Matthew Birchwood's monograph joins a large body of work that has emerged over the past decade on representations of Islam in early modern English drama and culture. It also addresses a notable gap in this scholarship—the period of the English Revolution and Restoration between 1640 and 1685. Birchwood's study not only fills this gap with solidly researched historical and dramatic analysis but convincingly demonstrates how writers of this period engaged the “Turk” in ways that were distinct and dynamic. In short, Birchwood demonstrates how dramatic depictions of the Islamic East were reinvigorated in the mid-seventeenth century to address the particularly turbulent domestic politics of that period. More specifically, his study traces the shifting ways in which English dramatists appropriated Ottoman history, Islam, and the figure of the “Turk” to process and critique Royalist-Parliamentary conflict, the regicide of Charles I, Cromwell's government, and the Restoration.

As the plays reveal, “Turks” stood in for both Parliamentary and Royalist figures, and the nature of this identification was never clear-cut. Birchwood maintains throughout his study that English drama in the wake of the Civil War was highly politicized and reflective of multiple and contradictory positions, while English representations of Islam were particularly ripe for appropriation into a framework of domestic politics because of their own extreme ideological flexibility.

Establishing a historical topography of English and Ottoman cultural encounters, the first chapter identifies crucial developments in trade and diplomacy, Ottoman expansion, and European-Ottoman relations. Given its broad scope, the chapter is filled with useful information but remains mostly suggestive in its attempts to draw clear connections between events such as the regicides of Sultan Osman II and Charles I and the publication in 1649 of the first English translation of the Qur’an. The following chapter more specifically addresses the translation of the Qur’an as an important backdrop to the anonymous pamphlet play The Famous Tragedy of King Charles I (1649). It illustrates how the play engages the conflict between Republicanism and Royalism in the wake of Charles I's execution and employs rhetoric about the “Turk” to mediate this conflict.

One of the main strengths of Birchwood's study is its illumination of the sophistication and complexity of the plays and its refusal to reduce any of the plays to a “consistent expression of a single, identifiable political credo” (82). In chapter 3, Birchwood compares two dramatic adaptations of a source detailing Ottoman-Persian conflict: John Denham's The Sopy (performed ca. 1641) and Robert Baron's Mirza (published 1655). Focusing mostly on Mirza, Birchwood demonstrates how this play's closer “adherence to its Persian subject matter repeatedly undermines its ostensible loyalism” (75). Thus, he reveals how Baron performs a complex negotiation of his source and of Denham's earlier play in order to produce a subtle critique of Charles I.

Sustained throughout the study is an attention to how English playwrights negotiated their own political positions in relation to the “hostile conditions of religious censure and government censorship” that attended the period (53). Chapter 4 provides an excellent analysis of William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1663). Birchwood argues that this first legitimate production since the closure of the theaters in 1642 echoes the crisis of allegiance provoked by the Civil War as well as responds to both “the exigencies of a reformed stage and the playwright's own expediently transformed” political allegiances (103). Particularly insightful are his analyses of the play's heroine and his discussion of the play's sequel and its performance and publication histories.

The final two chapters address developments of the post-Restoration period and anxieties relating to succession and Charles II's Catholic ties. Chapter 5 contains illuminating readings of Roger Boyle's Mustapha (1665), Elkanah Settle's Cambyses King of Persia (1667), and writings by Paul Rycaut and Henry Stubbe. The final chapter discusses Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673) and Ibrahim the Illustrious Bassa (1676), Henry Neville Payne's Siege of Constantinople (1674), and the anonymously authored News from Vienna (1683). As in previous chapters, Birchwood's readings of these texts attend to their ambivalent, often indeterminate political positions; in addition, he identifies a growing trend toward cultural relativism in these authors’ depictions of Eastern figures.

Birchwood's study brings rigorous historical analysis to a group of plays that have received far less attention than their Elizabethan and Jacobean counterparts. He also draws upon a rich array of underexamined primary sources (listed in a separate bibliography). Building upon previous work by Nabil Matar and Daniel Vitkus, Birchwood insists on the multivalent signification of Islam by showing how it never functions as a simple screen in the English drama. However, in the end, his book is much more about England than it is about Turks, or even about English views of the “Turk.” While their presence is never a stable sign, Turks always function as screens or foils for English domestic politics. In a succinct but powerful conclusion, Birchwood sums up his thesis that representations of the East not only provided “an ideological context and apparatus” for addressing English politics, “but by the same token, those ideas were themselves transformed in the process of assimilation” (186). It is the second part of this argument that receives less explicit attention than the first and at the same time seems to be summed up too easily as a trend toward increasing cultural relativism. But this is less of a criticism of Birchwood's study than an acknowledgment that one study simply cannot do everything and that more work remains to be done with this fascinating set of materials.