‘Argier’ through Renaissance Drama: Investigating History, Studying Etymology and Reshuffling Geography

‘Argier’ through Renaissance Drama: Investigating History, Studying Etymology and Reshuffling Geography Mohamed Salah Eddine Madiou Department of English, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan Scholarly occupations most often deal with The Tempest and Tamburlaine the Great, Part I & II, without much heed taken as to the real meaning of the recurrent syntagm ‘Argier’ and what its origins really are. This archaeological and toponymic effort runs counter to a dynastic tradition emanating from an approximate historical evaluation and geographic misevaluation which harbor the usual and inconsiderate thought that ‘Argier’ is “an old name for Algiers”, or even incongruously refer to it in some cases as “Algeria”. Under the whirlwind of the Derridean concept of “deconstruction”, and within a Saidian frame of reference, this paper subverts these centrifugal parameters configured by editors, usually through a refractory lens and a superficial historical trawl, and perpetuated by translators, appropriation and adaptation practitioners and other generations of editors. An eye to Renaissance plays and their editions all the more diverse have in fact given cause to suspect such deductions imprecise and only partially reliable. Coming with the augurs of its time, one should confront this seemingly unimportant terminology long-neglected through a painstakingly historical, geographical and linguistic prism to theorize its origins and linguistic usage in Europe, its development in the 16th and 17th centuries, and comprehend how it has come to resemble today’s ‘Algiers’. Memory as safeguarded in literature, and Renaissance drama most significantly, serves hereby as a canvas to read ‘Argier’ and ‘toponymically’ study its different name bestowals as projected in 16th and 17th c. Europe (namely France and England) in an attempt to imagine and reconstruct its origins, and comprehend its usage and development with a focus on its mention in English Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (Part I & II), and Renaissance French drama, with particular attention to Philippe Quinault’s unedited version of La généreuse ingratitude and its English translation by Sir William Lower Knight (The Noble Ingratitude). Keywords: Algeria, Algiers, Colonialism, Origins of Argier, The Tempest, Tamburlaine the Great, La généreuse ingratitude, Geography

Introduction: Setting the Tone “Tis far off, And rather like a dream than an assurance That my remembrance warrants” (The Tempest, Shakespeare 1623, i.ii.12).

