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Morose's turban.

Article Excerpt
GIVEN THE EXPLOSION of critical interest in ,the "global" as a paradigm in literary and cultural studies--not to mention the recent resurgence of anti-immigrant hysteria in the United States--the question of English cosmopolitanism and xenophobia is timely and important, approachable from many possible angles. It might seem circuitous, then, to use Jonson's Epicene, a play set squarely in London, as a point of entry into the discussion. Over half of the play takes place within the house of that most insular of characters, Morose, who feverishly tries to isolate his domestic domain from the noise and bustle of outside life. Despite his resistance to penetration from the wider world, however, Morose invokes that world admiringly in his first appearance onstage during a farcical "interaction" with his bowing and gesticulating servant Mute:



Your Italian and Spaniard are wise in these [gestures]! And it is a frugal and comely gravity.... The Turk in this divine discipline is admirable, exceeding all the potentates of the earth; still waited on by mutes, and all his commands so executed; yea, even in the war, as I have heard, and in his marches, most of his charges and directions given by signs and with silence. An exquisite art! And I am heartily ashamed and angry oftentimes that the Princes of Christendom should suffer a barbarian to transcend 'era in so high a point of felicity. I will practise it hereafter. (2.1.19-35) (1)

Even before Morose compares his household's disciplined regimen of enforced silence to foreign modes of communication and rule, Truewit describes his elaborate headwear as a "huge turban of nightcaps on his head buckled over his ears," a getup that Clerimont explains to be "his custom when he walks abroad" (1.1.139-41). Associated with the Turk when he is "abroad" in the streets of London, and imagining his rule at "home" in relation to the practices of Italians, Spaniards, and Turks (at least insofar as he "[has] heard" of these practices), Morose must be read in the context of English engagements with and perceptions of the non-English. (2)

The topic of this forum encourages us to do more than note the fact of the presence of the foreign in this London-based satire. (3) We need to nuance how we understand...

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