by AINA KHAN
Victor Oshin, left, says playing Othello resonated with his own experience of downplaying his identity to avoid being stereotyped PHOTO/Helen Murray/Al Jazeera
Adaptation explores religious roots of Shakespeare’s Moor of Venice as director says play is warning about ‘otherising’.
A new adaptation of Othello in the UK subtly interrogates the tragic hero’s religious identity, presenting to audiences the possibility that the Moor of Venice was a closeted, practising Muslim.
Produced by the English Touring Theatre, there is an Arabic recitation in the opening scene and an image of Othello with his hands cupped in what is unmistakably a Muslim prayer.
“I was very aware of the racism Othello suffers because of his skin colour, but there was a much more insidious and layered thing that was happening to him as an outsider,” director Richard Twyman told Al Jazeera.
“The biggest thing is within the language, where Othello is constantly called the Moor. We know historically about the Moorish kingdom of Spain (where Spanish Muslims or Moriscos’ were forcibly converted to Christianity in 1492). But I never put it together that Moor might also be referring to Othello’s spiritual and cultural identity,” he said.
It was not until Twyman encountered the research of Jerry Brotton, professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London and author of This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World, that it became plausible Islam was intrinsic to Othello’s identity.
Brotton told Al Jazeera: “A Moor is an inhabitant of Mauritania which is in northwest Africa. It’s effectively modern-day Morocco.
“In this period in the 15th and 16th century, Muslims were referred to as black. There was no word for Muslim. It didn’t enter the English language until the second decade of the 17th century. But you have all these synonyms – Turk, Moor, Saracen, Persian, which are an attempt by an English tradition to describe Muslims.”
In addition to the opening prayer scene, in which Othello unfurls a prayer mat for him and Desdemona to sit on during their marriage ceremony, the play makes other references to his spirituality.
In the first line, Othello recites in Arabic the foundational invocation for Muslims: “In the name of God, the most gracious the most merciful.”
He also moves from one religion to another.
A crucifix hangs from his neck throughout the play, but when he is told of his wife’s alleged infidelity, he raises his prayer beads and shouts in Arabic, “Ya Akbar”, “Oh, Great One”.
‘Islam was not the enemy’
Viewed in the historical context in which it was written, Othello offers a glimpse into the economic and political anti-Catholic alliance between Elizabethan England and the Muslim world.
“Spanish Catholicism for Protestant Elizabethan England was the absolute enemy,” Brotton said.
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Contemporary relevance
Othello is an exceptional, loyal and erudite character, but positive associations are attempted to be dashed when Senator Brabantio is informed of his daughter Desdemona’s relationship with the black Venetian general – “an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe.”
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