Comparative Drama Pub Date : 2023-11-27 , DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2023.a913245 Corinne Zeman
- "The world's a theatre of theft":Islamic Imposture in Tomkis' Albumazar
- Corinne Zeman (bio)
The Goblins whom I now am coniuring vp . . . [are] thin-headed fellowes that liue upon the scraps of inuention and trauell with such vagrant soules, and so like Ghosts in white sheets of paper, that the Statute of Rogues may worthily be sued vpon them, because their wits haue no abiding place, and yet wander without a passe-port. Alas, poore wenches (the nine Muses!) how much are you wrongd, to haue such a number of Bastards lying vpo[n] your hands? But turne them out a begging; or if you cannot be rid of their Riming company (as I thinke it will be very hard) then lay your heauie and immortall curse vpon them, that whatsoeuer they weaue (in the motley-loome of their rustie pates) may like a beggers cloake, be full of stolne patches, and yet neuer a patch like one another, that it may be such true lamentable stuffe, that any honest Christian may be sory to see it. Banish these Word-pirates, (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme.1
—Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare (1603)
Tudor and Stuart writers raced the languages of fraud and thievery, turning Islamicate loanwords, proper names, and ethnonyms into a working vocabulary for everyday subterfuges. In this essay, I demonstrate that in performance and on the printed page, early modern England fixated on Islamic "imposture"—the notion that Islam was an extravagantly enacted con job. The discourses of Islamic imposture surface in rogue pamphlets and city comedies, where they frame the clandestine workings of swindlers and thieves, a discursive strategy used to combat the daily convolutions of truth, legality, and credit in seventeenth-century London. Tracing the cooption and criminal redeployment of Islamicate cultures reveals the mutual imbrications of racialization and class formation and the role of translation in epistemic injustice. [End Page 222]
With the discourses of Islamic imposture as my lens, I turn to the little studied discipline of astrology. Over the course of the seventeenth century, European astrology—its principles borrowed wholesale from the Arabic and Persian traditions—was dismissed as an Islamicate grift and delegitimated as a scientific discipline. Satirists invoked the names of Muslim stargazers to condemn the guile of charlatans and the credulity of gulls. Interestingly, these sendups center on matters of linguistic propriety. Pretenders to celestial knowledge were said to counterfeit expertise by varnishing their prognostications with abstruse jargon taken from Arabo-Persian astrological texts. Thomas Tomkis' Albumazar, a 1615 university drama adapted from Giambattista Della Porta's Lo Astrologo, explores the interconnections between stargazing, villainy, and idiolect as it refashions a real-world Persian astrologer into a London cheat. The playscript uses intertheatrical citations to render criminality audible.2 Characters steal wares while actors seize words—from one another, from London's playhouses, and from the audience itself. The play asks theatergoers to consider who are the rightful owners, the creative borrowers, and the illegitimate abusers of language. In short, when does citationality become an act of piracy? Tomkis' stargazers are not unlike Thomas Dekker's "word-pirates"—rogues who wander over linguistic landscapes without "a passe-port," raiding wordhouses like literary corsairs. By play's end, they have troubled the borders between England and the North African "gulfe of Barbarisme," cobbling together a hybrid culture of ill-gotten semantic spoils.
Bad-Faith Economics
Early modern Europeans wrote extensively on "imposture," the notion that Islam was merely a simulacrum or poor imitation of Christianity. If Christianity was a singular truth, then Islam was a "dark double"—"a mungrell Religion, compil'de of . . . shadowes."3 Islam thus functioned in English thought as a "mirror image," as Matthew Dimmock has written, "enabling a sustained reflection on Christian faults and Christian depravity."4 Dimmock has shown that writers interested in imposture fixated on the Prophet Muhammad. Invoked by both the stage and pulpit amid discussions of religious and moral perversion, he was disapprovingly [End Page 223] branded the "cunning impostor and seducer of the World"—a counterfeit prophet who beguiled the souls of a suggestible public.5 When William Bedwell sat down to title his 1615...
