tears in tehran/laughter in london

Tears in Tehran/Laughter in London: James Morier, Mirza AbulHassan Khan, and the Geopolitics of Emotion

Daniel O'Quinn

Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 25, Number 1, Fall 2012, pp. 85-114(Article)

Published by University of Toronto PressDOI: 10.1353/ecf.2012.0064

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Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 1 (Fall 2012)ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.1.85 Copyright 2012 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University

abstract

authorDaniel O’Quinn is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph. He is the author of “Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790” (2011) and “Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800” (2005). He co-edited, with Jane Moody, the “Cambridge Com pan ion to British Theatre, 1730–1830” (2007), edited the “Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan” (2008), and co-edited, with Teresa Heffer nan, Mary Wortley Montagu’s “The Turkish Embassy Letters” (2012).

Throughout the eighteenth century, diplomatic relations were frequently supplemented by the deployment of entertainment, specifically the theatre, as a potential site where negotiation could be furthered, altered, or impeded. Both the British em bassy to Tehran in 1809 and the Persian embassy to London in 1809–10 involved acts of shared theatrical consumption. James Morier, the secretary to Harford Jones, published detailed descriptions of Ta’ziyeh performances in Tehran in A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor (1812). And the journal of his coun-terpart, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, en gages with the many operas and plays he attended during his sojourn in London. Both envoys recognize and contain the allegorical scenarios being staged in the scene of diplomacy. In each case, Morier and Abul Hassan are troubled by the reception of these affect-laden performances, and the ways in which they distinguish them selves from the audience around them reveal the limits of intercultural exchange at this moment in the Napoleonic wars.

Tears in Tehran/Laughter in London: James Morier, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, and the Geopolitics of Emotion

Daniel O’Quinn

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ECF 25, no. 1 © 2012 McMaster University

daniel o’quinn

Near the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, as the Napoleonic wars became ever more global in their ramifications, Britain was busily negotiating a treaty of alliance with the Shah of Persia as part of a larger strategy of protecting its holdings in India. Fat’h Ali Shah, for his part, was endeavouring to mobilize British support to help regain Tiflis, in present-day Georgia, from the insurgent Russians. The British embassy to Tehran in 1809 and the ensuing Persian embassy to London in 1809–10 generated important diplomatic gains and an opportunity for extended intercultural exchange between Britons and Shi’ite Muslims. These exchanges were the focus of much attention on both sides: London papers kept a daily record of the actions of the Persian envoy to London, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, and the envoy for his part kept a detailed journal of his London visit, which was widely circulated upon his return to Tehran under the title of Hayrat Namah, or Book of Wonders. The earlier embassy of Harford Jones was documented by his private secretary James Morier in an extraordinary illustrated travel narrative entitled A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor (1812).1

These diplomatic missions warranted attention because the en-su ing treaty heralded a significant realignment of powers. After Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz in 1805 and the subsequent dis-memberment of the Habsburg Empire, Sultan Selim iii of Turkey recognized Napoleon as emperor and the Ottomans were quickly at war with both Russia and Britain. In 1807, under the terms of the Treaty of Finkenstein, Persia also aligned itself with the French Empire against the Russians and the British.2 For the French, these alliances were part of a grand Napoleonic scheme to cross the Middle East and then attack British India; for the Persians, the alliance was aimed at repelling Russian aggression. Under the terms of the treaty, Napoleon recognized Fat’h Ali Shah’s claims to parts of Georgia and other territories in the Transcaucasus. However, after Napoleon defeated Russia at the Battle of Friedland in 1807, France

1 I thank Bridget Orr, Jane Moody, and Humberto Garcia for perceptive com-mentary on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank Marina Warner and Elizabeth J. Kuti for inviting me to present this work at the “Staging the East” conference at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, in June 2010.

2 For a sustained discussion of Persia’s diplomatic relations with Napoleonic France, see Iradj Amini, Napoleon and Persia: Franco-Persian Relations under the First Empire, trans. Azizeh Azodi (Waldorf: Mage, 1999).

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and Russia became allied at the Treaty of Tilsit and the basis of the Franco-Persian alliance dissolved. In 1809, Fat’h Ali Shah turned to the British for support. And the Ottomans secretly aligned them-selves with Britain because the French did not honour a key clause in the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) whereby the disputed territories of Wallachia and Moldavia would be “returned” to Ottoman control. This historically anomalous alliance of Britain, Persia, and the Ottomans was not without its tensions. Britain’s Islamic allies had recently sided with the French, and the Foreign Office could not have harboured any illusions about their motivations. In both cases, it was Napoleon’s shifting allegiance towards Russia that suddenly made Britain a desirable ally. Because Britain’s alliance with the Ottoman Empire was both recent and largely secret, most Britons and certainly most Persians would have associated Turkish “despotism” with French revolutionary zeal. Similarly, even after the formation of an Anglo-Persian alliance in 1809, many Britons associated the Persians with French culture. As Stephen Weston writes in the preface to Persian Recreations, or Oriental Stories (1812): “the inhabitants of Iran ... resemble the French in the days of Gallic Civilization.”3

My interest in the Anglo-Persian negotiations extends beyond this complex geopolitical dynamic. Both Mirza Abul Hassan’s journal and Morier’s narrative offer remarkable observations on the contemporary performance cultures of Tehran and London. Morier’s account of Ta’ziyeh performance is one of the earliest European descriptions of the practice,4 and Abul Hassan’s regular atten dance at the opera during his London sojourn was the basis for some of the earliest representations of this art form for Persian readers. For both writers, these theatrical experiences provide particularly rich sites for exploring intercultural exchange because the emotions generated in the theatre constitute a shared but contested ground on which cosmopolitan consciousness can be negotiated. Significantly, Morier and Abul Hassan represent 3 [Stephen Weston] Philoxenus Secundus, preface to Persian Recreations, or

Oriental Stories, with Notes, to Which is Prefixed Some Account of the Two Ambassadors from Iran to James the First and George the Third (London: S. Rousseau, 1812), ii. I thank Humberto Garcia for drawing my attention to Weston’s text.

4 The first account of this practice was William Francklin, Observations Made on a Tour from Bengal to Persia, in the Years 1786–87 (London, 1790), 246. Francklin’s account is far less detailed than Morier’s.

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both their own emotional responses to the performances and the affective dynamics of the larger audience accompanying them to the performance. This representation of emotional responses has important ramifications for how we understand the contact zone experiences5 of these diplomats because, as Susan Bennett argues, “audiences derive pleasure from those who accompany them to a performance ... and from the emission of ‘barely perceptible signs of pleasure as well as loud laughter and secret tears—their con-tagiousness is necessary for everyone’s pleasure.’”6 Both the theatre and the venues for Ta’ziyeh are sites where emotion is generated, transmitted, and negotiated, but in these cases the emotional labour has the potential either to crystallize or to dissolve cul-turally specific emotional codes and signs. Both Morier and Abul Hassan attend to how their affective response converges with and diverges from that of the audience around them. Through these observations of emotional signs, they establish affiliations between Shi’ite autocracy and European sovereign monarchy. They also ethnocentrically critique their counterparts either through direct sarcasm in Morier’s case or through more subtly rendered narrative disjunctions in the representation of principle and action in the case of Abul Hassan.

These two scenes of reception were separated by precisely one year, both falling within Muharram, the first month of the Muslim calendar. As a traditional time of mourning for Shi’ites, the Ta’ziyeh plays performed during this period to mark the martyrdom of Hussein Ali constitute crucial occasions for the staging of affect and community affiliation. The first section of this article uses

5 Mary Louise Pratt’s coinage, from Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), is useful for its emphasis on the sites of cultural exchange, but for the purposes of this article it has to be separated from the assumption that these zones necessarily involve “asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (4) as defined by European conquest and colonization. Anglo-Persian relations at this juncture do not conform to a colonial model—Persia is a significant geopolitical force at this point—and thus part of my objective here is to revise notions of trans-culturation as articulated by Pratt or “levantinization” as discussed by Srinivas Aravamudan in Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 162–89, to address this specific archive.

