Studies in Literature and Language
The Concept of Empire in the Elizabethan Literature: Reading Persia in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays
Abstract
The Elizabethan literature was fascinated by the representations of ancient and contemporary Persian Empire, as well as the figures like Cyrus the Great. The main historical sources about Persia that the English writers used, beside the Old Testament, were the writings of Xenophon and Herodotus. However, it was Xenophon that caught the attention of two prominent Elizabethan: Sir Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe. Their use of Persian images and figures in their texts was as an act of opposition to the Tudor foreign policy that supported Anglo-Ottoman ties in the 1570s and 1580s. The researchers, therefore, aim to analyse the anti-Ottoman discourse by using Persian Empire and identity in Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595) and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great plays (1590) by applying comparative analysis and close reading. The researchers, moreover, explore the way in which the Sidney’s and Marlowe’s aesthetic engagements aim at the initiation of the project of English empire-building based upon the Achaemenid and Safavid Persia along with representation of Persians as an imaginatively alternative self for the English people.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Alexander, G. (2010). Seeing through words in theories of poetry: Sidney, Puttenham, Lodge. In K. Cartwright (Ed.), A Companion to Tudor Literature (pp. 350-63). Malden: Blackwell.
Ambler, W. (Trans.). (2001). Introduction. Education of Cyrus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Balot, R. (2001). Greed and injustice in classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Burnett, M. T. (2004). Tamburlaine the great, parts one and two. In P. Cheney (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Christopher Marlowe (pp. 127-43). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Mieroop, M. (2016). A history of the ancient near East CA 3000-323 BC (3rd ed.). Malden: Blackwell.
Dimmock, M. (2005). New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in early modem England. London: Routledge.
Dimmock, M. (2010). The Tudor experience of Islam. In K. Cartwright (Ed.), A companion to Tudor literature (pp. 49-62). Malden: Blackwell.
Grogan, J. (2014). The Persian empire in English renaissance writing, 1549-1622. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Hulse, C. (2000). Tudor aesthetics. In A. Kinney (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to English Literature, 1500-1600 (pp. 29-63). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Katouzian, H. (2003). Iranian history and politics: The dialectic of state and society. London: Routledge.
Kermode, F. (2000). Sense of an ending: Studying theories of fiction (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kinney, A. (Ed.). (2000). Introduction. The Cambridge companion to English literature, 1500-1600 (pp. 1-10). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Loomba, A. (2003). Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England. In M. De Grazia, & S. Wells (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (pp. 147-66). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marlowe, C. (2000). The Plays. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.
Matar, N. (1999). Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Newman, A. (2009). Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire. London: I.B. Tauris.
Roemer, H. R. (2006). The Safavid period. In P. Jackson, & L. Lockhart (Eds.), The Cambridge history of Iran, Volume 6 (pp. 189-350). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shepherd, G. (Ed.). (1973). Introduction. An apology for poetry (Or the defence of poesy). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Sidney, P. (1973). An apology for poetry (Or the defence of poesy). In G. Shepherd (Ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Smith, E. (2000). Introduction to Tamburlaine the Great I, II. In Christopher Marlowe: The Plays. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.
Spenser, E. (2006). The Faerie Queene: Books three and four. In D. Stephens (Ed.). Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
Sullivan, G. A. (2004). Geography and identity in Marlowe. In P. Cheney (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (pp. 231-44). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
White, P. W. (2004). Marlowe and the politics of religion. In P. Cheney (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Christopher Marlowe (pp. 70-89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Xenophon. (2001). Education of Cyrus (W. Ambler, Trans.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/10810
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2019 Mohammad Amin Mozaheb
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Share us to: 
Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard
Please send your manuscripts to [email protected]，or [email protected] for consideration. We look forward to receiving your work.
We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).
STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office
Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org
E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture 
