The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (46 page)

Most modern editors choose the Quarto’s “Indian,” even though when confronted with cruxes elsewhere their default position is to choose the Folio’s version, as it is seen as the “better,” later text. Racially it seems obvious to align the Moor with an Indian rather than a “Iudean,” or Jew. But, as we have seen, the Elizabethans were convinced that Jews and Muslims were as one in refusing to accept Jesus as the Son of God. The “Iudean” of the Folio could refer to either Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ or Herod’s execution of his wife, Mariamne, both of which make absolute sense as metaphors for Othello’s behavior.
⁷⁵
Which was correct? Did Shakespeare change his mind in revising his text, or did someone else quietly amend it? We will probably never know, but it is striking that this irresolvable crux captures Othello’s overdetermined character, part Muslim, Christian, Jew and even pagan.

It is a conflation that finds its most extraordinary conclusion in the final lines. Othello takes us to Aleppo, the Syrian city where Anthony Jenkinson first met Süleyman the Magnificent fifty years before, where al-Annuri had claimed he was heading, and which today has a very different tragic resonance. Othello has traveled a long way east from his homeland in Barbary, via Venice and Cyprus deep into the Ottoman Empire, into Arabia with its “medicinal” trees, and finally to Syria. The Turk he kills is “turbaned” and “circumcised,” a sign that these are not attributes he shares. If he is not circumcised, then surely he cannot have been born a Muslim. Nor does he share sartorial affinities with the ostentatiously turbaned al-Annuri. But in acting out his stabbing of the Turk, Othello enacts the most remarkable moment of tragic self-division in all of Shakespeare. He has been interpreted as a loyal Christian soldier, atoning for his sins by defending Venice against the Turk and killing the heresy within himself, or as finally embracing his true barbarism as a demonic, murderous apostate, who becomes the raging, violent Turk, the culmination of a generation of plays depicting the Ottomans. He is of course both simultaneously: a profoundly ambivalent figure who embodies so much of Elizabethan England’s contradictory relations with the Islamic world. Here, in the split second of saying “thus,” Othello briefly becomes a Turk.

Othello
was the culmination of more than a decade of the Elizabethan theater’s fascination with Turks and Moors. Just two years earlier Shakespeare had written
Hamlet,
a revenge tragedy that eclipsed all previous examples and redefined the genre.
Othello
did something similar in combining every facet of the Muslim characters that had appeared on the stage up to that point. It drew on the bombast of Tamburlaine, the evil of Aaron, the melancholic grandeur of the Prince of Morocco and the raging Turk buried deep within
Henry V
. The audience, then as now, are not asked to sympathize with Othello, but to delight guiltily in the dreadful prejudices and violent fantasies unleashed by this most ambivalent of characters and by his nemesis Iago, safe in the knowledge that it was, after all, just a performance.

Although he could not have known it, Shakespeare wrote
Othello
at the zenith of Elizabethan England’s relationship with the Muslim world, which was about to come to an abrupt end. Queen Elizabeth never saw the play. She died on March 24, 1603, at the age of sixty-nine. She had ruled her kingdom for forty-five years, during which time she had repelled foreign Catholic invasion, firmly established Protestantism as the state religion, established a stable if unwieldy government and expanded her commercial and political interests abroad, nowhere more successfully than in the Islamic world. She was succeeded by her cousin the Scottish Stuart king James VI, who would rule as James I. He was under no illusions that Elizabeth would be a hard act to follow, and that the country he inherited required immediate links to the rest of Europe if it was to have any hope of future prosperity.

James, guided by Robert Cecil, opened negotiations for peace with Catholic Spain almost immediately. He was eager to bring England back into the economic and political life of Europe after half a century of self-imposed exile. In the summer of 1604, another embassy arrived from the south, but this time the ambassador was Spanish and Catholic. All thought of a Moroccan-English alliance against Spain had passed, as James had no more appetite for waging war overseas. That August, Spanish and English diplomats signed the Treaty of London, ending nineteen years of war between the two kingdoms. It was a tacit acknowledgment—albeit with grave circumspection—of Protestant England’s right to exist within Christian Europe. King James had ended England’s diplomatic isolation from the rest of Europe.