6 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 72. In this citation, Bennett quotes from Anne Ubersfeld, “The Pleasure of the Spectator,” trans. Pierre Bouillaguet and Charles Jose, Modern Drama 25 (1982): 127–39; 128.

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Morier’s ethnographic account of Ta’ziyeh performances during the month of Muharram in order to show how the affective dynamics of theatrical reception are deployed in complex arguments about the nature of despotic and monarchical governance. The second section elaborates on this discussion of intercultural reception by focusing on Mirza Abul Hassan’s accounts of going to the opera with his diplomatic hosts. I suggest that he relates to the opera serie of Guglielmi both as surrogates for the Ta’ziyeh performances he so palpably misses during his stay in London and as occasions to articulate his diplomatic affiliation with the British crown. The subtext of sadness and anger that permeates his journal operates as a trace of cultural alienation from his homeland and of social affiliation with his friends in the British metropole. This affiliation, like that plotted in the Ta’ziyeh performances witnessed by Morier, is built on an explicit denigration of Sunni rule. One of the important implications of this argument is that both Morier and Abul Hassan, albeit for different reasons and for different ends, distinguish the Persian court from prevailing notions of despotic governance derived from representations of the Ottoman Empire. This same blend of alienation and affiliation lies at the heart of diplomacy itself and is subject to complex political calculations that bring the contingencies of global affairs to bear on the seemingly private category of feelings.

Crying for All to See

When Jones was charged with the task of negotiating a treaty with the Shah of Persia, one of his first moves was to hire James Morier as his private secretary.7 Morier’s father had been the consul-general of the Levant Company at Constantinople, and James had accrued experience in both the London and Smyrna offices, giving him extensive linguistic skills and knowledge of the 7 That Harford Jones saw Morier’s appointment as crucial is stated explicitly in

Harford Jones Brydges, An Account of the Transactions of His Majesty’s Mission to the Court of Persia in the Years 1807–11, 2 vols. (London: James Bohn, 1834), 1:10. The reason why Jones saw Morier’s appointment as a matter of the utmost import can be gleaned from his subsequent appointments. Morier was charged with the specific task of attending Mirza Abul Hassan during his embassy to London in 1809–10 and again when the Persian diplomat returned to Great Britain in 1819–20. His residence in Smyrna no doubt meant that he was famil-iar with the social conventions of Islamic cultures. He also played a central role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Gulistan as secretary to Gore Ouseley.

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region. His first literary effort, A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor (1812), was based on journals and drawings made during Jones’s embassy to Tehran.8 Handsomely produced, the book was an ambitious venture that represents Persian society and culture in two ways. On the one hand, it narrates the envoys’ move ment through Persian spaces and succinctly describes the social exchanges with the people they encounter. On the other hand, large sections of the narrative are given over to proto-archeological accounts of early Persian culture. In an extended section on Persepolis, Morier offers not only a series of detailed observations of the site, but also a number of carefully rendered illustrations of the ruins. Morier’s representation of Persian culture swings back and forth between the distant past and the fleeting present of Iranian life, which is quite typical of nineteenth-century accounts of “manners and customs.” As Johannes Fabian argues, the combination of what appear to be distinct discursive modes serves the purpose of establishing the ethnographic object as allo-chronic, meaning the descriptions of archeological sites are central to the text’s political agenda.9

The negation of present social relations in favour of antiquarian-ism is counter-balanced by Morier’s expansive representations of ritual performances and entertainments, which carry with them a sense of endlessly repeated traditions that dissolve the convention-al distinctions between past and present. This temporal fold is extremely important to his representation of Ta’ziyeh, because it is precisely the rupture of the temporal continuum that makes these performances so significant. As Peter Chelkowski argues, “During the presentation of the Ta’ziyeh passion plays, the identification of the people with the performance is such that present time and place merge imperceptibly with the past, while the martyrdom of

8 After his retirement from diplomatic service in Persia in 1816, Morier turned his attention to writing novels. The Adventures of Haji Baba of Ispahan (1824), whose central character is modelled on Mirza Abul Hassan, was an enormous success. See Terry H. Grabar, “Fact and Fiction: Morier’s Haji Baba,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11, no. 3 (1969): 1223–36 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754058>; and James Watt, “James Morier and the Oriental Picaresque,” in Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism, ed. Graeme Harper (London: Continuum, 2002), 58–72.

9 For his analysis of allochronic gestures in anthropology, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 25–36.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754058

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754058

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Hussein leads to breast-beating and tears in an identification with the suffering of the martyrs centuries ago.”10 In Fabian’s terms, “in order to be knowingly in each other’s presence we must somehow share each other’s past”: the scene of performance here has the potential to give the British observers access to the Shi’ite past and bring them fully into the presence of their Persian hosts.11 How Morier does and does not allow this to happen is revealing.

At the time of the British embassy to Persia, Ta’ziyeh plays were performed during the month of Muharrem to commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein and his sons at Kerbala and the subsequent humiliation of his family by the Umayyad Sunni Caliph, Yazid. In 680 CE, Hussein, the third Imam of the Shias and the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, was on his way to the Kufa community, whose leader he was to become. He was ambushed in the desert by Yazid’s troops, but he refused to surrender his claim to the Shia legitimacy. Yazid’s troops cut off all access to water and besieged Hussein’s followers for ten days on the burning sands at Karbala. On the tenth day, known as Ashura, Yazid’s troops killed Hussein and massacred all of the Shi’ite men. The women and children were taken captive and transported to Damascus with Hussein’s head, which was displayed to the Caliph.

The Ta’ziyeh passion plays emerged out of intense ritual mourn-ing processions that commemorated these events. In the early years of the sixteenth century, a dramatic account of the tragedy was written by Hussein Va’iz Kashifi called Rauza al-Shuhada, or The Garden of Martyrs. The public recitation of this work known as Rauza-khwani became the structural spine for the improvisatory theatre of the Ta’ziyeh. By the mid-eighteenth century, Ta’ziyeh performances had solidified into an identifiable theatrical form with conventional performance and reception protocols. The martyrdom story is spread over multiple days in the month of Muharrem with the actual murder of Hussein roughly in the middle of the series. Each specific performance is opened by a Maddah, or encomiast, who sings panegyric to the Prophet and the saints 10 Peter Chelkowski, “Popular Entertainment, Media and Social Change in

Twentieth-Century Iran,” in From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic, vol. 7 in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly, and Charles Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 772.

11 Johannes Fabian, Memory against Culture: Arguments and Reminders (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 25.

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through a combination of recitation and singing in slow cadences. As Stephen Blum emphasizes, singing is crucial to the emotional economy of the performance: “It is a fundamental assumption of ta’ziyeh and of Iranian performing arts more generally that humans who have been properly socialized are able to communicate through singing, wailing, groaning, sighing, and the like, not just through speaking. Singing is often understood as motivated by the pain of separation from a beloved, and in ta’ziyeh this pain is, above all, anguish at the prospect of impending separation from family members.”12 The question of proper socialization will have great import when Abul Hassan interprets the audience response to operatic singing in London.

