SOURCE: Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard, ed. “Ethiops Washed White: Moors of the Nonvillainous Type.” In Critical Essays on Shakespeare's Othello, pp. 91-103. New York: G.K. Hall, 1994.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1987, Barthelemy traces the transformation of Othello within the course of the play. The critic notes that although Othello begins as the antithesis of the stereotypical black characters presented on stage in the late 1500s and early 1600s, by the play's end Othello has tragically relapsed into “the stereotypical Moor.”]

I kiss the instrument of their pleasures.

—William Shakespeare, Othello

During the seventeenth century, a few black characters appeared on the stage who, against their nature and kind, demonstrated that virtue stood not completely out of their reach. However, like their female counterparts, these virtuous few are clearly derived from the more commonly represented stereotype of the villainous Moor and are, more accurately, versions of that type rather than absolute departures from it. By demonstrating virtue, these few honest Moors offer further validation of the more common, harmful, and denigrating representations of black Moors because they prove that it is possible to resist the call of evil, though most unusual.

The earliest nonvillainous Moors to appear on the stage were Morocco in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1596) and Porus in Chapman's The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596).¹ Morocco, by far the more interesting of the two, comes to Belmont to participate in the lottery for Portia's hand. In the two brief scenes in which he appears, he evokes from the play's heroine only ironic contempt. Her relief at the departure of the vanquished suitor reveals her disdain for him: “A gentle riddance / Let all of his complexion choose me so” (II, vii, 78-79).² Perhaps Portia means more than skin color by “complexion” here, yet because Morocco is identified as a “Tawny Moor,” her choice of words intends to call some attention to his color. But more than Morocco's complexion casts an unfavorable light on him. His long speech before the caskets undermines any dignity he may have possessed, and his choice of the wrong casket proves him foolish. Morocco also presents an obvious and unwelcome sexual threat to Portia, and he makes known his desire for her before he chooses:

“Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.”
Why that's the lady! All the world desires her;
From the four corners of the earth they came
To kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint.

(II, vii, 37-40)

Only by leaving immediately and quietly does Morocco maintain any honor or dignity, as his earlier professions of valor are forgotten by the relieved mistress of Belmont.

Porus, the King of Ethiopia, fares better in love than does Morocco, but the circumstances surrounding his triumph with the Lady Elimine deny him a totally honorable victory. Present only in the last scene of The Blind Beggar, Porus comes to offer obeisance and tribute to his conqueror, Cleanthes. While there, the humbled Porus sees Elimine, who has come to plead for assistance from Cleanthes. She and her child have been deserted by Count Hermes, who, unknown to Elimine, is really Cleanthes disguised. Porus proclaims his love for Elimine as does the defeated King of Bebritia, Bebritius. Allowed by Cleanthes to choose a spouse from among the several defeated kings, Elimine chooses Porus. She chooses him, however, not out of love but to highlight her perverse fortunes: “In my eye, now, the blackest is the fairest, / For every woman chooseth the white and red. / Come, martial Porus, thou shalt have my love.”³

Elimine invokes here the paradoxical “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” and by choosing with this in mind, she expresses both her expectations and her hopes. She expects Porus to be foul; she only hopes that he proves to be fair. Bebritius, angered by his rejection, reminds Elimine of the traditional and, of course, seemingly more reasonable expectation: “Out on thee, foolish woman, thou hast chose a devil” (x, 164). By focusing on the risks involved in marrying a black man, both Elimine and Bebritius do much to disparage further the already humbled Porus, who cannot escape the traditional prejudice toward blackness and black men. However, because the play ends just fifteen lines after Elimine chooses, we have no way of knowing if she chooses wisely when she ignores the widely known risks.

Bebritius' comment, though, points out how every representation of a black person necessarily remains colored by his blackness. The conqueror Cleanthes may freely allow the vanquished Porus to marry a cast-off, former mistress; however, the conquered and again defeated Bebritius sees the danger. Portia too sees the danger, but she luckily escapes. It is important to note that in both these plays the danger is sexual and consequently social. Neither Morocco nor Porus commits any crime other than seeking to marry a white woman, but it is this ambition that brings down upon them racial abuse. No matter how innocent or noble, black men, once they attempt to involve themselves sexually with white women, become personae non gratae in the community. And we see in the similarity between these two minor characters how closely related vilification and villainy are to the fear raised by incursions into the community.

