Shakespeare's Problematic Plays

In this episode, we look at how our current concerns with identity politics intersects with those of Shakespeare's plays which portray sexist, racist, or anti-Semitic material.  

Fair warning: this episode will deal with language and tropes that some may find uncomfortable

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that gives rhyme its reason.  Today, we’ll continue our look at Shakespearean drama, but the focus this time will be on how some of the Bard’s plays present challenges to modern readers, audience members, actors, and directors.  

We often say, unreflectingly, that the work of Shakespeare is timeless, that it’s universal.  If we mean by these that many people in many societies have enjoyed his plays for many centuries, then the sentiments are relatively uncontroversial.  But if we take such plaudits literally – that his works are unaffected by historical conditions of composition, performance, and reception and that they appeal equally to all peoples at all times – well, then we’re on quite indefensible ground.  It should be obvious that Shakespeare is a man of a certain class in a certain culture at a particular time.  He is as much the creation of his world as he was the creator of fictional worlds.  As such, while his works undoubtedly have had broad appeal across time and space, they also must necessarily reflect the cultural milieu of their composition.

And the problem for some people is that Shakespeare and his cultural milieu manifest attitudes about sex, religion, and race that, compared to 21st century progressive attitudes, are insufficiently liberationist and equitable.  Given that Shakespeare still wields enormous cultural power, some are concerned that his works can perpetuate retrogressive ideas.  So I thought it worth our time to think about this.

To be honest, I’ve not been looking forward to this episode.  These issues can be quite polarizing and do not often lend themselves to nuanced discussion.  I figured that if I do an episode about sexism and racism in Shakespeare, some will accuse me of being a woke snowflake who promotes trigger warnings, safe spaces, and cultural Marxism (a term that makes sense only if you are entirely unfamiliar with the work of Karl Marx).  If I don’t do such an episode, others will accuse me of whitewashing literature and history, promoting patriarchal, Eurocentric imperialism, and valorizing the work of those greatest of historical villains: Dead White Men.  So I’m stuck between a rock and . . . another rock.

And then there’s another pair of rocks.  Typically in such discussions, one must decide between the two extremes: either Shakespeare is a proto-progressive who uniquely anticipated 21st century social justice tenets or Shakespeare is a tool of white supremacy whose atavistic politics have no place in a just society.

Since you’re listening to this, you’ve sussed that I decided to do it.  My purpose here is neither to valorize nor condemn the socio-political attitudes in Shakespeare’s plays.  This is a fool’s errand in any literary-analytical endeavor and besides, since Shakespeare creates characters for the drama – thus without authorial commentary or editorializing – any line drawn between the attitudes of characters and those of the author becomes impossibly blurry.  But the fact that what we would now see as chauvinistic ideas and attitudes do appear in Shakespeare’s works forces us to deal with the gap between then and now, and it could be that Elizabethans were not as benighted as we may at first think nor are we as enlightened as we might fancy.

So, the plays I’d like to look at today are The Taming of the Shrew, from perhaps the early 1590s; The Merchant of Venice, from the mid- to late 1590s, and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, from probably 1604.  That’s two comedies (properly speaking) and one tragedy.

I say “properly speaking” because we are used to thinking of Shakespeare’s plays as belonging to three categories: histories, comedies, and tragedies.  But there is an unofficial fourth group called the problems plays, a term first used in 1896.  Depending on the critic, membership in the Problem Play Club can vary, but basically the term is used to describe a play that is structurally a comedy, but has some dark, disturbing elements more redolent of the tragic idiom.  The charter members of the club are All’s Well that Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and (my favorite) Measure for Measure.  Two others frequently included are The Winter’s Tale and the aforementioned Merchant of Venice.  So I’ve punned on this idea with the title of today’s show – the problematic plays, invoking that shibbolethic adjective so often on the lips of puritanical funcancellers.

