- Speaking of the Moor: From "Alcazar" to "Othello." by Emily C.Bartels
The chronological range of Emily C. Bartels' fine study, Speaking of the Moor:From "Alcazar" to "Othello," is purposively narrow (1588-1604), for it captures a curious phase in England's theatrical history when playwrights put the Moor center stage. Bartels revives, in new terms, the old scholarly question of how to interpret the label "Moor." But rather than attempting to pin down this figure's provenance or color, she demonstrates that the Moor is surprisingly and insistently "uncodified." For the English, during this dynamic fifteen-year span, the Moor was not tightly associated with any particular "homogenizing trait," such as "color, religion, [or] ethnicity" (7). It was instead the Moor's multilayered, provisional, and diverse story that seized England's imagination.
No doubt, scholars interested in drama and historical conceptions of race will benefit from this book's arguments; I would, however, recommend Speaking of the Moor to readers outside this target audience for its implicit lessons in methodology. Bartels is masterful in her capacity to question our projections backward onto a period that preceded many of the historical developments that shaped later constructions of race. She marshals her impressive skills as a reader and researcher to uncover new evidence and pose new interpretations. Too often literature scholars pluck selections from nonliterary materials to support their argument but miss the primary text's central goals. Bartels takes a different tack: when, for example, she discusses Richard Hakluyt's massive Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & [End Page 248] Discoveries of the English Nation (1589, 1598-1600), she conveys an understanding of the collection in its entirety. Consequently, this comprehensive knowledge authorizes her outline of the period's mutable geopolitics—a geopolitics that fails to match subsequent imperialist agendas.
It is Bartels's central thesis that the figure of the Moor occupied a "complex position" for late-sixteenth and early seventeenth-century English writers, for he "uniquely represents the intersection of European and non-European cultures" (5). Reminding her readers that the Atlantic slave trade did not "significantly define England's relation to Africa until well into the seventeenth century" (11), Bartels resists viewing representations of the Moor through a later legacy of racial prejudice. Avoiding familiar but anachronistic frameworks takes discipline and vigilance, and Bartels offers us, instead, a picture of early modern globalization. Before New World colonialism, or the orientalizing of the east, or the construction of Africa as the "dark continent," the narratives of cultural exchange were unsettled and fluid (18). "England's accommodation of a global economy," Bartels argues, "pivoted uniquely around the culturally complex Moor" (20).
The chapters alternate between close readings of the drama—George Peele's Battle of Alcazar, Titus Andronicus, Thomas Dekker's Lust's Dominion; or, The Lascivious Queen, and Othello—and historical arguments founded on a specific set of non-literary texts: the aforementioned Hakluyt, Elizabeth's letters calling for the deportation of "blackmoores" from England, and John Pory's English translation of Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa. This organization allows Bartels to build and layer her globalization argument by offering different perspectives on England's relation to Africa. The opening chapter on The Battle of Alcazar presents a Mediterranean world that fails to predict the future trajectory of European prejudices, characterized by "unpredictable intersections of Europeans, non-Europeans, of Moors, Arabians, Turks, Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, and at least one Englishman" (43-44). Bartels's discussion of Hakluyt in chapter 2 powerfully demonstrates that the English were not focused on Africa: Africa failed to register in any discernible way in England's plans for economic development or colonial control. (52). Haklutyt's accounts of Africa underscore Bartels's valuable point that England's future in the region was far from determined and notably open ended. By establishing Africa's "displacement within England's imperialist fantasies" (47), she prepares the ground for chapter 3,"'Incorporate in Rome': Titus Andronicus and the Consequence of Conquest...