SOURCE: “‘Mulattos,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian Moors’: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 4, Winter, 1998, pp. 361-74.

[In the following essay, Neill discusses the contradictory significance of race in Othello.]

“I think this play is racist, and I think it is not”:¹ Virginia Vaughan's perplexed response to Othello is symptomatic of the problems faced by late-twentieth-century critics in approaching the racial dimensions of Shakespeare's play. For if the work of recent scholars has taught us anything about early modern constructions of human difference, it is that any attempt to read back into the early modern period an idea of “race” based on post-Enlightenment taxonomy is doomed to failure.² To talk about race in Othello is to fall into anachronism; yet not to talk about it is to ignore something fundamental about a play that has rightly come to be identified as a foundational text in the emergence of modern European racial consciousness—a play that trades in constructions of human difference at once misleadingly like and confusingly unlike those twentieth-century notions to which they are nevertheless recognizably ancestral. In the latter part of this paper, I hope to cast some light on Shakespeare's treatment of what came to be called “race” by exploring an experience of alterity in the East Indian archipelago, a theater of colonial encounter which may at first seem far away from the Mediterranean world of Othello. But I should like to frame that discussion by briefly considering some of the ways in which this tragedy perplexes the notions of ethnic and national identity that its subtitle so casually invokes.

In an essay that provides a useful corrective to anachronistically postcolonial understandings of race in Othello, Emily Bartels has stressed the ideological openness of the play's treatment of human difference, arguing that (except in the eyes of Iago and those he manipulates) “Othello is, as the subtitle announces, ‘the Moor of Venice’. … neither an alienated nor an assimilated subject, but a figure defined by two worlds, a figure (like Marlowe's Jew of Malta) whose ethnicity occupies one slot, professional interests another, compatibly”—the fortunate possessor, then, of “a dual, rather than divided, identity.”³ But the invocation of Barabas as a parallel type of comfortably hyphenated hybridity seems something of a give-away here. One has only to think of the extreme anxieties surrounding the question of what it meant to belong to, say, the “Old English” of Ireland to recall how easily dual identity could be interpreted as sinister doubleness or self-contradiction: from the viewpoint of “New English” settlers like Spenser, the adoption of Irish customs and speech by the Old English descendants of Norman conquerors could signal only a treacherous repudiation of their birthright.⁴ The unease of hybridity (whether elective or enforced), in a world where the hybrid was always liable to be construed as prodigious or monstrous, is apparent in the ambivalent ethnographic discourse of one of Shakespeare's principal sources for Othello—the Geographical Historie of Africa, written by the Granada-born Moor John Leo Africanus. In a somewhat poignant moment, this native informant and Christian converso, for whom African peoples are both “them” and “us,” describes himself as an “amphibian,”⁵ thereby acknowledging his contradictory position as a denizen of both Muslim and Christian worlds, as both African and European, humanist scholar and “barbarian.” It is a position that can seem inscribed in an adopted Latin name equally suggestive of dedicated papal allegiance and an unreconstructed bestial ferocity.⁶ In much the same way, Othello's Africa is at once the place that authenticates his birth “from men of royal siege” (1.2.22) and a wilderness of Plinian monstrosities, of “Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (1.3.145-46).⁷ One way of describing the action of his tragedy is in terms of the process by which Iago progressively prises open the contradictions in an oxymoronic subtitle that marks the uneasy translation of “erring Barbarian” into “civil monster” (1.3.356; 4.1.64)—the process (to put it another way) by which he successfully essentializes or “racializes” Othello's difference.

When Roderigo, under Iago's tutelage, dismisses Othello as “an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere” (1.1.134-35), he issues a fundamental challenge to the syntax of identity inscribed in the play's subtitle, “The Moor of Venice.”⁸ To be a Moor, he insists, is to be a fundamentally dislocated creature, a wandering denizen of that un-place known as wilderness, heath, or moor—“an erring Barbarian” in the punning phrase with which Iago assimilates Barbary to the notoriously vagrant condition of barbarism. From Roderigo's perspective, then, to be a “Moor of Venice” is to represent a principle of wild disorder lodged in the very heart of metropolitan civilization—to be, in another of Iago's violent oxymorons, a kind of “civil monster.” The innocent-seeming preposition that yokes Moorish origin to Venetian identity is thus a site of violent contradiction.⁹ Yet the of in “Moor of Venice” is easily passed over as a mere instrument of descriptive amplification, as unproblematic in its implications as the similarly deployed locatives in, say, Timon of Athens, The Two Gentleman of Verona—or, indeed, The Merchant of Venice, the play that is in some respects Othello's counterpart in Shakespeare's comic canon. To remember The Merchant of Venice in this context, however, is to recall the tellingly ambiguous description of the play in the Stationers' Register, “a booke of the Marchaunte of Venyce, or otherwise called the Jew of Venyce,” and hence to be confronted with the troubling implications of Portia's question, “Which is the Merchant here, and which the Jew?” (4.1.171)—a question that directs us toward a reading of that play in which issues of place and identity, of the “native” and the “stranger,” become so vexed as to seriously destabilize the innocent-seeming of that ties both Shylock and Antonio to their native city. The effect is to send us further back to Marlowe's satiric deconstruction of geographic identity in The Jew of Malta. As the alienated representative of “a scatter’d Nation” (1.1.121), Barabas is not so much of Malta as in it—just as his vaunted colleagues in international Jewry are located “in” Bairseth, Portugal, Italy, and France.¹⁰ Scorning allegiance not only to “those of Malta” (1. 143) but even to his own professed “Countreymen” (1. 159), the fellow Jews who share his persecution, Barabas takes sardonic pleasure in representing himself as an archetypal cosmopolitan, whose politic schooling in Machiavelli's Florence has helped him to manipulate “the warres ’twixt France and Germanie” (2.3.187) as it now enables him to exploit the conflict between Turk and Christian. Yet the pseudo-cathartic action of his “tragedy,” with its ludicrously repeated efforts to purge him from the costive body politic, suggests a more organic relationship between this outsider and “those of Malta” than either Barabas or his Christian persecutors would acknowledge.

