Moors, Villainy and The Battle of Alcazar

Moors, Villainy and The Battle ofAlcazar Peter Hyland One of the most important effects of recent theoretical approaches to the culture of the English Renaissance has been the revaluation and relocation of repressed or marginalized perspectives, especially insofar as this work has shown h o w such voices have been misrepresented or even silenced both in literary and cultural texts and in their critical reception. This has particularly been the case with the drama of the Elizabethan period, which was centrally implicated in the construction of an English national identity at a time of European competition and expansionism. M u c h recent criticism has examined ways in which the conception of national identity located its values within boundaries that were marked and validated through the representation of racial and religious 'otherness', particularly in relation to blackness and Islam, 86 Peter Hyland dramatized in the figure of the Moor.1 While there can be no question that this has revealed the racist underpinnings of much Elizabethan drama, it has also resulted in a totalizing approach that has misrepresented and distorted some of the texts. I want to consider here one w a y in which George Peele's play The Battle of Alcazar, and particularly its treatment of its Moorish villain Muly Mahamet, has suffered from such distortion A n y attempt to interpret attitudes reflected in cultural texts of the past, and especially attitudes in the sensitive area of racial distinction, must deal with the complex set of differences generated by temporal distance. The very term 'racist' is a recent coinage (neither 'racist' nor 'racialist' appears in the 1933 edition of the O E D ) , and while this obviously does not m e a n that the conditions and prejudices that w e think of as racist did not exist within the cultures that produced these texts, it does m e a n that w e must be very careful about h o w w e construe them. In his book Race and Culture, Thomas Sowell argues that the term 'racism', while widely used in contemporary ideological discussion, is ill-defined. For Sowell the word's 'straightforward meaning—a belief in innate Amongst the more important books on the construction of blackness on the early English stage are: Eldred Jones, Othello's Countrymen: Th African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press 1965); Elliot H. Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in Englis Drama, 1550-1688 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982); Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Black English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Jack D'Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of Florida Press, 1991; Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989; Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995). Moors, Villainy and The Battle ofAlcazar 87 racial inferiority or superiority' is in danger of getting lost because i t has been contaminated by 'ideological redefinitions', to the degree that 'political overuse of the word m a y destroy its effectiveness as a warning against a very real danger.' One of these 'ideological redefinitions' connects racial and gender issues. Ania Loomba, a prominent analyst of the racial implications of cultural documents, writes at the beginning of Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama: "The processes by which w o m e n and black people are constructed as the "others" of white patriarchal society are similar and connected....' There are two problems here. One lies in the shift from 'similar' to 'connected', for i f the processes are similar w e can analyze them in comparative terms, but if they are connected w e cannot examine the construction of race without also examining the construction of gender, and the danger is that an agenda of discrediting white patriarchy will stand in the w a y of empirical analysis. A second and potentially more serious problem is that Loomba's implied universalization of a contemporary truth takes insufficiently into consideration the 'otherness' of the past. If, in trying to define the 'racism' w e...