The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  44. Castries, vol. 2, pp. 93–94.

  45. Quoted in Wernham, Return of the Armadas, p. 107.

  46. Quoted in Nabil Matar, “Elizabeth Through Moroccan Eyes,” in The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I, ed. Charles Beem (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 145–67; at p. 156.

  47. See Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), p. 21; he characterizes this moment as a “jihad.”

  48. Wernham, Return of the Armadas, pp. 130–69.

  49. The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.304–5.

  50. Ibid., 4.1.382.

  51. Quoted in James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 73.

  52. The Merchant of Venice, 3.1.49–54.

  53. Ibid., 3.1.54–61.

  54. Ibid., 4.1.169.

  55. Ibid., 1.2.109–10.

  56. Ibid., 2.1.1–7.

  57. Ibid., 2.1.8–12.

  58. Ibid., 2.1.24–26.

  59. Ibid., 2.7.78–79.

  60. Castries, vol. 2, p. 64.

  61. T. S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), p. 296.

  Chapter 9: Escape from the Seraglio

  1. Quoted in H. E. Rosedale, Queen Elizabeth and the Levant Company (London, 1904), p. 18.

  2. Quoted in ibid., p. 27.

  3. Quoted in ibid., pp. 27–28, 39.

  4. Quoted in Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 40.

  5. “Barton, Edward (1562/3–1598),” ODNB.

  6. Quoted in Franklin L. Baumer, “England, the Turk and the Common Corps of Christendom,” American Historical Review 50, no. 1 (1944), pp. 26–48; at p. 35.

  7. Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 22–24.

  8. Anders Ingram, “English Literature on the Ottoman Turks in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” PhD thesis, University of Durham, 2009, pp. 388–95; available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/86/. See also his book Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2015).

  9. On carpets, rugs and other material imports through the Ottoman territories, see Gerald MacLean, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire Before 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 27–62.

  10. Karen Hearn, Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630 (London: Tate Publishing, 1996), p. 64.

  11. Jean Lobbet to Philip Sidney, Strasburg, July 5, 1575, in The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Roger Kuin, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), vol. 1, p. 483.

  12. R. W. Maslen, ed., An Apology for Poetry (or The Defense of Poesy): Philip Sidney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 105.

  13. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, “Essex House, Formerly Leicester House and Exeter Inn,” Archaeologia, or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity 73 (1923), pp. 1–51.

  14. Lionel Cust, “The Lumley Inventories,” Walpole Society 6 (1918), pp. 15–35.

  15. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 25, 42.

  16. The Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.345.

  17. The Comedy of Errors, 4.1.104.

  18. Santina M. Levey, The Embroideries at Hardwick Hall: A Catalog (London: National Trust Books, 2007), pp. 380–85; Hakluyt, vol. 2, pp. 201–3.

  19. Wood, Levant Company, p. 24; T. S. Willan, “Some Aspects of English Trade with the Levant in the Sixteenth Century,” English Historical Review 70, no. 276 (1955), pp. 399–410.

  20. Sir William Foster, ed., The Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant, 1584–1602 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1931), pp. 32, 33.

  21. Gillian White, “‘That whyche ys nedefoulle and nesesary’: The Nature and Purpose of the Original Furnishings and Decoration of Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire,” PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2 vols., 2005, vol. 1, p. 99.

  22. Levey, The Embroideries at Hardwick Hall, pp. 99–109.

  23. Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 167–68.

  24. Richard II, 4.1.125–32.

  25. Henry IV, Part 1, 1.1.12–13.

  26. Ibid., 1.1.19–27.

  27. Ibid., 5.2.85.

  28. Ibid., 2.4.94–97.

  29. Henry IV, Part 2, 2.4.136, 141, 155.

  30. Ibid., 5.2.44–49.

  31. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London, 1817), p. 192.

  32. Norman Rabkin, “Rabbits, Ducks and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28, no. 3 (1977), pp. 279–96.

  33. Henry V, 3.4.38–41.

  34. Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558–1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 28; Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), p. 163; Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 51–52.