The Maddah is succeeded by a Rauza-khwani, a highly skilled preacher, who uses storytelling and songs to narrate a specific episode in the martyrdom story. In full-blown Ta’ziyeh performance, the emotional identification inculcated by this preacher’s singing is intensified by a highly symbolic theatre in the round, where the action occurs on a central stage in close proximity to the spectators: “Actors are divided into good and bad characters. The protagonists sing their parts and are dressed mainly in green, whereas the villains wear red and recite their lines.”13 Traditionally, the only stage props employed are symbolic: for example, models of weapons are often deployed to invoke the battle at Karbala and a bucket of water is placed on stage to stand for the River Euphrates.14

Morier records three Ta’ziyeh performances that come quite late in the sequence of the passion play.15 These performances relate

12 Stephen Blum, “Compelling Reasons to Sing: The Music of Ta’ziyeh,” TDR/The Drama Review 49, no. 4 (2005): 86. DOI: 10.1162/105420405774762899 Sadegh Homyouni also provides a useful statement of the centrality of music to Ta’ziyeh in “A View from the Inside: The Anatomy of the Persian Ta’ziyeh Plays,” TDR 49, no. 4 (2005): 68–71. DOI: 10.1162/105420405774763014

13 Chelkowski, “Popular Entertainment,” 773.14 This outline of the performance protocols is taken from Chelkowski,

“Popular Entertainment,” 771–73. See also Chelkowski, “Time Out of Memory: Ta’ziyeh, the Total Drama,” TDR 49, no. 4 (2005): 15–27. DOI: 10.1162/105420405774763050

15 There is no definitive set of scripts for these plays. Ta’ziyeh is highly vari-able and often site-specific. For my analysis here, I rely on Lewis Pelly’s nineteenth-century rendering of the play cycle in The Miracle Play of Hasan and Hussein, 2 vols. (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1879). For a recent transcription and translation of a Ta’ziyeh performance, see Rebecca Ansary Pettys, “The Ta’ziyeh of the Martyrdom of Hussein,” TDR 49, no. 4 (2005): 28–41. DOI: 10.1162/105420405774762952

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/105420405774762899




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not to the martyrdom itself but to the humiliation of Hussein’s family after they are brought to the court of Yazid in Damascus. Morier is witness not to the actions of Yazid’s troops or Hussein’s noble death, but rather to the Shi’ite representation of the despotic court of the Sunni Ummayid caliph. In short, Morier, either by coincidence or by design, mediates for his British readers that part of the Ta’ziyeh passion play where Sunni despotism is exemplified and condemned for its cruelty.16 The potential for linking the cruelty of Yazid with the oppression of the Ottomans is manifest here, but, before arguing that the Persian hosts were staging a critique of Sunni rule for their British guests, it is important to recognize who is performing the first Ta’ziyeh play in Morier’s text.

The guards for the British envoy to Tehran were culled from the service of the East India Company. The most significant des-cription of these Indian guards involves their transformation into participants in the Ta’ziyeh performance:

On the 23rd we were invited by the jemindars (Indian officers) of the envoy’s guard, to see that part of the ceremony of the moharrem, which was appropriated to the day. We ascended an elevated platform, surrounded by a great crowd of Persians and Indians, and seated ourselves on numnauds prepared for us. On one side was a small ornamented temple, in which was represented the tomb of the imaum; and all around it were the Indians, who had changed their regimentals for a variety of fan-tastical habits, after the fashion of their own country. As every Indian can turn fakir, the greater part had assumed that character to perform the ceremonial of this feast. Many of them arose, and made long speeches (for every man has this liberty) on the death of the imaum, though they intermixed much extraneous matter.17

Based on Morier’s attention to who does what, he associates the Indian guards’ performances with the religious fanaticism of fakirs. At one level this is unsurprising, but it establishes the discourse of enthusiasm through which Morier contains the affective response to the performance. It also deploys tropes associated with Hindu superstition to render specifically Shi’ite rituals. These practices

16 These performances correspond to the dialogue presented in Pelly, 2:202–40.17 James Morier, A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor to

Constantinople between the Years 1808 and 1809 (London: Longman, 1812), 196–97. References are to this edition.

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share a mortification of the body that clearly fascinates Morier: “After this a Persian mollah, a young man of brisk and animated appearance, ascended a temporary pulpit, and commenced a species of chaunted sermon proper for the day. At the end of every period, he was answered in chorus by the multitude: and when he was nearly at an end, and had reached the most pathetic part of his harangue, he gave the signal for the people to beat their breasts, which they did accordingly with much seeming sincerity, keeping time to his chaunting” (197). What interests me here are Morier’s equivocations: the audience members beat their breasts with “seeming sincerity,” and he has already stated that the Jemindars, like all Indians, can turn fakir when necessary. Morier insinuates that the intense emotional response enacted by performers and audience alike is itself a performance.

This insinuation is crucial because Morier’s text does everything it can to separate itself not only from the bereaved Persians, but also from the very guards he relies on to ensure the safety of the envoy’s mission. In the face of the performance of a deep affilia-tion between the Jemindars and his Persian hosts, Morier chooses to shift attention away from the spectacle of shared affect to mere spectacle itself:

When the mollah had finished, a high and cumbrous pole was brought into the scene. It was ornamented with different-coloured silks and feathers, and on the summit were fixed two curious weapons made of tin, and intended to represent the swords of Ali. This heavy machine was handled by a man who, having made his obeisance to it (by first bowing his head, then kissing it), took it up with both his hands, and then amidst increasing applause balanced it on his girdle, on his breast, and on his teeth. Next, on a small temporary stage, appeared several figures, who acted that part of the tragedy of the history of the imaum appointed for the day. It consisted of the death of the two children of his sister Fatme,18 who, at the close of the performance were killed by Ameer, one of the officers of Yezid. The actors each held their speeches written on paper, which they read with great action and vociferation, and excited much interest in their audience, so that many sobbed and wept aloud; and when the ceremonial required the beating of breasts, many performed that part with a species of ferocious zeal, which seemed to be jealous of louder intonations

18 Morier’s identification of the characters is in error here.

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from any breast than their own. In a part of the scene were then introduced water carriers, who were emblematical of the thirst of the imaum at his dying moments. They bore on their backs bullock’s skins filled with water, no inconsiderable weight; but, in addition, they each received five well-grown boys, and under the united burthen walked round a circle of ten feet in diameter, three times consecutively. (197)

Morier’s rhetorical shift from emotional response to the de scrip-tion of scenography and physical acrobatics constitutes a rather forced attempt to separate himself from the martyrdom and its re-enactment. In a sense, he converts ritual to pantomime or to the kind of physical performances he would have seen at fairs in England. The two accounts of the actors’ feats of physical strength bracket his recognition that the audience’s exhibition of ferocious identification with the past constitutes an intense form of community consolidation. His investment in the technical virtu-osity of the players forms a bulwark against the affective bond exhibited by those around him. His rather trivial attention to the strength of the water carriers marks his own ineluctable separation from Ta’ziyeh’s capacity to harness the emotions of its audience.

Morier’s rhetorical discomfort is more than simply an aver-sion to religious enthusiasm; it also has a political valence. If this day’s performance binds Jemindars and Persians together into a “ferocious” entity, it also inculcates a series of political recog-nitions in Morier himself that are exhibited more directly in his account of the second Ta’ziyeh performance. Unlike the first open-air, public-space performance, the second takes place in the courtyard of some of the most powerful courtiers in Tehran: “On the following night the envoy and I visited the ameen-ad-doulah Hajee Mohamed Hossein Khan. At his house, Mirza Sheffeea, Hajee Mohamed Hussein Khan Mervee, Fath Ali Khan the poet, and other great men were assembled. The commemoration of the death of Hossein was performing in his courtyard; and when the mollah begun to read that part of the ceremonial appointed for the day, the windows of the room, in which we were seated, were thrown open, and we all changed our positions, and sat with our faces towards the mullah” (198). When he goes on to describe the response of the audience to the second performance, Morier affiliates himself with the Persian court and with Fat’h Ali Shah by arguing that the emotional affect demonstrated by these great men

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is itself a theatrical effect staged for the subjects of despotic rule. Morier recognizes the power of emotion to control the populace and indicates that he comprehends the tactics of despotism:

All this scene produced great lamentation among the spectators, who seemed to vie with each other in the excess of their weep-ing, and in the display of all the signs of grief. The prime minister cried incessantly; the ameen-ed-doulah covered his face with both his hands, and groaned aloud; Mahomed Hussein Khan Mervee made at intervals very vociferous complaints. In some I could per-ceive real tears stealing down their cheeks, but in most I suspect that the grief was as much a piece of acting, as the tragedy which excited it. The king himself always cries at the ceremony; his ser-vants, therefore, are obliged to imitate him. When the mob passed the window, at which we were seated, they again beat their breasts most furiously. (198)

The populace is reconfigured as a mob united in their imitation of the feigned tears of their leaders. The critique of despotism is two-pronged: first, it is linked to dangerous forms of religious fanaticism, and, second, it is explicitly declared to be a carefully orchestrated manipulation of the emotional lives of subjugated peoples. The collocation of mob violence and emotional enthusi-asm is a common component of anti-Jacobin rhetoric; however, this critique has another valence altogether, one that brings these faraway performances into the orbit of more recent and more proximate political events across the English Channel. For Morier’s British audience, these observations on dangerous “enthusiasm” extend beyond Oriental despotism to constructions of French revolutionary zeal.

