more insidiously, changes the measure and meaning of race, turning Spanish
identity and lineage into negotiable terms, their value dependent on deeds,
not fixed innately by blood.
There is, indeed, some protest. Alvero himself objects to the royal investi-
ture of one “that slew [the] King” ( 3. 4. 1846 – 47 ), and while one Spanish no-
bleman declares Eleazar “a villain and a base born fugitive,” another calls him
“a bloody tyrant, [and] an usurping slave” ( 3. 4. 1866 – 69 ). As well, before too
long, Philip’s Portuguese ally, the king Emmanuel, resorts to demonizing fic-
tions to comprehend the Moor’s otherwise incomprehensible success. Assert-
ing that “the Moor’s a Devill,” he argues,
never did horrid feind
Compel’d by som Magicians mighty charm,
Break through the prisons of the solid earth,
With more strange horror, then this Prince of hell,
This damned Negro Lyon-like doth rush,
Through all, and spite of all knit opposition. ( 4. 2. 2215 – 24 )The play goes out of its way to bring Emmanuel in, since his historical pro-
totype, Manoel the Fortunate, died before Philip was born.^20 Manoel was
known for attempting to expel Portugal’s Jews and unconverted Moors in the
early sixteenth century. But before we endorse the polymorphic racist preju-
dices of his dramatic descendant as the play’s, as at least one critic has done,
we should notice that Philip himself casts them immediately aside, to locate
the fault rather in his own faction’s “cowardise” and in the deceptions of the
Spanish cardinal, now a culpable “slave” ( 4. 3. 2228 – 29 ).^21 Eleazar is, of course,
a villain (though neither a Negro nor a prince of hell), but the “strange hor-
ror” that allows him to break into a position of power in “spite of all knit op-
position” is not some devilish enchantment, but Spain itself. Within a single
scene, although Eleazar loses the support of his father-in-law, he sways other
Spanish nobles to his side, with promises to “divide” the “Empery” among
them ( 3. 4. 1873 ). As civil war breaks out, Eleazar defends his place as “Castiles
Royall King” from the center of the Spanish court, while Philip must retreat
to Portugal, to clear his name of bastardy and treason from the outskirts of
Spain ( 3. 4. 1865 ). Though the Moor is obviously not in the right, he stands
nonetheless in the position of king, with the backing, if not quite the bless-
ing, of Spain.
As Eleazar thus changes the standards of Spanish identity, he is able not
132 chapter five