Race, Racism, and Shakespeare’s Enduring Othello

Race, Racism, and Shakespeare’s Enduring Othello

In many decades, Shakespeare’s Othello has staged in several different contexts where mostly, it has acted as a cultural mirror. Shakespeare’s Othello has, for over centuries, communicated fluctuating ideas, attitudes, and beliefs about race and racism between different races, which in different circumstances has kept changing. The text that has been in existence for over 400 years still carries the same message. However, the interpretation of the massage evolves, shifts, and changes depending on the context, intention, and the specific time when it is being staged. As a result of the different interpretations, Shakespeare’s Othello has portrayed a permanent and reinvented work of art.
Throughout the different reinventions of Shakespeare’s Othello as a work of art, they have always been clouded by the theme of race and racism. Shakespeare’s Othello was staged in blackface, where it was infused with racist and colonial attitudes. It is for this reason that these essays tend to find out if the play is racist or Shakespeare’s approach suggests the opposite idea.

Race is an extremely vexed term. Over time, different people have argued that the current meaning of the word race originated from the support which emerged from biological lines to support economic institutions, which propelled the idea of slavery. It is argued that the link between skin color and race is a mere contemporary obsession. A good thought that backs this idea of linkage between skin color and race is the relationship between the Jewish might the Irish and the English in the early years of 1600 to around 1605. The first two communities were thought to be racially different from the English. Adelman (1994) argues that several questions surround the invocation of race as a category in early modern England. Gillies (1994) also argues that early modern otherness was based on geography rather than on the anachronistic category of race. Nevertheless, in this play, it is within the capacity of Iago to make the blackness of Othello to be the primary symbol of his otherness. This was keenly observed by Gillies (1994) “once his Ensign has raised the flag inscribing Othello within the difference of skin color, all the presumably meaningful differences Othello has constructed between himself and the infidel collapse.” The play also insists on the skin color difference that can be seen physically as a definition of different races most probably because, unlike religion, it can never be changed unless through a scientific process. This brings up the debate about racism as outplayed by the play.
Shakespeare’s Othello has been described as a tragedy of a decent hero brought down by a lethal flaw. Shakespeare’s Othello is a domestic tragedy that contains timeless themes with self-interest and racism taking center stage of the whole play. Right from Iago’s Alter Ego, Race as Projection in Othello, the play cultivates both the racist end and another idea, which is opposite from the racist idea. Long before we meet Othello, we are introduced to his character by Roderigo and Iago as they describe his character in depth. Right from the description of Othello’s character, it is clearly shown how racist this play is going to be. The sense of racism starts seen when Othello fails to come up with a correct metaphor that fits his body as well as Desdemona’s body. This forces him to compare Desdemona’s body to his face. The sense of racism comes in when Othello discovers that ” that his blackness is a stain-a stain specifically associated with his sexuality-and “discovering” that stain on Desdemona are virtually simultaneous for him; hence the metaphoric transformation of Dian’s visage into his own begrimed face.” (Edward 384-412). However, this idea can be interpreted differently from a different perspective. It is also possible to argue that Othello had a clean mind and did not intend to bring out a racist description of Desdemona. This argument is based on the fact that Othello could not find a comparison name, and therefore he resolved to compare Desdemona’s body to his face. This can be viewed from a perspective that Othello had a clean heart and mind. To add to this, it is depicted later in the play that Othello loved Desdemona. This may also add to the argument that Othello does not really portray a racist character. From Iago’s end, it can be interpreted from how lago thinks about bodies, especially about the insides of bodies. For Iago is the play’s spokesman for the idea of the inside, the hidden away. At the beginning of his seduction of Othello, he defends the privacy of his thought by asking, “where’s that palace, where into foul things / sometimes intrude not?” (Edward 384-412). No palace is impregnable, no inside uncontaminated. Characteristically, Othello takes this image and makes it his own, reinscribing it in his later anatomy of Desdemona as “a cistern, for foul toads / to knot and gender in”(Parker 64 – 69). But merely by insisting on the hidden inwardness of thought, Iago has already succeeded in causing Othello to conflate the hidden with the hideous, as though that which is inside, invisible, must inevitably be monstrous (“he echoes me, / As if there were some monster in his thought, / Too hideous to be shown” (Parker 64 – 69). According to this logic, the case against Desdemona is complete as soon as Iago can insinuate that she, too, has-psychically and anatomically-an inside, unknowable and monstrous because it is inside, unseen.
