Transforming Attitudes Towards the Turk in Edward Ravenscroft’s Mamamouchi, or The citizen turn’d gentleman (1672) and Molière’s Le bourgeois Gentilhomme (1668)

When Edward Ravenscroft approached the polarising figure of the Turk in The citizen turn’d gentleman (1672), an adaptation of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1668), he inherited certain structures and motivations that stem out of very specific attitudes towards the Ottomans that were not easily transposed onto the English context. This did not stop him from penning one of the most successful plays of his time, but it also did not stop the critics from deeming his adaptation a cheap knock-off that hardly altered the original and was closer to a translation than to any exercise of real talent. His adaptation, however, builds on the expectations of his London audiences and the trends on narrative-building regarding East–West relations to cleverly alter the reception of the play rather than the execution thereof, resulting in a minimal style of adaptation that produced a profound outcome. This study explores Ravenscroft’s way of dealing with the very central figure of the Turk in The citizen turn’d gentleman and the relation to the original source material in order to prove that his decision was a conscious act, part of a much more complex adaptative procedure than he is given credit for.


Introduction
Edward Ravenscroft went from unknown playwright to immediate sensation in 1672, when he adapted Molière's wildly successful comedy, Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1668), onto the English stage. His Mamamouchi, or, The citizen turn'd gentleman was much in line with contemporary fashion in Restoration England: it poked fun 1 3 at the seventeenth-century London citizen and criticized the incipient bourgeoisie's ambitions and aspirations to join the higher classes. Despite not being as grandiose and bombastic a production as Molière's original, the Mamamouchi was a hit, featuring prominent use of the spectacular and cast some of the biggest comedic talents of the time, the likes of Cave Underhill, James Nokes, and Edward Angel.
The decision to adapt the comedy of Molière was not original amidst a swell of French adaptations that characterized this period. Formally, the satire in it is neither novel nor singular, and the adaptative process sees little alteration to the original dialogue and the important role of the Turk in Molière's original is transported onto the English version almost unchanged, to the point some academics erroneously categorized it as a translation.
To some extent, this categorization is understandable in the context of the Restoration, which saw a surge in demand for dramatic material that flooded the market with plays taken from continental sources like Spain, Italy and, above all, France. In the prologue to Mamamouchi, Ravenscroft acknowledges this trend as fleeting: "But know, when the translating vein is past, /That you must not expect new plays so fast" (8)(9)). Yet the "translating vein" was only getting started, and it would bring about unprecedented side effects.
In such a stiff and often polarising market, accusations of theft became an easy way to discredit one's competition. Although many of these accusations were more cynical jabs at rivals than genuine preoccupation with authorship, they did help to evolve old preconceptions on intellectual property inherited from the Renaissance.
Up until the 1660s, adaptation, plagiarism, and appropriation were very opaque concepts which often overlapped. To imitate was to praise, and therefore it was not only common, but encouraged, that authors should look to previous genius before going on their own. Since the times of Martial, skill was prized over originality and many great and established figures copied in order to improve. This practice may have elicited circumstantial reprobation at best, and was never a reason for persecution, let alone prosecution. The Restoration changed that: plays became investments, and as such theatre companies needed a way to keep them safe, and authors started becoming more aware of their role and value in the creative process. In addition, this new material was being borrowed from living playwrights, not the immortal classics. Adaptation was no longer a form of flattery, but a financial opportunity, and thus the way was being paved for the first copyright laws, which would be introduced in the Statue of Anne of 1710. 1 In this regard, Edward Ravenscroft was a product and willing participant of his time. A new voice that found a place at the forefront in the highly competitive market of the Restoration, producing comedies that were largely someone else's brainchild. The crowd-pulling impact of works like both editions of Mamamouchi (1672, 1675), or The London cuckolds (1681), earned him fame and enmity in equal terms. His infamous row with Dryden demonstrates that his success on 1 3 Transforming attitudes towards the Turk stage was a sore spot with those authors that advocated for dramatic purity, whatever that would be, and historical categorization of his work as a translation often stemmed from ideological bias rather than academic analysis.
Even if he hardly changed the original source material, Ravenscroft inserted himself, whether consciously or not, into a larger, broader narrative-building exercise by deciding to adapt Le bourgeois gentilhomme in particular. An exercise of East vs. West that would even help change the perception of the Turkish people in seventeenth-century England in terms of England's own self-awareness.
This study explores how Ravenscroft's use of the figure of the Turk is exemplary of his lowkey approach to adaptation and reveals a noticeably complex process, one that is much more attuned to the reality of his time than many give him credit for. His Mamamouchi is here read as a departure from the common mindset prevailing during the Renaissance and Restoration years concerning the nature and role of the Turk in English society.

