Shakespeares East West Exogamy

Shakespeare’s East-West Exogamy: Pre-Colonial Narratives Dr. Samira al-Khawaldeh The University of Jordan Abstract The incident of East-West exogamy is recurrent in Shakespeare's plays; central in Othello, but also prominent in The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest. This study revisits these three cases in the context of the relations between Elizabethan England and the East, especially North Africa and Ottoman Turkey, deriving its theoretical premises from postcolonial and post-postcolonial scholarship, occasionally arguing against the validity of certain assumptions of such scholarship. The study approaches its subject from two angles: first, the perception of Eastern characters in the texts' world; stipulating that Western colonialist attitudes and racial binary oppositions are not paradigmatic of the period, and that Shakespeare's conception of exogamy transcends the anxieties of racial differences, and problematizes its political implications. The East has not been colonized yet: the Ottoman Empire is already established while the British is still a dream in the making. The era lacks the symptoms of Europe's superiority complex considered by Said the manifestation of the third phase of Orientalism which synchronizes with the European colonial onslaught on the East in late eighteenth century. 1 The second aspect the study investigates is that exogamy is sensed as violation, as either hegemonic or subversive to political order. Paradoxically, woman is positioned as a symbol of honor and an empowered figure, but can be sacrificially given away. The influence of foreign women in positions of power is historically visible in Shakespeare's world: the case of Roxolana, Suleiman the Magnificent's wife, is mapped out here. The assumption this paper presents, deducted from historical and textual evidence, is that Shakespeare's Sycorax is based on the historical Roxolana as portrayed in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature. Keywords: Shakespeare, exogamy, Anglo-Ottoman relations, The Tempest, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Roxolana, Sycorax As Arthur Little argues in his Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Revisions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (2000) a woman can be visualized by a nation as allegorization of itself (4). Accordingly, marriage, exogamy in particular, becomes a conduit for political activities. The pursuit of possible alliances remained the ultimate teleology of royal marriages in Europe in the early modern era. It is also thought that “women on both sides of the colonial [an anachronistic term here] divide demarcate both the innermost sanctums of race, culture and nation, as well as the porous frontiers through which these are penetrated” (Loomba 159); so in the ruthless world of politics and fierce rivalry for dominance women were often used and abused. Royal exogamies were unashamedly arranged to forge alliances or seal political deals. 2 [I]n Arcadia and its seventeenth-century inheritors, of course, sovereignty was not a separate issue from love but rather an analogue for it – or better, the more fundamental expression of the same goal (Zurcher 160). In Renaissance England, the concept of marriage as political strategy imposed itself upon the minds even more so because of the case of Elizabeth I, whose celibacy was the price paid for ‘closing off’ England from foreign powers, “turning down several royal suitors in anxiety of political influence and loss of national independence” (Hall 127). James I, on the other hand, found in such marriages the chance to create bonds with outsiders, but of course all within the boundaries of Europe. Kingship and marriage, anthropologically speaking, are always parts of total social systems, and are always tied into economic and political arrangements (Gayle Rubin, quoted in Hall 123). This paper investigates the three Shakespearean cases of East-West exogamy: those in Othello, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest against the mise-en-scènes of the contemporary world politics, where marriage, especially exogamy among ruling houses, was treated in light of what we may phrase as women-for-power principle. The political resonance of man-woman relationship was a common metaphor that even rape was seen in contemporary erotic ideologies as “an analogue for political tyranny” (Sanchez 63); hence and by extension, exogamy at the highest social level should be viewed as an effective tool in the re-structuring of world power and appropriation. History records that women in authoritative positions, not necessarily actual rulers like 3 Elizabeth, - wives and mothers of rulers such as the Ottoman Valida Sultan, exerted an immense amount of influence on internal and foreign policies in their countries. It was a time in which Europe saw it was necessary to halt the expansionist power of the Ottomans. In his article on “Anglo-Ottoman Relations and the Image of the Turk in Tamburlaine” (2000), J. Burton explores the power mapping in Europe and the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, stating that England in particular was not in any real sense an empire or colonizing power. He emphasizes the dual nature of the AngloOttoman relations, and cites among his extensive textual evidence a curious letter from the Ottoman