Women Dressed as Turkish: Oriental Disguises in Italian and French Drama between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

From centuries back and still today, the Mediterranean Sea represents the frontline between two worlds. The aim of this paper is to show how, during the Renaissance, Italy became the geographical and cultural bridge between these two worlds. Thanks to the methods of contemporary history, the attention paid to everyday life, sexuality, and “corporal archives”, we are able to make an unexpected discovery: that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, encounters between Muslims and Christians were frequent and often pleasant.

Among the range of European literary genres, Italian comic drama was the first and best suited to describe this new phenomenon, with all its implications of politics, religion, and identity, and therein restoring one of the most unspoken and censured features, the uncanny eroticism of that which is “different”.

By comparing several plays written in Italy in the first half of the seventeenth century with the “orientalistic” theatre of Bonarelli, Molière, and Goldoni, we observe the birth and growth of a stereotyped and bookish vision of the other in which “Turkish outfits” incited fear and desire the audience. One symptom of the rising of Orientalism is the role played by “Turks in disguise”. During the Renaissance, theatrical camouflage had a very strong hold on the audience. Less than a century later, in Molière’s and Goldoni’s plays, however, those powerful garments became ridiculous, stereotyping, and uncomfortable costumes.