The Turk and the West: A Difficult Story
When Great Britain and five of the greatest powers of Europe convened in Berlin in 1878 to determine the outcome of the Russo-Turkish War, the Ottoman Empire, significantly weakened and humiliated, was referred to as "the sick man of Europe," a soubriquet coined by British Prime Minister John Russell a few years earlier (Munir, 2017). Such a term does not cause as much an impact nowadays because we are aware of Late Victorian and imperialist projections of the Turkish people as a threatening and morally inferior race.
However modernised, these attitudes are hardly new. They are based upon an enormous body of literature which has shaped a long history of Western-Eastern relations over the centuries, ever since Christians and Muslims first made contact. With the advent of the printing press, this body of literature was invested with an additional aura of veracity. The mixture of fact and stereotype purveyed by these works often acted as the base for the fictional recreation of the Turk in English literature, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Dryden all drew upon a large, albeit limited corpus of material to generate overwhelmingly negative representations of the Ottomans.
If one considers other famous Turks on the English stage during the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline periods, from Othello to Tamburlaine, we notice that they are, more often than not, treated in a negative light. Be it as threat or calamity, they are inextricably linked to Islam, "devoid of particular characteristics, this spectral Turk represents pure otherness, the ideal enemy" (Welch, 2013, 92). This unidimensional perspective on the Turk was generally accepted throughout Europe: not in vain the word Turk became interchangeable with Muslim for a long period of time, much in the same way the term Saracen did during the time of the Crusades, or Arab in more modern times.

The French Precedent
France's alliance with the Ottoman Sultan in the sixteenth century did not only affect the relationship the rest of Europe-England in particular-had with the East, but it also deterministically brought about Le bourgeois gentilhomme.
Its conception is a direct result of the diplomatic and political relations between France and the Ottoman Empire. The alliance that was born in 1536, itself being one of the longest in the Old Continent, was an ever changing one at that, its stability often threatened by bouts of anti-Turkish sentiment. Landweber explains that "Louis XIV had inherited a ticklish friendship with the Ottoman sultans from his royal predecessors; he had to balance its upkeep against the offence it gave to his European allies and the political-religious fodder it gave to his foes" (181). However, the expansiveness of the Ottoman Empire also increased the West's fascination for the East, and the French cultural elite turned this into a fashion they dubbed turqueries, a term undoubtedly imbued with negative connotations based on stereotype and a sense of superiority. The court of Louis XIV was especially entrapped by this fashion, where everything Turkish, and by extension everything Moorish, Arab, or vaguely evoking of Islamic culture, became a trend. Even Iberian Al-Andalus started to be seen in a more positive light (Duprat, 2010, 223).
There seems to be a shift, starting during the reign of Louis XIV, by which Turkish depictions in France served the purpose of defining France's self-perceived hegemony, and thus the French started to be more concerned with accurate representation of their Turkish allies. As opposed to the representations of the other regions of the world, whose outlines were composed of vaguely evocative elements (let's not forget that the turban, for example, could be used as much for the American king as for the Persian), Turkey, was becoming detached from the exotic and fantastic Orient; it had been given its own place in France's, and by extension the West's, distribution of the known world, and, through the portrayal of its "Emperor" in the 1662 extravaganza, the Grand Carousel, France had turned the Ottoman Empire into a peer which, of course, was second in grandeur to the Sun King, but was nonetheless updated by the current state of affairs into portraying a more culturally relevant form of the Turk. In sum, Turkey had come into existence.
Only seven years later, in November of 1669, the Ottoman envoy, Suleyman Aga, visited the court at Versailles, tasked with delivering a letter from Sultan Mehmed IV to Louis XIV directly. The pomp with which the Sun King received the Ottoman emissary signals how momentous French excitement towards the exotic Turk had become: There was something of a masquerade in this fascinating ceremony as some members of the Court fashioned themselves in unusually elaborate garments.
[…] [The king] did make a spectacle of himself by dressing in all of his diamonds and wearing an exotic crown decorated with splendid feat. (Behdad, 1992, 37) Indeed, this celebration was a masquerade that would set the tone for future representations of the Turk in France because "this event marked an interesting departure from the traditional allegorical" conception of the Turk (Landweber, 2005, 181) in favour of a keener focus on accuracy-or at least intended to be accurate-, one minimally yet significantly different from the very same Turks it portrayed during the Grand Carousel. Suleyman Aga's visit was the perfect occasion to prove that France had nothing to envy the Ottomans. In a splendorous effort to impress their allies, they defined themselves through them. Most importantly, though, Aga's rather underwhelming encounter with Louis XIV would be the reason Molière's Bourgeois gentilhomme came about.
