racism in othello essay

William Shakespeare

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The most prominent form of prejudice on display in Othello is racial prejudice. In the very first scene, Roderigo and Iago disparage Othello in explicitly racial terms, calling him, among other things, "Barbary horse" and "thick lips." In nearly every case, the prejudiced characters use terms that describe Othello as an animal or beast. In other words, they use racist language to try to define Othello not only as an outsider to white Venetian society, but as being less human and therefore less deserving of respect. Othello himself seems to have internalized this prejudice. On a number of occasions he describes himself in similarly unflattering racial terms. And when he believes that he has lost his honor and manhood through Desdemona's supposed unfaithfulness, he quickly becomes the kind of un-rational animal or monster that the white Venetians accuse him of being.

Yet racial prejudice is not the only prejudice on display in Othello . Many characters in the play also exhibit misogyny, or hatred of women, primarily focused on women's honesty or dishonesty about their sexuality. Several times, Othello's age is also a reason for insulting him. In all of these cases, the characters displaying prejudice seek to control and define another person or group who frighten them. In other words, prejudice works as a kind of strategy to identify outsiders and insiders and to place yourself within the dominant group. And Othello himself seems to understand this—he concludes his suicide speech by boasting that he, a Christian, once killed a Muslim Turk, a "circumcised dog" (5.2.355) who had murdered a Venetian citizen. Othello tries to use religious prejudice against Muslims to cement his place within mainstream Christian Venetian society.

Prejudice ThemeTracker

Prejudice Quotes in Othello

Race and Ontological Alienation in Othello by Romaissaa Benzizoune

Race and ontological alienation in othello.

Whenever an author lays claim to what it means to be Black, a site of disruption is created, wherein a Black audience member is expected to identify with or see as “truth” a representation of himself that cannot be.

Othello , like the few other Shakespearean plays that address the specter of race, remains controversial in scholarly analysis. The play and its protagonist (or, if Iago is interpreted as protagonist, its namesake) have both been hailed as progressive and attacked as problematic. Shakespeare’s efforts in the play have been celebrated by some critics and repudiated by others; Mika Nyoni goes so far as to describe Shakespeare as a writer who may have “influenced or helped to perpetuate racism and religious bigotry which was evident in The Slave Trade, Colonialism, and the persecution of Jews in Germany.” 1 Although many critics of the play have identified the site of contestation as either the racism of Iago or the violence of Othello, few have focused on the character Othello himself. Ultimately, the way that Shakespeare falsely inhabits the Black psyche in his representation of Othello is foreign and debilitating. By othering Othello from his very self, Shakespeare presents to us an (anti-Black) Black character that is more of a caricature that a tragic hero.

Regardless of Shakespeare’s inadequate portrayal of the Black character at the center of the play, Othello is useful as a window onto perceptions of race in England in the early modern period. The play features a cast with a variety of racial outlooks, ranging from outright racists (like Iago) to those who are more sympathetic (like the Duke of Venice) to those who are the most accepting of Blackness (Desdemona, and presumably, Othello). This range is perhaps a reflection of some of the attitudes prevalent in Shakespeare’s time, and while the views of these fictional characters cannot be taken as reflective of Shakespeare’s own views, it is clear that they are rooted in reality. Othello is an Other in every way, and one who is defined in the eyes of almost every character, including himself, by his Otherness. The prefix of “Moor” or “black” is often attached to his name, which in and of itself is never explained (was Othello really the name that he was born with in North Africa?). Othello does not have a name or a nation when he is “the Moor” (more than fifty times), “the dull Moor,” “the cruel Moor,” or even “the noble Moor.” 2 Of course, Iago showcases the potential of early-modern racists in a way that far surpasses Othering; all of the inventive slurs aside, he most shockingly compares Othello to a horse, suggesting that Desdemona’s relationship with a black man would be bestiality. 3 However, Iago’s antiblackness is not problematic, especially seeing that he is the villain of the play. It is the anti-Blackness that the supposed hero exhibits toward himself (vis-a-vis Shakespeare’s imagining of a Black man) that is far more concerning.

There is something disturbing in the way that Othello talks about himself—or more accurately, the way that Shakespeare imagines Othello would talk about himself. It is clear, especially by the end of the play, that his Blackness is only ever a site for insecurity and emasculation. In act 3, scene 3, Othello reflects on his skin color sadly: “Haply, for I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have.” 4 The way Othello objectively announces his blackness feels stiff and unnatural ( Haply, for I am black! ). Despite his status as a military general and his clear capacity for anger and resistance, Othello suspiciously never seems to question or resist racism: The effect renders him sympathetic to the white viewer at the cost of his very Blackness. (Othello reminds me of pandering, sympathetic “Mammy” figures in American cinema.) In the same conversation with Iago, he even bizarrely refers to himself as a slave: “O, that the slave had forty thousand lives.” 5 Most offensively, when lamenting Desdemona to Iago, Othello says: “Her name, that was as fresh/ As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black/ As mine own face.” 6 That a Black person would compare their own blackness to physical dirt is only as comical as it is offensive. When someone lives their whole life as a Black person, they psychologically understand the color of their own skin, and would never even think to think of themselves as “begrimed.” Just as a white character would not ever describe themselves as raw or undercooked, a black character would not describe themselves as dirty or covered in soot. However, historically, white or lighter-skinned people have seen black skin as dirty, sometimes due to a direct misunderstanding of what Black skin is. In the 1986 Iranian film Bashu, The Little Stranger, light skinned Iranians try to “wash” the black off the film’s protagonist, an Afro-Iranian from the country’s more secluded south.

Othello’s self-hatred and anti-Blackness not only feels ontologically inaccurate, but historically inaccurate as well. While it is obvious that a white man would make a big deal out of a North African Moor’s Blackness, it does not make sense that a North African Moor would primarily identify with the construct of “race” as opposed to that of homeland, tribe, religion, or other ethnic configuration. (Even today, North Africans will much sooner identify with nationality or religion rather than race; part of this is because many see themselves as Arab rather than Black.) To me, Othello reads exactly like a white man’s envisioning of a Black man; he is oddly obsessed with the aspects of himself that a white man would be obsessed with, and devoid entirely of other aspects that would situate him in a more believable identity. The way Othello would’ve been performed at the time—a white production for a white audience, featuring a white Othello in blackface—only reinforces for me the idea of Othello as white spectacle, featuring a creative rendition of a Moor that has little to do with reality. 7 When Shakespeare tries to make the Other knowable without really knowing him in the first place (and without grounding him in a clear historical background, preferring to shroud him in ambiguity and mystery) he is perhaps doing the Other an ultimate disservice.

Although this paper is not personal, race is often a personal experience felt and lived rather than neatly intellectualized. When Shakespeare writes an Othello who essentially hates himself for being Black, his intentions may have been pure. In painting Othello as a tragic figure worthy of sympathy, a victim of his own Blackness and societal perceptions of it, Shakespeare could have been attempting something radical. However, to me, Shakespeare’s imagining of Othello is vaguely insulting. It evokes for me a passage from Black Skin, White Masks in which Fanon criticizes Sartre’s work Orphée Noir : “Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing.” 8 In this ever-memorable passage, Fanon expresses eloquently what it feels like to be misrepresented as Black for all of posterity. Although Sartre was a well-intentioned “ally,” his interpretation of the experience of being Black (which is entangled in a transcendent argument for humanism, and that is where the “relativity” comes in) was twice damaging. 9 It was first of all inaccurate, because a white French man could never know anything of the black lived experience, but more than that, it took up a vital space for Black self-definition. As Fanon puts it, “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.” 10 Fanon’s critique is most powerful in the context of existential philosophy, of course, but Othello , just like Orphée Noir , serves as a white “intellectualization of the experience of being black.” 11 In both texts, a white male author—canonical, foundational, intellectual authority—makes grand assumptions about the Black psyche; in both works, that same white male author seems to position himself as a positive, savior force. Whenever a white person lays claim to what it means to be Black, a site of disruption is created, wherein a Black audience member is expected to identify with or see as “truth” a representation of himself that cannot be , and certainly does not feel, accurate. The real violence of the play occurs upon this very site. In the wake of Othello, just as in the wake of Orphée Noir , the black audience member finds themselves unmoored, robbed of self-representation, told about themselves.

Throughout my four years at NYU, and unsurprisingly, Othello is the only North African protagonist that I have been presented with. Within the play, he is the character that ends up being the most anti-Black, and his self-destruction enriches the plot in a way that is useful for climatic flair but not for authentic representation. While Othello is an insightful text in a variety of ways, a rereading of the play, with a postcolonial, Black studies lens, can only be so generous. The stunted depiction of Othello as a simple, sympathetic “Moor” is ultimately problematic in its illegibility, and any discourse about the play should leave room for this interpretation. In regards to this text and other canonical works I have encountered during my time at NYU, another line from Black Skin , White Masks comes to mind: “The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself.” 12

• Mika Nyoni, “The Culture of Othering: An Interrogation of Shakespeare’s Handling of Race and Ethnicity in The Merchant of Venice and Othello ,” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 2, no. 4 (January 2012): 680.
• William Shakespeare, Othello , (The Pelican Shakespeare, Penguin Books, 2001), 5.2.266; 5.2.299; 2.3.144.
• Shakespeare, Othello , 1.1.125.
• Shakespeare, Othello , 3.3.304-306.
• Shakespeare, Othello , 3.3.502.
• Shakespeare, Othello , 3.3.441-443.
• Peter Holland, Shakespeare and Religions (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 300).
• Frantz Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks (Penguin Classics, 2020), 102.
• Sartre though that Negritude was only useful as a transitory phase on the way to a post-racial reality.
• Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks , 102.
• Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks , 134.
• Frantz Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks (Penguin Classics, 2020), 103.

Romaissaa Benzizoune (‘BA 20, @romaissaa_b ) originally wrote “Race and Ontological Alienation in Othello ” in Professor Bella Mirabella’s Interdisciplinary Seminar “ Shakespeare and the London Theatre ,” in Spring 2020.

Thumbnail image: Othello and Desdemona (19th century) by Daniel Maclise, via Wikimedia Commons.

