Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans
Author(s): Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan
Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 19-44
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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Before Othello:Elizabethan
Representationsof Sub-SaharanAfricans
Alden T. Vaughanand Virginia Mason Vaughan
N Shakespeare's tragedy of i604, Othello describes how he won
Desdemona's love with stories of his early exploits:
Wherein I spake of most disastrouschances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
And of the cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders (I.3.I33-44).1
Othello's yarns are symptomatic of the travelers' tales that circulated in
England during the second half of the sixteenth century and beyond-narratives that ranged from mythical accounts of monstrous races and imaginary
places to fact-filled reports of actual strangers and their remarkablehomelands. Circulating in various written forms and, to a lesser extent, in visual
embodiments on stages, in public pageants, and occasionally in graphic arts
(see Figure I), such representationsfashioned in many English minds a host
of exotic Others-the distant denizens of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.2
Alden T. Vaughan is professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. Virginia
Mason Vaughan is professorof English at Clark University. For helpful comments on an earlier
draft of this article the authors thank the participants in the seminar on Constructing Race,
especially Benjamin Braude for his written comments. Our thanks also to Peter Blayney, Kim
Hall, and Leslie Thomson for sharing their expertiseon specific matters.
In all quotations from primarysources, we have conformed to the modern usage of "i"and
"j," "u"and "v";we have also converted the thorn "y"to "th"and replaced the macron with an
m, as, for example, "copany"to "company."
1 Quotations from Othello are taken from the Cambridge University Press edition, ed.
Norman Sanders (Cambridge,i984). Some recent discussions of Othello's origins include James
R. Aubrey, "Race and the Spectacle of the Monstrous in Othello,"C/jo, 22 (I992-1993),
22I-38;
Emily C. Bartels, "MakingMore of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and RenaissanceRefashionings
of Race," ShakespeareQuarterly,4I (1990), 433-54; Karen Newman, "'And Wash the Ethiop
White': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello," in Jean E. Howard and Marion F.
O'Connor, eds., ShakespeareReproduced:The Text in History and Ideology (London, i987),
14i-62;
Patricia Parker, "Fantasiesof 'Race' and 'Gender':Africa, Othello, and Bringing to the
Light," in Margo Hendricks and Parker,eds., Women, "Race,"and Writingin the EarlyModern
Period (London, I994), 84-100; and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello:A ContextualHistory
(Cambridge,1994), chap. 3.
2 This article addressesonly tangentially the pictorial representationsof Africans, a topic
that deserves separate, extended treatment, although, compared to Continental Europe, little
The Williamand Mary Quarterly,3d Series, Vol. LIV, No.
i,
JanuaryI997
20
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
DESCRIPTION OF AFRICA.
' r -, --i-HTi:
--~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~rl
3._
I.i
FIGURE I
of the
OrteliusHis Epitomeof the Theater
Map from the pocket-sizedAbraham
Worlde
(London,I603). Althoughsparsein placenames,it locatesGuineaand
text dwells
Africa.The accompanying
associatesblacknesswith sub-Saharan
Library.
courtesyof the FolgerShakespeare
on Africancolor.Reproduced
Much of the printedmaterialappearedin translationsof Continentaltexts;
much more, as time went on, was of Englishauthorship,when the island
and examined,pernation belatedlyjoined Europe'sage of reconnaissance
sonallyor vicariously,the world'shiddenwonders.
Not all European representationsof previously unknown peoples
emphasizedOtherness. Written accounts of New World natives, it has
recentlybeen argued,werean earlymodernformof ethnographythat show
"genuineinterestin the diversityof humansocietiesand implicitgrappling
they
with the epistemological
problemsattendantuponculturalencounters";
graphic art concerning Africa and Africansseems to have been created in i6th-century England.
Note, for example, the relative paucity of English illustrations in Jean DeVisse and Michel
Mollat, The Image of the Black in WesternArt, II: From the Early ChristianEra to the 'Age of
Discovery,- Part 2: Africansin the ChristianOrdinanceof the World(Fourteenthto the Sixteenth
Century) (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). Relevant, too, is Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of
Othernessin NorthernEuropeanArt of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1993). For a suggestive examination of late 16th-centuryjewelry that depicted Africans see Kim F. Hall, Things
of Darkness:Economiesof Raceand Genderin EarlyModernEngland(Ithaca, 1995), 2aI-26, and,
more generally, Peter Erickson, "Representationsof Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,"
Criticism,35 (1993), 499-527.
BEFORE OTHELLO
21
try to "locate the indigenous Americans within a preestablishedand reasonably stable world view."3 In this formulation, travel narrativesof the New
World assumed fundamental similarity between Europeansand New World
peoples despite differences in custom and culture. But as this essay will
show, representations of sub-Saharan Africans circulating in Elizabethan
England generally focused on difference,implying their natural inferiority
and non-assimilability into English notions of civility and proper appearance.4The sub-SaharanAfricans' "black"skin and drasticallyunfamiliarcustoms and convictions, the evidence suggests, set them apart in English eyes
and imaginations as a special categoryof humankind.5
I
The information explosion that awakened English readers to subSaharanAfricans was not, of course, without precursors.A broad smattering
of ethnographic knowledge about Africans had been available to literate
English men and women long before the middle of the sixteenth century.
Ancient texts, especially the works of Herodotus and Pliny the Elder, were
readily available in Greek or Latin and were translatedinto English during
the sixteenth century. The information they imparted about Africans was
usually unsophisticated and often unreliable, but it-along with bits of cultural observation-introduced English readersto the issue of body color that
would become a major theme of early modern authors. To Herodotus
Africans were "in countenance a like black, in hayre a like fryzled";to Pliny
they were "al black saving their teeth, and a litle the palme of their handes."6
3 William M. Hamlin, The Image of America in Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare:
RenaissanceEthnographyand LiteraryReflection(New York, 1995), 2, 9.
4 The notion of Otherness is explored in a variety of books and articles that shed useful, if
often indirect, light on the issues addressedin this article. Among the most extensive treatments
are Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard
Howard (New York, i984); FranqoisHartog, TheMirror of Herodotus:The Representationof the
Otherin the Writingof History,trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley, i988); and the rich contributions to
Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings:Observing,Reporting,and Reflectingon the
EncountersbetweenEuropeansand OtherPeoplesin the EarlyModernEra (Cambridge, I994). See
also Todorov, "Living Alone Together," the replies of 7 scholars, and Todorov's response, in
New LiteraryHistory,27 (i996), i-io6.
5 By the middle of the i6th century, most European accounts of Africa distinguished
between the northern countries-Egypt, Barbary,and sometimes Morocco (variouslynamed)which had long been part of Europe's known world, and the relatively unknown regions to the
south of the great desert, or, alternatively,of the Atlas Mountains. Not every author made such
precise distinctions, however, as frequent subdivisions and conflations of African geographyand
ethnography reveal. A prime English example is Andrew Borde, The Fyrst hoke of the
Introductionof knowledge,written in I542, according to the date on the dedication page, first
published in the mid-i15os, and reissued in the early 156os. Borde had two brief chapters on
Africa, one of them on Egypt, the other on Barbary, where the inhabitants "be Called the
Mores, there be whyte mores and black moors"; many of the latter are taken as slaves to
Christian countries to "do al maner of service but thei be set most comonli to vile thynges."
The ensuing description of black Moors, largely pejorative, is almost certainly based on evidence from sub-SaharanAfrica (edition of ca. 1555,chap. xxxvi).
6 The FamousHystoryof Herodotus,trans. B[arnabe] R[ich] (London, I584; reprint, New
York, I924), I94; [Caius Plinius Secundus], A Summarieof the Antiquities, and Wondersof the
Worlde. . . , trans. I. A. (London, [i166]), sigs. [Biii verso-Biiii verso].
22
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
Supplementing the classicaltexts was a disparatearrayof pilgrims' narratives and travelers'tales, most notably the fourteenth-century Travelsof Sir
John Mandeville. Mandeville's book, which now seems incredibly naive and
lightly grounded in geographicand ethnographicreality, was for severalcenturies taken literally. It shaped the expectations of many early explorers,
including Columbus in the 1490s and Martin Frobisher in the 1570s, and
reached a wide popular audience.7 The Travelscirculated at first in manuscript, then in severalContinental editions; by 1496, it was among the earliest
English imprints. Sixty-eight woodcuts in the second English edition (I499)
gave readersand illiteratebrowsersalike a graphic introduction to remarkable
creatures and places. Several more English printings followed in the
Elizabethanera, the last in 1583;more would follow in the seventeenthcentury
and even later. As the principalauthorityon Mandeville'sinfluence contends,
although "the new school of geographersand cartographerswhich grew up in
the sixteenth century did not believe Mandeville'sstories, . . . they could not
do without him."8RichardHakluyt included a Latin version of Travelsin the
first edition of his PrincipallNavigations(1589), and Sir Walter Ralegh cited
Mandeville favorably in his Discoverieof. . . Guiana (1596).9 Mandeville's
Travelsserved, in sum, as England's popular baseline of spatial and human
geography until the late sixteenth century, and, although its primacy waned
rapidlythereafter,its residualinfluence persistedfor at least anothercentury.
