The Moor in English Renaissance Drama

D'Amico writes that when he lived in Lebanon and Morocco he taught plays such as "Othello" "to students who, no doubt, would have been considered Moors by Shakespeare's contemporaries". His experience as an outsider trying to understand another culture shapes this work about the boundaries of perception set by race, religion and custom and about the boundaries of the imagination. From his authoritative reading of five plays of Shakespeare, and others by Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Dekker, D'Amico explores the relationship between Western society and the inmage of the Moor as an African and as a follower of Islam. "The Moor as villain becomes a convenient locus for those darkly subversive forces that threaten European society from within but that can be projected onto the outsider," he writes. "The destructive forces of lust and violence are thus distanced by being identified with a cultural, religious or racial source of evil." The plays reveal to him the way culture and imagination determine values and standards of judgement. What struck him most in his investigation, he says, is how great writers move beyond cultural stereotypes and are able to examine the human problems found in a figure such as the Moor. In Shakespeare's work, especially, what is projected onto the Moor reflects those desires that come from within. Aaron's question "Is black so base a hue?" posed in "Titus Andronicus" pervades the book. From D'Amico's historical account of contacts in trade and diplomacy between England and Morocco, to his discussion of ELizabethan and Jacobean drama, this work should appeal to all scholars of the Renaissance.