Gender and foreignness in William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes Parts One and Two (1656–1663)

This essay explores foreignness and literal and figurative border crossing by analysing the representation of female characters in William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes plays. Davenant's play/s, first issued as one part (1656) and then as an edition consisting of an enlarged version of Part One and an added Part Two (1663), were first performed at Davenant's home, Rutland House (1656), and then at the Cockpit (1659), before moving to Lincoln's Inn Fields after the Restoration of the theatres in 1660. ¹ The Siege of Rhodes plays are perhaps best known today for the fact that the first part was sanctioned for performance during the ban on acting in place between 1642 and 1659 and thus represents an early form of emergence from theatrical lockdown. The first part also broke new ground in performance with its use of moveable scenery and because it contains the first part written for a woman to act on a public stage in England. The novel features of the plays and the conditions under which they were performed contribute to the theme of foreignness, which the play approaches in a similarly innovative way. Central to the play's handling of foreignness is the figure of Ianthe, the veil she wears, and the homoerotic scenes she shares with Roxolana. Ianthe's agency and hybrid status as both familiar and foreign generates anxiety in some of the plays' characters, but Davenant's plays appear to celebrate rather than condemn her mercurial nature.

The Siege of Rhodes plays straddle generic boundaries, which has led many contemporaries and modern critics to diversely proclaim one or both parts of these plays the first English opera, precursors for the heroic play, or a continuation of the Stuart masque form. ² The first part of 1656 was entered as a ‘Maske’ in the Stationers’ Register and functioned as an opera. ³ The post-Restoration 1663 edition underwent some further generic shifts, moving away from recitative verse forms and with less music, and was entered in the Stationers’ Register vaguely as a ‘booke’. ⁴ The experimental and eccentric nature of the plays that leads to this struggle to accurately label and designate a genre or form is also reflected in the ingenuities they introduced to theatrical production. Part One was the first example on the English stage of movable scenery, recitative verse, and female actors, which arguably contribute to the disorienting way in which these plays render the familiar elements of the theatre unfamiliar or uncanny. The innovations in both genre and theatrical production in combination with the foreignness of the subject matter give rise to a sense of border-defying expansiveness. However, and somewhat ironically, Davenant's prefatory material to the 1656 edition is an ‘Address design’d for excuses’ and characterised by complaints of limitation. ⁵ He laments that the scenes have been ‘confin’d’ in stature, that the play could only contain seven cast members, and that the recitative verse has constrained his lines into ‘short fractions’. ⁶ Davenant's chief issue with the restrictions is the impact that they have on the magnitude of the story and its themes. The space is

so narrow an allowance for the Fleet of Solyman the Magnificent, his Army, the Island of Rhodes, and the varieties attending the Siege of the City; that I fear you will think, we invite you to such a contracted Trifle as that of the Caesars carv’d upon a Nut. ⁷

The dedication to the 1663 edition further highlights how the play engages with notions of foreignness on the stage. Although this version of the play was performed on a sizeable stage, with a large cast, and in heroic couplets, the preface still enacts the compression that he complained of in the 1656 edition. The language of the dedication collapses different nationalities into a single discursive space, London and the river Thames, thus troubling the binary distinctions between them. Ostensibly seeking protection for the plays from critics and censors, Davenant uses spatial metaphors to represent his patron, the Earl of Clarendon, sheltering the characters of his play:

my Rhodians seem to enjoy a better Harbour in the Pacifique Thames, than they had on the Mediterranean; and I have brought Solyman to be arraign’d at your Tribunal, where you are the Censor of his civility and magnificence. ⁹

