<title level="m">Othello and Racial Identity in Early Modern England <title level="m">Othello and Racial Identity in Early Modern England Author Navneet Sidhu Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Navneet Sidhu, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Race Blackness Racial Identity Muslims Othello (play) Racism Published file. Updated metadata proofed textual change for MCPH1. Created File. Review of article finished. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 Navneet Sidhu Navneet Sidhu

Navneet Sidhu was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

 Melissa Walter Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
The Black Population in Early Modern England

Black people were present in early modern England in notable numbers, not just as isolated cases. Noted in records with indicators such as a Black, a blackamoore and of Morisco, they lived in London, other major cities like Plymouth and Bristol, and the countryside. Historian Oneyka Nubia notes that in the London parish of St. Boltoph, records indicate that Black people made up 5% of the population. They were numerous enough in London that in 1601, shortly before the probable date of the writing of Othello, an edict was issued that the Negars and blackamoors in the city be deported. People of African, Moorish, and Arabic descent lived and worked in early modern England as merchants, musicians, craftsmen, and domestic servants. Some are known to history by name and many are not; most were free, although some were enslaved. They likely faced significant prejudice and racism in life, as they did in literary works like William Shakespeare’s 1604 play, Othello: The Moor of Venice.

Views of Black People in Early Modern Europe

Scholar Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives 1500–1677 discusses the origins and history of the lives of Black people in early modern England. Habib demonstrates that Black people were part of English society but were seldom fully documented. One of the better documented individuals was Catalina de Motril, a high-ranking servant who came from Spain with Catherine of Aragon at the time of her marriage to Prince Arthur Tudor, the older brother of Henry, in 1501. In a letter, she and one other servant were only marked as two slaves to attend on the maids of honour (Habib 23). The other person’s name and fate are lost. But Catalina may have played an important role beyond serving a princess: she was a regular attendant of the bedchamber, which was a position of some privilege, and later she testified about the potential consummation of Catherine’s marriage to Arthur as it pertained to Henry’s VIII’s divorce case against her. De Motril left England at some unknown point in the 1530s and returned to southern Spain, marrying and living in Malaga.

Like her, other Black people may have held important roles in English society but were seldom given credit. Habib discusses the Black skilled craftsmen, military, religious professions, and scholars (Habib 22) who did not get respect or credit through their work. They were present but often invisible in the historical record.

Portrayal of Black People in Literary Works

Although unusual, Black people arel represented through literary works of the early modern period. Scholars such as Ian Smith and Nandini Das discuss the binary implications of color, with white symbolizing purity and black indicating the opposite. Das claims that The color black often represented malignity, death, or wickedness (42), and sometimes even an association with witchcraft. Illustrations from Shakespeare’s Othello often highlight this contrast.

Smith explores how in early modern plays, black cloth was used to indicate a character’s blackness. White actors who adorned themselves in black cloth were playing the role of a Black person, a kind of racial cross-dressing that probably also included mimicking skin color and hair texture. For instance, Smith notes that blackface (possibly oiled walnut juice or charcoal) was commonly used to mimic the look of black skin. Not only that, lambskin with dark wool was used to mimic textured hair.

Moors

Kim F. Hall details the concept of a moor as an elastic identity, one that could signify a dark-skinned African or a lighter-skinned Arab, possibly someone from the Iberian Peninsula, which was ruled by Muslims from 792–1492 CE. The vague boundary of what exactly a moor was arose from confusion regarding language, nation, geography, colour, and religion (181). Hall details how the concept of African moors became dominant, and terms like blackamoore, black, tawny, white, and negro all indicate varying appearances and varying identities. Moors presented on the Elizabethan stage or in other forms of entertainment were typically coded both evil and male, according to Hall.

Shakespeare’s presentation of Othello as a hero but also a murderer wrestles with this tradition. For instance, in Act 1 Scene 1, Iago and Roderigo question the authenticity of Desdemona’s marriage to the celebrated military leader, implying Othello used some sort of witchcraft to win her. Not only that, they refer to him repeatedly as the moor in order to alienate and dehumanize him. Even though Shakespeare portrays Othello as a hero in some light, his blackness defined him (and many other blacks in England) no matter how hard they worked for approval.

Key Print Sources Das, Nandini. Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England. Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Habib, Imtiaz H. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1676: Imprints of the Invisible. Ashgate, 2007. Shakespeare, William. Othello, the Moor of Venice: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Kim F. Hall. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. Neil, Micheal. <q>Mulattos</q>, <q>Blacks</q>, and <q>Indian Moors</q>: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference. Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 49, no. 4, Winter 1998, pp. 361–374. Smith, Ian. Othello’s Black Handkerchief. Othello: The State of Play. Ed. Lena Cowen Orlin. Bloomsbury Press, 2014, pp. 95–120.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. Magic and Darkness. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 4 Jan. 2011. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/plays/othello/othmagic.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Best, Michael. Outsiders: Black. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 4 Jan. 2011. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/city%20life/outsiders.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Catalina of Motril. Historic Royal Palaces. https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/catalina-of-motril/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025. Nubia, Onyeka. Who Were the African People Living in Medieval and Tudor England? BBC Bitesize History. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z8gpm39. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.