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28.02.2017

Othello and the Orient Isle

Written by Jerry Brotton

Exile and migration. Toxic masculinity. Xenophobia and racism. Islamophobia. All played out in a geopolitical arena that pits West against an East defined by the Muslim lands of North Africa and the Middle East. We are only too aware that these are just some of the issues driving our current global predicament. But they equally describe much of the dramatic action of Othello, a play written over 400 years ago, but speaking to us today as urgently and viscerally as ever before. At its heart is a character that we still do not understand. Who is this Othello, the Moor of Venice? At the end of Act 4, Iago suggests that Othello is about to go ‘into Mauretania and taketh away with him the fair Desdemona’. Iago is playing on the fear that Othello, ‘the Moor’, will take his wife to Mauretania, beyond the reach of the Christian communities of Venice and Cyprus. Near the beginning of the play Roderigo calls him ‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger | Of here and everywhere’ who has traversed North Africa and the Mediterranean from Morocco to Venice, Cyprus and Aleppo. It is fears about this enigmatic figure, a convert from Islam to Christianity, of questionable faith and cosmopolitan ease, that drive the play’s action, not his race. It is these fears that have once again resurfaced so tragically as central to our contemporary situation.

Iago’s suggestions that Othello will take Desdemona into Mauretania allows us one way into understanding the character as Shakespeare imagined him. However, there is no straightforward connection between Othello’s ethnic identity as a ‘Moor’ and his geographical homeland of Mauretania. In classical times and Shakespeare’s day Mauretania referred to the Mediterranean coast of Morocco (distinct from the modern-day Islamic Republic of Mauritania, today situated to the south of Morocco). For an Elizabethan audience, the term ‘Moor’ evoked a whole series of complicated, and often contradictory assumptions and prejudices, which Shakespeare was clearly aiming to exploit in his decision to put Othello on the stage around 1601, just before Queen Elizabeth I’s death.

For Shakespeare, the term ‘Moor’ carried both religious and what we would today call ‘racial’ associations, although ‘race’ and certainly ‘racism’ was not a term used as we understand it in Tudor times. ‘Moor’ derived from the Greek, and referred to an inhabitant of Mauretania, but was also associated with ‘dark’ or ‘dim’, and became ‘Maurus’ in Latin, which throughout the Middle Ages took on the more ethnographic sense of black. The presence of Muslims believed to originate from Mauretania that entered Portugal and Spain also led to the term being used as a synonym for Muslim. The confusion over what Shakespeare meant when he referred to Moors emerges from a conflation of the term referring to black people and Muslims. John Pory, in his translation of Leo Africanus’ History and Description of Africa (1600), often believed to be one of the sources for Othello, claims that Moors ‘are of two kinds, namely white or tawny Moors, and Negroes or black Moors’. Significantly, whilst both Othello and Aaron (in Titus Andronicus) refer to their dark skin colour, the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice is labelled as ‘a tawny Moor’.
As a result, although a Moor was invariably a Muslim, he was not necessarily black. It is this ambiguity that Shakespeare exploits in his portrayal of both Othello’s ethnic and religious origins. Othello tells Iago ‘I am black’ and Roderigo denigrates Othello’s skin colour in the play’s early scenes, but these slurs quickly fall away, and in the second half of the play it is Desdemona who takes on the burden of her reputation being ‘blackened’. Similarly, when Othello recounts how he entertained Brabantio with tales of his past life, he speaks:

Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history.

This speech is crucial to how we understand Othello’s origins. He claims to have been captured ‘by the insolent foe’, to have been sold into slavery and then to have experienced some form of ‘redemption’. Intriguingly for the Elizabethans ‘redemption’ meant both ‘delivered from sin’ and ‘freed from slavery’: Othello is bought, set free and offered salvation through the sacrament of baptism to become the first Christian Moor on the Elizabethan stage. This would suggest that the ‘insolent foe’ is the Turk who captured and sold Othello as a galley slave before Christians rescued and converted him. What he does not say is if he was born a Muslim, or a pagan, like many other Berbers in sixteenth-century Mauretania, sworn enemies of that other complex ethnic group that haunts the play from beginning to end, ‘the general enemy Ottoman’, or Turkish Empire. The audience is presented with a character who moves with suspicious ease from one religion to another. What is the probability, Shakespeare seems to ask, that having turned away from one religion, Othello might just as easily ‘turn Turk’ and embrace another?