The plays’ focus on Rhodes's defence against the Ottoman siege and eventual conquest of Rhodes in 1522 highlights the instability of a national identity based on geography. A Sicilian Duke, Alphonso, is visiting Rhodes when the siege commences and Ianthe, his wife, then braves the Ottoman fleet to deliver military supplies to him. Captured by Ottoman forces, Ianthe impresses the Turkish Sultan, Solyman, with her virtue, and is thus released and granted passports allowing her and Alphonso to return home to Sicily. Thus, both the Sicilian and the Turkish characters are foreign in that they are not from Rhodes. Further, the focus of the play is not on locally born Rhodians nor on Rhodian nobility but on The Knight's Hospitaller: a company of Knights made up of a variety of European Christian nationalities. The play's staging of the geographical Rhodes, which has no solid or definable nationality, is underscored through Alphonso's claim that ‘[i]n Rhodes besieg’d we must be Rhodians too’, indicating that national European identity is simply a case of locale and nothing more intrinsic. ¹¹ Similarly, the setting highlights European conceptions of the Mediterranean as a site of dangerously fluid boundaries. As Ambereen Dadabhoy puts it, the Mediterranean is a zone ‘that simultaneously intermingle[s] and demarcate[s] ideas and identities’ and which offers ‘travellers and writers a location through which they could negotiate various forms of cultural, religious, and racial differences’. ¹² However, whilst Dadhaboy points out that this fluidity generally ‘necessitates the construction of stronger, less permeable and porous borders around identity and culture’, this is not the case in The Siege of Rhodes, which continually returns to and seemingly relishes its own indefinable edges. ¹³ Although the fact that the Rhodians are all white and all Christians arguably invites the British audience to ally oneself with them, which is further supported by the consistent reference to the English troops in the Rhodian forces, the plays complicate any easy association between the European Rhodians and familiarity or virtue and between the Turkish forces and foreignness or barbarity. ¹⁴ Solyman is consistently admired as noble, honourable and merciful, whilst Alphonso and other knights seem to be hot-headed and quick to judge. ¹⁵

The plot of Part One intertwines national and relationship boundaries when Alphonso's misplaced jealousy and suspicion of Solyman's intentions vis-à-vis Ianthe leads him to reject Solyman's offer to let them return home. He and Ianthe end up engaged in a battle with the Turkish forces during which they are both wounded at the play's conclusion. The enlarged Part One expands the cast – most notably through the inclusion of Roxolana, Solyman's wife – offering a parallel for Alphonso's jealousy with Roxolana who is similarly suspicious of her husband's relationship with Ianthe. Alphonso's jealousy exposes his own reliance on stereotypical depictions of Ottoman identities. Early modern depictions of the Ottoman empire yoke together their military and sexual voraciousness. ¹⁶ Thus, the attempted invasion of Rhodes is, for Alphonso, a clear indication that he would also attempt to invade Ianthe's body. Solyman's setting of Ianthe free despite the fact that ‘[s]he was his own by right of War’ unhinges Alphonso's understanding of the foreigner and leads him to exclaim over the ‘wondrous Turkish chastity’ and feverishly wonder if they are ‘besieg’d then by a friend?’. ¹⁷ However, Alphonso's thoughts cannot sustain the paradoxical notions of Turkish chastity and Turkish friendship and instead turn once again to suspicion, this time inscribing the difference and enemy status not only back onto Solyman but now on Ianthe too, whom he accuses of adultery because of her defence of Solyman's virtue. ¹⁸ In this vein, Matthew Birchwood has highlighted how The Siege of Rhodes plays expose the unstable way in which a European masculine identity is constructed against depictions of ‘the Other’ by transforming the Turkish character into the virtuous and honourable character of Solyman and making this opposition impossible. He writes: ‘Solyman's apparent appropriation of notionally European patterns of morality and “civil”-ity issues a disorienting challenge to Alphonso, provoking a crisis of identity’ and leading him to exclaim oxymoronically that ‘[t]his Christian Turk amazes me’. ¹⁹ Thus, by failing to create a Turkish character who is brutal or bloodthirsty in accordance with the stereotypes, and through denying a conventional narrative in which Solyman's familiarity would be rendered acceptable through conversion to Christianity, Davenant leaves us in limbo with Turkish characters that are still foreign, still the enemy, and still Muslim but who fail to enact barbarity and instead display the virtue and honour that the play celebrates. ²⁰ Alphonso's inability to see beyond these stereotypes is marked as his crucial flaw and the reason he and Ianthe reject Solyman's passports and end up wounded at the end of Part One.

In Part Two, the transitional space between the foreign and the familiar becomes increasingly focused on the figure of Ianthe. Despite being only a foreign visitor, Ianthe is elected by the populace of Rhodes to represent them as their envoy in treaty agreements because they have more faith in her ability to negotiate with the foreign invaders than with their current leaders. Ianthe thereby becomes the body through which the two halves of the siege mediate their conflict, but in order to do so, she must go to the Turkish camp alone. Her appearance in the Turkish camp enrages Roxolana to the extent that she contemplates Ianthe's murder, but during her stay, Ianthe successfully confronts and assuages Roxolana's jealousy. Yet, her absence from the Rhodian settlement heightens the anxiety of not only Alphonso but all of the European men she leaves behind. Alphonso fails to control his jealousy and launches a foolhardy attack on the Turkish camp, which results in a catastrophic defeat for the Rhodians and his own capture. The conflict resolves when Ianthe and Roxolana befriend each other, both couples overcome their jealousy, and the two opposing sides accept a peace treaty drawn up by Ianthe.

