“Puritan Mahumetans”: Reading Anglo-Muslim Contexts in Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer and The False Count

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.