What Colour was Othello?

We are used to seeing Shakespeare's Othello portrayed on the stage either by black actors such as the magnificent Paul Robeson or blacked-up white actors like Laurence Olivier (giving one of his typically mannered and affected performances).  And yet there is a contradiction in the play: in Act I, Scene I we are immediately introduced to the image of Othello as being ‘the thicklips’ and ‘an old black ram’, both derogatory descriptions that would apply to a sub-Saharan African.  And yet the subtitle of the play is The Moor of Venice and in the original story that is held to be Shakespeare's main source, Cinzio’s Un Capitano Moro also refers to a Moor and the Moors are supra-Saharan people today classified as being of Berber/Arab stock, among whom thick lips and a black skin are not common traits.

So the question may be asked: what colour was Othello?  One of the problems is the general application of the word ‘Moor’ in Shakespeare's day, very often rendered as ‘Blackamoor’, a derogatory term applied to North Africans with dark skins.  Interestingly, among all the insulting comments made about Othello in the play, this word is not used although Othello does refer to himself as ‘black’.

We should perhaps look at the question of the Christian/Moorish confrontation in Europe which showed itself in the Arab occupation of Iberia from 711-1492, the Crusades from 1096-1270 and the Ottoman Wars in Europe (c.1300-c.1700), the part of the conflict in which this play is set.  The question is seemingly never asked: what is a Moorish officer doing fighting with Christian Venetians against the Islamic Ottoman Empire?  The first point to make is that religious allegiance at this time did not necessarily involve parallel military allegiance.  In 11th century Spain, the hero Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar is given the title El Cid (from the Arabic ‘Sidi’) and fights for both Christian and Moorish masters. Another question left unanswered here is that of Othello having married Desdemona, presumably in a Christian ceremony, so we have to ask, not only what colour he is, but what religion he follows.  Othello never mentions God in the whole play and ironically the character who refers most frequently to God is Iago.

If Othello is a North African Moor then the Ottoman Turks are as geographically and culturally distant from him as Norwegian Vikings would be, so Othello's Venetian employers would have no problem in offering him a contract to fight against the threat to their island of Cyprus (which was eventually occupied by the Ottomans in 1570).  This situation still leaves Othello as a Moor however, and not a sub-Saharan African.  Obviously a member of the latter group could have worked his way north and established himself as a successful mercenary soldier, but given the traditional relationship of supra- and sub-Saharan peoples (i.e., the tendency of the former to enslave the latter) this would be so unlikely as to merit a mention in the original story and the subsequent play.

Next we come to the question of the acceptability of Othello's marriage to Desdemona.  In Cinzio’s original story their marriage is public, even though her parents initially object.  In Shakespeare's play the couple have eloped and married secretly, causing Desdemona's father an understandable measure of discontent in the circumstances, but he finally blesses the union.  Given the literal demonisation of dark-skinned people in Europe at the time (they were considered by many to be agents of the Devil), it is unlikely that either Cinzio’s or Shakespeare's Brabantio would have given even reluctant agreement to a markedly interracial marriage.

But, to return to Act I, Scene I, how does Othello’s ‘Moorishness’ fit with ‘the thicklips’ and the ‘old black ram’ - terms that refer to the physical appearance of and the sexual calumnies directed against sub-Saharan black people, as opposed to Moors? The solution I suggest is that, while Shakespeare takes the Moorish figure from Cinzio, he actually envisages the figure of Othello in terms of one of the black slaves whom he would have seen in London since Sir John Hawkins brought the slave trade to England and its colonies 50 years before Othello was written.  Given the general use of the words ‘Moor’ and ‘Blackamoor’ to describe African people in general, this merging of two physical types may now be explained.

Still the objection may be raised: surely Shakespeare was far too sophisticated and intelligent to make such a generalisation.  This may well be true and it could be that Shakespeare has seized upon Cinzio’s original story but deliberately pushed Othello's origins further to the south in order to make a statement about contemporary attitudes towards sub-Saharan Africans.  This does not make Shakespeare an early Abolitionist but it does place Othello in the same theme-park as The Merchant of Venice which again is not a 20th century type of condemnation of racial prejudice but does nonetheless make the point that people should be treated in terms of their own qualities and not in terms of some perceived tribal difference.

We should always remember that we are looking back to Shakespeare through the prism of 200-300 years of slavery and the institutional racism that appeared in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Given that decent and honourable men were powerless to overcome such abuses during hundreds of years, it is another indication of Shakespeare's status as a human being that he could go to the heart of those problems before Western ‘civilisation’ (not to mention its pupils Stalin, Mao and the Japanese military) had shown how far into the realms of obscenity scientific progress could develop them.