Honestly, I had no idea what a “Moor” was and had to look it up while I was reading the play. In the article “’That which Heaven Hath Forbid the Ottomites’: The Turks in Shakespeare’s Othello” by Joseph Locket he explains “Othello is a Moor, one of the North Africans remaining in Spain after the overthrow of the Islamic governments there.” Luckily, in our class discussion last Friday my group really dug into Othello, particularly in the aspect of the importance of race. We all agreed that perhaps the issue of race was one of the strong points of Othello that makes the play so distinct from many of the other main tragedies. For instance, the rage expressed my Desdemona’s Father would seem like the same old paternal anger seen in a Shakespeare tragedy where it not for his prejudice towards Othello because he is the Moor. Furthermore, I thought it was interesting that Othello was THE Moor, not just a moor of Venice. Shakespeare goes through a good deal of trouble within the play to make this distinction a strong apparatus for comprehending the play with much more that simply defining Othello by his title.
This focus on language was a key thing I notices when reading the play. Compared to his other plays the diction of Othello seemed to contain a great deal of sophistication. For instance, the enraged Duke berates Othello saying “the bloody book of law / you shall yourself read in the bitter letter / after your own sense – yea, though our proper son / stood in your action.” I know Shakespeare is known for inverting sentence structure by repositioning verbs, and sometimes he sounds a bit like Yoda, (or I guess I should say Yoda sounds like Shakespeare) but the point is this play in particular seems replete with Sonnet-like lines. This is significant in my opinion because it suggests to me that he is hiding something in the language of the play itself. I have to admit that at first I really didn’t catch as many of these references as I have in review, but after reading Locket’s paper I think I was really on to something. His paper is great if you want a good starting point for reading this play in light of the racial issues it brings to the surface. I think reading it in this light both interesting, and timely given the conflict between the “western world” and the “eastern world” in contemporary society. Clearly from the lines of Othello we see that this contention is ages old.
