been able to say fully or finally what “the Moor” represents.^5 Every critic from
Jones on has had to somehow confront the “notorious indeterminacy” of the
term—which, as Michael Neill so aptly summarized in 1998 , “could refer
quite specifically to the Berber-Arab people of the part of North Africa then
rather vaguely dominated as ‘Morocco,’ ‘Mauritania,’ or ‘Barbary’;...could
be used to embrace the inhabitants of the whole North African littoral;...
might be extended to refer to Africans generally (whether ‘white,’ ‘black,’ or
‘tawny’ Moors); or, by an even more promiscuous extension,...might be ap-
plied (like ‘Indian’) to almost any darker-skinned peoples—even, on occasion,
those of the New World.”^6 Not always an ethnic type, “Moor” might also in-
dicate a religion (usually Mohammedanism), a color (usually “black”), or
“some vague amalgam of the two.”^7 Early modern scholars have been less
alone with the problem since Henry Louis Gates brought new attention to the
instability of “race” as a term and concept in our own, more recent history.^8
Even so, in speaking of the Moor we have always had to ferret the subject out
from a seemingly endless set of diverse, divergent, and sometimes overdeter-
mined images, to decide who our Moors will be.
***Perhaps the first question we should ask, though, is why speak of “the Moor”
at all? The term has by now lost its currency as a designation of a racial or eth-
nic population. So why write (or read) a book in the early twenty-first cen-
tury on England’s staging of the Moor at the turn of the sixteenth century,
especially a book centered on only four plays: one, The Battle of Alcazar
( 1588 – 89 ), so generically quirky that critics have been hard pressed to see the
coherence between its “tangled” historical and political “web,” its antiquated
chorus, and its erratic revenge play;^9 one,Lust’s Dominion(ca. 1599 ), that
reads like a “frantic perversion of history” and feels like a “mere nightmare”
and that, like Alcazar, has rarely been performed or edited;^10 one,Titus An-
dronicus( 1593 – 94 ), which seems like a ghastly caricature in its excessive, out-
rageous, even gratuitous violence; and finally—but only—one, Othello(ca.
1604 ), that has commanded widespread critical respect and theatrical atten-
tion? Why sit down to read and rethink Othello, along with its unusually
ragged dramatic peers, and the unaccommodating subject of the Moor once
again?
The answer, in large part, is related to the very problem I—and I think,
Shakespeare—started with: the difficulty of speaking of the Moor “as he is” in
4 introduction