ABSTRACT

Sir Anthony Shirley provides a striking example: originally from Sussex, he embarked on the wars in the Low Countries in 1586. On the Shah's behalf Sir Anthony, who had sailed the seas and had explored those areas in which English trade was becoming increasingly interested, appears to have been turned into a living and excessively marketed icon of a globalising England, that is, of an England that increasingly focused on gaining fortunes abroad. Bisecting Anglo-Eastern affairs into Anglo-Ottoman and Anglo-Persian relations allows the playwrights to portray two fundamentally different perspectives. Its double focus lends the play a paradigmatic structure, separating the positive and negative aspects of the East. In contrast, the audience knows none of the Ottomans by name. While Persia appears as a complex society of individuals of different sex, status and opinion, the Ottomans form part of a highly uniform community represented in persona by the Great Turk.