If we look closely at the episode performed on that day, Morier’s Persian hosts may well be staging a lesson in despotism of their own that poses a number of important questions about Morier’s identifications. The grief expressed by his notable hosts and by the audience at large is for a figure that is remarkably like himself. Here is Morier’s description of the play:

First came Hossein’s horse, with his turban on the saddle. Then, in a row on chairs, were seated Yezid, with three others; one of whom, dressed in the European habit, represented a European am bassador, (Elchee Firing.) Zain Labedeen, Hossein’s brother, chained, and with a triangular wooden collar round his neck, appeared as a

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captive before Yezid, and was followed by his sister and children. Yezid’s executioner treated them with much barbarity, repelling the women when they implored his protection; and using the captives with great insult, at the instigation of Yezid. When Zain Labedeen, by Yezid’s firman, was brought to be beheaded, the Elchee Firing implored his pardon, which instead of appeasing the tyrant, only produced an order for putting the elchee himself to death. (198)

The execution of the European ambassador by Yazid is one of the most emotionally intense elements of the Ta’ziyeh passion because the ambassador is deployed in the narrative to assail Yazid not only for killing Zain Labedeen, but also for disrespecting Hussein’s female relatives and followers. In the story, Yazid forces the Shi’ite women to be paraded unveiled through the Damascus streets. The European Ambassador calls into question both the humanity and the morality of the Caliph, and thus enacts an alliance between Europe and Hussein’s followers, between Christian governments and the specifically Shi’ite Muslims. In the context of this particular performance, the expression of grief for the executed European ambassador marks an intense affili ation between the members of Fat’h Ali Shah’s court and their diplomatic guests. And it is through this allegorical affiliation that the present diplomatic agreement between the Shah and the British envoy is rendered as a rehearsal or enactment of a past rapprochement between Islam and Europe that also de-legitimated the political and religious claims of Sunni powers. In both past and present moments, friendship between Shi’ite and Firing explicitly counters a form of despotic Sunni government.

Morier’s own association with the tactical display of emotion by the Shah’s courtiers builds a similar alliance on slightly different grounds. In the Ta’ziyeh narrative, the Elchee Firing is overwhelmed by his own emotional response to Yazid’s cruelty. His reproach of Yazid is highly wrought, and he pays with his life:

The Envoy.—O Yazid, thou absolute infidel, pretend no longer to be pious, if this is religion which is practised by thee. Every sen-sible European would scorn thy creed, and regard it as a reproach to embrace it. But thou art an idolator, an atheist, and not a Mus-lim ... Nay, even an infidel would not act towards another as thou hast done to the holy Hussein ... Was not this head a delight to the spirit of ’Ali, the prince of believers? ... Blessed is the head severed

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on behalf of Hussein! Thank God I have become worthy to give my soul for him! O Hussein, may I be a sacrifice for thy face, eye-brows and eyes! May I be offered for thy head, which is severed from the body.19

In his narrative, Morier uses a series of rhetorical tactics to separate himself from the intense response of those around him to Yazid’s ruth lessness. Rather than emotionally railing against Yazid’s form of harsh despotism, Morier instead aligns himself with his hosts by intimating that they share a recognition of the value of the inculcation of affective response for the governance of the people. This has the rather remarkable effect of aligning the British envoy’s mission with the governmental objectives of the Persian court without either agreeing to sacrifice British lives for Persian gain or undermining the construction of Sunni/Ottoman alterity. This carries with it the implication that the Christian monarchy of George iii and the Shi’ite court of Fat’h Ali Shah can achieve a form of diplomatic affiliation through the pragmatic performance of emotional sympathy where none in fact exists. The suggestion here is that the shared ground between the Persian and British diplo mats is a willingness to perform as though one really was as noble as Hussein and his followers and as humane as the Elchee Firing. And with this recognition comes an admission that in the trans cultural performance of diplomatic relations hypocrisy must be not only embraced, but also fostered.

This helps to explain why, in Morier’s final description of Ta’ziyeh, he focuses so resolutely on the dangerous line between representation and reality as well as the pragmatic matter of the remuneration of the performers:

25th. This day was the last of the moharrem, when all those, who had performed the ceremonies peculiar to this season, appeared before the king. He was seated in a more elevated chamber, which looked towards the maidan. A tent had been pitched for the envoy, who was invited to attend, but he was too unwell to venture out. The representation of the day happened, indeed, to be incomplete. A strange circumstance had occurred at a village near Tehran, which so much frightened the man appointed to personify Hossein before his majesty, that in fear of the same fate he absconded. His alarm was natural, for at this village the man who performed the part of

19 Pelly, 2:239.

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the executioner chose to act to the letter, what was only intended as a very bloodless representation; and when Hossein was brought before him to be beheaded, he cut off the poor actor’s head. For this the king fined him one hundred tomauns. His majesty was pleased to take much notice of the Indians, whose ceremonial seemed to affect him much more than the others. Some keep the moharrem three days later. (199)

Like the practice of reading lines from pieces of paper, the ritual payment of players brings the fact of performance into the open and firmly brings the affective transaction into the present.20 The “incompleteness” of this performance extends beyond the key per-former not showing up: like the actor appointed to play Hussein who failed to perform for fear of being actually executed, the envoy Harford Jones just happened to be absent on the final day when the Elchee Firing would have been executed in the story. Does Jones’s non-attendance signal an affirmation of diplomatic hypocrisy, a coded message to the Shah that friendship and sympathetic affil-i ation are strictly about performance, not political reality? Or does Jones’s absence imply that the move from representation to reality threatens to shatter the illusion of sustaining a hypocritical diplomatic policy—namely, to militarily support the Persian court without risking British lives to defend it from enemies abroad?21 These two questions point to the unresolved structural ambiva-lence that Mary Louise Pratt sees as characteristic of the contact zone experience. Here, this irresolution constitutes a shared but deeply contested cosmopolitan consciousness: Morier and the Persian courtiers inhabit a shared elite culture of reception and per for mance, and yet it is unclear from Morier’s description which nation or monarch has the upper hand.22 It is only the sarcastic tone of the prior descriptions and the attribution of enthusiasm

20 This obviates the iconographic problem of imitating the Imam and his relations.

21 This was borne out three years later. After Napoleon invaded Russia in June 1812, Britain and Russia became allied; thus, Britain found itself allied with both sides of the ongoing Russo-Persian War. Ouseley proved to be receptive to Russian requests that Britain attempt to bring the two sides together. After the Russians decimated the Persian army at the Battle of Aslandez, Ouseley was instrumental in drafting the terms of the Treaty of Gulistan of 1813. The treaty drastically weakened Persia’s territorial and political claims and had adverse effects on Persia’s commerce.

