Othello
“If Othello didn?t begin as a play about race, history has made it one.”
The Venetian society that Othello is set in is representative of the writers context.
The attitudes and values that Shakespeare reveals through the text are those same attitudes and values of Elizabethan society in England in the sixteenth-century.
Although Othello is set in Venice and Cyprus, the attitudes and values shared in the text are probably reflective of the attitudes and values of Shakespeares own society. It is difficult to assess the attitudes and values of people in sixteenth-century Britain to the relatively few blacks living amongst them. We are given an insight into those attitudes and values through the representation of race and gender in the text of Othello.These attitudes and values are indicative of what a culture believes in and supports.
By the time Othello was written the English were becoming more and more aware of the existence of other races in the world besides themselves.
There had been a lot of travelling and blacks were beginning to be used in Europe for the slave trade. During the time the play was written, the Queen of England had banned all blacks from entering the city. She
othello, women, attitudes, society, race, values, through, iago, way, play, text, revealed, elizabethan, desdemona, brabantio, gender, portrayed, view, time, representation, racist, men, character, been, views, thought, society?s, people, black, roderigo, represented, quite, position, one, love