Moving forward, the theme of racism also comes clear when Desdemona is referred to as a black weed due to the male order of things in the play Othello. Stanley (1987) argues that Othello’s skin color is a product of sexual contamination. The black color has been compared with monstrous sexuality in the modern world. This though of racism is backed up by how the blackness of Desdemona has become a critical commonplace. Michael (1989) demonstrates how critical it has been for the skin color of Desdemona. He writes that the blackening of Desdemona indicates the convergence of women and black in the category of monstrous sexuality (Michael 383 – 412). In another instance, Iago creates a case that taints the play as racist. Iago creates Othello as “black” to use that as a primary tool to effectively neutralize the erotic potency that mocks his lack. It is Othello as progenitor that first excites Iago’s rage of racialization. His first use of the language of black and white is in his call to Brabantio: “An old black ram is mating your white ewe” (Michael 383 – 412.) If Cassio needs to make Othello into an exotic super-phallus, capable of restoring Italian potency, Iago needs to make him into a black monster, invading the citadel of whiteness. The idealization and the debasement are, of course, two sides of the same coin, and they are equally damaging to Othello: both use him only as of the container for white fantasies, whether of desire or fear. Your whit ewe/you: Iago’s half-pun invokes the whiteness of his auditors via the image of Othello’s contaminating miscegenation;’2 true to form in the racist discourse, “whiteness” emerges as a category only when it is imagined as threatened by its opposite. lago’s language here works through separation, works by placing “blackness” outside of “whiteness” even as it provokes terror at the thought of their mixture. But the play has already affiliated lago himself with darkness and the demonic; the threat of a contaminating blackness is already there, already present inside the “whiteness” he would invoke. lago creates Othello as “black”-and therefore himself as “white”-when he constructs him as a monstrous progenitor, and he uses that blackness as a race to destroy what he cannot tolerate (Michael 383 – 412). But the trope through which lago imagines that destruction makes lago himself into the monstrous progenitor, filled with a dark conception that only darkness can bring forth: “He will and must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light” (Michael 383 – 412). This trope makes the blackness lago would attribute to Othello like his monstrous generatively something already inside lago himself, something that he must project out into the world: as though lago were pregnant with the monster he makes of Othello.
This scenario taints the play as absolutely racist. However, it can be argued that Iago is the only character propelling the racism trait in the play whereas Othello propels an extremely opposite idea. In the previous scene, if the structure predicts the process through which lago becomes the progenitor of Othello’s blackness, the trope of the monstrous birth in the first act’s final lines perfectly anticipates the mechanism of projection through which lago will come to use Othello’s black skin as the container for his interior blackness. “Cassio uses Othello as the locus for fantasies of inseminating sexual renewal; Jago uses him as the repository for his bodily insufficiency and his self-disgust” (Edward 384-412). For lago, he needs the blackness of others, even the “white ewe” Desdemona is blackened in his imagination as he turns “her virtue into pitch.” How is lago’s impulse to blacken supposed to be understood, the impulse for which Othello is tainted as the perfect vehicle? “What does it mean to take another person’s body as the receptacle for one’s contents? (Edward 384-412).” The text brings out, is portrayed as a very exact account of what I’ve come to call the psycho-physiology of lago’s projection: that is, not simply an account of the psychological processes themselves but also an account of the fantasized bodily processes that underlie them. “Projection” is in its own way comfortingly abstract; by invoking the body behind the abstraction, Othello, in effect, rubs our noses in it.
