poised on the precarious edge of accusation in a way—like Portia’s now fa-
mous question, “Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?” (MV
4. 1. 174 )—that undermines rather than underlines their difference.^22 Though
Mendoza offers the declaration rhetorically, to incriminate the Moor, in Lust’s
Dominion, it takes only one more shove for the incrimination of Spaniard or
Moor to become the incrimination of Spaniard notMoor. Following Eleazar’s
cues, the Queen Mother recalls Spain’s conquest of Barbary and locates in it
the telling moment of adultery. “Twice ten years” ago, while Philip (II) was at
war in Barbary, she testifies, Cardinal Mendoza “threaten[ed] my death if I
deni’d his lust” and “by force” “abus’d the bed of Spain,” in that act fathering
the bastard prince ( 5. 1 .2966–67, 2982 – 83 , 2985 ). Once again appropriating the
scene of conquest to his own ends, Eleazar condemns the cardinal for “abus-
ing the bed” he himself has enjoyed. Unfathomably, Mendoza accedes, pro-
fessing his innocence only when he is dragged off to prison to await trial, with
Eleazar still reiterating the now dangerous refrain “Spaniard or Moor, the
saucy slave shall die.” What results is an astounding substitution of Spaniard
for Moor, Eleazar here not only making the Spaniard over in the incriminat-
ing image he has sported as his own but, in the process, calling into question
the readability of Spanishness itself.
There is one final twist. For not only does Eleazar take control of the
Spanish state by bastardizing the prince and incriminating the cardinal, dis-
placing the political legitimacy of the one and projecting his illegitimate sex-
ual doings onto the other; he also takes control of the Spanish race by
displacing and replacing the Queen Mother. There is no danger here, as there
is in Titus, that the Moor will reproduce himself. Neither Maria nor the
Queen Mother will give birth to a “blackamoor” baby and so, in Maria’s case,
undo the supremacy of white over black or, in the Queen Mother’s, expose
her own “lasciviousness” (which she has already publicized). Yet if Eleazar
does not literally reproduce his race, he does take figurative control over the
Spanish queen’s womb. As the Queen Mother watches Eleazar pacing, pon-
dering, and preparing for (we know but she does not) the cardinal’s demise,
she herself begins to worry: “What shape will this prodigious womb bring
forth, / Which groans with such strange labour” ( 4. 4. 2604 – 6 ; emphasis
added). Eleazar himself speaks of his scheme as something “breeding in the
brain” and looks forward to “the hour wherein ’tis born” ( 4. 4. 2622 , 2637 ). And
at just the moment that the queen is preparing to betray him, he turns his
own “strange labour” against her: subsuming and assuming her power to pro-
duce a legitimate heir, he offers the Spanish crown to the princess Isabella,
134 chapter five