Ianthe is thus the site upon which the binary between the familiar and the foreign seems to collapse and merge. Although white and Christian, Ianthe is a female character and therefore a potential ‘Other’. As Dadabhoy points out, ‘Women bridge the self-other binary and become the means through which […] playwrights experiment with multiple forms of difference’. ²¹ This is most clear in the fact that Ianthe enters the stage and spends most of her time on it veiled. Park has argued that the veil is ‘the emblem of her resistance to imperial possession’, representative of a border that Solyman cannot penetrate. ²² However, to read Ianthe's veil as a protective border, solidified by her Christian virtue, is to ignore the multiplicity of meanings that an early modern European audience would attach to the veil. In Susanna Burghartz's study of the veil, she points out that from the sixteenth century onwards, ‘the Orient and the veiled woman seem to be intertwined’ but that the ‘fixed boundary between the veiled women of the East and uncovered Western women appears more porous than one might expect’. ²³ As a result, ‘veiled women could connote sound, traditional standards of dress and could stand for propriety and decency, for the “Self.” But they could also be read as a sign of the “Other”’. ²⁴ The appearance of a female body onstage and veiled may have aroused audience suspicion as to whether she could be read as modest and proper, or foreign and dangerous. It is also worth noting that Ianthe calls her veil ‘this curtain’ in a clear reference to the theatrical medium. ²⁵ The actress playing Ianthe is thus the first female body to perform onstage, and is introduced shrouded in a veil, which heightens tensions around the character/performer's strangeness or foreignness as both female actor and character. The veiling of Ianthe is, I would argue, a means through which Davenant links his novel staging of a real female body in the public playhouse with the thematic conflict of his play to suggest that the boundary between familiar and foreign is fluid, fragile, and ineffectual.

The liminality of Ianthe's veil is intensified by the paradoxical language of contrast with which she is introduced. When she first appears veiled Solyman refers to her as ‘it’, and the discussion between Solyman and Mustapha that follows contains a series of juxtapositions that highlight the indefinable position in which the veil puts her: she is both the ‘Morning’ and ‘in a Cloud’, and she is ‘the Daughter of the Night’ who has ‘Stars to make her Bright’. ²⁶ Alphonso later repeats the language used by Solyman and Mustapha saying, ‘She is all Harmony and fair as light; / But brings me discord and the Clouds of night’. ²⁷ Kim F. Hall's work, amongst others, has made visible the discursive framework of race and morality where these contrasts between darkness and light appear in conjunction with the female body, in which darkness and blackness are associated with a racial ‘Other’ and suspect morality as opposed to whiteness, fairness, or brightness, which is linked to beauty and Christian purity. ²⁸ However, Ianthe in The Siege of Rhodes is consistently associated with both light and dark aspects. Importantly, though, the fluidity of the boundary is not condemned but rather celebrated – it is through Ianthe's liminal figuration that the central conflict of the text is resolved, and this is achieved through her relationship with another foreign figure – Roxolana.

Ianthe's relationship with Roxolana engages with early modern stereotypes of foreignness. ²⁹ Roxolana evokes Orientalist tropes when she nearly murders Ianthe out of jealousy, a scene staged in a sumptuous seraglio and flanked by eunuchs. Nevertheless, she does not enact the murder and instead shows mercy thus failing ‘to conform to her Orientalist stereotype’ and providing ‘more evidence of the play's reluctance to enforce conventional binaries such as this’. ³⁰ I posit, though, that Roxolana does enact one stereotype of foreignness: homoeroticism. Instead of stabbing a sleeping and unveiled Ianthe, Roxolana wakes her and tests her chastity by giving her ‘this kiss – it comes from Solyman’ to see how she will react. ³¹ Pleased by her chaste confusion at this advance, Roxolana decides to trust her. To prove their alliance, she then kisses her four more times, indicated by the sets of dashes: Roxolana. I have another Present for you now; And such a Present as I know You will much better than the first allow; Though Solyman will not esteem it so Tis from my self – of friendship such a Seal – [Kisses her] As you to Solyman must ne’r reveal. – And that I may be more assur’d By this agen you are conjur’d – . ³²