Mandeville's description of Ethiopians illustrates the contradictory and
often warped information about Africa that reached English readers in the
late fifteenth century and beyond. "In this land on the south are the folke
right blacke,"Mandeville reported. "In Ethiopie are such men that have but
one foote, and they go so fast that it is a great mervaile, and that is a large
foot that the shadow therof covereth the body from Sun or raine when they
lye upon their backs, & when their children are first borne they looke like
The Numidians too,
russet, and when they wax old then they bee all black."'10
Mandeville wrote, "are black of colour." They believe dark skin to "hold a
7 On Mandeville's influence see Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscoveryof Sir John
Mandeville(New York,1954). She discussesMandeville'sinfluencethroughoutEuropein the I5thand
i6th centurieson 240-43. Other pre-i55owidely circulatedtexts that transmittedgeographicalknowledge includethe writingsof MarcoPolo, RogerBacon,Vincent of Beauvais,and Isidoreof Seville.
8 Bennett, Rediscovery
of Mandeville,240. See 347-49, for a list of English editions through
i612.
9 Ralegh, The Discoverieof the large, rich and bewtiful empyreof Guiana (London, 1596),
Hakluyt's long Latin excerpt from Mandeville in The Principall Navigations, Voiagesand
Discoveriesof the EnglishNation . . . (London, 1589), 24-79, is the single instance in the entire
book of a document not translated into English. Hakluyt left Mandeville out of the greatly
expanded second edition of 1598-i600,
but Samuel Purchas reprinted excerpts in Latin in
HakluytusPosthumus;or, PurchasHis Pilgrimes . . ., 4 vols. (London, i625). The 1589 edition of
Hakluyt's collected travel accounts is sometimes identified by using the double "I"in Principall;
we prefer to distinguish between the two editions by using the modern spelling in all references
except the first in our text and notes and adding the publication date as appropriate.
10 The Voyagesand Travailesof SirJohn Maundevile... (London, [1583]), sig. Liii recto-Liii
verso. We use this edition, printed from the so-called Defective Text, because it circulated in
England during the Elizabethanera. Mandevillewas not, of course, the first author to emphasize
Africans'dark pigmentation and to claim that Africa abounded in odd-shapedpeople, but he was
the earliestand probablythe most widely read putative authority to be published in English.
70.
BEFORE OTHELLO
23
great beauty, and aye the blacker they are the fairer they think them....
And if they think them not black enough when they are born, they use certain medicines for to make them black withal. That country is wonder hot,
and that makes the folk thereof so black.""II
This climatic explanation of the African's pigmentation was commonplace in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For example,
The Fardle of Facions, an English translation in iSSS of Joannes Boemus's
Omniumgentium mores,suggests that the climate of Ethiopia explained not
only the inhabitants' color but their sparsenessof costume: "The countreie
lyeng in the eye of the Sonne, it must nedes be of heate almost importable....
The moste part of them, for that they lye so under the Sonne, go naked: covAndre Thevet's New Found Worlde
ering their privities with shiepes tayles."'12
(1568), translated from the original French edition of a decade earlier,
expanded on African color and its causes. Thevet denied that "those of Africa
are a like blacke or like in maners and conditions"; rather, in Egypt and
Arabia, they are "betwene blacke and white," other Africans are "browne
coloured whom we call white Moores, others are cleane blacke: the most
parte goe all naked."Very black skin, Thevet argued, "commeth of a superficiall action": extreme heat draws warmth from the heart and other interior
parts to the surface, leaving the dark Africans with scorched skin but
inwardly cold. (The English, by contrast, were cold on the outside "but marvelous hot within" and, accordingly, "hardy,couragious, & ful of great boldnesse.") In addition to a black exterior and cold interior, Thevet concluded,
Ethiopia's blistering climate gave "these Neigers"curly hair, white teeth, large
lips, crooked legs, and made "the women unconstant, with many other vices
which wold be to long to reherse." Thevet was also highly critical of
Ethiopian culture and even less complimentary to the natives of Guinea,
where "these pore, ignorant, and brutishe men, . . . Villaines or wicked
impes[,] goe all naked."'13
As these early accounts unwittingly reveal by their repetition of the
Africans' many unfamiliar characteristics,blackness and nakedness were fascinating-and repelling-to the light-skinned, heavily clothed English. On
many issues, the growing body of texts in English about Africa and Africans
was ambiguous, even contradictory,but on the people's pigment and most of
their customs the burden of the reportageis palpable. Writing at the dawn of
11 Mandeville's description of Egypt and its environs was missing from the Defective Text;
consequently, this passage does not appear in the 1583 printed text and is cited instead from
Malcolm Letts's edition of the Egerton Ms. See Mandeville's Travels, Textsand Translations,2
vols., ed. Letts, Hakluyt Society Publications, 2d Ser., Nos. 101-02 (London, I953), I:33. For a
sources,see i:xxxii-xxxv.
briefdiscussionof Mandeville's
12 [William Waterman, trans.], The Fardle of Facions, containingthe auncientemaners,customes,and Lawes,of thepeoplesenhabiting. . . Affrikeand Asie (London, 1i55), sigs. Cii recto-Ciii
recto. The Boemus text had been translatedfrom French to English in 1554 by Wyllyam Prat as
TheDescriptionof the CountreyofAphrique.
13 Andrewe Thevet, The New Found Worlde . . . wherein is Contained Wonderfuland
StrangeThings. . . (London, [I568]), I4V, 24v-26v. English writers of the i6th century sometimes
drew heavily, and-as was the custom-without acknowledgment, on Thevet's book, which
originally appearedin I558 as LesSingularitezde la FranceAntarctique.
24
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
the Elizabethan age, William Cunningham drew on numerous classical and
contemporary authors to concisely summarize the prevailing literary representation of sub-Saharan Africa's inhabitants: "The people [are] blacke,
Savage, Monstrous, & rude."'4
II
The tall tales and skewed visions of Mandeville, Boemus, Thevet, and
others were translated into English for the delight and wonder and only incidentally the enlightenment of the English reading public. By gradual but
increasing contrast, the secular-minded explorers who succeeded them in the
last quarter of the sixteenth century as England's chief sources of geographical information were more ethnographic, more precise, and generally more
truthful.15 The new breed of chroniclers was hardly disinterested, of
course-their principal concern was to garner riches from the East and West
Indies-and
they were surely not free of mythic preconceptions. Yet standards of reportage were changing; Renaissance curiosity encouraged a
reliance on experiential knowledge and a skepticism, however imperfect,
about ancient, unverified assumptions. In the final decades of the century,
English readers enjoyed an expanding flow of travel narratives, mostly by
their own countrymen, that increased substantially the quantity and accuracy of information about sub-Saharan Africans and shaped significantly the
popular image that underlay that era's theatrical representations.
The first extensive installment reached an English audience in 1577, when
Richard Willes completed and published the anthology of travel literature,
both Continental and English, that Richard Eden had been compiling before
his death in I576. Of major significance for England's emerging image of
Africans was Eden and Willes's reprinting, from Eden's earlier anthology
(1555), of the first eyewitness narratives by Englishmen of expeditions to the
western coast of central Africa. In a preface to those accounts in The History
of Travayle in the West and East Indies, Eden's own "breefe description of
Affrike" set the tone. After a few short paragraphs about North Africa ("Africa
the lesse"), Eden focused on central Africa, land of "the blacke Moores, called
Ethiopians, or Negros, all whiche are watered with the ryver Negro, called in
olde tyme Niger. In the sayde regions are no cities, but only certayne lowe
cotages made of boughes of trees, plastered with chauke, and covered with
strawe." Some pockets of Mohammedanism excepted, the inhabitants were
"pure Gentyles [i.e., pagans] and Idolatours, without profession of any religion, or other knowledge of God, then by the lawe of nature."16
14 William Cun[n]ingham, The Cosmographical
Glasse... (London, Is59), fol. 5.
15 For accounts of English expeditions to Barbaryand Guinea before 16o, mostly taken
from their subsequent publication by Hakluyt, see the second volume of John William Blake,
2 vols., Hakluyt Society Publications, 2d
ed. and trans., Europeansin WestAfrica, 1450-I560,
Ser., Nos. 86-87 (London, 1942). A concise historical summary of England's ventures in Africa
is Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade,Plunder,and Settlement:MaritimeEnterpriseand the Genesisof the
BritishEmpire,1480-1630 (Cambridge,i984), chap. 5.
16 Richard Eden and Richard Willes, eds., The History of Travaylein the Westand East
Indies,and othercountreyslying eitherway. . . (London, 1577), 337r-v.Eden's earliercompilation,
BEFORE OTHELLO
25
The travel narrativeson the pages that followed Eden's "breefedescription" amplify its disdainful tone, especially Robert Gainsh's lengthy report
on the second English voyage (I154) to equatorial Africa.'7 In sub-Saharan
Africa, according to Gainsh, "the people which . . . were in olde tyme called
Ethiopesand Nigrite, which we now call Moores, Moorens, or Negros [are] a
people of beastly lyvyng, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth,
and so scorched and vexed with the heate of the sun, that in many places
they curse it when it ryseth." Inhabitants of the continent's interior live in
"horrible Wyldernesses and mountaynes" among "dyvers kyndes of wylde
and monstrous beastes and Serpentes"; nearby is "a rough and salvage
region, whose inhabitauntes are wylde and wanderyng people." Elsewhere,
"women are common: for they contracte no matrimonie, neyther have
respecte to chastitie."'8 In Gainsh's intolerant account, African culture had
many vices and no virtues.
