This Orient Isle by Jerry Brotton

Author:Jerry Brotton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241004036
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

The vain and conceited Stukeley lacks the ambition and linguistic prowess of Tamburlaine. Instead he is fixated on the pursuit of a king’s crown, preferring to be king of an Irish ‘mole-hill’ rather than anyone’s subject.

At the end of Peele’s play, his historical sources dictated that everyone dies, though not before Muly Mahamet demands ‘A horse, a horse, villain, a horse’ in the climactic battle scene, prefiguring the demise of another tragic villain, Shakespeare’s Richard III, four years later. The only man left standing is Muly Mahamet Seth, Elizabeth’s future ally, but even he does little more than order the mutilation of Muly Mahamet’s body followed by a Christian burial for Sebastian (which not did happen historically). Like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, there is no obvious lesson from Peele’s play as it ends with no Chorus to provide a simple moral, and no character with which the audience can identify. Instead they are offered a choice between the pompous Abdelmelec, the pious Sebastian, the scheming Muly Mahamet and the mercenary Stukeley.29

This lack of simple identifications in Peele’s play came about in part through the contradictory nature of Elizabeth’s relations with Iberia and Morocco in the late 1580s. These contradictions provided an alternative to the prescriptive history of classical Rome and Greece, and allowed Elizabethan dramatists to develop their own idiom, enabling them to address contemporary English hopes and fears by staging them in a faraway land where the horrors of warfare, murder, atheism and tyranny could be explored in relative safety, free from the suspicious eyes of Elizabeth’s censors. We might think the play more conventionally recommends the avoidance of Catholic–Muslim conflicts, and advises Elizabeth against pursuing an alliance with al-Mansur (Peele’s Muly Mahamet Seth). But Tudor dramatists were obviously not foreign policy advisers. First and foremost they wanted to exploit the contradictory associations, ambivalent emotions and theological conflicts created by English experiences in Morocco and beyond as spectacular, exciting, captivating drama, regardless of morality or ideology.

The Battle of Alcazar was not, however, Peele’s only foray into contemporary events in Iberia and North Africa. At the same time he also produced a poem entitled ‘A Farewell to Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake’, written in anticipation of the departure of Norris and Drake’s Portuguese Expedition in spring 1589. Where The Battle of Alcazar had shown Catholic Portugal destroyed by its ill-fated Moroccan adventure, Peele’s poem imagined an English Protestant crusade taking on the might of Spanish Catholicism. He describes the fleet leaving behind ‘England’s shore and Albion’s chalky cliffs’ as they head for ‘the spacious bay of Portugal’ and the ‘golden Tagus’. Bidding farewell to all they hold dear, Peele even glances backwards at his own recent play alongside those of Marlowe and Greene:

Bid theatres and proud tragedians,

Bid Mahomet’s poo [poll, or head], and mighty Tamburlaine,

King Charlemagne, Tom Stukeley, and the rest,

Adieu. To arms, to arms, to glorious arms!

With noble Norris, and victorious Drake,

Under the sanguine cross, brave England’s badge,

To propagate religious piety.

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