Ottoman Empire and European Theatre Vol. III

Images of the Harem in Literature and Theatre.

Michael Hüttler, Hans Ernst Weidinger, Emily M. N. Kugler

• Publisher: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783990120736
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

On 3 May 1810 George Gordon, Lord Byron, swam like the mythic Leander from Sestos on the European side of the Hellespont to Abydos on the Asian shore. The hero of his poem "Don Juan" has lived in "feminine disguise" in the sultan's harem for more than a century. To commemorate Byron's Don Juan, the third volume of the "Ottoman Empire and European Theatre" series focuses on the image of the harem in literature and theatre. Nineteen international contributors explore historical conceptions of the Ottoman harem and seraglio in British, French and South East European sources from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Contributions by Jennifer L. Airey, Gönül Bakay, Michael Chappell, Anne Greenfield, Isobel Grundy, Bent Holm, Michael Hüttler, Hans Peter Kellner, Emily M. N. Kugler, Andreas Münzmay, Domenica Newell-Amato, Walter Puchner, Marian Gilbart Read, Käthe Springer, Stefanie Steiner, Laura Tunbridge, Himmet Umunc, Hans Ernst Weidinger, Mi Zhou.

ACT I

ENGLISH AUTHORS OF THE LATE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

VEILED IN THE SERAGLIO: WHIG MESSAGING IN MARY PIX’S TRAGEDY IBRAHIM (1696)

ANNE GREENFIELD (VALDOSTA/GA)

Were it possible to consult dramatist Mary Pix (1666–1709) about her own work, to ask her whether her 1696 tragedy, Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks contained Whig political propaganda and messaging, she would almost certainly disavow the suggestion. Pix avoids any mention of politics in her prologue, preface, epilogue, and dedication, and she implicitly reminds her audience and readers that Ibrahim is not designed to be taken ideologically or politically seriously. According to Pix, Ibrahim is a “dull repeated tale”¹ authored by an “imperfect Woman”², and she labels it “a thing only design’d for [viewers’] Diversion.”³ Unlike Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718), who just a few years later in 1701 would fill nearly all of his tragedy Tamerlane’s preface with praise for William III (1650–1702, r.1688–1702) and Whig politics generally, Pix actively shifts her viewers’ focus away from the political matters she depicts. Pix, it seems, would prefer that Ibrahim be remembered as a, as she puts it, “harmless, modest Play” written to amuse the “Fair” members of the audience, rather than as a politically-charged treatise depicting rulers, subjects, tyranny, and resistance. Recent scholars, too, have seemingly agreed with Pix, overlooking and ignoring the political messaging of Pix’s Ibrahim. While it is not uncommon to note in passing Pix’s tacit Whig tendencies in her plays, modern critics are far more interested in Pix’s representations of women and “sexual agency” than her politics.⁴ Even scholars who set out to analyze Pix’s political messages, as Pilar Cuder-Domínguez does in “Gender, Race, and Party Politics in the Tragedies of Behn, Pix, and Manley”, tend to focus far more on Pix’s “gender politics” than on her Whiggish politics.⁵ It has become a critical commonplace that, in Anne Kelley’s words, Pix’s plays “are not overtly political in subject matter”⁶.

However, as we shall see, Ibrahim is a Whiggish, politically-charged play. Not only does the play mimic recent political events in England (most prominently, the 1688 deposition of James II [1633–1701, r.1685–1688]), but a look at Ibrahim’s plot, dialogue, and setting also reveals a strong endorsement of turn-of-the-century Whig principles. Pix drew upon a tradition in English drama of allegorizing and politicizing Ottoman settings. She altered and exaggerated her source materials to showcase a heroic Whiggish revolution and a despotic tyrant. She imbued her play with Whig-oriented rhetoric that demonized divine right theory and glorified social contract theory. And even Pix’s setting is described and displayed in a manner that highlights the inequalities of monarchical absolutism. If one rejects Pix’s meta-commentary, then, one finds a play that is overtly political, one that takes full advantage of turn-of-the-century political faction and frenzy.

Why, one may ask, would someone who insists that her play was “a thing only design’d for [viewers’] Diversion”⁷, include so many political arguments in her play? Should one give precedence to the widely-recognizable political rhetoric of Ibrahim, or, conversely, to the author’s own insinuations that the play is politically innocuous and uncontroversial? The following chapter addresses precisely these questions, arguing that Pix capitalized on the spectacle and the political connotations of her Ottoman setting in order to produce a dazzling play that dealt with topical political concerns that would have greatly interested her viewers. Equally, however, Pix assuages the controversy of her political subject matter in her meta-commentary, seemingly aware that such political messaging was risky for female dramatist. Ultimately, Pix exploited her Ottoman setting in a more complex way than did many of her contemporaries. In Pix’s hands, an Ottoman locale could titillate viewers with spectacles of sexuality and luxury; it could interest them with some of the most popular and controversial political debates of her time; and, all the while, the geographical and ideological distance of her setting could mollify viewers and critics with assurances that Ibrahim’s political rhetoric and action were utterly unintended and – most importantly – harmless. Thus, even though Pix veils her political-messaging behind an Ottoman setting and underneath a focus on female suffering, it is time to reverse the three-hundred year old assumption that Ibrahim is not a politically-charged play.