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It is certainly a strain on one’s credulity to be asked to read the name of ‘Argier’ – henceforward put in quotation marks of chronological precaution – beyond the easiness wherewith it is usually interpreted. Besides the easy-toread annotations and centered structures – to employ Derrida’s optic – such as “old name for Algiers,” “Algeria” or else “Algiers” dismissed by editors as lapsing into ‘obviousness’ and interchangeability, ‘Argier’ includes much else that is revealing. The orientalist overtones usually connected to it, underlying travelogues in general and Renaissance drama in particular, such as Tamburlaine the Great, Part I & II(1587-88),1The Battle of Alcazar (1594),2 The Tempest(1610-1611)3 or else La généreuse ingratitude (1656),4owe their expression to this geographical segment, being from the 16thcentury on, a nomenclature designating one of the most important territories of the tripartite Maghribi province of the Ottoman Empire (to wit ‘Argier’, Tunis and Tripoli) – in some cases quadripartite, involving Morocco – then rival of 16th and 17thc. Habsburg Spain (1516-1700).These North African states, “whose capital was to be Algiers” (Shuval 2002, 89), defined by the Oxford-empowered dictionary Lexico as “[t]he capital of Algeria and one of the leading Mediterranean ports of North Africa”, were then, albeit autonomous, representatives of the Ottoman potentate, or as Marlowe puts it: “contributory”(1590, iii.iii 221) “Kings of Barbary” (ibid., iii.i.218) to the “Greatest potentate of Africa [the Ottoman Empire of the time]” (ibid. iii.iii. 221). Had it not been due to “Argier” being strategically located as “one of the frontiers between the Habsburgs [16th and 17thc. Spain]5 and the Ottoman Empire” (Shuval 2002, 89) – and also a significant investment of the Ottoman strength both in the terrestrial sphere, represented by Argier’s janissaries (called in Turkish yeniçeri), and the naval sphere, represented by its fleet and corsairs – the capital of the state of the same name would never have figured in European Renaissance drama, the orientalist reference of which(along with that of Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco6) is usually an expression of a European “anxiety” in relation to the Ottoman rival, as asserted by Kantarbaeva-Bill in  “Anglo-Ottoman Anxieties in The Tempest: from Displacement to Exclusion,” also a powerful nemesis of Elizabethan England which both Shakespeare and Marlow have tried to defeat on the stage. A contextual tone need be set. 16th c. Ottoman Empire has in fact “shared the world stage with a cluster of other and wealthy states. To their far west lay distant Elizabethan England, Habsburg Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire [Habsburg Austria] as well as Valois France and the Dutch Republic” (Quataert 2005, 3). These anxieties generally include oppositions, such as ‘Anglo-Ottoman’, ‘French-Ottoman’, ‘Persian-Ottoman’,7 or else ‘Habsburg- Ottoman’ (first Spain then Austria), which feature the Ottomans prominently on the stage from the Renaissance period onwards as, first, a rival of Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries (then the most powerful among its European counterparts); and second, a rival of Europe in general as many The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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powers emerged back then – to wit Austria emerging as a global power after its victorious 1683 confrontation with the Ottoman Empire – until its decline in the near mid-20thcentury,designated in consequence as “a Sick Man”, a topic which has so far enjoyed an elevation in critical esteem and historicist efforts. The long-term orthodoxy, however, which has for its substance ‘Argier’ being the “old name for Algiers”, “Algeria” or else “Algiers”, has all the more successfully stood the test of time with little serious attention paid to it, and this may be taken as symptomatic of a sort of lethargy on the part of historians and critics who have thus far given an acquiescent nod to the editorial definitions of the toponym. There is in fact scant knowledge as to 16th and 17th c. Algeria, and the etymological study of the names of ‘Algiers’ is of no less undervaluation, being laconically diagnosed and oftentimes allotted few lines of succinctness, nourishing even on some occasions cases of imprecision left as such. This study makes use of literature as a memory discourse and a necessary channel to the past, and provides an anti-amnesiac and historyspecific testimony to the toponym ‘Argier’ to remember and narrativize its forgotten, untold past. It seeks to analyze the name of ‘Argier’ and its origins, theorize its usage in 16th and 17thc. Europe, and comprehend how it has come to resemble today’s still used exonyms in the popular parlance, namely ‘Argel’, ‘Alger’ and ‘Algiers’, to cite but the most well-known. The ‘Argier’ terminology has in fact to be studied within the confines of its time, and The Tempest, Tamburlaine the Great, The Battle of Alcazar and La généreuse ingratitude are instances among others of highly rhetorical structures successfully expressing truths of their times, mainly the 16th and 17th centuries. The approach hereby taken – a bricolage sort of technique in the shape of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss – proves of great aptness in providing an insight into the history of the toponym; it does so by gathering fragments from here and there in the world of literature and proceeds in gluing them together, since literature is a repository of a residual past which can contribute to mending loss, as has wittily been suggested by Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It euphoniously states: “Irreparable is the loss; and patience/Says it is past her cure” (Shakespeare 1623, v.i.121). A Critical Reflection on the Current State of the Art The oddity of Argier’s structural and linguistic composition has been scarcely remarked upon. There is in fact considerable paucity as to the origins of this terminology, which is generally not entertained in discussion, and when it is, it appears remarkably brief. In her insightful article, Kantarbaeva-Bill argues for a keen measure of topical investment in The Tempest on Shakespeare’s part. The Tempest is the story of a one-time duke of Milan and knowledgeable man, Prospero, whose dukedom has been usurped by his brother Antonio. Prospero is forced to flee Milan with his beautiful daughter Miranda, and with The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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the assistance of Gonzalo, on a barely seaworthy raft, stranding both on a mysterious island – generally interpreted to be Malta – implied to be located not far from Carthage and also said to belong already to a Wildman who goes by the name of Caliban. The island is a land bequeathed to him by the unseen witch Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, who is said to have lived there after being banished from ‘Argier’. But there is much more to the story. KantarbaevaBill’s essay weighs the case for Anglo-Ottoman anxieties, grounding its assertions on the allegorical potential of Shakespeare’s late play reflective of the once has-been tensions between the English and the Ottomans. Besides The Tempest, the author also darts an attentive look at Tamburlaine the Great, which, albeit inaccurate a historical play, with its freight of prejudice to be treated with the greatest of skepticism and historical conscientiousness, “held true for most of the sixteenth century” spirit of the age. That is summed up with large strokes by Marlow in his play whose allegorical energy is, like The Tempest, referential to anxieties: the Persian-Ottoman (also known as Safavid-Ottoman) tensions of the time. Ottomans investing their strength on what is considered commonly as the Capital of the Maghribi province, the then ‘Algiers’ finds also its expression, which Kantarbaeva-Bill caps in a quote, stating: “The Ottoman Empire is reduced to Algiers, whose name was indifferently used for the city and the State itself, synonymous with Muslim piracy and enslavement to the Turks, causing fear and loathing in Europe.” (2015, para. 5) The statement bears its veracity, but an amount of inaccuracy nevertheless. The claim which has it that ‘Algiers’ has lived on piracy finds its satisfaction, an initiative on the part of the Ottomans to counter a financial crisis befalling one of its most important Mediterranean provinces which has been, for them, fair game. Piracy was then indeed resorted to in the Mediterranean basin on the ground that “the increase in population was not accompanied by comparable growth in agriculture” (Goldstone, qtd. in Shuval 2002, 91). This was a maneuver which then profited to both Muslims and Christians living in and working willingly for both the state of ‘Algiers’ and the Ottoman Empire as ‘janissaries’, earning salaries for their military service. But the religious dimension of Kantarbaeva-Bill’s claim has been immediately dismissed after its mention. Categorizing piracy to the Muslim compartment is in itself a claim incautiously staked, for, as Donald Quataert assiduously remarks, the “Ottoman enterprise was not a religious state in the making but rather a pragmatic, dynastic one” (2005, 19). This suggests that contrary to the Arab conquest which followed Islam to the word, the Ottoman Empire’s view on Islam has been quite loose and paradoxical, and its “law was for many years described as not quite Islamic law and/or not quite European law” (Miller 2008, 286) but “an effective model of a multi-religious political system” (Quataert, 6). From approximately the 13th c. onwards, after the Arab conquest and the Crusades, religion and empire existed more obviously on a paradoxical, if not hypocritical scale. Imperialism then was not The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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mainly about religion-spreading, but about empire-building, concerned with territorial accretion, though the acquisition of territories has often, and paradoxically, been taken advantage of to spread religion. In spite of the Ottoman Empire having often an appeal to Islamic law, which the Ottomans have used in a rather slack, yet radical and instrumental manner when planning a conquest, it is, as Quataert puts it, mainly “dynastic” (2005, 25), as “many Christians as well as Muslims followed the Ottomans not for God but for gold and glory – for the riches to be gained, the positions and power to be won” (ibid., 2005, 18).The Ottoman conquest in this way is not as religious as the Arab conquest – although even the Arabs sought to a certain extent to build a sort of dynastic state based on religion called Ummah. Another essential footing of Kantarbaeva-Bill’s essay is her definition of ‘Argier’. Bill defines the ‘Argier’ terminology, saying that “The term ‘Argier’ or ‘Algiers,’ a Western province of the Ottoman Empire, had become synonymous with a piratical state living off its raids against Christian shipping.” (2015, para. 7) Fairness enjoins one to note that the critic’s essay offers a glow-in-the-dark definition of the term ‘Argier’. Although her definition seems somehow to devolve into an inchoate observation and a simplistic reductiveness of the toponym – certainly due to lip service paid to it in the critical community – it is remarkable how much historical, linguistic and geographical complexity the critic has shrewdly conveyed in so short a space, giving an insight into a syntagm generally put into quarantine. Despite the toponym’s rather arid state of affairs, her essayistic attempt in fact accommodates an intrepid move to engaging a lonely enterprise, a dark arena where criticism mostly appears to come up short. Yet the definition, with its conciseness and religious compartmentalization, is lost somewhere and appears at last under reserved exterior, mostly when ‘Argier’ and ‘Algiers’ are put together on an interchangeable scale within a Renaissance purview (16th and 17th centuries), which bears in itself an etymological incongruity and anachronistic positioning. The name ‘Algiers’ is then a synecdoche for a fact, used at once for the capital and the state itself, as shall be discussed later on, and the choice of it is certainly not “indifferent”. The ‘Argier/Argier’ synecdoche bears historical valence with a potential to give an insight into how the capital and the state were then called before it has become today’s ‘Algiers/Algeria’. Kantarbaeva-Bill’s definition suffers in effect from the regrettable confusion emanating from the positioning of ‘Argier’ and ‘Algiers’ on an equal scale, a formulation which is discordant with the Renaissance usage, and the Christian/Muslim partitioning, a division which runs counter to ‘Argier’ and the Ottoman Empire being then multicultural and “heterogeneous zone[s]” (Quataert 2005, 18). And it is precisely in this way that the modern audience deals with ‘Argier’, often confused with other appellations, and improperly put together. A more cautious approach is in order to build a plausible, more specific case study on the usage of ‘Argier’ in The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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16th and 17thc.Europe and its origins, on how it has developed and how it is geographically, historically and linguistically different from ‘Algiers’ and other precedents – a delicate issue which demands elaborate treatment. The Question of ‘Center’: Towards Deconstruction and Reconstruction Of those very succinct toponymic analyses of the name ‘Argier’ which have been developed, all show inconsistencies geographical, historical and linguistic. It is admittedly difficult to trace back the origins of ‘Argier’ when a burdensome inheritance of editorial epidemic has generously bequeathed itself through centuries, and the instability characterizing the insecure practice of translation and its mode of operation goes without saying. Communicating with the speculative strain of the Derridean staple “deconstruction”, this study suggests a critique of textual criticism, disturbing the prerogatives of editorial discourse (pace Frank Kermode, and Russell A. Frazer and Norman Rabkin), and answering for editorial strabismus evoking the toponym ‘Argier’ in teleological annotations claiming central, “full