Faith, embodiment, and 'turning Turk': Islamic conversion on the early modern stage and the production of religious and racial identity

The early modern period is often associated with the emergence of the autonomous subject and the Protestant triumph of inner faith over outer forms. This dissertation complicates such a trajectory by considering how England's increased contact with Muslim "Turks" around the turn of the seventeenth century imposed new pressures on an already unstable English religious identity that explicitly embraced Protestant faith but retained the material habits of an enduring Catholic culture. I focus on how the popular stage imagined successful forms of resistance to "turning Turk" by appropriating and revising models from the past. I argue that the sexual threat of Islam and the perceived bodily consequences of "turning Turk" compelled the stage to fashion models of Christian resistance that anchored spiritual resilience in physical forms.;My first chapter discusses Thomas Dekker's The Virgin Martir (1620), based on the virgin martyr legend of St. Dorothea. I argue that the play's idealization of its heroine's inviolable body makes visible the medieval models that inform contemporary dramatizations of resistance to Islam. Chapter 2 analyzes how Philip Massinger's The Renegado (1624), set in a North African colony of the Ottoman empire, employs specific objects and methods of refusing to "turn Turk" that are inherited from England's Catholic past. The play's investment in spiritual redemption breaks down when faced with the prospect of redeeming a sexually defiled Christian woman. Chapter 3 examines how Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors (1594) and Othello (1604) offer a prehistory for the tensions between spirit and body that became crystallized in later dramas that explicitly feature Islamic conversion. They exemplify the Pauline ideal of a universal, disembodied faith, but point up the need for bodily distinctions to counteract the dangers of conversion. Chapter 4 considers the drama's representation of Ottoman invasion in relation to Britain's history of subjugation by former imperial powers. Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1586), Thomas Kyd's Soliman and Perseda (1587), and John Fletcher's The Knight of Malta (1616) refigure the Ottoman attacks of Rhodes and Malta by drawing an explicit analogy between conversion and invasion, invoking England's own vulnerability to Ottoman conquest.