At the British Museum, the grand exhibition entitled Shah ‘Abbas: The Remaking of Iran that opened beneath the mosque-like dome of the former Reading Room on February 19 2009 was deliberately kept dark to protect delicate parchments and textiles on display, but the effect was to perpetuate the cliché of a seductive oriental mystery. As The Times excitedly reported, ‘The spectator – like some traveller arriving along one of the East-West trade routes – is led into a strange, elaborate and literally shadowy land of men with drooping moustaches and shadowy designer stubble, of worshipping dervishes and Islamic-style dandies, of Indian ambassadors bringing their exotic gifts, of prancing Arab stallions and hooded hunting hawks’. The result, gasped Rachel Campbell-Johnston, was that ‘Weaving your way through it can feel a bit like picking your way through the labyrinth of one of the carpets. This world is intricate, complex, luxurious, and rare. It can also be difficult’. But The Times reporter was in no doubt of the urgency of confronting the challenge, now Iran looks ‘stubbornly unapproachable, nurturing its hardline fundamentalism and nuclear programme’.¹ The question this prompted, of course, is how this ‘shadowy’ Islamic world would relate to the great ‘Reading Room’ in Bloomsbury that was so close to the sites of the July 7 2005 bombings: would it appear as a miracle or a monster?

The Shah Abbas exhibition was praised by the press for reminding us of a time when envoys were sent to Iran ‘by Elizabeth i from a desire to build trading relations’ and because of her ‘view that Iran was an equal on the international stage’.² The museum’s director Neil MacGregor encouraged this response when he asserted that while he found the smiles of the current Iranian leadership ‘delphic’, the aim of the show was ‘to make it easier for people to start thinking about that complexity’. MacGregor proposed that to understand Shah Abbas we need only recall the ‘key parallel’ of his contemporary, ‘our own nation-shaping Elizabeth i’, who broke with Rome just as his Shi’ite state warred with the Sunni Ottomans: ‘In a strange way,’ the director told newspapers, Elizabethan England became ‘the only other state to have such a close formal link between the state structure and the state church’.³ So to underline the elective affinity between Elizabeth’s England and the Shah’s Iran, and to guide us through the Shia maze, the organizers laid a trail of helpful literary clues: repeated throughout the display citations of The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night reassured the visitor that the Safavid ruler whom the dramatist called ‘the Sophy’ had been as familiar and impressive to Shakespeare as Gloriana herself:

‘This is the economy, stupid’, MacGregor reassured The Financial Times readers: Shakespeare knew about the Shah because Abbas opened Iran to English traders, and the multi-cultural and tolerant society he is said to have created in Isfahan arose from that ‘economic expediency’.⁴ All the exquisite images of this ‘enlightened despot’ drinking with foreigners therefore have less to do with the ‘rapier, scabbard, and all,’ they feature so prominently than with the ‘soft power’ of porcelain diplomacy: the china plate’s the thing, in British Museum terms, to catch the conscience of the king. A cult of such worldly goods replaces historical analysis in much of the virtual shopping that passes for current Renaissance studies. But reviewers noticed how this consumerism minimised the Shah’s tyranny. Indeed, just two sentences in the sumptuous exhibition catalogue touch on his ‘acts of extreme cruelty’, such as ‘having two of his sons blinded and another killed’, cutting out the tongues of liars, or garrotting the dervishes who prophesied his death.⁵ There was no mention of how ‘One evening he went out dressed as a peasant and bought some bread and meat… to find he had been sold short. He had the baker thrown into an oven and the meat-seller roasted alive’.⁶ Tactfully ignored too were his habits of boiling prisoners in oil, or castrating his eunuchs himself, albeit with such skill it was said ‘very few boys died under his hands’.⁷ And nowhere in this glittering showcase for ‘The Art of Museum Diplomacy’⁸ was any reference made to Abbas’s own brand of diplomacy when he received the first embassy from the Emperor Rudolf ii in 1603, and the ambassador Georg Tectander ‘had an unnerving experience’:

