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Shakespeare's Persians

2008; Routledge; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17450910802083120

1745-0926

Ladan Niayesh,

Philippine History and Culture

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.