Abstract
Thomas Goffe favorably represents the image of Sultan Murad I. The presence of the Turkish Sultan serves to highlight the political and cultural significance. The play depicts the disappearance of the cultural, ethnic, and religious boundaries between the Turks and the English. In the tragedy, the Ottoman Amurath loves his wife, Eumorphe. However, his Machiavellian tutor Lala Schahin persuades Amurath to murder her and depart to martial invasions. The legend Eumorphe is a symbol of Ottoman despotism in Europe. The play points on Amurath’s mortal stand and his atrocities towards Christians which is punished by the Serbian assignation. The show accomplishes with the first Battle of Kosovo, in which Amurath is successful but is slain by the Serbian protagonist Cobelitz. According to the Ottoman tradition, his elder son Bajazet gets to the top but then he is enforced to slay his younger brother to avoid his rivalry for the authority. Keywords: Goffe, Turk, Ottoman, Murad I/Amurath I, Eumorphe, Mahomet, Cobelitz
Highlights
The sultanic image of the Great Turk on Elizabethan stage is exotic
Elizabethans are profoundly interested in news about Turkish wars
While some of the sultans’ expressions undoubtedly scandalize Christian audience, others denote them in a promising straight virtuous light. These represented Ottoman Turks are of popular criticism and literary counterparts in Western historical writings of that period, which have a fearful internal convention
Summary
The sultanic image of the Great Turk on Elizabethan stage is exotic. The presentation of “the Turk” in Elizabethan art and in the Western imagination is complex and does not lend itself to orderly reductions (Harper, 2011:7). Linda McJannet states that the English translated or written histories of the Turks between 1542 and 1600, endorse that European Christians were charmed by the Ottoman greatness and their customs (McJannet, 2006:60). Goffe's The Courageous Turk or Amurath I has institutes some disapproving criticism It has been termed "all but unendurable" because of its "outrageous rant and bombast" by Felix Shelling in Elizabethan Drama (1908) and called a "repulsive bombast" by Adolphus Ward in A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne (1875). The Courageous Turk's spectators in the seventeenth-century enjoyed the play because of the attractiveness of the Great Sultan Amurath, the elegant staging, the theme of Turkish account, and Goffe's idea about the weakness of kings and the eventual reward given to Christians who battled against earth's pagans (Bowers, 1987:115-122). The evil deeds of Amurath are exciting to the story, especially when it seeks the sultan's Greek wife Eumorphe
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