In that same month Ahmad al-Mansur died of the plague. His three sons fought for the right to succeed him, and the kingdom of Morocco descended into a bloody civil war that temporarily put an end to all diplomatic and commercial relations with England. Elizabeth’s other great Muslim ally, Sultan Mehmed III, had died of a sudden heart attack in December 1603, nine months after her. Mehmed had spent most of his eight-year reign battling unrest abroad and within his troublesome court, with little time to cultivate his father’s alliance with Elizabeth. As the Spanish and English sat down at Somerset House to agree to the Treaty of London, the only visible sign that remained of the Anglo-Ottoman alliance was the large carpet atop the table between them.

On November 1, 1604, James and his new royal court watched the first recorded production of
Othello
at the Banqueting House in Whitehall. It is one of the play’s many paradoxes that a king called James saw his villainous namesake destroying a Moor, but perhaps James took comfort from watching Othello kill the specter of the circumcised and turbaned Turk. Nine years earlier, while king of Scotland, James had written a rather indifferent poem called “Lepanto.” It celebrated the victory of the Holy League in 1571:

Which fought was in Lepanto’s gulf,

Betwixt the baptized race

And circumcised turban’d Turks.
⁷⁶

The new king had no interest in pursuing alliances with the Moors or what he elsewhere called the “faithless Turks.” The Elizabethan age was over, and with it England’s alliance with the Islamic world.

Epilogue

By the time Shakespeare prepared to say farewell to the London stage and retire to Stratford in 1611, the English were leading figures in the eastern Mediterranean trade. The Levant Company was exporting English goods worth £250,000 per annum to Turkey, prompting one of its merchants, Sir Lewis Roberts, to write that the company had “grown to that height that (without comparison) it is the most flourishing and beneficial company to the commonwealth of any in England.”
¹
The company was beginning to face competition from a newer joint-stock initiative, the East India Company, which had been awarded its royal charter in December 1600—during al-Annuri’s time in London—with the aim of trading throughout the vast emporium of the Indian and Pacific oceans, stretching eastward from the Cape of Good Hope to the Strait of Magellan. By the 1630s the East India Company was exporting more than £100,000 of bullion and importing more than £1 million worth of pepper and spices with a variety of trading communities of different religions throughout India and the Indonesian archipelago.

Like the Levant Company, the East India Company did not involve itself in its early years in the kind of diplomatic or military state policy that had led the Elizabethans into such close alliances with Muslim rulers. James’s rapprochement with Spain brought him into closer alignment with the rest of Europe. He opposed Ottoman expansion just at the time when the Turks disengaged from Europe to focus on the Persian threats on their eastern borders. The new Stuart king’s delusions of grandeur led him to believe that his destiny was to unify Christendom, which resulted in peace with Spain and correspondence with leading figures in the Greek Orthodox Church, to whom he proposed a Christian union with the Church of England. It can have done little to ingratiate him with the new Ottoman sultan, Ahmed I.
²

James had no interest in appealing to the Ottoman sultan for military assistance during the central European conflict that dogged the later years of his reign, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). He was no doubt influenced in this by his decision to marry his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to Frederick V, Elector Palatine and a claimant to the Bohemian crown. Besides, where Elizabeth had turned her sights on the east, James’s interests were drawn west, to the New World. In 1606 he sanctioned the creation of the Virginia Company, a new joint-stock initiative aimed at settling English colonies on the northeast coast of America. The company could hardly compete with the Spanish domination of the Americas, but it represented the beginnings of a global dimension to English foreign and commercial policy, which was from that point forward no longer centered on the Mediterranean and Muslim world.

While most of England lamented Queen Elizabeth’s death, back in Venice, Anthony Sherley must have celebrated, as it brought one of his greatest supporters to the English throne. Never renowned as a shrewd judge of character, James had been flattered by Sherley’s prolix correspondence, and in May 1603 he wrote to the Venetian authorities insisting that Sir Anthony “is not the bad subject he is represented to be.” He asked the Venetians to hand over one brother and intercede with the Ottomans on behalf of the other.
³
It took another two years to secure Sir Thomas’s release, but Sir Anthony was free again the very next month. James seems to have realized his mistake, because by February 1604 he issued a license permitting Sherley “to remain beyond the seas some longer time, and recommended to the princes [and] strangers by whom he may pass.”
⁴
This gave Sherley some formal status as an Englishman abroad, but it was hardly a ringing endorsement, and talk of a return to England was quietly dropped. Sherley reverted to his old ways, passing intelligence about Turkish troop movements to Rudolf II in Prague, promising “I work still for your majesty and am ready for any sacrifice for your cause.”
⁵
On December 1, the Venetian authorities voted unanimously to banish Sir Anthony from the city forever. He was given four days to leave, on pain of death. Nothing he or James could say would change their minds, and so within days he departed Venice for the last time.

