Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama

Murat Ögütcü, Aisha Hussain, Murat Ögütcü, Aisha Hussain, Lisa Hopkins, Douglas Bruster

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781350300453
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350300460
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked, marginalized as footnotes or generalized into stereotypes. Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama focuses on the multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical space to represent the concept of the East in drama.

This volume re-examines the (mis)representation of the East on the early modern English outdoor and indoor stage and broadens our understanding of early modern theatrical productions beyond Shakespeare and the European continent. It traces the origin of conventional depictions of the East to university dramas and explores how they influenced the commercial stage. Chapters uncover how conflicting representations of the East were communicated on stage through the material aspects of stage architecture, costumes and performance effects.

The collection emphasizes these material aspects of dramatic performances and showcases neglected plays, including George Salterne's Tomumbeius, Robert Greene's The Historie of Orlando Furioso and Joseph Simons' Leo the Armenian, and puts them in conversation with William Shakespeare's The Tempest and John Fletcher's The Island Princess.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Note on Text
• Introduction
• Part One Civility, Commonality and the Classics
• 1 Materializing Mamluks and Turks in Salterne’s Tomumbeius
• 2 Cultural and Celestial Representations in Goffe’s The Courageous Turk
• 3 Byzantines in English Jesuit Drama: Performing Simons’s Leo the Armenian
• Part Two Costume, Space and Place
• 4 Dramatizing Borders and Behaviours of the Eastern ‘Other’ in Greene’s Alphonsus and Orlando Furioso
• 5 Staging a Multicultural World in Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk
• Part Three Sight, Smell and Blood
• 6 ‘Seat of Merchandise’: Staging Indian Trade in The Triumphs of Honour and Industry
• 7 Scent of the Orient: The King’s Men and the Corporatization of Smell
• 8 Fat Falstaffs and Sullied Flesh in Dryden’s Amboyna
• Afterword: Journeys into the ‘Orient’
• General Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright