The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights

  And kill sick people groaning under walls;

  Sometimes I go about and poison wells;

  And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,

  I am content to lose some of my crowns,

  That I may, walking in my gallery,

  See ’em go pinioned along by my door . . .

  And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,

  And tricks belonging unto brokery,

  I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year,

  And with young orphans planted hospitals,

  And every moon made some or other mad,

  And now and then one hang himself for grief,

  Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll

  How I with interest tormented him.52

  Marlowe evokes every myth associated with anti-Semitism, focusing on the holy trinity of apostasy, murder and money. The pun on “interest” would not have been lost on his audience: Jewish “interest” was never far from the public imagination. Although Jews had been officially expelled from England in 1290, a small but significant community still lived in London.53 As he picks over his riches, Barabas declares:

  Give me the merchants of the Indian mines,

  That trade in metal of the purest mold;

  The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks

  Without control can pick his riches up,

  And in his house heap pearl like pebble-stones,

  Receive them free, and sell them by the weight.54

  The rich and exotic world of imperial conquest comes to rest “as infinite riches in a little room.”55 In this play more than any other, Marlowe demonstrated how charismatic characters like Barabas could transcend established boundaries of morality, religion and ethnicity. Marlowe himself had little interest in the specific nature of Barabas’s Jewish faith, or Ithamore’s Islamic beliefs; he wanted to show that in many respects their duplicitous behavior (though perhaps not their appetite for murder) could be just as rapacious and unprincipled as that of his audience.

  The Jew of Malta was another great success, but Marlowe’s dominance was tragically cut short. On May 30, 1593, he was stabbed to death in a house in Deptford, ostensibly after a dispute concerning the settlement of a bill. The exact circumstances of his murder are shrouded in mystery; what cannot be doubted is that his death brought to an end the career of one of Elizabethan theater’s most promising talents.56 Marlowe’s genius was to take the fear, hypocrisy and greed surrounding Elizabethan England’s relations with the Islamic world and transmute them into electrifying theater. Conflict, doubt and anxiety always make for better drama than moral absolutism. Five extraordinarily creative years had forever altered the course of English theater. It was difficult to imagine that any of his imitators would ever manage to surpass his brilliance. But one man, born like Marlowe in 1564, had been quietly learning his stagecraft by observing his fellow playwright, absorbing his style and working out how he might take things in a new direction. His name was William Shakespeare.

  8

  Mahomet’s Dove

  In his diary entries for the Rose Theatre’s spring season in 1592, Philip Henslowe noted that Marlowe’s Jew of Malta was a popular hit, performed on at least ten occasions, but its success was soon eclipsed by a new play called Henry VI. Henslowe recorded that the play’s first performance took place on March 3, 1592, and during the rest of the season it was performed on fifteen occasions, often on alternate days with The Jew of Malta.1 Today few people read Shakespeare’s earliest forays into English history, but during the first half of his career the three parts of Henry VI, written in rapid succession in the early 1590s, were enormously popular with audiences, offering a distinctive new style that challenged Marlowe’s theatrical supremacy.

  Shakespeare did not try to compete with Marlowe by imitating his “high astounding terms” and exotic settings. Instead he looked closer to home, to the Plantagenets, the flawed line of medieval kings who preceded the Tudors. London’s commercial theater had never been secure enough to put recent English history onstage, let alone to humanize it by considering the vulnerabilities and frailties of weak kings and transforming them into tragic figures. Marlowe emphasized his characters’ relentless will to power. Shakespeare, by contrast, succeeded in making historic failures into figures of empathy, insight and pathos.