The absence or presence of racist attitudes inevitably determines one’s response to Othello, as the difference between Plaatje’s remark and the comment as demonstrated in the play. In the following play, after discussing attitudes to color in Shakespeare’s England and Othello Sections I-V), an examination of instances in which racist mythology inscribes critical responses to the play (Section VI), focusing finally (Section VII) on how, in South Africa, silence about the prevailing racist tendencies in Othello criticism supports racist doctrine and practice. The English encounter with Africans began from about the mid-sixteenth century. Native West Africans had probably first appeared in London in 1554; certainly, as Eldred Jones points out, by 1601, there were enough black men in London to prompt Elizabeth to express her discontent “at the great number of ‘Negars and blackamoors’ which are crept into the realm since the trouble between the king of Spain and her royal highness (Edward 384-412). In turn, several visitors from England came to Africa in the second half of the sixteenth century. These English men came primarily to create a trading ground. As such scholars as Eldred Jones and Winthrop Jordan have taught us, there is ample evidence of the existence of color prejudice in the England of Shakespeare’s day. This prejudice may be accounted for in several ways, including xenophobia-as one proverb first recorded in the early seventeenth century has it that three moors to a Portuguese, three Portuguese to an Eng-European encounter with Africans. Generally, this analysis builds a ground of a plain face of racism in the play Othello.
The ending of Othello is perhaps the most shocking in Shakespearean tragedy. “I am glad that I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene,” (Parker 64 – 69) “it is not to be endured.”1 His disturbed response is one that the play conspicuously courts: indeed, Johnson does no more than paraphrase the reaction of the scandalized Venetians, whose sense of the unendurable nature of what is before them produces the most violently abrupted of all Shakespearean endings. Though its catastrophe is marked by a conventional welter of stabbing and slaughter, Othello is conspicuously shorn of the funeral dignities that usually serve to put a form of order upon such spectacles of ruin: in the absence of any witness sympathetic enough to tell the hero’s story, the disgraced Othello has to speak what amounts to his funeral oration-and it is one whose lofty rhetoric is arrested in mid-line by the “bloody period” of his suicide (Parker 64 – 69). “All that’s spoke is marred,” observes Gratiano, but no memorializing tributes ensue. Even Cassio’s “he was great of heart” (Parker 64 – 69) may amount to nothing more than a faint plea in mitigation for one whose heart was swollen to bursting with intolerable emotion.
In conclusion, the play Othello can be seen from two different perspectives. Throughout the different reinventions of Shakespeare’s Othello as a work of art, they have always been clouded by the theme of race and racism. Shakespeare’s Othello was staged in blackface, where it was infused with racist and colonial attitudes. It is for this reason that these essays have discussed the different approaches to the play. Right from the description, it portrays an end that is covered by racism. Shakespeare’s Othello is a domestic tragedy that contains timeless themes with self-interest and racism taking center stage of the whole play. Right from Iago’s Alter Ego, Race as Projection in Othello, the play cultivates both the racist end and another idea, which is opposite from the racist idea. Long before we meet Othello, we are introduced to his character by Roderigo and Iago as they describe his character in depth. Right from the description of Othello’s character, it is clearly shown how racist this play is going to be. The sense of racism starts seen when Othello fails to come up with a correct metaphor that fits his body as well as Desdemona’s body. This forces him to compare Desdemona’s body to his face. The sense of racism comes in when Othello discovers that ” that his blackness is a stain-a stain associated explicitly with his sexuality-and “discovering” that stain on Desdemona are virtually simultaneous for him; hence the metaphoric transformation of Dian’s visage into his own begrimed face.” (Edward 384-412).

Works Cited
Adelman, Janet. “Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.2
(1994): 35-40.
Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Vol. 4. Cambridge University
Press, 1994.
Edward, Snow “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello,” English Literary
Renaissance 10 (1980): 384-412.
Stanley Cavell “Othello and the Stake of the Other” in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of
Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 125-42
Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” Shakespeare
Quarterly 40 (1989): 383-412,
Parker, “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the ‘Secret Place’ of Woman,” Representations 44 (1993): 64-69.