Othello, Racial Themes and Public Reception:

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Racism, Ethnic Discrimination, and Otherness in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Merchant of Venice

2021, International Journal of English and Comparative Literary Studies

This study aims to present a comparative examination of the traces of racism and discrimination in two plays of Shakespeare, Othello and The Merchant of Venice, written in 1603 and around 1598, respectively in the Elizabethan Period. The attempt in this paper is to explore the construction of racism and the evidences of discrimination as depicted in Othello and the Merchant of Venice by use of the deconstruction of marriage. For this purpose, it deconstructs the marriage by focusing on Othello in Othello, and The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice; and, depicts racism and discrimination by comparing the characterizations of Othello in Othello and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Both sections critique the cruel issues these people experienced as other. The notion of ‘otherness’ and its application in the characterizations of Othello and Shylock, Othello vs. Shylock, the application of deconstruction of marriage to Othello and The Prince of Morocco, and racism in Othello a...

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This extended piece will examine the treatment of race by Shakespeare through analysis of three different characters. Aaron from Titus Andronicus and the eponymous Othello are both moors, and the character of Shylock from The Merchant of Venice is Jewish. Aaron is the primary antagonist of Titus Andronicus and Shakespeare’s earliest Moor whereas Othello, created over a decade later, can be seen to echo the anti-hero of classical tragedy. Both characters in some way subvert racial stereotypes, from Aaron’s rejection of white superiority to the honourable nature of Othello. The question of race is complicated further in Othello through Shakespeare’s creation of the villain Iago, the play’s whiteequivalent of Aaron. Much like Othello and Aaron, Shylock conforms to Jewish stereotypes, including his seemingly overwhelming desire for riches and wealth regardless of the moral cost. However, he does much to challenge such expectations. The rationale for his actions promotes sympathy for the character, and highlights the double standards present in the Elizabethan period. This paper will also consider the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays and the social conventions of the time regarding race, with the intention of discerning how the playwright’s own racial prejudices, if any, evolved during his career.

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In Shakespearean literature, one can find themes that challenge the Elizabethan conventional way of thinking and life, and the tragedy of Othello is no exception. In a dramatic presentation, Shakespeare challenges the way in which Black people are seen in Elizabethan society by placing a Moor in the context of Venice, Italy who is both hated and respected in his place in a racist society. There is no doubt that there is racism in Elizabethan society. According to Eldred Jones, during the era in which Othello is composed, Queen Elizabeth enacts legislation that calls for all Black people to leave the country (Jones, 1994). Racism is not the core theme of the dramatic piece; however, the existence of racism is illustrated and expressed via Shakespeare’s artistic medium. Just as feminism, greed, jealousy, hubris, and varying other matters dealing with the human spirit do not seepage Shakespeare’s consideration, nor do race matters. Furthermore, just as he dramatizes human issues, he dr...

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The aim of present paper is to investigate and explore the racial discrimination and religious othering in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Shakespeare encouraged racism all through his play, The Merchant of Venice. He shows this through the passionate and physical quality of the characters being assaulted by bigot remarks and through cliché impact. Intrinsic racism and extrinsic racism are because of racial pride and racial preference, separately. Shakespeare and Hamid’s world was a white-focused Christendom. Skin shading and religion were along these lines the essential highlights (of nature and support) that actuated bigotry, Venice or Italy being Shakespeare's and US are Hamid’s advantageous regions for sensationalizing his racial actions and reactions. In this paper, occurrences of racial pride and bias in selected texts are exhibited, the reasons for prejudice and religious othering are explored, Shakespeare and Hamid’s perspectives of race and bigotry are talked about, and their racial vision is outlined.

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Racism in Othello Alison Smith

Choose one non-dramatic text offered on the module, (an extract from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Literary Remains,) and show how it might help us understand Othello.

The extract presents a sustained attack by Coleridge on Shakespeare for his lack of realism in the 'monstrous' depiction of a marriage between a 'beautiful Venetian girl,' and a 'veritable negro,' in Othello. He sees Shakespeare's transformation of a 'barbarous negro' into a respected soldier and nobleman of stature as 'ignorant', since at the time, 'negroes were not known except as slaves.' (Appendix) The extract seems to raise two questions - how central is the taboo of miscegeny to the play, and to what extent is Othello's reputation able to counter this prejudice?

It is certainly not hard to conclude that it is probably Shakespeare's most controversial play. There is a clear theme of racism throughout, one which was firmly embedded in the Venetian society which rejects the marriage of Othello and Desdemona as erring, 'against all rules of nature,' [1.3.102] Nothing separates Othello from, 'the wealthy curled darlings of our nation,' [1.2.68] except skin-colour - he matches or even...

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25 Seeing Blackness: Reading Race in Othello

Ian Smith, Professor of English at Lafayette College, is the author of Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (2009). He has published on Shakespeare and early modern drama as well as postcolonial literature with work appearing in several anthologies and journals. He is currently preparing a book on early modern English blackface theatre entitled Fabricated Identities: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage.

• Published: 02 November 2016
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The tendency to regard vision as providing unimpeded retinal access to the world was already being revised in the early modern period to explain how sight is, in fact, unreliable. Sight is always compromised by culturally embedded ideas, and in Othello , Shakespeare reveals that in the instance of race, prejudicial and broadly shared stereotypes distort vision in ways that misrecognize blackness and make us poor readers of humanity. Blackness, that visible sign, creates a social blind spot. Taking Shakespeare’s specific interrogation of cross-racial reading as its cue, the essay asks to what extent the predominantly white discipline of English studies is implicated in such an inquiry, especially when modern experimental science confirms white bias and negative views of blackness as the American cultural norm that affects the way we read and interpret race.

(Un) Reliable Sight

For an early modern play that locates a black man at the centre of the dramatic action, we should probably not be surprised by the frequent references to sight in Othello (1604). Sight is interlaced in every aspect of the language and action—famously, even jealousy, a potentially destructive emotion, is construed as ‘the green-eyed monster’ (3.3.169). 1 In the play’s ocularcentric universe Othello is a sight to behold, his spectacular difference identified repeatedly as in Emilia’s colour-sensitive wish for her mistress, ‘I would you had never seen him’ (4.3.16). At the turning point in Othello’s self-awareness, he admits to what others have already assigned hermeneutic value: ‘I am black’ (3.3.265). While Othello is a Moor, as the play’s full title announces, the term ‘black’ was sufficiently capacious to be employed strategically to nominate outsiders whose difference from the majority culture was to be marked. 2 Still, ‘black’ worked most often as an effective synonym for a person of African origin. Desdemona’s claim that she saw ‘Othello’s visage in his mind’ (1.3.250) asserts what today we might describe as a politics of colour blindness, but for others Othello’s blackness is hardly a negligible or neutral fact. This chapter follows the play’s interest in sight and seeing, investigating Shakespeare’s investment in seeing blackness and the consequence of such an investment for reading and interpretive practices.

In the Western cultural tradition, sight has long been identified as superior among the senses, since it offers a seemingly indispensable means by which information about the external world is relayed in a reliable fashion to the viewer. Plato in the Timaeus declares that, ‘sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit to us’, for observation of the natural universe with its constant change produces the concept of time from which ‘we have derived philosophy’. 3 His exaltation of sight as providing ‘the clearest knowledge of the natural world’ is thereby coupled with ‘the sustaining principles of order and harmony’. 4 In his Metaphysics , Aristotle establishes the firm connection between sight and knowledge in the text’s famous opening and, guided by his fundamental belief in the relation between sensation and thought, Aristotle extols sight as the sense that allows the mind to make fine discriminations and distinctions: sight ‘most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things’. 5 Together, these two major classical statements by Plato and Aristotle have shaped the tradition surrounding sight, emphasizing access to the natural world as the basis of human knowledge and thought. 6 The derivation of ‘idea’ from the Greek idein , meaning ‘to see’, sustains this intersection of sight and insight, vision and contemplation, viewing and reflection. Or as Chris Jenks writes, the ‘lexical etymology reminds us that the way we think about the way that we think in Western culture is guided by a visual paradigm’. 7

The actual physiological process of seeing as theorized by Aristotle assumed greater importance in the early modern period over its Galenic rival that followed Plato. 8 In Galen, ‘the eye emits a “visual pneuma” that transforms the air into an optical instrument, illuminating the object of vision with the eye’s sensory power’. 9 Stuart Clark offers a summary of the Aristotelian process as documented in the period’s medical, moral, and psychological literature: ‘objects in the world gave off resemblances or replicas of themselves ( species ) which then travelled to the eyes and, via the eyes and the optic nerves, into the various ventricles of the brain to be evaluated and processed.’ 10 A linear, logical pattern governs Aristotle’s system of visual cognition. The conversion of external species into internal matter or phantasms that then pass into the brain represents an entirely rational system that underwrites the secure and grounded relation between the viewer and the world. 11 Such an epistemology of sight suggests a consistency between inside and outside where the material world of objects has a reliable representation in the mind, thus confirming the equation between objective truth and sight as well as sight’s veridical status. 12 ‘Not only is sight reason-like,’ avers David Summers, ‘but reason is sight-like.’ 13

But Clark’s fundamental thesis in Vanities of the Eye is that for the early modern period, ‘several important developments unique to the cultural history of Europe over roughly two and a half centuries worked to undermine this inherited confidence and disrupted the relationship between human beings and what they observed’. 14 Among these developments were the Protestant Reformation and the visual complications inherent in the distrust of icons and idolatry; the revival of Greek scepticism rooted in doubt that challenged the validity of sensory evidence, especially data deriving from the eyes; and the fascination with demonology that prompted disturbing questions about vision and the real. In a chapter titled, ‘Ocular Proof in the Age of Reform’, Huston Diehl, arriving at a similar conclusion about the impact of Protestant reform, notes the ‘epistemological crisis created by the reformers when they deny the magical efficacy of images and relics and yet assert the power of visible signs’. 15 ‘In one context after another’, Clark contends, ‘vision came to be characterized by uncertainty and unreliability, such that access to visual reality could no longer be normally guaranteed. It was as though European intellectuals lost their optical nerve.’ 16

In this chapter I extend the premise of this inquiry concerning the disruption of stable conventions of sight into the domain of race, examining by way of Othello how seeing blackness raises questions of unreliability not just of sight and knowledge, but of related intellectual engagements: reflection, reading, and interpretation. As Jenks observes, ‘it is critical that vision should be realigned with interpretation rather than with mere perception.’ 17 At the same time, the notion that perception (sight or vision as a physiological experience) is influenced by culture is now a critical norm. Subsequently, the counter-intuitive and unexpected finding, that sight might not be comprehensively trustworthy, turns out to be particularly compelling when it comes to seeing and reflecting on race. Employing the analytical premise that blackness is the biological datum that is read and interpreted according to the prevailing social paradigm (that is, blackness is to race as sex is to gender), this chapter engages Othello further to raise questions about seeing blackness in relation to the racial faultlines of our current critical and reading practices.

