Drama and Dissolution: Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turk at Whitefriars

This paper will propose a site-specific reading of A Christian Turn’d Turk (c. 1612) by Robert Daborne. Likely first performed at the indoor playhouse situated in the former Carmelite monastery of Whitefriars, Daborne’s play includes an elaborate dumbshow depicting the conversion of the English pirate, John Ward, to Islam. I argue that if this scene is understood to have been first performed in a converted playing space, then this affects the meaning of the dumbshow in two significant ways. Firstly, the ecclesiastical history of Whitefriars amplifies the dumbshow’s visual contrast with the vocal aspects of Protestant adult baptism, particularly forms of vocal confirmation described in accounts of the baptism of adult “strangers.” Secondly, the space enables a correlation between Mahometan and Catholic idolatry, intensifying the play’s Protestant triumphalism as Ward’s conversion and fall is mapped onto the defeat of English Catholicism.

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ABI SHINN is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (2018). Recent publications include an article in the journal Modern Philology on the architecture of conversion and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (joint winner of the Marlowe Society of America Roma Gill Prize 2023/24) and the edited volume Spenser and Animal Life (2024). She is currently co-editing a special issue of the journal Reformation with Róisín Watson on the topic of 'The Architecture of Conversion and the Conversion of Architecture in Early Modern Europe’, (due Spring 2027) and co-editing with Neil Rhodes a two volume edition of William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure for MUP’s Revels Companions series. Her current book project is titled The Architecture of Conversion and the Early Modern Stage c. 1592-1613.