No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Staging the Tories' Islamic Jihad against George I and the Whigs in Edward Young's The Revenge
Abstract
This article analyzes Edward Young's nuanced employment of Islam and appropriation of the Qur'an, first translated into English as The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1649, to attack allegorically the Tories' aspirations to support James Francis Edward Stuart (1701–1766), who was nicknamed “the Old Pretender” by the Whigs and James III by the Tories, to restore Catholicism/Islam into Hanoverian England. Edward Young's The Revenge (1721), which adapts Shakespeare's Othello (1604), dramatizes the Moor Zanga, who is of royal Moorish descent and the captive of the Spanish general Don Alonzo, performing Jihad on himself in revenge for the slaughter of his father king and nation by Alonzo/George I. The character of the Muslim Zanga embodies two levels of materialization and refashioning from the Whigs' perspective: Firstly, he connotes George I's Turkish servants, Mahomet and Mustapha, who signify the Hanoverian king's power and dominance over the Turks. Secondly, he draws a parallel to the Old Pretender's and the Tories' rebellions of 1715 and 1719 within a Jihadist and Qur'anic framework, serving as a political allegory of the Tories' attempts to dethrone George I.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Reviews of modern productions of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine often note a three-hundred-year hiatus between a recorded performance in 1641, just before the closing of the theatres, and Tyrone Guthrie’s revival at the Old Vic in 1951. While the statement is mostly true with respect to Marlowe’s play, Tamerlane or Timūr Lenk and the Ottoman emperor Bayazid I (Marlowe’s Bajazeth) had important theatrical incarnations in the 1700s before they declined into parody in the 1800s. When Marlowe’s play was revived in the modern era, the main characters reclaimed their dignity, but they also acquired markers of racial, ethnic, or religious otherness that had not been prominent earlier. Timūr’s (and Bayazid’s) varied theatrical representations illustrate the malleability of iconic cultural figures, the sometimes problematic emphasis on ethnic difference in modern theatrical practice, and the challenges and opportunities of cross-racial casting.
Charles Saunders’s Tamerlane the Great (1681) appropriates Islam and the Qur’an, first translated into English as The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1649, to attack the influence of the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–1683) on the Duke of Monmouth, the eldest Protestant son of Charles II. Saunders’s play dramatises two models of royal sons from the Tories’ perspective: Firstly, the loyal Arsanes, who represents the Tories’ idealised expectation of Monmouth to be an obedient son. Secondly, the illegitimate Mandricard, who envisions the Tories’ damnation of Monmouth as a slave to Shaftesbury. While Saunders’s play warns allegorically against the radical Protestants’ association with, what Garcia calls, ‘Islamic republicanism’, it advocates ‘Islamic royalism’ as a Qur’anic principle of the divinity of monarchs that appealed to the Tories. Saunders’s play ends with a reconciliation between Tamerlane/Charles II and his son Arsane/Monmouth, staging simultaneously the defeat of Bajaset and the Turks/radical Protestants.
This two-part chapter considers the case of Edward Young (1683–1765), poet and Fellow of All Souls. Young entered All Souls in 1708 and left twenty-two years later when he secured a Church living in the College’s gift. He divided his time between Oxford and literary London, writing poetry and plays with an eye to securing potential political and ecclesiastical patrons. He achieved international fame with his Night Thoughts (1742–5), a long blank-verse poem mourning three bereavements and arguing for the consolation of immortal life after death. In the first part this chapter, Clare Bucknell considers the changing fortunes of Young’s literary reputation – and in particular the reputation of the Night Thoughts – in Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She suggests that common knowledge of Young’s efforts to advance himself socially did much to colour readings of his work during the Victorian period, but that in the years around the Great War he became something of a focus for new, non-biographical approaches to poetry.
This article examines the transformation of the trope of the renegade character in late seventeenth-and early nineteenth-century English drama, as represented by John Dryden’s Don Sebastian (1689) and its adaptation by Frederick Reynolds as The Renegade (1812). Reynolds adopts the trope of Restoration ‘cultural renegade’, or what I call ‘Restoration gone cultural revolutionary protagonist’, to reflect on the military alliance between England of George III and the Oriental Muslims in Egypt in 1801 against their common enemy, Napoleon Bonaparte. The renegade character in the plays of Dryden and Reynolds transcends religious limitations of the negative connotations of betrayal and fosters cross-cultural interactions.
