Europe, do what it may to draw him in, in Lust’s Dominionthese two trajec-
tories collapse into each other. For here as the racist coding and elimination
of the Spanish Moor come into play as the ultimate fantasy, the longed for
apex of desire, that fantasy betrays its own implausibility, exposing the poten-
tially alienable Spanish Moor as an essentially inalienable SpanishMoor.
***The moment in Lust’s Dominionwhen Philip orders “all the Moors” from
Spain is indeed unprecedented within early modern stagings of the Moor;
none of the related plays imagines such a full-scale racial cleansing.^5 We can-
not be entirely certain that this was the original end envisioned by Dekker
and his collaborators. For as critics have posited, these final lines (along with
oblique references to the Gunpowder Plot) may have been the product of a
subsequent revision, constructed sometime after (and with an eye to) the 1609
expulsion.^6 It did not take the actual event itself, of course, to make clear that
the Moriscos were in line for such a fate: by the end of the sixteenth century
Spain’s restrictions against its Moors had already tightened so much, accord-
ing to Root, that the eventual expulsion may have been a predictable outcome
of “more than a century of inquisitorial repression.”^7 If Dekker and his col-
laborators were looking to Spain in 1599 , they may well have been able to see
this eventuality coming. Yet whether the play’s last lines were invented in 1599
or written later, whether they imaginatively anticipate or record an actual
historical event, in Lust’s Dominionthe prospect of banishing the Moor—
especially the one Moor, Eleazar, whose particular “evils” come to define “all
the Moors” categorically ( 5. 5. 3774 )—emerges as a pervasive but problematic
cultural fantasy.
When the play opens, Eleazar appears with the Spanish queen, engaging
in an illicit but not entirely unnoticed affair, which marks Spain as “lust’s do-
minion,” his lover as a “lascivious queen,” and himself, he says, as “the Min-
ion of the Spanish Queen,” who “makes a Cuckold of our King” ( 1. 1. 124 – 25 ).
His purposes are questionable, if also somewhat unfathomable. While the
queen lavishes her desires upon him, he castigates her for having “melted all
[his] spirits, / Ravish’d his youth” and “deflour’d [his] lovely cheeks” in order,
he says, to “try” her “love” ( 1. 1. 159 , 109 – 11 ). In addition, after she exits, he an-
ticipates “shutt[ing]” his “dear love” “up in hell” ( 1. 1. 213 – 15 ). Still, this danger-
ous liaison goes unpunished (for two scenes) until the king dies and his
putative heir, Prince Philip, returns from Portugal. By then, the late king’s
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