warn Maria that the Queen Mother will kill her, as indeed she does, “think-
ing her own son is done to death” and hoping “to be thy husbands wife”
( 3. 2. 1594 , 1596 ). If this dizzying cacophony of dramatic plots takes the focus
off Eleazar, it nonetheless brings the racist discriminations that Fernando has
articulated to a certain if outrageous end: his illicit desire for the Moor’s wife
is finally undone and outdone by the Spanish queen who would herself have
the Moor. In a world where Negroes’ hands have easy access to Spanish
beauty, and it seems, Spanish beauty to Moorish hands, ideology needs geog-
raphy to create a distance, and that distance simply is not (yet) there, even if
a fantasy of banishment is.
Ultimately, then, however much the impulse to expel the Moor might be
reiterated, recycled, or replayed, the move to banish Eleazar in Lust’s
Dominion—like the move to exile Gaveston in Edward II—marks the vexed
beginning of a political crisis, not simply an ameliorating end. The official im-
position of that collective cultural fantasy may indeed mark the culmination
of the Spanish Moor’s history and the cathartic consummation of the specta-
tors’ own desires. But as Lust’s Dominionpresses the Moor—and the idea of
expelling the Moor—to the brink of its own dramatic reality, the dialogue
within this play (as well as between it and Edward II) indicts the translation
of one bad Moor into a constructed race of banished Moors as neither as plau-
sible nor as possible as its reiteration might make it seem. If the irrepressible,
even irresistible fantasy ultimately becomes the ubiquitous sign of Spain at its
best, it starts as the ubiquitous symptom of Spain at its worst.
***While this vexed and complex writing out defines the Moor’s place in Lust’s
Dominion, so also does the equally vexed and complex writing in. For if the
desire to banish the Moor drives the play’s fantasies, the Moor’s ability both
to penetrate and to represent Spain constitutes its realities. In Lust’s Domin-
ion, Spain’s demarcation of the Moor is significantly coupled to the Moor’s de-
marcation of Spain. The result will eventually be civil war—one predicated by
Eleazar’s ascension to the highest reaches of court, rather than by talk of his
expulsion, evidencing his invulnerability, rather than his vulnerability, as a
Spanish subject. Though in the end he will undoubtedly fall, what falls stun-
ningly with him is the very stuff that Spain is made on—the sanctifying be-
lief in limpieza de sangre, in the “purity” of Spanish blood.^17
Like Aaron before him (and unlike Othello after him), Eleazar’s presence
Banishing “all the Moors” 127