On the surface, the Ottoman ambassador proved a disappointment to the exotic expectations of the nobles present: he only wore a wool coat and refused to bow to the Sun King, causing great offence. However, the embarrassment that the French king had suffered answered to more than Aga's lack of diplomatic savoir-faire: His simple dress revealed that what the court considered to be a high official to Sultan Mehmet IV was in fact much lower in rank, especially awkward in light of French Secretary for Foreign Affairs Hugh de Lionne's decision to welcome Aga impressively, inaccurately, and probably insensitively dressed as a Grand Vizier (Dyk, 2017, 2). On top of everything, the alleged experts brought by Louis XIV as intermediaries and translators proved inept in establishing fluid communication. The ceremony had become a comedy of errors and an embarrassment. Promptly, Louis XIV specifically commissioned Molière to create a comedy full of turqueries to be premiered the following year in order to return the embarrassment, to ridicule the Turk in the same way he felt he had been ridiculed. Close to one hundred and fifty years of diplomatic give and take between the two countries had led to this. 2 Molière pulled no punches, and he briefly joked about this through the Philosophy Master in Acte I. First, he gets into a fight with the Dancing-Master and the Singing-Master, after which he declares: "Cela n'est rien. Un philosophe sait recevoir comme il faut les choses, et je vais composer contre eux une satire du style de Juvénal, qui les déchirera de la belle façon. Laissons cela." Then, when attempting to learn Monsieur Jourdain in the arts of moral reasoning, the latter replies with: "Non, laissons cela. Je suis bilieux comme tous les diables; et il n'y a morale qui tienne, je me veux mettre en colère tout mon soûl, quand il m'en prend envie" (II.iv.p.280-81). 3 The embassy of Suleyman Aga provided plentiful material for Molière. While his satire of the French bourgeoisie prevails as the main theme, as was the tradition of the time, the Turk is ridiculed and the general attitude to the turqueries, even if vehicular for the generalized satire of the play, is that of mockery towards the supposedly Turkish figures of the play (i.e. the Mufti, dervishes, etc.). The main proof of this is the French king's insistence that the Chevalier d'Arvieux participate in the creation of the play. Laurent D'Arvieux was a French trader who had become a passionate advocate of Eastern cultures through his travels in Northern Africa and the Levant. His six volumes of memories brought the Turkish and Middle-Eastern cultures into mainstream consciousness, effectively making him a prominent Orientalist, and he was even invited by King Louis XIV himself to give lectures on Turkish culture. He was also involved in the planning of Aga's reception, and was undeniably responsible for a great deal of the expectations towards the Turkish ambassador. As a pre-eminent expert on Oriental matters, he "worked closely with Molière and Lully to give the play a 'realistic' sense of Oriental culture" (Behdad,38). King Louis XIV took the precaution of enlisting Arvieux in order to make this new play evidently Turkish. Not just Oriental, not simply exotic, but unmistakeably Turkish, so that the mockery-and its target-would be more than evident.

The Mamamouchi in England
The historical precedents that brought about the creation of Le bourgeois gentilhomme in France cannot, evidently, be applied to Ravenscroft's adaptation. England was transforming all its imports from France, be it phrases or fashions, by introducing them into a new linguistic and social context that gave them new meaning, and Molière was not any different (Jones,85). As such, the different social and cultural contexts into which the Mamamouchi was born would have certainly been understood by Ravenscroft, and in a sense, Franco-Turkish relations were as important as Anglo-Turkish ones in the adaptation of the Mamamouchi in England.
Molière's repertoire of sure-fire hits was large and the choice wide when it came to adapting his work into the English stage. The election of Le bourgeois gentilhomme surely came not because of, but along with the conscious decision of adapting the Turkish figure into a cultural milieu that differed from its original and that certainly understood it differently. As was common practice during the Restoration, Ravenscroft engrossed the comedic material of the French source according to English standards by mixing in extra plot elements from Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669) and L'Avare (1668), and yet he decided to leave those sections concerning the Turkish ceremony and the fake Sultan virtually untouched; sections he was most assuredly aware stemmed from the mockery and rancour of a French king. 4 In Ravenscroft, however, the figure of the Turk is treated with a comedic light-heartedness that is representative of the moral freedom of the Restoration. As far as evocation goes, the simple choice of source material was Ravenscroft's first and, in a way, his most fundamental change from the original, because it based the plays' adaptative capability on its reception.
In Act III of The citizen turn'd gentleman, Trickmore, the mountebank ally of Cureal and Young Jorden, manipulates Sir Simon away from his betrothed, Lucia, by implying she is of loose morals, to which Sir Simon replies: "I thank you, Sir, I will not be in the Turkish fashion and go with a crescent above my brows. I love to 1 3 Transforming attitudes towards the Turk walk without being pointed at" (III.iii.80-81). Here, Sir Simon is not mocking the Turk for their faith, even though his words reference their religious symbology. At most he is pointing out their extravagance. He is, however, exploiting the comedy of the image itself and making a rather obvious sexual joke by comparing the shape of an upwards crescent and the horns of a cuckold. The audience would have certainly snorted a guffaw at this jab, but mostly at the fact that it is Sir Simon who says this. His name is, after all, Sir Simon Softhead. For the audience, it would be clear that looking like a Turk is going to be the least of his problems. Incidentally, this scene happens to be one of Ravenscroft's few original additions to his adaptation. Where Molière indeed tries to mock Turkish customs in his play, Ravenscroft seems to only use the imagery of the Turk to create comedy in his very English characters, and perhaps do some foreshadowing of the Turkish ceremony that will act as the play's climax. Thus, "Turkishness" in the English version is relieved of Christian moral baggage and used merely for mockery, though not necessarily towards the Turks themselves.