sultan to Queen Elizabeth I (kept secret in London) which speaks of the Queen’s steadfastness in “submission and obedience” to the Ottoman sultan (130-38). This relation is certainly not based on equal terms and can only be reluctantly maintained, with the English side awaiting the right moment to subvert this temporary ‘alliance’. It is significant that the three Eastern characters in Shakespearean drama we are dealing with are all North African; with two at least involved in military action against fellow Muslims, whether Turks or Persians. Shakespeare deliberately adds the detail that Othello was on his way to ward off an Ottoman fleet heading for Cyprus, which was not in the original 1565 Cinthio’s plot (Cohen 2091). The Prince of Morocco, too, anxious to impress Portia, boasts of his action against the Persians and the Ottomans: By this scimitar, That slew the Sophy and a Persian prince That won three fields of Sultan Suleiman. (2.1.24-26) 4 Shakespeare seems to be harping on the hostilities between the Ottoman Empire and the North African states, though both sides were England’s allies, but it was obvious that the former posed a greater threat. This may explain why none of these characters is an actual, not metaphoric, Turk. In her essay “Reading Othello’s Skin: Contexts and Pretexts,” (2008) Meredith Anne Skura points out that “Provincial England was caught between the Spanish and Ottoman empires, each a constant threat to domestic shores” (301). Although we may well agree with the intellection that marking the Prince of Morocco and Othello as enemies of the Turk is probably intended to gain full sympathy of the audience (Bayouli 125), the fact that this reflects to some extent the ongoing threat of Ottoman hegemony should not be ignored. Othello is identified simply as a Moor fighting with the Italians against the Turks, and as there is no evidence to locate him in an exact geographical spot, one can only assume that he is, like the Prince of Morocco, a Moor in the original ethnic and geographical sense of the word; i.e., North African. In his book Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (2007) critic Benedict S. Robinson indicates that in romance North Africa is depicted as a seductive border zone between Christianity and Islam (10), and historical studies reveal that Morocco was the only Arabic-speaking region that did not come under Ottoman rule in early modern times (Sauer and Rajan 156). England, on the other hand, as Daniel Vitkus writes in his Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 15701630 (2003), was experiencing “imperial envy, ambition, desire, and fantasy” (3). Vitkus asserts that any profits England made in the East early in the seventeenth century “were 5 to be taken not by means of colonization or conquest, but primarily through peaceful trade, and secondarily through intimidation, piracy, and improvised violence at sea” (7). Criticizing what he inscribes as “first-wave postcolonial studies”, he warns against “committing the fallacy of back formation”, and emphasizes the difference between ‘to know Islam’ and ‘to maintain power over it’ (10-11). This is not to be taken as a clear departure from Said's postcolonialism, for it coincides with the latter's assertion that it was not until late eighteenth century that knowledge of the East in Europe became “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 3, 32). Logically, and in a manner more similar to Benedict S. Robinson’s, Said connects early modern European consciousness and vision of the East to its past history, the crusades in particular, after which Islam was for Europe “a lasting trauma, and until the end of the seventeenth century the ‘Ottoman peril’ lurked alongside Europe” (Said 59). Dryden’s purposeful editing of The Tempest where he deletes the whole issue of Claribel’s marriage to the King of Tunis, replacing it with a crusading campaign against the Moors (Robinson 58) – can be interpreted in terms of postcolonial analysis. The change however fits awkwardly in the play’s structure though it may reflect the developments in historical realities: Alonso helped Antonio ‘murder’ his brother Prospero, which makes both villainous, utterly unchristian characters. To turn them into ‘crusaders’ is almost satirical, subversive of the proclaimed teleology of crusading, and emptying it of any theological value. We have also to agree with Meredith Anne Skura that Moors’ “blackness made them geographically exotic, not ethnically inferior” (Skura 302), for Brabanzio finds 6 nothing worse to repudiate in Othello when he first hears of his daughter’s marriage to him than his “sooty bosom” (I.2.71). And Othello depicted as black ram retains exactly the same essence as Desdemona described as white ewe. More critics have worked on liberating Othello from the colonialist and imperial paradigms, asserting that the language of colour it employs lacks the full racist import it has since acquired (Cohen 2091). In Shakespeare’s world social hierarchy did not depend on ‘race’ in the modern sense; such hierarchy was more related to political power and international positioning; “the simple ‘othering’ of racial binaries is not exactly what we have in Othello” (Niro 47); at least not the binary opposition that develops in full-blooming racism in Coleridge’s notorious statement undermining the tragic stature of the play: “[I]t would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro;” adding, “It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated” (quoted in Raysor 47). The traumatic thought of such weird love must have imprinted itself on Coleridge’s mind; in his subliminal “Kubla Khan” there appears a “woman wailing for her Demon Lover!” Also, he does not seem to be trying to deprive the world of its balance when he himself finds inspiration in a black muse: A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. 