Othello and the Black Presence in Early Modern England

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Scholarly discussions of race in Othello have almost exclusively focused on the eponymous character. Often forgotten is another Moorish character the play evokes, even if she does not make an appearance on the stage: Barbary, the maidservant Desdemona remembers in the ‘Willow Song scene’ and whose tragic story of betrayed love she identifies with to process her own grief.

This paper seeks to fill this gap in the critical response to the play by arguing that, through the inclusion of Barbary, a figure with no counterpart in Shakespeare’s principal source, Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565), Othello subverts theatrical tradition relating to both gender and race, two intertwined categories in both contemporary pictorial and dramatic representations of African women.

The play challenges previous stereotyped representations of Moorish female servants on the early modern stage, often characterised by contempt for their alleged lustfulness, treachery, and unfaithfulness to (often) white mistresses. It also subverts contemporary visual and theatrical depictions of Moorish maidservants as figures of Otherness whose black skin serves as a racial background against which the whiteness of their mistresses’ skin, and so their privilege, status, and virtue, shine.

More crucially, Othello offers a figure who in both her African origins and in her position as a domestic servant, speaks to the experiences of many members of the early modern audience, not least black female servants among them. Scholars researching the black presence in early modern England are increasingly alerting us to the importance of taking black people into account when writing about early modern theatre.

In approaching Othello from the perspective of a black female servant audience member, I hope to show how the play’s early reception might have challenged previous literary and dramatic traditions of representing African maidservants and opened up a space for more sympathetic and positive identification.

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