The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  On November 1, 1604, James and his new royal court watched the first recorded production of Othello at the Banqueting House in Whitehall. It is one of the play’s many paradoxes that a king called James saw his villainous namesake destroying a Moor, but perhaps James took comfort from watching Othello kill the specter of the circumcised and turbaned Turk. Nine years earlier, while king of Scotland, James had written a rather indifferent poem called “Lepanto.” It celebrated the victory of the Holy League in 1571:

  Which fought was in Lepanto’s gulf,

  Betwixt the baptized race

  And circumcised turban’d Turks.76

  The new king had no interest in pursuing alliances with the Moors or what he elsewhere called the “faithless Turks.” The Elizabethan age was over, and with it England’s alliance with the Islamic world.

  Epilogue

  By the time Shakespeare prepared to say farewell to the London stage and retire to Stratford in 1611, the English were leading figures in the eastern Mediterranean trade. The Levant Company was exporting English goods worth £250,000 per annum to Turkey, prompting one of its merchants, Sir Lewis Roberts, to write that the company had “grown to that height that (without comparison) it is the most flourishing and beneficial company to the commonwealth of any in England.”1 The company was beginning to face competition from a newer joint-stock initiative, the East India Company, which had been awarded its royal charter in December 1600—during al-Annuri’s time in London—with the aim of trading throughout the vast emporium of the Indian and Pacific oceans, stretching eastward from the Cape of Good Hope to the Strait of Magellan. By the 1630s the East India Company was exporting more than £100,000 of bullion and importing more than £1 million worth of pepper and spices with a variety of trading communities of different religions throughout India and the Indonesian archipelago.

  Like the Levant Company, the East India Company did not involve itself in its early years in the kind of diplomatic or military state policy that had led the Elizabethans into such close alliances with Muslim rulers. James’s rapprochement with Spain brought him into closer alignment with the rest of Europe. He opposed Ottoman expansion just at the time when the Turks disengaged from Europe to focus on the Persian threats on their eastern borders. The new Stuart king’s delusions of grandeur led him to believe that his destiny was to unify Christendom, which resulted in peace with Spain and correspondence with leading figures in the Greek Orthodox Church, to whom he proposed a Christian union with the Church of England. It can have done little to ingratiate him with the new Ottoman sultan, Ahmed I.2

  James had no interest in appealing to the Ottoman sultan for military assistance during the central European conflict that dogged the later years of his reign, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). He was no doubt influenced in this by his decision to marry his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to Frederick V, Elector Palatine and a claimant to the Bohemian crown. Besides, where Elizabeth had turned her sights on the east, James’s interests were drawn west, to the New World. In 1606 he sanctioned the creation of the Virginia Company, a new joint-stock initiative aimed at settling English colonies on the northeast coast of America. The company could hardly compete with the Spanish domination of the Americas, but it represented the beginnings of a global dimension to English foreign and commercial policy, which was from that point forward no longer centered on the Mediterranean and Muslim world.

  While most of England lamented Queen Elizabeth’s death, back in Venice, Anthony Sherley must have celebrated, as it brought one of his greatest supporters to the English throne. Never renowned as a shrewd judge of character, James had been flattered by Sherley’s prolix correspondence, and in May 1603 he wrote to the Venetian authorities insisting that Sir Anthony “is not the bad subject he is represented to be.” He asked the Venetians to hand over one brother and intercede with the Ottomans on behalf of the other.3 It took another two years to secure Sir Thomas’s release, but Sir Anthony was free again the very next month. James seems to have realized his mistake, because by February 1604 he issued a license permitting Sherley “to remain beyond the seas some longer time, and recommended to the princes [and] strangers by whom he may pass.”4 This gave Sherley some formal status as an Englishman abroad, but it was hardly a ringing endorsement, and talk of a return to England was quietly dropped. Sherley reverted to his old ways, passing intelligence about Turkish troop movements to Rudolf II in Prague, promising “I work still for your majesty and am ready for any sacrifice for your cause.”5 On December 1, the Venetian authorities voted unanimously to banish Sir Anthony from the city forever. He was given four days to leave, on pain of death. Nothing he or James could say would change their minds, and so within days he departed Venice for the last time.