22 I am indebted to Humberto Garcia for his lucid observations regarding this final scene.

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to the Persians that tips Morier’s account towards an assertion of British cultural superiority. But this assertion is tenuous and prone to reversion. Because of the strong links between the dis-course of enthusiasm and anti-Jacobin rhetoric, Morier’s claim to cultural precedence is contingent on pre-existing discourses of francophobia, which means that deep in this bemused description of “fear” in this final scene lurks an all too real concern that the enthusiastic Persians will revert to their former Napoleonic allies if the British fail in their diplomatic performance. The ambivalence identified above reflects a fundamental insecurity not only about the political affiliation being negotiated by the British Envoy, but also about the allegory enacted in the Ta’ziyeh plays.

Banishing Sorrow from the Hearts of the Audience

After successfully reaching a tentative diplomatic agreement in Tehran with Jones, Fat’h Ali Shah named Mirza Abul Hassan as ambassador to the court of George iii to finalize the terms of the treaty. Abul Hassan was escorted to London by Morier and attended in London by Gore Ouseley, who was eventually named ambassador to Persia. Abul Hassan’s account of his time in London appears at first glance to be a rather aleatory document, but a number of strains run through it that are crucial for understanding his discussion of theatre and the dynamics of diplomatic exchange. First, it is a deeply political document. He continually registers for his Persian audience why he cannot carry out his diplomatic mission according to the conventions of Eastern diplomacy. His detailed account of delays and deferrals are exculpatory in nature, but they are attended by an abiding sense of sadness and loss. Abul Hassan’s exile, unlike that of similar Shi’ite traveller Mirza Abu Talib Khan, who had been in London ten years earlier, is one of pro-nounced dislocation, longing, and emptiness. Even his accounts of London’s women manifest restraint and alienation. He spends his time pining for a Miss Pole, and one gets the sense that, in spite of his Sufi-like expressions of desire, his more frequent performance of despondency carries an erotics all of its own. There is also a con-tinual assertion of friendship and alliance based on principles of behaviour that Abul Hassan, like Montesquieu, associates with the forms of governance. Abul Hassan frequently emphasizes his esteem for the royal family and repeatedly suggests that the Prince

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of Wales is the epitome of nobility. This complimentary tone is typically undercut by his narration of the prince’s behaviour, which seems to turn on drinking and telling dirty jokes. Abul Hassan’s critiques of Britain emerge from the disjunction between his praise for institutions and titles and his narration of sociability.

Nevertheless, he argues that the mutual admiration between Britain and Persia arises out of the former’s recognition that the notion of monarchy itself is of Persian origin. He explicitly argues that the two nations share basic understandings of how to govern, not unlike Morier’s more implicit suggestion that he understands why the Shah’s courtiers cry at Ta’ziyeh. It is diffi-cult to overemphasize the importance of this gesture because it places British monarchy and the Persian sultanate in the same governmental category, thereby asserting that differences between the countries are matters of degree not kind. This amounts to a rebuttal of prevailing accounts of Eastern despotism, and this rebuttal is also subtly registered in Abul Hassan’s account of theatrical reception.

Like Morier, Abul Hassan makes a great deal of the performances sponsored by his hosts. In one evening at Covent Garden, he sees the extremes of eighteenth-century British theatre in a performance that paired John Phillip Kemble in a late production of Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear with Joseph Grimaldi in Harlequin Pedlar, or the Haunted Well.23 Here is Abul Hassan’s rendering of this night at the theatre:

Friday, 12 JanuaryWhen my friends gathered at the house, Sir Gore Ouseley told

me that tonight they planned to take me to a theatre called Covent Garden. Some time ago the theatre was destroyed by fire; it has been rebuilt with the help of a donation of 200,000 tomauns from the King.

And so we went there. On either side of the lofty stage there are galleries with painted ceilings. Although somewhat smaller than the

23 Morning Chronicle, 19 January 1810. The two plays were paired frequently through December 1809 and January 1810. Harlequin Pedlar, according to the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, ed. Charles Dickens (New York: Colyer, 1838), was a “very great success, being played fifty-two nights” (167–68). Likewise, the Morning Post declared that John Phillip Kemble’s revival of King Lear “was performed in a manner at once honourable to the Theatre, and satisfactory to the audience” (23 December 1809). Both plays were staged in the aftermath of the O.P. riots and would have come under par-ticular scrutiny from the audience.

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opera, the decoration is more elaborate. Musicians banished sorrow from our hearts with their songs. It seemed to me strange that the audience reacted to some of the tunes with such boisterous applause that it could be heard by the cherubim in heaven, but to others they appeared totally deaf.

The manager of the theatre, Mr. Kemble, acted the part of a King of Britain who divides his kingdom between two of his daughters, leaving the third without a share. In the end, however, the first two daughters show themselves ungrateful to their father, and the disin herited but dutiful daughter escapes from the bondage of her wicked sisters with the help of a general’s son—a marquis—who is in love with her. When she succeeds to the throne, she accepts him as her husband.

Next, several multi-coloured curtains were lowered, and from be-hind these curtains—in the manner of Iranian acrobats—appeared the fantastic figures of divs and peris, of birds and beasts. No one watching their antics could possibly have retained his composure. Grimaldi, a famous clown, performed an act which I shall never for-get: he would leap from a high window and just as easily leap back up again, returning each time as a different character and causing the noble audience to laugh uncontrollably.

Walking around the theatre, my companions and I saw beauti-ful ladies, beautifully dressed, casting flirtatious glances from their boxes. Then we left the theatre by the King’s door and came home.24

Abul Hassan’s observations exhibit a number of rhetorical gestures that recur throughout the text. First, remarks about the king frame the entire passage. This seems unimportant, but Abul Hassan con sistently attempts to affiliate himself with the royal family in part to reaffirm his diplomatic credentials and in part to suggest a relationship of parity between George iii and Fat’h Ali Shah. Second, he pays specific attention to the space of the theatre and to the sociability of theatrical patrons. He is extremely interested in the inconsistency of response to the performances. Here he emphasizes the degree to which some songs engage the audience and some do not. This interest in the extremes of affective response and ultimately with the problem of reception is in many ways encapsulated in the phrase “banished sorrow from our hearts with their songs.” The pronoun “our” aligns Abul Hassan with his hosts

24 Margaret Morris Cloake, ed. and trans., A Persian at the Court of King George, 1809–10: The Journal of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1988), 92. References are to this edition.

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and the audience around him, but his hyperbolic description of the applause garnered by the songs performed before the main-piece and in between the main-piece and the after-piece insinuates not so subtly that his fellow audience members veer between excessive enthusiasm and clear neglect. The fact that this is registered by a religious trope should not go unnoticed, for Abul Hassan frequently suggests that his British hosts have a disjunctive and often misplaced veneration for worldly or vulgar attractions.

This sense of the inconsistency of aesthetic and ultimately moral response is subtly displayed in his account of the two plays in question. His description of King Lear is so remarkably flat that one is tempted to see it as a sign of his lack of interest. Unlike his account of King Lear, Abul Hassan’s text offers a complex description of Harlequin Pedlar, or the Haunted Well that essentially compares the pantomime to forms and styles of performance with which he is familiar. His comparison of the pantomime clowns to Iranian acrobats clearly signals that his reception protocols are formed and sustained by performance traditions in Persia. This simple observation is crucial because it helps us to comprehend at least some of Abul Hassan’s expectations for performance itself. In the case of in Harlequin Pedlar, or the Haunted Well, his prior experience with acrobatic performance—a prominent element of Ta’ziyeh—means that he is extremely responsive to Grimaldi’s physical prowess, to his remarkable skill at transformation, and to the sheer humour of his clowning.25 The most significant rhetorical move in the entire passage occurs when Abul Hassan inserts the word “noble” into the phrase “causing the noble audience to laugh uncontrollably.” Like Morier’s reduction of the Ta’ziyeh audience into a “mob,” Abut Hassan’s elevation of the socially mixed audi-ence of Covent Garden into an elite constituency has political impli cations. Suddenly, the entire rendition of the evening at the theatre revolves around the uncontrolled laughter of the nobility, their lack of restraint. In this context, his silence on the audience’s response to Kemble’s performance is perhaps not entirely damning, but sobering nonetheless. The insinuation is that the foremost men and women of the kingdom are unmoved

25 For more on Joseph Grimaldi’s performance style, see Andrew McConnell Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 2009), 109.

