Appearing in 1640 and riven with unanswered questions, Lithgow's poem expressed the endemic spiritual and moral uncertainty that troubled many private consciences in that decade and would dramatically shape public life for the remainder of the century. In the same year as the poem, Charles' abortive attempts to impose a religious settlement on the Scottish Church through military force had fatally exposed the breach between the English king and his Parliament, stretching bonds of loyalty and tradition beyond breaking point. The war and revolution that followed irrevocably altered the face of the nation, transforming not only its social, political and religious institutions but perhaps most fundamentally shifting the very terms by which the nation imagined itself. What we now think of as the ‘literary’ expression of the period – particularly drama for the purposes of this study– was inevitably caught up in this process, along with the outpourings of treatises, newsbooks and printed polemic most commonly thought of as ‘political’. As this book has sought to demonstrate and as Lithgow's poem synecdochally epitomises, Islam was an ever-present touchstone for a whole range of writers struggling to find meaning in the chaos, or determined to impose a meaning of their own.