Representing the Unrepresentable: Portraying Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, on the Victorian Stage

As many of you know, I'm writing a PhD thesis at the University of Leicester on (broadly speaking) representations of Islam in Victorian drama. I'm focusing on one play in particular, Hall Caine's Mahomet, which was written for Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre but never produced. (You'll see why if you continue reading.) That's Caine at left, c. 1898, in a portrait by R. E. Morrison.

Because several Peeper readers have expressed an interest in my scholarly work, I thought I would share with you an essay on the play that was first published by Ashgate Publishing in Henry Irving: A Re-Evaluation of the Pre-Eminent Victorian Actor-Manager (2005), a collection edited by Richard Foulkes, my supervisor at Leicester. The essay is based on my discovery of the play in the archives of Manx National Heritage in Douglas and a revised and expanded version of it will form the basis of one chapter of my thesis. Please note that the essay reprinted below is copyrighted material. I have left out the extensive footnotes that accompany the printed essay for ease of reading in this blog format; if you're interested, you can consult them in Professor Foulkes's book or contact me by email (tetenskr@msu.edu) and I'd be happy to send them to you.

In addition to being an important and interesting dramatic work in its own right and a touchstone to the literary and theatrical tastes of its day, Mahomet illustrates a shift that was taking place during the late-Victorian period in the Western perception of Islam. The play rejected the common view of Islam as a heresy and Muhammad as an impostor and charlatan in favour of an understanding of Islam as an authentic, divinely inspired religion and its leader as a man of sincerity and piety. It is the only nineteenth-century play—and one of only a few creative works in any medium of the period—that attempted to show a fully rounded and largely sympathetic portrait of Muhammad to non-Muslim audiences. It is an important example of what the historian John M. MacKenzie, taking issue with arguments made by Edward Said, has called the “endlessly protean” Orientalism of the late nineteenth century: written by one who repeatedly sought inspiration and rejuvenation through travel and contact with Arab cultural traditions, Mahomet is a work of admiration, not vilification.

Yet for reasons that will be familiar to those aware of recent examples of Islamic iconoclasm (for example, the controversy over cartoons printed in a Danish newspaper in 2005, the furore created by a production of Mozart's opera Idomeneo in Berlin in 2006), Mahomet was never produced. A few months after Caine began work on the play, rumours of the impending production appeared in English and Indian newspapers, leading to a firestorm of protest by Muslims in Britain and British India. Like their contemporary co-religionists, certain sections of the Empire’s 80 million Muslims objected strenuously to the physical impersonation of their prophet. The Lord Chamberlain, as licenser of plays, recognized the political exigencies involved, and out of a desire not to arouse Muslim animosity toward the Queen and her government in India, as well as a desire not to upset the precarious geopolitical alliances that Britain had crafted with other Muslim powers, he ordered Irving to drop his plans to produce Mahomet, to its author’s deep and lasting disappointment. 

Hall Caine's Mahomet could not be produced today for much the same reason it could not be produced in 1890. It is, rather, a unique document of nineteenth-century theatrical history that deserves scholarly attention precisely because it is unlikely ever to be seen on stage. One of my goals is to recover the play for future considerations of late-Victorian representations of Islam. 

I invite Peeper readers with a special interest or expertise in nineteenth-century British Islam to get in touch with me.

The Lyceum and the Lord Chamberlain: The Case of Hall Caine's "Mahomet" ~ By Kristan Tetens

Bram Stoker notes in his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving that Irving had long wanted to produce a play based on the life of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. The explorer Sir Richard Burton had been among the first to suggest an ‘Eastern’ topic to Irving; at a supper party in London in September 1886 he told his friend how much might be done with a play taken from some story, or group of stories, in the Arabian Nights, an unexpurgated translation of which Burton had published the year before. ‘Burton had a most vivid way of putting things—especially of the East,’ Stoker recalled. ‘Burton knew the East…its romances; its beauty; its horrors. Irving grew fired as the night wore on, and it became evident that he had it in his mind from that time to produce some such play as [Burton] suggested, should occasion serve.’

