ABSTRACT
Late in life, Aaron Hill repudiated his subscription volume of 1709, A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire, published in the same year as his first play, The Walking Statue: or, the Devil in the Wine-Cellar. It is an understandable decision. The Full and Just Account is a peculiarly uninformative mixture of anecdote, memoir, commonplace and juvenile speculation, drawn from Hill’s adolescence in Constantinople and travels in Palestine and Egypt, and redacted soon after he returned to England at the age of twenty-three. It has, however, the merit of bringing into focus the unstable mix of cultural values assigned at the close of the Restoration to the figure of the Turk-and it does so in a way that stresses the explicitly theatrical context in which such cultural values are assigned in the first place, and then condensed in the English imaginary. Thus in the chapter “Of the Turkish Morals” Hill moves from acknowledging that “the same variety of humour and morality, now reigns in Turkey, that is found on Christendom,” to furnishing a list of increasingly horrified exceptions to this principle of similarity, and finally to identifying those aspects of Turkish “morals” that make it “dangerous” for Christians to “deal in Turkey”: “Neither promise, vow, nor solemn oath, can bind their conscience, to omit an opportunity of adding any thing to former acquisitions.”1 Equally dangerous, and much more scandalous, Hill concludes, is the “ancient, hellish crime” of sodomy, of which Hill speaks with “black and horrid shame,” with “all the detestation of a Christian zeal,” but all the same with considerable gusto. By way of example of the Turk’s “unexampled impudence” in matters sodomitical, Hill recalls witnessing this scene in Adrianople:
The house in which Sir Robert [Sutton] lodg’d, was seated pleasantly upon a noble river, which runs along the city … We were standing here extreamly pleased with the delightful prospect, when from the plain on the other side, we saw a Turk of middle age and decent habit, lead a boy about fourteen directly to the bank which sloped upon the river, where he thought himself securely shelter’d from the people of a Village not far distant. Descended to a place convenient as he thought for the execution of his purpose, he began to our surprise, and inexpressible confusion, to prepare himself and his consenting catamite, for acting a design so hateful to our sight, and such a stranger to our customs, that we scarce believed our eyes, when they beheld this object: We hallow’d loudly to the lustful wretch,
who turned his head with seeming wonder to perceive us there, but still persisted in his first attempt, till snatching up a fowling-piece which lay by chance upon a table in the summer house, I cock’d it, and presented it against his body, as if I would have shot him dead immediately.2
