ish queen of ruining his reputation with her lust—of “arm[ing]” the “many
headed beast” of Spanish street talk and fueling Spain’s disdain for the Moor-
ish “minion” in its midst ( 1. 1. 131 ). Although his purposes are not transparent,
his allegations manipulate the Queen Mother’s sympathies and desires, put-
ting this increasingly crucial ally defensively under his command. When he
again brings up the scene of conquest, it is to distract his father-in-law from
connecting the dots between himself and the queen (whom Alvero seeks in
his presence). Accusing Alvero of “grow[ing] Jealous” and suspicious of his re-
lations with the Spanish queen ( 1. 2. 226 ), Eleazar glorifies his own (implicitly
better) father, who “lost his life” “with his empire.” He simultaneously uses
the example to exonerate himself. Proving the injustice of his resulting captiv-
ity under the Spanish tyrant, he argues: “Although my flesh be tawny, in my
veines, / Runs blood as red, and royal as the best / And proud’st in Spain”
( 1. 2. 231 – 33 ). Within Eleazar’s constructions, royalty prevails across the bounds
of culture, conquest, and captivity, outdoing and undoing the variables of his-
tory, ethnicity, and race. And with the question of the queen thus displaced
and replaced, Alvero can do nothing but urge Eleazar to “think on” these
“wrongs” in “fitter hours,” to now “take leave” of the dying king, “halfe of his
body” already lying “within a grave” ( 1. 1. 245 – 46 , 249 , 253 ).
Try as Eleazar might to narrate himself into a precarious position as a cap-
tive forced by a tyrant king into an unwilling and unwelcoming Spain, how-
ever, in producing himself as a wronged but rightful subject, he emphasizes
rather his uncontested domestic position.^18 From the start, it is clear that, de-
spite its interracial edges, his marriage to Maria gives him substantial leverage
at court. If the specter of miscegenation haunts Mendoza’s protests against the
Moor’s illicit dealings with the Spanish queen (for example, in the elision of
the Moor with Indian slaves), it does not haunt responses to the Eleazar’s mar-
riage.^19 Fernando will, of course, attempt to prove to Maria that Spaniards
should not be with Moors, but his efforts fail completely. In Lust’s Dominion,
there is no angry father making a public issue of the fact that a “black ram”
may be “tupping [his] white ewe” or demanding that the Moor answer
charges of bewitching one of Europe’s fairest daughters, as there will be in
Othello(Oth. 1. 1. 88 – 89 ). To the contrary, Alvero embraces Eleazar as his
“sonne,” even at the expense of his real son, Hortenso, who has no clout at
court until Philip joins with him at the end of the play. Indeed, in choosing
sides against the potentially ascendant Philip and Mendoza, Alvero self-
consciously stakes his own political standing on the Moor’s. When talk of
Eleazar’s banishment emerges, he worries that if the nobles “triumph o’re” the
Banishing “all the Moors” 129