European travellers to Iran were awed by the Shah’s spectacular New Year presents, but also recorded that the gifts he loved to receive were heads, ‘those of distinction enveloped in a silk turban, the others bare, and each thrust through with a lance’.¹⁰ So, when Sir Anthony Sherley, the first English emissary to Iran, met Abbas in 1598 he was saluted by a thousand lancers waving heads of Uzbeks impaled on spears, with ‘the ears on strings and hanged about their necks’. The Shah did not waste time, he reported, with talk of ‘apparell, building, beauty of our women, or such vanities’, but only wanted to hear ‘of our proceeding in our warres, of our usuall Armes, of the commodity of Fortresses… of the use of Artillery’.¹¹ Since Sherley’s father Sir Thomas was the Treasurer of War, what interested Abbas was how ‘his new model army could be equipped with up-to-date weaponry’.¹² So the Englishman ‘presented to the King a number of girdles and pistols he brought from Aleppo’.¹³ His reward was a contract to retrain the Shah’s gunners.¹⁴ In view of the nuclear stand-off, this was not the kind of Anglo-Iranian exchange to feature in the exhibition. The problem with the Shakespeare quotations, however, was that if they were meant to help to rehabilitate a pariah state they were equally militaristic. Thus, the organisers posted without comment Sir Toby’s warning shortly before Sebastian impales his skull, that his assailant is rumoured to be Shah Abbas’s fencing-master; and referred without explanation to the Sunni Prince of Morocco’s bloodcurdling war-cry that the scimitar he sports is one with which he ‘slew the Sophy and a Persian prince / That won three fields of Sultan Suleiman’ (Merchant, ii.i.24-6). As Ladan Niayesh observes in a recent essay on ‘Shakespeare’s Persians’, Morocco’s shining scimitar not only reveals the variety of oriental Others, but destroys the binarism ‘between the “West” and the “Rest”’.¹⁵ So, perhaps Toby really does compare the chimerical ‘devil’ from Abbas with the transvestite ‘virago’ of Elizabeth. For suppressed in the museum’s narrative of the triumph of globalization were the violent contradictions not only of Shah’s Iran but of Shakespeare’s England itself.¹⁶

‘They say he has been a fencer to the Sophy’: Sir Toby’s threat that ‘he pays you as surely as your feet hits the ground’ may pun on reports from the Sherley mission of the war-game with which Abbas trained his troops, and with which a 1607 play, The Travels of the Three English Brothers would begin: ‘He ran in among them with his sword drawn and gave four of them their death’s wound… cutting off the arms from divers of them. One gentleman which did but only smile… the King gave him such a blow in the middle, that one half of his body fell from the other’.¹⁷ For as is well known, these terrifying warnings about the Shah’s swordsman refer to Sir Anthony’s brother Robert Sherley, whose dazzling portrait beside that of his Iranian wife Teresia, the daughter of a Circassian chief Ishmael Khan, and a relative of Abbas, dominated the exhibition. Stylistically, these masque-like paintings resemble those mass-produced for the early Jacobean court, and must date from 1611, when as the catalogue records, ‘Teresia gave birth at the Sherley home in Sussex to a son, Henry, probably the first child born in England of Iranian descent’.¹⁸ Although she is shown wearing a type of veil, the most alienating feature of her portrait is the jewelled pistol she brandishes with a finger on the trigger. Misdating the picture, the museum connected this firearm with Teresia’s later rescue of Robert. But a loaded gun in Jacobean Sussex hints at a confrontation barely registered in Bloomsbury: ‘she eventually reached Rome, living out her days at… the Carmelite convent of Santa Maria della Scala’, where she is buried alongside her husband.¹⁹ The Sherleys resided opulently in Rome on the rights to sell relics and rosaries granted by the Pope.²⁰ This weapon was thus an assertion of a religious fundamentalism Europeans tend to forget when they judge Islam. But The Guardian suggested the parallels between Shakespeare’s world and the Shah’s were less comfortable than the museum, with its optimism about ‘soft power’, was caring to admit:

