Circumcision and Alterity in Early Modern Theatre

A LITTLE BIT OFF THE TOP • CIRCUMCISION AND ALTERITY IN EARLY MODERN POPULAR THEATRE
Chris Wignall Page 2
A Little Bit off the Top: Circumcision and Alterity in Early Modern Popular Theatre
Chris Wignall
INTRODUCTION
The Badge whereby Gods people once were known

From forreigners, was circumcision;
Since circumcision of the outward part
Is ceas’d, Lord! circumcise thy servants heart.1
NICHOLAS BILLINGSLEY, ON CIRCUMCISION
I sing a wondrous worke of God,

I sing his mercies great,
I sing his justice heere-withall,
Pow’rd from his holy seat,
To wit, a cruell martiall warre,
A bloodie battell bolde,
Long doubtsome fight, with slaughter huge
And wounded manifold.
Which fought was in LEPANTOES gulfe
Betwixt the baptiz’d race,
And the circumcised Turban’d Turkes.2
KING JAMES I, THE BATTLE OF LEPANTO
Circumcision has existed since at least 2400 BCE in Egypt,3 and has been a feature of
numerous societies: many of the tribes of the ‘New World’ were found to practice
circumcision,4 and it is a rite of passage in some African and Australian Aboriginal
tribes, for example. It is with Judaism and Islam, however, that the rite has become
1
Nicholas Billingsley, A Treasury of Divine Raptures (London: J. Cottrell, 1667), p.142
2
King James VI of Scotland and I of England, The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. by James Craigie
(2 vols.) (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1955), I, p.202
3
See David M. Friedman, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (London: Robert Hale,
2003), p.8
4
See W.D. Dunsmuir and E.M. Gordon, ‘The History of Circumcision’, in British Journal of Urology
83.1 (1999), p.1
synonymous, and this connection was especially strong in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, where a fascination with the process—and the alien and
threatening cultures associated with it—constitutes a major area of interest, as
evidenced in popular drama of the period.
In Judaism, circumcision is divinely mandated in Genesis, Chapter 17, Verses
9-14:
Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and
your descendants after you for the generations to come. This is my covenant
with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every
male among you shall be circumcised. You are to undergo circumcision, and it
will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. For the generations to
come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised,
including those born in your household or bought with money from a
foreigner—those who are not your offspring. Whether born in your household
or bought with your money, they must be circumcised. My covenant in your
flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male, who has not
been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken
my covenant.”
Circumcision is a covenant with God, with the penalty of karet, or being cut off from
the community by God, being imposed on the uncircumcised by Jewish law. Whilst
circumcision is not mandated in the Qur’an, it is stressed by Islam for purposes of
hygiene; according to some traditions, Muhammad is supposed to have required

circumcision as a fitrah, representing a man’s cleanliness and moral health.5
Consequently, Muslim children are also generally circumcised.
Western Christianity, on the other hand, whilst sharing with Judaism an
observation of the Old Testament, took their cue from Deuteronomy 10.16:
‘Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked’, and thus
preferred metaphorical circumcision to physical circumcision. The rite’s alien status
served to cement a perception of alterity associated with religions which practiced the
rite, principally Judaism and Islam—whilst, to Judaism, the mark was representative
of divine preference, for European Christians of the period, the opposite was true.
The extraneousness of circumcision to Christian life, and its perceived centrality to
the lives of others, inspired some interesting ideas and discussion about the rite,
despite its relative absence within the borders of Europe. Circumcision was an
emblem of all alien characteristics, a threat to Europe’s collective manhood, a route to
power, preferment and sexual fulfilment, and the ultimate proof of apostasy. It was a
source not only of anxiety, but also of ambivalence: if it was a badge of alterity, and
thus a cause for suspicion, where did that leave the circumcised Jesus? St. Robert
Southwell’s Moeoniæ contains one of many poems inspired by the rite:
5
See David L. Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery (New York:
Basic Books, 2000), p.45
The head is launst to worke the bodies cure,

With angry salve it smarts to heal our wound
To faultlesse sonne from all offences pure,
The faulty vassals scourges do redound,
The Judge is cast the guiltie to acquite,
The sunne defac’d to lend the starre his light,
The vine of life distilleth drops of grace,
Our rocke gives issue to an heavenly spring,
Teares from his eies, bloud runnes from wounded place
Which showers to heaven of joy a harvest bring,
This sacred dew let angels gather up,
Such dainty drops best fit their nectared cup,
With weeping eies his mother rewd his smart,
If bloud from him, teares came from her as fast,
The knife that cut his flesh did pierce his heart,
The paine that Jesus set did Mary taste,
His life and hers hung by one fatall twist,
No blow that hit the sonne the mother mist.6
Circumcision becomes another way in which the Jews betrayed Christ—as well as
handing him over to the Romans, they cruelly denuded him of his foreskin. This Holy
Foreskin—the præputium—was laid claim to as a relic by numerous churches
throughout Christendom, and its supposed presence in numerous bejewelled
reliquaries, as well as the feast day associated with it, may also have imbued
circumcision with a redolence of Catholic idolatry. It is this complex network of
6
St. Robert Southwell, ‘His Circumcision’, in Moeoniae. Or, Certaine excellent poems and spirituall
hymnes: omitted in the last impression of Peters complaint being needefull thereunto to be annexed, as being
both diuine and wittie. (London: John Busbie, 1595), p.6
attitudes and associations, as exemplified in the English drama of the period, which I
wish to examine in this essay.
The early modern English conception of circumcision, and how it contributes
to a construction of otherness, is an area which has received little attention from
critics. Of principal relevance are the works of Daniel Vitkus, whose all-encompassing
investigations into portrayals of the Islamic Other and the apostate during the period
does not neglect the subject of circumcision, and casts a long shadow over any other
critic’s endeavours in the area. Additionally, the work of Sander Gilman and Ania
Loomba have furnished me with interesting insights; Nabil Matar’s Turks, Moors, and
Englishmen in the Age of Enlightenment provides an interesting counterpoint to
assumptions of English racism and insularity during the period, and Marjorie Garber’s
fascinating work has been invaluable in the writing of the final chapter. I am also
indebted, more generally, to work done by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. I have
also been fortunate at the availability of primary sources, which I have consulted
whenever possible.
Daniel Vitkus notes how ‘Jews and Muslims were both understood by the
early modern English to be “infidels” expelled from Iberia at the same time, and with
a similar history of forced and feigned conversion preceding and following their
expulsion. Both were circumcised…and both practiced a radically iconoclastic form of
monotheism’,7 and Ania Loomba postulates that, to the early modern mindset,
circumcision is only part of a panoply of differences whereby ‘Jewish men are said to
menstruate, smell, be capable of breast-feeding or have hooked noses; blackness, mis-
shapenness, and grotesque features including swollen heads and hooked noses are
routinely attributed to many Muslims.’8 The first chapter examines the idea that
circumcision is used by early modern playwrights as a trope of all difference or alterity:
that it is an umbrella under which author can place not only Islam, but also Judaism
and other examples of geographical and ideological ‘otherness’, such as femininity and
homosexuality; and that, in creating a catch-all phrase for alterity, circumcision also
provides the apparatus to demonstrate their essential equivalence and homogeneity.
Similarly, that circumcision is a bond by the aid of which alliances—for good, or,
more often, ill—might be forged.
The connection between circumcision and castration—and its attendant
anxieties—has long been commented upon. Sigmund Freud, for example, notes that
7
Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean 1570-1630
(Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p.182
8
Ania Loomba, ‘‘Delicious Traffick’: Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern Stages’, in Shakespeare
Survey 52, p.206.
It is our suspicion that during the human family’s primeval period castration
used actually to be carried out by a jealous and cruel father upon growing boys,
and that circumcision, which so frequently plays a part in puberty rites among
primitive peoples, is a clearly recognisable relic of it.9
The second chapter examines the pervasive linkage between circumcision and
castration, and how the two contributed to a sense in drama both of the sense of
threatening and potentially emasculating eastern military threat which prompted
Richard Knolles to declaim ‘The glorious Empire of the Turkes, the present terrour of
the world’,10 and also to a sense of the self-imposed effeminacy of the eastern subject
themselves.
FIGURE I: The sense of a threatening alienness embodied in the Turkish genitalia

persisted long after the seventeenth century had ended, as this 1793 engraving by
James Gillray succinctly demonstrates.
9
Sigmund Freud, ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’, in Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader (London:
Vintage, 1995), p.778
10
Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that nation to the rising
of the Othoman familie with all the notable expeditions of the Christian Princes against them; together with
the Lives and Conquests of the Othoman Kings and Emperours unto the yeare 1610, 2nd ed. (London: Adam
Islip, 1610), p.1
As well as simultaneously embodying the effeminacy of the other and their ability to
effeminise, the conflation between circumcision and castration was reified in the
figure of the eunuch, who is a fixture of dramatic depictions of the eastern world at
this time. Stories abound in which Europeans are captured: a fate which was seen as
frequently leading to circumcision or even castration (the figure of the Eunuch in
early modern plays is frequently a former European Christian who has been captured
by the Turks; characters such as Eunuchus in John Mason’s The Turke serve to
promulgate the stereotype of the Turk as predatory castrator). Such accounts would
be fortified by accounts of capture by Muslim pirates, which almost invariably involve
circumcision as the captives are given a choice between enslavement and apostasy.
Hans Turley cites one typical example, where, after being captured by Algerian
pirates, ‘“many of our people were for renouncing their faith, and embracing the law
of Mahomet, in order, at that dear price, to be eased of their slavery”[…] Some of the
crew managed to escape the worst kind of slavery (but not circumcision) if they
renounced Christianity.’11 Similarly, Samuel Chew notes ‘the general impression in
England that Moslems practised forcible conversion’ and circumcision; there was,
Chew says, ‘a ready demand for coarsely piquant anecdotes of exotic sexual customs:
11
Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York and
London: New York University Press, 1999), p.24
the plurality of wives, the lawfulness of concubinage, the universal prevalence…of
homosexuality, the rite of circumcision, and the barbarous custom of castrating the
guards and servants of the seraglio.’12 These preconceptions of the East play into the
early modern archetype of an east which represented the threat of effeminisation and
disempowerment in a world where religious and ethnic identities were unstable,
despite their importance: an extension of the external threats to self-identification
already imposed by a state which vacillated between Catholicism and Protestantism.
The third chapter examines the relationship between circumcision and the
opening up of opportunities for material and sensual advancement. The east has long
been perceived, both before and after the period under scrutiny here, as a land where
carnal and material fulfilment could be obtained with much greater facility than was
possible in Christian Europe. As well as the very tangible reality of Ottoman imperial
power, which provided financial incentive to conversion, early modern drama
emphasised another motive for ‘turning Turk’ with its image of a sensuous east,
unencumbered by the moral constraints imposed upon England by Christianity.
Contemporary drama frequently suggests that Islam (along with the circumcision that
was supposed to inevitably follow conversion) is a faith professed by its adherents
12
Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York:
Octagon, 1965), p.548
purely for selfish, materialistic means, rather than for the spiritual ones of
Christianity; at its simplest, it is a Faustian choice between a life of amoral plenty
with eternal damnation in death, and a life of Christian chastity rewarded in death by
the pleasures of Heaven. The image of a morally bankrupt, indolent and indulgent
east allowed the west to condemn the Turk as amoral infidel: more worryingly, he
used the power of gratification supposedly inherent in his culture as a way of enticing
westerners to its midst. Frequently in early modern drama, circumcision and
castration figure as an exchange, both physical and symbolic, for access to the east’s
delights, and, similarly, that material wealth above that which could be obtained in
the west was available as a consequence of circumcision. Circumcision represents not
only castration and disenfranchisement: it also signifies subsumption and subjugation
into the homogeneous identity of the East; of apostasy and indolence, as well as a
double effeminisation, through both the essential femininity supposedly inherent in
‘perversely unmasculine13’ Turkish society, and the ever-present link at the back of the
early modern mind between circumcision and castration. Consequently, the east is
often portrayed as a seductive and beguiling—but ultimately perilous—place, where
promises of carnal and material fulfilment were used to divest from European men a
13
Vitkus, Turning Turk, p.119
portion of their manhood, as well as their Christian faith. It should be noted,
however, that this eastern enticement to emasculation is almost always reserved for
comic characters, whilst other characters seek different routes to the empowerment
promised by the east.
The final chapter examines other signifiers of difference, and how they relate
to that of circumcision. On the stage, there are numerous ways in which a characters
outsider status can be emphasised—whether through accent, skin colour, or
costume—which are inaccessible to someone who is merely reading the work. All of
these signifiers would have an immediacy and visibility lacking in the hidden sign of
the circumcised penis. However, and more importantly, costume could be changed;
accents could be muted, and it was widely assumed that the darkest skin could be
whitened by staying out of the sun—for example, in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness,
courtiers are blacked up to portray Africans, who emerge miraculously ‘whitened’
when they travel to England to appear in The Masque of Beautie. Circumcision, then,
was the one immutable and permanent sign of otherness, the hidden mark which
distinguished ‘true’ Christian from covert renegade, and prevented the reintegration
of the apostate into Christian society. The act of conversion, is essentially finalised by
circumcision; to be circumcised is to make a final renunciation of one’s Christian

identity, and become wholly, irredeemably, ‘other’. No matter how well hidden,
circumcision was totemic of the immutability of otherness, of the failure of the alien
to fully assimilate himself into western society. It is interesting to note the vast
number of female converts to Christianity compared to the much smaller number of
male converts; The conversion of an Islamic or Jewish woman to Christianity through
attachment to a Christian man is a common occurrence in early modern drama,
perhaps functioning as a symbolic counter to the problem of conversion away from
Christianity in a society provoked to significant concern about the onslaught of the
east’s pernicious influence, buoyed by reports of the number of ‘renegadoes’
converting from Christianity to Islam. However, its opposite—the Muslim or Jewish
man converting to Christianity—occurs very rarely in drama: when it does—such as
in Othello—it usually ends in a reversion to the difference which, whilst potentially
suppressible, is essentially ineradicable. Despite numerous female converts: Abigail in
The Jew of Malta, Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, Agar in A Christian Turned Turk,
Donusa in The Renegado, Iphigenia in Alphonsus, King of Aragon, and, to a lesser
extent, Zenocrate in Tamburlaine, to name a few, the number of male converts to
Christianity remains negligible. The small number of men who have successfully
converted from Islam to Christianity, such as Grimaldi in Massinger’s The Renegado,

and Cantharides in The Two Noble Ladies, is dwarfed by the number of male converts
in the opposite direction as well as by the number of female counterparts.

‘DOTH RELIGION MOVE ANYTHING IN THE SHAPES OF MEN?’:

CIRCUMCISION AS A TROPE OF DIFFERENCE
‘Amongst others, Philip of MORNAY, the noble and learned Frenchman in his
woorthy worke concerning the truenesse of the Christian religion, seemeth (and
not without good reason) to derive the Turks, together with the Tartars, from the
Iewes…the word Turke [is] a word of disgrace, signifying, in Hebrew, banished
men.14’
RICHARD KNOLLES, THE GENERALL HISTORIE OF THE TURKES
In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said suggests a framework of ‘othering’
whereby geographical alterity is linked with other exemplars of otherness:
‘delinquents, the insane, women, the poor…having in common an identity best
described as lamentably alien.’ 15 In this chapter, I aim to explore the idea that
circumcision was an important device for the early modern playwright, allowing him
to link geographical otherness—through the seemingly bizarre rite of circumcision,
viewed by Early Modern Englishmen as an inconceivably alien ceremony of genital
mutilation—and femininity, through that rite’s indelibly pervasive conflation with
castration and effeminisation (Sander Gilman notes, for example, how the sign of
circumcision seemingly ‘marks the Jew as inherently different, as his physical nature
transgresses against the absolute boundary between male and female, a boundary
represented by the radically different structure of their genitalia. The Jew is neither
14
Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, p.1
15
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), p.207
entirely male or female, but an entirely different category’).16 Thus circumcised people
are united not only in their preputial lack, but also in the sexual ambiguity it entails,
which edges them towards femininity without fully placing them in that category of
otherness. In this state of ambivalent sexuality, allegations of sodomy and
hypersexuality, as well as effeminacy, are not infrequent: like the circumcision it was
linked to, sodomy served as a trope which, according to Nabil Matar, placed ‘a group
outside the cultural and moral acceptability of the audience, or at least outside the
professed morality’,17 and is a recurring theme both in plays and travel narratives. For
example, Joseph Pitts writes how Muslims
are apt to drink…and are abominably rude, insomuch that it is very dangerous
for any woman to walk in any by-place but more dangerous for boys, for they
are extremely taken to sodomy…this horrible sin of sodomy is so far from
being punished amongst them that it is part of their ordinary discourse to
boast and brag of their detestable actions of that kind. ’Tis common for men
to fall in love with boys as ’tis here in England to be in love with women.18
In addition, circumcision tied together the two principal ‘renegade’ religions of
Judaism and Islam, consolidating them into a homogenised group, united in their
16
Sander L. Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1989), p.41
17
Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999), p.109
18
Joseph Pitts, ‘A True and Faithful account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans, with
an Account of the Author’s being Taken Captive’, in Daniel Vitkus (ed.), Piracy, Slavery, and
Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2001), p.236
penile incompleteness and in their opposition to Christianity—indeed, it was
necessary for Edward Brerewood to dismiss as a ‘fantasie’ the popular idea that
Muslims were descended from Jews, inheriting the rite of circumcision from them.
He repeats Richard Knolles’s assertion that
it is alleged that the word Tartar…signifieth in the Syriaque and Hebrew

tongues, a residue or remainder such as these Tartars are supposed to be of the
Ten Tribes. Secondly, because, (as the patrons of this fantasie say), they have
alwaies embraced (the ancient character of Judaisme) Circumcision.19
Historically, if not theologically, the two religions were very close at this time: Jews
were attracted to the Ottoman Empire, with its liberal Millet (‫ )م لة‬system, where they
could live with relative impunity as opposed to anti-Semitic Europe. Although some
countries had begun to re-admit practising Jews by 1570,20 most of the continent
(including, with the notable case of Queen Elizabeth’s ill-fated Marrano doctor,
England) explicitly banned the practise of Judaism. Thus, traders and travellers
visiting the east would be likely to encounter their first examples of practising
Judaism: Jews often acted as intermediaries between Christian traders and their
Islamic counterparts, even brokering European slaves captured from Christian ships.
19
Edward Brerewood, Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages and Religions through the Chiefe
Parts of the World (London: John Bill, 1622), pp.94-95
20
This is a trend England would resist until 1655, although a smallish community of Jews who publicly
professed Christianity whilst practising Judaism in secret—the Marranos—existed in London for
several decades prior to this decision.
In addition, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire frequently occupied important and
prominent positions in society—more so than any Christians living in the area—
whereas the small number of Jews in London would generally have to conceal their
faith. Indeed, it has been postulated that this perceived closeness between the two
religions resulted in a coterminous link between anti-Muslim feeling and anti-
Semitism, with anti-Semitism peaking at times when fear of Islam was also running
high: Jews were persecuted on suspicion of being agents of the Muslims.21 Such a
connection was envisaged at least as early as the fourteenth century, when the Black
Death, which according to John Kelly ‘occasioned one of the most vicious outbreaks
of anti-Semitic violence in European history’22 was blamed upon a conspiracy between
the Jews and the Muslim Caliph of Granada.23 This societal and geographical
closeness, both real and imagined, may well have contributed to a conception of
Judaism and Islam’s theological closeness, which connected the two religions along
with a panoply of other differences variously attributed to Jews and Muslims. Along
with the feminising supposition that Jews menstruate and are able to breast-feed, they
21
See Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler, The Jew as Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of
Anti-Semitism (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1986), p.92
22
John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An intimate history of the Black Death (London: Harper Perennial,
2006)
23
See The Great Mortality, p.139
were also assumed to have oversized feet and noses, misshapen bodies, and an
unpleasant smell24—attempts to add to the one physical manifestation of the Jew’s
otherness, his circumcised penis. Most interesting of all, however, to an age in which
‘Moor’ and ‘Turk’ were frequently conflated (indeed, as Jonathan Burton notes, ‘the
term “Moor” did not necessarily denote Muslim. It was used just as often to indicate
cultural and/or somatic difference’),25 and plays made frequent references to the
‘tawny’ and ‘swarthy’ complexion of either, is the stereotypical blackness of the Jew.
This supposed outward sign of Judaism is evidenced in a refutation by French traveller
François-Maximilien Misson:
’Tis also a vulgar Error that the Jews are all black; for this is only true of the
Portugese Jews, who marrying always among one another, beget Children like
themselves, and consequently the Swarthiness of their complexion is entail’d
upon their whole Race, even in the Northern Regions. But the Jews who are
originally of Germany, for example those of Prague, are not Blacker than the
rest of their countrymen.26
24
For a fuller exploration of these other physical differentiators between Jew and Christian, Ania
Loomba’s , ‘‘Delicious Traffick’: Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern Stages’, in Shakespeare Survey
52, pp. 201-215 provides some detail with reference to the early modern stage, whilst Sander Gilman’s
The Jew’s Body (New York & London: Routledge, 1991) goes into greater detail, but is concerned more
with Victorian constructions of otherness than early modern ones.
25
Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624 (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2005), p.141
26
François-Maximilien Misson, A New Voyage to Italy: With Curious Observations on Several other
Countries, as, Germany, Switzerland, Savoy, Geneva, Flanders, and Holland. (London: T. Goodwin,
1699), 2nd ed. 2 vols, II, p.96
In short, the early modern conception of circumcision furnished a means by which,
whether through causation or association, geographical and ideological otherness
could be fused together with other non-Christian religions, femininity, and a host of
other signs of difference. This is an idea borne out by plays of the period; circumcision
is used by early modern playwrights as a trope of all difference or alterity, an umbrella
under which author can place not only Islam, but also Judaism and other examples of
geographical and ideological ‘otherness’, femininity, homosexuality etc., and, in
creating a catch-all phrase for alterity, circumcision also provides the apparatus to
demonstrate their essential equivalence, connectedness and homogeneity.
The first play I am going to look at, ironically, does a very good job of
upending these assumptions: Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. The play
undermines attempts to create a self/other binarism: Marlowe’s Malta is no-one’s
native land; as Emily Bartels remarks, ‘everyone—from the Christians and Jews, to
the Italians and Turks—seems to be a stranger here.’ 27 Immediately this unsettles
discrete categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’, and such labels are exposed
for what they are: apparatus to subjugate and to relegate—exploitative traits shared by
everyone in this land. Thus everyone—Christian, Jew, and Turk alike, rather than
27
Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p.91
merely the latter two—are united. Stereotypy, such as it is, is evidenced by characters
who self-consciously embody them, rather than displaying them through some innate
predisposition towards evil. Barabas, like A Christian Turned Turk’s Ward, ‘plays the
Jew’, embodying stereotypical representations of Judaism and thus creating ‘an illusion
of knowable and containable difference’28 which belies the nonconforming reality.
The play opens with an exposition of the religious fluidity which is central to
the play, as Machevill describes how
I count religion but a childish toy,

