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Para1Over the last twenty years, a significant amount of scholarship has been dedicated to England’s imaginative engagement with Muslims and the Ottoman empire in the second half of the sixteenth century. Influenced by the work of Edward Said, some observers have argued for what amounts to an orientalist perspective in Elizabethan imaginative works. Nabil I. Matar, for example, has insisted that it was plays, masques, pageants, and other similar sources that developed in British culture the discourse about Muslim otherness […] . In England the theatre took up the cudgel against the Muslims and appealed to a populace that felt threatened by, and confused at, the appearance of the Muslim Other in their metropolis, in their harbors, and across their Mediterranean and Atlantic trading routes (Matar 13–14). Richmond Barbour has similarly suggested that the early modern English represented the east in fictional plays, poems, prose using a variety of proto Orientalist tropes that together served to other their Muslim characters. Most recent commentators, though, have qualified, even rejected such assessments. In looking at figurations of Islam in early modern romance narratives, Benedict S. Robinson for example, has argued that these routinely presented complex allegories about the contemporary social and political landscape, Muslim characters standing in for England’s Protestant elite. In a different vein and with a different focus, Dimmock has maintained that the Turk occupied an ambiguous position in English professional drama of the time, and this reflected the influence of England’s imperialistic designs and mercantile expansions. A non-European infidel to be resisted at the same time as he was an important trading partner and ally in England’s Reformation war against Spain and the idolatrous Catholic Church, the Turk was both revered and maligned in plays like The Three Ladies of London and 1 and 2 Tamburlaine. Likewise, Vitkus has argued for a model of desire and fear, identification and revulsion in describing early modern stage representations of the Ottomans. These, he argues, were the product of a fluid set of associations between the English and the Turks in the second half of the sixteenth century, relationships not born out of a colonial enterprise of empire building where dynamics of power were predictably unequal but out of burgeoning commercial investments. As we shall see, though it does traffic in a number of Barbour’s proto-Orientalist tropes, Selimus also presents a fluid, ambiguous portrait of the Turks and the Ottoman empire.

Para2Selimus’s introduction to the eastern world of the Ottomans commences with a prologue delivered to Gentles in the audience. Like Romeo and Juliet, it summarizes action to come, promising a most lamentable history, / Which this last age acknowledges for true (Prologue Sp1). The lamentable history (Prologue Sp1) that it describes is very much a narrative dominated by its titular protagonist, its implacable king. It will show Selimus pursuing / His wretched father with remorseless spite / And, daunted once, his force again renew, / Poison his father, kill his friends in fight (Prologue Sp1). The play ends with a similar focal point, its epilogue describing the whole as bringing victorious Selimus / Unto the crown of great Arabia (Epilogue Sp1).

Para3Bajazeth’s youngest son makes a powerful first appearance in the play’s second scene where he delivers an extended aside immediately upon entering the stage with his followers. Much of what follows draws from proto-Orientalist tropes of the Turk as treacherous and unnatural (Barbour 22–3). In this 150-line speech, Selimus acknowledges his violent dynastic ambitions, vowing one way or another to take the Turkish crown (Sc2 Sp1) from his elderly father, and he is brazen about his atheistic world view. In his aggressive pursuit of power, he vows both to have Mahound’s laws […] locked up in their case (Sc2 Sp1)(ironically considering it sacrilege for to be holy (Sc2 Sp1) and to scorn religion (Sc2 Sp1). He also forwards a cultural history of mankind in which, ages ago, some sage man, above the vulgar wise, / Knowing that laws could not in quiet dwell, / Unless they were observed, did first devise / The names of gods, religion, heaven, and hell, / And gan of pains and feigned rewards to tell: / Pains for those men which did neglect the law, / Rewards for those that lived in quiet awe (Sc2 Sp1). In what Elizabethan audiences would likely have seen as a particularly outrageous claim, Selimus argues that family too was a sham byproduct of the invention of a godhead. Selimus’s sardonic view of religion, of heaven and hell as bugbears (Sc2 Sp1), is reminiscent of Machiavelli (Riad has called Selimus the ideal Machiavellian prince (3) who in works like The Prince and The Discourses which were widely disseminated in the second half of the sixteenth century suggested that god and religion were human inventions. Neither, though, goes so far as Machevill does in the Prologue to The Jew of Malta, arguing that Religion is but a childish Toy (Marlowe B1r). Politically pragmatic, at least at this early point in the play, Selimus acknowledges religion’s essential role in keeping the baser sort in fear (Sc2 Sp1). Selimus’s malignancy is not entirely without motive. Here, he twice complains about Bajazeth’s intention to make Acomat his heir (Sc2 Sp1, Sc2 Sp1). This, he says, has made him free (Sc2 Sp1) to pursue his own ends since Bazajeth’s desire has injured him (Sc2 Sp1).

Para4A descendant of the shifty Vice figure, Selimus, like Richard III and Barabas, pursues his ambitions through subterfuge while at the same time playing the part of the victim. Upon being rebuffed in the scene 4, he uses Bajazeth’s unnatural (Sc4 Sp1) actions as excuse, vowing that he will not take […] rest ’til his right hand / Hath pulled the crown from off his coward’s head / And on the ground his bastards’ gore-blood shed (Sc4 Sp1). One of many instances of dramatic irony in the first half of the play, this is a course of action that auditors had already heard about in the second scene. Selimus’s deceptions and Vice-like downstage relationship with the audience continue when he finally reemerges ten scenes later from his defeat at Chiurlu. After vowing to be dutiful / And loving […] to Bajazeth (Sc18 Sp5), he immediately pronounces that once he gets mongst the Janisars, / Then on his head the golden crown shall sit (Sc18 Sp5) in an aside. At Bajazeth’s funeral in the 21 st scene, he again begins with an aside, averring that thus must he blind his subjects’ eyes / And strain his own to weep for Bajazeth (Sc21 Sp1). Religious pomp (Sc21 Sp1) is then deployed to appeal to what Selimus earlier referred to as the baser sort (Sc2 Sp1). For the rest of the play, Selimus pursues his tyrannical ends directly, trading circumspection for unguarded antagonism against his political rivals and unflinching brutality.

Para5In staging such a protagonist, Selimus was not just influenced by the moral interludes of the earlier sixteenth century; it also owed a heavy debt to Marlowe, especially to his Tamburlaine plays. First staged in 1587 and 1588 respectively, Tamburlaine the Great and its sequel took the Mediterranean east as their locale, following the violent ascent of Tamburlaine from a shepherd to ruler of Turkey, Egypt and Arabia to Monarke of the earth (Marlowe L2r). Part romantic hero, part sublime orator, part sociopath, the character of Tamburlaine was unprecedented on London’s professional stage. His breathless upward trajectory continues until the very end of 2 Tamburlaine, even as he heretically proclaimed in 1 Tamburlaine that his ambition was neither virtue nor virtue’s heavenly reward but the sweet fruition of an earthly crown (C1v). Few if any professional plays written in the 1580s proved to be more successful or influential. Henslowe’s diary records the Admiral’s Men frequently staging both parts in 1594 and 1595 to a packed Rose theatre (Foakes 23–33). Over a dozen imitations were produced within five years of 1 Tamburlaine’s debut, and versions of what is now called Marlowe’s mighty line could be heard in plays by Greene, Peele, Lodge, Shakespeare, and others. Marlowe’s Tamburlaines would also be a vanguard heralding new interest in professional drama as literary material, the printer-bookseller Richard Jones publishing tandem editions in 1590, 1593, and 1597 (Melnikoff, Jones’s Pen).