Ianthe's response to Roxolana's kisses is not fear or surprise, but instead pleasure: ‘Presents so good and great as these / I should receive upon my knees’. ³³ Although Roxolana calls this a seal of friendship, her wish to keep it secret and the fact that it is not just one chaste kiss but multiple kisses adds an element of homoerotic potential, as at least one other critic has noted. ³⁴ Lesbianism and foreignness were associated in several travelogues of the period; for example, in Nicolas de Nicolay's travel account of Turkey he recounts that a woman could ‘become so fervently in love the one of the other as if it were with men […] so full are they of luxuriousness and feminine wantonness’. ³⁵ It is clear from de Nicolay's emphasis on a woman taking the position of a man that this foreign lesbianism threatened his male sense of identity and authority, but Davenant fails to condemn its illicitness in his play. ³⁶ Instead, the homoerotic exchange provides Ianthe with the agency needed to resolve the ongoing conflicts.

The homoerotic alliance and friendship between Roxolana and Ianthe results in Roxolana, later in the play, securing the imprisoned Alphonso for Ianthe and handing him over to her, bound, giving Ianthe one more kiss in the process: Roxolana. For I did ever mean to keep my Vow: Which I renew, and seal it faster now. – Kisses her The Sultan franckly gave thy Lord to me; And I as freely render him to thee. ³⁷

In a powerful inversion of the usual male exchange of women, Roxolana hands Alphonso to Ianthe as a prisoner and puts Ianthe in a position of authority, which allows her to effectively chide him for his jealous suspicions – a chance that she seizes upon: Ianthe. I am chang’d since you beheld me last. In Rhodes I wholly did my self resign To serve your pow’r, but you are now in mine. […] Let this confirm your restless Jealousie: You came in bound, and thus I make you free. – Unbinds him’ ³⁸

Even after unbinding him, she reminds him that he is still under her protection in the Sultan's camp and considers further punishment in a long speech of righteous anger: Whilst you are here submitted to my sway, It safe discretion were to make you pay For all those Sighs and Tears my Heart and Eyes Have lost to make you lose your Jealousies. ³⁹

Though Alphonso tries to interrupt and prevent her from chiding him, complaining that it causes him pain, Ianthe continues for several more lines and only concludes on her own terms. ⁴⁰ In this exchange of the captive Alphonso, Roxolana proves that she is no longer jealous of Ianthe and resolves her domestic conflict with Solyman, but more critically it results in the subversive repositioning of Ianthe in authority over her husband whose masculine identity crisis had caused so much trouble. The play then ends in domestic and national harmony in which Solyman gives Ianthe the sole right to set the terms of the treaty. ⁴¹ As such, Ianthe's subversive and liminal positionality and her alliance with Roxolana have rewarded her with control in her private life and over the future prosperity of all the Rhodians.

As this essay has shown, Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes plays explore and disrupt stereotypical depictions of foreignness. Davenant presents Ianthe as a figure who can bridge the gap between the familiar and the foreign. Although Davenant does depict her as a site of anxiety for European male characters who construct their identities based upon binary oppositions, liminality in this play is not vilified but is instead celebrated. Ultimately, peace is created through the relationship between figures who refuse binary demarcations – Ianthe, Roxolana, and Solyman. The figure of Ianthe is associated with the dangerous potential of transgressive foreignness through the use of the veil and – in the case of the 1656 performance – by being the first actress on the public stage during the closure of the theatres, and as such it is she who is able to negotiate and forge alliances with the Ottoman invaders. Though Solyman is a formidable enemy as well as Turkish and Muslim, Davenant also highlights his nobility, virtue, and mercy. Roxolana is both murderous and, potentially, dangerously erotic to the extent that she strays into the homoerotic, but despite this, she is able to overcome her jealousy, resolve her domestic problems, and provide Ianthe with the agency required to resolve the conflict. In The Siege of Rhodes plays, then, Davenant seems to be celebrating the grey areas in between the binaries, which perhaps speaks to his own ability to work across the boundaries of censorship, political allegiance, and theatrical production.