Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the hammam: masquerade, womanliness, and Levantinization.

Halsband (Life [note 1], 19.1).

14 Montagu criticizes Addison's distracting foray into romantic subplot, and upholds classical Aristotelian notions concerning the unity of action. She finds Shakespeare's Julius Caesar much better in its compression, and points out that Juba and Syphax are too close to Othello in their characterization. She also recommends stronger libertarian rhetoric throughout the play ("[Critique of Cato Wrote at the Desire of Mr. Wortley, suppress'd at the desire of Mr. Adison" [1713], in Halsband, Essays and Poems, 62-68). In 1710, the young Montagu will defend learned women to Gilbert Burnet:

There is hardly a character in the World more Despicable or more liable to Forth rush the Levant and the Ponent Windes.

- Milton, Paradise Lost (10.704)

Based on a journey to the Ottoman Empire undertaken during the years 1716-18, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's travel letters were first published in their entirety in 1763. The author had died the previous year. Montagu's stay at Constantinople with her husband Edward Wortley who had been appointed Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, provides the central focus of the travel letters. But as her reflections range widely across the culture and geography of the Eastern Mediterranean, a more inclusive title seems appropriate. Amongst various titles given to this collection by editors over the ages, I find that given by J. A. St. John in 1838, Letters from the Levant, During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716-18, more suggestive than The Turkish Embassy Letters.(1)