Selimus’s engagement with Marlowe’s heroic dramas is evident throughout. The play stands as an offshoot of the Tamburlaine dramas, Selimus the great grandson of the Turkish sultan Bajazeth whom Tamburlaine defeated, humiliated, and drove to suicide in 1 Tamburlaine. Its series of eastern locales smacks of the terrain of Tamburlaine, and its hero’s amorality, egotism, and ambition mirror Tamburlaine’s. Selimus reproduces too the unsettling end of 1 Tamburlaine whereby its titular hero stands victorious even after committing horrific crimes and thumbing his nose at divine retribution. At the same time, 2 Tamburlaine’s focus on siblings and succession is replicated by the dynastic rivalry between Selimus, Acomat, and Corcut. To underscore its Tamburlaine credentials, Selimus even directly alludes to Marlowe’s protagonist on three separate occasions. Moments before his death, Bajazeth conjures up his namesake, calling him that woeful emperor / Whom the Tatarians locked in a cage / To be a spectacle to all the world (Sc19 Sp1). Tamburlaine, the great scourge of nations (Sc19 Sp1) he makes clear, Was he that pulled him from his kingdom so (Sc19 Sp1). Later, Tonombey describes his father as being lineally descended (Sc26 Sp2) from Usumcasane, the dogged follower of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine who is made King of Morocco in Act 4 of 1 Tamburlaine and who mourns Tamburlaine’s imminent death at the end of 2 Tamburlaine. Selimus calls forth a very different lineage for Tonombey in the play’s penultimate scene when he addresses him as thou that vauntst thyself / Sprung from great Tamburlaine the Scythian thief (Sc29 Sp1).

Para6While it is almost impossible to deny Selimus’s debt to 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, observers have disagreed over the nature of the play’s engagement with the plays. Irving Ribner has argued that Selimus is a servile imitation of Marlowe’s heroic dramas but one that affords an intellectual response to them. In it, he argues, the unspeakable horror of Selimus’s reign is offered as an example of what must result when Marlowe’s ideal of kingship prevails (167). More recently, Tom Rutter too has argued that Selimus was written as a response to the Tamburlaine plays. He concludes, though, that Selimus’s atheistic political philosophy is rendered so extreme that it is purposely made to feel absurd (209). Peter Berek has rejected arguments like these, contending that perhaps Greene the author of Selimus and Marlowe did disagree about politics and human nature. But it is unlikely that Greene thought it more important to advance an intellectual debate than he did to get a good price from the players (Weak Sons 57). Still, Berek admits that Selimus does engage with the ethical implications of 1 and 2 Tamburlaine perhaps more than any of his peers, creating in Selimus a version of Tamburlaine as an unmistakeable villain. While audiences may prefer him to his brother Acomat, argues Berek, they still can have no doubt that he is, as Selimus himself admits at the end of the play, a basilisk. In a provocatively different account, Jane Grogan has suggested that Selimus retreats from distinctions drawn between Shia and Sunni forms of Islam in 2 Tamburlaine. Instead, the play mostly transforms the Islamic schism staged in Marlowe’s sequel—Turk against Persian—into an internecine Turkish conflict. Though modeled on what Grogan argues is a Persian Tamburlaine, Selimus is essentially dressed up as a Turk. This is the beginning of a trend on the English stages that ignores the sectarian complexities of Islam in favor of conflicts between Christians and Muslims, generally defined. Grogan’s argument is compelling. Ismael does indeed cast a dark shadow over Selimus. Not only is he invoked many times by Bajazeth (e.g. Sc1 Sp2, Sc10 Sp14), but he is also identified as a potential ally of Acomat (Sc23 Sp1). The play, though, makes little effort to define the conflict between Selimus and Acomat as a sectarian one, as it was historically.

Para7Selimus’s violent struggle with Acomat emerges in the final third of the play, after Bajazeth is deposed. Bajazeth introduces us to Selimus’s elder brother in the opening scene, describing him as pompous (Sc1 Sp2) and loving to court it with his wife, / And in a pleasant quiet joying to pause (Sc1 Sp2). Acomat himself, though, does not enter the play until the ninth scene when he pledges to lay off effeminate robes / And arm his body in an iron wall (Sc9 Sp1). Spurned by the janissaries in his ambition to become Ottoman emperor, he quickly succumbs to an all-consuming anger and vows to take revenge on his father for renigging on his promise to resign in favor of him. Thereafter, a disturbing example of the proto-Orientalist trope of the Turk as violent and ruthless (Barbour 22), Acomat embarks on a murderous rampage, hurling his nephew Mahomet onto a grove of steelhead spears (Sc13 Sp18), strangling his niece Zonara, and disfiguring Bajazeth’s trusted adviser Aga. Acomat’s on-stage blinding of Aga and servering of Aga’s hands are especially unsettling. Indeed, a number of observers have argued that the episode was the inspiration for similar scenes of violence in both Titus Andronicus and King Lear. Acomat’s violent spree inspires a rapprochement between Selimus and his father, and this eventually leads to Acomat’s downfall.

Para8Though pervasive, Acomat’s presence in the play is not just glossed over by the prologue and epilogue (he apparently is one of the friends (Prologue Sp1) Selimus kills in fight (Prologue Sp1); it also has been routinely neglected by commentators. Ribner and Hopkinson both ignore Acomat, and Vitkus even mistakes him for his younger brother in accusing Selimus of the cruel treatment of Aga (19). More helpful have been Berek and Riad who have each described Acomat as a foil to Selimus. Acomat’s unjustified fury, Riad argues, his cruelty, villainy and even his language and sardonic humor are all qualities meant to emphasize his brutality and bring Selimus into a more favourable contrast (3). That the original author or authors of Selimus were keen to develop such a contrast is supported by the fact that Ahmed’s rebellion is mentioned only briefly in Ashton and Whetstone.

Para9Acomat’s villainy works to create an ethical dilemma for the play’s audience, encouraging them to side with Selimus and his atheistic arguments for Machiavellian political expediency. Acomat, though, is not simply a more sardonic and violent version of Selimus. Unlike his youngest brother, he is associated throughout with an acculturated court environment of economic privilege, honor, fame, and religion, a milieu reminiscent of Elizabeth I’s court at the time. His vengefulness is specifically motivated by what he sees as Bajazeth’s betrayal of courtly values, of his abandoning duty, promise, and religious oaths (Sc11 Sp1). Indeed, even as he is committing terrible acts of violence in the second third of the play, he continues to accuse Bajazeth of injuring him (Sc13 Sp1, Sc15 Sp5) and to invoke the aid of Mahomet to his cause (Sc11 Sp1, Sc13 Sp3). Moreover, Acomat may vow to lay off effeminate robes (Sc9 Sp1) in his first appearance, but his association with love and women comes back to haunt him at the end. Not only is he shown rushing to the aid of his wife at the conclusion of the 26th scene, but at that moment he admits that he has left his wife as overseer (Sc26 Sp3) of his Amasya jurisdiction. Adding to the effeminization of Acomat, Selimus, in the previous scene, refers to the forces of Amasya as the unmanly host (Sc25 Sp9) of Acomat’s wife. After he captures her, Selimus then compares her failed resistance to that of an Amazonian queen. What? he mockingly asserts, Though you braved us on your city walls, / Like to that Amazonian Melanippe, / Leaving the banks of swift-streamed Thermodon / To challenge combat with great Hercules, / Yet Selimus hath plucked your haughty plumes (Sc28 Sp1). Together, Acomat’s gendered, courtly associations suggest that in favoring Selimus against his brother at the end of the play, the audience was not just choosing the lesser of two analogous evils but siding with patriarchy, hypermasculinity, and political pragmatism over what it characterizes as an effeminizing and effete court culture.

Para10While the speeches and misdeeds of Selimus and Acomat color much of the play, the hand-wringing and suffering of their father loom large in the play’s first two thirds. It is Bajazeth who dominates the play’s opening scene, dismissing his followers immediately after they first enter and delivering an impassioned hundred-line speech. Here, the Turkish sultan complains about his thirty-year reign, recounting past struggles with foreign menaces like the Persians, Tatars, and Christians as well as impending difficulties with home-born outrages (Sc1 Sp2), that is, a burgeoning internecine struggle for power amongst his three sons. In this struggle, even though Acomat has the support of his father, Selimus wields the most power in that his exploits as a warrior have endeared him to the all-powerful janissaries.

