Abstract: Like other works by El Fénix, El Hamete de Toledo draws on pseudo-historical materials that are selectively adapted and fictionalized according to the precepts of the Arte nuevo , contributing to a discourse tied to the historical juncture of its composition (1608). The play reworks a contemporary legend about a Moorish slave captured at sea during corsair warfare, who later betrays his master and commits several murders before being apprehended, imprisoned, and publicly tortured and executed. Recent scholarship has proposed pro-Morisco or even proto-abolitionist readings of the play, often detached from the context of its production. However, the drama's protagonist—a Moorish corsair of Spanish origin, whose characterization would have inevitably evoked the Morisco community for Lope's audiences—is constructed as a dangerous and untamed beast who cannot be integrated into the Iberian social body. This article re-examines El Hamete de Toledo within the framework of early modern Spanish frontier literature and in relation to the ideological pressures, cultural imagery, and racialized prejudices and fears that culminated in the expulsion of the Moriscos.
Natalio Ohanna (Sun,) studied this question.