And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
(Prologue, 14-15)29
Machiavelli, of course, provides much of the ideological impetus behind the play’s
central character, Barabas: as Isaiah Berlin significantly notes, Machiavelli introduces
a competing morality to a Christian paradigm of meekness in preparation for the next
life, which concentrates on this life.30 Characters in The Jew of Malta are strongly
demarked by their religious affiliations, yet at the same time they utilise their creeds
selectively, in order to legitimise their actions and prejudices: Christians have a
28
Ibid., p.100
29
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, in Mark Thornton Burnett (ed.), Christopher Marlowe: The
Complete Plays (London: J.M. Dent, 1999), p.461
30
See Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Originality of Machiavelli’, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas
(London: Hogarth Press, 1979), pp.25-80
tendency to invoke their religion only when they desire to dominate and exploit non-
Christians; Muslims and Jews invoke their respective religions, connected through the
shared rite of circumcision and a supposed aversion to Christianity, for their own
materialistic ends.
At the beginning of Act One, Scene One, Barabas introduces the first of three
partnerships Barabas has forged with Islamic figures, as he admits that he relies for his
wealth upon
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,
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones.
(1.1.21-28)31
This first instance of Judeo-Islamic exchange shares numerous characteristics with
those that follow it, which expose a supposition of the shared features of Muslims and
Jews, including a lust for power and wealth, and the reliance both parties have upon
one another in order to fulfil these aims. As with all Barabas’s relations with Islam,
however, a brief period of profitability ultimately leads to failure: in this case, his trade
31
Burnett (ed.), The Jew of Malta, p.463
with Islam is destroyed when the same people’s demands for ransom from the
Christian rulers of Malta force them to extract it from Barabas and his fellow Jews,
and his ability to invest further is seemingly withdrawn, since ‘of naught is nothing
made’.32
This leads Barabas into his second (and to this chapter, most important,
because of the explicit use of circumcision, which figures in the play as an
intertheological bond indicative of the unified features of Judaism and Islam) Islamic
partnership, with the villainous Ithamore. The first meeting between Barabas and
Ithamore introduces the characters’ shared characteristics: their duplicity—which on
occasions amounts to a pathological inability to tell the truth; their hatred of
Christians, and their mutual circumcision, which is not only explicitly stated through
Barabas’s statement that ‘we are villains both/Both circumcisèd, we hate Christians
both’,33 but also through the frequency of phallic references to their unifying feature:
Ithamore’s reference to eunuchs below would bring to mind the Turkish threat of
castration, and Barabas’s invocation to Ithamore to ‘Be moved at nothing, see thou
pity none,/But to thyself smile when the Christians moan’ is replied with ‘O brave,
32
Ibid., p.471
33
master, I worship your nose for this!’ (2.3.175-177)34— the large nose stereotypically
attributed to Jews, and probably augmented in stage costume, is ‘the iconic
representation of the Jew’s phallus…the displaced locus of anxiety associated with the
marking of the male Jew’s body though circumcision’,35 according to Sander Gilman.
These traits are introduced simultaneously as the pair embroider tales of their exploits
against Christians. Barabas details how
I walk abroad o’ 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 pinioned along my door.
(2.3.179-185) 36
Whilst Ithamore responds in similar terms:
In setting Christian villages on fire,

Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves.
(2.3.208-9) 37
34
Ibid., p.489
35
Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991),
p.115
36
The Jew of Malta, p.489
37
Ibid., p.490
In immediately establishing their similar preoccupations, Marlowe plays on the idea
of these two exemplars of difference are intrinsically identical in their motivation and
temperament, and it is after this exchange of stories superimposing the two’s
ideological status that Barabas remarks upon its source; a unifying feature that
simultaneously transcends and confirms their ideologies:
Why, this is something. Make account of me

As of thy fellow; we are villains both:
Both circumcisèd, we hate Christians, both.
Be true and secret, and thou shalt want no gold.
(2.2.218-221)38
Barabas and Ithamore’s relationship always retains the status of a malevolent
duumvirate whose motivations—a hatred of Christianity and desire for wealth and
power—are reified in their circumcision, the mark of their threat to Malta’s Christian
majority; of their deviancy and alterity. In fact, this status is expanded and confirmed,
even at the same time as it is attacked and undermined by the same characteristics
that have brought them together. When Abigail converts to Christianity, and Barabas
consequently loses his only child, Ithamore steps into the breach, effectively becoming
a surrogate son to Barabas. Although this adoption bears the hallmarks of Barabas’s
constant mendacity and is prompted by Barabas’s usual greedy motives, as well as his
38
tendency to act out archetypal ‘Jewish’ behaviour, rather than springing from any
paternal feelings toward Ithamore, it nonetheless demonstrates the depth of a
perceived connection between the two religions:
O Trusty Ithamore, no servant, but my friend!

I here adopt thee for mine own heir.
All that I have is thine when I am dead,
And whilst I live use half, spend as myself;
Here, take my keys, I’ll give ’em thee anon.
(3.4.42-46) 39
Of course, like Barabas’s reliance upon Islamic traders for his wealth, the relationship
between Barabas and Ithamore is doomed to failure: the mutual duplicity of Barabas
and Ithamore means their relationship could only descend further into deceit,
culminating in Ithamore’s attempted blackmail of his master, in which he is egged on
by the thief Pilia-Borza; Barabas resolves to retaliate—ironically, invoking his Jewish
identity before vowing to hide it in order to extract his revenge:
Was ever Jew tormented as I am?

To have a shag-rag knave to come demand
Three hundred crowns, and then five hundred crowns!
Well, I must seek a means to rid ’em all,
And presently: for in his villainy
He will tell all hew knows, and I shall die for’t.
I have it.
I will in some disguise go see the slave,
And how the villain revels with my gold.
(4.3.65-73)40
39
Ibid., p.501
40
And so, disguised as a French musician, Barabas slips a poisoned flower into the
hands of Ithamore and his mistress, Bellamira the courtesan, in a Machiavellian
device which reflects once more Barabas’s materialistic desire for power. Like Barabas,
the flower appears unthreatening but conceals a deadly secret, having but one,
obscure, outwardly visible sign of his threatening and dangerous difference:
BELLAMIRA: Prithee, Pilia-Borza, bid the fiddler give me the posy in his hat
there.
PILIA-BORZA: Sirrah, you must give my mistress your posy.
BARABAS: A vôtre commandement, madame.
[Gives nosegay.]
BELLAMIRA: How sweet, my Ithamore, the flowers smell.
ITHAMORE: Like thy breath, sweetheart, no violet like ’em.
PILIA-BORZA: Foh, methinks they stink like a hollyhock.
BARABAS: [Aside] So, now I am revenged upon ’em all.
The scent thereof was death; I poisoned it.
(4.4.40-49)41
The third instance of a Judeo-Islamic alliance with Barabas occurs when he
allies with Calymath to gain his revenge upon the Maltese community which has
wronged him:
I’ll be revenged on this accursèd town;

For by my means Calymath Shall enter in.
I’ll help to slay their children and their wives,
To fire the churches, pull their houses down,
Take my goods too, and seize upon my lands:
I hope to see the Governor a slave,
And, rowing in a galley, whipped to death.
(5.1.62-68) 42
41
Ibid., pp.520-521
42
The alliance between Barabas and Calymath, whereby Barabas aids the Turkish
invasion of Christian Malta, and is rewarded (albeit temporarily) with the post of
Governor, would probably seem the most pressing and real to an audience fearful both
of Islam’s threat of conversion and of the military power behind it. This alliance
reflects much more succinctly than its predecessors the Christian fear of a renegade
Judeo-Turkish alliance, and its potential to unseat Christian power. In English drama,
both Jews and Turks are agents of financial and political destabilization, posing
threats through their violence, imperial successes, and extortionate usury, as well as an
aura of the threat of castration, borne out of their mutual castration.
Barabas’s desire for revenge was clearly one which resonated strongly with
London theatregoers. Its most famous tribute, of course is Shakespeare’s The
Merchant of Venice, but the shadow of the menacing Barabas is also cast over a later
play, John Webster’s The Devil’s Law-Case (1622), in which the Christian Romelio
adopts the guise of a Jew: like Barabas and others, he ‘plays the Jew’, and in his
‘Jewish’ behaviour suggests a very Barabas-like alliance with the Turk, as well as
alluding to other traditionally ‘Jewish’ traits, such as hypersexuality and cannibalism:

Excellently well habited! Why, methinks

That I could play with my own shadow now,
And be a rare Italianated Jew:
To have as many several changes of faces
As I have seen carv’d upon one cherrystone; […]
But in the spring and fall, and so the cause
As to coin money, corrupt ladies’ honours,
Betray a town to th’ Turk, or make a bonfire
O’ th’ Christian navy. I could settle to’t
As if I had eat a politician
And digested nothing but pure blood.
(3.2.1-16)43
Whilst through Calymath’s military aid, Barabas is able to overcome the
Maltese community which has ill-treated him, and install himself as governor, his
final alliance with the Turk, like those that preceded it, rebounds, and he is killed in a
boiling cauldron. Barabas’s circumcised alliances are doomed never to succeed; even as
he subtly lampoons English fears of otherness, Marlowe also attempts to ameliorate
them: the same properties which make the other threatening also render him
impotent and unthreatening.
Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk is another play which affords a
large role to Muslim-Judaic interactions. Whilst Marlowe’s play includes one Jewish
character, embroiled in a number of arrangements with the Turks and in defiance of
Christian rule, Daborne’s play includes two Jews—Benwash and his servant
43
John Webster, The Devil’s Law-Case, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds.), The Selected Works
of John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.302-303
Rabshake—who are more or less integrated into a Muslim society, whilst Christians
are here the interlopers. However, the play shares with The Jew of Malta a tendency to
filter all differences down into a semblance of uniformity. Importantly, though, A
Christian Turned Turk does not exclude Christians from this process: in the world of
this play, all identity threatened by the power of the Muslim majority to destabilize
and corrupt. Benwash, in particular, has a very ambivalent religious identity; in order
to repel the advances of the lascivious Muslims toward his wife, he has—at least
nominally—‘turned Turk’:
Thou has forgot how dear

I bought my liberty, renounced my law
(The law of Moses), turned Turk—all to keep
My bed free from these Mahometan dogs.
I would not be a monster, Rabshake, a man-beast,
A cuckold.
(6.73-79)44
The conception of religious fluidity is not an uncommon one; a lack of religious
affiliations is a frequent one in plays dealing with otherness; one example of many can
be found in Robert Greene’s Selimus, in which the eponymous emperor of the Turks
disparages religion and those who subscribe to it:
[…]they established laws and holy rites

To maintain peace and govern bloody fights
Then some sage man, above the vulgar wise,
Knowing that such laws could not in quiet dwell,
Unless they were first observed, did first devise
The names of gods, of religion, heaven and hell,
44
Robert Daborne, A Christian Turned Turk, in Daniel Vitkus (ed.), Three Turk Plays from Early
Modern England (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2000), p.176
And ’gan of pains and feigned rewards to tell:

Pains for those men which did neglect the law;
Rewards for those that lived in quiet awe.
Whereas indeed they were mere fictions.
(2.93-102)45
A similar exchange takes place in A Christian Turned Turk, confirming the relaxed
state of religious affirmation in this alien world:
BENWASH: Christian or Turk, you are more wise, I know,

Than with religion to confine your hopes.
GOVERNOR: He’s too well read in poesy to be tied
In the slave’s fetters of religion.
What difference in me as I am a Turk
And was a Christian?
(7.25-30)46
Early modern sermons made much of apostates who owed no religious alliance, who
doffed ‘their religion as they doe their clothes’47 as the situation dictates.
Uncircumcised Christians, lacking the mark of the renegade Turk or Jew, are
hampered in an ability to change their religious affiliation. Benwash and Rabshake, on
the other hand, demonstrate a consummate ease in switching between Jewish and
Islamic personae. This chimeric religious ability underlines the interchangability of
45
Robert Greene, The Tragicall History of Selimus, Emperor of the Turks, in Daniel Vitkus (ed.), Three
Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2000),
p.71
46
Vitkus (ed.), A Christian Turned Turk, p.190
47
the two religions, and the fluidity of the two’s religious affiliations is alluded to on
numerous occasions:
BENWASH: I sware as I was a Turk, and will cut your throat as I am a Jew.
(16.75) 48
This is a sentiment Rabshake echoes:
BENWASH: What dost thou mean by this?

RABSHAKE: To rob you as I am a Turk, and cut your throat as I am a Jew.
(16.121-122) 49
The two are spiritually ambiguous: their circumcision suggests that they are adherents
of either Judaism or Islam; their identities are problematized when the profess both.
Unlike a Christian’s conversion to Judaism or Islam, which would supposedly
necessitate the differentiator of circumcision, Benwash is able to fluidly switch
between the religion of his forefathers and the religion he has nominally adopted.
Further, he suggests that Jews and Muslims are tied together by physical features,
from which Christians are excluded—including, once again, the image of the large
nose which, according to Sander Gilman, is irrevocably linked to the phallus:
RABSHAKE:[…] the newcome pirate is a reasonable handsome

Man of a Christian.
AGAR: Why? Doth religion move anything in the shapes of men?
48
49
Ibid., p.224
RABSHAKE: Altogether! What’s the reason else that the Turk and Jew is
troubled (for the most part) with gouty legs and fiery nose? To express
their heart-burning. Whereas the puritan is a man of upright calf and
clean nostril.
(6.7-13)50
However, the Christian pirate Ward finds a way to subvert the physical
similarities which allow Turk and Jew to switch identity by faking his own
circumcision, and his Benwash-like ‘conversion’ to Islam. In substituting his foreskin
for an ape’s tail, Ward is able to gain the rewards of conversion—principally, the hand
of the beautiful Donusa—whilst escaping the threat of the identity- and masculinity-
consuming hybridity which pervades the world of A Christian Turned Turk. Like
Benwash, he is a Muslim in name only; he can covertly retain his Christian identity
because he covertly retains his foreskin, and thus the rite of conversion is incomplete.
As Sares says, he has ‘played the Jew with ’em’ 51; ironically, despite his ‘conversion’ he
retains a closer affinity to the stereotypically deceptive Jew than to the Muslim.
Rabshake links Ward’s conversion, and the metonymous circumcision he
assumes Ward has also undergone, to further forms of otherness. He casts the newly-
circumcised Ward as passive participant in the ‘Italian’ sex of sodomy:
50
51
Ibid., p.199
You, Turk, I have nothing to say to you. Ha, ha, ha! Poor
Fellow, how he looks since Mahomet had the handling of him! He
Hath had a sore night at “Who’s that knocks at the backdoor?” Cry
You mercy, I thought you were an Italian captain.
(13.52-55) 52
The process of Ward’s ‘othering’ is now complete: as well as the irreducible mark of
otherness effected thorugh the right of circumcision, Rabshake suggests he is
effeminised both through his inability to penetrate and through his adoption of
‘feminine’ sexual passivity in the alien act of sodomy.
The association of conversion with the acquisition of activities seemingly alien
to the English bedroom is not confined to Daborne’s play: Rabshake’s characterisation
of Ward as a traveller who has acquired, along with a physical mark of his new-
minted alien status, a taste for the exotic (and effeminising) sexual practices of the
lands he has visited is reflected in the character of Bordello, ‘an humerous travellour’
in John Mason’s The Turke, who declares
Thou hast bene at my pleasure indeede Pantofle, I will

Retreate into the country, hate this amorous court and betake
My selfe into obscurity: I tel thee boye I wil returne by this Circyan
Isle without transformation since Hebe hath discovred her secrets
I will turne Jupiter, hate the whole sexe of women, and onely
Embrace thee my Ganymede.
(1.2.489-494)53
52
Ibid., p.209-210
His appearance in the play—totemic of the east’s threats both of femininity
and of effeminisation—serve to supplement that of the character of Eunuchus, who
will appear more prominently in the next chapter. They have adopted characteristics
of the hypersexual other, exemplified in the character of Eleazar in the anonymous
play Lust’s Dominion, a Moor who conforms both to his stage stereotype and to the
title of the play by being ruled by lust. Whilst Eleazar’s cuckolding of the King of
Spain provides his main role in the play, he is also described as
the black prince of Divels, there go’s hee

That on smooth boies, on masks and Revelings
Spends the revenues of the King of Spain
(1.1.122-124)54
and another reference to anal sex in relation to circumcision emerges in Solyman and
Perseda (c1590), an anonymous play most often attributed to Thomas Kyd. In it, the
arrogant Basilisco undergoes a forced circumcision, to which the clownish Piston
retorts in a curiously Rabshakeian fashion:
The Ladies of Rhodes hearing that you have lost,

A capitoll part of your Lady ware,
Have made their petition to Cupid,
To plague you above all other,
53
John Mason, The Turke, ed. by Joseph Q. Adams, Jr. (London: David Nutt, 1913), p.17
54
J. Le Gay Brereton (ed.), Lust’s Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen (Louvain: Librarie Universitaire,
1931), p.9
As one prejuditiall to their muliebritie,

Now sir, Cupid seeing you alreadie hurt before,
Thinkes it a greater punishment to hurt you behind,
Therfore I would wish you to have an eye to the back dore.
(1717-1724) 55
Ward and Basilisco’s fate can be viewed in two ways; Marjorie Garber notes that early
modern medicine asserted that there was only one sex, and that women were an
inferior branch of it.56 There are a number of examples of early modern drama which
exhibit an expansion of this conception of difference, its reductivist purview widened
to include other examples of alterity, and it is perhaps symptomatic of a habit of
pigeonholing otherness into one cohesive face of difference; a Saidian tendency
towards cultural conflation characterised by the reduction of multiform strands of
otherness into a single, digestible, construct—and one which circumcision lent a
potent, conjunctive cultural symbol to. On the other hand, the fate of these characters
could be suggestive of a united front of corrupting and subsumptive alterity
threatening Christian Europe’s borders: Ward and Basilisco’s respective
comeuppances serve to suggest that Christians might fall victim to the west’s all-
consuming taxonomy of otherness; that becoming other in one regard is equivalent to
becoming other in all regards. This conception of the subsumptive power of difference
55
Thomas Kyd (att.), The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda (London: Edward White, c1590), p.50
56
Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Penguin, 1992), p.10
is a fear which circumcision, with its associations with castration, would have helped
to evoke.
‘A COMMON-WEALTH OF OUGHT BUT GELDINGS’