Act V opens to the ceremony in which Jorden will be knighted Mamamouchi, a made-up Turkish paladin, by the Great Ottoman Sultan himself in what is the height of comedy in the play. Unlike Jorden, the Restoration audience that would go see The citizen turn'd gentleman would obviously be aware of the Sultan's real identity; thus, in this scene where Jorden constantly seems to flop about the stage not knowing what he is saying and doing, they would, again, laugh at Jorden's naiveté and dim-witted nature rather than at the Turk, who would serve as an enabler of ridicule, rather than a sufferer thereof.
Despite the fact that Ravenscroft copied Molière's scene almost word for word, the English version gains a certain relevance that is not found in the French play. Just as the French author built on French experience to rebuild Suleyman Aga's visit to Versailles, so did the English author build on English expectations to create his adaptation. Even if it can be argued that at the time Western attitudes on the Turk were slowly becoming homogenised, nuances between the English and the French were still present. Ravenscroft proved his ability to pick up on such nuances when he chose a title that echoed Robert Daborne's 1609 play, A Christian turn'd Turk.
Daborne's play tells the story of famed English privateer-turned-pirate, John Ward (aka Jack Ward, c. 1553-1622), notorious for his criminal activities off the Barbary Coast, and was published during the height of fervour for the corsair shortly after his retirement. Tales of Ward's exploits were being sung in numerous ballads across the nation, such as The seamen's song of Captain Ward; Dansekar and Ward; or the most well-known, Captain Ward and the Rainbow , and he became the most celebrated pirate of the turn of the seventeenth century. His effectiveness in the Mediterranean, however, garnered him a special share of vitriol from English authorities because of his associations with Muslims. Ward introduced new technologies into Barbary Coast piracy and established himself as the figurehead of criminal activity in the area, to the point that he became a source of tension between England and Venice regarding his petition for pardon to the English crown. Ward's infamy became even more notorious after he was denied this pardon, when he decided to build a palace in Tunis, convert to Islam, and retire there under the name of Yusuf Raïs. As Glen O'Hara points out, "Ward's apostasy […] shows once more the permeable boundary between legality and illegality. Seize Muslim ships, or Frenchmen and Spanish at times of war, and one was celebrated; attack Christians and 'turn Turk,' and one has passed beyond the pale" (48).
Indeed, Ward's association with the Muslims eclipsed the fame earned by his piratical activities. Daborne's play deals with these contemporary concerns regarding apostasy and the figure of the Turk, in this case, as the canonical Renaissance "Muslim other" that steers righteous Christians from their path. According to Nabil Matar, "the ease of conversion to Islam and the lack of regret amongst those who had converted was surprising, and the lack of divine retribution for converts because of their heresy, unsettling" (33). Thus, Daborne developed a moralizing purpose in the actions of Ward and other pirates, through which he decried the temptation for other Christians to turn to piracy or to Islam for economic gain, this apostasy being graver than the criminal actions themselves. Certainly, Islam is the Devil's temptation, and Daborne himself fashioned this evil around Marlowe's undeniably famous Dr. Faustus (1592) by having Ward turn his humanity over to a demonic power for materialistic purposes (which inevitably ends in a violent death). This association is made more evident in the light of an anonymous, non-dramatic sequel to Faustus called The second report of Doctor Iohn Faustus that appeared in 1594, in which the Doctor joins the Muslims (Sisneros, 2016, 48). However, the Turk depicted in this work is, again, an enabler: the major faults and central moralising force rely on Ward, the remorseless convert who must be punished, and his partner Danseker, who repents and is saved. 5 The general attitude towards the Turk is a negative one based on little more than their religion not being the right one.
