that he blushed not to tell queen Elizabeth, “that he preferred rather to
be sovereign of a mole-hill, than the highest subject to the greatest king
in Chistendom [sic];” adding moreover, “that he was assured he should
be a prince before his death.” “I hope,” said queen Elizabeth, “I shall
hear from you, when you are stated in your principality.” “I will write
unto you,” quoth Stukeley. “In what language?” said the queen. He
returned, “In the style of princes; To our dear Sister.” ( 1 : 414 )In Fuller, the “mole-hill” is not Ireland but Florida, a place of special interest
in the mid-seventeenth century, when England began to see a profitable fu-
ture in the New World.^63 The substitution only reiterates the irrelevance of
which “principality” is at stake. The punch line turns on turning a question
about a different nation (“what language?”) into an answer about a different
class (“the style of princes”)—a class which aligns Stukeley familiarly with
“our dear Sister,” the English queen.
If these representations take their cues from Peele, however, in national-
izing Stukeley’s story they must (and do) extract it from the complications
and implications that come with Alcazar’s larger, cultural picture. For to read
Stukeley in the context of Alcazaris to see neither a self-actualized worldly cit-
izen nor a valorous English hero, but an antinationalist Englishman who is as
out of place within Morocco’s political theater as are Sebastian and Muly Ma-
hamet. In his final hour Stukeley, “slain with many a deadly stab” at the hands
of his followers, appropriates the occasion of Alcazar to retrace his spectacu-
lar tracks—to “tell the story of [his] life” on “the desert fields of Africa” in
order to “beguile the torment of [his] death” ( 5. 1. 132 – 35 ). In a lengthy solilo-
quy, he details his extravagant history—from his “golden days” of youth in
London ( 5. 1. 138 ), to his advancement in Spain, where he lived “like a lord”
and “glitter[ed] all in gold” ( 5. 1. 149 , 146 ), to his “royal welcomes” in Rome,
where he was “graced by Gregory the Great” and “created” “Marquis of Ire-
land” ( 5. 1. 155 – 57 ), to his arrival in Lisbon and his rerouting to Morocco, the
“discontented humour,” “strife,” and banishment that prompted his many
moves appearing in the gaps between them ( 5. 1. 142 , 152 ). Coming afterStuke-
ley has been stabbed, this attempt to bring his worldly past to life is as ironic
and empty as Hamlet’s triumphant self-profession, “This is I, Hamlet the
Dane,” which, as Catherine Belsey has suggested, covers a void, at a moment
when all is irredeemably lost and Hamlet has no place “to be” (Ham.
5. 1. 257 – 58 ).^64 Stukeley’s performance not only interrupts the progression of
plot, eclipsing the staging of both Muly’s and Sebastian’s deaths and delaying
40 chapter one