Beneath the Crescent: Unveiling Political Allegories About Muslims in Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study challenges the traditional critical commentary on the negative representation of Muslims in Restoration drama– as simply reflecting anti-Muslim sentiment at the time. Utilizing a new historicist approach, the researchers argue that playwrights like Elkanah Settle used Muslim characters and settings allegorically to address anxieties surrounding the sexual and political climate of Charles II's court. Analyzing Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673) as a case study, the text demonstrates how depictions of lascivious Moors served as veiled critiques of the King's libertine lifestyle and the perceived moral corruption within the court. Furthermore, the new historicist lens reveals how Restoration playwrights in general employed Muslim characters as a smokescreen to comment on contemporary English politics, using them not just to reflect existing attitudes but to explore the complex interplay between cultural anxieties and political power. Thus, this study underscores the significance of analyzing early modern drama with respect to the internal sexual debates and power dynamics of British society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".