Seven days after Aldridge's second (and final) Coburg performance in Amherst's The Death of Christophe, King of Hayti (1821), the theatre programmed William Barrymore's drama of Indian patriotism, El Hyder, or, The Chief of the Ghaut Mountains (1818). El Hyder, together with H. M. Milner's Tippoo Saib; Or, The Storming of Seringapatam (1823), contextualizes the Royal Coburg's commitment to exploring issues concerning Britain's gradually extending empire. Whereas The Death of Christophe was an example of a drama popular both in terms of its performance longevity and the ‘Go it Jerry!’ songs it spawned, it failed to engage with the longer term implications of developments in the Caribbean region – although it had the beneficial effect of providing an effective training vehicle for Ira Aldridge.

There was no monolithic reception of Islam on the British Romantic period stage. Curiously, the representation of different ethnicities and cultures was probably more frequently encountered by London playgoers than is the case today. Instead of crude generalizations about religion or ethnicity, there were nuanced receptions specific to different regions. These receptions include the subject of this chapter, that of Indian (Moghul) Islam typified by Hyder Ali (Haidar-Ali) and his son, Tippoo Saib, and their fight against the British in the thirty years up to 1799. The issue concerning these rulers of Mysore is the stark contrast between the extent of the British vilification of the pair up to Tippoo's death in 1799 and their recuperation on the London stage scarcely a generation later. The smouldering problem of Hyder Ali's history of loose alliances with France came to a head under Tippoo's reign in the late 1790s when Britain was at a particularly difficult stage of the war against the French.