It is such an incursion by the valiant Moor Othello that first alarms Venice and later provides Iago with an exploitable situation on which to build his diabolic plot. It is this same sexual relationship that ultimately leads to Othello's and Desdemona's undoing. However, in Othello (1604), Shakespeare manipulates the stereotype of the Moor and, consequently, the expectations of the audience. In so doing, he animated for the stage possibly the most popular and important representation of a black man until the twentieth century. On the most obvious level, Shakespeare reassigns roles in what could be a rather conventional secular psychomachia. Rather than playing the villain, a role that should be Othello's by dramatic convention and popular tradition alike, the valiant Moor becomes the center of the psychomachiac struggle between good and evil. Shakespeare alters things further by redistributing in a somewhat startling manner various aspects of the stereotypical Moor among the principal characters, each in some way becoming what Othello alone ought to be. The audience, as it becomes more and more uncomfortable with the reassignment of roles and characteristics, finds itself finally forced to reevaluate the validity of interpreting real life through allegory.

No feature has proven more important in characterizing blacks than the traditional belief in their venery, and as we have seen, in all but the two Alcazar plays, villainy finds expression in sexual desires or intrigues. In Othello, frank and unencumbered sexual desire is not confined to the villains; rather, it is distributed among most of the major characters including Othello, Desdemona, Emilia, Cassio, and, of course, Iago and Rodrigo. But the sexual interplay between the three principals, Othello, Desdemona, and Iago, defuses the sexual center of the play away from its expected and traditional location, the Moor, and focuses instead on two rather distinct and antithetical views of sex.

That Iago rather than Othello is obsessed with sex is startling because sex is conventionally the black man's preoccupation. In some ways, Iago's obsession helps to explain why it is blacks who are represented as lascivious and sex-obsessed, for Iago never ceases to project onto others his own overriding sexual interests as he reveals his own sexual anxieties. But we know it is Iago who is so obsessed, not Othello. Iago seizes every opportunity to incite others to accept the traditional view of the Moor as lecherous, and as licentious any woman who could love such a man. But the obscenities Iago shouts under Brabantio's window reveal more about himself than anyone else. In his soliloquy at the end of Act I, Iago again lingers on sexual themes, exposing the prurience of his mind as well as his sexual anxiety. A similar soliloquy in Act II reveals Iago to be almost monomaniacal:

That Cassio loves her [Desdemona], I do well believe it;
That she loves him, 'tis apt and of great credit.
… now I do love her too,
Not out of absolute lust, (though peradventure
I stand accountant for as great a sin)
But partly led to diet my revenge,
For that I do suspect the lustful Moor
Hath leaped into my seat.(4)

Iago returns again and again to his own prurient musings, obsessions, and anxieties to feed his plot, and finally he succeeds in engendering in Othello's mind a similar obsessiveness and anxiety.

On the opposing side in the battle for Othello's mind and soul stands Desdemona, the loving wife who offers her beleaguered husband redemption. But Desdemona is no innocent virtue; though chaste, she frankly acknowledges to the duke, her father, and the assembled lords of Venice her total devotion to her husband. “My heart's subdued / Even to the utmost pleasure of my lord” (I, iii, 250-51), she tells them.⁵ When she later asks permission to accompany Othello to Cyprus, she again openly expresses her sexual desire for her husband:

… if I be left behind,
A moth of peace, and he go to the war,
The rites for which I love him are bereft me,
And I a heavy interim shall support,
By his dear absence

(I, iii, 255-59)

In so unlikely a place as Desdemona's embrace Shakespeare places for Othello safety from sin, temptation, and, ultimately, damnation.

Uncomfortably set between these odd permutations of lust and chastity stands Othello. Perversely for him, lust demands abstinence while chastity and salvation require entering Desdemona's embrace. When Othello refuses Desdemona's final invitation to her bed, he rejects virtue and chooses evil. By opposing honest sexual desire to obsessive prurience and sexual manipulation, Shakespeare disperses and relocates these sexual and dramatic tensions away from one of their traditional sources, the Moor. In Othello, the Moor comes to be uniquely motivated, not by the usual desire for sexual gratification and power but by all-consuming sexual anxiety.

