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If the imaginary ‘Persia’ of the ‘Sophy’ is a pretext for Shakespeare’s Illyria, this may reflect the real Illyria, as the pluralistic, multi-ethnic home of James vi’s favourite Catholic, Marco Antonio De Dominis Archbishop of Spalato. Improbably, it was this Adriatic divine, who later settled in London, whose books and letters offered ‘the most systematic treatment’ of the project of Christian union which the king adopted.¹ For Shakespeare, however, ‘the golden window of the east’ (Romeo, i.i.112) was always the horizon of such possibilities. Thus theatre historians calculate his playhouse was itself oriented like a church towards the azimuth of ‘the worshipped sun’ (111), with the stage and entrance fronting ‘the point on the horizon where the sun first appeared on St Barnabas Day, 11 June, the summer solstice, at the time of the building of the Globe’ in 1599.² According to such theories the theatre’s eastern alignment is signalled in Julius Caesar, the first Globe play, when on the Ides of March Casca points to where ‘Some two months hence’ the sun ‘first presents his fire; and the high east / Stands as the Capitol, directly here’ (ii.i.105-10). The dramatist’s own faith in the awakening promise of the east, as the direction from which come the ‘grey lines / That fret the clouds’ as ‘messengers of day’ (102-3), appears to be confirmed by the privileged position of his very grave, as close as possible to the ‘golden window of the east’ – and thus the resurrection – in Stratford’s Holy Trinity church. Yet as his Romans dispute whether ‘Here lies the east. Doth not the day break here?’ the ‘watchful cares… Betwixt [their] eyes and night’ (98-100) epitomise the ordeal of indeterminacy which complicates this recurring daybreak scenario on Shakespeare’s stage, where in play after play the orientation towards the dawn is mediated by conflicting interpretations, and if this hermeneutic drama leads us to expect some revelation the golden light is received in a Pauline perspective, through a glass darkly. Whatever comes to us from the east, this rose window implies, will be filtered through our fractured Christian frame:

‘What light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east’ (Romeo, ii.i.44-5): Shakespeare’s questioning of ‘yonder east’, where ‘envious streaks / Do lace the severing clouds’ and ‘jocund day / Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops’ (iii.v.7-10), expectancy about the instant ‘the all-cheering sun / Should in the farthest east begin to draw / The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed’ (i.i.127-9), and anticipation of ‘grey-eyed morn… Chequ’ring the eastern clouds with streaks of light’ (ii.ii.1), is so pressing it seems to figure what Jacques Derrida viewed as the messianism of his own stage.³ Beyond any convention of ‘Hyperion’s rising in the east’ (Titus, v.ii.56), this invocation of ‘the eastern gate, all fiery red, / Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams’ (Dream, iii.ii.391), and repeated call to ‘shine comforts from the East’ (iii.iii.20), projects an arrivance onto the East strikingly dissimilar to Marlowe’s equally compulsive identification of ‘this eastern world’ with empire and exploitation. From Tamburlaine’s claim to be ‘Monarch of the East’, to Barabas’ traffic ‘East and by south’, or Faustus’ commerce with ‘India, Saba, and farthest countries in the East’, the East is named by Marlowe 36 times, yet always in the material terms of merchant or military power.⁴ Not once does Shakespeare’s rival make the connection that transfixes his own work, between the East and the enlightenment of a rising sun.