Irving had caught a glimpse of the East in 1879 during a cruise taken with his patroness, the Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, which included Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and the eastern Mediterranean from Turkey to Egypt. This voyage is often credited with providing Irving with his conception of Shylock, thought to be based on his observations of Levantine Jews, but it also provided him with first-hand knowledge of Islamic cultures. When a new play on the life of Muhammad was published in Paris by Henri de Bornier and accepted for production by the Comédie-Française in 1888, an English production on the topic seemed timely. Irving obtained a copy of de Bornier’s five-act verse drama, which was called Mahomet, had it translated into English, and asked the novelist and playwright Hall Caine to revise it for production at the Lyceum.

Irving first met Caine in Liverpool in the summer of 1874 while on tour under the management of Hezekiah Bateman and his wife, Sidney. The actor’s performances thrilled Caine, who was then just 21 years old and working as a draughtsman in a firm of Liverpool builders while he tried to launch a literary career. Later that year, when Caine was preparing the first issue of a new monthly magazine, he contacted Irving to request a photograph that could be used to illustrate an essay on the actor’s influence on the contemporary theatre. Irving, touched by the young man’s interest and well aware of the benefits of being on good terms with up-and-coming writers, complied and then invited him to the London premiere of Hamlet on 31 October, which Caine attended in his capacity as theatrical critic for the Liverpool Town Crier. His enthusiastic review of the production, with Irving as Hamlet and Isabel Bateman as Ophelia, was reprinted and distributed widely as a broadsheet pamphlet. Caine followed this with a number of lectures and essays on Irving’s art.

‘Caine seemed to intuitively understand not only Irving’s work but his aim and method,’ Stoker later wrote. ‘Irving felt this and had a high opinion of Caine’s powers. I do not know any one whose opinions interested him more.’ In 1876, when Edward Aveling claimed to be Irving’s brother, prompting Aveling’s Nonconformist minister father to rage against the theatre and all those associated with it, Caine wrote a rebuttal at Irving’s behest that was published in the Liverpool Argus, a service that earned him the actor’s lasting gratitude. In September 1878, at Caine’s invitation, Irving presided at a meeting of the Liverpool Notes and Queries Society. Three months later, on 30 December, Caine attended one of the most brilliant nights in British theatrical history: Irving’s first performance at the Lyceum under his own management, when he presented a new production of Hamlet with Ellen Terry as Ophelia. It was at this time that Caine met Stoker, Irving’s business manager, who was to become one of his closest friends. In 1881, Caine left Liverpool and moved to London to serve as amanuensis to the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossett. After Rossetti’s death in 1882, Caine turned his attention to writing fiction. He was by this time on friendly terms with the leaders of London’s literary and artistic circles and a regular at Irving’s Beefsteak Room gatherings at the Lyceum.

The actor had hoped to produce a play based on Caine’s third book, The Deemster, a novel of Manx life published in 1887, but discovered when he returned in April 1888 from his third American tour that the stage rights had been bought by Wilson Barrett. From that time, according to Stoker, Irving ‘had a strong desire that Caine should write some play that he could act.’ The actor repeatedly suggested subjects, themes, and characters; Caine spent considerable time and energy ‘in an effort to fit Irving with a part, and the pigeon-holes of my study are still heavy with sketches and drafts and scenarios of dramas which either he or I or our constant friend and colleague Bram Stoker (to whose loyal comradeship we both owed so much), thought possible for the Lyceum Theatre.’ Many of the ideas discussed had weird or supernaturally tinged religious themes. Two of them, the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman, featured a main character that is made to wander the face of the earth until Judgment Day, by land and sea, respectively, after spurning or challenging God. In another, the Demon Lover, based on an old Scottish ballad, the main character is the Devil disguised as a sailor who lures the wife of another man to her death. Yet ‘in spite of the utmost sincerity on both sides,’ according to Caine, these efforts came to nothing.

By 1889, when the idea of a Lyceum Mahomet arose, Caine was enjoying a growing reputation as a novelist and playwright. He had found popular success with the novel and stage versions of The Deemster. His fourth novel, The Bondman, appeared in serial form between June and November and would become an instant bestseller upon its publication as a book in January 1890. A new play, Good Old Times, had been produced by Barrett at the Princess’s Theatre in February. Thus, when Irving brought to his rooms one day a typewritten translation of De Bornier’s Mahomet, Caine was a rising man of letters with some experience in writing for the stage. Of De Bornier’s play Irving told him, ‘It’s not right, but it’s the right subject. See if you can do it over again.’ Perhaps to inspire Caine, the actor lent him several volumes of Burton’s Arabian Nights, which included copious annotations on Muslim manners and customs.

