The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (31 page)

To create such a formidable character, Shakespeare exploited every available stereotype; he asks his audience to see the Moor as an embodiment of the failings of the “civilized” Roman world. By incorporating Tamora and by extension Aaron into their body politic, the Romans invite their own destruction. As much as the Elizabethans aspired to emulate the Roman Empire, it was also the citadel of Catholicism, which since the Reformation had represented the barbaric idolatry of the papacy. Such a double perspective emerges toward the end of the play, when Roman soldiers capture Aaron while he is hiding with his newborn son in “a ruinous monastery.”
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When he is presented to Titus’s sole surviving son, Lucius, Aaron promises to confess everything if the Roman will “swear to me my child shall live.” Lucius refuses, saying, “Who should I swear by? Thou believest no god.”
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Aaron responds:

What if I do not?—as indeed, I do not—

Yet for I know thou art religious

And hast a thing within thee called conscience,

With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies

Which I have seen thee careful to observe,

Therefore I urge thy oath; for that I know

An idiot holds his bauble for a god,

And keeps the oath which by that god he swears,

To that I’ll urge him: therefore thou shalt vow

By that same god, what god soe’er it be

That thou adorest and hast in reverence.
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In a sudden moment of metamorphosis, the audience is transported from imperial Rome to post-Reformation England, in a scene from Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, with a Moor captured by “popish” Roman Catholic soldiers and condemning their idolatrous “tricks and ceremonies.” The audience is put in an invidious position, agreeing with Aaron’s dismissal of Catholicism, only to realize that it is identifying with an “irreligious Moor” who regards faith as nothing more than a “bauble.”

Titus Andronicus
is not a play designed to elicit sympathy for Aaron the Moor. His villainy remains indebted to an older tradition of medieval morality plays, but Shakespeare adds a new dimension by making him ethnically different, funny and, crucially, unrepentant. The play manipulates its audience’s profound ambivalence about the role of such “barbarians” in a confused post-Reformation world of shifting political and theological alliances. Shakespeare combined classical fears about outsiders with Elizabethan England’s ambiguous relations with Moors and Turks to create gripping drama filled with conflicts and contradictions. Nobody really cares about Barabas, because he kills his own children and gleefully attacks any religious belief, but Aaron is a sadistic, murderous atheist who nevertheless cares for his child and offers a familiar critique of Catholicism, leaving the audience then as now confused about whether to admire or revile him.

•   •   •

Even as
Titus Andronicus
played to large crowds throughout the 1594 season, negotiations between Elizabeth and al-Mansur were under way for a second Moorish delegation to visit England. In May 1595 Edward Holmden, master of the Grocers’ Company and a prominent merchant in the Turkey Company, wrote to the Privy Council from Morocco and reported that it “is still given out that the king’s ambassador shall go for England, being a man of account, and two alcaids [military governors or chiefs] with him, and carrieth a retinue of twenty-five or thirty persons . . . he will be here before Michaelmas [September 29]. The cause is not known.”
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Although Holmden claimed that the embassy’s “causes” were unknown to him, its leader was clearly on his way to England to discuss further Anglo-Moroccan military operations against the Spanish.

Diplomatic tensions between England and Spain were once more leading both sides toward open conflict. Tit-for-tat naval raids throughout 1595 led Philip II to sanction yet another invasion of England, which this time involved landing a Spanish army in Catholic Ireland ahead of a full-scale military assault on the English mainland. When news reached London, Elizabeth’s Privy Council authorized a preemptive strike at Cadiz, Spain’s main Atlantic seaport and home to the Indies fleet. The Moroccan delegation was designed to negotiate logistical support for Elizabeth’s naval operations, including Moroccan ships and soldiers, and the creation of a fort at Agadir from which the English could attack the Spanish gold fleet en route to and from the Americas. No records survive of the delegation reaching London that autumn, but although al-Mansur eventually refused English access to Agadir, he sent several galleys and supplies to support the English attack on Cadiz.

Having coordinated an unlikely alliance involving Muslim Moroccans and Dutch Calvinists, Elizabeth’s fleet of 150 ships and 6,000 soldiers left Plymouth in June 1596 under the joint command of the loyal veteran Charles Howard, lord high admiral of England, and the queen’s new favorite, the dashing thirty-year-old Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Others involved included Sir Walter Raleigh, who was seeking political rehabilitation after returning empty-handed from a long and dangerous voyage to Guyana. There were younger men too, in search of booty and adventure, including the royal physician Roger Marbeck and the twenty-four-year-old poet John Donne.

In late June the fleet reached Cadiz and attacked immediately, first by sea, then by land.
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In the short but fierce naval exchange that followed, the English destroyed several Spanish galleons including the
St. Philip,
which Marbeck watched being blown up by a “Moorish slave” who set fire to the ship’s gunpowder store before seeking refuge alongside thirty-eight other Moroccans among the English forces. Marbeck wrote that Howard and Essex agreed

to furnish them with money and all other necessaries, and to bestow on them a bark and pilot, and so to have them freely conveyed into Barbary, willing them to let the country to understand what was done and what they had seen. Whereby I doubt not but, as her majesty is a most admirable prince already over all Europe and all Africa, Asia and Christendom, so the whole world hereafter shall have just such cause to admire her infinite princely virtues.
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The English also captured two Spanish galleons, the
St. Matthew
and the
St. Andrew,
both of which had run aground, although the Indies fleet laden with a cargo worth an estimated 12 million ducats of bullion was destroyed before the English could reach it. They then sacked the city, ransomed hostages and sailed away on July 4, leaving Cadiz on fire and a large part of Philip’s Indies fleet at the bottom of its harbor.

