Kim F. Hall's highly praised Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995) was, at the time, regarded as the definitive study of blackness (and whiteness) in literature and portraiture of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Hall's work may be situated among the inquiries of G. K. Hunter, Eldred Jones, Elliot H. Tokson, Jack D'Amico, Anthony Barthelemy, Virginia Mason Vaughan, Joyce Green MacDonald, Margo Hendricks, and Ania Loomba, all scholars who have also written about Africans and related Ottomans and Indians. The subsequent interventions of Nabil Matar, Daniel Vitkus, Jonathan Burton, Linda McJannet, and Bernadette Andrea on Islam have furthered our understanding of racial and religious “strangers,” to use the early modern descriptor. The most recent contributions to the dialogue—Emily C. Bartels's Speaking of the Moor: From “Alcazar” to “Othello” and Lara Bovilsky's Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage—prove that in spite of the many outstanding publications on the subject, there is even more to be said on the “Moor.” Although Bartels's and Bovilsky's books may appear to share the same topic, they do not necessarily overlap. The use of “early modern” by one and “Renaissance” by the other indicates, as the terms themselves imply, distinct approaches to understanding the Moor.

The Introduction to Bovilsky's Barbarous Play is an astute survey of the typological (versus biological and contemporary) connotations of “black” and “race,” and the rest of the book does not disappoint. Chapters insightfully confront the associations among race, gender, nationality, and religioethnicity in depictions of women, Italians, and Jews from Shakespeare's Othello and The Merchant of Venice to John Webster's The White Devil and The Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, Composed at Several Times. Bovilsky's reading of Milton's appropriation of language in his Italian sonnets is particularly good, but the last chapter, on “Race, Science, and Aversion,” is perhaps the most valuable. Using Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's torrid tragedy The Changeling as a model, Bovilsky dissects the Renaissance period's “vagaries of individual humoral physiology” (137). The Renaissance construction of character, Bovilsky suggests, involved linking race, the humors, and emotion. At this point in Barbarous Play, one is reminded of Jonathan Gil Harris's groundbreaking monographs Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England (2004) and Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (1998). Barbarous Play does not claim to be a sequel to the innovative perspective that Harris heralds, but its attention to Renaissance physiology and physiognomy is valuable.

Barbarous Play is a commendable book, but it cannot compete with Emily Bartels's Speaking of the Moor, a tour de force that should be required reading in every college course on the Moor in early modern drama. Chapters alternate between interpretations of plays and investigations of core, nonfictional sources. Chapters 1, 3, 5, and 7 focus on George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar (1590), Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1593–4), Thomas Dekker's Lust's Dominion (1600), and Shakespeare's Othello (1603). Chapters 2, 4, and 6 assess Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589, 1598–1600), Queen Elizabeth's several edicts of expulsion in the late sixteenth century, and al-Hasan ibn Mohammed al-Wezâz al-Fâsi's The History and Description of Africa (1526). At first glance, Bartels's choice of texts, all very familiar to any scholar studying the Moor, may indicate that her argument is not new, for others have pieces in print on the very same materials. However, what distinguishes Speaking of the Moor from previous criticism is the detail and depth with which Bartels ties everything together, not neglecting the political, cultural, societal, and commercial frames that make early modern literature what it is and that are inseparable from the Moor. Thus, while Bovilsky's Barbarous Play can at times overrely on narrow close readings, with limited use of external context, Bartels's Speaking of the Moor is a more comprehensive and complete examination.

Bartels begins with The Battle of Alcazar, thought to be the first English drama with a fully designed Moor in the form of “Muly Hamet,” predecessor to Eleazer in Lust's Dominion and Aaron in Titus Andronicus. The Battle of Alcazar and Muly Hamet have not received extensive critical attention, since Muly shows limited complexity, and the play itself is not particularly refined, with an uneven plot and an awkwardly constructed Chorus. But Bartels's review of the wars of succession in Morocco and the Anglo-Moroccan trade in saltpeter (among other commodities), matters that inform Peele's writing, provides a fresh look at the play—not to mention that the subjects of politics and exchange are interesting in themselves. The discussion of Hakluyt in Chapter 2 is an appropriate transition to Titus Andronicus in Chapter 3. Navigations was wildly popular among early moderns, who used Hakluyt's collection of accounts to form foreign locales and peoples in fiction. Despite Navigations's leanings toward a protoimperialist structure, the actual English enterprise, writes Bartels, was at this point less defined than the Portuguese, and Africa was not as important to trade as the wealthy South Asia and Far East. Yet the Africa in Navigations, as hot, infested with tropical diseases, and home to barbarity, inspired to some degree the formation of the Moor. Although Aaron of Titus Andronicus may appear to have sprung from Hakluyt, Bartels argues that the Roman milieu of the play is equally important to unlocking Aaron, for his identity as Moor occurs alongside the act of being Roman, and both were accused of barbarity at times. Likewise, although scholars propose that literature's Moors were influenced by Elizabeth I's efforts to expel the Moors of her realm—efforts expressed in the issuing of a number of edicts in the latter half of her reign—Bartels points out that Elizabeth, like Hakluyt, did not possess a fully formed supremacist posture but rather had “a color-based racist discourse in the making” (102). If anything, Elizabethan England regarded Spain, not Moors (whom Elizabeth wanted to offer Spain for English hostages), in terms of an “oppositional relation,” but Bartels claims that this sense of difference was based on “the practicalities of war and was … inattentive to boundaries of race or color” (102).

For the Spanish, however, centuries-long mingling with Muslims and Jews as fellow Iberians created a unique response to the Moor, as evidenced in Lust's Dominion, the focus of Chapter 5. In Lust's Dominion, Eleazer is both outsider and insider, or as Bartels puts it, “the potentially alienable Spanish Moor” and “the essentially inalienable Spanish Moor” (120). Such duality marks al-Hasan ibn Mohammed al-Wezâz al-Fâsi, rechristened “Leo Africanus” after baptism by Pope Leo X. Al-Fâsi's The History and Description of Africa was translated into English by John Pory in 1600. Scholars have judged History to be almost as important as Hakluyt's Navigations in shaping the Moor and Africa in the English imagination. However, Bartels reminds us that while the “subaltern speaks” through History, Pory's interference is not invisible. And yet the diversity of al-Fâsi's Africa is evident and immutable. Set alongside paintings of the Venetian populace by the likes of Gentile Bellini or Vittore Carpaccio, History and its artistic peers provide glimpses of rich, mirrored scenes. In Othello, the vision extends to Cyprus, where boundaries intersect. Compared to Battle of Alcazar, Othello reveals a shift from the openly devilish barbarian to the conflicted noble Moor, but ideological underpinnings have also undergone transformation: Iago's rhetoric is “‘racist’” (159), states Bartels, because for Iago—and here Bartels is absolutely correct—Othello's elevation is a situation where the “Moor in Venice” is also the “Moor of Venice,” the latter's implied inclusivity a triumph for Othello but the cause, unfortunately, of “the drama's defining tension” (159). Othello, a play whose hero is known for his travels through the worlds of the Mediterranean and his eloquence, is a fitting way to end Speaking of the Moor. Wide-ranging in its selection of texts and elegantly argued, Emily Bartels's Speaking of the Moor might just be the last word on the Moor in early modern literature.