From Sermon to Play: Literary Representations of ‘Turks’ in Renaissance England 1550–1625

Abstract

This article explores the figure of 'Turks' in a number of texts ranging from sermon to play. More specifically, it addresses a variety of available representations of 'Turks' and considers the ways in which literary critics and cultural historians have assessed their role and significance in early modern English writings. Whether as ambassadors, partners in trade, demonised infidels, potential military allies or as characters on the commercial stage, English writers invested 'Turks' with controversial and frequently contradictory meanings that were both real and imagined. As a result, this cultural 'other' emerges as a complex construct, an idea through which Englishmen and women could reflect on their own culture and which defies easy critical categorisation.

Anglo‐Muslim relations in 18th‐century literature and culture

“…(As a terminological side note, vague labels such as "the East" and "the West" oversimplify and homogenize the cultural diversity of large geographic areas, as O'Quinn indicates, but since "the West" and "Western civilization" are often still used both for ease of reference and for polemical purposes, it is useful to recall Huntington's (1996Huntington's ( , 2011 influential but deeply problematic identification of the "West" as the "cultural kinship" between the nations of Western Europe, North America, Australia, and a handful of other nations, 28 and map 1.3.) Thus, in the 18th century, the Ottoman Empire evolved from the early modern "scourge" of Christendom (McJannet, 2006;Schmuck, 2006;Toenjes, 2016) toward the 19th century stereotype of the "sick man of Europe" (see, however, De Bellaigue, 2001, 2017 for discussions of Western misperceptions of Islamic culture from 1798 forward). How was the shift represented?…”