The Panoptic Regime of Whiteness

Othello’s demand for ‘ocular proof’ (3.3.362) of Desdemona’s purported infidelity is consistent with the conventional notion that what one sees constitutes infallible knowledge that, in turn, serves as the basis for accurate interpretation. Since ‘to be once in doubt | Is once to be resolved’ (3.3.182–3), Othello tells Iago, ‘I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove’ (3.3.193). When doubt does enter Othello’s mind, the predicted outcome ensues: ‘What sense had I in her stolen hours of lust? | I saw’t not, thought it not—it harm’d not me’ (3.3.340–1), confirming the seemingly logical connection between seeing and knowing. Launched unalterably on the path toward conviction, Othello confronts Desdemona, the handkerchief becoming the chief, material proof: ‘Fetch’t, let me see’t’ (3.4.84). Of course, proof ascertained by firsthand or eyewitness experience, it turns out, is not as foolproof as it might at first appear, and the play’s tragic unfolding rests on this counterintuitive recognition exemplified in the cognitive confusion caused by a visible, peripatetic handkerchief. Proffered as the ultimate instance of ‘ocular proof’, the handkerchief fails, in the end, to deliver the truth or knowledge Othello imagines. Moreover, while sight is invoked as a credo of certainty to counter Othello’s rising doubt, the dramatic irony of the request cannot be overstated: the Moor and black man, whose alien presence in Venice is defined by his corporal visibility, demands proof of the visible kind, thereby surrendering to the very optical system within which his racial tragedy is enshrined. For if sight is conducive to certainty and contemplation, Othello runs the risk of supporting the idea that his blackness is sufficient to justify the claims made and conclusions drawn according to the law of visible proof.

Notions of blackness saturate the play, turning a physiological fact into a racial idea expressing the collective cultural thinking. As a useful comparison, most readers are aware of the Prince of Morocco’s colour-conscious appeal in The Merchant of Venice (1596): ‘Mislike me not for my complexion, | The shadowed livery of the burnished sun, | To whom I am a neighbour and near bred’ (2.1.1–3). 18 The anxious suitor’s apology represents more than the rhetoric of competitive advantage. Rather, given Morocco’s position as the object of scrutiny, it signals his clear recognition of the Venetian social aversion directed squarely at skin colour, thereby confirming that seeing blackness is never just a neutral sensory experience but a fortiori an ideologically encoded act. In this regard, vision relays the defining collective institutional practices and ideas that inform and produce the structural homogeneity essential for the community’s white power elite. It encapsulates the Venetian habitus , in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, in which an intersection of social and cultural factors gives shape to a way of life and thought. 19 Immediately upon the prince’s entry, therefore, Morocco’s skin tone triggers an oppositional orchestration of ideas and values through the complex racializing mechanism of the Venetian optical system.

Othello likewise represents the alienating power of the Venetian system in which, to adapt Bourdieu’s language, the black man is effectively pitted against the ‘cognitive and motivating structures’ whose task it is to ‘reproduce the regularities immanent in’ the self-identified white society. 20 Brabantio complains before the full senate that without the intervention of witchcraft, evoked as an alien practice to further indict Othello’s blackness, Desdemona would not have found Othello desirable. ‘For nature so preposterously to err— | Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense’ (1.3.63–4) is, for the angry senator‒father, unthinkable. Brabantio’s argument rests on the appeal to ‘nature’, making it clear that whiteness is the natural order that resists the disorder and perversity endemic to racial mingling. Iago also invalidates the interracial match, making an appeal to ‘nature’ to contend that sameness is the organizing cultural principle that legitimizes racial exclusion. Desdemona, he claims, made the error in rejecting white men ‘Of her own clime, complexion, and degree, | Whereto we see in all things nature tends’ (3.3.234–5). While Brabantio and Iago may be the most vocal defenders of the normative order of whiteness (one should also include Emilia), the language used makes it clear that theirs is not an isolated view. Desdemona’s behaviour in shunning ‘The wealthy curled darlings of our nation’ (1.2.68) for Othello’s ‘sooty bosom’ (1.2.70), Brabantio states, would ‘incur a general mock’ (1.2.69), implying a broadly shared set of values. Such aberrant behaviour on Desdemona’s part constitutes a reckless disregard for the natural ordination of whiteness and nation as the presumed order of things. These arguments, grounded in the principle of sameness, effectively theorize the ‘cognitive and motivating structures’ of the Venetian cultural system.

Difference is not only subjected to heavy scrutiny within a similar corporal system, but Othello’s black features also elicit fear among Venice’s viewing subjects. Brabantio can only conceive of Othello as a ‘thing … to fear, not to delight’ (1.2.71), and, concerning Desdemona, Iago questions, ‘what delight shall she have to look on the devil’ (2.1.220–1), exploiting the commonly held association between devils and blackness. While the consternation caused by Jonson’s royal women all painted black in The Masque of Blackness (1605) is well known, other texts perpetuate this propensity for black panic. 21 In William Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust ( c. 1622), the widely shared notion that a black person’s face has the power to terrify is adduced several times. For example, Alonso, relies on this fundamental premise in declaring that the Moors ‘have not yet, unlesse with grim aspects | So much as frighted this my tender daughter’ (2.2.17–18). 22 Rejecting Mully Mumen’s offer of love, Jacinta states bluntly, ‘Th’art frightfull to me’ (5.5.2) to the Moor of whom Julianus demands, ‘Set the black character of death upon me, | Give me a sentence horrid as thy selfe art’ (5.5.35–6). In their representation of black fear, Rowley and Shakespeare register an aspect of contemporary English life conveyed in the annual mayoral pageants that unfolded in London’s streets, incorporating citizens in the drama of social construction and cognitive alignment with the civic attitudes expressed. Written for the Grocers’ Company, Middleton’s The Triumphs of Truth (1613) features among its dichotomous drama of good versus evil, error versus truth, the arrival of a small group of Moors whose ‘black’ appearance generates the trepidation evident in ‘the faces | Of these white people’ (415, 411–12). Again, in Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue (1622), written for the same livery company, the Indian Queen’s colour—‘this black is but my native dye’ (54)—requires justification among London’s white citizenry. In the case of both pageants, blackness stands as a sign of distrust and fear until these aliens, the Moors and the Black Queen, confess to Christian conversion through the intervention of enterprising English merchants who serve London’s corporate culture’s investment in growing overseas commerce. Yet blackness carried such an indelible and predetermined negative meaning that white viewers repeatedly experienced visual and cognitive dissonance, unable to reconcile outward appearance with the symbolic internal whiteness of conversion.

Seeing blackness, therefore, often produced fear and paranoid fantasies, the sign of multiple tactical reactions to the black presence within Europe. First, visual paranoia did not only serve the destructive purposes of stereotyping and racial rejection; it also enabled the construction of a powerful and, as history has shown, long-lasting invention of whiteness. The historian Kate Lowe has argued that the influx of African slaves into Europe in the early modern period (for a century and a half starting in the 1440s), with the resulting transition from white slavery to predominantly black slavery, initiated ‘a momentous time of white, European self-definition’. 23 Othello and Morocco are not slaves (both, in fact, have royal lineage), but even their racial presence in Europe is sufficiently disruptive for Shakespeare to dramatize the increasing historical pressures of proximity. The will to preserve whiteness acted as the defensive counterpart to the perceived necessity to contain and discredit the expansive presence of blackness. Fear, understood from an early modern English perspective as a proactive response, is a symptom of the desire to manage the cultural integrity of whiteness.

The visual response to blackness as a source of fear reinforced the damaging negative stereotypes that transformed a physical fact into a racial idea. Even Iago’s seemingly innocuous but patently disjunctive reference to ‘black Othello’ (2.3.29) affirms Othello’s colour as anomalous and marginalizing within the demographic norm of the republic. While advances in anatomy confirmed Aristotelian theories of vision in the early modern period, the tendency to hold onto Platonic (later Galenic) models revealed a desire to explain vision and, by extension the agency of the viewer, in gendered terms. For Aristotle, the human eye functioned as a passive ‘matrix in which light implants its substance’, whereas for Galen, the emission of pneuma implied a masculine agency. 24 An allusion to Galen’s theory of extramission can be identified in the Black Queen’s appeal for Englishmen to see past her colour: ‘But view me with an intellectual eye, | As wise men shoot their beams forth, you’ll then find | A change in the complexion of the mind’ (35–7). Notably, therefore, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky concludes that the persistence of the Platonic model served a particular political purpose: ‘what replaced the emission of Platonic “fire” as a cultural model of the masculine’s eye power was ideology in its purest form: the gaze’. 25 I would argue further that the coalescence of sight, fear, and blackness in early modern texts is not only informed by gender, but reproduces the masculine for the purposes of installing the objectifying power of the racial gaze. In demanding ‘ocular proof’, therefore, Othello has unwittingly surrendered to the racial gaze, cultivated within the Venetian panoptic regime, which would turn colour into the totality of his character.

