Othello: Questions for Discussion and Further Research
Othello is an explosive cocktail of onstage racial and religious tension. Contemporaneous Western responses to Islam undoubtedly shape Othello’s treatment by other characters in the play.
Scholar Matthew Dimmock offers some insights on Shakespeare’s engagement with the Muslim world in a 2015 Oxford University Press blog post aimed at students and general readers alike. You may wish to spend some time reading Dimmock’s post — as well as other secondary sources focused on transnational issues during the late Elizabethan era — as you grapple with this play’s broader historical and cultural context. Your college or university library is a helpful resource in this endeavor.
Discuss:
- What is Othello’s setting? Compare it with the settings of William Shakespeare’s other works. (Dr. Laura Estill has compiled a spreadsheet at folgerpedia.folger.edu that may be helpful.) Why do you think the playwright picked these settings? What do they say about British relations with — and their ideas about — other nations during the Early Modern period?
- How were Black people received and treated in British society during Shakespeare’s time? How were they portrayed in British theater (including Shakespeare’s earlier work)? In what ways does Shakespeare’s Othello reflect these attitudes and practices, and in what ways does it contradict them?
- What message(s) does the play send about power and violence within relationships? Do any external factors complicate things? Cite a specific scene and explain how the message is embedded.
- What religious references can you spot in the play? How do these references — and the belief systems they draw upon — frame Othello’s world and its issues?
Do further research:
- What kinds of contact did Early Modern Britons have with African countries? Research specific nations, events, and dates. What was Shakespeare’s likely exposure to North African cultures or the Muslim world?
- Our textbook mentions an Italian source for the story behind Othello, a renaissance tale by the Italian writer Cinthio. Research the tale in Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi , then discuss what its plot may reveal about other contemporaneous attitudes toward North Africa and Africans.
