Course info

This seminar explores late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century dramatic depictions and performances of male and female characters and settings from the East, a cultural and imaginative space which held great fascination for early modern dramatists and theatre audiences, comprising regions from the Eastern Mediterranean and Africa to East Asia. According to contemporary scholars, early modern English representations of the East and especially of Muslims and Islamic cultures were more ambiguous and fluid than in the period of Orientalism in the 18^th and 19^th centuries: they were tendentious, hateful, often polemic and sometimes favourable, characterised by a blend of fear, admiration, desire and imperial envy. Early modern drama contains stereotypical images and characters that still influence Western perspectives on the East (especially Islam), e. g. the cruel, aggressive or voluptuous male Turk/Muslim or the seductive (and in the case of Early modern drama strikingly powerful) woman of the East. This seminar will examine if the selected dramatic texts can be said to belong to a period “before Orientalism” (as some scholars have suggested), not merely in historical but also in cultural and aesthetic terms. We will focus on the following questions: do early modern plays imagine the East in ways that cannot not be reduced to Orientalist binary oppositions between the culturally and morally superior West and the inferior East? Do the selected texts reproduce, endorse or even challenge or unsettle such oppositions and strategies of Othering? What is the role of dramatic performance in representations of cultural and gender identities in the plays, e. g. in the contexts of religious conversions and intercultural love relationships?

We will analyse the following plays:

• Christopher Marlowe: Tamburlaine the Great I/II (1578/1588)
• William Shakespeare: Othello (1604)
• William Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra (1607)
• The following films / stage performances will be discussed in class:
• Othello (1995), dir. Oliver Parker (DVD)
• Othello (2015), dir. Iqbal Khan (DVD)
• Antony and Cleopatra (2018), dir. Iqbal Khan (DVD)

Please purchase or borrow copies of Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s plays (the Arden edition is recommended for Othello and Antony and Cleopatra and the New Mermaids edition for Tamburlaine I/II). All secondary literature for the course and the syllabus will be provided via moodle.