tury, out of a desire to unseat homogenizing assumptions of cultural differ-
ence, lies in looking too far in that direction, to the exclusion of the “other.”
I may err on the side of wanting early modern drama and culture to be more
radical, more liberal than it finally was. As essential as the complicating par-
ticulars that open representations of the Moor up are, no doubt, the classifi-
cations and codifications that would close such complexities down. There is
no Othello story, after all, without Iago and the nasty stream of racist epithets
he hurls (and prompts others to hurl) in the Moor’s direction. Nor is the
restoration and institution of a globally oriented Moroccan regime in Alcazar
meaningful without the challenge of a vengefully myopic Moorish challenger.
And even if TitusandLust’s Dominionsituate the Moor within a European
mainstream, as I will argue, as a subject who is almost impossible to write off
or out, the Moors in question are nonetheless archvillains. This is part of the
stuff that Moors on the early modern stage are inexorably made on. And it
stands beside incriminating histories—beside the “cruel hands” of Hakluyt’s
Moors, beside John Pory’s apology for Africanus’s “Mahumetan” past, beside
Queen Elizabeth’s proclamations against “blackamoors.” But even in the face
of a “perfect villainy” that is executed by a Moor, a “black” “look” that augurs
“bloody” “deeds,” or a “fleece of woolly hair” that speaks revenge, we cannot
know to what extent England’s production of the Moor was encumbered by
“anxiety”—a word, though currently ubiquitous within our critical lexicon,
that projects our own anxiety-ridden times and psyches backward. Nor can
we evaluate England’s take on the Moor in terms of moral distinctions, sepa-
rating “Princes of Darkness” from “white” Moors “of the nonvillainous type,”
as preceding surveys of dramatic Moors have done.^73 For what seems to me
crucial to early modern representations of the Moor is their ability to have it
both ways (at least), to distance complex cultural and cross-cultural politics
from simplifying moralities, to imagine the embrace and the exclusion of the
Moor as constantly competing impulses, and to insist on complicating differ-
ences in the face of an ostensibly all-consuming difference.
In order to expose the diversity between and within England’s represen-
tations of the Moor and the importance of that diversity to England’s negoti-
ation of a global environment, I want to look closely at the brief but crucial
moment at the turn of the sixteenth century, when the Moor seems to have
captured England’s imagination newly and urgently. It is then that Hakluyt’s
Navigationsconstruct a determined and overdetermined expansionist terrain,
then that The History and Description of Africabrings the voice of a “real”
Moor to life, then that Queen Elizabeth protests the presence of “black-
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