VIOLENT ARCHETYPES AND THE THREAT OF CASTRATION
Now I have you, mannikin, depend

I'll dock you of your foreskin and something else that will end
All hope of posterity, no little Sadducees will you beget
When I've finished with you, but sit in a eunochy fret
Waiting for death to relieve you of a hated life
You look a little pale? What ho, a knife, a knife.57
STEVIE SMITH, A JEW IS ANGRY WITH HIS FRIEND WHO DOES NOT BELIEVE IN CIRCUMCISION
But chiefly (which God in the end will punish upon those Mahometans, both Turks
and Moores) in causing poore Christians (boyes and others) to be circumcised
perforce, yea cut, and made eunuches. A just judgement of God (I say) of all those
Tyrants, both Turkes, Moores, and others, to be trembled at.58
JOHN HARRISON, THE TRAGICALL LIFE AND DEATH OF MULEY ABDALA MELEK
THE LATE KING OF BARBARIE
In 1625, the south-western coast of Cornwall was attacked by pirates from the
Levant. In an attack which marked the beginning of a persistent and genuine threat of
capture and conversion which would last for several years, at least twenty vessels
encroach upon the southern Cornish shores, attacking villages and taking inhabitants
away to slavery and (reputedly) coerced apostasy. F.E. Halliday notes that ‘these very
professional pirates descended on the fishing fleets and merchantmen who ventured
into the channel, and even raided the coast to carry off men and women to
57
James MacGibbon (ed.), The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p.280
58
John Harrison, The tragicall life and death of Muley Abdala Melek the late King of Barbarie, With a
proposition, or petition to all Christian princes, annexed thereunto: Written by a gentleman imployed into
those parts (Delph, 1663), p.13
slavery…during a black ten days of 1625, they took twenty-seven ships and two
hundred men. A few weeks earlier, sixty men, women, and children had been
snatched out of a church on Mount’s Bay.’59 As well as this encroachment upon
English shores and even English churches, the corsairs were also reputed to have
attacked the north of the county by taking Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel and
claiming it as Islamic territory; from this base, thousands of villagers were supposed to
have been taken away in a two-pronged attack. This event provides a realization of the
ever-present conception of the east’s ability to take away Englishmen, and, more
importantly, to take away their Christianity and their masculinity. It also exposes the
fears and assumptions attached to that threat, taking the encroachment of Islam upon
the shores of Christian England moved from the realm of rhetoric to that of reality.
Although the extent of this impingement is hard to extract from breathless fiction, the
attacks serve to crystallise an English fear of castration from the east, with Islamic
captors forcing ‘some English boyes perforce to turne Moores, cutting them, and
making them capadoes, or eunuchs.’60
Such threats were hardly common, and the great majority of Englishmen
captured by Muslims were sailors captured by Islamic pirates, whose captives had
59
F.E. Halliday, A History of Cornwall (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1959), pp.210-211
60
Harrison, The tragicall life and death of Muley Abdala Melek, p.18
furnished the early modern imagination with lurid tales of forced conversion and ill-
treatment for decades previous. However, the threat suggested by the Cornish attacks
was an order of magnitude more pressing, shifting the threat of capture from being
confined to seafarers to Englishmen at large. The event serves as an illustration of the
fears which constantly coloured the early modern view of otherness: on numerous
levels, they were figured as representative of the threat of castration. Narratives of
capture are invariably joined by narratives of conversion to Islam in early modern
writing. In turn, conversion is inextricably linked to the rite of circumcision, which
itself is often conflated and confused with castration in these texts—probably aided by
the similarly prevalent image of the eunuch, who constitutes another symbol of the
castrating power of the east. In addition, conversion itself was seen as a loss of one’s
masculine, Christian identity, to be subsumed into the alien, feminine culture of the
east. The perceived power of the east to effeminise was augmented by the military
threat it posed—conversion threatened ‘the loss of both essence and identity in a
world of ontological, ecclesiastical, and political instability.61’ The Ottoman Empire’s
military power outstripped that of England62—whose own imperial ambitions were
61
62
See Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700 (London: UCL Press, 1999) for an excellent
examination of Turkish military power at this time.
mostly relegated to the stage at this time—but this power, and a penchant for
expansionism, were overstated. This perception of vast military potential furthered the
east’s disempowering and subsumptive abilities beyond that of the Barbary pirates, but
also relegated Europe to a ‘feminine’ position of subservience and inferiority in the
face of the east’s military superiority. Whilst in many plays the Islamic other is given a
sympathetic treatment, George Peele’s
Arabian Moore
Blacke in his looke, and bloudie in his deeds
And in his shirt staind with a cloud of gore,
[…]with naked sword in hand,
Accompanied as you now behold,
With devils coted in the shape of men
(1.1.15-20)63
who wields a horrible effeminisingly masculine military sway over Europe, manages to
remain a common (if rarely quite so morally unambiguous) archetype in popular
theatre of the period. The fear of ‘Mahometan’ encroachment is succinctly
emblematised by Robert Greene in his play, Alphonsus, King of Aragon, which includes
a scene which necessitates the stage direction
Let there be a brazen Head set in the middle of the place behind the Stage, out of the
which, cast flames of fire, drums rumble within.
(Act 3)64
63
George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar, in F.S. Hook and John Yoklavitch (eds.), The Dramatic Works of
George Peele (London: Yale University Press, 1961) (2 Vols, II), p.296
This ‘brazen Head’ is that of Muhammad, transmuting Islam into a religion at once
infuriatingly idolatrous and horrifyingly diabolical,65 in front of which a group of
Christian princes prostrate themselves, and which belches out flames and promises
them military success if they convert. Whilst this is comic in its intent, as a parody of
this fear of enforced apostasy it indicates that such fears existed, and are widely
portrayed in popular drama.
Similarly, the threat of castration which the east embodied may, in part,
inform the persistent theme of the potential for bodily harm which pervades
depictions of the other, whether Jewish or Islamic. Most famously, perhaps, is
Shylock’s oft-quoted demand for ‘an equal pound/Of your flesh to be cut off and
taken/In what part of your body pleaseth me’ (1.3.145-147)66 in The Merchant of
Venice, a wonderfully telling quote which is frequently cited as evidence of the
castrating threat attached to Judaism,67 a continuation of the ritual murder which were
64
Robert Greene, The Comicall Historie of Alphonsus, King of Aragon (London: Thomas Creede, 1599)
65
The head would re-emerge in a less loquacious form, but with similarly Faustian undertones, in
Greene’s 1589 play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.
66
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds.), The Norton
Shakespeare, pp.1099-1100
67
The instance in which this idea is described most illuminatingly is in James Shapiro’s excellent
Shakespeare and the Jews (Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1996), of which the fourth chapter is
particularly relevant.
traditionally attached to conceptions of the Jewish character, exemplified in stories
such as Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale:
Fro thennes forth the Jewes han conspyred

This innocent out of this world to chace:
An homicyde thereto han they hyred,
That in an alley hadde a privee place;
And, as the child gan forby for to pace,
This cursed Jew him hente, and heeld him faste,
And kitte his throte, and in a pit him caste.68
In addition, such stories almost invariably incorporated, in addition to a parody of
crucifixion, and, less commonly, cannibalism, the assumption that circumcision was
an integral part of these ritual murders. This connection of circumcision and
castration to a more generalised physical harm is one which colours several of the
plays under my scrutiny. Day, Rowley and Wilkins insert a Jew into their play, The
Travels of the Three English Brothers, for example, who spits
Swine devourers, uncircumcisèd slaves

That scorn our Hebrew sanctimonious writ,
Despise our laws, profane our synagogues
[…]Lawless wretches!
One I shall gripe, break he but his minute.
Heaven grant he may want money to defray.
O how I’ll then embrace my happiness.
Sweet gold, sweet jewel! But the sweetest part
Of a Jew’s feast is a Christian’s heart!
(10.6-20)69
68
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. by V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson (New York &
London: W.W. Norton, 2005), p.251
—a passage which combines Jewish contempt for Christianity predicated upon a lack
of circumcision with cannibalism, placing the two at the heart of Jewish culture.
Circumcision also ties Islam to violence: part of Ward’s ‘conversion’ in A Christian
Turned Turk sees him asking to be allowed
But every week a Christian. I am content

To feed upon raw flesh. If’t be but once a month
A Briton, I’ll be content with him.
(16.117-120)70
Similarly, Thomas Goffe’s The Couragious Turke uses the theme of cannibalism to
motivate the audience against the Turk when he has a character cry
O, nobles, would this wine were Christians blood,

But that it would phrenetique humours build,
And so infect our braines with superstition!’
(3.1.1210-1212)71
Such applications of the traditionally-supposed Jewish tendency towards
Christophagy to Islam combine traditionally anti-Semitic themes of castration and
ritual murder with the physical fear of the military power and threat to Christianity
posed by ‘the Turk’.
69
John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins, The Travels of the Three English Brothers, in
Anthony Parr (ed.), Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999),
p.108
70
71
Thomas Goffe, The Couragious Turke (London: Richard Meighen, 1632)
However, it is in the figure of the eunuch that the manifestation of the east’s
castrating potential over the west is most obviously demonstrated. The eunuch—and
the process of becoming one—is a recurring feature of plays examining otherness, and
the narrative usually makes explicit the European and Christian provenance of these
unfortunates. Such emphasis also underlines how their identity as such, in addition to
their masculinity, has been usurped: John Mason’s The Turke provides a typical
example in the character of Eunuchus, who explains how
Howso’ere my fortunes make me now a slave

I was a free borne Christians sonne in Cyprus,
When Famagusta by the Turke was sackt:
In the devision of which citty spoyles,
My fortunes fell to Muleasses lot:
Nor was it Tyranny inough that I was captive,
My parents robd of me, and I of them,
But they wrongd nature in me, and made me an Eunuch,
Disabled of masculine functions,
Due from our sex: and thus subjected,
These sixteene years unto the vilde commaund
Of an imperious Turke, I now am given
To serve the hidden secrets of his lust.
(1.2.443-455)72
This image of the East as simultaneously effeminate and effeminising forms a
frequent motif in early modern theatre; conversion, whether undergone willingly or
under coercion, is a precarious gamble in which—whilst potentially providing a door
72
Adams (ed.), The Turke, pp.15-16
to material and carnal opportunities unavailable in the west—could result in
disempowerment and emasculation rather than sensual empowerment. Even if the
latter is the case, the fainéant luxury symbolised by the east is somehow ‘feminine’ in
the eyes of the European, whose views of the ‘Turk’ are nothing if not contradictory.
The Turk is both effeminate and hypermasculine, at once subsuming the priapic
fantasy of the harem and a carnally enabling lack of Christian propriety alongside a
threat of castration and effeminisation, along with the rich and gaudy—‘feminine’—
trappings which supposedly pervaded eastern society.
Philip Massenger’s 1624 play The Renegado provides a good starting point for
a discussion of the conflation of the eastern castration threat on the early modern
stage, mostly mediated through the comically-framed fears of Gazet. Landing upon
the shores of Tunis, Gazet is gripped by a fear of the conversion and attendant
circumcision which, he believes, is the inevitable fate of Christian men in this land,
and is preoccupied by the task of retaining his foreskin for much of the play. Vitelli,
his master, first broaches the possibility of ‘turning Turk’:
VITELLI: And what in Tunis?

Will you turn Turk here?
GAZET: No, so I should lose
A collop of that part my Doll enjoined me
To bring home as she left it: ’tis her venture,
Nor dare I barter that commodity

Without her special warrant.
(1.1.38-42)73
Gazet’s response suggests that he has been specifically requested not to return home
circumcised: that the fear at the forefront of Gazet’s ‘Doll’s’ mind is that he will
succumb to what was clearly a pervasive belief in the apostatising influence of these
lands, and to diminish his masculinity through the rite of circumcision. This woman
clearly shares with Gazet a belief in the power of the east to convert, a power so
potent that merely to be present there is to run the risk of circumcision or castration.
To stave off such a possibility, Vitelli advises his servant to ‘Temper your tongue and
meddle not with the Turks,/Their manners, nor religion.’ (1.1.47-8).74 It is also
possible that Gazet’s ‘Doll’ is a comic construct, not even supposed to exist within the
confines of the play, but a rhetorical device through which Gazet can voice his own
fears. However, it is interesting that this opposition to effeminising seductions of the
east must itself be framed in a feminine manner, whether real or imagined. A similar
female opposition to an effeminising east also occurs in Solyman and Perseda, where
73
Philip Massenger, The Renegado, in Daniel Vitkus (ed.), Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England
(Basingstoke: Columbia University Press, 2003), p.250
74
Ibid., p.251
Perseda—albeit dressed in male attire—is the only character willing to stand up to
Solyman’s expansionism.
Gazet then goes on to elaborate on this castrating potential, shifting it from a
natural consequence of one’s presence in exotic lands to a punishment for
transgression under the seemingly inscrutable and alien laws of the state. Since green
is a colour sacred to Islam, and wearing it was frequently forbidden to non-Muslims,
Gazet warns Vitelli to
Take you heed, sir,

What colours you wear. Not two hours since, there landed
An English pirate’s whore with a green apron,
And as she walked the streets, one of their muftis
(We call them priests at Venice) with a razor
Cut it off—petticoat, smock, and all—and leaves her
As naked as my nail; the young fry wondering
What strange beast it should be. I ’scaped a scouring—
My mistress’ busk-point, of that forbidden colour,
Then tied my codpiece. Had it been discovered
I had been caponed.
(1.1.48-58)75
Once again, femininity stands in opposition to effeminisation. The ‘English pirate’s
whore with a green apron’ subverts the vestiary laws of this land, and as a result comes
into contact with the emasculating razor wielded by the mufti. The nakedness of this
white, female body serves as testament to the threat of castration which lies
75
Vitkus (ed.), The Renegado, p.251
everywhere in this land. This woman cannot be feminised by the knife, but in
revealing her body, she becomes hyperfeminine, a warning to Gazet to conceal the
green decoration of his codpiece to avoid a similar fate, and, like his ‘Doll’, an
admonition to tread carefully in this land to avoid dilution of identity.
However, whilst the two are in Tunis to sell their wares (a phrase which
acquires an additional meaning in the case of Gazet), Vitelli, who is a nobleman
disguised as a merchant, has an additional motive for his visit to the east: he must
rescue his sister, ‘the virtuous Paulina, […] Sold to the viceroy a fair Christian virgin.’
(1.1.113-115)76 by the villainous Grimaldi. Vitelli imagines his sister as an analogue of
himself in this sexually-threatening land,
Mewed up in his Seraglio and in danger

Not alone to lose her honour, but her soul;
[…] To be patient now
Were, in another name, to play the pander
To the viceroy’s loose embraces and cry “ay me!”
While he, by force or flattery, compels her
To yield her fair name up to his foul lust,
And, after, turn apostate to the faith
She was bred in.
(1.1.129-139)77
76
77
Ibid., p.254
Paulina functions, at this stage, as Vitelli’s feminised doppelgänger; onto her, he
projects his own fears of being sexually and spiritually corrupted by the lascivious
influence of the Turk. These are fears which are reified in the figure of Carazie, a
eunuch formerly of England who constantly reminds the audience of his castration:
I was made lighter

By two stone weight, at least, to be fit to serve you!
(1.2.25-26)78
And:
Say but you doubt me,
And, to secure you, I’ll cut out my tongue;
I am libbed in the breach already.
(2.1.63-65)79
These threats are enhanced by the fact of Carazie’s identification as a former
Englishman, and by Gazet’s constant evocation of them, which even colours his
speech when not talking about the threat of castration inherent in this place: his
repeated cry, when selling his wares—‘What do you lack, gentlemen?’ (1.3.4)80—for
example, or his repeated use of ‘credit’ to denote the foreskin, which he believes may
be exchanged in this land for freedom:
I ne’er knew citizen turn courtier yet

But he lost his credit, though he saved himself.
Why, look you sir; there are so many lobbies,
78
Ibid., p.256
79
Ibid., p.268
80
Vitkus (ed.) The Renegado, p.259
Out-offices, and disputations here,

Behind those Turkish hangings that a Christian
Hardly gets off but circumcised.
(2.6.3-7)81
This use of ‘credit’ to denote the cultural exchange of a castrated/circumcised
Englishman is advanced as Manto and Carazie—who is already castrated—concoct a
plan to make a fool of the preening Gazet; Carazie almost seeming to wish to
perpetuate the state of eunuchdom of which he himself is a part. After Gazet declares
I have a pretty stock

And would not have my good parts undiscovered.
What places of credit are there?
(3.4.34-6)82
He enquires of Carazie,
GAZET: What is your place, I pray you?

CARAZIE: Sir, an eunuch.
GAZET: A eunuch! Very fine, i’faith—an eunuch!
And what are your employments? Neat and easy?
CARAZIE: In the day, I wait on my lady when she eats,
Carry her pantofles, bear up her train;
Sing her asleep at night, and when she pleases
I am her bedfellow.
GAZET: How! Her bedfellow?
And lie with her?
CARAZIE: Yes, and lie with her.
GAZET: O rare!
I’ll be an eunuch, though I sell my shop for’t
81
Ibid., p.282
82
Ibid., p.297
And all my wares.

CARAZIE: It is but parting with
A precious stone or two: I know the price on’t.
GAZET: I’ll part with all my stones; and when I am
An eunuch, I’ll so toss and touse the ladies!
Pray you, help me to a chapman.
CARAZIE: The court surgeon
Shall do you that favour.
GAZET: I am made! An eunuch! Enter Manto
MANTO: Carazie, quit the room.
CARAZIE: Come, sir, we’ll treat of
Your business further.
GAZET: Excellent! An eunuch! Exeunt
(3.4.42-60)83
Castration and circumcision were often used interchangeably in early modern times;
here apostasy and effeminisation are linked by the taking of a traditional narrative of
conversion—motivated by eastern promises of sexual fulfilment—and replacing
circumcision with its metonymous practice of emasculation. Gazet’s potential fate is
representative of the fear of a castrating east: whilst it is framed as a ruse to play upon
a comic character, it exposes an underlying fear of the Islamic desire to perpetuate and
extend their own sexually-threatening rite of circumcision (or, in Carazie’s case, the
interchangeably-used procedure of castration) into Europe. In Gazet’s case, this is
foiled, for whilst he would have
[…]bought a place,
83
Vitkus (ed.), The Renegado, pp.297-298
A place of credit, too, and gone through with it;

I should have been made an eunuch (there was honour
For a late poor ’prentice!) When upon the sudden
There was such a hurly-burly in the court
That I was glad to run away and carry
The price of my office with me.
(4.4.150-156)84
Gazet’s escape from the Seraglio is a comic mirror of Vitelli’s own escape from the
ensnaring bonds of Islamic conversion, which is effected by Donusa’s own conversion
from Islam to Christianity. His fate is indicative of a trend in literature of the period
whereby comic characters and scenarios are used as a way of dealing with the real and
persistent English preoccupation with the potential of the east to castrate the west,
both literally and figuratively; what Vitkus calls the ‘comic moment that literalizes
English anxieties about the effemination that would allegedly result from contact with
Islamic culture.’85 Comic characters like Gazet foolishly submit (or intend to submit)
to the knife of the Turkish castrator in order to glean the wealth, sex, or power offered
by the alluring east: they are a warning against greed and lack of forethought as much
as a warning against the dangers of Islam.
Gazet and, as we shall see in the next chapter, Clem, form examples of the use
of comedy and comic characters to project and deflect anxieties of the east’s castrating
84
Ibid., p.308
85
power, which seem to suggest that its threat cannot be countenanced seriously.
Comedy is used as a method of distancing oneself from the threat, imposing very real
fears upon grotesquely unreal characters. Almost all characters who come into contact
with the east’s circumcising knife are framed comically: whenever comedy is not
employed, the reversibility of the process is emphasised, and the potential for
Christian redemption is retained. For example, in A Christian Turned Turk, Ward’s
‘circumcision’ is reversible by virtue of its spuriousness; in Solyman and Perseda,
Basilisco’s circumcision is undoubtedly genuine—he undergoes a painful rite in which,
‘bound…to a piller’, the Turks have ‘lopt a collop of my tendrest member’ (1684-
1687)86—however, having failed to gain the love of Perseda, he repudiates his adopted
religion, and any signs of it, by vowing, ‘Ile be a Turke no more’ (1748)87. Such
situations are constructed to reassure and allay the fears of an audience for whom such
practices were not only a source of prurient fascination, but also of genuine concern;
only in comic characters is the fear of irreversible and irredeemable apostasy reified.
The use of circumcision and castration as sources of humour does not diminish—
indeed, it reflects—the consternation with which such practices were viewed in
Europe.
86
Thomas Kyd (att.), The Tragedye of Soliman and Perseda (London: Edward White, c1590), p.49
87
Ibid., p.51
As well as providing an innocuous and neutralising outlet for western fears of
the east’s castrating potential, comic castrati also serve another function: they serve as
a counterpoint to bolster the legitimacy of other visitors to the east, to emphasise their
constancy and their ability to skirt the dangers of apostasy revealed by their comic
counterparts. These comic characters are allowed to bumble away, succumbing to the
east’s threat of castration, and thus allowing other characters to escape unscathed. At
the same time, they serve to trivialise the fears which are their own undoing,
concurrently revealing the existence of this perceived threat and exposing its absurdity.
Soliman and Perseda, a 1590 play most convincingly attributed to Thomas Kyd,
provides a similar warning of the threat posed by the east upon European masculinity.
As in The Fair Maid of the West and its sequel, the play centres on a romance which
provides a sense of constancy in the face of the east’s potential to invert and erode self-
definition, whilst another character finds himself irreversibly changed by his contact
with alterity. The relationship in this case is between Erastus and Perseda, whilst the
fate of the brutish Basilisco furnishes the play with a stern warning of the subsumptive
dangers of the eastern world.
After killing the knight Ferdinando in an argument, Erastus flees to seek
refuge in Turkey, to where he is followed both by Basilisco, intent on avenging his

friend and on gaining Perseda’s hand, and Perseda, who, like Bess, will cross any
geographical boundaries, and brave innumerable alien cultures, in pursuit of her love.
Soliman, the ruler of Turkey, grants Erastus shelter, and gives him a rich place in his
court, making no attempt to convert him. Whilst he has provided Erastus with items
of rich clothing, which, Piston warns him, it would be impolitic not to wear;
reminding him that he is ‘unwise’
That you weare not the high sugerloafe hat,