So this episode will be a little different from the others.  Analytically-speaking, we’ll be looking at today’s texts in a much more limited way, focusing primarily on how they speak to our contemporary anxieties about identity politics.  Please do remember that this is a reduction of these vastly complex plays to avatars of our own shifting political obsessions.   And, for those who need one of those trigger warnings, I suppose I should say that this episode will contain references to language some may find troubling.  Put your fingers in your ears and hum should you feel the need.

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Let’s take these plays in their order of composition, and that brings us to The Taming of the Shrew.  For those not in the know, a shrew, in this sense, is a wilful, spiteful, malevolent woman.  There is also a tiny little mammal with a pointy nose called a shrew, but the Oxford English Dictionary points out that this second meaning is virtually absent from the Anglo-Saxon to the late medieval periods, and proposes that the nasty woman meaning may be original.

In Shakespeare’s play, the shrew ostensibly in need of taming is a woman from Padua called Katherine.  Her demure younger sister, Bianca, entertains many suitors, but their father Baptista forbids Bianca to marry until ill-tempered Kate has found a mate.  The suitors enlist the help of Petruchio, a boastful, materialistic Veronese on the lookout for great wads of cash.  He makes a bargain with Baptista and commences to, as we would say today, gaslight Katherine until she succumbs to his authority.  In a closing wager with other husbands, Petruchio proves that his wife is the most obedient and obsequious, and then they go to consummate the marriage – tastefully, of course, off stage.

And, of course, we must also remember that in Shakespeare’s day all female roles were performed by young men, not by any law but simply by male-imposed theatrical convention. 

I hope only the most hardened of male chauvinists fail to see the deeply troubling aspects of this comedy.  This is not merely an old-fashioned “battle of the sexes” comedy a la Tracy and Hepburn.  Here, women are chattel, properties to be bargained away in the marketplace.  As such, we get uncomfortably analogous to horse trading, and like a fractious mare, Kate needs to be broken.  In fact, the character Gremio puns upon the word courting as carting to emphasize the equine comparison. 

But, one may say, marriage in the early modern world was often a primarily financial arrangement and that Shakespeare merely represents or even exaggerates the transactional nature of sexual relationships.  And, one would be right.  But the way Petruchio treats Kate seems more cruel than such matrimonial attitudes would demand.  He tells us:

I'll attend her here,

And woo her with some spirit when she comes.

Say that she rail; why, then I'll tell her plain

She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.

Say that she frown; I'll say she looks as clear

As morning roses newly wash'd with dew.

Say she be mute, and will not speak a word;

Then I'll commend her volubility,

And say she uttereth piercing eloquence.

If she do bid me pack, I'll give her thanks,

As though she bid me stay by her a week;

If she deny to wed, I'll crave the day

When I shall ask the banns, and when be married.

Thus, he means to be confrontational and contradictory at all points, never relenting.  And indeed, he does not, for he later brags:

 Thus have I politicly begun my reign,

 And ’tis my hope to end successfully.

 My falcon now is sharp and passing empty,

 And, till she stoop, she must not be full-gorged,

 For then she never looks upon her lure.

 Another way I have to man my haggard,

 To make her come and know her keeper’s call.

 That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites

 That bate and beat and will not be obedient.

 She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat.

 Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not.

 As with the meat, some undeservèd fault

 I’ll find about the making of the bed,

 And here I’ll fling the pillow, there the bolster,

 This way the coverlet, another way the sheets.

 Ay, and amid this hurly I intend

 That all is done in reverend care of her.

 And, in conclusion, she shall watch all night,

 And, if she chance to nod, I’ll rail and brawl,

 And with the clamor keep her still awake.

 This is a way to kill a wife with kindness.

 And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humor.

 He that knows better how to tame a shrew,

 Now let him speak; ’tis charity to shew.

