Bit of a drag, really, all things considered. The readings for this 18th-century lit course aren't shaping up all that well. Irene is a melodrama about the fall of "Greece" to the Turks--it is light on the historical detail, lighter on the cultural accuracy, and sort of an excuse to cast aspersions on the Turk, with a bunch of Greeks who dither and then fail to liberate their country, and a Turkish sultan who dithers and then has everybody killed. Irene herself has her moments, I guess--she is spectacularly self-interested and tries to play both sides. The Greeks are Classical buffoons. The Turks twirl their moustaches.

EDIT: I am in class and all keyed up on coffee from writing all night and need something to use up my excess processing speed, so allow me to copypaste part of my as yet unedited paper dealing with Irene, just fo the record.


*****
Johnson spent 23 years writing Irene. It was only performed due to the intervention of his friend David Garrick, sank without a trace, and was not revived during his lifetime. He considered it his greatest failure.


It is not as good or as interesting as the Turkish Embassy Letters, and I won’t spend as much time on it. It is a bundle of clichés that manages to hit several of the Oriental caricatures previously mentioned, portraying Turks as heretical, lustful, and brutal, in an era where far more nuanced treatments of the Ottomans had become available. But is still says a few interesting things about the colonizer-colonized relationship, and about the invocation of Classical Greece as foundation of a concept of common Europeanness that cast the Turks as interlopers.


As a story, Irene is derivative in some ways of Othello, with the ambiguity taken out. Instead of the liminal, tragic figure of the Moor, we get the sultan Mahomet, a moustache-twirling stock villain whose efforts to possess Irene might at least rouse our revulsion if she weren’t so impenetrably mercenary and self-centred. The Iago figure, Cali, doesn’t even have the wit to stay alive long enough to see everybody else get slaughtered. What we are left with could be summed up as dithering followed by strangulation.


The most sympathetic figures are the Greek resistance fighters, Leontius and Demetrius, who bear the unfortunate burden of representing Christian Europe and ancient Greece simultaneously, and dropping into foolish Classical male ego-performance as though they’re on the plains of Troy, when where they are in fact is in a historical battle that they are very much losing, that they audience knows they historically lost, and when the last thing they have time for is hurt feelings (as e.g. Leontius at I.ii. 33-7, and again at IV.iii. 43-6)). They evoke no Christian God, only a vague Providence, as if in the hope that the age of heroes might not be ended and Apollo and Hera might show up any minute to help.


But whatever Providence there was in the battle was on the Ottoman side—“unresisted lightning” and “roaring whirlwinds” supporting the Turks in battle (I.i. 54-5). “’Twas vice,” Demetrius says, “. . . ‘twas vice, Leontius / that froze our veins, and withered all our powers” (I.i. 56-7). But it’s left to Cali, when he arrives, to dig in the knife by naming them as “Christians.” They are Christians helpless before a scourge from God, an irreducible infidel Other; at the same time Hellenes helpless before a lascivious barbarian other bent on sensual conquest, possessing their women and and the “unexhausted plenty” (I.i. 64) of the land; and finally a colonized people helpless before the superior energy and purpose of a brutal imperial Other that will sweep away their decayed civilization in its “vice” and alienate their native patrimony.


Whether Irene will resist or succumb to Mahomet thus becomes the main conflict of the first part of the play. Having beat the Greeks in battle and defamed their cultural achievements by putting to death Menodorus of the “martial rhet’rick” (I.iv. 26), Mahomet will by his marriage to Irene symbolically compromise the purity of the proto-European Greek lineage. This is a virulent strain of alterity, a return to the days of Muslims as inhuman plague that will consume the wealth of nations and “ev’ry suppliant lift his eyes to Mecca” (I.v. 52). It is also very similar to the European plunder of the New World and the literal plagues unleashed thereby. Although Irene is true to Mahomet, he kills her, and the Ottomans rule Greece for 350 years—or for all Johnson knew in 1749, forever. In that sense the play unavoidably becomes on some level a rallying cry for imperialism: “Those who do not colonize the Other, are colonized by him.” ( )