able beginnings in England to their redemptive end at Alcazar.^10 And in
the second part of If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody(ca. 1606 ),
Thomas Heywood interrupts the two focal points of the dramatic action,
the building of England’s Royal Exchange and Elizabeth’s defeat of the
Spanish armada, two signal acts of English nation building, to announce
the results of “that renowned battell / Swift fame desires to carry through
the world” ( 293 ).^11
“That renowned battell / Swift fame desires to carry through the
world.” The obvious question is why? Why would early modern audiences
desire to hear about a “civill mutinie” between two Moors over the disposi-
tion of Moroccan rule (Famous History 1565 )? Why would Heywood inter-
rupt representations of foundational moments in the evolution of English
nationhood to direct attention to Alcazar? And why would the conflict at
Alcazar prompt early modern dramatists to embrace a new dramatic subject,
the Moor? Officially, Alcazar was not England’s war. The one Englishman
who achieved fame through the battle, Thomas Stukeley, had been planning
instead to invade Ireland, with the forces and backing of the pope, and it
was only because he took temporary harbor in Lisbon (a port in the storm)
and was enlisted by Sebastian that he joined the campaign in Morocco,
fighting there for Portugal, not for England. Other English soldiers were in-
volved in the battle, but their contributions were “so insignificant,” as Nabil
Matar contends, that they are not mentioned in contemporary Moroccan
records or in Polemon’s Booke of Battailes.^12 In Hakluyt’s Navigations, a brief
account of Sebastian’s forces (translated from a Latin history of that king)
ends with the insertion “It is further to be remembered, that divers other
English gentlemen were in this battell, whereof the most part were slaine”
( 6 : 294 ). The document names one English survivor, M. Christopher Lyster,
but gives no details about his role in the conflict, focusing instead on his
subsequent fate. As that record tells it, he was “taken captive” and “long de-
tained in miserable servitude” at “the cruel hands of the Moores” ( 6 : 294 ).
After an escape, he became “Viceadmirall” of a voyage “for the South sea,”
served in other posts “of speciall command and credite,” and finally was
“miserably drowned in a great and rich Spanish prize upon the coast of
Cornwall” ( 6 : 294 ). Almost before it can be articulated, his involvement at
Alcazar, along with England’s, thus appears (or disappears) as an incongru-
ous trace, and the account presses forward to document signs of England’s
outreach elsewhere and the ubiquitous conflict with Spain. What then was
Alcazar to England, England to Alcazar?
Enter Barbary 23