Of course the particular fear that attaches to the demon-Jew in early modern European culture has to do with his insidious role as the hidden stranger, the alien whose otherness is the more threatening for its guise of semblance. This was a culture whose own expansionism, ironically enough, generated fears of a hungrily absorptive otherness which were expressed in complementary fantasies of dangerous miscegenation, degeneration, and cannibalistic desire; in its fictions the Jew represents the deepest threat of all—that of a secret difference masquerading as likeness, whose presence threatens the surreptitious erosion of identity from within.¹¹ One reason why Shylock remains such a deeply troubling figure at the end of Merchant is the unspoken possibility that his forcible conversion (like that of Jews in sixteenth-century Spain) will only institutionalize the very uncertainty it is designed to efface. Jessica's marriage to Lorenzo—albeit that marriage in some sense confers the husband's identity on the wife—contains the same latent threat; hence, perhaps, the uneasy silence that surrounds her in the concluding moments of the play.

The great advantage of Moors over Jews—or so it might seem to early modern Europeans—was that they could not so easily disguise their difference:¹² blackness (as Aaron boasts in Titus Andronicus) “scorns to bear another hue” (4.2.99); and the ultimately reassuring thing about George Best's famous story of the English mother who gave birth to a black baby is that the taint of alterity seems compelled by nature to discover itself—“the blacke More,” as Scripture and proverb insisted, “[cannot] change his skin [any more than] the leopard his spottes,” for it was impossible “to wash the Ethiop white.”¹³ Yet, of course, Aaron's boast is undercut by his own scheme to substitute the impeccably white offspring of his “countryman” Muliteus for Tamora's black infant, and—as the parallel campaigns of persecution against converted Jews (marranos) and converted Moors (moriscos) were calculated to demonstrate¹⁴—it turns out that Moorishness was almost as capable as Jewishness of concealing its aggressive Otherness within the body of the Same. This was the case partly because of the notorious indeterminacy of the term Moor itself: insofar as it was a term of racial description, it could refer quite specifically to the Berber-Arab people of the part of North Africa then rather vaguely denominated as “Morocco,” “Mauritania,” or “Barbary”; or it could be used to embrace the inhabitants of the whole North African littoral; or it might be extended to refer to Africans generally (whether “white,” “black,” or “tawny” Moors); or, by an even more promiscuous extension, it might be applied (like “Indian”) to almost any darker-skinned peoples—even, on occasion, those of the New World.¹⁵ Consequently when Marlowe's Valdes refers to the supine obedience of “Indian Moores” to “their Spanish Lords” (Faustus, 1.1.148),¹⁶ it is usually assumed that the two terms are simply mutually intensifying synonyms, and that the magician means something like “dusky New World natives.” But Moor could often be deployed (in a fashion perhaps inflected, even for the English, by memories of the Spanish Reconquista) as a religious category. Thus Muslims on the Indian subcontinent were habitually called “Moors,” and the same term is used in East India Company literature to describe the Muslim inhabitants of Southeast Asia, whether they be Arab or Indian traders, or indigenous Malays. So Valdes's “Indian Moores” could equally well be Muslims from the Spanish-controlled Portuguese East Indies. In such contexts it is simply impossible to be sure whether Moor is a description of color or religion or some vague amalgam of the two, and in the intoxicated exoticism of Marlovian geography, such discriminations hardly matter.

But in less fantastical contexts they could matter a great deal—as, for example, when renegade Europeans in the East Indies were said to “turn Moor,” just as in the Mediterranean they were more usually said to “turn Turk.”¹⁷ In travel literature of the period these two expressions are sometimes interchangeable, “Turk” being used even in descriptions of the East Indies as a loosely generic description of the people otherwise called “Islams” or “Mahomettans.” The Dutch voyager William Cornelison Schouten, for example, describes an encounter with the men of Tidore, “some [of whom] … had Wreathes about their heads, which they say were Turkes or Moores in Religion.”¹⁸ Turkishness or Moorishness here is a matter of religious allegiance, rendered visible (like the malignancy of Othello's “turbanned Turk” [5.2.351]) in details of costume. Thus when Othello, the Moor turned Christian, accuses his brawling Venetian followers of “turn[ing] Turk …” (2.3.166), his hyperbole has a disturbing irony that (as critics now routinely observe) resonates with a suicide in Act 5 that takes the form of a re-enacted slaughter of the Turk. Moreover, because the religious and racial parameters of Moorishness were seldom entirely distinct, the exact implications of the metamorphoses whereby Christians “turned Moor” and Moors “turned Christian” were disturbingly blurred. If a Christian turned Moor, did he in some sense “blacken” himself? If a Moor “turned Christian,” did he thereby cease in some important sense to be a Moor? If he did not, would residual Moorishness turn out to be a matter of blood, color, or faith?¹⁹ It is true that the purely religious connotations of “Christian” produce a significant asymmetry between “turning Christian” and “turning Turk (or Moor),” making it seem as though the “racial” component of identity can be transformed in only one direction; yet these questions were difficult to answer with any assurance, so long as the language of difference remained as shifting and uncertain as it was before the emergence of the modern discourses of race and color. The history of the simultaneous (and largely inseparable) campaigns for purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) and purity of religion in Spain are only extreme symptoms of a larger European difficulty that threatened to turn a phrase such as “Moor of Venice” into a hopeless oxymoron.²⁰ That, indeed, is what Richard Brome clearly felt it to be when he dubbed his comedy of senile jealousy The English Moore (1637). Brome's plot turns on the performance of a “Masque of Blackamoors” (a self-conscious travesty of his old master Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness), in the course of which it is prophesied that the princess of Ethiopia will be blanched by marriage to an Englishman. But in the play proper, metamorphosis never amounts to anything more than the shedding of the heroine's blackface disguise. And just as (in the words of the inset masque) “’tis no better then a Prodigee / To haue white children in a black Contree” (4.4.22-23),²¹ so it appears that there can be no such thing in nature as an “English Moor.”

