noted, and stands in Belmont beside a group of noble Europeans, no more or
less likely a match for the wealthy Portia than they.^12 In the final episode of
Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part I( 1600 –16 03 ), Mullisheg, the
Moorish king of Fez, provides the material and figurative (and if he could
have it, erotic) means for the ever English Bess to prove herself climactically
“a girl worth gold” (Fair Maid, I 5. 2. 153 ).^13 In Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays
( 1587 ), Moors are seamlessly enmeshed in the multicultural forces of the
Turks, fighting alongside Arabians, Jews, Grecians, Albanese, Sicilians, Nato-
lians, Sorians, black Egyptians, Illyrians, Thracians, and Bithynians.^14 Even in
outline, striking here are not simply the differences betweenthese Moors, who
appear in Venice, Morocco, Belmont, Spain, and Rome, but also the differences—
the multilayered dramatic and cultural histories—invoked withinthe repre-
sentation of any given Moor.
To be sure, across dramatic and nondramatic depictions in this period,
what we would call “racist” articulations are clearly taking shape and obscur-
ing the particulars that make any one Moor’s story culturally and ideologically
complex.^15 In letters dated from 1596 to 1601 , Queen Elizabeth, now fa-
mously, turns the presence of “blackamoors” within her realm into an urgent
national problem and promotes their deportation as a natural and possible so-
lution. Within the landscapes of Africa in Richard Hakluyt’s globe-trotting
Principal Navigations( 1589 , 1598 – 1600 ), the “cruel hands of the Moores” ap-
pear out of nowhere and out of context, to “long detain” “English gentlemen”
“in miserable servitude,” as if that is just what Moors are wont to do ( 6 : 294 ).^16
In a translation of The History and Description of Africa( 1600 ), John Pory em-
phatically associates Moors with the “accursed religion” of Islam and frames
the text with an edgy apologia for the “Mahumetan” past of its author, “John
Leo.”^17 On the stage, Alcazarlinks barbarity to blackness in the figure of its
“barbarous Moor,” Muly Mahamet, who seems not coincidentally to be both
“black in his look, and bloody in his deeds,” his face “full of fraud and vil-
lainy” providing a readable sign of his malignancy ( 1 Pro. 6 ,16; 5.1.70). InTitus,
Aaron presents himself as similarly transparent, insisting that his “cloudy
melancholy” and “fleece of woolly hair,” among other things, can only mean
one thing ( 2. 2. 33 – 34 ): “Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, / Blood
and revenge are hammering in my head” ( 2. 2. 38 – 39 ).^18 AsLust’s Dominion
plays with fantasies (soon to be historical realities) of deporting all Moors
from Spain, it comes as close as I think early modern drama ever does to ar-
ticulating a clearly cut racist ideology. Within its dramatic fiction, the “perfect
villainy” of the leading Moor ( 5. 5. 3794 ), the self-styled “black Prince of
6 introduction