Para11Such an opening is very much in the vein of Seneca, who in tragedies like Medea, Hippolytus, and Hercules Oetaeus started things off with extended declamatory speeches from his titular protagonists. These set pieces provided not only necessary lines of exposition but opportunities for passionate complaints about the world and fate. Seneca’s plays, of course, were fixtures in the humanist grammar-school and university curricula, revered for their heroic protagonists, for what was understood as their moral didacticism, and for their rhetorical set pieces and fluorishes. Throughout the sixteenth century, students not only translated Senecan passages from Latin into English and then back into Latin, but they also performed the tragedies for their peers in their original language. The ubiquity of Seneca in the schools is underscored by Francis Meres’s ample praise in Pallidis Tamia (1600) where he notes that the Roman playwright is accounted the best for […] Tragedy among the Latines (Oo2r). It is also helps explain the print publication of five translations of Seneca’s tragedies between 1559 and 1565 and of collected editions in English and Latin in 1581 and 1589 respectively.

Para12In conventional Senecan fashion, Bajazeth in his complaints responds to external pressure stoically by looking at death as a form of relief and the prospect of his own death as source of comfort. Early on, his frequent reveries about his dead eldest son come at the heels of his own experiences with trauma, both real and imagined. In the opening scene, Bajazeth re-experiences a series of past failures but then imagines that at least his eldest son has found peace in death, reassuring himself that Well may Alemshae’s soul rest in her latest grave (Sc1 Sp2). Similarly, in the scene 8 after defeating Selimus in battle and sending Alemshae’s murderer Ottrante off for execution, he proclaims that the unrevengèd ghost of his son / Shall now no more wander on Stygian banks / But rest in quiet in th’Elysian fields (Sc8 Sp5). As Bajazeth is more and more beaten down, though, by the rebellions of Selimus and Acomat, uncontrollable emotion frequently gets the best of him, and we often see him weeping, even swooning (14). Such moments of intense emotion can be associated with Senecan furor; they also smack of proto-Orientalist tropes of the time that linked the Turks with effeminacy (Barbour 28).

Para13These moments increasingly lead the Ottoman emperor to turn to death as a wished-for end. Bajazeth contemplates death after he encounters the mutilated Aga: send for Selimus, / So I may be revenged I care not how. / The worst that can befall me is but death; / ʼTis that would end my woeful misery (Sc16 Sp4). He calls for it too after being deposed by Selimus, appealing to Fortune, Then oh, thou blind procurer of mischance / That stayst thyself upon a turning wheel, / Thy cruel hand, even when thou wilt, enhance / And pierce my poor heart with thy brilliant steel (Sc19 Sp1). Reminiscent of Hieronimo’s speeches in the third act of The Spanish Tragedy, these instances of resignation in the face of extreme suffering play to the audience’s empathy and counterbalance the Machiavellian scheming of Selimus and sadistic brutality of Acomat in adjoining scenes. In this, the play offers an account of Bajazeth that is much more sympathetic than its main source which describes him as sly, lustful, prone to drinking, and power-hungry (Ashton G4v, G2r 2, G8r).

Para14Bajazeth’s declamatory, emotional speech can also be linked to the series of verse complaints collected together in the incredibly popular Mirror for Magistrates series, the first title of which was published by the printer Thomas Marshe in 1559. Tragic autobiographies narrated by famous men and women from history were first authored and compiled in the fourteenth century by Boccaccio in his De Casibus virorum illustrium. John Lydgate translated these into English around 1431. His Fall of Princes eventually inspired the writer William Baldwin to extend the collection’s de casibus formula, whereby men and women are shown to rise and fall at Fortune’s bidding, to English historical figures. Their 1559 Mirror would be adapted, revised, and/or expanded numerous times by other bookmen, editors, writers, compilers in the following decades. As Paul Budra has shown, the various poems that make up these collections are presented both as histories and tragedies, fashioned to be read didactically and empathetically. Thus, Thomas Sackville’s complaint, Henry, Duke of Buckingham, provides not just a warning about the dangers of untrammeled ambition but a moving portrait of Richard III’s partner in crime. Written in rhyme royal like a number of the Mirror complaints, Sackville’s poem lays it on thick, the repentant Buckingham exclaiming about his sad fate, And as the Turtle that hath lost her mate, / Whom grypyng sorowe doth so sore attaynt, / With dolefull voyce and sound whych she doth make / Mourning her losse, fylles all the grove wyth playnt, / So I alas forsaken, and forfaynt, / With restles foote the wud rome vp and downe, / Which of my dole al shyvering doth resowne (Baldwin W2r).

Para15Like most of the Mirror complaints, Bajazeth’s long opening soliloquy contains an extended account of his personal and communal struggles; it also is inflected by despondent emotion throughout, the result of what Bajazeth tells his followers is his heavy and disconsolate state (Sc1 Sp1). He begins by complaining of the heavy burden of leadership where doubt and care are with us evermore (Sc1 Sp2), and his sadness builds until he recounts the untimely death of his son Alemshae, exclaiming with a parenthetical sigh, Good Alemshae (ah, this remembrance sour) / Was slain, the more t’augment my sad distress. / In losing Alemshae poor, I lost more / Than ever I had gainéd theretofore (Sc1 Sp2). Bajazeth’s sad bemoanings will continue in a majority of his subsequent speeches. Facing Selimus’s attack at Chiurlu, he describes his heart as being overwhelmed with fear and grief (Sc5 Sp3); having defeated Selimus, he again describes his heart heavy (Sc10 Sp1), telling his followers to withdraw […] that he may rest his overburdened soul (Sc10 Sp1). His final appearances in scenes 14, 18, and 19 are even more fraught with doleful emotional outbursts, him reacting to the deaths of his grandchildren and followers as well as to the mutilation of Aga with poignant testimonials of his trembling (Sc14 Sp1), shivering (Sc14 Sp1), weeping (Sc14 Sp6, Sc14 Sp7, Sc16 Sp4, Sc19 Sp3), mourning (Sc14 Sp7, Sc14 Sp7), and consuming sorrow (Sc16 Sp2). As he comes closer and closer to his end, he more and more imagines himself as a powerless pawn of Fortune. Before withdrawing to rest in scene 10, he asks, What prince soe’er trusts to his mighty pow’r, / Ruling the reins of so many nations, / And feareth not least fickle Fortune lour / And thinks his kingdom free from alterations (Sc10 Sp1). And in the same speech where he appeals to Fortune to pierce his poor heart (Sc19 Sp1), he begins by complaining, Fortune never showed herself so cross / To any prince as to poor Bajazeth (Sc19 Sp1). Like Romeo does in Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare F4v, Bajazeth comes to see himself as fortune’s fool.

Para16Selimus’s father is not the only character to suffer greatly as a consequence of the play’s dynastic struggle. Bajazeth’s advisor Aga endures terrible treatment at the hands of Acomat, and like Bajazeth, he bewails his mistreatment in the doleful style of the Mirror. Waiting to leave for Dimoticum with the deposed Bajazeth, Aga tells his tragedy (Sc19 Sp2), his rising from poor estate (Sc19 Sp2) to an exalted (Sc19 Sp2) position serving the Ottoman emperor. In recounting his personal history, he blames his terrible lot on Some blazing comet […] portending miserable chance to me (Sc19 Sp2). He ends his life intending to forever weep and wail our strange calamities (Sc19 Sp12) with Bajazeth in the afterlife. In coupling Bajazeth’s tragic fall with the of Aga, Selimus, like Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, reproduces the larger de Casibus structure of the Mirror which presents what Budra has described as a concatenation of tragic biographies (79). Moreover, read didactically as a history, the play offers up Bajazeth and Aga as examples of aged and deficient leadership, or, more prejudicially, of infidels brought down by their irreligion and by their barbaric succession practices. Read, however, as de Casibus tragedy, the play presents a deeply moving portrait of two characters who were, through no faults of their own, brought low by the ever-turning wheel of Fortune.

Para17After deposing his father, Selimus quickly turns his attention to his many political rivals, calling them these heads of Hydra in his first long speech as Ottoman emperor (Sc18 Sp14). As unconstant as the wind (Sc18 Sp14), Bajazeth is targeted first, and Selimus quickly sends for his father’s physician, a cunning Jew (Sc18 Sp14), to do the deed with some intoxicated drink (Sc18 Sp14). This plan (or platform (Sc18 Sp14) as Selimus calls it) was apparently in the works before the deposition, Selimus already certain that Abraham will venture any thing for gold (Sc18 Sp14). After a brief interview where he resolved to do the deed (Sc18 Sp15), Abraham then poisons Bajazaeth, Aga, and himself in the following scene.

