The staging of Islam and The Alcoran of Mahomet in Charles Saunders’s Tamerlane the Great and the Restoration politics

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.