Elizabethan audiences read Othello’s blackness itself as proof of monstrosity

Evidence

Othello is a hybrid monster of sorts, doubly cursed with African and other monstrous bloodlines. The belief that Africans were demons and monsters still dominated Europe during Shakespeare’s time. In Stephen Bateman’s study of monsters published in 1581, Africans are called “Black Monsters” and are described as such: “Ethiopes, a people in the West part of Ethiopia: also there are those black men, that have four eyes: and it is said that in Eripia be found very comely bodied men, notwithstanding they are long necked, and mouthed as a crane, the other part of the head like a man.” These fantasies were associated with all Africans, including Moors like Othello, whose black skin was associated with perdition and evil. In the twentieth century, Othello is more commonly associated with the tragic character portrayed on the stage by great thespians like Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson, rather than with an African monster. However, Elizabethans “associated [Africans] in the popular imagination with monsters, so that the play’s numerous references to monstrosity would have resonated with Othello’s racial characteristics to establish his extreme difference to typical Europeans.” Elizabethans thought that Africans were monsters. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 309

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Feeds the reader’s question about what the monster lets its makers avoid seeing — blackness-as-perdition does that labor here.
• QUESTION: The shift from monster to Othello the tragic hero in the twentieth century raises the question: which cultural need changed to make that reading possible?

Related

• Elizabethans believed Africans were monstrous creatures with deformed features (similarity 0.94)
• Racial identity alone marked Othello as a monster regardless of his actions (similarity 0.88)
• Christian hatred of Mohammedans manufactured the image of Moorish cruelty and blackness (similarity 0.81)
• Tamburlaine and Othello threatened English racial purity as monstrous hybrids of multiple races. (similarity 0.81)
• Othello’s Moorish identity made his monstrous fate inescapable regardless of his actions. (similarity 0.81)
• Elizabethan culture framed black-white union as producing monstrous offspring. (similarity 0.80)
• Othello’s tragedy shows Muslim ancestry is inescapable even when the character himself repudiates it (similarity 0.78)