cance differences. While we have come into a global era after New World
colonialism and slavery had institutionalized racial prejudice, after British im-
perialism had orientalized the East and assigned Africa the lasting legacy of a
“dark continent,” after terms of oppression, assimilation, segregation, and in-
tegration had formed around a number of collective subjects, the early mod-
erns came into their global era before. Where our world is in these ways “old,”
theirs was relatively “new.” In effect, we are writing our evolving multicultural
geographiesagainsta long history of cultural differentiation that the early
moderns were just beginning to write in. This is not to say that some terms
of racial and cultural difference were not already in place in the sixteenth cen-
tury. As I have suggested above, they obviously were—though the continued
scholarly debate about when exactly blackness became race underscores their
tentative hold.^71 It is rather to emphasize that in the sphere of global relations,
England’s slate, though not clean, was sketchy, the indelible writing on the
wall not yet clear.
Enter, then, the Moor, center stage. In Othello, when Desdemona asks
Emilia whether she would commit adultery “for all the world,” Emilia takes
her phrase literally, insisting that “the world’s a huge thing” and a “great
price / For a small vice” (Oth. 4. 3. 63 – 65 ). The “world” was indeed a “huge
thing” at the turn of the sixteenth century. And it seems no coincidence that
references to “all the world” surface repeatedly in plays that feature Moors.
For there was perhaps no figure better suited to an exploration of that world
and the ideological adjustments it required than the Moor, who took his bear-
ings from multiple Mediterranean and European geographies, who stood out
from and in for a number of other subjects, and who drew and defied discrim-
ination. Nor was there, for that matter, a better medium than drama, which
depends on improvisation, on the illusion that actions and reactions within
dramatic fictions are unscripted, evolving always in and at the moment of
their articulation. If to write the Moor into history was to produce the figure’s
identity, however conceived, as a matter of “truth,” to stage the Moor was at
once to bring that figure into form and draw attention to the process of form-
ing, to construct a Moorish character and expose that character as con-
structed, out of the needs, desires, and biases of a particular moment. It was,
that is, to expose cultural identity and cross-cultural exchange as a dynamic
work in progress, always contingent on the unpredictable intricacies of cir-
cumstance and always therefore vulnerable to change, a thing perpetually in
the making and never quite the thing made.^72
To be sure, the danger in coming at these plays in the twenty-first cen-
18 introduction