Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630 (review)

Daniel Vitkus's fascinating study of representations of cross-cultural contact on the early modern stage is timely for two reasons. First, his book intercedes in early modern and postcolonial studies to reframe our perceptions of English contact with the Other during this period. He boldly questions scholarly reliance on binaries such as Self/Other, West/East, colonizer/colonized, arguing that they tend to break down under historical scrutiny. He also persuasively shows that it is inaccurate to describe the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods as imperialist; rather, it was the lack of an empire that fueled English expansion into the Mediterranean. Second, Turning Turk proves interesting in the context of our own current political climate. The study offers a glimpse into the ways in which Islam, Judaism, and the Middle East (among other religious and geographical identities) were perceived and constructed by Western culture in this formative period and by such canonical authors as Shakespeare and Marlowe. It thus provides precedents for contemporary concerns, anxieties, and convictions.

In the first two chapters, Vitkus lays the groundwork for his argument through a provocative critique of New Historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt, Kim Hall, and Barbara Fuchs, who, he claims, have "largely repressed" the "material reality (i.e. failure) of England's early attempts at empire" (5). Vitkus distinguishes between what he sees as the proto-imperialist rhetoric of the period (1570 to 1630) and actual empire, which was not successfully established until the second half of the seventeenth century. Further, he goes on to claim that "the assumptions of postcolonial theory and criticism simply do not apply to an early modern Mediterranean context" (7). Rather, he develops a model for reading representations of alterity on the English stage that is predicated upon the fundamental instability of identities in the Mediterranean mercantile world. In his analysis of characters such as Tamburlaine, Othello, Barabas, and Shylock, Vitkus shows that the Self/Other binary collapses through the highly conflicted portrayals of these foreign figures. In The Jew of Malta, for instance, Barabas's identity is not fixed as an anti-Semitic stereotype; rather, he "has metamorphosed into a new incarnation: he is a much more slippery, self-fashioning devil, adapted to the conditions of the early modern marketplace" (186). His identity as the Other is not stable; rather, Vitkus claims, this Machiavellian merchant represents English fears about their own participation in Mediterranean trade.

The most interesting aspect of this book is Vitkus's exploration of the trope of conversion, or turning. This often refers to religious conversion, and it is intriguing to learn that many English citizens voluntarily converted to Islam during the period. This turning, as Vitkus points out in his chapter on Othello, was frequently figured in sexual terms, underscoring the construction of Islam in particular as a lascivious faith. But turning also meant transformation more generally, and the book ultimately makes the claim that through their participation in Mediterranean trade, the English were "turning Turk"; that is, they "were anxiously 'turning' into a more open commercial society" (163). Although the stage plays analyzed here relied upon anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic narratives and presented stereotypical characters such as the ruthless Turkish sultan and the Machiavellian Jewish merchant, Vitkus shows how these negative portrayals signal the anxieties that the English felt about conversion.

The third chapter, on Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays, is the weakest point in an overall excellent book. Often in this chapter the readings of the historical sources are clearer and more forceful than the analyses of the plays themselves. Here and in his chapter on Othello, Vitkus relies on the reader's knowledge of the plays and concentrates more on providing detailed readings of the early modern writings (such as Knolles's General Historie of the Turkes, written in 1603) that inform his theoretical argument. This chapter would benefit from a more extended treatment of the playtexts; nonetheless, it sets up some...