How, in any case, can literature depict any religion as a category of identity? Is religion like ethnic or racial identity, or like the forms of belonging associated with realms, regions, or countries?

      The question of misrepresentation is rendered more complex still by the way in which representation itself was at stake between Christianity and Islam in the world at large. What the art historian Terry Allen has termed “aniconism, the nonuse of images” in Islamic culture was conditioned by theological beliefs (Allen, 20). Though dimly perceived and poorly understood by Christians, the avoidance of representation in Islam was, ironically, one of the few religious concepts to gain some measure of representation in nondramatic European writings on Muslims and the East. Monotheism, to which aniconism is intimately tied, and the importance of prophecy, prayer, and pilgrimage are others. Only rarely are these elements referred to in the drama of the period when it stages what purports to be Muslim belief and practice. Yet in Tamburlaine Parts I and II we do find a series of scenes that may have sprung from an abortive encounter with some traces of Islamic thought in medieval and early modern European learning.

      There is only one direct reference to Islam and visual representation in Marlowe’s works. Defeated and captive, the Turkish emperor Bajazeth bemoans his fate in Tamburlaine, Part I:

      Now will the Christian miscreants be glad,

      Ringing with joy their superstitious bells

      And making bonfires for my overthrow.

      But ere I die, those foul idolaters

      Shall make me bonfires with their filthy bones.

      (I: 3.3.236–240)

      Unlike the Persian Cosroe, Bajazeth is defined from his earliest appearance in the action by frequent appeals to “Mahomet.” And it is in this scene that Tamburlaine first refers to himself as the “scourge” of God and backhanded protector of the Christians (lines 44–50). These “miscreants” or misbelievers will rejoice for now at the Turk’s defeat, then. Their misbelief consists in foul idolatry, which many in the audience knew was the usual charge of Muslims against the Christians.

      Textual editors have been silent on the “superstitious bells” the Christians will ring. Superstition was so closely linked with idolatry that in 1678 Thomas Tenison wrote a substantial tract entitled Of Idolatry: A Discourse, in Which Is Endeavored a Declaration of, Its Distinction from Superstition. In the first chapter, Tenison cites sources on the lengthy association of the two terms and explains that the superstitious veneration of demons or heroes is only one branch of idol-worship (Tenison, 2–11). Jonathan Burton has shown that the term “bell-metals” was regularly applied to the quantities of lead, tin, and other metals exported to the Ottomans by the English Crown for use as canon and munitions. The trade in ordnance was much condemned in Catholic Europe, the more so as its raw materials were derived from the Tudor dissolution of the monasteries and the breaking of their furniture, statuary, and bells. But to English Protestants the bell-metal trade was a logical form of recycling, one that cemented Elizabeth’s delicate negotiations with the Turkish Porte at the expense of its traditional French and Venetian commercial allies. Burton shows how Elizabeth’s diplomatic correspondence with Murad III accentuated a unitarian tendency in Protestantism over against Catholic trinitarianism and the idolatry it was said to promote.3 This strategy was not known only to the elite: in his sermon, Hanmer


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