Robert Daborne’s play A Christian Turn’d Turk (1609) has interested many scholars studying early modern Anglo-Ottoman encounters, and has become a particularly useful text for exploring English responses to Mediterranean captivity, themes of religious conversion, and constructions of Islamic otherness in early modern English literature and culture. The play was inspired by the true story of the English Captain John Ward, a Mediterranean pirate who converted to Islam in the early seventeenth century - a process otherwise known to the English as ‘turning Turk’. It was performed at a time when anxieties about religious conversion to Islam in England were high, especially because of the number of English who were converting to Islam as a result of Ottoman captivity, as well as the many who converted voluntarily, being desirous to enter the service of the prosperous Ottomans and their extensive empire. However, as early modern race scholars have shown, this period was also a significant moment in the history of racial formation, and in my research I consider how stage representations of Islamic otherness seem to have been informed by the developing racial discourses of the time. In my first blog for this platform, I would like to present a reading of Islamic conversion in Daborne’s play to illustrate how these ideas of racial and religious otherness work together on the early modern stage to create discourses of difference.

 From 1606, Ward had been running his trade and raid activities from Tunis in North Africa, which was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time (Vitkus 25). In the following year, Ward tried to return to England but failed to obtain a royal pardon for his sea crimes from James I, and so he eventually converted to Islam and settled in Tunis where he continued with his piratical endeavours (Vitkus 27). Ward’s story was widely publicised in two pamphlets published soon after his permanent move to Tunis, namely Andrew Barker’s True and Certain Re-port of the Beginning, Proceedings, Overthrows, and now present Estate of Captain Ward and Dansiker...(1609), and News from the Sea, Of Two Notorious Pirates…(1609), which was by an anonymous writer (Vitkus 24). The storyline for Daborne’s play was adapted from the narratives about Ward’s life included in these pamphlets (Vitkus 24).

In the play, Ward decides to turn Turk when he falls in love with Voada, who is the sister of Crosman, the Captain of the Janissaries in Tunis, and who insists that the Englishman converts before she entertains his interest in her. His conversion is staged as a ritual which is enacted in Scene 8 as a dumbshow (a mimed performance without any speech), though the scene begins and ends with narrations by the Chorus. The event begins with the entry of a procession of figures including “one with a Mahomet’s head”, followed by “the Mufti”, and “two Turks, one bearing a turban with a half-moon in it”, one with “a robe” and “a sword”, and another Turk with a “globe in one hand” and “an arrow in the other”(8.s.d).^[1] Thereafter, Ward is brought in on an “ass” (8.s.d) and is made to lie “bare-headed” (8.s.d) or naked on a table where he is supposed to undergo a circumcision, though we later learn that this doesn’t take place as Ward dupes the Muftis by replacing his foreskin with an “ape’s tail”(9.3). Ward “subscribes” to Islam by putting his hand into the air and his conversion is completed when the Mufti “puts on his turban and robe, girds his sword, then swears him on the Mahomet’s head” and presents him with a final test in which Ward is made to denounce Christianity by rejecting “a cup of wine” offered to him “by the hands of a Christian” (8.s.d.). The ritual then concludes and the figures exit the stage leaving the Chorus to offer a supplementary explanation for the events that have occurred.

 In the absence of speech, the dumbshow uses an interesting range of props and gestures that reflect some of the tropes which commonly featured in representations of Ottoman and Muslim others on the early modern English stage.  The Turk with the “globe” in one hand, for instance, demonstrates English perceptions about Ottoman imperial ambition and their desire for world domination, while the “arrow” in the other complements this object with an allusion to far-reaching targets and Ottoman military prowess. Similarly, the old Mahomet’s head which the Mufti swears on illustrates the identity that the early modern English ascribed to Islam’s Prophet Muhammed as a pagan deity.^[2] However, I would argue that the most intriguing inclusions in the dumbshow are the turban, robe and sword that Ward dons in the conversion ritual. The act of dressing into the “habit of a free-born Turk” (8.18), as the chorus describes it, forms part of Ward’s conversion process and seems to be one of the last steps in confirming Ward’s turn to Turk. Through this change in clothing, Daborne introduces a visual component to the conversion that helps counteract what Ania Loomba describes as one of the “crisis” of conversion that intensified anxieties around this practice in early modern England: there was no discernible way to tell if “the convert really converted” or if the “outer [...]conversion really matches up to an inner reality” (55-6). Ward’s dressing in Turkish garb, which forms part of the conversion process, accordingly becomes a means of consolidating Ward’s conversion by rendering his new religious identity visible externally.

 Daborne’s use of clothing in this way reflects an impulse to make Islamic difference tangible and easy to recognise on the body of the convert, and in my reading of the scene it strikes me that Daborne is attempting to visually code the conversion in another way, through blackness. Specifically, Daborne colour-codes the conversion by using the term “black” in the scene to signify the act of Ward’s conversion. Before the ritual begins, the chorus introduces the event by asserting that the “deeds” that have been “presented” thus far in the play will seem “white” when “[c]ompared unto those black ones” which are about to transpire (8.3-4). Since Ward’s conversion is the only ‘deed’ that takes place in the short scene, the phrase “black deeds” clearly refers to this set of religious acts. Once the ritual is completed, the chorus continues to use blackness as a label for conversion by warning us that “black’s the way to hell”, and noting again in the final line of the scene that the remainder of the play will demonstrate how these “black deeds will have [further] black ends” (8.28).   The phrase “black deeds” therefore becomes a kind of substitute name for the act of turning Turk, which is not referred to by any other title in the scene. As such, I would suggest that Daborne effectively equates the process of Islamic conversion with the idea of blackness.