Para18As Çipa traces (56–8), historians of the Ottoman empire, wary of rendering Selimus’s sultanate illegitimate, have long been less than forthright about Selimus’s unprecedented dealings with his father after coming to power. In some instances, the cause of Bayezid II’s death has been ignored while in other cases, it has been attributed to natural causes. A Short Treatise, however, pulls no punches. It provided ample material about Bayezid II’s downfall. The main narrative describes how Selimus had poyson ministred […] by a iewe phisition (H4r) on Bayezid II’s journey to Dimoticum, while Ashton, in a marginal note, offers Cuspin’s account that Selimus delivered poison in one of his fynest dishes (H4r) at a sendoff banquet. The chronicle also provides a motive, describing at significant length Selimus’s desire to acquire his father’s vast personal wealth. Couetousnes, it says, (mother of al cruelty, yea and of all other kynde of mischefe) was readye & at hande to pricke hym forwarde to worke this wycked and cruell dede (H4v). This is many ways is the stuff of a Tudor interlude, Selimus an everyman, Couetousnes a vice intent on his destruction. Abraham, of course, is no mother nor is he shown to be the instigator of Selimus’s plot against his father. Even so, his character is little more than an abstract manifestation of evil, and his sudden appearance is incredibly vice-like, coming as it does almost immediately after Selimus fully resolves as sultan to commit both patricide and fratricide. Abraham is even given a menacing aside in his interview with Selimus, turning to the audience to vow, And would your grace would once but taste of his poisons, / I could as willingly afford them you, / As to your agéd father Bajazeth (Sc18 Sp15). This sudden entrance of a purely malevolent character is reminiscent of the final scenes of Edward II, where Lightborne appears out of nowhere to take on the assassination of Edward II at the bidding of Mortimer Junior. Indeed, Selimus even describes his murderous plot against Corcut as a pageant (Sc18 Sp14), imagining it through old-school dramatic terms.

Para19Selimus may have been cued by A Short Treatise’s identification of a iewe physician as Bajazeth’s assassin, but its full portrait of Abraham—his disloyalty, his shadowy potion making, his murderousness, and his greed—can be connected to a long history of antisemitism in England which began long before the Jews were officially expelled from England at the end of the thirteenth century. As James Shapiro has shown, though, prejudice against Jewish people intensified after the upheaval of the Reformation when social and religious identity was very much in flux. By the end of the sixteenth century, at the same time as their was a limited migration of recently converted Spanish Jews into England, the Jew had in many ways become the other of what was imagined to be a stable and recognizable English subject. As much as anything, then, it is Abraham’s stealth, his slipperiness, his ability to move unnoticed among the Ottomans, that was possibly the most unsettling for its first audiences. Selimus tells his followers that Abraham is with (Sc18 Sp14) Bajazeth, but even so, when his physician first steps forward in scene 19, Bajazeth does not recognize him, asking, For who art thou that thus dost pity us? (Sc19 Sp5). Abraham is not just unrecognizable at this point; he also has been lurking quietly in the shadows for over eighty lines after entering with a cup at the scene’s opening. Selimus’s Jew, in other words, is rendered as much through absence as he is through stereotype.

Para20Selimus was not the only play of its day to present a Jewish character to English audiences; it arguably is, however, unique in its particular fashioning of Abraham. In his 1579 The School of Abuse, the anti-theatrical pamphleteer Stephen Gosson recounts recently seeing a play he calls The Jew at the Red Bull Theatre which presented the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of Usurers (C6v). Unfortunately, this play, for which Gosson offers a rare endorsement, is now lost, and as such it is impossible to know for sure whether it indeed offered the same antisemitic fare as does Selimus. It has been argued, though, that Robert Wilson’s interlude-like The Three Ladies of London should be seen as a response to The Jew. In this early 1580s professional play, the Jewish levantine moneylender Gerontus is clearly devised as a foil to the Christian merchant Mercadore who attempts to get ahead by fraud, dissimulation, or any other means. At the end of the play, Gerontius agrees to forgive Mercadore’s 3000-ducat debt in order to keep him from having to convert to Islam. Most commentators like E.K. Chambers have concluded that Gerontus’s actions here and throughout the play work to unsettle Jewish stereotypes. Arguably the most influential stage representation of the Jew written around the time of Selimus was The Jew of Malta. Though its composition date is unknown, we do know from Henslowe’s diary that the play was a theatrical tour-de-force throughout the 1590s. With his lead character Barabas, Marlowe fashioned a thoroughly stereotypical portrait of a Jew, one apparently realized on stage with prosthetic nose and orange wig. Like Abraham, Barabas is disloyal, greedy, an expert maker of poisons, and an unrepentant murderer. Many scholars, though, have convincingly argued that Marlowe’s villain is purposely shown through a plethora of layered ironies to be no worse than the Christians around him and that his portrait is so markedly stereotypical that it works to expose the prejudicial fantasies of its first audiences.

Para21If there is any Marlovian irony to be found in Selimus’s Abraham episode, Bayezid II’s dramatic actions with respect to the Jewish people ten years into his emperorship in the 1490s can be taken as one potential source. In 1492, in response to a formal decree from Ferdinand and Isabella, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand Jews were expelled from Spain; hundreds of thousands more were forced to leave in the following decades (Shaw). Recognizing the economic benefits that they could bring to his empire, Bayezid II rescued many of these 1492 refugees with his Ottoman navy, and he made it clear these men and women were to be made welcome in Ottoman territories. In this, the sultan continued the tolerant policies towards Jewish people implemented by previous Ottoman emperors, particularly of his father Mehmud II. In Selimus, Bajazeth’s employment of a Jew ends up being a piece of his undoing, but it is unclear whether this irony was intended. Neither A Short Treatise nor Two Very Notable Commentaries make any mention of Bayezid’s Jewish policies, though the latter source does mention Mehmud II’s welcoming Jewish refugees from Spain into Istanbul as part of his rebuilding efforts after conquering the city in 1453 (Cambini F1r).

Para22Like a number of plays in the 1580s and early 1590s, Selimus has comic scenes driven by a clown character. Clowning was first made popular on the Elizabethan professional stage by Richard Tarlton who was a star performer with the Queen’s Men between 1583 and 1588 (the year of his death). His extemporal interactions with audiences, down-home buffoonery, and after-play jigs (in which he both sang and danced) became the stuff of legend, memorialized in a series of printed anecdotes and in the jest book Tarlton’s Jests. He worked too as both a playwright and a pamphleteer. The popularity of the Elizabethan clown was among other things connected with the rapid growth of England’s urban centers in the second half of the sixteenth century. As David Wiles has argued, London’s newly urbanized audiences identified strongly with Tarlton’s rustic routines, especially with his ability to turn the tables on his more urbane interlocutors.

Para23Bullithrumble’s performances in Scenes 20 and 22 draw heavily from Tarlton’s famed routines. He not only first enters with the kind of energy Tarlton was known for (the stage direction describes him as running (20), but he also immediately establishes a rapport with the audience in addressing them with Married, quoth you? (Sc20 Sp1). Thereafter, Bullithrumble responds to Corcut’s request for food with a comic mixture of misunderstandings (e.g. My name, sir, oho lord yes […] (Sc20 Sp7), neologisms (e.g. felonians (Sc20 Sp3), and jumbles (e.g. keep your hands from lying and slandering (Sc20 Sp13). Like Tarlton’s clowns, he also escapes real-world consequences in the end, vowing to keep his best joint from the strappado (Sc22 Sp14) (i.e. his neck from the noose) by running away.

Para24Akin to those in other plays of the period, Selimus’s Bullithrumble scenes resonate with what were conventional clowning scenarios. Reverberating modes of clowning were the product of the theatrical culture of the time where playwrights, players, and playgoers were conversant across companies and theatres. Towards the beginning of his first appearance, Bullithrumble worries that Corcut is some cozening conicatching crossbiter that would fain persuade me he knows me, and so under a ’tence of familiarity and acquaintance, uncle me of victuals (Sc20 Sp5). Part of an emergent fascination with urban criminality driven in large part by Greene’s true-crime conycatching pamphlets, Bullithrumble’s anxiety over being duped by a crossbiter finds similar expression in The Taming of the Shrew when Petruccio’s servant Curtis complains of the clown Grumio’s reluctance to share news by accusing him of being so full of conicatching (Shakespeare T3r). Towards the end of the same scene, Bullithrumble’s encounter with Corcut and the page becomes a job interview, Bullithrumble mistaking their desire for meat (Sc20 Sp10) for a desire for employment. Tell me, he asks, if I should entertain you, would you not steal? (Sc20 Sp11). Similar scenes of recruitment can be found in Marlowe’s Edward II (Gaveston quizzing three poor men), Greene’s James IV (Ateukin hiring Slipper, Nano, and Andrew), and Mucedorus (Segasto asking Mouse to come home with him). In exiting, Bullithrumble promises to make Corcut and the Page as eloquent as our parson himself (Sc20 Sp15). In doing so, he reminds us of his penchant for parodying the performances of Protestant clerics. This tendency is perhaps most obvious when, after assuring Corcut that he is a Christian with a yes, verily, and do believe: and it please you, he then promises to go forward in his catechism (Sc20 Sp7). Both versions of Doctor Faustus contain numerous scenes of clowns playing the pastor, from the second scene where Wagner ends his interview with the two scholars with and so, the Lord bless you, preserue you, and keepe you my deare brethren, my deare brethren (Marlowe B1r) to Robin and Ralph’s (Rafe’s) comic Latin conjurings.

Para25Shrewish women were frequently the bane of the professional theatre’s many Derricks, Strumbos, and Slippers. Bullithrumble offers his own series of complaints against a wife who he accuses of beating him, accosting him with a never silent tongue, and saddling him with seventeen cradles (Sc22 Sp12). Some of these complaints can be found in Bullithrumble’s fifteen-line doggerel song which he delivers at the start of his first scene. Coming as they do after the deaths of Bajazeth and Aga, Bullithrumble’s bemoanings about the extreme, inescapable violence of his wife (her club’s trump (Sc20 Sp1), her laying it on his skin (Sc20 Sp1), her blows (Sc20 Sp1), her holly wand […] blessings (Sc20 Sp1) work to displace the threat of Selimus onto women. In doing so, the play’s scenes of clowning soothed English anxieties about the violent Turk through misogyny, if only for a short run of two scenes.

Para26Bullithrumble’s appearance in scene 20 is as surprising as it will be short lived. Up until this point, nothing prepares us for the festive jocularity of his clowning. Indeed, his entrance comes immediately after the deaths of Bajazeth and Aga in what is arguably the most doleful scene in the play, Aga ending things by promising to beg a boon of lovely Persephone, / That Bajazeth and I may in the mournful fields / Still weep and wail our strange calamities (Sc19 Sp12). In running onto the stage while laughing to himself, Bullithrumble provides a cathartic release for the audience, a vigorous counter to all of the violence, pathos, and darkness that had been building from the very first scene. Jarring too is the familiarity of it all. Historically, Korkud’s frantic escape from his brother took him to a cave near the city of Manisa in western Turkey (Finkel 103). But within a few dozen lines it becomes clear that Bullithrumble’s pastoral locale is liminal, as much England as it is Asia. Hints of this are given throughout. Domestic directives are ten commandments (Sc20 Sp1), Bullithrumble’s marriage officiant is Sir John (Sc20 Sp1), and knaves are cozening conicatching crossbiters (Sc20 Sp5). Bullithrumble himself has godfathers and godmothers (Sc20 Sp7) who will vouch for his name upon the font-stone and upon the church book (Sc20 Sp7) and he is kept in line by one Maister Pigwiggen our constable (Sc20 Sp11). All of this culminates in the next scene when Bullithrumble refuses to give himself up to Cali Bassa, observing, Marry, that had been the way to preferment, down Holborn up Tyburn (Sc22 Sp14). Brian Walsh has argued that all of these anachronisms work to shred what has been the exoticism of the play up until this point. This, he claims, is very much a Queen’s Men moment, the audience of Selimus given the presentness of theatre in the face of what has been its representation of a distant time and place.

Para27In running away at the conclusion of scene 22, Bullithrumble exits the stage for the final time. In this, the play is more akin to Titus Andronicus where the clown’s appearances are limited to two scenes than to Queen’s Men plays like The Famous Victories of Henry V or Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay where the respective clowns Derrick and Miles appear in a number of scenes. His short stage life is predictable, closely linked as it is to that of Corcut who is executed in the following scene. Thematically, it makes sense as well in that Bullithrumble’s fecundity (i.e. his being the father of seventeen children) stands in the abstract as an insurmountable threat to the fratricidal political programs of both Acomat and Selimus.

Para28Corcut does not make his first entrance until the 20th scene where his opening 30-line lament comes on the heels of Bullithrumble’s energetic burst onto the stage. Before this, he had been a frequent topic in the play. Bajazeth describes him as a philosopher (Sc1 Sp2) who spends his time in learning arts and Mahound’s dreaded laws (Sc1 Sp2), and Calli Bassa calls him a man of peace (Sc10 Sp5) who never saw his foeman’s face / But always slept upon a lady’s lap (Sc10 Sp5). Much of this portrait of Corcut is taken from A Short Treatise which describes him as spending his time in the study of philosophy & knoweledge of Mahumetans lawe & diuinitie (G5v). Though Bajazeth and Selimus see him as an aggressive pursuant of the sultanship (Sc1 Sp2, Sc5 Sp2), Corcut ends up playing the dutiful son, only asserting through a messenger his right (Sc10 Sp12) of succession as the eldest surviving sibling. Though strange in the Ottoman world, Corcut’s primogeniture-like presumptions would have appealed to the play’s English audience, as would his combined pursuit of arts and divinity, smacking as it does of the educational programs of Protestant humanism.

Para29Displaced, famished, and pursued by his ruthless youngest brother, Corcut continues to pull at the audience’s sympathies in the play’s only pastoral scenes. In his first long speech, he complains of Selimus’s damned ambition (Sc20 Sp2) and condemns his father’s death unkind (Sc20 Sp2) which he suggests is an affront to high God (Sc20 Sp2). Corcut’s deep grief is visually embodied in his being disguised like a mourner (20), and his relationship with his father will be made to stand in stark contrast with that of his younger brother in the following scene when Selimus delivers a sham eulogy at Bazajeth’s interment. Corcut’s comic interview with Bullithrumble ends with an appeal for food, Corcut asking for the clown’s charity in Protestant terms, invoking blesséd Christ and the hope of grace in adoring him (Sc20 Sp8). Two scenes later, the page’s betrayal of his master is especially moving as it underscores Corcut’s artlessness and comes immediately before Corcut declares his innocent desire to spend his life, / Feeding his sheep among these grassy lands (Sc22 Sp4).

Para30Selimus’s final confrontation with his older brother takes place in the following scene, and it ends with Corcut announcing his conversion to Christianity and calling for Selimus’s own conversion and repentance for his plethora of sins, especially his murder of his father. Such a transformation, of course, was pure fiction, one of the more stark examples of the play adapting chronicle history for its Elizabethan audience. Corcut’s change of heart, we learn, took place only recently, after he escaped his home for the pastoral landscape of Smyrna. Since my vain flight from fair Magnesia, he testifies, I have conversed with Christians / And learned of them the way to save my soul / And please the anger of the highest god (Sc23 Sp12). Dimmock has demonstrated the various ways in which Corcut’s denunciation of his brother smacks of a number of Protestant practices and tenets, including programs of Muslim conversion and visions of God’s final judgment as leading directly—sans Purgatory—to everlasting torment in hell (176–7). To these should be added the humble, communal roots of Corcut’s conversion, coming as it does as a result of conversations with Christians in a rural locale.

