The "Turk Phenomenon" and the Repertory of the late Elizabethan Playhouse

Mark Hutchings
University of Reading
m.p.v.hutchings@reading.ac.uk

Mark Hutchings."The 'Turk Phenomenon' and the Repertory of the Late Elizabethan Playhouse". Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 16 (October, 2007) 10.1-39<URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-16/hutcturk.htm>.

1. When Hieronimo avenges Horatio's murder, his plot calls up a deeply resonant historical moment to which the early modern English theatre would return repeatedly over the next half century and beyond. The inset play in The Spanish Tragedy would later be expanded into the full-length drama Soliman and Perseda, a clear sign of the popularity of Kyd's play but also of the appeal and flexibility of Turkish material to playwrights and playgoers alike.[1] The trick itself, successful as it is for Hieronimo (and indeed Bel-Imperia) in achieving its goal in the play-world, is a "counter-factual" representation that synthesises the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 and displacement of the Knights Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem from Rhodes in 1522 with a fictional Christian revenge narrative – the devoutly to be wished for overthrow of the "Great Turk" that would of course not take place.[2] 1453 changed the political landscape, reverberating across Europe as the Turks advanced further west. The late-Elizabethan playhouse drew on a conventional narrative of fear that was also, as is now widely recognised, one of fascination, spectators secure in the knowledge that England was largely out of reach of the Ottoman threat.[3] But this staging of the Ottoman Empire (and of English perceptions of Turks) was also energised by two linked events, both momentous and both with far-reaching consequences for England and its relations with "the East" – and "the West": the Reformation during the reign of Henry VIII, and his daughter's promotion of Anglo-Ottoman relations following her excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570. One of the many consequences of this was that in the last decade or so of the sixteenth century a sizeable proportion of the playhouse repertory became deeply influenced by this development, and the result was a complex artistic, ideological, and commercial phenomenon.[4] The following discussion examines the significance of the genre for acting companies, focusing on how a repertory-based approach may shed further light on its role in shaping the theatre of the 1590s.
   
   
2. Charting the course of these plays and their "Turkish" properties as they appear and in many cases reappear, replayed, revised, or recalled in other, later plays, draws on a range of scholarship in this field, but most significantly it acknowledges an important recent development in theatre studies. In shifting from "author"-centred approaches that privilege individual dramatists and "their" plays in ways many theorists believe to be anachronistic to an emphasis on how companies operated, scholars have drawn attention to the importance of recognizing that early modern theatre was a collective enterprise.[5] Indeed, Jeffrey Masten argues that all plays, whether composed by one or more than one dramatist, are forms of collaboration (Masten 1997). While it is certainly the case that Kyd and (especially) Marlowe were influential in fostering a new playhouse aesthetic that would flourish throughout the 1590s, it is the material implications of this influence, and the "Turk narrative" to which it contributed, that make the case for a company and inter-company approach to drama in this period. By its very nature the staging of the Ottoman Empire was sustained by artistic cross-fertilisation that was, in a broader sense collaborative – for dramatists, actors, and playgoers collectively – as well as competitive.[6] As theatre historians recognize, the culture of playing in the 1590s was vibrant but unstable, yet to settle into what in comparison, in the early seventeenth century, would be (for most scholars at least) a more orderly state of affairs. Not until 1594 did companies enjoy the security of access to permanent places for playing and they were themselves often in flux, players moving between troupes, and, in the best-known example, losing their playhouse (or at least the lease), while City and Church authorities repeatedly attempted to halt playing altogether. It was in this climate that the Turk genre emerged.[7] An analysis of the rise of "Turk plays" then needs to take into account the material conditions of playmaking, and in particular the complex intertextual relations between and across company repertories. Indeed, in one sense the notion of a play "market" currently in vogue is perhaps particularly appropriate, for if the Turkish material metaphorically (and, in the form of reusable stage properties and transferable costumes, literally) operated as part of the playhouse economy, it was both a component and a by-product of England's controversial trading partnership with the Ottoman Empire.
   
   
3. It is not proposed here to examine in detail the literary (or, more broadly, "textual") origins of the plays that were staged during this period; numerous influences and sources – translations, histories, diplomatic reports, and travel narratives – have been identified by scholars, and it is beyond the scope and design of the present account to offer a similar survey here.[8] But it is worth touching on briefly why the Turk genre emerged when it did. There can surely be little doubt that it was directly related to the radical shift in foreign policy under Elizabeth, leading first to commercial links and subsequently to diplomatic relations. Anglo-Turkish commerce was visible in the form of goods available in England (though carpets had long been a luxury item) and accounts of diplomatic initiatives as well as commercial voyages circulated in print in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589; 2^nd edn. 1598-1600) and Richard Knolles's Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), for example, as well as in pamphlets and newsheets. Even Elizabeth's letters to and from the sultana were published. As controversial as her overtures to the "Great Turk" were, Elizabeth and her ministers made little effort to conceal what was regarded by Catholics throughout Europe as a betrayal of Christianity; rather, these proclamations contributed to the cultural environment in which the playhouse's "Turks" operated. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that even if Elizabeth intended a positive "spin" (as we might read it today) on her policy, it was wholly successful, for anti-Turkish sentiment is in evidence throughout the early modern period.[9] The legacy of 1453 in the western imagination – as historical event and as dramatised narrative – was such that the Ottoman Empire remained a potent threat, real or imagined, its new "role" as a potential ally in England's anti-Catholic foreign policy by no means erasing or superseding established cultural memory.[10] Nor could Elizabeth's radical initiative overdetermine what happened between "Turks" and the queen's subjects in their encounters beyond London – or on the city's stages. What recent scholarship in this area has shown is that the genre admitted a multiplicity of interpretations: the assumption that the figure of the Turk functioned simply and repeatedly as a convenient bogeyman has been challenged as texts are opened up to reveal layers of meaning – or potential meaning – for early modern playgoers and theatre historians alike.
   
   
4. Rather than read this material primarily as a cultural or ideological phenomenon, however, this article examines how focusing on the repertory may in turn contribute to our understanding of how these motifs and narratives operated, both in performance and in the playhouse culture as they were used and reused, appropriated and adapted for a range of purposes. As will become clear, the "Turks" – plural – in this reading are unmoored and transferable, less a stable sign of 1453 and the Ottoman threat to Christianity than a floating signifier whose meaning was as much "local" as "general". Just as an item of clothing (transformed, on stage, into costume) served multiple purposes for an acting company, newly signifying in each play while carrying with it traces of older roles or moments recalled by playgoers, this "Turk" material often functioned as a palimpsest, evoking complex and diverse associations modulated by a range of influences and contexts. Resonant as it often may have been of 1453, perhaps evoking, too, an older "crusader" narrative, this material was above all a commodity subject to theatrical forces. Its remarkable durability may be explained not by supposing it was a stable currency but by identifying the malleable properties that made it fluid and convertible.
   
   
5. The following, then, is an outline of one approach to this fascinating theatre narrative. The extent of the range and influence of the genre is best illustrated visually, in tabular form (see Appendix). The table comprises a select list of plays and, where known, dates of performance and (where applicable) publication, venues at which they were staged, the acting company concerned, and dramatist(s) involved. Not all of the plays listed here were primarily concerned with "staging" the Ottoman Empire; in many cases a play merely refers to Turks incidentally. What should be emphasised at the outset is that although for the sake of clarity and accuracy a distinction has been made between texts where the Turk motif plays a significant role – insofar as this is confirmed by the surviving printed text (or, in the case of a lost play, where it is implicit in the title and indicated thus *) – and those plays where an allusion is made in passing (signalled thus #), for the purposes of the argument proposed such a division (subjective as it is) is artificial. All of these plays were part of a narrative that operated collectively, and the point is that even where a reference in a play is brief and apparently nondescript, such a "quotation" nonetheless participated in both calling up an established narrative and importing various resonances the narrative had into that play in performance; indeed, there must have been many acts of physical quotation, where a character, play, or actor was evoked or "remembered" on stage, that have simply left no textual trace.[11] This is important because a narrow focus on a small body of plays risks skewing the data, as well as misrepresenting the broader narrative. It is not qualitatively significant, for example, that until he wrote Othello for the King's Men Shakespeare did not turn to Ottoman material to write a "Turk" play; much more significant is the fact that in the 1590s alone he referred to the theme in no fewer than thirteen plays.[12] This imbalance (as it may seem to us) should raise questions about how we approach this kind of material, and indeed how such "moments" in performance, however brief, might be teased out by critics to rehearse their possible implications. Critical approaches of this kind (see for example Hillman, Hoenselaars) in turn invite a further contextualisation – as parole to langue, as it were – in terms of the repertory both within specific companies and across the playhouse spectrum.
   
