Myra Jehlen, “History Before the Fact; or, Captain John Smith’s Unfinished Sym-
phony,” Critical Inquiry 19 , no. 4 (Summer 1993 ), 681. See my discussion in “Making More
of the Moor,” 438 – 42.
Matar, Britain and Barbary, 15 ; see also Bovill, 181 – 82.
Matar, Britain and Barbary, 13 – 15.
Bovill, 22.
On Sebastian’s defeat and death, see Braunmuller, 67 ; Bovill, 148 – 57 ; and
Yoklavich, 226.
29 .Montaigne’s Essayes, 2 : 403. Compare Thorlief Larsen, “The Historical and Leg-
endary Background of Peele’s ‘Battle of Alcazar,’ ” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada
( 1939 ): 185 – 97. Larsen argues that the “political consequences” of Portugal’s fall were not
yet “realized or understood” in Europe, and that, rather, “what had impressed the popular
imagination apparently was the ghastly slaughter which took place at the battle, and the
fact that no fewer than three kings had there lost their lives” ( 185 – 86 ).
Braunmuller, 67.
D’Amico, 20 – 21.
See Braunmuller, 69 – 70 ; and Walter W. Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923 ), 85 – 93.
Hunter writes: “Peele makes strenuous efforts to explain the genealogical intrica-
cies of the Barbary kingship and to clear up the tangle of political aims that link King Se-
bastian of Portugal, Philip II of Spain, Tom Stukeley (the Pope’s candidate for ‘King of
Ireland’), the Turkish Emperor, and Queen Elizabeth herself. What his realistic aims
achieve is in fact a picture of the tangled web of Realpolitikin which all the characters are
enmeshed” (English Drama, 79 ).
Larsen, 193.
Joseph Candido, “Captain Thomas Stukeley: The Man, the Theatrical Record,
and the Origins of Tudor ‘Biographical’ Drama,’ ” Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 105 ,
nos. 1 – 2 ( 1987 ):54, 50, 51.
For a prominent example, see Braunmuller, who suggests that Sebastian’s descent
“from the English house of Lancaster” makes his story especially pertinent to the promo-
tion of an Elizabethan nationalism, the “politics and war in northern Africa” providing
“only an exotic” frame ( 66 ). See also Peter Hyland, “Moors, Villainy and the Battle of Al-
cazar,” Parergon 16 ( 1999 ): 85 – 99.
Barthelemy, Black Face, 78 ; see 72 – 84. In Tokson too, Muly’s “blackness” is what
stands out, implicated in and implicating all the denotations (“ ‘the Moor,’ ‘this Negro
moore,’ and ‘this Negro’ ”) that describe him and the “good” Abdelmelec, who, though
“only referred to as a Moor,” was “probably intended to be shaded to some degree” ( 40 ).
Matar, Britain and Barbary, 16 – 17 , 20.
See, too, the prologue to Act Two, where the Presenter announces that “Nemesis,
with bloody whip in hand, / Thunders for vengeance on this Negro-Moor” ( 2 – 3 ).
Barthelemy, Black Face, 78.
Braunmuller, 73 , makes this case.
On this ancestry, see Bovill, 36 – 39 ; and Yoklavich, 227.
