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  • Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of “the East”, 1576–1626
  • Ania Loomba
Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of “the East”, 1576–1626. By Richmond Barbour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Although colonialism has been central to the analysis of early modern Europe, literary and cultural critics have been slower to turn their gaze eastwards. In the 1980s, critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Hulme made the Americas central to the study of early colonial relations, and English literary critics for a generation after tended to privilege the ‘New World’. The dominant model of colonial relations that emerged from this scholarship was that of asymmetry between powerful Europeans and the natives whom they regarded as linguistically and culturally ‘naked’.1 Coincidentally, this model of colonial relations dovetailed with Edward Said’s influential study of the relations between Europeans and non-Europeans in a different era and in a different part of the world—Orientalism also dealt with the ways in which Europeans inscribed, silenced and represented those whom they had colonized, and it too inspired a large body of postcolonial critique. Not surprizingly, literary critics who have, over the past decade or so, begun to examine the contact between early modern Europe and the East have critically engaged both these bodies of work. They have found alternative models of cross-cultural contact in hitherto neglected literary criticism, such as Samuel Chew’s The Crescent and the Rose (Oxford University Press, 1937) which offered an account of English Renaissance literature’s obsession with Muslims; in medieval literature and history, via books like Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 1977) and in world-systems theorists such as Janet L. Abu-Lughod Before European Hegemony; The World System AD 1250–1350 ( Oxford University Press, 1989). As several recent books and articles have argued, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Asians were hardly Europe’s silent other, and nor was Europe’s encounter with Asia either new or startling for either party.2 Rather, European encounters with the East had a long and complex history, and early modern Europeans both feared and admired Eastern monarchies, most notably the Turks, even as they were desperate to gain a toehold in the great Asian trade circuits. The English especially were plagued by their own belatedness and ineffectuality in these attempts.

This is also the central argument of Richmond Barbour’s Before Orientalism, which examines assorted literary and cultural texts from early modern England—most notably, Richard Knolles’s massive and influential account of the Turkish empire, The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603); Christopher Marlowe’s blockbuster Tamburlaine the Great (1597); William Shakespeare’s rewriting of a classic cross-cultural encounter, Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7); various Jacobean masques and mayoral pageants including Ben Jonson’s famous The Masque of Blackness, (1605) which featured Queen Anne and her maidens in blackface; the travel writings of Thomas Coryate, England’s first ‘tourist’ in Asia ( 1612–1617); as well as documents pertaining to Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1615–18). All of these writings, Barbour shows, betray both English insularity and English insecurity vis-à-vis the East. Placing these texts within the contemporary contexts of travel, trade and the theatre, Barbour traces in English writings a growing rhetorical binarism between East and West, between Muslim/ Turk and Christian, and between the contemporary decay and hoary past of the Orient. Barbour explains the disjuncture between such rhetoric and the actual position of England by asking us ‘to distinguish early modern Europe’s strategic and economic relations with, from its domestic constructions of, Asia. Agents committed to sustained negotiations in Asia typically learned more plaint, polyvalent attitudes towards various ‘others’—including those Europeans who ‘turned Turk’—than did consumers of their adventures at home in England (5). Thus its is not surprising to find that writers who never left England, such as Knolles, were more binaristic in their thinking than those who, like Coryate and Roe, actually negotiated overseas travel, or that most travel writings were more open to cultural differences than most domestic theatricals which catered to the demands of a local audience...

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