Race in Othello

From its 1604 publishing date until the modern era, Shakespeare’s Othello has continued to be an essential sociological tool in its historical evocation of discussions of prejudice. The modern chronology of Othello’s worldwide criticism is consistently laden with race issues and exhibits the development of human thought in its gradual drift away from the archaic structural notions of human difference toward a more humanist and sensible perspective. This timeline of documented literary reactions validate the importance of discussing race in Othello.

Proclivity toward racial misconception plagued Othello’s early modern critical works so frequently that it provides generous insight into the widespread nature of prejudices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1886 Othello Variorum, Preston is cited as professing she “always imagined Othello as white. Black does not suit the man” (Andrews,278). Her refusal to trust Othello’s original authorial form palpably brings to light the status of western racial tensions in the late nineteenth century. In reply, Ridley provides in a detailed description of what a true Othello must be in his attempt to ‘correct’ Preston. He earnestly professes that the actor portraying the Moor must be white and painted black with a “narrow nose”(Andrews,278). The dominating preference of white actors in ebony makeup with narrow noses, albeit falsely playing characters of another race, nullifies Ridley's own argument and paradoxically endorses his own narrow-mindedness. Josiah Morse’s 1907 essay The Psychology of Prejudice also references Preston’s quote. Morse articulates the shortcomings of psychiatric knowledge of the time and the fact that society had yet to apply psychology to the ...

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...perhaps not completely defeated in what Andrews sees as the “last flash of his character’s true nobility” (Andrews,275).

In conclusion, studying Othello’s color evokes much more than mere racial category, but the entire chronology of human discrimination. It is evident through both contextual and critical insight that Othello is an indispensable textual work. Philip Koln declares it, “a cultural seismograph, measuring the extent and force of gender, racial, and class upheavals in any society that performs it”(Distiller,340). The evolution of Othello’s critical responses and representations serve to amplify its importance tenfold as it successfully charts the beginning of humanity’s departure from xenophobic tendencies toward a more global community.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William, and Jane Coles. Othello. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print.