  The first act of Henry VI, Part 1 opens much as Tamburlaine ends, with the death of a fabled warrior—in this case, Henry V—with no obvious successor strong enough to fulfill his legacy.2 What follows is a catalog of woe, as the infant king and his advisers prove powerless to prevent civil strife and the loss of French territories so valiantly conquered by his father. Central to the play are its portrayal of the French mystic and warrior Jeanne La Pucelle, known in Britain as Joan of Arc, and the death of the famous English warrior John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in a scene said to have caused the shedding of “the tears of ten thousand spectators” when the play was first performed.3

  In Act I, scene 2, the French dauphin Charles tries to raise the siege of Orleans but is beaten back by the English. He is then introduced to Joan, who,

  by a vision sent to her from heaven,

  Ordained is to raise this tedious siege

  And drive the English forth the bounds of France.4

  Marlowe’s ghost was never far from Shakespeare’s early plays, and Joan describes herself as “by birth a shepherd’s daughter,” who is “black and swart.”5 Challenged to single combat to prove her worth, she wins, whereupon the heir to the French throne boldly chooses to make her the leader of the French army. Looking on this self-confessed visionary, Charles exclaims:

  Was Mahomet inspirèd with a dove?

  Thou with an eagle art inspirèd then.

  Helen, the mother of great Constantine,

  Nor yet Saint Philip’s daughter’s, were like thee.

  Bright star of Venus, fall’n down on the earth,

  How may I reverently worship thee enough?6

  The dauphin struggles to understand Joan’s strength and capabilities before he alights on an analogy that expresses her singular power: if Mahomet had a mystical dove, then she must have been inspired by an eagle. Both the eagle and the dove have obvious symbolic resonance in a play about war: peace has no place in the dauphin’s ideology, and Joan, famed for her prowess on the battlefield, is associated with a spectacular bird of prey. But, more significantly, the allusion to Islam puts France within a context of holy war. Joan is recruited because she demonstrates divine powers, and it is this divinity that establishes her role in French history as a crusader.

  This is Shakespeare’s only explicit reference to the Prophet Muhammad, an allusion to the widely held Christian belief that Muhammad was a fraudulent apostate mimicking divine intercession. In his sermon “The Baptizing of a Turke” (see chapter 6), Meredith Hanmer proclaimed that Muhammad “taught a dove to feed at his ear, wherein he was wont to put grains of corn [and] persuaded his wife and others that he was a prophet, that the spirit of God fell upon him and that the Angel Gabriel, in the form of a dove, came to his ear and revealed him secrets.”7 Sir Walter Raleigh also peddled this myth in his voluminous History of the World (1603–1616), denouncing “Mahomet persuading the rude and simple Arabians, that it was the Holy Ghost that gave him advice” as a fraudulent mimicry of the apparition of the Holy Spirit as a dove at Jesus’ baptism.8 Thomas Nashe, widely regarded as one of Shakespeare’s collaborators on Henry VI, also wrote about Muhammad’s dove in The Terrors of the Night (1593), which refers to “the dove wherewith the Turks hold Mahomet their prophet to be inspired.”9 Nashe may in fact have had a hand in drafting the exchange between Charles and Joan.

  In the English chronicles, Joan is an impostor, but in French history she is a saint. From the perspective of a Protestant English audience watching the play in 1592,
it made sense to compare the Catholic French with the Prophet Muhammad. The “false” prophecy of Muhammad is followed by Charles’s invocation of more obvious Catholic prophets—John the Apostle and his eagle, St. Helen and the True Cross, and Philip the Apostle’s daughters (known for prophesying the “true” word of God among “heathens”). The parallel between Islam and Catholicism damns the French in the Protestant English audience’s eyes. Charles then promises Joan a grander urn than that given to “the rich jewell’d coffer of Darius”—a reference to the last ruler of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia. Darius was of course not a Muslim, but to the Elizabethan audience he conjured up an image of oriental absolutism. Marlowe had exploited Islamic characters and settings to create a suitably epic drama; Shakespeare’s use of them now highlighted the religious differences confronting the Elizabethans in the early 1590s.

