response, he appeals to her national pride, adding station to ethnicity and
color and promising that “in pride Mariashall through Spain be born”
( 3. 2. 1508 ): if she agrees to “love” him, he declares, he will “circle [her] white
forehead with the Crown / Of Castile, Portugall, and Arragon, / And all those
petty Kingdoms which do bow / Their tributarie knees to Philip’s heir”
( 3. 2. 1519 – 24 ). It is only because these efforts are unsuccessful that he translates
racial and cultural difference into geography and turns prejudice into law.
Significantly, that law evolves here uneasily as the unwarranted extension
of a specific example. As Fernando’s threats move from military conscription
of Eleazar, who could die “nobly,” to the banishment of all Moors, whose of-
fenses are assumed rather than explained, to the death of any Negroes who are
incriminated as sexual predators, the king blurs the convenient disposition of
a particular Moor into legal and social imperatives against all Moors and Ne-
groes, turning Eleazar into the natural representative of a necessarily alienable
(black) race. Yet as these terms get more general, they also get less tenable.
That is, the harder Fernando tries to distance the Moor as a racially marked
Other, the clearer he makes the Moors’ (and Negroes’) penetration of Spain.
Fernando’s audience, after all, is the Moor’s own Spanish wife, and the unre-
lenting obstacle to his lust is a marriage that gives Eleazar legitimacy within
Spain. Maria, in fact, thinks that Fernando might spare her “for [her hus-
band’s] sake” ( 3. 2. 1493 – 94 ). Moreover, though the king imagines that he
could send Eleazar to war, he acknowledges that it would take an act of par-
liament to rid the realm officially of Moors. Even that seems inadequate. For
as he elides Eleazar’s particular case into a more easily incriminated general
race of Moors and Negroes, he suggests that Maria might not be the only
Spanish dame to be “touched” by a Negro—that the contact between black
and white is neither an anomaly nor an aberration, but a fact of Spanish life.
Otherwise, why would it take an official threat of death to restrict Negroes
from “touching” Spanish dames, if not Spanish dames to be “touched” by
them? (We can think back to Titushere, to Lucius’s declaration that any one
who relieves or pities the starving Moor must die.)
Fernando’s persuasions ultimately fail, and although he resorts to force
within the bedchamber, his threats come quickly to naught. Maria has not
only anticipated his coming but also informed Eleazar, who arms her with a
poison to fend off the lustful king. Fend him off she does, by poisoning him
into a deathlike sleep right out of Romeo and Juliet ( 1595 – 96 ). In an even more
incredible dramatic twist, “Oberon, and Fairyes” ( 3. 2. 1583 S.D.) come out of
nowhere—disjunctively invoking A Midsummer Night’s Dream( 1595 – 96 )—to
126 chapter five