Shakespeare's Persians
Résumé
To the Elizabethans (and perhaps to us as well), Persians were Muslims of an unusual kind. Inheritors of the Pagan empire of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, the non- Mediterranean, non-Turkish, non-Sunni Persians were a religious exception among the ‘‘Saracens’’ and a political foil to the Ottomans. The Sherley brothers’ diplomatic efforts towards a European alliance with Persia against the Turks added to and depended on this perspective. Traces of this special status and its representational instability are visible in a number of Shakespearean and other plays of the period. Their study helps open up a ‘‘space of negation, negotiation, and confusion of identity’’ called for by Daniel Vitkus as a necessary preliminary for the construction of a post-Saidian, non-dualistic paradigm of oriental otherness.