The Restoration Muslim Tangerines Caliban and Sycorax in Dryden-Davenant’s Adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Abstract

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.

Staging the Tories' Islamic Jihad against George I and the Whigs in Edward Young's The Revenge

“… 3 3 McJannet, tracing the theatrical adaptations of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great (1587), explains that: “While Timūr and Bayazid were larger than life and sometimes demonized in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they were domesticated during the Restoration and eighteenth century, only to be re‐vilified and reduced to parody in the nineteenth” (McJannet, 2016, 32). For instance, Alhawamdeh analyzes the characters of the Tangerines Caliban and Sycorax in Dryden‐Davenant's The Tempest or The Enchanted Island (1667), which adapts Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611), as “Muslim Moorish friends or foes and possible subjects of Charles II's English Tangier on the Barbary coast” (Alhawamdeh, 2021, 121). …”

The staging of William III's politics of peace with the Turks andThe Alcoran of Mahometin Nicholas Rowe'sTamerlane

“…3 For an example of Restoration dramatists' representation of Muslims as friends or foes, Hussein A. Alhawamdeh analyzes the drama of John Dryden and other Restoration dramatists in the light of the evolution of the discourse of "cultural renegade" or what he calls "Restoration Gone Cultural Revolutionary Protagonist" (Alhawamdeh, 2011, 1;Alhawamdeh, 2021). 4 Stubbe and many Unitarians looked at Islam as a continuation of the old teachings of Christianity.…”