The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks
The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks by Linda McJannet
Palgrave Macmillan | October 2006 | ISBN: 1403974268 | 256 pages | PDF | 5.25 MB
The Sultan Speaks is the first study of English historical plays about the Turks in relation to their sources and analogues, including histories originating in Greek, Arabic, and Turkish. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic and on narrative theory, McJannet traces the transmission of these eastern sources and analyzes Richard Knolles’s citation of the “Turks’ own chronicles,” the historiographic equivalent of letting the sultan speak. She demonstrates that while the historians increasingly contain the sultan’s words with adverse authorial commentary, playwrights such as Marlowe and Fulke Greville use both dialogue and commentary to enhance the sultan’s stature and to mitigate his negative acts.
Linda McJannet, Professor of English at Bentley College, was educated at Wellesley College and Harvard University. Her work on the East in early modern drama has appeared in journals such as Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England and in the collection Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (1998). She is also the author of The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions: The Evolution of a Theatrical Code (1999).
A short interview with the author about this book can be accessed here (opens a web page in pdf). I recommend you read it first if you intend to download the book to get some relevance, and to put things in perspective.
Reviews
"The undeniable main achievement of The Sultan Speaks is its sustained attention to the complex ways in which western representations of the Ottomans, and the sultan in particular, derived from cross-cultural and intertextual encounters. McJannet offers the most significant treatment of transculturation that I am aware of, taking in readings of Greek, Arab, and Ottoman texts to demonstrate how eastern texts played a role in the western representation of the Ottomans. This book will be eagerly read by all those interested in questions of early modern contact history, English relations with Islam and the east, English theater history, and cultural politics." –J onathan Burton, Associate Professor of English, West Virginia University; author of Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624
McJannet’s The Sultan Speaks challenges the view that not much can be said about England and Islam in the early modern period without a thorough understanding of the classical languages of both traditions. Through rigorous archival research and an innovative theorization of dialogism, McJannet establishes that early modern English histories and the dramas deriving from them embed eastern sources from Byzantine, Ottoman, and Arab scholars. Her study thus speaks persuasively from within the English tradition not merely to genealogies of nascent orientalism, but beyond to previously neglected instances of cultural influence from east to west.” – Bernadette Andrea, Associate Professor of English/Chair of the Department of English, Classics, and Philosophy, University of Texas at San Antonio; Author of Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (forthcoming)
“McJannet's detailed study of eastern sources available to early modern English playwrights opens up a newly complicated understanding of the relationship between the West and the Ottoman Empire. Looking at both Latin and vernacular sources culminating in the work of Richard Knolles and William Seaman, she provides a much more measured view than several of the plays themselves, allowing us to see where they drew from possible resources and where they transformed them in their own interests. Her close readings and her extensive bibliography, advancing our current interest in the subject considerably, are invaluable.” – Arthur F. Kinney, Director of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies and Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Preliminaries: Historicizing Rage and Representing Historical Speech
Sixteenth-century Histories of the Turks: Shocking Speech and Edifying Dicta
Marlowe's Turks
"History written by the enemy": Eastern Sources about the Ottomans
Citing "the Turkes own chronicles": Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes
Horrible acts and wicked offenses: Suleyman and Mustapha in Narrative and Drama
Epilogue after Knolles: William Seaman’s The Reign of Sultan Orchan
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Rapidshare Link
Peace