Marlowe’s Icarian trajectory always careers westward, to see ‘the sun fall from his sphere’.⁵ By contrast, of Shakespeare’s 50 references to ‘the East’ no less than 25 invoke the sunrise at ‘the first op’ning of the gorgeous east’ (Love’s, iv.iii.219). It has become axiomatic for post-colonial criticism, however, that what ‘the plays of Shakespeare all suggest is that the plot of English history is unfolding westward – away from Rome and England, on a spiritual Crusade for a new Christian world altogether.’ From this Protestant perspective Shakespeare shares what Jeffrey Knapp calls Elizabethan England’s ‘westward longings’ for ‘a westward future’ and an Atlantic escape from ‘the dead end of eastward quests’.⁶ Yet this American cooption over-simplifies the national identity crisis that has been analysed by Robert Brenner, which was framed by the economic competition between the emergent and Puritan-directed New England lobby and the East India establishment chaired by Catholic grandees.⁷ And it overlooks the consistently heliotropic turn of these works, a responsiveness to ‘the morning sun of heaven’ illuminating ‘the gray cheeks of the east’ (Sonnet 132) which is the reverse of the Virgilian transit imperii, and seems instead to align what Robert Weimann calls ‘the commodious thresholds’ of Shakespeare’s stage away from the conflicts of the sunset world, towards the renewal of the East:⁸

‘Nay, Cadwal, we must lay his head to th’east. / My father hath a reason for it’ (Cymbeline, iv.ii.256): if scenes like the funeral in Cymbeline look eastward, what shapes their orientation is a receptiveness that contrasts with Orientalism. As Belarius teaches the princes he urges to stoop, as ‘this gate / Instructs you how t’adore the heavens, and bows you / To a morning’s holy office’, this sun-worship is opposite to Marlovian triumphalism, where ‘The gates of monarchs / Are arched so high that giants may jet through / And keep their impious turbans on without / Good morrow to the sun’ (iii.iii.1-9). Belarius’ lines recall Tamburlaine’s ‘giant presumption’ to ‘ride in triumph through Persepolis’; and since Shakespeare’s character is himself coded as a ‘sympathetic representation of an English Catholic’ his image of ‘a malignant and a Turbaned Turk’ (Othello, v.ii.362) looks like the stock Catholic bracketing of Protestantism and Islamic fundamentalism.⁹ It is easy, therefore, to read this Shakespearean heliotropism as simply crypto-Catholic, and assume that as ‘The sun represented divinity… sunburn suggested closeness to God’.¹⁰ But this mistakes the window for the sun, missing the point that as Derrida observed, the reason this stage turns east is that everything happens on it ‘in the penumbra, between night and day’, for while it may grieve for those on whom the ‘wolves have preyed’ it would not be messianic ‘if it stopped hesitating about the day to come’.¹¹ Thus, ‘Vigilance without end’, is how Emmanuel Levinas described Shakespearean theatre, thinking of the insomnia of Macbeth.¹² This is why Derrida imagined Shakespeare as the spear-shaker on Europe’s starlit battlements – like the watchman on the walls searching for a flame ‘burning through the dark’ which ‘appears slowly from the east’ in the Oresteia – who keeps open ‘poetic and thinking peepholes’ to the daybreak, awaiting the solar event ‘as the foreigner itself’ with ‘a hospitality without reserve accorded in advance to the absolute surprise’ of the visitor yet to come, be it a monster or messiah:¹³

‘See, see, King Richard doth himself appear, / As doth the blushing discontented sun / From out the fiery portal of the east’ (Richard ii, iii.iii.61-3): although there will be many such false dawns in these plays, Shakespeare’s preparation for the sunrise gives his dramaturgy the messianic imminence of an epiphany, awaiting ‘the sight of day’ in ‘trembling’ expectation of the instant ‘the searching eye of heaven’ rises in his ‘throne the east’, and ‘fires the proud tops of the eastern pines, / And darts his light through every guilty hole’ of a West exposed in all its ‘murders, treasons, and detested sins’ (iii.ii.33-40). This sunrise theme, which recurs like a signature-tune in every genre, reminds us how often Shakespeare’s plays are located, as befits dramas regularly staged for Christmas or Twelfth Night, during the liminal hours around New Year, when to Hamlet’s disgust, ‘The King doth wake… and takes his rouse, / Keeps wassail and the swagg’ring upspring reels’ (Hamlet, i.iv.9). As François Laroque writes, the daybreak celebrations of this ‘festival par excellence’ enacted ‘a veritable myth, in which dreams of the Golden Age came true’, and ‘a period of truce’ restored ‘a kind of universal fraternity’ fuelled by a ‘notion of hospitalitas which dictated that… houses should open their doors to all’. There was thus a structural affinity between the hospitality of the Shakespearean theatre and those seasonal customs, like the exchange of the Christmas Wassail Bowl or New Year gifts, which were intended ‘to extend family conviviality to embrace the whole society’.¹⁴ Shakespeare’s eastern orientation was thereby keyed to the journey of the Magi and its annual re-enactment in the advent of the Mummers, or in those fictional embassies from ‘The Prince of Purpoole’ or the ‘Prince of Love’ which taught the lawyers of the Inns of Court the suits of immunity – not of the hosts but of their guests.¹⁵

