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| The revival of his forgotten Ottoman play shows Dr Johnson isn’t just a dead white male | The revival of his forgotten Ottoman play shows Dr Johnson isn’t just a dead white male |
| (about 4 hours later) | |
| The staging of his only play, set in 15th-century Constantinople, allows a fresh conversation about decolonising English literature, says author Jerry Brotton | The staging of his only play, set in 15th-century Constantinople, allows a fresh conversation about decolonising English literature, says author Jerry Brotton |
| There is no more quintessentially stale, pale and dusty Englishman than Dr Samuel Johnson, committed Tory and devout Anglican. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him “the most distinguished man of letters in English history” for his essays, criticism and fiction. His Dictionary of the English Language (1755), with its 40,000 entries, set the standard for all subsequent dictionaries. But who reads him any more? Even university students struggle with Johnson’s essays, which are mostly about other dead white men, such as Shakespeare. | There is no more quintessentially stale, pale and dusty Englishman than Dr Samuel Johnson, committed Tory and devout Anglican. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him “the most distinguished man of letters in English history” for his essays, criticism and fiction. His Dictionary of the English Language (1755), with its 40,000 entries, set the standard for all subsequent dictionaries. But who reads him any more? Even university students struggle with Johnson’s essays, which are mostly about other dead white men, such as Shakespeare. |
| Traditionalists might decry Dr Johnson as another victim of decolonising the curriculum in favour of BAME writers, but many have probably not even read him. They are even less likely to have read his translation of the 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit Jerónimo Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (1735). Equally neglected is his one and only stage play, Irene (1749), on the doomed relationship between an Ottoman sultan and Greek prisoner set in Istanbul, inspired by his interest in translating Lobo’s account of the religion and politics of the Habesha people of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Both reveal an interest in and sympathy with people and places a world away from the elite gentlemen’s clubs and political debates of Georgian England. | Traditionalists might decry Dr Johnson as another victim of decolonising the curriculum in favour of BAME writers, but many have probably not even read him. They are even less likely to have read his translation of the 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit Jerónimo Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (1735). Equally neglected is his one and only stage play, Irene (1749), on the doomed relationship between an Ottoman sultan and Greek prisoner set in Istanbul, inspired by his interest in translating Lobo’s account of the religion and politics of the Habesha people of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Both reveal an interest in and sympathy with people and places a world away from the elite gentlemen’s clubs and political debates of Georgian England. |
| Increasingly the classroom is just one of many spaces to challenge traditional assumptions about figures such as Johnson and his inaccessible writing. In his case, an urban accident of geographical proximity has led to a reassessment of Irene beyond the seminar room. The house where Johnson lived and wrote his dictionary is today a museum. It sits in a central London square opposite the Arab British Centre, an organisation dedicated to understanding the Arab world and its history in the UK. | Increasingly the classroom is just one of many spaces to challenge traditional assumptions about figures such as Johnson and his inaccessible writing. In his case, an urban accident of geographical proximity has led to a reassessment of Irene beyond the seminar room. The house where Johnson lived and wrote his dictionary is today a museum. It sits in a central London square opposite the Arab British Centre, an organisation dedicated to understanding the Arab world and its history in the UK. |
| Both institutions teamed up to launch an exhibition this month entitled London’s Theatre of the East. It includes an exhibition in Dr Johnson’s house of Arab-British artists responding to the long history of Arabs and Muslims in England and on its stage from Shakespeare to Johnson’s Irene. They include the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil’s dramatic monologue about the wife of the printer who published the first English translation of the Qur’an in 1649. The British-Moroccan novelist Saeida Rouass is cutting up Johnson’s Irene and his dictionary with Arab accounts of British life to create a startling composite text. Other artists will also be on display in the exhibition, alongside the first public performance of Johnson’s Irene in 270 years. | Both institutions teamed up to launch an exhibition this month entitled London’s Theatre of the East. It includes an exhibition in Dr Johnson’s house of Arab-British artists responding to the long history of Arabs and Muslims in England and on its stage from Shakespeare to Johnson’s Irene. They include the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil’s dramatic monologue about the wife of the printer who published the first English translation of the Qur’an in 1649. The British-Moroccan novelist Saeida Rouass is cutting up Johnson’s Irene and his dictionary with Arab accounts of British life to create a startling composite text. Other artists will also be on display in the exhibition, alongside the first public performance of Johnson’s Irene in 270 years. |
| The time has come to reassess Johnson’s neglected play. When it opened at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in 1749 it only ran for nine nights. The problem lay in the play’s central story of the Ottoman sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror (or “Mahomet” in Johnson’s play), and his relationship with Irene, a Greek Christian captured after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Using a trope common to the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, the apocryphal story portrays Mehmed as a violent oriental despot, crazed with lust, who publicly beheads the hapless Irene once he realises his passion for her threatens to undermine his political authority. | The time has come to reassess Johnson’s neglected play. When it opened at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in 1749 it only ran for nine nights. The problem lay in the play’s central story of the Ottoman sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror (or “Mahomet” in Johnson’s play), and his relationship with Irene, a Greek Christian captured after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Using a trope common to the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, the apocryphal story portrays Mehmed as a violent oriental despot, crazed with lust, who publicly beheads the hapless Irene once he realises his passion for her threatens to undermine his political authority. |