For all its reputed firsthand observation, this early English narrativewas
still enthralled by classical and Mandevillian notions, with unfortunate
implications for evolving English images of newly discovered Others. In
"Trodlogitica"(according to ancient authors) the people inhabit caves or
dens, eat serpents, and "have no speache, but rather a grynnyng and chatteryng. There are also people without heades, called Blemines,havyng theyr
eyes and mouth in theyr breste." Africa houses satyrs, too, Gainsh told his
readers, "which have nothing of men but onely shape," and in "Ethiopia
that are accustomed to mans fleshe." In Africa's
Interior"are "Anthropophagi,
torturous heat, the inhabitants seemed "at certayne times to lyve as it were in
fornaces . . . halfe way in Purgatorie or hell."'9 Like most European commentators on Africans, Gainsh noted that "the people [are] very blacke,"
but, instead of attempting to explain that observation, he referredhis readers
to Continental editions of Peter Martyr'sDe orbo novo decadesfor accounts
of why the West Indians, by contrast, had an olive hue. Yet Gainsh obliquely
revealed his own prejudice on the matter when he reported with implicit
TheDecadesof the Newe Worldeof WestIndia .. . (London, I555),reprintedin EdwardArber, ed.,
The First ThreeEnglishBookson America(Birmingham, i885), was primarily a translation of the
first three "decades"of Pietro Martire d'Anghiera's narratives of exploration, in which each
"decade"had ten parts. Eden appended a few travel accounts and other geographic items and,
tacked on the end, his own "BreefeDescription of Affrike"and narrativesof the first and second
English voyages to Guinea. But the book was overwhelmingly the work of Pietro Martire (often
anglicized to Peter MartyrAnglerius), and the title pages gave no hint of the English commentary on Africa. Decades of the Newe Worldeseems to have contributed only marginally to the
shaping of England's attitudes towardAfrica.
17 The first English voyage, undertakenin i553 by Capt. Thomas Wyndham and expatriate
PortugueseCapt. Anthony Anes Pinteado,saysalmost nothing about Africans.Most of the narrative
concerns the feud between the two captainsand the expedition's efforts at trade with the natives,
mostly through a "Kyng,who being a blacke Moore (although not so blacke as the rest)"drove a
hard bargainin the narrator'seyes. Eden and Willes, eds., Historyof Travayle,338v-4Iv(quotation
on 340r). Authorshipof the otherwiseanonymous reportof the second voyage to Guinea is attributed to Gainsh in the runningheads of Hakluyt,PrincipalNavigations(I589),89-97.
1 Eden and Willes, eds., Historyof Travayle,342v-353r (quotations on 348v, 349r).
19 Ibid., 349v, 35or. Gainsh was Mandevillian in his reportage of bizarre monsters, but
unlike Mandeville,who assigned most of them to Asia, Gainsh scatteredthem throughoutAfrica.
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
26
agreement that in ancient times elephant ivory had been reputed (by
Europeans, he might have added) "to represent the naturall fayrenesse of
mans skynne."20
The 1554-1555
voyage was significantfor its primacyamong English
descriptions of Guinea and-more important in hindsight-for bringing
back to England "certayneblacke slaves."As merchants intent on exploiting
the stores of ivory, metals, and spices of the African continent, the
Englishmen's principal interest in kidnapped Africans lay not in obtaining
servants for use back home but in training guides and interpretersfor forthcoming expeditions. Several, perhaps all, of the five or so African captives
eventually returnedwith English voyages and fulfilled appreciablytheir captors' commercial purposes.2' (Narrativesof those voyages refer to the guides
as "our Negros.") Gainsh, in any event, provided his countrymen with the
first recorded instance of English enslavement of Africans, even if the longrun intention was to return them to their homelands.
Whatever Eden and Willes's readersmay have thought about the morality or practicalityof enslaving Africans in England, they learned on the final
page of The History of Travayle'ssection of English voyages to Guinea that
some Europeanswere alreadymaking extensive use of forced black labor. On
the island of Saint Thomas off the central African coast, Portuguese plantation owners brought captives from the African mainland to raise and process
sugar;some plantations employed "i50. or. 200. and some. 300. blacke slaves
of men and women, to tyll the grounde, and doe other laborious woorkes."22
Knowledgeable English men and women must have known, too, that the
Portuguese and Spanish had already transported thousands of Africans to
America to replace the rapidly diminishing supply of indigenous laborers.
With Eden and Willes's book, the notion of enslavement as a customary
European condition for Africans gained important additional publicity and
reinforcedthe growing connection between color and bondage.
A year after the Eden-Willes anthology gave English readers their first
prominent account of Africa through their compatriots' eyes, George Best's
TrueDiscourseof the Late Voyagesof Discoverieraised the pejorative quotient
to a new level. Best, whose firsthand account of Martin Frobisher's three
attempts in the 1570S to find a northwest passage to the East Indies was an
important document of early North American exploration, embellished his
TrueDiscoursewith a gratuitous "Geographicalldescription of the Worlde."
Among the benefits to be gained from a "diligent reading [of] this
Discourse," his preface declared, was "howe to proceede and deale with
20 Ibid., 353r,348v, reprintedwith minor changes in Hakluyt,
PrincipalNavigations(1589),
94, 97; also in Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages,Traffiques,&, Discoveriesof the
EnglishNation . . ., 3 vols. (London, 1598-i600; reprint, 12 vols., Glasgow, 1903-1905), 6:i66,
176. Martyr'sDe orbo novo decadeshad been issued on the Continent in various editions in 1571
et seq.
21 Eden and Willes, eds., Historyof Travayle,352v; Hakluyt, PrincipalNavigations(1589), 97;
Hakluyt, PrincipalNavigations(1598-i600), 6:176, 217, 2i8-i9. One of the captiveswas the son of
an African "Captaine"(6:207), which must have caused additional resentmentamong the natives.
22 Eden and Willes, eds., Historyof Travayle,353v.
BEFORE OTHELLO
27
straungepeople, be they never so barbarous,cruell and fierce."23Best had in
mind the inhabitants of northern North America, with whom he had already
clashed, but his early pages exude contempt for the "straunge people" of
Africa, whom he scarcelyknew.
Like Mandeville and others before him, Best was fascinated by the
Africans' black skin, but, unlike many commentators, he rejected the climatological explanation: "The people of Aifrica, especially the Ethiopians, are
so cole blacke, & their haire like wooll curled short, which blacknesse &
curled haire, they suppose to come only by the parching heate of the Sun."
Best supposed differently. Climate cannot cause indelible blackness, he
insisted, "for even under the Equinoctiall in America,& in the East Indies, &
in the Ilands Molucca, the people are not blacke, but white, with long haire
uncurled as we have."24He adduced further evidence from England, where
an Ethiopian brought into its cold climate produced a black son, even
though its mother was "a faire Englishe woman." Best's alternativeexplanation for African skin color revealed his blatant chromatic bias: their "blacknesse proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that
Countrey, and so all the whole progenie of them descended, are still poluted
with the same blot of infection." From his examination of holy writ for the
cause of the original infection, Best offered an unusual exegesis of Genesis,
chaps. 9, 10. When Noah and his family were in the ark, Best hypothesized,
his son Chain, disobeying his father's proscription on sex, "used company
with his wife . . . to disinherit the offspring of his other two breethren"by
producing the first heir in the postdeluvian world. For this contempt of
authority, God decreed that Cham's son Chus and all his posterity "should
be so blacke & lothsome, that it might remaine a spectacle of disobedience
to all the World."25
In Best's explanation, the Ethiopians' blackness was not just a curious
epidermal phenomenon, as it had been to many earlier commentators, but a
spectacle.In his era, "spectacle"connoted "a person or thing exhibited to or
set before the public gaze as an object either (a) of curiosity or contempt, or
(b) of marvel or admiration"(OxfordEnglishDictionary).To the English eye,
a black African provoked curiosity at the very least and often marvel;rarely,
if ever, did the sight inspire admiration.Judging from the writings of George
Best and all of his contemporarieswhose ruminations survive, contempt was
the prevailingresponse. Black pigmentation, moreover, invoked in readersof
Best's TrueDiscourseand many later glosses on Genesis the moral lesson that
23 [George Best], A True Discourseof the Late Voyagesof Discoverie. . . (London, 1578)
(quotations from title page and sig. [Ai verso]). Best's account was not included in the first edition of Hakluyt's PrincipalNavigations(I589), but a condensed version appearedin volume 3 of
reprint). Except where otherwise noted, all citations
the second edition (vol. 7 of the 1903-1905
are to the edition of I578.
24 Best, True Discourse, 28. In the version published in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations
(i6oo), "tauneyand" is inserted before "white"(7:260, in edition of 1903-1905).
25 Best, TrueDiscourse,28-31. Best's specific interpretationseems not to have been adopted,
in print at least. In the first half of the I7th century, English authors increasinglyascribed the
African'sblacknessto the Curse of Canaanbut without Best's unique scripturalreading.
