Acting Pirates: Converting A Christian Turned Turk

Abstract

The early modern playhouse was well suited — too well suited, in the eyes of its detractors — to play out anxieties about identity and allegiance, class and gender, place and nation. The stage’s ambiguous, liminal position in early modern London culture, at once protected and attacked by the authorities, is a commonplace in criticism. 1 While the theatre’s ‘official’ role was the legal fiction that it practised playing to entertain the monarch at court, it was also perceived to be a site of danger and abuse, associated with lewd, frivolous, and immoral behaviour. 2 Philip Stubbes’ complaint in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) that legislation regulating types of dress such as the Act of Apparel (1563; updated as the Sumptuary Laws in 1597; repealed in 1604) was being flouted by all classes could of course be applied directly to the theatre too, not only because costume was a floating signifier through which the players represented character and identity, but in the acting conventions that made this representation of identity and self malleable, transitory, and unstable. 3 If Stubbes feared that ‘such a confuse mingle and mangle of apparel in England, and such horrible excesse thereof, as euery one is permitted to flaunt it out, in what apparel he listeth, or can get by any meanes’ was detrimental to order in society, the stage, ironically, was aptly placed to register such perceptions. 4 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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