   
6. The information compiled in the table, combined with a necessarily brief examination of Henslowe's Diary, gives an indication of the importance of the narrative to the companies operating in the 1590s. As can readily be seen, all the principal troupes employed the motif in a variety of ways. While the picture of playing prior to the consolidation of the position of the Chamberlain's Men and the Admiral's Men in 1594 remains at best hazy, it is possible from the table (which inevitably is sometimes speculative about provenance or dating) to appreciate, at a glance, how widespread and influential the Turk motif was. There can be little doubt that even occasional playgoers were familiar with visual or verbal images of the Ottoman Empire: whether at inns prior to the ban in 1594 or subsequently at the Rose, Curtain, Swan, or Theatre, and then at the end of the century at the Globe and Fortune, companies maintained a repertoire of "Turk plays". Drawing conclusions from data that is incomplete or uncertain (and often both) presents obvious difficulties, but what the table confirms is not only (as scholars are well aware) Marlowe's influence on his contemporaries but also the centrality of the Turkish narrative to Marlowe's plays and those that followed in their wake. Marlowe did not invent the Turk motif when he wrote Tamburlaine in 1587, but the appeal of the new aesthetic (and its suitability for staging tyrannous sultans) led directly and indirectly to the rapid growth of the Turkish genre in the London repertories. How rapid is easily illustrated. Within at most five (and perhaps two or three) years the two Tamburlaine plays had inspired (or otherwise influenced) Alphonsus, King of Aragon, 1 & 2 Tamar Cham (both lost), The Battle of Alcazar, Selimus and perhaps The Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek (though judging from the title this lost play may have had much in common with The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda), as well as (less tangibly) other history plays written and performed in the 1590s. The impact of Tamburlaine in 1587 was immediate but also long lasting; if the aesthetic eventually lost its appeal, the Turkish genre did not.
   
   
7. The genre itself can be deceptive: it may easily be assumed that the "Turk play" adheres to fairly straightforward criteria – indeed, such a view might explain its longevity. Unsurprisingly a number of them conform to what Andrew Gurr glosses as "the battle plays of that militant decade" (Gurr 1992, 173), representing some of the Ottoman Empire's triumphs (and reverses). The Battle of Alcazar and Captain Thomas Stukeley both draw on the catastrophe at Alcazar that led to Spain absorbing Portugal, for example, while the lost play The Capture of Stuhlweissenburg was inspired by a recent battle of that name (Knutson 1991, 204). These plays were not necessarily mere ciphers of the historical past or present, however. The Jew of Malta, for example, dramatises the events of 1565, when the Turks were defeated by the knights they had expelled from Rhodes forty years earlier, but the play far from endorses the behaviour of the besieged Christians. Indeed, it is remarkable for its resistance to the Malta narrative in Christian accounts where, unsurprisingly, the Turkish defeat (like that six years later at Lepanto) was celebrated. Moreover, if the most important and influential treatment of Turkish history, the Tamburlaine diptych, deploys several of the topoi with which the "Turk" play would become closely identified, its influence on the repertory had complex ramifications which straddle issues of interpretation and material theatre history alike. For if the appearance of Tamburlaine in 1587 produced imitations by rival companies, such as the Queen's Men (McMillin and MacLean, 156-60), it was these very imitations, and the textual echoes that followed, that served to complicate "orthodox" interpretations of Turks on the stage. Indeed, Tamburlaine the figure and symbol consequently emerges less as a fixed presence than as a fluid symbol of England's unorthodox relationship with the Ottoman Empire, mediated through the stage.
   
