Timūr’s theatrical journey: Or, when did Tamburlaine become black?

Abstract

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.

The staging of William III's politics of peace with the Turks andThe Alcoran of Mahometin Nicholas Rowe'sTamerlane

“…Rowe's Tamerlane dramatizes two tropes of “easternness,” in Ballaster's terminology, of “attacks on priestcraft” and “critiques of absolutism.” Rowe's play offers a criticism of the hypocrisy of Dervise (the mufti ), who interprets Islam as an empire rather than a religion, and it presents an opposition to the absolutism of Bajazet. Linda McJannet traces the transformation of the trope of Timūr and Bayazid, from being “sometimes demonized in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,” to becoming “domesticated during the Restoration and eighteenth century,” and “only to be re‐vilified and reduced to parody in the nineteenth” (McJannet, 2016, 32). The domestication of Tamerlane/William III and Bajazet/Louis XIV, as reflected in Rowe's play, reveals the post‐Restoration dramatists' borrowings from the tropes of “easternness,” as a dramatic technique, to address domestic anxieties of foreign conspiracies against England and the ideals of the Glorious Revolution.…”

“…Modern scholarship has tackled briefly the staging of Islam in Rowe's Tamerlane , showing either the positive representation of Tamerlane as a Muslim character (McJannet, 2016, 38; O'Quinn, 2014, 640; Smith, 1975, 55) or as an example of implicit propaganda for William III's imperial project in Europe (Orr, 2001, 91; Wolff, 2016, 18). Bridget Orr argues that Rowe's Tamerlane represents the new imperial philosophy of William III and the Whigs:

Tamerlane is a particularly interesting text in the history of British imperial ideology because the parallel allows for a recognition of a specifically expansionist ambition in the English.

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Staging the Tories' Islamic Jihad against George I and the Whigs in Edward Young's The Revenge

“… 3 3 McJannet, tracing the theatrical adaptations of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great (1587), explains that: “While Timūr and Bayazid were larger than life and sometimes demonized in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they were domesticated during the Restoration and eighteenth century, only to be re‐vilified and reduced to parody in the nineteenth” (McJannet, 2016, 32). For instance, Alhawamdeh analyzes the characters of the Tangerines Caliban and Sycorax in Dryden‐Davenant's The Tempest or The Enchanted Island (1667), which adapts Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611), as “Muslim Moorish friends or foes and possible subjects of Charles II's English Tangier on the Barbary coast” (Alhawamdeh, 2021, 121). …”