Reviews of modern productions of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine often note a three-hundred-year hiatus between a recorded performance in 1641, just before the closing of the theatres, and Tyrone Guthrie’s revival at the Old Vic in 1951. While the statement is mostly true with respect to Marlowe’s play, Tamerlane or Timūr Lenk and the Ottoman emperor Bayazid I (Marlowe’s Bajazeth) had important theatrical incarnations in the 1700s before they declined into parody in the 1800s. When Marlowe’s play was revived in the modern era, the main characters reclaimed their dignity, but they also acquired markers of racial, ethnic, or religious otherness that had not been prominent earlier. Timūr’s (and Bayazid’s) varied theatrical representations illustrate the malleability of iconic cultural figures, the sometimes problematic emphasis on ethnic difference in modern theatrical practice, and the challenges and opportunities of cross-racial casting.
Early Modern English Drama and the Islamic World Islam and English Drama: A Critical History Though it may seem to be a recent phenomenon, scholarly interest in Islam and early modern English drama goes back almost a hundred years to Louis Wann's 'The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama' (1915) and Warner Grenelle Rice's 'Turk, Moor, and Persian in English Literature' (1927). 1 In its exhaustive scope, Rice's unpublished dissertation anticipates Samuel C. Chew's The Crescent and the Rose (1937), which is usually seen as the pioneering discussion of the topic in modern times. 2 The dominant concerns of these early critics were the historical accuracy (variously defined) and aesthetic merits of the plays in hand. Wann identified the historical sources used by the playwrights and judged that, while the sources themselves were often inaccurate, the dramatists achieved 'a much more accurate and dispassionate portrayal of oriental character than we are wont to [assume]'. 3 By contrast, both Rice and Chew were more likely to see the representations of Islamic characters (especially Moors) as examples of monstrous cultural stereotypes. In their view, the playwrights' adherence to their sources doomed rather than redeemed them, and their interventions were seen as usually making matters worse. 4 Rice argued that as a result Muslim characters are 'dreadful beyond belief ' and are therefore 'failures'-artistically and perhaps ideologically, though this category was not explicit in his analysis. 5 Chew likewise comments with mordant irony on the plays' excess of prejudice and lack of artistic merit. After summarizing the denouement of The Courageous Turk, he concludes: 'and the tragedy comes to an end-much to the reader's relief '. 6 Similarly, having noted that prefatory verses to Osmond the Great Turk stress the author's youth, Chew observes that the author 'needed whatever excuse could be offered for him'. 7
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