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by the pains and anxieties of the surrogate monarch, but that they are fully engaged with Grimaldi’s tricks. It amounts to a portrait of a ruling class devoid of seriousness: shallow, distracted, and vulgar. The passage ending with one of many remarks on the “flirtatious glances” of women only pushes the critique to its most blunt con clu sion. Abul Hassan’s account of public enter-tain ment subtly portrays elite society as too consumed by pleasure to be taken entire ly seriously. And this critique of the British nobility intimate ly entwines with Abul Hassan’s own form of ethnocentrism: it is the hinge on which he subtly asserts the superiority of Persian society. This analysis of fashionable socia bility takes on increasingly complex forms when he engages with the most elite forms of entertainment in London. In these more sustained discussions, the question of the in con sistency of audience response acquires more directly political significance.

Despite Abul Hassan’s explicit enthusiasm for Grimaldi and his implicit critique of his fellow audience members in the Covent Garden scene, it is the opera that draws his most sustained atten-tion.26 One year after the Ta’ziyeh performances recorded by Morier, in the month prior to Ashura, social ritual replaces reli-gious ritual and Abul Hassan finds himself at the King’s Theatre. On 30 December 1810, in the company of Ouseley and Morier, Abul Hassan saw Guglielmi’s opera seria entitled Sidagero and a rather curious ballet named Pietro il Grande:

After dinner we went to the Opera, which is a grand theatre like noth-ing I have seen before: it has seven magnificent tiers, all decorated in gold and azure, and hung with brocade curtains and paintings.

Dancers and sweet-voiced singers appeared one after the other to entertain us, acting and dancing like Greeks and Russians and Turks. Their music and songs banished sorrow from the hearts of the au-dience. It is amazing that although 5000 people may gather in the theatre, they do not make a loud noise—when they enjoy a song they clap their hands together; if they think the singing bad, they say ‘hiss’.

Sir Gore Ouseley remarked: “Truly, it is a splendid theatre. Some-times the King and Queen and Prince also come to see a performance;

26 For a detailed schedule of the autumn 1809 and winter 1810 operatic season, see William Ayrton, The Harmonicon 1830, Part the First (London: Samuel Leigh, 1830), 112–13. The Neapolitan com poser Guglielmi dominated the season with multiple productions of La Scommessa, Sidagero, Atalida, and Romeo e Giulietta (all libretti by Buonaiuti). Abul Hassan explicitly mentions all but the latter production and went to the others on multiple occasions.

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they enter by a special door, which is always guarded by soldiers, and which you also had the honour to use.”

During the evening, a spectacle was produced in which an Italian named Tramezzani played a king who is at war with another king of Greece. In English he is called Sidagero. When his castle is destroyed, he is thrown into prison with his two small children and condemned to death. This opera affected me deeply because of my exile. (76)

The structure of Abul Hassan’s description is intriguing for he intercuts his description of the physical space of the opera house with his description of the performance. This effectively de-stabilizes the temporal order of the evening’s entertainment in order to emphasize his location in the space. Clearly, his entering the theatre by the same doors as the Royal family is of paramount importance because it marks a symbolic affiliation that Abul Hassan stresses throughout his text.

When he turns to the entertainment itself, he makes no dis-tinction between the opera and the ballet that followed it. Abul Hassan transposes the Baltic setting to the Aegean Sea, but other-wise he gives an accurate account of the plot of the opera. His hosts take him to an opera in which a king is martyred by a rival. Here is the synopsis from the playbook:

Sidagerus, King of Codanonia ... a large island in the Baltic Sea, de-scended from a very ancient hero of that island, who was after wards deified and adored, under the name of Theuth, whence the people derived the name of Teutons. Ostredia, Augur of the temple of Theuth, had predicted an inroad of the Cimbri, a nation that in hab ited the neighbouring peninsula of Jutland, who were to come to punish the former nation for having incurred the wrath of the god. Ulmansor, King of the Cimbri, and Calmira his Queen, both of a war like disposition, and tyrants, took occasion, from slight infrac tions of treaties by Sidagerus, and other pretended grievances, to flat ter themselves that the Cimbri had been predicted by the Augur; they invaded Codanonia, took and destroyed the Capital, and led away in captivity the King, Royal Family, and people, to Cimbria Chersonesus.27

The parallels to the martyrdom of Hussein Ali are manifold. Not only is Sidagerus descended from an ancient hero who becomes the centre of the religion of his people, but the opera also implies that he will be martyred. Much of the action of the first act takes

27 S. Buonaiuti, Sidagero; or, Codanonia Conquistata (London: Brettell, 1809), 3.

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place on the plains outside of Sidagerus’s castle and dramatizes his defeat; the second act, like the Ta’ziyeh performances recorded by Morier, moves to the prisons and the court of Ulmansor. Ulmansor’s humiliation of Sidagerus, his wife, and his children is rendered with all the emotional intensity of opera seria and is reminiscent of Yazid’s cruelty in Damascus, but it is Sidagerus’s request to be martyred in the penultimate scene that most fully links the opera to the Ta’ziyeh performances.

Abul Hassan’s reception of Sidagero inverts Morier’s reception perfectly: whereas Morier took ritual and re-territorialized it as entertainment, Abul Hassan takes entertainment and re-territori-alizes it as ritual, specifically as a surrogate Ta’ziyeh for his own personal mourning in the period before Muharram. Abul Hassan’s position in relation to the performance is much like Morier’s: Abul Hassan watches the English watch Italian and some French performers sing and dance on stage, and Morier watches the Persians watch Indian Jemindars perform the Ta’ziyeh songs. In both cases, the primary observers watch a performance where the audience and the performers share generic expectations and knowledge about the protocols of correct performance and recep-tion. In response to this observed bond between audience and performers, Morier and Abul Hassan distinguish themselves from the reception dynamic in front of them. Morier downplays his own affective response to the Ta’ziyeh, first, by discursively turn-ing away from the exhibition of affect and, second, by refashioning affective response as a governmental tactic, a neces sary despotic ruse. In contrast, Abul Hassan highlights his affective response by empha sizing, first, the restraint of the British audience and, second, his exile itself: because he lives alone among strangers, he seems to be saying, the emotions elicited by Sidagero bind themselves more forcefully to scenes of similar calamity.