28
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
disobedience to the father's law leads, righteously and inevitably, to an everlasting, indelible curse.26
Fascination with the variety of human pigmentation was not, of course,
an English innovation. The historian of early Spanish conquest, Francisco
Lopez de Gomara (as translated and reprinted in Eden's anthology of 1555
and reprinted again in the Eden-Willes expanded version of 1577) observed
that "one of the marveylous thynges that God useth in the composition of
man, is coloure . . . in holdyng one to be whyte and an other blacke, beyng
colours utterly contrary: some lykewyse to be yealowe whiche is betweene
blacke and white: and other of other colours, as it were of divers liveries."
Like Best half a century later, Gomara rejected the climatological explanation of the variety in human pigmentation, but the Spaniard offered an
impartial alternative. "I know not the cause why God hath so ordeyned it,"
Gomara admitted, unless it was "to declare his omnipotencie and wisedome,
in [creating] such diversities of colours" in people as he did in beasts, birds,
and flowers. Notable throughout Gomara'slengthy paragraphon pigmentation is the absence of value judgments; his discussion of various human colors privileged none.27
Such a benign approach did not satisfy Best, who, as a self-styled
authority on the whole world had likely read Gomara in the Eden collections
if not in an earlierContinental edition. Nor, apparently,did it satisfy a substantial segment of the English public. By 1584, when Reginald Scot's
Discoverieof Witchcraftrailed against a host of widespread but nonsensical
beliefs, black skin had alreadybeen demonized in portions of English popular culture. "In our childhood," Scot lamented, "our mothers maids have ...
terrified us with an ouglie divell having hornes on his head, fier in his
mouth, a taile in his breech, eies like a bason [bison], fanges like a dog,
clawes like a beare, a skin like a Niger, and a voice roring like a lion."28 If
Scot, born in the late 153os, had been frightened as a child by visions of a
devil with (among other alarming attributes) "the skin of a Niger,"
England's negative connotation of African pigmentation reached back to the
1540S or earlier. Even if Scot was reporting a new scare tactic by "our mothers maids," the demonization of Negroes dates from the early 1i8os. In either
case, The Discoverie of Witchcraftreinforces the impression established by
Gainsh, Best, and their published contemporariesof an English fixation on
the Africans' blackness-a color "utterly contrary"in Gomara'swords-and
26 See Aubrey, "Race and the Spectacle," 223-27,
for a discussion of i6th- and i7thcentury texts that discuss the monstrosity of black children born to white mothers.
27 Eden, ed., Decadesof the Newe Worlde,338; Eden and Willes, eds., Historyof Travayle,
4-[4v]. The Eden and Willes anthology of 1577 reprinted a condensed version of Martyr'sfirst
four decades, plus other Continental items and some English tracts. We here use the orthography of the later version.
28 Scot, The Discoverieof Witchcraft... ([London], 1584), 152-53.
Scot's book was widely
read and highly influential, even after James I, early in his reign, ordered all copies to be
burned. By Scot's day, English illustrations and verbal descriptions customarilyportrayedSatan
as black; his contribution to the demonization of Africans was to identify explicitly that blackness with people from the Nile.
BEFORE OTHELLO
29
a persistent effort to associateit with barbarianculture, physical monstrosity,
moral shortcomings, and, in some instances, divine wrath.
III
This scattered evidence from the early Elizabethan era suggests that
English contempt for dark-skinnedpeople had a long pedigree. When added
to the sharp increase in pejorativeprinted referencesto Africans in the final
two decades of the reign and to the proliferation of Africans in England,
mostly as slaves, it bolsters the argument that after centuries of relative ethnic isolation English men and women were jolted by sudden exposure, in
print and in person, to peoples remarkablydifferent from themselves.29The
sub-Saharan African's black skin-the physical characteristic most immediate and obvious to the European eye-was the visual antithesis of the whiteness prized by Elizabeth and her ladies; the Africans' culture, as portrayed by
sixteenth-century writers, contrasted unfavorably with English norms; and
when accounts of African character crept into English commentary, they
were predominantly condemnatory. Manifestations of the perceived differences in color, culture, and character quickly made their mark in a wide
range of English publications.
In the theatrical realm, Africans seem initially to have been introduced
for their visual power. They were literally spectacular, and the makers of
court masques and public plays during the second half of the century were
not slow to exploit the phenomenon. Moors were frequently used in outdoor
pageants-along
with monstrous-looking wild men-as presenters, figures
who by virtue of their startling appearance were able to capture the courtiers'
attention and make space for the performance. Such was the case, for example, when a masque of six Moors appeared at Elizabeth's court in 1560. The
black characters displayed on the stage or in outdoor pageants were usually
white actors dressed in black cloth or body paint, but, however the message
of blackness was conveyed, its impact was acute: audiences could instantly
see the difference between the black character's real or contrived skin color
and the other actors' lighter hue.30 Dramatists manipulated the resulting
spectacle to evoke a range of responses, including ethnocentric contempt and
ambivalent curiosity or revulsion.
29 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black:AmericanAttitudestoward the Negro, i55o-i8i2
(Chapel Hill, i968), 3-II, gave brief but impressiveevidencefor this argument,which has since had
numeroussupportersand detractors.For the most recent endorsementsee Hall, Thingsof Darkness,
esp. i-6i. SomeEnglish people were alreadyfamiliarwith black pigmentation,of course, becausea
small number of the Englishwere of Africandescent. Presumably,they were quite thoroughlyintegrated into English society, so that the post-Isso English face-to-face encounter of whites with
blackswas a relativeratherthan an absolutematter. On earlyAfricansin the British Isles see Peter
Fryer,StayingPower:TheHistoryof BlackPeoplein Britain(London, i984), chaps.i-4.
30 Aubrey, "Raceand the Spectacle,"shows the link between wild men and black Moors,
including an illustration on 225. The use of blackness for visual effect culminated in i6o6 in
Jonson's Masqueof Blackness,in which Queen Anne "blackedup" to representan Ethiopian. See
Eldred Jones, Othello'sCountrymen:TheAfrican in English RenaissanceDrama (London, i965),
29-30, for a brief overview of Elizabethanmasquesand pageants that included Moorish or black
figures, and 120, for a discussion of the ways blacknesswas conveyed on stage.
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
30
By the late 1i8os, when Londoners were no doubt aware of the
Portuguese enslavement of black Africans, actors painted as Moors were frequently used to create spectacular entrances in a venue unsuitable for
horses.3' Christopher Marlowe may have established the convention in his
Tamburlaine,Part One (1587), which includes the following stage direction:
"Tamburlaine, Techelles, Theridamas, Usumcasane,Zenocrate, Anippe, two
Moors drawing Bajazeth in his cage" (4.2.Isd). In Tamburlaine, Part Two
(1i88), the captured son of Bajazeth recalls this scene when he attempts to
bribe his keeper with the promise: "With naked negroes shall thy coach be
drawn"(1.3.40).
ThomasLodge'sWoundsof Civil War,writtenin the same
period as Tamburlaine,similarly has the Roman dictator Scilla enter "in his
chair triumphantofgold, drawn byfour Moorsbeforethe chariot."George Peele
anachronisticallyintroduces Moors into the medieval King Edward the First
with "The trumpetssound. QueeneElinor in her litter borne byfoure Negro
Mores."Fact mirroredfiction in 1594 at a royal entertainment at the Scottish
court of James VI, when a blackamoorwas similarly used to draw in a chariot. This theatrical convention continued into the next century, when playwrights FrancisBeaumont and John Fletcher introduced "a Chariotdrawn by
two Moors"into their FourPlaysor Moral Representations
(i6io).32
The custom of using Moors instead of horses as beasts of burden may
have reinforced stereotypes prevalent in contemporarytravel narratives;the
impression conveyed by a nonspeakingwalk-on was strictly visual. Black figures with major speaking roles were even more spectacular.Peele's Battle of
Alcazar (1589), set in North Africa and Portugal, enacts the events before the
famous battle at Alcazar in 1578, in which Sebastian, king of Portugal, was
killed trying to restore Muly Mahamet to the throne of Morocco, which had
been usurped by another Moorish prince, Abdelmelec. Although the play is
populated with Turks (Amureth and his Bassas), North African Moors
(Abdelmelec and Muly Hamet Seth) as well as the renegade Englishman
Thomas Stukeley and the Portuguese king, Peele significantly differentiates
Muly Hamet from the other characters.Referredto in the stage directions as
"the Moore" (e.g., 211.Isd)and later in the text as the "negro Moore" (e.g.,
310) Muly is distinguishedmorally by his villainy and physicallyby his blackness. The opening Chorus makesthe connection palpable:
The Negro Muly Hamet ...
Blacke in his looke, and bloudie in his deeds,
And in his shirt staind with a cloud of gore,
31 There was some conflation in the Elizabethanmind between "tawny"Moors from North
Africaand "blackamoors"
from sub-SaharanAfrica.But as the OED notes, as late as the i7th century
"theMoors were commonlysupposedto be mostly blackor very swarthy."The stage directionsthat
follow call for Moors or "Negro"Moors, clearlya directivefor the actorsto blackentheir faces.
