Speaking of the Moor

Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Title "Speak of me as I am," Othello, the Moor of Venice, bids in the play that bears his name. Yet many have found it impossible to speak of his ethnicity with any certainty. What did it mean to be a Moor in the early modern period? In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when England was expanding its reach across the globe, the Moor became a central character on the English stage. InThe Battle of Alcazar,Titus Andronicus,Lust's Dominion, andOthello, the figure of the Moor took definition from multiple geographies, histories, religions, and skin colors. Rather than casting these variables as obstacles to our-and England's-understanding of the Moor's racial and cultural identity, Emily C. Bartels argues that they are what make the Moor so interesting and important in the face of growing globalization, both in the early modern period and in our own. InSpeaking of the Moor, Bartels sets the early modern Moor plays beside contemporaneous texts that embed Moorish figures within England's historical record-Richard Hakluyt'sPrincipal Navigations, Queen Elizabeth's letters proposing the deportation of England's "blackamoors," and John Pory's translation ofThe History and Description of Africa. Her book uncovers the surprising complexity of England's negotiation and accommodation of difference at the end of the Elizabethan era.

Emily C. Bartels is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University and Associate Director of the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. She is author of Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.