returned to England thereafter (to betray Henri’s plans of invading England),
and though he was temporarily imprisoned in the Tower, under Elizabeth’s
auspices he subsequently became a privateer. Those activities elicited such
protest from Portugal, Spain, and France that Stukeley again lost the queen’s
favor and left the country, garnering support rather from powerful Catholic
leaders: from Shane O’Neill, a prominent Irish nationalist; Philip II, who
made Stukeley a knight in the Order of Calatrava; and Pope Gregory XIII,
who made him “Marquis of Leinster.” In a history I have already outlined,
Stukeley’s career took its final turn in Portugal, where Sebastian coerced or
convinced him to fight in Morocco, on Mulai Mohammed’s behalf.^59 And in
the end, it is likely that his forces turned against him, killing him at Alcazar
for abandoning the invasion of Ireland, betraying them and their Catholic
crusade.
Because of this globe-trotting track record, critics have valorized the real
and imagined Stukeley as a self-actualized “citizen of the world” and have lo-
cated in Peele’s characterization a newly compelling stage personality, full of
the “expansiveness of spirit that typifies the Marlovian hero at his overween-
ing best.”^60 It is he, rather than Abdelmelec, who gets credit for going global.
Within Alcazar, Stukeley himself provides the passion and the cues for such a
reading. When he first appears in Lisbon, the Portuguese governor welcomes
him and his faction as “brave Englishmen” ( 2. 2. 2 ) and objects to their plan to
invade Ireland, protesting: “are ye not all Englishmen, / And ’longs not Ireland
to that kingdom?” ( 2. 2. 20 – 21 ). In response, Stukeley defines himself rather as
one who “may at liberty make choice / Of all the continents that bounds [sic]
the world,” insisting that although he is an Englishman, so also is he a man,
destined “to follow rule, honour, and empery, / Not to be bent so strictly to
the place / Wherein at first I blew the fire of life” ( 2. 2. 29 – 33 ). According to his
philosophies, “to be begot or born in any place” is “not so great desert,” “sith
that’s a thing of pleasure and of ease / That might have been perform’d else-
where as well” ( 2. 2. 34 – 37 ). This is not the breaking apart of an English “fan-
tasy of ethnic coherence,” though, as John Drakakis has suggested, that would
happen elsewhere.^61 Birth is neither culturally impure or intermixed; it is ran-
dom, at least as far as political loyalties are concerned.
Yet despite its appearances, Stukeley’s antinationalist posture actually
instantiates a national, not a global, perspective, its negation reinforcing
rather than upending the boundaries of state. His driving ambition is noth-
ing more, and nothing less, than “to win a crown,” as he reiterates in his first
soliloquy, proclaiming, “There shall no action pass my hand or sword, /
38 chapter one