   
8. The Tamburlaine plays changed the theatrical landscape, the success of the first play leading to an unplanned sequel, while rival companies (and indeed playwrights) sought to emulate the Admiral's Men by offering similar fare. Although no text survives of 1 Tamar Cham and its sequel, there is no doubt that it drew on Marlowe's for inspiration (and Edward Alleyn played the leading role in the Tamburlaine and Tamar Cham plays). But it was the Queen's Men who were most threatened by the Admiral's Men's success, and Robert Greene supplied first Alphonso, King of Aragon (1587) and then, most interestingly, Selimus (for which, it appears, a sequel was planned but not written).[13] Selimus is an important text in the "Tamburlaine narrative" not only because it shows how desperate the Queen's Men were to keep pace with their rivals (a battle they would of course lose), but because it sheds light on contemporary perceptions of Marlowe's play. Theatre audiences respond in diverse ways, but surviving evidence suggests that, far from condemning Tamburlaine, playgoers marvelled at his theatrical presence and demonstration of unrestrained and apparently limitless power (Levin). The historical figure Timur was important from a Christian perspective because he had saved Constantinople from the Turks in 1402, preventing its capitulation for half a century. It might reasonably be assumed then that the contemporary reception of the play may also be read as an endorsement of Tamburlaine's defeat and humiliation of Bajazeth. As both the first play and its sequel progress, however, it is clear that the Turks are by no means central to the narrative: as with The Jew of Malta, Marlowe seems far from interested in writing a play that conforms to audience expectations. Indeed, the question of interpretation is bound up with the market forces of the playhouse, for if the first play does offer (though not necessarily endorse) a relatively straightforward anti-Turkish narrative, it is the demand for a sequel (signalled in the Prologue published in the 1590 quarto) that changes the play's ideological coordinates. In 2 Tamburlaine Marlowe runs out of historical material (Timur died just three years after his victory over Bajazet), and chooses to bring the play, significantly, much closer to the present. This sequel may not have been the first "imitation" of Tamburlaine (it is possible that Greene wrote Alphonsus first, if 2 Tamburlaine was not completed before 1588), but it is perhaps here that it first becomes apparent that Marlowe's invention opens up rather than closes down the possibilities the Turkish genre invited. Sigismund of Hungary in 2 Tamburlaine anticipates Ferneze in his demonstration of Christian hypocrisy, and the battle between Turks and Christians is a comparative sideshow; indeed, the play has been read as being primarily concerned with Protestant matters (Battenhouse). What is particularly interesting about the Tamburlaine narrative, however, is the response it stimulated once it entered the playhouse economy.
   
   
9. Critics have proposed a range of allegorical interpretations of Tamburlaine.[14] When Greene came to write Selimus, for which a sequel was anticipated in the epilogue, clearly signalling Marlowe's influence, he made an interesting artistic decision. It is curious but also logical that his Tamburlaine figure is in fact a Turkish sultan: the play's depiction of a series of atrocities presided over by Sultan Selimus was clearly designed to out-Tamburlaine Tamburlaine – both aesthetically but also (more importantly) in an attempt to improve the company's competitiveness against their great rivals, the Admiral's Men. But in so doing Greene inverts the historical context (Tamburlaine is transformed from conqueror of the Turks into a Turk himself) to serve a theatrical imperative. Here, then, is an example of how the demands of the market could drive artistic production. Indeed, in its portrayal of internecine warfare between sons following the death of their father (drawing on the historical Selim I), Greene's play is effectively a sequel to the Tamburlaine plays, which end, of course, with the death of Tamburlaine as he passes on the empire to his two surviving sons. If Selimus is so regarded, it may well be that contemporaries viewed the Tamburlaine plays in a similar way: in Virgidemiarum (1597) Joseph Hall refers tantalisingly to "the Turkish Tamburlaine" (Levin, 53).
   
