Staging the Ottoman Turk

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: Historical/Theoretical Perspectives 1.1. The Historical Background

1.1.1. Ottoman-Venetian Relations

1.1.2. Anglo-Ottoman Relations

1.1.3. Franco-Ottoman Relations

1.1.4. Decline of the Ottoman Empire

1.2. Theoretical Approach

1.2.1. Knowledge and Power

1.2.2. History and Representation

1.2.3. Perspectives on "Oriental Despotism"

1.3. Conclusion to Chapter One

Chapter 2: Rise to Power: The Great Conquerors 2.1. Sultan Bayezid (1389-1402)

2.1.1. His haughty Throne

2.1.2. European Crowns

2.1.3 Monster with a Cage

2.1.4. Tamerlane (1702)

2.1.5. Conclusion

2.2. Sultan Mehmet II (1451-1481)

2.2.1. Conquest of Istanbul

2.2.2. Memory and Identity

2.2.3. The Christian Hero (1735)

2.2.4. Irene (1749)

2.2.5. Conclusion

2.3. Sultan Suleyman (1520-1566)

2.3.1. Magnificent Solyman

2.3.2 Barbaros

2.3.3. Ibrahim

2.3.4 Mustapha (1609)

2.3.5 The Siege of Rhodes (1656)

2.3.6. Conclusion

Chapter 3: Shifts in Power: Period of Destabilization 3.1. Sultan Osman II (1618-1622)

3.1.1. Tyranny

3.1.2. Osman (1757)

3.1.3. The Sultan (1770)

3.1.4. Osman on the French Stage

3.1.5. Conclusion

3.2. Sultan Murad IV (1623-1640)

3.2.1. Bajazet (1672)

3.2.2. Seraglio

3.2.3. Sultana

3.2.4. Exotic Other

3.2.5. The Sultaness (1717)

3.2.6. Turk's Head

3.2.7. Conclusion

3.3. Sultan Ibrahim (1640-1648)

3.3.1. "Ott'man Blood"

3.3.2. The Conspiracy (1680)

3.3.3. Conclusion

Chapter 4: Comic Representations of the Ottoman Turk

4.1. "New Beginnings"

4.2. Commedia dell'Arte Scenarios (1611)

4.3. Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670)

4.4. False Count (1682)

4.5. A Peep into Seraglio (1775)

4.6. Abduction from the Seraglio (1782)

4.7. The Russian Slaves: A Day In Turkey (1792)

4.8. Conclusion

Conclusion

Works Cited

Acknowledgements

There are a number of people in my life to whom I owe gratitude for the support they gave while I was engaged in this study, which was originally a Ph.D. dissertation. I would like to begin by expressing my heartfelt thanks for the invaluable support, assistance, guidance and encouragement I received from Brian Corman, Domenico Pietropaolo and Roseann Runte. Words are not sufficient to express my thanks and appreciation to each one of them, who gave unselfishly of their time and energy.

To Brian Corman, always a source of advice and wisdom, I must extend my special thanks for his guidance. He has been most perceptive, challenging and a thorough reader. With the greatest warmth and regard, I thank Roseann Runte, who, with such generosity of spirit, provided me excellent feedback and most insightful comments during the entire process of writing this book. I am most grateful to Prof. Pietropaolo, whose positive attitude, thought-provoking questions and insightful comments were invaluable for my research.

I acknowledge with special gratitude and appreciation, the financial support provided to me by the Open Fellowships of University of Toronto, and a Travel Grant, which allowed me to do research at the British Library in London.

The most profound acknowledgement goes to my family. My greatest debt, an incalculable one which I cannot begin to repay, is to my husband Oguz, my daughter Derya and my son Kaan. I dedicate this book to them.

Last but not least: thank you Mom and Dad (Guzin and Fethi Kismet) for sending me to the English High School for Girls in Istanbul.

PEACE!

Introduction

To the eye of the initiated this curtain produces only images

But to him/her who knows the signs, symbols of truth.