presence” (Derrida 1967, 353), as based on what Derrida calls “a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude” (ibid. 1967, 352), which has contributed some fraud to the toponym’s “free structure” (a signified) located beyond the center (a pseudo-signifier although Derrida does not use the phrase) and whose specificity cannot be captured, as to be seen as the sole passport to etymologically comprehending the toponym. This essay is an excuse for editorial practices (also known as textual criticism), translations or else adaptations and appropriations which have contributed to obscuring the origins and historical character of ‘Argier’. Having not even received due weight in its original form, the terminology is immediately subject to the imposition of emendations, replacements and inaccurate incorporations, a subversive discourse giving cause for geographic, historical and linguistic concern. It offers a counter-discursive groundwork to disenchant the monopoly of the available paradigms of definition of the term ‘Argier’, perform the task of constructing alternatives predicated on traces of the past (as found mainly in Renaissance drama and other texts) and spirit easy definitions away in an effort to re-establish a decent theoretical construction. It attempts to make the definition of the toponym ‘Argier’ more precise, which rarely and succinctly supplements the very little documentation and the never-ending flow of editorial revisions. Arguing that the conquests befalling ‘Algeria’ over time have, among other factors, responsibly generated a variety of name bestowals, this theoretical essay also proposes to make a carefully developed system of taxonomy to organize the terminology in question in accordance to how it is used in Renaissance drama (French and English) in an attempt to fathom its usage in 16th and 17th c. Europe. Such an attempt is buttressed by evidence of textual type (Renaissance drama) in a comparative The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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approach, vital to reconstructing the past albeit, and admittedly, to a certain degree only. Studies such as the one undertaken in this theoretical essay always run the risk of being received as arbitrary, particularly in terms of corpus selection and methodological organization as to strike the reader as “why this, why not that?” This essay does not purport to be comprehensive in its corpus choice as plays and travelogues, where the toponym ‘Argier’ turns up, are too numerous to mention; it proceeds rather in a more piecemeal fashion focusing on a substantial, limited corpus and broaching a topic which has not been much discussed, yet proves on investigation to be of extreme importance. It takes for a mission a linguistic, historical and geographical reconstruction, reexamining the name of ‘Argier’, its history and geography editorially sabotaged, in an attempt to fill a gaping hole and theorize its usage through fairly typical examples from English Renaissance Drama,8 Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (Part I & II) in this premise, and French Renaissance drama, with particular attention to Philippe Quinault’s unedited version of La généreuse ingratitude, to confront the issue away from editorial contamination and inaccuracies of translations. This is to observe the usage of the toponym ‘Argier’ in French drama (as it was originally used by the French dramatist Quinault), focusing afterwards on a near post-restoration translation of the same text (in English The Noble Ingratitude)9 undertaken by the English translator Sir William Lower Knight so as to analyze in a comparative initiative how the word was retrieved by English translator Lower in his translation to fit an English context. As translation is, after all, a cultural practice which has also strong ties to history and society, an analysis of passages from the source text (Quinault’s) and the translated text (Lower’s) alike can reveal two different usages of the same name in two different contexts which can give an insight into how the terminology was used in 16th and 17thc. France and England, and how it has developed to resemble today’s ‘Algiers’. Chronologically, this essay includes Renaissance drama pieces where the toponym is broached most often. This corpus has been chosen due to the range of diversity acting on behalf of different locations and different times in two different languages. While this theoretical argument rests mainly in the 16th and 17th centuries, it will, should the occasion arise, take into account the becoming of the toponym in the 18th and 19th centuries in a comparative procedure. This study indeed sees itself interpolated in complex ways by passages from 19 c. Thomas Campbell’s Letters from Algiers (1885), and 20thc. Jamal Mahjoub’s The Carrier (1998) and the film adaptation of The Tempest (2010) to analyze how these works use the toponym ‘Argier’. The tenor of historical, geographical and linguistic reconstruction through literature lies pertinently in Edward Said’s essayistic troika of “History, Literature and Geography” (2000). Said introduces the concept of The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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“correspondence”, an “amateurish” and interdisciplinary maneuver (as opposed to his idea of professionalism), being a collaboration and a rapprochement between disciplines (literature with history, geography and linguistics in this case study) and a “congruence, continuity, and reconciliation between different areas of experience” (Said 2000, 458).The archival energy of ‘Argier’, and paradoxically its missing past, make it mandatory to study the term first through its manifestation in literature as an attempt to comprehend its 16th and 17thc.historical and ideological implications, and restore the linguistic and geographic context wherein it has been used, a philological, yet also historical mode of scavenging efficient for past retrieval. This perspective Said calls “historicist philology” being, “[M]uch more than studying the derivation of words – [and] is the discipline of uncovering beneath the surface of words the life of a society that is embedded there by the great writer’s art. You cannot perform that act without somehow intuiting, through the use of the historical imagination, what that life might have been like” (2000, 456). (italics in the original) Said argues for an investment in the past through literature irrecusably attached to history which is “transmuted into a highly idiosyncratic, irreducibly concrete structure of sentences, periods, parataxes” (Said 2000, 456) and even words, as this case study is testimony to, in view of comprehending “historical reality”. However, the study of “the life of a society” (history) through “the great writer’s art” (literature) should be accompanied by a “historical imagination” (theorization) as a way of bridging a gap, a tripartite alliance forming mainly the combination upon which this premise is mainly grounded, but which does not exclude resorting to other disciplines to undertake the travail of reconstructing missing origins, as literature – or any other form of archive – proves insufficient on its own for so tenacious a loss as that of the past. In a slightly different line, philosophic historian Foucault believes the historian incorporates imagination in the historical approach itself, saying, “The tools that enable historians to carry out [a] work of analysis are partly inherited and partly of their own making” (1969, 3), meaning imagination resides at the heart of history itself. History in Foucault’s logic does not simply bequeath archives; it “works on [them] from within and […] develop[s] [them]” (ibid. 1969, 7). Geography is of no less importance in Said’s theorization of “historical imagination”, which he, in passing, draws on Antonio Gramsci, “whose relationship between history and culture is mediated by and intervened in by a very powerful geographical sense” (Said 2000, 458) (italics in the original). Gramsci’s theoretical elaboration on geography as a generator of history is contributory to Said’s conclusion that “[h]istory therefore derives from a discontinuous geography” (ibid. 2000, 466). Said is The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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however cautious to stress the transformation of a past geography, and its existence under another form before its being reconfigured into another geographic context through various historical experiences, a past geography to be taken into consideration when comparing it with its present form. Transformations in all of their manifestations thus “make it nearly impossible to attempt reconciliations between history and literature without taking account of the new and complex varieties of historical experiences now available to us all in the post-Eurocentric world” (Said 2000, 470). This thereby makes geography in fact a generator of history and a new history, in the process, a generator of a new geography in a cyclic overlap. The study of place names (toponymy) with their geographical and historical ambitions, and with account of both their past and present forms combined, are essential to studying and comprehending the spatial-temporal and linguistic contexts where/when names have been used, and this is the main focus of linguist André Basset in “La langue berbère dans les Territoires du Sud: La Répartition, les Etudes, Remarques”. “The infinity of traces” – a phrase first deployed by Gramsci in The Prison Notebooks prior to being taken back and commented upon by Said in Orientalism and The Question of Palestine – are forms of historical archives appealing to archaeological rehabilitation in an effort to create and “compile” an “inventory” (Gramsci qtd. in Orientalism1978, 25). This is a reconstruction in itself only operative by means of “consciousness” (qtd. in ibid. 1978, 25) and “historical imagination”, as suggested by Said earlier. Basset defines toponymy as a repository of, and a form of “infinity of traces”, saying : “Ceci nous prouve, et c’est un des merites de la toponymie, qui toujours garde sur place des traces des formes anciennes du parler ou maintient des éléments de parlers ou de langues anterieurs” (emphasis added).10 What goes awry in Basset’s definition is the obdurate link he makes to linguistics in general and dialects in particular. While he gives his “traces of ancient forms” a linguistic dimension, they are in reality not to be restricted to linguistics only, but extended to include history and geography as well. Toponymy is itself an interdisciplinary study of an “infinity of traces” respective of history, geography and linguistics alike. “Historical imagination” and “critical consciousness” are in this way key strategies to mending “historical reality” – or the “infinity of traces” to use Gramsci’s phrase once again – for the sake of reconstructing and creating an “inventory”, as making correspondence solely between literature and history is not a full measure practice, but part of the process of reconstruction left half way if not “mediated by critical consciousness [criticism]” (Said 2000,457), and imagination (interpretation) being “the missing middle term[s] between history and literature” (Ibid 2000, 457). The interdisciplinary perspectivism adopted in the elaboration of this theoretical argument is a correspondence between literature, linguistics, history and geography (and other disciplines)in tandem with “historical imagination” (theorization), with a The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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view to comprehending its origins and theorizing the linguistic usage of the name ‘Argier’ in 16th and 17thc. Europe, and analyzing how it has developed to resemble today’s appellations (Argel, Alger, Algiers). Reading and Imagining the History of ‘Argier’ The Legend that is Algiers awaits. Its strange and tenacious roots tangle in the imagination. It is like a mysterious, unexplored body to be unraveled layer after layer by the hands of an experienced lover (Mahjoub 1998, 1). (emphasis added) On parle des Algériens, mais on les connaît aussi peu que les nations les plus éloignées de notre continent (One speaks of Algerians, but they are as little known as the most distant nations from our continents) (De Tassy Laugier1725) [trans. by the author]. Everything about the past is safeguarded in tangible traces, artifacts and objects of historical significance calling for archaeological digging for the sake of understanding, just as everything about geography is in maps preserving ancient geographic representations. Literature likewise is a repository of history, a means to exploring the past and studying its ragged edges, and also furnishing a bit of history that can flesh out the bare bones of loss, in this case study ‘Argier’ and its “mysterious, unexplored” origins whose “strange and tenacious roots”, to borrow geologist Jamal Mahjoub’s words, “tangle in the imagination”. Literature in general, and Renaissance drama in particular, as traces from the past, report on the state of affairs of the toponym at issue, and contribute to archaeologically scavenging its relatively unknown history and approximately retrieving its origins, since one cannot but inhabit the time span in question through reconstructive imagination. The coverage of millennia of history cannot indeed unfurl in few pages, and this paper does not in any way pretend to an epoch-making piling nor does it posit an alleviation of a complexity. One needs indeed to complicate their reading of the past, and engage in an archaeological analysis which goes beyond simple commemoration to reach imagination and meaning-making, with a view to ransoming the obdurate voids left by history. And the voids etymology posits are no less obdurate. The etymology of words is concerned with origins entitled as “divine” (xiii) and characterized by “passivity” (1975, 32) by Said in Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), and, like the origins of language itself, “can only be imagined” (ibid. 1975, 43). This calls forth Derrida’s philosophical argument that “in the absence of a center or origin, everything becomes discourse” (1967, 354) which the uncertainty and infinity of “structure” allows ad infinitum. And its semblance in the forms of epistemological