He likens his treatment of his wife to the training of a hawk.  Until she stoops to him, she will not be allowed to eat and will not be allowed to sleep.  Starvation and sleep deprivation.  He also contradicts everything she says and insists on his rightness until she breaks down, finally agreeing with her husband that the sun is the moon: 

Then God be blest, it ⌜is⌝ the blessèd sun.

 But sun it is not, when you say it is not,

 And the moon changes even as your mind.

 What you will have it named, even that it is,

And so it shall be so for Katherine.

OK, we should clearly see this as physical and emotional abuse.  Katherine is a hostage, an abductee, not a wife.  Then she gives a speech at the end of the play, chastising all wives who will not obey their husbands, who refuse to submit to their rule.  It’s really the speech that causes much of the controversy around the play today.  Here it goes:

Fie, fie! Unknit that threat’ning unkind brow,

 And dart not scornful glances from those eyes

 To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.

 It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,

 Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,

 And in no sense is meet or amiable.

 A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,

 Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty,

 And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty

 Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.

 Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

 Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,

 And for thy maintenance commits his body

 To painful labor both by sea and land,

 To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,

 Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe,

 And craves no other tribute at thy hands

 But love, fair looks, and true obedience—

 Too little payment for so great a debt.

 Such duty as the subject owes the prince,

 Even such a woman oweth to her husband;

 And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,

 And not obedient to his honest will,

 What is she but a foul contending rebel

 And graceless traitor to her loving lord?

 I am ashamed that women are so simple

 To offer war where they should kneel for peace,

 Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway

 When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.

 Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,

 Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,

 But that our soft conditions and our hearts

 Should well agree with our external parts?

 Come, come, you froward and unable worms!

 My mind hath been as big as one of yours,

 My heart as great, my reason haply more,

 To bandy word for word and frown for frown;

 But now I see our lances are but straws,

 Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,

 That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.

 Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,

 And place your hands below your husband’s foot;

 In token of which duty, if he please,

 My hand is ready, may it do him ease.

I can hear some of you saying, “What?  How is there any controversy about this?  This is clearly the speech of a woman so psychologically battered that she has internalized the misogyny that oppresses her.  This is some extreme case of Stockholm Syndrome!”

Umm . . . yeah, that is a good point.  Folks like me, big fans of Shakespeare, really have a hard time with this one.  It really reads like a statement of complete fealty, a total abdication of one’s personhood.  And with this as the culminating speech of a play that has already whipped a good deal of sexism on us, well . . . some folks find this difficult reading.

But perhaps we’re being hasty here.  It’s worth pointing out, after all, that none of the male characters come off particularly well.  They are fools and dupes to a man.  Petruchio, admittedly somewhat rounder than the other characters, may be roguishly fascinating in the way a narcissist can be, but I find him a difficult character to identify with or to like. And Bianca, that embodiment of male fantasies of feminine perfection, comes off as pale and blank as her name suggests.  Katherine, on the other hand, seems to be the only fully-formed personality in the play and her shrewishness may be the very reasonable reaction to having constantly to suffer fools.  

Furthermore, one can point out that the Taming of the Shrew, as a play proper, is actually a frame narrative – that is, a story within a story.  The text opens with a scene called the Induction, in which a drunken beggar called Christopher Sly, while blacked out, is taken up by a lord and his servants and brought to the manor house.  There, Sly is to be convinced that he himself is the lord and that a page named Bartholomew is his lady wife, who shall say

“What is ’t your Honor will command,

 Wherein your lady and your humble wife

 May show her duty and make known her love?”

 And then with kind embracements, tempting kisses,

 And with declining head into his bosom,

 Bid him shed tears, as being overjoyed

 To see her noble lord restored to health,

 Who, for this seven years, hath esteemed him

 No better than a poor and loathsome beggar.

And then he will attend a play, which is the story of Katherine and Petruchio.  So the whole of the Taming of Shrew is an exaggerated, ironic, and deceptive performance of gender roles and relations and one can easily argue that Katherine’s monologue is the bookend to Bartholomew’s obsequiousness, a ploy mocking Christopher Sly’s pretensions and sexism.