Of course the English (like other Europeans) brought some important cultural baggage to their encounters with foreign peoples: ideas about genealogy, about the biblical separation of humankind, and about the moral symbolism of color, all of which pushed them toward an essentialist reading of phenotypic difference. Yet, as Karen Ordahl Kupperman has recently argued, because they were predisposed to think “in terms of socially or culturally created categories,” treating most “differences between people … [as] ‘accidental’ …[consequences of] environment or experience,” they had not yet learned to “divide humankind into broad fixed classifications demarcated by visible distinctions.”²² As with the disdainful attitudes of the English toward the Irish—a people whose physical similarities to the English were conveniently obscured by their cultural differences—categories such as “civil” and “barbarous,” “naked” and “clothed” were often of far more significance in establishing the boundaries of otherness than the markers of mere biological diversity.²³ In the later sixteenth century, however, the rapid expansion of national horizons through exploration and trade increasingly faced the English with foreign cultures whose sophisticated ways of life resisted assimilation into the cultural categories by which the threat of alterity had traditionally been contained.

In the early part of the period, the English often approached these peoples with a certain ethnographic objectivity. Much of the travel literature collected by Hakluyt is quite assiduous in cataloguing the various “distinction[s] of color, Nation, language[,] … condition” that divide the peoples of the earth;²⁴ and variations of dress, weapons, manners, custom, social organization, and (above all) religion figure at least as prominently as differences of skin and feature. But as we move into the seventeenth century, the pressure of encounter with so many unfamiliar peoples begins to shift definitions of alterity away from the dominant paradigm of culture. In another telling asymmetry, it is possible to see color emerging as the most important criterion for defining otherness, even as nation becomes the key term of self-definition.²⁵ The gradations of color appear to cause significant difficulties for the Dutch traveler Van Linschoten, for example, in his influential Voyages (translated and published with Hakluyt's endorsement in 1598), as he struggles (in sometimes-contradictory language) to define the nature of the differences between the various Asian peoples he encountered. The people of Ormuz are “white like the Persians,” those of Bengal “somewhat whiter then the Chingalas”;“The people of Aracan, Pegu, and Sian are … much like those of China, onely one difference they haue, which is, that they are somewhat whiter then the Bengalon, and somewhat browner then the men of China”; in China itself, “Those that dwell on the Sea side … are a people of a brownish colour, like the white Moores in Africa and Barbaria, and part of the Spaniards, but those that dwell within the land, are for color like Netherlanders & high Dutches.” Yet “[t]here are many among them that are cleane blacke,” while “[i]n the lande lying westward from China, they say there are white people, and the land called Cathaia, where (as it is thought) are many Christians.”²⁶

The East Indian archipelago posed particular problems of definition since the islands were themselves undergoing a rapid cultural transformation, as a militant, expansionist Islam progressively displaced well-established Hindu and surviving Buddhist and animist practices. The proliferation of religious, cultural, and ethnic differences must have been baffling to the English newcomers, subjecting their available definitions to peculiar strains. The various indigenous peoples and the rival groups of traders who clustered in their towns could of course be classified according to the geographical or political entities to which they belonged as “Javans, Chineses, Men of Pegu, Bandaneses,” and so forth; or they might be categorized according to religion as “ethnicks,” “pagans,” or “Moors”; or they might be grouped, together with the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, as “Indians” or “East Indians” (in a regional designation that the uncertainties of post-Columbian geography had permanently confused with differences of complexion). What precisely this meant in terms of color was a little confused: George Best's A Trve Discovrse of the late voyages of discouerie (1578), for example, had described East Indians, along with American “Indians,” as being “not blacke, but white,” though this was altered in Hakluyt's version of the True Discovrse to “tauney and white,”²⁷ a distinction that other observers typically aligned with gender, remarking (in the words of Thomas Cavendish) that “although the men bee tawnie of colour … yet their women be faire of complexion”—something they attributed to the effects of clothing and exposure to the sun.²⁸ In the familiar (and deeply ambiguous) trope routinely employed in both West and East Indian contexts, the hue of the natives is figured as “the sun's livery.” So we are told of Princess Quisara in Fletcher's The Island Princess (1621) that “The very Sun I thinke, affects her sweetnesse, / And dares not as he does to all else, dye it / Into his tauny Livery” (1.1.60-62).²⁹ The princess's whiteness is the sign of inward “sweetnesse” that will be expressed in the conversion to Christianity that accompanies her betrothal to the Portuguese hero Armusia at the end of the play. The issue of color cannot be entirely erased, however; and the cynical Pyniero is allowed to suggest that there is something unnatural about the princess's “wear[ing] her complexion in a case,” because if exposed to the sun's kisses, it would so readily convert to a dusky hue: “let him but like it / A week or two, or three, she would look like a Lion” (ll. 63-64). East Indian tawniness (whether actual or, like Quisara's, merely potential) may constitute an accident of culture and geography, but it is also a kind of servile “Livery,” the badge of allegiance to the false religion to which the princess and her countrymen are in thrall.³⁰ And it resonates dangerously with those contemporary discourses that interpreted dark skin (in both African and West Indian contexts) as a sign of natural servitude.³¹