On 29 November 1889, Caine sent his initial thoughts on De Bornier’s play to Irving. ‘I have read Mahomet, and am profoundly impressed by the potentialities of the subject, but deeply disappointed with the play as a creation,’ he said. Caine found the first, second, and third acts ‘quite valueless.’ The fourth and fifth acts, however, he thought were (or could be) ‘as fine & stirring as anything in drama. The scene of Mahomet’s return after saving the life of the lover of his wife is really thrilling. But it could be enormously heightened … the catastrophe ought to be fine, & yet it is not. You want the thing worked up to from the opening lines.’ Despite the inadequacies of the French play, Caine urged Irving not to reject it until they had an opportunity to discuss it further. ‘The subject is too fine, the atmosphere too rich & new to be lightly set aside. But the changes (as you thought) would have to be very great. Indeed the whole fabric ought to be built up again.’ Caine was already thinking of ways in which that might be done: ‘I have one leading idea, which stirs my blood to think of,’ he wrote. ‘It centres in the Jewish mistress, who is completely thrown away in this play. I see a very stirring & picturesque first act, too.’  Caine asked Irving if he thought De Bornier would permit him to use the subject as well as all of the fourth act and half of the fifth act, but otherwise to rewrite the play.

The following month, Caine wrote to Irving again. ‘I have thought much on Mahomet, & the subject grows larger & yet more impressive. There is a great play in it.’ Caine regretted that De Bornier had been the first in the field with a new treatment of the subject. While he and Irving waited to hear whether the playwright would allow extensive changes to be made to the play, Caine told the actor he had developed an alternative plan in case such permission were denied. Muhammad would be dropped as the play’s central character. ‘I would call it The Prophet & the scene only would be similar. In all other particulars the play would be different.’ In a postscript, and perhaps in response to a request that he not discuss his work on the play with others, Caine assured Irving that he had not mentioned Mahomet to anyone except Stoker.

By the beginning of 1890, Caine had discarded De Bornier’s play as a starting point and instead was preparing an original scenario for Irving’s consideration. In the late afternoon of 26 January he presented his idea of the play to Stoker and his wife, Florence, at their Chelsea home, where Caine was staying. ‘His image rises now before me,’ Stoker recalled: 

'He sits on a low chair in front of the fire; his face is pale something waxen-looking ... His red hair, fine and long, and pushed back from his high forehead, is so thin that through it as the flames leap we can see the white line of the head so like to Shakespeare’s. He is himself all aflame. His hands have a natural eloquence—something like Irving’s; they foretell and emphasise the coming thoughts. His large eyes shine like jewels as the firelight flashes … As he goes on he gets more and more afire till at last he is like a living flame. We sit quite still; we fear to interrupt him. The end of his story leaves us fired and exalted too.'

The next day the two men went to see Irving in his office at the Lyceum. Caine told him the story of the play, which Irving enthusiastically approved. Caine set to work. In March he spent three weeks in Morocco to gather details of Muslim life for the play and for a new novel. In April, a surprise: the French government announced that it was halting the Comédie-Française production of De Bornier’s play. The public was told that because the production of the play would create serious diplomatic difficulties, the Council of Ministers had decided that it could not be produced by a state-supported theatre like the Comédie-Française. This decision had been prompted in part by the intervention of Abdülhamid II, the Ottoman sultan, who perceived in the play an insult to Muslim traditions (particularly Sunni traditions) of aniconism, which hold that the representation or impersonation of the prophet is a form of idol worship prohibited by the Qur’an and several hadith.

To a modern reader, De Bornier’s play is breathtakingly arrogant in its treatment of Islam. It is, in part, a duel between Islam and Christianity, with Christianity triumphant at the end as the character of Muhammad, declaring that Jesus was the greater prophet, commits suicide by drinking poison so that his unfaithful wife can be reunited with her lover. Caine, who had been wise to drop the play as a model, called its plot ‘false to history, untrue to character, Western in thought, and Parisian in sentiment.’ The Spectator, however, one of several English journals that followed the affair, wondered what all the fuss was about. Noting that the play would be very effective on the stage, it attributed the play’s suppression to the French government’s dislike of nobility—De Bornier was a viscount—and its anti-Christian bias. Little did anyone know that the elements for a similar showdown between government authority and dramatic art were coming together at Irving’s theatre in Wellington Street.