Restoration audiences were no doubt familiar with Ward's story, and likely with Daborne's dramatic version as well (Langbaine lists it in his Momus Triumphans, though no mention of its vitality in the Restoration is made). Ravenscroft was certainly familiar enough with A Christian turn'd Turk that he chose to change the title of the original Le bourgeois gentilhomme to a more evocative The citizen turn'd gentleman. Considering the number of songs that celebrated pirates and renegadesand Ward in particular-well into the Caroline and Restoration periods, this title change appears to stem out of something other than sheer coincidence: even if Ravenscroft wasn't trying to mirror his play to Daborne's, he did place it in a context that was propitious for comparison. As a marketing strategy, translating Molière's original title would have easily placed him within the appeal of the French author, much in the same way it did for Shadwell in 1672 when he adapted L'Avare into The Miser, or for Thomas Otway in 1677 with The cheats of Scapin, a literal translation of Les fourberies de Scapin. Not only did Ravenscroft seek the evocation to Daborne's play, but in 1675, he revised the text and altered the title again by adding the word Mamamouchi at the beginning. The Turk was not simply a by-product of adapting Molière, but an asset in itself, it made the English playwright want to Transforming attitudes towards the Turk explicitly associate his play with it: not only is this a Molière piece, but one which contains the whimsical exoticism of a Mamamouchi.
Daborne's and Ravenscroft's plays seem to be quite different from each other, but there are some not-so-subtle parallelisms to be found. The moralizing nature in A Christian turn'd Turk can't help but save the soul of its protagonist, who eventually regrets his conversion because, as we learn in the story, Ward turned to Islam for a more powerful reason than just money: love. Whereas the real Ward probably was motivated by monetary gain, the theatrical Ward was moved by the desire to marry Voada, a beautiful Turkish woman with whom he had fallen in love. Furthermore, Ward's horrible act of apostasy is emphasized through the actions of the other pirate in the play, Simon Danseker, who sticks to his faith and is eventually pardoned. In Ravenscroft's The citizen turn'd gentleman, Jorden's motivations for conversion feed on his hopes to become a member of high society and earn power over people, and his intent to marry a beautiful princess is based merely on lust and ambition. In addition, there is no counterpart to Jorden's apostasy, mainly because Jorden's conversion is treated lightly and attributed virtually no importance or transcendence, either to the character's development or the play's.
Ravenscroft seems to bring the Turk back onto the seventeenth-century London stage with the intention of reversing moral order, much in line with Restoration attitudes towards societal impositions and repression of desire. Like the pirate Ward, Old Jorden commits the crime of apostasy, though in this case it is apostasy of his social status, which the Restoration discourse would ridicule without mercy. 6 Daborne's solemn use of Mohammed's head and the Qur'an to manifest the idolatry of the heathen Turk in I.iv is opposed by the comical choreography in Ravenscroft's Turkish ceremony in V.i, where sashes and scimitars seem to paint a generic eastern tableau put on by a train of circus actors. Where Daborne occupies a significant chunk of I.iv with dumbshow to represent the seriousness and solemnity of the conversion ritual, Ravenscroft presents musicians, dancers, dervishes and pomp, and introduces a mock-Turkish language that heightens the comedic value of the scene. Finally, where John Ward seems to acknowledge his conversion as a major change in his life, mulling over his decision and finally repenting, Jorden seems to briefly ponder about whether or not it is gentlemanly to change opinion before declaiming "long live Mahomet" at the closing of Act IV. Ravenscroft builds upon Molière and dilutes any sort of remnant solemnity by introducing the dim-witted interventions of Old Jorden or exaggerating the movements and choreography of the Great Turk's train, thus putting the weight of the comedy on the English fop. Much like Daborne, the Turk is not treated as an active participant to the character's downfall, but as a witness. Despite the respective contemporary attitudes of moral superiority over the East that affected Daborne and Ravenscroft, the Turk is surprisingly neutral in both 1 3 instances. In the case of John Ward, the threat of Catholicism posed a greater risk to the English, because it was present in England, and the Turk was not so much a Turk as one more of Mephistopheles' many faces. In Ravenscroft's case, however, the religious baggage of Islam has been lifted altogether, and thus it begs the question as to how this decision to interpret Turkishness came about.
Ravenscroft's audience was the same that "drank Ethiopian coffee from Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses" (Rosenthal, 2020: 6). In the theatre, other plays contemporary to The citizen turn'd gentleman, like Roger Boyle's Mustapha (1665), Settle's Empress of Morocco (1673), or Dryden's Aureng-Zebe (1675) still fed off of the negative Eastern image. Yet it seems that this portrayal is no longer as prevalent with the Turkish as it is with the general idea "of the Orient." This is because with a sudden flood of Eastern material came a certain confusion, as Gerald Maclean puts it: [F]rom 1660 at least, there developed not only an undeniable presence of writing about Eastern empires and cultures in general, but also, as with men's fashions, some degree of confusion between what properly belonged to the Mughals, Safavids or Ottomans. A proliferation of imaginative and often casual confused references to 'Indian,' 'Persian' and 'Turkish' customs, habits ad objects strongly suggests that writers felt free to take it for granted that a great deal was widely known, but that precision was not very important. (207) Indeed, more objective material concerning the Turkish in particular was entering the collective imaginary, like Sir Paul Rycaut's seriously informative and comparatively objective The present state of the Ottoman Empire. Published in 1668 and written after living in the Ottoman Empire for over five years, this work argued, from its very first page, that the stereotyped Turk, "of the same composition with us, cannot be so savage and rude as they are generally described" (A3 r -A4 v ).