Significantly, Abul Hassan does not state in this passage which emotions are elicited by the opera: it is a crucial lacuna that readers of the journal are only able to retroactively establish. But he does mark out a significant contrast from the response he sees around him, for he states that the tragedy of the opera seria and the ostensibly serious subject of the ballet generate mirth in the audience rather than sadness. Because the capacity to transmit emotion via song is fundamental to his comprehension of both theatrical performance and of humanity itself, Abul Hassan insinuates that this “banishing of sorrow from the heart of the

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audience” amounts to a failing in his British hosts, and thus his emotional reception of Sidagero operates as a norm against which he judges the elite audience around him.28

We are fortunate to have corroborating documents that specif-ically address the feelings elicited by Sidagero in Abul Hassan. Weston states, “It appears also from the tears he shed, on seeing Tremazzani torn from his children in Sidagero, that he was tender hearted.”29 According to Lord Radstock, a figure whom Abul Hassan considered one of his closest friends in London, the Persian envoy “possesses much feeling. As a proof of this, he was so affected with a pathetic scene, representing a king and queen with their children in chains, and in a dungeon, (in which, by the bye, there is the finest acting I almost ever beheld) that the tears ran down his cheeks during the whole of the performance. When I complimented him the next day on this display of his feelings, he instantly replied, ‘Who could have done otherwise on beholding a king and queen and their children, in such a com-plicated scene of misery and distress?’”30 Abul Hassan’s journal argues that he was affected deeply because of his exile; Radstock’s report indicates that Abul Hassan’s tears are for the humbling of monarchy. These are not contradictory claims, but rather mutually

28 For a discussion of the link between song and humanity in Ta’ziyeh, see Blum. It is tempting to argue that both Abul Hassan and Morier share a rhetoric of counter-reception. In Tehran, Morier defines himself as a consumer of entertainment and the Persians as religious enthusiasts. In London, Abul Hassan defines himself as a ritual practitioner and the Londoners as profligate consumers of wine, sex, and entertainment. This counter-rhetoric lies behind his astonishment that Londoners would pay 2000 tomauns to engage Madama Catalani for one performance. But this kind of Manichean argument fails to account for the way in which both observers see the performances in question as hybrid entities. Morier recognizes that Ta’ziyeh is also a form of entertainment with certain reception protocols. Similarly, Abul Hassan marks a genuine affective relation to operatic representation—that is, he recognizes the politico-religious implications of the Guglielmi opera.

29 Weston, 27. Weston attributes this demonstration of emotion to Abul Hassan’s love of children.

30 “A Slight Sketch of the Character, Person, &c of Aboul Hassen, Envoy Extraordinary from the King of Persia to the Court of Great Britain, in the years 1809 and 1810,” Gentleman’s Magazine (February 1820): 120. This article in Gentleman’s Magazine takes the form of a letter from Lord Radstock to the Countess of ——, dated 10 January 1810. This passage continues: “And at the end of the comic opera, at which he often laughed heartily, I asked him which he liked best, the serious or the comic opera? Without a moment’s hesitation he replied, ‘the serious, when I am inclined to cry—and the comic, when I am in a humour to laugh’” (120).

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reinforcing state ments about how Abul Hassan understands both monarchy and the deployment of theatre in diplomatic relations. Since the fall of Sidagerus is so reminiscent of the story of Hussein, we need to register both the religious and the political valences of his martyr dom. In his remarks for a Persian audience, Abul Hassan empha sizes that the performance of martyrdom in a period so close to Ashura makes him feel alienated from his religious homeland and from the past scenes at Karbala brought so vividly into the present by Ta’ziyeh. In his remarks to Radstock, he focuses attention on the scene of monarchical distress, on the affect generated by the opera’s capacity to concretize a political world turned upside down.

That Abul Hassan’s response to Radstock takes the form of a question is important, because it indicates his surprise that other audience members failed to be affected by events that, however embedded in the past of the narrative, resemble key elements of Britain’s current predicament. Clearly, George iii and his family are not in captivity, but Sidagero is fundamentally an opera about war and the deposition of rightful monarchs from their thrones. For the Persian envoy, and it seems for some of his British interlocutors, the spectre of recent events in France, no less than the past events at Karbala, allegorically permeate the performance at the King’s Theatre. Abul Hassan’s remarks recognize that in its most effective moments, the representational barrier between past events in the Baltic and current events in Europe has the potential to dissolve. Since opera seria’s combination of recitative and da capo arias resemble so closely the performance dynamics of Ta’ziyeh, it is not surprising to see Abul Hassan arguing for the allegorical potential of the scenes.

The political reading of Sidagero put forward here is reinforced by the rest of the evening’s program and Abul Hassan’s reaction to it. Sidagero was followed by a ballet entitled Pietro il Grande, composed by Venua and choreographed by the ballet master Rossi. Weston insinuates that Abul Hassan’s opera pleasures were very much linked to the ballet: “The Opera was a source of great delight to the Persian, and he appeared very often in his box; he admired the à plomb of Angiolini, and the Girdagird, or Pirouette of Vestris.”31 In its account of the ballet’s pastiche

31 Weston, 34.

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of orientalist fantasy and historical events from Peter the Great’s life, Abul Hassan’s journal indicates that he found amusement in not only the spectacle of dancing Czars and Pashas, but also the dramatization of Russian defeat at the hands of the Ottomans: “After this there was a dance in which the dancers imitated the Emperor and the Empress of Russia and the Pasha of Turkey and his wife and other Turks. A tiny woman from Italy danced and amazed us by remaining half an hour on the point of one foot. Her name is Angiolini” (76–77).32 Again, the tenor of his journal is markedly different from Radstock’s rendering of his conversation:

[The Mirza] held the dancing very cheap. He laughed heartily at the folly of bringing forward Peter the Great and his Empress danc-ing to divert the throng. “What!” exclaimed he, “is it possible that a mighty monarch and his queen should expose themselves thus? how absurd! how out of nature! how perfectly ridiculous!” Were I to translate the look that followed these words, it would be thus: “Surely a nation that can suffer so childish and preposterous an ex-hibition, and be pleased with it, can have little pretensions either to taste or judgement.” Soon after, he jokingly said, “When I get back to my own country, the King shall ask me, ‘What did the English do to divert you?’ I will answer, ‘Sir, they brought before me your Majesty’s enemies, the Emperor and Empress of Russia, and made them dance for my amusement.’” This he repeated with the highest glee, as if conscious of saying a witty thing.33

The journal entry, like Morier’s fascination with feats of strength in the Ta’ziyeh, focuses on the technical virtuosity of Angiolini, but Abul Hassan’s remarks to Radstock distance him from the puerile rendering of the history of his nation’s enemies. For observers like Ouseley and Abul Hassan, for whom the history of conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Porte was crucial to their diplomatic

32 The ballet was published as F. Venua, Pietro Il Grande (London: Robert Birchall, c. 1812). Venua composed the music for many ballets at the King’s Theatre opera house in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. According to the printed text, this particular ballet included a “Pas de Trois by Mons Boigirar et Mesdames le Clair et Nora,” a “Tambourine Dance by Mons. Moreau; a Pas Seul Mdme Monroy, a Meneuett a la Polonaise and a Pas Seul Mdme Nora.” The publication singles out a favourite “Pas Russe” danced by “Mons. Vestris [probably Armand] and Mademoiselle Angiolini,” a “Turkish March and a Pas Seul by Mons. Vestris, a Pas de Deux by Mons. Moreau and Mdme Monroy and a Pas Seul by Mademoiselle Angiolini.”

33 Gentleman’s Magazine (February 1820): 120.

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negotiations, the events represented in the ballet would have been immediately recognizable. After being defeated by the Russians in the Great Northern War, Charles xii of Sweden escaped to the court of Sultan Ahmed iii, whom he persuaded to declare war on Russia in the fall of 1710. Peter the Great’s forces were defeated by the Ottoman troops under Grand Vizier Bataci Mehmed Pasha. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Pruth. However, Baltaci Mehmed Pasha made an important strategic mistake by signing the treaty with relatively easy terms for the Russians. Had he not accepted Peter’s peace proposal and used his numerically superior troops to imprison or execute the Russian leader, the course of history could have changed.34 Without Peter, Russia would have been less likely to become an imperial power, and the long history of conflict in the Balkans, the Black Sea basin, and the Caucasus might not have happened. Indeed, Peter’s survival is precisely what renders the Anglo-Persian alliance necessary one hundred years later.