In its culturalist fixation on the shimmering surfaces of the silk fabrics that were Iran’s main exports to the West, the Shah show did not explore the ulterior purposes of the weapons offered in exchange. That might have been to avoid offending Istanbul: their intended target. But this superficiality was also because the museum’s image of Shakespeare’s England was too simplistic to explain what the Sherley brothers were doing on a mission that ‘ran completely counter to the foreign policy of Elizabeth i’s government, which was seeking friendship with the Ottomans on the principle that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”’.²² Thus, while the catalogue describes the extravagant silk robes, turban and sash Robert wears in his picture as the ceremonial suit in which he was dressed by his hosts when he and his brother were first received by the Shah at Qazvin, there is no mention of the Catholic politics which brought these young Englishmen to Iran, and explain the fact that contrary to the impression given by the museum, ‘The Sherley mission had no sanction whatever from the English government’.²³ By coincidence, however, another exhibition opened at the same time in London that also starred portraits of Robert and Tiresia Sherley, and this exposed the naivety of the message that these East-West encounters were all about trade. Van Dyck at Tate Britain centred on a pair of equally extravagant images of the silk-swathed couple, but in these the great painter portrayed them in their true colours, with Teresia in her Roman garden and Robert, again flaunting the turban he liked to top with a cross ‘to show that he is a Catholic’, now as the Shah’s ambassador to the Pope.²⁴

‘I will not give my part of this sport for a pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy’ (ii.v.156): the aside is about Sir Anthony’s boast to the Earl of Essex of pocketing 30,000 crowns a year to upgrade Iran’s artillery. So, baiting Malvolio as ‘a kind of puritan’ (ii.iii.135), it is ominous when Shakespeare’s Illyrians compare their violence with the Shah’s. The Oxford Shakespeare annotates Fabian’s aside by noting that ‘In 1599 Sir Robert Sherley returned from an embassy to the Shah and boasted of the rewards he had received’.²⁵ In fact, Robert would not leave Iran until bound for Rome in 1608, when he was made a Papal count, not knight, and never boasted of anything. Given the wildness of contemporary reports about the Sherleys, textual editors can be relied on to get the brother wrong. The confusion may even have provided a context for Shakespeare’s updating of the Plautine plot of identical twins. For the Sherleys’ activities in Iran were more significant, and this ‘pension from the Sophy’ more pertinent to Twelfth Night, than any editor yet admits. In reality the brothers were sent east by the Earl of Essex as a manoeuvre against the Queen. Under cover of a decoy trip to Italy their errand was to induce Iran to attack the Ottomans, thereby releasing Spain to invade England or compel Elizabeth to purge her Malvolio, the lawyerly minister Robert Cecil, and name as her successor James vi of Scotland, then pledging to usher in the ‘golden time’ of ‘convents’ and religious toleration (v.i.169) the play’s Duke Orsino is still promising at the end.²⁶

Twelfth Night can be appreciated without referring to King James’s plan for ‘a general Christian union’; but without the play’s Epiphany theme that ‘Journeys end in lovers meeting’ it is hard to appreciate what ‘every wise man’s son’ (ii.iii.39) knew in 1601 about hopes of the East.²⁷ For because the Essex plot ended in fiasco the Sherleys spent their lives covering their tracks, making it as difficult for historians as contemporaries to grasp why these Englishmen ‘should be working for the Shah to drum up an alliance against the Ottomans, when everyone knew Elizabeth was pursuing a pro-Ottoman policy’.²⁸ But in Sussex the Sherley family were known as recusants; and the brothers, who like John Donne were educated in Oxford at Hart Hall when the college was ‘a refuge for Catholics’, probably converted on arrival in Venice.²⁹ They thus typified the Catholic gentry at the heart of the Essex rebellion: premature Jacobeans activated by the Earl’s commitment to a politique measure of toleration like that of Henri iv’s recent Edict of Nantes.³⁰ It was while arms-running for the French king that Sir Anthony was dubbed a knight of the holy Ordre de saint Michel, for which he was gaoled in the Fleet. But if the ecumenical dream of ‘A solemn combination’ of ‘our dear souls’ (v.i.371-2) lay behind the delusions about the universal love of God the Sherleys projected onto ‘the very devil’ in Iran, the violence of the divisions within both Christianity and Islam explains why, as Twelfth Night seems to warn, this fooling with religion might all end in blood:

