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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.

Parts 1 and 2 of the Arab Jordanian series Rās Ghlaiṣ (‘The head of Ghlaiṣ’) (2006–08), written by Jordanian screenwriter Muṣṭafā Ṣāliḥ and directed by Aḥmad D‘aibis and Sha‘lān al-Dabbās, share three ‘common denominators’, in Haun Saussy’s terminology, with Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2 (1587): (1) the shepherd character as a monstrous despot, (2) pastoral love of the shepherds and (3) the mobilization of nations/tribes to take revenge against Tamburlaine/Ghlaiṣ. Ṣāliḥ’s delineation of the nomadic hero Ghlaiṣ is similar to the Marlovian model of Tamburlaine in a time of war and love. Ghlaiṣ, as an Arab Jordanian Tamburlaine, seeks in a Machiavellian manner an ultimate rule and control over all nomadic tribes in the Jordanian desert and behaves as a monstrous lover. This article takes two pieces of literature from two different cultures as an example of the adaptability of screen narrative to the scope of comparative literature and appropriation studies, showing simultaneously the experience of Jordanian screenwriters as one example of what Craig Batty calls the ‘screenwriting turn’ (2014: 1). Both Marlowe and Ṣāliḥ dramatize the shepherd despots to warn against the threat of colonial and imperial ambitions and models.

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