  With his final exile from Venice, his Persian embassy was definitively over. James had no interest in pursuing alliances with either Persians or Ottomans; his primary aim was peace with Spain, which left Sherley with little diplomatic leverage (not that his increasingly erratic behavior left him much of that anyway). And yet this was still not the end of his picaresque story. He returned to Prague, from where he went to Morocco in 1605 to propose a Moorish campaign against the Turks in Algiers. Perhaps predictably it came to nothing. By the following year, he was working for the Spanish court in Madrid, persuading a gullible Philip III to fund a privateering fleet, with disastrous results.

  In 1607 the Sherley brothers’ stories became so famous that a group of journeymen playwrights wrote a play about their exploits, entitled The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, although it came nowhere near capturing the sheer strangeness of their adventures. By this time, Shah Abbas had grown so frustrated by the lack of news from Sir Anthony that in 1608 he dispatched Sir Robert on a similar mission. Sir Robert had not been idle in his brother’s absence, converting to Catholicism and marrying the daughter of a Circassian chieftain, the nineteen-year-old Sampsonia, baptized by Carmelites as Teresa. He traveled across Europe, was made a count by the pope and then traveled to Madrid, where in April 1611 he was finally reunited with his brother Anthony after twelve years. The elder brother’s immediate response to their reunion was to denounce Robert as an English spy to the Spanish authorities. The youngest had finally eclipsed the elders: Sir Robert went on to serve King James and his son King Charles I until his death in 1628. Sir Thomas was released from prison and returned to England, depressed and destitute, dying on the Isle of Wight in 1633.

  Sir Anthony stayed in Spain, an increasingly marginal and pathetic figure, living off a meager Spanish pension. He remained full of impossible dreams of power and influence yet was racked with debt, with “scarce money to buy him bread,” living “in a bodegon, which is little worse than an English ale house.” Somehow he persuaded Robert to take his account of the Persian embassy back to London and publish it as his Relation in 1613, but nobody paid much attention. In the 1620s he wrote two similarly sententious treatises addressed to the ministers of Philip IV, who had succeeded his father in 1621, proposing ever more deluded plans for his and Spain’s greater glory. The final damning picture of Sherley was given by Francis Cottington, England’s ambassador to Spain, who wrote, “The poor man comes sometimes to my house, and is as full of vanity as ever he was, making himself believe that he shall one day be a great prince, when for the present he wants shoes to wear.”6 His fall from grace was so profound that he died in Spain in complete obscurity at an unknown date in the 1630s.

  • • •

  Shakespeare never again portrayed Moors or Turks with the detail or intensity of the plays he wrote between Henry VI and Othello. But he still had something to say about the growing scale and plight of migrants and refugees in early seventeenth-century London. Sometime around 1603–1604, he was involved in drafting revisions to a play written by several other playwrights (including Thomas Dekker) called Sir Thomas More, which dramatized the life and times of Henry VIII’s famous counselor.7 Scene 6 is now believed to ha
ve been drafted by Shakespeare, and a manuscript survives that is the only example of a section of a play written in the author’s hand. It was written in response to the infamous May Day riots of 1517, when English artisans attacked foreign residents—or, in the language of the time, “strangers” or “aliens”—whom they blamed for monopolizing trade and taking “local” jobs. Such riots had taken place throughout London in the sixteenth century, some as recently as the early 1590s, so it was a highly sensitive and topical subject (as it is today). In scene 6, Shakespeare re-creates the moment More tries to calm the rioters, who demand “the removing of the strangers,” to which he responds:

  Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

  Hath chid down all the majesty of England.

  Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

  Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage,

  Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,

  And that you sit as kings in your desires,

  Authority quite silenced by your brawl,

  And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;

  What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught

  How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

  How order should be quelled. And by this pattern

  Not one of you should live an aged man;

  For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

  With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,

  Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes,

  Would feed on one another.8

  It is a powerful and emotive rejection of xenophobia, arguing that if mob rule triumphs over the dispossessed and the rule of law, it will unleash a vicious and anarchic individualism where everyone will “feed on one another.” To clinch his point, Thomas More asks the rioters what might happen if their roles were reversed with those of the aliens and they found themselves seeking asylum:

  Say now the king,

  As he is clement if th’ offender mourn,

  Should so much come too short of your great trespass

  As but to banish you: whither would you go?

  What country, by the nature of your error,

  Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,

  To any German province, Spain or Portugal,

  Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:

  Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased

  To find a nation of such barbarous temper

  That, breaking out in hideous violence,

  Would not afford you an abode on earth,

  Whet their detested knives against your throats,

  Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

  Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements

  Were not all appropriate to your comforts

  But chartered unto them? What would you think

  To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case,

  And this your mountainish inhumanity.9

  More’s speech works and the rioters disperse. His compassionate plea for toleration of aliens and strangers might seem inconsistent coming from a playwright who seemed to relish expelling aliens and outsiders from his plays, from Aaron and the Prince of Morocco to Shylock and Othello. But perhaps, buried within these tortuous dramas is an abiding sympathy, an instinct for toleration and reconciliation that finds its clearest expression in this fragment from another play.10 It is surely one of the reasons Shakespeare’s plays continue to hold our attention four hundred years later.

  This desire for reconciliation can be found in another play Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career. Around 1611 he returned to the Mediterranean a final time for the setting of one of his plays: The Tempest. Act I opens on board a storm-tossed ship carrying Alonso, King of Naples, and Antonio, Duke of Milan, with other members of a wedding party. They are returning to Italy after marrying Alonso’s daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis and are shipwrecked on an island somewhere between Tunis and Naples—the same island where Antonio’s deposed brother, Prospero, had been exiled with his daughter, Miranda. Prospero was washed up on the island with his young daughter and all the books he could salvage from his library. Tutored in the arts of magic, Prospero established a way of life on the island with his “spirit” Ariel11 and his onetime companion, now slave, Caliban. But the island has a longer history: Ariel had been imprisoned in a cloven pine by the island’s previous resident, the “damn’d witch Sycorax,”12 Caliban’s mother. With the witch gone and Ariel released, the “bare isle” is governed by Prospero and inhabited by his daughter, his slave and his ethereal assistant.

  For centuries, critics have debated the location of Prospero’s island, some placing it in what Ariel calls “the Mediterranean float [sea],” others noting that in the same speech he speaks of “the still vexed Bermudas.”13 This, alongside Caliban’s apparent similarity to Native Americans, has led many scholars (mostly Americans) to assume that the play is set in the “brave new world”14 of the Americas. Such interpretations point to reports from the recently established colony of Jamestown, in Virginia, to which a fleet of English ships had been sent in 1609 to reinforce the beleaguered English settlement. The fleet was struck by storms and was shipwrecked in the Bermudas, but miraculously everyone survived and managed to reach Jamestown.

  Yet Shakespeare’s play was rooted in the myths and histories of the Mediterranean world. He reminds his audience that Caliban’s mother was born “in Algiers,”15 an Ottoman stronghold throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of Shakespeare’s sources for the story was the Roman poet Virgil’s classical epic of the foundation of Rome, the Aeneid, in which its hero, Aeneas, travels from Troy to Rome via Carthage, where he meets its queen, Dido. The play’s courtiers even quibble over Dido’s and classical Carthage’s location in relation to sixteenth-century Tunis. One of them insists, “This Tunis, sir, was Carthage,”16 a dispute that serves to remind the audience of the transitory nature of empire.

  As in Virgil’s poem, Shakespeare imagines the gulf between North Africa and Europe as vast. The seaborne crossing between Tunis and Naples is less than 370 miles, but Claribel, the “Queen of Tunis,” is described as “she that dwells / Ten leagues beyond man’s life,”17 in Muslim North Africa. One of Alonso’s courtiers accuses him of failing to marry his daughter off to a European prince, “But rather lose her to an African.”18 Once again, Shakespeare returns to a story of a Christian woman—first Portia, then Desdemona, finally Claribel—being offered in marriage to a North African man—the Prince of Morocco, Othello, now the King of Tunis. In The Tempest, the far away becomes near at hand as the various dreams of colonization, interracial marriage, republicanism and revolution are rehearsed through the characters as they arrive or reflect on this “desolate isle.”

