ABSTRACT
Fulke Greville’s Mustapha and Alaham are closet dramas set in the early modern Muslim world. This chapter examines the relationship between the religious politics within the plays, and the anxieties of ideology in the court of James I. It argues that the plays are fraught with the problems of patriarchy and gender. In Mustapha, where a father–king assassinates his own son to prevent sedition, Greville examines the political theory of sovereignty both in theory and practice with relentless accuracy.
