"Looking after them, reading in Homer": Thomas Goffe’s Turk Plays in Oxford

Abstract

This article discusses two Turk plays of Thomas Goffe that were performed at Christ Church in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and subsequently printed: the plays present events from late medieval history, but with extensive classical allusion. The article considers the plays’ use of theatrical reference and books as props: these devices may have encouraged a particular response in the academic audiences who first saw these plays, especially influencing their attitude to the Turkish emperors who are fictionalised presentations of historical medieval figures, exotic, religiously and culturally ‘other’, but also made familiar by their contextualisation among the figures of a classical past, the study of which was the foundation of Tudor education.