‘Bloody as the hunter’, the ‘interceptor’ in Shakespeare’s comedy, who on ‘carpet consideration’ is a mere ‘knight dubbed with unhatched rapier’, unexpectedly turns out to be ‘a devil incardinate’ whose ‘incensement… is so implacable that satisfaction can be none but by pangs of death and sepulchre’ (iii.iv.196-213). This ‘incardinate’ ‘incensement’ hints at the papal backing for Essex’s coup. The traumatic volte-face on which Twelfth Night turns, when the harmless ‘eunuch’ (i.ii.52) Cesario (really Viola in disguise) is confused with ‘his’ twin, the mercenary Sebastian, does seem keyed to the shock of the plot.³¹ Jonathan Bate maintains that since Shakespeare was ‘over half-way an Essex man’ his Richard ii was indeed the play the rebels paid to be acted at the Globe on February 7 1601 to rally their rising next day.³² The first recorded performance of Twelfth Night came one year later at Candlemas, the feast of the purification of the Virgin, February 2 1602, in Middle Temple hall. But whatever Shakespeare once wished, his dark comedy with the title of the post-Christmas reality check now looks set to count the cost of ‘What You Will’. Strung on a series of mock duels, until its brutal climax when Sebastian plays ‘havoc’ (v.i.195) with the foolish knights, this Epiphany play pushes its warning to be careful what you wish so cruelly that it suggests the author shared the astonishment when Essex led his mob of ‘angry young men in a hurry’ in the stampede across London they planned to be ‘the bloodiest day that ever was’.³³ For the ‘strange regard’ Olivia and the other characters give the warlike brother who appears to have ‘made division of [him]self’ (215) mirrors the consternation with which the onlookers greeted these ‘Rash, inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries, / With ladies’ faces and dragon’s spleens’ (John, ii.i.67-8), when the ‘viragoes’ turned out to be in earnest, and bringing not love but war:

For a New Year celebration Twelfth Night is notoriously unsatisfying, its ‘dark house’ (iv.ii.30) unenlightened and its ‘air of pestilence’ (i.i.19) unpurged when Orsino declares that until Malvolio is pacified ‘We will not part from hence’ (v.i.371).³⁴ For though Fabian hopes its ‘sportful malice’ will ‘rather pluck on laughter than revenge’ (354-5), the unprecedented belligerence of Twelfth Night leaves the Duke’s project for a ‘solemn combination’ stalled, hanging on an ambiguous ‘suit’ (269) prosecuted by Malvolio against the master of the ship carrying the twins which was wrecked before the start. Orsino gives orders to ‘Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace’; but the steward’s implacable last words, ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you’, do not augur well when it is belatedly remembered ‘He hath not told us of the captain yet’ (365-8). Since it appears that the ‘maid’s garments’ Cesario remembers wearing when ‘The captain did first bring me on shore’ can never be rediscovered until the prisoner is freed from ‘durance’ (267-9), the page’s equivocal sexuality is therefore a screen for all the unfulfilled desires of this interrupted time of gifts. In fact it is difficult not to view Malvolio’s sudden court ‘action’ (v.i.268) as symbolic of the trials after the coup, with many of the rebels, including Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, stuck in legal limbo in the Tower pending pardon from King James. As the steward is to be ‘both the plaintiff and the judge’ (343), it looks as if in Illyria ‘there shall be no more cakes and ale’ (ii.iii.104). But in no other Shakespearean comedy is the promise of ‘the present hour’ (v.i.346) paralysed by quite such a sense that (in the words of the song that ‘Sherley’ pun again on ‘Shah’) ‘What’s to come is still unsure’ (ii.iii.45).