Racism’s Mental Deformity

The play’s concern with sight centers most prominently on the dramatic action surrounding Othello’s request for visible evidence as well as Iago’s verbal repertoire of tricks to satisfy that demand. Othello is insistent, declaring mere verbal challenge or accusation insufficient—‘’Tis not to make me jealous | To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company’ (3.3.186–7)—and demanding instead incontrovertible visible proof: ‘Make me to see’t’ (3.3.366). The distinction Othello makes between words and sight is noteworthy, for its importance lies not in its accuracy or validity, but in the attention it brings to the verbal tools and strategies employed by Iago. Rather than accuse Desdemona directly in the beginning, Iago is hesitant, repeating Othello’s own words or using half-formed sentiments, leaving Othello to observe: ‘these stops of thine fright me the more’ (3.3.124). Iago uses aposiopesis, described in the Ad Herennium as occurring ‘when something is said and then the rest of what the speaker had begun to say is left unfinished’; it continues to explain the rhetorical impact, providing an excellent gloss on Iago’s tactics: ‘Here a suspicion, unexpressed, becomes more telling than a detailed explanation would have been’. 26 The ultimate effect of aposiopesis used by Iago is to make Othello an intellectual collaborator who finishes up the half-stated ideas himself to give the ‘worst of thoughts | The worst of words’ (3.3.136–7). In the worst-case scenario, Othello imagines himself a generator of ideas, becoming the first to actually indict his wife by name following Iago’s spurious hints about cuckoldry and jealousy. Gradually, the accumulation of rhetorical silences, stops, and starts takes its toll, sucking Othello into a vortex of suspicion and doubt from which he will not escape.

While Iago’s rhetorical strategies throughout produce his desired fatal outcome for Othello and Desdemona, they reveal in the ‘temptation scene’ a certain racial mentality Shakespeare foregrounds for the audience’s attention. At a crucial moment, Iago’s hesitant but deliberate repetitions prompt Othello to exclaim, ‘By heaven, thou echo’st me, | As if there were some monster in thy thought | Too hideous to be shown’ (3.3.109–11), followed by Othello’s logical request for those thoughts to be unfolded: ‘Show me thy thought’ (3.3.119). Yet early in the play, at the conclusion of the senate scene, Iago, in a soliloquy, formulates a plot to ensnare and destroy Othello using this same language of monstrosity: ‘It is engendered: Hell and Night | Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light’ (1.3.391–3). Thus Othello’s initial reading of Iago’s verbal hesitations as possibly concealing a monstrous and ‘horrible conceit’ (3.3.118) is correct and linguistically consistent with Iago’s stated long-term plan. Indeed, something dreadful is ‘shut up in [Iago’s] brain’ (3.3.117), something that is both ‘monstrous’ and ‘hideous’, commonplace but powerful terms used to designate black Africans.

Monsters have been discussed in the context of miscegenation and cross-species mixing, the deformed progeny being incorporated into European cultural and political discourse to create in-group classifications, establish normative practices, contain instability, and justify hierarchies of difference. 27 Additionally, and supremely relevant for this play, in the early modern ‘popular imagination, of course, the association of African races with monsters supposed to inhabit their continent made it easy for blackness to be imagined as a symptom of the monstrous’. 28 Thus, for example, William Cunningham, from a survey of classical and contemporary sources about black Africans, concludes: ‘The people [are] blacke, Savage, Monstrous, & rude.’ 29 Johannes Boemus writes of Africans in Ethiopia: ‘There be in it dyuers peoples of sondry phisonomy and shape, monstruous and of hugly shewe.’ 30 This emphasis on size implicit in notions of the monstrous is extended to blacks’ prodigious physical endowments often the source of scandalized commentary; some ‘early cartographers ornamented maps with representations of naked black men bearing enormous sexual organs’. 31 At the same time, ‘horrible’, meaning ‘extremely repulsive to the senses or feelings; dreadful, hideous, shocking, frightful’ ( OED ), recalls the equally well documented optical power of black faces to inspire fear and dread.

The play, therefore, does not simply achieve a deft and insightful reversal, relocating the monstrous and the hideous in Iago while teasing out the repeated early modern English associations of Africans, blackness, and monstrosity. More important is the exposure of a way of thinking and state of mind, identified with trafficking in stereotypes of blackness, that is justly characterized as ‘monstrous’. 32 In the margins of his 1581 text, Doom Warning All Men to the Judgment , Stephen Bateman makes the notation, ‘Black Monsters’, while delivering moral warnings about divine judgement exemplified in ‘the sundry strange and deformed men and women’ in Africa. 33 In contrast to the catalogue of physical deformities attending blacks, Shakespeare reveals Iago’s mental deformity, consciously coded as a monstrosity to alert us to its frightening power. Iago, having rejected an idealist or religious philosophy, affirmed that it is ‘in ourselves that we are thus or thus’ (1.3.315–16), espousing a secular, existentialist declaration that posits ownership of his hideous mind. Iago refers not just to a set of desperate actions that he will undertake, but with ‘monstrous’ as a proxy for blackness, he identifies specific deeds as ‘black’, revealing a racialized mindset even as he surrenders to those behaviours himself, and thereby links blackness and danger—that is, blackness and criminality—as part of the Venetian racial mythos. Accused of being a devil at play’s end (5.2.284–5), Iago emblematizes blackness in his monstrous diabolism.

Othello’s destiny is to be caught in the maelstrom of innuendo and monstrous thinking, internalize its worst imaginings, and project onto the handkerchief his fears while holding onto it as a totem of truth. Rather than prove the truth of Desdemona’s supposed infidelity, the handkerchief comes to embody the full ‘compliment extern’ (1.1.63) of machinations conceived in Iago’s mind. The handkerchief—especially a black handkerchief, given the period’s repeated associations of blackness and the monstrous—becomes a visible, material manifestation of Iago’s mental monstrosity unpacked, one might say, for the audience to see. 34 Iago has notoriously and fiercely guarded his private thoughts, secret agenda, and true allegiance, vowing never to ‘wear my heart upon my sleeve’ (1.1.64). While ‘hideous’ hints at the hidden, secret nature of Iago’s thoughts, ‘monstrous’, with a pun on monstrare , from Latin meaning ‘to show’, points to the exorbitant grotesque that cannot be completely concealed from sight, and that, once revealed, creates visions of horror. 35 The key words ‘monster’, ‘hideous’, and ‘show’ tap into the play’s visual episteme to capture the dynamic tension of seeing and hiding, revelation and occlusion, concealment and disclosure, here aptly directed at Iago’s mental programme—an example, in contemporary terms, of racist thinking masking itself from view. The audience, however, as the sole witness to Iago’s earlier pledge of ‘monstrous birth’ recognizes its uncanny diabolical delivery in the form of the black handkerchief, the objective correlative of the ‘horrible conceit’ Othello rightly feared. While Othello remains blinded to the full truth of his own initial suspicions, Shakespeare has set firmly in place a debate about ‘horrible’ and ‘monstrous’ ideas privately held or unacknowledged and the possibility that they can be rendered visible through unintended or indirect means.

The Audience’s Mind’s Eye

Further attention to Iago’s rhetorical strategies in the ‘temptation scene’ reveals that in response to Othello’s demand for ‘ocular proof’, he offers first a detailed account of Cassio’s purportedly sexual dream. At first seemingly a mere stalling tactic, the narrative description has an intrinsic value, remaining true to the play’s visual focus as an example of enargeia , defined by classical and early modern rhetoricians as the strikingly vivid quality of a description that brings a scene before the mind’s eye. As a distinctive feature of the larger category of description ( ekphrasis ), enargeia often achieves amplification through the accumulation of striking narrative details. 36

One of the most widely used classical rhetorics in the Renaissance provides a definition of enargeia that echoes Shakespeare’s famous phrase (‘ocular proof’): ‘It is Ocular Demonstration when an event is so described in words that the business seems to be enacted and the subject to pass before our eyes.’ 37 Other writers elucidate several points embedded in this compact statement. Quintilian calls attention to the forensic value of vivid description ( evidentia in Latin) in persuading a judge, insisting that the goal is not simply to narrate but to display the facts ‘in their living truth to the eyes of the mind’. 38 What is uniquely fitting for Iago’s purposes, however, is that the use of language Quintilian envisions approximates eyewitness content created with another’s words (seeing as if with one’s own eyes). Henry Peacham explains the effect in The Garden of Eloquence : the listener’s mind is, ‘therby so drawen to an earnest and stedfast contemplation of the thing described, that he rather thinketh he seeth it then heareth it’. 39 Thanks to Iago, Othello’s imagination is inflamed with vivid narrative details, the result of the phenomenon of seeing with words that turns ‘listeners [or readers] into spectators’. 40 Importantly, the concept of enargeia from the discipline of rhetoric brings the notion of audience, and the audience’s mind, to the fore in early modern theories of sight. The conjunction of rhetoric, sight, and audience finds its most clear statement in Erasmus’ evocation of enargeia ’s performative effect in painting a powerful verbal picture ‘so that at length it draws the hearer or reader outside himself as in the theatre’. 41

Iago clearly has a prominent role in the deployment of vivid description that ‘convince[s]‌ Othello of the epistemological priority of visual experience over any less-sensible evidence’. 42 Othello, too, uses enargeia in his defense in the senate, loaded with ethnographic details of strange people and foreign lands as well as biographical data about ‘hair-breadth scapes i’th’imminent deadly breach, | Of being taken by the insolent foe | And sold to slavery’ (1.3.136–8). Othello’s history of the handkerchief is similarly rich in the particulars of its manufacture and the mysteries of its provenance (3.4.54–74). In both instances, the choice to paint a densely delineated portrait that becomes cemented in the hearers’ minds is joined to the need to produce exculpatory evidence: establishing Othello’s innocence against charges of illicit magic, in one instance, and verifying the handkerchief as legitimate and valid proof, in the other. The legal framework identified in Quintilian’s explication of vivid description resonates with the demand for evidentiary proof that concerns Othello on diverse fronts. 43

The play’s most important moments of striking description, at least for the purposes of this essay, occur in the two opening nighttime scenes (Act 1.1–2). I return to these well-known scenes for what they can help us understand about sight and the audience’s mind. With Brabantio presenting himself at an upper window, Iago has an audience whom he wants to convince of Othello’s guilt in stealing the senator’s daughter. In effect, Othello is being charged with blackness; that is, he is being accused in absentia of violating the Venetian cultural code of whiteness. Iago’s deliberate ploy is to present the evidence of proof to Brabantio in such a graphic way that the father’s mind is shocked by the explicit images that lay bare the acts of seeming sexual transgression. The passages are well known, a consequence of the rhetorical impact being discussed, so one example will suffice: ‘Even now, now, very now, an old black ram | Is tupping your white ewe’ (1.1.88–9). Here, Iago punctuates the verbal illusion of a live event that, Heinrich Plett argues, is one of the effects of using enargeia : ‘the event described seems to be happening hic et nunc before the inner eye of the recipient.’ 44 And as the first scene unfolds, Roderigo piles on narrative details in a lengthy speech that indicts Othello by injecting life into popular racial stereotypes about ‘the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor’, the ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger, | Of here and everywhere’ (1.1.125, 135–6).