32 The CompletePlays of Christopher
Marlowe,ed. Irving Ribner (New York, 1963); Lodge,
The Woundsof Civil War,ed. Joseph W. Houppert (Lincoln, Neb., i969), 43; Peele, KingEdward
the First, ed. Horace Hart (Oxford, i9ii), sig. Ei recto; for the 1594 royal entertainment at the
court of James VI, see the Arden edition of A MidsummerNight's Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks
(London, 1979), xxxiv; Beaumont and Fletcher,FourPlaysor MoralRepresentations
in One, in The
Worksof FrancisBeaumontandJohn Fletcher,ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge,1912), 10:311.
BEFORE OTHELLO
3I
Presentshimself with naked sword in hand,
Accompanied as now you may behold,
With devils coted in the shapes of men (Io-23).33
Muly is unhistorically made a Negro not because of his origins but because
of his deeds, which include smothering his younger brothers and strangling
his uncle. Peele's "negroMoor," probably portrayedby a "blackedup" white
actor, must have been "immediately the most conspicuous figure on stage,
his movements and gestures automatically emphasized by his make-up."34
The color of that make-up, in turn, signified exoticism, martialprowess, and
barbariccruelty.
IV
Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voiagesand Discoveriesof the English
Nation appeared almost simultaneously with The Battle of Alcazar'sopening
performances. The former's eight-hundred-plus folio pages of travel narratives and related documents contained numerous descriptions and commentaries on Africa, some of them repeated from Eden and Willes, most of them
newly published. Once again, English readerswere exposed to Gainsh's outlandish notions about Africa and Africans and to the only slightly less pejorative accounts by Eden and others. But the bulk of the new reports said
relatively little about African people and culture. Instead, Hakluyt's readers
encountered a variety of narrativesthat explained in great detail the navigational tactics for reaching the lands of "the Negroes"-the color appellation,
borrowed from Iberian languages, by which most Africans were identified in
sixteenth-century English accounts-or to England's commercial transactions with them. Rare indeed was the English chronicler who distinguished
between the various tribes or nationalities within central and southern Africa
or who examined their cultures with anything approaching objectivity and
precision. When Hakluyt's newly published English narratorsdid occasionally discuss sub-Saharan Africans, the descriptive terms were consistently
pejorative:"wilde and idle," "savage,""barbarouspeople."35
The most vituperative view of Africans in Principal Navigations is
imbedded in two epic poems by Robert Baker, who had sailed to Guinea in
1562 and again in 1563. Baker'spoems had almost certainly appearedfirst as a
separatepamphlet in 1i68 and thus had already enjoyed popular circulation
before Hakluyt gave them permanency and additional exposure.36 If so,
33 Quotations from The Battle of Alcazar are taken from the Malone Society reprint, ed.
W. W. Gregg (London, 1907). Citations are noted by line numberswithin the text.
34 M. C. Bradbrook, The Living Monument: Shakespeareand the Theatre of His Time
(Cambridge,1976), i6i.
35 Hakluyt, PrincipalNavigations(1589), 102, i6i, 795.For an insightful examination of the
Hakluyt publications' image of Africa and Africans see Emily C. Bartels, "Imperialist
Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and the Construction of Africa," Criticism,34 (1992), 517-38.
36 On the pre-Hakluyt printing of Baker'spoems see David B. Quinn's introduction to the
32
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
Baker'searliest readersand listeners (news pamphlets were often read to illiterates) encountered in the late 156os the derogatoryimages of Africans that
would gain further currencyin the 157os and 18os.
After a lengthy description of the voyage to Guinea, Baker'sfirst poem
narrateshis expedition's discoveryof a river into the interior:
And entring in, we see
a number of blacke soules,
Whose likelinesse seem'd men to be,
but all as blacke as coles.
Their Captaine comes to me
as naked as my naile,
Not having witte or honestie
to cover once his taile.
By which I doe here gesse
and gather by the way,
That he from man and manlinesse
was voide and clean astray.
Scattered through the remaining two-thirds of the first poem and the even
longer second poem are similarly stigmatic characterizationsof individual or
collective Africans: "wilde man," "blacke beast," "brutish blacke people,"
"blackeburnt men," "beastlysavagepeople," "fiendsmore fierce then those in
hell." Equally telling is the frequencywith which Baker labeled the Africans
"slaves,"even when his text makes clear that they were free enough to resist
English encroachmenton their homeland. Near the end of the second voyage,
AfricansrescueseveralEnglishmenfrom drowning and starvationbut, significantly, cease to succor the Englishmenwhen they realizethat no tradingvessel
would soon arriveto rewardthe rescuers.37The Africans'acts of friendship,in
short, had been self-serving;black people, in Baker'sepic, appearas deficient
in characteras he thought them to be in cultureand color.
The association of Africans with slavery that infused the Gainsh and
Baker tracts received prominent reinforcement from Hakluyt's narrativeof
John Hawkins's expedition to Africa and America in 1562. Hawkins had
learned in the Canary Islands "that Negroeswere very good marchandisein
Hispaniola, and that store of Negroesmight easily be had upon the coast of
Hakluyt Society's edition of PrincipallNavigations . . . , 2 vois. (Cambridge, i965), I:xxix; and
P.E.H. Hair, "Guinea," in Quinn, ed., The Hakluyt Handbook, 2 vols., Hakluyt Society
Publications, 2d Ser., Nos. 144-45 (London, 1974), i:i98-99. Although no separatecopy of the
poems survives, they probably appeared in "the brefe Dyscource of Roberte Baker in Gynney
India Portyngyule and Ffraunce&c.," licensed for publication in i568, and recordedin Edward
Arber, ed., A Transcriptof the Registersof the Companyof Stationersof London,I554-i640 A.D., 5
vols. (London, i875-i894), i:i66r.
37 Baker, "The first voyage of Robert Baker to Gunie ...,"
and "The second voyage to
Gunie . . . ," in Hakluyt, PrincipalNavigations (1589), 132-42. In the later edition of Principal
Navigations (1598-i600), Hakluyt replaced Baker'spoems with a narrativeaccount by William
Rutter of the expedition of 1562 (6:258-6i).
BEFORE OTHELLO
33
Guinea."He soon acquired more than three hundred natives, "partlyby the
sword, and partly by other meanes,"whom he sold to his immense profit in
the Spanish West Indies.38Not surprisingly, Hawkins returned to Africa in
1564 for another cargo of slaves. John Sparke the younger's eyewitness
account of this voyage is notable for its more extensive acknowledgment of
human variety along the African coast than can be found in most English
accounts, but it also added new rumors of African treacheryand cannibalism.39 And again, the seizure and sale of Negroes is presented to English
readersas normative as well as remunerative.40The persistent message about
Africans in PrincipalNavigationsis that they are remarkablydark, frequently
untrustworthy or dangerous, and radically different not only from the
English but, implicitly, from all other humans. And the specific qualitiesphysical, political, social, religious-that set them apart are invariably
painted in deeply pejorativetones.
Partial exceptions to this trend among English-languagepublications of
the period were Abraham Hartwell's translation of a Portuguese account of
the Congo by Odoardo Lopez (anglicized as Edward Lopes), first published
in Italian in 159i, and an anonymous translation from Dutch of Hugh van
Linschoten's detailed travel narrative(1598). Both books were translatedand
published at Hakluyt's urging.41
Although Lopez's expansivetract did not appearin English until 1597, it
apparently circulated in manuscript after Philippo Pigafetta crafted it in
Italian "out of the tumultuariePapersof Lopez, and from his unpremeditated
speeches"in the late 18os. Lopez's principal purpose was missionary: to
describe, praise, and promote Portugueseefforts to ChristianizeAfricans;the
narrativeis accordingly quite favorabletoward the Congolese and optimistic
about their prospects for conversion and civilization. Lopez was keen about
their physical attributes too. The book's many illustrations depict sturdy,
healthy folk, with features that could be (and by the unidentified artist may
actually have been) taken from Roman models. And although Lopez, like
virtually all commentators on pigmentation, pointed out that "the men are
blacke, & so are the women, and some of them also somewhat inclyning to
the colour of the wilde Olive," he insisted that "excepting their blacknes
they are very like to the Portingalles."42No English author of this era comparedAfricans so favorablyto his own countrymen.
38 Hawkins, "The first voyage of . . . sir John Haukins ...,"
in Hakluyt, Principal
Navigations(1589), 521-22.
39 [Sparke],"The voyage made by M. John Hawkins . . .," in Hakluyt, PrincipalNavigations
526,
(1589),
527.
For an accountof Hawkins'ssubsequentslavingexpeditionto Africasee
Voyadgeof M. John Hawkinsto ... Guyneaand the
Hawkins,A TrueDeclarationof the Troublesome
WestIndiesin ... I567 andI568 (London,1569).
40
(1589),
Hakluyt,PrincipalNavigations
524-28.
41 Philippo Pigafetta, A Report of the Kingdome of Congo . . . [from observations by
Odoardo Lopez], trans. Hartwell (London, 1597). Pigafetta, an Italian, initially drew on Lopez's
"writinges and discourses" to create a more or less coherent narrative, published in Rome in
1591. For a later edition see Duarte Lopez, A Reportof the Kindgdomof Congo. . . , ed. and trans.
MargariteHutchinson (London, i88i; reprint, New York, i969); John Huighen van Linschoten,
His Discoursof Voyagesinto the Easteand WestIndies(London, 1598).
