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SCHOLARS OF ANGLO-ISLAMIC CONTACT understandably focus on the socalled Turk plays-a dramatic corpus starring Muslim characters and set in Ottoman-occupied lands. Yet genre-specific portrayals of islamic alterity offer an incomplete picture of global contact. We must broaden this archive to see the diversity of English responses to the islamic world. i suggest that we look to a counterintuitive genre: the city comedy. London-based dramas fold islamic cultural materials into the fabric of metropolitan life. These plays are not only littered with Levantine imports and Arabic loanwords, but include frequent moments of cross-cultural masquerade-scenes in which English characters make imaginative excursions across racial and religious boundaries. in the pages below, i look to Ben Jonson's Epicene to explore the comic displacement of a Turk-play stock character: the Ottoman sultan.1 Jonson's comedy stars a cantankerous bachelor who sees the ottoman monarch as an enviable model of heterosexist mastery. Spinning a fantasy of oriental dominion, this would-be sultan experiments in ethnic drag. He not only dons a turban, but establishes a seraglio in central London. Epicene offers insight into the counterintuitive identity experiments precipitated by global contact. More to the point, it permits us to consider the effects of genre on islamic representation. The netted echoes of Turk plays past haunt the performance of this city comedy. But while Turk plays subject Muslim characters to the purgative logic of tragedy, city comedies defang but do not excise alterity.2
in its very first scene, Epicene introduces audiences to a turbaned Morose. Truewit reports, "I met that stiff piece of formality . . . yesterday, with a huge turban of night-caps on his head, buckled over his ears" (1.1.140-42).3 On the early modern stage, turbans were used to designate Muslim characters.4 This visual code would have registered with audiences in Whitefriars, for Epicene was performed in repertory with Turk plays like Robert Daborne's A Christian Turn'd Turk.5 The repertory functions like a living, mnemonic palimpsest; it thickens performance by activating meanings across playscripts and genres.6 In Epicene, Jonson activates the theme of conversion-or, more exactly, the turned-Turk topos. Like the renegades of Turk plays, Morose adopts the material signifiers of a Turkish identity to announce his withdrawal from the social and specifically auditory landscape of London. His costume indicates that...