Mark Hutchings, Türkler, Repertuvarlar ve Erken Modern Dönem İngiliz Sahnesi, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-137-46262-6, pp.254

Abstract

The book, Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage, written by Mark Hutchings and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017, is about the recurrent use and staging of the images of Turks on the English playhouses through following a certain and regular repertory system circulating among London playmaking. The Elizabethan theatre in this respect is occupied mostly by the staging of Turks, not due to historical and cultural images and popularity of cultural identity of Ottomans in that period but rendering a Turk as a constructed theatrical identity circulating among the acting companies between 1567 and 1642. The studies made on the representation of Turks and Ottomans in the early modern English drama made use of the historical accounts and geopolitical conceptions, depicting the Ottoman Empire as “the present terror of the world”, articulated by Richard Knolles in his famous and historical account, Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603). Accordingly, the dramatic corpus of the early modern England attempted to understand how the Turks through the Ottoman Empire were constituted and formulated within the early modern English imagination. It is in this regard that this book contributes to the literary studies in the direction of giving detailed information related to the depiction of both major and minor texts including and treating the Turk material, which was fashionable and popular in the early modern period.