Hamlet wagers 6 Barbary horses against 6 French swords. Falstaff talks about fighting with a Barbary hen. Bassanio in Merchant of Venice talks about travelling merchants going to foreign lands including “Tripolis, Mexico and England, Lisbon, Barbary, and India” There are also an additional 5 references to Barbary horses.
The Barbary States were Algeria, Tunisia, Tripolis, and Morroco. These were powerful coastal societies tied in various ways to the Ottoman world, and in Shakespeare’s day they were central to English fears about piracy and captivity. Ships were seized. Sailors were enslaved. Families, merchants, churches, and governments negotiated over the price of a human life.
English first hand accounts of the Muslim world and the Barbary States in particular were sparse, even non-existent prior to Richard Knolles publication in 1603 where he writes the History of the Turks, the same year Shakespeare publishes his Ottoman-heavy play with a Moor in the title role, Othello.
Today we are joined by Daniel Vitkus, editor of Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England, and Abdulhamit Arvas, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and expert on early modern Muslims, Barbary pirates, and Shakespeare. They are here to help us explore the place of the Barbary Coast in Shakespeare’s England, to understand the culture of hostages and holding someone ransom, what was happening to Britons that were taken captive and sold into slavery by the Barbary pirates, as well as to explain the surprising dichotomy of being afraid of the Barbary nation while admiring their products, like horses.
Download a transcript of this week’s episode
About Daniel Vitkus
Daniel Vitkus holds the Rebeca Hickel Endowed Chair in Early Modern Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630 and of numerous articles and book chapters on the literature and cultural history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Vitkus has edited Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (Columbia UP) and Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (Columbia UP). His latest book, co-authored with Jyotsna Singh, is called A Contextual Companion to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: History, Myth, Gender, just published by Edinburgh University Press in February of 2026. His book-length work-in-progress is titled Solarpunk Shakespeare: Political Ecology, Materialism, and the Human.
About Abdulhamit Avras
Abdulhamit Arvas is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He was widely published on early modern sexuality, gender, race, cross-cultural encounters, and global Shakespeare. His first book, Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity (Duke UP, 2025), received Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize for the Best Book in Renaissance Studies, awarded by the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), as well as the First Book Award by Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). He co-edited the tenth anniversary issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, titled Critical Confessions Now (2020), which was subsequently re-issued as a book by Palgrave Macmillan (2023). He is currently at work writing a new introduction for a new edition of Othello by Oxford University Press, while working on his second monograph, The Grammar of the Other: Translation and the (Un)Making of Gender, Sexual, and Racial Difference.
What We Talk About
- Why Barbary horses were so highly valued in Shakespeare’s England
- How Barbary corsairs captured English sailors and held them for ransom
- What captivity, enslavement, and conversion could mean for those taken
- Why some English people chose to live and work in North Africa
- How trade, diplomacy, and fear of the Muslim world shaped Shakespeare’s plays
- ….and more!
Recommended Resources:
Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850
Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689
Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters
Emrah Safa Gurkan, Sultanin Korsanlari [Pirates for Sultan]—as of publication, this work is not available in English. The link directs you to the Turkish version.
Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean, ed. Mario Klarer**
Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption, ed. Daniel Vitkus
The Global Renaissance, ed. Jyotsna Singh**