With Feste singing ‘There dwelt a man in Babylon’ (71), or swearing by St Anne that ‘ginger shall be hot in the mouth’ (305), the revellers of Twelfth Night struggle to deliver the gifts of the day of kings, but they still expect them to come from the Orient: the jape to make Malvolio the king of beans has him smiling like ‘the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ (iii.ii.67-8). Yet the unfinished lawsuit with the sailor puts a question mark over the eastern journey that initiates this plot, reminding us how Sebastian had refused to disclose his destination when Antonio begged to ‘know of you whither you are bound’: ‘No, sooth, sir. My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy’ (ii.i.8-10). We never do learn where the twins were heading when their ship sank off the Illyrian coast, nor why its master is now liable to be accused and imprisoned by, of all people, Malvolio. But if the steward is in fact a stand-in for Cecil’s Protestant regime, the eastern Mediterranean setting acquires a risky topicality in light of the government’s pro-Turkish strategy, and the Sherley brothers’ operations to subvert this with their mission to the Shah. The stalemate of Twelfth Night then reads like Shakespeare’s suspended judgement on those presents promised from the East. Constance Relihan notes how he seems to repress the orientalism of his main source, Barnaby Riche’s romance ‘Apollonius and Silla’, set in Constantinople and Cyprus.³⁵ Yet the trial of the Captain actually makes his play contingent on a voyage as indeterminate as that of the brothers who had altered their tale so often about their business in Iran. Thus, when the Shah asked Sir Anthony to lead a return embassy to his purported patron Elizabeth, who wanted never to see him again, he persuaded Abbas to make him an emissary ‘to all Christian princes’; and it seems it is the ‘extravagancy’ of this suit, ongoing as Shakespeare wrote, on which Twelfth Night attends:

In Twelfth Night everything quibbles on a silk suit. Thus, at the start ‘the suit from the Count’ (i.v.93) is blocked because Olivia ‘will admit no kind of suit’ (i.ii.41), but after many ‘another suit’ (iii.i.100), with even Antonio arrested ‘at the suit of Count Orsino’ (iii.iv.292), Sebastian does not go ‘suited to his watery tomb’ (v.i.227). By the time this was all put on for the suited silks in the Temple Sherley had altered the case for his suit to the Shah so suavely, due to the breaking news of Essex, his agent in Italy was saying ‘if we were to go for dinner I would end up paying the bill’; and the factor of the Levant Company that had sponsored him to open the silk road into Turkey wrote from Aleppo that he was ‘a warning to know how to trust such slippery gentlemen’.³⁶ So it may not be chance that, as Keir Elam notes, in Twelfth Night ‘As in no other play, material – the textile, weave and colour of fabric – determines not only distinctions between characters but events themselves’.³⁷ This fixation on transforming textiles – running from ‘flax on a distaff’ (i.iii.85) worked by ‘The spinsters and knitters in the sun’ (ii.iv.43) to the cypress crepe of Olivia’s veil (iii.i.113), damask silk of Viola’s fantasy sister (ii.iv.111), and the velvet gown (ii.v.43) worn by Malvolio in his dreams – emphasises ‘the centrality of clothes’ to self-fashioning.³⁸ But as with Sir Andrew’s ‘divers-coloured stock’ (i.iv.114), or the cross-gartered ‘yellow stockings’ (ii.v.174) that trip the steward up, such silky objects of desire prove treacherous, as if the ‘strange body’ of foreign trade was ‘inside England’s stately home’, along with ‘changeable taffeta’ and Persian rugs.³⁹ Thus, ‘We have no great opinion of his wisdom,’ the English ambassador moralised when Robert Sherley appeared in Spain in 1609, ‘for coming with a turban on his head’.⁴⁰ If Twelfth Night does efface the ‘East’ which is its referent that might then be because, as Patricia Fumerton observes, silk suits like those of the Sherleys were truly disorienting, since they suggested the dangerous strangeness of the orient had now arrived and come inside:

Robert Sherley ‘much affected to appear in foreign Vests… and accounted himself never ready till he had something of the Persian habit about him’, scoffed Thomas Fuller.⁴² Likewise, ‘My Lady’s a Cathayan’ (ii.iii.68), exclaims Sir Toby. Though he brags he will fight ‘To the gates of Tartar’ (ii.v.179) on the Shah’s frontier, any impaled head will be his own, however, for in Twelfth Night the orient ‘resembles nothing more than England’.⁴³ Thus, the very word ‘Cathayan’ connotes not a ‘lying Chinese’, as editors gloss, but a European ‘going native’ in the East.⁴⁴ As Richard Marienstras emphasises, rather than projecting violence onto the alien Shakespeare persistently situates it within the familiar, and ‘in every case, the near is more dangerous than the far’.⁴⁵ Nowhere is the play’s relativizing of oriental violence more pointed, therefore, than in the torment of Malvolio, a revenge for the treason trial of Edmund Campion, ‘the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink’, in the words of a Catholic poem, as despite the Rackmaster Thomas Norton, author of Gorboduc, the Jesuit never signed a confession for that ‘niece of King Gorboduc’ (iv.ii.12-15) the Queen.⁴⁶ This cruel mock trial leaves the steward ‘more puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog’ (44). But Feste’s roles in it are ‘Sir Topaz’ and ‘Master Parson’ – priests Henry Garnet and Robert Parsons – and these tie the charade to Sherley’s scheme.

References to ‘the old hermit of Prague’, ‘Sir Topaz’ and ‘Master Parson’ continue to bemuse editors, but they acquire significance from the religious politics of the Essex Plot. For Sir Anthony had arrived in Rome via Moscow and Prague in April 1601, and conferred at the Spanish embassy with Parsons, when the talk, however, was all of ‘the attack on London’.⁴⁷ Parsons guessed the reason the Shah’s envoy was now plotting against England instead of Turkey was the ‘maltreatment’ of a third brother – the ‘notable pirate’ and ‘salt-water thief’ (v.i.63) Thomas – by Cecil, ‘in taking his wife and keeping her openly’ as his mistress: just as Malvolio plans.⁴⁸ Shakespeare’s informant could have been the clown Will Kemp, with whom Anthony gossiped in Rome.⁴⁹ But ‘It is common knowledge that the City is extremely alienated from the Queen’, Sherley stated, ‘because of the death of the Count of Essex’. So, ‘Strike at London’, he was reminding Parsons, ‘and you strike at England’s heart’.⁵⁰ He was right. Londoners were appalled by the Earl’s execution, which had happened just when the Iranian delegation was crossing the Alps. Such was the apparent ‘wreck past hope’ (v.i.73) to which dreams of a ‘golden time’ had been reduced by the real time of Twelfth Night. But that Shakespeare was able to create an opening out of this impasse was perhaps due to the Shah after all: against his brother’s return Abbas was holding the youngest of the Sherleys hostage in Iran.

