Early Modern English Drama and the Islamic World. 'Now will I be a Turke': Performing Ottoman Identity in Thomas Goffe's The Courageous Turk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although it is frequently regarded as a bombastic dramatization of standard anti-Ottoman propaganda, Thomas Goffe's The Courageous Turk actually deploys stereotypes of the Turkish other to raise fundamental questions about the relationships between passion and restraint and between Turkish and English identities. The play suggests that the savage violence of the stereotypical stage Turk is due less to volatile passions and more to the strictures of Turkish law and the imperative to emulate the idealized Turkish national type. Despite its relative lack of psychological depth, the play offers a message that is arguably less racist than Shakespeare's Othello , where a Christian Moor who is fully acculturated to Western society nonetheless proves unable to restrain his natural passions. In contrast, Goffe shows the importance of socially constructed racial identities in determining behaviour and maintaining the imperial polity. Because its characters use Western ideologies such as Stoicism and Petrarchanism to justify atrocious 'Turkish' behavior, the play also suggests unsettling parallels between English and Turkish subjects. By blurring the distinction between the English self and the Ottoman other, The Courageous Turk may suggest the arbitrariness and constructed nature of England's own emerging sense of national identity, as well as the potentially monstrous consequences of enforcing conformity to that identity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".