Yet it must be admitted that to work around Katherine’s final monologue we need to propose extratextual leavening.  The speech, as speech, is thorough-goingly misogynistic.  But how is it delivered?  Unfortunately, we have no director’s notes from the time, so we don’t know for sure, but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that Kate gives her speech with a knowing irony.  Her exhortations can seem to modern ears so over the top that one questions their sincerity.  Perhaps she’s helping Petruchio win the bet by exaggerating their chauvinistic attitudes to absurd ends.  Maybe it’s meta.  Maybe the joke here is on anyone in the audience who is dim enough to believe that “yes, that’s the proper way for a girlie to behave!”  

Of course, this is speculative.  Many directors today do, in fact, take this tack, that the play ridicules misogyny rather than wallowing in it.  But you almost have to do it beyond the actual words on the page.

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Our next play, on the other hand, contains both some very troubling anti-Semitic tropes as well as some of the most humane language in Shakespeare’s canon, and they are put in the mouth of the story’s putative villain.  That character is Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, and not, as many assume, the title character of The Merchant of Venice.  The title character is a man called Antonio, a wealthy merchant whose friend Bassanio has fallen in love with Portia, an heiress in Belmont.  To woo Portia, Bassanio needs cash, but his credit is too poor to be able to raise it.  So, he asks Antonio to borrow the money for him.  The merchant agrees and goes to Shylock to secure the loan.  They strike a deal for 3000 ducats to be repaid in three months.  Shylock says,

If you repay me not on such a day,

 In such a place, such sum or sums as are

 Be nominated for an equal pound

 Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken

 In what part of your body pleaseth me.

So if Antonio defaults, Shylock can cut a pound of flesh from him.  It’s a strange bargain, but it makes sense when you understand that Shakespeare’s not giving us a “stage Jew” – a cardboard avaricious villain like Christopher Marlowe’s Barabas in his play The Jew of Malta.  While Shakespeare does invoke some tired stereotypes about Jews being cunning and greedy, we also find that the Christian “hero” of the story is rather a scumbag.  Shylock complains:

You call me misbeliever, cutthroat dog,

 And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine,

 And all for use of that which is mine own.

 Well then, it now appears you need my help.

 Go to, then. You come to me and you say

 “Shylock, we would have moneys”—you say so,

 You, that did void your rheum upon my beard,

 And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur

 Over your threshold. Moneys is your suit.

 What should I say to you? Should I not say

 “Hath a dog money? Is it possible

 A cur can lend three thousand ducats?” Or

 Shall I bend low, and in a bondman’s key,

 With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness,

 Say this: “Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last;

 You spurned me such a day; another time

 You called me ‘dog’; and for these courtesies

 I’ll lend you thus much moneys”?

The upright Antonio, so generous to his friends, is virulently antisemitic.  He undercuts Jewish lending, he calls Shylock a dog and spits on him.  And responding to Shylock’s question, he says, “I am as like to call thee so again,  To spet on thee again, to spurn thee, too.”  I have to say, I would want to slice this guy, too.

But would Elizabethan audiences have seen anything wrong in Antonio’s behavior?  Would they have respected Shylock’s charges of gross mistreatment?  It is, of course, hard to say.  Elizabethans would have had no immediate knowledge or experience of Jews or Judaism because back in 1290, King Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion, banishing all English Jews to the continent and beyond.  Thus, all early modern English people knew about Jewish culture and people manifested in old tropes, caricatures, and stereotypes, so it’s hard to imagine that the 16th century English soul could be fully sympathetic to Shylock’s human plight. 