| In Johnson’s version of the story, Irene and her friend Aspasia debate their public and religious roles as women, rather than just their passions. Irene tells Mahomet that women share with men thought, wit and reasons, and she dies because of the decisions she makes, not because she is simply a pawn in a male world. Mahomet in turn is shown in a state of emotional turmoil at his conflicted situation, rather than as the raging Turk of the Elizabethan stage. | In Johnson’s version of the story, Irene and her friend Aspasia debate their public and religious roles as women, rather than just their passions. Irene tells Mahomet that women share with men thought, wit and reasons, and she dies because of the decisions she makes, not because she is simply a pawn in a male world. Mahomet in turn is shown in a state of emotional turmoil at his conflicted situation, rather than as the raging Turk of the Elizabethan stage. |
| Johnson’s collaborator, David Garrick, demanded the play was altered for performance, with Mahomet portrayed in melodramatic fashion and Irene killed onstage. This led to booing and laughter on the play’s premiere and a hasty decision to return to Johnson’s original version, with Irene dying offstage. Johnson tried to challenge prevailing beliefs about oriental drama, especially the assumption that its female characters were passive, complicit victims. It was this challenge, as much as the mannered language and static staging, that led to its critical and theatrical neglect. | Johnson’s collaborator, David Garrick, demanded the play was altered for performance, with Mahomet portrayed in melodramatic fashion and Irene killed onstage. This led to booing and laughter on the play’s premiere and a hasty decision to return to Johnson’s original version, with Irene dying offstage. Johnson tried to challenge prevailing beliefs about oriental drama, especially the assumption that its female characters were passive, complicit victims. It was this challenge, as much as the mannered language and static staging, that led to its critical and theatrical neglect. |
| The performance at Dr Johnson’s house restores Johnson’s more compassionate and contradictory depictions of Irene and Mahomet. This will never redeem the play as a lost classic. But it does allow new audiences drawn from across black, Asian and minority ethnic communities to engage with this icon of white English culture writing about their own history, however garbled it may be. Alongside Johnson purists, they may see that there is no national or cultural purity to what is called English literature, or even language. The culture and history of Abyssinia and the Ottoman empire were important ingredients imported into Johnson’s life and works, and we diminish his achievements if they are ignored. | The performance at Dr Johnson’s house restores Johnson’s more compassionate and contradictory depictions of Irene and Mahomet. This will never redeem the play as a lost classic. But it does allow new audiences drawn from across black, Asian and minority ethnic communities to engage with this icon of white English culture writing about their own history, however garbled it may be. Alongside Johnson purists, they may see that there is no national or cultural purity to what is called English literature, or even language. The culture and history of Abyssinia and the Ottoman empire were important ingredients imported into Johnson’s life and works, and we diminish his achievements if they are ignored. |
| Decolonising Dr Johnson doesn’t consign him to the rubbish heap of dead white writers: on the contrary, it returns him centrestage to a more diverse English literary culture. Decolonising the English curriculum as well as, in this case, its stage allows all of “us” – black, Asian, Muslim and white Britons – to be part of a conversation about Johnson and his literary legacy. It also deepens our understanding of Johnson and his writings, rather than diminishing or even dismissing them. Yes, he was a political and religious conservative, but he was also a passionate abolitionist who identified with outsiders based on his own life of mental and physical ill health. | |
| To read Johnson’s translations and watch his one and only play drawn from other cultures and traditions from outside the English-speaking world is to see that national purity in language and literature is always a dangerous myth created after the fact. Johnson knew it in writing his dictionary and Irene, and that is part of his complicated legacy. | To read Johnson’s translations and watch his one and only play drawn from other cultures and traditions from outside the English-speaking world is to see that national purity in language and literature is always a dangerous myth created after the fact. Johnson knew it in writing his dictionary and Irene, and that is part of his complicated legacy. |
| It seems appropriate that another individual associated with his legacy will also be looking down on the performance of Irene later this month. A portrait of Francis Barber, Johnson’s servant and heir, still hangs in Dr Johnson’s house. Barber helped revise Johnson’s dictionary and advised James Boswell in writing the biography of Johnson. Francis Barber: born a slave in Jamaica, who married a white woman, opened a draper’s shop in Staffordshire, and whose heirs are still among us. It is our problem – and challenge – to address Barber’s heritage of slavery and forcible removal that also enabled us to have the version of Dr Johnson that we do – dictionary, Irene and all. | It seems appropriate that another individual associated with his legacy will also be looking down on the performance of Irene later this month. A portrait of Francis Barber, Johnson’s servant and heir, still hangs in Dr Johnson’s house. Barber helped revise Johnson’s dictionary and advised James Boswell in writing the biography of Johnson. Francis Barber: born a slave in Jamaica, who married a white woman, opened a draper’s shop in Staffordshire, and whose heirs are still among us. It is our problem – and challenge – to address Barber’s heritage of slavery and forcible removal that also enabled us to have the version of Dr Johnson that we do – dictionary, Irene and all. |
| • Jerry Brotton is the author of This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. London’s Theatre of the East is at Dr Johnson’s House through 15 February 2020; arabbritishcentre.org.uk; drjohnsonshouse.org | • Jerry Brotton is the author of This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. London’s Theatre of the East is at Dr Johnson’s House through 15 February 2020; arabbritishcentre.org.uk; drjohnsonshouse.org |
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