7 Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such deep delight ‘twould win me That with music loud and long, I would build that dome within the air! It is worth mentioning here that it is Othello’s gift for narrative, analogous to the Abyssinian’s “symphony and song”, that fascinates Desdemona. More importantly, Coleridge’s comment that “Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated” the monstrosity and disproportionateness of such love hits the heart of the matter: it did not appear monstrous and disproportionate in the Elizabethan world; it was viewed as strange, uncommon, but not demonic. In fact a Venetian senator expects Othello to have won Desdemona’s love “by fair request and such fair question / As soul to soul affordeth” (I.3.13-14), a completely normal form of attraction. The Duke thinks Othello’s tale would win his own daughter, too (I.3.170). Desdemona, likewise, is a muse, for Othello believes she will “sing the savageness out of a bear” (IV.i.185). The aristocratic Moor is the one speaking of the effect of the fine arts on savageness, which he can only attribute to the animal world, not the human. One may find further decolonization of the text in the article “Reading Othello's Skin: Contexts and Pretexts” (2008) by Skura, where we are required to glance at Morocco through the eyes of the Elizabethans: it was a “noble site”, and for the English, an entity like France or Spain, as were Fez and other Barbary states, the locus of rich and powerful peoples close to the heart of civilization (301). This is certainly the 8 real/imagined land from where Shakespeare fetched his Moors, and portrayed them as consorts fit for the fine ladies of Italy. Comparing himself to Portia and to her suitors, the Prince of Morocco has this to say: I do in birth deserve her, and in fortunes, In graces, and in qualities of breeding; (2.7.32-33) It is his self narrative that won Othello Desdemona’s pity and love. Shakespeare, well-known as the poet who “subverts conventional paradigms” (Wells 88), inverts the Scheherazade/Schahriar binary. The allure and enchantment of narrative impact power and authority: yet unlike the narrator in The Arabian Nights Othello does not survive, for he himself turns into a character in Iago’s narrative, the-story-within-astory pattern of The Arabian Nights. In fact the adventures related by Othello, a traveler, present him as another Sindbad, a voyager: I spoke of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach (I.3.133-35) Shakespeare also subverts racial and religious paradigms by ignoring such differences or playing them down; yet following the traditional view of him as holding a mirror to life, 9 the same should also be true to a lesser or greater degree of his world as a whole. The King of Tunis suffers no insulting racialist words; the resentment expressed towards him seems impersonal, rather a repudiation of Alonso’s unintelligible decision than the foreignness or ethnicity of the King of Tunis. The courtiers object to the distance separating Claribel from her people and the fact that it is an arranged marriage, not based on love, - an inversion of the Desdemona/Brabanzio pattern in Othello. Besides, there is nothing in common between the King of Tunis and Caliban despite the North African origin of the latter. Calibans and Iagos are not typical of specific localities; they can grow in any soil. On the other hand, the mere fact that the Prince of Morocco is allowed a presence, a voice and a chance not granted to some European suitors, four of whom Portia wishes to trick out of the whole competition, is by itself a dignifying and even-handed treatment: Therefore, for fear of the worst, I pray thee set a deep glass of Rhenish wine on the contrary casket; for if the devil be within and that temptation without, I know he [the young German, the Duke of Saxony] will choose it. I will do anything, Nerissa, ere I will be married to a sponge. (1.2.80-83) Compared to this her mention of Morocco’s blackness of complexion seems a goodhumored joke about a neutralized marker of difference, which Shakespeare attributes to climate and geographical variations: Morocco: Mislike me not for my complexion, 10 The shadowed livery of the burnished sun, To whom I am a neighbour and near bred (2.1.1-3) Morocco’s blood too is not less red than that of “the fairest creature northward born, / Where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles” (2.1.4-5). If racism is defined as the belief that one’s colour bears with it some essential qualities, good or bad, then colour in Shakespeare is not racialized in the strict sense: "the complexion of a devil" can garb "the condition of a saint." If he [the Prince of Morocco] have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me. (1.2.109-110) It is true that "the complexion of a devil" is a metaphor of blackness, the devil