With his final exile from Venice, his Persian embassy was definitively over. James had no interest in pursuing alliances with either Persians or Ottomans; his primary aim was peace with Spain, which left Sherley with little diplomatic leverage (not that his increasingly erratic behavior left him much of that anyway). And yet this was still not the end of his picaresque story. He returned to Prague, from where he went to Morocco in 1605 to propose a Moorish campaign against the Turks in Algiers. Perhaps predictably it came to nothing. By the following year, he was working for the Spanish court in Madrid, persuading a gullible Philip III to fund a privateering fleet, with disastrous results.

In 1607 the Sherley brothers’ stories became so famous that a group of journeymen playwrights wrote a play about their exploits, entitled
The Travailes of the Three English Brothers,
although it came nowhere near capturing the sheer strangeness of their adventures. By this time, Shah Abbas had grown so frustrated by the lack of news from Sir Anthony that in 1608 he dispatched Sir Robert on a similar mission. Sir Robert had not been idle in his brother’s absence, converting to Catholicism and marrying the daughter of a Circassian chieftain, the nineteen-year-old Sampsonia, baptized by Carmelites as Teresa. He traveled across Europe, was made a count by the pope and then traveled to Madrid, where in April 1611 he was finally reunited with his brother Anthony after twelve years. The elder brother’s immediate response to their reunion was to denounce Robert as an English spy to the Spanish authorities. The youngest had finally eclipsed the elders: Sir Robert went on to serve King James and his son King Charles I until his death in 1628. Sir Thomas was released from prison and returned to England, depressed and destitute, dying on the Isle of Wight in 1633.

Sir Anthony stayed in Spain, an increasingly marginal and pathetic figure, living off a meager Spanish pension. He remained full of impossible dreams of power and influence yet was racked with debt, with “scarce money to buy him bread,” living “in a
bodegon,
which is little worse than an English ale house.” Somehow he persuaded Robert to take his account of the Persian embassy back to London and publish it as his
Relation
in 1613, but nobody paid much attention. In the 1620s he wrote two similarly sententious treatises addressed to the ministers of Philip IV, who had succeeded his father in 1621, proposing ever more deluded plans for his and Spain’s greater glory. The final damning picture of Sherley was given by Francis Cottington, England’s ambassador to Spain, who wrote, “The poor man comes sometimes to my house, and is as full of vanity as ever he was, making himself believe that he shall one day be a great prince, when for the present he wants shoes to wear.”
⁶
His fall from grace was so profound that he died in Spain in complete obscurity at an unknown date in the 1630s.

•   •   •

Shakespeare never again portrayed Moors or Turks with the detail or intensity of the plays he wrote between
Henry VI
and
Othello
. But he still had something to say about the growing scale and plight of migrants and refugees in early seventeenth-century London. Sometime around 1603–1604, he was involved in drafting revisions to a play written by several other playwrights (including Thomas Dekker) called
Sir Thomas More,
which dramatized the life and times of Henry VIII’s famous counselor.
⁷
Scene 6 is now believed to have been drafted by Shakespeare, and a manuscript survives that is the only example of a section of a play written in the author’s hand. It was written in response to the infamous May Day riots of 1517, when English artisans attacked foreign residents—or, in the language of the time, “strangers” or “aliens”—whom they blamed for monopolizing trade and taking “local” jobs. Such riots had taken place throughout London in the sixteenth century, some as recently as the early 1590s, so it was a highly sensitive and topical subject (as it is today). In scene 6, Shakespeare re-creates the moment More tries to calm the rioters, who demand “the removing of the strangers,” to which he responds: