Nabra: <\/strong>G\u00fcll\u00fc Agop\u2019s monopoly on theatre in Istanbul did have some important provisions though. Berkay Comert says in an article for Medium,<\/p>\nOpera and similar musical genres would be excluded from this monopoly. Also, according to the specification, he had to establish a theatre within six months in \u00dcsk\u00fcdar, within three years in Galata, Tophane, and Beyo\u011flu, within six months in Istanbul, and if he did not do so, the monopoly would be removed. Ten different games would be played in the first year, which would be increased in the following years. Regardless of profit and loss, at least 50 performances would be given every year in \u00dcsk\u00fcdar, 30 in Galata and Istanbul. The last three provisions of the contract were that compulsory demonstrations for the benefit of the poor would be made, a gendarme would be in the theatre, and ticket prices would be regulated.<\/p>\n
This was the exact opposite of the government\u2019s stance on theatre in the past, that it was exclusive to the elite class. Now, they were mandating that it would be accessible to the people.<\/p>\n
Marina: <\/strong>The first, original theatre texts in Turkish were by Azerbaijani playwright Mirza Fatali Akhundov, but many consider the first genuine Turkish play script, meaning written by a Turkish playwright in Turkish, to be The Marriage of the Poet<\/em> by \u0130brahim \u015einasi in 1859, originally written for Dolmabah\u00e7eSaray Theatre. It\u2019s a one-act comedy first released in serial form in the newspaper that \u015einasie ran. In fact, newspapers were generally important to the growth of theatre in the empire since newspapers started around the same time that stage plays began. So, the reviews and articles about theatre and newspaper popularized the art form further.<\/p>\nThe play came about shortly after Sultan Abdulmecit\u2019s 1856 reforms,<\/p>\n
In which he pledged again equal treatment of all Ottoman subjects regardless of race or creed. As dress, social ritual, and family life were transformed, so the values of traditional Diwan poetry of the medieval tale of rhyming couplets, the play in the round for which no written text existed were questioned. The stage was now set for the Turkish innovators.<\/p>\n
Soon after signing the new edict, he began to build himself a new palace at Dolmabah\u00e7e. It was for the theatre in his palace that Ibrahim \u015einasie Effendi wrote the first Turkish play, \u015e\u00e2ir Evlenmesi<\/em>, The Poet\u2019s Marriage.<\/em> The plot and characters were not unlike those of the old Turkish theatrical show or Ortaoyunu, except that the play was meant not only to entertain, but also to point out a moral, that the marrying of an unseen bride could have unpleasant consequences.\u201d<\/p>\nAnd that was from one of the aforementioned articles, which we\u2019ll include here.<\/p>\n
Nabra: <\/strong>According to Wikipedia, because I couldn\u2019t get access to the original source, \u201c\u015einasi employed a Turkish language that was closer to the vernacular rather than the vocabulary and structures previously used by the cultural elite. He intentionally distorted the way he spelled words in order to make the language more phonetic and to aid in the performance of the play.\u201d He wrote this play for the people instead of for the elites, which was a testament to how theatre had expanded and gained broad engagement at this point.<\/p>\nOur good friends at Wikipedia summarized the play in this way.<\/p>\n
In the play, a poor young man became infatuated with a beautiful woman, but according to Muslim tradition, grooms were unable to see the faces of their brides until after the marriage contract was finalized. The family of the beautiful woman used the stipulation to their advantage when they secretly replaced the young poet\u2019s beloved with her highly unattractive older sister. The young man was eventually reunited with his darling through misdeeds of his own.<\/p>\n
Okay, a little bit problematic, but the play was a satirical criticism of traditionalists through the criticism of arranged marriages. From the preface to Edward Allworth\u2019s translation, the play shows \u201cthe impatience of the new men with old practices satirizing go-betweens and arranged marriages, but it also chides the emerging self-styled intellectuals and poets for their pontificating about thiyator, artistic pretensions among the ghost of a towering literary heritage, and pseudo-liberalism coupled with snobbery toward the less educated.\u201d And yes, they decide to write theatre as T-H-I-Y-A-T-O-R. So unless that\u2019s some type of Turkish term, I think that\u2019s just Edward very well-articulating the kind of snobbery of theatre in a brilliantly re-spelled word.<\/p>\n
Marina: <\/strong>Yeah, like \u201ctheatre.\u201d<\/p>\nNabra: <\/strong>So I could not help myself, \u201cTheatre, thiyator.\u201d So here is the opening of the play we\u2019re going to perform for you in the translation, which is the most famous translation by Edward Allworth. The scene is between the groom and his friend. Do you want to be the groom, Mr. Ardenthack, or his friend, Master Wise?<\/p>\nMarina: <\/strong>I will be Master Wise.<\/p>\nNabra: <\/strong>Amazing. Get ready for the best cold read you ever heard.<\/p>\nAt last, this evening I become a bridegroom. Luckily, I signed the marriage contract today. If I hadn\u2019t, passion and excitement might have made me an unwed bridegroom.<\/p>\n
Marina: <\/strong>Is such a thing possible?<\/p>\nNabra: <\/strong>Why not? If it\u2019s a love match, as they say.<\/p>\nMarina: <\/strong>Shocking.<\/p>\nNabra: <\/strong>Now, see here, if a husband can get along without passion or affection, fine for him. But what am I marrying Miss Dove for? Because… Because… She\u2019s my darling<\/em>, and nothing else. Wasn\u2019t I sane<\/em> to fall in love with her so madly<\/em>?<\/p>\nMarina: <\/strong>Maybe so.<\/p>\nNabra: <\/strong>Ah, the freshness of her beauty, the sweetness of her disposition. Everything about her pleases me. Now, if my poor Dove just did not have a big sister with a face like a crow.<\/p>\nMarina: <\/strong>Oh, a shame. What do they call her?<\/p>\nNabra: <\/strong>Ugh, Miss Placid, I believe. Even the name of the wretched woman bothers me.<\/p>\nMarina: <\/strong>Why is that?<\/p>\nNabra: <\/strong>When it comes to good looks, she is destitute<\/em>. But forget about that. Besides staying out of circulation until forty-five, her brains have gone bankrupt too. I guess there\u2019s nothing to her except an overinflated hulk. Ah, I\u2019m ashamed to be seen with such a sister-in-law.<\/p>\nAnd end scene.<\/p>\n
As I said, politically incorrect, but admittedly kind of amusing.<\/p>\n
Marina: <\/strong>Well, also, I just want to point out, so whenever I was doing research on this episode, I was talking to the aforementioned Turkish friend Deniz, and she said, \u201cOh, growing up in school, we learned a lot about Ottoman theatre in the classroom.\u201d And I said, \u201cOh, great. Can you send me the resources?\u201d And she was like, \u201cYeah, Marina, they\u2019re in Turkish. Do you still want them?\u201d I was like, \u201cOh, great point.\u201d<\/p>\nBut Nabra really liked this scene, and so I was trying to find different translations of it, and found one that was, I mean, honestly baffling, and then found this one, and we were able to sort of put them side by side and say, \u201cOkay, I think we see what they were doing,\u201d but this one makes a lot more sense. So the labor of finding it, Nabra, we really appreciate it because it\u2019s interesting to see how we\u2019ll be able to piece some of these sources together in English, but also a need for a more coherent and cogent narrative to be constructed in English. And I know that there are plenty of scholars who are working on this now, but it\u2019s just, I think, something that we continue to point out on the podcast and it\u2019s interesting.<\/p>\n
Nabra: <\/strong>Yeah, it was amazing how difficult it was to get my hands on this. I ended up going to the LA Public Library, shout out public libraries, and had to scan it because it was not in circulation, but it also showed me the importance of translation because the amazon.com preview of some random version had such a bad translation. It was so bizarre, and we just wanted to do as much justice as we could to these very important playwrights of the Ottoman Empire, even though it doesn\u2019t translate as well culturally, I guess, to the present day where there\u2019s this very difficult misogynist narrative, really, in this play. And without knowing that it was a critique of traditions and that this character was not supposed to be likable, it could be taken very differently by modern audiences.<\/p>\nAnd I think that\u2019s also why Allworth has these stand-in names, instead of the other translation I found had actually the Turkish names that were in the original play as the names of the characters. But instead, Allworth has these terms, Mr. Ardenthack and Miss Dove and Miss Placid, instead to show what they were supposed to symbolize. And maybe that goes back to origins like Ortaoyunu, which had a lot of stock characters, and even Karag\u00f6z had these stock characters that were really of the culture and of the art that they were performing.<\/p>\n
Marina: <\/strong>Don\u2019t forget that I was aptly named Master Wise.<\/p>\nNabra: <\/strong>Yes, please don\u2019t call me Mr. Ardenthack from now on unless I deserve it.<\/p>\nMarina: <\/strong>Now that the idea\u2019s in my head…<\/p>\nNabra: <\/strong>No, she\u2019s so mean to me.<\/p>\nAnyways, to return to our narrative on Ottoman theatre\u2014I hope you enjoyed that artistic interlude\u2014Menemencio\u011flu tells the story of another important local production in very compelling detail, so I\u2019m going to give you a long quote by her. The play is by the very important Ottoman playwright, Nam\u0131k Kemal. So Menemencio\u011flu says, \u201cWithin two months of the formation of this committee,\u201d which was this literary committee that was very important that we\u2019ll talk about shortly,<\/p>\n
Nam\u0131k Kemal had completed a play whose production was to be the great dramatic event of the century, Vatan<\/em> or The Fatherland<\/em> or Silistra<\/em>. The play is based on an episode in the defense of Silistra on the lower Danube, which the Russians were unable to capture during the Crimean War. Hubb Ul-vatan, or love of the fatherland, an ideal advocated by Kemal in many articles and letters, motivates the action.<\/p>\nA noble young man forms a group of volunteers to join the war. The girl he loves disguises herself as a soldier and follows him to the front. Trumpets sound, guns are fired, martial songs are sung, all ends well. The lovers are united, and the enemy is defeated.<\/p>\n