taken as the prince of darkness, but one must contemplate how Shakespeare immediately divests the expression of its moral connotations by combining it with a saintly character; the word 'devil' is dissociated from the inner being and remains no more than a colour. The blackness of the devil is a cultural matter, not a Shakespearean invention; while treating it as mere garment and not the essence is. Desdemona, on the other hand unifies the mind and the complexion in a positive portrayal to justify her love for Othello when she declares that she saw Othello's visage in his mind. 11 Another indication of equality, critics argue, is that the prince of Morocco is allowed to enter the competition for the hand of Portia, for “the competitive relation by its nature suggests imitation, exchangeability, equivalence” (Robinson 64). This of course brings with it the possibility of winning. The question that remains is about the function exogamy serves in the plays of Shakespeare. Some scholars suggest that in the plays of Shakespeare the mixed marriage does not have the function of affirming the superiority of the western values but is motivated by a true desire of meeting the other. The separation between East and West that stands as an obstacle to the marriage is not resolved, as in The Renegado for instance, by means of a transformation of the Oriental, her own forsaking of her religion and her people (Bayouli 123). Religious differences are not an issue here. Moreover, the fate of these marriages and courtships is not determined by the characters' religion or race. The Prince of Morocco is not really rejected, his loss was more due to luck or destiny. As for Othello, the evil he confronts in the person of Iago acts on many levels, the racial being only one of them. On the imaginative level, women in the European romance tradition are quite often the motivating force behind the conversion of high-ranking Muslim men; - a theme thoroughly investigated by Matthew Dimmock in his book New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (2005). 12 Stock figures like Othello existed in numerous contemporaneous plays and were based in a romance tradition in which a martial hero is created explicitly in opposition to the Ottomans (Dimmock 2). If the Othello figure descends from the romance tradition, that same tradition is intricately entwined with the crusades as Robinson asserts that chivalric romance is a response to the failure of the crusades, "acts of collective cultural fantasy that seek to take imaginative possession of the long and fluctuating border between Europe and Islam. The encounter with Islam is one of the paradigms in early modern romance (4). If women epitomized their nations, they were also presented in literature as the sacred sacrifices put forward for the gods in service for their nations and their glory. Iphigenia walks nobly to her death solving her nation's problem; but the ritual does not always have to be so bloody: politics and diplomacy will frequently coat it with the dignifying bond of marriage. Edith Plantagenet is offered in marriage to Saladin in Scott’s medieval romance The Talisman for the expressed hope of converting him or at least influencing him; a strong reminder of what Edward Said describes as “domestication of the exotic” and “a way of controlling the redoubtable Orient” (60). Saladin’s polite decline, however, is rendered inoffensive, rather a noble and chivalric gesture, for both he and the reader are made aware of the love affair going on between the princess and the Scottish royal heir. Such wishful thinking of influence is most observable in medieval romance where very often mighty Saracens are converted to Christianity under the irresistible allure and cunning contrivance of beautiful European maidens. It is suggested that “medieval romance paired its war stories with stories of 13 exogamous or miscegenated desire that fantasize an erotic and material absorption of the Saracen world” (Robinson 9). Interestingly, Shakespeare sets the precedence of deviating from these traditions of romance when he spares Othello, his noble hero, the indignity of conversion through seduction or lust. In the historical sixteenth-century world, on the other hand, several women in the Ottoman harem, mostly of foreign origin and different religion, succeeded in playing such interruptive, seductive roles. Their notorious meddling in state affairs is historically recorded by Turkish historians who complained that the empire had been debased into a ‘sultanate of women’ for over a century. The sixteenth-century bureaucrat and historian Mustafa Ali’s apocalyptic assessment may be seen as typical of the Ottoman response. In a series of influential treatises, Ali proposes that the decline of the empire resulted from ‘the spread of corruption and irresponsibility in government, the injustice destroying the realm, and the growing political influence of women and eunuchs of the Harem’ (Andrea 14). European observers too, like Richard Knolles in his The Generall History of the Turks (first published in 1603), narrate stories of European beauties like the Russian Roxolana, who by the sheer power of their femininity and cunning “commanded the allcommanding sultan” (Ballaster 61). Roxolana, who rose to be the official wife of the Ottoman Sultan Solayman the Magnificent was perceived