of Morocco to his hands” ( 2. 2. 48 – 50 ), that the play can proceed, that Muly’s
small cadre of supporters can grasp onto “the slenderest hair” of opportunity
and see an end to “this miserable life” ( 2. 2. 55 – 56 ).
In staging the prehistory of Alcazar, Peele thus uses a revenge frame to ar-
ticulate, complicate, and ultimately displace the categorical differentiation of
its Moors. As false plays against true, “barbarian” against “Barbarian,” so does
isolation against alliance, the local against the global. The Moor who tri-
umphs understands that “all the world” is watching. And though he reaches
out materially only to the Turks, his gesture nonetheless permeates the ideo-
logical and dramatic barriers that would otherwise limit Moroccan history to
Morocco, prove the Turk a Turk, and reduce a provocative politics to an
overdetermined morality. As the opening act outlines the complex genealogies
that define and rupture the Moorish regime, it makes clear that to succeed in
the world is necessarily to succeed in the world, which extends beyond Bar-
bary and its blasted groves.
***Starting with the second act, the civil war escalates almost to the point of its
own erasure, inflecting but not dominating the action. It is here that the Pre-
senter announces “now begins the game,” here that European interests and al-
liances become crucial, here that “Sebastian’s tragedy in this tragic war”
emerges centrally, ushering in Thomas Stukeley’s vainglorious rise and fall
( 2 Pro. 53 ). It is here, too, that the claustrophobic revenge play is displaced and
replaced by a complex Mediterranean history, Hunter’s “tangled web,” and
here that the Presenter’s moral frames seem increasingly out of sync with the
enactments they introduce.^49 As the scope and staging of Moroccan politics
expand to include European subjects, the tensions between the local and the
global that fracture the easy dichotomies in the opening act become clearer,
as well as more clearly relevant to England. As the uneasy alliance between
Muly Mahamet, Sebastian, and Stukeley takes shape, Morocco provides a
staging ground for both Portugal and England. And though the European
campaign pivots on the promotion of a fervent nationalism, suggestively
shadowed by Muly’s isolationism, what prevails with Abdelmelec’s regime is a
global politics which challenges the ideologies of nation.^50
Now begins the game: Sebastian’s tragedy within this tragic war. In advo-
cating for the Portuguese king, the Presenter stresses the moral edges of that
tragedy, ultimately placing the blame on Muly, the “foul ambitious
34 chapter one