The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0686 Friday, 21 July 2006
[1] From: Thomas Le <
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Date: Thursday, 20 Jul 2006 10:43:29 -0700 (PDT)
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0675 Shakespeare and Islam
[2] From: Imtiaz Habib <
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Date: Thursday, 20 Jul 2006 17:26:22 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0681 Shakespeare and Islam
[3] From: David Basch <
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Date: Thursday, 20 Jul 2006 21:50:04 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0681 Shakespeare and Islam
[4] From: Brian Gatten <
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Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 03:16:55 -0500
Subj: RE: Shakespeare and Islam
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Thomas Le <
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Date: Thursday, 20 Jul 2006 10:43:29 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: 17.0675 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0675 Shakespeare and Islam
One of the first rules of civilized discourse is civility.
V. K. Inman's vituperative rantings do not rise to the level of
civilized discourse. His vitriolic opinions belong in another arena and
should not be dignified with an answer.
Therefore, they will not be.
Thomas Le
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Imtiaz Habib <
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Date: Thursday, 20 Jul 2006 17:26:22 -0400
Subject: 17.0681 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0681 Shakespeare and Islam
What does V.K. Inman think the terms "blackamoor" or "blackamore" mean?
If North Africans like the Berbers are not as black as those from the
Congo or Sierra Leone or Guinea, they ain't white. That's for sure-and
particularly to the Elizabethans. See Purchas. A black Aaron is not
consistently Shakespearean? Please, do your historical research before
making such desperate assertions.
Imtiaz Habib
Associate Professor of English
Old Dominion University
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Basch <
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Date: Thursday, 20 Jul 2006 21:50:04 -0400
Subject: 17.0681 Shakespeare and Islam
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0681 Shakespeare and Islam
Concerning Shakespeare and Islam, no one has mentioned Othello, the
Moor, who is characterized as a Moslem convert, another factor of his
"otherness" within his society.
In Othello's last speech, he alludes to his own circumcision as a former
Muslim as he notes his seizing of "the circumcised dog" in Aleppo and
smiting him "thus." In the play, he in fact smites himself at that
moment, being rescuer and evil perpetrator at one and the same time. As
Florence Amit observed, even Othello's name, when parsed into syllables
and understood as Hebrew, declares literally, "his sign of God," which
in a Jewish-Hebrew context refers to his circumcision, which is "the
sign of God."
Of course, there is no judgmental statement by Shakespeare here about
Muslims, just the words of a particular man, Othello, responding to his
unique situation marvelously in character.
David Basch
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Brian Gatten <
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Date: Friday, 21 Jul 2006 03:16:55 -0500
Subject: RE: Shakespeare and Islam
V. K. Inman writes:
>Very few North Africans are black. Arabs tend to be
>olive skinned and the Amazight (formerly called Berbers) who conquered
>Spain are very light and sometimes blond. So what is a Moor? Are modern
>portrayals of Moors as blacks in Shakespeare consistent Shakespeare's
>concept of Moors? And how did this idea that Moors are black come about?
Near the beginning of this thread, I posted about Nabil Matar's book
Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, in which Matar
suggests Elizabethans willfully conflated North Africans with
sub-Saharan Africans in order to deal with the economic and political
threats posed by the first group by portraying them as members of a
group over which Britons exerted greater power. Jack D'Amico makes a
similar argument in The Moor in English Renaissance Drama. Religious
and climatological theories of race also probably played a role in the
conflation of the terms "Moor" and "blackamoor" (for instance, I think
it's Hakluyt who regarded Africans as being black because they were the
non-Christian descendents of Ham).
Dympna Callaghan has an article somewhere (Alternative Shakespeares vol.
2, possibly) in which she suggests Elizabethan stage conventions
dictated that "Moors" were always represented by actors in blackface
just as women were always represented by actors in whiteface. I forget
if she includes anyone else in her blackface claim (I'm tempted to say
she says the same for Turks and Jews, but I may very well be wrong about
that). In any case, it suggests a less-than-nuanced visual
characterization of Moors, as well as a provocative parallel with
gendered othering.
Actors began playing Othello as a "tawny" Moor after Edmund Kean did so
in 1814. This was almost entirely due to blatant racism on the part of
people like Samuel Coleridge, who couldn't imagine Shakespeare allowing
Desdemona to kiss a black man. A.C. Bradley neatly dismisses (I think)
their arguments for the light-skinned Moor in Shakespearean Tragedy:
Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.
So basically, the Elizabethans' practice of portraying Moors as
dark-skinned was sort of proto-racist, and the 19th century's practice
of playing them as Arabs was full-blown racism. Pick your poison, I guess.
Incidentally, the Star Trek captain Othello Inman was thinking of was
Patrick Stewart. I suppose it's possible he played the role more than
once, but he did not wear dark makeup in the production I'm familiar
with (in Washington D.C. in 1997). In that production, directed by Jude
Kelly, Stewart's Othello was white, and all the other roles were played
by black actors.
-Brian Gatten
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