That Pietro il Grande was being deployed as a political allegory in this scene of diplomacy is indicated by a further snippet of conversation recorded by Radstock:

I forgot to mention a laughable observation he made the other night during the grand ballet. He asked Sir G. Ouseley what the Empress was going to do with the great chest and the casket which her slaves were carrying? Sir G. Ouseley replied, that she was go-ing to endeavour to bribe the Pasha to sign a truce and withdraw his troops. “Is that it?” cries the Mirza, “then I’ll answer for her success; for those fellows, the Turks, would even sell their father, could they gain a piastre by it.” He appears to despise and detest the Turks as much as possible.35

When asking Ouseley to make this explicit, Abul Hassan may well have been attempting to draw his host into a direct recognition of Turkish duplicity. By characterizing the Ottomans as corrupt, Abul Hassan would have been endeavouring to distinguish the Persians from their Ottoman rivals, whose recent alliance with Britain

34 For brief discussions of the Great Northern War and the Pruth Campaign, see B.H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (London: Archon Books, 1965); and Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 107–39.


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would be uncomfortable at best. I would argue further that this was an important diplomatic gesture because both the Ottomans and the Persians would have been distancing themselves from Napoleon at this moment. Abul Hassan suggests here that the Ottomans would still be aligned with Napoleon if the territories promised to the Sublime Porte by France in the Treaty of Tilsit had been conferred. In contrast, Persia’s motivations are based on mutually shared enmity towards both Russia and France, and therefore are less subject to corruption.

The entertainment value of Pietro il Grande for its London audiences lay mostly in the potential for exotic and costly display, but the ballet also emphasizes why Britain’s, and by extension Persia’s, rivals are vulnerable. In 1710, the Russians lost to the Ottomans, but mitigated their losses by corrupting the victorious Turkish Pasha. The charge of corruption aimed at the Pasha serves both long-term and immediate political goals, because in the case of this diplomatic exchange it characterizes both Russia and the Ottoman Porte as failing empires. This characterization was hardly contentious in relation to the faltering Ottomans, but it was a crucial assertion of common cause against the resurgent Russians who were not only officially—albeit reluctantly—at war with Britain during this period, but also threatening Persia’s northern territories. Remember the alliance being negotiated by Abul Hassan was aimed at garnering British support for the Shah’s efforts to expel Russia from southern Georgia.

One senses that Abul Hassan recognizes that his hosts have brought him to the opera to see the humiliation of the Shah’s enemies; but he also makes it very clear that while this may be entertaining for his hosts, the ballet can only be amusing for him either as a display of virtuosity or as a vulgar occasion to ridicule the Turks. According to Radstock, he was more than happy to deploy the ballet as part of a strategy of impugning his Turkish counterpart: “He told the Turkish Ambassador the other morning, when I was present, that he would carry him to the opera, where he should first see the Grand Vizir dance and then sell his country. The stupid Turk bowed, and seemed very thankful, receiving the speech as a compliment.”36 If Radstock provides a clear sense of how mutual disregard for the Ottomans was mobilized for


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diplomatic gains between Britain and Persia, Abul Hassan reveals how a visit to the theatre itself could be used to directly undermine the Turkish cause.

On 6 February 1810, Abul Hassan followed through on his offer and escorted the Turkish ambassador to the King’s Theatre to see another Guglielmi opera, La Scommessa, which was paired not surprisingly with Pietro il Grande. He writes,

This evening, after dinner, Sadri Effendi, the Turkish Ambassador, wanted to go to the Opera, so we went there in the carriage with Sir Gore Ouseley. The audience, of all classes, were already in their seats.

The ballet concerned a war between Russia and Turkey, during which the Turkish commander offered to sell his country to the Rus-sians for money. The dancers wore Russian and Turkish costumes.

During the whole of his stay in London, the Ambassador had nev-er been to the theatre. He expressed great surprise and said: “I have you to thank for this—without you I should never have visited the Opera House.”

“The nights are long in every country,” I replied, “but especially in London. From now on, I shall take you to the Opera every night, and you will see strange and wonderful things.” (133–34)

These “strange and wonderful things” are mortifying for the Turk-ish ambassador on more than one level. First, the representation of the Ottomans is directly insulting. Second, it is clear that the English take the Persian envoy to be entertained by Turkish cor-ruption, and a kind of bond is built between the British and the Persians at the Turk’s expense. For his part, Abul Hassan gets to revel in both the humiliation of Turks on stage and the inculcation of diplomatic suspicion in his Turkish counterpart.

If Abul Hassan’s ridicule of the Turkish Ambassador fits into a certain diplomatic logic, it is important to recognize how his critical representation of the audience at the King’s Theatre stands in stark contrast to the elevation of the Elchee Firing in Ta’ziyeh. In the diplomatic scenario narrated by Morier, Ottoman alterity is established by highlighting its links to the tyranny of the Sunni caliph Yazid. This connection is focalized through the remarkable identification between Morier and Ta’ziyeh’s fantasy of European humanity in the character of the Elchee Firing. In the diplomatic scenario narrated by Abul Hassan, Ottoman alterity is established by highlighting the link between the present Turkish ambassador

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and the dancing Pasha on the stage of the King’s Theatre. This gesture effectively leaves the question of the European audience’s relation to the Russians open to readerly interpolations. Britain’s relation to Russia was highly complex. After Russia was forced to succumb to French influence, Britain and Russia were technically at war with one another since 1807, although neither allowed the conflict to escalate be yond local naval skirmishes. At roughly the time that London audiences were being entertained by Pietro il Grande, Franco-Russian relations were deteriorating. By 1812, Britain would be allied with both Russia and Persia against the French; and Persia’s attempts to repel Russian aggression would fail in spite of Britain’s ostensible commitment to protection. Abul Hassan’s text brings the disjunction between the complexity of the political situation and the fatuousness of the ballet into stark relief.37 If Morier directly accuses the Persian audience of fanaticism, Abul Hassan implies that the British audience is either shallow or naively unaware of the contradictions inherent in their applause for Vestris’s enactment of Peter the Great’s loss to the Turks.

As Radstock’s remarks indicate, identification between Abul Hassan’s hosts and the dancing Russians is both politically and aes-thet ically unacceptable. Abul Hassan recognizes that his audi ence’s pleasure in Angiolini’s or Vestris’s refined virtu osity is augmented by a less admirable pleasure in ethnic carica ture. Just as his repre sen ta tions of the Prince of Wales’s vul garity undercuts Abul Hassan’s hyperbolic praise of British monar chical institutions, his account of the opera establishes a shared reverence for martyred kings that is undercut by his account of the ballet’s reception. In this complex negotiation for national and religious precedence, the Shi’ite diplomats glorify themselves by demonizing their Sunni enemies, by hyper bol ically praising the humanity of past and present European diplomats, and by subtly undercutting their own repre sen ta tion of British moral and governmental prin ciples. This rhetorical strategy allows sufficient ground for an alliance between Persia and Britain without giving up the claim to being the apogee of civility.

To put it crudely, there is a game of social one-upmanship between Abul Hassan and his British hosts to claim superiority

37 Pelly, 2:239.

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for their respective countries, even as this game is premised on cultural affinities and a general distaste of Sunni (Ottoman) author ity. In this case, cosmopolitan consciousness emerges from the transcultural contact zone of the theatre, opera house, or the site of Ta’ziyeh performances, but it entails a mutual recogni tion of national sovereignty rather than an asymmetrical relation ship between colonizers and colonized, because, unlike the Otto mans, the Persians were a formidable geopolitical force in the early nineteenth century. By paying close attention to the role of emotional reception and negotiation in the contact zone of performance, I have shown how both Abul Hassan and Morier selec tively identify with a foreign, exotic culture in order to con-struct rival representations of elite national sub jectivity. That the boundary between diplomatic and emotional negotiation is so porous—that is, that diplomatic and emotional labour are so deeply inter twined—warrants our closest attention not only because it forces the reader to address the question of cosmo politanism as an open-ended exchange, but also because it demands that the reader attend to the geopolitics of emotion itself.

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tears in tehran/laughter in london

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