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Podcast: EMPIRE LINES
Episode: The Tragedy of Mustapha, Fulke Greville (1609) and Roger Boyle (1665)
Description: Aisha Hussain plays out tropes of Ottoman Turks in English Orientalist theatre, in two 17th century productions of The Tragedy of Mustapha.
In 1553, the Ottoman Sultan Soleyman ordered the murder of his eldest son and heir to the throne, Prince Mustapha. Stranger than fiction, his story speaks to the crises of succession, sibling rivalries, and infanticide that marred the imperial Ottoman Court. Though set in modern day Hungary, this true story was first - and most fully - staged by the English playwrights Fulke Greville and Roger Boyle over a century later. Greville and Boyle's Turkish tragedies...