Throughout his career, Shakespeare was conflicted about identity at the moment when the question What is an Englishman? was as vital to his audience as questions about identity are to us today. “If Othello really is that decent, honest, and credulous, if he can really have friends and be loved by a beautiful woman, the white characters in the play can’t accept it,” Spiro said.
In Shakespeare’s time, Moors could be from Africa, but they could also be from the Middle East, or even Spain.
Although Othello is a Moor, and although we often assume he is from Africa, he never names his birthplace in the play. He meant instead someone with darker skin than an Englishman at a time when Englishmen were very, very pale. When Shakespeare used the word “black” he was not exactly describing a race the way we would. Shakespeare’s writing mostly predates the transatlantic slave trade and the more modern obsession with biological classification, both of which gave rise to our contemporary ideas of race. What people mean when they ask if Othello is black is: What did Shakespeare mean when he called Othello black? Would we say Othello is black today? Is Othello black? With the news that David Oyelowo will play Othello opposite Daniel Craig’s Iago and that the Metropolitan Opera is finally discontinuing the practice of blackface in productions of Otello, we may see a revival of this oft-asked question.
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