Sheik Kusteri[1] has founded his curtain

Making it a likeness of the world;

To watch it amuses those who are looking for entertainment,

But those who behold the truth learn a lesson from it.

(An "Ode of the Screen" to a Turkish Shadow Play)

Although the Ottoman[2] culture, before the mid-nineteenth century, engendered neither formal tragedy nor comedy (Halman 17), Karagoz (Turkish Shadow theatre), one of the three principal norms of popular performance tradition in the Ottoman Empire, evolved as a comic genre[3]. The world of Karagoz, the illusionistic art of the shadow play, reflected the multi-faceted feature of the Ottoman culture and incorporated a total of three hundred and fifty characters, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and non-Turkish but Muslim minorities as subjects. This was an assemblage from various provinces of the Empire such as the "Rumelili" or "Arnavut" (Albanian) from the Balkans, "Laz" from the Black Sea Shore, "Kastamonulu" from Central Anatolia, "Kurd" from South East Region, and so on. All of these figures made up a delightful assortment of characters wearing their local costumes and speaking their local dialects. The non-Turkish minorities of the empire such as the Arab, Armenian (Ermeni), Greek (Rum), Jew (Yahudi), French (Frenk), Levantine and Persian (Acem) each speaking with their own accent as residents of the mahalle (quarter) or merely as passers-by, reflected the Ottoman's diverse world onto the Karagoz screen. The tradition in the House of Osman was not a national, but a dynastic and multiracial empire in which the Turkish language played a significant role in creating unity. Its varied populations whether Turkish, Muslim, Christian or Jewish were above all else Ottomans, members of a single body politic. Although Islam was a powerful element in the collective consciousness of the empire, the Ottoman system transcended "above all else conceptions of nationhood, religion and race. Alone in its time, it thus gave recognition to all three monotheistic faiths" (Kinross 614). In essence, the world of the Turkish shadow theatre with its individual puppets, each representing the typical characteristics of various groups, was a microcosm of the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul.[4] In its early period of existence, Islam, aspiring to fight idolatry, forbade the representation of living things, especially human faces. Because its worship centred exclusively on the act of silent prayer, drama and music had no place in its liturgy. Representation and animation of human figures were considered an intrusion upon the creativity of God; and imitation of His creatures was the equivalent to sin. Despite the austerity and rigidity of the Orthodox Islamic views of plastic arts and drama, through the ingenuity of the human mind, Shadow Theatre flourished during the Ottoman Empire. As Nicholas Martinovitch points out, "the creative genius of the human spirit" in an effort to overcome religious constraints produced figures which were distortions and parodies of human figures. Moreover, by perforating the puppets, the creators found a way of eliminating their "animate" nature, which would otherwise advocate idolatry (Martinovitch 35).

During his campaign to Egypt, Sultan Selim is said to have asked a puppeteer of a hayal-i-zil[5] performance to go with him to Istanbul, so that his son Suleyman I could see the shadow play. During the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent, Karagoz, reflecting the cultural vitality of the empire, constituted not only a prominent part of the imperial life, but in displaying a broad spectrum of socio-political, psychological and moral issues, it also fascinated the Ottoman populace. As the neighbourhood (mahalle) displayed on the Karagoz screen reflected the social pattern of a traditional quarter in the city, the audiences witnessed a parade of images of all typical Ottoman inhabitants, who were noticeable through their ethnic and regional attributes. This was significant because the residents of the mahalle were all subject to the decrees issued by the sultan. Their representation on the screen conveyed the reality that there was no distinct separation between the Turkish and non-Turkish/non Muslim populations, who freely mingled with each other. As Evliya Chelebi, the foremost Ottoman travel writer and cultural commentator reported, by the seventeenth century, although Hasanzade, a prominent master of the Turkish Shadow Theatre, incorporated three hundred skits in his repertoire, he had no authority to represent the Ottoman sovereign. The characters were all drawn from common people:

No player would have dared to present to the spectators the silhouettes of the Sultan, of the viziers or of any dignitaries of the Empire. All civil, military or religious authorities were banned from the Shadow Theatre screen either through fear or reverence. This of course did not prevent their being replaced by symbols, which were in harmony with the atmosphere of the 'mahalle' and which veiled their secret identity as well (Siyavusgil 25).

