allow the material and social disenfranchisement of the Jew and require his
self-abnegating conversion in The Merchant of Venice(MV 4. 1. 345 ), in Othello
the testimony of the Moor displaces and replaces the “bloody book of law”
that might otherwise condemn his (or anyone’s) actions (Oth. 1. 3. 68 ).
We need, then, to extract the story of the Moor from the multicultural
and transhistorical narratives into which it has been provocatively, if problem-
atically, blurred and to expose its unique emphasis on cultural crossings which
significantly involve Europe and which, by involving Europe, bring the pres-
ence of diversity poignantly home. For representations of the Moor, which I
want to unfold here in all their particulars, are not bounded by any set or sin-
gle racial, religious, or ethnic markers—by Africa or the New World, Islam or
the Turks, by blackness or tawniness, or by an anxiety-provoking strangeness.
Rather, I will argue, they unsettle just these kinds of codifications, situating
Moors centrally within Europe’s past and present, as one crux of an open,
evolving, and heterogenous world picture.
***If returning to the Moor will help us better navigate a world of proliferating
differences as critics and global citizens in the twenty-first century, what pro-
pelled England’s preoccupation with that figure at the turn of the sixteenth,
when the idea of a world economy was much newer, more tentative, and nar-
rower? Why, in particular, would early modern playwrights bring the Moor to
center stage, as an innovative dramatic character whom English actors could
or should impersonate and English audiences applaud? In the early modern
moment, why produce and perform the Moor?
The plays I am focusing on here emerged during a time when England
was working to expand and publicize its investment across the globe with a
surge of new textual and actual activity.^62 In the last decades of the sixteenth
century, while English translators were bringing classical descriptions of the
world into circulation, Richard Hakluyt was documenting the “principal nav-
igations” of “the English nation” in order to prove that the English, “in com-
passing the vaste globe of the world more then once, have excelled all the
nations and people of the earth” ( 1 :xx).^63 While Elizabethan privateers such as
Francis Drake were raiding Spanish spoils from the West Indies and Por-
tuguese spoils from the East, independent merchant ventures were gaining
economic coherence and some national clout under the regulatory umbrellas
of the Turkey ( 1581 ), Barbary ( 1585 ), Levant ( 1592 ), and East India ( 1601 ) com-
16 introduction