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formations “live[] only on […] opposition” (ibid. 1967, 355). Because language “bears within itself the necessity of its own critique,” (ibid. 1967, 358), so does discourse and any other form of construct designed to assuage the uncertainty of “structure”. This makes “structure” a myth and “center” – a sort of bricolage in Lévi-Strauss’s vision – only assume “mythopoetic function [imagination]” (ibid. 1967, 363). The case is similar indeed to the one made in Histoire du Royaume d’Alger (1725)by Laugier De Tassy and as foregrounded in the embryonic cell of this section – an officer sent to the Ottoman Kingdom of ‘Algiers’ in the 18th century on the service of the Christian Kingdom of the Netherlands. One speaks in fact of ‘Algiers’, but as little is known of the term as of the remote time of its past, to reformulate De Tassy’s quote. Said’s and Derrida’s respective approach might guide one in what is being contrived in this case study. No one has so far seen fit to develop a theoretical foothold as to the origins of ‘Argier’, its usage in 16th and 17thc. Europe, and how it has developed as to resemble today’s various used exonyms. And the case is no different if one turns to 16th and 17thc. ‘Algeria’ as a whole. In Algeria, there currently is no shift in the theoretical methods wherewith its pre-colonial past has been dissected. An unstinting endeavor exists which seeks to retrace the pre-colonial past of ‘Algeria’, but none of them goes as far as the 16th and 17th centuries, which hitherto remain relatively unknown. A rhetoric has supplied much grist for the imaginary mill that feeds generally on the connection of precolonial ‘Algeria’ (in passing a postcolonial appellation) to the pre-1830 period (before the French colonization).This is but disorienting fiction eclipsing the past of ‘Algeria’, for it is an initiative which only takes us to other colonial periods under the rule of the Romans, the Arabs, the Spanish, and the Ottomans, to cite but the most well-known, which, all of them and in their own fashions, have seized ‘Algeria’ in a full-blown disaster, left it in historical shambles, and have had in passing particular influence on the list of its longstanding, and miscellaneous, exonym and endonym appellations, as well as the Capital-State synecdoche which shall be discussed in due time. These colonial periods are generally considered ‘pre-colonial’ in the popular parlance, mostly vis-à-vis the French potentate whose colonizing ethos and praxis, based on a direct concretization of the “divide and rule” maxim, and the intensive “depersonalization” and “dehumanization” process – a Fanon-inspired concept – ,remain the most traumatic of all in the history of ‘Algeria’ still ready to be fanned into flames at any time, and have “over a century tried to suppress any form of cultural expression, whether Arab or Berber” (E. Tabory and M. Tabory 1987, 66). Yet this is putting the matter quite euphemistically. The aforementioned colonizations intervene in the turbulent debate around Algeria’s national identity, causing interference with its pre-colonial past which is quintessentially Amazigh.11 Its heterogeneous people, known as “Imazighen”, have however been referred to as “savages” or “Berbers”12 by The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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the Romans, subsumed as a folkloric minority by the Arabo-Islamic tradition and the Ottomans alike, or else relegated to just being a symbol representing a once-upon-a-time past with no actual presence. This is what Salem Chaker means when he vividly states that Imazighen “existed in a distant past that one cannot resurrect […] [they] belong in history books, museums, folk festivals and, possibly, in the universities as an object of scholarly study” (2001, 14748). Hence the Imazighens’ claim having been most significantly predicated on the use of language which, according to Abderrahman El Aissati, “is an acte (sic) de presence: to tell both the French and the Arabs that there is an identity which has preceded both, and which has every right to claim supremacy on its own territory” (2001, 60) (emphasis added). It was until recently that Amazigh has arguably been considered part of the national identity along with Arabic, but the Amazigh ‘question’ still keeps brewing, a symptom of an Algeria still riven by anxieties of national identity. Much needs to be said about the Ottoman colonization of North Africa. After the Arab conquest, “[T]he Ottoman Turks had never colonized the Arab provinces in the sense of settling in them; thus among the Arabs, Ottomanism had acquired the connotation of partnership between the peoples of the empire rather than that of domination by one ethnic group over another” (Khalidi 1985, 1). What appears decidedly shaky in Khalidi’s quote is the helter-skelter combination of “Ottoman” with “Turk”. Khalid in fact has chosen to steer clear of such weighty nuances as ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Turk’, which are taken to be the same. The Ottoman Empire admittedly burgeoned in Asia Minor (Anatolia) in ca. 1300, laid siege in ‘Istanbul’ and sealed its power on the global scene after the fall of Byzantium. But history bears witness to it not being Turkish per se but a “multi-ethnic, multi-cultural enterprise that relied on inclusion [and homogenization]for its success” (Quataert 2005, 2), and the infantry assigned the task of colonial expansion was aided and abetted by foreigners (janissaries), who were thus not necessarily Turkish. Khalidi’s quote places the Ottoman colonization of the Arab Middle East front and center, but more to the point, it indirectly turns on the question of the Ottoman colonization of Amazigh North African countries, then already colonized by the Arabs. ‘Algiers’, under the Ottoman rule, was autonomous, yet paradoxically attached to the Ottoman Empire, whose main siege was in Istanbul. In the then ‘Algeria’, the Ottoman policy was annexationist and, as Khalidi puts it, it is not seen as colonization in the brutal sense, but mostly as a “sympathetic” collaboration between the vassal, proxy states and the sultan functioning in a parasitic fashion, so much so that Ottoman administration was absorbed in the “pre-colonial” imagination (and so was the Arab conquest). The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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Ottoman rule had a homogenization purport (even though met with resistance on the part of the Amazigh natives and the Arabs who were already there) and its administration lasted until 1830, when ‘Algiers’ (already a colony) was invaded again and colonized by the French. Their policy was on the contrary separationist, pretending to the establishment of a nation-state governed by a “grid of intelligibility” – to employ Foucault – wherein the colonizer is superior and the colonized inferior. Algeria’s multifarious outfit of colonizers, all diverse in policies of operation, of which “depersonalization” is one albeit different in degree from one colonizer to another, have muffled its pre-colonial past which has been rendered almost invisible. Its colonial past thus smacks too much of imperialist cartography, the redrawing of which has stopped with the French cartographic representation of ‘Algeria’, which confirms that “the conquest of the earth” – to summon Conrad – entails inevitably geographic ramifications. And name bestowal, closely linked to geography, is similarly no less complex an enterprise than cartography. In the beginning of the 16th century, following the fall of the Western Island of ‘Algiers’13 to the Spanish, most commonly known in history as ‘Peñón de Argel’ (Capture of Algiers) in ca. 1516, the inhabitants called for help Ottoman corsairs in the vicinity, known as Oruç and his brother Barbaros Hayreddin. They requested to free them from the chokehold of a Spanish invasion, an intervention which, as historical experiences bear witness to, always comes with a price. Sultan Selim I (King of the Ottoman Empire 1512-1520), based in Istanbul, consequently annexed the territory of ‘Algiers’, a maneuver met with resistance on the part of the locals and considered as betrayal. He appointed Barbaros Hayreddin governor-general (King) of the new Ottoman province of ‘Algiers’ (called Cezayir-i Garp or Western Island and its capital Cezayir), a Regency then based on monarchical rule, which became afterwards part of what was referred to as the “North African provinces of Barbary” (including Morocco, Tunis, Tripoli, and the then ‘Algiers’). On account of the rivalry existing at the time between the developing imperial factions of Europe vying for territorial acquisitions – namely early modern France (known as the First French Empire) with its colonization of the Americas, the early modern English Empire (commonly known as the First British Empire) with the beginning of its overseas settlements, and the Spanish Empire (known as Habsburg Spain, the most powerful Empire in Europe between ca. 1516-1700) among others – an etymological assumption has it that the failure of “Peñón de Argel” event in 1516 produced a new linguistic tradition. The failure of the then redoubtable Spanish potentate to sustain its hold on its attempt to capture the preOttoman capital of ‘Algiers’ (after their conquest of Oran and Mers elKebir), hampered by Ottoman intervention, and not see its colonizing mission through to the end could certainly not have escaped from the The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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scathing remarks of the other European empires in the competitive spirit of the age. They probably used the linguistic structure of “Peñón de Argel” in popular parlance to gossip about the Spanish failure in direct confrontation with the Ottoman Empire. This is indeed mere conjecture, but no over-interpretation as, due to the competitive circumstances of the time, this could have happened. ‘Argel’ (a Spanish exonym for the then ‘Algiers’) is assumed to have been adopted as a common linguistic usage in Spain to refer to ‘Algiers’, and so was adopted by other countries in Europe, albeit in a slightly restructured form. The Spanish name of ‘Argel’, it is thus assumed, was subsequently taken to accommodate to other geographical contexts and linguistic usage. While Oran and Mers el-Kebir were controlled by the Spanish Empire in approximately 1509 and 1505 respectively, the capital ‘Algiers’ was controlled by the Ottoman Empire from ca.1516 to 1830. The state of ‘Algiers’ referred to, under Ottoman rule, as the ‘Regency of Algiers’ or Eyalet-i Cezayir-i Garb in Turkish (a linguistic deformation of El-Djezaïr Gharb, ‫الجزاير غرب‬   in Arabic, meaning the Western Island) has, history reveals, not always born such an appellation, and the parcel of land the phrase geographically refers to is topographically different from post-colonial Algeria (after the French colonization), and other epochs under other colonial rules. The state of ‘Algiers’ was known, prior to the Arab, Spanish and Ottoman conquests, as ‘Mauretania Caesariensis’; after the Roman colonization of “Tamazgha”, it was replaced by the Roman appellation “Numidia”, but “Mauretania Caesariensis” was then only limited to the northern part of what is Algeria today (i.e. the state), bound on the western frontier by the Kingdom of Fez (Mauritania Tingitana), and on the eastern frontier by the Kingdom of Tunis. While ‘Mauretania Caesariensis” refers to the Kingdom itself, another Roman appellation was then later devised to designate one of the kingdom’s cities, the city of ‘Algiers’, as ‘Icosium’, a Punic, Amazigh and then Roman colony which was destroyed by the Arabs after their arrival, resulting in the enslavement of the Christian Romanized Amazigh. The capital was reconstructed later, in ca. the 10thc., by Amazigh Bologhine Ziri14 of the Zirides dynasty of the Ath Mezghanna. That greatly inspired the name of the capital, called then “Zayer Ath Mezghanna” (with the state still being referred to as “Tamazgha”) coming from the name “Ziri”, Bologhine Ziri, representative of the “Zirides dynasty”, which shall be discussed later on in more detail. Over the years, the name lost its Amazigh structure and was re-appropriated by the Arabs who transliterated it into ‘El-Djezaïr Beni Mezranna’ ‫ الجزاير بني مزغانة‬in Arabic, meaning the Island of the Sons of Mazranna (Louis Leschi1941). It was first used by Arab geographers AlIdrisi and Yaqut al-Hamawi in their geographical accounts in the 12th century, and later on truncated to El-Djezaïr (‫يازجلا‬ ‫) الجزاير‬, whose pronunciation contains traces of the Amazigh appellation. The transliterated Arabic name The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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may thus have contributed something to the Latinized exonyms of ‘Argier’ ‘Alger’ and ‘Algiers’, with some deformations congenital to particular contexts, yet all have sounds originally found in ‘El-Djezaïr’ (‫يازجل‬ ‫) الجزاير‬, which is phonetically transcribed as/ældʒʌzaɪər/. ‘El-Djezaïr’ originally stems from the Amazigh name of ‘Zayer’, which in passing may have influenced the Ottoman synecdoche “Cezayir”. 