On the other hand, it seems to me that Shakespeare wants us to consider the possibility.  In one of the most famous speeches in the Merchant of Venice, Shylock pleads for a recognition of his humanity, warts and all.  When he hears that Antonio has been bankrupted, he swears that he’ll get his pound of flesh.  He says Antonio

 hath disgraced me and

 hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses,

 mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted

 my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies—

 and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not

 a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,

 senses, affections, passions? Fed with the

 same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to

 the same diseases, healed by the same means,

 warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer

 as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not

 bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you

 poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall

 we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will

 resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,

 what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong

 a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian

 example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I

 will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the

 instruction.

This speech, rendered in prose incidentally – Shylock’s passion cannot be contained in the blank verse – is both a soaring testament to our common humanity and a venomous charge of Christian hypocrisy.  As such, the audience or the reader is put on the spot: surely insisting on the painful death of Antonio shows a lack of compassion and mercy, but Shylock has never been shown these qualities.  Is his bloody vengeance simply modeling phony Christian charity?  If he’s the villain, surely he has cause.  

The other tremendously famous speech in this play comes from Portia, Bassanio’s beloved, who comes disguised as a lawyer to judge the case between Shylock and Antonio.  She recognizes the literal justice of the moneylender insisting on the terms of the bond, but she urges he temper that justice with mercy:

The quality of mercy is not strained.

 It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

 Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

 It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

 ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

 The thronèd monarch better than his crown.

 His scepter shows the force of temporal power,

 The attribute to awe and majesty

 Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

 But mercy is above this sceptered sway.

 It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;

 It is an attribute to God Himself;

 And earthly power doth then show likest God’s

 When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,

 Though justice be thy plea, consider this:

 That in the course of justice none of us

 Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,

 And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

 The deeds of mercy.

Doesn’t that just stir the soul?  An undoubtedly eloquent assertion of grace and humility.  But, like many of Shakespeare’s great monologues, we often remember it out of context, as if it was a free-standing poem.  But situated, as this one is, in a court scene in which a powerless Jew petitions for justice from powerful Christians against a Christian, we detect that Portia’s sentiments are not as universal and benevolent as we might vaguely recall.  The speech starts by asserting mercy as a Godly virtue – from the God that both Christians and Jews share.  But by the end, Portia makes a clean distinction between the two peoples.  She says, “Therefore, Jew” – identifying only by his race or religion – and goes on to say that without mercy “none of us should see salvation.”  The “us” here is Christian only, as each faith has differing (and sometimes even mutually exclusive) conceptions of salvation.  The type Portia invokes is based on a messianic Christology, one that Shylock obviously would not share.

Then, of course, at the play’s denouement, Portia having ruled that Shylock is indeed entitled to Antonio’s flesh but not to his blood, the Christian victors show no mercy at all to the defeated and humiliated Jew.  Antonio addresses the court and its judgment:

So please my lord the Duke and all the court

 To quit the fine for one half of his goods,

 I am content, so he will let me have

 The other half in use, to render it

 Upon his death unto the gentleman

 That lately stole his daughter.

 Two things provided more: that for this favor

 He presently become a Christian;

 The other, that he do record a gift,

 Here in the court, of all he dies possessed

 Unto his son Lorenzo and his daughter.

The “merciful” and unstrained court strips Shylock of his wealth, giving half to Antonio and half to the state.  Furthermore, he must leave whatever else he accumulates before his death to Lorenzo, the Christian man who eloped with Shylock’s daughter, Jessica.  And, maybe most demeaning of all, Shylock must convert to Christianity.  I mean no disrespect to Christianity, so save the angry emails; it is a tradition for which I have great respect, admiration, and affection – but forced conversion, especially in vengeance, is nothing but dehumanizing. The moneylender is at once stripped of property, family, patrimony, and identity.  I fail to see any mercy droppething here.  And I really find it difficult to imagine anyone in the audience cheering or gloating over his erasure.  Maybe I have a too sunny view of human nature.  I see a victim, not a villain, but one pitiable, not pitiful.