Para31Acute anxieties about religious conversion had first come to England on the heels of the Reformation as the country managed a wide-scale religious transformation of its own. By the end of the 1580s, the curbing of a larger Catholic threat had been accompanied by burgeoning concerns about the nature and quality of conversion amongst England’s Protestant laity. Such hand-wringing helped to engender a broad fascination with the turning of English men and women away from Christianity to the Muslim religion. As Vitkus in Turning Turk has demonstrated, Christian converts were often understood to be seduced by what was imagined to be the sexual licentiousness of Muslim culture, and Jane Degenhardt has shown that English resistance to this erotic threat was ironically often figured on the professional stage through recourse to models of Catholic chastity and martyrdom. In such an environment, turning Christian also produced anxiety, Protestants worrying particularly about what they saw as examples of the incomplete conversions of Jews. According to Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Jews were frequently deployed as cyphers for Christian concerns about conversion (38).

Para32As more than one commentator has observed, Corcut’s abbreviated arc offers a didactic counter to the unsettling actions of his two siblings, Christian virtue in the face of exoticized brutality and tyranny. Unlike in a later play like Othello, though, Selimus does not explore the aftereffects of a Muslim converting to Christianity as Corcut’s conversion is barely allowed to play out. Instead, with Corcut’s final appearance the drama fashions a portrait of what we are expected to take to be an authentic Protestant conversion. Corcut enacts his sincerity not simply through testimony (I have conversed with Christians (Sc23 Sp12), loquaciousness, and fervent proselytizing but also through a resigned acceptance of his coming, violent fate. Let me die, he entreats, I never will entreat thee for my life / […] . Thou God of Christians, / Receive my dying soul into thy hands (Sc23 Sp12). Dispatching his brother straightaway, Selimus quickly turns his attention to other rivals, but the strangled corpse of Corcut remains on stage to signify the tragic martyrdom of the play’s only turned Turk.

Para33By far the most significant source for Selimus was Peter Ashton’s A Short Treatise upon the Turk’s Chronicles (1546), an English translation of Francessco Negri’s Turcicarum rerum commentarius (1535) which was itself a Latin translation of Paolo Giovio’s Commentario delle cose de’ Turchi (1532). A Short Treatise was published by the godly printer Edward Whitchurch. By the 1590s, Whitchurch’s octavo was one of a number of printed histories of the Ottoman Empire available in England. Following the fall of Byzantium (afterwards Istanbul) in 1453, many historical accounts of the Ottomans appeared in continental Europe, and some of these were translated and printed in England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Beginning in the 1520s, news pamphlets recounting Ottoman advances in Europe also started to appear in London’s bookstalls. As both Matthew Dimmock and Anders Ingram have demonstrated, the Protestant Reformation emerged as a crucial context in Ottoman publications that appeared in and after the 1540s. Many printed tracts, even as they attempted to recount the historical roots and contemporary practices of the Ottoman Empire, zeroed in on the Ottomans’ religion, arguing that it was a scourge targeting Christianity, a punishment for the ungodly excesses of the Church of Rome.

Para34The Commentario became one the most widely read accounts of the Ottomans in sixteenth-century Europe (Ingram). After being printed in Rome in 1532, it was quickly translated into a number of languages, and Negri’s Latin translation was englished both by Ashton and by the English peer Henry Parker. Giovio’s Commentario was not the work of a Protestant reformer. It was originally written to endorse a Catholic crusade against the Ottomans by Giovio’s patron Charles V. Even so, its English versions ended up being significantly inflected by Reformation rhetoric. On the title page of A Short Treatise, Whitchurch directs his buyers to Wake up now, Christiens out of your slumbre, / Of the Turkes to recouer your long lost glory, / Fear not theyr strength, theyr power, ne number, / Sith ryght, & not myght, atchyueth the victory (Ashton A1r). Ashton pursued a similar line. In his dedicatory epistle to Rafe Sadler, a former minister serving English Reformation engineer Thomas Cromwell, he reminds his readers of recent defeats in Europe at the hands the Turks, arguing that histories can inspire Christians to undertake courageous acts of revenge. He also rails against Christians turning Turk, leading sinful, areligious lives.

Para35A Short Treatise is very much a multivocal offering. It not only is inflected by Giovio’s original Italian-language history and Negri’s Latin translation of it, but it also includes Whitchurch’s title page, a commendatory poem by Thomas Litell that compares the Ottoman’s recent bloodshed and slaughter to that of the romans, and inset quotations mostly from the Austrian humanist Johannes Cuspinian’s De Turcarum origine, religione et tyrannide which was first published in Antwerp in 1541. Along with the dedicatory epistle and quotations, Ashton added a geneologye of the turkysh Emperours and A Table contaynyng the chyefe and most notable thynges in these Chronicles at the work’s end as well as a large number of his own marginal notes throughout. These notes sometimes condense (e.g. Selimus was put to flight G6v), sometimes draw aphoristic conclusions (e.g. Marke the contrarye natures & disposicyons of bretherne G5r) from adjoining passages.

Para36Selimus owes many debts to A Short Treatise. To begin with, the play’s course of events closely follows what is outlined in the chronicle, from the rise of Selim half way through its ninth chapter to the death of Ahmed at the beginning of its tenth. The play also reproduces a number of elements that were at the time unique to Giovio’s version. These include Bajazeth’s refusing to interview Selimus; the characterization of Corcut as a philosopher and Bajazeth as weak and emotional; Acomat’s disfigurement of one of Bajazeth’s advisors; Selimus’s commissioning a Jewish physician to murder his father; Bajazeth’s funeral; Selimus’s conspiracy against Amurath and Aladin; Mustaffa’s betrayal of Selimus; and Selimus’s murder of Mustaffa. Riad (43–5) has also identified a number of speeches in the play that echo Ashton’s own language. For example, Bajazeth’s resolution in the third scene to give to Selimus all great Samandria, / Bordring on Belgrade of Hungaria (Sc3 Sp3) is likely taken from Ashton’s description of Bayezid II granting Selim the prouince … of Samandria, nere unto Belgrade of hungarye (G4v). Adopted too seem to be Selimus’s claims about the importance of resolution in the second scene (i.e. Quick speed is good, where wisdom leads the way (Sc2 Sp1)), taken from Selim I’s common saying in A Short Treatise that he is not worthy to be called wise, that wil not shortly dispatche that thyng which he hath ones decreed to do…. (N2v). Ashton’s marginal notes also appear to have directly influenced the author(s) of the play. Bajazeth’s complaint that Acomat is ten times more unnatural to me (Sc14 Sp5) reprises Ashton’s characterization of Ahmed as having a traytourly and unnatural … hart (G8v). Similarly, Cherseoli’s praise of Selimus as a prince of forward hope (Sc1 Sp8) enacts Ashton’s claim that Liberalitie & forwardness in a capytayne winnethe the hartes of soldyours (G5r).

Para37Another possible chronicle source for Selimus was John Shute’s Two Very Notable Commentaries the One of the Original of the Turks and Empire of the House of Ottomanno (1562), a translation of Andrea Cambini’s Della origine de Turchi et imperio delli Ottomani (1529). Like A Short Treatise, the Commentaries provides a relatively detailed account of the reigns of Bayezid II and Selim I. While most of its specifics are very different from events enacted by the play, Riad has pointed to the character name Otrante, to the play’s spelling of Mustaffa, and to the positive characterization of Bajazeth as possibly having been drawn from Shute’s rendition of Cambini (42–43). To these bits of evidence might also be added the Commentaries’ representation of Selim, who throughout is described as not simply ruthless but continually scheming and unscrupulous. The pastoral setting of the play’s clown scenes might also have been inspired by Shute’s account of Corcut being betrayed to Selimus by certayne men of the countre (O3r).