One way of dealing with the taxonomic complications exemplified in Van Linschoten and reflected in The Island Princess was to develop a notion of difference that would effectually obscure the confusing variations of hue that Van Linschoten acknowledges in both European and non-European populations by establishing a more absolute division between “them” and “us”. During the first three decades of the seventeenth century, uncertainties about the nature of human difference are gradually flattened out in the literature of East Indian voyaging, as the peoples of the region begin to be categorized, according to the crudest distinction of color, as “black”—a designation that serves solely to distinguish them from “white” Europeans.³²

This idea of Europeanness as a form of group identity delimited by color seems itself to have been something new. In a probing analysis, “‘The Getting of a Lawful race,’” Lynda Boose has posed the question whether English notions of Moorishness, for example, were shaped by anything resembling “the modern sense of some definitively racial shared ‘Europeanness’? Or was the difference between a ‘Moor’ and someone we would call a ‘European’ conceptually organized around the religio-political geography of Christian vs. Muslim more than around a geography of skin color?”³³ In this regard, it might seem significant that the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest cited use of European to distinguish the inhabitants of Europe from “Indians” is in Massinger's The City Madam (1632)—“You are learn’d Europeans, and we worse / Than ignorant Americans” (3.3.127-28);³⁴ for in this case the grounds of distinction are clearly cultural and religious rather than racial. Moreover, the dictionary offers no example of the word as a generic term for “white” people before 1696. But in fact Samuel Purchas had used European to define a community of color as early as 1613, when, in describing the divided condition of postlapsarian humankind, he contrasted “the tawney Moore, black Negro, duskie Libyan, ash-colored Indian, oliue-colored American. … with the whiter European.”³⁵ In Purchas's taxonomy Europeans are united by a common whiteness, while other peoples are divided by differing degrees of color, even as those colors taken together associate them in a common non-Europeanness.

It is important to recognize, I think, that this way of discriminating otherness—whatever its ultimate effects may have been—was not in itself motivated by an aggressive colonialism. On the contrary, as the section of Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus devoted to East Indian voyaging suggests, it seems to have arisen from the profound sense of insecurity experienced by the increasingly embattled English trading community in the region, an insecurity felt as a disorienting challenge to their own identity. Included among Purchas's documents is Edmund Scott's An Exact Discourse of the Subtilties, Fashions, Religion and Ceremonies of the East Indians, a narrative that offers a particularly revealing glimpse of the processes by which an acute anxiety about the sustainability of their enterprise and community helped to shape an ideology of color.³⁶ In An Exact Discourse, a text almost exactly contemporary with Othello, the negotiation and demonstration of various kinds of difference—in rank, nation, and color—become crucial to the preservation of the identity of the vulnerable enclave that Scott calls “the English nation at Bantan.”³⁷

At the heart of Scott's narrative, as I have argued elsewhere, is an acute anxiety about the threat to English identity experienced by the mercantile representatives of “the English nation” in the newly established trading factory of the East India Company at Bantam in Java. This threat was triggered initially by the perplexing discovery (referred to elsewhere in Purchas's documents) that their Dutch rivals had been passing themselves off as English: “the common people knew us not from the Hollanders, for both they and wee were called by the name of Englishmen, by reason of their usurping our name at their first coming to trade.”³⁸ The potential for violence in such a confusion of identities is registered in the quibbling chapter title that Purchas added to Scott's narrative: “Differences [i.e., quarrels] betwixt the Hollanders (stiling themselves English), the Javans, and other things remarkable.” The problem was an especially vexing one because the English self-image was partially dependent on their sense of affinity with the Dutch, of whom Scott writes: “though wee were mortall enemies in our trade, in all other matters wee were friends, and would haue liued and dyed one for the other.”³⁹ But the merchants were able to overcome this difficulty through a display of self-fashioning pageantry when they resolved to stage their difference from the Dutch through an improvised Accession Day triumph: marching in elaborately sinuous patterns up and down their compound, clad in their best finery, with scarves and hatbands of red-and-white taffeta, the tiny company (“being but fourteene in number”) waved their banners of St. George, beat their drums, and discharged volumes of shot into the air. This swaggering (if undermanned) performance of Englishness so impressed the natives, according to Scott, that he and his companions felt empowered to deliver a brief disquisition on the linguistic and political distinctions between Dutch and English, thereby ensuring that this unhappy confusion would never be repeated.⁴⁰

