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Race in Othello
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RACEShakespeare presents Iago as manipulating the pre-existent societal racist views
within the Venetian society to gain his own power and control over that of Othello. By
continuously referring to Othello’s race in derogatory terms, Iago gradually diminishes
Othello’s power and reputation. Repetitively he dehumanises Othello to ‘The Moor’ and
references his distinguishing features: ‘thicklips’. Iago’s addressing of the audience through
metatextual comedic jokes and his soliloquies, also showcases his understanding of societal
beliefs and his ability to form his audience into accomplices. In addition to challenging the
power dynamic, Iago also challenges inter-racial relationships as unacceptable, describing
Othello as ‘a black ram tupping your white ewe’, here both Othello and Desdemona re
animalised to ‘ram’ and ‘ewe’. He further uses olfactory imagery to disparage the
relationship to ‘smell in such a will most rank’, asserting his disgust of Othello being with a
white woman. Iago’s fear of Othello’s interracial relationship are not just with Desdemona
but with his own wife Emilia. Iago is successful in his efforts, as, through the course of the
play Othello internalises this racist language and eventually believes it: ‘what delight shall
she have to look on the devil?’ ‘devil’ here showcasing his now demonisation of himself.
Othello further calls upon ‘black vengeance, from hollow hell!’ clearly now associating
blackness with the negative through the reference to ‘vengeance’ and ‘hell’. Iago therefore
successfully manipulates and destroys Othello’s love for Desdemona by drawing on the racist
nature of Elizabethan England and the deemed unnaturally of interracial relations. There is
however, a divergence in views as to why Shakespeare uses Iago in this way or to why Iago
operates in this way. In the 1820s Coleridge expressed Iago as having a ‘motive hunting
motiveless malignity’, expressing Iago to be truly unmotivated and simply acting as an agent
of chaos. Furthermore, Coleridge believed Othello to be unlikely to be black, as the
interracial relationship of Desdemona and Othello appeared too unrealistic, and instead
depicted Othello as having a lighter skin tone of North African or Southern European decent,
stemming the ‘bronze age of Othello’. However, J.R Andres contradicted the ‘motiveless’
behaviour depicted by Coleridge dictating: ‘Iago is not motiveless but clearly motivated by
racism and hatred’. Andres argues that Iago’s desperation to destruct Othello’s reputation is
due to his hatred of a black man disrupting the hierarchy of white patriarchy and holding the
ability to dictate power over him. However, Iago’s racist behaviour can be viewed not as a
result of his personal inherent racism as Andres suggests but instead his exploitation of pre-
existent social racist constructs within Elizabethan and Venecian society, simply to gain
power, and highlighting the ease with which a white patriarchy can use racism to dimmish
black power. Iago poses the question: ‘I play the villain?’. However, Okri believes this reading
to leave behind Othello’s character of which is portrayed in a systemically racist manner,
holding significant stereotypes of the black man as volent and dangerous. Okri views Othello
as ‘a white man’s myth of the black man’, and therefore despite Iago’s provoking racist
behaviours, Shakespeare’s writing itself of Othello’s actions is formed from a racist ideology.
[conclude with what you think of these different perspectives]
Within Othello, blackness is undoubtably presented as ‘other’, with interracial
relations deemed ‘unnatural’ in a 1570 Venice and the mirrored early 1600 English society.
This is instantly evident within the play as Othello is immediately dehumanised as ‘The
Moor’ and ‘his Moorship’, the word ‘Moor’ here relating to the European coloniser’s term
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