Erasmus’ analysis, that the picture created through words ‘draws the hearer or reader outside himself as in the theatre’, shifts the lexicon around enargeia sufficiently for us to grasp the metatheatrical construction of the opening scene where the audience in the theatre functions as a prime interlocutor engaged. Othello’s absence, in conjunction with the racially charged information brought forward, puts the audience in the position of having to use its mind’s eye. The audience’s resulting mental image of the Moor is the product of social and ideological conditioning of the time. Elizabeth Spiller argues that in the sixteenth century, ‘written texts and paper images’ were essential technologies that facilitated English encounter with foreigners. 45 The names Sir John Mandeville, Johannes Boemus, Sebastian Munster, Peter Heylyn, and Hakluyt figure significantly in this tradition of cross-cultural print encounter. 46 Starting in the mid-1550s, the introduction of Africans in English society, the result of capture, led to an appreciable growth of the black presence by the turn of the century, a largely shadow community ‘disliked but valued, politically debarred but quietly retained, legally non-existent but historically permanent’. 47 But for the audience attending a performance of Othello , the encounters in reading and in the social environment of London notwithstanding, the stage tradition of presenting Moors must have played a significant educational role for those who had seen Muly in Peele’s Battle of Alcazar (1588), Aaron in Shakespeare’s own Titus Andronicus (1592), or Eleazer in Lust’s Dominion (1600).

The congruence of these factors—textual, historical, and dramatic—can be seen, for example, in the way Heylyn’s description of blacks operates as a template for several dramatic personae. Africans, he claims, are ‘much given to lying, treacherous, very full of talk, excessively venerous, and extream jealous’, all of which attach to Othello at some point. 48 Though the non-literary and social data might mitigate the portraits of Moors in some instances, the theatrical evidence was unrelenting in its dogmatic denigration of blackness. 49 ‘Moor’, substituting for the absent Othello, is not just a blank, empty category label. The audience reacts to the deliberately unnamed and unseen Moor by testing, and most likely confirming, its portable knowledge about blackness against Iago and Roderigo’s accusations while simultaneously filling in the blanks about the absent, as yet unknown black man (what I call the ‘Othello blind spot’) with a mind conditioned by cultural information gathered from the available non-literary texts, real life encounters, and accumulated knowledge from past theatrical performances. The theatre, to follow Erasmus’ thinking, is the ultimate instantiation of enargeia , for as the ‘seeing place’ (from the Greek theatron ), its images of blacks, past and present, come alive in full, animated degradation to be impressed on the audience’s mind’s eye.

The audience experience I am trying to theorize can be explored more fully by way of Norman Bryson’s essay ‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field’ in which he writes: ‘For human beings collectively to orchestrate their visual experience together it is required that each submit his or her retinal experience to the socially agreed description(s) of an intelligible world.’ 50 The cultural conditioning that influenced how audiences saw, conceptualized, and thought about blackness in the early modern period is the product of ‘socially agreed description(s)’ that confirm vision as ‘socialized’. 51 However, when the audience finally sees the anonymous Othello in the play’s second scene, Shakespeare inserts dramaturgic details—a nighttime scene, men with torches arriving to arrest Othello, his refusal to hide, Othello’s famous utterance, ‘Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them’ (1.2.59)—that recall Jesus in Gethsemane at the moment of Judas’ betrayal (John 18: 1–11) to dispel the negative stereotypes imputed previously to Othello. The audience experiences a visual shock; everything the strategically unnamed ‘Moor’ left to the audience’s imagination to fill in earlier is instantly undermined. The earlier image of the violent social intruder and sexual predator is countered by Shakespeare’s evocation of a man, like Jesus, calm and morally exemplary, who is the racial target of political jealousy. Shakespeare deviates from the prevailing ‘social construction of visual reality’, that is, the prevailing stereotypes of blackness, to produce an intellectual and ‘visual disturbance’. 52

Bryson invites us to see that the cultural or ideological conditioning that colours vision is, in an important sense, the source of blindness.

Between the subject and the world is inserted the entire sum of discourses which make up visuality, that cultural construct, and make visuality different from vision, the notion of unmediated visual experience. Between retina and world is inserted a screen of signs, a screen consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built into the social arena. 53

The notion of vision as unimpeded retinal access to the world is revised to explain how sight is always compromised by ‘multiple discourses’, and that ‘screen of signs’ blocks the view and ‘ casts a shadow ’. 54 That is, in the case of race, prejudicial and broadly shared stereotypes distort vision in ways that misrecognize blackness and make us poor readers of humanity. This is the audience recognition that Shakespeare brilliantly dramatizes in the opening pair of scenes in Othello . Moreover, the effect of such distortions is a kind of blindness or, according to Lacan, ‘a scotoma’ 55 (from Greek meaning ‘darkness’)—a blind spot, which is ‘the area of the retina where the optic nerve exits the eye’. 56 The shadow cast by the multiple discourses that racialize blackness mimics the obstruction of vision that occurs in the ocular blind spot to explicate the full impact of racial conditioning and stereotype on the audience: critical and intellectual blindness that produces supremely unreliable readers. The play’s legal language makes it entirely just to observe that Othello, as a black man, is put on trial in the Venetian setting, due in no small part to racial stereotyping. Equally important, in Othello ’s framing pair of opening scenes, Shakespeare challenges the audience’s ability to see clearly and places the reading and interpretation of blackness on trial.

Reading and White Preference

Shakespeare’s interrogation of seeing, reading, and interpretation has an important qualification: he is addressing, in the context of the early modern theatre, the issue of cross-racial reading. Shakespeare investigates an audience from a majority white culture that, due to multiple factors, sees and thinks from within racial stereotypes that the playwright, in turn, makes visible and available for conscious reflection. Iago’s contention that Othello is handicapped as a reader of the Venetian scene because of racial and cultural differences is instrumental in Othello’s gradual mental transformation. About the women, Iago claims: ‘I know our country disposition well: | In Venice they do let God see the pranks | They dare not show their husbands’ (3.3.204–6), to which Othello replies incredulously, ‘Dost thou say so?’ (3.3.208). Unlike Iago who challenges Othello’s ability to read white culture, Shakespeare makes the dramatic departure to question the majority white culture’s ability and willingness to read blackness. I would like to iterate the continuing relevance of that particular Shakespearean inquiry today.

In their recent study Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People , social psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald examine hidden racial bias and its social effects. Developing their thesis by way of analogy with retinal scotoma, they argue that in American society subjects are unaware of and blind to their own racial biases. The issues examined earlier in the context of early modern texts and culture—the panoptic order of whiteness, the imperative of cultural sameness, and hidden or unacknowledged racial bias—are found to operate in modern society but are subject in this instance to the evaluative scrutiny of experimental science. Rather than use explicit testing measures, such as direct response to questions which carries a greater risk of subject interference, Banaji and Greenwald used another method, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and developed the first Race IAT to ‘measure one of our society’s most significant and emotion-laden types of attitudes—the attitude toward a racial group’. 57 The researchers focused especially on black and white racial groups. Years of testing, now confirmed by other researchers, have produced the following findings. 58 First, they conclude ‘that automatic White preference is pervasive in American society’ with 75per cent of those tested showing that preference: ‘This is a surprisingly high figure.’ 59 This preference holds true even when subjects subscribe consciously to different, non-biased outlooks. 60 Second, ‘the automatic White preference expressed on the Race IAT is now established as signaling discriminatory behavior’. 61 Additional research into the reliability of eyewitness accounts elaborates the issue of cross-racial reading. Specifically, tests reveal that, ‘With respect to false identifications, White participants exhibited a larger own-race bias than did Black participants; the size of the own-race bias was comparable for White and Black participants with respect to correct identifications.’ 62 These findings speak to unconsciously held attitudes, but their material and social costs in all areas of African Americans’ lives, from housing discrimination, job discrimination, healthcare, to the criminal justice system, are all too real. 63

As contemporary readers, especially within the discipline of English studies, we cannot be immune to the implications of these findings that suggest, as Shakespeare has before us, that our ability to see and read blackness might be severely impaired by unconscious biases that have been socially and culturally conditioned. The impact of these claims in the experimental sciences has an immediate practical value for legal studies and critical race theory and should have an equally practical and imperative claim in literary studies regarding how we read and reflect on race. 64 While automatic white preference may result from conditioned behaviour, Shakespeare’s use of the play’s second scene stands as an example of the importance of conscious intervention to disrupt oppressive racial orthodoxy and destabilize the sedimentation of convention. Seeing blackness, as examined in this chapter, helps us understand that race is the reading and interpretation of a physiological sign of colour, with the attendant attitudes and responses on the part of the reading subjects informed by an own-race bias. This definition is as true in the early modern period as it is today and helps to challenge the recurring scepticism about race as a viable early modern category and bypasses the too narrow insistence on post-Enlightenment taxonomies and the role of colonialism. 65 Again, the evidence of persistent racial discrimination that has emerged from the research examined counters the naïve presumptions of proponents of post-racial theory who would like to table race altogether as an issue that has been addressed and whose influence has been nullified. Such a move also guarantees the abrogation of responsibility. Given the factual data, ‘[o]‌ne would have to suffer from a very deep form of blindness to ignore the continuing presence of racism in the world today’. 66 A post-racial premise, moreover, would have a curbing effect on early modern race studies. In the end, the inference to be drawn from the collectible data is that white-bias significantly affects the casual, daily routine of seeing, thinking, and reflecting; so this essay asks, by way of Othello , how such bias influences acts of reading and interpretation within a profession whose scholars are, to use a memorable formulation, ideologically conditioned or ‘positioned as white’. 67

Select Bibliography

Baker, Steven , ‘Sight and a Sight in Othello ’, Iowa State Journal of Research 61:3 ( 1987 ), 301–9.

