any single set of terms (and in the plays I am focusing on, it is “he”). The “no-
torious indeterminacy” that seems to mar the Moor’s story is, in fact, essen-
tial to its core, not because, as a signifier, “Moor” is unstable and unreadable
but because, as a subject, “the Moor” does not have a single or pure, cultur-
ally or racially bounded identity. Within early modern representations, I hope
to show, the Moor is first and foremost a figure of uncodified and uncodifi-
able diversity. Though shadowed by evolving vocabularies of discrimination
and practices and policies of prejudice, between and within each incarnation
that figure nonetheless takes definition from a number of histories, geogra-
phies, and ideologies, all with their own racial and cultural markers, and all
necessarily contingent on the immediate circumstances of their articulation.
In fact, the early modern Moor uniquely represents the intersection of Euro-
pean and non-European cultures. And if his dark- skinned presence calls into
being discrete and discriminatory inscriptions of history, race, and ethnicity,
segregating Europe from other cultures (or rather, other cultures from Eu-
rope), the Moor’s complex position between worlds also calls those inscrip-
tions into question.
If we look, just in outline, at where and how Moorish characters take
their bearings on the English stage in the short period between Alcazarand
Othello, the complicating intersections are clear. In Alcazar, a “negro” Moor
stands against his Barbarian uncle on the fields of Morocco, both of Arabian
descent, one allied with the Turks, the other with Portuguese, Spanish, Ital-
ian, and even English defenders (Alcazar 1 Pro. 7 ).^11 Titus’s Moor Aaron is a
prisoner of war, captured by the Romans and absorbed into their society with
the Goths—to the point that he fathers a mixed-breed offspring with Rome’s
new empress, the Gothic queen, and embeds that son, at least temporarily, in
Rome, the deadly giveaway of the child’s dark skin notwithstanding. In Lust’s
Dominion, Eleazar is at once the son of a conquered Barbarian king and the
husband to a Spanish noblewoman as well as the lover of the Spanish queen
and, for a brief but incredible moment, the Spanish king himself. And Oth-
ello, as we have seen, is a worldly “Moor of Venice,” a Venetian his wife, the
military his life, and the images of Egypt, Arabia, India, and Africa his discur-
sive legacy. What’s more, the dramatic heritage of these marquee Moors de-
rives directly and indirectly from the extravagant figures of both Jew and Turk
in Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta(ca. 1589 ). Notably, too, even as sec-
ondary characters, Moors occupy and define similar kinds of cultural intersec-
tions. Shakespeare’s Prince of Morocco is modeled on a Turk, Brusor, from
The Tragedie of Solimon and Perseda(ca. 1590 ), as Jonathan Gil Harris has
introduction 5