19th c. Scottish poet Thomas Campbell also used ‘Icosium’ in one of his letters, before he decided to visit ‘Algiers’ on September 18th, 1834. He notes: “I was in the King’s library [while in Paris], exploring books on ancient geography, I cast my eyes on a point of the map – the ancient Roman city of Icosium – that corresponded with the site of Algiers” (1850, 315) (emphasis added). The cartographic reference to ‘Algiers’ as ‘Icosium’ – and no other – in the book of geography is not only revealing of ‘Algiers’ being the word used in the 19th century, a new linguistic tradition serving as a cartographic designation of the province, but also gives a metonymic mention to the ancient name ‘Icosium’, to underscore the Roman term being substituted over time to fit a new historical, geographical and linguistic context. It most importantly and paradoxically also pinpoints the linguistic importance of ‘Icosium’ as a referential word of ‘Algiers’ still used in Campbell’s time in the European geographic scholarship, despite its obsolete character. The term ‘Icosium’ encountered in a book of “ancient geography” may refer, on the one hand, to how ‘Algiers’ was known in European writings, cartography, and popular parlance before the word ‘Algiers’ was coined, although nullified an interpretation, on the other, by the hypothesis which has it that, by “ancient geography”, the Scottish poet has consulted a book of geography dating back to a far ancient time, the time of the Romans. One can, however, deduce that the Roman term ‘Icosium’ was in the 19th century a relevant term in the geographical records of Europe, a Roman terminology still used to designate the old capital of “Mauretania Caesariensis” – even when another term has been taken as a more suitable, timely appellation which, in the case of Campbell’s time (the 19th century), was ‘Algiers’, being specific to the English context, which he even incorporates in one of his travel accounts, Letters from Algiers (ca. 1845). When he was in Paris, Campbell, it is however assumed, read the book of “ancient geography” in the French language but re-structured the syntagm ‘Alger’ (a term specific to the French context) when writing his letter to fit in with the English context (Algiers), a displacement move commonly adopted by editors, translators, adaptation and appropriation practioners, a point to be neutralized for now. Both Campbell’s epistolary excerpt and De Tassy’s Histoire du Royaume d’Alger are testimony to the English and French names, ‘Algiers’ and ‘Alger’ being existent and used in the 19th and 18th centuries respectively. To this point, the study has helped seal some synecdoche appellations. They can be mapped as seen in Table 1 (see below). The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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Studying the Exonym ‘Argier’ and its Origins Sometimes one just has to look a little harder to find the gift. Also, that a man’s fate is tightly bound in a thousand layers of sheer muslin which can take a lifetime to unravel (Mahjoub 1998, 2). The ‘Argier’ nebula is bound by the urges of its epoch and a special set of circumstances, and involves complex and heterogeneous factors in its formation. It first addresses such questions as how it was under local auspices, before being externally realigned through commercial exchange, colonial invasions and other conjunctures. In studying the origins of ‘Argier’, one is first asked to distinguish between its endonym appellations (internal), those used inside the territory as mother appellations – in this case, first Amazigh and then Arabic, as shall be discussed later – and exonym appellations (external), those used outside the territory as assigned appellations – in this case, Roman, Ottoman, French, English, Catalan and Spanish. These have substantially contributed to the exonym tradition of ‘Algiers’, within which this study is enwrapped. One usually encounters the toponym ‘Argier’ without paying adequate attention to, at times even without noticing, its morphological strangeness, and some difficulties in its comprehension are due to a theoretical dryness and lack of editorial contextual conscientiousness. Much of what is being offered here – it is granted – is a long overdue, perhaps belated intervention, which derives its critical and theoretical force from a screening of imprecise interpretations and pat formulations defining ‘Argier’ in the editorial tradition, a foray into identification which partially meets its obligation and which has yet dissolved into a generation of misnomers, if analyzed critically within a historicist, literary and geographical frame of reference. The toponymic hermeneutics tersely performed on the terminology by editorial efforts, which – and it is the one nowadays most evident and most central in common usage – oftentimes has ‘Argier’ refer to “an old name for Algiers”, as done by Frank Kermode in the Arden edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1954, 27),while sometimes – this one less widespread – has the toponym anachronistically refer to “Algeria”, as done by Russell A. Frazer and Norman Rabkin in their edition of Tamburlaine the Great Part I (1976, 207) and Part II (ibid. 1976, 236), in Drama of the English Renaissance: Volume I, The Tudor Period, with a broad cleavage running between them and with the toponym’s profound substance simply not spelled out. These interpretive structures postulated by an editorial interposition, which needs accuracy just the same, bear some truism which has become frozen in its tendentious pattern of explanation, becoming over time a dynastic, deep-seated reference which has ended up ailing a defining lethargy, and even pretending to an ultimate truth status nonetheless. Such suggestions, illuminating and paradoxically all the more disorienting, are content phrases The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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yielding no faint suspicion, which have met with generational reinforcement, and their ‘obviousness’ has consequently not been belied for many centuries. They are in fact retrieved by geographers, historians, and displacement practices, such as translations, cinematic adaptations, appropriations, Globe productions and other editions, which accept these interventions in an undoubted procedure, and even incorporate them in future reproductions. In so doing, they bring serious change – albeit often unconsciously – to ‘original’ productions, and even develop inconsistent, simultaneous overlaps between the different and already existent edited and translated versions of the plays having the syntagm ‘Argier’ as part of their setting, such as The Tempest, Tamburlaine the Great (Part I & II) and La généreuse ingratitude – among others such as George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar. And this critical state of affairs has generated a certain motivation for this present discussion. These words or phrases positioned generally as footnotes or annotations (basically meant to solely enlighten and by no means to be used to emend future reproductions) are indeed only appropriate to give an insight into what the toponym superficially means, and by no means to serve as an oversimplification designed to water down the toponym’s complexity whose roots thrust deeper into the past. It is this too-facile illumination which indeed compensates for the annotative definitions’ limited scope as to go unnoticed and even become endemic in academic circles. Given undoubted prominence, these labels purporting to simplistically define a large and complex structure are notoriously vague, yet at the same time unavoidable, being the only available ticket to have an inkling of what the toponym means, as documentation on the question is absolutely sparse. As a consequence of editorial intervention, texts which contain ‘Argier’ have seen the terminology superseded and taken out of its time by formulations all the more different (but taken to be the same), such as ‘Algiers’, or else ‘Alger’ (in the case of translations into French), which currently shoulder each other in the accepted body of knowledge, with a considerable lack of acknowledgement on the part of critics, historians and geographers as to the historical, geographical and linguistic difference each of them materializes. The term cannot be translated into so simplistic a reduction without obvious, disconcerting imbrications, unnoticed anachronism, and historical, geographical and linguistic incongruity. As clearly put by Said in Beginnings: Intention and Method, “the risk of error [induced by textual criticism or editing] is [not only] increased, but the distance between original, archetype, and copies, if not increased, is then varied. Each copy spends more of the original capital than its predecessors, and in so doing it transgresses, if it does not actually contaminate, the previous version” (1975, 209). The conditions wherein the term ‘Argier’ has thus appeared, and its linguistic usage (in passing specific to a particular context which shall be discussed in due time) prove inappropriate the etymological interchangeability, incumbent so often on the terminology, and reveal how ‘Argier’ (different from ‘Alger’, The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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‘Algiers’ or ‘Algeria’) should in reality be received. The problematic nature of editorial interpretations made the term hereby susceptible to literary and linguistic, historical and geographical re-treatment in order to acquaint oneself with its general tenor in greater detail. On a phonetic level, ‘Argier’, besides the influence of the Arabic ‘ElDjezaïr’ on it, itself influenced by the Amazigh name ‘Zayer’, is a construct which, if parsed, finds itself on the cusp of other suggestions (precedents) all the more revealing, which enact disturbing departures and new possibilities. ‘Argier’ may have stemmed from the 16thc. Spanish name ‘Argel’, and thus a phonetic misconstruction of the latter, but this assumption is ruled out by the closest probability, and more striking phonetic resemblance there exists between ‘Argier’ and the French name ‘Alger’. While ‘Alger’ is undoubtedly a French anagram for ‘Argel’, ‘Alger’ as the possible origin of ‘Argier’ is quite a complex matter to examine. To prove whether ‘Argier’ stems principally from ‘Argel’ or ‘Alger’, one should first study their presence in textual samples from English and French Renaissance drama from a philological perspective. However questionable the practice may be of studying these terminological paradigms as found in Renaissance drama, this move clearly proves a method regenerative and constructive to elucidate an obscure past, living off past texts to survive. After all, and as Said puts it, “All past written records inherited by us in the present are saturated in the history of their own times; philological work is responsible for examining them […]. In a sense therefore philology is the interpretive discipline by which you can discern that peculiar slant on things which is the perspective reality of a given period” (2000, 455). In Philippe Quinault’s pastoral tragi-comedy La généreuse ingratitude, unprocessed by editorial intervention, and set in an unspecified forest in ‘Argier’, the terminology is repeated three times; the same applies to its translation by Sir William Lower Knight (The Noble Ingratitude), also set in an unspecified forest in ‘Argier’. A comparative analysis of both texts (which, in passing, were produced in nearly the same period) and the three passages where the term appears, serves to reveal a linguistic usage specific to two different contexts. In Quinault’s original French version, the term appears (scarcely) as follows: Zaide: Je (sic) dois me souvenir (sic) qu’en son (sic) dernier voyage, Mon frère a dans Alger conclu (sic) mon mariage, Que mon nouvel (sic) Amant doit bientôt (sic) arriver. (Quinault 1656, 18) (emphasis added) In Sir W. L. Knight’s English version, however, the word appears in another The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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form as shown in the translation below of the passage above: Zaida: I cannot but remember that my brother In his last (sic) voyage did conclude my marriage In Argier, that he who’s design’d (sic) to be My husband, is here (sic) shortly to arrive. (Quinault trans. by W. L. Wright 1661, 30) (emphasis added) As can be noticed, both ‘Alger’ and ‘Argier’ are used in the same period. While the former is known to be specific to the French context, the latter’s linguistic usage is revealed to be historically, geographically and linguistically restricted to the English context. Knight accommodates the name ‘Alger’ to an English context (just as Campbell does regarding ‘Algiers’, as previously discussed) while translating Quinault’s play into English, a displacement procedure giving a historical, geographical and linguistic insight into how the French term ‘Alger’ was used in 17thc. England. If the assumption made earlier that the Spanish name ‘Argel’ launched linguistic and terminological traditions in Europe is to be taken account of, it seems reasonable to suggest that both the French term ‘Alger’ and English term ‘Argier’ are post-1516 terminologies, and therefore are both derivatives of ‘Argel’. The latter, according to French archaeologist Louis Leschi, referring to his colleague M. Lespès, was begot by the Catalonian name ‘Aldgere’, itself also a phonetic misconstruction of ‘El-Djezaïr’ (1941). This means that, to this point in the analysis, the Amazigh name ‘Zayer’ comes first, then Arabic ‘El-Djezaïr’ then the Catalonian appellation, and the Spanish one thereafter. ‘Zayer’ is interpreted here to stem from “Thiziri”, which has a lunar meaning, “moonlight” in the Amazigh language, which by the by inspired the appellation of the Zirides dynasty. This interpretation dethrones the Arabic name of ‘El-Djezaïr’, which is generally perceived to be the original. While ‘Alger’ is argued to be an anagram for ‘Argel’, and since ‘Argel’ is begot by the Catalonian appellation ‘Aldgere’, ‘Alger’ can be also said to stem from the Catalonian name, which is the third source after the Arabic appellation ‘ElDjezaïr’ and the fourth after the Amazigh appellation ‘Zayer’. However, the claim that ‘Argier’ derives from ‘Alger’ merits a word of explanation here. If the phonetic resemblance is to be heeded, the possibility of ‘Argier’ stemming from ‘Alger’ appears strongest. While Argier’s etymological link to ‘Argel’ is inevitable (as it has inherited the residual letters and phonemes of its precedents),‘Argier’ approaches more the pronunciation of ‘Alger’ than that of ‘Argel’, which makes ‘Argier’ a deformed phonetic imitation of ‘Alger’ – and therefore at a fourth remove from the Catalonian name “Aldgere”. One ought to digress here to a significant case study diagnosed by Kantarbaeva-Bill in  her essay to elaborate more on the above claim. A hermeneutic reading, which has for its substance an allegorical interpretation The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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of The Tempest and Tamburlaine the Great, produced at comparatively early moments in the emergence of the English (and the European) imperial enterprise, has been confirmed by a subliminal message that Kantarbaeva-Bill believes to be embodied in Sycorax’s unfavorable description, a character who performs an Ottoman personification, asserting that a “literal resemblance [exists] between its plot [the play of The Tempest] and certain events and attitudes in English political history” (Kantarbaeva-Bill 2015, para. 17).She argues that “Shakespeare was not only familiar with multiple modes of Ottoman representation but also willing to use them in ways that reflected the changing politics of the new century” (ibid., para. 5). On the basis of this interpretation which has it that Sycorax unfavorably personifies the Ottoman Empire, the possibility of ‘Algiers’ being representative of the Ottoman Empire in The Tempest, as already suggested earlier, and in Tamburlaine the Great as well as La généreuse ingratitude, is also not to be overlooked. The phonetic deformation ‘Argier’ of the term ‘Alger’ can thus be made deliberately as part of a strategy of a demeaning type on the part of the English, rivals then of the Ottomans, a strategy directed against the then Ottoman state of ‘Algiers’, touching in the process upon the French pronunciation of ‘Alger’, as the French Empire was also then a rival of England. The strategy of mispronunciation has also been adopted in Campbell’s Letters from Algiers, where the word “Algerine” (a mispronunciation of Algerian or Algérien) is assumed to contain a connotative negative loading, first to unfavorably designate the inhabitants of ‘Algiers’ of the time – and probably other parts of the then topographical structure of ‘Algeria’ – as subject to the French; and second, to disfigure the pronunciation of a French term as part of the Anglo-French scenario of anxieties, a hypothesis which will have to await another analytical occasion. As defined by Lexico, “Algerine” refers to “[m]id 17th century” inhabitants of the then ‘Algiers’, but most specifically to “pirates of Algiers”, which in passing mention is not only composed of the French word ‘Alger’, but is also assumed by Lexico to be partially elicited from “Algier, Arger, Argier, [which are] variants of the name of Algiers”, whose difference is, needless to say, supererogatory at this level, which cannot consider details that belong to another scale. The name ‘Argier’ emerging in the 16th century, as already suggested, has continued to exist until the end of the 17th century, when it started to be superseded by another etymological tradition. The following chronologically ordered list of travel accounts, as an ensemble of traces from the past, offers a glossary of names which indicate the development of the English term ‘Argier’ in the 17thc. before it starts to be replaced by a new tradition towards the end of the century. The dates and the use of the terminology in question in the titular structures of these English travel accounts are in fact indicative of a certain stability of the English term ‘Argier’ in the 17th century before it was emended in popular parlance: The Famous and Wonderful Recovery of a Ship The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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of Bristol Called the Exchange from the Turkish Pirates of Argier (1622), A Return from Argier: A Sermon Preached at Minhead in the County of Somerset the 16 of March, 1627 at the Re-admission of a Relapsed Christian into our Church By Edward Kellet Doctor of Divinity(1627), and The Adventures of an English Merchant Taken Captive by the Turks of Argiers (1670).While the translation of Knight (The Noble Ingratitude), believed to have been produced in 1659, maintains the use of the terminology in midcentury, the title of The Adventures of an English Merchant Taken Captive by the Turks of Argiers (1670) (11 years later) shows a new terminology which asserts itself as an incipient tradition illustrating quite well an intermediary state. The term ‘Argiers’ displays an addendum of the letter ‘s’ to the already existent ‘Argier’, while ‘Algiers’, a terminology which comes afterwards in the development scheme, substitutes the letter ‘r’ of ‘Argiers’ by the letter ‘l’. ‘Argiers’, in this way, is assumed to be symptomatic of a transitional stage in the English context between ‘Argier’ and ‘Algiers’ from the end of the 17th century to certainly the 18th century. While the new tradition of ‘Argiers’ starts approximately at the end of the 17th c., the term ‘Algiers’ can be said to have possibly started in the 18th century; it came to be most commonly used in the 19th century and the tradition is still operative in the present day. A small digression is necessary here. In 1785, ‘Algerian’ pirates rode roughshod on the early American Republic, having captured on a number of occasions American ships at a time when America was in its beginnings and had difficulties to ransom the victims. The captives were taken to “Algiers” and forced to toil as slaves for the state of ‘Algiers’ and for themselves.15 George C. Smith, one of the captives, uses the exonym ‘Algiers’ in his1812 letter, stating: “do not let me die a slave in Algiers” (qtd. in Mintz 2006, 44), which shows that the exonym was used back then and probably even earlier. This forgotten event in American-Algerian history has inspired the naming of one of the towns of America in New Orleans, “Algiers”. As for the term ‘Argiers’, it is found to have been used recently, outside of its assumed timeframe, in a footnote by Thomas Cartelli in “After The Tempest: Shakespeare, Postcoloniality, and Michelle Cliff’s New, New World Miranda” (1995) to comment on Peter Greenaway’s 1991 adaptation of The Tempest, where an explanation is given as to how “Sycorax looked like ‘when she was powerful in Argiers’” (1995, 98). It is probably a residual irrelevance retrieved from past editions and reproductions, or certainly due to a lack of sources which cannot define the difference between ‘Argiers’ and other terminologies, such as ‘Alger’, ‘Argier’ and ‘Algiers’, frequently taken to be the same. The mention of ‘Argiers’ outside of its linguistic context thus reveals an unstable use of the names of ‘Algiers’ in academia. This takes us to an ‘Algiers’ of another spatial-temporal context, resulting in terminological imbrications which have made the usage of ‘Argier’ obscure and almost unfathomable. Below is a schematic in miniature of an exquisitely complex structure which The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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may be useful as a synoptic guide to the origins of the English term ‘Argier’ and its development from the Amazigh reconstruction of the Roman city of ‘Icosium’ to the present day. TABLE 1 The Capital-State Synecdoche Name of the Capital