  35. Henry V, 3.1.34.

  36. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John Allen, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Regg, 1844), vol. 2, pp. 94–95.

  37. John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online; available at www.johnfoxe.org, 1570 ed., Book 6, p. 893.

  38. Ronald Lightbown, Carlo Crivelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 117.

  39. Edward Seymour Forster, ed., The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1927; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 54–55.

  40. Ibid., pp. 56, 131.

  41. Richard Johnson, The Most Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom (London, 1596), pp. 16, 21.

  42. Ibid., p. 23.

  43. Ibid., p. 101.

  44. Henry V, 5.2.193–96.

  45. Ibid., Epilog, 9-13.

  46. Foster, Travels of John Sanderson, p. 242.

  47. Hakluyt, vol. 1, p. 43.

  48. CSPD, vol. 6, 1598–1601, January 31, 1599, p. 156.

  49. CSPV, vol. 9, 1592–1603, no. 814, p. 375.

  50. Ibid., October 2, 1599, no. 817, p. 377.

  51. Thomas Dallam, “The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam, 1599–1600,” in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant, ed. J. Theodore Bent (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), pp. 1–99; at pp. 67–68.

  52. Ibid., pp. 74–75.

  53. Ibid., p. 84.

  54. Quoted in Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 228. This amends the version translated in Susan Skilliter, “Three Letters from the Ottoman ‘Sultana’ Safiye to Queen Elizabeth I,” in Documents from Islamic Chanceries, ed. S. M. Stern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 119–57; at p. 139.

  55. Skilliter, “Three Letters,” p. 139, n57.

  56. Ibid., p. 143.

  57. Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 171.

  58. Quoted in Skilliter, “Three Letters,” p. 153.

  59. “Dallam, Thomas (bap. 1575, d. in or after 1630),” ODNB.

  Chapter 10: Sherley Fever

  1. Twelfth Night, 1.2.52.

  2. Ibid., 5.1.365.

  3. Ibid., 3.2.67–68.

  4. Patricia Parker, “Twelfth Night: Editing Puzzles and Eunuchs of All Kinds,” in Twelfth Night: New Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 45–64; at p. 47. On Wright’s map, see Helen Wallis, “Edward Wright and the 1599 World Map,” in The Hakluyt Handbook, ed. D
. B. Quinn, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 69–73.

  5. Twelfth Night, 2.5.156–57.

  6. Ibid., 3.4.243–48.

  7. See Richard Wilson, “‘When Golden Time Convents’: Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s Eastern Promise,” Shakespeare 6, no. 2 (2010), pp. 209–26.

  8. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905), vol. 1, p. 374.

  9. Quoted in R. M. Savory, “The Sherley Myth,” Iran 5 (1967), pp. 73–81.

  10. Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s., vol. 22 (1844), p. 474.

  11. See Sir Edward Denison Ross, Sir Anthony Sherley and His Persian Adventure (London: Routledge, 1933); Boies Penrose, The Sherleian Odyssey: Being a Record of the Travels and Adventures of Three Famous Brothers During the Reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1938); D. W. Davies, Elizabethans Errant: The Strange Fortunes of Sir Thomas Sherley and His Three Sons, as Well in the Dutch Wars as in Muscovy, Morocco, Persia, Spain, and the Indies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967); Kurosh Meshkat, “Sir Anthony Sherley’s Journey to Persia, 1598–1599,” PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2013.

  12. Ross, Sir Anthony Sherley, pp. 86–87.

  13. Penrose, Sherleian Odyssey, p. 245.

  14. CP, Part 4, May 2, 1594, p. 522.

  15. CP, Part 8, December 30, 1597, p. 526.

  16. CP, Part 8, March 1598, pp. 116–17. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be an Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2011), pp. 91–92. A different translation appears in Davies, Elizabethans Errant, pp. 80–81.