  • • •

  The anxious and seditious atmosphere of Henry VI captured the mood of a nation whose optimism since the victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 had evaporated. The failure of Drake and Norris’s Portuguese Expedition in the summer of 1589 was the first of several foreign policy setbacks that suggested Elizabeth, who was now in her midfifties and had ruled for more than three decades, might be on the wane. Walsingham was in the last months of his life and Leicester was dead, as were many of her other most trusted advisers. Only Burghley remained, but he was in his seventies. The news from France was also bad. King Henry III’s attempt to mediate between the Catholics and Huguenots had provoked his murder in August 1589 and the contested succession of the Huguenot Henry of Navarre as King Henry IV.

  Henry of Navarre’s elevation split France, and the outraged French Catholic League rose up against him as he marched on Paris. The possibility that the French capital would fall into Protestant hands was too much for Philip, who ordered Spanish forces to invade France through the Low Countries. Elizabeth could not countenance the thought of a Spanish-controlled northern France being used as a launching pad from which to invade England again, so she dispatched an English army of 3,600 men to support Henry’s campaign in Normandy. In May 1591, when Shakespeare would have been working on Henry VI, she sent another 4,000 soldiers under the command of the rehabilitated veteran Sir John Norris. Once again, Norris was compromised by the vagueness of his orders. He spent the next twelve months at Henry’s whim tied up in pointless sieges and skirmishes, his force dwindling by the spring of 1592 to just 600 sick and hungry men. Henry VI described in graphic detail the political mismanagement of an English campaign in France in the 1420s. Its audience was painfully aware of the disastrous campaigns of the last three years, which had left thousands of English soldiers dead or returning home as invalids, with nothing to show for their support of the French Protestant cause.10

  • • •

  The turmoil in France was felt as far afield as Constantinople, where Harborne’s successor, Edward Barton, assiduously exploited divisions within the French diplomatic community. Ever since his appointment, the industrious if somewhat intemperate Barton had proved remarkably successful, thanks to his cultivation of a close personal relationship with Murad’s powerful consort, Safiye Sultan. In a letter sent to Burghley in July 1591 Barton boasted, “Such an eyesore I am to the Christians here resident and so well esteemed by the Turks.” His proximity to the sultan was such that it was assumed Murad was preparing a new Turkish fleet to sail against the Spanish in league with Elizabeth.11 The resident French ambassador, Jacques de Savary Lancosme, a firm supporter of the Catholic League, now found himself compromised by the accession of the Huguenot Henry IV. Barton accused Lancosme of working for Philip II and had him arrested by the Ottoman authorities. When Lancosme was finally released into Barton’s charge, the triumphant Englishman sent him as a prisoner to Henry IV.12

  Just as Barton believed he had cemented a three-way alliance among France, England and the Ottomans, Henry IV was making plans to break the religious stalemate in France by converting to Catholicism. Throughout the spring of 1593, the king was locked in discussions with theologians about how to present his conversion to both sides of the religious divide. His Catholic advisers finally agreed solemnly that “His Majesty was not a Turk . . . that he should be led gently from error to truth.”13 An oath abjuring his Huguenot faith and embracing Catholicism was agreed, and on July 25, before entering the capital, Henry celebrated high mass in the Abbey of St.-Denis, just outside Paris. Elizabeth had feared that Henry would try to cement his political position by choosing what one of her counselors called a religious “metamorphosis,” and she responded to the news of his conversion by refusing him any further military support.14

  In March 1592, the English Catholic propagandist and exile Richard Verstegen had circulated a pamphlet entitled A Declaration of the True Causes of the Great Troubles, Presupposed to be Intended against the Realm of England, in which he attacked Elizabeth’s privy councilors, Burghley in particular, for England’s political difficulties. He criticized the advisers for “the assisting of the Huguenots of Navarre,” which was just one aspect of England’s “general discord with all the Catholic Christians of the world.” He continued:

  Thus the realm of England, being brought into breach of amity, not only with the Church of God, but with all their old allies and friends, if we now consider with whom they are joined in true friendship, we shall find them to be so few as none at all, since they have neither spared, to offend friend nor foe. But if we look what new confederates they have chosen, instead of the old, we shall see them to be the great Turk, the kings of Fez, Morocco, and Algiers, or other Mahometains and Moors of Barbary, all professed enemies to Christ.15

  Having condemned Elizabeth’s alliance with the Turkish and Moroccan “Mahometains,” Verstegen mocked English support for a variety of Protestant groups across northern Europe. “They are also in league with a few beer-brewers and basket-makers of Holland and Zealand,” he wrote jeeringly, as well as “a company of apostates and Huguenots of France.”

