Chapter 30 - Persian Virtues

Summary

How do the virtues of toleration and hospitality manifest in early-modern drama? This chapter defines the virtues of toleration and hospitality through their intimate association with Ancient Persia, its rulers and foundational Zoroastrian ideology of promoting order and unity in diversity in the kingdom for communal harmony and felicity. Although an unexpected parallel, early modern writers call upon the locale of Persian as a concept with the capacity to inspire English monarchs to model themselves on paradigms of intercultural hospitality found in vignettes of Persia’s rulers, such as Cyrus and Artaxerxes, in Greek texts. These stories of cooperation between Persians and Greeks provide the context for Shakespeare’s enigmatic reference to Persian clothing in Act 3 when Edgar momentarily inhabits a Persian persona from Lear’s delusional perspective. Shakespeare’s use of ancient Persian virtues draws attention to the subtle forms of intercultural cooperation that hover in the background of his tragedy and radically contribute to a form of historical revisionism that privileges the forces of cooperation over conflict between oppositional groups such as Persian and Greeks of antiquity.