‘He hath had wonderful great entertainment of the [Shah] with many exceeding rich gifts’, marvelled the English consul in Aleppo when Sir Anthony began his reverse embassy, before adding: ‘His brother remaineth in Persia until his return. God grant his voyage return good’.⁵¹ Robert was, in fact, now the Shah’s ‘slave’, according to Vatican informants, and the eighteen-year old boy went everywhere as ‘a favourite of the King, who generously gave him everything he needed’. He had ‘gained the goodwill of the King by whom he is liked,’ ran the despatches, ‘because he renders services’ according to local ‘habits and customs in things far from edifying’.⁵² Just what these services might have been is suggested by other memoirs. As a lover of Persian verse and a ‘composer of rhapsodies and part-songs’, the Shah frequented coffee-houses where ‘boys performed lascivious dances to the accompaniment of flutes’, one elderly Spaniard complained.⁵³ Sir Thomas Herbert, who accompanied Robert on his final embassy in 1628, recalled how ‘youthful pages’ played music as Abbas was served at table by other ‘Ganymede boys’.⁵⁴ And John Thaddeus, a Carmelite, related that provincial governors would send beautiful youths as gifts, that he ‘kept more than two hundred boys’ in his harem, and that he ‘was accompanied by forty naked boys when he went to the baths’.⁵⁵ No wonder King James wrote to the Shah asking after Robert.⁵⁶ That this court culture of pederasty and music was governed by eunuchs Abbas had personally castrated may have added urgency to the news circulating in 1600 with the True Report of Sir Anthony Shirley’s Journey that the younger of these English brothers had been left behind. To the discomfort of Islamic clerics the British Museum chose to highlight a portrait of the Shah ‘lounging next to a handsome page-boy who pours him wine’ in its publicity, however. A poem inscribed on the picture, we were told, compares ‘the lips of the beloved’ to ‘the lips of the cup’ and wine to love.⁵⁷ And in the show itself other steamy lyrics about the ‘food of love’ (i.i.1) illustrated the long and explicit Persian literary tradition of spiritualised pederasty. These poems were not translated. But if Shakespeare was similarly inspired by the Sherley case it seems the exhibition curators were not the first to use the homoeroticism of the ‘Sophy’s’ musical banquets to negotiate the violence of religious extremes:

Viola’s plan to ‘serve this duke’ by convincing the Captain ‘it may be worth thy pains’ to ‘present me as an eunuch to him’, so as to sing ‘And speak to him in many sorts of music’ (i.ii.53-4), is often explained as a dramatic false start.⁵⁸ But Elam establishes that the figure of the eunuch continues to haunt this play; and Stephen Orgel proposes that when acted by a boy the part of Orsino’s ‘little Caesar’ insinuated ‘a world of possibilities that were, to a Protestant society (perhaps temptingly) illicit’. These critics relate Cesario’s musical offering to opera in a Catholic Rome where boy-castrati excited fantasies that were ‘simultaneously heterosexual and homosexual’.⁵⁹ But as Relihan points out, the play’s authorization of homosexual desire is also ‘linked to its delicate negotiation between eastern cultures and English values’.⁶⁰ Bruce Smith indeed sees Twelfth Night as a rewriting of the Renaissance ‘Myth of the Shipwrecked Youth’, which ordinarily introduced same-sex desire in a Moslem setting in order to reinforce existing prejudice. Thus, when Shakespeare has Orsino cherish Cesario because the ‘Dear lad’ has a ‘small pipe’ like a ‘maiden’s organ… And all is semblative a woman’s part’ (i.iv.29-32), he challenges the ways in which this hostage narrative operated to police ‘the dangerous fact of sexual desire between a man and an adolescent boy’, Smith asserts, and that disorientation is more than simply sexual, for ‘If we have undergone a rite of passage, it is a journey toward another country, not a return trip to the shores we left behind’. ‘Getting outside oneself, experiencing the world through somebody else’s eyes’, according to this evaluation, ‘is central to [the] comic vision’ of Twelfth Night.⁶¹ The escape from the seraglio would become the story for a later Orientalism. But at this instant when relations between East and West were determined more by Christian schism than any anti-Islamic crusade, the perfumed garden of the harem offered Shakespeare a cultural scenario, it seems, to turn a hostage crisis into hospitality, and western prejudice to eastern promise.

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