Nabil Matar: Othello's skin colour represents Elizabethan fears

From a lecture by the Professor of English at the Florida Institute of Technology, given at the Globe Theatre, London

The representation of the Moors in English drama shows how the political anxiety they generated by their military designs and negotiations in London drove playwrights to blacken them, with all the historical and theological associations that blackness evoked in the imagination of a white community. The Moors became Negroid because such blackening was necessary for stabilising politico-diplomatic fears and neutralising national concern.

To the Elizabethan groundling or the courtier, especially the latter, the Moors on the stage and the streets of London did not represent colonised or subdued natives; rather men of stealth, ambition and triumph. The Battle of Alcazar ended with Muly Seth standing over the corpse of the defeated Portuguese king.

It was because of such fearsome characters that Elizabethan playwrights would humble all subsequent Moors on stage: the Prince of Morocco is embarrassed by his skin colour, and Othello is humiliated, while Mullisheg, in The Fair Maid of the West, is ridiculed by denigrating jokes from Clem.

To English playwrights whose country had not yet colonised one inch in Africa, the Moroccans were not defeated subalterns and kidnapped savages - as other non Europeans and non Christians were. Rather, they were men of international political power and danger: the only way to fantasise their otherness and separation was to blacken them into sons of the cursed Ham with thick lips, and rolling eyes, fearful "to look on" (Othello, Act 1, Scene 3).