Shakespeare’s Use of Racism

This post has been contributed by Kate Rothwell. For more on Desdemona, see our other student posts: ‘Desdemona and the Female Voice’, ‘Othello Sucks: A Different Perspective’ and ‘On Carney’s “Being Born A Girl”: Toni Morrison’s Desdemona’.

Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise! (Othello 1.1.88-89)

Racist slurs, fears of miscegenation, xenophobia – all integral parts of one of Shakespeare’s most well-known tragedies.

On Carney’s ‘Being Born A Girl’: Toni Morrison’s Desdemona

This is an anonymous student-written post.

Carney approaches Morrison’s Desdemona with efforts to evaluate and reflect upon the differences between Morrison and Shakespeare’s characters, and the theme of womanhood as Morrison addresses it. In ‘Being a Girl: Toni Morrison’s Desdemona’, therefore, Carney addresses the tradition of Desdemona’s depiction as “silent, submissive, and in a sense even complicit in her own murder” (4), and contrasts it to Morrison’s, in which she “exist[s] in places where [she] can speak, at last, words that in earth life were sealed or twisted into the language of obedience” (14).

Desdemona and the Female Voice

This post has been contributed by Haply Eyres. For more on Desdemona, see our other student posts here and here.

Desdemona Retiring to her Bed by Théodore Chassériau (1849)

‘Writing back’ is the practice of writers from formerly colonized countries remodelling and reimagining texts from the English literary canon in order to express new ideas and the voice of a different culture. Toni Morrison’s Desdemona shifts the focus of William Shakespeare’s Othello from the male protagonist, to his wife and her upbringing by a black African nurse.

Othello Sucks: A Different Perspective

This post has been contributed by Ellie Fells. For more on Toni Morrison’s play, see our previous student post ‘Reanimating Desdemona in the Twenty-First Century’.

Shakespeare’s Othello is perhaps one of his best known plays, a story of a Moor who kills his wife out of jealousy and bitterness, letting himself believe that she has had an affair, before telling the world that she killed herself. I was, however, somewhat surprised when I read the title of the article, ‘Othello Sucks’. Othello ‘sucks’?! Not usually a word found next to the title of one of Shakespeare’s plays. However, within reading just the first few lines of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s essay, I quickly was opened to a whole new perspective.

Reanimating Desdemona in the Twenty-First Century

This is an anonymous student-written post.

Cabinet card image of German actor Ferdinand Bonn (1861-1933), in character as Othello. TCS 1.2795, Harvard Theatre Collection.

Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, first performed in May 2011, is compelling not only because it ‘talks back’ to Shakespeare’s Othello, but because it answers centuries of racism, blackface performance and problematic representation that have haunted the play’s history.