The Tempest collates the notions of English masculinity, Islam and women into the indigenous femininity within the colonial situation traced in the story from a male perspective uniquely. In doing this, Shakespeare continues the Elizabethan tradition where the Ottoman man or woman is often a sort of palimpsest of identities made manifest in the context of other informing elements. Yet even within a single play the apparent 'meaning' of an Ottoman figure may shift or be displaced as circumstances offer. 6 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Oxford: Oxford’s World Classics, 2008.Ħ This involves the assignment of unique priority to certain useful, even fictional, characteristics of Ottoman/Muslim figures and the concurrent dismissal of any qualities.
5 Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature, Cambridge: CUP, 2009.However, when the optics of displacement does not convince, the provocative or dissenting voices of the submissive Claribel, gender-ambiguous Ariel, weak Caliban and predatory Sycorax are silenced and consequently totally excluded from the larger plot of The Tempest. The Ottoman Empire is reduced to Algiers, whose name was indifferently used for the city and the State itself, synonymous with Muslim piracy and enslavement to the Turks, causing fear and loathing in Europe. The fact that Prospero is Italian thus has no opposition to English or England since both Italy and England had equal political and military powers and colonial aspirations.
Italy and its Navy had played an important role during the Turkish siege of Constantinople and the Italian states were the first to come into contact with Ottoman merchants. It is the argument of our paper that though traditionally interpreted as a metaphor of colonization, either of the New World or of Ireland, The Tempest ’s pervasive setting on an island in the Mediterranean serves to illuminate how each English reference to the Ottomans depends upon Shakespeare’s choice of displacement. However, for a dramatist, traditionally cautious of such material, Shakespeare was not only familiar with multiple modes of Ottoman representation but also willing to use them in ways that reflected the changing politics of the new century. Drawing upon a tradition of work in which the Ottomans and Islam were already contested figures, the writers had either to explore 4 or to ignore the direct implications of the relationship.ĥ In comparison with The Merchant of Venice and Othello, Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, has no direct allusions to the Ottomans on the whole. England’s precarious position on the European political stage, its split and insecure religious identity, its relatively late entry into global commerce were particularly important factors in producing elastic ideologies of religious and cultural differences.
1Ģ Against a shifting international background of contradictory political and ideological machinations where the English in particular were at once involved with and opposed to renewed Ottoman campaigns in Eastern Europe, the diversity embodied in these texts offers a significant portrait of a militant and polarized culture in which the Ottoman, the 'Turke,' had become a multiple medium through which a variety of cultural anxieties and beliefs could be addressed. However, both this association and the complicated way in which it was manifested in English culture, was soon to come to an end with English mercantile interests beginning to shift further east altogether with the imminent succession in 1603 of a king whose policies were far more internationalist in scope. 1 For a more detailed insight into British interactions with the Ottoman Empire and Arabic cultures s (.)ġ Early modern debates represent some awareness, common in most European courts, that by 1600 the Anglo-Ottoman relationship was at its peak, abundantly reflected in English dramatic and non-dramatic texts of that period.
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