The Muslim Moors in John Dryden’s plays: The Conquest of Granada (1672) and Don Sebastian (1689)

Abstract

The works of  Peele, Kyd, Marlowe, Greville, Goffe and others exhibit the growing fascination with Muslim Oriental subjects.  Many of such plays are loaded with conventional notions and Crusading themes about Islam and the East.  In the Restoration, however, English interest in the Muslim culture shifted such generally conventional representation to encounters of love-and-honor.  While the Renaissance is marked with hostility and cultural tensions between East and West, the Restoration is a time, when such hostilities between the Muslim and the Christian worlds have been much diminished.  Historically, the Ottoman decline called into question the common literary view that devised the myth of the Turkish peril.  Late seventeenth-century drama renewed a special interest in Oriental matters.  This paper throws light on two of the later historical plays of John Dryden, the Conquest of Granada (1672) and Don Sebastian (1689).  Dryden's representation of the Moors stand in sharp contrast to the dominant Restoration heroic genre.  Explore Dryden's ideological theory in regard to cultural representation, these two historical performances are quite revealing.  Dryden's stereotypical portrait of the Moorish culture and religion is seen in the dark image of the Islamic world he depicts.  His stereotypical representation of the Oriental 'Other'  also envisages the opposition between two different cultures and ways of life: one Christian and the Other Muslim.