Rycaut's influence during the Restoration is undeniable, Mary Pix even uses him in the preface to Ibrahim (1696) to amend historical inaccuracies in it. However, as Katie Sisneros points out, "The present state of the Ottoman Empire was a scholastic tome, relatively inaccessible in both literacy and income levels by the vast majority of English subjects," and instead it was Broadside ballads, "consumed widely and across the social and economic spectrum, [that] were more accessible to and often indeed written expressly for the poor population of England who were largely illiterate and had little to no expendable time or income" (7). Even balladeers, who wrote for a broader and more popular range of readers and listeners than just theatre-goers, understood certain basic features of Ottoman social and political life that could be taken as common knowledge even in the lower classes. In both cases though, the Turk is portrayed more as a generalised opposition than a real moral threat.
In addition, by the 1660 s England was not only familiarized with the Ottoman Empire through the consumption of literary material, but also through commerce, since it was the Crown's most important trading partner in Christian Europe (Maclean, 2007, 27). The English people were well aware and well informed about it, and theatre-going audiences in particular "would have been aware of the national global interests evoked or assumed in performance" (Rosenthal, 2020: 8). Although Islam was still an opposition to Christianity, the Turk in particular was hardly ever just that. In fact, since Anglo-Turkish relations had been mostly friendly, as opposed to those of the Hapsburgs or the Venetians, for example, English society was more accommodating to the idea of the Turk as something that is not simply the enemy: "[t]he Ottoman Empire had long held the fascination of British audiences," and " [b] y the late seventeenth century a gradual softening in representations of the Turk had occurred" (Marshall, 2008, 142).
As a tangible entity in day-to-day British affairs, the Ottomans lost the demonized mysticism of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and instead "acted as a reminder for the audience of their own religious, political and moral superiorities" (143). Their image departed from a generic, whimsical, and exotic "Orient" because, unlike "the Orient," the Ottoman Empire actually existed. The characteristic otherness of the Renaissance Turk morphed into a more humanised ethopoiea: the violent, aggressive, menacing moral threat had now become indolent, lascivious, prone to luxury, and incompetent (Maclean,209). As such, Ravenscroft saw Molière's comedy as a way to place the indolent, lascivious, prone to luxury and incompetent Restoration fop in the Ottoman court so as to indirectly subvert previous Renaissance morality with Restoration England's own identity. Suddenly, the play's connection with A Christian turn'd Turk is no longer just evocative. This image of foppish characters and powerful sultans sharing the court contrasts enormously with the celebrated renegades of John Ward and the Renaissance.
In fact, the downgrading that the Ottomans suffered in the English imaginary at a time when Britain had not yet become an imperial predator could even lead to a certain degree of "empire envy," where the Ottomans would be perceived as more harmless than before, but envied nevertheless magnanimity and extent of their dominions. When Marina threatens "to flee beyond sea to a nunnery, and so ever seclude myself from the world" if she's not allowed to marry Young Jorden (II. iv.23), she is surreptitiously recognizing Catholicism as a greater evil than Islam. Instead, the Ottomans come to be defined more by social and political structures, where envy replaces fear. Gerald MacLean said about this: In envying the Ottoman Turks their empire, the English came to refashion themselves as British with an empire of their own. Envy, I think, most usefully captures the mix of admiration and hostility towards Turks that appears in a great deal of writing of the time. (45) This was a complex dynamic, "marked by the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through […] cultural sophistication in the context of shame over England's perceived relative barbarity" (Rosenthal, 2020: 6). One only has to go back to Rycaut to find that, in spite of his fair account of the Ottomans and the generalized acceptance that English prejudice showed an inaccurate image of the East, England was still seen as the superior country: If the tyranny, oppression, and cruelty of that state, wherein reason stands in no competition with the pride and lust of an unreasonable minister, seem strange to thy liberty and happiness, thank God that thou art born in a country the most free and just in all the world; and a subject to the most indulgent, the most gracious of all the Princes of the universe. (2) Rycaut, aware of this dichotomic perception of the Turk, knows who he is writing for, and as such, understands that England shall prevail. Ravenscroft was equally aware of who would attend his plays and of the narrative he is trying to build. It makes sense that Mr. Jorden be so eager to join the Sultan at his court. Whereas in France the Ottomans were abject others, in England they were seen as inferior yet admirable: "What is unique about this representational discourse […] is that the vacillating dichotomy was wide enough and dynamic enough to allow for a diverse range of interpretations, associations, and conclusions by the English, instead of a single, static, and concrete portrayal" (Roy, 2012, 11). 7 Ravenscroft undoubtably knew about and played on this English need to define a national self and exploited it throughout his career more than once. In fact, he shows similar motivation-though less success-in 1686, when he adapted Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and revised his role of national icon as an obfuscation of the Restoration's globalism. It also had something to do with his very English tragedy, King Edgar and Alfreda (1677), which-textual subjectivity aside-floundered precisely because it tried to define English identity in regards to an unsophisticated and ancient England that was strictly the opposite of what the new, cosmopolitan Stuart reign sought. It makes sense, then that the setting and the message that are carried in The citizen turn'd gentleman become a cardinal contributor to the play's success.