The reasons for such ambiguity surrounding Othello’s origins can be partly explained by the extensive and amicable relations that were established between Elizabethan England and the kingdom of Morocco. By the late 1580s, Protestant England regarded Spanish Catholicism, rather than Ottoman or North African Islam, as its biggest religious and political threat. Following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Queen Elizabeth established diplomatic relations with the Moroccan ruler Mulay Ahmad-al Mansur. In January 1589 the Moroccan ambassador Marshok Reiz [real name Ahmad Bilqasim] arrived in London and was greeted by merchants of the Barbary Company. He proposed ‘a sound and perfect league of amity’, a military commercial alliance with Elizabeth, whereby Morocco received English military support in exchange for Moroccan goods. Both countries were eager to resist the power of Philip II’s Spain. The English also established close commercial and diplomatic alliances with the Ottoman Empire of Sultan Murad III, leading to the creation of the Turkey Company in 1581 which, over time, would become known as the Levant Company. Some of its members even converted to Islam (many under duress, but others willingly) in a process of ‘turning Turk’ that resonates so powerfully throughout Othello. They included Samson Rowlie, an English merchant from Great Yarmouth who in 1577 was captured by Turkish pirates off Algiers, castrated and given the name ‘Hassan Aga’. He rose to become chief eunuch and treasurer of Algiers as well as one of the most trusted advisers to its Ottoman governor, an Englishman that had successfully ‘turned Turk’, much to the consternation of the English authorities, but the fascination of London’s theatre audience: of more than sixty plays featuring Turks, Moors and Persians performed in London’s public theatres between 1576 and 1603, at least forty were staged between 1588 and 1599. Moors and Turks were all the rage, and Shakespeare quickly followed fashion.

Within months of Marshok Reiz’s visit Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus, with its depiction of Aaron the Moor, the villainous but charismatic agent of most of the play’s tragic action. Just five years later, another Moroccan delegation to England was proposed, and again Shakespeare responded; the Prince of Morocco in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is a remarkably sympathetic figure, who vies for Portia’s hand in marriage. That Portia dismisses him with the line ‘Let all of his complexion choose me so’ is further testimony towards the studied ambivalence with which the Moor was perceived in Elizabethan drama.

Anglo-Moroccan relations came to a head in the summer of 1600, when Abd al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri arrived in London and presented his diplomatic credentials to Queen Elizabeth. Al-Annuri proposed a military alliance between the two countries that would attack both Spanish and Ottoman positions in North Africa. Although such proposals foundered (primarily because Elizabeth did not want to compromise her alliance with the Moroccans’ adversaries, the Ottomans), al-Annuri’s highly visible presence in London appears to have influenced Shakespeare when writing Othello within just months of the ambassador’s departure. Both are charismatic, sophisticated but also troubling figures, employed to fight the Ottoman Turks, potential allies, but who might at any moment ‘turn Turk’, reconvert, or simply disappear, cosmopolitan and ‘extravagant’ strangers of here and everywhere.

We can no longer see Othello as simply the barbaric, jealous black man of so many 20th-century stage productions. These interpretations were important in supporting American Civil Rights and anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, and many great productions came out of that moment, but as with so many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, Othello now responds to a set of different issues: of how to cross borders and remain cosmopolitan in an age of globalisation that manipulates populist xenophobia; and how to appreciate that Islam, in all its various Turkish, North African and Arabic manifestations, is and has always been a part of Europe, since the time of Shakespeare.

Jerry Brotton is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London and author of This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (Penguin).