But even as Scott's band succeeded in shoring up their sense of national distinctiveness on one front, they found it threatened with dissolution on another: for this crisis of identity with the Dutch was quickly followed by a second in which the terms of difference were much less easy to define and whose menace the English could only disarm by appealing to a rhetoric of color. This “Tragedie” (as Scott calls it) concerned “a Mullato of Pegu” (i.e., a man of mixed race from Burma) who, as a result of his ambiguous role as a servant in the English trading factory, was taken for an Englishman. The story begins with what we might now read as an explosion of racial resentment on the part of its protagonist. Having been drinking with a second mulatto, “one of his countreymen” who belonged to a visiting Flemish vessel, the “English” mulatto became enraged when the Flemish provost attacked his fellow Peguan and beat him back onto the Flemish ship.⁴¹ “Seeing his countryman misused, and being somewhat tickled in the heade with wine,” the mulatto planned to “reuenge his countryman's quarrell.”⁴² A small orgy of killing ensued: the mulatto sought out and stabbed both the Fleming and the other mulatto (whom he allegedly feared as a potentially hostile witness); he then tried unsuccessfully to kill a Philippino slave who accompanied his victims; and finally, “being nuzled in blood,” as Scott puts it, and “meeting with a poore Iauan … [he] stabde him likewise.”⁴³ Unfortunately for the killer, however, the Fleming lived long enough to give some clues as to the identity of his assailant; and the mulatto, incriminated by inconsistencies in his own story as well as by the testimony of the slave, was at last brought to confess all three murders.

Scott, who was now the senior East India Company man in Bantam, found himself torn between a righteous desire to appease “the bloud of those Christians that were murthered”⁴⁴ and a proprietorial insistence on his exclusive claim to administer justice to members of his own community. He resisted both what he saw as extravagant Javan demands for compensation and an arrogant Dutch insistence that he hand over the killer for a lingering death: they “saying hee should haue the bones of his legs and armes broken, and so he should lye and dye, or else haue his feete and hands cut off, and so lye and starue to death.”⁴⁵ Treating the issue as one of both personal pride (“I answered, that it lay not in them to put him to death, if I list to saue him”) and national prestige (“for an Englishman scornes to giue place to Hollanders in any forraine countrie”), he roundly declared that the murderer “should dye the ordinary death of the country, & no other.”⁴⁶ Hiring a local executioner, Scott made him promise to dispatch the mulatto as swiftly and humanely as possible, even lending the “hangman” his own well-sharpened kris (short sword), “which was very seruiceable for such a purpose.”⁴⁷ The choice of this quintessentially Malay (though English-owned) weapon to be the proxy instrument of judicial Englishness seems fraught with ironies at least as complicated as those that attend Othello's flourishing of Spanish steel to reassert his hybrid identity as “Moor of Venice.” But the choice had a certain appropriateness to a situation in which the contradictions of mixed identity became a source of significant unease—an unease strikingly illustrated, I think, in Purchas's brutal abridgment of this section of Scott's narrative. In Purchas all but the bare details of the killing and of the murderer's execution have been excised—reducing Scott's complex “Tragedie” to a simple monitory account of physical “Dangers by a Molato.”⁴⁸ There are numerous other cuts in Purchas's version of the pamphlet, but this is the only one for which he feels constrained to apologize, in a marginal note that disingenuously pleads the danger of prolixity.

No doubt Purchas's anxiety, like Scott's own, had everything to do with the ambiguous status given to the killer by the contradictory identity that the text ascribes to him—that of a man “of Pegu” who is, at the same time, “our mulatto.” Scott's possessive pronoun mediates as uneasily between ownership, community, and kinship as the deeply equivocal “mine” that announces Prospero's final acknowledgment of Caliban. It is the same unstable pronoun that both defines and masks the relationship of Shakespeare's mercenary “stranger” to the Venetian state when “the Moor” is transformed into “our noble and valiant general” (2.2.1-2). In Scott the dangerous ambiguity of the connection that his “our” at once declares and mystifies becomes apparent at the point where the dying provost is said to have claimed that “an Englishman had slaine him.” A deputation of Dutch went at once to the English house to inform Scott that “one of our men had slaine one of theirs … [and] they thought it was our Mulatto.”⁴⁹ The Dutch rhetoric here is pointed: they contrive to taint the English by association with the mulatto killer, who is denounced as “one of our men,” while holding themselves aloof from their own murdered mulatto, who is carefully excluded from the opposite category, “one of theirs.” Subsequent events intensify this unhappy confusion but also provide Scott with an opportunity to purge it and to realign his own people with their fellow Europeans, the offended Hollanders.

When the mulatto denies the Dutch accusation, he is dispatched, along with Scott's deputy, Gabriel Towerson, to question the mortally wounded Fleming: “when they came, they asked him who had hurt him, hee said an English man. Maister Towerson asked him whether it was a white man, or a blacke, … because he named still an English man, wee were in some doubt: the Fleming being also in drinke said, a white man, then presently hee said againe, it was darke, hee knew not well, and so gaue up his life.”⁵⁰ Resonating with the symbolism of Othello's “Put out the light” soliloquy, darkness temporarily effaces the markers of difference here; but what is really extraordinary about the passage is the almost casual way in which the English seem to acceded to the mulatto's inclusion in the category “English man”—almost as if there could be such a creature as a “Mulatto of England.” This temporary recognition of kinship was perhaps partly enabled by the murderer's status as Christian—“though he was a Pegu borne, yet he was a Christian, & brought vp among the Portingalls”—so that Scott was at charitable pains to have the murderer brought to repentance before his death. The chosen agent of religious instruction, fittingly enough, was another hybrid figure—a renegade Muslim, “an Arabian borne [who] belonged to the Dutch ships, and spake the Spanish tongue maruellous well”; this go-between convinced the murderer of the power of God's son “to redeeme vs, and to wash away our sinnes were they neuer so bloody.”⁵¹ The inclusive “us” here brings the reader momentarily close to the pieties of Purchas's climactic vision in the Pilgrimage, when he imagines a future redemption in which the divided branches of humanity will be reunited, “their long robes made white in the bloud of the Lambe … without any more distinction of color, Nation, language, sexe, condition.”⁵² But the efficacy of this emulsifying mystery belongs only to the extratemporal moment of penitence: it cannot affect the day-to-day management of difference in a situation where any loss of distinction threatens the elimination of “the English nation at Bantan.” Hence the narrative now goes on to detach the condemned man from the English camp and to link him, through the indelible mark of color, with the proper denizens of Bantam, the East Indian and Chinese, whose vicious and guileful “subtilties” Scott finds so threatening to English interests.

