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

While using Annals of English Drama or the electronic database Literature Online I have often enough encountered the name of William Percy and the titles of two of his plays, The Cuckqueans and Cuckolds Errants (1601) and The Fairy Pastoral (1603), without ever having read them. Each was edited from manuscripts for the Roxburghe Club in 1824. The dates assigned above are of their likely composition. Mahomet and His Heaven, another of Percy's dramatic pieces, belongs to the same period. This is its first appearance in print. Dimmock provides an original-spelling edition with a long introduction, full textual apparatus, substantial commentary, and an impressive bibliography.

This is clearly an opportune time to resurrect a work that adds significantly to our knowledge of Early Modern English attitudes to the Islamic world. Mahomet and His Heaven is the only extant play of its era in which Muhammad is among the dramatis personae, and here he is central. In Robert Greene's Alphonsus, King of Aragon the Prophet speaks through a 'brazen head' but remains unseen. Moreover Percy's play seems unique in showing detailed knowledge of Latin translations of the Qu'rān, which is opened on stage. So far as its subject matter is concerned, Mahomet and His Heaven was highly original, not to say daring. Dimmock's account of Christian-Muslim interaction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is copiously and meticulously documented and very informative. He ably guides us through the complexities of the historical record.

I have used the phrase 'on stage', but it is unclear whether Mahomet and His Heaven or any of Percy's other five plays were ever given public performances. William Percy (1570–1648) was the third son of the eighth Earl of Northumberland and Katherine Nevill and it seems probable that his plays were recited or acted privately in great houses, such as Syon or Petworth. Yet one manuscript is dedicated to 'the children of the Reuells and of Poules' and Mahomet and His Heaven includes such stage directions as 'He held him by the Bearde, or clawd him by the face if for Poules'. The past tense is presumably due to the lapse of time between original composition (1601) and preparation of the specific manuscript (1644), but Percy appears merely to be describing the business he envisaged when writing the play. The child actors of Paul's were naturally beardless, but the boy personating Mahomet, who is being constrained by Gabriel, would surely have worn a false one, and the Prophet protests: 'Let goe thy hold, I say' (1.1.43). The play is replete with instructions for characterization, costuming, properties, and actions, which would bear more discussion than Dimmock attempts.

Like The Fairy Pastoral and The Cuckqueans, Mahomet and His Heaven had several alternative titles and exists, alongside other Percy playscripts, in three folio holographs, two in the Alnwick Castle Library in Northumberland and one in the Huntington Library, California. But since the holographs were made decades after initial composition, the play's textual history is obscure. Dimmock gives reasons for basing his edition on Alnwick 508, but his prime interests are not those of the textual critic.

The play was given a reading at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London in 2005, and, in Dimmock's view, proved 'eminently performable' (p. 56), though the Islamic prohibition against personating the Prophet precludes full theatrical performance within the foreseeable future. Besides, the dialogue strikes me as exceptionally crude. Percy's blank verse makes that of even the least talented Elizabethan and Jacobean professional playwrights seem relatively competent. There are scores of lines in which the iambic beat is lost. Dimmock (p. 1) cites George F. Reynolds' assertion that 'the literary value of Percy's plays is nil', and I have to agree. But Dimmock's edition of Mahomet and His Heaven can be welcomed. As he says, the play's significance lies...