prehensibly “strange thing” ( 5. 1. 289 )—a sign of how indeterminate discrimi-
natory vocabularies still were.
Activity in the Mediterranean, of course, had not ceased by 1611. Nor did
Moorish characters disappear altogether from the English stage after Othello.
But once activity in the New World began to reconfigure England’s economic
priorities, where and how it looked for its own prosperous returns, the Moor
was no longer a featured dramatic subject, no longer figured as the motivat-
ing agent of cultural change and exchange. To the contrary, in Jacobean plays,
Moors appear most frequently in secondary roles, defined and delimited by
the subordinating axes of gender and class. Witness, for example, Zanthia in
John Marston’s Wonder of Women; or, the Tragedy of Sophonisba( 1606 ),
Zanche in John Webster’s White Devil( 1611 – 12 ), and Zanthia in Beaumont
and Fletcher’s Knight of Malta ( 1616 )—all female servants of questionable in-
tegrity and unquestionably limited agency. As well, at the end of that era, when
William Rowley remakes Lust’s DominionasAll’s Lost by Lust(ca. 1619 – 20 ),
the Moor’s potential to remake the history of Spain in his own image is sub-
stantially reduced.^5 While the leading Moor Mulymumen eventually usurps
the Spanish crown, he is not the first to challenge or overthrow the lecherous
Spanish king (Rodorique), is not able to marry the Spanish woman (Jacinta)
of his sexual and political dreams, and is not installed as “the first of Moors
ere was King of Spain” until the very end of the play ( 5. 1. 204 ). When he is in-
stalled, his reign appears therefore as the unstageable outcome of an inher-
ently troubled regime, his impact and import unclear. Tellingly, too, in 1630 ,
when Heywood creates a sequel to his Fair Maid of the West, although the king
of Fez, Mullisheg, has a larger role than he has in Part One, he has a smaller
part in the construction of culture. For in Part Two, it is not he who shapes
the fortunes of the English Bess (as he does, at the end of Part One), but the
English Bess and her cohorts who reshape the fortunes of the Moorish king-
dom and Moorish king, as mediators of both literal and figurative conversion.
In fact, the issue of conversion—in such plays as Robert Daborne’s A Chris-
tian Turned Turk( 1612 ) and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado( 1630 )—gives a
particular prominence rather to the Turk as an icon of cultural change and ex-
change, albeit via characterizations that border on caricature.
Ultimately, then, the dramatic landscape shifts, with figures such as Cal-
iban puncturing the boundaries of difference on one side, the specter of the
Turks proffering the possibility of conversion on the other, and the Moor em-
bedded in the middle as a subject more easily circumscribed than either. But
if the interest in the Moor, as a figure central to England’s expanding material
conclusion 193