  17. Subrahmanyam, Three Ways, pp. 93–95; Davies, Elizabethans Errant, pp. 81–83.

  18. George Mainwaring, “A True Discourse of Sir Anthony Sherley’s Travel into Persia,” in The Three Brothers; or, The Travels and Adventures of Sir Anthony, Sir Robert and Sir Thomas Sherley, in Persia, Russia, Turkey, and Spain (London: Hurst, Robinson, 1825), pp. 23–96; at p. 26.

  19. CSPD, vol. 7, 1601–1603, June 27, 1602, p. 209.

  20. CSPD, vol. 6, 1598–1601, no. 6, p. 130.

  21. Mainwaring, “A True Discourse,” pp. 34–35.

  22. Ibid., p. 55.

  23. William Parry, A New and Large Discourse of the Travels of Sir Anthony Sherley Knight, by Sea and over Land to the Persian Empire (London: Felix Norton, 1601), pp. 15, 18.

  24. On Shah Abbas and Isfahan, see Roger M. Savory, Iran Under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 76–103, 154–76.

  25. Mainwaring, “A True Discourse,” p. 60.

  26. Ibid., pp. 60–61.

  27. Quoted in Ross, Sir Anthony Sherley, p. 121.

  28. Quoted in ibid., p. 154.

  29. Quoted in ibid., p. 158.

  30. Mainwaring, “A True Discourse,” p. 68.

  31. Sir Anthony Sherley, Sir Anthony Sherley his Relation of his Travels into Persia (London: Nathaniel Butter, 1613), p. 64.

  32. A True Report of Sir Anthony Sherley’s Journey (London, 1600), sig. A4r.

  33. Mainwaring, “A True Discourse,” p. 69.

  34. Parry, A New and Large Discourse, p. 21.

  35. Sherley, His Relation, p. 29.

  36. Parry, A New and Large Discourse, p. 23.

  37. Ibid., p. 24.

  38. Quoted in Ross, Sir Anthony Sherley, pp. 159, 162, 163.

  39. Sherley, His Relation, p. 29.

  40. Ibid., p. 74.

  41. Ibid., pp. 79–82.

  42. Ibid., pp. 83–85, 96, 106.

  43. Ibid., pp. 113, 115–17.

  44. Mainwaring, “A True Discourse,” p. 92.

  45. A True Report, sig. B1.

  46. “Two Letters from Anthony Sherley from Russia,” in Ross, Sir Anthony Sherley, p. 239.

  47. Quoted in ibid., p. 167.

  48. Parry, A New and Large Discourse, pp. 33–34.

  49. Ibid., p. 35.

  50. CP, Part 10, July 8, 1600, p. 227.

  51. Quoted in Ross, Sir Anthony Sherley, pp. 244–46.

  52. Quoted in ibid., p. 37.

  53. CSPV, vol. 9, 1592–1603, no. 925, p. 431.

  54. Quoted in Ross, Sir Anthony Sherley, p. 41.

  55. CSPV, vol. 9, 1592–1603, no. 943, p. 438.

  56. Ibid., no. 940, p. 437.

  57. Quoted in Davies, Elizabethans Errant, p. 132.

  58. Quoted in ibid., p. 133.

  59. Quoted in Ross, Sir Anthony Sherley, p. 47.

  60. Quoted in Penrose, Sherleian Odyssey, pp. 107–8; Davies, Elizabethans Errant, pp. 134–35.

  61. “Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex (1565–1601),” ODNB.

  62. Quoted in Ross, Sir Anthony Sherley, pp. 49–50.

  63. Quoted in Evelyn Philip Shirley, The Sherley Brothers: An Historical Memoir of the Lives of Sir Thomas Sherley, Sir Anthony Sherley and Sir Robert Sherley, Knights (London, 1848), p. 33.

  64. Scott Surtees, William Shakespeare, of Stratford-on-Avon, His Epitaph Unearthed, and the Author of the Plays run to Ground (London: Henry Gray, 1888), pp. 21–22. On Sherley and Surtees, see Subrahmanyam, Three Ways, pp. 79–80. See also Jonathan Sell, Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 105–11.