in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as a ruthless schemer and opportunist, and in the latter part of the 14 seventeenth century she came to embody western fantasies of the quintessential sultana and the Asian harem. Her “disruptive influence on Ottoman state affairs was perceived as a female threat to the patriarchal system” (Yermolenko 27) even in Europe. In general terms, European women’s upward mobility within the Ottoman Empire occurred largely through marriage or concubinage in the harems of powerful men, which, to reiterate, did not require their conversion (Andrea 5). The possibility of such powerful roles must have been in the minds of those who advocated or thought of exogamy, such as Alonso in The Tempest; who is the opposite of Brabanzio, especially when no reason is mentioned for forcing his daughter to marry the King of Tunis; a silence that keeps the real reasons as ‘hidden agenda’. David Scott Kastan spells it out bluntly when he suggest that European expansionism is evident in the play, but more, he insists, in the marriage of Claribel to the king of Tunis (179) Nevertheless, the whole context of the affair echoes of thoughts of power and kingship: Claribel is compared to “widow Dido” (i.e., Queen Dido), another expatriate who commanded absolute power in Carthage. The strange epithet ‘widow’ is another subliminal expression that betrays vague possibilities for Claribel’s future as well: the end of such marriage and a widowhood like Dido's that may hail new and great transformations. Shakespeare’s Prospero testifies to this exploitation and he is in no way unique. As Kastan further suggests, the romance in The Tempest is a veneer hiding a plan to rescue Milan from vassalage to Naples. It is expected to bring peace and harmony between the two states and to unify Italy. He relates this incident to English history 15 pointing out that it allows the merging of national interests that King James’s fantasy of European peace and coherence would demand (175). Anthropology, history and literature are all concerned in investigating this phenomenon. Historically, James I arranged the marriage of his own daughter on the same basis; while anthropologists label it as "exchange of women". In her Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (2008) Bernadette Andrea summarizes some of these ideas: Drawing on the ‘exchange of women’ model for cultural formation introduced by anthropologist Claude L´evi-Strauss and modified by feminist theorists such as Gayle Rubin, Luce Irigaray, and Eve Sedgwick, I further propose that this exchange of gifts and letters enacts a significant, albeit limited, subversion of the paradigm whereby women are circulated as objects between men to secure patriarchal relations. Jane Donawerth explores similar subversions in an early modern English context by focusing on women’s literary and political agency as ‘part of the Tudor-Stuart gift-exchange system, which helped to weave the social fabric of court, community, and extended family’ (13). Due to the fierce competition across the Mediterranean, not just between Eastern and Western powers, but also between the European states themselves, Spain and England for instance, as well as between the various powers in the East such as the Ottoman empire and the Moroccan Sultanate, some cases of exogamy have been seen not so much part of the cultural formation as causes of internal disruption of an otherwise 16 indomitable enemy: Roxolana’s ascendancy together with the history of her rule at Topkapi makes her the most famous and shocking embodiment of all exogamous cases in Shakespeare’s historical world; constituting an enormously rich subject for European literature and even political thought. She is claimed to have been the mastermind of the tragedy of Mustafa, her stepson, murdered by his father Sultan Suleyman for alleged treason, in order to secure the succession for her own son to the throne and thus establish herself as the powerful valide sultan or mother of the sultan, replacing the conventionally male plotter of “Oriental intrigue” with a female counterpart. Among the many works centred on her character published in late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is Fulke Greville’s The Tragedy of Mustapha (1609). Greville applies the “lessons” of the story, as he construes them, not just to the Ottoman court but to all political arenas and nations, including his own (Mcjannet 143). Such women would play a double role, for they also act as mentors to their sons and hold the political office of ‘mother of the sultan’ (Andrea 14). One has to agree with the rationale Alain Grosrichard finds for this process and this extreme form of influence, that it is a simple matter of cause and effect: the supreme right to absolute pleasure necessarily leads to an effective absence of sovereign power. He writes: While the Ottoman sultans of the sixteenth century took an active lead in the affairs of the Empire, those who were to follow them would on the whole become detached from it and would not venture from their palaces, where they would remain under the sway of women or favourites (Grosrichard 20). 