Re-Orienting Gender and Islamic Alterity in Early Modern English Drama

Abstract

Early modern scholars often read the dramatic representations of the Muslim woman in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which is largely informed by Said’s theory of Orientalism. However, the Ottomans remained as a dominant superpower throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the assumption of a power relation between a dominating West and a subordinate East cannot be sustained within the political and historical context of the age. For this reason, the image of Islamic femininity in the period’s drama should be re-interpreted so as to reflect this overturn in the world’s power balances. In this essay through short analyses of a series of early modern plays with Ottoman themes I argue that while the representations of the Muslim woman in early modern drama share characteristics with the Muslim woman in Orientalist literature, in Ottoman contexts, these representations denote not the inferiority, but the superiority of Islam, and embody the military and religious threat Islam posed to Europe.

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