Othello

Lecture Outline

• Background to the play
• Key Topics: Racial Identity and Rhetorical Authority
• Othello's Death
• Summary of Terms

Historical Background and Sources

Moor
1. Originally: a native or inhabitant of ancient Mauretania, a region of North Africa corresponding to parts of present-day Morocco and Algeria. Later usually: a member of a Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent inhabiting north-western Africa (now mainly present-day Mauritania), who in the 8th cent. conquered Spain.

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• Robert Greene’s Selimus, Emperor of the Turks (1594)
• William Percy's Mahomet and His Heaven (1601)
• Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine: Parts One and Two (1590).
• William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594)

Topic 1

Alterity:
The fact or state of being other or different; diversity, difference, otherness.

Otherness: the condition or quality of being different or “other”, in regards to the social and/or psychological ways in which one group excludes or marginalizes another group.

The Moor as Other

Aaron and Othello

Food for thought

• How else might one be "othered"?
• Does anyone reflect on their identity, alterity, or otherness in the course of the play?

Topic 2

Decorum:That which is proper to the character, position, rank, or dignity of a person.

Let me go, sir, or I'll knock you o'er the mazzard. (2.3.149)

Reputation, reputation, reputation

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And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. (1.3.144-46)

DUKE
I think this tale would win my daughter too (1.3.172).

Put Out the Light

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Othello's End

Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus. (5.2.349-54)

Look on the tragic loading of this bed;
This is thy work: the object poisons sight;
Let it be hid. (5.2.361-363)

Final Food

• Does this act in any way inform or alter the nature of Othello’s identity?

Summary of Key Terms

• Alterity
• Decorum
• Other / Otherness
• Rhetoric