> I agree with Carroll about Othello. Desdemona's father is upset that he
> is a Moor, but gets nowhere with the council.
Which happens to desperately need their best general for a pending war.
Iago and Rodrigo mock his
> dark skin, but they're the villains.
But not because they're racist. Rather because Iago is evil, Rodrigo isn't exactly a villan; he's a tool.
In the social world Shakespeare
> depicts, Othello is one of the most respected and effective men in
> Venice.
But this is one of the points of the play: Othello is the opposite in fact of the stereotype that Iago uses and Rodrigo and Brabantio, who are completely conventional and represent ordinary opinion, share. He's sort of a Colin Powell.
> He's an outsider, but No one says he is stupid,
But he is "simple."
lazy,
> undeserving of command, disloyal, liable to rape or lacking in
> self-control,
Oh yeah? Iago, accurate in his judgmentof character, builds his whole plan on this premise. Of course as you say any number of white Shakespeare characters are also lacking in self control. However, here, Othello doesn't just happen to be Black, and S's manipulation of the stereotype is come careful and deliberate.
> biologically subhuman etc.
Sure, "biologism" didn't exist then. But he is compared to, and ultimately reduced to, an animal.
No one questions his authority.
> It's true he kills his wife , but Shakespeare's plays are full of men
> who are insanely jealous (Leontes) or who kill with not enough
> forethought (Hamlet, Romeo). And after he kills Desdemona, the fury of
> the envoy is turned not on Othello, but on Iago, who set the whole
> thing in motion. Shakespeare permits othello a noble suicide, while Iago
> is taken off to be tortured.
No question. Othello is a tragic hero. My calim isn't that Shakespeare is a racist--we don't know--or that the play is, which it isn't, unl;ike, say, Merchant of Venice, which is anti-semitic. My point is that stereotypes closely analogous to modern racism are used in the play, mainly by Iago, and depicted in Brabantio and Roderigo as common sense, which shows that they would have been shared and recognized at the time.
> It's also far from clear that othello is supposed to be a black
> African, as opposed to an Arab ( he speaks scornfully of a turk as an
> "uncircumsized dog," which would only be an insult if he were Muslim,
> i.e. circumsized himself; also, his mother seems to be some sort of
> Egyptian?).
Not a distinction taht then or now made a great deal of difference in Europe.
The Elizabethans knew perfectly well that the Arabs had a
> great, if unchristian, civilization, with a material culture equal to
> their own.
They would also have known, the ones who travelled anyway, that sub-Saharan Africa had great civilizations.
Medieval and Renaissance romances, after all, are full of
> noble paynims, love affairs between Christians and Muslims, etc. It
> really doesn't seem to me much like the discourse of black and white in
> nineteenth century America.
It's different. But it's analogous. It's an ancestor of these attitudes.
--jks