The Sultan Speaks Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks

The Sultan Speaks is the first study of English historical plays about the Turks in relation to their sources and analogues, including histories originating in Greek, Arabic, and Turkish. Drawing on Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic and on narrative theory, McJannet traces the transmission of these eastern sources and analyzes Richard Knolles's citation of the "Turks' own chronicles," the historiographic equivalent of letting the sultan speak. She demonstrates that while the historians increasingly contain the sultan's words with adverse authorial commentary, playwrights such as Marlowe and Fulke Greville use both dialogue and commentary toenhance the sultan's stature and to mitigate his negative acts.

Linda McJannet, Professor of English at Bentley College, was educated at Wellesley College and Harvard University. Her work on the East in early modern drama has appeared in journals such as Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England and in the collection Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama (1998). She is also the author of The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions: The Evolution of a Theatrical Code (1999).