And that’s what makes the play a problem.  See, this all happens by the first half of act 4 – there’s still an act and a half left in which the Shylock plot has no part.  Occasionally today, productions will cut Act 5 altogether.  It’s an awkward end, too, some misunderstanding about the loving couples promising rings then giving them away under false pretenses.  We’re back in the realm of light romantic comedy after what I think is one of the most devastating scenes in literature.  How are we supposed to read that?  Is it a comedy in which the lovers overcome some melodramatic and mustache-twirling obstacles?  Or does the very framework of comedy, in this case, prove itself trivial and vacuous in the face of the gross inhumanity of the presumptive good guys?  Some would argue, and indeed many do, that this conundrum doesn’t matter.  The fact that anti-Semitism is given any platform at all, even a condemnatory one, is an act of violence and oppression.  Any performance of this play, however framed or staged, only perpetuates hateful attitudes and behaviors.  This has become an especially acute point in recent months, given the tragic events of October in Israel, which has led to a distressing rise in anti-Jewish rhetoric and action in America and other western nations.  This seems a rather simplistic appraisal of a complex cultural text at a complex cultural moment, but it’s one that increasingly finds favor.

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The same may be said of the final play we’ll discuss today: Othello, the Moor of Venice.  The tragedy concerns the elopement between the African Othello, who has been made general of the Venetian army, and Desdemona, the daughter of Venetian senator Brabantio.  The miscegenous marriage is, of course, a source of tension in the play.  But the great tension involves Iago, Othello’s ensign, who decides to destroy that marriage by convincing the new groom of his bride’s infidelity.   Iago’s motive has enjoyed long contestation.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously asserted that Iago’s was a “motiveless malignity,” but the character himself seems to give a number of reasons for his foul machination: anger that he was denied a promotion, suspicion that Othello slept with Iago’s wife Emilia, simple hatred.  But is it racial hatred, or a hatred that sometimes manifests in racist tropes?  Maybe this is a distinction without a difference for some.

The main source for Shakespeare’s play is Gli Hecatommithi by Cinthio (Giovanni Battista Giraldi), a collection of tales, one of which concerns the ill-fated wedding of a Moorish captain.  Shakespeare adds many of his own elements, including a threatened invasion by Ottoman Turks.  But, perhaps in response to a recent visit to England by Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, an ambassador from Barbary which caused quite the stir of celebrity, Shakespeare elected to produce a story about infidelity with a Moorish husband.  I’ll put a link to that ambassador’s portrait in the show notes – many consider it the model for Shakespeare’s portrayal of a Moorish nobleman.

And that term “Moor” is quite crucial here.  A Moor was, to medieval and early modern Europeans, a Muslim citizen from north Africa, the Iberian peninsula, and Malta.  The term may also be applied to Turks, Arabs, and Berbers.  Interestingly, Moors were not “Black” in the way we use the term today.  In early modern Europe, “black,” as far as skin color went, was a far more capacious category and simply meant anyone not terribly pale.  Today, Black usually refers to peoples either from or descended from the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa.  Thus, a Libyan or Moroccan person is not “Black” in the same way a Kenyan or Haitian person would be.  Shakespeare emphasizes his titular character’s Moorishness by including it in the play’s title, and likely envisioned his Othello as a Berber, or perhaps a Turk, which gives a dramatic tension to Othello’s impending war against the Turks in defense of Venice and Cyprus as well as to his conversion from Islam to Christianity.  

And this is not to say that Shakespeare has an altogether unblemished record in his portrayal of Moorish characters.  In his early, quite, quite bloody tragedy Titus Andronicus, the character Aaron the Moor’s blackness is a signifier, part and parcel, of his malevolence.  In the above-mentioned Merchant of Venice, one of Portia’s suitors is the Prince of Morocco, a rather buffoonish character that always strikes me as a somewhat lazy caricature of Eastern luxury, effeminacy, and decadence.  Portia’s racially-charged asides indicate her distaste.  

Yet, when the characters refer to Othello, especially Iago, blackness becomes a source for invective.  He tells Brabantio about Othello and Desdemna’s elopement: “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is topping your white ewe,” using a black and white binary within an animalistic metaphor.  He later compounds this with a bestial image: “ you'll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse.”  Ok, gross and crude and certainly racialized.  Additionally, Roderigo, Iago’s dupe, refers to the noble general with a physiological synecdoche, calling him “thick lips.”  

So even though Shakespeare’s Moor is probably north African or perhaps Turkish, from very early on, when non-white actors began to be cast in the title role, those actors tended to have physical characteristics associated with sub-Saharan peoples.  We should remember that the earliest performances would have included white actors in heavy makeup.  So the play has long been a locus for Western discussions and anxieties about blackness and assimilation and miscegenation.  There’s a quite famous portrait of the first African-American actor to play the role, a man named Ira Aldridge, and I’ll pop a link to that as well in the show notes.

All of this certainly demonstrates a racial animus in the Iago and his fellows.  And, of course, Brabantio is not pleased with Othello “coming to dinner,” as it were.  Venetian society sees him as an outsider due to his dark skin, but at the same time, Othello is elevated to a very powerful  and prestigious position in that society.  The Duke and others respect their general.  Indeed, the Duke defends Othello against charges that he senses are born of racism.  Brabantio enters the council and complains that his daughter has been abducted.   The Duke insists that anyone found responsible for this, even his own son, will be dealt with severely.  Brabantio then indicts the Moorish general with bewitching his daughter.  The Duke scoffs:

To vouch this is no proof

 Without more wider and more ⟨overt⟩ test

 Than these thin habits and poor likelihoods

 Of modern seeming do prefer against him.

Brabantio continues his bigoted reservations against Othello as son-in-law, but under the Duke’s persuasion relents.  The mixed-race marriage is accomplished and approved and the business of state awaits.

Yet, the reality of a prejudice against mixed marriages obtains in this play, and some have made the case that Othello’s value to the Venetians is merely instrumental:  he’s good at fighting and so they’ll overlook his skin color for now.  Marrying a senator’s daughter?  Well, that’s pushing the outside of the envelope, but if needs must . . . 

I see the value in such a reading.  Such critics also point out that Othello’s military prowess may be a version of the “physicalizing” of the black body – reducing Black personhood to qualities of strength or virility or dexterity.  Perhaps.  Can’t deny it’s a possibility.  But he’s also very talented orator (despite his obviously false humility here), a great strategist, and a noble heart.  He deftly moves through the corridors of status and power.  Othello is no dumb jock.

The biggest trip-up in this play is the fact that this noble, cultivated man eventually behaves like the savage his detractors have always insisted he was.  He eventually kills Desdemona in a jealous rage after being easily and transparently duped by Iago’s machinations, a deception that can be read as exploiting white attitudes about Black intellect.  Though the characters present at the murder scene all pretty quickly cop on that Iago is the villain, not the murderer.  Lodovico laments the general's betrayal and fall:

O thou Othello, that ⟨wert⟩ once so good,

 Fall’n in the practice of a ⟨damnèd⟩ slave,

 What shall be said to thee?

So, the perennial question about Othello is this: is it a racist play or a play about racists?  Same thing could be said, I suppose, about the other plays we looked at today: is Merchant and anti-Semitic play or a play about anti-semites?  Is the Shrew a sexist play or a play about sexists?  At the risk of defending Shakespeare, as I said earlier that I wouldn’t necessarily, I tend to see him as critiquing these social injustices.  But to do so, one must reveal them, and that, in itself, can be a difficult experience.  Nigerian poet Ben Okri says that “it hurts to watch Othello.”  I can imagine that women find Taming of the Shrew painful, and that Jews find The Merchant of Venice painful.  And while I can stand by an intellectual argument that we should continue to stage and study these plays because they force us to confront traumatic social realities, I cannot dismiss the experiences of those who live those realities.