William Percy's Mahomet and His Heaven : A Critical Edition (review)

Few readers will be familiar with William Percy's Mahomet and His Heaven, here formally published for the first time. The play is better known as Arabia Sitiens, or A Dream of a Dry Year (1601). Dimmock opts for an alternative title of a serially revised work to foreground its distinctive content: this is "the only play extant that flaunts its Qu'r|$$|Amanic source" (1) and impersonates Muhammad. These distinctions, and the unusually detailed stage directions, stir interest in a blindingly tedious fiction thick with incidental characters, five pairs of whom move typically from quarrels to concord on disparate errands in two regions: Arabia (a target of anti-Muslim satire, sometimes a figure for England) and a farcical parody of the Islamic heaven. Willingly or not, Dimmock's study tests the esthetic dilemma inherent to cultural criticism: what does it matter that a play mined for allusions and ideological constructions lacks the emotional density and engaging rhetoric of viable drama? In this case it matters, if only because the play's circulation was negligible. Dimmock notes late in the introduction that the text was probably never staged. The revelation diminishes the prior claim that "the placing of Mahomet on the stage" (30) makes Mahomet uniquely important: it did not, after all, violate taboos about the visible representation of holy persons. It took place in the mind.

The Qu'rānic germ of the plot, a passage on the world's receipt of magic, was elaborated into a Muslim myth of two angels sent by God to undergo temptation and judge humans. Percy develops the tale in the spirit of "medieval anti-Muslim refutation that depends upon exposing absurdity and comedy at the heart of Islamic theology" (22). His Mahomet, troubled by Arabia's sins, swears to exterminate its people by drought but, stayed by angels, sends two down to reappraise things. Upon meeting the long virginal, lust-provoking, shrewish Epimenide, "Empresse of the Deserts" (60) and already wooed by two pastors and a mage, Maroth and Haroth disclose their divinity and, promised sex, the prayer that returns them to heaven, whereupon she recites it and whirls off. In heaven, she cuffs Mahomet on the ear and is imprisoned; still moved by her beauty, he recalls her and finds himself, after wiping her shoe, invited to "kiss my cul" (141), and he rages at her. Following the ex machina arrival and submission of Haly, the son-in-law whose innovations divided the Sunni from the Shia, Mahomet banishes Epimenide, Maroth, and Haroth to the moon; he concludes with punishments and blessings, including the marriage of two couples, for the others who plagiarized the prayer or were haled to heaven. Though ridiculous in some earlier moments, Mahomet assumes an antichrist-like gravity in the judgment scene.

Dimmock prioritizes the Islamic over the more available domestic associations of the play. He notes but declines to develop intriguing questions of its performativity — it is variously suited to production by Paul's Boys or professional actors, an aristocratic family, and declamatory reading as closet drama; it caters to Catholic nostalgia over the Corpus Christi cycles — in favor of the text's genealogical links to an impressive array of medieval and early modern discourses on Islam. He marks yet does not elaborate parallels between Elizabeth and the irresistible, impossible Epimenide — a rich vein given the troubles of the Percies, Catholic sympathizers and friends of Essex, under her rule. One would have welcomed a more comprehensive appraisal of William Percy's investment as a playwright. He is variously described as a man "competing in the public marketplace" (7) and a gentleman composing "for a specific audience . . . (probably a family entertainment)" (30).

The book's relative reticence on domestic and theatrical matters is counterpoised by extensive quotation from numerous primary sources on Islam. Dimmock's archival work is impressive, his facility at finding and downloading the pertinent...