 Given the religious context of the scene, the colour reference at first reads as a symbol for the Christian connotations of darkness that were well-known in early modern English culture. In the Christian discourse of the period, blackness and darkness “stood for death, mourning, baseness, evil, sin and danger” while whiteness and lightness connoted to “purity, virginity, [and] innocence”(Fryer qtd in Hall 9). Based on these meanings, the representation of Islamic conversion as “black” would serve to highlight the sinfulness of Ward’s apostasy and his submission to the “accursed priests”(8.11), “pagan tribes” (8.17), and generally “damned” (8.16) faith and society of the Turks. Yet while the language might produce this effect, it seems like an unnecessary inclusion for this purpose of amplifying Ward’s sin, since Daborne’s description of the conversion is already laden with condemnatory language against the religion of the Turk. Even the label “Turk” itself, embedded in the notion of “turning Turk”, would sufficiently capture the heinousness of Ward’s apostasy since the word “Turk” was often used to symbolise any “enemy” to the wider English public and was therefore synonymous with general ideas of otherness (Sisneros 8).

 Instead, I would argue that Daborne incorporates this colour-coded language into the conversion act in order to help articulate the change Ward undergoes in visual terms, as a turn from the “white” that preceded the conversion to a new Islamic “black[ness]”.  Ward does not become physically or racially black through his conversion, but Daborne invites the audience to imagine Ward as black and to see Islamic conversion as a change that can somatically mark an Englishman as black, making their difference easy to detect. As Kim Hall has shown, Christian discourses of blackness and whiteness were not mutually exclusive from racial ones, as early modern English writers evidently “recognised the possibilities of this [religious] language for the representation and categorization of perceived physical differences” (4). Moreover, Hall argues that when the English used these religious symbols of light and dark to negotiate physical differences between themselves and others, this language became racialised (6). Blackness for Daborne might accordingly be derived from religious ideas but is simultaneously able to categorise and organise physical difference.

 By presenting Ward’s ‘turning Turk’ as a process of ‘turning Black’, Daborne seems to be experimenting with projecting racialising effects onto the act of Islamic conversion in order to make the character’s religious difference more profound.  The impetus behind the writer’s decision to use racial tropes in order to highlight Ward’s difference might also be connected to the play’s setting in Tunis in a region of North Africa then referred to as the Barbary Coast. Although the cultural and political backdrop of the play seems Turkish, especially given Ottoman authority over Tunis in the period, it is important to remember that the play is set in Africa and North Africa in particular, which is an area that early modern playwrights frequently associated with black characters and ideas of racial difference. This includes some of Shakespeare’s well-known characters such as the “black” (Ant. 5.473) Cleopatra from Egypt; the Prince of Morocco who has a tawny, “shadow’d” “complexion” (MV 4.498-499); the “Monster” (Tmp 2.935) Caliban whose mother is from “Argier” (Tmp 2.329) or contemporary Algeria; and even the “black” (Oth. 3.576) Othello whose handkerchief implicitly links this Moor figure to Egypt via the “Egyptian” (Oth. 10.1983) who gifts it to his mother.^[3] Thus, to amplify Ward’s new religious otherness, Daborne may have been informed by the markers of racial othering used on the early modern stage to characterise racial others aligned to North Africa.

 It is important to reiterate that this scene does not find the white Englishman Ward becoming physically black, and is unequivocally not an indication that white English converts like Ward were on the receiving end of racism, or became blackened in the early modern English imagination in an analogous way to black Africans and other racial others. On the contrary, Daborne’s use of blackness to characterise Islamic difference demonstrates how racial and religious identities intersected with one another as English writers tried to construct essential ideas of otherness. This conversion scene is one of many moments on the early modern stage that invite us to think critically about England’s longstanding historical traditions of producing and enacting problematic systems of prejudice, like Islamophobia and anti-black racism, as well as how these systems were shaped together in early modern English culture.

^[1] All italicised emphasis in the stage direction quotations are from the editor.

^[2] Peace and Blessings be Upon Him.

^[3] The plays referenced here are Antony and Cleopatra (Ant.), The Merchant of Venice (MV), The Tempest (Tmp), and Othello (Oth.) respectively.

Bibliography:

Daborne, Robert. A Christian Turned Turk. Ed. Daniel Vitkus. London: William Barranger, 1612. Print.

Degenhardt, Jane Hwang. Islamic conversion and Christian resistance on the early modern stage. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Print.

Hall, Kim F. Things of darkness: Economies of race and gender in early modern England. New York: Cornell University Press, 1995. Print.

Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, race, and colonialism. New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2002. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition. Ed. Stanley Wells et al. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ProQuest Ebook Central. Web. 18 Oct. 2020.

Sisneros, Katie Sue.“The Abhorred Name of Turk”: Muslims and the Politics of Identity in Seventeenth- Century English Broadside Ballads. 2016. University of Minnesota, unpublished PhD dissertation. Print.

Vitkus, Daniel J., ed. Three Turk plays from early modern England: Selimus, A Christian turned Turk, and The renegado. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Print.

Title Image: An Algerian Ship off a Barbary Port, accessed here