Para38While the outlines of Corcut’s escape from his brother were derived from Ashton, some of the comic elements of this episode were almost certainly taken from the professional play Locrine. Towards its end, after being defeated by a British army led by Locrine, the wandering and starving Scythian king Humber encounters the play’s clown Strumbo who enters the scene intent on eating his breakfast. Like Selimus, Strumbo first tells the audience about a violent encounter with his wife where she played knaue’s trumps with him and he feared she would set her ten commandements in his face (H2r). Spying Strumbo, Humber see the clown as an answer to his prayers, exclaiming, O Iupiter hast thou sent Mercury / In clownish shape to minister some foode? / Some meate, some meate, some meate. Again, like in Selimus, Strumbo comically replies, O, alasse sir, ye are deceiued, I am not Mercury, I am Strumbo (H2v). Frightened by the ghost of Albanact, Locrine’s brother who Humber defeated in battle, Strumbo then exits the scene. Though it has been argued that Locrine took this episode from Selimus (Maxwell), most commentators, citing the brevity of Bullithrumble’s appearance, have credibly concluded that Selimus was the borrower.

Para39Though offering a much shorter, condensed account of the struggle between Bayezid II and his children than either A Short Treatise or Two Very Notable Commentaries, George Whetstone’s English Mirror which was first published by George Seton in 1586 might also have been a source for Selimus. Whetstone provides a history of the Ottoman empire in his eleventh chapter of his first book, describing the Turks as a scourge sent and suffered by God, for the sins and iniquities of the Christians (E3r). In his section describing Selim’s rise to power, he not only refers to Selim’s marriage to the daughter of the great Tartarian but he also highlights Bayezid II’s inabilitie to gouern as well as his being greatly perplexed with his sons’ revolt. Most importantly, unlike Two Very Notable Commentaries, he alludes—albeit vaguely—to Acomat’s violence against his father, reporting both that this diuision of the brethren, was the death of many of their adherents and that Bayezid II pardoned Selim because he needed his youngest son to defend him against his eldest brother Acomat (E6r).

Para40No consensus on the authorship of Selimus has yet been reached. The 1594 quarto’s title page provides no ascription, and while the title page of the 1638 reissue vaguely advertises a T.G. many scholars believe that this was a erroneous attribution to the playwright Thomas Goffe (author of The Raging Turk and The Courageous Turk) who was born around the time of the play’s composition in 1591. Since the late nineteenth century, Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Kyd, Walter Ralegh, and Fulke Greville have each had their advocates. (For an overview of these attributions, see Riad 22–39.) It is, however, fair to say that a strong majority of scholars and editors (F.G. Fleay, A.B. Grosart, C.F. Tucker Brooke, Marion Bodwell Smith, A.F. Hopkinson, W.W. Greg, Irving Ribner, and, most recently, Martin Wiggins, Dimmock, Vitkus, and Catherine Richardson) have concluded that the play was in all likelihood written at least in part by Greene. Many of these attributions have focused on Selimus’s subject and/or diction. Throughout his career as a professional writer, Greene was highly attuned to trends in popular entertainment, and before his death, he was no stranger to the many plays taking the recent history of the near east as their subject. At some point in the late 1580s or early 1590s, Greene wrote The Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Aragon, a heroic drama set in Asia minor that has almost universally been taken to have been inspired by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays. Grosart, who in the late nineteenth century was the first to associate Selimus with Greene, suggested that the promise of an Alphonsus sequel at the play’s close (I3r) may have eventually led Greene to write another play on a similar subject. Though much of his evidence linking Greene’s work with Selimus is questionable, Grosart is persuasive when he identifies shared diction, particularly words like arm-strong, flesh (as a verb), crossbiter, and nutrimented that are all almost unique to Greene’s writings in the 1580s and early 1590s (General Index).

Para41Much has been made as well of Robert Allott’s attribution of six passages from Selimus to Greene in the sententiae volume England’s Parnassus (i.e on E4r, G5r-v, K1r, L7r, N7v, Kk6v) that came to press in 1600. Grosart drew attention to two of these in the late nineteenth century. Riad is right to point out that the Allott attributions are the most important pieces of external evidence that we have (23). Allott may have had a personal connection to Greene, and as such his Selimus attributions can be taken to have much authority. If, as Arthur Marotti has argued in the Dictionary of National Biography, Allott was the son of a gentleman from Lincolnshire, he might have first met Greene at Cambridge in the early 1580s, Allott pursuing a B.A. at Corpus Christi College while Greene was completing his M.A. at Clare College. Allott, though, might instead have been born in Yorkshire in the mid 1570s, only matriculating at St. John’s College Cambridge in 1592, the year of Greene’s death. Such a timeline somewhat weakens Allott’s authority and might also be taken to help explain why three of Allott’s other Greene attributions in England’s Parnassus are wrong.

Para42Rarely considered, though, in studies that link Selimus with Greene has been the extent to which the play fails to reproduce the thematic and theatrical characteristics of Greene’s other known plays. During his lifetime, Greene developed a reputation for fixating upon women and love in his writings, so much so that Thomas Nashe in his Anatomy of Absurdity (1589) disparagingly dubbed him the Homer of women. While female characters and love (what Nashe calls amorous discourses) loom large in each of the five plays of Greene’s dramatic canon (i.e. Alphonsus, King of Aragon; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; James IV; Orlando Furioso; and A Looking Glass for London and England written with Thomas Lodge), neither occupies a central place in Selimus. Moreover, almost entirely absent from Selimus are the songs, dances, supernatural characters, and magic-driven spectacle that so thoroughly populate Greene’s known drama. Greene may have (or may not have, if you believe John Jowett) belittled professional players as puppets and antics in his Groatsworth of Wit (1592), but his animus was clearly not driven by an antipathy towards popular entertainments and stage spectacle. Indeed, in all of his ascribed work for the professional stage, Greene productively deliberates on the workings and effects of theatrical experience. Be it through the dramatic choral competition between Oberon and Bohan in James IV or Bacon’s glass prospective in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay or Medea’s conjurings in Alphonsus, he works, even more than Shakespeare, through the meta-theatrical. One also wonders why Creede would not have advertised Greene’s authorship of the play as he does on his first edition of James IV (1598). Greene was essentially a celebrity author in the early 1590s (Melnikoff), and a Greene ascription would likely have increased Creede’s sales.

Para43Noting significant discrepancies in style, versification, and perspective within the play, a number of commentators have also proposed that the 1594 quarto may be the result of revision and is thus likely a corporate product. Kenneth Muir argued that Selimus was originally written as a closet drama by an author like Greville in the 1570s or 1580s and then later revised for the professional stage. Again, a majority of commentators taking Muir’s position have argued that it was Greene who was involved at some later point with the play. Arguments for Greene as reviser of an earlier play go some way towards accounting for Selimus’s significant differences from the other five plays ascribed to him. Less compelling, given these differences, are claims (put forward, for example, by Robertson) that Greene originally wrote a complete version of the play that was later revised.

Para44Selimus’s inconsistencies have also been taken to indicate collaboration. Commentators have suggested that the play was a joint product of Greene and Peele, of Greene and Marlowe, and most recently of Greene and Lodge (Murphy and Freebury-Jones). As far as the Greene/Lodge attribution goes, it bears mentioning that one of the six passages attributed to Greene in England’s Parnassus supports her argument: Hate hits the hie, and windes force tallest towers / Hate is peculiar to a Princes state (K1r). Selimus only has the second line (Sc15 Sp11), while much of the first can be found in Lodge’s 1596 pamphlet Wit’s Misery (i.e. Hate climes vnto the head; winds force the tallest towers I3r). One explanation for this disparity is that Allott was working from a manuscript version of the play, one written in part—unbeknownst to Allott—by Lodge.

Para45Aesthetics and authorship have frequently been linked in studies that have sought to attribute Selimus. For some early commentators, the poor quality of the play provides the most persuasive evidence of Greene’s authorship. According to Brooke, Selimus is a disjointed mess of multiplex heroes, slapdash rhyming, and unoriginal situations and poetry (xix), and as such it stands as an obvious product of Greene’s Grub-Street working methods, namely his constant borrowing (xix) from other poets including himself and his being yoked to the literary fashions of his day. Conversely, more positive reactions to Selimus have tended to find other candidates. For Charles Crawford the play is artful and admirably varied (261), particularly in its extensive borrowings from Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The significant overlap of these borrowings with both parts of Tamburlaine led Crawford to conclude that Selimus was written by Marlowe at the beginning of his playwriting career.

