Shakespeare's Attitude Toward Turks in Othello

In William Shakespeare's Othello, the military general Othello is involved in the campaign against the Turks, leading the Venetian forces against the enemy. He is a Moor, and he is viewed as an outsider in spite of his role. Both the Moors and the Turks were viewed at a distance in Elizabethan times and represented the alien, otherness, the exotic, and held an inferior position in the view of Elizabethan England. Shakespeare makes use of attitudes toward both Moors and Turks in shaping the story of Othello.

Papp and Kirkland note the antipathy many in England felt toward foreigners (and, indeed, the British are still considered to be xenophobic in some degree), and the authors offer a reason for this:

For England, unlike the american nation it eventually spawned, took no pride in becoming a melting pot for many cultures. Even though Elizabethans were living in an age when explorers, scholars, merchants, and writers were flinging open the doors to other cultures, most people preferred to hang back, tarrying on the well-trodden thresholds of ignorance and fear (Papp and Kirkland 49).

In addition, there was always a certain sense of superiority that colored how the British viewed others:

Hand in hand with the Elizabethan people's provincial outlook went the certainty that they were better than everyone else. Once the English had more or less settle the religious question, built up a powerful navy, and reestablished themselves as a power to be reckoned with in international

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inciple as well as with its plot: The battle of the sexes in marriage is its central motif and dominates the frame, subject matter, and arrangement of the tales (Neely 82). The political element in Shakespeare reflects the concerns of his own time regarding turkish incursions and challenges and also reflects attitudes about the Turks. Othello is a Moor, and the British did not trust people from Africa nay more than from Turkey. However, there is also the issue of skin color, and more than once someone in Othello refers to the blackness of othello's skin and relates this to prejudices about blackness, darkness, and foreignness. Right at the beginning, Iago calls to Brabantio, "Even now, now, very now, an old black ram/ Is tupping your white ewe" (I.i.97-98). The Duke, however, suggests that outward color is not everything when he says to Brabantio, "And, noble signior,/ If virtue no delighted beauty lack,/ Your soninlaw is far more fair than black" (I.iii.323-325). This raises the linguistic issue, for "black" is used to refer to things that are bad, evil, mysterious, sinful, and so on, which is why Othello's virtue shows him to be more fair than "black." The term "Moor" itself reflects an attitude that all people of a cert

Category: Literature - S