17 Some critics suggest that it is this “corruptive power of seductive woman [that] is one of the reasons that Othello gives for murdering Desdemona: ‘Yet she must die, or else she’ll betray more men (v.ii.6)’” (Wells 88). Sexual force works in many directions, exposing and undoing potential tyrants involved one way or another. Even Alonso in The Tempest, in Melissa E. Sanchez's analysis, seems to have lost everything as a result of marrying his daughter to the king of Tunis (Sanchez 50-71). If fictionalized Scott's Saladin escapes exogamy, Othello himself, an analogue, does not. His marriage takes place in the centre of international political strife in all of its manifestations, where it is expected to fit in the general plan and strengthen one side against the other. It is significant that Desdemona, like Miranda, is the one to initiate the marriage proposals; both think they are breaching the rules of their fathers, but in fact, though unaware, they are slipping into convenient slots in those larger schemes of politicians. Miranda is walking the exact path Pospero has drawn for her. Othello resonates of possible parallel instrumentalization, when the senates and the Duke endorse Desdemona’s marriage to Othello, as if it is something predicted, taken for granted, despite her father’s reluctance. One cannot help pausing and reflecting on the impression Roxolana’s figure and history must have left on Shakespeare’s mind; glamorously and horrifyingly depicted in at least two of the most popular works published just before he embarked on The Tempest: Knolles’ Generall History of the Turks published in 1603 with a whole chapter devoted to her, the only woman among many sultans, with an engraved picture, and Greville’s Tragedy of Mustapha in 1609. The following analysis throws more light on this enigmatic woman, 'the other within': 18 The figure of Roxolana/Roxane consistently signifies the most troubling aspects of oriental empire to the western European imagination: sexual obsession, duplicity, violent revenge. Such aspects prove troubling precisely because, while they appear to indicate the gulf between East and West, they consistently emerge as ‘hidden’ threats to occidental civil society, lurking symptoms of the ‘other within’: As if, by learning to decipher the structures of an impossible power from the outside, Europeans were discovering that they had equipped themselves with the best key for interpreting their own present. An endoscopic fantasy, in a sense, one in which novels and drama would find an inexhaustible source. Roxolana/Roxane is a figure of class insurgency (a slave who becomes a queen), a figure of ostentatious luxury and a figure of boundless passion, whether in her ambition for political or sexual absolute power (Ballaster 64). In a recent work entitled Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture (2010) edited by Galina I. Yermolenko, it is argued that all reports emphatically dwell on her sorcery; we are told that among the common people in the Ottoman Empire she was nicknamed ziadi which means 'witch' in Turkish. In European literature she is described as the “ungratious,” “devilishe,” and “pestilent” woman at the centre of intrigue, poisoning Suleyman’s mind with sorcery and witchcraft. Roxolana was demonized in several sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Seneccan French and English plays. Greville uses the story to express his fear of and to moralize against women’s rule in Europe, and Elizabeth’s in particular (Yermolenko 28-31). Historians believe that 19 Roxolana is the one who ushered the ‘sultanate of women’ in 1533 (Ballaster 59), continuously vilified as the “cursed woman”, the “unnatural stepmother,” and “adulterous harlot” (Mcjannet 147). The present study proposes that textual evidence raises a strong possibility that this female figure, famous in Shakespeare's world, in Europe as well as in the East, is the prototype of the character of Sycorax in The Tempest. While Tunis is "blest" by Claribel, Algiers seems to have been blighted in its recent past by the witch Sycorax, who has been banished from there “for mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible” (1.2.265-66). We understand this is the verdict Sycorax has received in Algiers; very much like the image of the ‘witch’ Roxolana in Turkey, who played havoc in the household and the politics of her master/husband. The word 'mischiefs' is left vague, quantified but not qualified, as if referring to some familiar case fresh in the minds of the playwright's audience; a case inflated into a paradigmatic phenomenon. Moreover, the puzzling epithet “blue-ey’d dam” (I.2.2.283), a distinctive physical feature, marks the witch more as a European than as a native of Algeria. Caliban too, her monstrous son, is a close representation of Roxolana's hunchbacked son, Giangir, who is the hero of and whose name appears in some titles of early modern Western literature: a semi-tragic figure who stabs himself to death at the sight of his murdered half-brother, Mustafa. In his article mentioned above, J. Burton discusses the new rhetoric in early modern discourse through which infidels become allies and peace becomes an acceptable alternative to holy war (126), but if we examine this idea in the context of The Tempest we realize that it is merely 'rhetoric' and nothing more. The contradictory voices surrounding Alonso and his daughter's marriage indicate two levels on which this case of 20 exogamy is interpreted: one public and the other private. The peace rhetoric is for public consumption even though it does not sound convincing; just a