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With increasing attention in early modern studies to English representations of Persia/Iran—both as an “imaginative geography” (to borrow Edward Said’s concept from Orientalism) transmitted via translations of classical Greek sources and as a vibrant economic, military, and political empire coeval with England’s nascent global ambitions—Houston’s book is the first to offer a synoptic view of dramatic renderings from the early decades of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. This time span covers the initial stirrings of the English Reformation, the anxious transition to a “female king” with Elizabeth I, some of the earliest English travelers in Safavid Iran and their quixotic attempt to establish an Anglo-Persian alliance, the political challenges pre- and post-Interregnum, and the constitutional crisis pre- and post-Glorious Revolution. While assessing plays that have received more critical attention — such as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2 (1587–88) and John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins’s The Travailes of the Three English Brothers (1607)—Houston also adduces lesser known writers and genres to give a fuller picture of English understandings of “Persia,” both ancient (Achaemenid) and contemporary (Safavid). This breadth of engagement with English drama in the period—including interludes, closet drama, and stage plays—makes for a book that anyone who deals with any portion of the early modern Anglo-Persian encounter should consult.
Chapter 1, “Introduction: The Imagined Empire,” maps out this vast terrain starting with the itinerary of Robert Brancetour, a man born in England who, in the 1530s, travelled to the court of the Safavid shah, Tahmasp I, as part of a multicultural caravan to propose an alliance against the Ottoman Turks. His partner, who died en route, was an Italian. After completing this journey, Brancetour worked for the Holy Roman emperor, Charles V, who was also king of Spain. Ten years later, the English king, Henry VIII, through his ambassador, Sir Thomas Wyatt, sought the return of Brancetour. As Houston explains, “Brancetour was viewed as a traitor because he had attempted to incite some Englishmen in Spain to rebel against Henry” during the fraught decades that saw Henry’s break with the Church of Rome (4). Charles V knew Brancetour as “he that hath been in Perse,” and refused to repatriate him to England for punishmen
Very early in August Wilson’s career—in the opening scene direction to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—the playwright puts his work in dialogue with the Bible:
Chicago in 1927 is a rough city, a bruising city, a city of millionaires and derelicts, gangsters and roughhouse dandies, whores and Irish grandmothers who move through its streets fingering long black rosaries. Somewhere a man is wrestling with the taste of a woman in his cheek. Somewhere a dog is barking. Somewhere the moon has fallen through a window and broken into thirty pieces of silver.1
The rosary beads evoke post-biblical Christianity, but the thirty pieces of silver point directly to the Bible. The reference is to Matthew 26:14–16, where Jerusalem’s chief priests secure Judas’s betrayal of Jesus for that price. In Matthew, the sum likely refers back to Exodus 21:32, which establishes remuneration for an injured slave: “If the ox gores a male or female slave, the owner shall pay to the slaveowner thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.”2 The chief priests therefore include an implicit insult in their price, essentially buying Jesus for the price of an injured slave. After Judas later returns the silver and hangs himself, the chief priests, finding it unlawful to deposit blood money in the treasury, use the bounty to buy land for burying dead foreigners (Matthew 27:7-10). The priests desire Judas’s betrayal but refuse to imbue Jesus with any significant value.
Wilson’s Chicago moon shatters into indiscriminate blood money: thirty pieces of silver lying below a non-descript window. Having descended through a window, the moon offers no light, becoming instead the potential means of the sort of betrayal, disrespect, regret, self-loathing, [End Page 435] and death found in Matthew that could happen in Chicago’s darkness. That is, if somebody should find the money and put it to the use that Wilson’s allusion suggests. Although Wilson’s past tense makes clear that the violent transformation of the natural world into blood money has already occurred, betrayal is uncertain. The money could remain unfound, be collected and put to a different use, or fund betrayal in precisely the fashion of the biblical antecedent. Wilson’s allusion thus enriches his play by reference to scripture, but signifies on biblical themes, wrenching the gospel story into the modern setting through a long human and aesthetic history that leaves scars. Matthew’s story resonates in Wilson’s world, but it is irreparably altered, rendered indeterminate and mysterious. By offering a rich web of allusions stretching to ancient Hebrew scripture, the
Bernadette Andrea is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies and the Department of Feminist Studies. She is the author of The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture (2017) and Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (2007). Her edited books include Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World, with Patricia Akhimie (2019); English Women Staging Islam, 1696–1707 (2012); and Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, with Linda McJannet (2011). She has served as coeditor, with Julie D. Campbell and Allyson M. Poska, of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2017–2024), and as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2022–2023).
Michel Büch is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg. His interdisciplinary research bridges theatre and performance studies with critical race theory, psychoanalysis, affect theory, and neuroscience to enable a thorough critique of modernity and its lived realities today. Drawing on extensive experience in dramaturgy and cultural management, Büch uniquely integrates rigorous scholarship with practical theatre expertise and collaboration with academics and theatre professionals in his teaching. He is the author of Whiteface: Antiblackness and Improv Comedy (2022) and serves as production manager for the University Players.
Jiamiao Chen (陈佳苗) is a PhD candidate in the English Department of the University of Bristol. Her research interests include late medieval and early modern drama, medieval hagiography, and Geocriticism.
Erith Jaffe-Berg is Professor of Theatre at the Department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production at the University of California at Riverside. Her research focuses on the commedia dell’arte and performances by minority groups in Early Modern Italy. She is the author of Jewish Theatre Making in Mantua, 1520–1650 (2022), Commedia dell’Arte and the Mediterranean: Charting Journeys and Mapping “Others” (2015), and The Multilingual Theatre of Commedia dell’Arte (2008). She has published essays on early modern performance in journals such as I Tatti Studies, Theatre Survey, Early Theatre, and The Journal of Dramatic Theatre and Criticism. She has contributed to various anthologies, most recently The Palgrave Handbook on Theatre and Migration (2024), the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Rena
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