Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East 1576-1626

Abstract

Richmond Barbour's Before Orientalism is a useful if uneven contribution to the growing scholarship on England's imaginative and commercial involvement with India and the East in the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-centuries.In situating his project, Barbour rehearses the by now well-worn critique of Edward Said's Orientalism: its confi nement to a (Western) discursive system that treats "its own accounts of others as the accounts that matter" (4), effaces alien agency, and oversimplifi es "the complex processes by which societies engaged, articulated, and shaped each other, in multiple and shifting alliances" (5).(As is often the case with such critiques, the author does not entirely avoid the pitfalls he identifi es.) Barbour's corrective emphasizes "the imitative, fi tful, uncertain, and not infrequently disastrous" (3) aspects of England's early modern expansionist ventures: its Eastern engagements reveal less the incipient domination of an Orientalist model à la Said than relative weaknesses that serve instead to undo Eurocentric confi dence.He further distinguishes domestic constructions of Asia-often as crudely dualistic as later Orientalist models-from the "more pliant, polyvalent attitudes towards various 'others'" that emerge when we study accounts of those agents actually responsible for England's strategic and economic relations with Asia.This division between the domestic and the foreign "theatres" of English eastern initiatives supplies the book's overarching structure: its fi rst part examines how the East was staged in London, while the second studies two "inaugural scenes" of Englishmen in the East (Thomas Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe).Drawing on the work of Matar and others, Barbour begins with the presumption that England's view of the East was mediated by the ambivalent fi gures of the Turk and the Ottoman empire.This rhetorical engagement, exemplifi ed by Richard Knolles' 1603 The Generall Historie of the Turkes, reveals a proto-orientalist binarism opposing a Christian Europe to an Islamic Orient.But the opposition, Barbour argues, functions ambivalently: it both alarms and reassures, invokes and dismisses danger.On the one hand, Knolles treats the Ottoman Empire as a model to imitate in that it has "assumed for itself that secular imperium which Jacobean mythology intended for Great Britain" (19).It represents a model of unity and discipline all too lacking in Europe.On the other, Knolles' emphasis on Tamerlane and Scanderbeg, the Battle of Lepanto, and on the "Asiatic mores ascendant in the Turkish regime" (25) marks the Ottomans (and by extension Asia) as vulnerable.In accusing them of "oriental excess," Knolles further implies that Ottoman power is at heart empty, more theatrical than real.Barbour aligns this rhetoric with the language of antitheatrical attacks on London's theatre-where "[a]ntitheatrical and masculinist discourses converged…to build a fundamental proto-oriental critique" (29)-while arguing that such rhetoric ought to be seen as compensatory rather than as assertive, refl ecting England's weakness abroad rather than its strength.The subsequent-and to my mind rather weak-chapter on Tamburlaine builds upon these insights to draw "three major links between England and Tamburlaine:

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