Othello most powerfully and explicitly articulates his anxiety when he assures the signory of Venice that he wishes Desdemona to join him for reasons other than sexual gratification. In his request for permission to take his wife to Cyprus, Othello employs a rhetoric of negation:

Your voices, Lords: beseech you, let her will
Have a free way; I therefore beg it not
To please the palate of my appetite,
Not to comply with heat, the young affects
In me defunct, and proper satisfaction,
But to be free and bounteous to her mind;
And heaven defend your good souls that you think
I will your serious and great business scant,
When she is with me; … no, when light-wing'd toys
Of feather'd Cupid, foils with wanton dullness
My speculative and active instruments,
That my disports corrupt and taint my business,
Let housewives make a skillet of my helm,
And all indign and base adversities
Make head against my reputation!

(I, iii, 260-74)

Speaking here, just after Desdemona's rather frank avowal of her sexual desire, Othello attempts to diminish the impact of his wife's argument. However, Othello goes so far as to deny himself even the desire of “proper satisfaction,” a phrase that jars against Desdemona's request for the “rites for why I love him.”⁶ Whereas Othello will later incorrectly choose abstinence and, paradoxically, damnation to defend his honor, here he chooses abstinence to prove his manhood.

Of course, Othello's sexual anxiety is an intrinsic component of his larger fear of being a stereotypical stage Moor, and his attempt to deny his interest in “proper satisfaction” is an attempt to deny his kinship to his immediate predecessors Aaron and Eleazar. Characterized by their lechery and villainy, Aaron and Eleazar achieve power and overmaster their masters through a display of real sexual power. Aaron cuckolds the emperor; Eleazar whores the king's mother and “boys” the king. Othello seeks no such power over his masters, and though he retains real military power, he does not translate that power into a metaphor for sexual prowess. In fact, Othello humbly denies himself parity with the signory in terms that imply sexual and social submission. When he is accused of having “corrupted” Desdemona by “spells and medicines,” Othello begins his defense by saying, “Most potent, grave and reverend signiors, / My very noble and approv'd good masters.” He continues with his self-deprecation, saying, “Rude am I in my speech, / And little blest with the set phrase of peace” (I, iii, 76-77 and 81-82). Even in the most immediate circumstances of the play, Othello's humility seems excessive, but in contrast to his precursors, his behavior is remarkable. To imagine a typical stage Moor saying these words is but to witness him dissemble. However, Othello, unlike his predecessors, sincerely means what he says, as he demonstrates by his attempts to diminish whatever threat he may pose to the state. But his marriage itself compromises the state's security; he was called before the signory to begin defending Venice, not himself. And although Othello intensely wishes not to be a typical stage Moor, he finds himself in exactly that position. He is the black man who provokes a crisis by his sexual relationship with a white woman. He must, therefore, immediately and uncompromisingly identify his state of subservience and remain there; by so doing, he at least can assuage one fear and dismiss one threat. With that done, he is then free to move against the Turk, who is after all not a totally different sort of threat.

Yet in spite of his best efforts to the contrary, Othello cannot escape the role fated to Moors on the stage, and as he moves to free himself of the confines of the role, he moves inexorably closer to it. The irony of his fate finds no clearer emblem than Othello as dupe to the play's villain, the most atypical role in which Othello finds himself. And Iago's intentions as villain directly counter Othello's, for Iago wishes to ensnare Othello in the confines of the stereotype that Othello struggles so desperately to escape. As the playwright of Othello's demise, Iago directs Othello toward the traditional role of villainous Moor, toward making Othello fit the maxim that Iago himself will not fit: “Men should be that they seem, / Or those that be not, would they might seem none!” (III, iii, 130-31). By provoking Othello to jealousy, an attribute believed not uncommon to Moors and earlier witnessed in Eleazar, Iago achieves his goal.⁷

Othello, as Iago points out and as the audience would immediately recognize, has ample reason to be jealous of Cassio, for unlike himself, “Cassio's a proper man” (I, iii, 390). “A fourth eminent cause of jealousy may be this,” Burton determines in The Anatomy of Melancholy: “when he that is deformed … will marry some fair nice piece … [he] begins to misdoubt (as well he may) she doth not affect him. … He that marries a wife that is snoutfair alone, let him look, saith Barbarus, for no better success than Vulcan had with Venus, or Claudius with Messalina.”⁸ Othello's blackness is deformity enough for Brabantio and Iago, and they both press this fact on Othello's mind as they remind him to be wary of his wife.

