“Dear Mr. Shakespeare:” The Bard Answers Phoebe Boswell re Othello
“Did you know, Mr. Shakespeare for no one is sure
That when you decided to draw Othello as a Moor
That his blackness, his otherness would always raise queries
About whether the play’s racist and other such theories?”- Phoebe Boswell
Dear Phoebe Boswell: This be that other Will S., speaking from the grave
You have questions for me, and there are words I would have.
(Apologies first, for use of this maudlin’ medium
He’s earnest enough, but exudes excess tedium.)¹
Was the Moor I made Black? Was he Brown? He turned green!²
The monster I made of his noble soul means
An unfettered courage, sinking Ottoman fleets
Is no safeguard for hearts from deception’s defeats.
My island’s Sea Dogs — Hawkins, Raleigh, and Drake —
Shocked the world entirely when that armada they sank.
Had my hero been white, and joined by white dame
Then audiences might wonder which of them I chose as frame.³
Yet that same John Hawkins whose skilled hand⁴
Rebuilt England’s Navy, and the Spanish withstand -
Made his name and his fortune through traffic in souls.
The Queen called to deport them, but nobody knows
Why she never did.⁵
I erred when I posed black as devil back then⁶
But have you magically leveled your scales by pen?
Are you any more colorblind than I?⁷ Can it be
That man judges man by some rubric which he
Would accept the mirrored inverse, and judge toward himself
Would he open his home, where his own family dwells
And admit strangers? No. It is not black, nor blackness
But the fear of mortal edges, their finite vastness.
Cognition underpins such thoughts we call race
Makes sisters and brothers of all sharing this space.⁸
If a shot rings out some April Fourth⁹
And silences a dreamer of dreams I’ve yet to hear
Take ye in all of his lines, lest the core disappear
Look you at the full, live you there, without fear.
- Indulgent self-referentiality here. I am imagining Bill the Quill apologizing to Phoebe Boswell for the use of MY pen. I stumbled across a production of Boswell’s ‘Dear Mister Shakespeare’ on YouTube while looking for a good rendition of Othello (and getting just a bit uncomfortable with the blackface Laurence Olivier version). It’s a well-produced 5 minute meditation on the nature of Othello that is insightful, constructive, and eloquent. I particularly like Ashley Thomas’s performance as movement art, though the presentation might benefit from a complete set of credits (I see ‘directed by Shola Amoo’ but do not actually know that the presentation was produced exclusively by the two of them in reference to Boswell’s poem.)
- There are a lot of hits on a Google search as to “was Othello black?” An interesting question, since many African-Americans (and/or Black Americans) would not regard North Africans as “Black.” North Africans are routinely confused with Latinos, which is logical seeing as how many Latino identities include quite a bit of North African DNA, and Spain itself is inseparably linked to 700 years of history as mostly Muslim territory. But Othello DOES refer to himself as Black, as do just about all the major characters in the play, so even if “articles” like this one are “correct,” reliable conclusions might be best resisted. I will confess that I have not read Ania Loomba’s Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism. I might, but with that sort of “article” suggesting that Othello is a Muslim (after he calls attention to his own baptism as a Christian). In any event, this Othello is manipulated by Iago into a jealous rage, even as Iago warns of “the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on” (Act 3, Scene 2).
This is probably NOT the sort of green-eyed monster that Othello was bade beware of, but I thought a graphic interlude appropriate.
Were I a rat, that would be a scary green-eyed monster indeed.
3. ‘My’ Shakespeare (or the Shakespeare that is using my ‘pen’) is a bit of a dishonest ghost. Here, he claims that he made his Othello Black because he didn’t want his audience to get confused by any of the white admirals that might otherwise be in the story. That’s almost certainly untrue. More likely, Shakespeare performed a play at Queen Elizabeth’s court, encountered a Moor, found the contrasting culture and appearance fascinated, then looked for/concocted a story about a moor, settling on some version of what became Othello.
The reason to imagine a Shakespeare who lies in his first response to a challenge about race is because that is such a common response for most white (and other) people.
4. Admiral John Hawkins introduced England to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Apparently, he earned immense profits capturing slaves in Africa and transporting them to the Spanish colonies in the New World. He also helped rebuild the British navy, and helped lead it to victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588. He died in 1596, along with his protege, Sir Francis Drake. The last of the “sea dogs,” Sir Walter Raleigh, was suffering a grave loss of prestige as of 1603.