News of the English victory spread quickly across Europe and North Africa. Although the expedition had failed to capture the vast wealth of the Indies fleet, its commanders celebrated it as a great triumph. William Monson, one of the English naval commanders, proclaimed, “Spain never received so great an overthrow, so great a spoil, so great an indignity at our hands as in that journey to Cadiz.”
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The English did not have a monopoly in claiming victory. When the “Moorish slaves” reported back to Marrakesh, al-Mansur was quick to insist on his part. In characteristically astounding terms his court historian al-Fishtali described how “the sky darkened with dissension against the tyrant of Qishtala [Philip II], and the kings of the nations of the Christians attacked him like wild dogs. The most ferocious against him, and the one most daring in attacking his kingdoms and tightening the noose around him, was Isabella the sultana of the kingdoms of the lands of England.”

Al-Fishtali claimed that the Cadiz victory was thanks to al-Mansur’s diplomatic and logistical support. It was al-Mansur who “had lured her with his support and sharpened her will against him [Philip II]; he showed her his willingness to confront him by supplying her with copper to use in cannons, and saltpeter for ammunition which he permitted her to buy from his noble kingdom. . . . With God helping him, he pitted her against the enemy of religion.”
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It is unclear just what the Moroccan galleys had achieved during the battle, but according to al-Fishtali’s account, England and Morocco were now joined in a holy war against Catholic Spain.
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Philip II responded by preparing yet another armada, this time one that would land first in Ireland and exploit the Catholic rebellion there before invading England. A fleet of more than sixty ships carrying over 10,000 soldiers left Lisbon for Ireland on October 25, 1596, but off the northwest Spanish coast it ran into a terrible storm, losing half its ships and thousands of lives. Defeated at home and overstretched abroad, Philip II was forced to declare his kingdom bankrupt just weeks later. He would try to raise another armada the following year, but the weather wrecked his plans once more.
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Some of Philip’s Spanish advisers felt that, when it came to invading England, Divine Providence had deserted them. It seemed that on this matter God was indeed on the side of the English.

•   •   •

Although a second Moroccan delegation never materialized, another Moor did appear in London—not at London’s royal court, but on its stage. In late 1596 Shakespeare wrote
The Merchant of Venice,
or to give it its full title when it was first published in 1600,
The Most Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice with the Extreme Cruelty of Shylock the Jew
. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who demands a pound of flesh from a Venetian merchant, Antonio, in settlement of a bad debt, has divided audiences for generations. Antonio borrows the money to help his feckless friend Bassanio pursue the wealthy heiress Portia, who is in turn being wooed by a series of suitors, including the Prince of Morocco. The play reaches its climax with the famous courtroom scene where Shylock prepares to cut out a pound of Antonio’s flesh, only to be prevented by Portia, disguised as a lawyer, who argues that “if thou dost shed / One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods”
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will be confiscated by the Venetian state. Unable to act, Shylock is then condemned as an “alien” who has sought the life of a Venetian. He is stripped of his wealth and required to “presently become a Christian,”
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leaving the stage a broken man and agreeing to all the Christians’ terms.

Shakespeare had several inspirations for writing this play. The Cadiz expedition was clearly on his mind as scholars base their dating of the play on an explicit reference to the captured Spanish galleon
St. Andrew
in the play’s opening lines. The Venetian merchant Salarino talks about “my wealthy Andrew dock’d in sand”—the ship had run aground when it was captured in Cadiz, and nearly did so again when it was brought back to England in the summer of 1596. In terms of dramatic precedents, Shakespeare was responding to Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta
and Wilson’s
Three Ladies of London
with their contrasting depictions of Jewish merchants—as well as Muslims.

Another recent event may also have inspired Shylock’s creation. In January 1594 Elizabeth’s personal physician, Dr. Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese-born Jewish convert to Protestantism, was arrested on charges of treason and conspiring with the Spanish to poison the queen. Although Lopez had indeed been paid to spy for the Spanish, the charges of attempted murder were completely fabricated by the Earl of Essex, who was eager to prove his loyalty to the queen and gain an advantage over his great rival Burghley. Lopez was a pawn caught up in court machinations, and he never stood a chance. At his trial he was accused of accepting 50,000 crowns from Philip to poison Elizabeth. One of his prosecutors, Sir Francis Bacon, captured the suspicion that Lopez’s conversion had generated by describing him as “of nation a Portuguese, and suspected to be in sect secretly a Jew though here he conformed himself to the rites of Christian religion.”

Lopez was sentenced to death and executed that June. According to the historian William Camden, he protested from the scaffold “that he loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ; which coming from a man of the Jewish profession moved no small laughter in the standers-by.”
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For those who watched Lopez being hanged, drawn and quartered, his profession of innocence was seen as a comically equivocal admission of guilt, the duplicity of a convert who spoke of love when he meant hate.

The cruel but uneasy laughter that accompanied Lopez’s violent demise permeates Shakespeare’s play. It seems that Shakespeare intended it to be a comedy (which is how it was listed when published in the Folio of 1623), and at various times over the past four hundred years audiences have felt able, or perhaps incited, to laugh at Shylock’s downfall and the anti-Semitic abuse from Portia and Antonio that comes with it. But the laughter is not the same as that associated with Shylock’s direct predecessor, Marlowe’s Barabas. Like Barabas, Shylock watches his daughter, Jessica, convert to Christianity, but despite his murderous designs on Antonio, he never engages in the wicked depravity of Marlowe’s character. Shakespeare provides Shylock with a depth of humanity not out of some secret liberal desire to express toleration toward the Jewish faith, but to sharpen the dramatic ambiguity and the power of his character.

Shylock appears in only five of the play’s scenes, but in one of the most significant he utters a resounding plea for a common humanity. “I am a Jew,” he tells Solanio and Salarino: