Thomas Kyd’s influential play The Spanish Tragedy (1592) is a gory revenge drama which is well-known for its reflection of the tensions that were prevalent between Protestant England and Catholic Spain towards the end of the sixteenth century. Many critics have shown how the play demonstrates these tensions by characterising Spanish characters, and the Iberian world of the play, as fundamentally villainous, immoral and self-destructive. However, the play also makes a notable reference to the ‘Turk’ at a crucial moment of the narrative which might extend our understanding of how this figure was demonised in the early modern English imagination.

The Ottoman allusion takes the form of a playlet which is staged in the final scene of Kyd’s play during the nuptial celebrations of Bel-Imperia, the niece of the King of Spain, to Balthazar the Prince of Portugal. The mini-drama is set in the aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of Rhodes and follows “the Tragedie, Of Soliman the Turkish Emperour”, a character inspired by the historical figure Sultan Suleiman I who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1520 to 1566.¹ The story was also available in England as a play-text entitled The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda (1592) which most scholars attribute to Thomas Kyd since it presents a similar rendering of the narrative (though both the play and playlet were based on a story that featured in Henry Wotton’s A Courtlie Controuersie Of Cupids Cautels (1578)). In this tale, Soliman is embroiled in a love triangle with Perseda, a beautiful captive taken from Rhodes, and Erasto, a knight who joins Soliman’s service after the conquest and whom the Emperor comes to favour. The Turk falls in love with Perseda but later learns that Perseda and Erasto were formerly sweethearts. He initially allows the couple to reunite but is later convinced by his Bassa (or advisor) to kill Erasto. Perseda reacts to the murder of Erasto by killing the Emperor before proceeding to kill herself.

The writer of the playlet, Hieronimo, uses this staged performance in order to enact revenge on Balthazar and Bel-Imperia’s brother Lorenzo who together murdered Hieronimo’s son Don Horatio (who was also Bel-Imperia’s lover) in an earlier part of the play. Through purposeful casting choices, Hieronimo is able to kill Balthazar, while Bel-Imperia kills Lorenzo and then herself all under the pretence of drama. In addition to avenging his son’s death, Hieronimo’s play disrupts plans for a formalised union between Portugal and Spain and kills all possible successors to Portuguese and Spanish rule.

The use of the Turk at this crucial moment of the play is intriguing. Since Turkish identity was synonymous with Muslim identity in the period, most critics agree that the playlet draws on early modern English religious views on the similarities between the apostasy of the Catholic Church and Islam. Kyd, they suggest, was likely following the rhetorical strategies frequently employed in English Protestant polemics, where the ‘Turk’ was used as a symbol of evil. Matthew Dimmock, for instance, has shown how one Protestant text by Robert Horne the Bishop of Winchester described “the Pope” as “a more perillous ennemie vnto Christe, than the Turke” and “Popery more Idolatrous, then Turkery”.² Thus early modern perceptions of the sacrilegious Turk would have emphasised the heathen evils of the Spanish court, and the villainy of the Spaniard Hieronimo in particular.

Kyd’s use of the ‘Turk’ as a negative rhetorical symbol, specifically one which signifies religious, cultural and racial difference, can tell us as much about early modern English views on this figure as it does about English disdain for Catholic Spain. Examining how the playwright draws on Turkish identity to characterise villainy highlights some of the terms through which this figure was demonised in this early modern drama and thus more generally on the early modern English stage. One aspect of the ‘Soliman and Perseda’ playlet which might extend our understanding of this is its ‘polyglot’ design.

In the performance, Hieronimo insists that each of the actors must “must act his parte, In vnknowne languages”(K1v). The combination of foreign languages with foreign characters ascribes the performance with a multicultural milieu, as the Spaniard Hieronimo becomes a Greek-speaking, Turkish Bashaw; the Spanish Princess Bel-Imperia acts as an “Italian dame” who speaks French; the Portuguese Balthazar turns into a Latin-speaking, Turkish Soliman; while the Spaniard Lorenzo plays the Rhodian Erasto who speaks Italian. Hieronimo explains his decision to his actors by asserting that the performance strategy “may breede the more varietie” (K1v) and he additionally promises that the “conclusion” will “prove the invention” (K1v), or explain all. When the other characters leave the stage, Hieronimo explains his plan to the audience, asserting his hopes that the court will be “Wrought by the heauens in this [performance’s] confusion”(K1v) thus enabling him to get away with his murderous plans - and this is what happens.

By facilitating Hieronimo’s manslaughter the playlet’s polyglot form is necessarily presented as an evil element of the performance. Several critics have accordingly explained this multilingual feature through Hieronimo’s description of his plans for the Spanish court as “the fall of Babilon”(K1v). Scholars suggest that that multilingual performance produces a “babel” which would have invited early modern audiences to conflate the play’s Iberian world with the biblical, disgraced city of “Babilon”. However, given the Ottoman backdrop of the playlet, it is also possible that early modern audiences would have associated this multiculturalism with the Ottoman Empire which had a similarly polyglot identity.

The diversity of the peoples and languages of the Ottoman Empire was represented in travel writings and historical chronicles circulating in England in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries. In The nauigations, peregrinations and voyages, made into Turkie (1585), for example, Nicholas Nicholay presents observations of the “dyvers Phisitions” in Constantinople who have “great knowledge[...]in the language and letters, Greeke, Arabian, Chaldee and Hebrewe” (N1r). He elsewhere describes the “merchant Iewes” of Constantinople who employ “workemen of all artes and handicraftes moste excellent” who have the capacity to “speake and vnderstand all other sortes of languages used in Levant” and thus helped to “set up printing” in the city which is used to “put in light divers bookes in divers languages, as Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and the Hebrewe tongue” (R3r). Publications such as Nicholay’s suggest that the multilingualism of the Ottoman Empire was a concept known and circulating in late sixteenth-century England and that early modern theatre-goers may, in turn, have recognised the diversity in the playlet as a reference to Ottoman or Turkish identity.

If the sinister “varietie” of the playlet was derived from or connected to the trope of the treacherous Turk which is central to the playlet, then Kyd’s playlet invites us to consider: How might the stage Turk have influenced early modern views on the relationship between foreign languages, cultural hybridity and social difference in the early modern English imagination? And correspondingly, what role did language and multiculturalism have in constructions of Ottoman or Turkish alterity on the early modern stage?

Further Reading:

Some critical work I’ve been reading to think more about these questions include:

Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Abingdon: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), pp. 108-110

Carla Mazzio, "Staging the Vernacular: Language and Nation in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 38 (1998), 207-232

Linda McJannet, The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

References:

1. Kyd, Thomas., The Spanish tragedie containing the lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Bel-imperia (London, 1592), K3r. All further quotations from the play-text are taken from this Quarto version of the play and are cited within the body of this post.

2. Dimmock, Matthew., New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Abingdon: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), p. 74.