wiched between and contrasted by Muly’s Seth derogation and ostracization
of Muly Mahamet, “the traitorous Moor” ( 5. 1. 203 ). With Sebastian’s recovered
body lying newly before him, Muly Seth receives two peasants, who throw
Muly’s body at his feet. Declaring the traitor “beastly, unarmèd, slavish, [and]
full of shame,” Muly Seth asserts that death by drowning is “too good for such
a damnèd wretch” ( 5. 1. 236 , 246 ). He then calls for a spectacle of retaliation
that will embody the “rage and rigour of revenge” ( 5. 1. 247 ): he orders that
Muly’s skin “be parted from his flesh,” “stiffen’d out and stuff ’d with straw,”
“so to deter and fear the lookers-on / From any such foul fact or bad attempt”
( 5. 1. 251 – 54 ). In excoriating Muly’s “bad attempt,” Muly Seth separates the
Moor’s actions from Sebastian’s, suggesting usurpation from within a greater
threat than occupation from without. While Sebastian will be honored by
public obsequies, Muly will be flayed; and while both will become objects of
politicized spectacles, it is Muly who will be on permanent, if not also ghoul-
ish, display before the “lookers-on.”
Yet tellingly, even as Muly Seth distinguishes the soon-to-be stuffed and
stiffened body of the “beastly” Moor from the honored body of the Por-
tuguese king, he also takes into account the political connection between the
two. Instead of producing Muly simply as a didactic prop, a punishable em-
bodiment of a “foul fact,” clearly and cleanly separated from his European
ally, and instead of treating Muly’s “bad attempt” as an exclusively internal
problem, Muly Seth expressly puts the Moor forward “that all the world may
learn by him t’avoid / To hale on princes to injurious war” ( 5. 1. 249 – 50 ). Not
only is the spectacle designed for “all the world”; it is designed in terms of it,
the moral of its story, not local but global. For it is not Muly’s unsuccessful
attempt to usurp the Moroccan throne that must be punished and its like pre-
vented, but his successful move to lure the Portuguese prince into “injurious
war.” Between the lines of Muly Seth’s official sentence lies anticipation and
regulation of further cross-cultural exchange.
As a theatrical text, Alcazaris unquestionably quirky, uneven, and dis-
junct, having no single focal point but a series of several competing foci. And
yet what brings order and meaning to the ostensible chaos is a depiction of
Moroccan politics, which is as crucial to Muly’s, Sebastian’s, and Stukeley’s in-
dividual tragedies as the story of Fortinbras is to Hamlet’s. In setting Moor
against Moor, “Barbarian” against “barbarian,” Alcazarpresses its spectators to
look beyond the bounds of race, religion, and nation, to see a Mediterranean
“world” improvised from the unpredictable intersections of Europeans and
non-Europeans, of Moors, Arabians, Turks, Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, and
Enter Barbary 43