For a long time we have been obsessed with one most tangible feature of Shakespeare's Othello: the hero's color. This we have done with good reason, for Othello's skin color is explicitly mentioned in the text from the very beginning. The fact that this tragic hero is black (when Shakespeare's other heroes are white) is so intriguing that we seek to make sense of it. Writing in 1811, Charles Lamb insists that Othello is essentially unstageable, for there is “something extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona” (221), earlier describing Othello as “a coal-black Moor” (221), his italics showing his disgust at the thought. Samuel Taylor Coleridge only a few years later asked if Shakespeare could be “so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth—at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves” (231), and concludes that “Othello must not be conceived as a negro” (232). Nearly two hundred years later, Michael D. Bristol claims that, because Othello would have been originally played by a white man in blackface, his character hearkens back to “a kind of blackface clown” (355), used in a type of farcical skit known as charivari. The 2001 movie O, which took the play's plot and set it at an exclusive American private school, emphasizes Othello's color further. O (Othello's counterpart) is the only black student in a white school, and his final words—“When you all are [. . .] sitting around talking about that nigger who lost it back in high school—you make sure you tell them the truth”—paraphrase Othello's final speech in a way that brings the racial question to the forefront. Really, there is little doubt that Othello's blackness is important.
The danger with emphasi...
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...gedies.” Othello. Ed Pechter. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. 235-243. Print.
Bristol, Michael D. “Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in Othello.” Othello. Ed. Pechter. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. 350-365. Print.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Comments on Othello.” Othello. Ed. Pechter. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. 230-234. Print.
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O. Dir. Tim Blake Nelson. Lions Gate Entertainment, 2001. Film.
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F. R. Leavis discusses the breakdown of sympathy for Othello, arguing that ‘Othello is too stupid to be regarded as a tragic hero’. Other critics also argue that Shakespeare ‘fully exploits the unique cultural opportunity to develop a more complex and sympathetic representation of black experience’ [The Noble Moor – Othello and Race in Elizabethan London, Roger Lees], implying that the sympathy that a contemporary audience would have felt for Othello was based oncultural context, given that the audience were predominantly white. However, it could be argued that it cannot just be the cultural context to Shakespeare’s audiences that has allowed Othello to become one of his most renowned tragedies; if this were the case, the play would have lost all critical interest by the 18th Century. It is Shakespeare’s use of the conventions of tragedy in attributing Othello with hubris that, although making it hard to empathise with at times, in the...
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Jones, Eldred. "Othello- An Interpretation" Critical Essays on Shakespeare's Othello. Ed. Anthony G. Barthelemy Pub. Macmillan New York, NY 1994.
"Othello's color had no connotations of the enslavable inferiority. There were many great Negroes in those days like that Antonio de Vunth, who was King of Congo's ambassador to the Holy See."(Shakespeare, pp.200)
Othello is one of Shakespeare?s prime examples of an ?other?, someone who doesn?t truly belong to society by some unfortunate inheritance of ethnicity and race, made worse by the negative stereotypes constructed by the Venetians to apply to outsiders like him. Although Othello is a gifted military hero, a ?worthy governor? (II.i.30) and a ?full soldier? (II.i.36), he is also damned by his color, his blackness. Most of the Venetian insiders, including his wife Desdemona, refer to Othello as merely ?the Moor?, and label him with such blatant insults as ?l...
- - -. Othello. 1968. Ed. Kenneth Muir. The New Penguin Shakespeare. London: Penguin Books, 1996.