And the gilded gowne the Emperour gave you
(1405-1406)88
It is notable that these clothes include a European-style sugarloaf hat, rather than the
turban, whose acceptance was linked with European apostates.
At the same time as Soliman’s religious permissiveness towards Erastus,
however, he is forcing his way into Christian Europe, with Soliman’s general, Brusor,
declaring
We come with mightie Solimans commaund,

Monarch and mightie Emperor of the world,
From East to West, from South, to Septentrion,
If you resist, expect what warre affords,
Mischiefe, murther, bloud, and extremitie,
What wilt thou yield and trie our clemencie?
Say I, or no; for we are preremptorie.
(1350-1356)89
88
Solyman and Perseda, p.42
The ambivalent attitude toward ‘the Turk’ is reflected in the character of Soliman: at
the same time as he demonstrates such kindness to Erastus, he gloats at his ability to
force Christians into Turkish subjugation, crowing ‘Rhodes is taken, and all the men
are slane,/Except some few that turne to Mahomet’ (1443-1444)90. This ambivalence
is furthered by Soliman’s installation of Erastus as governor of Rhodes. Whilst
Soliman is content to impinge upon and threaten Christendom in general, Erastus has
managed to gain access to the power and preferment the east has to offer, whilst
escaping the problems posed through conversion. Two Christian virgins—one of
which, of course, is Perseda—are introduced as spoils to Soliman, to be used ‘at thy
pleasure’ (1477).91 Erastus and Perseda are reunited, but Solyman has become a typical
‘lascivious Turk’, with Perseda the unwilling object of his affections and Erastus his
rival.
Whilst this is going on, Basilisco emerges to undergo the fate Erastus has
managed to escape, as he undergoes a painful forced circumcision:
Alas the Christians are but very shallow,

In giving judgement of a man at armes,
A man of my desert and excellence.
The Turkes whom they account for barbarous,
89
Ibid., p.40
90
Ibid., p.43
91
Having forehard of Basiliscoes worth,

A number under prop me with their shoulders,
And in procession bare me to the Church,
As I had beene a second Mahomet,
I fearing they would adore me for a God,
Wisely informd them that I was but man,
Although in time perhaps I might aspire,
To purchase Godhead, as did Hercules,
I meane by doing wonders in the world:
Amidst their Church they bound me to a piller,
And to make triall of my valiancie,
They lopt a collop of my tendrest member.
(1675-1687)92
Once again, circumcision, with its attendant undertones of emasculation, is figured as
a source of power through Basilisco’s narcissism: he decides the ceremony is to prove
‘Basiliscoes worth’, his ability to acclimatise to the Islamic world, and a mark of the
esteem he is held in in this land. It is also, he decides, a penance, the toll which will
allow him access to Perseda; on hearing that she is married to Erastus he laments,
‘Did I turne Turke to follow her so far?’ (1752)93 Additionally, the scene hearkens
back to traditional anti-Semitic stories in which Jews kidnap children and subject
them to a ritual murder during which they are crucified and cirucmcised.
Whilst Soliman has appointed Erastus governor of Rhodes, upon discovering
him to be a barrier to Perseda’s acceptance of him he has him arrested, and he is
92
Ibid., p.49
93
Ibid., p.51
ultimately strangled by Brusor, yet another man who is jealous of him. After this
happens, Rhodes revolts against Turkish rule, and, as control of the island has fallen
to Perseda—in this inverted world, where femininity is a route to power, it takes a
woman to stand up to Soliman’s effeminising and inversive power, a role which
Perseda accepts with aplomb. Disguised as a man—the Sultan’s advances have,
perversely, masculinised her where they have effeminised others—she delivers the
following exchange:
SOLIMAN: Great Soliman, Lord of all the world.

PERSEDA: Thou art not Lord of all, Rhodes is not thine.
SOLIMAN: It was, and shall be maugre who saies no.
PERSEDA: I that say no will never see it thine.
SOLIMAN: Why what art thou that dares resist my force?
PERSEDA: A Gentleman and thy mortall enemie,
And one that dares thee to the single combate.
(2086-2092)94
Continuing the idea that only femininity can destroy the feminising, she kills
Solyman with a kiss, after which she hands Solyman a note:
Tyrant my lips were sawst with deadly poyson,

To plague thy hart that is so full of poison.
(2184-2185)95
94
95
Ibid., p.64
The rise and fall of Solyman is that of the stock eastern tyrant: he destroys his
empire and power through his lustfulness, his propensity towards femininity and
effeminisation. As always, the ultimate superiority and guaranteed victory of
Christendom over the domain of otherness is confirmed; the battle for the world’s
soul, such plays reassure the audience, will ultimately be won by Christianity.
Alan and Helen Cutler posit that anti-Semitism finds its root in anti-Islamic
sentiment: that the perceived similarities between the two religions led to Jews being
viewed as an internal analogue of the external Muslim threat.96 Whilst plays such as
The Jew of Malta serve to bolster this idea, there are a number of plays (for example,
John Mason’s The Turke, and William Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust) which literalise this
idea, circumventing the character of the Jew and instead utilising the figure of the
Muslim as the enemy within, a fifthcolumnist to rival the Turk-aiding Barabas. In
Lust’s Dominion, Eleazar’s cuckolding of the king is emblematic of his subtler attempts
to take over Spain. The queen is completely under Eleazar’s spell, asserting that she
would ‘wage all Spain/To one sweete kisse’ (1.1.51-52),97 but her son, Philip, is not so
enthusiastic:
96
See Alan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler, The Jew as Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of
Anti-Semitism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), p.89-90
97
Brereton (ed.), Lust’s Dominion, p.7
My father whilst he liv’d tyr’d his strong armes

In bearing Christian armour ’gainst the Turks
And spent his brains in warlike stratagems
To bring confusion on damn’d infidels;
Whilst you that snorted here at home betraid
His name to everlasting infamy;
Whilst you at home suffered his bed-chamber
To be a brotherly, whilst you at home
Suffered his Queen to be a concubine,
And wanton red-cheek’s boys to be her bawds,
Whilst shee reeking in that lechers armes.’
(1.3.456-469)98
Particularly telling is the transformation of Queen to ‘concubine’—from a figure
associated with European courts to one ineluctably associated with an indolent and
lubricious eastern court; therefore, this transformation is emblematic of a greater
orientalisation in Spain, initiated by Eleazar. Additionally, this cuckolding itself is
suggestive of an effeminisation, a usurpation of the King of Spain’s masculine
prerogative—with an additional veneer of irony added by the fact that he is being
cuckolded by one of the ‘damn’d infidels’ he has expended so much effort in fighting
against. The king’s death brings Eleazar closer to the throne, and his plan to discredit
Prince Philip by spreading rumours of his illegitimacy are designed to further this
aim, vowing,
98
Ibid., p.22
Spain, I’le new-mould thee, I will have a chair

Made all of dead mens bones, and the ascents
Shall be the heads of Spaniards in ranks.
(5.5.3501-3504)99
The threat of Eleazar’s domination is mitigated in two ways: firstly, he is stabbed by
Philip, who, his throne uncontested, declares that ‘for this Barbarous Moor, and his
black train,/Let all the Moors be banished from Spain’ (5.6.3812-3813).100 Secondly,
and in common with nearly all plays which deal with alterity, the threat is set at a
distance by being framed in a foreign land, and one which was the target of a great
deal of English bile. Indeed, in numerous ways the Spaniards themselves could be
seen as more ‘alien’ than the Moor—‘no Muslim ambassador’, notes Nabil Matar,
‘was ever pelted with stones, as was the Spanish ambassador in the Jacobean period’.101
Eleazar is, at least at one point, afforded moral superiority to the Spanish:
I imprison them? I prize their lives

With weights, their necks with chains, their
Hands with manacles? Do I all this, because
My face is nights colour dy’d.
Think you my conscience and my soul is so,
Black faces may have hearts as white as snow
And ’tis a generall rule in morall rowls,
The whitest faces have the blackest souls.
(5.6.3602-3610)102
99
100
Ibid., p.146
101
Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, p.40
102
Ibid., p.139
This geographical and ideological distancing of the arena which Eleazar briefly
dominates both problematizes and lulls English fears of eastern encroachment: it
suggests the potential for the defeat of that Elizabethan bogeyman, the Spanish
Catholic, but also of an Islamic foothold in Europe, along with its attendant threat of
castration. Placing stories of alien usurpation in foreign countries serves much the
same purpose as inflicting circumcision/castration almost unfailingly upon comic
characters: is allows the frightening scenarios they portray to be depicted without
upsetting an idea of English indomitability. As the comic character exposes the east’s
threat as one to which comic characters alone are susceptible, leaving the central
protagonists unharmed, so are scenarios in which Christianity is threatened by alterity
consistently situated in unsympathetic countries. This practice also allows a
problematization of identity, allowing Christians to be viewed less favourably than the
Islamic invaders they are threatened by; a Marlovian injection of lack of loyalty to any
specific side amongst the audience which prevents any one character from being
entirely good.
‘FOR EACH WOUND SHE GAVE RETURN A KISSE’: CONVERSION, TRADE, AND
PERCEPTIONS OF A SENSUOUS EAST
Nothing is penall by the Lawes of this Nation, but what is alwaies, or, at least for
the present, destructive to the well being of the Prince or People: By which the
more active Youth (the strongest ingredient to compose an Army of) remain so fully
satisfyed with an uninterrupted License to attain the farthest extent of their desires.,
as they apprehend no felicity beyond the Liberty they enjoy: And in such as Time
and Weariness hath exchanged the humour of Lust, for one more Thriving, the
Priviledge they have to exact on strangers, hinders their apprehensions from finding
that loathsome tast, Forraigners imagine to result from so absolute a Jurisdiction, as
is, and hath been for many ages exercised by their Emperours over them. And thus
the State is a double gainer; this Indulgence affording opportunity for all to lay out
themselves to the advantage of their Country, either in getting Wealth, or Souldiers
to defend it.103
FRANCIS OSBOURNE
The King of Kabyles or Cookooe persuaded me very seriously to serve him

will[ing]ly and to turn Moor and offered to give me seven hundred roubles by the
year, which ammounteth to the sum of fifty pounds of English money…likewise to
give me a house and land…lastly he offered to give me a wife freely, which they
esteemed the greatest matter, for they all buy their wives at great price.104
RICHARD HASLETON
There is a scene in Tamburlaine the Great, Part II where Tamburlaine assesses the
worthiness of his sons to assume his place. For Tamburlaine, his sons’ worth is
determined by whether or not they are willing to sustain a wound:
Wilt thou shun the field for fear of wounds?

View me, thy father, that hath conquered kings,
And with his host marched round about the earth
103
Francis Osbourne, Politicall reflections upon the government of the Turks (Oxford: Thomas Robinson,
1656), p.25
104
Richard Hasleton, Strange and Wonderful Things Happened to Richard Hasleton…in his Ten Years’
Travails in Many Foreign Countries, cit. in Daniel Vitkus (ed.), Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary
Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p.90
Quite void of scars and clear from any wound,

That by the wars lost not a dram of blood,
And see him lance his flesh to teach you all.
He cuts his arm.
A wound is nothing, be it ne’er so deep[…]
Now look I like a soldier, and this wound
As great a grace and majesty to me
As if a chair of gold enammelèd,
Enchased with diamonds, sapphires, rubies,
And fairest pearl of wealthy India,
Were mounted here under a canopy,
And I sat down, clothed with the massy robe
That late adorned the Afric potentate[…]
Now, my boys, what think you of a wound?
(3.2.103-129)105
Tamburlaine here conflates injury and preferment: his wound is metonymous with ‘a
chair of gold enammelèd,/Enchased with diamonds, sapphires, rubies,/And fairest
pearl of wealthy India,’ and is the key to the acquisition of such luxury, both for him
and for the sons whose worth such a wound gauges. In the same way that
Tamburlaine transmutes worth into injury, the rite of circumcision—viewed in the
early modern period as an act of mutilation tantamount to castration—was perceived
to be a route to preferment by early modern Europeans. As Marcel Mauss notes,
prestige, in some societies, is intimately linked to expenditure; to consumption and
105
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part II, ed. by Mark Thornton Burnett (London: J.M.
Dent, 2001), p.104
destruction, and to the infliction of wounds. 106 Similar assumptions seem to be in play
in western perceptions of the rite of circumcision during this period. As
Tamburlaine’s assessment of their worth relies upon his sons’ acceptance of a wound,
so must Europeans who wished to sample the carnal and material delights promised
by the East submit to the circumciser’s knife.
When Giovanni Minadoi branded Islam a ‘venerous and pestilent doctrine by
a Prophane and heathen Prophet’, and accused converts to it of impugn[ing] the
champions & desendor of the Christian faith,’ who ‘woulde become a slave to another
for a filthie superstition and impietie’,107 his views accorded with a more general early
modern view which presented the Muslim world as one founded upon the promise of
sensual pleasures, both in this life and the next. The Muslim people were
stereotypically known for their lives of indolent luxury and sensual repletion,
emblematised by the idea of the seraglio. Circumcision, in this context, represents a
literal sacrifice, in that it was enacted in the expectation that material gains would
106
This is the ritual of Potlatch, which more usually involves reciprocal and accretionary destruction of
personal property, but does not preclude bodily harm in some instances. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift:
Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, Trans. by E.E. Evans Pritchard (London: Cohen &
West, 1970), p.32
107
Giovanni Minadoi, The history of the warres betweene the Turkes and the Persians. Written in Italian by
John-Thomas Minadoi, and translated into English by Abraham Hartwell. (London: John Wolfe, 1595),
p.126-127
ensue.108 Philip Massenger, for example, links circumcision and prurience in a bawdy
joke in A Very Woman:
PEDRO: Give her but this letter, and this ring,

And leave thy pleasant lying which I pardon;
But leave it in her pocket, there’s no harm in’t,
I’ll take thee up a Petticoat, will that please thee?
BORACHIA: Take up my petticoat? I scorn the motion;
I scorn it with my heels—Take up my petticoat?
PEDRO: And why thus not?
BORACHIA: Sir, you shall find me hotter,
If you take up my petticoat.
PEDRO: I’ll give thee a new petticoat.
BORACHIA: I scorn the gift – Take up my petticoat?
Alas! My lord, you are too young, my lord;
Too young, my lord, to circumcise me that way.
(2.3)109
The perceived richness of Islamic life, then, could be attributed, at least in part, to
circumcision, a rite which represented a symbolic exchange of a portion of masculinity
in order to satiate the remainder. The lack of the foreskin is therefore emblematic of
lustfulness—and, conversely, retention of the foreskin a symbol of ‘Christian’ virtue.
Daniel Vitkus contends that circumcision figured ‘as a sign of the Muslim’s sexual
excess—the reduction of the phallus signifying the need to curtail raging lust’,110 and
108
For an anthropological definition of sacrifice, see M.F.C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes (eds.),
Sacrifice (London: Academic Press, 1980), p.11
109
Philip Massenger, A Very Woman: Or, The Prince of Tarent (London: Henry Dell, 1759), p.128
110
so the rite becomes not only the mark of a quasi-Faustian pact,111 but also performs a
societal purpose in its reduction of the natural venery of the Muslim, emblematic of
the lecherousness of the other. In addition, it is symbolic of a carnivalesque inversion
which was supposed to be a feature of foreign climes—Richard Brome’s Antipodes, for
example, imagines a world in which ‘The maids do woo/The bachelors, and ’tis most
probable/The wives lie uppermost’ (1.3.139-141).112 In this world, femininity and
effeminacy were supposed to be prioritised over masculinity, and so a rite in which
masculinity was perceived to be reduced is a path to empowerment.
This rite was a barrier to uncircumcised Europeans who might wish to partake
of the advantages of Eastern life, for it represented a sacrifice of masculinity and
111
This interpretation of circumcision has interesting parallels to the Faust myth, Marlowe’s treatment
of which would likely be fresh in the mind of contemporary playgoers. Circumcision could be seen as
an analogue of the Faustian contract, which, in tying the signatory to profane materialism, is
traditionally sealed by some form of incision; see, for example, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1616):
MEPHISTOPHELES: Then, Faustus, stab thy arm courageously,

And bind thy soul that at some certain day
Great Lucifer may claim it as his own,
And be thou as great as Lucifer.
FAUSTUS: [Cutting his arm]
Lo, Mephistopheles, for love of thee,
Faustus hath cut his arm, and with his proper blood
Assures his soul to be great Lucifer’s,
Chief lord and regent of perpetual night.
View here this blood that trickles from mine arm,
And let it be propitious for my wish.
(2.1.49-58)
112
Richard Brome, The Antipodes, in Anthony Parr (ed.), Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999), p.243
identity, of complete submission and assimilation into the world of the east, before its
delights could be sampled. However, if one was willing to forsake one’s identity, then,
and ‘turn Turk’, the Islamic East was seen as a place in which carnal fulfilment was
available much more readily than in Christendom, facilitated both by a lax moral code
and a society institutionally geared towards the acquisition of sensual encounters—it
is interesting to note that the phrase to ‘turn Turk’ was not just applied to people who
decided to adopt a new religion: as well as spiritual transgression the phrase was used
to denote a more fleshly transgression—with a specific suggestion of prostitution. The
Renegado, For example, makes much of this dualism:
PAULINA: Nay, more; for there shall be no odds betwixt us:

I will turn Turk.
GAZET: [aside] Most of your tribe do so
When they begin in whore.
(5.3.151-154)113
In addition, a perception of the east’s promise of wealth and opportunity
further set it apart from an England which promised neither to all but a select few.
Hailing from a country wracked with poverty and religious factionalism, the idea of a
wealthy eastern world in which wealth and social status were available would have
been an especially appealing one, both for dramatic characters and for the audiences
113
who watched them. However, this promised metamorphosis exacted a price before
allowing access to this world of opportunity, and in addition to the ontological
implications of abandoning one’s country and national identity, circumcision
seemingly provided this toll; a gamble which, in drama, unfailingly ends in
disenfranchisement and emasculation, and rarely if ever delivers what it promises in
return.
Emasculation and empowerment are constantly linked in representations of
the east in this period: as well as the tendency for (mostly comic) characters to believe
circumcision to be a viable route to eastern preferment, the figure of the eunuch is
always linked to eastern venery, whether through their traditional status as guardians
of the seraglio, or an extension of the perceived route to power of emasculation.
Samuel Purchas,114 for example, notes how
The hot jealousies of the lustfull Mahometans are such, that they will scarce
endure the Brothers or Fathers of their beloved Wives or Women, to have
speech with them, except in their presence: and Time, by this restraint, hath
made it odious for such Women as have the reputation of honestie, to be seene
at any time by strangers. But if they dishonour their Husbands beds, or being
unmarried are found incontinent professing chastitie, rather then they shall
want punishment, their owne Brothers will bee their Executioners, who for
such unnaturall acts shall be commended, rather then questioned. Yet there is
toleration for impudent Harlots, who are as little ashamed to entertayne, as
114
Purchas does not reference any particular author for the following statement; it is from a chapter
collated from accounts ‘by Englishmen and Others; Moderne and Ancient’.
others, openly to frequent their houses. The Women of better fashion have
Eunuchs in stead of men, to wait upon them, who in their minoritie are
deprived of all that may provoke jealousie.115
According to Purchas, then, eunuchs gain favour because they pose no threat to the
‘lustfull Mahometans’ and their ‘hot jealousies’. Gazet’s declaration that he will ‘part
with all my stones; and when I am/An eunuch, I’ll so toss and touse the ladies!’
accords with this idea of converse empowerment through emasculation. George
Chapman’s Revenge for Honour similarly demonstrates the presentation of the eunuch
as being somehow sexually empowered by emasculation:
Come, I know,
Although th’ast lost some implements of manhood
May make thee gracious in the sight of woman,
Yet th’ast a little engine, cal’d a tongue,
By which thou canst orecome the nicest female,
In the behalf of friend. Insooth, you Eunuchs
May well be stil’d Pimps-royal, for the skill
You have in quaint procurement.
(2.1.327-334)116
Once again, circumcision and castration simultaneously evoke not only femininity, but
also venery; in its fixation upon the rite of circumcision, early modern drama reveals a
desire to combine stereotypes of the feminine other and the other residing in a state of
115
Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes In five bookes (London: Henrie Fetherstone, 1625), p.375
116
George Chapman, Revenge for Honour (London, 1654), p.24
carnal repletion, and circumcision is part of a complex interplay between these two
representations.
Several plays examined in the previous chapters demonstrate this assumption
that the wealth and fulfilment offered by the east extracted a price through
circumcision or castration: firstly, The Renegado, with Gazet’s belief in castration’s
furnishing of ‘credit’, and who narrowly escapes the castrating Moroccan knife which
would have provided ‘honour/for a late poor ’prentice’ (4.4.152-153)117 and allowed
him to ‘toss and touse the ladies’ (3.4.52)118 clearly suggests that, at least amongst
comic characters, castration or circumcision was metonymous in this eastern world
with carnal and social empowerment. Gazet considers his masculinity as the ‘price of
my office’ (4.4.156),119 which can be exchanged freely for preferment in this land.
The Renegado contrasts two opposed ways of using the east to gain power and
preferment—the one favoured by comic characters, of becoming circumcised or
castrated and so subsuming oneself into eastern culture in the hope that it might
elevate one’s status: a gamble which rarely if ever pays off, and the more acceptable
one of trade, which allows the retention of one’s identity whilst taking advantage of
117
118
Ibid. p.298
119
the wealth which was supposed to suffuse the Orient. Gazet begins as the latter,
setting up a stall and attempting to extract some money out of the east, even if it is
only a cover for Vitelli’s rescue attempts, whilst jealously guarding the manhood he
seems to think is threatened. Later on, he succumbs to the former, deciding to trade
his ‘credit’ to the court surgeon and exchange it for preferment and carnal fulfilment,
and although his plans in this regard are scuppered, he continues to display a
willingness to go through with the operation.
In addition to Gazet’s attempts to gain honour through castration, the

character of Vitelli undergoes another corruption which emphasises the idea of the
sensuous east, this time under the tutelage of the beautiful Donusa:
VITELLI: I am so innocent that I know not what ’tis

That I should offer.
DONUSA: By instinct I’ll teach thee
And with such ease as love makes me to ask
When a young lady wrings you by the hand, thus,
Or with an amorous touch presses your foot,
Looks babies in your eyes, plays with your locks,
Do you not find without a tutor’s help
What ’tis she looks for?
VITELLI: I am grown already
Skilful in the mystery.
DONUSA: Or if thus she kisses you
Then tastes your lips again—
VITELLI: That latter blow
Has beat all chaste thoughts from me.
(2.4.119-130)120
120
Vitkus (ed.), The Renegado, pp.129-130
This scene constitutes an example of Brome’s inversion where ‘The maids do
woo/The bachelors’, as well as an interesting counter to the stock scene in which a
chaste European woman is corrupted by a lustful eastern man, the scene represents
the power to corrupt with which the east was supposed to be imbued, and which the
rite of circumcision was the ultimate symbol, totemic of venery, mutilation,
effeminacy and apostasy. Through Donusa, the east has taught Vitelli ‘That virtue’s
but a word, and no sure guard/If set upon by beauty and reward’ (2.4.136-137).121
The spectre of conversion once again surfaces in the romance between Vitelli
and Donusa, as she is to be put to death if she cannot turn him Turk: it is forbidden
in this land for a Muslim woman to indulge in ‘corporeal looseness and incontinence
with any Christian’ (4.2.147-148)122—conversion and circumcision are enforced as
necessary by law in order to engage in the east’s famed licentiousness. Consequently,
Donusa emplores Vitelli to renounce Christianity, ‘the mistress you too long have
served, [and which] compels you/To bear with slave-like patience’ (4.3.88-89).123
Vitelli’s beliefs are, however, to strong for him to be swayed into apostasy:
121
Ibid., p.130
122
Ibid., p.313
123
Ibid., p.318
Dare you bring

Your juggling prophet in comparison with
That most inscrutable and infinite essence
That made this all and comprehends his work?
The place is too profane to mention him
Whose only name is sacred.
[…]I will not foul my mouth to speak of the sorceries
Of your seducer, his base birth, his whoredoms,
His strange impostures; nor deliver how
He taught a pigeon to feed in his ear,
Then made his credulous followers believe
It was an angel that instructed him
In the framing of his Alcoran.
(4.3.114-131)124
Instead of converting Vitelli, she finds herself seduced by Christianity, turning the
fear of being seduced into assimilation in the east back on itself by winning a convert
to Christianity, who declares
Let me kiss the hand

That did this miracle and seal my thanks
Upon those lips from whence those sweet words vanished,
That freed me from the cruellest of prisons,
Blind ignorance and disbelief. False prophet!
Impostor Mahomet!
(5.3.128-133)125
124
Ibid., p.319
125
Thus both Gazet and Vitelli skirt the edge of conversion and its emasculating
undercurrents but are redeemed, whether through the deus ex machina of ‘a hurly-burly
in the court’ (4.1.154),126 or an impassioned speech on the rectitude of Christianity.
A Christian Turned Turk similarly proposes a link between conversion (and
circumcision), and gaining access to the delights of the orient. In this case, the reward
for undergoing circumcision is the hand of Voada, who makes explicit the cost of this
marriage:
But you must be of one if you’ll enjoy me

If then your thoughts answer to what you speak,
Turn Turk—I am yours.
(7.125-127)127
Ward contemplates a genuine conversion—his position, as a pirate, complicit in the
enslavement of Christians and selling them in the east is already an ambivalent one,
and he muses
What is’t I lose from this my change? My country?

Already ’tis to me impossible.
My name is scandalled? What is one island
Compared to the Eastern monarchy? This large
Unbounded station shall speak my future fame,
Besides, they are slaves stand subject unto shame,
One good I enjoy outweighs all ills whatever
Can be objected. To sum my happiness:
126
Ibid., p.308
127
That god on earth, to whom all men stand bare,

Gold, that doth usher greatness, lackeys me.
I have more than I can spend. What wants
Is in command, and that my valour makes
Due purchase of. I’ll rather lead on slaves
Than be commanded by the power of kings.
Beauty, command, and riches—these are the three
The world pursues, and these follow me.
(7.179-194)128
However, as Vitelli managed to gain the fruits of the east whilst avoiding circumcision
by converting Donusa to Christianity, Ward also manages to find a way to gain the
‘beauty, command, and riches’ promised him by the east whilst avoiding the
circumciser’s knife, in a cunning ploy which involves substituting his foreskin for an
ape’s tail. Ward’s foreskin is left intact, and he is allowed the reward for his supposed
conversion whilst retaining his masculinity and potential for redemption, although his
death leaves this potential unfulfilled.
A Christian Turned Turk also contains another example of Blackness as enabler
when Ward’s officer, Gallop, who is pursuing Agar, says:
Bawd night, I do salute thee! Thou that dost

Wink at all faults, that hug’st so many sins in thy black bosom, the
Sun grows pale to view them. to thee, damnation’s nurse, I make my
Prayer, conjure thee by all my lustful embraces thou hast been witness
To, by all the cuckolds thou hast made twixt morn and twilight, to add
One to the number. But one, thou black-eyed negro! Never did woman
128
Vitkus (ed.), A Christian Turned Turk, pp.194-195
Make such shift to dub her husband, though many thou dost
Know have made most bare bones. O let this instrument that hath so
Many freed from the hell of usurers and from the jaws of their fear
(bandogs!), hath paid so many’s debts, relieve my wants.
(10.13-22)129
Here Gallop paints night—a ‘black-eyed negro’—as a path to satiety, using imagery
which ties it to the world of alterity, its rewards and penalties.
The Fair Maid of the West contains a very Gazet-like comic character, Clem,
utilising a cultural misunderstanding as the basis for its evocation of fears of the
castrating Turk, and the seductiveness of the east. Like The Renegado, it ties up both
images of the east’s opulence and the menacing supposition of its power to effeminise,
projecting an image of an east which promises empowerment, but conversely delivers
disempowerment through its negation of masculine prerogative.
The play is principally concerned with the relationship between Spencer and
Bess. This relationship, and in particular the character of Bess, represents
incorruptibility in the face of the manifest corruption and corruptiveness of the east:
conveniently sharing a name with England’s monarch, she is a constant in a world
which threatens to invert moral values, converting chaste to unchaste, humble to
proud, masculinity to femininity. Her constancy is emphasised in the opening scenes,
129
Ibid., p.201
where she rejects the lascivious advances of the regulars in the tavern she works in—
retaining her chastity even despite the attempts of her suitor Spencer, who laments
I have proved her

Unto the utmost test, examin’d her
Even unto a modest force, but all in vain.
She’ll laugh, confer, keep company, discourse,
And something more, kiss; but beyond that compass
She no way can be drawn.
(1.2.58-63)130
This constancy throws Clem’s change, so important to this dissertation, into sharp
relief. Clem’s fate is initially intended for Spencer, whom Mullisheg perceives as a
rival for Bess’s affections. Upon entering and being introduced by Bess as ‘a gentleman
of England and my friend’ (5.2.88),131 Mullisheg decides to simultaneously promising
him ‘grace and honour’ (5.2.91)132—perversely figured in this world in terms of
castration—and emasculate him, so that Mullisheg himself might become a more
likely candidate for the affections of Bess than Spencer. However, Bess does not want
this—‘not for ten worlds!’ (5.2.94)133—and Clem steps willingly into the breach. The
exchange underlines the castrating potential of the other, and the use of castration as a
130
Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, ed. by Robert K. Turner, Jr. (London: Edward
Arnold, 1968), pp.11-12
131
Ibid., p.87
132
Ibid., p.88
133
Turner (ed.), The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, p.88
route to power, by the dual meaning of the word ‘gelded’: whereas, for Clem, the
word signifies enrichment, for Mullisheg, it refers to castration:
MULLISHEG: He should have grace and honour—Joffer, go

And see him gelded to attend on us.
He shall be our chief eunuch.
BESS: Not for ten worlds! Behold, great king, I stand
Betwixt him and all danger.—have I found thee?
Seize what I have, take both my ship and my goods,
Leave nought that’s mine unrifled; spare me him.—
And have I found my Spencer?
CLEM: Please, your majesty, I see all men are not capable of honour.
What he refuseth, may it please you to bestow it on me.
MULLISHEG: With all my heart. Go, bear him hence, Alcade,
Into our Alkedavy. Honour him,
And let him taste the razor.
CLEM: There’s honour for me!
ALCADE: Come, follow!’
(5.2.90-105) 134
Mullisheg’s figuring of ‘honour’ in terms of emasculation is an extension of the
idea that conversion, and the attendant rite of circumcision, is a necessary prerequisite
of attaining the ‘honour’ promised by the east, which is unattainable to comic
characters—who are usually of low birth—in the west. For Mullisheg, and by
extension, the eastern world in general, wealth and preferment are predicated upon
assimilation, which necessarily implies circumcision, or—as in this case and that of
134
Ibid.
Gazet—literal castration. To gain this preferment, such characters must ‘taste the
razor’, making a sacrifice for enablement.
In addition to conversion’s association with carnality, the material gains of the
Orient were also dependent upon conversion, and the attendant rite of circumcision,
which was closely allied to the emergence of intercontinental and, more importantly,
interideological trade. Thomas Willan, for example, notes how ‘if an Englishman
sought to ‘impeache’ is fellow countrymen in Morocco, ‘he must of a Christian
become an infidel, and abandon his countrie.’’135 The material gains associated with
‘turning Turk’ were not a temptation solely for those abroad; in Robert Wilson’s The
Three Ladies of London, the highly materialistic Italian, Mercadore, uses the threat of
conversion to bolster his financial interests.
The play is a morality play, in which characters such as ‘Love’ and ‘Conscience’
are pitted against ‘Lucar’ and ‘Dissimulation’. In this, Mercadore comes down firmly
in the latter camp, bringing with him both Catholicism and Turkey:
LUCAR: Gentlemen, you are hartly welcome, howe are you called, I pray you
tell me?
MERCADORE: Madona, me be a mershant and be cald Senior Merkadorus.
LUCAR: But I pray you tell me what Countriman?
MERCADORE: Me be madona an Italian.
135
Thomas Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1959), p.174
LUCAR: Yet let me trouble ye, I beseeche ye whence came ye?

MERCADORE: For serva voutra boungrace, me come from Turkie
LUCAR: Gramerci, but Senior Mercadore, were you not to undertake
Secretlie to convey good commodities out of this countrey for my sake?
MERCADORE: Madona, me doe for love of you tinck no paine to mush,
And to do any ting for you me will not grush:
Me will a forsake a my Fader, Moder, King, Countrey, & more den dat.
Me will lie and foresweare me selfe for a quarter so much as my hat.
What is dat for love of Lucar Mercadore will not doe.
Me care not for all the world, the great Devill, nay make my God angry for
you.
(387-401)136
In this speech, Mercadore encapsulates a concept which runs throughout dramatic
representations of conversion in this period: his affiliation is not to any country, but
to material gain, for which he will ‘forsake a my Fader, Moder, King, Countrey, &
more den dat.’ It is also notable here that the author has been at pains to distance the
character from England: his own alterity is constantly emphasised through a
ridiculous ‘Italian’ accent, as well as his foreswearing of any nationalistic ties and the
Catholicism which is invoked through his incessant use of the word ‘madona’, even if
referring to Lucar. However, Mercadore continues to function as a caricature of the
potential apostate, whose sole allegiance is to material gain, forgoing considerations of
loyalty and spirituality.
136
Robert Wilson, The Three Ladies of London, in H.S.D. Mithal (ed.), An Edition of Robert Wilson’s
Three Ladies of London and Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (London: Garland, 1988), p.10
Mercadore’s potential for apostasy is realised when his Jewish creditor,
Gerontus, desires the repayment of three thousand ducats. Mercadore can avoid this
outcome, however, if he is willing to ‘turn Turk’, for ‘if any man forsake his faith,
king, countrie, and becomes a Mahomet’ (1712),137 all debts are nullified.
MERCADORE: Arrest be doo skal knave, mery do and if thou dare,

Me will not pay de one peny, arrest me doo, me do not care.
Me will be a Turke, me came hedar for dat cause,
Derefore me care not for de so mush as two straws.
GERONTUS: This is but your wordes, because you would defeate me,
I cannot thinke you will forsake your faith so lightly.
But seeing you drive me to doubt, Ile trie your honestie:
Therefore be sure of this, Ile go about it presently.
Exeunt
(1553-1560)138
The traditional figure of avarice, the Jew, is replaced here by Mercadore’s nominal
Catholicism. Gerontus, on the other hand, is more staunchly religious, refusing to
believe Mercadore ‘will forsake your faith so lightly’; he does not believe that one’s
faith should depend upon financial expediency, and initiates court proceedings to put
the fluidity of Mercadore’s identity to the test. Arriving at the trial in ‘Turkish weedes’
(1710),139 he reiterates his desire to convert rather than repay his debt.
137
Mithal (ed.), The Three Ladies of London, p.39
138
Ibid., p.35
139
Ibid., p.39
MERCADORE: Me will be a Turke, and for dat cause me came here.

JUDGE: Then it is but a follie to make many wordes. Senior Mercadorus draw
neere.
Lay your hand upon this booke, and say after mee.
MERCADORE: With a good will my lord Judge, me be all readie.
JUDGE & MERCADORE: Say, “I, Mercadorus, do utterly renounce before all
the world, my dutie to my prince, my honour to my parents, and my good will
to
my cuntry:
Furthermore I protest and sweare to be true to this country during life,
And thereupon I forsake my Christian faith.”
GERONTUS: Stay there most puissant Judge. Senior Mercadorus, consider
what
you doo,
Pay me the prinipall, as for the interest, I forgive it you:
And yet the interest is allowed amongst you Christians, as well as in Turky,
Therefore respect your faith, and do not seeme to deceive me.’
(1720-1731)140
Gerontus is willing to give up his traditional role of usurer in order to safeguard
Mercadore’s soul, enhancing the reprehensibility of Mercadore’s threatened transition.
When Mercadore sneers at this offer, Gerontus furthers it, halving the amount owed
to him. It is only when Gerontus relinquishes Mercadore of the debt entirely that he
decides to remain a Christian:
MERCADORE: O Sir Gerontus, me take a your offer, and tanke you most
hartily.
JUDGE: But seneor Mercadorus, I trow ye will be a Turke for all this.
MERCADORE: Seneor no, not for all da good in da world, me forsake a my
Christ.
140
JUDGE: Why then it is as sir Gerontus saide, you did more for the greedines of
the mony,
Then for any zeale or good will you bare to Turky.
(1743-1747)141
Although it is revealed as a ploy to save him from having to repay 3,000
ducats, Mercadore’s plan crystallises the idea that, for someone willing to sacrifice
their spiritual, sexual and national identity, material gains could be made through
conversion. To underline this idea, numerous plays include characters who make
explicit their rejection of religion as a barrier to their attaining satiety. In Robert
Greene’s Selimus, the titular character reveals how
I count it sacrilege for to be holy

Or reverence this threadbare name of “good”.
Leave to old men and babes that kind of folly;
Count it of equal value with mud.
Make thou a passage with slaughter, treason,
Or whatever else thou can;
And scorn religion—it disgraces man.
(2.15-21)142
Similarly, Grimaldi in The Renegado cries
Wherefore shake we off

Those scrupulous rags of charity and conscience
Invented only to keep churchmen warm
Or feed the mouths of famished beggars;
But, when we touch the shore, to wallow in
141
Ibid.
142
Vitkus (ed.), Selimus, p.69
All sensual pleasures?

(1.3.46-51)143
Followers of non-Christian religions, the implication being, may enjoy greater wealth
and more fulfilling lives than Christians, but, in pursuing a religion based around
earthly rewards, rather than celestial ones, they sacrifice their spiritual integrity and
their chance of heavenly redemption—converts and ‘infidels’ traded not only their
masculinity, but also their souls. Similarly, in The Jew of Malta, Barabas considers
circumcision to be a sign of celestial favour, a guarantor of wealth and pecuniary
success. He declares, ‘Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus,/Than pitied in a Christian
poverty.’ (1.1.113-114)144, and speaks condescendingly of
These swine-eating Christians—

Unchosen nation, never circumcised,
Such as, poor villains, were ne’er thought upon
(2.3.6-8)145
John Mason’s The Turke, like William Rowley’s Lust’s Dominion, contains a
fairly typical representation of the Turk as a figure of sexual impropriety. Muleasses,
the titular ‘Turke’, has wheedled his way in to the Italian court. Eunuchus,
Muleasses’s castrated manservant, describes how
143
144
145
Ibid., p.484
I now am given
To serve the hidden secrets of his lust
Unto Timoclea, the wife of Borgias,
Whose private mixtures I am guilty of.
Betwixt these three I stand as in a maze,
In eg’d to al their sinnes, and made a bawd
To lust and murder.
(1.2.454-460)146
As well as serving as evidence of the castrating threat posed by Muleasses, and
demonstrating his amoral lasciviousness, Eunuchus here functions as a variation on
the concept of trading one’s masculinity for pleasure. He has been castrated so that he
might aid the priapic Muleasses in his miscegenation and cuckold-making; the
eunuch’s de-masculinisation is necessary to facilitate the functioning of a satyrical
Eastern society—the trade-off between penile completeness and carnal fulfilment writ
large, with some sacrificing their sexuality so that others might indulge theirs.
As well as this theme of emasculation, the idea of Islam as a religion of avarice
and acquisition, of amoral permissiveness, returns in a number of invocations by
Muleasses to ‘Mahomet’:
Great Prophet, let thy influence be free

Uncheckt by danger: mew not up my soule,
In the pent room of conscience:
Make me not morall Mahomet, coopt up
146
Adams (ed.), The Turke, pp.15-16
And fettred in the fooles phylosyphy,

That points our actions unto honesty.
Give my plots fortune, let my hope but touch
The marke I aime at: then the gazing time
Shall in the present hide my former ill
Successe like Lethe to the soules in blisse
Makes men forget things past and crownes our sins
With name of valour, be we impious.
A seculus felix styles us vertuous.
(2.1.696-708)147
Similarly, he intends to impose this corrupting influence on his lover, Timoclea,
taking her from a state of ‘Christian’ chastity to a state of amoral lustfulness.
Do as your sex has done, tast what’s forbid,

And then distinguish of the difference,
I come not now to war with eloquence,
Those treaties are all past, if you embrace
Our proffer’d love, wele pray; or call it lust.’
(2.1.114-117)148
From the start, Muleasses is entrenched as a vector of corruption, spreading his brand
of amorality throughout the Italian court. His religion, through its perceived
permissiveness and amorality, allows this to occur, but, the play implies, the blackness
which is often synonymous with alterity is also important: it seems to have the
potential to hide and abet—even to absolve—sins:
147
Ibid., p.24
148
Adams (ed.), The Turke, p.100
Rise, rise, ye mistie-footed Jades of night.

Draw your darke mistresse with her sable vayle,
Like a blacke Negro in an Ebone chaire,
Athwart the worlds eie: from your foggy breaths
Hurle an Egyptian grosenes through the ayre
That more may see my plots.
(2.1.729-734)149
As in Gallop’s invocation to the ‘black-eyed negro’ of night in A Christian Turned
Turk, and Eleazar’s declaration that ‘Night is a glorious roab, for th’ ugliest sin’
(2.3.1081)150 in Lust’s Dominion, duplicity is constantly figured as ‘black’: it is notable
that blackness, as well as being associated with alterity—the ‘Turk’ and the ‘Jew’ alike
were often portrayed with black skin—but also was traditionally associated on the
stage with demons and devilry.
149
Ibid., p.24
150
‘THE APPAREL OFT PROCLAIMS THE MAN’: COVERT RELIGION AND THE
DEMARCATION OF DIFFERENCE
Our Amiable faces cannot be seen,

If we keep close:
Therefore hide your cocks head, lest
His burning cocks-comb betray us. 151
THOMAS DEKKER, LUST’S DOMINION
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.152

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN
In 1594, an event which is universally supposed to have had a significant influence on
dramatic representations of alterity occurred when Queen Elizabeth’s physician,
Doctor Roderigo Lopez, was found guilty of high treason after being implicated in a
plot to poison his mistress. This is significant here because Doctor Lopez was a Jew,
albeit one who had, at least nominally, converted to Christianity. Protestations of his
innocence, as well as of his rejection of Judaism, were laughingly dispelled, as an
account by contemporary historian William Camden reveals:
They were all of them condemned, and after three months put to death at
Tyburn, Lopez affirming that he loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus
Christ, which coming from a man of the Jewish profession moved no small
laughter in the standers-by.153
151
152
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. by Stephen Fender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
p.23
153
William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of
England, 3rd ed. (London: Charles Harper and John Amery, 1675), pp.484-485
In the early modern world, religious affiliations were permanent and ineradicable, and
a Jew or Muslim who wished to convert to Christianity would, even if they gained
their wish, always be marked by the persistent stigma of their alien past. Members of
society who did not conform to the norm of white Protestantism were marked, both
literally and figuratively. Additionally, in an age in which covert religion was
commonplace—the ‘church papists’ who publicly toed the Protestant line whilst
practicing Catholicism in private being the most prominent of a litany of crypto-
faiths—it was invariably assumed that these converts duplicitously practised the rites
and ceremonies of their former religions behind closed doors.
In this context, the circumcised penis is the definitive analogue of the secret
renegade, the mark of an alien rite imposing its claim on a person’s soul, and
conforms to early modern assumptions of the ineradicability of foreign ideologies.
This is interestingly exemplified in plays dealing with alterity, which frequently allow
alien women into the fold of Christianity, but almost never men. As Ania Loomba
notes, ‘we have the recurrent spectacle of a fair maid of an alien faith and ethnicity
romanced by a European, married to him, and converted to Christianity. Her story,
unlike those of converted men, does not usually end in tragedy, nor does it focus on
the tensions of cultural crossings…instead of a self-fashioning, hers is a re-fashioning
by her Christian husband. Unlike the Moorish man, she does not represent a fearful
alterity to Christendom but the possibility of a controlled exchange’;154 she continues,
‘If circumcision was the major physical barrier to the idea of the converted Muslim (or
Jew), then women, whose bodies did not bear this mark, could be more easily
imagined as crossing the religious and racial divide.’ 155 This is borne out by numerous
female converts from Islam and Judaism: Abigail in The Jew of Malta, for example,
whose conversion is prefigured both by the conversion of Barabas’s home into a
nunnery, and his installation of his daughter within it, and by his demand that she
seduce Lodowick ‘with all the courtesy you can afford;/Provided that you keep your
maiden-head’ (2.3.231-232).156 Whilst Barabas is tied to his religious and ideological
affiliations through circumcision, Abigail is not so hampered, and converts, much to
Barabas’s chagrin, although he soon finds a replacement in the similarly-circumcised
Ithamore. Another convert is Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, who declares:
Alack, what a heinous sin it is in me

To be ashamed to be my father’s child!
But though I am a daughter to his blood,
I am not to his manners. O Lorenzo,
If thou keep a promise, I shall and this strife,
Become a Christian and thy loving wife.
(2.3.15-20)157
Despite her conversion being dependent upon the essential difference between her
and her father—her femininity—she relies for her transition into Christianity upon a
further, albeit temporary, change as she adopts a cross-dressed disguise to evade her
154
Loomba, ‘‘Delicious Traffick’’, p.209
155
Ibid., p.211
156
157
Greenblatt et al. (eds.), The Merchant of Venice, p.1106
father. Additionally, this dual transformation emphasises the sexual implications
which conversion constantly invokes.
Other female converts to Christianity include Donusa in The Renegado,
Iphigenia in Alphonsus, King of Aragon, Agar in A Christian Turned Turk, and, to a
lesser extent, Zenocrate in Tamburlaine, to name a few. Whilst male converts do exist,
their numbers are significantly smaller, consisting of men such as Grimaldi in
Massinger’s The Renegado, and Cantharides in The Two Noble Ladies—and where
conversions do occur, the play is either always at pains to differentiate the characters
from their peers by pointing out the ‘Christian’ hypergoodness with which these
people are imbued, or intent on plotting their downfall, as with the most famous
convert to Christianity, Othello. The character is constantly battling against his innate
alterity, and taking Desdemona for his wife invokes the fear of miscegenation in the
Venetian court:
Your fair daughter,

At this odd-even and dull watch o’th’ night,
Transported with no worse nor better guard
But with a knave of common hire, a gondolier,
To the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor.
(1.2.123-127)158
158
William Shakespeare, Othello, in Greenblatt et al. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare (London & New
York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p.2103
—a liaison which her father dubs ‘treason of the blood’ (1.1.170).159 The problem of
the relationship between Christianised Moor and ‘fair’ Christian is resolved by
Othello’s death, which invokes his latent alterity:
In Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus.
He stabs himself
(5.2.361-365)160
Like the spectators at Lopez’s execution, the play refuses to accept that difference, no
matter how reduced by assimilation, can ever be entirely eradicated. Instead, it is ever-
present, and Othello’s invocation of circumcision demonstrates how circumcision was
a symbol in the early modern period of the ineradicability of difference.
If circumcision acts to bar men from converting to Christianity, it also serves
to prevent the readmission of former Christians into the fold: Nabil Matar describes
how, as the only way of determining whether a returning Christian had succumbed to
the temptation to ‘turn Turk’, communities and sea captains would sometimes ‘strip [a
potential apostate] naked to see whether he had been circumcized or not.’161
159
Ibid., p.2104
160
Greenblatt et al. (eds.), Othello, pp. 2171-2172
161
Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, p.72
Circumcision was a mark of apostasy, a punctuation to the act of conversion; to be
circumcised is to make a final renunciation of one’s Christian identity, and become
wholly, irredeemably, ‘other’, and physically marked as such.
Othello’s assimilation into Venetian society, of course, is prevented by more
than one immutable sign of alterity: the blackness of his skin forms a much more
immediately obvious signifier of Othello’s outsider status. In addition to black skin,
more visible symbols of alterity, such as costumes, fake noses and wigs, could be
drawn from stereotypy and used to differentiate such characters, as well as augmenting
the hidden sign of circumcision. However, the most revelatory constructions of visual
difference comes from depictions of converts assuming the guise of alterity without
actually converting and having to suffer the indignity of circumcision; in these
accounts, the adoption of Turkish costume serves to allow the character access to
scenarios they would be unable to experience in their European garb. It serves as a
reversible surrogate for circumcision, a usually comic reminder to the audience that
these characters are merely playing a part, that, behind their costumes, their ‘real’
identities survive unscathed.

Skin colour, too, is not necessarily permanent. In Ben Jonson’s Masque of
Blackness, female members of the Jacobean court covered their faces with soot in order
to play Africans,
Who though they were the first formed dames of earth,

And in whose sparkling and refulgent eyes
The glorious sun did still delight to rise,
Though he—the best judge and most formal cause
Of all dames’ beauties—in their firm hues draws
Signs of the fervent’st love, and thereby shows
That in their black the perfect’st beauty grows,
Since the fixed colour of their curlèd hair,
Which is the highest grace of dames most fair,
No cares no age can change or there display
The fearful tincture of abhorrèd gray,
Since Death herself (herself being pale and blue)
Can never alter their most faithful hue.
(114-126)162
Jonson repeats the Elizabethan assumption that the sun is the sole cause of the colour
of these ‘Ethiops’’ skin. As a court masque, however, the participants are not only
playing Africans, but themselves. As Stephen Orgel notes, ‘a masquer’s disguise is a
representation of the masquer beneath. He retains his personality and hence his
162
Ben Jonson, ‘The Masque of Blackness’, in Richard Harp (ed.), Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques, 2nd
ed. (London & New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp.317-318
position in the social hierarchy’,163 and Sir Dudley Carleton noted the assumption of
blackness amongst the ladies of the court with distaste:
The presentation of the mask at the first drawing of the traverse was very fair
and their apparel very rich, but too light and courtesanlike. Their black faces
and hands, which were painted and bare up to the elbows, was a very
loathsome sight and I am sorry that strangers should see our court so strangely
disguised.164
A combination of Jacobean ideas about the causation of blackness and the aesthetics
of the courtly masque, where a thin veneer of soot is not enough to disguise the status
of masquers, then, results in a mutability of colour, and the ‘loathsome sight’ of their
assumed blackness is allowed to dissolve into whiteness. This happens over two years,
when Jonson produces his Masque of Beautie. Having been moved away from the sun’s
blackening influence to England, their Whiteness and true identities can be revealed:
Present remembrance of twelue Æthiope Dames:

Who, guided hither by the Moones bright flames,
To see his brighter light, were to the Sea
Enjoyn’d againe, and (thence assign’d a day
For their returne) were in the waves to leave
Their blacknesse, and true beautie to receive.
(23-28)165
163
Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (New Yor: Columbia University Press, 1981), p.117
164
Maurice Lee, Jr. (ed.), Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603-1624: Jacobean Letters (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), p.68
165
Ben Jonson, ‘The Masque of Beautie’, in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, (London: William Stansby,
1616), p.903
Whilst it is important to note that the dynamic between audience and participant
differs significantly from more popular productions—where a transition from
blackness to whiteness is also a transition from disguise to revelation—it is also
interesting to note how Jonson deals with skin colour in these two masques, which
reveal the theatricality of blackness; it is, essentially, no more than a layer of soot
deposited by the heat of the sun, which fades into more acceptable whiteness when
they move to the less sunny climes of England. Skin colour, then, is no less reversible
than costume as a sign of difference: only circumcision can provide true confirmation
of alterity, as all other signs are, in one way or another, reversible.
‘Taking the turban’ was a phrase which, like the similarly alliterative ‘turning
Turk’, was used to signify conversion. However, where the latter contains an
undertone of prostitution and sexual impropriety, to ‘take the turban’ is to convert
with the additional transgressive suggestion of breaking the sumptuary laws which
had existed since the fourteenth century—reaching, according to Marjorie Garber,
their ‘apogee’ under Elizabeth I166—and the purpose of which, according to Aileen
Ribiero, ‘was to enforce class distinctions, which it was felt were being eroded by
166
Garber, Vested Interests, p.26
dress’.167 As well as safeguarding norms of social status, conventions of morality and,
to a lesser extent, gender, were also being enforced by these laws, and the traditional
‘Turkish’ costume, whilst it might include a masculine beard and scimitar, was also
considered a rather effeminate affair, even if just by virtue of its difference to standard
English clothes.168 To adopt such clothing would, therefore, be imbued with an
undertone of literal transvestism—and one which would potentially be even more
shocking than male-to-female crossdressing, the status of which as a staple of the
early modern stage amounting to a tacit, if uneasy, acceptance.169 The act of ‘taking
the turban’, then, was representative of a combined transgression of class, faith,
ideology, and sexuality, reified by the visual trope of costume. Circumcision in drama
might have been the most threatening and frightening symbol of apostasy and
ideological difference, but it was not the only one, as audiences would be constantly
reminded of the difference between characters by the always-visible symbolism of
their costumes.
167
Aileen Ribiero, Dress and Morality (London: B.T. Batsford, 1986), p.15
168
A little later on, in the 1660s, John Evelyn accused certain fashions, influenced by theatrical
interpretations of the Orient, of turning men into ‘a kind of Hermaphrodite’ (see Ribiero, p.87).
169
See David Cressy, ‘Gender Trouble and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England’, in The Journal
of British Studies 35.4 (1996), p.453-458
FIGURE II: The illustrations in Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes serve to emphasise a
vestiary demarcation between Muslim and supposedly Non-Muslim figures (Tamburlaine was, in fact, a
convert to Islam, but his transition from ‘Scythian shepherd’ to Turk-bashing warlord clearly won him
Europe’s affections).
One play which provides an important scene in relation to the adoption of
Turkish garb is Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk. Whilst the play makes
much of Ward’s feigned circumcision, the dumb-show which represents his
conversion skirts this, instead depicting Ward literally ‘taking the turban’. Ward’s
conversion is enacted in a dumb-show, which forms the centrepiece of Ward’s
penchant for transgression:
Enter two bearing half-moons, one with a Mahomet’s head following. After
them, the Mufti, or chief priest, two meaner priests bearing his train. The
Mufti seated, a confused noise of music, with a show. Enter two Turks, one
bearing a turban with a half-moon in it, the other a robe, a sword: a third with
a globe in one hand, an arrow in the other. Two knights follow. After them,
Ward on an ass, in his Christian habit, bare-headed. The two knights follow.
The two knights, with low reverence, ascend, whisper the Mufti in the ear,
draw their swords, and pull him off the ass. He [is] laid on his belly, the tables
(by two inferior priests) offered him, he lifts his hand up, subscribes, is
brought to his seat by the Mufti, who puts on his turban and robe, girds his
sword, then swears him on the Mahomet’s head, ungirts his sword, offers him
a cup of wine by the hands of a Christian. He spurns at him and throws away
the cup, is mounted on the ass, who is richly clad, and with a shout, they exit.
(Scene 8)170
Ward’s adoption of Turkish garb is also a rejection of Christianity, as well as being a
visible outward sign of Ward’s apostasy. The turban almost forms a surrogate
foreskin, a replacement for what has supposedly been lost through conversion. Ward’s
conversion and vestiary transformation has, seemingly, set him wholly against
Christianity; the costume represents not only Ward’s change in faith, but also an
obligation to fight Christianity:
Now wears the habit of a free-born Turk

His sword excepted, which lest they should work
Just villainy to their seducers, is denied
Unto all runagates, unless employed
In wars ’gainst Christians.
(9.18-21)171
In evading circumcision, Ward is able to retain his essential redeemabilty: whilst his
death, epitaphed ‘Ward sold his country, turned Turk, and died a slave’ (16.326),172
precludes such an outcome, he has not been marked by the sole physical hallmark of
170
171
Ibid., p.199
172
Ibid., p.231
apostasy, circumcision, and could return to Christianity if he wished. The Turkish
costume he adopts might constantly remind an audience of Ward’s betrayal, but,
unlike circumcision, is a reversible symbol. It reminds the audience not only of Ward’s
apostasy, but also emphasises his duplicitous, ambivalent position, an uncircumcised
‘Turk’ who can switch at will between Christianity and Islam, depending on his
Machiavellian wont. As a pirate, complicit in the enslavement of Christians and
selling them in the east, Ward is already hardly a character designed to evoke the
sympathies of a Jacobean audience. His demi-conversion serves to further complicate
his character; his costume becomes emblematic of Ward’s ability to simultaneously
abuse Christians and flout Islamic ritual.
As Ward manages to evade circumcision, but achieve the pretence and
advantages of ‘conversion’ by adopting Turkish garb, Mercadore in The Three Ladies of
London finds success in a similar plan. In order to deceive the honourable Jewish
moneylender, Gerontus, he declares,
Mele go to get a some Turks apparell,

Dat me may coosen da Jewe, and end dis quarele.
(1553-1566)173
173
Gerontus sees this for the ruse it is, declaring that, although
now he comes in Turkish weedes to defeat me of my mony,

But I trow he wil not foresake his faith, I deeme he hath more honestie.
(1709-1714)174
However, Mercadore persists, and, like Ward, is able to enjoy the fruits of conversion
without the associated circumcision: by adopting Turkish ‘weedes’, he effects a
facsimile of conversion, and Gerontus reluctantly announces, ‘Thou forsakest thy
faith, wherefore I forgive thee frank and free’ (1741),175 and Gerontus is able to shrug
off his Turkish apparel, remaining an uncircumcised Christian. In The Three Ladies of
London, Turkish costume acts as a surrogate for circumcision as a marker of
difference, and its impermanence, unlike circumcision, allows a return to a prior
identity, and so becomes less threatening of the subsumptive potential which early
modern audiences associated with alterity.
Philip Massinger’s A Very Woman utilises sartorial demarcation in an
interesting fashion. Once again, the assumption of Turkish identity allows a
European character to gain access to areas unavailable to him in his true guise. The
character whose temporary taking of the turban acts as an enabler is Don John, the
174
Ibid., p.39
175
Ibid.
Prince of Tarent.176 He is a suitor for Almira, the Viceroy of Sicily’s daughter, but is
rebuffed as she and her parents have made a good match with his rival, Don
Cardenes. After injuring Cardenes, Don John is forced into exile in Malta, and
Almira is sent into the wardship of Cuculo, a Sicilian noble. Swathed in Turkish
garments, Don John hides in a Maltese slave market, where his white skin makes him
a less desirable purchase than his Moorish fellows. The slave-master fusses:
Put that pig-complexion’d fellow behind,

He will spoil my sale else.
(3.1)177
Despite this, Don John is sold to Cuculo, in whose household he arouses a not
insignificant amount of attention amongst the female characters:
ALMIRA: What fellow’s that?

LEONORA: Indeed I know not, madam.
It seems of some strange country by his habit;
Nor can I shew you by what mystery
He brought himself to this place, prohibited.
ALMIRA: A handsome man.
LEONORA: But of a mind more handsome.
(3.5)178
176
‘Tarent’ is, presumably, Taranto, which had been a principality in southern Italy until 1465.
177
A Very Woman, p.126
178
Ibid., p.146
Almira is bewitched by this ‘Turkish’ slave, and the incongruity between his costume
and stereotypical ‘Turkish’ appearance and behaviour:
LEONORA: How stragely this fellow runs in her mind:

ALMIRA: Do you hear, cousin?
LEONORA: Her sadness clean forsaken.
ALMIRA: A poor slave
Bought for my Governess, say you?
LEONORA: I fear so.
ALMIRA: And, do you think, a Turk?
LEONORA: His habit shews it,
At least bought for a Turk.
ALMIRA: I, that may be so.
LEONORA: What if he were one naturally?
ALMIRA: Nay, ’tis nothing,
Nothing to th’ purpose; and yet, methinks ’tis strange,
Such handsomeness of mind,
Should spring from those rude countries.
(4.3)179
Costume, here, reveals the theatricality of sartorial demarcation: one is able to
‘become’ Turkish, to adopt the characteristics of alterity, as easily as putting on
Turkish clothes. However, the incompleteness of this transformation, its essential
falsity, is also evident here. His ‘Turkishness’ is that of an English actor on stage,
playing the role of Turk from behind makeup and from beneath a costumier’s
turban—a theatricality which is made explicit in the next play to be examined, John of
Bordeaux. Don John’s subsumption into Turkish identity is only partial, and the
179
A Very Woman, pp.156-157
‘handsomeness of mind’ which shines through his disguise serves to reinforce the
primacy of the uncircumcised white Christian body behind it. As Gary Taylor notes,
‘identities constructed by race or gender were, for Shakespeare and his acting
company, prosthetic. They were created by adding something artificial—false breasts,
soot—to the ‘natural’ template of the white male body.’180
In this case, it is the combination of Don John’s truthful, unTurkish identity,
and its framing in Turkish clothing—the incongruous alterity of which serves to
heighten his essential sameness to Almira—which is so attractive:
I have seen
A thousand handsomer, a thousand sweeter
But say this fellow were adorn’d as they are,
Set off to shew and glory—what’s that to me?
Fie! What a fool am I? What idle fancies
Buz in my brains?
(4.3)181
Almira’s envisioning of Don John as an exemplar of sameness couched in the guise of
otherness is dealt a blow, however, when the mistress of the household, Borachia,
imparts some drunken gossip to Almira—making complete the perception of his
‘alterity’ in the one sure way:
180
Gary Taylor, ‘Shakespeare Plays on Renaissance Stages’, in Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton (eds.),
Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.11
181
A Very Woman, p.157
ALMIRA: But what’s that man?

BORACHIA: I’ll tell thee, madam,
(But pray you be secret.) He’s the Great Turk’s son, for certain;
And a fine Christian: My husband bought him for me.
He’s circumsign’d.
LEONORA: He’s circumcised, thou wouldst say.
ALMIRA: How dost thou know?
BORACHIA: I had an eye upon him;
But ev’n as sweet a Turk, an’t like your ladyship.
And speaks ye as pure Pagan—I’ll assure ye,
My husband had a notable Pennyworth of him,
And found me but the Turk’s own son, his own son
By father and mother, madam.
(4.3)182
Clearly, Borachia takes it as no small cause for pride that she should have the son of
the ‘Great Turk’—a figure commanding a considerable degree of awe and fear in
Europeans at this time—under her command, and her drunken boast is borne of a
desire to invert the perceived threat of Ottoman dominance, rather than by Don
John’s literal circumcision. It is a manifestation of Borachia’s false assumption that the
outward signs of circumcision—Don John’s Turkish costume—are congruent with the
inward reality. Borachia’s revelation also has the more immediate effect of alterizing
Don John once more, halting Almira’s attempts to separate him from his Turkish
disguise. Thus it is as a ‘Turk’ that he reveals his story, which has remarkable
182
A Very Woman, p.159
similarities to that of Don John and Almira. Whilst still under the impression that his
story is an unrelated Turkish anecdote, Almira finally realises the depth of her feelings
for Don John:
Stop there a while; but stay still.

In this man’s story, how I look! How monstrous!
(Turns aside)
How poor and naked! Now I shew what Don John
In all the virtue of his life, but aim’d at
This thing hath conquer’d with a tale!
(4.3)183
Thus when he reveals his true identity, of course, Almira does not rebuff him as she
has previously, and when her previous beau, Cardenes, recovers and sends for his
fiancée, Almira has become enamoured of the Prince of Tarent.
These plays seem to promote the sumptuary transgressions of their characters
as an essentially consequence-free way of gaining the benefits of conversion,
circumventing the irreversible physical demarcation of apostasising. However, another
play which affords Turkish dress a significant role, Robert Greene’s John of Bordeaux,
creates a more problematic assumption of Turkish vestments. The play unfortunately
exists only in a form corrupted almost to the level of illegibility, but nonetheless
provides important insights into the area of dramatic costume and alterity— especially
183
A Very Woman, p.163
as little information about such demarcation is extant. In the play, Turkish clothing
signifies power, but there are also undertones of assimilation and corruption alongside
it. Bacon, the scholar who formed half of the titular sorcerous duo of Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay, declares
I have long desiered to se the Turke

To witnes with my nies what I have read. I’ll
To Revena marchinge with yor troupes and Se a whiell.
(61-63)184
Thus Bacon furthers the desire for forbidden knowledge which previously led him to
create an omniscient brazen head, of all things. Bacon is captured by Turks who are
fascinated by an item of Bacon’s possession, ‘a booke wher in was drawne formes and
carrectours that seme most strange’ (130-132),185 but even more so by his strange
clothing:
Straung ar thy lokes and ounquoth thy natier

Ner have I sene such garmente in campe yet manie
Christian prisoners have we tane. What canst thow
Do or what is thy degree?
(146-149)186
184
Robert Greene, John of Bordeaux, or, The Second Part of Friar Bacon (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1936), p.4
185
Ibid., p.6
186
Ibid., p.8
The divisive ability of clothing is introduced here: by his clothing, Bacon is
marked out as ‘ounquoth’ (presumably ‘uncouth’) and ‘straung’: it is a visual marker
which even differentiates Bacon from his fellow Europeans. The Turk, Amurath,
declares that ‘ner cam befor the face of Amewroth an English man’—indeed, ‘well
mayst thow be a devell’ (161-162),187 his manner of dress being so alien.
After Bacon threatens the Turk, boasting that ‘at my lust great Constantinople
shall vanish/As did Illion in to flames’ (154-155),188 the ability of clothing to threaten
is brought into play—as in A Christian Turned Turk, the malevolent potential of
violence and castration emblematised in the scimitar or dagger which was a standard
part of ‘Turkish’ stage accoutrement is highlighted. Perce, Bacon’s manservant, notes
that ‘his dudgen haft is anngeri, and his sword begines to clatter’ (168),189 and costume
becomes emblematic of Turkish power:
TURKE: Tell me velin wherefore camst thow

BACON: I for to gratulat my princelie frend cam wandering
Amewroth unto thy camp, to have thy crowne thy robe
And semeter, which I will have mawger thy prowdist
Gard er thow and I depart or selves from hence grudge
Not but yeld them me with out delaye,
For Inglish Bacon will not hav a naye
TURKE: Blasphemus Christian what my royall crowne framd at
187
Ibid., p.8
188
John of Bordeaux, p.8
189
Ibid., p.8
The cost of warlicke Ottaman that first was supreme

Of the mightie Turke my curious robe and my semeter
My I exchaung them for the western world and have the
Land that limite from the akllps unto the farthest
Setting of the son I would not leve my robe nor yet
My crowne, my semeter se Cristian how it shines
(169-182)190
Here Bacon’s attempted assumption of Turkish power is figured as a vestiary
exchange: Turkish power, and all it represents, is bound up in the ‘curious robe and
semeter’ in which Amurath is clad. In order to obtain his shiny crown for Emperor
Frederick, Bacon kidnaps Amurath’s son and holds him to ransom. In a
problematization of Bacon’s Christian identity, he uses unchristian charms and spells
to restrain the Turks whilst he captures Selimus:
BACON: Ha father now the ballful blad is up

SELIMUS: Remember how my mother loves me well, thinck how
Shell shead her brineish teres for me when Selimus her only son must die.
For her sacke, Jentell father, save my lyf, geve all thy kingdom for thy
Onlie son.
BACON: Strike
TURKE: Hould, Bacon, take thou my croune my robe my semeter and what
elce I hav, onlie intreat nay charge for thy command is donne.
(202-209)191
To emphasise the exchange of roles and identities bound up in this trade of clothing,
Perce asks
190
Ibid., pp.8-9
191
Mr shall I gev him my cape my goune and my sword and then a can not
Say that we ar behoulding to him for exchaung is no roberie.
I remember onc at Oxford in a commedie yor worship put me to play the part
of
A chemnie sweeper and after to clere the stage you carried me a waye
In a cloke bage now this is Like to prove a tragedie I but on
The Turke robes and make an extent in his beest aparell.
(212-217)192
As well as making the exchange one of clothes, and the identities and associations
bound up in them, Perce underscores the essential theatricality of costumes, whether
on the stage or off it, and how roles are assigned depending upon the clothing
someone wears: as Ward was potentially able to shrug off his Turkish robes and rejoin
the fold of Christianity, so Frederick is able to assume the role of Sultan by adopting
Amurath’s crown and scimitar:
EMPEROR: How likest me Bacon in my Turkishe robes, how sitte this

Diadem upon my head, how hange my semeter? What grace
The me adorne the my imperiall stat or no?
BACON: Frederick looke lik the haughty god of war when ckad in
Pompe of all his royalltie he showes the trionpes of his
Thoughte in heaven.
EMPEROR: Now frolike frier I prethee tell me why great Ameroth
Did pries theas thinge so dere
BACON: For the forging of that diadem twas don by ottoman
From whose desente the Turkeish princes draw their pettegre,
The moniment of all their royalties
Dependid on the wearinge of that craune as sacred from
192
Ibid., p.10
The head of Ottaman.

(410-422)193
As circumcision legitimises and finalises conversion, provides a necessary rite by
which Christians are allowed access to the benefits of eastern life, in the adoption of
the Turkish vesture ‘Turkish’ advantages and roles are conferred.
Toward the end of the extant portion of this play, the power and attendant
corruption symbolised by Frederick’s Turkish robes is confirmed when John of
Bordeaux is exiled on suspicion of treachery, and his wife, Rosalyn, is similarly
tarnished. The Emperor also accuses Bacon of ‘seeke[ing] my death by spells and
magiecke force’ (1032),194 and will be executed unless they find a champion to defend
their honour within a month. The Emperor has become corrupted and paranoiac, his
rationality subverted by the power emblematised in the Turkish costume he adopts;
his allies become suspect, and he no longer knows who to trust. Unfortunately the
play is cut short at this point, so what happens next is unknown. John of Bordeaux
does, however, provide an interesting insight into the nature of costume as a shifting
and fluid marker of difference.
193
194
Ibid., p.42
CONCLUSION
In renaissance England, circumcision constituted a powerfully polymorphous signifier
of alterity. It helped to shape definitions and preconceptions of alien identity, and
reveals facets of commonly-held assumptions concerning foreign sexuality.
Additionally, in the construction of the image of the ‘circumcised Turban’d Turke’195
can be detected the attempts of the conversely uncircumcised inhabitants of early
modern England to define themselves. Circumcision played into ideas about an east
defined in polar opposition to Europe; where the fantastic and fabulous—aided by the
venerable Travels of Sir John Mandeville, with its tales of abundance, allure, and apple-
sniffing pygmies, the weirdness of which did nothing to diminish their acceptance—
were mundane, and European staples of morality, sexuality, and rationality, were
subverted. Circumcision is what separates Christian and ‘infidel’, a potent symbol of
alterity in which ideas of femininity and unfathomable and baleful otherness are neatly
conjuncted: ideas and preconceptions about the rite create an interesting avenue of
insight into the phallocentrism of renaissance England, and how its terms of power
were seemingly inverted by a carnivalesque east.
195
Craigie (ed.), The Poems of James VI of Scotland, p.202
There was a persistent trend in early modern culture towards the
compounding of disparate ethnic groups whose uniting feature was their difference to
a white, European ‘norm’. Non-Christian religions were, for example, frequently
related back to Pagan rites—‘Moors’ in drama are often depicted invoking the aid of
Roman or ancient Greek gods, in a tendency that stretches back to the middle ages.
In circumcision, a convenient tool was discovered by which these distinct specimens
of difference could be combined. Thomas Thorowgood, for example, even announces
that native Americans were Jewish, using their circumcision as evidence of this:
Circumcision is frequent among the Indians, which some not observing, have
thereupon denyed them to be Judaicall, and Io. de Laet is forced to
acknowledge such venereous people have somewhat like to circumcision
occasioned by their lasciviousnesse; but daily experience declareth that they
have indeed upon them this Judaicall badge. Herodotus averreth the Colchi for
this to be of the Aegyptian race, and that the Phenicians and Syrians of
Palaestina learned from them that rite; and though some have judged the
Tartars to be Jewes, because circumcised, others yeeld not to this, because they
were Mahometans by Religion, and from them received that custome; but
these people have cut off their foreskinne time out of minde, and it cannot be
conceived whence they had this ceremony, but that it is nationall.196
196
Thomas Thorowgood, Digitus dei: new discoveryes with sure arguments to prove that the Jews (a
Nation) or people lost in the world for the space of near 200 years, inhabite now in America; how they came
thither; their manners, customs, rites and ceremonies; the unparallel’d cruelty of the Spaniard to them; and that
the Americans are of that race. Manifested by reason and scripture, which foretell the calling of the Jewes; and
the restitution of them into their own land, and the bringing back of the ten tribes from all the ends and corners
of the earth, and that great battell to be fought. With the removall of some contrary reasonings, and an earnest
desire for effectuall endeavours to make them Christians. Whereunto is added an epistolicall discourse of Mr
Circumcision provided an apparatus to expedite this reductive tendency: Thorowgood
concludes the matter with the confident statement that ‘they are circumcised,
therefore they be Jewes.’197 In drama, circumcision is often used to unite the religions
of Judaism and Islam, as in The Jew of Malta, producing a mass of alterity which is
threatening because of its unity. Circumcision, through its associations with
castration, makes them uniformly ambiguous and sexually unknowable. Circumcision
facilitated a tendency to create a uniform face of difference, at once threatening in its
uniformity, its shared goals and characteristics, and reassuring in its simplicity and
homogeneity, its shared flaws and weaknesses. The rite allowed playwrights to
distance the alien character from the audience, linking them, via undertones of
castration and effeminisation, to femininity, and even sodomy. The very idea that one
might submit to circumcision further distances such characters, but it also unites the
circumcised—whether Muslim or Jew—in their genital difference to Christians, a
binary polarity between circumcised and uncircumcised. This was an idea which may
have been reinforced by the connection at this time between the two religions; whilst
much of Europe was riven with anti-Semitism, the Ottoman Empire accepted all
John Dury, with the history of Ant: Monterinos, attested by Manasseh Ben Israell, a chief rabby (London:
Thomas Slatter, 1652), p.9
197
Ibid., p.40
religions into its midst, and Jews frequently held powerful positions in the Islamic
world.
The relationship between Barabas and Ithamore in The Jew of Malta—who,
‘Both circumcisèd’, ‘hate Christians both’198—is seemingly predicated upon this idea
that circumcision bestows a pan-doctrinal bond; that these two religions are
interchangeable because of their shareing of an initiatory rite. Marlowe, of course,
upends this assumption, suggesting that their relationship is founded upon their
mutual avarice and duplicity, rather than any religious marks they may share.
Marlowe’s frequent invocation of the rite, however, demonstrates that it was an issue
in early modern constructions of difference. It was a commonly-held belief, shared by
numerous theologians of the time, that the common rite of circumcision was proof
that the two religions were metonymous, or at least derived from the same source.
Barabas has dealings with all three of the religions in the play, but it is with Islam that
he finds his route to power, and it is with Islam that Barabas is most potently linked.
Leo Africanus describes three routes to the Islamic faith:
Naturall I terme them, that are borne of Turkish parents: and them I call
accidentall, who leauing our sacred faith, or the Moysaicall law, become
198
Mahumetans: the which the Christians performe by circumcising themselues,

and the Jewes by lifting up a finger.199
Whilst Christians must submit to a painful rite in order to convert, Jews’ conversion is
cemented simply ‘by lifting up a finger’, an ease of conversion second only to the
‘naturall’ route of birth. Benwash in A Christian Turned Turk, Like Barabas, may be
nominally Jewish, but his circumcision facilitates a fluidity of character, in which he
may ‘sware as I was a Turk, and will cut your throat as I am a Jew’,200 switching
between Jewish and Muslim identities and allegiances as he sees fit.
According to Richard Fletcher, ‘Christians first encountered Muslims as
conquerors: it is readily intelligible that they should have perceived Islam as inherently
martial.’ He gives the two fundamental ingredients of Christian perception of Islam as
‘Muhammad as prophet, impostor, heretic; his followers men of blood and
199
Leo Africanus, A geographical historie of Africa, written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More,
borne in Granada, and brought vp in Barbarie. Wherein he hath at large described, not onely the qualities,
situations, and true distances of the regions, cities, townes, mountaines, riuers, and other places throughout all
the north and principall partes of Africa; but also the descents and families of their kings ... gathered partly out
of his owne diligent obseruations, and partly out of the ancient records and chronicles of the Arabians and
Mores. Before which, out of the best ancient and moderne writers, is prefixed a generall description of Africa,
and also a particular treatise of all the maine lands and isles vndescribed by Iohn Leo. ... Translated and
collected by Iohn Pory, lately of Goneuill and Caius College in Cambridge (London: George Bishop, 1600),
p.386
200
violence.’201 Circumcision manages to encapsulate these beliefs: it is evidence of non-
Christian beliefs, and it hints at violence in its bodily incision. It also threatens
Christian masculinity directly, through its suggestion of castration. At the same time,
however, and for the same reasons, it demasculinises the circumcised other, renders
him unthreatening because their manhood is somehow incomplete.
If circumcision was part of the apparatus used by early modern men in order to
figure themselves as more masculine than the eastern other, it was also emblematic of
the threat that was posed by the Orient: a threat to remove, by any of various means,
this mark of superiority; it provided a way of conceiving of the military threat posed
by the east in literal terms of emasculation, effeminisation, or castration: that the
‘Turk’ might come along and remove any visible signs of difference between Christian
and Muslim.
Most interactions between England and the east took the form of trade.
Despite this significance, surprisingly little trade takes place straightforwardly in
drama of the period, but circumcision does figure in dramatic attempts to frame trade.
Whilst more serious characters can use trade as a means to extracting the wealth
promised by the east, comic characters, such as Clem and Gazet, whose low status
201
Richard Fletcher, The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the
Reformation (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p.158
also, perhaps, makes them more susceptible to the east’s pernicious charms, see no
other route to the preferment promised by the east than through assimilation—
essentially, they trade their foreskins for the contingent possibility of reward, in a
trade whose illegitimacy highlights the legitimacy of the avenues pursued by more
serious (and well-born) characters. Thus comic characters have the very symbol of
their masculine power excised in the hope of gaining the preferment which has eluded
them in the west. Like Ward’s games of ‘hazard’ aboard his ship, which he uses to
entrap greedy sailors to sell into slavery in the east, the spectre of eastern promise is an
unfair game, which leads to assimilation with none of its rewards, and all of its costs.
However, whilst comic characters are the bread-and-butter of attempts to
dramatise the perceived threat posed by the east, more serious characters are often no
less threatened. Ward manages to circumvent conversion, although even prior to the
rite in which he nominally turns Turk, he occupies a position of Turk-like threat,
giving the role of Barbary corsairs who posed the most genuine threat to Christian
identity a whiter face to fear. Hence, despite his evasion of the circumcising knife,
Ward retains this Muslim potential to disempower, and his death, stabbing himself
whilst he is branded an ‘unheard-of monster’ (16.314)202 serves as retribution. In
202
Solyman and Perseda, Basilisco—having undergone a ceremony in which solemn Turks
‘lopt a collop of my tendrest member’ (1687)203—is killed by Solyman as he argues
over a kiss from Perseda.
Early modern audiences were fascinated by the east at least as much as they
were concerned by it. The idea of the great Sultan, with his hundreds of concubines
and palace of indescribable luxury, was a source of huge interest, as well, perhaps, as
desire. Demanding a physical toll from characters in return for unearthly rewards is a
staple of drama. In circumcision, the perfect platform for this pseudo-Faustian
exchange could be found: a physiological transaction in which a perception of eastern
carnal and material potential collided with the Faust myth. Such a temptation is
usually succumbed to by comic characters, whose comic exploits are humorous
because the audience knew that what these characters seek is unattainable by the
assimilation and effeminisation that comic characters fervently believe can lead them
to riches. This is merely one of the ways in which the east of drama attempts to coerce
Christians into conversion. Where non-comic characters apostatise, such as in the
case of Ward and Basilisco, ‘Turning Turk’ is likely to entail death—in a non-
203
Christian land, and under the aegis of a non-Christian faith—and so, presumably, to
eternal damnation, bringing the idea of conversion as a Faustian pact full-circle.
Michael Neill notes that ‘the particular fear that attaches to the demon-Jew in
early modern culture has to do with his insidious role as the hidden stranger, the alien
whose otherness is the more threatening for its guise of semblance.’204 On stage,
however, such insidious fears were allayed by the multiformity of visual signifiers of
difference, whether applied to the ‘Jew’, ‘Turk’, or ‘Moor’. Blackness, outlandish and
exotic costume, prosthetic noses, turbans, and scimitars were all used to create an on-
stage differentiation from a white European ‘norm’. However, plays of the period
seem intent on exposing the theatricality—and, more importantly, the reversibility—
of costume: in John of Bordeaux, the Emperor’s assumption of Turkish garb corrupts
him; he assumes, along with the costume, the role of the archetypal jealous and
power-hungry Turkish tyrant. In A Christian Turned Turk, Ward’s acceptance of the
turban replaces the standard rite of circumcision as symbol of his assimilation into the
eastern world, and in The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beautie, the skin
colour of the ‘African’ women is revealed as no less reversible than the soot used to
create its effect on the white skin of English courtiers. However, whilst the turban
204
Michael Neill, ‘“Mulattos”, “Blacks”, and “Indian Moors”: Othello and Early Modern Constructions
of Human Difference’, in Shakespeare Quarterly, 49.4 (1998), p.363
and the sword can be removed and discarded, their physiological analogue, concealed
within the billowy trousers of Turkish stage garb, cannot. Whilst it is less visible—
and, consequently, more unsettling and threatening—it also constitutes the one mark
which cannot be eradicated by moving out of the sun or the readoption of English
clothing. Since circumcision was believed to be a necessary part of conversion, it was
the one way of distinguishing the apostate from the loyal, sameness from otherness,
and in conversion from Christianity, symbolises the permanence of difference; the
part of the New Christian which stubbornly refuses to submit.
In relation to early modern drama, circumcision forms a potent symbol,
revelatory both of conceptions of otherness on early modern society, and, in revealing
the fears and desires evoked by this archetype, the motivations concealed within the
psyche of early modern England. Circumcision neatly straddles a number of
conceptions inherent in attempts to define otherness: it provides a common symbol by
which diverse religions and ethnicities can be proven metonymous; it reified the
supposed castrating potential of the east; and it provided a bargaining tool by which a
life of ‘western’ asceticism could be traded in for a life of ‘eastern’ indulgence. That
early modern playwrights found in circumcision such a potent tool in their arsenal of
devices by which the outsider could be adequately depicted says more about the
society which forged these associations than the ones to whom they were directed.
APPENDIX: A THEATRICAL CHRONOLOGY OF SELECTED EARLY MODERN PLAYS
AND EVENTS, 1581-1634
• c1581: Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London, a morality play involving
characters such as ‘Lucre’ and ‘Usurie’, is first performed. This play was written for
Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester’s company, who travelled to more
provincial locations to produce their plays, confining themselves mostly to the
southeast of England, but occasionally venturing as far north as York or
Newcastle.205
• 1581: The Turkey Company, formed to provide its subscribers with exclusive
trading rights in areas of the East, after merchants successfully petitioned Queen
Elizabeth for the creation of such a body the previous year. The charter lasts for
seven years.
• 1583: The burgeoning business in Oriental trade is evidenced by a note in the
State Papers of 1583, which describes a ‘suit of merchants trading to Turkey, [who
are] to be furnished with three ships to meet the increasing demands of their
205
See Robert Wilson, The Three Ladies of London and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, ed.
by H.S.D. Mithal (New York & London: Garland, 1988), p.177 for Mithal’s scrupulous collation of
the extant records of this company’s travels.
traffic with Turkey. They have three ships now building, and last year freighted
seven ships for those parts.’ 206
• c.1587: Christopher Marlowe’s Tragedy, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, is first
performed by the Admiral’s Men, with Tamburlaine most probably played by
their star actor, Edward Alleyn, who is also a likely candidate to have played
Barabas in The Jew of Malta.
• c1587: On the back of Tamburlaine’s success, Robert Greene writes the similarly-
themed The Comicall Historie of Alphonsus, King of Aragon, and in this year it is first
produced. Information on the first performance of the play is scanty (Gerard
Langbaine207 rather unhelpfully notes that the play is ‘a History which I never
saw’208), but it is known that the play was unsuccessful, and that a planned sequel
never appeared.209
206
Robert Lemon (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1581-1590
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865)
207
Langbaine’s Account of the English Dramatick Poets is a reasonably comprehensive account of early
modern theatrical performances, and seems to be a generally accurate source of information on these
plays and their authors, even if it has occasional lapses, as cited below. It is important to note, however,
that the book was written significantly after the period being studied (Langbaine himself lived from
1656 to 1692, and the edition I have consulted was published in the year of his death); this is not first-
hand knowledge, but that of a scholar who has researched dates of performance several decades after
the fact.
208
Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford: George West and Henry
Clements, 1692), p.519
209
See Waldo F. McNeir, ‘Robert Greene and John of Bordeaux’, in PMLA 64.4 (1949), p.782
• 1587: War against Spain develops, which, compounding the already significant
threat posed by pirates, made the Mediterranean a dangerous place to do business,
and so significantly retarded the amount of trade which occurred between
England and countries on the Mediterranean.
• 1588: Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part II is first performed, like
Part I, by the Admiral’s Men.
• 1588: As the company’s charter was not renewed, the patent of the first Levant
Company expires.
• c1588: Robert Greene’s Selimus, Emperor of the Turks, another transparent attempt
to emulate the style made popular by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, is first
performed by the Queen’s Majesty’s Players.
• c1589: George Peele’s tragedy, The Battle of Alcazar, is first performed by the Lord
High Admiral’s Servants.
• c.1589: Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta is first performed by the
Admiral’s Men. Essentially a tragedy, the play also incorporates broad elements of
tragedy when dealing with the character of Barabas, whose extravagantly
ridiculous anti-Christian misadventures would find a more serious counterpart in
Shakespeare’s The Jew of Malta seven years afterwards.

• 1589: The first edition of Richard Hakluyt’s gargantuan 12-volume The Principal
Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation is published. The work is an
invaluable resource, dealing with England’s overseas trade, exploration, and
expansion, as well as with diplomatic relations with the east.
• c1590: Solyman and Perseda, a tragedy attributed to Thomas Kyd, is written.
Performance details are negligible, and indeed Gerard Langbaine concludes that
‘This play, I presume was never acted, neither is it divided into Acts.’210
• 1594: Dr Roderigo Lopez, Queen Elizabeth’s physician, is implicated in a plot to
poison the queen, and is executed for high treason. The fact that he was a Jew,
albeit one who had converted to Christianity, was made much of, and fuelled a
hefty rise in anti-Semitism at the time, as well as emphasising the ineradicability
of Jewish identity. Contemporary historian William Camden notes how, on the
scaffold, he proclaimed that ‘he loved the queen as well as he loved Jesus
Christ...which coming from a man of the Jewish profession...moved no small
Laughter in the Standers-by.’ 211
• 1595: There was concern amongst merchants who traded with Turkey that their
(not insignificant) profits were being undermined by their Dutch counterparts, as
210
Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, p.550
211
Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, pp.484-485
evidenced in the State Papers of this year, which describe how ‘the trade cannot be
carried on but with tall ships that employ many mariners, and the Queen receives
much in customs…the Dutch can maintain the trade with fly-boats, and would do
it so cheaply that it would ruin the English trade, and decay the customs’212—a
problem exacerbated by ‘Spanish galleys lying in wait’213 to capture the wares of
their Protestant enemy.
• 1596: Anthony Sherley conducts an expedition along the Western coast of Africa.
Sherley’s exploits, along with his brothers Robert and Thomas, are the subject of
Day, Rowley, and Wilkins’s play The Travels of Three English Brothers, first staged
in 1607.
• c1596: Taking as a template Marlowe’s seven-year-old The Jew of Malta, William
Shakespeare writes is more serious and overtly tragic counterpart The Merchant of
Venice, which is first performed this year.
• 1599: Robert Sherley, the de facto Persian ambassador to Christendom at this
time, spends six months in Persia, where he is employed in training the Persian
army according to the customs of England.
212
Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth,
1595-1597 (London: Longmans, Green, and Dyer, 1864), p.102
213
Ibid., p.162
• c1600: Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of The West, Part I is first performed,
probably by the King’s Men, although at the turn of the century, Heywood joined
the Earl of Worcester’s Men (who would become Queen Anne’s Men after 1603),
assuming the roles of both actor and playwright214. These players performed in
public theatres, such as the Rose, the Curtain, and the Red Bull—theatres which,
according to Robert Turner, ‘invited the patronage of the generality of playgoers;
the plays they favoured tended to be more romantic, more conservative morally,
and less sophisticated intellectually than those offered at such private houses as the
Blackfriars.’ 215 Similarly, Louis Wright216 describes the Red Bull as ‘from the
beginning, frankly a plain man’s playhouse, where clownery, clamor, and spectacle
vied with subject matter flattering to the vanity of tradesmen...no idle tricks of
love but manly plays, full of vigor, were to be seen at the Red Bull.’217 He also
notes that Heywood ‘appreciated the sensibilities of the commercial groups and
214
See Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II, ed. by Robert K. Turner (London:
Edward Arnold, 1968)
215
Ibid., p.x
216
If occasionally seeming a little dated, and concentrating on a fairly small group of theatres, Wright’s
Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England has proven a valuable source of information on certain
Elizabethan Theatres and their output. The book is a more general account of Elizabethan cultural
history, and only one fairly short chapter—16 (pp.603-655)—has furnished me with any information of
relevance to this work.
217
Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1935), pp.609-611
made strenuous efforts to placate public opinion.’218 The play is tragicomic in tone,
and, like The Renegado, contains a comedic conflation of the east’s ability to enrich
and castrate, in this case using the character of Clem’s confusion between two
connotations of the act of ‘gelding’. This is continued into Part II of the play.
• 1600: Lust’s Dominion, an anonymous tragedy featuring the sexually voracious and
immoral Eleazar (Attributed falsely to Marlowe in its first publication, but more
likely to be the work of Dekker), is first played.
• 1603: Elizabeth I, whose reign had been characterised by friendly and lucrative
dealings with the Islamic east, dies; her successor, James I, is considerably less
amenable to ‘the Turk’: as Nabil Matar notes, ‘Notwithstanding the dangerous
allure of Islam, Queen Elizabeth co-operated commercially and diplomatically
with both the Turks of the Ottoman empire and the Moors of the Kingdom of
Morocco...Queen Elizabeth repeatedly sought military and diplomatic help from
him [Ahmad Al-Mansur, ruler of Morocco]. In 1603, the last year of his life as
well as hers, Al-Mansur proposed to the Queen that Moroccan and English
troops, using English ships, should together attack the Spanish colonies in the
West Indies, expel the Spaniards, and then “posesse” the land and keep it “under
218
Ibid., p.604
our dominion for ever and—by the help of God—to joyne it to your estate and
ours.”’219 Prior to Elizabeth I, people trading with Muslims were ‘liable to
prosecution for dealing with infidels220’—the reign of Elizabeth I was the basis for
a temporary period of good relations between the English government and that of
the ‘Turk’ that would come to an end—or at least be significantly impaired—with
the coronation of her successor, James I, who reportedly ‘wished to form a league
of Christian princes against the infidel’, and was ‘willing to furnish ten thousand
foot soldiers for the same.’221
It is important here to note the distinction between the political and
economic reality of dealing with the ‘Turk’, and the specious ‘Turk’ of the early
modern imagination. Plays, sermons and other popular accounts might have
promoted the archetype of the implacably voracious, cruel and amoral Muslim,
but the Islamic world was too large and too economically and militarily significant
to ignore. Thus political dealings with the east operated independently of
envisionings which were a part of popular culture.
219
Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the age of Discovery (New York and London:
Columbia University Press, 1999), p.9
220
Ibid., p.19
221
Franklin L. Baumer, ‘England, the Turk, and the Common Corps of Christendom’, in The American
Historical Review, 50.1 (1944), p.45
Elizabeth I’s death occurred in the same year as the demise of her
important eastern ally, Ahmad Al-Mansur, bringing to an end an important link
between Christian England and the Islamic world (most notably against the
colonies of the Catholic empire of Spain). James I’s position on Islam is made
clear by his poem, The Lepanto, in which the king cries:
‘I sing a wondrous worke of God,
I sing his mercies great,
I sing his justice heere-withall,
Pow’rd from his holy seat,
To wit, a cruell martiall warre,
A bloodie battell bolde,
Long doubtsome fight, with slaughter huge
And wounded manifold.
Which fought was in LEPANTOES gulfe
Betwixt the baptiz’d race,
And the circumcised Turban’d Turkes.222’
The death both of Queen Elizabeth I, and of Ahmad Al-Mansur, was a
significant blow to Anglo-Islamic relations. A similar alliance would not be
222
King James VI of Scotland and I of England, The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. by James Craigie
(2 vols.) (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1955), I, p.202
repeated during or after King James I’s reign. However, despite the chilling in
relations James’s succession may have caused, James realised the economic
necessity of maintaining trading links with the Islamic world.
• 1603: Richard Knolles publishes the first edition of his Generall Historie of the
Turkes, a foundational text in English awareness of the Islamic east whose creation
was both in response to—and a spur to further increase—the English interest in
the ‘Turk’. The book is dedicated to James I, whose Lepanto Knolles praises
highly. Whilst still highly critical of the Turk and ‘the damnable and hellish
doctrine of his false prophet’, 223 the book allowed, for the first time, the educated
reader to gain a glimpse of Islamic culture which was not an anecdotal traveller’s
tale or theatrical caricature. It is also likely to have been a principal source of
historical information for many of the plays that emerged in its wake.
• c1604: Othello, by William Shakespeare, is first performed.
• 1604: King James opens a debate about trade with Turkey; the possibility of
increasing customs on trade arriving from the east—and even whether this trade
should continue at all—is debated.
223
Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that nation to the rising
of the Othoman familie with all the notable expeditions of the Christian Princes against them; together with
the Lives and Conquests of the Othoman Kings and Emperours unto the yeare 1610, 2nd ed. (London: Adam
Islip, 1610), p.360
• 1605: The Levant Company is formed from a merger of the Turkey and Venetian
Companies. It would continue—albeit in slightly altered form after the mid-18th
century—until its dissolution in 1824.
• 1607: The Travels of the Three English Brothers, a ‘tragi-comedy’ which was the
fruit of a collaboration between John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins,
is first performed by Queen Anne’s Men at both the Curtain and Red Bull
theatres.
• c1608: John Mason’s The Turke, ‘A Worthie Tragedie’ in which western fears of
the castrating east are embodied in the character of Eunuchus, is presented by the
Children of His Majesties Revels (probably the same troupe as the Paul’s Boys) at
Whitefriars, ‘with generall applause’224, as the title page states.
• c1610: Robert Daborne’s tragicomic A Christian Turned Turk was first performed,
probably by the Queen’s Revels company at the Whitefriars Hall theatre225. This
play seems not to have been particularly well-received (see note on Massinger’s
The Renegado). Unlike The Renegado’s Gazet, and The Fair Maid of the West’s
Clem, both comic characters who submit or intend to submit to castration in
224
John Mason, The Turke (London: Frances Falkner, 1632)
225
See Daniel Vitkus (ed.), Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York and Chichester:
Columbia University Press, 2000), p.24
order to enjoy the benefits of the East, Ward is able to escape
circumcision/castration by substituting his foreskin for an ape’s tail.
• 1610: King Philip of Spain expels the million Spanish Moors who had been in
residence in his country, in the process removing a significant proportion of
Europe’s Muslims. They forge alliances with the Barbary pirates who have
plagued European shipping for many years.
• c1617: A collaboration between John Fletcher, Nathan Field, and Philip
Massenger produces the tragi-comedy, The Knight of Malta, which is first
performed this year.
• 1617: The issue of piracy in the Levant is brought to political and popular
attention by the capture of Sir Richard Hawkins, along with seven English fishing
vessels, which were intercepted ‘between Newfoundland and Italy.226’ The
depredations suffered by English vessels at the hands of pirates leads to a
discussion of the danger Turkey posed, and of the ‘necessity of Christian princes
uniting for their extirpation227’, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Sir William
Garway, aggravated by the manner in which Turkish pirates damage the trade of
226
Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of James I,
1611-1618 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1858), p.426
227
Ibid., p.427
the Levant company, suggest that ‘the best way of destroying pirates would be to
make war, both by sea and by land, against the Turks.’ 228
• c1618: Thomas Goffe’s tragedy, The Raging Turke is first performed. It is acted by
the students of Christchurch, Oxford, where Goffe is a student.
• 1619: The sequel to Goffe’s The Raging Turke, The Couragious Turke, another
tragedy, is first performed at Christchurch.
• c1621: The Two Noble Ladies, a tragicomedy published anonymously, is ‘often
tymes acted wth approbation’229 by the Children of the Revels, players who had
previously been known as Queen Anne’s Men, at the Red Bull.
• c1622: William Rowley’s tragedy All’s Lost by Lust is first played at the Cockpit
theatre by Lady Elizabeth’s Servants, apparently to great success. According to the
title page, it was revived ‘with great applause’230 at the Phoenix by Her Majestys
Servants circa 1633. Until recently fashionable amongst London’s coterie of
aspiring gallants, The theatre had started to lose ground to the Globe and
Blackfriars by the beginning of the 1620s. 231
228
Ibid., p.476
229
Anon., The Two Noble Ladies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930)
230
William Rowley, A Tragedy called All's Lost by Lust (London: 1633)
231
See Wright, Louis B., Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England, p.610
• c1624: Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, a comedy, is staged at the Phoenix
Playhouse, also known as the Cockpit, by the King’s Men. Daniel Vitkus232 notes
that, ‘unlike Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk, which seems not to have been a
success on the English stage, The Renegado was well received by seventeenth-
century playgoers...there is evidence that it was frequently performed during the
1630s and up until the closing of the theaters in 1642’. 233 Like Heywood’s The
Fair Maid of the West, the majority of The Renegado’s comedic elements are
preoccupied with a comedic character (in this case the clown, Gazet’s) foolish
entrapment in the east’s simultaneous power to empower and to castrate.
• c1624: Robert Davenport’s tragedy, The City Night-Cap, is first performed, ‘with
great applause’, 234 by His Majesties Servants at the Cockpit (also known as the
Phoenix).
• 1625: South-western Cornwall is attacked by pirates from the Levant: at least
twenty vessels encroach upon the southern Cornish shores, attacking villages and
232
Along with Nabil Matar, with whom he works closely, Daniel Vitkus’s work is invaluable to my
work here. His edition of Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned
Turk, and The Renegado brings together three lesser-known—but very relevant—plays, together with
in-depth editing and a very useful historical introduction and informative notes. Also of note are his
Turking Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, and Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption:
Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England.
233
Daniel Vitkus, Three Turk Plays, p.40
234
Robert Davenport, The City-Night-Cap: Or, Crede quod habes, & habes. A Tragi-Comedy (London:
Samuel Speed, 1661)
taking inhabitants away to slavery and coerced apostasy. The corsairs also attacked
the north of the county by taking Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel and
claiming it as Islamic territory; from this base, thousands of villagers were taken
away in a two-pronged attack: the encroachment of Islam upon the shores of
Christian England moved from the realm of rhetoric to that of reality, as
Englishmen were ‘circumcised perforce, and tortured to turne Moores.’235
• c1630: Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part II is staged, thirty years
after its predecessor. In 1624, Heywood became employed as a writer for the Lady
Elizabeth’s Men and the Queen Henrietta’s Men, both of whom were
Christopher Beeston’s companies, and it is likely that it was they who performed
the work, probably at Beeston’s Cockpit (Phoenix) theatre. The play continues the
saga of Clem.
• 1634: Philip Massenger’s tragicomedy A Very Woman is first produced by His
Majesties Servants at Blackfriars—a stage, according to Wright, which ‘attempted
to win the patronage of aristocratic audiences who would be willing to pay larger
235
Harrison, The tragicall life and death of Muley Abdala Melek, p.18
fees than those charged by the public theaters.’ 236 The title page notes that the
audience reacted favourably, ‘with great Applause’. 237
236
Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England, p.609
237
Philip Massinger, Three New Playes; Viz The Bashful Lover. The Guardian, The Very Woman
(London: Humphrey Moseley, 1655)
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Circumcision and Alterity in Early Modern Theatre

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A LITTLE BIT OFF THE TOP • CIRCUMCISION AND ALTERITY IN EARLY MODERN POPULAR THEATRE

Chris Wignall Page 2

The Badge whereby Gods people once were known

I sing a wondrous worke of God,

circumcision,4 and it is a rite of passage in some African and Australian Aboriginal

threatening cultures associated with it—constitutes a major area of interest, as

evidenced in popular drama of the period.

In Judaism, circumcision is divinely mandated in Genesis, Chapter 17, Verses

circumcision is not mandated in the Qur’an, it is stressed by Islam for purposes of

hygiene; according to some traditions, Muhammad is supposed to have required

circumcision as a fitrah, representing a man’s cleanliness and moral health.5

Consequently, Muslim children are also generally circumcised.

Western Christianity, on the other hand, whilst sharing with Judaism an

preferred metaphorical circumcision to physical circumcision. The rite’s alien status

The extraneousness of circumcision to Christian life, and its perceived centrality to

emblem of all alien characteristics, a threat to Europe’s collective manhood, a route to

Southwell’s Moeoniæ contains one of many poems inspired by the rite:

The head is launst to worke the bodies cure,

Foreskin—the præputium—was laid claim to as a relic by numerous churches

throughout Christendom, and its supposed presence in numerous bejewelled

circumcision with a redolence of Catholic idolatry. It is this complex network of

wish to examine in this essay.

The early modern English conception of circumcision, and how it contributes

to a construction of otherness, is an area which has received little attention from

Englishmen in the Age of Enlightenment provides an interesting counterpoint to

expulsion. Both were circumcised…and both practiced a radically iconoclastic form of

menstruate, smell, be capable of breast-feeding or have hooked noses; blackness, mis-

circumcision is used by early modern playwrights as a trope of all difference or alterity:

provides the apparatus to demonstrate their essential equivalence and homogeneity.

more often, ill—might be forged.

The connection between circumcision and castration—and its attendant

FIGURE I: The sense of a threatening alienness embodied in the Turkish genitalia

frequently leading to circumcision or even castration (the figure of the Eunuch in

be fortified by accounts of capture by Muslim pirates, which almost invariably involve

renounced Christianity.’11 Similarly, Samuel Chew notes ‘the general impression in

the plurality of wives, the lawfulness of concubinage, the universal prevalence…of

disempowerment in a world where religious and ethnic identities were unstable,

despite their importance: an extension of the external threats to self-identification

already imposed by a state which vacillated between Catholicism and Protestantism.

power, which provided financial incentive to conversion, early modern drama

unencumbered by the moral constraints imposed upon England by Christianity.

was supposed to inevitably follow conversion) is a faith professed by its adherents

Christianity; at its simplest, it is a Faustian choice between a life of amoral plenty

westerners to its midst. Frequently in early modern drama, circumcision and

the west was available as a consequence of circumcision. Circumcision represents not

only castration and disenfranchisement: it also signifies subsumption and subjugation

double effeminisation, through both the essential femininity supposedly inherent in

often portrayed as a seductive and beguiling—but ultimately perilous—place, where

portion of their manhood, as well as their Christian faith. It should be noted,

promised by the east.

outsider status can be emphasised—whether through accent, skin colour, or

courtiers are blacked up to portray Africans, who emerge miraculously ‘whitened’

circumcision; to be circumcised is to make a final renunciation of one’s Christian

number of female converts to Christianity compared to the much smaller number of

male converts; The conversion of an Islamic or Jewish woman to Christianity through

attachment to a Christian man is a common occurrence in early modern drama,

perhaps functioning as a symbolic counter to the problem of conversion away from

Christianity in a society provoked to significant concern about the onslaught of the

east’s pernicious influence, buoyed by reports of the number of ‘renegadoes’

converting from Christianity to Islam. However, its opposite—the Muslim or Jewish

man converting to Christianity—occurs very rarely in drama: when it does—such as

in Othello—it usually ends in a reversion to the difference which, whilst potentially