Name of the State

Icosium Zayer

Mauretania Caesariensis (a part of Numidia) Tamazgha

El-Djezaïr

El-Djezaïr

Cezayir

Cezayir-i Garp

Roman Amazigh (after the reconstruction of the destroyed city of ‘Icosium’) Arab Ottoman Source: author’s work.

FIGURE1 The Origins of ‘Argier’ and its Development from the Amazigh Reconstruction of the Roman city of ‘Icosium’ to the Present Day. Source: author. Terminology

Zayer

Century

ca. 10

th

El-Djezaïr


 ‫الجزاير‬ th

Cezayi

ca. 12 c. ca. 1516

Aldger

ca. 1516

Argel

Alger and Argier

ca. 1516

th

th

16 and 17

Argiers

Algiers

th

th

th th 17 and18 c.18 and 19 c. onwards

There are different discourses played out against one another when it comes down to the term ‘Argier’ and how it is retrieved by editions, translations and adaptations. In Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great Part I (1587-88), the term ‘Argier’ is referred to eleven times, while in Part II seven times, which is testimony to the linguistic usage of the term already in the 16thc. English drama. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-1611), it is twice reiterated, to then find itself completely suppressed in Aimé Cesaire’s anti-colonial adaptation, Une Tempête (1969).However, the manifestation of ‘Argier’ is different in the 2010 film The Tempest, a feminist adaptation based on the play of the same name, directed by Julie Taymor. In the cinematic adaptation, starring Helen Mirren (as Prospera) and Ben Whishaw (as Ariel), the name of ‘Argier’ appears as follows accompanied with few other syntactic changes if compared to Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Prospera: […] Thou hast. Where was she born? Speak! Tell me. Ariel: Ma’am, in Algiers. Prospera: O, was she so? I must Once in a month recount what thou hast been, Which thou forget’st. This damn’d witch Sycorax, For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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To enter human hearing from Algiers, Thou know’st, was banish’d. Is not this true? Ay, ma’am (Taymor 2010, 14:17-45) (emphasis added).

Almost the same textual pattern is found in the Arden Edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where however the original structure of the term ‘Argier’ is editorially maintained by Frank Kermode. It appears as follows: Prospero: […] Thou hast. Where was she born? Speak; tell me. Ariel: Sir, in Argier. Prospero: O, was she so? I must Once in a mouth recount what thou hast been, Which thou forget’st. This damn’d witch Sycorax, For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible To enter human hearing, from Argier, Thou know’st, was banish’d: for one thing she did They would not take her life. Is not this true? Ariel: Ay, sir (Shakespeare 1623, 27) (emphasis added). Shakespeare’s passage has been taken almost verbatim by Taymor. It is noticeable though that ‘Argier’ has undergone an in-text substitution by the screenplay writer, which displaces the term from its original dwelling to fit a contemporary context. The Tempest and Tamburlaine the Great have, it is undeniable, been tailored to an audience familiar then with ‘Argier’, a term which strikes the modern audience as interrogative, hence the director’s decision to shift the terminology to ‘Algiers’ in order certainly to elide a historical complexity, thought as ‘irrecovery’, or probably to tone down a highly disconcerting etymological ambiguity. While the displacement of the term ‘Alger’ to ‘Argier’ in Lower’s English translation has proved helpful to compare the linguistic usage of the term in 17thc. France with that of 17th c. England, Taymor’s in-text substitution of the term ‘Argier’ with ‘Algiers’ is unjustified, a term which ought to be maintained in its original form to make the reader acquainted with the 16th and 17th English name of the present ‘Algiers’. Its displacement has resulted in a historical, geographical and linguistic anachronism, since the terminology ‘Algiers’ did not exist in such a temporal context as that of The Tempest. The use of ‘Algiers’ in a 17th century play underlines by asyndeton, i.e. omission, a contextual rupture. Geographic etymology as knowledge is important to geography as a representation of that knowledge, or as Penck observes in a reformulation of Foucault: “knowledge is power, geographical knowledge is world power” (qtd. in Watts 1993, 173). Etymology is thus a central pivot around which geography rotates, the nexus of geographic studies and a key starting point for any assessment of a geographic perspective, without which geography results The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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in mere drawings without a sense of orientation. Studying the toponym ‘Argier’, its origins and development, provides a larger canvas onto which geographic scholarship and historians can situate themselves, and which can help situate places and their names in their own times and histories. There is in fact a fraction line in intellectual circles due to a sudden whim to displace the toponym ‘Argier’ from its original historical habitat and replace it by a modern-day appellation as a way to simplify and provide a frame of clear, perhaps extremely clear understanding, as done previously by Taymor and by Mahjoub in his The Carrier (1998), a story set in the 17thcentury, which yet uses ‘Algiers’. This is also equally applicable for literature, translations, adaptations, appropriations and editions which tend today to be overtaken by the whirlwind of oversimplification and displacement as it is for scientific geography and history. In geography and history, one case is particularly striking. Donald Quataert’s The Ottoman Empire 1700-1922 provides, as its subtitle suggests, “new approaches to European history”, giving rise to suspect, at first sight, that his book adheres to the models of new historicist behavior. His historical analysis, with a geographic stamp and toolkit, reports on a similar ailment of displacement as that diagnosed in Taymor’s adaptation and Mahjoub’s appropriation of The Tempest, which has ineluctably entailed myopic geographic prescriptions occulting the works of geography and history alike and providing them with an irrelevant scenery. Quataert replaces ‘Argier’ by ‘Algiers’ on 16thc. and 17thc. cartographic representations (2005, 22), during an era when ‘Algiers’ had not yet been born, neutralizing ‘Argier’ as irrelevant potentiality and thus contributing to the generational amnesia that has taken over the toponym for a span of centuries. And also contributing to the mobility that has made it forfeit its original significance, rendering Quataert’s study seriously hover on the brink of a significant void. ‘Argier’ has in fact never assumed centrality or a position of sorts; it has withered to the point of collapse, and its modern-day appellations have been used to the point of calcification. ‘Argier’ has been given center(s) so far incongruous, and has been pulled down by a vortex of change, as has been implemented by Quataert, Taymor and Mahjoub in their works, who all replace it with “Algiers”. And though Quataert provides a justification, noting: “The issue of place names is a thorny one. To call places as they were in the past can cause confusion, for modern readers. The old names often but not always have completely disappeared from the present memory of all but a few devotees of the area or subject,” (2005, xiv), the answer to this anticipation of objection is simple: history has to be studied in its complexities. The organic framework of Quataert’s claim is extremely loose, because he does not engage head-tohead with the complexities of history, and for a whole array of reasons one can seriously doubt his study. Although “the issue of place names is a thorny one”, modern readers have to be acquainted with history as it was before it is tackled as it is today. As old names “have disappeared from the present memory”, an The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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anti-amnesiac discourse is in order, one which can counter loss and re-ignite the once-has-been history obscured by such facile approaches as that adopted by Quataert. Considering oversimplification as a sine qua non condition for the proper understanding of the analysis by the reader, or grounding a study a priori on how the study might be received, is simply not the way. For the sake of simplification, Quataert has seriously run the risk of editing history and paradoxically has in the event complicated it. This confirms Michael Watts’s words: “[w]hat the most compelling geographies of the last decade have accomplished nonetheless, is to add complexity to our understanding of African places and spaces” (1993, 185). Conclusion To summarize ruthlessly a complex issue, this analysis has been motivated by the elliptical origins and usage of the terminology of ‘Argier’ in 16th and 17thc. Europe, its development and how it has come to resemble today’s appellations. Casting its net mainly across 16th and 17th century ‘Algeria’ in general, which remains to date very much clouded in obscurity, this study endeavors to encode a discourse confrontational in its engagement of history and geography, yet also of textual criticism, which has not proven a repose activity in this case study. The terminology of ‘Argier’ has indeed been caught up in a situation where a polarizing discourse, succinctly defining it, operates at a significant Platonic remove from its original historical, geographical and linguistic context. ‘Argier’ has lost much of its historical reservoir with generations of editors, translators, appropriators and geographers who, although have given an enlightening definition to it, and displayed a recontextualized use of it, have unduly specified its original context, and its historical, geographical and linguistic dimensions. The reference to ‘Argier’ as “an old name for Algiers”, or else “Algeria”, should not in fact be taken at face value; they are solely editorial guidance in forms of supplement and appendage which cannot serve as a foothold for in-text substitutions in future editorial attempts, translations, adaptations and appropriations, or any kind of reproduction, at the risk of bringing the late 18th century-onward name of ‘Algiers’ to an alien context. The morphological study of ‘Argier’ has in fact proven that the term has traditionally been deferred to the modern context, a displacement which has induced a great amount of anachronism and inappropriate linguistic use largely gone unnoticed. The dynamics of editorial and analytical association of ‘Argier’ with ‘Algiers’ in interchangeable interaction (as done by Kantarbaeva-Bill, Taymor, Quataert and Mahjoub), and with other appellations, are figments of imagination, myths of some sort which, although insightful for incipient readers of ‘Argier’, turn out quite imprecise when analyzed with reference to history, geography and linguistics. Old ‘Algiers’ The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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does certainly not geographically represent the current terminology due to topographical difference and cartographic redrawing, and the terminology of ‘Argier’ contains its own historical, geographical and linguistic underpinning with a potential to provide insights into a missing past. However similar, ‘Aldgere’, ‘Argel’, ‘Alger’, ‘Argier’, ‘Argiers’ and ‘Algiers’ are in fact paradoxically different exonyms, each one with its own historical, geographical and linguistic imperatives specific to particular spatial-temporal contexts. The study of the name of ‘Algiers’ thus cannot be undertaken irrespective of the history, geography and ideology of the time, vital to understanding how it was known on the 16th and 17thc. European stage and how it has developed. These are details without which any etymological study would have either resulted in an anachronistic incongruity or a misleading imprecision. Although this study has suggested that the exonyms of ‘Aldgere’, ‘Argel’, ‘Alger’, ‘Argier’, ‘Argiers’ and ‘Algiers’ stem from the Arabic ‘El-Djezaïr’, which in turn stems originally from the Amazigh ‘Zayer’, their usage and development still remain ambiguous and can only be a matter for further speculation. This study has also reached the finding that ‘Argier’ is a 16th and 17th century older English-based exonym for both the 16th and 17thc. capital and state of ‘Algiers’ (Argier/Argier), both of which were then referred to in England as ‘Argier’, equivalent to the Ottoman synecdoche ‘Cezayir/ Cezayir-i Garp’ used then as both exonym and endonym. The terminology, it has been argued, stems from a mispronunciation of the French term ‘Alger’, which, along with ‘Argier’, originates from the Spanish term ‘Argel’; it, in turn, is begot by the Catalonian name ‘Aldgere’. While ‘Argier’ is a 16th and 17th c. English name, and ‘Algiers’ is approximately a late 18th c., 19thc. and present-day name, ‘Argiers’ has been assumed to stand for the transition between both. The new toponym ‘Algiers’ afterwards established itself as the formal English appellation of late 18th and 19thcentury and present-day ‘Algiers’ – regardless of the geographical circumstances ‘Algiers’ was in at that time, being under colonial rule and still in the process of cartographic reexamination – designating only the Capital, while the country’s name has diverted to another tradition: ‘Algeria’. As a final commentary, some words of self-criticism. One may perhaps find, and quite rightly, that this theoretical schematization does not account for the complexity of the term and its history. This essay acknowledges its uncertainty and performs the task of a “supplementary” discourse “resulting from a lack which must be supplemented” (Derrida 1967, 367) as a way to complement the “absence” of an editorial total “presence”. This endeavor should be seen at best as a signpost on a journey still in progress. It advocates a more profound, more self-conscious approach to studying ‘Argier’, and indicates indeed how much room remains in place for the study of the toponym. And the theorization of its usage in the 16th and 17th centuries and its development are not to be put into watertight compartments, since they are The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 22, no 1-2 (2019)

