Abstract
In the summer of 1578, in the North African town of El-Ksar el-Kebir, two Moors and their factions fought for rule over the Moroccan domains of Marrakech and Fez.1 Abd el-Malek, the ruler at that time was the legitimate head of state, next in line after his brother. Abd el-Malek was challenged, however, by his brother’s son, Mulai Mohammed el-Meslokh, who had usurped power in 1574 and been ousted in 1576. As the conflict unfolded, Abd el-Malek enlisted the support of the Turks, while Mulai Mohammed sought aid from the Portuguese king, Don Sebastian, who was backed also by Spain, Rome, and a wayward Englishman, Thomas Stukeley. The final battle—what the Renaissance would know and critics come to know as “the battle of Alcazar”—restored the legitimate line. Abd el-Malek died from illness during the conflict, but his brother, Ahmed el-Mansur, succeeded and ruled from 1578 to 1603. Sebastian and Stukeley were killed, and the dispossessed Mulai Mohammed drowned on the battlefield, his recovered body was flayed, stuffed, and displayed as part of the triumphant progress of the restored regime.2
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Notes
This history is from E. W. Bovill, The Battle of Alcazar: An Account of the Defeat of Don Sebastian of Portugal at El-Ksar el-Kebir (London: Batchworth Press, 1952).
On the “Alcazar” literature, see The Dramatic Works of George Peele, vol. 2, ed. John Yoklavich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 226–36, and pp. 369–73.
Cited in Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 36.
George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar in The Works of George Peele, vol. 1, ed. A.H. Bullen (1888; Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1966); all citations come from this edition. There remain some questions about date and authorship; see Yoklavich, The Dramatic Works, 221–3,
and Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: Africans in English Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 42.
Shakespeare may actually have collaborated with Peele on Titus; see, for example, Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 148–243.
Thomas Heywood, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobodie, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, 6 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), vol. 1, cited here by page numbers. On Heywood’s nationalism and its expression in his Apology for Actors,
see Crystal Bartolovich, “Shakespeare’s Globe?” in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 178–205, esp. pp. 182–3.
For a comprehensive Mediterranean history, see Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). On England’s place in the world, see Walter Cohen, “The Undiscovered Country: Shakespeare and Mercantile Geography,” in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, pp. 128–58.
The pivotal study of England’s early nationalism is Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). On nationalist tropes in early modern drama, see also Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997),
Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985),
and Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997).
Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffigues and Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904).
For a survey of the popular literature on Stukeley, see Yoklavich, The Dramatic Works, 247–73, and Thorlief Larsen, “The Historical and Legendary Background of Peek’s ‘Battle of Alcazar,’” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada (1939), pp. 185–97, on p. 192n23.
Joseph Candido, “Captain Thomas Stukeley: The Man, the Theatrical Record, and the Origins of Tudor ‘Biographical Drama,’” Anglia- Zeitchrift für Engische Philologie 105 (1987): 50–68, on 50.
Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England, 3 vols., ed. P. Austin Nuttall (New York: AMS press, 1965), I: 415.
From The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
John Drakakis, “Afterword” in Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 336. See also Graham Holderness and Andrew Murphy, “Shakespeare’s England: Britain’s Shakespeare,” pp. 19–41, in the same collection.
All quotations from Marlowe are from Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J.B. Steane (1969; London: Penguin, 1986). Mary Floyd-Wilson has argued that Scythians were merged with Britons within the category of “northerners”; English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 15, see also p. 28. Even so, there remains an important difference between these groups and figures.
Willy Maley, “‘This sceptred isle’: Shakespeare and the British Problem” in Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 89; see also pp. 83–108.
Compare Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southern (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), who reads the clash between the ruling Moors in terms of “the classical confrontation between good and evil,” p. 78;
and G.K. Hunter, “Othello and Colour Prejudice,” in Interpretations of Shakespeare, ed. Kenneth Muir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 188–91.
From Elizabeth’s public letter of 1601, quoted in Jones, The Elizabethan Image of Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1971), p. 20. See my essay, “Too Many Blackamoors: Deportation, Discrimination, and Elizabeth I,” SEL, 46:2(Spring 2006):305–22.
Michael Neill, “‘Mulattoes,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian Moors’: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Difference,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49: 4 (1998): 361–74, identifies this kind of nonequivalence.
On janizzaries, see Matar, Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 22. See my own discussion of the edgy imperialist dynamics in The Jew of Malta, in Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 82–108.
Yoklavich, The Dramatic Works, p. 350; Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of Southern Florida, 1991), p. 82.
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© 2007 Goran V. Stanivukovic
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Bartels, E.C. (2007). The Battle of Alcazar, the Mediterranean, and the Moor. In: Stanivukovic, G.V. (eds) Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601840_6
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