them by vigorously condemning Muly for being “black in his look, and
bloody in his deeds,” guilty of “ambitious tyranny,” “cruel,” and “unbelieving”
( 1 Pro. 34 , 10 , 32 ). While acknowledging that Muly’s father installed his son on
the throne, the Presenter stresses that Muly’s “passage to the crown” was “by
murder made” ( 1 Pro. 13 ) and calls up two dumb shows to enforce the point. In
the first, Muly puts his two “younger brethen” to bed, “like poor lambs pre-
pared for sacrifice” ( 24 , 26 ); in the second, Muly and “two murderers,” “dev-
ils coated in the shapes of men” ( 20 ), bring his uncle Abdelmunen to the
scene, smother the princes before him, and then strangle him (the last, a mur-
der which Mulai Mohammed did not commit). At the end of these specta-
cles, the Presenter turns responsibility over to Nemesis, who, he says, “calls the
Furies from Avernus’ crags, / To range and rage, and vengeance to inflict,
/ Vengeance on this accursed Moor”—Muly—”for sin” ( 38 – 40 ).^39 If Peele’s
staging of this “modern [i.e., commonplace] matter full of blood and ruth” is
not quite the “classical confrontation of good and evil” which Barthelemy has
argued for, it does bear the signs of a morally freighted revenge play
( 1 Pro. 50 ).^40 Abdelmelec takes arms against the usurping Muly, imploring the
gods to “pour down showers of sharp revenge” upon the “traitor-king”
( 1. 1. 88 ). Muly stands his ground, embracing “blood” as “the theme whereon
our time shall tread” ( 1. 2. 54 ). And when Abdelmelec triumphs, requisite
ghosts urge the retreating Muly to continue the cycle, echoing the stock re-
frain “Vindicta!” (S.D. 2 Pro. 8 ).
Instead of setting the prevailing terms for Alcazar, however, this saga of
revenge takes shape rather as a dramatically outmoded backstory, signaled es-
pecially by its dumb shows, if not also by the Presenter’s absolute moral dif-
ferentiation of bad Moor from good, the “barbarous” from the “Barbarian.”
Signs of a more complex political and racial geography, in fact, perforate its
fictions. Not only is Abdelmelec, arguably, as vengeful as Muly.^41 In addition,
try as the Presenter might to incriminate Muly as Negro, to correlate his
“black” “looks” with his “bloody” “deeds,” and to set him apart from his
“brave Barbarian” rival, these distinctions are undone by the glaring fact that
the two Moors share a single bloodline. In the opening chorus, the Presenter
notes in passing that Muly is “sprung from th’ Arabian Moor” ( 1 Pro. 15 ), and
his uncle Abdelmelec echoes these terms as he lays out his own right to suc-
cession, claiming that he and his followers are “sprung from the true Arabian
Muly Xarif, / The loadstar and honour of our line” ( 1. 1. 50 – 51 ). According to
Abdelmelec, Muly Xarif “descended from the line / Of Mahomet,” left Arabia,
and “strongly plant[ed] himself in Barbary” ( 1. 1. 64 – 67 ). Even this genealogy
Enter Barbary 31