boundaries of banishment and makes a legal separation between the Moor
and the Spanish seem implausible if not also impossible. In an important re-
versal of terms and players, Lust’s Dominionrestages Mendoza’s discriminatory
gesture in a way that renders both its particular imposition and its underlying
logic highly questionable. This time it is the Spanish king, Fernando, who
imagines ousting Eleazar, changing his original loyalties but acting once again
on lust. Though Fernando’s initial defense of Eleazar has the useful side effect
of keeping Maria near both court and king, it also puts the Moor in the way
of the seduction that was an important part of its point. In acting on his lust-
ful desires, the Spanish king invokes and expands the cardinal’s controversial
precedent. Entering Maria’s bedchamber (armed for rape, we might notice, in
case his persuasions fail), he insists that, if she does not succumb to his ad-
vances, he will send Eleazar to war to die “nobly” ( 3. 2. 1529 ), “call a Parlament /
And banish by a law all Moorsfrom Spain” ( 3. 2. 1532 – 34 ), and finally make it
“death for any Negroes hand, / To touch the beauty of a Spanish dame”
( 3. 2. 1537 – 38 ).
If the reversal, as well as the illicit circumstances that condition both his
embrace and his rejection of the Moor, betray the instability of Fernando’s
particular politics, his propositions simultaneously undermine the logic of
racial discrimination more broadly. These fantasies come, tellingly, not at the
beginning of his seduction but the end, and his threat to impose a physical
separation between Spaniard and Moor derives from (and emphasizes) his re-
peated failure to create a social, sexual, emotional, or ideological distance. In
beginning his persuasions, Fernando tries first to appeal to Maria’s Spanish-
ness, asserting:
Thy husband is no Spaniard, thou art one,
So is Fernando, then for countries sake
Let mee not spare thee, on thy husbands face
Eternall night in gloomy shades doth dwel;
But I’le look on thee like the guilded Sun. ( 3. 2. 1495 – 1501 )Using definitive differences in color and nation to suggest undesirable differ-
ences in race, he contends (and pretends) that, for her “countries sake,” she
should prefer the sunny Spaniard to her husband, who is “no Spaniard,” his
“gloomy” countenance marking him subtly as also not white.^16 Maria resists
these attempts to exhibit and exploit racial differences by turning Fernando’s
overused imagery against him and rejecting his “Sun-set eyes” ( 3. 2. 1504 ). In
Banishing “all the Moors” 125