Para46One important piece of potential evidence is Selimus’s strong connection with Locrine. Entered in the Stationers’ Register in July, 1594 and first printed the following year, Locrine follows the downfall of the son of Brutus, the legendary descendant of Aeneas and founder of Britain. As they both owe large debts to Spenser and share a number of passages, Locrine and Selimus have frequently been taken to have been written by the same hand or hands. Though Locrine’s title page ascribes the play to VV.S, few commentators have concluded that the play was either written or revised by Shakespeare. Instead, the play has been routinely albeit inconclusively attributed to Greene, Peele, Kyd, Marlowe, Lodge, and Charles Tilney.

Para47Selimus was written at some point before 1594 when it first came to press. If the play was penned by Greene or by Marlowe, it could not have been composed after September 1592 or May 1593, the respective months of their deaths. Most scholars have agreed that the earliest possible date of Selimus’s composition is 1587, the year that Tamburlaine was likely first brought to the London professional stage. Selimus is not simply heir to the kind of heroic drama that Marlowe appears to have invented in the late 1580s, but it alludes to the first part of Tamburlaine at a number of points including Bajazeth’s invocation of his namesake’s humiliation at the hands of Tamburlaine (Sc19 Sp1). A case can also be made that Selimus was heavily influenced by the second part of Tamburlaine (1588) in its focus upon sibling rivalry in the political sphere.

Para48In all likelihood, though, the play was written a few years after the two parts of Tamburlaine were first staged. Henslowe’s diary documents the continued popularity of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays from 1592 on, suggesting that Marlowe’s brand of heroic drama remained influential throughout the 1590s. The REED (Records of Early English Drama) project records performances of the Queen’s Men during their 1590 tour (at Norwich and at Bristol) as including a Turk rope dancer (McMillin and MacLean 180). It is conceivable that these entertainments were meant to accompany performances of what was their new offering Selimus. As a number of scholars have pointed out (e.g. Riad 56–61), the play is characterized by much textual borrowing, particularly from Marlowe’s other plays, from Sidney’s Arcadia, and from Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Ruins of Time. Much of this is not particularly helpful as far as dating Selimus goes. The composition dates of Marlowe’s plays remain uncertain, and both Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s Faerie Queene were circulating in manuscript before they both came to press in 1590. As Wiggins points out, however, Spenser’s The Ruins of Time, which was first printed as part of his Complaints in 1591, refers to the death of Sir Frances Walsingham in April, 1590. It is also impossible to know for certain whether Selimus owes a debt to Locrine or viceversa, though most commentators have settled on Selimus as the later offering. Even so, most commentators put the the earliest date of Locrine at 1590. One piece of important but mostly overlooked evidence for the play’s dating has to do Greene’s true-crime pamphlets. These were a cultural phenomenon in 1592 after A Notable Discovery of Cosenage and The Second Part of Conycatching were both printed in late 1591 (each was entered in the Stationers’ Register in December, 1591). In his first scene, Bullithrumble worries in an aside that Corcut is some cozening conicatching crossbiter that would fain persuade me he knows me, and so under a ’tence of familiarity and acquaintance, uncle me of victuals (Sc20 Sp5). Bullithrumble here not only deploys Greene’s unique true-crime vocabulary as a familiar language (i.e. cozening conicatching crossbiter), but he also envisions a scheme drawn entirely out of Greene’s pamphlet material. If this comic sequence was originally part of the play, such an allusion makes 1592 or 1593 best guesses at Selimus’s composition date.

Para49The first third of Selimus is for the most part written with various stanzaic forms of rhymed iambic pentameter verse. Like Romeo and Juliet, the drama begins with a prologue fashioned as a sonnet, in this case divided into an octave and a sestet, Italian style. Bajazeth’s and Selimus’s opening soliloquies are mostly made up of ottava rima (ababaabcc) and rhyme royal (ababbcc) respectively while Acomat’s and Visir’s exchanges in their first scene are fashioned with both verse forms. In scenes 13 and 15, stichomythic verse can be found, rhymed lines of dialogue split between two characters, the responding character often expressing an antithetical or repetitive sentiment. For emphasis, rhymed couplets and a few triplets close a number of speeches. These are similarly used at the conclusions of a majority of scenes. With the exception of the Bullithrumble episode which is rendered mainly in prose, much of the rest of the play (a bit more than half of its lines) is composed of end-stopped blank verse.

Para50The predominance of stanzaic verse at the play’s beginning—especially the rhyme royal—has led a number of commentators to conclude that a version of the play was originally written in the 1570s or 1580s and then, inspired by the blank verse of Tamburlaine, revised by a different hand. McMillin and MacLean have argued, however, that this mixed form of versification is very much an important marker of Queen’s Men plays, with Wilson’s Three Lords and Three Ladies of London the model. While other playwrights like Marlowe and Kyd were experimenting with blank-verse in order to explore different forms of dramatic realism, Queen’s men playwrights were using different verse forms to create an impromptu feeling in their plays. Selimus, they conclude, should be seen as one of the Queen Men’s anti-Marlowe plays, and of these the most complex (158). According to them, the play stages a shift from stanzaic verse to blank verse in the first third of the play; thereafter, it aligns blank-verse speaking with Selimus’s and Acomat’s tyranny and violence. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, they argue, is not hard to detect behind this degeneration (158).

Para51Like a number of the professional plays of the period, Selimus’s language is substantially figurative containing a plethora of similes, metaphors, and conceits as well as numerous historical and mythological allusions. One of the distinctive features of the play is its abundant animal and maritime imagery. Along with brief imaginings of snakes, vipers, vultures, dogs, lions, lambs, rams, steeds, dams, tigers, porcupines, bulls, seas, waves, ships, tides, havens, octopuses, tempests, and ports are more extended conjurations. In the third scene, Bajazeth’s opening complaint is delivered in the form of an epic simile, equating Selimus with the great Egyptian crocodile who Wanting his prey, with artificial tears / And feignéd plaints his subtle tongue doth file / T’entrap the silly wandering traveler /And move him to advance his footing near, / That when he is in danger of his claws, / He may devour him with his famished jaws (Sc3 Sp1). Bajazeth’s story of crocodiles using tears and plaints to trick their prey was proverbial in the period. Also familiar to Selimus’s first audiences would have been Bajazeth’s lament at the beginning of the scene of his death in which he imagines himself as a weather-beaten ship (Sc19 Sp1) that long has been caught in stormy seas. This extended nautical metaphor is reminiscent of Wyatt’s famed Petrarchan sonnet My Galley that was first published in 1557 in what is now known as Tottel’s Miscellany. Like his father, Selimus frequently speaks in highly poetic language. Perhaps the most striking of these speeches comes at the play’s end when in a conceit of two-dozen lines he compares himself with the ibis, him being both the heroic scourge of swift-wingéd snakes (Sc30 Sp3) and the spring of the basilisk that destroys all that it touches.

Para52Senecan language can also be found in the play in the form of classical allusions, violent imagery, and powerful epithets. Confronted with the corpses of his grandchildren and the Beylerbey of Natolia at the end of the play’s 14th scene, Bajazeth responds with a curse teeming with the kind of declamatory furor so characteristic of Seneca’s tragic heroes. There, he calls on Avernus jaws (Sc14 Sp7), loathsome Taenarus (Sc14 Sp7), and Black Demogorgon (Sc14 Sp7) to send furiesand all the damnéd monsters of black hell / To pour their plagues on curséd Acomat (Sc14 Sp7). Bajazeth voices more Senecan oaths in scene 19 after being deposed by Selimus when he and Aga are preparing to depart Istanbul. He first invokes Night, thou most ancient grandmother of all (Sc19 Sp3), to Suffer not once the joyful daylight peep, / But let thy pitchy steeds, ay, draw thy wain, / And coal-black silence in the world still reign (Sc19 Sp3). He then desperately curses his parents, his sons, himself, Selimus, and all things under the wide sky (Sc19 Sp3).