Elizabethan portrayals of Muhammad recycled medieval polemics, casting him as heretic, pervert, and monster.

Evidence

In Elizabethan England, portrayals of Prophet Muhammad often relied on medieval polemics, resulting in characterizations as a heretic and sexual pervert. In some examples from literature and drama, the Prophet took the form of a monster, a dreaded beast, or as a “Mungrell born” creature with a scalded head. As we have seen, by Shakespeare’s time, the Turk had replaced the Arab as the dominant symbol of Islam, a shift that impacted representations of Muslim characters, whether of a human or monstrous nature. In William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure, the Turk is “wicked” and “cruel,” with beastly attributes: the sultan’s “madness” is more terrifying than “a wild lioness,” and his “beastliness” “far exceeded [that of] beasts.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 276

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the medieval monster-Pope thesis from earlier chapters extending unchanged into Elizabethan-era literary formula.