take seriously Oumelbanine Zhiri’s worry about our scholarly dependence on
its authority.^16 To look at the English Historyis not to hear the voice of al-
Wazzan but the voice of John Pory, both as he translates a translation which
he takes as the Moor’s text and as he adds to it his own materials—a “gener-
all description of all Africa,” a substantial, “particular description of all the
knowne borders, coastes and inlands of Africa, which Iohn Leo hath left
vndescribed,” and concluding summaries of Africa’s princes and religions.^17
(In what follows, I speak of the translated text, the voice constructed and
transmitted by Pory, as belonging to “Africanus” in order to differentiate it
from the materials which Pory authored independently.) It is the English text,
however, that provides seventeenth-century England a new and improved
source on Africa.
As critics have long noted, Pory’s translation of The Historystands sug-
gestively behind as well as within Othello, paving the imaginative way for
Shakespeare’s stunning and innovative choice to fill the role of tragic hero
with a Moor who is also “of Venice.” Jonathan Burton, in arguing for “the
subversive nature of Africanus,” has urged us, wisely, to “disentangle
Africanus and Othello.”^18 Indeed, the one moment Shakespeare invokes The
Historymost blatantly and crucially—in Othello’s testimony before the
court, associating him with a dangerous landscape where the wild things
(cannibals, Anthropophagi, and men with heads in their chests) are—actu-
ally echoes John Pory, not John Leo. But while Othello is not Africanus, or
Pory, or even a hybrid combination of the two, after The Historythe dra-
matic representation of the Moor takes a striking turn. Where before the
leading Moors figured on the stage were notoriously “bad” or, in the case of
the triumphant Moroccans in Alcazar, countered by an evil antitype, Othello
puts a noble Moor with invaluable military credentials at the center of its ac-
tion and its Venetian court. Instead of pivoting on an illicit sexual liaison
with a duplicitous Gothic queen or a lascivious queen mother, in Othellothe
Moor’s integration into Europe is evidenced and fostered—if also, in the
wrong hands, troubled—by his sanctioned marriage to a Venetian senator’s
daughter. It is tempting, then, to credit The Historywith altering the early
modern staging of the Moor, though that kind of claim can only be a teas-
ing speculation. Still, the bound-breaking History and Description of Africa
directly and indirectly sets the stage forOthello’s tragically heroic Moor of
Venice, providing, in its moment, the historical flip side of Hakluyt’s impe-
rialist narratives and Queen Elizabeth’s discriminatory letters and helping us
understand, in ours, how an “extravagant and wheeling” Moorish “stranger”
142 chapter six