ABSTRACT
The two-faced Muslim of the early modern English imagination has manifold consequences for Western cultural and political discourse. The Moroccan ambassador's portrait is a Foucauldian panopticon, an early modern diplomatic protocol doubling as Elizabethan intelligence. The Muslim is expediently useful to Elizabeth's government because of his virulent malevolence, not despite it. The Muslim, to the Elizabethan political imagination, emerges predictably as a creature that is beneficent and malignant. Elizabeth's polite disinclination of the military venture against Spanish proposed by Al-Mansur was not a refusal of an alliance as such but rather a vehicle for the negotiation of the English profitability of such an enterprise. The dangerous Muslim who could be selectively useful was not the sole example of the Elizabethans fashioning an expedient model in paradoxical circumstances. Two instances include Elizabeth's creation of the cult of the virgin queen and the dialogic-dialectical performance of the many-voiced Elizabethan theatre industry serving the competing pressures of multiple political constituencies.