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no matter for prescription, but for imagination. Theorizing the origins, usage of ‘Argier’ and its development is a far too complex question which can only be answered piecemeal. This foray into a reconstruction of the past confirms Shakespeare’s quote in the exordium, that studying the past is not an “assurance” but only “a dream”, an approximate imagination of some sort which serves as a joint between the study of history, geography and literature, as already explicated by Said (2000). This amounts to saying that loss can never be fully recovered; it can in fact only be imagined. Notes 1 While Frazer and Rabkin date back the writing of the two parts of Tamburlaine to 1587, another theory posits the two parts to have been written between 158788. 2 The Battle of Alcazar is believed to have been written in 1591. 3 The Tempest, published by John Heminges and Henry Condell in the 1623 First Folio, is generally assumed to have been written between 1610-1611. 4 La généreuse ingratitude (in English The Noble Ingratitude) is a pastoral tragicomedy in five acts by French dramatist and librettist Philippe Quinault, assumed to have been written between 1653 and 1654. 5 The house of Habsburg is a dynasty which, in the 16th century has split into two branches: Habsburg Spain (Western Europe) and Habsburg Austria (Eastern Europe). Although both were located in different territories, with Austria ruling the Holy Roman Empire in Eastern Europe and Habsburg Spain having its own territories in Western Europe, both maintained good mutual relations. 6 These provinces generally go hand in hand in reference in Renaissance drama, but rarely all together. 7 The Persian Empire was also known as the Safavid Empire. 8 This paper is only partial and incomplete in its coverage. For the purpose of this paper, I am deliberately ignoring the rather large number of descriptive travelogues – although I make reference to Thomas Campbell’s Letters from Algiers, for it suits a particular purpose. I have chosen rather to laboriously plow through the toponym’s mention in Renaissance plays and how editors refer to it in their annotations which best suits this paper’s purpose being to study ‘Argier’ and its different attributed editorial definitions. 9 La généreuse ingratitude has been rendered into English by Sir William Lower Knight. The English translation of the play is generally dated back to 1659, and its publication to 1661. There being a tendency, however, which assumes Knight to be the author of the play, not the translator. 10 “This proves, and it is one of the merits of toponymy that safeguards traces of ancient forms of dialect and maintains elements of dialects or anterior languages” (1941, 70) [trans. by the author]. 11 “Amazigh” and “Berber” differ. “Amazigh” is an internal, and the only correct appellation used to refer to “Imazighen”, meaning “free men”, while “Berber” is an external, deprecatory appellation meaning “savage”.

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12 “Berber “comes from the word “Barbarity”, which means “savagery” or “brutality”. 13 Algiers’ has always been referred to as an island in Renaissance drama. See, for example, The Tempest, where ‘Argier’ is an island wherefrom Sycorax has been banished, although this proves impossible geographically as ‘Algiers’ is part of a land and not separate from it. And no island of a significant space has ever existed off the shores of ‘Algiers’ that could have been called ‘Argier’. As ‘Argier’ has always been seen as “the most singularly notorious harbor in the world, nothing less, and not a place to venture lightly” (Mahjoub, 1), which dabbles in piracy, the European popular imagination of the time may have run away with the exonym, so as to associate it with an island around which pirates prowl. Island has also an imperial connotation as, in the then imperial spirit of the age, colonies have generally been described as “islands”, as in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, both written with imperialist assumptions in mind. Protruding rocks at a close remove from shores were also exaggeratedly referred to as islands. For example, “Peñón” means a small rocky island situated offshore yet linked to the shore. 14 The Amazigh names have been misspelled by Arab geographers and historians. In the case of “Bologhine Ziri”, it was transliterated to fit an Arabic pronunciation (Bologhine Ibn Ziri). Another case is “Ath Mezghanna”, which is transliterated to accommodate to an Arabic pronunciation “Beni Mezghanna”. As a consequence, they are generally taken to be Arabic names, but in reality they are Amazigh. 15The America-Eastern countries history started well before the 20th c. And the American-Algerian war of 1785-1797 stands as evidence.

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