Othello
Race

As Ben Okri has said:

If Othello did not begin as a play about race, then its history has made it one.

Or, as the Oxford editor Professor Michael Neill summarises it:

Anxieties about the treatment of race in Othello are a recurrent feature of both its critical and performance histories: where they once focused on the supposed scandal of miscegenation, they are nowadays more likely to address the play's complicity in racial stereotyping.

In plot terms, Othello's race serves to mark him as "other". As both a Christian and a black African, Othello is (as scholar Tom McAlindon puts it) both of, and not of, Venice. And actor Paul Robeson considered Othello's colour as essentially secondary, as a way of emphasizing his cultural difference and consequent vulnerability in a society he does not fully understand.

In the world of the play itself, Jyotsna Singh argues that Brabantio's – and others' – objection to Othello, a decorated and respected general, as a suitable husband for Desdemona, a senator's daughter, only makes sense in racist terms: reinforced by the bestial imagery used by Iago in delivering the news. The racist slurs used by Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio in the play suggest that Shakespeare conceived of Othello as a black African: "thicklips"; "an old black ram is tupping your white ewe"; "you'll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse"; "the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou" – as do things Othello says of himself: "haply for I am black"; or "begrimed and black as mine own face".

There is critical divide over Othello's ethnic origin. A " Moor " broadly refers to someone from northwest Africa, especially if Muslim, but in Shakespeare's England "Moor" was used with broader connotations: sometimes referring to Africans of all regions, sometimes to Arabic or Islamic peoples beyond Africa, such as those of Turkey and the Middle East, and sometimes to Muslims of any race or location.
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