chapter two
Imperialist Beginnings
Hakluyt’s Navigationsand the Place
and Displacement of Africa
Roughly five yearsafterAlcazar, Peele collaborated with William Shake-
speare on Titus Andronicus( 1593 – 94 ), the second early modern play to feature
the Moor as a primary subject.^1 The “execrable wretch” Aaron ( 5. 3. 176 ) bears
clear traces of the “barbarian” Muly Mahamet, but otherwise Titusseems to
have come a long way from Alcazar—from its dramatization of contemporary
history and its imaginative construction of a Moroccan regime which deter-
mines its own civil and global destiny, letting in “all the world” on its own
terms.^2 The later play embeds the Moor in the classical past, in the history of
imperial conquest, presenting that figure as what Rome takes in and ulti-
mately must cast out if it is to insist on its cultural purity. Like Alcazar, how-
ever, in staging the Moor Titustouches directly on England’s negotiation of
global change and exchange and especially on its fantasies of cross-cultural
domination.
Before turning to that play, I want to look first at the one text that, prob-
ably more than any other, was giving such fantasies shape at just the moment
when the Moor was becoming a prominent theatrical subject: Richard Hak-
luyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Na-
tion( 1589 , 1598 – 1600 ). Hakluyt’s agenda, most scholars agree, was to push the
English court toward an imperialist future, and he did so by crafting En-
gland’s spotty record of “navigations” into an extensive and progressive history
of expansion.^3 However the narratives themselves complicate that project,