“Strange Commodities”

The early seventeenth century witnessed a crisis in England’s relationship with the Islamic world. On the one hand, between the 1580s and the 1630s, the Levant Company controlled England’s most important trade routes and was itself the site of the most explosive economic growth. On the other hand, James’s antagonism toward the Islamic states and his efforts to reconstitute a unified Christendom— as I argued in chapter 2—left England’s contacts with Islam a subject of real anxiety, heightening the contradiction between the demands of economic expansion and the fear of cultural contamination. In this chapter I will turn to Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, a play deeply concerned with the forms of cross-cultural intimacy enabled by England’s commerce with Islam, and a play that, like The Tempest, ends with a retreat from Africa to Italy. It is also a play that insistently links its representation of Islamic difference to ongoing Christian divisions. The effort to come to terms with a world of expanding commerce runs into contradiction in the complex religious geography of the seventeenth century. As with the legal theories discussed in chapter 3, The Renegado seeks to rethink forms of identity at a complexly contested cultural moment, and in the service of a religious politics very different from that articulated by Greville.