ABSTRACT
Since its masterly reconstruction by W. W. Greg in 1923, George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1589?) has provided a case study in the formation of a play text from multiple forms which reveal the mechanics of alteration for specific dramatic performance, through a text ‘drastically cut for representation in a limited time, by a comparatively small cast’ and a ‘plot book’ which offers a sense of the scale of the original production.1 Recent editions of the play have extended Greg’s work, recognizing in the restored version ‘exactly the type of melodrama that an Elizabethan audience enjoyed’,2 its structural and generic form presenting a template for the likely mode of theatrical production for numerous contemporary texts. Critics such as Eldred Jones and A.G. Barthelemy have found Alcazar unique in another significant aspect, for it features probably the first portrayal of a Moor in a major role on the English stage.3 Yet in this focus solely upon the intricacies of form and specifics of character, the play’s entire political dimension, a complex reorientation of global politics and the location of the Ottoman Empire within those politics, is often ignored.
