The Sultan Speaks

The Sultan Speaks is the first study of English historical plays about the Turks in relation to their sources and analogues, including histories originating in Greek, Arabic, and Turkish. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic and on narrative theory, McJannet traces the transmission of these eastern sources and analyzes Richard Knolles’s citation of the “Turks’ own chronicles,” the historiographic equivalent of letting the sultan speak. She demonstrates that while the historians increasingly contain the sultan’s words with adverse authorial commentary, playwrights such as Marlowe and Fulke Greville use both dialogue and commentary to enhance the sultan’s stature and to mitigate his negative acts.

This book is the first study of English historical plays about the Turks in relation to their sources and analogues, including works originating in Greek, Arabic, and Turkish.

Carlos, directed by Olivier Assayas, is an epic, intensely detailed account of the life of the infamous international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—also known as Carlos the Jackal. One of the twentieth century’s most wanted fugitives, Carlos was committed to violent left-wing activism throughout the seventies and eighties, orchestrating bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings in Europe and the Middle East.