The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (28 page)

Of the more than sixty plays featuring Turks, Moors and Persians performed in London’s public theaters between 1576 and 1603, forty were staged between 1588 and 1599, more than ten of which acknowledge explicit debts to Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine
.
⁴²
The line between imitating Marlowe and exploiting the new fascination with the Islamic world became increasingly blurred as playwrights drew on a growing body of diplomatic, commercial and religious writings. Robert Greene, who had suggested that Marlowe was an atheist, now offered up his own play set in the east for the Queen’s Men.
The First Part of the Tragicall Reign of Selimus, Sometime Emperor of the Turkes, and Grandfather to Him that now Reigneth
(c. 1588–1590) was an explicit attempt to imitate
Tamburlaine
by envisaging a two-part play chronicling the life and reign of the Ottoman sultan Selim I.
⁴³
Selim was the first sultan to get his own play on the English stage. A combination of Tamburlaine (who is mentioned on three separate occasions) and Machiavelli’s prince, he is shown poisoning his father, Bayezid II, and murdering his brothers in pursuit of absolute power. Greene’s Selim has little interest in what he calls “the holy Prophet Mahomet,” the “sacred Alcoran” or “gods, religion, heaven and hell,” which he dismisses as “mere fictions” and “bugbears to keep the world in fear.”
⁴⁴
In keeping with medieval Christian stereotypes, Greene portrays him as a pagan drawn to idolatry. Selim buries his father at the “Temple of Mahomet” as Greene tries every theatrical trick to compete with
Tamburlaine
’s success, from exotic settings and epic battles to deathbed conversions, poisoning, strangling, the severing of one character’s hands and even a graphic eye-plucking scene that anticipates a similar moment in
King Lear
(1606). The play ends much like the first part of
Tamburlaine,
with “victorious Selim” preparing to march against the Egyptian sultan, as Greene’s Chorus angles for a sequel:

If this first part, gentles, do like you well,

The second part shall greater murthers tell.
⁴⁵

Unfortunately, it seems the audience did not like it well at all. Greene lacked Marlowe’s rhetorical flair: he put a murderous and unsympathetic Turk in Tamburlaine’s clothing, with none of his epic allure. There would be no second part.

Greene tried again with
Alphonsus, King of Aragon,
which purported to chronicle the life of Alfonso V, King of Aragon and Naples, and his defeat at the hands of a fictional Ottoman sultan, the bombastic Amurack. In a theatrical flourish designed to trump the burning of the Qur’an, the “God Mahomet” is brought onstage as a brass idol, “a brazen head set in the middle of the place behind the stage, out of the which cast flames of fire, drums rumble within.”
⁴⁶
Mahomet’s false prophecy leads to Amurack’s defeat at the hands of Alphonsus. The sultan offers his daughter Iphigina to the Spanish king, promising in a bizarre fantasy of Christians triumphing over the Ottomans that for her dowry he “shall possess the Turkish empery.”
⁴⁷

Many attempted to outdo Marlowe. They failed not because their audience’s appetite for the exotic had diminished, but because they were unable to reach beyond stereotypes and create believable characters. Writers like Thomas Dekker, Fulke Greville, John Day and William Haughton all tried, each one producing ever more overblown plays featuring despotic characters strutting, stamping, ranting and bellowing their way across the stage as they conquered and murdered their way to power. They wore turbans (also known as “Turkish caps”) or flowing robes, carried ostentatious scimitars and boasted elaborate “moustachios.” The result was an outlandish parade of histrionic orientalism whose affected performance has become an enduring characteristic of English theatrical tradition. This convention first developed when Marlowe’s “mighty line” was yoked to contemporary reports reaching London from merchants and travelers living and working throughout Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Persia and even India.
⁴⁸

But as Marlowe’s followers churned out ever more lurid imitations of
Tamburlaine,
the mercurial young playwright followed that work’s success with a complete change of direction: in 1589–1590 he wrote
The Jew of Malta
. While
Tamburlaine
was a recognizable figure from world history, this new play was an explosive and unprecedented leap of the imagination. There are no direct (or at least obvious) sources for the play. Its central and wholly unscrupulous character was taken from the Bible, where Matthew tells the story of how Barabbas, a violent mobster, was released from prison by Pilate instead of Jesus (Matthew 27:15–26). Marlowe’s Barabas is one of the most outrageously immoral characters in Elizabethan drama: a wealthy Jewish merchant who relishes the riches of trade and has no qualms about murdering those who threaten it. Out went the epic, restless geographical sweep of
Tamburlaine
and in came the insular setting of Malta, a Mediterranean island so apparently insignificant that Tamburlaine never even mentioned it in his thundering speeches of imperial conquest. Gone too was Tamburlaine’s mighty rhetoric and military ambition, replaced by a middle-aged Jew who first appears onstage counting his “infinite riches” and confessing that his people “come not to be kings.”
⁴⁹