By a convenient rhetorical sleight, the mulatto is first kinned with his own executioner. Scott records with some satisfaction the hangman's promise to serve this prisoner better than he had earlier served a counterfeiter whose punishment he grievously botched: “when he killed the coyner,” the man protests, “he did not execute his own father.” Scott explains this as a reference to the custom whereby “when a Iauan of any account is put to death[,] … their nearest of kin doth execute [the common executioner's] office, and it is held the greatest fauour they can do them.”⁵³ The executioner, we can surmise, intends a compliment to Scott by identifying the humblest of the “Englishmen” as his own senior kinsman. But Scott's failure to spell out the meaning of the hyperbole has the effect of stressing the tie between the headsman and his victim, rhetorically severing the mulatto from the English camp and consigning him to the community of Others. But then, as the condemned man is led into the fields outside the town of Bantam to meet his death, a large crowd of townspeople, “both Iauans and Chyneses,” comes “flocking amaine,” excited by the rumor “that there was an Englishman to be executed.” They are disconcerted by their sight of the victim, however: “many were blanke, and wee might heare them tell one another it was a black man.” Scott and his men immediately seize the opportunity to deliver a second lesson on difference which completes the alienation of “our Mulatto”: “wee told them, he was iust of their own color and condition and that an Englishman or white man would not doe such a bloody deed.”⁵⁴ At this moment a common blackness is announced as the defining condition of all who are not English or white, regardless of whether they are Chinese, Javan, men of mixed race, or men of Pegu (groups whose various gradations of color are elsewhere quite carefully catalogued). By the same token, the mulatto's crime becomes a proof of his racial difference, just as his color is the badge of his reprobate condition.

Something very similar, it seems to me, happens in Othello through the systematic blackening of the Moor and the symbolic detachment from Venice that it involves. To begin with, Othello's blackness seems to be an almost casual effect of Iago's improvisatory malice and of Roderigo's and Brabantio's gullibility. It is at best an accident whose superficial significance could even be underpinned (in ways to which Dympna Callaghan has alerted us⁵⁵) by the audience's pleasurable consciousness that it is only a cosmetic illusion: “Othello” is, after all, a white man; so his appearance of blackness is something easily annulled by the duke's invocation of that essential whiteness that unites all Christians under the skin (“your son-in-law is far more fair than black” [1.3.291]). Yet by the end of the play, the Venetian world—and the audience, too, if they are not careful—will have come to see it as the sign not only of his reprobate condition but of the irreducible alterity that the language of racial abuse insists is inseparable from it: “blacker devil,” “filthy bargain,” “gull … / As ignorant as dirt,” “dull Moor” (5.2.129, 153, 159-60, 223).⁵⁶ In the reading of the Moor's body so successfully propagated by Iago, none of Othello's efforts to reinstitute the sustaining paradoxes of his mixed condition, as an “honorable murderer” whose suicide triumphantly enacts and cancels out the contradictions that have been exposed in the designation “Moor of Venice,” is sufficient to overcome the suggestion that such a creature can only constitute a kind of “civil monster.” Othello's re-enacted killing of the “circumcised dog” is also a re-enactment of his original apostasy by one whose contradictory position forces him to “turn, and turn … / And turn again” (4.1.253-54). But such desperate iteration is as hopeless as it is compulsive. For, as the outcast condition of Scott's mulatto implies, while a Moor may turn Christian, he can never “turn” Venetian. Like the mulatto's thinly motivated stabbing of his own countryman, Othello's overdetermined killing of the “turbanned Turk” is on one level a demonstration of his own essential unkindness; on another, like the executioner's hyperbolic killing of “his own father,” it enacts a violent re-absorption into the domain of the Other—confirming the rhetorical estrangement by which the Venetians return “he that was Othello” to the condition of anonymous “Moor” in which he was first brought into the play. It is in this sense that we can speak of the play's progressive racialization of the protagonist.

