Shakespeare and Islam

By Matthew Dimmock        

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS - December 27th 2015   

Without Islam there would be no Shakespeare. This may seem surprising or even controversial to those who imagine a ‘national bard’ insulated from the wider world. Such an approach is typified in the words of the celebrated historian A.L. Rowse, who wrote that when it came to creatively connecting with that world, Shakespeare, the ‘quiet countryman’, was ‘the least engaged writer there ever was’.  Yet without Tudor and Jacobean England’s rich and complex engagement with Islamic cultures the plays written by William Shakespeare would be very different, if they existed at all. This is evidently true in terms of content. Take away around 150 references to Islamic motifs in 21 plays – to Turks and Saracens, to ‘Mahomet’, Morocco and Barbary – and the corpus looks very different. Take away The Merchant of Venice and Othello, both of which foreground encounters with Islam, and two of the best known and most frequently performed of the plays are lost.  To argue that most of these references are insubstantial or irrelevant is to misunderstand the ways in which they are used. Throughout the history plays, for instance, Shakespeare embeds a rhetoric of crusade, of fighting for ‘Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field’ against ‘black pagans, Turks, and Saracens’, in order to define martial Christian valour and to demonise enemies. Alternatively, the apparently casual references to silks, taffetas, ‘bags of spices’, ‘Turkish tapestry’, and ‘Turkey cushions bossed with pearl’ that litter his drama are intended to signal a particular kind of opulence, but they simultaneously reveal England’s expanding commercial horizons as the material products of Islamic cultures were increasingly brought into English homes.

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