Turning Turk: Muslims, Moors, and Renegades on the Early English Stage (I) (Pre-1800)

People tend to think that popular fears about youth converting to Islam in predominantly Christian countries is a contemporary phenomenon, but the threat and seduction of Islamic power—and the specter of “turning Turk”—loomed large in the early English imagination, and was dramatized in over a dozen Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. In this course we will study the most significant of these plays together with critical and historical readings that reveal the full extent of English encounters with the Ottoman empire and the Arab world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with attention to the construction of race, ethnicity, and national identity. Readings will include Peele, Greene, Daborne, Massinger, Heywood, Dekker, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, among others. 3 hrs. sem. (Diversity)/