Yet Emily Bartels's insistence on Othello's openness is not entirely misplaced, and Virginia Vaughan's perplexity (“I think this play is racist, and I think it is not”) remains understandable. Even Edmund Scott, after all, is only partially successful in his attempt to purge “the English nation at Bantan” of the confusions created by the hybridizing presence of “our Mulatto.” As the murderer's body lies “gasping on the ground,” Scott cannot forbear offering it to the Dutch as a reproof to their own vices—“I openly told the Hollanders that, that was the fruite of drunkennesse, & byd them euer after beware of it”—thus carelessly blurring the boundary between colors and conditions which his lesson to the townspeople had established. And as he pauses to reflect on the fatal sickness of yet another of his fellow-merchants, the chief factor's anxiety at the fragile state of the English trading community seems to readmit the ghostly presence of his scapegoat to membership of a “we” that is once again exposed as dangerously unstable: “we had lost in all, since the departure of our ships eight men besides the Mulatto that was executed, and we were now ten liuing and one boy.”⁵⁷ The “Mulatto of Pegu” is once again one of “our” men, a “Mulatto of England,” as it were. In Othello it is precisely the desperate haste with which the Venetians seek to efface the admonitory spectacle of slaughter (“The object poisons sight, / Let it be hid” [5.2.362-63]) that calls into question the sustainability of the racial scapegoating that Iago has brought about, forcing us to pay attention to a very different narrative—the one that ends not in the self-alienating and murderous expulsion of a Moor turned Turk again but in a kiss that self-consciously proclaims an act of union. The play, however—and this is why it continues to torment us—refuses to align itself with either narrative, retreating instead into the obliquity of the taunting pleonasm with which Iago at once challenges and disables judgment: “What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word” (ll. 300-301).

Notes

1. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: a contextual history (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 70.

2. See, for example, Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1995); Margo Hendricks, “Civility, Barbarism, and Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter,” and Lynda Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial discourse in early modern England and the unrepresentable black woman,” both in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 225-39 and 35-54. The literature on the treatment of race in Othello has become so extensive as to make full citation impossible, but a convenient summary will be found in Vaughan, 51-70.

3. Emily C. Bartels, “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997): 45-64, esp. 61-62, emphasis added.

4. See, e.g., Patricia Coughlan, ed., Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork: Cork UP, 1989); Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997); Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the crisis in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997); and Michael Neill, “Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare's Histories,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 1-32.

5. John Leo, A Geographical Historie of Africa, trans. John Pory (London, 1600), 41-42, 41, and 43.

6. In his First Book, for example, Leo breaks off his description of the vices to which “they” are subject in order to acknowledge his own relationship to these Others as one whose life resembles that of the strange fish-bird he calls “Amphibia”: “Neither am I ignorant, how much mine owne credit is impeached, when I my selfe write so homely of Africa, vnto which countrie I stand indebted both for my birth, and also for the best part of my education. … For mine owne part, when I heare the Africans euill spoken of, I will affirme my selfe to be one of Granada: and when I perceiue the nation of Granada to be discommended, then will I profess my selfe to be an African” (42-44). For a more extended treatment of Leo's ambivalence about his identity, see Emily C. Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” SQ 41 (1990): 433-54, esp. 436-38.

7. Citations follow the Arden Shakespeare Othello, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997); citations of all other Shakespeare plays follow William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

8. The significance of the subtitle is indicated by the remarkable consistency with which (in contrast to the generally fluid treatment of nomenclature in the period) it is repeated from the Stationers' Register entry to the Quarto and Folio and the other early texts deriving from them.

9. The same point is made by Peter Swaab in his program notes for the recent Royal National Theatre production of Othello: “Shakespeare's title has the force of a paradox. How far can ‘the Moor’ really be ‘of’ Venice? Like Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Othello is a resident who remains in important ways alien; like Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, his downfall involves too much trusting that a culture can give him an identity; and as with a historical figure such as Lawrence of Arabia, the word ‘of’ conceals a vulnerable fantasy of power in distant lands. ‘The Moor of Venice’ is a mixed marriage of a phrase” (quoted from the program for the run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 8-11 April 1998; this production was first staged at the Salzburg Festival on 22 August 1997 and subsequently at the Lyttelton Theatre in London).

10. “There’s … Obed in Bairseth, Nones in Portugall, / My selfe in Malta, some in Italy, / Many in France, and wealthy every one” (1.1.125-27); citations of Marlowe follow The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 1:253-335, esp. 1:267-68.

11. For an outstanding account of the cultural fantasies surrounding Jews in early modern culture, see James S. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), esp. 167-94. See also Avraham Oz, The Yoke of Love: Prophetic Riddles in The Merchant of Venice (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1995), 93-133, esp. 100-103.

12. For the resemblances between Moor and Jew as figures of alterity, see Leslie A. Fielder, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), 103-6 and 195-96. Cf. Shapiro, 171-72, on Jewish “blackness.”

13. Jeremiah 13:23. This version, from the 1560 Geneva Bible, gives particular prominence to the figure by printing “The blacke More” as a title at the head of the column. On the history of this motif in literature and in the visual arts, see Jean Michel Massing, “From Greek Proverb to Soap Advert: Washing the Ethiopian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 180-201; and Karen Newman, “And wash the Ethiop white’: femininity and the monstrous in Othello” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The text in history and ideology, Jean Howard and Marion O’Connor, eds. (London: Methuen, 1987), 143-62. For Best's story, see Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903-05), 7:263-64.

14. On the forcible conversion of the Spanish Moors and the suspicion to which it paradoxically rendered them vulnerable, thereby exposing them to the malice of the Inquisition, see Henry Charles Lea, The Moriscos of Spain: Their Conversion and Expulsion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968). The near paranoia that inspired the official campaign for limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) in Spain issued directly from this fear of the hidden stranger masquerading as one of the familiar.

15. See also Bartels, “Making More of the Moor,” 434.

16. The phrase is common to both A and B texts; see Bowers, ed., 2:165.

17. For a useful account of the significance of “turning Turk” in this period, see Daniel J. Vitkus, “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,” SQ 48 (1997): 145-76.

18. William Cornelison Schouten of Horne, “Voyage of 1615-17” in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905-07), 2:232-84, esp. 280.

