The Moor in Whitehall: A Moroccan Ambassador at Elizabeth I's Court, Cross-Cultural Diplomacy, and the Genesis of Shakespeare's Othello

Morocco World

6 days ago

In November 1604, Othello was first performed before King James I at Whitehall Palace. The play has since been read as a meditation on jealousy, race, and the fragility of trust; yet its origins cannot be fully understood without situating it in the fertile—and fraught—terrain of Elizabethan and Jacobean encounters with the Islamic world (Matar 2005; Brotton 2016).
Shakespeare's principal plot source, Giraldi Cinthio's 1565 novella Un Capitano Moro, provided him with the basic architecture of the tragedy: the noble Moor in Venetian service, the illicit marriage to a senator's daughter, the corrosive influence of a duplicitous ensign, and the ultimate destruction of both the general and his wife (Bullough 1975). Yet, in the transformation from Cinthio's prose to the blank verse of Othello, something significant occurred: the Moor became not merely a literary type, but a figure that bore the marks of lived intercultural contact between England and the Muslim powers of North Africa (Vitkus 1999).
Historiography and Cross-Cultural Encounters
Historians of Anglo-Moroccan relations, such as Nabil Matar and Jerry Brotton, have meticulously documented the warmth of diplomatic and commercial ties between Protestant England and Saʿdian Morocco in the late sixteenth century (Matar 2005; Brotton 2016). United by hostility toward Catholic Spain, Queen Elizabeth I and Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur exchanged letters, envoys, and commercial concessions. Sugar, saltpetre, and gold moved north; cloth, arms, and naval expertise moved south.
It was in this geopolitical climate that the Moroccan ambassador Abdel Wahid Ben Massoud Ben Mohammed Al-Annuri arrived in London in August 1600, leading a delegation of some sixteen men. His mission was explicit: to negotiate a military alliance that might culminate in a coordinated assault on Spanish territories (Brotton 2016, 214–218). Contemporary reports and visual records—the ambassador's portrait survives—describe a tall, dignified figure in sumptuous robes, skilled in the arts of rhetoric and diplomacy. Londoners, accustomed to seeing 'Moors' only in the margins of royal pageants or in sailors' tales, suddenly encountered a living embodiment of Muslim sovereignty, military power, and political sophistication (Matar 2005, 112–115).
From Diplomacy to Drama
The historical record places Abdel Wahid in London until early 1601. His presence coincided with the height of theatrical vitality in the capital, when the Lord Chamberlain's Men (Shakespeare's own company) were performing for both court and public (Honigmann 1997). By 1603, with James I on the throne, Shakespeare had begun adapting Un Capitano Moro into the play we now know as Othello.
Here historiography and cultural studies intersect. Abdel Wahid's embassy was not an isolated curiosity; it was part of a larger English engagement with the Muslim world that unsettled the binary opposition of Christendom and Islam (Vitkus 1999). Morocco, unlike the Ottoman Empire, was a partner rather than an adversary, and in certain contexts, an equal. Abdel Wahid's presence in London demonstrated that Moors could be envoys, negotiators, even allies—figures of political legitimacy, not merely exotic Others (Brotton 2016, 223–225).
Shakespeare, I would argue, took from Cinthio the tragic scaffold but fleshed it out with the living memory of Abdel Wahid: a noble Moor of high standing, operating within a European polity, whose loyalty and identity might nonetheless be subject to scrutiny, prejudice, and betrayal.
Orientalism Before Orientalism
Edward Said's Orientalism famously traced the nineteenth-century codification of 'the Orient' as an object of European knowledge and domination (Said 1978). Yet, in the early seventeenth century, England's discourses on the Islamic world were more unstable, more transactional. The Moroccan ambassador was not yet a subject to be classified and ruled; he was a sovereign's representative, courted and respected (Matar 2005; Brotton 2016).
In Othello, we see a tension between two representational impulses: the romanticized warrior whose foreignness is alluring (Desdemona's attraction to Othello's 'tales of adventure') and the racialized outsider whose difference can be weaponized against him (Iago's insidious references to 'the Moor' and 'old black ram') (Neill 2006). The play thus participates in what we might call proto-Orientalist discourse—one that vacillates between fascination and fear, between alliance and alienation (Vitkus 1999).
Othello is not an Ottoman sultan or a caricatured stage Turk; he is a Christianized Moor in Venetian service. Yet the mechanisms that undo him—whispers of unassimilable difference, the easy mobilization of racial slurs, the fragility of trust—mirror the anxieties that could undercut even the most promising cross-cultural alliances.
Cultural Memory and the Elizabethan Imagination
Abdel Wahid's London visit sparked more than political intrigue. It expanded the English imaginary. Writers, artists, and dramatists now had a living model of a Moorish ambassador—someone who could move between Islamic and European courts, who embodied both alterity and parity (Brotton 2016, 227–230). For the playhouse audience, Othello's combination of martial prowess, rhetorical skill, and vulnerability to racialized suspicion would have resonated with what they had heard, seen, or imagined about Morocco's envoys.
Furthermore, Shakespeare stages Othello's tragedy not in Morocco but in Venice and Cyprus—borderlands of Christendom's interface with Islam. This displacement allows the play to explore questions of loyalty, service, and trust without directly dramatizing England's own alliance with a Muslim state, while still drawing on its emotional charge (Vitkus 1999).
Historiographic Speculation and Literary Genesis
While no documentary evidence proves that Shakespeare met Abdel Wahid, the circumstantial case is compelling. The proximity in time between the embassy (1600–1601) and the composition of Othello (1603–1604), the convergence of diplomatic and theatrical circles in London, and the vivid cultural impression made by the Moroccan delegation suggest that the ambassador's visit formed part of the creative ferment from which the play emerged (Brotton 2016; Matar 2005).
It is here that cultural studies adds nuance: Othello is not a one-to-one portrait of Abdel Wahid, but a palimpsest in which literary tradition (Cinthio), political reality (Anglo-Moroccan diplomacy), and popular fascination with the figure of the Moor are layered together (Neill 2006).
Conclusion: Beyond the Exotic
To read Othello through the lens of Abdel Wahid Ben Massoud's embassy is to resist reductive notions of the Moor as mere exotic Other. It is to recall that, for a brief historical moment, England and Morocco stood as partners in a global contest for power, their representatives meeting as equals in London's chambers and palaces (Brotton 2016; Matar 2005).
In this light, Othello becomes more than a tragedy of personal jealousy. It becomes a meditation on the possibilities and perils of cross-cultural alliance—a reminder that admiration can curdle into suspicion, and that the very qualities which commend the outsider to service may also render him vulnerable to betrayal.
The Moor who strode through Whitehall in 1600 was a real man, an ambassador of a sovereign state; the Moor who strode the stage in 1604 was his dramatic kin, bound by the same paradox: to be both indispensable and perpetually suspect in the eyes of those he served.
References Brotton, Jerry. This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. London: Penguin, 2016.
Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. 7. London: Routledge, 1975.
Honigmann, E.A.J. Othello. Arden Shakespeare, 1997.
Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Neill, Michael. Othello. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
• Vitkus, Daniel J. 'Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor.' Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1999): 145–176.