42 Lopez, Reportof the Kingdomeof Congo,"To the Reader,"14.
34
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
Lopez's emphasis on similarity rather than difference had its limits. To
his eyes, the facial features of the Congolese were "not as the Negroes of
Nubia and Guinea,which are very deformed."Congolese exceptionalismpertained to their culture as well. Lopez viewed most of the Congo's neighbors
less charitably;the "Anzichi,"for example, were "a savage and a beastly people," who feasted not only on war captives and slaves but even on their nearest kin. On balance, then, the image of most Africans conveyed by the
Lopez-Pigafetta-Hartwellcollaboration was decidedly ambivalent. That was
true to some extent of its admiration for the Congolese too; the Portuguese,
Lopez reported, purchased more than five thousand slaves each year from
Angola, a major subdivision (in Lopez's confusing geography) of the
Congo.43 Even the most admirable Africans, Lopez seemed to be saying,
were fair game for enslavementif they had not converted to Christianity.
The Dutch traveler Linschoten also wrote quite favorably about the
Congolese and other sub-SaharanAfricans. Like Lopez, Linschoten mixed
observation with evaluation, and the latter was often condemnatory. "It is
good traffikingwith the people of Guinea,"he reported, "but neither knowing God nor godly discipline, heathens, and idolators, without governement
or any order,"they fell far short of his approval. Elsewherein central Africa,
"the countrey people are much addicted to steale from straungers,but not
from their own nation, and the women much given to lust and uncleanenesse, specially with straungers, which among them is no shame."
Linschoten considered the Moors' body paint and clothing "verie strange
and unseemely: no lesse disorder is there in their houses, for they live like
beastes, and sleep on mattes laid upon the ground." Like Lopez too,
Linschoten praised the appearance of the Congolese but denigrated other
Africans:people in the Congo, in the Dutchman's eyes, were "not like other
Moores of Guinea,that are foule and deformed."44
V
In the early 159os, the first Shakespeareandrama to portray an African
echoed the travel literature's derogatory theme. Whereas many dramatists
were content to display Moors pulling chariots and Peele made one the locus
of evil in TheBattle ofAlcazar, Shakespeare'sAaron is a more complex character. Set in ancient Rome, Titus Andronicus begins with the conquered
queen of the Goths and Aaron, her paramour,led on stage by their captors.
Throughout a lengthy exposition, Aaron the Moor stands silent and brooding. The visual impact of Aaron's quiet figure on display is borne out by
Henry Peacham'ssketch of a scene from TitusAndronicus.The editor of the
Oxford edition contends plausibly that "thereis no reason to doubt that the
portrayalof each figure [in the drawing]is based on the physicalappearanceof
actors in these roles. Their gesturesand costumes give us a more vivid impression of the visual impact of Elizabethanacting than we get from any other
43 Ibid., 14, 32-36, 62.
44 Linschoten, Discours of Voyages, [197]-2i6
(quotations on i98-200,
202).
BEFORE OTHELLO
35
source"(see Figure 11).45Ostensibly the play's two major figures, the Roman
generalTitus and Queen Tamora of the Goths, hold center stage and should
attract the viewer's attention, but the blackened figure of Aaron standing to
the side immediately distracts the eye from the drawing'scenter. Simply by
contrast, the blackness dominates. Color difference is the black character's
most immediatevisual signifier,establishingat once his exotic Otherness.
The language of Titus Andronicusalso stresses Aaron's apartness.46As
Aaron plots a rape, dismemberings,and severalmurders, the other characters
allude to his color: he is "raven-coloured" (2.2.83) and "swart" (2.2.72);
Marcus compares him to a "black ill-favoured fly" (3.2.67), and Titus
describes him as a "coal-blackMoor" (3.2.79). During act 3, Aaron delights
in his deceptions:
Let fools do good and fair men call for grace,
Aaron will have his soul black like his face (3.1.205-o6).
TitusAndronicus'scharactersrepeatedlyfuse Aaron's physical blacknesswith
his moral corruption. Yet in a striking scene in the fourth act, Shakespeare
humanizes Aaron when the Moor discovers that the empress has borne his
child. Her grown sons want to kill the infant for fear that his black skin will
reveal their mother's adultery, but Aaron responds protectively, arguing the
superiorityof dark skin:
What, what, ye sanguine, shallow-heartedboys,
Ye white-limed walls, ye alehouse painted signs!
Coal-black is better than another hue
In that it scorns to bear another hue;
For all the water in the ocean
Can never turn the swan's legs to white,
Although she lave them hourly in the flood (4.2.99-105).
(See Figure III.)
Aaron implicitly agreeswith George Best that black skin is ineluctable, but,
to the Moor, black is beautiful.
In the play's final scene, Aaron becomes the scapegoat for Rome's troubles, the "chief architect and plotter of these woes" (5.3.121).47 Aaron's evil
behavior and his physical features-black skin and wooly hair-now signify
the cruelest sort of barbarism.
Aaron is Shakespeare'smost complex representationof a black character
before Othello but not the only one. In Love'sLabour'sLost,lovers who stage
a masque of "Muscovites"are accompanied by "Blackamoorswith music."
Eugene M. Waith, ed., TitusAndronicus(Oxford, i984), 27.
See Jonathan Bate's introduction to the Arden edition, 3d Ser., in Titus Andronicus
(London, 1995), 95. Quotations from TitusAndronicusare taken from this edition.
47 For expanded discussion of this theme, see Virginia Mason Vaughan, "The
Construction of Barbarismin TitusAndronicus," in Joyce MacDonald, ed., Race,Ethnicity,and
Powerin Shakespeareand His Contemporaries
(Cranbury,N. J., i996), i63-78.
45
46
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
36
-~
~
~
s_
e'Ss
fe
FIGURE II
Henry Peacham'ssketch of a scene from Shakespeare'sTitusAndronicus(ca.
I594). Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Bath.
According to Peter Fryer, many black musicians lived in London at this
time, and perhapsthe Lord Chamberlain'sCompany hired some for a special
performance.48 It is more likely, however, that the "Blackamoors" were
white musicians disguised in blackface, their color highlighting the whiteness of the lovers' ladies; even Rosaline, mockingly described as "black as
ebony" (4.3.243), is fair in comparison. A similar contrast is suggested in The
Merchantof Venice,when tension over the marriageof Lorenzo to a Jewess is
dispersed by laughter at the servant Launcelot, who has "gotten up" the
"Negro's belly" with child (3.5.35).49 A Jew like Jessica can turn Christian,
whereas the offspring of a Negro and a white will bear the signs-as Aaron
discovered-of indelible difference.
Not all representations of black Moors on the sixteenth-century stage
were negative. George Chapman's The Blind BeggarofAlexandria(1598) concludes with the hero's defeat of four kings, including "Blacke Porus the
A minor character, Porus fights bravely and is
Aethiopian king" (1339).
praised accordingly by the victor. At the play's conclusion, Porus is selected
48 Fryer,StayingPower,8. Fryersuggeststhat from the Is7os onward, black people could be
found in Englandin threeprincipalcapacities:householdservants,prostitutes,and court entertainers.
49 Portia's first suitor, the Prince of Morocco, appearsto be a tawny Moor. Even so, she is
glad to dismiss him with the comment: "Let all of his complexion choose me so' (2.7.79). See
also Hall, Thingsof Darkness,165-67.
BEFORE OTHELLO
37
to fowre,
E A v E (ifWit
paine,-thc biackamore
With waffhgc otic,andwipige morethendue:
Forthou fhalt findc, that Nauureis of powre,
Doe what htou carAl to keepe his firmcr hue:
Thoughc with-afoxe, wee Nature.thnifteawaic
Shee namesataine. if wee withdmwcour hande:
FIGUREIII
Geoffrey Whitney illustrates the impossibility of washing the "Aethiop"
white in A Choice of Emblemes(Leiden, I586). Reproduced courtesy of the
Folger ShakespeareLibrary.
by the hero's cast-off mistress to be her husband. When she is admonished
that in choosing Porus she chooses a devil, the fair Elimine declares:
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
38
In my eye now the blackest is the fayrest,
For every woman chooseth white and red,
Come martiallPorusthou shalt have my love (I592-94).50
Like Desdemona, she loves her martial Moor for the dangers he has passed
and for his exotic differentness.
This depiction of a black Moor as a successful lover was highly unusual
in the late sixteenth century. More typical was Eleazar, the "soft-skinned
Negro" of Lust'sDominion (i6oo), a play sometimes attributed to Thomas
Dekker.51 Like Titus Andronicus, Lust's Dominion begins with Eleazar, a
black Moor in an illicit relationship with a white woman of power. The
longtime lover of Spain's queen, Eleazarrefersto his face as a "blacktemple"
(i62),
"Inky" (575), and "in nights colour dy'd" (3606), and to his neck as
"jetty"(3117). Another characterdescribes him as a man "that hath damnation dy'd upon his flesh" (3342). Toward the play's finale, two Spanish
intriguers murder Eleazar'sblack henchmen, Zarackand Balthazar.To cover
their deed, the Spaniards are instructed to "put the Moors habits on, and
paint your faces with the oil of hell" (3584-86). In sum, throughout the play
Eleazar'sblack color and his devilish characterare entwined in language and
in the action. Lust's Dominion concludes with the queen's repentance,
Eleazar'sdefiant death, and the new Spanish king's declaration:
And for this BarbarousMoor, and his black train,
Let all the Moorsbe banished from Spain (38I2-I4).52
In Titus Andronicus,Aaron is the sole Moor and a case unto himself; here
evil is generalizedto all black Moors, whose faces wear the "oil of hell."