With Paris in a frenzy over the banning of De Bornier’s play, Caine quietly continued work on his own version of the prophet’s story, which would centre on Muhammad’s flight from Mecca (the Hijra of 622 CE) and his triumphant return there from Medina some years later. On 17 May, Caine wrote to Irving to tell him that he had completed the first three acts of Mahomet. ‘They seem to me to justify our expectations of the subject. They possess me. I can scarcely put my hand to anything else.’ He worried that Ellen Terry would be unhappy with her part and asked Irving to reassure her that he would soften ‘the one act of great treachery which she would have to do’ with additional passages of pathos and also that the final two acts would show the noble and contrite aspect of her character: ‘You will see that acting on your hint I have given her one pretty, playful scene (with the boy) … if I could at some time have a chat with her I might much enhance the charm of it.’ Caine noted that he had added a situation for her at the end of the third act that seemed to him to ‘afford scope for acting such as hardly anything in modern drama … I must not weaken the effect of it by saying in advance what it is. What I’ve said already will sound vain enough, but the subject possesses me, & you will forgive the vanity.’ Caine seemed even more pleased with the character of Muhammad. ‘The prophet himself I must leave you to judge of. I love him.’ Caine cited the character’s nobility, simplicity, unselfishness, wisdom, humour, and passion. ‘Naturally he is least operative in the 3rd Act, where he is the victim of a base plot, & only when in the 4th & 5th Acts the evil is laid bare before him will all his greatness appear,’ Caine told Irving. ‘But I have no doubt of him even in the 3rd Act, & in the 1st & 2nd he is without equal.’ Caine sent his handwritten manuscript to Stoker for typing and asked for a meeting with Irving after he had had an opportunity to review the partially completed play. 

The tenor of this exchange between author and actor was typical of their relationship. ‘There was to both men a natural expression of intellectual frankness, as if they held the purpose as well as the facts of ideas in common,’ Stoker recalled later. ‘The two men were very much alike in certain intellectual ways. To both was given an almost abnormal faculty of self-abstraction and of concentrating all their powers on a given subject for any length of time. To both was illimitable patience in the doing of their work.’ Stoker noted that the two men also shared ‘a faculty of getting up and ultimately applying to the work in hand an amazing amount of information.'

On 31 May Irving and Terry completed their twelfth Lyceum season, which had featured The Dead Heart, The Bells, Louis XI, and Olivia. Beginning on 3 June they toured the provinces for nearly a month, giving readings from Macbeth. Irving then played The Bells and Louis XI for two weeks at the Grand Theatre, Islington. After that Irving and Terry went their separate ways on vacation, reuniting in Winchelsea before returning to London to prepare for the new season, which would include Herman Merivale’s Ravenswood, an adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor.

While Irving was away from London, rumours that he intended to portray the prophet of Islam began to spread. 'The very fact of approaching De Bornier regarding his play had somehow leaked out,' Stoker recalled. On 20 June a brief item in the French Journal des débats asserted that De Bornier’s Mahomet had inspired the English production. Although this was true, a longer paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette one week later went to great lengths to clarify the connection: ‘We are in a position to state that, though Mr. Irving had never the very slightest intention of producing M. Henri de Bornier’s play at the Lyceum, or any play founded upon it, he bought the English rights of it, partly as an act of courtesy, and partly to hold control of the subject.’ The paper noted that Irving had commissioned an Eastern play from a well-known English novelist and dramatist: ‘This play, which is not in any sense whatever an adaptation of M. de Bornier’s play, but an entirely original work, in all its essentials quite different, is now nearly written and ready, and report speaks of it in very warm terms."

Such highly detailed information could only have come from someone intimately involved with the planned production; almost certainly it was provided by Caine himself, who throughout his career was known for his brazen self-promotion, or by one of his literary friends on his behalf. It could also have come from Stoker. If the goal had been to distance the Lyceum production from the banned French play, it was an ill-conceived strategy that backfired terribly, serving only to bring Irving’s plans to the notice of Muslim communities at home and abroad.
 
