and critics now tend to treat Moors and Turks interchangeably under the um-
brella of “a generalized Islamic identity.”^52 As a consequence, even a figure
such as Othello, who merely imagineshimself to be a circumcised Turk but
bears no other or actual traces of a Muslim past, is nonetheless assigned one.^53
Not only does the elision of Moor and Turk thus risk implanting religion
squarely into representations where its relation to the Moor may be, at best,
uncertain and oblique; it also risks inflecting our new vision of the Moor, and
therefore of the Mediterranean, with a new kind of estrangement. We no
longer read England reading either the Turks or Islam simply as the ultimate
in evil; rather, conceptions of that threat have been mollified by our and early
modern England’s awareness of the inclusiveness of the Turks’ cultural poli-
tics and practices, the permeability of their image, the variability of their her-
itage, and the all too realizable prospect that, with a switch of a blade and a
religion, almost anyone could “turn Turk.” Nonetheless, critics have under-
stood that very openness—and with it, the multiculturalism of the Mediter-
ranean, its Moors and Turks—as a source of anxiety for a contrastingly
provincial England.^54
Yet as this book will stress, what is crucial to the Moor’s (and so to the
Mediterranean’s) story—and what has been long submerged in conceptions of
England’s cross-cultural outreach but what we are now in a position to see—
is its close, ameliorating, and complicating connection to Europe.^55 Euro-
peans were no strangers to Morocco, as The History and Description of Africa
attests. Nor were Moors strangers within Europe. The very Moor who wrote
The History(“John Leo Africanus”) did so from Rome, after being baptized
by Pope Leo X. Moreover, by the sixteenth century, Moors had been subjects
of Spain for so long that their history and Spain’s were effectively inextricable,
as Barbara Fuchs has argued.^56 Even after Spanish Inquisitors began (in 1492 )
to condemn their Muslim beliefs, it would take over a hundred years for
Moors to be officially banished from Spain.^57 We need only look again to the
stage to see how interested England was in these intersections. It is no coinci-
dence, as I have suggested, that in each of the plays I am treating here, either
Europeans come to Morocco to further their political fortunes (as is the case
inAlcazar) or Moors appear in Europe to further theirs (Aaron in Rome,
Eleazar in Spain, Othello in Venice).
Such is not ordinarily the case within representations of other “non-
Europeans.” Consider the innovative “tyrant plays” that chose “Eastern”
despots, in lieu of English monarchs, to tell cautionary tales of disastrous rule.
Thomas Preston’s Cambyses, King of Persia(ca. 1569 – 70 ) concentrates myopi-
14 introduction