In an empire ruled by an absolute monarchy and a totalitarian regime, while the prohibition to portray the sultan or his vezir, did not prevent their representation by symbols, each Karagoz show, however, was "a risque-revue, as fearless as a militant newspaper" (And, Karagoz 67). By a curious irony, though, as Western weekly papers recorded events from the Ottoman court, sultans, vezirs, agas and muftis, all in their opulent costumes playing out all signifiers of Otherness, populated European stages. Thus, in addition to topical news and political history, a long dramatic tradition kept the Ottoman sultans and their affairs in the forefront of Western minds. Along with Renaissance travelers such as Sanderson, Sandys, Lithgow and so on, London dramatists like Peele, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Heywood and others produced the canonical version of Renaissance thought about Islam and/or the Ottoman Turk. Just like the travelogues, which were not simply a portrait of cities and landscapes in the Orient, but written with a conscious rhetorical effect, Renaissance drama presented a similar ideology displaying standard, received ideas about the Ottoman Empire. As the travelers drew their descriptions of the Ottomans (particularly the sultans and other dignitaries) from a distant and unreliable view of sights that were "forbidden" to the outsiders in the Ottoman Empire, the dramatists based their depictions on this collective store of "knowledge" about the Turks. The moral of Richard Knolles' massive edition of the General History of the Turkes (1603), for example, attested to the fact that an "armchair" historian without leaving England could give an account of the historical events of Ottoman/Islamic culture though a collection of erroneous interpretations, representations, attitudes, interests and stereotypes.

Representation of the Ottomans on the English stage can be traced back to the tradition of the English folk plays and the Mummers' Plays with the part of the Turkish knight opposing St. George, performed by an actor in "Herod's vein" and in all likelihood, with a blackened face (Tiddy 14). Despite references to Turkish knights in romances or folk plays prior to the sixteenth century, for the Englishman the Ottoman, as Wood notes, " if he existed at all, was but a shadowy figure inheriting the opprobrium formerly heaped upon the Saracens by generations of crusaders"[6] (Wood 1). The figure of the Turk[7] as a fixed type, loosely representing the "pagan" as such, or the idea of anti-Christian forces, was not simply restricted to allegorical treatments as in a Mummers' Play. Since the terms "Mohammedan", "Moslem", "Arab", "Turk" and "Saracen" were used almost interchangeably as mere theological abstractions within the universe of Western discourse, the distinction between Ottoman and Turk was also neutralized in eighteenth-century dramatic representations. Originally, the term Turk applied only to one of the nomadic peoples in Central Asia. As the millet (literally "nation") system of the multi-religious, multinational Ottoman Empire aimed to create one civilization, the Turk was regarded as only one of the representatives of the cultural mosaic of the diverse peoples of the Ottoman society. In the West, while the Turk was synonymous with Muslim, Islam was defined as Mohammedanism. Considering that even in the Age of Enlightenment the Dictionnaire universel and the Dictionnaire de l'académie française described the word "impostor" as synonymous with Mohammed, the discursive confinement of the Islamic prophet as a "type" led to the polemic use of the term Mohammedanism, as "an insulting European designation" (Said 66). Despite its pejorative connotation, the incorrect definition of Islam was based on the assumption that "Mohammed was to Islam as Christ was to Christianity" (Said 60). Referring to the stereotypical notions generated about the complex society of the Ottomans, who "established one of the longest-lived (ca. 1300-1922), yet least studied or understood, dynastic states in world history" (Kafadar, xi) Naff writes:

While the Islamic image has always been distorted[8] or misrepresented in the West, the Islamic world of the eighteenth century—particularly the Middle Eastern heartland of the Ottoman Empire, its Arab and North African provinces ... has been a prime victim (Naff 3).

