cally on the Persian king’s incestuous manipulation of a Persian “race,” his
people and his kin; and even his notably unstaged conquest of Egypt provides
fodder for a Measure for Measure-like substitution of rule withinthe Persian
state ( 6. 18 ).^58 Marlowe’s Scythian Tamburlaine is determined to make himself
“monarch of the East,” scourge of god, and lord of all the earth (Tamb. I
- 185 ). But when he maps his astounding imperial ambitions across the
globe, taking over Persia, Greece, western Africa, Arabia, and Egypt in the
play’s first part alone, his campaign stops tellingly short of Europe, reaching
only the seas around Portugal and Venice. Selimus, Emperor of the East( 1594 )
recycles significant parts of Tamburlaine’s story, including the Turkish em-
peror Bajazet, who claims as his domain “all the world” “from the south pole
unto the northern,” “from East to Western shore” ( 1. 13 – 15 ).^59 Yet while the
Turkish empire is at stake, the focal point of the play is a historically based
civil struggle for the Turkish crown, played out as a family romance between
the Turkish emperor and his catastrophically disloyal sons.^60 In the end, how-
ever much these plays and players may revel in unbounded fantasies of em-
pire, Europe remains out of the reach of their actions, if not also of their
desires.
Indeed, set the Moor against the multicultural Turk or the ubiquitous
Jew and what emerges on the early modern stage is a dramatic subject
uniquely poised to negotiate, mediate, even transform the terms of European
culture. Where the “renowned Turke” Bursor is a bombastic Muslim crusader
determined to stain “the desert plaines of Affricke” “with blood of Moores”
(SolimonB 1 r), his dramatic descendant, the Prince of Morocco, is a suitor,
who swears by a “scimitar / That slew the Sophy, and a Persian prince” but
whose imperialist histrionics are circumscribed by a romantic conquest that
starts and ends in Belmont (MV 2. 1. 24 – 25 ).^61 What finally distinguishes and
defeats him is neither his scimitar nor, for that matter, his “complexion” (MV
- 185 ). But when he maps his astounding imperial ambitions across the
- 1 ), but his privileging of gold over silver and lead as a measure of his, and
Portia’s, worth—a measure he appropriates from an English “coin that bears
the figure of an angel / Stampèd in gold” (MV 2. 7. 56 – 57 ). Or consider the
contrast between Shakespeare’s Moor and Jew of Venice. Where Shylock cel-
ebrates his distance and difference from the Venetians, Othello actively em-
beds himself within Venice’s political and domestic spheres. The Jew’s sole and
signal “bond” is a hideously vengeful arrangement to cut, if not symbolically
to circumcise, a Christian merchant’s flesh, the Moor’s, a military commission
and a marriage. Where Shylock rejects all things Christian, Othello embraces
the terms, if not the beliefs, of Christianity. And where laws against the “alien”
- 1 ), but his privileging of gold over silver and lead as a measure of his, and
introduction 15