   
10. Focusing on the Tamburlaine plays offers a useful illustration of the conjunction between the "Turk" narrative and the repertory system, both within a single company, where the success of the first play engendered a sequel, and among its competitors. While little is known about how Selimus fared in performance – no records have survived – rather more information about the Tamburlaine plays exists, though of course not as much as we would like. Little is known about the play's first performances in 1587-88; rather more, thanks to the survival of Henslowe's Diary, can be reconstructed of their revival in 1594-95. Clearly their reappearance in the repertory of the Admiral's Men following the reorganisation of the playing companies in May 1594 was testament to their continuing appeal to playgoers, and their ability to pay dividends to Henslowe and the actors. The following table is designed to offer a glimpse of what the Diary can tell us about this particular revival, and how it might augment our knowledge of the Turk genre. The table includes data about the play's takings (which for reasons of space will not be explored in detail here), but it is of particular interest because it sets out the artistic/commercial relationship starkly:[15]
    
    

     

    Date	Play	Rcpt.
    28 Aug 1594	1Tamburlaine	71s
    12 Sept	1Tamburlaine	45s
    28 Sept	1Tamburlaine	31s
    15 Oct	1Tamburlaine	38s
    17 Oct	1Tamburlaine	40s
    4 Nov	1Tamburlaine	39s
    27 Nov	1Tamburlaine	22s
    17 Dec	1Tamburlaine	31s
    19 Dec	2Tamburlaine	46s
    30 Dec	1Tamburlaine	22s
    1 Jan 1595	2Tamburlaine	62s
    27 Jan	1Tamburlaine	30s
    29 Jan	2Tamburlaine	47s
    17 Feb	1Tamburlaine	30s
    18 Feb	2Tamburlaine	36s
    11 Mar	1Tamburlaine	30s
    12 Mar	2Tamburlaine	22s
    21 May	1Tamburlaine	22s
    22 May	2Tamburlaine	25s
    15 Sept	1Tamburlaine	21s
    12 Nov	1Tamburlaine	18s
    13 Nov	2Tamburlaine	32s

     

     

11. Perhaps unsurprisingly the sequel always followed a performance of the first play, demonstrating "that the Admiral's Men exploited the narrative dependency of part two" (Knutson 1991, 51): clearly it is the requirements of the repertory system that are paramount to the Admiral's Men when the Tamburlaine plays returned to the Rose in the mid-1590s.[16] It might be argued, however, that this successful revival was not solely dependent on the now-dead playwright's energies in the late 1580s but also to the continuing vibrancy of the genre – to which plays such as Selimus also contributed. That is, that the Admiral's Men's successful revival of the plays was underpinned by the Turk motif, rather than by the Marlovian aesthetic that was on the verge of going out of fashion.[17]
    
    
12. A repertory-centred approach offers re-readings of plays on different terms, an approach that insists on a broader context, a context indeed that (ideally) gets as close as possible to the original conditions of production and reception. If it is plausible that the Tamburlaine phenomenon had become redefined as a genre rather than a style as such by the mid-1590s – that it was as much a "Turk play" as it was a (no-longer innovative) theatrical aesthetic – then this in part may explain the genre's (and these play's) continuing relevance and appeal for playwrights and audiences alike. Certainly, the plays of Marlowe, Peele, and Greene staged in the late 1580s established the Turk motif as a playhouse "property", a resource; by the early 1590s plays begin to refer to matters Turkish in passing. One example will be given here, from towards the end of the decade. Henry V is a play with tangible echoes of Marlowe's plays. While the Tamburlaine plays and their spin-offs called attention to Turkish tyranny and the threat posed by the Ottoman Empire, the move away from the Marlovian aesthetic subsequently signalled a rather more ironic approach to this material. Thus in Shakespeare's play Henry's playful (but sincere) proposal to Katherine that they should produce a son to recapture Constantinople (an anachronism of course in the play-world) is undercut by the ambiguous interrogative, "Shall we not?"[18] For the contemporary audience a deeper irony is available, for as A.J. Hoenselaars points out, "the original phrase 'to go to Constantinople to take the Turk by the beard' became a repository for vacuous ideals, a phrase that could only be rehearsed with an increasing sense of self-satire" (Hoenselaars, 39). While it has been argued that the stage functioned as a forum for anti-Turk propaganda (Matar 1998, 50-63), it seems at least as likely that the playhouse interrogated assumptions and reworked conventions. Moreover, the repertory system itself, driven in part by market forces, exploited conventions and themes for their practical and theatrical appeal, arguably transforming ideological markers in the process.
    
