Europeanizing the Turks in Robert Greene's Alphonsus, King of Aragon
Résumé
Unsurprisingly for a romance of conquests in the East, Robert Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Aragon features the Great Turk Amurack. But it is more surprising to see him married to an Amazon, whose interventions recall Penthesilea defending Troy. The play also includes the ghost of Calchas, the soothsayer from the Iliad who caused the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia. Here his prophecy demands the ‘sacrifice’ of the Turk’s daughter Iphigina who must marry the victorious Aragonese. Giving her away, Amurack wishes Alphonsus to ‘live King Nestor’s years’.
The play’s Trojan references are too numerous to be accidental. This chapter purports to account for them by arguing that although at the end of the sixteenth century, the dominant theory about the origins of the Turks was the Central-Asian one, the alternative legend of a Trojan origin, thriving after the fall of Constantinople, was still an option. Making room for the Turks in the translatio imperii scheme, it made it possible to appropriate them ideologically. A belated example, Greene’s Alphonsus shows how such Europeanizing efforts were still attempted at the end of a century which had witnessed the fall of Rhodes, the siege of Vienna, or the battle of Lepanto.