Sir Walter Raleigh’s “lost colony” of Roanoke probably merits some consideration, as it ties to my bigger point about ‘race.’ By 1603, the ‘loss’ of the lost colony would have been known in London. Failed Spanish, French, Dutch, and other colonies would also be fairly well known. The 1619 Project focuses on the meaning of the actual introduction of trans-Atlantic slave trading into North America (though Native Americans were also enslaved and trafficked across the Atlantic in that era), but in Shakespeare’s day, the feeling of fear and uncertainty would probably loom large — as to the New World, slavery, race, and more. As an armchair historian, I’ll leave the history to others. But as a poet, I would imagine that London audiences of Shakespeare’s day might contemplate “slaves” working much like indentured servants, and then rising to defend their masters in the New World where such things might be necessary, but never actually existing in their ‘old world’ except as curiosities.
Slavery as an institution might have been known in England for decades (and through Biblical history, known to go back even further). But exactly what it meant was still under consideration in 1603. Had slavery been a purely racial construct by that era, then the notion that Othello might marry Desdemona would have been so obscene as to render the entire play too dangerous to be publicly performed. But since the concept of race was still being constructed, Shakespeare might contemplate in writing what ‘blackness’ means.
Later on, as more British people started to benefit from the institution of slavery, I would expect many more of them would defend a racial construct that treats sub-Saharan Africans as entirely “other.” But even that is tricky: Moors are not sub-Saharan Africans.
5. Here we slip back to Phoebe Boswell’s poem, which questions the deportation order issued by Queen Elizabeth, the appointment of a man to carry it out. Somebody may actually know why it wasn’t carried out . My suspicion is that there was a classification issue: slaves were deemed ‘cargo’ to be held like any other property in a ship, or like any other livestock. But if the legal institutions of slavery were still being developed and slaves were generally treated like ‘indentured servants,’ then certain matters were needed that would be quite different from how livestock were treated. Rather than try to resolve incongruous legal, psychological, and cultural norms, a decision to deport — followed by a resistance to actually doing so — makes sense to me.
I dwell upon this era because the construction of race as a cultural concept is the point of this entire poem. It is difficult to imagine Othello being performed in the American South during the Antebellum era UNLESS Southerners ‘reconsidered’ Othello as a Moor, and distinguished him from their sub-Saharan Africans (which could work for them — ‘Brown’ skinned peoples were not exactly to be treated the same as ‘Black’ skinned peoples). But even then, Othello clearly manifests numerous virtues and marries a white woman. Taboos came later.
These days, Critical Race Theory has fallen under significant attack. One of its central precepts, that race is a ‘social construction,’ isn’t really contentious: science confirms that incontrovertibly. But it is appropriate to look at words like those used by Shakespeare and read them in context. Even in 1603, the theater was somewhat controversial: centering a Moor in a play could put his entire company at risk. By 1619, more ‘Puritan’ influences in North America (and in the Caribbean) would be ascendant, and by 1642, the First English Civil War would have resulted in closure of the theaters for several decades. Most of Shakespeare’s words might have gone out of fashion — and construction of race transpired (ab)using the new translation of the King James Version of the Bible.
6. MY Shakespeare (as opposed to the actual historical figure) may apologize for a simplistic treatment of Othello (or Shylock, or any other figure). However, even in 1603, a link between the color ‘black’ and the ‘devil’ might not have meant what Shakespeare claimed it meant: what colors did the Puritans embrace in their fashion? I suspect modern readers have lost some sensitivity to the meanings of colors, particularly religious traditions (not just ‘cardinal’ red, but the many different color choices of the factions contending in Europe). Shakespeare probably was not inventing this “black = bad” motif — but applying it to a discussion about a Moor’s dark skin would raise color considerations without invoking more dangerous fashion considerations (and ‘fashion considerations’ in that era could mean far more politically and economically than we are aware of today — beyond the ‘royal only’ colors, certain shades to an eye of that era might indicate a cloth supplier with sources of pigments typical of French, Spanish, or other colonial or imperial connections, even if such colors were not themselves linked to heraldry).
7. Colorblindness is the crux of the CRT debate as I see it. One side claims that unless one can perceive color, one cannot rectify errors and abuses from others who not only perceived color, but exploited it to amass power. Another side claims that looking at color perpetuates the racist choices of the past, and so colorblindness is an ideal. Neither would have made much sense to Shakespeare in 1603. My Shakespeare isn’t affirming a colorblind conceptualization of race, any more than he is affirming intrinsic meaning behind any color — what one does, fears, feels, and chooses in the face of death is the only meaningful basis for judgment.
8. Continuing the same vein, I suspect that Shakespeare would have been somewhat uncomfortable with simplistic notions of sibling connection, BUT perhaps this dead Shakespeare, after a few centuries, has realized we’re all pretty much the same when we die.
9. And finally, why this poem is published on April 4, 2022. Martin Luther King, Jr. As I see it, Shakespeare and MLK Jr might be “encoded in the DNA,” at least metaphorically. My Shakespeare, ultimately, is encouraging anyone who will listen to refrain from the practice of stripping a single quotation out of context and extracting the entire measure of a man from that sentence.