VI
The plays discussedhere were staged frequentlyin the London public theatersand accessibleto a mixed audienceof letteredaristocratsand illiteratecitizens. These negative representations of alien black Moors were perhaps
symptomatic of what Richard Helgerson calls "nation formation," in which
accounts of exotic peoples helped England define itself. As a nation being
formed, insecurely groping toward common ground in religion and politics
and searchingfor national symbols in literatureand art, England was as concerned with what it was not as with what it was. And the English public
acquiredits images of alien Others to an appreciableextent in the theater.As
the Swiss travelerThomas Platterobservedin I599, "In the comedies they learn
what is going on in other lands, . . . since for the most part the English do not
much use to travel,but are content ever to learn of foreign mattersat home."53
50
Chapman, TheBlind BeggarofAlexandria,ed. John Johnson (Oxford, I929).
Lust'sDominion, or TheLasciviousQueen,ed. J. le Gay Brereton (Louvain, I931).
The actual banishment of all "Moriscoes"from Spain took place in i6io.
53 Platter, quoted in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923),
2:365-66; Helgerson, Formsof Nationhood: TheElizabethan Writingof England(Chicago, i992),
51
52
BEFORE OTHELLO
39
They also learned about their own nation. The England refracted in
Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Marlowe's Tamburlaine,and Shakespeare's
TitusAndronicuswas of necessity "an England reconstituted in response to a
new global system of differences." Hakluyt's task was thus "not merely to
record what the English had done and what the world was like" but also to
"reinventboth England and the world to make them fit for one another."54
Like the London playwrights,the explorerscollected in Hakluyt emphasized
the opposition between English civility and the "barbarism" of exotic
Others, especially those with black skin.
Because Hakluyt's overriding purpose was to promote English imperialism where it seemed to him most viable-the temperate regions of North
America-his second edition of Principal Navigations did not add appreciably to his earliercoverageof Africa. Although a busy decade of English travel
had elapsed since the 1589anthology, in preparinghis immense new version
of English voyaging Hakluyt was content to reprint most of the Guinea narratives; he added very little new material on Africa in volume 2 (1599) and
even less in volume 3 (i6oo). In part, no doubt, that reflected a generalwaning of English commercial interest in Africa, given, among several compelling reasons, Portugal's combative control of the western coast and the
heavy mortality from disease that English expeditions had alreadysuffered.55
But it reflected, too, the leading English propagandists'belief that England's
imperial future lay elsewhere.At the end of the century, English writers and
readers seemed content to know less, proportionately, about Africa than
about any other part of the Old World or even, increasingly,of the New.56
English indifference toward Africa and the accompanying simplified,
pejorative generalizations about African people are epitomized in George
Abbot's BriefeDescriptionof the WholeWorlde(I599). In this first edition of a
book that would often be revised (but never, to any appreciableextent, the
pages on Africa) during the next half century, Abbot justified his sparse
treatment of Africa:
Because of the great heat of it, lying for the most part under the
Zona Torrida,and for the wildernessestherein:it was . . . very little
discovered,till the Portingalesof late, began their navigationon the
and A. J. Hoenselaars, Imagesof Englishmenand Foreignersin the Drama of Shakespeareand His
A Study of Stage Charactersand National Identity in EnglishRenaissanceDrama,
Contemporaries:
1558-1642 (Rutherford,N. J., I992).
54 Helgerson, Formsof Nationhood,I53. See Helgerson's chap. 4, and Bartels, "Imperialist
Beginnings,"for discussions of Hakluyt's role in "nation formation."
55 For the ravages of disease in English accounts see, for example, Hakluyt, Principal
6:I76 (Gainsh, ISSS),249 (William Towerson, ISSS),26i (Rutter, I562),
Navigations(I598-i600),
460 (JamesWelsh, I589). The French suffered similarly in West Africa. See Thevet, New Found
Worlde,26v.
56 The indefatigable Hakluyt continued to collect travel narratives, of course. Many of
them appeared,along with reprints of many items that had alreadybeen published, in Purchas's
many works, especially PurchasHis Pilgrimes,in i625 and later editions. On Purchas'sdebt to
Hakluyt see C. R. Steele, "From Hakluyt to Purchas," in Quinn, ed., Hakluyt Handbook,
on the post-i6oo publication of materialon Guinea see Hair, "Guinea,"ibid., 205-o6.
I:74-96;
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
40
backe-side of Africa, to the East Indies. So exact a discription is not
therefore to be looked for, as hath bene of Asia, and Europa.
Abbot then devoted most of his pages on Africa to Egypt, Abyssinia, and the
rest of northern and eastern Africa. Of the huge central and southern portions, he declared that there "is nothing almost in antiquitie worthie the
reading."57
Abbot admitted that recent writers, unlike those of antiquity, had "some
few things" worthy of his readers' attention. First was the Africans' color:
"that all the people in generall to the South, lying within the Zona torrida,
are not only blackish like the Moores: but are exceedingly black. . . . They
are named Negroes, as them, whome no men are blacker." The second
notable characteristic of central and south Africans, Abbot proposed, was
their lack of bona fide religion, being neither Mohammedans nor Christians
but, rather, "adoring Images, and foolish shapes for their gods." One could
read more about the countries and the people of Africa in the works of
Osorius and Peter Martyr, Abbot admitted, "but there is no matter of any
great importance." What can be said about Africa generally, he concluded
with more imagination than science, is that "new and strange shapes of
beasts are brought forth there" because of the heat and the scarcity of water;
"beasts of all sorts are inforced to meete at those few watring places that be,
where oftentimes contrarie kinds have conjunction the one with the other:
so that there ariseth newe kindes or species, which taketh part of both."58
Abbot stopped short of suggesting a conjunction of Africans and apes-his
list of exotic beasts did not include simians-but
unintentionally he helped
set the stage for the dehumanization of Africans in later English tracts.
In the year following Abbot's Briefe Description, John Pory translated
into English the most complete ethnographic account of Africa circulating in
Europe.59 Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa was originally
written around I526, first in Arabic and then in Italian. Several Latin versions were published in the mid-sixteenth century, but Pory's was the first
English version. Africanus was born in Granada, given the name Ibn
Mohammed Al Wezaz Al Fasi, and raised as a Muslim. His account of Africa
57 Abbot, A BriefeDescriptionof the Whole Worlde(London, Is99), sigs. [Ciii verso], [Cvii
recto]. Subsequent reprintsor new editions appearedin i6oo, i6o5, i6o8, i6I7, i620, i624, i634,
i635, i636, and i65o. Abbot died in i633; no changes were made to the editions that appeared
thereafter.All quotations in this article are from the edition of I599.
58 Ibid., sigs. [Cvii recto], [Cviii verso]-D[i recto]. This was hardlya new notion; Thevet, for
one, had made the same point (with credit to ancient writers)in New Found Worlde,5.
59 Leo Africanus,A Historyand DescriptionofAfrica ... , 3 vols., ed. Robert Brown, trans.
John Pory, Hakluyt Society Publications, ist Ser., Nos. 92-94 (London, i896). Additional
accounts of Africa, most notably Andrew Battel's "StrangeAdventures . . . in Angola . . . "
which began in I590, appear in Purchas. For Battel see Samuel Purchas, HakluytusPosthumus;
6:367-406, and a separate later
or, PurchasHis Pilgrimes. . . , 20 vols. (Glasgow, I905-I907),
reprinting, with editorial apparatus, in Hakluyt Society Publications, 2d Ser., No. 6 (I90I).
Purchas also reprinted major portions of Leo Africanus's book; see Purchas His Pilgrimes
(I905-I907),
5-7.
BEFORE OTHELLO
4I
is based on his own experience living in Fez and in diplomatic travel through
northern Africa. As he himself admits, sub-SaharanAfrica, or "the land of
Negros," is "unknowen unto us, and remooved farre out of our trade."The
Hakluyt Society editor, Robert Brown, notes that all of Africanus's "information regarding Central Africa appears to have been gathered during the
long journey which he made with his uncle by the ordinary caravanroute"
and that this portion of his description is not fully based on his own observations.60 Moreover, Africanus's description of the "Landof the Negros" constitutes only one of nine books. For him, Africa was more fully defined by
the peoples north of the Saharawho were like himself.
Africanus begins his account of the "Landof the Negros" by referringto
Islamic writings from ca. I000 A.D. that described the people as living "a
brutish and savage life, without any king, governour, common wealth, or
knowledge of husbandrie. Clad they were in skins of beasts, neither had they
any peculiar wives. . . . Some of them performe great adoration unto the
sunne rising: others . . . worship the fire."6' Although his tone is more
descriptive than derogatory, Africanus (at least in Pory's translation) sees
these people as Other-in color, religion, custom, and character.
Africanus describes the fifteen kingdoms he visited. In Gualata, the people are "friendly unto strangers"but have "no forme of a common wealth,
nor yet any governoursor judges, but the people lead a most miserablelife."
