Othello

Since I already read Othello my senior year of high school, I didn’t have any new revelations about it. So, I’m going on to what new things I have learned. I suppose the aspect that has now interested me the most is the effect of the Barbary privateering on the public idea of Turks during this time period. Most specifically, how Shakespeare expressed those ideas in his writing of Othello. It seems one of the more lucrative trades during the time was the enslavement of British and other European women. An very informative, if equally boring abstract that I found was titled Britons, Muslims, and American Indians: Gender and Power and this link will take you to the page the PDF is on.

According to this article, "there were numerous women captives who were seized in the first half of the seventeenth century by North African privateers and hauled to the slave markets of Salee, Algiers, or Tunis". On the other hand, it also says that, "European dramatists did not seem to have much of a clue of as to what was really happening to women in captivity: their fiction was quite different from Mediterranean reality. For while they were fantasizing, captured women from Britain and the rest of Christendom were confined in the boudoirs of Muslim rulers, husbands and masters. Such a stark reality may explain why, in the whole corpus of English dramatic literature of the early modern period, there is not a single play about an English woman captive in North Africa, suggesting perhaps that no English writer could address a situation where the compatriots he described would not be "possessors" but "possessed.""
Another intriguing fact was that although Christians and Jews were not allowed to intermarry, there were no prohibitions against the marriage of a Christian to a Muslim (either Turkish or Moorish).

However, there was a catch that wasn’t so obvious in Othello. Although a Muslim male could marry a Christian woman while staying a Muslim, any male that wanted to marry a Muslim woman had to convert to Islam. The author of the article chalks it all up to a theory of religious and sexual domination. A great deal of Othello revolves around ideas of sexuality; either sexual purity and monogamy, or adultery. Othello is deceived by believing Cassio and Desdemona had an illicit sexual relationship. Then he goes nuts and kills her. Obviously there were other factors involved, but this was the aspect that interested me the most.