Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East 1570-1626 (review)

In Before Orientalism, Richmond Barbour offers us rich insights into manifestations of theatricality in selected texts and contexts that relate England to the 'East': Richard Knolles's Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603); Marlowe's Tamburlaine; Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra; selected royal spectacles and civic entertainments (mostly Jacobean); and the travels and writings of Thomas Coryate. Moving beyond a typically Eurocentric perspective on Renaissance England, Barbour takes us on a journey from London's spectacles of the 'East' to the theatrical and political encounters of Thomas Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe in Moghul India. In his introduction, Barbour examines the 'cultural logistics' of England's eastern initiative. Overall, the author looks afresh at the theatrum mundi trope, while capturing the way in which it informs and energizes English constructions of the 'East.' Here Barbour draws on the familiar critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, as he cautions against focusing on 'the West's constructions of the East, while ignoring reversals, hybrid permutations, and offsetting triangulations of that dynamic.' At the same time, Barbour distinguishes 'domestic constructions' of the 'East' from Europe's 'strategic and economic relations' that reveal more tolerance for non-Europeans.

Richard Knolles's demonizing representations of Islam are the focus of the first chapter. Using a few passages, Barbour explores Knolles's emphases on the theatricality of Ottoman power as well as its 'slothfull and effeminate' attributes. Overall, Barbour offers a limited historical analysis of Knolles. Instead, he reads it more as a 'drama for English readers,' while linking the 'antitheatricalist and masculine discourses' to a 'proto-orientalist critique ... [of] eastern shows of opulence and power.'

In the next chapter on 'Asiatic themes and trappings on the London stage,' Barbour's discussion of Tamburlaine covers many areas, ranging from humanist debates about rhetoric to Elizabethan 'politics of spectacle,' but without a consistent focus on the play's constructions of the 'East.' Neither does the author acknowledge recent work by Shankar Raman and others on the play's investment in discourses of discovery. The traditional, conservative reading of Antony and Cleopatra that follows is based on a binary opposition: 'Rome asserts itself as a place of discipline, premeditation, rationality ... [while] Egypt knows itself as a carnivalesque zone of excess, impulsive self-dramatization ... compelling eroticism, transcendence, deliquescence, death.' Thus, he precludes a more complex, dialectical perspective on the play's conflicts, which, since Janet Adelman's early work, has now become a critical commonplace. Instead, in his explorations of the 'topoi of orientalism' in the play, Barbour seems to overlook the more 'hybrid permutations' that he calls for in his introduction.

The next, enlightening chapter explores representations of 'the East' in civic, courtly, and professional entertainments. While conflating classical and exotic themes, and frequently representing a 'fabulous, not empirical geography,' these spectacles reveal a tendency to convey 'Exotic splendor, not ethnographic precision.' Significantly, as Barbour demonstrates, these 'proto-orientalist' productions produce a 'haphazard ethnography ... despite the increasing contacts between English subjects and peoples overseas.'

In chapter 4, Barbour examines the writings of an important but frequently overlooked figure, Thomas Coryate, whom he labels 'Britain's first modern tourist and travel writer,' since he went to India 'with no commitment to trade.' Here, Barbour shows us how Coryate's commodification of travel exemplifies an 'emergent attitude of modernism,' while also functioning as a 'logical extension of commercial Jacobean appetites.'

The final chapter, on Sir Thomas Roe, offers an enlightening section on 'The London Company's discursive regime.' Here Barbour illuminates how the East India Company developed a novel system of surveillance - of information-gathering and record-keeping - that became a model for later forms of corporate control. In addition, we also see how Roe's eyewitness accounts of the Moghul Court's 'power on display' reveal the limits of self-aggrandizing, Jacobean self-representations. The fact that Roe is absent from the Moghul emperor's memoirs is a telling detail that Barbour deploys in looking at English history...