POLITICIZING THE EAST

When Pix decided to depict, in Ibrahim, a tyrannical Ottoman sultan who rapes an innocent maiden, she would have been cognizant of the political connotations of that choice. Eastern sultans, especially those of the Ottoman Empire, were strongly associated with tyranny, luxury, and sexual excess in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English imagination. In particular, Whig writers regularly depended upon images of Ottoman courts in illustrating the depravity of divine right theory. In 1716, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) discusses one such use of ‘despotic’ Eastern regimes as political iconography, calling to mind with a single reference the sorts of political abuses of power that threatened England:

The beautiful Part of this Island, whom I am proud to number amongst the most candid of my Readers, will likewise do well to reflect, that our Dispute at present concerns our Civil as well as Religious Rights. I shall therefore only offer it to their Thoughts as a Point that highly deserves their Consideration. Whether the Fan may not also be made use of with regard to our Political Constitution. […] In this Case they wou’d give a new Turn to the Minds of their Countrymen, if they wou’d exhibit on their Fans the several Grievances of a Tyrannical Government. Why might not an Audience of Muley Ishmael, or a Turk dropping his handkerchief in his Seraglio, be proper Subjects to express their Abhorrence both of despotick Power, and of male Tyranny?⁸

In advising his female readers to don images of Eastern sultans on their fans as a way to defy and affront the Tories and Jacobites around them, Addison drew upon a favorite rhetorical and political strategy of Restoration and early eighteenth-century writers. As the above excerpt indicates, the mere image of a sultan on a lady’s fan could act as a powerful symbol of tyranny and political abuse.

Nowhere in England were representations of Eastern sultans used more readily as political rhetoric than on the stage. Dramatists from John Dryden (1631–1700) to Nathaniel Lee (1645/1652–1692) to Nicholas Rowe to Joseph Trapp (1679–1747) set their politically-charged tragedies in Eastern courts. While English writers appropriated a variety of Eastern settings, including Morocco, Persia, India, China, Babylon, Moor-occupied Spain, and even the generic and undefined ‘East’, the vast majority – and the most successful – of these plays were set in the Ottoman Empire. Most of these Ottoman-based plays showcased not just Turkish scenery and stagecraft but, they displayed imagined Ottoman cultural practices as well. Usually, neither the scenery nor the cultural practices were depicted in politically-neutral ways. In these plays it is customary for most of the action to take place in the royal seraglio (an Ottoman setting that reminds viewers of the debauchery of the court), for sultans to imprison or even kill their kin for fear of regicide (a custom that paints these rulers as cruel and jealous), and for monarchs to be overpowered by a ‘queen mother’ (a power dynamic that emasculates the image of the sultan). In the hands of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dramatists, Ottoman settings served several highly-political purposes. The action and spectacle surrounding an Ottoman court on the stage would have evoked, in the minds of English audiences, impressions of political tyranny at its worst.

Pix’s Ibrahim, then, like the ladies’ fans Addison describes above, capitalized on the image of a Turkish court as political iconography. And Pix’s viewers would have surely recognized the political connotations of Pix’s tyrannical sultan, scheming eunuch, vizier, and chief mistress, and the excessive tyranny, luxury, and sexuality that marked her Ottoman setting and staging. Thus, even with Pix’s assurances (in her prologue and epilogue) that she didn’t mean to purport anything politically or ideologically serious, Pix’s viewers would have found the action of the play politically topical – and probably interesting.

POLITICAL MESSAGING IN PIX’S PLOT

The plot of Pix’s Ibrahim, taken on its own, is filled with Whig political messaging. The play opens by depicting the sloth, effeminacy, sexual excess, and tyranny of the Ottoman court, as ruled by the Sultan Ibrahim, and influenced by Ibrahim’s wicked chief mistress, Sheker Para, and his ambitious Vizier, Azema. The sultan is an icon of tyranny, abusing even his most loyal subjects with physical cruelty, economic expropriation, and (in the case of these subjects’ female kin) sexual violation. Ibrahim’s vices escalate and apex in his rape of the chaste and beautiful Morena, daughter to his loyal Mufti. When Morena is brought back to her father’s house post-rape, her father, her fiancé (Amurat), and her fiancé’s father (Mustapha) vow to depose and kill Ibrahim. Ibrahim’s rape of Morena is constructed as the ultimate abuse of royal power, and – in the fashion of the Roman Lucrece – it is a post-rape conversation among the victim’s patriarchs that leads to revenge and revolution against the ruler-rapist. The play ends with a heroic revolt led by Morena’s friends and kin, the pathetic suicides of Morena and Amurat, and, finally, the just assassinations of Ibrahim, Sheker Para, and Azema. Political stability is achieved in the last lines of the play, as Ibrahim’s infant son, Mahomet, is appointed sultan, and the ever-faithful Mufti and Mustapha vow to look after the kingdom diligently.

Turn-of-the-century audiences would have been accustomed to viewing sexual violence as a political mechanism on the stage. Since the early 1660s and during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis particularly, Whig and Tory dramatists alike constructed rape as well as attempted rape to illustrate political abuses.⁹ Whig writers tended to depict cruel tyrants who raped (or tried to rape) the innocent wives and daughters of their subjects, illustrating the limits of divine right theory and the need to overthrow unjust rulers. Tories, on the other hand, tended to depict rebels who raped innocent women in the aftermath of a revolution, emphasizing the chaotic barbarism and violence that accompanies regicide and rebellion. Thus, part of the political appeal of Pix’s Ibrahim would have come from t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Preliminary Matter
• Title
• Copyright
• ABBREVIATIONS
• REMARKS
• OUVERTURE
• PROLOGUE
• ACT I: ENGLISH AUTHORS OF THE LATE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
• ACT II: BRITAIN IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES
• ACT III: BYRON: THE YOUTH
• ACT IV: BYRON: THE SULTANA
• ACT V: FRENCH INFLUENCES
• APPENDIX