a jewel of her majesty’s picture, set with some rubies and diamonds, three great pieces of gilt plate, ten garments of cloth and gold, a very fine case of glass bottles silver and gilt, with two pieces of fine Holland, which so gratefully she accepted, as that she sent to know of the ambassador what present he thought she might return that would most delight her majesty: who sent word that a suit of princely attire being after the Turkish fashion would for the rareness thereof be acceptable in England. Whereupon she sent an upper gown of cloth of gold very rich, an under gown of cloth of silver, and a girdle of Turkey work, rich and fair, with a letter of gratification.19
The whole exchange was conducted by the two royal women’s intermediaries: Barton represented Elizabeth while Safiye delegated everything to her kira (a Jewish agent), the Spanish-born Esperanza Malchi, whose power in the imperial harem was second only to her own. A delighted Barton valued the sultana’s gifts at £120 before sending them on to England.20 No record of Elizabeth’s bejeweled portrait remains, but other surviving examples provide some clue to the kind of object she sent. They include Nicholas Hilliard’s magnificent golden locket of the queen encrusted with diamonds and rubies, which showed her as “Defender of the Faith,” a title she had used repeatedly in her correspondence with Murad.
The exchange of these luxury items was a carefully rehearsed diplomatic act designed to celebrate the Anglo-Ottoman alliance, a point underlined by a translation of Safiye’s “letter of gratification,” which reached Greenwich Palace with her presents in August 1594. The letter provided an unequivocal statement of Ottoman political supremacy. It began by praising God and “the pure soul of Lord Muhammad” before listing Murad’s numerous titles as “emperor of the seven climates and of the four parts of the world,” then reminding the queen that the correspondence was initiated “on the part of the mother of Sultan Murad Khan’s son,” Safiye, the sultan’s consort and mother of his presumptive heir. The letter then managed to praise Elizabeth while also stressing her subservience to Murad:
Sultan son of Sultan from all the sons of Adam to this time, the shadow of God, the protector of faith and state, Khan Murad, the support of Christian womanhood . . . who follow the Messiah, bearer of the marks of pomp and majesty, trailing the skirts of glory and power, she who is obeyed of the princes, cradle of chastity and continence, ruler of the realm of England, crowned lady and woman of Mary’s way—may her last moments be concluded with good and may she obtain that which she desires!21
As far as Safiye was concerned, regardless of the presents exchanged between them, Elizabeth came under Murad’s imperial and theological protection. Her letter unwittingly confirmed the accusations leveled against Elizabeth and her Protestant counselors by Verstegen and the exiled English Catholic diaspora: England was being treated as a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, prepared to trade anything from cloth to its faith.
• • •
In late 1593, just as this exchange of gifts and letters began, London learned of the outbreak of war between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, following the sultan’s invasion of Hungary that July. This conflict would drag on for thirteen years with no decisive outcome, and news of its campaigns would dominate English publications for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign. Reports of the conflict coincided with the reopening of London’s playhouses after a year of closures prompted by a particularly severe outbreak of plague.
On January 24, 1594, a new play by Shakespeare was performed at the Rose Theatre by the Earl of Sussex’s Men: The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. Having found early success by staging the prehistory to the triumph of the Tudors, now Shakespeare cast his creative net further back to the decline of the Roman Empire and the brutal, bloody tragedy of a fictional general.
The play shows Titus returning to Rome in triumph after a ten-year campaign against the Germanic Goths, in which twenty-one of his sons have died. As tradition demands, he attempts to appease the gods by sacrificing the son of the imprisoned Tamora, Queen of the Goths. The new Roman emperor Saturninus makes Tamora his empress, and she vows revenge on Titus for her son’s death. Tamora’s sons rape Titus’s daughter Lavinia, leading to a grisly and unrelentingly violent cycle of atrocities that culminates in Titus feeding Tamora her dead sons in a pie before killing her, his own daughter and himself. By the end of the play fourteen killings have been shown or described (ranging from ritual murder to infanticide and suicide), there are six severed body parts (including heads, hands and tongues), a rape, one live burial, one bout of madness and one case of cannibalism. Shakespeare adapts Lavinia’s rape and Tamora’s enforced cannibalism from the story of Tereus and Philomel in book six of Metamorphoses. The sixteenth-century translation of Ovid’s Latin poem used by Shakespeare begins with the line “Of shapes transformed to bodies strange I purpose to entreat.”22 For Shakespeare, Ovid’s stories of transformation and mutability were an endless source of inspiration. He reveled in the ability to miraculously transform the stage and its humble actors into myriad protean characters, places and situations. But Shakespeare was not content with emulating Ovid; he was determined to surpass him. In Titus Andronicus, instead of one rapist there are two, where Ovid has one murdered child Shakespeare has five, two children are eaten rather than one, and Lavinia has not just her tongue severed but also her hands.
Shakespeare also borrowed from his contemporaries. Robert Greene’s Selimus gave him the idea for the sickening scene where Titus is tricked into cutting off his hand to ensure the release of his sons, unaware that they have already been beheaded. This leads to one of the grisliest stage directions in all of Shakespeare: “Enter a messenger with two heads and a hand.”23 Titus is an aged and tragic version of Tamburlaine, a histrionic antihero railing about his military valor and honor, yet blind to the consequences of his intransigence for him and his family. If the play begins by mimicking Tamburlaine’s humorless swagger, its spectacular violence owed something to The Jew of Malta with the murderous exploits of Barabas. When Titus’s brother Marcus discovers the raped and mutilated Lavinia, he says, “Cousin, a word,”24 before realizing she has no tongue. Titus later tells the messenger, “Lend me thy hand, and I will give thee mine.”25 At the play’s climax Titus appears dressed as a cook about to feed Tamora her sons in a pie, a gruesome joke about getting your “just deserts.”
