whom he plans to win for himself. If his actions are seeded with lust, they are
also seeded with power.^23 In advancing Isabella, he advances and possesses her
hereditary right, which he traces through the father, instead of the mother.
Denying the Queen Mother’s royal body its determining place and power, he
insists that “all may doubt the fruits of such a Womb” as hers ( 5. 2. 3093 – 94 ).
And while he directs the Spanish lords to “be deaf, be blind, hear not, behold
her not” ( 5. 2. 3103 ), he prompts them rather to “look...upon your Sovereign
Isabel,” to consider whether she “is...not like King Philip” ( 5. 2 .3092, 3095).
With the male, not the female, setting the terms here, legitimacy is now in the
eye of the beholder, and the beholding eye that matters, that dictates the suc-
cession of Spanish royalty and sets the terms of the Spanish race, is the Moor’s.
Ultimately Philip does return to restore the boundaries that would per-
manently delimit the Moor, but his triumph is only partial. He first must es-
cape the imprisonment the Moor has authorized, and in order to do so, he
and his ally Hortenso must impersonate the Moors who hold them—
“put[ting] the Moorshabits on, and paint[ing] [their] faces with the oil of
hell” ( 5. 5. 3584 – 86 ). Only in this guise—and only through a play-within-the-
play, which Eleazar directs and in which he plays the cardinal and has Philip
and Hortenzo, whom he thinks are Moors, imitate themselves—can Philip
then change places with Eleazar, constraining him physically with manacles
and containing him ideologically, as if once and for all, as “the actor...of
evils” ( 5. 5. 3773 – 74 ). In hoisting Eleazar with his own petard, Philip’s actions
replay the final substitution of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, where the Christian
governor traps the Jew in the “deep pit past recovery” (Jew of Malta 5. 5. 36 )
that the Jew has constructed to trap the Turks.^24 Eleazar himself emphasizes
that he is “betray’d and cozen’d in [his] own designs” ( 5. 6. 3763 – 64 ). If in Mar-
lowe the ironic reversals are still to come, with the Spanish, who resemble the
Turks, waiting ominously in the wings to claim and control the island, in
Lust’s Dominionthey reside in the very moment of the Spaniard impersonat-
ing a Moor, performing and installing himself in what Isabella calls “the mold
of Hell” ( 5. 5. 3558 ).
What becomes clear in the final scene, however, is that it is easier to put
on the “oil of hell” than it is to take it off. As the play works to its close, Philip
and Hortenzo remain in Moorish drag—their disguise so convincing that
they must discover themselves not only to the unsuspecting Eleazar but also
to the Queen Mother. In reclaiming his own legitimacy, Philip stabs the Moor
in front of the “brave spirits of Spain” ( 5. 6. 3773 – 74 ), “thrust[ing] him down
to act amongst the devills,” in a gesture that recalls Eleazar’s stabbing of
Banishing “all the Moors” 135