"The world's a theatre of theft": Islamic Imposture in Tomkis' Albumazar

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• "The world's a theatre of theft":Islamic Imposture in Tomkis' Albumazar
• Corinne Zeman (bio)

The Goblins whom I now am coniuring vp . . . [are] thin-headed fellowes that liue upon the scraps of inuention and trauell with such vagrant soules, and so like Ghosts in white sheets of paper, that the Statute of Rogues may worthily be sued vpon them, because their wits haue no abiding place, and yet wander without a passe-port. Alas, poore wenches (the nine Muses!) how much are you wrongd, to haue such a number of Bastards lying vpo[n] your hands? But turne them out a begging; or if you cannot be rid of their Riming company (as I thinke it will be very hard) then lay your heauie and immortall curse vpon them, that whatsoeuer they weaue (in the motley-loome of their rustie pates) may like a beggers cloake, be full of stolne patches, and yet neuer a patch like one another, that it may be such true lamentable stuffe, that any honest Christian may be sory to see it. Banish these Word-pirates, (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme.¹

—Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare (1603)

Tudor and Stuart writers raced the languages of fraud and thievery, turning Islamicate loanwords, proper names, and ethnonyms into a working vocabulary for everyday subterfuges. In this essay, I demonstrate that in performance and on the printed page, early modern England fixated on Islamic "imposture"—the notion that Islam was an extravagantly enacted con job. The discourses of Islamic imposture surface in rogue pamphlets and city comedies, where they frame the clandestine workings of swindlers and thieves, a discursive strategy used to combat the daily convolutions of truth, legality, and credit in seventeenth-century London. Tracing the cooption and criminal redeployment of Islamicate cultures reveals the mutual imbrications of racialization and class formation and the role of translation in epistemic injustice. [End Page 222]

With the discourses of Islamic imposture as my lens, I turn to the little studied discipline of astrology. Over the course of the seventeenth century, European astrology—its principles borrowed wholesale from the Arabic and Persian traditions—was dismissed as an Islamicate grift and delegitimated as a scientific discipline. Satirists invoked the names of Muslim stargazers to condemn the guile of charlatans and the credulity of gulls. Interestingly, these sendups center on matters of linguistic propriety. Pretenders to celestial knowledge were said to counterfeit expertise by varnishing their prognostications with abstruse jargon taken from Arabo-Persian astrological texts. Thomas Tomkis' Albumazar, a 1615 university drama adapted from Giambattista Della Porta's Lo Astrologo, explores the interconnections between stargazing, villainy, and idiolect as it refashions a real-world Persian astrologer into a London cheat. The playscript uses intertheatrical citations to render criminality audible.² Characters steal wares while actors seize words—from one another, from London's playhouses, and from the audience itself. The play asks theatergoers to consider who are the rightful owners, the creative borrowers, and the illegitimate abusers of language. In short, when does citationality become an act of piracy? Tomkis' stargazers are not unlike Thomas Dekker's "word-pirates"—rogues who wander over linguistic landscapes without "a passe-port," raiding wordhouses like literary corsairs. By play's end, they have troubled the borders between England and the North African "gulfe of Barbarisme," cobbling together a hybrid culture of ill-gotten semantic spoils.

Bad-Faith Economics

Early modern Europeans wrote extensively on "imposture," the notion that Islam was merely a simulacrum or poor imitation of Christianity. If Christianity was a singular truth, then Islam was a "dark double"—"a mungrell Religion, compil'de of . . . shadowes."³ Islam thus functioned in English thought as a "mirror image," as Matthew Dimmock has written, "enabling a sustained reflection on Christian faults and Christian depravity."⁴ Dimmock has shown that writers interested in imposture fixated on the Prophet Muhammad. Invoked by both the stage and pulpit amid discussions of religious and moral perversion, he was disapprovingly [End Page 223] branded the "cunning impostor and seducer of the World"—a counterfeit prophet who beguiled the souls of a suggestible public.⁵ When William Bedwell sat down to title his 1615...