Dealing With Tyranny: Fulke Greville’s Mustapha in the Context of His Other Writings and of His View on Anglo-Ottoman Relations

Abstract

Mustapha, the tragedy by Fulke Greville depicting the execution of the eldest son of Suleyman the Magnificent, has received increasing attention in recent research on representations of the Eastern “other.” Unlike earlier works treating Mustapha as an anti-absolutist work with an only incidental Ottoman context, recent studies have underlined Greville’s seemingly balanced depiction of the Ottomans, showing both good and bad Ottoman characters. Accepting and elaborating on the actual importance of the Ottoman context in Mustapha, the present article challenges these recent studies. First, it compares Mustapha to the literary and narrative sources available to Greville and concludes that Greville does not produce a more nuanced rhetoric such as has been argued to exist in other early modern English plays. Second, taking Greville’s two other narrative works into account, it argues that his representation of the Ottoman Empire in Mustapha is closely connected to his overall evaluation of it as a political theorist.