Banaji, Mahzarin R. and Anthony G. Greenwald , Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Delacorte Press, 2013 ).

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Bryson, Norman , ‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field’, in Hal Foster , ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988 ).

Clark, Stuart   Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 ).

Cutler, Brian , ed., Expert Testimony on the Psychology of Eyewitness Identification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 ).

Hugenberg, Kurt , and Galen V. Bodenhausen , ‘ Facing Prejudice: Implicit Prejudice and the Perception of facial Threat ’, Psychological Science 14:6 ( 2003 ), 640–43.

Jenks, Chris , ‘The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture: An Introduction’, in Jenks , ed., Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995 ).

Kinney, Arthur F. , Shakespeare and Cognition: Aristotle’s Legacy and Shakespeare’s Drama (New York: Routledge, 2006 ).

Knapp, James A. , ‘ “Ocular Proof”: Archival Revelations and Aesthetic Response ’, Poetics Today 24:4 ( 2003 ), 695–727.

Lobanov-Rostovsky, Sergei , ‘Taming the Basilisk’, in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio , eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997).

Martin, Jay , ‘The Noblest of the Senses: Vision from Plato to Descartes’, in Martin Jay , Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 ).

Meissner, Christian A. and John C. Brigham , ‘ Thirty Years of Investigating the Own-Race Bias in Memory for Faces: A Meta-Analytic Review ’, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 7:1 ( 2001 ), 3–35.

Mitchell, W. J. T. , Seeing Through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012 ).

Ryden, Wendy and Ian Marshall , Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness (New York: Routledge, 2014 ).

Steven Baker , ‘Sight and a Sight in Othello ’, Iowa State Journal of Research 61:3 (1987), 302 .

On Moors and blackness, see Ania Loomba , Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 45–9 .

Plato, Timaeus , 47a‒b, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns , eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961) . See also the Republic , 507b‒511d.

David Summers , The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 32 .

Aristotle , Metaphysics , 980a, trans. W. D. Ross , in Richard McKeon , ed., Introduction to Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1947) .

See also ‘The Noblest of the Senses: Vision from Plato to Descartes’, in Martin Jay , Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 21–82 . Despite some disagreement from important figures like Lucien Febvre and Robert Mandrou, who rearrange the hierarchy of senses in the late medieval and early modern periods, Jay argues that their contention rests on marginal evidence (34–5).

Chris Jenks , ‘The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture: An Introduction’, in Jenks , ed., Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1 .

Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky , ‘Taming the Basilisk’, in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio , eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997), 199 . On the importance of Aristotle’s theories of sight, knowledge, and memory for the early modern period, see Arthur F. Kinney , Shakespeare and Cognition: Aristotle’s Legacy and Shakespeare’s Drama (New York: Routledge, 2006) .

Lobanov-Rostovsky, ‘Taming the Basilisk’ , 198.

Stuart Clark , Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2 .

See Clark, Vanities of the Eye , 15 and 39–77 for a more detailed description of the process of seeing that includes the role of phantasms.

Jenks notes that ‘philosophy’s project became dedicated to the “rigorous” and “scientific” divination of the accurate and most appropriate transportation of the “outside” into the “inside”. The conventional highway for this transport has been the senses, but primarily “sight”’ (‘The Centrality of the Eye’, 3).

Summers, The Judgment of Sense , 40.

Clark, Vanities of the Eye , 2.

Huston Diehl , Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 134 .

Jenks, ‘The Centrality of the Eye’ , 4.

On the useful intersection of meanings located in ‘complexion’ as a concept from humoral theory, see Roxann Wheeler , The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) .

On the ‘habitus’ and ‘homogeneity’, see Pierre Bourdieu , Outline of a Theory of Practice , trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 80–3 .

Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice , 78.

Ian Smith , ‘White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage’, Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 44–5 .

William Rowley , All’s Lost by Lust and A Shoemaker, A Gentleman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1910) ; all citations are taken from this edition.

Kate Lowe , ‘The Stereotyping of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe’, in T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe , eds., Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17 .

Lobanov-Rostovsky, ‘Taming the Basilisk’ , 199.

Ad Herennium , trans. Harry Caplan , Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 4.30.41 . See also George Puttenham , The Art of English Poesy , ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 250 : ‘when we begin to speak a thing and break off in the middle way, as if either it needed no further to be spoken of, or that we were ashamed or afraid to speak it out’.

On monsters and monstrosity in the early modern period, see Mark Thornton Burnett , Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) ; Patricia Parker , Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 231–72 ; and Karen Newman , ‘“And Wash the Ethiop White”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello ’, in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor , eds., Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York: Methuen, 1987), 143–62 .

Michael Neill , ‘Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello ’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40: 4 (1989), 409 ; on the popular association of monsters and black Africans, see James R. Aubrey , ‘Race and the Spectacle of the Monstrous in Othello ’, Clio 22:3 (1993), 221–38 .

Quoted in Alden Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan , ‘Before Othello : Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans’, William and Mary Quarterly 54:1 (1997), 24 .

Johannes Boemus , The Fardle of Facions (London: John Kingston and Henry Sutton, 1555), sig. C2r.

Newman, ‘“And Wash the Ethiop White”’ , 148.

Burnett, Constructing ‘Monsters’ , 122, suggests: ‘ Othello aims to suggest, in fact, that the “monster” that has been produced is not Desdemona’s death, still less the “monstrous” behaviour of Othello, but the “monstrous” mystery of Iago’s inner compulsions.’ Although I agree with Burnett’s notion of Iago’s ‘inner compulsions’, I want to also emphasize the role of the mind and its relation to thinking and seeing.

Quoted in Aubrey, ‘Race and Spectacle’, 229.

Ian Smith , ‘Othello’s Black Handkerchief’, Shakespeare Quarterly 64:1 (2013), 1–25 .

Burnett, Constructing ‘Monsters’ , 2–3; Burnett also considers the importance of the visual dimension of ‘monster’.

On the history and distinction between the terms, see Graham Zanker , ‘Enargeia in the Ancient Criticism of Poetry’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 124 (1981), 297–311 .

Ad Herennium , 4.55.68.

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria , 4 vols., trans. H. E. Butler , Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 8.3.62 .

Henry Peacham , The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Jackson, 1593), 134 .

Heinrich F. Plett , Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 27 . The quotation is from the Progymnasmata of Nikolaos of Myra.

Desiderius Erasmus , On Copia of Words and Ideas , trans. Donald B. King and H. David Hix (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1963), 47 ; see also Joel B. Altman , ‘“Preposterous Conclusions”: Eros, Enargeia , and Composition in Othello ’, in his The Improbability of ‘Othello’: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) , where he examines enargeia in relation to the theatre but for very different purposes from the ones argued here.

James Knapp , ‘“Ocular Proof”: Archival Revelations and Aesthetic Response’, Poetics Today 24:4 (2003), 712 .

For an engaging account of the law and the jury system in relation to Othello , see Katharine Eisaman Maus , Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 104–27 .

Plett, Enargeia , 9.

Elizabeth Spiller , Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 16 .

On the non-literary sources of images of blackness, see Elliot H. Tokson , The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 1–19 .

Imtiaz Habib , Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 118 .

Quoted in Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man , 17–18.

In the visual arts, a range of perspectives covering the African as slave, ambassador, and duke is documented in Joaneath Spicer , ed., Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: The Walters Art Museum, 2012) .

Norman Bryson , ‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field’, in Hal Foster , ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 91.

Ibid. , 91 .

Ibid. , 91–2 .

Ibid. , 92 .

Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition , 19. On the distinction between the natural blind spot and artificial scotomas, see V. S. Ramachandran , ‘Filling in Gaps in Perception’, Current Directions in Psychological Science 2, no. 2 (1993): 56–7 .

Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald , Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Delacorte Press, 2013), 41 .

Christian A Meissner and John C. Brigham , ‘Thirty Years of Investigating the Own-Race Bias in Memory for Faces: A Meta-Analytic Review’, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 7:1 (2001), 3–35 . A meta-analysis synthesizes the available data in a particular research area to provide ‘greater statistical power’; see Brian Cutler , ed., Expert Testimony on the Psychology of Eyewitness Identification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 15 ; and Kurt Hugenberg and Galen V. Bodenhausen , ‘Facing Prejudice: Implicit Prejudice and the Perception of facial Threat’, Psychological Science 14:6 (2003), 640–3 .

Banaji and Greenwald, Blindspot , 47.

This is the effect of cognitive dissonance; see Banaji and Greenwald, Blindspot , 54–61.

Brian Cutler and Margaret Bull Kovera , Evaluating Eyewitness Identification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 39 .

Banaji and Greenwald, Blindspot , 189–209; see also Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel , Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do about It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 43–8 .

Marianne Novy expresses a brief interest in experiments covering weapons and the propensity for racial misrecognition, but she turns her attention to whether works ‘can be free from being read as exemplifying racist ideology’. Shakespeare and Outsiders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 103 .

This debate is the central concern for Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton , eds., ‘Introduction’, in Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 1–36 .

W. J. T. Mitchell , Seeing Through Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. xi .

Toni Morrison , Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. viii .

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Othello — The Question of Racism and Its Representation on Othello

Critical Analysis of Othello in Terms of The Themes of Racism, Prejudice, and Miscegeny in The Play

• Categories: Othello William Shakespeare

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Published: Jun 29, 2018

Words: 2413 | Pages: 5.5 | 13 min read

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Introduction, racism and prejudice in othello, bibliography.

