Resumo de Othello - William Shakespeare

What is a Moor? This would seem to be an easy question to answer: a
Muslim of North African ancestry. But the question has proved to be a
contested and often divisive one among readers of Othello. The question
turns on whether Shakespeare intended to work with the somewhat
confused Elizabethan distinction between Moors and other Africans. One
earlier critic wrote: the descendents of the proud Arabs, who had
borne sovereign sway in Europe, and, what is more, had filled an age of
comparative darkness with the light of their poetry and their science,
were confounded with the uncivilized African, the despised slave. The
critic proceeds to insist that Othello is one of the former. Indeed,
this seemingly factual question has often been decided by suspiciously
motivated answers. As Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out, those critics
who have found Othello to be a noble hero are all too often the same
ones who declare that he is a pale-skinned Arab, while those who think
his actions are beastly are also those who insist that he is a black
African.
Moreover, this apparently fine distinction is often a guise for a
cruder question: what color is Othello's skin? Some readers have gone
to great lengths to insist that black is applied to Othello
metaphorically; it describes, they claim, the state of his soul, not
the hue of his face. This question has proved particularly prominent,
of course, in performance. For several centuries, Othello was played by
white actors wearing black-face. The great actor Edmund Kean, with the
scholarly support of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, insisted that Othello had
skin no darker than a Spaniard, and favored light-brown make-up when
playing the part. In contemporary American productions, Othello is
generally played by African-American actors, but there are prominent
exceptions: Orson Welles, in his film version of the play, cast himself
as Othello and wore the pale make-up that Kean had demanded centuries
before. Clearly, there is more at stake here than the definition of Moor in Elizabethan English. Earlier critics have a tendency to
follow, rather than to critique, the prejudices of Shakespeare's
Venetians. One at times wants to throw up one's hands and insist that
it does not matter what color Othello's skin is ? what matters is the
existential situation of being an outsider scorned by society's
insiders. This is perhaps true, but it is disingenuous. For
Shakespeare, with a world of materials before him, firmly insists on
the Elizabethan category of Moor ? any claim that Othello is not
about Moors but about the human condition is belied by Shakespeare's
insistent specificity on the issue of Othello's Moorishness, which
seems to actually invite the historical and often political debate,
which this play has provoked. Othello is undoubtedly a psychological
drama, but it also demands, repeatedly, to be recognized as one
enmeshed in the history of its time. But we should be careful not
to construe the history of its time too narrowly. Critics have
insisted that it is inaccurate to have an actor of sub-Saharan ancestry
play Othello, who is decidedly Northern African. To do so, these
critics argue, is to read more recent political conflicts back into
Shakespeare's tragedy. But such a criticism itself misreads history.
Most significantly, when Othello was first written and performed, the
African slave trade was just beginning to be known and practiced in
London, and this too is part of the play's ancestry. So it ought not be
surprising that some of the most successful productions have invoked
memories of slavery in America, or apartheid in South Africa ? for
these too have their historical roots in the same soil as Shakespeare's
play, though it is a darker aspect of Othello?s history, one which many
readers have preferred to lighten.

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