  Chapter 11: More Than a Moor

  1. Castries, vol. 2, pp. 143–45.

  2. Ibid., p. 146.

  3. Ibid., p. 160.

  4. Ibid., pp. 161–62.

  5. Ibid., pp. 165–67.

  6. T. S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), pp. 302–3.

  7. Castries, vol. 2, p. 187.

  8. Sir Henry Sydney, Letters and Memorials of State, 2 vols. (London: Arthur Collins, 1746), vol. 2, p. 211.

  9. Quoted in Bernard Harris, “A Portrait of a Moor,” in Shakespeare and Race, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 23–36; at p. 28.

  10. Sydney, Letters and Memorials, vol. 2, p. 212.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Quoted in Harris, “A Portrait of a Moor,” p. 29.

  13. Sydney, Letters and Memorials, p. 212.

  14. Ibid., p. 214.

  15. Castries, vol. 2, p. 178.

  16. Ibid., pp. 178–79.

  17. Ibid., p. 192.

  18. Ibid., p. 199.

  19. John Stow, Annales, or a Generale Chronicle of England (London: John Windet, 1603), p. 791. See also Castries, vol. 2, p. 203.

  20. Castries, vol. 2, pp. 194–95.

  21. Stow, Annales, p. 1405.

  22. Paul Hentzner, Paul Hentzner’s Travels in England, During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, trans. Horace Walpole (London: Edward Jeffery, 1797), p. 34.

  23. A Geographical Historie of Africa, written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought vp in Barbarie (London, 1600), sig. A2.

  24. Ibid., p. 200.

  25. Stow, Annales, p. 791.

  26. Ibid.

  27. P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), vol. 3, pp. 221–22.

  28. CP, Part 10, p. 399; D. W. Davies, Elizabethans Errant: The Strange Fortunes of Sir Thomas Sherley and His Three Sons, as Well in the Dutch Wars as in Muscovy, Morocco, Persia, Spain, and the Indies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 187–88.

  29. Quoted in Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), p. 27.

  30. Castries, vol. 2, pp. 208–9.

  31. Ibid., p. 196.

  32. Ralph Carr, The Mahumetane or Turkish Historie Containing Three Books (London: Thomas Este, 1600), unpaginated “Preface,” and p.
103.

  33. Ibid., p. 5.

  34. Ibid., p. 1.

  35. All references to Lust’s Dominion are from Fredson Bowers, ed., The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), vol. 4, pp. 115–230. On the question of the play’s complicated authorship and date, see Charles Cathcart, “Lust’s Dominion; or, The Lascivious Queen: Authorship, Date, and Revision,” Review of English Studies 52, no. 207 (2001), pp. 360–75.

  36. Dekker, Lust’s Dominion, 1.1.151–52.

  37. Ibid., 1.2.158.

  38. Ibid., 1.2.156.

  39. Ibid., 5.3.166.

  40. Ibid., 5.3.182–83.

  41. Emily C. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 118–37.

  42. Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  43. For the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the play’s dating and textual history, see E. A. J. Honigmann, The Texts of “Othello” and Shakespearian Revision (London: Arden, 1996) and his Arden Shakespeare edition of Othello, pp. 344–67.

  44. Thomas Rymer, “A Short View of Tragedy” [1693], in The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt Zimansky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), pp. 132–64; at p. 133.

  45. Thomas Middleton Raysor, ed., Coleridge’s Shakespeare Criticism, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), vol. 1, p. 47.

  46. Ben Okri, “Leaping Out of Shakespeare’s Terror: Five Meditations on Othello,” in A Way of Being Free (London: Phoenix, 1997), pp. 71–87; at pp. 72, 80.

  47. “Race,” OED.

  48. Antony and Cleopatra, 3.13.107.

  49. Othello, 1.1.33, 56–57, 64.

  50. Ibid., 1.1.85–90.

  51. Ibid., 1.1.109–12.

  52. Ibid., 1.1.114–15.

  53. Ibid., 1.1.127.

  54. Ibid., 1.1.124, 132–35.

  55. Ibid., 1.2.17–22.

  56. Ibid., 1.3.8.