amoors” in her realm. And it is congruently then that Moors become a fea-
tured subject on the stage, in Alcazar,Titus,Lust’s Dominion, and Othello.
Moors figured, of course, in such contemporaneous plays as The Fair Maid of
the West, Part IandThe Merchant of Venice, as I’ve mentioned, and also in
plays that came after, among them Webster’s White Devil( 1611 ), Heywood’s
Fair Maid, Part II( 1630 ), Behn’s remake of Lust’s Dominion,The Moor’s Re-
venge( 1677 ), and Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus( 1686 ). The numbers are not
large: Elliot Tokson identifies only twenty-nine plays and masques “contain-
ing black characters or characters disguised as blacks” (not all of them Moors)
that emerged between 1588 and 1687.^74 Prior books on the Moor have sur-
veyed this broader field, overlooking the unusual concentration on Moors
that begins with Alcazar and ends with Othelloand making little distinction
between featured Moors and those in minor roles, which allow and demand
less scrutiny.^75 What gets lost within these panoramas is the particular rele-
vance of the figure and the moment: the fact that, just before New World col-
onization began to set the terms of expansion, England’s accommodation of
a global economy pivoted uniquely around the culturally complex Moor.
By focusing on the dramatic and historical representations that character-
ize the Moor in the decades from AlcazartoOthello, this book attempts, then,
to define an important local period in England’s imaginative engagement with
“all the world” and with the Moor, whose position between worlds suggests
the malleability and multiplicity of cultural bounds and histories. In the sub-
sequent decades, the New World would become increasingly central to En-
gland’s cross-cultural plans and dreams, and the Atlantic slave trade would at
once justify and be justified by an increasingly recognizable racism. It is per-
haps all the more important then to understand what came before: a provoca-
tive unmooring of cultural identity that happens around the Moor, between
and within the dramatic texts that feature that “extravagant...stranger”
(Oth. 1. 1. 135 ) as well as between them and the historical record, whose con-
structions they directly and indirectly amplify, expose, and critique. In the
chapters that follow, what I will set down is a story not of endless indetermi-
nacy but of contingency, complication, and change, hoping to make clear that
in speaking of the Moor “as he is” we must always “say besides.”
20 introduction