الخطاب "المشفّر": الشرق على المسرح البريطاني في فترة عودة الملكية والقرن الثامن عشر
Mohammed Rawashdeh, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan.
Abstract
There is almost consensus among the Easterners that Eastern culture suffers great distortion in Western writings, especially in literature. Western writers are usually accused of exaggerating and generalizing the social, political, and religious problems of the East. Easterners view the overwhelming Eastern jealousy and the violence that results from it in English drama as one of the manifestations of this distortion.
This study looks at the treatment of the East, in general, and of Eastern jealousy, in particular, in the drama of the Restoration and the eighteenth century from a different perspective; it suggests that the English dramatists employed the Eastern setting, with its presumed sexual fantasies and despotism, as a disguise to comment on the social, economic, and political problems of England itself. In other words, these dramas functioned as coded discourses through which the English dramatists were able to convey their ideas to the English audiences, rather than as real representation of Eastern life. The English dramatists presented dramas from which the English audiences could learn while at the same time conveniently disassociate, or at least distance, themselves from.