“A[u]gmenter of Their Kingdome”: Goffe’s The Couragious Turke , or, Amurath the First as a Christian Tragedy based on Knolles’ The Generall Historie of the Turkes

Since Turkish Sultans mainly represented Islam for playwrights and the audience, English Renaissance plays about the Turkish Sultans were predominantly Christian tragedies illustrating the superiority of Christianity over ‘Mohammedanism’. The earliest Ottoman sultan to appear in such a tragedy is Sultan Murad I, or Amurath I (1362-1389) in Thomas Goffe’s tragedy entitled The Couragious Turk, or Amurath the First. In this respect, Goffe’s Amurath the First contains a great density of biblical allusions, where Amurath functions as an anti-type in comparison to his Christian counterparts, Eumurphe and Cobelitz. As many playwrights before him, Goffe gathered the material from Richard Knolles’ The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603). The aim of this study is to provide a detailed study of Goffe’s Christian tragedy in the light of Knolles’ aforementioned text.