Staging the Tories' Islamic Jihad against George I and the Whigs in Edward Young's The Revenge

Abstract

This article analyzes Edward Young's nuanced employment of Islam and appropriation of the Qur'an, first translated into English as The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1649, to attack allegorically the Tories' aspirations to support James Francis Edward Stuart (1701–1766), who was nicknamed “the Old Pretender” by the Whigs and James III by the Tories, to restore Catholicism/Islam into Hanoverian England. Edward Young's The Revenge (1721), which adapts Shakespeare's Othello (1604), dramatizes the Moor Zanga, who is of royal Moorish descent and the captive of the Spanish general Don Alonzo, performing Jihad on himself in revenge for the slaughter of his father king and nation by Alonzo/George I. The character of the Muslim Zanga embodies two levels of materialization and refashioning from the Whigs' perspective: Firstly, he connotes George I's Turkish servants, Mahomet and Mustapha, who signify the Hanoverian king's power and dominance over the Turks. Secondly, he draws a parallel to the Old Pretender's and the Tories' rebellions of 1715 and 1719 within a Jihadist and Qur'anic framework, serving as a political allegory of the Tories' attempts to dethrone George I.