19. Cf. Shapiro on the ambiguities surrounding “what happened to racial otherness when [Jews] converted” (170).

20. For a useful account of the complex entanglement of color and religion in early Iberian racism, see James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997): 143-66; in the same issue, see also Robin Blackburn, “The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery,” 65-102, esp. 77-78. On the uncertain denotation of Moor in the play, see Vitkus: “Othello, the noble Moor of Venice, is … not to be identified with a specific, historically accurate racial category; rather he is a hybrid who might be associated, in the minds of Shakespeare's audience, with a whole set of related terms—Moor, Turk, Ottomite, Saracen, Mahometan, Egyptian, Judean, Indian—all constructed and positioned in opposition to Christian faith and virtue” (160). The opposition, however, is never simply religious or even cultural.

21. Quotations of Richard Brome's The English Moore are from The English Moore; or The Mock-Marriage, ed. Sara Jayne Steen (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983).

22. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997): 193-228, esp. 193.

23. See Neill, “Broken English and Broken Irish,” 6n.

24. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages (London, 1613), 546.

25. In his richly informative “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods” (William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 [1997]: 103-42) Benjamin Braude discerns an analogous shift in the treatment of African peoples between 1589 and 1625, as the biblical Curse of Ham was increasingly interpreted as an explanation of both color and moral character: “slavery,” he argues, “had started to make it credible” (138).

26. John Huighen Van Linschoten, Iohn Hvighen Van Linschoten his Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies (London, 1598), 14, 28, 29, 40, and 37.

27. George Best, A Trve Discovrse of the late voyages of discouerie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya, by the Northwest (London, 1578), 28; cited in Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997): 19-44, esp. 27; cf. Kupperman, 207-8 and 226-27.

28. Thomas Cavendish in Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 2:181.

29. John Fletcher, The Island Princess in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966-96), 5:539-642. For American examples of descriptions featuring this trope, see Kupperman, 207.

30. In a deliberate confusion of reality, the Islamic allegiance of the actual Moluccans is assimilated in the play with idolatry through the disguise adopted by the villainous Governor of Ternata, who is at once a (presumably Mahometan) “Moore Priest” (4.1. s.d.) and the false prophet of “the Sun and Moon” (4.5.70). For more detailed discussion of this play as an instrument of mercantile colonialism, see Shanker Raman, “Imaginary Islands: Staging the East,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 26 (1995): 131-61; and my essay “‘Materiall flames’: The Space of Mercantile Fantasy in John Fletcher's The Island Princess,” forthcoming in Renaissance Drama.

31. See Sweet, 146-47, 149, 155-56, and 166.

32. See, e.g., “The Journall of Master Nathaniel Courthop” in Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 5:86-125, esp. 109. Cf. the continuation of Courthop's journal by Robert Hayes in Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 5:126-37, esp. 126 and 135; and “An Answere to the Hollanders Declaration …” in Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 5:155-74, esp. 170.

33. Boose in Hendricks and Parker, eds., 306n.

34. Philip Massinger, The City Madam, ed. Cyrus Hoy (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1964), 61. In this episode Luke Frugal salutes the supposed “Indians” of the play (in fact a group of disguised Londoners led by his own brother) for their worship of Plutus, God of Riches.

35. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, 546. On Purchas's shift toward an increasingly moralized construction of blackness in his later writing, see Braude, 135-37.

36. Published in London, the Exact Discourse survives in two significantly different texts—the original pamphlet of 1606 and the abbreviated and annotated version (apparently based on a separate manuscript) published in Purchas His Pilgrimage. The different manuscript origins of the two versions are suggested by numerous minor variants. Unless otherwise indicated, citations of Scott follow the 1606 edition.

37. Scott, A1^r. See also Michael Neill, “Putting History to the Question: An Episode of Torture at Bantam in Java, 1604,” English Literary Renaissance 25 (1995): 45-75.

38. Scott, C2^v.

39. Scott, H3^r.

40. Scott, C2^v.

41. For Scott the word mulatto seems to describe any person of part-European ethnicity; although the term is nowadays considered offensive, I have felt bound to replicate Scott's usage, since the protagonist of his story is identified in no other way.

42. Scott, D1^v-D2^r.

43. Scott, D2^r.

44. Scott, D3^v.

45. Scott, D4^r.

46. Scott, D3^v, D3^r, and D4^r.

47. Scott, D4^v.

48. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, 2:461, marginal note.

49. Scott, D2^r, emphasis added.

50. Scott, D2^v.

51. Scott, D4^r.

52. Purchas, Purchase His Pilgrimage, 546.

53. Scott, D4^v.

54. Scott, D4^v

55. See Dympna Callaghan, “‘Othello was a white man’: properties of race on Shakespeare's stage” in Alternative Shakespeares 2, Terence Hawkes, ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), 192-215.

56. “[D]ull Moor”—involving as it does a complicated quibble that depends on the resemblances and etymological links (supposed or otherwise) between Medieval Latin Morus = Moor; Latin morus (from Greek µωρís) = dull, stupid; and morum = blackberry or mulberry (hence morulus = black, dark-colored)—can be construed as a contemptuous inversion of the oxymoronic “Moor of Venice.”

57. Scott, E1^r, emphasis added.

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1997 South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference in Atlanta, at the Folger Shakespeare Library's Midday Colloquium, at Muhlenberg College, and to members of the Graduate Seminar at Trinity College, Cambridge. I am grateful to all four audiences for their constructive comments and suggestions.