Prejudice And Racial Issues In Shakespeare's Othello

When reading Othello we see there is a bond between a black man (Othello), a white woman (Desdemona) and the public. To fully understand racial issues in Othello we need to look at Elizabethan attitude towards black people. During the Elizabethan era was a great deal of hatred amongst Christians and Muslims happening through Europe. Muslims came from an area that had attacked and threatened all of Europe, Muslims extended their control across southern Mediterranean Sea and Spain. There was cultural animosity amongst the black and white people. The social order of the era had a general cultural unfriendliness to outsiders that started from the increasing existence of dark individuals that were a hazard to the economic state. Rivalry was a subject of excessive conversation, argument, disagreement plus desire during that era. We understand clearly during Othello …show more content…
With Othello being the only black figure in the play he must take on more insinuations that he is ignorant and that he doesn’t understand anything about the woman that he is married to or the culture that he believes he is a part. At each turn Othello is reduced to a small starting with his place as the comic butt of Iago’s cunning dishonesties. Othello is then labelled a fool, doubting certainty and believing the descriptions and situations of seduction and infidelity. Through Iago’s planning, Othello cannot tell his wife from a whore, Cassio from an adulterer, Emilia from a bawd, a villain from his trusty lieutenant. (Callaghan and Gossett 114). In one last courageous effort of self-assertion Othello permits judgement on himself and tries to change his life and the positions in which Iago has cast it. Though he tries he cannot meaning that the profound racism from the start has put him in jeopardy of continuing to disturb the actual words he uses to build his life