Nicholas Rowe's Tamerlane (1701) dramatizes the nuanced and complex relations of England during the Glorious Revolution with the Turkish Empire, recalling William III's efforts in mediating the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 as a permanent peace between the Turks and the Holy League in order to end Louis XIV's imperial gains from the Turkish wars. Axalla's incarnation of the English ambassador, Lord Paget (1637–1713), indicates Rowe's play as a celebration of English diplomacy with the Porte. Notwithstanding modern scholars interpreting the character of Bajazet as a historical parallel with Louis XIV, it is worth noting that he also connotes Sultan Mustapha II (1664–1703), who endeavored to restore ancient Turkish conquests by fighting in the wars in person. The circulation of the trope of “the most Christian Turk” during the Glorious Revolution as a designation of Louis XIV reflects the Turkish–French military alliance against which Rowe's play stands out. Moreover, Tamerlane keeps shifting the parallel between, on the one hand, William III, as noted by Rowe, and, on the other, as a revisionist, peaceful Muslim. Tamerlane appropriates several verses that call for peace from the Qur'an, which was translated by Alexander Ross as The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1649.
In an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, William Wells Brown stated: “Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.” In these oft-cited lines, Wells Brown makes a strong claim for the absolute impossibility of representing slavery. But I wish to pause and stay with his earlier suggestion that it might just be possible to tell about slavery in a whisper. Breaking through the fastidiousness of the audience, a whisper can bring the condition of slavery close.
This article analyses the filtering of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) in the Restoration drama repertoire, showing the Restoration revision of the Shakespearean stereotypical delineation of the ‘half-moor’ Caliban in the light of Restoration England’s complex relations of admiration and trepidation with regard to the Muslim Moors and Turks. Dryden-Davenant’s The Tempest or The Enchanted Island (1667) complicates the figures of Caliban and Sycorax as Muslim Moorish friends or foes and possible subjects of Charles II’s English Tangier on the Barbary coast. Dryden-Davenant’s The Enchanted Island makes historical parallels and allusions to Charles II’s marriage to the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza and the English possession of Tangier as a part of the marriage dowry.
Aphra Behn composed two plays which dramatise Christian–Muslim encounters. Centred upon the contact zone of the Iberian peninsula and the Maghreb, Abdelazer (1676) and The False Count (1681) employ Spanish settings and draw upon a dynamic history of imaginative associations generated by real and fictional encounters with the Muslim world. The eponymous hero of Abdelazer is a dispossessed Moroccan prince who plots revenge against the usurping Spanish royal family. Behn significantly alters her source material, the Elizabethan revenge tragedy Lust’s Dominion, to emphasise Abdelazer’s regal status: his blood, after all, is “as red, and Royal as the best”. In The False Count, Behn invokes the familiar bogeyman of the Ottoman, albeit in parodic fashion. In the play’s central episode, a counterfeit “Grand Signior”, commanding a galley of entirely spurious “Turks”, comically exposes the hypocrisy and apostasy of the Christian protagonists. Spanning the five years from Exclusion Crisis to the discovery of the Popish Plot, between them these plays raise provocative questions of succession, conversion, captivity, and allegiance entirely germane to the English political scene. Reading them alongside relevant contemporary sources enables a more nuanced appreciation of their significance in the wider context of Anglo-Islamic encounters of the period.
Turning Turk looks at contact between the English and other cultures in the early modern Mediterranean, and analyzes the representation of that experience on the London stage. Vitkus's book demonstrates that the English encounter with exotic alterity, and the theatrical representations inspired by that encounter, helped to form the emergent identity of an English nation that was eagerly fantasizing about having an empire, but was still in the preliminary phase of its colonizing drive. Vitkus' research shows how plays about the multi-cultural Mediterranean participated in this process of identity formation, and how anxieties about religious conversion, foreign trade and miscegenation were crucial factors in the formation of that identity.
Shakespeare has been misread for centuries as having modern ideas about sex and gender.This book shows how in the Restoration and Eighteenth century, Shakespeare’s plays and other Renaissance texts were adapted to make them conform to these modern ideas.Through readings of Shakespearean texts, including King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello, and other Renaissance drama, the book reveals a sexual world before heterosexuality. Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality shows how revisions and criticism of Renaissance drama contributed to the emergence of heterosexuality.It also shows how changing ideas about status, adultery, friendship, and race were factors in that emergence.
This is an original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment and the religious conflicts that rocked England and its empire under the later Stuarts. In a series of vignettes that move between Europe and North Africa, William J. Bulman shows that this period witnessed not a struggle for and against new ideas and greater freedoms, but a battle between several novel schemes for civil peace. Bulman considers anew the most apparently conservative force in post-Civil War English history: the conformist leadership of the Church of England. He demonstrates that the church's historical scholarship, social science, pastoral care and political practice amounted not to a culturally backward spectacle of intolerance, but to a campaign for stability drawn from the frontiers of erudition and globalization. In seeking to sever the link between zeal and chaos, the church and its enemies were thus united in an Enlightenment project, but bitterly divided over what it meant in practice.