    
13. How the plays collated in the table below tapped into the Turk motif in performance is both more complex and less certain – at this historical distance – than scholars can determine. If the Henry V example is in any way representative it suggests that the legacy of 1453 was that it was Janus-faced, offering on the one hand sincerity yet on the other being susceptible to irony. That Henry soon died and his infant son lost France, as the Chorus informs the audience, suggests that 1453 resonated ironically, at least here. But given the impossibility of securing a precise meaning, certainly now and perhaps then too, these individual instances of the staging of the Turk in the 1590s are less important, separated out, than what they can perhaps tell us (with a deal more certainty) about the playing companies and the repertory during this decade. The remainder of this article returns to this issue, and attempts to tease out some of the (tentative) conclusions that might be drawn.
    
    
14. One measure of the genre's good health in this decade is its continuation from its beginnings in the late 1580s through to the second half of the 1590s, following the consolidation of playing into two companies and the amalgamation or demise (in the case of the Queen's Men and Pembroke's Men) of the others. In part the success of the Turk play was arguably assured by the May 1594 establishment of the "duopoly", as Andrew Gurr terms it, for if one favours the notion that the Chamberlain's Men and Admiral's Men were henceforth effectively in direct competition (Gurr 1987, 190) this shift (if such it was) imposed pressures on writers and the companies which perhaps helped keep the momentum of the genre going. Howsoever this may be, what is clear is that the changes of 1594 did not significantly alter the trajectory of the genre. What had been fashionable for Strange's Men, Derby's, Leicester's, and the Queen's Men in the previous decade worked too for the Admiral's Men and the Chamberlain's Men after 1594. In turn this may in part explain why the genre lasted as long as it did – not just to the end of Elizabeth's reign but well into Charles I's, too. The Turk motif, in its various guises, was evidently so successful prior to 1594 that it was adopted (and perhaps adapted) by both the Admiral's Men and Chamberlain's Men. It is not simply that playbooks came into the hands of these two companies and were revived, though of course this happened; clearly these performances maintained the currency and visibility of the genre. More significantly this led in turn to the genre's renewal in post-1594 plays.
    
    
15. What the data in the table also demonstrates (perhaps unsurprisingly) is that one way of constructing a narrative about the Turk motif is to regard it less as an ideological phenomenon and more as a theatrical tool that served commercial rather than political ends. In other words, the Chamberlain's Men and the Admiral's Men continued to stage plays about Turks (or plays which "quoted" the motif) – plays that were evidently popular with audiences – in part because they were rivals in the same marketplace. Rivalry is a handy explanation for Greene's writing Selimus for the Queen's Men – not least because of his personal animosity towards Marlowe; it is a nice fit for the decline of the Queen's Men and the rise of the Admiral's, which would stage Marlowe's plays with Alleyn in the lead in the mid-1590s. But as has been suggested, plays such as Selimus may be regarded as imitators as much as challengers: indeed, from the perspective of a genre-based analysis Selimus becomes part of the "Tamburlaine narrative" that established the Turk motif in playhouse culture. The argument then that after 1594 the two main companies and other troupes established distinctive repertories (Gurr 1996, 16) does not quite ring true in this case.
    
