Moors In Othello

In Elizabethan era England, the terms ‘blackness’ and ‘moor’ were widely used. In the context of Elizabethans, the words were used to denote strangers in a foreign land who were deemed dark. Shakespeare together with his contemporaries described these individuals as dark people who were strangers to England. The blackness was commonly associated with Africans. The casting of Othello, in the play Othello by William Shakespeare, as a black person portrays visual sign of the otherness as widely held by the Elizabethans. The ‘black moors’ were descendants of servants and slaves. The Moors were considered to be very different from the Englishmen and hence, exotic.
In the minds of the audience, a stereotypic perception of the Elizabethans is formed