Early modern English anxieties: English-Ottoman encounters in The Fair Maid of the West Parts I & II, and The Renegado

O'Brien, Tracy Ann (2018) Early modern English anxieties: English-Ottoman encounters in The Fair Maid of the West Parts I & II, and The Renegado. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries marked a period during which England increased its participation in overseas exploration, trade, and colonization, and was embroiled at home in religious discord and the transference of the English crown from Queen Elizabeth I to King James I and then to King Charles I. Playwrights responded to the sense of uncertainty that emerged from such social and political instability through fictionalized depictions of English-Ottoman encounters in the Mediterranean that involved romance, violence, and religious conversion. This project contains analyses of three such plays: Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West Part I (c. 1600) and Part II (c. 1630), and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (c. 1624), and interrogates the dramatists’ portrayals of conflicts between Ottomans and Europeans in the Mediterranean. This thesis considers how such portrayals signify the anxieties of the early modern English through themes of race, sexuality, gender, class, nation, and religion, and how these intersecting factors contributed to on-stage representations of nascent English identity.

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