Staging The Ottoman Turk

In the wake of the fear that gripped Europe after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, English dramatists, like their continental counterparts, began representing the Ottoman Turks in plays inspired by historical events. The Ottoman milieu as a dramatic setting provided English audiences with a common experience of fascination and fear of the Other. The stereotyping of the Turks in these plays—revolving around complex themes such as tyranny, captivity, war, and conquests—arose from their perception of Islam. The Ottomans' failure in the second siege of Vienna in 1683 led to the reversal of trends in the representation of the Turks on stage. As the ascending strength of a web of European alliances began to check Ottoman expansion, what then began to dazzle the aesthetic imagination of eighteenth century England was the sultan's seraglio with images of extravaganza and decadence. In this book, Esin Akalin draws upon a selective range of seventeenth and eighteenth century plays to reach an understanding, both from a non-European perspective and Western standpoint, how one culture represents the other through discourse, historiography, and drama. The book explores a cluster of issues revolving around identity and difference in terms of history, ideology, and the politics of representation. In contextualizing political, cultural, and intellectual roots in the ideology of representing the Ottoman/Muslim as the West’s Other, the author tackles with the questions of how history serves literature and to what extent literature creates history.

For centuries the figure of ‘the Turk’ spread fascination and fear - in the theatre of war and on the theatrical stage. On the one hand, ‘the Turk’ represented a spectacular dimension, an imaginary world of pirates, sultans and odalisques; on the other hand, he stood for the actual Ottoman Empire, engaged in long-lasting confrontations and exchanges with Occidental powers. When confronted with historical circumstances - military, commercial and religious - the cliché image of ‘the Turk’ dissolves in complex combinations of potential references. The Taming of the Turk: Ottomans on the Danish Stage 1596-1896 elucidates, for the first time, three centuries of cultural history as articulated in dealings between the Kingdom of Denmark and the Ottoman Empire seen in a general European context. From the staging of ‘the Turk’ as a diabolical player in royal ceremonies of early modern times, to the appearance of harmless ‘Turkish’ entertainment figures in the late nineteenth century. Artistic, theatrical and theological conceptions co-act in paradoxical ways against a backdrop of pragmatic connections with the Ottomans. The story of this long-forgotten connection between a small northern-European nation and a mighty Oriental empire is based on a source material - plays, paintings, treaties, travelogues etc. - that has hitherto chiefly been neglected, although it played a significant role in earlier times. The images of ‘exotic’ figures sometimes even turn out to be self-images. The documents hold the keys to a number of mental and fundamental (pre)conditions, and thus even to imagery constructions of our day.

While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European–Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.

Contesting the argument that Restoration-period drama referred almost exclusively to domestic social and political issues, this text interrogates the extent to which seventeenth century heroic plays justify and perpetuate stereotypical representations of the Ottoman Turks in Western discourse. It provides a comprehensive account of representation of “the Other” based on difference. Joining historical discussions ranging from the Ottoman Empire’s rise as a world power to the development of British imperial ideology, the book asserts that dramatic texts and production provide a rich and unexamined archive in which the issues of representation, difference, and cultural stereotyping are attendant on the emergence of imperial figure largely. This account not only deciphers representation of the Ottoman Turks based on simplification and stereotyping in dramatic representations, but also throws light on the most pressing political issues of seventeenth century England, including revolution, regicide, and restoration, dramatized in the guise of the Ottoman Turks and Ottoman history. The book’s attention to the Ottoman-related themes of a number of plays decisively redraws the map of Restoration drama.

This book considers the relationship between the vogue for putting the Ottoman Empire on the English stage and the repertory system that underpinned London playmaking. The sheer visibility of 'the Turk' in plays staged between 1567 and 1642 has tended to be interpreted as registering English attitudes to Islam, as articulating popular perceptions of Anglo-Ottoman relations, and as part of a broader interest in the wider world brought home by travellers, writers, adventurers, merchants, and diplomats. Such reports furnished playwrights with raw material which, fashioned into drama, established ‘the Turk’ as a fixture in the playhouse. But it was the demand for plays to replenish company repertories to attract London audiences that underpinned playmaking in this period. Thus this remarkable fascination for the Ottoman Empire is best understood as a product of theatre economics and the repertory system, rather than taken directly as a measure of cultural and historical engagement.

The book series "Ottomania" researches cultural transfers between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, with the performing arts as its focus. The fifth volume of the sub-series Ottoman Empire and European Theatre focuses on The Turkish Subject in Ballet and Dance from the seventeenth century to the time of Christoph W. Gluck (1714-1787). The Turkish theme was a popular topic on European ballet stages throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and most influential choreographers had 'Turkish' ballets in their repertoire. Taking as its departure point Ch. W. Gluck and Gasparo Angiolini (1741-1803), succesful composer and choreographer of ballets at the French theatre in Vienna, this publication discusses the topic from a historical perspective, presents new findings, and introduces the latest scholarly achievements of the research field. Contributions by Emre Aracı, Bruce Alan Brown, David Chataignier, Sibylle Dahms, Vera Grund, Bert Gstettner, Bent Holm, Michael Hüttler, Evren Kutlay, Dóra Kiss, Laura Naudeix, Strother Purdy, Katalin Rumpler, Käthe Springer-Dissmann, Dirk Van Waelderen, Hans Ernst Weidinger

It is an often ignored but fundamental fact that in the Ottoman world, as in most empires, there were 'first-class' and 'second class' subjects. Among the townspeople, peasants and nomads subject to the sultans, who might be Muslims or non-Muslims, adult Muslim males were first-class subjects and all others, including Muslim boys and women, were of the second class. As for the female members of the elite, while less privileged than the males, in some respects their life chances might be better than those of ordinary women. Even so, they shared the risks of pregnancy, childbirth and epidemic diseases with townswomen of the subject class and to a certain extent, with village women as well. Thus, the study of Ottoman women is indispensable for understanding Ottoman society in general. In this book, the agency of women from a diverse range of class, religious, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds is, for the first time, woven into the social and political history of the Ottoman Empire, from the early-modern period to its dissolution in 1918. Suraiya Faroqhi charts the history of elite and non-elite women in thematic chapters concentrating on urban women, family life, work, slavery, education and survival in times of war. In the process the book introduces readers to the key sources, primary and secondary, necessary to reconstruct and understand the ways that females navigated social, legal and economic constraints, through the central prisms of family relations, work and charity. The first introductory social history of women in the Ottoman Empire, and including a timeline and extended further reading section, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of Ottoman history and the history of women in the Middle East.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2009 in the subject Musicology - Miscellaneous, grade: 2.0, University of Osnabrück (Musikwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: This thesis is about the presentation of the Turks in operas of the West-ern European nations. I will have a look at which different roles where used to describe the Turks. In the sense of this paper the term "Turk" does not restrict its perspective to the area of the modern Republic of Turkey. As, for example, Preibisch (1908, p13) notes: during the 18th century composers did not distinguish between, for example, Persia and Turkey. Pahlen (1980, p12) even suggests that the whole Arabian community was regarded as Turkish. Moreover, except other Arabian countries sometimes even China and India were regarded as "Turkey" (Whaples 1998, p4). To be precise, this inaccuracy can be applied to a lot of other countries that were part of the Ottoman Empire like Egypt, Algeria, and so on. However, although some of the operas that will be discussed in this paper do not play in Turkey or contain Turkish charac-ters but are placed in neighboring countries of the Ottoman Empire or contain characters from these countries, these works will also be dis-cussed because from the perspective of our ancestors, they all display Turkish elements. The definition of Turkish that will be used in this pa-per is therefore similar to that used by Griffel (1975, p85ff) and is based on a rather dynamic concept. This means, when analyzing an opera concerning its "Turkishness", the common perspective of the time has to be kept in mind. Apart from that, I will analyze how the typical characters changed over the course of time keeping in mind the historical background. This is achieved by comparing similar characters from different operas with each other. As we will see, basically the timeline can be separated in three different parts. In the baroque-period the Turks were generally viewable in heroic roles which fitted to the concept of the