G\u00fcll\u00fc Agop imported Russian uniforms from Odessa and ordered elaborate stage sets. News of the forthcoming production filled the city with excitement. On the evening of Tuesday, first of April, 1873, the theatre was packed with members of the higher bureaucracy, writers, intellectuals, and students. From the very beginning, the impassioned tirades were interrupted by applause, and when the curtain fell, there were calls for the author to appear. He had already left the theatre. A group of spectators carrying lanterns to see by in the dark streets marched to the offices of Tasvir-i,<\/em> or the Example<\/em>, of which Kemal was the editor, shouting, \u201cLong live Kemal! Long live The Fatherland<\/em>! This is our wish! God grant our wish!\u201d<\/p>\nSo exciting. Theatre needs to be this much of an event again all the time, and people marching through the streets chanting afterwards. I just love that.<\/p>\n
\nDue to the original oral tradition of Turkish theatre in the past, there was not initially a desire to preserve texts in this way. That started to change, however, with the establishment of professional theatre companies who were starting to perform and develop Turkish plays in the Turkish language.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Marina: <\/strong>Well, and I want to add quickly that the more that I\u2019m learning different Turkish words, I\u2019ve taken two Turkish lessons now, so two whole hours of Turkish, is that when Nabra was reading, you said \u201cVatan<\/em>\u201d\u2014\u201cThe Fatherland<\/em>\u201d\u2014Nabra, but the similarities to Arabic are quite striking, right? So in Arabic, we would say \u201cvatan\u201d is homeland, and then \u201chubb,\u201d she said, \u201cHubb Ul-vatan\u201d, love of the fatherland in Turkish, and I\u2019m sure our Turkish friends, perhaps our pronunciation is not perfect, but \u201chubb\u201d in Arabic is also love.<\/p>\nSo it\u2019s just always interesting to see these connections of language. And of course, there are particular reasons for that, which is not the aim of this podcast to discuss right now, but I wanted to point them out.<\/p>\n
Nabra: <\/strong>By 1867, there were three professional groups in Istanbul, and the circus could be considered the fourth. According to Uslu, \u201cDuring this period, Muslim intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire saw playwriting as an important sector of artistic production, and there was a boom in both copyright and performance, especially regarding Turkish playwriting,\u201d which is a change from the more improvised versions of theatre.<\/p>\nMarina: <\/strong>Yes. So generally, original plays were not published since they would be the subject of censorship from the Ministry of Education if they were. Censorship was especially intense during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid from 1876 to 1909. Censorship at times was absurd and difficult to navigate, which we see today too. Some words that were outlawed in print were \u201cYildiz,\u201d \u201cCyprus,\u201d \u201cCrete,\u201d \u201cMacedonia,\u201d \u201cBosnia,\u201d \u201cHerzegovina,\u201d \u201cMurat,\u201d \u201cdethronement,\u201d \u201csocialism,\u201d \u201cstrike,\u201d \u201canarchy,\u201d \u201cfreedom,\u201d \u201cequality,\u201d \u201cconstitution,\u201d \u201cexplosion,\u201d and \u201cnose.\u201d That is correct: \u201cnose.\u201d The last one was to ensure that the sultan\u2019s nose was not insulted, especially due to the popularity of the play Cyrano de Bergerac<\/em>, which was not allowed to be performed.<\/p>\nBut due to the original, to the oral tradition of Turkish theatre in the past, there was not initially a desire to preserve texts in this way anyway. That started to change, however, with the establishment of professional theatre companies who were starting to perform and develop Turkish plays in the Turkish language, instead of European plays from non-Turkish playwrights. There were more Turkish actors on the stage, and theatre was an art form for the public, not just the sultan.<\/p>\n
A major step in the development of playwriting as a recognized form of literature in the Empire was the establishment of the Ottoman Theatre Literature Committee in 1873. The stated objectives of the committee were, one, solving the Armenian actors\u2019 pronunciation problem, which was seen as the most problematic issue of Turkish theatre at the time. Despite the major Armenian influence on theatre across the empire, there was still a strong nationalist sentiment that discriminated against them in certain ways, and newspapers often criticized Armenians\u2019 \u201cpoor pronunciation of the language on stage.\u201d But this committee did lead classes for Armenian performances, which resulted in what some have written about it say led to a more positive, popular opinion of their performances.<\/p>\n
The second stated objective of the committee was enriching the theatre literature with the help of the translated works from European languages. And the third goal was correcting translations and adaptations made in a superficial manner. And four, improving the national theatre literature by writing as many plays as possible.<\/p>\n