Within two scenes the island’s Christian authorities confiscate Barabas’s wealth to settle the annual tribute demanded by the Ottomans. Barabas embarks on a gleeful rampage of deception and murder to recover his wealth. He buys a Turkish slave called Ithamore and forms a murderous alliance with him based on their shared religious identities. Barabas tells Ithamore, “Both circumcised, we hate Christians both.”
⁵⁰
He proceeds to poison his own daughter Abigail (as well as a convent of nuns) when she converts to Christianity and plays the Maltese Christians and the invading Ottoman army off against each other to ensure his own survival, before they both realize what he is up to and turn on him, boiling him alive in a cauldron as he rails against them:

had I but escap’d this stratagem

I would have brought confusion on you all,

Damn’d Christians, dogs, and Turkish infidels!
⁵¹

Marlowe’s play drew on recent events, from the unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565 to the
Bark Roe
incident of 1581 and the wider role of Jewish merchants as commercial intermediaries between Christian and Islamic interests. What interested him as a dramatist was not the mechanics of trade, but the deeper underlying issues of trust and betrayal, faith and apostasy, conversion and cultural exchange. These were problems that English merchants like Hogan, Harborne and Roberts had been struggling with for decades, but it took Marlowe’s genius to give them voice. Here was a play that put the three religions of the Book onstage, with each found to be more rapacious, duplicitous and hypocritical than the next. In a wonderful declaration of self-confessed villainy, Marlowe set Barabas up to revel in the prejudices of an Elizabethan audience:

As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights

And kill sick people groaning under walls;

Sometimes I go about and poison wells;

And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,

I am content to lose some of my crowns,

That I may, walking in my gallery,

See ’em go pinioned along by my door . . .

And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,

And tricks belonging unto brokery,

I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year,

And with young orphans planted hospitals,

And every moon made some or other mad,

And now and then one hang himself for grief,

Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll

How I with interest tormented him.
⁵²

Marlowe evokes every myth associated with anti-Semitism, focusing on the holy trinity of apostasy, murder and money. The pun on “interest” would not have been lost on his audience: Jewish “interest” was never far from the public imagination. Although Jews had been officially expelled from England in 1290, a small but significant community still lived in London.
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As he picks over his riches, Barabas declares:

Give me the merchants of the Indian mines,

That trade in metal of the purest mold;

The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks

Without control can pick his riches up,

And in his house heap pearl like pebble-stones,

Receive them free, and sell them by the weight.
⁵⁴

The rich and exotic world of imperial conquest comes to rest “as infinite riches in a little room.”
⁵⁵
In this play more than any other, Marlowe demonstrated how charismatic characters like Barabas could transcend established boundaries of morality, religion and ethnicity. Marlowe himself had little interest in the specific nature of Barabas’s Jewish faith, or Ithamore’s Islamic beliefs; he wanted to show that in many respects their duplicitous behavior (though perhaps not their appetite for murder) could be just as rapacious and unprincipled as that of his audience.

The Jew of Malta
was another great success, but Marlowe’s dominance was tragically cut short. On May 30, 1593, he was stabbed to death in a house in Deptford, ostensibly after a dispute concerning the settlement of a bill. The exact circumstances of his murder are shrouded in mystery; what cannot be doubted is that his death brought to an end the career of one of Elizabethan theater’s most promising talents.
⁵⁶
Marlowe’s genius was to take the fear, hypocrisy and greed surrounding Elizabethan England’s relations with the Islamic world and transmute them into electrifying theater. Conflict, doubt and anxiety always make for better drama than moral absolutism. Five extraordinarily creative years had forever altered the course of English theater. It was difficult to imagine that any of his imitators would ever manage to surpass his brilliance. But one man, born like Marlowe in 1564, had been quietly learning his stagecraft by observing his fellow playwright, absorbing his style and working out how he might take things in a new direction. His name was William Shakespeare.

8

Mahomet’s Dove

In his diary entries for the Rose Theatre’s spring season in 1592, Philip Henslowe noted that Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta
was a popular hit, performed on at least ten occasions, but its success was soon eclipsed by a new play called
Henry VI
. Henslowe recorded that the play’s first performance took place on March 3, 1592, and during the rest of the season it was performed on fifteen occasions, often on alternate days with
The Jew of Malta
.
¹
Today few people read Shakespeare’s earliest forays into English history, but during the first half of his career the three parts of
Henry VI,
written in rapid succession in the early 1590s, were enormously popular with audiences, offering a distinctive new style that challenged Marlowe’s theatrical supremacy.

Shakespeare did not try to compete with Marlowe by imitating his “high astounding terms” and exotic settings. Instead he looked closer to home, to the Plantagenets, the flawed line of medieval kings who preceded the Tudors. London’s commercial theater had never been secure enough to put recent English history onstage, let alone to humanize it by considering the vulnerabilities and frailties of weak kings and transforming them into tragic figures. Marlowe emphasized his characters’ relentless will to power. Shakespeare, by contrast, succeeded in making historic failures into figures of empathy, insight and pathos.

The first act of
Henry VI, Part 1
opens much as
Tamburlaine
ends, with the death of a fabled warrior—in this case, Henry V—with no obvious successor strong enough to fulfill his legacy.
²
What follows is a catalog of woe, as the infant king and his advisers prove powerless to prevent civil strife and the loss of French territories so valiantly conquered by his father. Central to the play are its portrayal of the French mystic and warrior Jeanne La Pucelle, known in Britain as Joan of Arc, and the death of the famous English warrior John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in a scene said to have caused the shedding of “the tears of ten thousand spectators” when the play was first performed.
³

In Act I, scene 2, the French dauphin Charles tries to raise the siege of Orleans but is beaten back by the English. He is then introduced to Joan, who,

by a vision sent to her from heaven,

Ordained is to raise this tedious siege

And drive the English forth the bounds of France.
⁴

Marlowe’s ghost was never far from Shakespeare’s early plays, and Joan describes herself as “by birth a shepherd’s daughter,” who is “black and swart.”
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Challenged to single combat to prove her worth, she wins, whereupon the heir to the French throne boldly chooses to make her the leader of the French army. Looking on this self-confessed visionary, Charles exclaims: