This section places Shakespeare's Moors in an historical context.

Moor, n. member of the mixed Berber and Arab race of Morocco

Moorish adj. of the Moors


The term 'Moor' for a Jacobean audience may simply have signified Othello's 'otherness' and marked him as an outsider. Moors came from Morocco but in Renaissance drama, symbolized something other than human - and often, indeed, something devilish. In Othello, dramatic tension is created by the important fact that Othello is different.

There are three Moors in Shakespeare's plays:

The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, a dignified ruler

who hopes to marry Portia, the heiress of Belmont, an estate near

Venice. The stage direction in the First Folio reads Enter Morochus a

tawnie Moore all in white. Tawny suggests that he is light-skinned,

not black. He asks Portia not to judge him by the colour of his skin

['Mislike me not for my complexion' (2.1.1)] but Portia makes it quite

clear to the audience that she would never willingly marry one 'of his

complexion' (2.8.78-9).

Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, the lover of Tamora, Queen of

the Goths, a villainous forerunner to Iago whose devilish schemes

destroy Titus and the Andronicii. He is described as 'coal-

black' (3.2.77), with a 'fleece of woolly hair' (2,3,34) and called

'accursed devil' and 'the incarnate devil' by the Romans. When the

(Roman) Nurse calls Aaron's son 'A devil… a joyless, dismal, black

and sorrowful issue… as loathsome as a toad / Amongst the fair-

faced breeders of our clime' (4.2.66-8), Aaron asks her if black is 'so

base a hue' and she replies 'sure' (4.2.72). Aaron refers to his infant

son as a 'thick-lipped slave' (4.2.174).

Othello, a proud and heroic military general, whose marriage to a

white woman reveals society's intrinsically racist values.


This portrait shows the Moorish ambassador to Queen Elizabeth who was resident in London for a six-month period from 1600-01.

It has been suggested that Shakespeare based his portraits of Africans and non-whites on travellers' tales and artists' impressions but London was an important centre of trade and there were opportunities to see Africans in England. Might, for example, Shakespeare have seen the 42-year old Moorish ambassador (pictured above) in person? According to Eldred Jones, Queen Elizabeth considered the number of 'Negars and blackamoors' who had 'crept into' London by 1601 such a problem that she appointed one Caspar Van Zeuden (a merchant from Lubeck) to transport them out of England. Jones concludes that "statements that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists did not know what Moors or Negroes looked like merely ignore the available evidence" [Othello's Countrymen (London, OUP, 1965) pp.12-13].


The first recorded performance of Othello was in 1604. The previous year Abraham Ortelius had published Epitome of the Theater of the World, a series of maps with commentaries in which he described some of the characteristics of the male inhabitants of 'Barabarie' as:

"generalye all tawney, moores, verye sturdye and stronge of bodye... They are very jealous of theyr wyves... and very hardlye can they forget any iniurye offered them... The countrye swaynes are better, more lovinge, and patiente, but so simple that they will beleeve any incredible fiction."


John Leo Africanus (real name, Hassan Ibn Muhammad al- Wazzan) was a Muslim born in 1507 in Grenada, Spain, which made him a BlackaMoor or Moor. Perhaps for merely pragmatic reasons, he converted to Christianity under Pope Leo X. After 40 years of traveling the world, however, he re-converted to Islam. John Leo wrote about his travels for the Pope and European audiences. Margaret Trabue Hodgen cites John Leo as saying that 'Negroes' (meaning sub-Saharan Africans) led a beastly life and 'were utterly destitute of reason' [Early Anthropology in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Univ. of Philadelphia Press, 1964 p. 412)].


Contemporary reports, with which Shakespeare may have been familiar, often described African males as "libidinous":

Richard Jobson described black men as "furnished with such

members as are often a sort of burthensome unto them." [The

Golden Trade ed. Charles Kingsley (1904)]

John Leo Africanus wrote: "They have great swarms of Harlots

amongst them." [The History and Description of Africa & of the

Notable Things Therein Contained trans. John Pory c. 1600 ed.

Robert Brown 3 vols. Pub. London 1896]

Samuel Purchas declared "Yet is there no nation under Heaven more

prone to Venery" [ Purchas, His Pilgrimes NY AMS Press, 1965].

Such reports were reflected in literary representations of Africans, particularly on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage. Playwrights created black characters whose sexuality was a key facet of their relationship with others.

In an interview in the New York Times (18 May 1930), the (African American) actor Paul Robeson said: "There are very few Moors in Northern Africa without Ethiopian blood in their veins, but I am approaching the part as Shakespeare wrote it and am playing Othello a man whose tragedy lay in the fact that he was sooty black."

Links to related sections: 'Approaching the language' in the Learning Section and 'Inter-racial Marriage' and 'Racism in Othello' in this section.