Shakespeare’s bloodiest and most violent play, Titus Andronicus has had a mixed critical history. Despite its initial success it fell out of favor in the later seventeenth century, and from the eighteenth its extreme violence led many critics to dismiss its “bad taste.” These included T. S. Eliot, who in 1927 called it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written, a play in which it is incredible that Shakespeare had any hand at all.”26 (The pun was probably unintentional.) Later in the twentieth century the atrocities of the Second World War left many directors and critics agreeing with the British theater reviewer Harold Hobson’s verdict that “there is absolutely nothing in the bleeding barbarity of Titus Andronicus which would have astonished anyone at Buchenwald.”27 Since the 1980s it has experienced an extraordinary theatrical and critical revival. Today it is as popular as when it was first performed in 1594, and in 2014 the English press reported with some relish that a new Globe Theatre production had seen five members of its audience faint.28
In a play where violence seems to be the rule rather than the exception, the distinction between civilization and barbarism becomes increasingly tenuous. Initially Rome represents everything that is civilized, but once it allows the barbarian Goths inside its gates, it too can turn on itself and, as Titus says, become “a wilderness of tigers.” Distinguishing between civilization and barbarism was a problem that had preoccupied Elizabethan Protestants in their relations with the Islamic world for decades. To Elizabeth and her advisers, it was difficult to see who was more barbaric: idolatrous Catholics trying to eradicate heretical Protestantism, or Muslim infidels offering military and re
ligious salvation.
One of the most striking characters in the play is without question Aaron the Moor. Aaron is the ultimate outsider, an amoral and unrepentant villain who unlike the Goths refuses to be assimilated into Rome or any other society. He first appears as part of the triumphal procession of Goth prisoners that Titus leads into Rome, though why a North African Moor should be in league with Germanic Goths is never explained. Aaron is Tamora’s lover, a relationship that continues after her marriage to Saturninus, which leads to the birth of a “blackamoor” child, described as “a joyless, dismal, black and sorrowful issue.”29 Once Tamora is established as Roman empress, Aaron is allowed to go on a murderous spree of “murders, rapes and massacres / Acts of black night, abominable deeds,”30 encouraging Tamora’s sons to rape Lavinia, framing Titus’s sons for murder, and tricking Titus into cutting off his own hand. Aaron’s only loyalty is to his “first-born son and heir.”31 At the end of the play, the surviving Romans deem death too good for him: he is buried “breast-deep in earth”32 and left to die.
Classical texts by writers such as Seneca and Ovid often allowed for the intrusion into civilized society of a destructive barbaric outsider who causes chaos, but Shakespeare invigorated and developed this tradition by drawing on Elizabeth’s fraught relations with North Africa’s Moors. Recent stylometric analysis of Titus Andronicus suggests that, like Henry VI, he was not alone in writing it. Several key scenes—including many featuring Aaron—appear to have been written by George Peele.33 To what extent Peele was involved may never be known, but Aaron was clearly modeled on his evil, duplicitous blackamoor Muly Mahamet in The Battle of Alcazar. Like Peele’s character, Aaron is a “blackamoor,” an “irreligious Moor”34 who conflates his own skin color with villainous relish. As he plots Lavinia’s rape he compares himself to a snake, his “fleece of wooly hair that now uncurls” like “an adder when she doth unroll / To do some fatal execution.”35 As he helps Titus to chop off his hand, Aaron laughs:
Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace
Aaron will have his soul black like his face.36
Aaron is one of the earliest Elizabethan representations of black men as duplicitous, lustful and evil. By naming him Aaron, Shakespeare associates his character with more immediate anxieties about Muslims and Jews. Aaron, the Old Testament prophet and elder brother of Moses, is common to all three Abrahamic religions. The Qur’an venerates him as related to the Virgin Mary, while Judaism celebrates his descendants as upholders of Jewish ritual law. Many in Shakespeare’s audience would know that the biblical Aaron’s youngest son was called Ithamar, an obvious allusion to the villainous Turk Ithamore in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.
While Aaron’s name and ethnicity recall Marlowe’s Turk/Moor, his speech and actions bring to mind Barabas. Toward the end of the play, when he is confronted with his crimes and asked if he is “not sorry for these heinous deeds,” Aaron responds:
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day—and yet I think
Few come within the compass of my curse—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men’s cattle break their necks,
Set fire on barns and haystacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends’ doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
“Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.”
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.37
The relish with which Aaron recounts his brutality is reminiscent of Barabas’s attitude to his own villainy. Even when he is buried in the ground, Aaron mocks those who would turn to conscience or prayer:
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done.
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform, if I might have my will.
If one good deed in all my life I did
I do repent it from my very soul.38
Aaron encapsulates all the fears associated with his non-Christian character. He is black, a Moor, but also “irreligious”; however, by associating him with Barabas and Ithamore, Shakespeare also conflates him with Turks and Jews as well as Moors and atheists. He is everything the audience should despise; and yet they are drawn irresistibly to him. Then as now, we listen to Aaron—as he speaks directly to us in soliloquy or asides—powerless to intervene, mute accomplices, colluding in his outrageous villainy.
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.”39 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.”40 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.41
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.”42 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.
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