‘Twelfth Day [January 6 1663]… we met with Major Thomson… who doth talk very highly of Liberty of conscience… he says that if the King thinks it good, the papists may have the same… After dinner to the Dukes house and there saw Twelfth Night acted well, though it be but a silly play and not relating at all to the name or day’:¹⁶ Samuel Pepys’ blithe contempt for Shakespeare’s comedy gains irony from his failure to connect it with his talk of toleration, but his diary entry provides historical perspective on its hope to ‘let no quarrel nor no brawl to come / Taint the condition of this present hour’ (v.i.345-6). For ‘what’s to come’ in Twelfth Night would take centuries to arrive. But it cannot be chance that the other Sherley play, The Three Brothers, was acted in 1609 by a company of Catholic players along with Pericles and King Lear.¹⁷ ‘I do not like the fashion of your garments,’ Lear cautions Edgar, ‘You will say they are Persian; but let them be changed’ (iii.vi.73-4). Shakespeare grew wary of this ‘Persian’ Catholic disguise. Yet The Three Brothers seems to share his dream of ‘golden time’, because it ends with the Sherleys reunited as the Shah gives orders to build ‘a church / Wherein all Christians that do hither come / May peaceably hear their own religion’.¹⁸ This was a vision that even the Calvinistic Thomas Middleton could endorse, when in another Sherley public relations exercise he declared how it was not Robert’s ‘garments embroidered thick with gold’ which ‘dazzled’ but the ‘excellent music of his tongue’ that sued so well it had converted the Shah himself into ‘confessing and worshipping’ Christ.¹⁹

‘Would you undertake another suit,’ Olivia likewise assures Cesario in Shakespeare’s comedy of silken embassies, ‘I had rather hear you to solicit that / Than music of the spheres’ (iii.i.100-2). In truth, the Sherley brothers would never be reunited, and Robert would soon be reporting ‘the hatred [Abbas] bears to Christians… burning and pulling down all Churches’.²⁰ Yet in Shakespeare’s Illyria hopes still centre on Cesario’s suit. Sir Anthony had left Iran with thirty-two chests of silk as gifts for European monarchs from the Shah. These were last seen at Archangel, where Sherley stowed them aboard a Dutch ship bound for England. He had perhaps cashed them in to finance Essex, before sailing ‘into the north of my lady’s opinion’ to ‘hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard’ (iii.ii.22). Someone who might have known the whereabouts of these presents was his uncle Sir Thomas Sherley, the Treasurer of the Middle Temple. But after the Essex disaster, Sir Thomas was in charge of the lawyers’ festivity for a difficult New Year. He had ‘a strong motive to stage a prestigious entertainment’, and so he commissioned the professional Lord Chamberlain’s Men and their musicians to stage a play.²¹ The comedy they acted was Twelfth Night. So it would be satisfying to think Shah Abbas’s silk ultimately paid for Shakespeare’s comedy, and that this extravagant New Year gift from the East was a musical offering of ‘the food of love’ (i.i.1). Certainly, the Persian wise men pursued Sherley in the courts because they claimed their presents had been sold for ‘a great price’. But the broker, according to Father Parsons, had been ‘his friend the captain’.²² And only the missing captain knew the truth about the ‘Sophy’s’ suit.