"Roderigo: What a full fortune does the thick-lips owe, If he can carry't thus. [1.1.67]

'...here comes one, if not the only, seeming justification of our blackamoor or negro Othello. Even if we supposed this an uninterrupted tradition of the theatre, and that Shakespeare himself, from want of scenes, and the experience that nothing could be made too marked for the senses of his audience, had practically sanctioned it, - would this prove aught concerning his own intention as a poet for all ages? Can we imagine him so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth, - at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves? - As for Iago's language to Brabantio, it implies merely that Othello was a Moor, that is, black .... No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated.'"

OTHELLO: My parts, my title, and my perfect soul Shall manifest me rightly. Othello 1.2.31-2

IAGO: Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe! Othello 1.1.87-88

IAGO: ...you'll have Your daughter covered with a Barbary horse, You'll have your nephews neigh to you, you'll have Coursers for cousins, and jennets for germans. Othello 1.1.109-112

IAGO: It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor. Othello 1.3.342-344

IAGO: love- liness in favor, sympathy in years, manners and beauties. Othello 2.1.226-228

OTHELLO: Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe Othello 5.2.345-346

• Davison, P. (1988) Othello: An Introduction to the Variety of Criticism Hampshire: Macmillan Press
• Shakespeare, W. (1997) Othello (c. 1602) E. A. J Honigmann (Ed.) Surrey: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd.
• Wheale, N. (2000) Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth Century Critical Evaluations of Othello. Shakespeare Text & Performance: Materials for the Second Assignment (Hand-out)

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Racism and Racial Prejudice in Othello

How it works

In the book, Othello, by William Shakespeare, we see a big impact of racism and racial prejudice. Othello shows a lot of this and how it gets in the way by restraining love in society. He is a black man who is also a great and successful war soldier. He dedicates himself to serve society’s goals by fighting for his country. Even though, Othello is a Moor, he is the most hardworking and the most respected. When it comes to his love life with Desdemona, he is very different.

This truly affects Othello’s life and the structure of the course throughout the plot.

• 1 Prejudice in Othello
• 2 Racism in Othello

Prejudice in Othello

Othello is a tragedy of racial conflict. He is also shown as a representative of racial prejudice. Throughout his life as a married man, the prejudice of his race blocks the eyes of others in society that see him in a different point of view. He is married to a white woman in which he loves very much. In other people’s perspective in society, they look at this as a little strange. The Christian traditions at the time believed that that African American people were sexually unrestrained. In the beginning of the book, Othello was made fun of by being called “Big Lips. This was a racist comment upon his name in which people looked at him as “evil.

Racism in Othello

Throughout the book, racism just keeps getting worse for Othello. Iago doesn’t seem to stand him at all because of the fact that he’s a Moor and that he’s black. Iago believes that an African American person person cannot be successful or good in any way. He also believed that Othello couldn’t marry a beautiful woman who was white. Iago is angered when he finds out that they get married. He bugs out and uses racist language. Iago uses a term to abuse Othello as a “black ram. This shows his true hatred for Othello and black people in general.

As Othello’s awareness of others in society and what the people actually think of him gets to him, he isn’t surprised at all. He begins to realize that everyone in his society actually does think less of him because of who is as a Moor. He sees that Iago was a bad and racist person. The insecurity about his race and the realization that he is different than every person in his society leads to his hatred and anger to really come out. This anger really gets to Othello in which he kills Desdemona. He felt less upon himself and started to lose his self-confidence as a person. He comes to conclusion that Cassio would’ve been a better husband towards Desdemona because he was white and that he was considered a “ladies man. Othello thinks that he was never meant to marry Desdemona.

Throughout Othello’s life, he was greatly affected by race and racial prejudice. He changed as a person because of this and many bad actions took place while realizing it. Othello shows a great role of a strong and loyal soldier until he realizes what society really thinks about him. His non acceptance in society leads to the killing of his wife.

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Anti-Racism in Shakespeare’s Othello Essay

Introduction, brabantio’s case as an example of shakespeare’s anti-racism, racism as an attribute of a villain, could othello be a racist play.

Shakespeare’s Othello is a play that touches upon the issues that have not lost their relevance throughout the centuries. While in developed countries nowadays, racial and gender inequalities are widely criticized, they are considered the norm in the Venetian society of Othello . Shakespeare challenges these norms, mainly through his portrayals of Othello and Emilia. Overall, Shakespeare’s ideas make Othello a play well ahead of its time.

Numerous characters throughout the play demonstrate implicit racial attitudes, and Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, is one of those. In Act 1, Scene 2, he expresses his disbelief in the genuineness of his daughter’s feelings for Othello and states that the latter must have seduced her using some sort of magic. Witchcraft practice was considered a serious offense in medieval Europe; hence, Brabantio’s accusations are indicative of his extremely negative perception of Othello. Brabantio concludes the scene with the phrase “for if such actions may have passage free, Bond slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be” (Shakespeare 23). His racism is most evident when he expresses his disgust for Othello’s appearance at the Duke’s palace, angrily exclaiming “to fall in love with what she feared to look on!” (Shakespeare 30). While many characters in the play make brief remarks, which are indicative of their racial attitudes, Desdemona’s father is the most persistent in his ignorance.

For Shakespeare, Brabantio’s views are representative of the racial prejudice of the society in general, rather than of his personal feelings towards the protagonist. Othello, telling his story of falling in love with Desdemona, states that “her father loved me, oft invited me” (Shakespeare 32). It proves that Brabantio does not hate Othello, but he can not see him as an equal and definitely can not fathom his daughter loving someone like him. His denial most likely comes from his upbringing and conservative values.

As Desdemona’s father can be considered the voice of the conservative elites in Venice, Shakespeare’s portrayal of this character can shed light on his take on racial issues. Two-character juxtapositions can help to understand the author’s position. Brabantio can be compared to Othello as they both present their points to the Duke. A less obvious, but equally important juxtaposition is the one between Brabantio and the Duke. Much like Desdemona’s father, the Duke belongs to the ruling class of the society, but he exhibits an entirely different attitude and behavior.

From the moment Brabantio enters the palace, he can barely control himself, interrupting other speakers and throwing repetitive accusations at Othello (Shakespeare 28-30). His argument lacks logical reasoning and is based purely on his perception of race. On the other hand, Othello’s story is cohesive and believable; he is humble and respectful of his opponent. Moreover, he expresses willingness to sacrifice his career and even life if Desdemona does not confirm his story (Shakespeare 31). While the Duke shows sympathy for Brabantio’s cause, he demonstrates a lack of racial bias and doubts the accusations, saying “to vouch this is no proof, without wider and more overt test” (Shakespeare 31). When Desdemona confirms the true nature of her feelings for Othello, Brabantio’s witchcraft theory is proven wrong, and he has no other choice but to accept Othello as his son-in-law (Shakespeare 36). The outcome hardly pleases Desdemona’s father, but he admits its fairness. Therefore, Shakespeare does not only expose the flawed logic of racists, but he also demonstrates how empirical evidence can be used to destroy dangerous stereotypes.

Iago regularly uses offensive metaphors to demonstrate his contempt for Othello and manipulate people. For example, Brabantio is enraged when Iago tells him that “an old black ram is tupping your white ewe,” referring to Othello and Desdemona (Shakespeare 9-10). However, as the play progresses, it becomes clear that Iago’s opinion of other characters is equally low. His misogyny is especially noticeable, as he compares women to guinea-hen in his conversation with Roderigo, and mocks Desdemona and Emilia later (Shakespeare 58-60). He calls his only ally and accomplice “my sick fool Roderigo” (Shakespeare 75). Overall, the analysis of Iago’s speeches leads to the conclusion that he despises humankind in general.

As the play progresses, it becomes clear that Iago has the traits of a psychopath. He completely disregards the feelings of others and sees other people as dispensable. He uses Roderigo and his wife, Emilia, to achieve his goals and eventually kills both. When Iago encourages Roderigo to kill Cassio, he reveals his true thoughts, saying “now, whether he kill Cassio, or Cassio him, or each does kill the other, every way makes my gain” (Shakespeare 176). Overall, Iago is the most immoral and unlikable character in Othello and one of the most notorious villains in Shakespearean plays.

Shakespeare shows that racism and hatred are integral to Iago’s character. While Iago probably hates Othello more for promoting Cassio instead of him, rather than for his skin color, he masterfully uses the others’ racism to turn them against the protagonist. The racial bias of Roderigo and Brabantio might be a result of ignorance, but Iago’s racism is fueled by hatred, which makes him extremely unlikable. By assigning the most racist lines to this character, Shakespeare clearly shows his disapproval of racism.

Some scholars argue that Othello is a racist play because Shakespeare portrays the protagonist as a jealous fool who loses everything at the end. Indeed, his uncontrolled anger and inability to think logically under pressure could be the traits a Renaissance writer associated with race. However, the analysis of other Shakespeare’s plays shows that this assumption is quite questionable. In Shakespearean tragedy, a protagonist always has a fatal flaw – Hamlet is indecisive, Romeo is impulsive, Macbeth is overly ambitious, and Othello is jealous. These flaws are often the only negative traits that Shakespeare assigns to these extremely virtuous characters. Othello perfectly fits this description, as his superiors and subordinates refer to him as valiant, noble, brave, and “great of heart” (Shakespeare 27, 53, 72, 203). Hence, Othello’s flaw proves that he belongs with the tradition of Shakespearean tragedy, rather than tells anything about the author’s racial attitude.

The fall of Othello is another essential element of the classic tragedy. All Shakespeare’s tragic heroes die suffering – Macbeth is dethroned and beheaded, Romeo and Juliet commit suicide because they believe their love is dead, Lear loses his only loyal daughter and dies. It leads to the conclusion that Othello’s tragic end is not predetermined because of his race, but is an inevitable outcome for a heroin Shakespearean tragedy.

