ABSTRACT
Why does the apprentice Clem, in a Barbary play of 1600, cite Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, often known as Jeronimo? It was, to be sure, one of the more popular plays of the Elizabethan era, but why does Clem’s experience of Morocco bring the Spanish tragedy to mind? The passage he refers to, spoken by the ghost of Andrea at the opening of the play, actually ends: “I was a courtier in the Spanish court” (I.i.4, emphasis mine).1 At one level, of course, this young upstart is implicitly comparing himself to the dead Andrea, whose rise in the world and love affair with a princess bring him to a bad end. More interestingly, I think, Clem picks up on the “oriental” notes in Kyd’s play, and transposes that peculiar representation of an Iberian court to his own experience of North Africa. The English conflation of Spain and the world of Islam is part of a sustained orientalizing discourse that animates the Black Legend, figuring Spain’s supposed cruelty and depravity in terms of the Mediterranean rather than the New World.
