‘For Few Mean Ill in Vaine’: Roxolana and the Clash of Passion and Politics in the Ottoman Court in Fulke Greville's The Tragedy of Mustapha (1609) and Roger Boyle's The Tragedy of Mustapha (1665)

Abstract

Despite the many historical references to wealth, military strength and political efficiency, Turks were generally represented as violent, lustful and despotic figures in early modern cultural discourses. The stereotyped cultural Turk soon populated the London stages, thus moulding a recognisable dramatic type whose brutality and sexual appetite were also combined with political corruption. However, as this contribution seeks to demonstrate, Fulke Greville's Mustapha (1609) and Roger Boyle's Mustapha (1665) instead discuss characters who digress from traditional Orientalist portrayals of Turks whose sexual incontinence parallels with political corruption. In particular, this article engages with intersections between gender studies and Orientalism to investigate how Roxolana, in both plays, transgresses traditional representations of the female Christian‐to‐Muslim convert, whose lust distracts the Turkish ruler from his political duties. Both playwrights explore Roxolana's active interest in affairs of the Ottoman Court and the unexpected alliance she forms with Hungarian Queen Isabella when she, at the Hungarian Queen's request, protects Isabella's infant son and the Hungarian crown jewels. Their friendship appears to echo gift exchanges between Queen Elizabeth I and Turkish Queen Mother, Safiye Sultan, after the establishment of the Levant Company, which are detailed in various letters exchanged between the two monarchs in 1599. In light of this, I explore how Greville and Boyle could be commenting upon the political turmoil that James I's succession and the Stuart Restoration brought about in England, given that the country was more stable in a religious and political sense under the rule of former monarch Elizabeth I.