Restoration audiences would see Jorden's eagerness to join the Ottomans as understandable, yet mediocre: if he can't actually be a part of high society in London, he'll have to settle for nobility in Istanbul. Jorden, in turn, sees himself part of a society that ridicules him and is beneath him, much in the way said society views him. It is safe to say that such a nuance would not be present in Molière's original. But Jorden may be incurring in something more than simple ignorance. Laura Rosenthal views the Restoration's fixation with material wealth and social rank as a subversion of Diogenes' philosophy of cosmopolitanism, where one would come to define and include oneself within the world and achieve "sophistication through possession and appreciation of selected treasures, but also the ideas and differences they carry" (2020: 2). It is interesting to note, then, that unlike the French original, Jorden renounces all his earthly possessions and his faith (IV.iv.127) for the privilege of becoming a Mamamouchi. The fact that the English play changes Molière's ending by allowing Jorden to still think himself a Mamamouchi is quite representative of the Restoration irony that Ravenscroft sought.
The citizen turn'd gentleman makes more subtle changes to Molière in order to highlight this point. The ceremonial dress, for example, is expanded in the English version: Jorden is already wearing a "Turkish vest" (V.i.1) which does not appear in the French text; then the Mufti offers him the turban and scimitar, and the English Dervishes also "gird him with the sash" (V.i.32). Both the vest and the sash are additional garments that Rupp sees as "highlighting the adaptation's aesthetics of excess and exaggeration" (473). Perhaps bestowing the quality of excess and exaggeration on a sash and a vest may be somewhat hyperbolic, especially when the Mufti is wearing a massive, candle-laden turban, but Rupp does not appear to be off-track.
Since Ravenscroft is not burdened by historical accuracy, he can build on an idealised image of what a mock-Turk could look like. Thus, the added items do indeed paint a more exaggerated tableau of the foppish Jorden. However, they would aim at the ridicule of Jorden's social overreaching, rather than at exaggeration for exaggeration's sake.
Another change that also builds on Molière is how Cleverwit, in the role of the Sultan, interacts with Jorden during the ceremony. Both in Le bourgeois gentilhomme and The citizen turn'd gentleman, the ceremony is conducted by the Mufti. In the English version, Cleverwit, dressed as the Sultan, makes a gesture that his French counterpart, Cléonte, does not: "Then solemn music plays and Cleverwit descends to Jorden and lays both his hands on his head." This gesture gives closing gravitas to the investment by touching Jorden, but it also puts Cleverwit in a good position to be discovered, and yet, Jorden's blinding ambition forbids him from clearly realizing the charade being played before him, no matter how ridiculous he may appear to everyone else, and even if he is literally face to face with the impostor. An impostor who, in the English version, is indirectly responsible for the loss of everything he holds dear, and in a larger scope, is representative of "the curious collusion and hierarchy of worldly and religious authority" (Rupp,473).

The Defiance of Orientalism
It is undeniable that both France and England have had major roles in shaping the West's idea of the East, and as such, contemporary audiences that saw Le bourgeois gentilhomme or The citizen turn'd gentleman would be participating in the construction of a Westernized Eastern narrative. Either author would inevitably understand the image of the Turk in this stereotyped sense. In fact, the whole of the analysis carried out is based on the obviousness of such a claim, to the point it has been silently assumed. Thus, this study does not aim at delving into The citizen turn'd gentleman in terms of Orientalism and remains outside the bounds of general orientalist thought. No commentary is necessary on whether stereotyped views have taken part in the creation of either of the plays because the answer is self-evident: they most certainly have.
However, orientalist influence should not be ignored altogether. Representations of the Turk in Le bourgeois gentilhomme are intentionally distorted through what today we would consider an orientalist lens, but these views serve a purpose: Laurent D'Arvieux's help in its conception at the behest of the king only confirms that any attempts at historical and cultural accuracy were only designed to reify the stereotyped narrative authorised by the French crown towards the Ottomans. In this sense, Molière does follow the trappings of Orientalism. It is no coincidence that in January of 1672, less than two years after the comedy's première, Racine's tragedy Bajazet became a sensation in France, establishing what many consider to be the foundations for Orientalism. Racine defended his play as historically accurate, rather than realistic, by presenting it with several "historical" sources, amongst which was Rycaut's The present state of the Ottoman Empire (Boukail, 2016, 130). The play itself, however, bears little resemblance to the real events it depicts.
