On Turning Turk, or Trying to: Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turke

Abstract

This chapter continues to focus on national identity in its performative and contingent aspects by shifting attention to the London stage and examining how the dramatic artistry of Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turke (1612) imaginatively asserts an essentialized English identity by constructing a moral and nationalist frame that demonizes the desire to convert to Islam and suggests that it is impossible for a native-born Englishman to foreswear his national identity. In shifting from documentary representations of Englishmen in the East to an imaginative theatrical text, I hope to demonstrate the double action of imperial envy at work in these different representational forms. As I suggested in the previous chapter, while Samson Rowlie and T. S. became identified with the Ottoman elite and Thomas Roe wrestled with ceremonial protocols he refused to understand, all three testify to the wealth, power and prestige that constituted those aspects of imperial power most to be desired and envied. While neither Rowlie nor T. S. willingly elected to enter captivity, they nevertheless overcame adverse circumstances and exemplify how ingenuity and native abilities enabled them to achieve positions of considerable importance beyond anything they might have acquired in their native land.