The play -- in four acts, not five, as Caine had told Irving in May -- does in fact owe little to De Bornier. It begins in Mecca just before the return of Mahomet -- 'this son of the desert, this man of the book, this brand new Prophet’ -- from the Jabal al-Nour mountain. Among those waiting for him is Rachel, a Jewess, who has persuaded her lover, Omar, to kill Mahomet in revenge for the murder of her father. When Mahomet arrives in the city (he is described as ‘a man of forty years, bare-headed, his hood fallen back, dressed in the pilgrim’s garb of sheepskin, and walking with a staff’), he proclaims that his doctrine is ‘to worship one God and to serve no false gods.’ When the jeering crowd threatens him, Rachel takes him into her house and later lulls him to sleep with a song and a slow 'Egyptian' dance. Omar raises a knife to kill Mahomet, but his courage fails and instead he provides the prophet with a password that will allow him to escape enemies waiting outside. 

As Act II begins, Mahomet and his followers, including Omar, approach Medina after several days on the open desert. ‘Twelve midnights past [Islam] was driven out of Mecca in disgrace, with derision, before the assassin’s knife,’ says Mahomet, ‘yet the day is coming when it will return in honour, with triumph and before bended knees.’ Rachel arrives and tells Mahomet that she wishes to join him. Privately Rachel tells Omar that her conversion was insincere and that she has come to be with him, not with Mahomet. Omar, dismayed at her duplicity, tells her to return to Mecca but she refuses. He begins to tell Mahomet of Rachel’s involvement in the plot to murder him in Mecca, but Mahomet refuses to listen.  

Act III takes place in Medina two years later. Mahomet, now married to Rachel, has brought peace and order to the city. He sends a mission to the leaders of Mecca, demanding that they adopt Islam. When they refuse, Mahomet vows that Mecca will fall. Rachel learns of Mahomet's plans and plays at marching into Mecca with Mahomet's young grandson, using fans for swords (this is the ‘one pretty, playful scene [with the boy]’ that Caine added for Terry and described to Irving in May 1890.) Rachel sees her chance for revenge at last. She persuades Mahomet to lead the advance party into Mecca and then writes a letter to the city's leaders, warning them of the impending attack. As Mahomet addresses the people of Medina from the minbar of the mosque, he decides that Omar will lead the advance party instead. Rachel, still in love with Omar, falls to the ground with a scream.  

The final act begins with Mahomet and his followers encamped at night on the plain outside Mecca. A messenger brings the news that the advance party has been captured. Rachel confesses her treachery to Mahomet, who now suspects she is having an adulterous relationship with Omar. Intending to kill Omar, Mahomet arranges to have him returned to the camp. Omar denies Mahomet's charges of adultery and tells him that he gladly led the advance party, knowing that it would save the prophet's life at the probable cost of his own. Mahomet begs Omar's forgiveness. In Mecca, the jailer in charge of Mahomet's imprisoned advance party is ordered to find 4,000 Bedouins to attack Mahomet's camp; instead, he arranges to open the city gates to Mahomet, who enters Mecca peacefully and forgives those who had prosecuted him. He announces that he will return to the desert to rest and pray: ‘The faith of Islam is founded, its empire begun … Mahomet’s task is finished, his life’s work is done.’ He then turns to the crowd: ‘Farewell, everyone who has followed me in hunger and thirst and the want of all things. I must leave you now. But God has been more merciful to me than to Moses, for he has suffered me to see the day of my people’s glory. The face of Allah shine on you forever! He rides upon the heavens; his excellence is in the sky. Truth has come and falsehood has fled before the sword. The night is gone, and look, the day has dawned! Farewell! Farewell!’ At the very moment the sun rises over the horizon, Mahomet climbs the hill outside the city and then descends behind it, going out at the place he was first seen. 

One of Caine's friends, the novelist Robert Leighton, had read Mahomet in manuscript and noted that ‘without an inartistic adherence to the strict lines of history,’ the play follows ‘with reverent fidelity the great landmarks of the prophet’s life.’ Caine himself asserted that ‘the dramatic grit of Mahomet’s story lies … in his struggles with the Coreish [Quraysh].’ Onto this historical armature Caine layered the fictional intrigue of a love triangle, a highly sentimental plot device that figures prominently in his other works, and comic relief in the form of teasing scenes between a pair of young lovers and the antics of a jester.