And I think it\u2019s always just useful to point out when we\u2019re talking about Armenians generally, that this nationalist rhetoric did eventually then lead to the Armenian Genocide, which is being foreshadowed here in many ways. So I just did not want to skip over and ignore that, especially currently in times of genocide, it\u2019s always worth pointing out these things as we\u2019re seeing them in different texts.<\/p>\n
Nabra: <\/strong>Absolutely. Throughout the researching for this episode, it was actually really difficult to figure out this balance of the popular theatre and the interest and excitement around Armenian performers and writers and playwrights, and also this strong nationalist sentiment of trying to push Turkish theatre and the Turkish language work and Turkish actors. So it\u2019s strange and it\u2019s hard to figure out what really the atmosphere was at the time through scholarly articles. So thank you for pointing that out, Marina.<\/p>\nSo in the late 1800s really, theatre boomed. The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama<\/em> describes plays that focused on heroism and nationalism, historical plays, plays based on mythology and folktale, biblical themes, protests against polygamy, commentary on superstitions, plays about contemporary life, works that satirize neighboring countries, romantic comedies, comedies of mistaken identities, marriage controversies, class commentaries, tragic romances, and more.<\/p>\nIn 1884, the Ottoman theatre Company was abolished by order of Sultan Abdulhamit, and this coincided with the increased censorship that we mentioned earlier, and theatre as a whole nearly disappeared a time until the next revolution.<\/p>\n
Marina: <\/strong>The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 greatly changed the social, and thereby artistic, atmosphere of the empire. Censorship was ignored and forbidden plays were performed to large crowds. The Fatherland <\/em>was widely performed. According to Menemencio\u011flu, \u201cTheatres mushroomed. There was a sudden plethora of plays with titles like, in translation, Morning of Freedom<\/em>, The Last Days of Abdulhamit<\/em>, and Intrigue in the Palace<\/em>. What gradually emerged in this rather confused period was that a truly national Turkish theatre was being created. The plays of this period concerned themselves with the political and social problems of the day, and with the projection of a new concept of \u201cTurkishness\u201d in place of the old Ottomanism.<\/p>\nDuring this period, political theatre was a way to express dissatisfaction with the previous regime, as well as enthusiasm towards the new social period, which came to be known as the Second Constitutional Period. From the Young Turks Revolution in 1908 through the Turko-Italian War of 1911, the Balkan War of 1912, World War I, and finally, the Turkish War of Independence that led to the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, theatre reflected the politics of the time and dealt with topics related to the struggle of the Turkish people against their enemies in war or historical Turkish war heroes. One company called Osmanli Donanma Cemiyetti was formed specifically to raise money for the purchase of warships.<\/p>\n
Nabra: <\/strong>In 1914, the liberal mayor of the time, Cemil Topuzlu Pasha, inaugurated the music and drama conservatory called D\u00e2r\u00fclbedayi. It was a huge moment in Turkish theatre history. World War I interrupted the school, of course, but it started up again after the war, operating mostly as a theatre group rather than an educational establishment. And eventually, it led to the establishment of the Istanbul Municipal Theatre, which still operates today.<\/p>\nVery notably, young women were allowed to study at the conservatory. And in 1920, the first Turkish Muslim female actor, Afifa Jale, played the lead in a Turkish play entitled Yamalar<\/em>. And that brings us to the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922.<\/p>\nThis overview was incredibly brief and obviously does not cover the entirety of theatre history in the empire. The empire was bursting with creativity and artistic expression and had so many impactful and influential plays, performances, playwrights, actors, directors, and theatremakers of all kinds from so many different backgrounds. But I hope this overview gives you an idea of the rich atmosphere of theatre in the Ottoman Empire, and like all of our episodes, encourages you to do your own research and learn more about this robust theatre culture.<\/p>\n
Marina: <\/strong>This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of Kunafa and Shay<\/em> and other HowlRound podcasts by searching \u201cHowlRound\u201d wherever you find podcasts.<\/p>\nIf you loved this podcast, please post a rating and write a review on your platform of choice. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode, along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content, on the howlround.com website.<\/p>\n
Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and contribute your ideas to the Commons.<\/p>\n
Yalla<\/em>. Bye!<\/p>\nNabra: <\/strong>Yalla<\/em>. Bye!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n