To understand Restoration tragedy, one must first understand what the playwrights and audiences meant by the term as well as the many diverse influences that shaped the serious drama of the later seventeenth century. The first decades of serious drama after the Restoration were characterized by visual and verbal grandeur. By the end of the 1670s, playwrights and their audiences began to question the certainties of heroic action, and, as drama became darker in tone, the grand spectacles of the early Restoration evolved into scenes of horror and destruction. Instead of horror, the tragedy of the 1680s emphasized pathos and perhaps most notably shifted its emphasis from the hero to heroine, usually a virtuous woman beleaguered and overwhelmed by sorrows. The movement towards woman-centred drama can be seen not only as the first step towards domestic drama, but as the most distinctive development in the tragedy of the later Restoration.
This chapter examines Ottoman conceptions of war and peace as influenced by the evolution of European conceptions from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, the classical period of the empire. The Ottoman conception of war and peace developed not just out of the precepts of classical Islamic teaching, but also-and perhaps more-from the evaluation of the realities of the period. The evolution of Ottoman conceptions during the classical period may accordingly be categorized into two phases: the early or foundational period from the beginning of the fourteenth to the midfifteenth century, when traditional notions of ghaza were dominant; and the period of growth from the mid-fifteenth to the late seventeenth century, when raison d'état and European ideas of statecraft became prevalent, though rhetorical lip service to the ghaza continued.
Eighteenth-century pseudo-oriental fictions were determined by a process of literary recycling involving the salvaging, subversion and recreation of oriental and pseudo-oriental material. This article focuses on the English playwright Edward Young who devised his play Busiris in 1719 by recycling the pseudo-oriental heroic drama template, by disguising propagandist discourse in fictional garb, and by salvaging ancient and modern orientalist scholarship. Though overlooked by contemporary critics, this last element of the recycling process is, I argue, fundamental to understanding the creation and reception of pseudo-oriental texts during the Enlightenment, when knowledge was disseminated across fictions and reinvented by fiction. Accordingly, the first part of this article surveys the different elements belonging to the composition of the play. It then deals with the transformation of the three intersecting elements constituting it, namely orientalist scholarship, heroic drama and Hanoverian politics. This leads to showing how the drama was caught in a cycle of novelty, one where it was revisited and reinvented by literary critics and second-hand historians
The figure of ‘Mahomet’ was widely known in early modern England. A grotesque version of the Prophet Muhammad, Mahomet was a product of vilification, caricature and misinformation placed at the centre of Christian conceptions of Islam. in Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture Matthew Dimmock draws on an eclectic range of early modern sources - literary, historical, visual - to explore the nature and use of Mahomet in a period bounded by the beginnings of print and the early Enlightenment. This fabricated figure and his spurious biography were endlessly recycled, but also challenged and vindicated, and the tales the English told about him offer new perspectives on their sense of the world - its geographies and religions, near and far - and their place within it. This book explores the role played by Mahomet in the making of Englishness, and reflects on what this might reveal about England's present circumstances.
The first translation of the Koran into English appeared in 1649, the first year of the Commonwealth. The political and religious significance of the publication was then and remains contested. In this essay, Mordechai Feingold
traces the history of the translation’s appearance, describing the personages and motivations involved with the publication and its reception. Arguing that Thomas Ross is the likeliest editor, he challenges an alternative identification of those responsible for the translation and paratexts. Feingold surveys the critical reception of the edition, which appears to have been partisan rather than principled, and concludes with a description of rival editions proposed by contemporary Arabists.
A reviewer of a production of Edward Young's tragedy, The Revenge , in 1815, wrote:
Sound morality and good manners demand that this Play should either be greatly altered, or banished from the Stage. No character of Kotzebue is either so unnatural or so dangerous as Zanga. We may pronounce him a despicable coward by the surest test of cowardice – a vindictive spirit that knows not how to pardon…. Zanga is described as brave, heroic, and noble, yet forgiveness is not in his nature. He is more contemptibly mean – more desperately wicked than Iago . He is made more an object of esteem and pity than Othello…. Why did not the author make him the victim of his own contrivances? Why did he not exemplify in the disappointment of Zanga , the sure punishment of an indiscriminate revenge? … He is a fiend that gains our respect by forcing our admiration, and he does this when the real nature of his actions qualify him rather for the gibbit than for the honourable termination of his life.
The “refinement” of Othello in the eighteenth century British theatre
- Rosenberg M.
To Robert Walpole Esq
- W Thomas
The archaeological and postcolonial transformation of the discourse of orientalism from Renaissance to Restoration drama. Doctoral dissertation Indiana University of Pennsylvania Indiana PA
- H A Alhawamdeh
By the grace of God of England Scotland France and Ireland king defender of the faith
- R James
- Iii James
A letter of resolution concerning the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation
- S Nye
Jihad in Islam: Just-war theory in the Quran and Sunnah.Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research
- J Parrot
This thing of darkness is mine: Aphra Behn's Abdelazer, or, The Moor's revenge
- Thomas S.
An account of the rise and progress of Mahometanism with the life of Mahomet: And a vindication of him and his religion from the calumnies of the Christians
- H Stubbe