It is not difficult to imagine the extravagant romantic realism with which Irving would have staged the play, which provides significant scope for exotic display: the swirling sights and sounds of the Meccan marketplace, with its shopkeepers beseeching passersby to buy their wares as men cross the stage with mules decorated with fringed harnesses; the approach of Mahomet from the rocky red hills surrounding the city, his figure outlined in gold as the fiery sun sets behind him; the entrapment of Mahomet by Rachel as she sings and performs a sensual harem dance as he falls asleep on the divan, a scene lit by spirit lamps; Omar poised above the sleeping Mahomet with knife in hand; the heat- and wind-blasted desert between Mecca and Medina, with its burning red sand and ridges of black volcanic rock; Mahomet’s weary caravan of followers, their meagre worldly possessions strapped to the backs of camels; the prosperous city of Medina, with its massive gate, high stone battlements, and graceful minarets; Mahomet’s address to the people of Medina in the spacious mosque, its enormous columns, intricately patterned walls, and high dome illuminated by flickering flambeaux as his followers make offerings of gold and silver; Rachel’s collapse in the mosque as she is forced to prepare her lover for a mission she knows he is unlikely to survive; Mahomet’s encampment on the plain outside Mecca, with tents extending to the horizon and the lights of the city glittering in the distance; and the prophet's exit in a blaze of rising sun, symbolic of the dawn of a new day for humanity. Much of the action of the play is accompanied by multiracial throngs of men, women, and children, including Arabs, Jews, Bedouins, and Egyptian slaves. Hundreds of supernumeraries and dozens of live animals would have been required. Without question the production would have been a thrilling theatrical realization of Richard Burton’s East, brought to vivid life by Irving and his designers.

Within weeks of the appearance of the paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette, however, newspapers across India had published notices on the subject and Muslims both there and in England began to organise protests that took the form of public meetings, petitions, and letter writing campaigns. In Delhi, several Muslim leaders told Deputy Commissioner Robert Clarke that they were ‘unwilling to give unnecessary publicity’ to newspaper reports of the Lyceum production; Clarke thanked them for taking the ‘quieter and probably more effective course of representing their anxiety’ directly to him. In a letter to the Delhi superintendent, Clarke noted that ‘the mere fact of Muhammad being represented by an actor on the stage could not be other than painful to every believing Mahommedan.’

Among the prominent Indian Muslims who led protests was Abdul Luteef (or Latif), founder of the Mohammedan Literary Society in Calcutta and a leading advocate for the social, cultural, and intellectual progress of Muslims in Bengal. Luteef had taken an active role in protesting the proposed Comédie-Française production of de Bornier’s play; now he was incredulous that a similar sacrilege might happen in London. He wrote to Lord Lansdowne, the viceroy of India, and to several former viceroys, including Northbrook and Ripon, whom he urged to ‘exercise all legal powers as well as moral persuasion to prevent such an outrage to Mohammedan feeling.’ On 2 September, he sent an impassioned letter to several English-language newspapers in India. ‘Little did I think that the evil which we Mohammedans so much dreaded would raise its head in England itself,’ he wrote. ‘I can assure you that this news has been received by the Indian Musselmans with the greatest regret and surprise … Ordinarily, the matter might not have any importance attached to it in the eyes of the British public, but the French incident, the Turkish protest, and the agitation which even then spread up to India, should open the eyes of all thinking men to the inadvisability of allowing such representations to take place.’ Luteef was a trusted broker between the British administrators of India and the Muslim community there; in 1883 he had been made a Companion of The Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire in recognition of his services. The high esteem in which he was held is reflected in the speed with which his concerns about the Lyceum production were addressed. One week after Luteef’s letter was published, Richard Assheton Cross, the Secretary of State for India, requested that the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and the Home Office investigate whether the production was rumour or fact. 

On 26 September, a letter from the vice president of the Liverpool Moslem Association, Raffiüddin Ahmad, appeared in The Times. ‘The Indian Mussulmans are deeply irritated to learn of the proposed mockery of the prophet on the stage of a country which has pledged itself to respect their religious feelings, and the Queen of which has been destined by Providence to reign over a greater number of Moslems than any single ruler, Mahomedan or Christian, on the surface of the globe,’ he wrote, asking the newspaper’s readers: ‘Is it right and proper to hurt the religious feelings of so many of your fellow-subjects in the East, to satisfy the whims or fill the coffers of a theatrical company, however influential it may be?’ Ahmad’s letter prompted immediate action on the part of Edward Frederick Smyth Pigott, the Examiner of Plays, who sent a copy of it to Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and Pigott’s immediate superior. ‘With respect to the enclosed,’ he wrote, ‘pray assure all whom it may concern, whether Mahomedans or Managers, that I shall never dream of submitting to you, for the LC’s licence, any piece calculated to offend the religious feelings of any portion of Her Majesty’s subjects of whatever creed.’ Muslims, he asserted, had ‘the same right to be respected as Christians, and we do not permit Jesus Christ to be represented on the stage.’ He observed that he had, however, ‘never heard a whisper of any such intention on the part of any manager … and I make it my business to know all that is going on in theatrical affairs.’ Clearly he had missed the announcement of Irving’s plans in the Pall Mall Gazette three months before.