piece of political discourse. The private understanding, with the possibility of consolidate alliances (like those between Elizabeth I and the Moroccan Sultan against Spain) or ambitions, is what Alonso may have planned for Claribel, just like the secret plans Prospero has for Miranda, an intention revealed to no other soul except his closest counselor, who construes the situation and condones it. If we concede that The Tempest is “much more obviously a play about European dynastic concerns than European colonial activities” as Kastan proposes, and that "Texts and contexts are … related dynamically rather than hierarchically" (Kastan 180), we must come up with a reasonable explanation of why Shakespeare includes the detail of Claribel’s marriage in the plot and why he adds the detail of the Ottoman fleet in Othello. My suggestion is that the marriage in Tunis as well as the fighting against the Turks must have been of special significance to Shakespeare and his audience as these signify engaging the text with its historical context. This line of thought partially agrees with Jonathan Hart's attempt in his book Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World (2003) to minimize the allegorical interpretation of The Tempest, seeking to establish a postcolonial critique instead. One has to admit the need to emphasize the political and cultural approaches. Also in The Tempest we find corroboration of the marriage/kingship trope frequently resorted to in early Stuart political discourse indicated above, in which chastity for example was connected with liberation and conversely marriage with dominance. James I is well-known for his elaboration on the marriage metaphor when 21 conceptualizing his ideal of monarch/subject relations (Sanchez 71). In The Tempest, this takes the form of a love/service duality, as in the forward marriage proposal Miranda makes to Ferdinand: I am your wife if you will marry me; If not, I’ll die your maid. To be your fellow You may deny me, but I’ll be your servant Whether you will or no. (3.1.83-86) The binary opposition of wife/maid, fellow/servant implies another set of hierarchies: Wife/maid, served/serving, for in his acceptance speech Ferdinand emphasizes this total mix-up of love, marriage, command and servitude: Ay, with a heart as willing As bondage e’er of freedom. Here’s my hand. (3.1.88-89) Love at this point is bondage, while freedom remains no more than a hope, - a hope for the desired fulfillment. Prospero, aware of the situation, utilizes this weakness in Ferdinand and actually enslaves him as his log-man. The very instant that I saw you did 22 My heart fly to your service, there resides To make me slave to it, and for your sake Am I this patient log-man. (3.1.64-67) This is not a “hackneyed trope” as Melissa Sanchez judges in her article entitled “Seduction and Service in The Tempest” (2007): Ferdinand claims that his heart has flown to Miranda’s ‘service,’ which grammatically must be ‘there’ where the heart is currently residing. But, again, Ferdinand must also grammatically be the ‘slave’ to Miranda’s ‘service,’ an illogical redundancy that emphasizes the emptiness of such hackneyed tropes (73). The problematic ‘it’ here does not refer to Miranda’s service but to Ferdinand’s heart; the hierarchy should be set in the following order: Miranda; Ferdinand’s heart flying to her service, and residing with her; Ferdinand himself is made a slave to his own heart (to which ‘it’ refers), which is dedicated to Miranda’s service. 23 It is a double-bind: Ferdinand is the slave of her servant, i.e., of his own heart and desire. Can this be a pattern which may apply to the case of Claribel and the King of Tunis? Gonzalo, (perhaps as a better informed insider in Alonso’s circle), unlike Sebastian, seems to think well of Claribel’s marriage (5.1.211). Unlike the female figures of The Tempest who remind us that politics – particularly in the domestic sphere – are not reducible to purely rational calculation but driven in large part by desire, fantasy, and identification to borrow Sanchez' phrase (52), the male figures do reduce it, and marriage and desire with it, to such rational calculations. In fact Robinson, in his study Islam and Early Modern English Literature referred to above, does connect The Tempest to its predecessor, the early modern romance known as the “Constance romance”, where we find the stereotype of the Christian woman who, exiled in the East, manages to convert the sultan and his people (Robinson 59). However, though this might have appeared to Europeans as a moral improvement on heinous Roxolana, from an Eastern point of view, it would certainly seem as witchcraft per se. On the other hand, it may throw more light on the boastfulness of the Prince of Morocco in front of Portia, in which he counts Eastern enemies only, and strangely enough not one European. Such a prince can be a useful ally to Italy, and by hint to Elizabethan and Jacobean England in their struggle against Spain and Turkey. In this way, Europe may exert influence on the East through these marriages/alliances; it is not simply a matter of erotic appropriation. In conclusion, Shakespeare's Othello, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest offer us a worldview that defies cultural bias and racial hatred; for in these texts Eastern 24 men are given equal opportunity as their European