Usually, Shakespeare gives most lines and soliloquies to the title characters in his plays. However, in this case, Iago, not Othello, is the character with the most lines. It could be argued that Othello’s race is the factor that made Shakespeare alter the traditional structure of the play. However, it is not necessarily indicative of the author’s racism. Racial bias existed in Elizabethan England, and introducing a Black protagonist from the beginning could prove to be a difficult task. Instead, by making Iago, in effect, a narrator, Shakespeare lets the public see Othello through his enemy’s eyes. As the story unfolds, and it becomes clear that Iago is a villain, the audience has no other choice but to accept Othello as the hero. Therefore, in Othello , Shakespeare challenges the traditional structure of the play, giving the public a chance to look at the events from the antagonist’s perspective. However, it does not undermine the importance of Othello’s character. On the contrary, by exposing Iago’s cowardice and vileness in intimate detail, Shakespeare ensures that the audience sides with Othello, despite any implicit bias it might have initially developed.

Shakespeare is often praised for writing plays that remain relevant in the modern world. Othello is one of the rare examples of Renaissance literature that tackles the problem of racism. For the first time in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare introduces a Black tragic hero who is noble and virtuous. Through the juxtaposition of Othello with racist characters, Shakespeare shows that one’s personality and values are not defined by race. Therefore, Othello can be considered one of the earliest examples of anti-racist literature in Western culture.

Shakespeare, William. Othello. Yale University Press. 2005.

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IvyPanda. (2022, February 24). Anti-Racism in Shakespeare’s Othello. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anti-racism-in-shakespeares-othello/

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IvyPanda . 2022. "Anti-Racism in Shakespeare’s Othello." February 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anti-racism-in-shakespeares-othello/.

1. IvyPanda . "Anti-Racism in Shakespeare’s Othello." February 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anti-racism-in-shakespeares-othello/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Anti-Racism in Shakespeare’s Othello." February 24, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anti-racism-in-shakespeares-othello/.

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Racism in Othello, Essay Example

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Given the age and the setting in which Shakespeare’s Othello was written and first performed, racism as a component in the drama is surprisingly less evident than a modern audience would likely expect, at least not in the way racism is thought of today. It is ordinary to think of racist views as far more a product of older and less enlightened days, and Othello’s approximate date of creation as the year 1603 would certainly make an audience of today anticipate powerful racism within it as a matter of course. Moreover, England as a nation was adamantly insular and xenophobic, particularly as the defeat of the Spanish Armada of 1588 was still resounding in living memory. Shakespeare was himself notorious for writing to suit the public taste of his day, as he also tailored plays to please the power bases at court.

The basic reason, however, that racism as such is not a predominant factor in Othello is easily explained by the man who wrote it. Shakespeare’s genius would never have been content to present a mere racial motivation as a pivotal plot device, or even as a defining character trait; his art was too expansive and he knew the complexity of human beings too well to allow that. There is racism in Othello , to be sure. So, too, is racism revealed as an element in Iago’s intense hatred of the Moor. Shakespeare’s vision and presentation, however, is too enormous to rely upon so primitive and ultimately uninteresting a foundation. In exploring Othello’s tragedy and Iago’s evil, Shakespeare goes further to explore how racism itself is never a single, blind trait.  In Othello , as in life, various factors collide within men, and “racism” is merely one manifestation of the wider, darker path these may take. “Only a very intelligent and highly imaginative writer could articulate the fusion of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny… in such psychically plausible terms” (Dollimore 132).

The England of Shakespeare’s day was, as stated, fiercely insular. Insularity typically breeds xenophobia, which may be seen as the structure in which racism resides. The ancient feud with France, for example, fueled within the British character a proud disdain of all French people, which led to a widespread and violently racist view of the French as a weak and immoral people. Then, antisemitism was not a hypothetical issue. Rodrigo Lopez, Queen Elizabeth’s personal physician for years, was a Portuguese Jew. When the Earl of Essex, desperate to gain the Queen’s favor in the 1590’s, had Lopez brought to trial on scant evidence of treason, the interrogation centered on the doctor’s Jewishness.  As is universally acknowledged, this fueled The Merchant of Venice , simply because “…Lopez was the best-known of the few Jews in England when the play was written” (Afran, Garber 3).

This is essential to note in regarding Othello as a victim of racism, because Shylock and Othello are the greatest representations of racism victims in Shakespeare, if not in all of Western literature, and how Shakespeare dealt with Shylock goes far in explaining why he presents the racism in Othello as he does. Shylock is not rendered as an especially likeable character; Shakespeare knew his audiences would never accept a fully dimensional Jew, and Shylock is presented in a very stereotypical manner. He is relentlessly grasping and he lives to make deals, which is how Jews were generally perceived at the time. Shakespeare, however, is incapable of drawing characters in single dimensions of any kind, and the humanity and pain of Shylock as a man is known to all the world.

With Othello , which is a later, and more subtle, play, Shakespeare does not focus on racism as such. It should be understood, in light of the comparison with Shylock, that the English had a different view of Moors, or people of African descent: “…The Elizabethan social situation was not indisolvably ( sic ) categorical, black versus white. Some Elizabethans knew about and appreciated Moorish culture, which of course relates to Othello’s character” (Kolin 15). To the greater and more cosmopolitan Elizabethan audience, Moors were nearly mythically powerful warriors, and aristocratic in their own traditions. This admiration itself has within it elements of racism, of course, yet it was by no means a simple dismissal of a Black man as a lower order of human. Consequently, Shakespeare was free to more carefully explore the many elements that go into what is often simply assessed as “racism”.

Many critics of Othello disagree, and they have the relentless hatred of Iago on their side. “There’s no denying that racism was the motivation, the means, and the end in Iago’s systematic destruction of Othello” (Robinson 94). This viewpoint overlooks the play’s greatness, as well as the brilliance of Iago’s mystery. To begin with, Iago only occasionally hints at a dislike of Othello because of his race, as he even admits that his hatred is too large to be attributed to one cause. It is simply there, within him, and the intrinsic evil of Iago is a far more fascinating character presentation than that of an angered and envious racist. To say that Iago’s racist disgust at Othello is the driving force of the play is to remove the heart of the play, and to insultingly over-simplify Shakespeare’s art.

Other critics come closer to the mark when they investigate the sexual component in the mixed race relations of Othello and Desdemona, if only because a dread of a supposed greater African potency underlies a good deal of white racism, then and now. To the racist, few things are as horrific as the notion of a Black man taking a white woman, and Shakespeare brings this up again and again, in Othello. If there is racism here, it is sexually-based.

It is not simple, either, for this sort of deep look inside racism reveals the even greater fear: the race will be polluted, and forever. In a discussion of the animalistic references to sex in the play, many of which involve different species having sex, Daileader comments: “These copulative images highlight the idea that inter-racial sex creates a new creature – and not only in the future progeny, but at the very moment of sexual union” (23). This is the overpowering fear at the heart of racism, that something unnatural will result when races combine. It is never directly referred to in Othello , but Shakespeare effectively makes the audience confront the irrational terror possibly in their own hearts.

Another aspect of racism itself, often overlooked and employed within Othello as further evidence of the author’s genius in capturing fully-dimensional characters, is how Othello is himself an active participant in the very racism he must deal with. This is true of any culture; as racist ideas are infused within it, the object of them must in some way share in the bias. Othello makes it very clear, and early in the play, that he is indeed the great hero everyone in Venice sees him as. He is very certain of his accomplishments, as he is of what the city owes him in respect. Any other hero would, then, assume Desdemona’s devotion to be a natural thing. He is a great man and he completely deserves the love of a fair maiden.

Othello, however, knows he is of a different race. “A tawny Moor, a black African, Othello  is also the ‘turbanned Turk’ of his own description” (Bloom 126).  Consequently, he always marvels at Desdemona’s love, and this is his own racism at play. No hero in Shakespeare is ever this amazed at being loved: “I cannot speak enough of this content/ It stops me here/ It is too much joy” (Shakespeare 22). This wonder is a form of disbelief, and it is this disbelief, born from Othello’s awareness that a Moor warrior does not as a rule have an adoring, white bride, that subtly conveys the sense that Othello views himself as different, if not inferior.

This ties into the sexual component of the drama, for Othello’s uniqueness would not place him in jeopardy if he were not married to a white woman. He has, in a sense, gone too far, and he is aware of it. Iago is as well, because Iago knows he can exploit Othello’s racial insecurities through exactly this avenue. When all is said and done, this mighty warrior is a Black man wed to a woman of a different race, and everyone in the drama, Othello included, knows that this makes him vulnerable.

The most comprehensive criticisms of Othello concede that it is a mistake to view the racism within the play as racism is understood today. In fact, the study of Othello offers vast opportunities for a better understanding of what is a truly complex issue, and it is in any culture’s best interests to seek to explore all the shades of motive within it, from the xenophobic to the sexual. Studying racism is very much a matter of studying humanity, because racism, for good or ill, has always been a reflection of human interaction.

Finally, it must be conceded that Shakespeare’s genius in presenting racism in Othello was to reveal how subtle and universal a force it can be. In a very real sense, everyone is a victim of racism because both object and racist alike live within the same world that allows the racism. This is one of the massive undercurrents in Othello, and it greatly overshadows any concept of a biased Iago as the critical instrument of the drama: “…To say that Othello, Desdemona, and Cassio seek only love and honor in the play is to gloss over the ways in which they are themselves ‘flawed’ by the racial structures: we need to guard against viewing any of them as simple oppositions to a racist Iago” (McDonald 814). Because of the scope and genius of Shakespeare, a brilliant drama revealing the many shades of motive and feeling within racism is always available to be more deeply explored.

Works Cited

Afran, B., and Garber, R. A.  Jews on Trial . Jersey City, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 2005. Print.

Bloom, H. William Shakespeare’s Othello . New York, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2010. Print.

Daileader, C. R. Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-Racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

Dollimore, J. Sex, Literature, and Censorship . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2001. Print.

Kolin, P.C. Othello: New Critical Essays. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. Print.

McDonald, R. Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945 – 2000 . Malden, MA: Blackwood Publishing Ltd., 2004. Print.

Robinson, E. L. Shakespeare Attacks Bigotry: A Close Reading of Six Plays . Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009. Print.

Shakespeare, W. Othello: A Tragedy in Five Acts . New York, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1954. Print.

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