Once planted in Othello's mind, the seeds of jealousy take root quickly and swiftly bear fruit. Preoccupied with the alleged wantonness of his wife, the gullible and jealous man sees signs of guilty love everywhere:

What sense had I of her stol'n hours of lust?
I saw't not, thought it not, it harm'd not me,
I slept the next night well, was free and merry;
I found not Cassio's kisses on her lips.

(III, iii, 344-47)

Othello's jealousy and the fear that it promotes, as well as his response to Iago's lies, precisely match Burton's description of the impotent man: “More particular causes [of jealousy] be these which follow. Impotency first, when a man is not able of himself to perform those dues which he ought unto his wife: for though he be an honest liver, hurt no man … and therefore when he takes notice of his wants, and perceives her to be more craving, clamorous, insatiable and prone to lust than is fit, he begins presently to suspect, that wherein he is defective, she will satisfy herself, she will be pleased by some other means.”⁹

The relationship between impotency and jealousy seems clear to Iago, who seizes upon the irony of Othello's steadfast denials of sexual interest and perverts them. Fixated and full of his own prurient musings, Othello now moves closer toward being the stereotypical Moor. But he is not consumed by lust and desire for gratification; instead, he fears that someone else performs his office. Nor does Iago let slip an opportunity to press this point home, until finally Othello is convinced that Cassio plays the role of lecher, the role Othello so steadfastly rejects. Once Othello, under Iago's direction, has cast Cassio in the role which by tradition should be his own, the tragic irony for Othello follows because he loses his sense of who he really is and begins to reclaim the role that he has rejected. Now maddened by jealousy, Othello, like his predecessors, becomes obsessed with sexual desire, but this time with Cassio's and Desdemona's rather than his own. From here Iago can easily persuade Othello to dissemble, yet another mark of all Moorish villains.

Othello himself records his fall to that previously rejected role in his comments on his own blackness. Although the allegory of blackness and its characteristic language surround him throughout the play (Iago uses it, as do Brabantio and the duke), when Othello succumbs, saying, “Haply, for I am black, / And have not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have,” he identifies himself with the outsider his enemies have cast him as (III, iii, 267-68). He quickly completes his metamorphosis when he calls forth “black vengeance, from thy hollow cell” (III, iii, 454). (Here the folio reads “the hollow hell.”) Calling down on himself the spiritual blackness of his theatrical forebears, Othello identifies himself finally with the devil.

The success of Othello's transformation finds quick confirmation when those who knew and loved the former Othello fail to recognize him as the jealous, raging Moor. Emilia, Lodovico, and Desdemona all comment on the change in Othello and use a similar trope to express their confusion. Desdemona says of Othello: “My lord is not my lord, nor should I know him, / Were he in favour as in humour alter'd” (III, iv, 121-22). Lodovico, equally puzzled by Othello's behavior, asks: “Is this the noble Moor, whom our full Senate / Call all in all sufficient?” (IV, i, 260-61). Othello no longer seems to be Othello.

But the discrepancy between what Othello thinks he has become and what he has become tragically becomes clear to him only when it is too late. The role he attempts when he comes in to murder Desdemona is Justice, but Iago is much too good a stage director, for we recognize the Moor, finally, for what he is. Othello becomes the villain, reclaiming at that crucial moment over Desdemona's bed the role he has so long sought to avoid. And although there is a discrepancy between his perception of himself and the audience's perception of him, that distance collapses as Othello, welling with sexual desire, comments on Desdemona's beauty:

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars:
It is the cause, yet I'll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth, as monumental alabaster.

(V, ii, 1-5)

Othello tries our sympathies for him even further when he bends over Desdemona's bed to kiss his doomed wife before he exacts his price:

… when I have plucked the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again,
It must needs wither. I'll smell it on the tree,
A balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice herself to break her sword: once more:
Be thus, when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,
And love thee after: once more, and this the last,
So sweet was ne'er so fatal: I must weep,
But they are cruel tears; this sorrow's heavenly,
It strikes when it does love.

(V, ii, 13-22)

Surely these are chilling moments for any audience as it watches the determined murderer linger over kisses stolen from the sleeping Desdemona. Each additional kiss calls to mind those other black Moors who sought to abuse other innocent women, for who can forget Othello's purpose for approaching Desdemona's bed? His final hint at necrophilia, and in this context Othello surely means physical love, captures the prurience of this scene. Othello's protestations of sorrow and love may be real, but his kisses are not kisses of tenderness of forgiveness. Were they, he would not, could not, reject Desdemona's offer of connubial love and, ironically, redemption.

When Othello finally discovers the disjunction between what he supposes he has done and what he actually has done, he learns his tragedy. And what exactly he learns is something that the audience has witnessed; he learns that the noble Moor, the adversary of a stereotype, has collapsed into that now victorious stereotype. When he sees this, the noble Moor calls down justice on the villainous:

Whip me, you devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight,
Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulfur,
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!

(V, ii, 278-81)

The Moor now condemns himself with the language commonly used to damn black fiends, as though he has assumed not only the role of the tormented but also of the tormentor, the damned and the damning.

In his final assault upon himself, Othello continues to apply to Othello the murderer the language and character of the typical Moor:

… I pray you in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of them as they are; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice; then must you speak
Of one that lov'd not wisely, but too well:
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian,(10) threw a pearl away,
Richer than all his tribe.
.....And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus.

(V, ii, 341-49, 353-57)

Now fully cognizant of the discrepancy between what he thought himself to be and what he is, Othello speaks calmly of the man duped by the villain, of his honor and sense of being wronged. However, none of this extenuates his guilt. The “base Indian,” the “circumcised dog,” committed a crime, and Othello, who once served Venice well, executes justice for the state and finally merges his two roles. He is both villainous Moor and, at last, Justice. His ability to destroy one role by using the other helps win for him our sympathy.

Several other important factors contribute to eliciting a sympathetic response from us. Cast as the villain, and even having effected his and Iago's policy, Othello, however, is never fully and resolutely a villain; he lacks the love of evil that underlies the villain's every act. Othello is the misguided victim, as much sinned against as sinning, and this fact alone moves us to pity. This fact also points to the irony of Othello's tragedy; he falls victim to his own struggle. He struggles to destroy evil as he struggles to escape the identity of a Moor. But he escapes neither and becomes both. Othello, in fact, fulfills the worst suspicions that his worst enemies hold of him. Gratiano reminds us of this when he comments sadly:

Poor Desdemona, I am glad thy father's dead;
Thy match was mortal to him, and pure grief
Shore his old thread atwain: did he live now,
This sight would make him do a desperate turn,
Yea, curse his better angel from his side,
And fall to reprobation.

(V, ii, 205-210)

Brabantio's nightmare has come true, and were he alive, this would provoke him to disclaim all faith. But the real horror here is that Brabantio's nightmare is also Othello's, and Othello becomes what he was most loath to be. We sympathize because he fell not for pride's sake but for honor's and because he remains vulnerable to that which he is and is made to be, no matter how that differs from what he wishes to be. In the end we, like Othello, wish he had not fallen victim to himself, victim to his fate.

Our sympathy for Othello, however, is sympathy for his struggle to escape his fate, not sympathy for what he is fated to be. For that there is no sympathy. Thus Brabantio can sympathize with Othello until he sees only the typical stage Moor, the man who bewitched his daughter. Those who sympathize see Othello as a brave warrior in control of his own destiny. Is not this the moral of his tale to Desdemona, who he says “lov'd me for the dangers I had pass'd” (I, iii, 167)? Brabantio himself was once beguiled by Othello's ability to overpower fate:

Her father lov'd me, oft invited me,
Still question'd me the story of my life,
From year to year; the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have pass'd.

(I, iii, 128-31)

Othello's repetition of “pass'd” is deliberate and gives explicit expression to both the trials he conquered and the dangers he escaped. Brabantio loses respect immediately and irrevocably when he no longer sees Othello as the Moor who defies fate but instead as the Moor who threatens family and state. Brabantio, after all, is incredulous that Othello could at this time be called by “special mandate for the state affairs,” and Brabantio's vulgar and bitter suggestion about Desdemona exemplifies again his changed perception: “Look to her, Moor, have a quick eye to see: / She has deceiv'd her father, may do thee” (I, iii, 72, 292-93). Angered by Desdemona's change in loyalty from father to husband, Brabantio holds her to be entirely faithless.

Those who, like Brabantio, in the end see only the Moor, surrender judgment to prejudice. Surely the most articulate spokesman for this point of view is Thomas Rymer, who finds much of Othello, including the status of the hero, ludicrous: “With us a Black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter; but Shakespear would not have him less than a Lieutenant—General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or Small-coal Wench; Shake-spear would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or Privy-Councellor; and all the town should reckon it a very suitable match.”¹¹

Rymer's comments point to a problem that is not unique to Othello but is still of great significance. In the end, we can only be sympathetic to Othello's plight if we are first open to Othello himself. If we are immovable in our contempt or incredulity, the play is then all that Rymer says it is. The problem of sympathy for Othello is doubly important when we recall that of all the plays in English dramatic history, no other play until the twentieth century offered a black hero of Othello's stature. And always there to undermine the most positive aspects of Shakespeare's representation of a noble black is Othello's lapse into the stereotype. Justice smites a Moor. Fate seems to control not only Othello but his representation. However successful Shakespeare's manipulation of the stereotype may be, Othello remains identifiable as a version of that type. We may see Shakespeare's hand more subtly, if we see Othello's and Desdemona's tragedy as a personal tragedy. After all, chaos does not come again; order always exists in Venice and even its outposts. Shakespeare's black Moor never possesses the power or desire to subvert civic and natural order.

Shakespeare comments with similar subtlety on Othello through the internal playwright Iago. In the hands of this malicious playwright, characters must be what they seem; black men must be villains. The irony here, of course, is that villains must seem to be what they are not and vice versa. How differently from Iago Shakespeare represents Othello is witnessed in part by the sympathy Shakespeare evokes from us for Iago's victim. But this points to the basic duality of Othello's character, a duality that is constantly at work in the play. In the end, however, the separate parts become one in Othello, and the good becomes inseparable from the evil, Justice from the Moor, the playwright from the dissembler.

The importance of Othello as the dominant representation of an African on the stage cannot be overestimated. Unlike any of the other plays discussed in this or the previous chapter, Othello seems to have been always in revival. Not until Oroonoko was staged in 1695 was there a close rival to Othello for putting a dramatic representation of a black character before English audiences. Between 1604 and 1687, Othello was in production not less than fourteen times. No generation of seventeenth-century playgoers could not have seen the play in several revivals. The publication history of Othello also indicates significant popularity. Although the first publication did not occur until 1622, almost twenty years after its first performance, Othello was published in quarto seven times in the seventeenth century and was included in the four seventeenth-century folios. In spite of the remarkable endurance of Othello, its ability to influence positively the portrayal of Africans on the stage is, not surprisingly, almost negligible; the stereotype remains vigorous even into the Restoration, as the adaptations of Titus Andronicus and Lust's Dominion suggest. While a single play could not be expected to reverse centuries of tradition, one senses that Othello had virtually no effect on the representation of Moors in the seventeenth century. How much of this is due to Othello's own tragic relapse to the stereotypical Moor cannot be determined, but surely that must be a factor. Indeed, audiences may have learned other lessons from this play as they remembered the sight of the black Moor murdering the innocent and white Desdemona. Perhaps too, Emilia's stinging charge, “O gull! O dolt! / As ignorant as dirt!” (V, ii, 164-65), lingered in their ears. Or perhaps when Emilia cries, “O, the more angel she, / And you the blacker devil!” (V, ii, 131-32), the age-old conflict between black and white, between good and evil, received an all-too-believable and terrifying reconfirmation. For some, like Rymer, the belief that Othello was even high enough to fall was merely fabulous anyway. Perhaps Othello, like its hero, simply could not replace everywhere the long-held perceptions of black men.