In Melli, the people "excell all other Negros in witte, civilitie, and industry,"
perhaps as the result of being "the first that embraced the law of Mahumet."
Although the inhabitants of Tombotu "are people of a gentle and chereful
disposition," the villagers of Gago are "ignorant and rude people, and you
shall scarce finde one learned man in the space of an hundred miles." While
Africanus is mainly concerned with agriculturalproducts and trading practices, he also notes the color of the inhabitants:the citizens of Agadez are "all
whiter then other Negros"; the people of Casena "are extremely black, having great noses and blabber lips." Color and culture are not necessarily
linked, yet there seems to be a correlation:the whiter people of Agadez have
houses "stately built after the fashion of Barbarie";the Casena residents live
in "forlorne and base cottages"; the inhabitants of Zanfara, "tall in stature
and extremely blacke," have "dispositions most savage and brutish."
Nakedness also signifies bestiality. The people of Gaoga, for example, "have
neither humanitie not [sic] learning among them, but are most rusticall and
savage people, and especially those that inhabite the mountaines, who go all
naked save their privities."62
Africanus abruptly ends his account of the "Land of the Negros" and
rushes to territorymore familiar both to himself and his readers,Egypt. The
abruptnessof this transition bespeaks,perhaps, his own awarenessof his lack
of knowledge about Africa's terra incognita and, perhaps too, some uneasiness with peoples and customs so different from his own.
60 Africanus, Description ofAfrica,
61 Ibid., 3:8I9-20.
62 Ibid., 823-3I, 834.
I:XXXViii,
I27.
42
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
Accounts such as Abbot's and Africanus's helped to create the ideological climate in which Queen Elizabeth, when "hard tymes of dearth"
descended on England in the waning years of the sixteenth century and for
several years thereafter, called repeatedly, though unsuccessfully, for the
expulsion from the realm of "the great number of negars and Blackamoores"
who had become a "greate annoyance of hir owne leige people."63
VII
The pervasiveness of the notion that sub-Saharan Africans were uniquely
deficient in color, culture, and character outlined above from Elizabethan
writings and stagings can only be surmised. No records survive to show the
size of press runs of Eden or Best or Hakluyt; even if the number of copies
printed and sold were known, the more important question, How extensively were they read? remains unanswerable. And in an era moving from an
oral to a print culture very slowly-in the hinterlands, at least, and among
the city poor-the dissemination of information cannot be judged on readership alone.64 Equally important was aural and visual transmission: hearing
texts read aloud, seeing book illustrations, maps, and other graphic images,
witnessing plays and public pageants.
There are, nonetheless, some grounds for arguing that an overwhelmingly negative view of Africans prevailed in the late Elizabethan era, even if
its magnitude is immeasurable. The sheer accumulation of derogatory references in narratives, plays, poems, and other printed and visual material in
the second half of the sixteenth century is surely telling. Moreover, negative
literary and visual representations had no significant counterpoint; no corpus
of Afrophilic prose or performance balanced the scale. Some texts were
ambiguous, of course: Lopez's book on the Congo and neighboring regions,
for example, and Chapman's Blind Beggar did not denigrate all Africans and
portrayed some favorably. Other English representations of sub-Saharan
Africans were largely neutral, especially in merchants' accounts of voyages to
Guinea. The purpose of such ventures was commercial, not ethnographic,
and the narrators generally hewed close to their appointed task. Those texts
typically ignored all natives except the local rulers and merchants with whom
the English bartered; English assessments of those few Africans depended
heavily on the outcome of the transactions. And even the decidedly uncomplimentary accounts of Africa and Africans were not relentlessly pejorative;
an ostensibly objective tone infuses portions, sometimes quite substantial, of
most English descriptive literature. On stage, even Aaron the Moor has
uplifting moments.
Yet the frequency of highly critical writings and stagings and their evidently extensive circulation suggest that broad segments of English society
63 Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., TudorRoyal Proclamations,4 vols. (New
Haven, i969), 3:22I-22,
with modifications in orthography from the Cecil Papers (microfilm),
Folger ShakespeareLibrary.
64 Approximate literacy trends are charted in David Cressy, Literacyand the Social Order:
Readingand Writingin Tudorand StuartEngland(Cambridge,i980), chap. 7.
BEFORE OTHELLO
43
had access by eye and ear to a badly skewed image of sub-Saharan Africans.
Cases in point: Robert Baker's poems probably reached many unsophisticated readers and listeners in a separate edition of 1568 and were read by a
presumably more sophisticated audience in Hakluyt's compendium of 1589.
George Best's screed on African color appeared in his True Discourse of 1578
and Hakluyt's almost verbatim reprint in the second volume of Principal
Navigations in 1599. One of the earliest and most pejorative travel narratives,
the anonymous account (attributed to Robert Gainsh) of the 1554 voyage to
Guinea, had remarkable longevity, appearing in 1555 as an addendum to
Eden's translation of Peter Martyr's Decades, in 1577 as part of Eden and
Willes's History of Travayle, in 1589 and again in 1599 as contributions to
Hakluyt's Principal Navigations. In the absence of offsetting representations
of sub-Saharan Africans in other publications, the repetitive impact of the
most derogatory texts must have been significant, perhaps profound.
Similarly, frequent stagings of The Battle of Alcazar, Titus Andronicus, and
Lust's Dominion before London's heterogeneous audiences would have reinforced the negative image that readers gained from Best, Hakluyt, and Leo
Africanus while introducing such images to segments of the population that
were unfamiliar with those primarily upper-class tomes.
Recipients of the negative image were mixed in gender as well as socioeconomic class. When Thomas Platter attributed much of England's awareness of "foreign matters" to the theater, he observed that the performances
reached "husband and wife together in a familiar place." Earlier, Reginald
Scot's attribution to "our mothers maids" of bedtime stories of an ugly devil
with African skin indicts the era's nannies in the derogatory representation
of Africans, and surely the frightened children were as often girls as boys. By
and large, the evidence suggests, denigrative images of sub-Saharan Africans
transcended class, gender, age, and levels of literacy.
In one sense, Elizabethan England can be said to have inherited the disparaging image of "black" Africans and merely expanded it. Many classical
and medieval authors had commented adversely on black skin and what they
perceived as outlandish customs; to those early, scattered representations the
English added their own, more numerous observations. But the difference
between pre-Elizabethan images and those produced by English narrators,
translators, and playwrights in the second half of the sixteenth century was
not only quantitative; the message also differed in substance. Representations
of Africans before the middle of the sixteenth century were brief, often tangential to the text's primary theme, and comparatively nonjudgmental. They
ancient authors often claimed or
rarely addressed African culture-indeed,
implied no knowledge of it-and limited their observations for the most part
to the reciting of hoary myths: Africa's uninhabitable climate, its few but
appallingly cannibalistic inhabitants, its many quasi-human creatures. The
classical accounts, in any event, had necessarily limited circulation. Until midcentury, they were available only in Greek or Latin or, in some cases, in a
Continental language. The bulk of the English population before the
Elizabethan era must have been largely oblivious to Africa and Africans.
44
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
During the second half of the sixteenth century, English representations
of sub-SaharanAfricans in print and performancewere increasingly (though
unevenly) numerous, lengthy, focused, and critical of the Africans' bodies
and beliefs, customs and character.With few exceptions, the emerging composite picture portrayedAfrican skin as unattractive and, in some texts, as
the stigma of divine punishment. It generally portrayedAfrican religion as
wholly unworthy (in contrast to grudging respect for Europe's and Asia's
major faiths), if, indeed, black Africans were acknowledged to have any religion. It generallyportrayedAfrican government as petty and arbitrary,dominated by kings, princes, and governors of usually unspecified areas and
authority. It generallyportrayedAfrican buildings and communities as primitive and insignificant, meriting little attention and no admiration. It generally portrayedAfrican characteras grossly uncivil and often as unscrupulous,
thieving, and sometimes treacherous. In sum, Elizabethan images of Africa
featured an unbalanced, sometimes ambiguous, but overwhelmingly derogatory picture of a segment of the world's population that the English had
theretofore scarcely known at all. There were, to be sure, exceptions to the
stereotype, but they only served to prove the rule. As Africanus protested
after giving a positive description of a visit with the king of Tombuto, "Thus
much I thought it good to set downe, for to shewe, that even Africa is not
utterlydestitute of courteous and bountifull persons."65
By i603-i604, when Shakespearewas writing Othello,knowledgeof Africa
was far more abundantand detailed than it had been at the beginning of the
Elizabethanera. Like the exceptionalking of Tombuto, a black Moor could be
portrayedas a hero, the villain as a white Venetian. Still, it is the radicalinversion of Venetian expectations-"Your son-in-lawis far more fair than black"that lends Othello his unusual heroic stature. Iago, meanwhile, draws on
well-establishedassociationsbetween blackness,bestiality,and sin in his choice
of epithets: Othello is to him "an old black ram,"with "thicklips," and "the
devil."lago's prejudiceseems in the end more Englishthan Venetian. His insinuations about blackinferioritycould not have resonatedin an audienceof i604
without the images,verbaland visual,that had infestedElizabethanEngland.
65 Africanus, Descriptionof Africa, 2:308 (italics added). For insights into Leo Africanus's
book and especially Pory's interjections see Hall, Thingsof Darkness,27-40.