contemporaries to build alliances, establish marriages, and seek courtship across national, religious, cultural and racial boundaries; - a possibility that can be thwarted only by political considerations, schemes of domination and individual temperaments. This should justify our disagreement with Walter Cohen’s opinion that little seems at stake in Othello, for the Shakespearean tragedies with which it is often compared chronicle the fall of kings and princes, connecting familial and psychological concerns to the fate of nations, whereas Othello does not (2091). This play in particular, reflects a world where the East and the West were not left in peace to develop a bond of love and trust. Despite the difference in color, the ram/ewe metaphor in Othello connotes of no hierarchy; and in The Tempest, the King of Tunis is definitely no Caliban, whereas the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice is received more congenially than some European notables. Some critics observe that he is the first suitor to actually appear on stage (Robinson 62). The corruption of such a worldview, as Said elucidates, accumulated over a long period of political strife and intrigue until it was pronounced in Coleridge’s unfortunate lexicons two centuries later at the peak of imperialist expansionism. Shakespeare’s work discussed here demarcates a world unlike Coleridge’s, or ours which is rife with ideas of the 'clash of civilizations’ and incompatibility of cultures. The nature of his project is truly universal. Love or the possibility of love at least has a chance in Othello, The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice as a basic, central and unifying human bond. And though in these same plays, especially Othello, Shakespeare’s attempt to prove the validity and legitimacy of intercultural and interracial connectedness collapses, the catharsis lingering in the audience’s mind is, and has always been, that there shall always 25 be some people who scheme to exploit love for political power and dominance, or to destroy it altogether, quite often with dire repercussions. This is undeniably a tragedy of a certain magnitude. Works Cited Andrea, Bernadette. 2008. Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Ballaster, Rosalind. 2005. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785. Oxford: Oxford University Press Bayouli, Tahar. 2008. "The Representation of the Orient in Early Modern English Drama". International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies. Vol 1, Number 1, pp 110-128. 26 Burton, J. 2000. "Anglo-Ottoman Relations and the Image of the Turk in Tamburlaine". Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Vol 30, Issue1, pp 125–56. Cohen, Walter. 1997. "Introduction to Othello". The Norton Shakespeare. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Pp 2091-2098. Dimmock, Matthew. 2005. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Burlington, VT, USA: Ashagate. Grosrichard, Alain. English translation 1998. The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East. French 1979. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Verso. Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. (Ed.). 1997. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Hall, Kim F. 1995. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. Hart, Jonathan. 2003. Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World. Gordonsville, VA, USA: Palgrave Macmillan. Kastan, David Scott. 1999. Shakespeare after Theory. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge. 27 Little, Arthur L., Jr. 2000. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. Palo Alto, CA, USA: Stanford University Press. Loomba, Ania. (Ed.). Orkin, Martin. (Ed.). 1998. Post-Colonial Shakespeare. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge. Loomba, Ania. 1998. Colonialism-Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. Mcjannet, Linda. 2006. Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks. Gordonsville, VA, USA: Palgravr Macmillan. Niro, Brian. 2003. Race. Gordonsville, VA, USA: Palgrave Macmillan. Raysor, Thomas Middleton. Ed. 1930. Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Robinson, Benedict S. 2007. Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton. New York and Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Said, Edward W. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books. 28 Sanchez, Melissa E. 2008. “Seduction and Service in The Tempest”. Studies in Philology. Vol. 105, Number 1, pp 50-82 Sauer, Elizabeth. (Ed). Rajan, Balachandra. (Ed). 2004. Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations, 1500-1900. Gordonsville, VA, USA: Palgrave Macmillan. Skura, Meredith Anne. 2008. “Reading Othello’s Skin: Contexts and Pretexts”. Philological Quarterly. Vol. 87, pp. 299-334. Smith, Emma. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press. Vitkus, Daniel. 2003. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630. New York and Houndsmill, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Wells, Robin. 2001. Shakespeare on Masculinity. Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press. Yermolenko, Galina I. (Ed). 2010. Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture. Farnham, England: Ashgate. Zurcher, Amelia A. 2007. Seventeenth-Century English Romance. Gordonsville, VA, USA: Palgrave Macmillan. 29 30