Notes

1. Another character, Alcade, the King of Africa, in The Thracian Wonder (1599), may be relevant here; however, I am uncertain that he is black. Tokson holds the opposite opinion; he writes that it “is quite clear that King Alcade is dark skinned” (93). He bases his judgment on Alcade's comment that in Europe “Men have livers there / Pale as their faces” (The Thracian Wonder, in The Works of John Webster, ed. Alexander Dyce [London, 1830], Vol. IV, III, iii, 209). This, however, could be a reference not to blackness but to sun exposure, much like Cleopatra's: “Think on me, / That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black” (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, I, v, 27-28). Tokson also sees a reference to Alcade's daughter as a “white Moore” (V, ii, 249 and 250), as further corroborative evidence for his opinion. While we do know for certain that the daughter is white, I believe her whiteness raises questions about Alcade's supposed blackness rather than solutions. In a few medieval romances some black parents do miraculously have white offspring. (See Heliodorus, An Aethiopian History, Book IV.) Could Alcade be from this tradition? Although it is possible, I have been unable to locate an example in drama. A dramatization of An Aethiopian History entitled The White Aethiopian (1650?) exists in manuscript, but there is no record of performance. Alcade and his daughter seem to be more closely related to the King of Africa and his daughter, Angelica, in Greene's dramatization of Orlando Furioso, first published in 1594 and then again in 1599. Alcade also makes a rather curious statement that adds to my uncertainty. When he first appears in the play, he says to Sophos and Eusanius, the real heroes of the play:

   In Africa, the Moors are only known,
   And never yet search'd part of Christendom;
   Nor do we levy arms against their religion,
   But like a prince, a royal justicer,
   To patron right and supplant tyranny.

   (III, iii, p. 204)

   Is Alcade claiming to be other than a Moor? If so, does he mean he is not a Muslim, or not black or neither? We have no way of knowing. Finally, many other white Africans exist in dramatic literature, most notably in plays about Rome and Carthage. It seems to me more likely that Alcade belongs to this tradition. My uncertainty about him, however, requires that he remain outside of this discussion.

2. It is difficult to say how dark Morocco really is. The stage direction at the start of Act III, scene i, reads: “Enter Morocco, a tawny Moor all in white.” Tawny offers its own difficulties because Shakespeare uses it synonymously with black in Titus Andronicus. (In Act V, Aaron calls his son, who several times earlier is called black, a “tawny slave” [V, i, 27].) Morocco himself speaks of his complexion in figurative language that fails to provide accurate information. I am inclined to believe that Morocco is fully black, primarily because of the visual contrast his black skin would make with the white and presumably exotic clothes.

3. George Chapman, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria in The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies, ed. Thomas Marc Parrott (New York, 1961), Vol. I, scene x, ll. 161-63.

4. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. M. R. Ridley (New York, 1958), II, i, 281-82, 286-91. Throughout my discussion of Othello, I quote from this Arden Shakespeare edition of the play because it, unlike many other editions, is based on the text of the first quarto of 1622.

5. A variant reading found in the 1623 folio has Desdemona saying here: “My heart's subdued / Even to the very quality of my lord” (I, iii, 245-46).

6. Although this line is frequently construed to refer to the “rites of war,” I read it as meaning the “rites of love.” (See Romeo and Juliet, III, ii, 8, and Ridley's note to this line.) In the line immediately following this, Desdemona says that during Othello's absence “I a heavy interim shall support.” Shakespeare, as well as other Renaissance playwrights, frequently uses the figure of women bearing weight as a metaphor for coitus. It seems reasonable to assume that Desdemona speaks frankly and as a sexually mature adult.

7. Lois Whitney suggests in her article “Did Shakespeare Know ‘Leo Africanus’?” that Shakespeare while writing Othello relied heavily on Pory's 1600 translation of Leo Africanus. On the subject of Othello's jealousy she writes: “In the matter of love, jealousy, and wrath Leo's characterization has a bearing also.” (PMLA, XXXVII, 1922, p. 482.) See also Tokson, Popular Image of the Black Man, 17.

8. Burton also cites Leo as his source for “Incredible things almost of the lust and jealousy of his countrymen of Africa, and especially such as live about Carthage.” Burton then points out that “every geographer of them [Moors] in Asia, Turkey, Spaniards, Italians,” reports of the lust and jealousy of Moors. It should be noted that The Anatomy of Melancholy was not published until 1621, and hence could not have been known by Shakespeare. However, as a copious amalgamation of fact and lore, the book codifies opinions that were in currency long before its publication. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London, 1977), Part 3, pp. 264, 270-71.

9. Ibid., 266-67.

10. The folio reads “Judean” here.

11. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy, in The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. C. R. Zimansky (New Haven, Conn., 1956), 134.