If applied to Orientalism, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concepts of anthropological deterritorialization and reterritorialization make some sense. Although the French philosopher inextricably linked territory to the concept of deterritorialization, when seen in the terms of the reshaping of cultural perceptions such as the ones crafted in the work of Molière, Racine, or any of the proto-orientalist literatures, we can assume that a fantastical territory is present. In the case of Molière, what Deleuze and Guattari coin "relative deterritorialization," that is, accompanied by reterritorialization, seems to take place (63). That is, the image of the Turk is stripped of certain cultural and historical characteristics that unchain it from its exotic otherness just enough so that it becomes somewhat hybridized with Western qualities, reterritorializing it into a familiar Western milieu that makes it suitable for customized remodelling, i.e. reterritorializing it.
Going back to the Philosophy Master's joke, Ravenscroft chose not to include this particular jab in his adaptation: his aim, after all, was not derision of the Turkish figures (or the king, for that matter), but the mockery of the affected Mr. Jorden by way of the Turks. Being made into a tangible entity, the Turk is still treated as the other, but a diplomatic other, one that is not so much a threat as it is a joke. A rival to an incipient empire like Britain, but not to its moral foundations, because these moral foundations were already being challenged by the English themselves. Unlike its French counterpart, Mamamouchi has very little to do with actual Turkey. As such, it is placed into something of a liminal space, not being either completely fantastic, nor absolutely accurate. Orientalism, in its limited sense of hostility to anything that does not confirm Western stereotypes, fails to appear as clearly.
It would be unnecessarily delusional to pretend that such an extrapolation of ontological musings responds to a conscious decision by the English author, but looking at The citizen turn'd gentleman through the Deleuzian lens, parallels still hold. By being relieved of its political and cultural baggage, it creates an emptiness of meaning which is filled with a different discourse: that of the Restoration audience member. In England, Orientalism itself is more of an eighteenth-century affair, and the particular circumstances of Anglo-Turkish relations could almost exclude Turkey from this "orientalised Orient" to the point that it becomes crucially different in terms of the reception such a play would earn. It may be that, as consumers of the standard Western discourse, English audience members might have filled the void with stereotypical attitudes that may resemble the attitudes shown in Molière; after all, it would be illusory to pretend Orientalism did not exist until the term was coined. However, Ravenscroft's role in the matter stops at the penning of the play, and as such, his methodology is strikingly different from Molière's, despite being almost identical.
More often than not, comparative studies tend to analyse how one author changes the source material of another in order to make it relevant to his target audience. To some extent, Ravenscroft did add some elements and characters from other plays, but in the end, the structure, story, even the words that he adapted remained essentially the same as Molière's, to the point that many of the scenes, especially those concerning the Ottomans, are transliterations of the original. His treatment of the Turk is, paradoxically, meaningful in its near identical nature. Meaning is not undetachable, nor does it shape perception of Turkishness. In The citizen turn'd gentleman, the Turk has experienced "absolute deterritorialization," which does not carry along the reterritorialization that does appear in Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Instead, it exists in the English collective imaginary in a state of immanence where "there are no longer any forms or developments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects. There is no structure, any more than there is genesis" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1989, 266). In essence, Ravenscroft managed to modify a play and its perception of the Turk without changing the words, and the key was timeliness and a keen reading of his time.

Concluding Remarks
Ravenscroft's adaptation has stood somewhere in limbo, even in the present day: the audience proved the play a hit, and yet it was criticised-and so was its author-as an inferior one by the cultural elites; called a hackneyed effort that butchered and corrupted the genius of Molière with no real quality or care. It seems that when studying the Restoration all roads somehow lead to Dryden, and so, it befits this study to remember his words denouncing his generation's lack of creativity in his prologue to the 1668 revival of Albumazar: "But this our Age such Authors does afford, / As make whole Plays, and yet scarce write one word." Dryden certainly intended to criticize his contemporaries with the previous remarks, but they simply don't apply here, a fact that would be most irritating to the Poet Laureate, considering his turbulent relationship with Ravenscroft.
Ravenscroft certainly played off from Molière's success by using his material, but he made it English in a most fascinating way: not by changing it, but by assimilating the source material into such a context as Restoration England that demanded original material, but that had drastically different perspectives and attitudes on Oriental (and Turkish) matters. Through a simple title change, he added Daborne's exclusively English literary and moral baggage, giving new relevance and weight to the Turkish elements already present in Molière. Then, by playing his cards right, with a few tweaks here and there, he emerged with a comedy that enhanced the original with minimal effort, shedding light on the individual merits and subtle complexity of its transport into English within these contexts, as well as proposing a reconsideration of its author's adaptative prowess. In this case, less became more, and perhaps Ravenscroft's creativity was simply overshadowed by his audacity.
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