In the course of the analysis of varies dramatic texts, this study aims to shed light on the politics of representation by contextualizing and analyzing the practices of representation of the Muslim/Ottoman Turk on the English stage. The opening chapter analyzes the problems of historiography of the Ottoman Empire in order to reach a historicized understanding of the complexity of Western values and attitudes towards the Muslim/Ottoman Turk. It sets out the foundations of the ideological positions articulated by cultural, religious and historiographical strands in the plays. The following chapters will explore how the Ottoman milieu as a dramatic setting provided for the European audience s a common experience of fascination and fear of Other. With an awareness of how the dramatists operated within the discursive limits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, each chapter offers a detailed consideration of the vital role that European drama played in the formation of Western assumptions and conclusions about the meaning of East/Ottoman/Muslim.

The first chapter, which offers a theoretical, discursive and historical basis for the analysis of specific representations of the Ottoman Turks, lays the foundations of successive chapters, categorized according to the reigns of the sultans depicted in the plays. Essentially, the relevance of the texts in the sphere of the ideological, forms an historical and analytical basis for the representations of Ottomans which have evolved across a range of generic forms.

The most important contextualizing factors which need to be acknowledged in addressing the politics of representation are (a) the relationship between dramatic representations of the Turks and their material world (b) discursive practices that produced knowledge about the Ottomans and their power (c) a cluster of issues revolving around matters of identity and difference. In this context, it must be emphasized that the endlessly repetitive, highly intertextual denial of Ottoman realities in these plays determines in advance the dramatization of the characters. In other words, it is the whole repertoire of imagery and visual effects that organizes the representation of the Ottoman Turks by channeling difference into dichotomies such as Self and Other, West and East, Christian and Muslim. Ultimately, in arguing not only how dialectics shape the representation of the Ottomans and constitute a force in the plots and the stagecraft, but also how they establish the "truth of the matter" (Hall 46), this study draws upon different methodologies by offering a selective overview of a range of theories and arguing for the importance of gleaning certain features from each.

In the representation of Ottoman Turks in English drama (1656-1792), the "Orient" is crucial in the ideological construction of the West. Yet, ironically, the decline of the Ottoman Empire from the eighteenth century onwards also seems to serve the ideological construction of a somewhat abstract, ageographical and ahistorical "Orient" by scholars of the twentieth century who have vigorously allied themselves with studies that explore the relationships among knowledge, power and politics. To offer a specific example, Edward Said's renowned book, to which this thesis owes a great deal, has its own cultural distortion and bias as it refers to the Ottomans only in passing. Said's amply documented scholarship which not only discusses the unified character of the Western discourse about the "Orient" from antiquity to the present, but which specifically deals with Islamic Orientalism, tells us nothing about the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922). Since there are already difficulties in overcoming the pervasive negative assumptions about the Ottomans embedded in Western understanding, the overgeneralization of the historical interactions of systems and cultures and an unwillingness to confront concrete realities of the past, make the Ottoman case particularly complex. Consequently, in analyzing the representation of Turks in English drama, the aim of this study is not only to seek a solution to the failings of a Eurocentric orientalist history, but also to overcome the historigraphical and methodological problems arising from the current counter-hegemonic "regime(s) of truth" (Foucault 1980, 131) which claim to give voice to the unvoiced. Orientalism as Said asserts, is a "corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it". And, this study interrogates the relations of knowledge and power, culture and politics by anchoring its arguments in the empirical depths of the seven hundred years of the imperial experience of the Ottoman Empire, historiographically documented as "the Orient".

Chapter 1:

Historical/Theoretical Perspectives

1.1. The Historical Background

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Ottoman state was a world empire which influenced directly or indirectly the lives of millions in the Mediterranean, in East Central Europe and the Middle East. Its geopolitical position, vast territory, ample human and economic resources, its magnificently efficient administration and its army, one of the best organized military machines of the early modern period, gave the Ottoman Empire the status of a world power

(Agoston 126).

