“Now will I be a Turke”: Performing Ottoman Identity in Thomas Goffe’s The Courageous Turk

Abstract

In the past several years, scholars have devoted increasing attention to representations of the Middle East and of Persian, Moorish, or Turkish characters in early modern English drama. Many of these studies have examined the cultural, political, and economic encounters between the English and Islamic or quasi-Islamic others and the ways in which early modern English writers constituted their own identity through representations of the other. In particular, critics such as Daniel Vitkus have focused on the permeability of the boundaries between the ideological constructs of East and West and the hybrid identity assumed by Englishmen who ventured into what he calls the “multicultural Mediterranean.” Thus, English identity was constituted not only in antithetical contrast to Middle Eastern cultures, but also by the possibility of assimilation into those cultures—of “turning Turk.”1