  Verstegen was fully aware of Walsingham’s and Harborne’s attempts to draw the Ottomans into a closer military alliance during the previous decade. He warned his readers,

  The great Turk and his consorts, may be by the English excited to invade some parts of Christendom, near unto them adjoining (as already upon such persuasion they have attempted) but good unto England they can do none albeit the English would exchange their Geneva Bible for the Turkish Alcoran, because their situations are so far distant.

  The attack on England’s Protestantism was clear enough: “the English thus leagued with infidels, heretics and rebels” would only make them increasingly isolated within Christendom.16 The religious accommodation of the Anglo-Ottoman Capitulations had come back to haunt Walsingham and their English adherents.

  Elizabeth’s counselors were so concerned about the possible damage of Verstegen’s pamphlet both at home and abroad that they commissioned Burghley’s nephew, the philosopher, scientist and future lord chancellor Francis Bacon, to write a refutation, entitled “Certain Observations made upon a Libel Published this Present Year, 1592.” Toward the end of his lengthy response Bacon directly addressed Verstegen’s claim that “England is confederate with the great Turk.” First, he asked rhetorically:

  If he mean it because the merchants have an agent in Constantinople, how will he answer for all the kings of France since Francis I which are good Catholics; for the Emperor; for the King of Spain himself; for the Senate of Venice; and other states, that have long time ambassadors liegers [residents] in that court? If he mean it because the Turk hath done some special honor to our ambassador (if he be so to be termed) we are beholding to the king of Spain for that; for that the honor we have won upon him by opposition hath given us reputation through the world.

  This was a standard justification, based on commercial exigency, which had been used ever since William Harborne’s arrival in Constantinople: every Christian ruler had ambassadors and mercha
nts in the city, and England’s opposition to Spanish aggression in the region had won rather than lost friends.

  Bacon’s next claim was more theologically ambiguous: “If he mean it because the Turk seemeth to affect us for the abolishing of images, let him consider then what a scandal the matter of images hath been in the church, as having been one of the principal branches whereby Mahumetanism entered.”17 As far as Bacon was concerned, Islamic aniconism was not responsible for Protestant iconoclasm; instead, the flagrant idolatry of Catholicism had enabled heresies like Islam to thrive. His argument went right back to Erasmus’s claim in his essay “On the War Against the Turks” (1530) that Islam had flourished because of Catholic disunity, and was a scourge sent by a Christian God to punish the church’s sins. This had some resonance, but it was hardly a convincing justification for the deeply entrenched alliances that Elizabeth had cultivated with the Islamic world over the previous three decades. Then as now, ideological differences could always be put to one side in pursuit of trade.

  Bacon had good reason for his reticence. Even as he wrote, Elizabeth’s relations with “the great Turk” were taking on a new dimension. Rumors were circulating through Europe’s royal courts that Elizabeth was providing financial and military support “to help the Great Turk to invade Christendom,” partly inspired by the success of Barton’s embassy.18 Barton was also petitioning Burghley to send Murad gifts from the queen to endorse his appointment.

  In September 1593 Burghley relented, and the Ascension of London docked in Constantinople laden with offerings for the sultan. Barton presented gifts of gold plate, cloth and satin to Murad and his entourage while also conferring gifts upon Safiye Sultan, whom he described as “the Sultana or empress who (by reason that she is mother to him which was heir to the crown imperial) is had in far greater reverence than any of his other queens or concubines.” One of Barton’s retinue described the gifts “sent in her majesty’s name” as