Shakespeare’s east-west exogamy : pre-colonial narratives

Abstract EN

The study revisits the incidents of East-West exogamy in Shakespeare's Othello, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest in the context of Elizabethan England's relations with North Africa and Ottoman Turkey.

It derives its theoretical premises from postcolonial and post-postcolonial scholarship, occasionally arguing against the validity of certain assumptions of such scholarship.

The study approaches its subject from two angles : first, the perception of Eastern characters, stipulating that Western colonialist attitudes and racial binary oppositions are not paradigmatic of the period and that Shakespeare's conception of exogamy transcends the anxieties of racial differences, and problematizes its political implications.

The East has not been colonized yet.

The second aspect investigated is that exogamy is sensed as a violation, hegemonic or subversive to political order.

The influence of foreign women in positions of power is historically visible in Shakespeare's world : the case of Roxolana, Suleiman the Magnificent's wife, is mapped out.

The assumption this paper presents, deducted from historical and textual evidence, is that Shakespeare's Sycorax is based on the historical Roxolana.