Since its publication in 1978, Edward Said's account, in Orientalism, of the Western approach to the Orient has been both pivotal and a major incentive for the growth of work on colonial discourse. In seeking to trace the interrelations of culture, history and textuality, Said, in his widely read and greatly influential book, ultimately leaves the reader with the observation that: "Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant" (Said 57). Said separates East and West from a wide range of perspectives—political, religious, economic, historical, cultural, etc.—which go back as far as Aeschylus' The Persians and conclude with Kissenger, and claims that Orientalism is a "broadly imperialist view of the world" (Said 15). In discussing the East/West relationship from a "general and hegemonic context" (Said 9) Said draws attention to a "geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, historical and philosophical texts" (Said 120). He claims that Western political and intellectual domination over the East has defined the nature of the Orient as weak and that of the Occident as strong. Said's model of "'fixity' in the ideological construction of otherness" (Bhabha 8) is for Bhabha[9] a "historical and theoretical simplification" (Bhabha 25). This applies to the Ottoman case from the point of view that Said's ahistorical and ageographical approach to the Orient does not do justice to the historical realities of the Ottoman Empire as a world power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

What is essentially problematic in Orientalism is that it tells the reader nothing about centuries-old Ottoman imperial order. In exploring the relations of knowledge and power, and of culture and politics as the determining elements in defining the worlds of Islam and Christianity, Said refers to the Ottomans only in passing. In his introduction to Orientalism, which has widely informed studies of Western encounters with Islam from the time of the Crusades to the present, Said defines his premise with precision and clarity by stating that he will deal with the Near East with occasional reference to Persia and India. He indicates that in his work "a large part of the Orient seem[s] to have been eliminated" such as "Japan, China and other sections in the Far East—not because these regions were not important (they obviously have been)" (Said 17). In his amply documented book, Said begins by confronting the domination of Britain and France of "the Eastern Mediterranean from about the seventeenth century on" (Said 17). He is almost apologetic about the fact his discussion will "not do justice to the important contributions to Orientalism of Germany, Italy, Russia and Portugal" (ibid). Ironically, in his apparent chronological account of Orientalist/imperialist[10] exploration and expansion, Said, as he focuses on the British and French experience of the East, makes a conscious choice not to talk about the Ottoman Empire, historiographically documented as "the Orient". The problem here is that the semantic domain of the concept of power includes the concepts of appropriation and domination, which turn up frequently in Said's characterizations of the will to power. Paradoxically, however, based on Said's own appropriation of the domain of the Orient, the six hundred years of the imperial experience of the Ottoman Empire is discarded outright or "when mentioned, is rendered unrecognizable or irrelevant" (Zilfi 4). However, the Ottomans who had excelled in statecraft and administration, financial policies, land and military organization, were a "centralized and self consciously imperial state" (Kafadar xi). As Francis Robinson writes in The Illustrated History: Islamic World:

After taking Constantinople in 1453 the Ottoman Emperors Mehmet the Conqueror (r.1444-46/1451-81), Bayazid II (r.1481-1521), Selim (r.1512-20), and Sulayman the Magnificent (r.1520-66) conquered the fertile crescent, Egypt, and the Hijaz, thus gaining control of Mecca and Medina, Yemen, and North Africa up to Morocco (Robinson 65).

In 1453, the capture of Constantinople, renamed Istanbul, was seen as the realisation of the "apocalyptic prophecies circulating" (Robinson 58) about the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul, the location (previously besieged by the Arabs in 668) between Europe and Asia, symbolized the beginnings of the Ottoman Sultan's religious and political power in both the West and the East. In 1500s the Ottoman armies not only began to penetrate Eastern Europe, but with the conquest of Egypt in 1517, the office of the caliphate—reaching back to the Islamic Prophet—which was previously claimed by Mamluk Sultans, officially passed to the Ottoman Sultan.[11] This meant that from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, that is, until the 1922 abolition of the caliphate by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular Turkish Republic, it was the Ottoman Sultans who, as the heads of Islam, were the sovereigns of the Muslim world. As Lord Kinross writes: