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Home > EARLYTHEATRE > Vol. 12 > Iss. 2 (2009)

 

Abstract

In Book V of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the knight Artegall turns Turk, donning 'th'armor of a Pagan knight' to infiltrate the court of the Souldan, allowing his fellow knight Arthur to defeat the tyrant with a mirrored shield, destroying him through an act of mimesis. Using this passage as a departure point, I argue that anachronism and mimesis, making the Muslim other a figure in a transhistorical drama and appropriating aspects of his identity for one’s own self-fashioning, were central to the construction of both the Turk and the Englishman in Elizabethan literature. I explore this dynamic in The Faerie Queene and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, with a glance at the historical hybrid hero Scanderbeg’s role in the English literary imagination. The incorporation of Muslim figures into the romance space constructed by these texts highlights the hopes and anxieties attending cross-cultural contact and the commensurability of human beings, and the double-sided capacity of the English to become like those with whom they trafficked.

Author Biography

Justin Kolb is a doctoral student in the department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His essay '"To me comes a creature": Recognition, agency, and the properties of character in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale' appears in The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature, forthcoming from Ashgate, 2010. His research has been supported by a University of Wisconsin College of Letters and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship and a grant from the UW Center for the Humanities.


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