  In this play Claribel, the King of Tunis and the Algerian witch Sycorax remain far away, and never appear onstage. The rich potential of the island’s location and history remains buried in its many layers of meaning. The stories of trade, and the threats of privateering, piracy, enslavement and conversion that affected thousands of English men, women and children throughout the Mediterranean as it was being performed in London, are almost completely silenced. Only a whisper can be heard in the implied histories of Ariel, Caliban, Tunis, Algiers, Naples and Bermuda. The geography of The Tempest is relevant only insofar as it is labeled self-consciously as irrelevant: the island is nowhere and anywhere, a utopia in the Greek sense of the term ou-topos, meaning both “good place” and “nowhere.” Shakespeare understood that by 1611 King James’s foreign and economic policies left Jacobean England looking east and west, gazing backward to the Mediterranean “Old World” of Greece, Rome, Spain and the Ottoman Empire, and forward to the Atlantic “New World” of the Americas. His play uses this new global awareness to tell a story of uncertain habitation and confl
icted identity, filtered through the layered history of the Mediterranean.

  The Tempest provides a fitting conclusion to the history of Elizabethan England’s relations with the Islamic world. Shakespeare grew up under a regime whose isolation from much of Catholic Europe propelled it into alliances with Muslim rulers from Marrakesh, Algiers, Tunis, Constantinople, Qazvin and Isfahan. With the accession of King James, this policy came to an abrupt end, and with it a tradition of representing formidable, eloquent and savage Turks, Moors and Persians on the Elizabethan stage. They would be reinvented in a different key by a new generation of Jacobean playwrights.

  As we have seen, the Sherleys had already been given their own play, The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, first performed at the Curtain Theater in 1607. Robert Daborne was at work on A Christian Turned Turk (1612), the story of the English pirate and Muslim convert John Ward, who took the name Yusuf Reis and lived out his life in Tunis in opulent luxury. In 1624 Philip Massinger premiered his tragicomedy The Renegado, also set in the privateering capital of Tunis, where Christian and renegade Italians flee the temptations of the Muslim court to return to Italy. In contrast to The Tempest, plays like Massinger’s responded to reports of English men and women living and working in the Mediterranean, some captives, others converts (willing or forced) to Islam. But the preoccupations of their authors were not those of Marlowe, Peele and Shakespeare; their interests were primarily historical, their tone comical, their aim pure entertainment, lacking the urgent topicality of the 1590s, when many feared that Protestant England could at any moment be invaded. The Islamic world was just one of many within the emerging global economy with which the Jacobeans found themselves entangled. The threat—or hope—of a rapprochement between Protestants and Muslims was now a thing of the past.

  As if to emphasize this shift, in 1632 the London draper Thomas Adams endowed the first English professorship in Arabic at Cambridge University for “the good service of the King and State in our commerce with those Eastern nations, and in God’s good time to the enlarging of the borders of the Church, and propagation of Christian religion to them who now sit in darkness.”19 In 1636 Oxford followed suit when Archbishop William Laud, then chancellor of the university, appointed Edward Pococke, an English chaplain working in Aleppo, as the first Laudian Professor of Arabic (the post still exists, and it was recently filled by a woman for the first time in its history).20 In 1649 the first English translation of the Qur’an was published; entitled The Alcoran of Mahomet, it was based on André Du Ryer’s French edition, L’Alcoran de Mahomet translaté d’arabe en françois.21 The Arabic-speaking Islamic world became the subject of scholarly study that promised (though did not always manage) to dispel the fantasies, misconceptions and prejudices that had driven English perceptions of the subject for centuries and that were so rich a resource for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. England would now try to contain the Islamic world through orientalist scholarship and the painstaking study of philology, archaeology and comparative religion.