The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0649 Wednesday, 12 July 2006
From: Cary DiPietro <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Wednesday, 12 Jul 2006 04:34:24 +0900
Subject: 17.0627 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0627 Shakespeare and Islam
My thanks to those who responded both on and off-list to my initial
query about Shakespeare's possible encounters with Islam in the period
of his writing of Titus, and for pointing me in the direction of many
valuable sources. All of this is leading to a presentist-inflected
reading of the play in terms of the intersection of violence, race, and
religion. Although I share V K Ingram's reservations about the
potentially inflammatory language and hyperbole of his comments, Nabie
Swaray answers my question precisely when he writes, 'The entire world
is gripped in this dilemma, and the media continues to bombard us with
images and news about Islamic atrocities. The parallels are similar. If
the method of conquest and conversion employed by the " barbarous Turks"
are [were?] as frightening and threatening to the safety of the rest of
the world and her citizens [as they are today?], this and other factors
must have fueled a passionate interest in Islam...This must have been
the dilemma Shakespeare and even other writers such as the Elizabethan
and Jacobean dramatists had to face... Islam, which is linked with the
rise and dominance of the Ottoman Empire at that period must have
sparked a global interest, especially when that part of the world
remained threatened by this unfamiliar enemy.' The issue to be
determined is whether Titus (as opposed to the later Othello which
likely occurs in the wake of the first Moorish embassy to London and
after the publication of popular travel narratives, in particular, the
second edition of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations and John Pory's
English translation of Leo Africanus) supports such a view.
I'm alert to the objections which might be raised to such a post hoc
position, and the teleological implications of reading for historical
continuity between present and past. Such assertions, however
qualified, potentially flatten out the heterogeneity and specificity of
the past to read the present as the culmination of a recognizable,
knowable history. This is essentially the nature of V K Ingram's
response to my question about whether Edward Said's theory of
Orientalism can be read back to the period of Titus, in which he cites
recent comments by Katherine Scarffe Beckett (I have yet to read the
book). Her reservations make perfect sense, that western commentaries
on the East through the medieval and early modern periods were more
complicated than Said's thesis allows. As she rightly notes, Said is
concerned with principally the eighteenth century to the present day,
and the diverse ways in which orientalist discourse reifies an Orient
which serves as colonial subject to western imperialist interests.
While Beckett supports Said in his claims, it's not hard to see how the
objections commonly raised against Said's Orientalism might also be
applied to such a reading of Titus - that a theory of Orientalism
flattens out the heterogeneity of Foucault's discourse analysis upon
which Said builds; that the theory itself constitutes an act of
colonizing Orientalism.
Said was himself alert to such objections. There is a great moment in
Said's 'Orientialism Reconsidered' when he compares the epistemological
problem of positing an Orient with the Shakespeare text: 'The
interesting point here is how difficult it is to try to understand a
region of the world whose principal features seem to be, first, that it
is in perpetual flux, and second, that no one trying to grasp it can by
an act of pure will or of sovereign understanding stand at some
Archimedean point outside of the flux... Similar problems are
commonplace in the interpretation of literary texts. Each age, for
instance, re-interprets Shakespeare, not because Shakespeare changes,
but because despite the existence of numerous and reliable editions of
Shakespeare, there is no such fixed and non-trivial object as
Shakespeare independent of his editors, the actors who played his roles,
the translators who put him in other languages, the hundreds of millions
of readers who have read him or watched performances of his plays since
the late sixteenth century. On the other hand, it is too much to say
that Shakespeare has no independent existence at all, and that he is
completely reconstituted every time someone reads, acts, or writes about
him... The point I am making is a rudimentary one: that even so
relatively inert an object as a literary text is commonly supposed to
gain some of its identity from its historical moment interacting with
the attentions, judgements, scholarship, and performances of its
readers.' Unsurprisingly, Said turns out to be a presentist,
negotiating a balance between the alterity and specificity of the past,
and our interactions with and negotiations of history in the present.
In the case of Titus, while it may be anachronistic to read Orientalism
back to Titus (though anachronism offers a useful point of entry into
this epistemological problem, which is, in a sense, my point), at the
same time, is it too much to argue that Shakespeare's representation of
Aaron in Titus contains potentially discursive functions in the context
of the triangulated Protestant-Catholic-Ottoman conflict, and increasing
commercial trade, as well as piracy, in the Mediterranean passages
connecting England and Europe with the Levant and North Africa? Thanks
to those who pointed me in the direction of work by Nabil Matar, Daniel
Vitkus and Jack D'Amico precisely on this subject. Disappointingly,
Vitkus gives Titus only a passing mention. Perhaps more remarkably,
D'Amico's book, in an extended chapter on Titus which follows a
wonderful discussion of representations of and encounters with North
Africans in England and in the context of such texts as Peele's The
Battle of Alcazar, goes on to treat Aaron strictly as a Marlovian
Machiavel. I'm assuming this is his debt to Jonathan Bate's Arden 3
edition, and to the influence of such seminal studies as Heather James'
'Shakespeare's Troy', clearly dependent upon the assumption of single
authorship. But read in the context of Peele's Moors, I find it hard
not to see the rich texture of classical allusion in Aaron's language,
his 'barbaric' predilection for violence and his opportunistic
Machiavellianism as also indicative of early modern English literary
representations of the 'infidel' Moors.
Just some thoughts yet to be worked out.
Cary DiPietro
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