    
16. If the Chamberlain's Men and Admiral's Men were indeed rivals (and Andrew Gurr suggests the rivalry began around 1596), it may be that this competition contributed significantly to the consolidation of the genre in the last years of the queen's reign. In the years preceding 1594, however, before fixed playing places and company-venue affiliations were established, the picture is much less clear. One intriguing detail that may not shed much light on the issue but raises important questions about the relationship between genre and company repertory is the provenance of playbooks in the early 1590s. After costumes playbooks were of course a company's most valuable asset, and as recent studies on later repertories have argued they contributed significantly to defining a company's identity.[19] But in the years immediately following Henslowe's construction of the Rose in 1587, which coincided with the rise of the Turk genre, the situation was much more fluid and (for scholars at least) uncertain. Apart from acting as landlord of the playhouse,

    Henslowe's main additional function, so far as it can be deduced from the tantalizingly unclear hints in the Diary, was the possession of a set of playbooks which he loaned along with his playhouse to the visiting companies. (Gurr 1996, 95)

    In these early years, then, the notion of a "repertory" as such – or at least one exclusive to a single company – is misleading. Matters changed, of course, during this decade, but it is symbolic (as well as material) that a genre that depended on imitation and intertextual allusion, and would become a staple for a number of companies rather than exclusive to one or two, took root during a period when some companies apparently interchanged plays from across the repertory. In a sense then the origins of the Turk motif lay in the collaborative environment of the nascent playhouse economy that was also, or would become before the end of the decade, a competitive market. But it was the urge to imitate, a halfway house, as it were, between collaboration and competition, that best defines and explains the rise of the Turk play and its flourishing in the 1590s.
    
    

Appendix

The following select list of plays includes (a) texts where the Turkish motif is prominent or distinctive, and (b) those texts where it features passingly as a reference or allusion. Playhouse(s), company affiliation, and dramatist(s) are given where known or conjectured. The table draws principally on the following for its "Turk" material: Adams (1913), Wann (1915), Rice (1926), Chew (1937), Burien (1952), Artemel (1966), Berger et al (1998), and Foakes (2002). For the dating and provenance of these plays the following authorities have been consulted: Feuillerat (1908), Chambers (1923), Sibley (1933), Greg (1939-59), Bentley (1941-68), Onions (1980), Kawachi (1986), Harbage (1964), Gurr (1992), Gurr (2004), and Braunmuller and Hattaway (2003). Not surprisingly, these authorities by no means always agree on matters of dating, and some aspects of this data are necessarily conjectural.

A Select List of "Turk" Plays, c.1576-1604 

Key

* denotes text lost

** denotes fragments only extant

*** denotes plot extant

# denotes reference to Turks/Ottoman Empire in text

 

Notes

---

 

Works Cited 

• Adams, Joseph Quincey,  ed. The Turk. Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1913.
  
  
• Artemel, Suheyla. "The Idea of Turkey in English Literature of the Early Seventeenth Century" Diss. U of  Durham, 1966.
  
  
• Battenhouse, Roy. "Protestant Apologetics and the Subplot of 2 Tamburlaine." English Literary Renaissance 3 (1973): 30-43.
  
  
• Barbour, Richmond. Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East, 1576-1626. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2003.
  
  
• Bentley. G.E. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 7 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941-68.
  
  
• Berek, Peter. "Locrine Revised, Selimus, and Early Responses to Tamburlaine." Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 23 (1980): 33-54.
  
  
• Berek, Peter. "Tamburlaine's Weak Sons: Imitation as Interpretation Before 1593." Renaissance Drama n.s. 13 (1982) : 55-82.
  
  
• Berger, Thomas L., Bradford, William C., and Sondergard, Sidney L. An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500-1660. Rev. edn. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1998.
   
• Bly, Mary. Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2000.
   
• Bradley, David. From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1992.
   
• Braunmuller, A.R. and Hattaway, Michael. Eds. The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama. [1990] 2^nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2003.
   
• Burien, Orhan. "Interest of the English in Turkey as Reflected in English Literature of the Renaissance." Oriens 5 (1952):  209-29.
   
• Carson, Neil. A Companion to Henslowe's Diary. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1988.
   
• Cartelli, Thomas. Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991.
   
• Chambers, E.K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Vols. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1923.
   
• Charney, Maurice. "The Voice of Marlowe's Tamburlaine in Early Shakespeare." Comparative Drama 31 (1997):  213-23.
   
• Chew, Samuel. The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1937.
   
• Dimmock, Matthew. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
   
• Dimmock, Matthew. Ed. William Percy's "Mahomet and his Heaven": A Critical Edition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
   
• Erne, Lucas. Beyond "The Spanish Tragedy": A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd. Manchester: Manchester U P, 2001.
   
• Feuillerat, Albert. Ed. Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth. Louvain: A. Uystpryust, 1908.
   
• Foakes, R.A. Ed. Henslowe's Diary 2^nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2002.
   
• Friedenreich, Kenneth. "English Renaissance Accounts of the Fall of Constantinople." English Miscellany 26 (1977):  105-27.
   
• Greg, W.W. A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration. 4 Vols. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1939-59.
   
• Grossrichard, Alain. The Sultan's Court: European Fantasies of the East. [1979] Trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1998.
   
• Gurr, Andrew. "Intertextuality at Windsor." Shakespeare Quarterly  38.2  (1987): 189-200.
   
• Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 3^rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1992.
   
• Gurr, Andrew. Ed. Henry V.  Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1992.
   
• Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
   
• Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2004.
   
• Hadfield, Andrew. Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545-1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
   
• Harbage, Alfred. Annals of English Drama, 975-1700 [1940, 1964] 3^rd edn. rev. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim. New York: Routledge, 1989.
   
• Hillman, Richard. "'Not an Amurath an Amurath Succeeds': Playing Doubles in Shakespeare's Henriad." English Literary History 21 (1991): 161-89.
   
• Hoenselaars, A.J. "The Elizabethans and the Turk at Constantinople." Cahiers Elisabethains 47 (1995):  29-42.
   
• Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Stallybrass, Peter. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2000.
   
• Kawachi, Yoshiko. Calendar of English Renaissance Drama 1558-1642. New York: Garland Press, 1986.
   
• Knutson, Roslyn Lander. The Repertory of Shakespeare's Company 1594-1613. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1991.
   
• Knutson, Roslyn Lander. Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2001.
   
• Levin, Richard. "The Contemporary Perception of Marlowe's Tamburlaine." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England I (1984):  51-70.
   
• Mcmillin, Scott and MacLean, Sally-Beth. The Queen's Men and Their Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1998.
   
• MacIntyre, Jean. Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres. Edmonton:  U of Alberta P, 1992.
   
• Mann, David. "Sir Oliver Owlet's Men: Fact or Fiction." Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991):  301-311.
   
• Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1997.
   
• Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558-1685. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1998.
  
  
• Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia U P, 1999.
   
• Matar, Nabil. Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689. Gainesville: U P of Florida, 2005.
   
• Munro, Lucy. Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2005.
   
• Onions, C.T. A Shakespeare Glossary. 2^nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
   
• Orgel, Stephen. "What is a Text?" [1981], in Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage. London & New York: Routledge, 2002, 1-5.
   
• Patrides, C.A. "'The Bloody and Cruell Turke': the Background of a Renaissance Commonplace." Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1963):  126-35.
   
• Rice, Warner G. "Turk, Moor, and Persian in English Literature from 1550-1660, with Particular Reference to the Drama." Diss. Harvard U, 1926.
   
• Shepherd, Simon. Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1986.
   
• Sibley, Gertrude Marion. The Lost Plays and Masques 1500-1642. New York: Russell & Russell, 1933.
   
• Stallybrass, Peter. "Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage", in Margreta de Grazia et al, eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1996. 289-320.
   
• Vitkus, Daniel J. Ed. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia U P, 2000.
   
• Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
   
• Wann, Louis. "The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama", Modern Philology 12 (1915): 423-47.
   
• Wilson, Richard. "Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan the Terrible", in Wilson, ed., Christopher Marlowe. London: Longman, 1999. 120-39.