Preposterous Conversions: Turning Turk, and its “Pauline” Rerighting

Abstract

In the opening chapter of Shakespeare from the Margins, I attempted to outline cultural semantics of the preposterous, as both the unnatural and the reversed or turned. In what follows, I propose to extend this exploration to early modern rep resentations of the Turk and Turk.1 As a keyword for inversions in family, state, and minde,2 the term pervades English writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen turies, in texts such as Massinger's The Unnatural Combat (1624), in which a father proclaims it preposterous in nature that he should give account/ Of [his] actions to [his] sonne.3 The con cept involved not simply a vertical overturning, however, but the sinister conversion (or perversion) of progression from left to right. The idea is also associated with turning backwards from male to female (or to imperfect male), with Hebrew and other graphic forms of spelling backwards, and with sodomy under stood as preposterous amor.4 Preposterous amor itself was frequently conflated with other early modern paradigms of inversion. What Drayton termed the

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