ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a particular moment, a unique encounter: Claudius, bent before the altar, before the crucifix. It explores about, for example, how metatheatricality infiltrates and undermines the stability of religious identity, and how the theater re-makes religious discourse for purposes of its own. As Dennis Britton presents it, the situation in A Christian Turned Turk is complex, there is no onstage enactment of circumcision, merely the mention of the possibility of such a comic substitution having taken place, but Britton makes an intriguing connection with the representation of stable religious identity. If in the theater the reality of 'turning Turk' is a matter of externals such as clothing and stage props, and if a bodily marker such as circumcision can be faked by means of an ape's tail, how can we differentiate between the truth of religious belief/identity and its play-acted cousin.