中文翻译：
“世界是一个盗窃剧场”：汤姆基斯专辑中的伊斯兰骗局
以下是内容的简短摘录，以代替摘要：
- “世界是一个盗窃剧场”：汤姆基斯专辑中的伊斯兰骗局
- 科琳·泽曼（简介）
我现在正在联络的哥布林副总裁。。。这些人都是头脑迟钝的家伙，靠着这些流浪灵魂的影响和痛苦而生活，就像白纸上的幽灵，所以《盗贼法》值得对他们提起诉讼，因为他们的智慧没有立足之地。 ，却在没有通行证的情况下徘徊。唉，可怜的姑娘们（九位缪斯女神！），让这么多私生子躺在你的手上，你受了多大的委屈？但把他们赶走是一种乞求；或者如果你不能摆脱他们的Riming公司（因为我认为这将是非常困难的），那么就把你的重生和不朽的诅咒放在他们身上，无论他们做什么（在他们生锈的头的杂色织布中）都可能像乞丐斗篷一样，充满了石块，但又不像其他一块，这可能是真正可悲的东西，任何诚实的基督徒可能会很难过地看到它。将这些文字盗版者（你们这些神圣的学问情妇）驱逐到野蛮的深渊中。1
——托马斯·德克尔，《美好的一年》（1603）
都铎王朝和斯图亚特王朝的作家们竞相使用欺诈和盗窃的语言，将伊斯兰借词、专有名称和民族名称变成了日常诡计的工作词汇。在这篇文章中，我证明了在表演和印刷品中，早期现代英国对伊斯兰教的“冒充”的关注——伊斯兰教是一种奢侈的骗局。伊斯兰骗局的话语出现在流氓小册子和城市喜剧中，它们描绘了骗子和小偷的秘密活动，这是一种用来对抗 17 世纪伦敦日常的真相、合法性和信用的话语策略。追踪伊斯兰文化的拉拢和犯罪重新部署，揭示了种族化和阶级形成的相互交织，以及翻译在认知不公正中的作用。[完第222页]
以伊斯兰骗局的话语作为我的镜头，我转向了很少被研究的占星学学科。在整个十七世纪，欧洲占星学——其原理大量借鉴了阿拉伯和波斯的传统——被斥为伊斯兰的骗局，并被剥夺了作为一门科学学科的合法性。讽刺作家援引穆斯林天文学家的名字来谴责江湖骗子的狡诈和海鸥的轻信。有趣的是，这些讽刺文章集中在语言恰当性问题上。据说，天体知识的觊觎者用阿拉伯-波斯占星文献中的深奥术语来粉饰他们的预言，从而伪造了他们的专业知识。托马斯·汤姆基斯 (Thomas Tomkis) 的《Albumazar》是一部 1615 年的大学戏剧，改编自詹巴蒂斯塔·德拉·波塔 (Giambattista Della Porta) 的《占星术》( Lo Astrologo )，探讨了观星、邪恶和白痴之间的相互联系，将现实世界中的波斯占星师重塑为伦敦骗子。剧本使用跨剧引用来渲染犯罪行为。2角色偷窃商品，而演员则从彼此、从伦敦的剧院以及从观众那里夺取话语。该剧要求观众思考谁是合法的所有者、创造性的借用者和非法滥用语言的人。简而言之，引用何时会成为盗版行为？托姆基斯的观星者与托马斯·德克笔下的“文字海盗”没有什么不同——这些盗贼在没有“通行证”的情况下在语言景观中徘徊，像文学海盗一样袭击文字库。到比赛结束时，他们已经扰乱了英格兰和北非“野蛮湾”之间的边界，拼凑出一种由不义之财的语义战利品组成的混合文化。
恶意经济学
现代早期的欧洲人写了大量关于“冒充”的文章，认为伊斯兰教只是基督教的幻影或拙劣的模仿。如果基督教是一个单一的真理，那么伊斯兰教就是一个“黑暗的替身”——“一个混杂的宗教，由……阴影组成。” 3因此，正如马修·迪莫克（Matthew Dimmock）所写，伊斯兰教在英国思想中发挥着“镜像”的作用，“使人们能够持续反思基督教的过失和基督教的堕落”。4迪莫克表明，对冒名顶替感兴趣的作家都专注于先知穆罕默德。在有关宗教和道德倒错的讨论中，舞台和讲坛上都提到了他，他被不以为然地贴上了“世界上狡猾的骗子和诱惑者”的标签[完第223页] ——一个欺骗易受影响的公众灵魂的假先知。5当 William Bedwell 坐下来为他的 1615 年命名时……
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