Muhammad on the stage

Matthew Dimmock, editor
WILLIAM PERCY’S "MAHOMET AND HIS HEAVEN"
A critical edition
259pp. Ashgate. £50 (US $99.95).
978 0 754 65406 3
 
Mahomet and His Heaven (1601) has not fulfilled its author’s dying ambitions. In the 1640s, living a “melancholy and retired” life, drinking “nothing but ale”, William Percy made several manuscript copies of his play, apparently still hoping for a first public performance. Today, such an event is more unlikely than ever. All visual representations of the Prophet cause offence; a work whose concluding Act shows an infatuated Muhammad bending to clean the shoes of a contemptuous woman would provoke anger on an exceptional scale. As editor, Matthew Dimmock does make a brief case for the play’s ingenious plotting and “undeserved obscurity”, but he is clear in rejecting the case for any modern production. His principal interest lies in the play as a source for cultural history.

Percy’s work is unusual in claiming contact with the Koran and unique in its sustained dramatic depiction of the Prophet. Given the current interest in Early Modern depictions of the East, this publication will undoubtedly open new avenues of inquiry. In part, that inquiry will focus simply on the nature of anti-Islamic propaganda. Mahomet and His Heaven begins with the Prophet’s judgement on a sinful Arabia, a place he wishes to punish through a divine drought. Angels and spirits are sent to investigate, but at the end of the play they bring only corruption to Muhammad’s already dubious heavenly rule. In Act Five the Queen of the Desert, the object of the play’s numerous sexual quests, has the Prophet himself in her thrall. In common with many of his contemporaries, Percy associates the East with luxury and sexual licence; by manipulating elements in the Islamic tradition, he eventually takes those ideas to caricature the Muslim heaven itself.
The picture, however, is not quite so simple. Percy’s play is also a tragicomedy, with Muhammad as a kind of Prospero conducting symbolic masques, blessing marriages, and turning away from vengeance at the last. The vision of union at the close of Act Five brings the reconciliation of Shia and Sunni factions – a recovery from schism for which Percy, as member of a famous Catholic family, must have hoped in the Christian West. Some of the fascination of Mahomet and His Heaven lies in these interlocking religious conflicts: Christian against Muslim and Catholic against Protestant. Muhammad, dispensing judgement and forgiveness, is an object of satire for his presumption, but he is also a kind of proxy for the unifying power of Christ. That doubleness is also there in the depiction of Arabia: at one point a corrupt “Dervish” is transformed into a Christian “Fryar” simply through an authorial slip of the pen. Dimmock’s edition is good at identifying such points of contact. In a world where theatrical reference to religion was strictly controlled, the allusive safety of Islam was no doubt part of its appeal.

That relative safety, it has been noted, was not enough to help Percy’s play onto the commercial stage. We cannot even be sure that it had a private performance. Attention to staging, however, is remarkably strong. The extensive descriptions of props, costume and movement do, in part, read like the report of an actual performance (perhaps at one of the great houses of the Duke of Northumberland, William Percy’s brother). In part, they are also a rather desperate plea for the play to be taken up by the Children of St Paul’s (performers who, as Hamlet famously complains, were said to “carry it away” in 1601). One manuscript contains an introductory note to “the Master of children of Powles”, and in all cases Percy offers staging alternatives to suit the Company’s needs. Most remarkably, there is repeated attention to intonation, with the author supplying suggestions line by line:

Epimenide (Queen of the Desert):
[Hie and crowing] Et tu Brute of the Fæminine Gender?
[Low. A Flirt] Take that for you paine.

At such points Percy is nervously attuned to the differences between adult and child performance, noting, “it will be too sharpe and shrill in a boyes or womans voice I conceive”.

The play, one imagines, could have been a success at St Paul’s. Its genre, its use of song and magical spectacle, and its tinge of eroticism would all have appealed to the distinctive audience of that place. It is a pity, therefore, that Dimmock, so helpful on the religious picture, shows relatively little interest in the play as drama. His list of Dramatis Personae (inherited from the earliest manuscript) is incomplete, and many stage directions are difficult to follow because of a lack of editorial notes. Confusing spellings, such “tow” for “two”, are left uncorrected. The editor may claim fidelity to his manuscript, but in these areas the modern reader needs more help.

Matthew Dimmock’s stated aim is to recover Mahomet and His Heaven “for any consideration of early English mythologies of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad”. It is a task he performs admirably – his edition contributes to an important and growing field of scholarship. But theatre history, too, has seen significant development, and the play has much to offer on this front. Perhaps especially because it is unlikely to see production, scholarly attention to this text’s exceptional focus on performance remains a necessary task.

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Bart van Es is a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. He edited A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, published last year.