Matthew Dimmock - William Percys Mahomet and His Heaven

William Percys Mahomet and His Heaven is an enigma. Its origins are uncertain, its textual history confused, its status as legitimate playtext doubted, its literary merit consistently denied.1 Written by an apparently dissolute minor noble on the outer fringes of Oxford and London literary culture, it has proved easy to dismiss as an interesting but anomalous curiosity. As a consequence, the play remains largely unknown to all but a handful of specialists. While I hope that this edition, alongside other recent and forthcoming work, may go some way to rescue Percy and his text from an undeserved obscurity, this is not its primary purpose. From my first encounter with a microfilm copy at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford, I have been acutely conscious of the plays importance for any consideration of early English mythologies of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, particularly as they were dramatised in the playhouse. In the wake of a recent re-evaluation of Christian/Muslim interaction that has questioned traditional assumptions about this crucial historical period, Mahomet and His Heaven can no longer be ignored.2

For it is a remarkable play, even when measured against the vast and varied corpus of early modern responses to Islam and the Ottoman turke. It is the only play extant that flaunts its Qurnic source, for while numerous dramatic references to the Qurn exist, few other playwrights took the controversial step of having it opened on stage or demonstrating knowledge of its contents.3 For most the Alcaron exists as a symbol of Muslim faith, a prop to assist conversion, a perversion to be purged by fire; for Percy it is a subject of study, a silk-bound and bejewelled indicator of status, a means to effect religious reconciliation. Mahomet and His Heaven is also the only early modern play extant to personify Muhammad, a potentially sacrilegious act then as now (although for very different reasons). Robert Greene, in his play Alphonsus of Arragon (158991?) offered a dramatic vision of the Prophet speaking to his idolatrous acolytes through a brazen head that exhaled flakes of fire (IV.i.29), a conscious return to the anti-Muslim polemic of the Middle Ages.4 While inevitably participating in this mythology, formed from centuries of propagandist accretion, Percys Mahomet is the product of a considerably more sophisticated engagement with the available source material and an insight into the rapidly changing circumstances of the early seventeenth century.5

In these terms, Mahomet and His Heaven also emphatically confirms the absence of any single and absolute notion of Islam or the Muslim that defined the views of English or Christian culture as a whole. Early English conceptions of religious difference can only be understood in terms of the ideological fractures prompted by religious reform the process of Reformation that continued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.6 A renegotiation of the theological position of the Saracen had played a central role in earlier Christian division, and indeed was similarly pivotal to Martin Luthers understanding of the true believer and his church, and to the debates concerning reform in England between Thomas More and William Tyndale.7 Such perceptions of Islam were augmented by some early travel accounts (such as those of the fictional John Mandeville and Marco Polo), but remained primarily informed by a body of literature produced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, most prominently the Cluniac corpus, initiated by Peter of Cluny (known as the Venerable) and incorporating the first translation of the Qurn into Latin, Robert of Kettons