literary studies away from geography or ethnicity and toward religion as the principal category through which Europeans represented themselves and others during the period. Even as geo-ethnic categories of identity have been challenged, the methodology most associated with them, the study of images or representations of “the other,” has remained front and center. Superb scholarship has already been done on the representation of Islam in the English Renaissance, from Nabil Matar’s pathbreaking book Islam in Britain to Jonathan Burton’s Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama. So it is with some trepidation that I suggest Islam was not represented on the early modern English stage. Of course, as with studies of ethnicity, religious studies in the period take the failure of the image into account, especially in the case of the theater, for they are largely about misrepresentations in the sense of stereotypes and tendentious preconceptions, on and off stage. Islam may have been more profoundly misrepresented still, however, to the point of virtual absence despite the staging of putatively Muslim characters, beliefs, and rituals in a range of plays. How, in any case, can literature depict any religion as a category of identity? Is religion like ethnic or racial identity, or like the forms of belonging associated with realms, regions, or countries?
The question of misrepresentation is rendered more complex still by the way in which representation itself was at stake between Christianity and Islam in the world at large. What the art historian Terry Allen has termed “aniconism, the nonuse of images” in Islamic culture was conditioned by theological beliefs (Allen, 20). Though dimly perceived and poorly understood by Christians, the avoidance of representation in Islam was, ironically, one of the few religious concepts to gain some measure of representation in nondramatic European writings on Muslims and the East. Monotheism, to which aniconism is intimately tied, and the importance of prophecy, prayer, and pilgrimage are others. Only rarely are these elements referred to in the drama of the period when it stages what purports to be Muslim belief and practice. Yet in Tamburlaine Parts I and II we do find a series of scenes that may have sprung from an abortive encounter with some traces of Islamic thought in medieval and early modern European learning.
The origin of “Islamic aniconism” remains controversial. Aniconism is not a central belief or practice that defines Islam as a religion, although it is attested in Hadith, traditions about the sayings and actions of Muhammad. The attitude to representation that Western art historians call “aniconism” is complex. It is images of living beings that are banned, not of inanimate objects. Maps or world-images of any kind are not in question, and mapmaking thrived under Islam. Furthermore, the focus is on religious rather than secular art: according to Allen, “figural representation has always been a part of secular art in the Islamic world” (17). There is no question, of course, of attempting visually to represent the godhead in any context, religious or secular. Yet, unlike biblical aniconism and European iconoclasm, Islamic aniconism is not principally a way of avoiding the profanation of religious figures and ideas by means of visuality. Images of people and animals in general, not simply of the Prophet and religious figures, are forbidden, and in religious contexts above all. According to one tradition in Hadith, this is because the image maker or painter tries to appropriate God’s creative power in depicting living things. Muhammad once said that painters would receive a harsher punishment than others on the Day of Judgment. Another saying holds that in Hell, the painter will be commanded to breathe life into the images he has made and will fail (Arnold, 5). These traditions represent a hardening of earlier attitudes toward painting in Islam, and they run counter to the continual presence of figural art on secular themes in Turkey, Iran, and elsewhere up to the sixteenth century and beyond. Allen has influentially distinguished the secular and the religious in Islamic art while insisting that secular practice subtends religious ideology. Nevertheless, the curious punishment of the painter and the theology behind it remain compelling.
As I am neither a theologian nor an art historian, the previous paragraphs are offered in all humility and no doubt require some correction. In unearthing what Marlowe and other late-sixteenth-century Europeans knew, or thought they knew, about Islam, the image, and the world-picture in its widest sense, I felt it necessary to explore what Islamic aniconism, to call it that, was and is. And I admit that the fine distinctions I have described already would have been lost on many in Marlowe’s audience, had they even known about them. Some Christians still maintained medieval notions of Muslims as idolatrous worshippers of Muhammad. The more sophisticated viewed Muslims through the lens of Christianity’s own religious disputes, casting them as iconoclastic. Protestants in England often placed Islam in direct opposition to Catholicism, with its supposed veneration of images as idols that at once profaned and replaced the godhead. Philippus Lonicerus’s Chronicorum turcicorum, a book Marlowe almost certainly knew, describes the Turks’ destruction of “imagines, picturas & effigies” at Constantinople: only God is to be worshipped, they assert, not stone, wood, or base or precious metals (Volume I, Book 2, Second Part, 101). In the vernacular, a sermon by Meredith Hanmer, printed in popular black letter type, trumpeted the conversion of “Chinano” the Turk to Christianity upon his rescue by Drake from 25 years of Spanish captivity. Asked why he had not converted earlier, Chinano claimed two things held him back: the cruelty of the Spaniard, and “his Idolatry in the worshipping of Images.” Hanmer dwells on Muslim anti-idolatry, playing upon a common English theme by assimilating Islam to Reformation Christianity because of its rejection of religious, and especially Catholic, images (Hanmer, E2 recto, E5 recto–verso; Matar, 126–129). Aniconism becomes Protestant iconoclasm. Yet in the Tamburlaine plays traces of a subtler and perhaps somewhat less mistaken view of Islam and representation may be found, one that comprises theological ideas about God and creation, about human misrepresentations and their consequences in the afterlife, and about the very possibility of representing life itself in visual form at all. Spectacular dramatist and poet of ekphrasis though he was, Marlowe began his stage career with a dual challenge to his own strengths. He may have done so in part through a fragmentary knowledge of Islam, gained perhaps during his studies at Cambridge.2
There is only one direct reference to Islam and visual representation in Marlowe’s works. Defeated and captive, the Turkish emperor Bajazeth bemoans his fate in Tamburlaine, Part I:
Now will the Christian miscreants be glad,
Ringing with joy their superstitious bells
And making bonfires for my overthrow.
But ere I die, those foul idolaters
Shall make me bonfires with their filthy bones.
(I: 3.3.236–240)
Unlike the Persian Cosroe, Bajazeth is defined from his earliest appearance in the action by frequent appeals to “Mahomet.” And it is in this scene that Tamburlaine first refers to himself as the “scourge” of God and backhanded protector of the Christians (lines 44–50). These “miscreants” or misbelievers will rejoice for now at the Turk’s defeat, then. Their misbelief consists in foul idolatry, which many in the audience knew was the usual charge of Muslims against the Christians.
Textual editors have been silent on the “superstitious bells” the Christians will ring. Superstition was so closely linked with idolatry that in 1678 Thomas Tenison wrote a substantial tract entitled Of Idolatry: A Discourse, in Which Is Endeavored a Declaration of, Its Distinction from Superstition. In the first chapter, Tenison cites sources on the lengthy association of the two terms and explains that the superstitious veneration of demons or heroes is only one branch of idol-worship (Tenison, 2–11). Jonathan Burton has shown that the term “bell-metals” was regularly applied to the quantities of lead, tin, and other metals exported to the Ottomans by the English Crown for use as canon and munitions. The trade in ordnance was much condemned in Catholic Europe, the more so as its raw materials were derived from the Tudor dissolution of the monasteries and the breaking of their furniture, statuary, and bells. But to English Protestants the bell-metal trade was a logical form of recycling, one that cemented Elizabeth’s delicate negotiations with the Turkish Porte at the expense of its traditional French and Venetian commercial allies. Burton shows how Elizabeth’s diplomatic correspondence with Murad III accentuated a unitarian tendency in Protestantism over against Catholic trinitarianism and the idolatry it was said to promote.3 This strategy was not known only to the elite: in his sermon, Hanmer