Official communications warning of dire consequences should the Lyceum production go forward poured into Whitehall. Abdülhamid II, through Rustem Paşa, the Turkish ambassador to Britain, expressed his deep concern to Salisbury, the prime minister. The India Office received numerous letters from civil servants throughout India describing the probable effect of the production on the ability of Britain to maintain peace in key regions of the subcontinent. Lord Lathom, the Lord Chamberlain, recognizing the political exigencies involved, wrote privately to Irving, requesting that further work on Mahomet be halted and informing him that such a play would not be licensed. He told Irving that Britain was obliged to consider the religious sensibilities of India’s 50 million Muslims and the tens of millions located elsewhere in the Empire. Despite the example of what had happened to De Bornier’s play in France, which he must certainly have been aware of, Stoker called this a ‘bolt from the blue’ and seems to have been genuinely surprised that anyone could object to the Lyceum Mahomet. ‘None of us had the slightest idea,’ he wrote, ‘that there could be any objection in a professedly Christian nation to a play on the subject.’ He noted that ‘the Lord Chamberlain’s department does its spiriting very gently; all that those in contact with it are made aware of is the velvet glove. But the steel hand works all the same—perhaps better than if stark. It is an understood thing that the Lord Chamberlain’s request is a command in matters under his jurisdiction.’

Irving complied at once with the Lord Chamberlain’s wishes, then sent a telegraph to Caine apprising him of the situation. Caine recalled that it was ‘a deep disappointment to Irving himself, for the dusky son of the desert was a part that might have suited him to the ground, and to me it looked like an overwhelming disaster, slamming the door on the efforts of years.’ The Lyceum Mahomet was, he claimed, ‘by much the best of my dramatic efforts.’  Irving offered to compensate Caine for his labour, but Caine refused to accept any payment.

Although life at the Lyceum went on—Irving and Terry had opened their thirteenth Lyceum season on 20 September with Ravenswood—Caine found it difficult to get over the loss. In October he wrote an angry article for The Speaker that allowed him, he later said, to relieve his feelings ‘by spitting on my antagonists.’ What Caine most resented was the Lord Chamberlain’s interference with his prerogative as an artist to depict a subject of his own choosing. ‘I claim the right … to protest in the name of literary liberty against the blind bigotry and silly superstition that would cry “Hands off!” whenever a sacred subject comes within the province of imaginative art,’ he wrote. ‘I hold that the only right a man wants to touch any subject, however sacred, in any art, no matter what, is the right of an honest intention to do it well … To pay court to all religious feelings, as such, is either to narrow all art by the exclusion of the highest themes, or to reduce it to child’s play.’ Pointing out the thousands of Christians who had travelled that very year to see the passion play at Oberammergau, Caine asserted that ‘Christianity has recognised what Islam has never seen—that art may be a help towards spiritual life, and that the divinity of its Founder is not obscured, but vivified, by truthful representations of His humanity.’ He declared that if the Indian Muslims claimed for ‘the mere human incidents of the flight and return a sanctity that no dramatist may violate, they are not to be pampered in their religious sensibility, but to be reasoned out of it.’

Many agreed with Caine, including Leighton. ‘So far from doing any possible wrong to the faith of Mohammedans … the play is calculated to be of the greatest service,’ Leighton wrote in a letter to the editor of The Speaker, adding, ‘it appears to me a grievous thing that a dramatic censorship which allows the performance of farces such as The Pink Dominoes and burlesques such as Venus should set its face rigidly against a serious subject treated with the seriousness, the good taste, and the learning which Mr. Caine has devoted to the dramatic delineation of the grand figure of the prophet.’ Another person who claimed to have read the play told the Graphic that ‘in the opinion of competent judges, this play is in entire sympathy with Islam.’

