Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004 ), 66 ; see also 52 – 82. Though
“tainted” by the differences of usury and Judaism, Harris argues, the Jew represents one
layer of a “palimpsest” onto which a number of foreign bodies could be superimposed and
the hybridity of cultural identity, especially that of Europe, exposed ( 62 , 78 ). Compare
James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 ), esp.
his discussion of “race, nation, or alien,” 167 – 93. On the historical intersection of Jews and
“blacks,” see Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004 ).
Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama(Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 ). Related work includes: Sujata Iyengar, Shades
of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England(Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2005 ); and Jean Feerick, “Spenser, Race, and Ire-land,” English Lit-
erary Renaissance 32 , no. 1 (Winter 2002 ): 85 – 117.
See Vitkus, Turning Turk, 24 – 44 esp.
Neill, Putting History to the Question, 269 – 84.
In Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, Matar presses (and stretches) the connection to
create a defining triangulation between “Britons, Muslims, and American Indians”; see
83 – 107. Neill makes what I think are more viable connections to East and West Indian sub-
jects, in Putting History to the Question, 269 – 84. On the relation between Barbary and the
Turks, see Kenneth Parker, “Reading ‘Barbary’ in Early Modern England, 1550 – 1685 ,”Sev-
enteenth Century Journal19,no. 1(Spring 2004 ): 87 – 115. For a useful overview of the Ot-
toman Empire in this period, see Daniel Goffman,The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern
Europe(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 ).
In Turning Turk, Vitkus claims that while Moor and Turk “were sometimes used
to refer specifically to the people of Morocco or Turkey,” “more often they signified a gen-
eralized Islamic identity” ( 91 ). See also Matar, Britain and Barbary,1589–1689(Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2005 ), who treats “the Moor on the Elizabethan stage” as “a di-
rect result of England’s diplomatic initiative into Islamic affairs” ( 13 ); and Burton, Traffic
and Turning, who elides Moorish and Turkish ambassadors.
In Turning Turk, for example, although Vitkus reads Othello as a “hybrid” figure
who cannot be “identified with any specific ethnic label” ( 90 ), he argues that Othello’s sui-
cide “reenact[s] a version of his own circumcision, signifying his return to the ‘malignant’
sect of the Turks and his reunion with the misbelieving devils” ( 104 ). See also Julia Rein-
hard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005 ); and Jonathan Bate, “Othello and the Other,” Times Literary Supple-
ment(October. 19 , 2001 ),14–15.
See, for example, Vitkus, Turning Turk, who presents the Mediterranean as an un-
settling “alien” space ( 22 ); and Harris, Sick Economies, who argues that the Jew’s hybridity
provokes an “economic anxiety” about the indeterminacy of material value ( 82 ).
See, for example, James A. Williamson, A Short History of British Expansion, 2 nd
ed., 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1931 ), which covers the “external aspects” of the “his-
tory of the British people” from 1066 through the 1920 s, but which omits the “purely con-
