Shakespeare's Restless World by Neil MacGregor

Author:Neil MacGregor [MacGregor, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101638118
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

From London to Marrakesh

AFRICAN TREASURE

Elizabeth I was a monarch of many names – Good Queen Bess, Gloriana, the Virgin Queen and occasionally something much more exotic: ‘The Sultana Isabel, who has high position and majestic glory, constancy and steadiness, a rank which all her co-religionists, far and near, recognise, whose stature among the Christian people continues to be mighty and lofty’. The Sultana Isabel is, of course, Queen Elizabeth I as seen from far away – from Africa in 1600. This flattering description of her majestic glory, constancy and steadiness was given by one of her new allies on the world stage, Sharif Ahmad al-Mansur, the wealthy king of Morocco – far richer than Elizabeth herself – and a force to be reckoned with in both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

Sharif Al-Mansur’s comment on their Queen is a reminder that English play-goers in Shakespeare’s time were just beginning to be global citizens. They were proud of Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the earth, credulous, willing listeners to tall stories of the sort of lands filled with ‘cannibals that each other eat / the Anthropophagi and men whose heads / do grow beneath their shoulders’, and eager readers of a new genre of thriller – traveller’s tales like Sir Walter Raleigh’s book of 1596, The Discovery of Guiana, possibly Shakespeare’s source for Othello’s stories.

This curiosity about an expanding, unsettling world was played out in the theatre. In The Merchant of Venice, a richly dressed, exotic figure sweeps on to the stage to woo the Italian heiress, Portia.

MOROCCO: Mislike me not for my complexion,

The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,

To whom I am a neighbour and near bred.

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