The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 29.0360  Saturday, 20 October 2018

 

From:        Michael Luskin <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         October 20, 2018 at 10:32:56 AM EDT

Subject:    Article and Review of an Othello Production in London

 

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/portrait-othello-black-muslim-tragic-hero-181019213737799.html

 

 

A portrait of Othello as a black Muslim tragic hero

 

Adaptation explores religious roots of Shakespeare’s Moor of Venice as director says play is warning about ‘otherising’.

 

by Aina Khan

 

LONDON, ENGLAND - A NEW ADAPTATION OF OTHELLO IN THE UK SUBTLY INTERROGATES THE TRAGIC HERO'S RELIGIOUS IDENTITY, PRESENTING TO AUDIENCES THE POSSIBILITY THAT THE MOOR OF VENICE WAS A CLOSETED, PRACTISING MUSLIM.

 

Produced by the English Touring Theatre, there is an Arabic recitation in the opening scene and an image of Othello with his hands cupped in what is unmistakably a Muslim pray “I was very aware of the racism Othello suffers because of his skin colour, but there was a much more insidious and layered thing that was happening to him as an outsider,” director Richard Twyman told Al Jazeera.

 

“The biggest thing is within the language, where Othello is constantly called the Moor. We know historically about the Moorish kingdom of Spain (where Spanish Muslims or Moriscos’ were forcibly converted to Christianity in 1492). But I never put it together that Moor might also be referring to Othello’s spiritual and cultural identity,” he said.

 

It was not until Twyman encountered the research of Jerry Brotton, professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London and author of This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World, that it became plausible Islam was intrinsic to Othello's identity. 

 

Brotton told Al Jazeera: “A Moor is an inhabitant of Mauritania which is in northwest Africa. It’s effectively modern-day Morocco.

 

“In this period in the 15th and 16th century, Muslims were referred to as black. There was no word for Muslim. It didn’t enter the English language until the second decade of the 17th century. But you have all these synonyms - Turk, Moor, Saracen, Persian, which are an attempt by an English tradition to describe Muslims.”

 

In addition to the opening prayer scene, in which Othello unfurls a prayer mat for him and Desdemona to sit on during their marriage ceremony, the play makes other references to his spirituality.

 

In the first line, Othello recites in Arabic the foundational invocation for Muslims: “In the name of God, the most gracious the most merciful.”

 

He also moves from one religion to another.

 

A crucifix hangs from his neck throughout the play, but when he is told of his wife’s alleged infidelity, he raises his prayer beads and shouts in Arabic, “Ya Akbar”, “Oh, Great One”.

 

‘Islam was not the enemy’

 

Viewed in the historical context in which it was written, Othello offers a glimpse into the economic and political anti-Catholic alliance between Elizabethan England and the Muslim world.

 

[ . . . ]

 

Othello emerged in contrast as the most nuanced attempt at a Muslim character.

 

As Anglo-Islamic relations blossomed, the arrival in 1600 of Muhammad Al-Annuri, the Moroccan ambassador to Elizabethan London, is said to have been Shakespeare’s inspiration for Othello.

 

Wearing a flowing black robe and white turban, his portrait was painted to commemorate a military alliance between England and Morocco which never came to fruition. It is now the earliest surviving picture of a Muslim painted from life in England.

 

[ . . . ]

 

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA NEWS

 

 

 

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