Muslim leaders declared that such justifications were beside the point. Jahan Kader Mirza, a member of the royal family of the Indian princely state of Oudh and a vice-president of Luteef’s Mohammedan Literary Society, observed that ‘the real objection of my co-religionists was based not on the particular tone and language of the play, but upon the repugnance which they feel to any human beings personating the character of the Holy Prophet and revered members of his family, and their being dragged down into a spectacle for public amusement.’

It may be argued that Caine's failure to fully appreciate Muslim objections to the physical depiction of Muhammad means that his interest in the life of the prophet was largely mercenary. This would be incorrect. Over the course of his career, Caine wrote richly textured stories set in Africa and the Middle East that were based on his personal observation of Islamic cultures during extended visits to Morocco, Egypt, the Sudan, and Palestine. Displaying an obvious empathy for those fighting to preserve their political and cultural autonomy, he wrote with urgency about the forces reshaping traditional Arab ways of life and with unflinching directness about religious bigotry and racial tension. He supported the nationalist aspirations of Arabs in Egypt, outraging Britain's imperial administrators and earning the admiration of George Bernard Shaw. A committed Christian Socialist who had substantial contacts in the British Muslim and Jewish communities, he dared to imagine a reconciliation of the world's great religions. Although Irving's production of Mahomet would undoubtedly have shared certain tropes of orientalist discourse with other late-Victorian depictions of Eastern subjects, it would have been unique during this period in its attempt to show a fully rounded and sympathetic portrait of Muhammad to non-Muslim audiences.

By the time Caine’s article appeared in The Speaker, he had finished the play, changed its name to The Prophet, and sold it to the actor E. S. Willard for production in the United States, although there is no evidence that Willard or anyone else ever staged it. Caine’s efforts were not entirely wasted, however: Stoker notes that he ‘preserved his work by privately printing, three years later, the scenario of the story in dramatic form’ after altering some characters and changing its setting to modern Morocco.

In December 1890, just over a year after he began work on Mahomet, a dejected Caine wrote to Irving: ‘I return at last the 9 vols of Burton’s Arabian Nights which you were so good as to lend me when we were considering the Mahomet which began so hopefully & ended so disastrously,’ he said. ‘I am going to publish the thing, so many of my literary friends have urged me to do so after reading it, but there is no great public for printed plays.’ In this letter he mentions he is working on a new play that might appeal to Irving, one that seems to him to ‘possess very great possibilities indeed, & to present one character of great strength. It is called The Lord Chief Justice.’  Apparently hope sprang eternal. Like Caine’s other efforts to ‘fit Irving with a part,’ however, this one also was doomed to failure. Still, those who study Irving and his circle today owe much to Caine, who from his earliest acquaintance with the actor was one of his most perceptive observers. In describing the Mahomet episode in his autobiography, Caine provides a shrewd assessment of Irving’s temperament:

‘The truth is that, great actor as Irving was, the dominating element of his personality was for many years a hampering difficulty in the way of popular success. When in my boyhood I knew him first, he was a young fellow of thirty, very bright, very joyous, not very studious, not very intellectual, full of animal vigour, never resting, never pausing, always rushing about, and hardly ever seen to go upstairs at less than three steps at a time. At the end of his life he was a grave and rather sad old man, very solemn, distinctly intellectual, and with a never-failing sense of personal dignity. Between his earlier and his later days he had done something which I have never known to be done by anybody else—he had created a character and assumed it for himself … It was a character of singular nobility and distinction, but a difficult character, too, not easy to put on, and having little in common with the outstanding traits of his original self—a silent, reposeful, rather subtle, slightly humorous, detached, and almost isolated personality, with a sharp tongue but a sunny smile and certain gleams of the deepest tenderness … There was nothing artificial or theatrical in Irving’s assumption of this character, which grew on him and became his own and gave value to every act of his later life; but all the same it stood in the way of his success in a profession wherein the first necessity is that the actor should be able to sink his own individuality and get into the skin of somebody else …Toward the end of his life, with the ever-increasing domination of his own character and the limitation of choice which always come with advancing years, it was only possible for him to play parts that contained something of himself.’

Small wonder, then, that Irving had been intrigued by the opportunity to add another theatrical portrait of a grand charismatic figure to his gallery of characters.